watch | jerry orbach

DOWNLOAD: Jerry Orbach - Try To Remember [mp3]
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watch | cello and theremin

played in a reverberation chamber, where no two surfaces are exactly parallel.

listen | sun ra quartet

PLEASE PRESS PLAY.

look | hallucinogenic plants

r.i.p. | helen levitt

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xo

PLEASE PRESS PLAY.
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dream | psychedelic shaq

shaquille o'neal and i were leaving a bowling alley together, last night or this morning between alarms, and he was pleading with some kid to tell him how to beat the boss of level three in a video game. after that, on our way out through a crowd, i looked him in the face, frowned, and said in a voice a little higher than normal, "do you like playing for new jersey?" his lips squinched to the left and he told me, also in kind of a high voice, "fffff... man, i hate it. they thought they hired a showman, but honestly, all i'm interested in doing is driving to the board and chopping down that ball. it's so annoying. i get as much pressure from the team as i do the fans. bums me out." we shook our heads. it was a heart to heart.

my mom picked us up in her beater cargo van. it seats sixteen. on the highway, all the oncoming traffic was boxy with small round headlights. old suvs and trucks. the end of the afternoon sky behind them and silos going by between were all cast in unnaturally deep kodachrome colors, so shaq kept quiet and stared. i had a used up disposable camera in my lap and looked through the viewfinder, which was broken in such a way that turning the crank would pass a corner of perforated film across the scene and that looked like you wouldn't believe. broke my heart that camera was spent.

in the same dream, hannah took a shot at my face with a silver pistol, but missed and only gave our dad a tiny black eye. i mean that his eye shrunk. i also surfed straight down a grassy mountain on my bare right heel, kicking up a wake of pale green dust like an airplane would do in the sky. i was in a white grateful dead t-shirt and plain white short shorts. goodnight.

DOWNLOAD: The Temptations - Psychedelic Shack [mp3] (more!)

look | david foote, perverted

listen | josh johnson, mostly

one time i was eighteen and there was a place, the leper dorm at the art college, where we played a few songs that we'd practiced in my own dorm's laundry room. josh johnson lived there and one kid slept in a bathtub with claw feet and blankets out in the living room because, you know, art school, eighteen, etc. it was in minneapolis and winter and we'd recently smashed out the back window of josh's car accidentally in a parking lot. i know for sure that i was wearing a grocery bag of a hat, was very new to almost everything and behaved sweetly to a degree that i'd hate to see played back on video. i imagine that's the permanent truth about yourself ten years ago, though. sure it'll be true of all this. here's a palace music song we played.

DOWNLOAD: Josh Johnson, Daniel Arnold, Deborah Copperud - Horses [mp3]

* photo by militia shimkovitz

read | leigh newman

"We unloaded the guns, leaving two of them by a tree. Dad kept going up the bank. I slung my grandfather’s gun over my shoulder and headed home through the woods, panicking, stumbling through untouched snow that now came up to my waist. My stretched belly hurt with every step. And on top of it all, I couldn’t remember the way. We had gone so far downriver that I wasn’t sure where the house was." [more]

DOWNLOAD: Richard Buckner - Blue & Wonder [mp3] [more]
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listen | pillars and tongues

DOWNLOAD: Pillars & Tongues - Hall Of Bliss [mp3] (thx)

* photos by nicephore bis
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look | neil krug

well surprise surprise, ol' neil krug went and did it again, at the beach this time from the look of it, with the usual longhairs and expired celluloid. he also went and did an interview over at fecal face, with varying degrees of success depending on your opinion of mystique. worth a look, if only for more vague hints as to the nature of that last movie ever he's got cookin out in the desert. here's a glint of color among the FF formalities:

"I am a huge fan of 70s Giallo cinema and the Leone spaghetti westerns of the late sixties. The music and disposition of that era is comforting to me in a lot of ways. I'm probably trying to recreate that to some degree."

READ: The Neil Krug / Fecal Face Interview
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listen | assemble head in sunburst sound

pack up the van. we're getting the fuck out of here.+

watch | bat for lashes

bummed as i obviously am that this smoker, "daniel," isn't about me, it's a pretty sweet call to use your music video to reveal that your seemingly dead serious new single is actually about the karate kid.

UPDATE: i thought i was kidding. turns out i wasn't. weird!
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read | edward abbey

on the building of the glen canyon dam:

Down the river we drift in a kind of waking dream, gliding beneath the great curving cliffs with their tapestries of water stains, the golden alcoves, the hanging gardens, the seeps, the springs where no man will ever drink, the royal arches in high relief and the amphitheatres shaped like seashells. A sculptured landscape mostly bare of vegetation--earth in the nude.

We try the walls for echo values--
HELLO....
      Hello....
           hello....
--and the sounds that come back to us, far off and fading, are so strange and lovely, transmuted by distance, that we fall into silence, enchanted.

We pass sandbars where stands of white-plumed cane and the lacy blossoms of young tamarisk wave in the breeze among driftwood logs aged to a silver finish by sun and wind and water. In the lateral canyons we sometimes see thickets of Gambel oak and occasional cottonwoods with gray elephantine trunks and bright clear-green leaves, delicately suspended, trembling in the air.

