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listen | william devaughn

PLEASE PRESS PLAY.

listen | d'angelo

happening | ocotillo

oh you're coming? gonna geek out with kalen screaming, get all deep whiteboy with tim and me, lose your shit? that's great. fantastic. i'm glad to hear it. glad to hear you're coming to matchless. matchless tomorrow. tomorrow night for ocotillo. for the man of the setting sun. for the one band that's better than any other band by a landslide of votes. ocotillo's first show.

do you think i'm only kidding around about it? about the superlatives and the exclamations? don't be an idiot. jeff thrope, who is ocotillo, holy jesus has he ever got it. and it's not only that he's my siamese brother, either. not even at all. no, it's that coming back from the beach sounds like "gone are the women" and not vice versa. it's the company man and the shooka shooka goat hooves shaking and that paul simon and paul mccartney never thought to spend a desert weekend reading each others' minds. finally it's that mario got sonned and do you know why? because mario sounds slick and all but jeff, jeff sounds wild and desperate. jeff sounds bloody.

are you following me? are you coming? you must. because believe this: everything's still in its infancy here, but if you miss this i guarantee your kid's gonna tell you nineteen years from now, "my parent, you had a shot at seeing the first ever show by ocotillo, the band that meant everything to your generation and friends, for free in a room smaller than our ranch house and you stayed in? really? you went to savalas instead? you went to a hookah bar? and you call yourself my relative? you know what? stop. i don't know you. i fucking hate you. no wonder i'm ugly."

SEE YOU AT MATCHLESS, 9PM THIS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

DOWNLOAD: OCOTILLO - MAYBE IT'S TIME TO LEVON [MP3]

happening | family band

essential times.
DOWNLOAD: Family Band - Blessed [mp3]

listen | bob dylan

it's about as plain a thing to say as "i'm breathing" to tell you that bob dylan is putting my heart all to pieces tonight, but i'll just go ahead and tell it anyway. this time around it's peco's blues, a newfound must that sounds to be a pat garrett and billy the kid recording session, ganging up on me with the bedsheet scent of a weekend sticking around. go on and listen.

DOWNLOAD: BOB DYLAN - GOODBYE HOLLY [MP3]

happening | melanie bonajo

 




melanie bonajo | captive lives western spectacle | capricious space

~through halloween~


DOWNLOAD: JULIAN LYNCH - ANDAZA [MP3]

read | breece d'j pancake

breece pancake was a west virgina kid who shot his own head off at twenty six years. that was 1979. he'd had a couple short stories published in the atlantic and would have a few more to come, and even a book that half the world would go crazy over, now that he was dead. his favorite folk singer was phil ochs.

this is an excerpt from trilobites:

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I stir the meat, listen for noise or talk on the porch, but there is none. I look out. A lightning flash peels shadows from the yard, and leaves a dark strip under the eave of the barn. I feel a scum on my skin in the still air. I take my supper to the porch.

I look down the valley to where bison used to graze before the first rails were put down. Now those rails are covered with a highway, and cars rush back and forth in the wind. I watch Trent's car back out, heading east into town. I'm afraid to ask right off if he got what he wanted.

I stick my plate under Mom's nose, but she waves it off. I sit in Pop's old rocker, watch the storm come. Dust devils puff around on the berm, and maple sprigs land in the yard with their white bellies up. Across the road, our windbreak bends, rows of cedars furling every which way at once.

"Coming a big one?" I say.

Mom says nothing and fans herself with the funeral home fan. The wind layers her hair, but she keeps that cardboard picture of Jesus bobbing like crazy. Her face changes. I know what she thinks. She thinks how she isn't the girl in the picture on the mantel. She isn't standing with Pop's garrison cap cocked on her head.

"I wish you'd of come out while he's here," she says. She stares across the road to the windbreak.

"I heard him yesterday," I say.

"It ain't that at all," she says, and I watch her brow come down a little. "It's like when Jim called us askin' if we wanted some beans an' I had to tell him to leave 'em in the truck at church. I swan how folks talk when men come 'round a widow."

I know Jim talks like a dumb old fart, but it isn't like he'd rape her or anything. I don't want to argue with her. "Well," I say, "who owns this place?"

"We still do. Don't have to sign nothin' till tomorrow."

She quits bobbing Jesus to look at me. She starts up: "You'll like Akron. Law, I bet Marcy's youngest girl'd love to meet you. She's a regular rock hound too. 'Sides, your father always said we'd move there when you got big enough to run the farm."

I know she has to say it. I just keep my mouth shut. The rain comes, ringing the roof tin. I watch the high wind snap branches from the trees. Pale splinters of light shoot down behind the far hills. We are just brushed by this storm.

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DEFINITELY READ: The rest of Trilobites
SEE ALSO: Hollow and The Honored Dead

+ photo by austintexas

watch | julian lynch

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listen | jessica pratt

the idiotic chatter of high heels and bracelets giving tacky rhythm to the skirt whoosh and the sunglasses and all kinds of gratuitous mesh -- the zombie conversations they outyammered -- got to be so much in nolita wednesday that i ducked into a brick wall church with a cemetery and, with my legs sore and my eyes dead and their garfield lids at aggravated half-mast, i had a breath. inside was a grave place with the brown purple lights dark and candles going and quiet except for a man standing seven or eight pews back, crying softly and praying to jesus in rollerblades. i lit a candle and asked his jesus for a break and for a green and blue place if it wasn't too much trouble. maybe this bushel hyde is what i got.

and maybe next time we can get into how this all-night sleepyhead in lace and gothic curtains braved the airlines for the first time ever, without identification, to howl along with inspired wise-asses and karaoke goons in the dank hot mouth of the trash bar, far away from california home. whatever any of that means. christ. forget all that. listen to this.

