Archive for the ‘Tunes’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

There’s certain things in life I cannot change

Written by

Delta Spirit – Yamaha

I have something of a ritual in aeroplanes. After the flight attendants make their final passes and go sit down for landing, I pull my headphones back out. As the plane rattles and rumbles toward earth, I sit peacefully with my palms facing upward in my lap and say the Jesus Prayer.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy.
Lord Jesus Christ. Have mercy, have mercy, have mercy.

Then I think about how I’m sitting in a heavy plastic and metal container, sinking through air and elements. I think about how easy it would be to hit the ground straight on, to turn everything I can presently see into fire and smouldering rubble. And then I don’t necessarily will for that to happen — it seems presumptuous to give God notes on when I should die — but I let the idea linger, imagining how all my stressors would be would be wiped out immediately, how peaceful death would be. I let the notion be present while I’m praying.

The plane shudders and vibrates and my lips keep moving silently, palms open to the heavens. [Delta Spirit.]

Posted on June 24, 2012 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Seein’ things that I may never see again

Written by

Willie Nelson – On The Road Again

I drank a bottle of whiskey with two bronzed, blond British girls on the 25-hour train from Penang, Malaysia to Bangkok, Thailand.

Let me tell you about it.

What did we talk about?

Stupid shit, mostly. Jobs. Crossover comedians (Brand, Gervais). TV shows. Their plans for when they would fly home in three days. What I miss about America (burritos, friends). Favorite drinks. Stories of losing passports. How they almost missed the train.

All around us, others talked too – the inane chatter of strangers trying desperately to connect through trite, overarching maxims about life and politics and religion. Where are you from? Where are you going? Where have you been recently? What do you think about Obama/religion/token recent news event?

How did we meet?

We didn’t, at first. I stood behind the gate as passengers exited the ferry from Butterworth to Penang Island. A blond bombshell sprinted off first, barefoot, her skirt riding up. I looked at my phone. I was late too. The ferry left at 1:55 and I usually calculate half an hour to get across. The train was scheduled for 2:20 and I was going to miss it.

Hurry, ferry. Post-haste, currents. Patience, train. Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner.

I made contingency plans in my head. I could still make it back to the Air Asia office before closing, get a plane ticket for the next day. I’d arrive roughly the same time.

The ferry obeyed my prayers. As I disembarked at 2:10, I saw another girl standing with two bags, peering pleadingly into the exiting throng. Ah, I thought — her friend.

The train was delayed an hour. Welcome to Asia. Fifteen minutes earlier, the runner burst through the doors of the station breathlessly: “What train are you waiting for?” Someone told her, “Bangkok,” and she squealed. “You don’t know how happy that makes me!”

When I boarded the train, they were sitting opposite me. “Hey,” I said, and then was quiet because strangers terrify me. But at some point we started chatting.

What did I see?

I saw Kayla’s curls, the thick triumphant mane of a lioness. I saw her book, The Perfect Man (“My biography!” I joked, on account of I’m hilarious). I saw her white heart-shaped earrings and thick tanned thighs. I saw her rhythmically remove and apply new nail polish. I saw her eat chips (“crisps”) in bread (“rolls”).

I saw Tash’ silver nose stud twist down so that it stuck out of her nose distractingly. I saw her skirt fail its modesty duties several times. I saw her roll a cig (“fag”) and smoke it at the border crossing. I saw her pull down the front of her shirt to scratch a boob idly. I saw the grime on her feet. I saw her fill several pages of a diary with thick, bold lettering. I saw her hold a bag to her bottom as she lay sideways napping.

What did we drink?

We planned to wait until after the border to start, but didn’t make it. Out of a ripped tote bag came a bottle of cheap Malay whiskey and some carbonated citrus concoction as mixer. I stole three paper cups out of a plastic bag in the back, and Kayla poured me in. We played cards. We drank and were not drunk, because Malay whiskey is useless. We downed the bottle, both bottles, and let them fall to the floor at our feet merrily.

What did we eat?

We brought snacks. I had a bag of coconut peanuts which weren’t very good. They had blown the last of their Rinngit on goodies: Mr. Potato chips, dried mango, gummys, stale chocolate cookies. We shared all. Come meal-time, they constantly rebuffed the server (whose name was Black. I asked) before I could protest that I had cash, even if they didn’t.

