4 for Friday

1. Coil - Are You Shivering - From the album "Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1" it is absolutely that. This might be my favorite Coil track. To me their weirdness and darkness and theatricality and intricacies of sound are totally present and at their best here.
2. PJ Harvey - Happy and Bleeding - Old school PJ, before she got all polished and theatrical. I used to have quite the angsty time singing to this album.
3. Ryan Adams - Wonderwall - I never thought an Oasis song could sound good.
4. Iron & Wine - Sea and the Rhythm - My favorite Iron & Wine song. I could die to this.

6 for Saturday

So I was terribly busy running around adventuring yesterday and wasn't able to post my 4 for Friday, so to make up for that I'll post 6 for Saturday. That's two more for the price of nothing, my friends.
1. The Knife - Got 2 Let U
2. Coil - The Tenderness of Wolves
3. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Abattoir Blues
4. Combichrist - Sent to Destroy
5. H.I.M. - One Last Time
6. Death from Above 1979 - You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

Overheard on Valencia last night

Setting - Guy and girl standing in front of Ritual. I'm walking by with a friend of mine.

Guy: It's fake!
Girl: Pap smears are not fake!!

And scene.

4 for Friday!!!!

No text this week, just links to the songs. Find your own opinions of them.
1. Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Lie Down in the Light
2. Front 242 - Operating Tracks
3. Placebo - Nancy Boy
4. Magnetic Fields - The Death of Ferdinand de Saussere

I <3 you, San Francisco.

(12:20:20 PM) Marie: oh also on my way home
(12:20:27 PM) Marie: there was a girl on the train with her friends
(12:20:34 PM) Marie: who was like doing handstands on the moving train
(12:20:47 PM) Marie: she was really tall and was holding herself with her feet on the ceiling
(12:21:04 PM) Marie: then she was grabbing the handrails and doing flips and shit down the aisles
(12:21:11 PM) Marie: and hanging upside down off of them
(12:21:25 PM) Marie: and then she inspired a random guy on the train to do a backflip too
(12:21:28 PM) Marie: it was pretty magical

4 for Friday

1. Neko Case - That Teenage Feeling - This song is sooo indicative of my life 8 or 9 months ago. It's my favorite song off of Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.
2. Tracey Thorn and Jens Lekman - Yeah! Oh Yeah! - This is a great cover of a great Magnetic Fields song. I love the idea of Jens singing Stephin Merritt. And Tracey (Everything But the Girl)sounds lovely as well.
3. Propagandhi - Gifts - This is one of their more "emo" songs, solely because John Samson is singing it. Well, the lyrics are pretty emo too. John Samson is just emo. Go listen to the Weakerthans if you don't believe me.
4. Whiskeytown - Turn Around (Alternate Version) - Oh Ryan Adams. You were such a little southern-accented rough voiced boy. (I think he was like 23 when this came out). I love it.

I saw Jens Lekman!

I have video and pictures. He made us promise not to post them on the internet, but I have to show the world a small bit of his dreamy amazingness:

It was too fantastic for words.

4 for Friday

This one is gonna be quick cause I have shit to do:
1. Coil - The Dark Age of Love
2. Combichrist - god bless
3. Mika - Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)
4. The Knife - Listen Now

4 for Friday

So this is a little thing I'm going to start doing cause I've always wanted to have some sort of music feature for this blog but I didn't really know what. So on Fridays I'm just gonna hit shuffle on iTunes and post the first four songs that come up. Woohoo.

1. Jens Lekman - Run Away With Me This is one of my favorite Jens songs. I'm going to see him in a couple of weeks. I'll make sure to try to propose to him. Again.
2. Ryan Adams & The Cardinals - Sink Ships This is one of those Ryan Adams songs (much like Cherry Lane or Meadowlake Street on Cold Roses) that starts out fairly standard and mediocre and then switches it up at the end and becomes just sort of amazing and transcendent. I can't really describe it any better than that, but he's really fucking good at doing it.
3. Bonnie "Prince" Billy - You Remind Me of Something (The Glory Goes) A good Bonnie song. Very nice to sing along with.
4. Einstürzende Neubauten - Good Morning Everybody And now for something completely different...German experimental noise music. I like Blixa. He's tied with Warren for title of my favorite Bad Seed.

So hopefully I'll keep my motivation and continue doing this. I will confess that I did skip posting the real third song that played because it was a 17 minute long spoken word type thing by Coil. Should I have gone ahead and posted that? I have a lot of weird shit like that that will probably pop up from time to time in doing this so I guess I should figure out if everything is fair game or if I'm going to keep it strictly "Music music".

Overheard on the N last night

Guy talking to his friend on the phone: "He was like "You look like a fucking hipster" and I was all "I will stab you"."

