Soft Music for Stupid People

rotl: Paul Young - “Love Will Tear Us a Fart” (Referenced in...

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 21:41:17 -0700

Paul Young - “Love Will Tear Us a Fart”

(Referenced in Roderick on the Line, Ep. 48: “Wherever Trail Needs to Be Built”)

Love will RIP us a fart, you mean.

So, Substance came out 25 years ago today, which reminded me to...

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 10:49:00 -0700

So, Substance came out 25 years ago today, which reminded me to get out the camera and show how this project ended up. Which project is a slipcast ceramic version of the Substance cassette. Christen did the actual ceramics work, I did the computer stuff to make the mold that was cast.

This was intended as a wedding gift, but it didn’t come out quite well enough for that purpose. There was trouble with the slip, and in the kiln, and we got some gross bubbling. As a proof of concept though I think it’s a success. We still have the mold, and hopefully will get back into the studio in the fall to make some more.

The actual cassette pictured is the one I bought in 1987, in middle school. I’ve kept it on my desk for years.

The first time I heard this I was halfway through a red-eye...

Tue, 22 May 2012 11:24:15 -0700

The first time I heard this I was halfway through a red-eye transatlantic flight, and I think I woke every single passenger up with my screaming. I honestly think it’s the funniest thing that has ever been recorded, by anybody, ever. (Yes, I have heard all the recorded things.)

jessethorn:

From Comedy Death Ray: Bob Ducca’s list of ailments, as written & performed by Seth Morris.

“I’m hyper-tolerant to lactose.”

“Puff knuckle.”

“Dirt belly.”

“Pere Ubu.”

“I suffer from Scrotal Migraines.”

Prototypes (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 22 May 2012 05:16:11 -0700

Prototypes (Taken with instagram)

Taken with instagram

Sat, 19 May 2012 09:43:55 -0700

Taken with instagram

Step 2b.

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:17:56 -0700

Step 2b.

Step 2.

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:39:03 -0700

Step 2.

Step 1 of a new project.

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:56:46 -0700

Step 1 of a new project.

Source for the previous. There’s a lot of great weird...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:35:00 -0700

Source for the previous. There’s a lot of great weird stuff going on here — Neil Young’s menacing proto-hippy/Planet of the Apes look, their manager sitting with his back to the camera while pretending to pretend to play bass, the bait-and-switch into Mr. Soul — but it’s Stills’s little cowboy duckwalk that really stands out. It’s such a pure moment of rock and roll peacocking.

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:21:59 -0700

A keeper from my Kinko’s days. It’s easily my...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:00:19 -0700

A keeper from my Kinko’s days. It’s easily my favorite poem ever, and when my time comes I want my ashes to be molded into a frame to replace the frame in this picture. The poem was taken from a large batch of vastly inferior silly kid poems brought in by a teacher. I imagine that Misty Romero, who was in 4th grade in 1996, is probably a SuicideGirl now.

Photo

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:36:00 -0700

MDT

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 18:31:17 -0800

Daylight savings kicked in today. Every year, on falling back, I think of one particular night in my life. It’s one I actually think about often, but am absolutely guaranteed to think about when the time changes.

It’s 1994 or 95, and I’m studying film at CU Boulder. Part of studying film at CU at the time was taking Stan Brakhage’s survey classes — I don’t remember anymore what they were actually called — which amounted to just watching films for two hours. This was always an evening class. It started at 7pm.

One December evening I arrived at class a full half-hour early, which may have been the only time I was early to any class over the course of my college career. It was an absolutely frigid night, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I just stood in the hallway outside of the classroom. Stan’s office was directly above the classroom, in an odd sort of loft space that was accessible by a stairway that went only to that one room. And he was up there, talking on the phone. I think we might have been the only two people in the building.

I could hear him, of course, as if he were standing next to me. If you ever had the pleasure-slash-terror of hearing Stan speak, you know how his voice carried, even when he was speaking gently. Which he was not at this particular moment. In fact, he was arguing with his wife. And what they were arguing about, as far as I could tell after guiltily and desperately eavesdropping for a few minutes, was his reluctance to continue seeing his therapist. He was adamant, and after going around and around about it for a while, I suppose his wife must have said something like “But WHY NOT, Stan?” and he answered with a sentence that, coming out of Stan Brakhage’s mouth, struck me as probably the single most unassailable thing I had ever heard or ever would. Which was:

“Because it’s dark out there, and cold.”

