spaced out and stout-mouthed

played accessory to a crime the other day when our neighbor "dinky" came by with a baby seal in the back of his pickup and was looking for some herring to feed it. i couldn't really say no even though i thought he was kinda fucked up for taking it. it had apparently been stranded past the tide line at a fairly substantial low and, although it was almost certainly a goner, he decided to take it home as a "pet" and now it's surely a goner. poor thing was scared as hell in the scratched up bed beside a spare tire, some old line, and a handful of rusty bolts. and aggresive too. those little fuckers have some burly claws. it seemed as though it should still be feeding on momma's milk so i'm not too sure that the fish i donated did any good. probably for the best.

on another (and final work related) note, i fired the chump carpenter. think i'm stuck with the crazy cook, however.

if you're looking for something to do in Anchorage this sunday(5 June), swing by Cuddy park for what has apparently been dubbed the Anchorage Festival of Unpopular Music. don't know the complete line up but los gran torinos will appear (unfortunately, without our sax player) along with eu vusahm, fats tunamelt, spitshine, chicago 8, flying falcons, and more. also, Food Not Bombs will be there to provide, well, food. i think stubby's crack company's mobile zine library will be there as well. the whole thing is free, outside and (somewhat) family friendly. yeah, i get a vacation and now i get to stress out over this show. . .

so, i had no idea that colorado springs is the "evangelical vatican" . . . a very interesting article in Harper's about a christian wacko that speaks with W. once a week. came upon this one via (worth scrolling down for the commentary)

be sure to watch the trailer for The Guatemalan Handshake. yeah, that's bonnie will oldham there.

listening to:

mornings: skinner pilot-this parking lot is being videotaped, minutemen-ballot results
evenings w/ headphones and nips from the flask: the foreign press-demos and sketches
to lull me to sleep: lau nau-kuutarha

tastes like chicken

7 or so years before I would eventually meet her, Kara Simon was somewhere in the Richmond area of Virginia patiently folding over xeroxed pages to create volume 2 of 'Tastes Like Chicken', a collection of her poems. As the two of us became closer, and started pushing books and music onto one another (some of my Blake and my third or so copy of Actual Air will remain within her collection), we eventually got around to sharing some of our own writings. Well, actually, it was me that had to do the getting around--Kara had a performer's streak to her and had no qualms about sharing her creative side, whereas I'm a chickenshit and lack the type of confidence that she had an abundance of. Anyways, at some point, I was handed 5 unstapled, folded over pages of her words with her name and an 804 area code phone number on back.

Kara took her own life on 29 April 2005. Aside from an old note from last fall left under a wiper blade and then found again on the floorboards of my old pick-up on the evening of her memorial telling me that I was living in a weird buiding and why couldn't I hear her knocking on my windows, these are the only words I have left from Kara.

This is the first poem from 'Tastes Like Chicken' II:

we were young
and we were all taught to swallow shame and pretend pride.
and we would spend time
walking around and looking for satisfaction:
something easy, a quick trick
a distraction
something to spare us.
how can you answer when you don't know the question.
silly?
an empty mind is what you get for an empty life.
waiting for the next explosion of insignificance.
whose life is deeper. yours or mine?
it is foolish to have pride.
be truthful.

--Kara Simon


Love to you, girl.

the dust blows in

I've heard neither Manitoba nor Caribou but judging from helmsman Dan Snaith's contribution(see below) to Dusted Magazine's 'Listed' column, I ought to. The guy is so right on about some of my favorite records (specifically In the Aeroplane and Black Unity) and his list, aside from Nistromsaand and Bisombes (whom I'll now be sure to check out), reads like a weekend's playlist in my old apartment.

1.Albert Ayler - Love Cry
It's tough to choose between Ayler's albums because they're all that good and he cycles through the same half dozen songs most of the time but the addition of a harpsichord on this one takes his already transcendent music to a higher level of heaviness.

2. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow
No amount of hyperbole is too much for this band. Set all their imitators aside - their thundering is a call from on high.

3. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Mozart eat your heart out. Some scraggly motherfuckers from Georgia/New Mexico just blew you a new asshole.

4. Phillipe Besombes - Libra OST
Avant-garde French composer Besombes has been largely forgotten since his heyday in the 1970s but this will be his year. Moogs, phasers, drums, sheepskin coats and pipes... this will serve as an adequate introduction to the man until he returns to storm the charts.

5. Madvillain - Madvillainy
An album that surpassed all my unreasonably high expectations for it. Madlib is seen here in his finest, rawest, maddest form with Doom at is peak matching him every step of the way.

6. Pharoah Sanders - Black Unity
Listening to this makes me wonder why no one makes records as heavy as this these days. The idea of this many ridiculously talented musicians pulling together something this momentous ever again seems laughable.

7. Faust - The BBC Sessions
When I think about this record I imagine it being recorded by a colony of rock giants dressed in sabre-toothed snugglies.

8. Animal Collective - Sung Tongs
Another album that has already been heaped with praise but deservedly so. An album that focuses all their best ideas and marks them as the truly important band that they are.

9. Lars Nistromsaand - The Molten Core of the Cosmos
People tend to associate progressive rock quite correctly with endless organ solos and wizard costumes but this classic album from 1982 recorded on one microphone captures the sound of three drum kits and three singing saws getting as conceptual as you like before Nistromsaand's career was cut unmercifully short by libellous allegations of paedophilia.

10. The Zombies - Odyssey and Oracle
Perfect pop, perfectly arranged and performed. Guaranteed to raise a smile from even the greatest misery Muppet.

*** *** ***
Woke up at 3 am last night and laid around for about an hour listening to an owl that was right outside my cabin. I believe it was one of these guys on it's way to Barrow. Sometimes it takes moments like these to remind me that my life out here in bush AK
. . . well, let's just say that sometimes it takes moments like these to remind me.

while someone else is eating or opening a window or walking dully along . . .

It's hard to think of things to say when someone you love takes their own life. . .

shit, sometimes it's just hard to think. . .

Instead, I'll share this poem by W.H. Auden. I vividly remember reading it in high school. It was one of the first poems (along with Whitman, Tennyson, et al.) to really affect me and it's lesson has stayed with me always.

Musee Des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

--W.H. Auden

To see the poem alongside Breughel's painting, go here.


Much love to you, Kara.