(He was discussing how he got sucker-punched by some "Don Johnson looking motherfucker" and a few minutes prior had asked Robbie if his face was all red or if he was bleeding.)

I saw Iron & Wine for free!

In fact it was the second time I've seen him for free (last year's Hardly Strictly being the other) but this was so much better because it was a very small secret show at a tiny record store and my friends and I were in the very front sitting at his feet. So amazing. Plus it happened the day after my birthday.
Here is a little video I took of Naked as We Came with my shitty digital camera:


There are pictures here.

Yesterday didn't happen.

Yesterday was a waste of a birthday, so I've decided it didn't happen. I'm still 27. Ha.

Birthday Part One

So far the day has been uneventful. I went out for breakfast and had a mango mimosa. It was bomb. The weather has not been cooperating so I've just been hiding out inside, drinking rum and doing nothing. Garrett wrote me the best birthday email though. I miss my SD peeps. I will update later with more.

Crawl away, silly spider

I have very vivid memories attached to this sculpture.

Hopefully they crawl away soon too.

My New Place

Fireplace, Books, originally uploaded by primalux.

Moving, Part 1.
Pictures taken after a week of living in my new place.

I'm running into walls and I'm too stupid to stop it.

I think when you invest time and emotion in something and you see progress it's so much harder to let that thing go. Reality becomes all clouded by this idea of possibility or curiosity, which has really always been my downfall. I don't ever want to be so cynical as to think I can predict the future. I always want to be curious. I always want to be thrilled and excited by the unknown and the concept of "possibility".

..but i will always be curious. life is just too damn precious for it not to mean fucking everything all the time.

Ryan Adams wrote that on his old blog. Nothing has ever summed up the only "meaning" I've found in existence so succinctly.

The downfall of that is I get trapped in these tangled situations because I decide that someone or something is "worth it" and I want them to share in this experience of life. I need to remember that some people don't want that. Some people want to live in the past. Some people want to be trapped in memories and idealized, romanticized vignettes in their heads. I would rather die than lived trapped in my head again. I would rather die than think the only thing I have to look forward to is the past and all the things I've already done.

Things are a little bit difficult because for the first time as an adult I'm really, really alone. I have no close friends up here now, with the exception of Chris but we now no longer live together and it's complicated anyway. Plus he's going back to Jersey for a month. I have no one I'm dating or even seeing at this point. I've been really dissatisfied with everyone I've met up here for the most part. I don't feel like carrying on some random sex thing with someone because it just seems like too much work. I don't think I really ever want to be in a relationship again, or at least not for a long time, so that kind of limits the kind of people I'm going to meet, but I also don't really feel like going through all the torture of getting to know someone anyway. Anyway, this somewhat limits my activities because while I'm not totally opposed to doing things alone or anything, I really dislike going to shows alone or going to bars alone or dinner alone. Plus doing all those things just invites random dudes to come and try to hit on me, which is profoundly annoying. So I'm sort of in this mode where I just want to cloister myself, but I also know that's just too easy of a trap for me to fall into. And that I will go insane and not be happy at all anyway.

I will figure this all out in time I know. It's just all exploded out of nowhere this weekend and so this is the first time I've really been thinking a lot about it.

Alcatrash

Alcatrash 1, originally uploaded by stubbornbeauty.

Best drunk picture ever

Heartbeats & Covers

So this is possibly my favorite song by The Knife:

If you don't know, The Knife are this crazy electronic, Bjork-esque brother-sister music group from Sweden and I ♥ them a lot.

I was watching crappy TV in the morning as I often do on my days off, and I heard this cover of Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez on that "Bones" show:

It definitely fits into that whole mellow/folksy/acoustic thing I love.

In searching on YouTube for that video, I also found this one. It's a cover by a Belgian girls choir called Scala & Kolacny Brothers:

Since I grew up singing in choirs I think I might have a special love for them, but also it's pretty awesome anyway.

I am hopeless.

So I know I just did a post about an amazing Bonnie Prince Billy song, but this may be THE MOST AMAZING BONNIE PRINCE BILLY SONG EVVVVAAAARRR!!!!!1!!

Seriously though. Every time I hear it I'm like "WTF universe. All songs should be this awesome"

(mp3 link) Bonnie Prince Billy - Birch Ballad

I will always be a wolf among wolves

This song is my newest obsession.

She loves a soul,
That I've never been
A dog among dogs,
A man among men
And every day,
When I come home to her
She holds a phantom,
She kisses and she hugs him
And I am not
Averse to how she loves him
Why must I live and walk,
Unloved as what I am

Why can't I be loved as what I am
A wolf among wolves, and not as a man
Among men

She craves a home
That she can go in
A sheltered cave,
That I have never seen
Not in my life,
And not even in my dreams

Why can't I be loved as what I am
A wolf among wolves, and not as a man
Among men