A Mix To Bring You Near

My new mix on 8tracks has been getting "Liked" quite a bit. If you hop over to the mix's page, you'll understand my, no pun intended, mixed feelings about that. This will be a Tapebomb. 2011 will see that project return with, hopefully, a new tape being spread every month. I certainly have enough of a mix backlog.
The cover image is "M is for Memories and Mixtapes" by Kristen Solecki. That link goes to her Etsy page instead of her actual website, which at the moment, is hacked.
Good times for everyone, neh?

DN on Obama's Deficit Commission

"If the President had the kind of spine that we hoped he had when we elected him, he would be saying, 'No way are we going to balance the budget on the backs of working people.'"-Robert Kuttner

Dancing Cones

When I speak of art as being that which reminds us of the possibility for wonder and grace, that there are ways of seeing and engaging with the world beyond what we experience daily, I mean things like this: via: Wooster

Back Baby!

I turned on the local college radio station for the first time in months and within five minutes won tickets to a concert.
This is how I roll.
Speaking of back, so's Arthur. Here's his latest post and here's the line to make you want to read it:

The American working class has been destroyed. The American middle class is in its final stages of destruction. Soon the bottom rungs of the rich themselves will be destroyed.
The entire way through this process the government will lie and the media will lie.

Clap harder everyone! I think Tink's getting better!

Teaching

This strikes like an apt metaphor for teaching as an employment track right now.

Also, one of my colleagues is responsible for this. It's brilliant:

The next party will have balloons and tumor shirts.

You're Not Forgiven

Sinfest

I'm kind of loving where the current Sinfest storyline is going: Bad Behavior.

Party Invitation

tENTATIVELY,acONVERGANCE

I have come from where I find small bloodstains on my bedsheets to this new place where the discoveries are of a different nature. So a commemoration, as we do. This time: rough draft Halloween. Dress up, but not in everything. Save yourself. See this as part of the repetition: Preperation, preperation, preperation.

Let's all plug in to the telepathic disco, hard up for hand me downs no more, and the Koinos Kosmos gets us through the door.

This is the fall. This is the harvest season. This is when things lie down dead to begin anew. There will be a reckoning. There will be a calling to account.

Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled. It's an evolution beyond narrative.

There are plans. There will be a progression. There will be an order.

I often use my mouth too, as two hands aren't enough, and the mouth is such a versatile tool for holding.

Beer, liquor, mixers, snacks, dinner, vegan ice cream birthday cake, and things not spoken yet.

Because you didn't understand what the point of anything was, so the future didn't save a place for you.

Do you remember? Do you remember? Do you remember? When we were magic.

Learn to be an honest monster.

Saturday 19:00 23.10.2010 Here:

Written on a Cocktail Napkin at a Bar

You're the kind of girl guys lose themselves over completely. So be gentle with him. He won't care if you're not, but it's better for you if you are. Devotion is an underrated commodity.

Make-Out Mixes

A friend asked if I'd ever made a make-out mix, which inevitably led to a discussion of which tracks could be on such a mix and which could not. I'd never made a mix like that before. The closest I'd ever come was a jazz/chillout playlist I made for an evening when I was preparing dinner for someone.

I'd been at her place a few days earlier and we let her iPod, set to random, do all the work. Most of the music I'd given her, which, on the one hand, meant music I loved was playing. On the other hand, I love oddball music. The obscure singer/songwriter tracks were fine, but the techno and hardcore punk were so mood-crushing as to be funny. Which served to kill the mood that much more. So I compiled a generic list that was, at least, free of egregious mood killers.

The mix was playing while I was preparing dinner (chicken in a red wine marinade, I think) and José Feliciano's cover of "California Dreamin'" came on. My date wasn't there yet, but all I wanted, when I heard that song, was to hold her close and dance so slowly to the soft sounds of that guitar.

This is the mix I put together from that memory, and maybe that mood dominates more than it should. Instead of being a make-out mix, this is the soundtrack for a lonely late night drive in autumn across unadorned Midwestern plains. I don't know if the person behind the wheel is driving to or from someone, but that someone's the only thing on the driver's mind. There's a radio signal fading in and out, broadcast by a DJ who doesn't know what he's doing to that driver, but the DJs never do.

excerpts from my note file

Writing love letters to dead friends.
I still get caught sleeping.
There was nothing, there was nothing, there was nothing, then there was you.
If I say I was in love with her, is it because I was or because I'm looking for sympathy?
I'm elegiac of the women I don't meet, nostalgic for the memories we never made.
Do you remember the things you burned?
I'm trying to move from bitterness to generosity.
There will be glass in the fruit before this is over.
Burn your birdhouse down.

Previews of tapebombs 8, 9, & 10

As I'm preparing what will be tapebomb 10, I realize:

1. that I have yet to make covers for and distribute tb's 6 & 7
2. that I had selected and ordered the tracks for tb 8
3. that the tracks I'd selected for tb 10 had some overlap with tb 8
4. that there is an emotional trajectory across tbs 8, 9, & 10 if tbs 8 & 9 are switched

Practical meaning: none. I have to buy some tapes.

Meditation From an Image Dreamed Midflight

In Little Red Riding Hood, it's the wolf that's the star—the transvestite, the perfect impersonator, the grand actor that can betray his body and be a convincing simulacrum of any species. He is Fenrir, son of Loki, who can't be held by any traps. Far from having a boulder sewn into his belly and being borne to the bottom a lake (even the grim brothers knew the wolf is a thing that does not die), he left that cottage victorious, red cloak draped across his shoulders, a new skin on his face. Just as some tribes had tales of those who, by donning animal skins, could take the shape of that animal, the wolf wears his skins well. He's a better tailor than Ed Gein and will fit his form to the shape he has sewn. Right now, he is taking to the street in a little red cloak and the face of a coquette to lure all the hot-blooded little boys to him. The Big Bad Wolf is not a metaphor for a pederast, he is the warning against himself, the beast that will find you, get inside you, and consume you as you feel each bite until his teeth close on your small, hot heart. Then, that beast within you, wearing your face, will set out to eat again because a hunger for things like that can never be sated.

The graffiti read, "I was here." Below that, someone had added, "and, for a moment, I thought that was enough."