Udder Disdress

Taking a suggestion from a friend, I've added studded tears to Brigitte Bardot's perfect face. I also ended up just tearing up the sleeves after I realized the material was too thin to properly stud in a sort of box formation.

Boohoo

On To the Next One

There's much can be said for unemployment, I suppose. To say nothing of increased boogying activity abouts town, my little studio has grown. This new tri-leaf wooden table has upgraded my living situation tenfold, doubling as a writing desk and craft bench. At the moment it is strewn with strips of cotton, English standard silver studs, scissors, pliers, pens and notebooks.

One of my latest projects has been slicing up some shirts for a friend who screenprinted his own designs onto American Apparel tees, but was dissatisfied with how neat and boxy they are. Fabric is nice and thin, supersoft 50/50 cotton/polyester, which makes it nice to cut into drapey and distressed styles. So far I've played with his Brigette Bardot prints, and am eager to get my hands on his palm tree Jesus prints.

(check out that sweet racerback!)

Today I went out and found an Xacto knife to make the business of studding a pair of leather boots that were gifted unto me much less painful. I am grateful also to Artichoke Haircut for providing me with incentive to produce my poetry. I think it's the combination of high-level proficiency among the editorial staff, the professional look of the chapbook itself, and the encouragement to be utterly batshit weirdo and humorous in approach that endears me to its monthly reading series. Brand new turds on Jukebox. Word.

Also completed the first step in my introduction to Henry Miller, vis-a-vie his 1930 novel Tropic of Cancer, containing some resonating passages I've rewritten in my journal for the penstroke experience. I'm also fifty some pages into The Colossus of Maroussi, a literary 180, about Greece. Decidedly more upbeat. In fact, some of the passages on his "bliss" are starting to irritate me. But presumably he deserves it. His time throughout Cancer is addled with syphilitic prostitutes, vomitus, lice and homelessness. This is also why I like it. I just imagine a Paris, entering the second decade of the twentieth century stretched sooty with growing pains from the Industrial Revolution, where people used many of the same endearing expressions of disgust and nuances common to our day. I will find some and list them later. But here are a few literary gems:

(from Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller; 1961 Grove Press, New York, NY.)

"I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul."

"Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts." (257)

"Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates." (254)

And:

"If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world." (248).

Yeah, he's got a thing for verbosity and that thing I do, the list of ever-expanding images and adjectives within one thought. It's just that once you put down what you think is a good word, there's a better one to follow it, and a better and a more perfect and a perfecter, and all of them seem to reflect one another's glow. Word addition as opposed to word choice, maybe. Word Addiction. Or just over-choiciness. Whatever. This is Miller country. If it weren't a little messy it wouldn't be beautiful.

Another beautiful thing I've discovered is this band Lost Tribe, kind of goth punk out of Richmond, VA. Not just because I'm so wooed by the idea of subcultures as tribes, but listen to their samples on their page.

And when they played at Golden West on Saturday night I wasn't disappointed. In fact, even though they were opening for Ice Age, a Danish hardcore band, who are also pretty awesome, a lot of us thought maybe Tribe was better. I noticed the lead singer right away, with his Hendrix fro, light brown skin and sweet studded boots. Their set involved A LOT of fog. I mean, we were choking on it in the front row. The drummer and bass player all but disappeared, and they were all backlit by one single white spotlight.

The guys from Ice Age are teenagers, which may be why Tribe struck us as a little more put together--they're like ten years older. But doesn't mean that I didn't sustain a bunch of arm-bruises and soreness from pushing around a bunch of sweaty dudes during their set. And check out this homemade video they did.

Iceage - New Brigade from iceage on Vimeo.

The lead singer is pretty adorable, but also commanded the stage and audience with a true-blue death glare and spitting range. (There was also a guy behind me spraying beer out of his mouth onto us. It was a salivatingly good time.) Nice to see exciting live music, especially hardcore/ish and Euro to boot.

I will have to write a love poem to Baltimore someday soon.

Um...

Still not sure how I'm supposed to watch this video by Best Coast without giggling. But I dig her tights nonetheless. And, you know, the whole absurd West Side Story a la Drew Barrymore thing.

Get More: MTV Supervideo, Music, Best Coast

Brand New Audio-Gasm

Just been listening to Syd Barrett's long-lost lovechild with Marc Bolan, Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Not from the vaults, freshlickers. Enjoy.

Word Turds

I wish I could quit and just shrink back to normal not this inflated pustule of ambition and rubbed raw idea corpse. But sometimes I find a crumb to the candyhouse, like the monthly reading series You're Invited from the venerable rag in its sophomore publishing, Artichoke Haircut. It was at Dionysus last Thursday that I read some work for the first time since--oh jesus--college. Hopefully I beat out that last reading in its sheer shittiness, I mean at least this one I really went for the shit jugular and read two poems ie bowl full of word turds. I'll probably regret this very soon, but here's the link to Jukebox where I've splayed these images gratuitously.