A middle-aged Minnesotan sitting kiddy-corner from us accidentally ordered enough for two, so he passed half of it our way. (I had helped him at the border when he couldn’t understand the Thai lady’s butchered English.) We demanded spoons from Black and dug in, one plate of steamed rice and mushy seafood dumped on top. We were on top of the world.

What did we have in common?

One shared experience aside, not much. They were Daily Mail readers. They were bartenders from Cornwall, England, at the end of four months partying across Asia. They were 22. At one point that life would have appealed to me. But they played music on an iPhone 4s out loud to the glares of an older white man behind them.

Kayla just wanted to watch “shit Saturday TV” with her “mam” once she got home. Tash mentioned that she didn’t need “uni” to become a chef, just experience. I agreed: College is largely useless. But then I thought maybe people who read the Daily Mail should have to take some university courses just to broaden their bases. Then I felt super judgmental and icky.

How did we part?

Amicably but awkwardly. We split a cab to Khao San. I paid since they had provided the whiskey. When we got out they asked, “Which way are you going – left or right?” and I looked around and saw my guest house and pointed. They said they were glad to meet me and nodded the direction they were walking. There were no plans to meet up later, no mention of friending on Facebook.

I saw them, two days later, in the middle of Khao San, looking as burnt and unkempt as before. “Hey,” I said, and we chatted briefly, hesitantly. I kind of suggested grabbing some drinks, but they were off to the airport in an hour and had no money left. “Later,” I said, but there will never be a later.

We weren’t soul-mates and we weren’t kindred spirits; we were hardly friends. We were the shared participants in an event we’ll bring up as a fun party story three or four times over the courses of our lives to hopefully persuade people that we’re more interesting than we really are. [Honeysuckle Rose.]

Posted on June 17, 2012 - Tunes - 2 Comments » Share

You got some free time; I can take it

Written by

Plants and Animals – Control Me

I’m sitting on a plastic chair at a bunch of hawker stalls drinking Heineken. It’s almost 5 bucks for the bottle, but it’s 640 mL. I guess that’s a fair price, it just feels like a lot since nothing else is more than $2 here.

I don’t want to go home.

There, camped in the living room, is Nida. She’s Nick’s Thai girlfriend. Kind of. She decided to surprise him with a visit, except he decided to move to America permanently without telling her. So she showed up midafternoon with some light knocking on the door. Ray let her in. I was sitting in my office editing, the music blaring.

“Uhh, hey, dude. Nida’s here.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Shit.”

Nida doesn’t speak English. It took us half an hour and the help of Google translate to explain that Nick left and he really wasn’t ever coming back. We knew we’d gotten through because her face turned stern and she stopped asking questions. She sat in silence for a bit. Then she started crying. Ray went and got a box of kleenex, which seemed to me the most gracious, kind-hearted, tender act of all time. I was hugely relieved, since I had no fucking clue what to do.

I’m sitting at Soho, a bar downtown, sipping a black Russian and talking to two tourists from Fresno. They know my roommates through a friend of a relative. I call Nida the “pit of despair camped in my living room.” I drink some more.

After Ray and I got through to her that there’s nothing for her here, she perked up and started acting happy. It was unsettling. But we explained to her, via Google translate, that we had to go back to work. After a while she came to my office and asked if I was busy. I was.

When I finished my shift, I asked what she needed. Nothing. She just wanted to talk. I tried to nod politely and smile reassuringly as she said the same things over and over. Said how Nick told her he’d be back in a week. How they used to go shopping together. Excetera. I tried to maintain that Nick was gone forever; she merrily ignored me. Eventually I gave up and said I had to go. (I did).

I’m walking alone downtown. A small man with an unbuttoned polo slinks up next to me. “Chinese girl?” he asks. I wave my hand no. He walks with me a ways, and I keep waving him off, so he slips away. On the sidewalk a tubby dog sleeps, hind legs splayed awkwardly. I shove my earphones in.

I had gone back to the house between errands to bring Nida some char kuay teow. She scarfed it down. She wanted to know which bus to take to the bus station. I don’t know, man. I don’t take buses, just my bike. I don’t know what to do in general around heartbreak. She wants to crash on my couch (we sternly informed her that someone else had moved into Nick’s old room, which was true) and I don’t have the heart to turn her away.