Apparently I started another Cormac McCarthy book.

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 14:17:30 -0700

Apparently I started another Cormac McCarthy book.

I’m really enjoying the CANT record because SHUT UP,...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:09:58 -0700

I’m really enjoying the CANT record because SHUT UP, ALREADY, DAMN.

"Abraxas. Adocentyn. Apollyon. Ariel. Ars Notaria. Azael. In the Angelic Conversations of Doctor DEE..."

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 03:07:00 -0700

“Abraxas. Adocentyn. Apollyon. Ariel. Ars Notaria. Azael. In the Angelic Conversations of Doctor DEE (q.v.) Azael is the interpreter of God. What did “q.v.” mean? The first thing to do after staring again long into the vast ruins pictured on the endpapers front and back—broken antique torsos, huge headstones covered in clearly cut but unintelligible words, toppled pillars sunken in grass, arches, urns, capitals, obelisks—was to turn to the page whereon he had found the name of his secret lodge or club … it wasn’t far from the front, in an entry on Alchemy … the book almost fell open there, so stared at was the page.”

- John Crowley, Ægypt

bebelestrange: Debbie Harry by Chris Stein On Selvaggina, Go...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:23:38 -0700

bebelestrange:

Debbie Harry by Chris Stein

On Selvaggina, Go Back into the Woods, John Balance introduces “Amethyst Deceivers” by talking about Debbie Harry wearing this shirt, and expressing his deep desire to have one of his own. Now Balance is gone and you can buy this shirt at Hot Topic. The world gets shabbier by the day.

In a more practical way, this was how Doctor Dee often encoded: he kept a huge number of stock...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 19:33:05 -0700

In a more practical way, this was how Doctor Dee often encoded: he kept a huge number of stock phrases in various languages, which would be substituted for the key words of the secret message. The word “bad” could be enciphered by “Pallas is blessed of charm” or “You are admired of women, Astarte,” or “A god of grace enthroned.” If the same phrase were in Greek, it meant a different thing: “crown” perhaps, or “stealthily.” Whole fictions could be constructed out of these phrases, they were designed to fit together with standard couplings to yield long tedious and half-intelligible allegorical fantasies that actually meant something brief and fatal: The Duke dies at midnight. In fact the great trouble of the method was that the encoding was always so much longer than the message.

Late at night, unraveling such a one, Doctor Dee would sometimes think: All creation is a huge, ornate, imaginary, and unintended fiction; if it could be deciphered it would yield a single shocking word.

–John Crowley, Ægypt

What have I become?

Fri, 20 May 2011 16:20:36 -0700

This: a person who is really, really annoyed by the lack of projection and staying power exhibited by L’eau de Tarocco, particularly in this stupid roll-on, which seems like such a good idea but just doesn’t work well at all due to the air bubble that forms right by the ball every time you turn it over. And this shit was expensive. And I’m complaining about this while wearing a CRASS t-shirt.

I had a rough weekend. On Saturday morning I heard...

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:57:19 -0800

I had a rough weekend. On Saturday morning I heard “Pure” by The Lightning Seeds on the radio. I hadn’t heard it since, say, 1990. I listened to the whole thing, for old times’ sake, while the knowledge slowly dawned on me that it might actually be the single most insipid pop song ever recorded. Of course, it’s also virulently catchy. Then, later that night my household decided to watch an ostensibly visually stunning Hollywood blockbuster to break in our brand new, very very big HD TV. We knew it was going to be terrible. We did not know just how terrible.

And of course, I couldn’t get the damn Lightning Seeds out of my head the whole time. Now I am obsessed with the idea of making a video for Pure out of footage from Avatar, in hopes of making a pop culture artifact of the purest, most concentrated terribleness ever known. I can see the whole thing in my mind. The only character who would appear would be that blue chick. Cut after cut of her huge eyes, smiling coyly, narrowing flirtatiously, widening in horror as things explode in the background.

But I can’t make this thing, because I know if I started I would never finish, as I would descend into madness and turn inevitably to cannibalism like the narrator of “The Rats in the Walls”.