Summer Babes

Sundresses, margaritas, long candelit porch chats...summer is a woman's season.

Not surprising, then, that my ever-growing Summer 2011 Mix is dominated by female voices, old and new.

L.L. is a standby on nearly every mix I make, and a good anthem for the reckless love of summer youth.

Youth Knows No Pain by LykkeLi

Cults, who seem to be a newcomer, will be releasing their self-titled album on June 7 I believe the website says.

Cults - Go Outside by wereofftherails

The hazy lethargy of Beach House suits this wretches swampy Maryland season.

Dirty Gold and Best Coast bring back the Cali dreams which by now we should all know are only shadows but are convincing nonetheless.

Dirty Gold - California Sunrise by isaidahip

Pussypower!

The Lykke Li show at 9:30 last night was one of those times I didn't want a camera. Such emotional hypnosis is pretty hard to capture, even if you and your galpal are looking fresh. Just not worth it. More worth it to try to do the reality screen-shot, which maybe we're forgetting how to do now that we have cameras on us almost constantly. So that's what I did--click, click, click--and now I have an indelible memory that was hand-crafted to selective perfection.

Four long billowy black curtains hung from the ceiling and a red fog covered the stage floor. A few white strobe lights initiated the hypnosis as the track from "Untitled" filled the speakers. The band came out in the dark and started up "Jerome." You knew she was about to come out in a black unitard and black flowy something. Sure enough, the drums signaled her arrival and there was her chin-tipped silhouette--come forth blonde raven sadness queen everyone's yelling, the tiny pubescents and their eager 6-foot boyfriends.

They played pretty much the entirety of Wounded Rhymes and "Little Bit," "Dance, Dance, Dance," from Youth Novels. Songs like "I Know Places," "Sadness Is a Blessing" crushed the soul, absolutely, to smithereens. She stalks around the stage with such authority and deep moaning pain and that face that breaks apart in front of a sold out crowd. You kind of feel worried for and intimidated by her. It's awesome. She interacts with the crowd, literally pulling forth our energy, alchemy for dark metals. It transcends the pleasure of one and becomes the connection of many, yes including the douchebags who you kind of wonder why they are there. So I tried to imagine them away (shit to gold folks) and connect the pyramid of interest amongst her and us. Her voice was even a little hoarse but I'd like to see my voice hold up against a world tour. Plus she uses such a more daring range in the new album, and I suspect she's following up with the goal to have a rougher female voice like latterday Joni Mitchell by keeping a healthy cigarette regimen. (Good thing those ladies made their impossibly high register albums early on, 'cause hearing Mitchell sing "Big Yellow Taxi" these days sounds more like a campfire than a songbird, no disrespect.)

The residual feeling is that of relief. LL has said in interviews she really is disappointed with where pop's gone. What she's accomplishing is a more artistic fusion: using the pop song form when it's appropriate, but not adhering to or dependent upon it for expression, departing pretty dramatically from it in songs with more abstract or overly despairing concepts...which is to say she has as much to contribute musically to her sound as she does lyrically and compositionally. She turns the focus inward, where art is most sincere than your daily marketing images. But when it comes out,it sounds the way it feels, but made new: into something pleasurable. We are saved from the vacuous monotony of "Partypartyparty let's all get wasted Friday Friday Friday partyinpartyin--yeah!" Pop has lost that nineties self-deprecating anthem of "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me, get funky with the Cheez Whiz," etc., in favor of and "I Whip My Hair Back (and Forth)" which is just the ultimate self-indulgent act...but seriously are women so deprived of examples of their innate virtues that we have Katy Perry and Ke$ha telling us the best we have to hope for is to get dressed up, drunk, and make everyone want us? Materialism is so out. Heart is in. And Lykke Li fuses her talent with her heartbreak, causing this sinewy, seductive dream haze or stormy wild woman. It's common, when she's onstage, for her to grab a drumstick and leap around a cymbal or two. Then she comes back to the mike with two in her hand and uses them to sing. If conversation is no easy thing for her, sexual expression is like breathing. And yet it's the heart she wants to seduce, I think that's probably not so clear to everyone. I feel a little protective of her actually. She rips open her own vulnerability for us to come and inspect--but it's really her courage we're looking at.

The main idea here, I guess folks, is that I have a raging girl crush on Lykke Li for her warrior bravery and stylish femininity: pure pussypower.

Therefore I hereby present the artist Lykke Li with the enviable Pseudo-Bi-Monthly Hot Fudge Sundae Pussypower Award, hip-pip!