Soon it turns weird. She hands me a slip of paper with her contact details and the sentence, in English, “I want to be your friend.” Later, she will send me a series of unrequited emails in broken English saying things like, “Are you free time.don’t forget to email me. I wert to be your friend.you very good,” and, later, “I wert to take care. I like you. Drop me a line.Please let me hear from you.”

Existence in general is surreal, but this sequence of events particularly so.

[The End of That.]

Posted on May 19, 2012 - Tunes - 1 Comment » Share

Then along the bending pathway

Written by

Rufus Wainwright – In A Graveyard

The playfulness of the Smiths’ “Cemetry Gates” aside, the many homes of the dead sit rather uneasy amongst any three minute stationed pop song, yet, in weakening the mould, “In A Graveyard” proposes a truth and then a possibility, that in death we all belong and that within this are extremes of beauty to be unearthed (so to speak). However close to universal wishfulness this may thread upon, it’s Wainwright’s clarity of voice that devises and executes the certainty of existing beauty, however fragile its foundations may be as relates to the individual.

“I smiled in knowing we’d be back one day.” The discovery of a truth by the singular, but then a dilution, a showing of fragility in the grab and pull of future (or ‘momentarily, dear’) shared experience in the “we”. I wonder if Wainwright purposely ommitted “knowing I’d be back” in favour of “knowing we’d be back”. Shades of fear jolting in the beauty, possibly. Still the beauty persists; nowhere more prominent than throughout the song’s startling melodic perfection. Warring revolts to silent stars, black horizons dim to blue, and revolutionary smiles are born. It’s all quite simple, quite deliberate, quite, well, beautiful. It’s wish fulfillment fulfilled. So while two white horses follow Dylan, and Morrissey bemoans all those people, all those lives, “Where are they now?,” Rufus’s romantic scope breathes new and bright angles upon history’s great laments – such as Hardy’s “And strange-eyed constellations reign his stars eternally.” Strange-eyed constellations reign his stars eternally. How preposterously beautiful. [Download.]

Posted on April 23, 2012 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Where are we?

Written by

M83 – You Appearing

The eerie emptiness of an apartment, freshly vacated by a soured roommate who spent the last two days of his tenure throwing an almighty temper-tantrum, the most passive-aggressive of strops – slamming doors at odd intervals, blaring Hindi Internet radio from his laptop speakers with the door open at 4 a.m., leaving a note about the smell of your sandals as pitifully childish revenge because a few months back you had to confront him about leaving sweaty socks in the living room – leaving behind not so much a lifting of the oppression but an uncertain, vacant quiet. [Saturdays = Youth.]

Posted on April 19, 2012 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

I turn to smoke when you need air

Written by

Wye Oak – Take It In

There’s one cigarette I miss above all. Months after quitting, I’m still bumping into smokes I miss: the drunk-at-2-a.m.-out-on-the-balcony cig, the fuck-my-job-end-of-shift cig, the I’m-feeling-emotionally-insecure-but-bet-a-cig-would-make-me-look-cool cig. But the return of MLS reminded me of my favorite: the I-filed-three-times-at-that-game cig. Brown-papered cloves would wait in the cup holder of my Civic. I would sit down at the steering wheel and sigh, exhausted but fulfilled. I liked to dangle the cig in my mouth for a few minutes, winding down, tasting the sugar-sweetness of the filter, staring into the dark mid-distance, resting my wrists on the wheel. Fingers that had so recently clanked away so many thousands of keystrokes would flick the lighter and crack the window. And then: inhale.

Goddam. Glorious.

I miss that. [The Knot.]

Posted on April 17, 2012 - Tunes - 2 Comments » Share

A way of crystallizing the bad times

Written by

Twin Shadow – Forget

I was typing on Skype to someone I’ve met in person twice when the screen started to sway. Then the ground dragged my feet back and forth and the whole apartment was lurching.

I lived in California for a while so I’m used to earthquakes. I remember once letting a tame one rock me back to sleep during a sunny mid-afternoon nap.

