Just ordered:

Woo hoo!

Happy about Obama, not so happy about Prop 8.

Can we stop saying "Yes we can" now?

Saint Etienne

Bob Stanley looks back at 2008 here.

Just Finished

Current Reading

"Sighing again and saying reflectively: 'I don't know!' he let his thoughts wander into the metaphysical byways that skirted his self-pity and self-contempt. 'How much easier life must be when one has that little bit of extra something that tips one to the manic rather than the depressive side.'"

Tomorrow I start my first days of classes at Pratt.

"We're bloody marvelous!"

Thursday, April 10, 2008, Union Square, A Very Happy Boy

 

"God knows how I adore life..."

And a little extra something sweet:

"...peepshows and freak shows..."

Indeed

"...I knew that pop music should, first and foremost, be exciting, but that it could also deliver considerably more than a quick kick. I knew that it was not monolithic in syle or content or constituency: that it represented the input and articulated the fantasies of people from no one class or race or nationality. I knew that, sooner or later, it had to have some politics: though not all the time, and not necessarily those which would benefit any of the self-serving hacks and bullshitters who periodically offered themselves up for election. I knew that pop didn't so much love having money as it enjoyed spending money: that things like shoes, shirts and haircuts were both utterly trivial and vitally important; indeed, that their triviality and importance were inextricably linked. I knew that pop was both about asserting your identity and about reinventing it if the identity with which you started out was unsatisfactory--what, after all, were Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Johnny Rotten and Prince if they are not inventions?--and that pop also involved not only a conspiracy between high-life and low-life to destroy the bourgeoisie, but a conspiracy by the bourgeoisie to penetrate the mysteries of the proletariat and the aristocracy." From Shots From the Hip by Charles Shaar Murray

RIP The Black Kitty

Tableau Vivant

"I've come to hate my body..."

This lp, their third, was my first introduction to the Velvet Underground, and while it wasn't anything like I'd expected, I was instantly besotted. See, I'd heard of the Velvets, they sang about trannies and drugs and fags and all kinds of big city decadence which at the time seemed just fabulous. But this was something much more complicated, most of the songs were delicate and sublime and dreamy and on occasion even sweet. Hell, "What Goes On" was so groovy it was almost danceable. And what about "Jesus?" If it was ironic it sure as hell didn't sound it. And then there were the two gems, the oddly pastoral "Candy Says" and the swoony "Pale Blue Eyes," two songs whose beauty still stops me dead in my tracks, nails me to the wall, even makes me (ahem) a bit misty. There were still hints of cynicism and perversion here and there, "I'm Set Free" with its "new illustions," "Some Kinda Love" ("no kinds of love are better than others"), and "After Hours," which is apparently about a murder, but the record as a whole achieved a weird sort of balance between despair ("I've come to hate my body") and transcendence. Anyhow, this is my Velvet Underground, a tad more romantic than cynical but all the more fabulous for it.

"The Precious Book"

by Gwen John (1920)

"Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Sation at Night"

by Frank Auerbach (1972-73)

"Teenage Wildlife"

by Cecily Brown