DOWNLOAD: JESSICA PRATT - BUSHEL HYDE [MP3] -->

SEE ALSO:
+ Sharon Van Etten
+ Meg Baird
+ Elyse
+ Mariee Sioux

+ photo by lenard smith
+ jessica pratt by karen lembke

watch | ayahuasca

"daniel ... is the last shaman of the inganos ...

his whole body is a pul-sating hum of energy!"

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look | breakneck ridge

it was only the first granite scramble up breakneck ridge in cold spring when the old altitude terrors kicked in and i started to feel all fucked up, like irritable and awful. weirdly the feeling of too much gravity dragging the body back down was doing helium tricks to my head, all dizzy and bobbing and anxious, like i'd float off if i didn't hold on. jeff was climbing faster than i cared to (or so i told myself) and i thought of the dream last night that had my father and i co-piloting an airplane with a hole as big as a cargo van in its wall, right out into the sky. we were flying straight up, 180 degrees and worried as hell, with the idea that we'd try to go to outer space.

a few days later liz showed me a dream book that said it meant a reckless plan of mine had likely taken off lately, and that i'd have a shot at "higher consciousness, new-found freedom and greater awareness" sometime soon if i could play it right. that's about the exact opposite of what was in my head that minute out on the rocks. a dream three nights before, of abie baby lolling and drooling in a low blood sugar spazz-out while new york burned and crumbled around us in an outlandish terrorist attack, seemed like a more appropriate match for the afternoon.

not that i was so awfully shaken by the heights. it was just that i was in a hell of a mood, really. i was in a hell of a mood and i was silently taking it out on annie and jeff. well, maybe not completely silently. to be honest, i was being a dick pretty outright, saying "shut up" when they talked and so on. nasty of me considering it wasn't them at all but mostly ghosts of cold spring past who were turning my vertigo into something darker. old plans half meant and fallen through. you get the idea. all the drinking didn't help any either, the new drinking, which i wasn't used to, which had been muddying up my understanding of time for probably two months now. probably.

but actually no it wasn't the drinking at all. truth was that the drinking had been wonderful. so had annie and jeff. and tim and kalen. kalen who, at the foot of the ridge, had put us all in tears when she absentmindedly slammed the trunk of the car on tim's head while he was changing into this wildly red soccer jersey with the number 11 on the back and holy shit was it funny. there was no blood. tim shook it off, swallowed a tylenol and went dancing up the crags in that crazy shirt like a karaoke ball tapping out lyrics. we grunted up behind him to a lookout at a reasonable halfway point and sat down with some slices of pepper jack cheese and those gritty cratered health crackers and a packet of dried figs.

i know it sounds like a lie, or at least like something that's too glaringly, stupidly precious to mention, but it's true that across the hudson, there was a view of a thousand feet of freight train crawling along the bottom edge of storm king mountain, dividing it from the water. gag all you want at that. knock yourself out. it was our view looking down. the dream book says that trains indicate a time of reflection and a change in your fortunes. that they "often reflect a hope for new liaison on the part of the dreamer," or they call attention to existing liaisons, all those colored tiny cars, pulling each other around the corner.

of course all that's nonsense, dream books. too easy. anyway it doesn't matter because i wasn't dreaming. i was wide awake. i know because if i hadn't been, i would be dead, because falling asleep while you're hiking straight up a mountain is not a mistake most people get to make twice. that is a fact. good thing most other mistakes are a little more forgiving than breakneck ridge, eh? i used the lull to take a few pictures and to sigh my rotten mood off. the crackers tasted delicious with the cheese and the fruit. jeff pretended to throw tim off the cliff and tim made a joke i can't remember. on the way down we talked dirty and laughed so hard it was almost the end of us. here are some of those pictures i just mentioned. happy labor day.

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happening | joe gardella

via kipsgallery.com: "Joe Gardella works as if time does not exist. For him, spending, off and on, 3 or 4 years on a drawing is just fine. The works presented in this current show were done over a period of two years some 30 years ago.

The drawings were executed on paper and all present a tectonic central motif of a vertical barreled shape. In some pieces this form is delicately constructed out of thin watercolor washes, in others, infinite strokes of fine dark graphite lines in varying tonal intensity, define the central shape while leaving untouched the white expanse of the paper.

Extremely work intensive, Joe Gardella's drawings are the antithesis of today's speed-crazed world. One might ask the question why the artist does not try to obtain similar results with the help of the current formidable technology available today and favored by so many artists? But then, the mark of the human hand would be lost... and it is precisely that which infuses Gardella's drawings with their real poetry."

JOE GARDELLA
Sep 3 - Sep 19, 2009
KIPS GALLERY
511 W 25

watch | dear & yonder

DOWNLOAD: Vetiver - Been So Long [mp3] +

look | woodstock handmade houses

*Photos from Woodstock Handmade Houses, by Robert Haney, David Ballantine and Jonathan Elliott.




DOWNLOAD: Pale Hoarse - Darkness Has Taken Over Me [mp3] +

look | randy arnold

look | tom banks

tom banks went out to big sur for folk yeah's "party in the pines." saw woods, farmer dave scher, kurt vile, wooden shjips, vietnam, ariel pink, gang gang dance, dungen and saviours there, took their pictures too. makes me kinda wish to die that i didn't. here's more.