But this one just kept going. On and on it rolled. My nocturnal roommates woke up, screamed “earthquake!” and filmed the fan shuddering back and forth. I walked out to the balcony and tried to see how much the building bent back and forth. Other families crowded out on their balconies, pointing and exclaiming. Many shuffled down the stairs to stare up at us from outside.

Later that day, after the vibrations eventually stilled, I took the elevator down to grab some grub. Some neighbors piled in. They asked me if I’d run outside. “No, I figured if the building collapsed I would die in the stairwell anyway,” I said and they laughed, half out of nervousness at the thought of the building falling on top of them and half at the idea of this white guy talking rapidly at them. One of the ladies in the elevator had run out without sandals, and they told me about it, laughing again. I chuckled and snuck glances at the daughter’s pale thighs.

The earthquake which prompted the tsunami in 2004 was a 9.1-magnitude. This one was an 8.7, with aftershocks as powerful as 8.2. But apparently there’s a difference between vertical and horizontal impact, and there was no tsunami.

I refreshed a liveblog news site on my phone and eventually didn’t make a run for it. But I had planned it all out inside of my head. I’d shove my laptop, headphones, mp3 player, phone, voice recorder, my passport, my grandfather’s ring, a copy of Denis Johnson’s Jesus Son, and two pairs of boxers in my backpack. I would take off on my bike up Penang Hill. Past the temple, I’d park at Ayer Hitam (Black Water) Dam – from there you can see the entirety of Georgetown.

Later I did the math and realized my placement on the far side of the island from the ‘quake meant my condo would have been safe in the first place. Still, I was morbidly excited by the thought of watching an entire city destroyed, safe with my only valuable possessions strapped to my back.

Later that night I filtered off to bed. Lying on my side, I stared open-eyed out the window, where silent bolts of lightning illuminated the entire room, Nature coldly reminding me it could destroy me in a blink.

Posted on April 14, 2012 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

I’m leaving today

Written by

Carey Mulligan – New York, New York

This game is cruel; but its cruelty is sensual and stirs George into hot excitement. He feels a thrill of pleasure to find the senses so eager in their response; too often, now, they seem sadly jaded. From his heart, he thanks these young animals for their beauty. And they will never know what they have done to make this moment marvellous to him, and life itself less hateful –

[Words / Art: Josh Henkins / Music.]

Posted on April 11, 2012 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

Mountain Goats and Anonymous 4

Written by

Posted on April 5, 2012 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

There’s no new way to go

Written by

Starfucker – Mystery Cloud

Everybody should do in their lifetime, sometime, two things. One is to consider death. To observe scowls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Ever. That is a very gloomy thing for contemplation, but it’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative for creating life. You’ll get wonderful things out of that.

Our brains create algorithms for every action or process. When we repeat something, we just reach back to a pre-written formula and read the script. That’s why we use less cognitive capacity when playing video games than sleeping. That’s why we can groggily follow a routine after we wake up but before we’re conscious of the world around us.

Unexpected changes to the world mean we have adjust — revisit the algorithm and either tamper with the code or write a new one for the new situation. That’s why it’s easier to pick up new habits when the rest of your life is in flux. If you want to quit smoking, just move. Your brain gets in algorithm-writing mode and lets you input new data (such as, “I don’t smoke cigarettes”) with less of a fuss. It’s stressful and exhilarating.

Today, after I dropped Goon off at the place she’s crashing, I put my headphones in. They are HiFiMan re-0s. To distinguish left from right earbud, they have a tiny letter engraved on them, but unless there is blaring lighting, I can’t make it out. A week ago I snuck into a Popular and used a sharpie to draw a big red dot on the right earbud, but I’ve since rubbed it off. It was 1 a.m., so I blindly shoved the earbuds in and started driving back home.

It’s surprising how a little thing like hearing the left-panned audio in your right ear can disorient you. I felt upside down. I felt like I was spinning counterclockwise. I felt lost.

[Reptilians.]

Note: My roommate says the name Starfucker is a reference to anal sex. I don’t like that. It feels crude. I like to think the name refers to sexual intercourse with literal stars. I like to imagine human genitalia rubbing against nuclear-fissioning plasma. This note carries no real significance, but, well, you read it anyway.

Posted on April 1, 2012 - Tunes - No Comments » Share

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »