In a Linklater mood

"At least I admit that I don't know. I know that things are fucked up, beyond belief, and I have nothing original to say about it..."
--from subUrbia

This was in the stall at Penn Station yesterday

Sickos...

Godspeed!

Can this be true??

Emo-core pioneers Texas Is The Reason have announced plans to reform for a one-off show in their hometown of New York City November 25. The performance, which represents closure for a group that abruptly split while touring Germany in 1997, will take place at Irving Plaza with Ian Love as support. Says guitarist Norman Brannon, "The one thing we all agreed on, even back then, was that our last show should have been in New York City," adding, "This show has been in the back of our minds for a long time."

Go here for more

You MUST not miss this show.  I MUST not miss this show.  I still cannot fucking believe this is happening at all, much less a one-off show in New York City.

Godspeed!

Larry Clark talks to NERVE

Getting up close & personal with the famed/infamous director of Ken Park, Kids, Wassup Rockers, etc., Nerve.com interviewed the idol of my clearly distracted life.  Never thought we could get this out of a simple interview:

I don't usually get into this, but your question got me thinking about it. I started making photographs by accident. When I was twelve years old, my father and my mother started this little mom-and-pop business, and they went door-to-door and did home portraits of babies. When I was fourteen, fifteen, I was forced into the family business. I had to help my mother in this. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I was taking the pictures, photographing the babies and driving around Oklahoma in all these small towns. I was doing this thing called kidnapping, where you knock on the doors, find out who has babies, talk your way in and you do a home portrait of the babies in the home. Six by seven inches for $10.95, and that's what I had to do when I was a kid. And I was this fucked-up kid. I was skinny, and I stuttered and I had to go make babies laugh and put stuffed animals on my head, and they'd fall off, and I'd go "uh-oh" and the baby would laugh. Click. And it was miserable, but it put a camera in my hands. I was taking drugs, in the '50s when it was so secret, there wasn't supposed to be any drugs, and one day I just started photographing my friends.
 
So I just realized, "Hey you don't have to photograph babies, there's this stuff going on that no one's ever seen, and it's never seen or talked about." When I was in junior high school, I knew this girl who had five brothers, and they were all fucking her, so probably her father was too. It was never talked about, but everybody knew about it. Parents were drug addicts, alcoholics. Kids would come to school with blinded eyes because the parents beat them up. This wasn't unusual in the '50s and was kind of out in the open. I remember one father used to beat up his kid in the front yard in public. The kid actually later became a cop, so look out for this kid, he's got some issues. So I was photographing things that you couldn't see anyplace else. And I felt back then, I said, "If I could see these images, I wouldn't have to make them." Back then in the '50s, to get laid, there would be a few girls that would fuck everybody and there would be gangbangs, and so on and so forth.
 
So it's still kind of like that, if you look at my films. It's still about things that you can't see other places. When I made my first film, Kids,  I'd done so much autobiography, and I was married, and I had kids. My son was twelve when Kids came out and my daughter was nine. They were approaching their teen years, I was interested in what was going on with teenagers, and I knew nothing about it. And I said, well, visually, who are the most interesting teenagers? Skateboarders. Back then, they were all outlaws and the cops were afraid of them and the parents were afraid of them, everybody hated them. Skateboarding comes out of punk rock. Punk rock was all about dysfunctional fucked-up families, if you listen to the lyrics. And skateboarding was similarly dysfunctional fucked-up kids from really fucked-up families. Punk rock saved lives — without punk rock a lot of kids would have killed themselves, and without skateboarding a lot of kids would have killed themselves. It gave kids an outlet. And it was kind of the same process as Wassup Rockers I spent years with those kids and got to know them. They let me into their secret world where no adults were allowed and they gave me access, and then I made a film about that. So it's still kind of about, "if you can see it in other places, I wouldn't do it."

For more of the interview, log on to read all about it.

Godspeed!
 

Holy fuck! Heaven's to Betsy (you'll understand)

from Pitchfork's "Puritan Blister"

"Minus Story" by William Bowers

--I am Kloot.

--Heavenly. I am Spoonbender.

--Therapy?

--Talk talk.

--Swell. Ok go.

