Tuesday, July 29, 2008

I like the crowds and the really big shows, people touching people that they really don't know

My iPod is slowly going insane.  This morning on my train commute 30 seconds of a Hold Steady song was interjected into a Nico Muhly song.  This is the 3rd time its happened, however the 1st 2 time were around a year ago and occurred during a song by Our Lady of the Flowers, aka Nicholas Moore.  Nicholas is a friend of mine who started making ambient/drone/noise music when he moved to Colorado.  After some prodding he sent me 5 discs of circuit bent madness.  None of the tracks were named, and at the time I thought he sampled the Hold Steady song, and afterword I couldn't find it.  I thought it was interesting song, 7 or 8 minutes of drone abruptly cutting to Craig Finn shouting "I like the crowds and the really big shows,  People touching people that they really don't know".  The irony kinda made sense.  But this morning it happened again, same Hold Steady sample interjected into a different song. What the hell?  

Monday, July 28, 2008

from The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

But slapped amid these mundane bills, as if it belonged there by right, was a great three-sheet broadside, a thing the size of a horse-blanket, Engine-printed, rumpled in the hasty plastering. Indeed, its very ink seemed still damp.
A mad thing.
Mallory stopped dead before it, stricken by its crude bizarrity. It had been done in three colors - scarlet, black, and an ugly greyish-pink that seemed a muddle of the two.
A scarlet blindfolded woman - a Goddess of Justice?- in a blurry scarlet toga brandished a scarlet sword labeled LUDD over the pinkish-grey heads of two very crudely rendered figures, a man and a woman depicted in busts - a king and a queen? Lord and Lady Byron perhaps? The scarlet goddess trampled the midsection of a large two-headed snake, or scaly dragon, its writhing body labeled MERIT-LORDSHIP. Behind the scarlet women, the skyline of a London was vigorously aflame in scarlet tongues of fire, while the sky all about the various demented figures was full of stylized scrolLs of thick black cloud. Three men, clergymen or savants apparently dangled from a gallows in thE upper-right hand corner, and in the upper-left a confused mass of ill-formed gesticulating figures waved flags and Jacobin pikes, advancing toward some unknown goal under the bearded star of a comet. 
And this was not the half of it. Mallory rubbed at his aching eyes. The vast rectangular sheet seethed with smaller images like a billiard-table littered with random pool-balls. Here a dwarfish wind-god blew out a cloud labeled PESTILENCE. There a cannon-shell, or bomb, exploded in stylized spiky fragments, small black misshapen imps being flung aside by the blast. A coffin heaped with flowers held a noose atop it. A nude woman crouched at the feet of a monster, a well-dressed man with the head of a reptile. A tiny praying man in epaulets stood on a gallows, while the hangman, a little fellow with a hood and his sleeves rolled up, gestured brusquely at the noose . . . More of the smudgy smoke-clouds, flung onto the image like mud, connected the whole business like the dough of a fruit-cake. And there was text, too, near the bottom. A title, in large smudgy Engine-type: "THE SEVEN CURSES OF THE WHORE OF BABYLONDON!!!"

Saturday, July 26, 2008

The stones you collected on your trip to the coast never left your pant pockets. They went through the wash, now they are banging and clanging a racket in the dryer.