We pass too many of these marvelous side canyons, to my everlasting regret, for most of them will never again be wholly accessible to human eyes or feet. Their living marvels must remain forever unknown, to be drowned beneath the dead water of the coming reservoir, buried for centuries under mud.

                                                                                               ~from Desert Solitaire

DOWNLOAD: The Sensational Zion Seekers - Called Up To Meet Him [mp3]
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visit | queens county farm museum

let's go.

watch | kid cudi

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listen | girls

ahhhhhhhhh girls have a new jam and it sounds like suicide grease lightniiing!
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watch | ross mcelwee

via joel: what's made me a junky for old unposed photos is the softness of the colors and the focus and the plain stupid honesty of it all. just some bullshit that happened when nobody was really noticing that's stuck in place, looking like cream with a little food coloring in it. i don't know if that's a reaction to modern advertisement or another pathetic attempt at immortality or at least significance in quiet living or if it's inadvertent conformity to some lingering fashion trend. maybe it's the way my parents and grandparents thought things oughta look and i'm just acting out some genetic predisposition. it's not worth so much thought.

whatever it is, ross mcelwee knows exactly how much food coloring to put in the cream. and in what i've seen of his documentary, sherman's march, he matches the softness of those cloudy easter tones with the thickness of his voice and heavy tonsils in narration. he makes you think of photography, not only in appearance, but in the way that he outclasses it with his ability to simultaneously show you the pastor proselytizing with his jesus cartoon, the doe-eyed mom getting the message, her twerp kid slobbing on the vanilla filling of her ice cream sandwich and the easter bunny distracting her with treats. a still could never tell it all without coming off contrived. and then there's the audio. "you pay a price for being a female prophet." plain stupid honesty. it makes you think of photography. i don't mean that poetically. do you know what i mean?

definitely go see the other sherman's march clip (and the extremely well-put analysis) on greengoldfilm.net.

* joel adds, via email: his shit is the bomb. now he teaches at harvard.
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look | all for everyone

watch | virgin forest, dan asher

watch | will oldham

can't wait. sorry this shit's so lazy lately. so much to do.
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look | emma livingston

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read | tunde adebimpe

Brandon Kim reporting for IFC:

Music is omnipresent in Rachel Getting Married, and it's also all live and seemingly spontaneous, drawing the audience in with the characters as if we're all there together hearing the same thing at the same time. How did that musical set affect your performance?

That set, especially the Buchman household, was bristling with music from the time we showed up 'til we left. There were instruments all over the place, and a wedding band who also provided most of the soundtrack, much of which was recorded live as the action progressed. The way it affected my performance, and I think everyone's, probably, was that we had this music as another character in the scene to play with, or against. There's a scene where Kym (Anne Hathaway's character) breaks away from a very tense conversation and screams "Are they gonna play all fucking weekend?!?", in reference to what's essentially the film's soundtrack. Totally ad-libbed, kinda hilarious, expressing a very real concern.

READ: Full interview, including Brandon's last ditch attempt at seduction.
DOWNLOAD: Tunde Adebimpe - Unknown Legend [mp3] (thx)

look | son house at newport folk festival

SEE: More incredible folk photos by John Rudoff, M.D. [via Cold Splinters]
DOWNLOAD: Son House - My Black Mama Part 1 [mp3]

watch | john cheever, john updike

Dick Cavett reporting for the New York Times:

We needn’t apologize for saying things like “it rained cats and dogs.” Clichés are useful. Yet both these men were able to speak without them. A conscious self-discipline? Or just part of their natural genius with words? In any case, a rare and lovely thing to behold.

In their talk, where a cliché could easily have served, examples of fresh language abound. Here is a case in point (whoops!) from Cheever, this one recalled from an earlier show:

He said he had asked his children to let him know if he began to show signs of decline. But instead of “show signs of decline” or “begin to fall apart” or “start slowing down” or “lose my grip,” he said, “I’ve made my children promise to tell me immediately when I begin to shed my leaves.”

Later article: The price exacted by booze, drugs and the wear-and-tear of leading a double (triple?) life of bisexual adultery while maintaining a family and brilliant writing career was writ large on the raffish Cheever face. Looking at the two writers sitting side-by-side in the green room backstage, waiting to go on, Cheever’s somewhat rumpled appearance contrasted noticeably with that of the prim and preppy Updike.

A note on John U. and bad habits: Either before or during one show, someone lit a cigarette, and Updike said, “I could have sworn in court that I am not smoking these days. Then yesterday I edited some pages and, amazed, looked down and there were eleven butts in the ashtray.”

John died of what doctors abbreviate “ca. of the lung.” Maybe docs, especially, like to avoid the dread word.

WATCH: Dick Cavett Interviews John Cheever & John Updike
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watch | birds of prey

DOWNLOAD: Gerald Primeaux - Two Harmonized Peyote Songs [mp3]
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watch | phosphorescent

i'm waiting on the development of two dubiously flashless disposable cameras to get into the details of why phosphorescent's willie nelson show at bell house saturday was the best concert i ever saw my whole life. until then, here's one of his encores that doesn't even begin to hint at the firm but loving two-hour grasp he had on the nape of the universe's neck that night.

DOWNLOAD: Phosphorescent - A Picture Of Our Torn Up Praise [mp3]
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read | richard brautigan

DOWNLOAD: YES - SWEETNESS [MP3]
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