--I'm from Barcelona. My dad is dead. Texas is the reason. Cop shoot cop. Giant drag.

--Someone still loves you, Boris Yeltsin. Say hi to your mom.

--!!!

-- Count the stars. They might be giants. It's a beautiful day. Clap your hands. Say yeah. Do, make, say, think. Think about life. Test icicles. Add n to (x). Hum. Make believe. Go west. Journey. Go go go, airheart! Jump little children. Further seems forever. Rage against the machine. Destroy all monsters. Reel big fish. Get him, eat him. Be your own pet. Mew. Scream. Kiss. Love. Spoon. Squeeze. Ride. Fuck. Converge. Jack off Jill! Faster, pussycat. The strokes! The organ!

--Need new body. These arms are snakes. Gravity kills. You say party, we say die. Pretty girls make graves.

--Oh no! Oh my! Disappear, fear. The soundtrack of our lives: palace music. Up with people: Alicia keys. Johnny thunders. Stevie nicks. Tom waits. Britney spears. Bill withers. Brian may. Frankie goes to Hollywood. Ladies love cool James. Gene loves jezebel. Ben folds five.

--The who?

--Men at work.

--Enuff z'nuff. God is my co-pilot. His name is alive.

--Flotation toy warning: God lives underwater. Help, she can't swim!

--She wants revenge. When people were shorter and lived near the water—

--Man, man. The robot ate me.

--A-ha. I am robot and proud.

--We are wolves.

--That dog. Dogs die in hot cars.

--No doubt. Hold steady. Til Tuesday.

--Why?

--Explosions in the sky. Hanoi rocks. Now it's overhead. Pony up. A certain ratio. Everything but the girl.

--Wham! Take that. Destroyer.

--Yo la tengo. Morphine! Poison!

--This bike is a pipe bomb.

--Sting, wasp! Tap tap.

--Run on. No means no. I love you but I've chosen darkness.

--The teardrop explodes.

--I am the World Trade Center. Kill me tomorrow.

--Suicide: You am I. Chin up, chin up. We are scientists. Liars. Heartless bastards. The fucking champs. And you will know us by the trail of dead. Oxford, collapse. Snap. Sorry about Dresden.

Godspeed (You! Black Emperor)

A year with Jessica & Jessica (not a lesbian thing, though)

Take the G train where?

Godspeed!

I'm completely fascinated

I'm reading this review on Salon about this book that I really really really want to read (even though I just went to B&N yesterday and picked up 4 other equally AWESOME texts.  So, anyway, here's an exerpt from the article:

Finally there is that most important thing about music: its connection to love, or, more specifically, to arousal and mating. Unlike birds and whales, humans don't produce musical mating calls. But as social animals, humans need strategies to attract potential mates, and music might have been an important part of the process. "As a tool for activation of specific thoughts, music is not as good as language," Levitin writes. But "as a tool for arousing feelings and emotions, music is better than language." If you want your potential mate to remember you, you serenade her, or at least get Peter Gabriel to do it.

This is obvious -- that music elicits emotion better than speech is something we all understand. It's why movies have soundtracks, and it's why couples have favorite songs. "You gotta hear this," Natalie Portman tells Zach Braff in "Garden State," playing him the fine Shins' song "New Slang." "It'll change your life." The scene is more touching than gushy because, of course, it's true: it's not always the Shins, but music does change your life. At the end, they fall in love.

Buy the book from Amazon here.

Godspeed!

Why, oh why, don't you cut your hair?

Godspeed!

How they party in the 'burbs

BBQ at my big brother's condo upstate from NYC.  Drinks, burgers, shoes off the carpeting, etc.  Oh, and my parents were there and my mother got wasted off of 1 1/2 mudslides.  As Sonic Youth would say "What a waster..."  Click on the picture for more. 

Godspeed!

Syllabus: September

Girl Talk.  Night Ripper.  I really don't have to say anything else at all.  Just listen to the fucking record.  You will not be able to stop yourself from enjoying it.  Also, as a note, turn OFF the "shuffle" feature of whatever device or app (iTunes, WinAmp(?), Media Player, Quicktime, etc.) you happen to be favoring.  Okay, go here.

Godspeed!