Monday, December 2, 2013

It Was a Clandestine Winter of Television; We Were So Tired of the Fashion Blogs




  • The Field Mice were put in my head Saturday night and have stayed there.
  • Yes, I realize there was no field recordings this past weekend. There were some drafted and saved but Bryce's incredible Parmegiani tribute trumped. Don't worry, the field recordings are drafted and saved.
  • Today is actually the slowest day in Blegsylvania that's not one of the five slowest days in Blegsylvania that ended yesterday. So, have some links, some songs, a Lisa Robertson song, not much more.
  • I was in Politics and Prose on Saturday before Obama showed up, though all the Ford Escalades on Connecticut and suited fuckers with ear pieces in the store sorta tipped it off he was going to be there soon. Once I overheard two store employees talking, I bought my books and got the fuck out of there as fast as I could.
  • Hobsbawm, for those of you who do.
  • Alarming clown epidemic.
  • Maggie's weekly links.
  • New Inquiry's Sunday links.
  • { feuilleton }'s weekly links.





  • ICC. I still haven't driven it, be damned if I'm going to buy an EZ Pass just to see it once.
  • Purple Line! Watch the outpouring of love for the Hay's Spring amphiphod from local homeowners along the proposed route.
  • Verily, fuck Bethesda.
  • SeatSix (who sent me link to alarming clown epidemic) and I have our deposits down on next year's DC United season tickets even though neither of us went to a game after July. Part of my reasoning is my long-time Fuck Me Jig bet that there will never be a new soccer stadium in DC, that I would do a Fuck Me Jig in front of my new seat (in an endzone, but that's another post) in a new stadium should one ever be built. Repeat after me: there will never be a new soccer stadium in DC.
  • A family bestiary.
  • Kafka, for those of you who do.
  • Diminishing perspective.
  • Here is a sentence I never imagined typing: The Pixies are playing Strathmore. I'll not be there. For many reasons, not least of which: jeebus, their music didn't age well for me.
  • Monica's farewell show.






HOTEL COUPLETS

Lisa Robertson

It was a clandestine winter of television; 
We were so tired of the fashion blogs. 

The moist world was doing what it could 
To think at pinkish dusk. 

I say this from the position of having already been emptied 
That summer I heard the chora in the beergarden. 

Vitality, monstrosity, sociability, anarchy--these are 
      standing in for a kind of sensing that hasn't happened yet. 
      There's a slicing rain horizontally striping the train 
window. 

If ornamentation can be austere 
It's a form of brutality. 

I started asking questions about the sculptural values 
      that sound has 
And how authority is installed. 

Describe the silence there. It's a recording of silence 
A marbling or breathing through 

Of sentences coarse, heavy, and blistered 
About things that weakened. 

By 1650, with her outdated ruffs and loyalties, her 
      pipes, her horses and her Roman histories 
      I was an overheard language. I lay down in it with my 
own nerves and blood. 

Each has the pleasure of a new proportion. 
It can't be solved, only articulated. 

Your wind, your clean sky, places, food, sleep 
It all agrees brilliantly with the shape of the earth. 

In this attic room with the deep blue carpet and skylight
      Imagining these small actions from my chair fills me 
with an even calmer happiness. 

I was the flexible medium of the future and the 
      impossibility of beginning. 

I was longing for the visible. 



5 comments:

  1. By 1650, with her outdated ruffs and loyalties


    Ruffs remain part of the formal attire of bishops and ministers in the Church of Denmark. They were abolished by the Church of Norway in 1980, although some conservative ministers such as Børre Knudsen continue to wear them. They are also optional for trebles in Anglican church choirs. Underground artist Klaus Nomi used a ruff as part of his concert attire toward the end of his life, both as a complement to the renaissance-era music he began focusing on in this time frame and to hide the effects of Kaposi's sarcoma. In the twentieth century, the ruff inspired the name of the Elizabethan collar for animals. [Wikipedia]

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  2. Maybe we could get the DC footie team to move down here. There's talk of trying to bring in an MLS squad to town to fill (hahaha) the Georgia Dome out of which the helmetball Falcons will be moving soon (our NASL Silverbacks made it to the c'ship game this year, yay!)— not, of course, to be confused with Turner Field out of which my beloved Braves will be betraying er moving in 2017 to fucking Cobb County. This is the same Cobb County which eschewed 1996 Olympic venues by refusing to erase anti-gay ordinances from its rolls, the same Cobb County whose Commissioner said the only reason they're doing this is so they can improve transportation from the [white] exurban counties north of there but will absolutely block any attempt to improve MARTA by allowing a spur from downtown because it would bring 'those people' north.

    AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!1!!!

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  3. I remember when I read an article about the Field Mice on the long-defunct music blog The War Against Silence. I immediately searched out "How'd You Learn To Kiss That Way?" and was totally knocked out. So good. Had to go and search out all the bits missing from that comp, not to mention many of the other Sarah Records artists.

    TWAS also turned me on to Ultrasound. I loved that blog, then he had to go and obtain a life.

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  4. When I see "ICC" I think International Code Council.

    Yes, I WOULD like my meds adjusted.

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