heinrich-siegfried bormann - visual analysis of a piece of music from a color-theory class with vasily kandinsky - october 21, 1930
via uncertaintimes
Tom Swifties from the short story Community Life by Lorrie Moore.
I have to go to the hardware store, he said wrenchingly.
There’s never been an accident, she said recklessly.
Would you like a soda? he asked spritely.
I like a good sled dog, she said huskily.
This hot dog is awful, she said frankly.
You’re average, he said meanly.
Take a bow, he said sternly.
AMARILLO MORNING by Spike Jonze (1997)
This short documentary by Spike Jonze, is included on the second DVD of the Palm Pictures two-disc set, “The Work of Director Spike Jonze.” “Amarillo By Morning” is a 1997 documentary short by Spike Jonze. While filming pro bullriders for a commercial at the national rodeo in the Houston Astrodome in Houston, Texas, Spike befriended two suburban teenagers who aspired to be cowboys. The documentary chronicles an afternoon in their lives
"At dawn we went through El Paso. It was strange leaving Texas. I hadhad no plans to leave it, and didn’t know how I felt. I drove on into New Mexico, Sally still asleep. Then I really felt Texas. It was all behind me, north to south, not lying there exactly, but more like looming there over the car, not a state or stretch of land but some giant, some genie, some god, towering over the road. I really felt it. Its vengeance might fall on me from behind. I had left without asking permission, or earning my freedom. Texas let me go, ominously quiet. It hadn’t gone away. It was there behind me."
I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone
by Richard Brautigan
I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen before.
I couldn’t say “Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she’s got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she’s not a movie star…”
I couldn’t say that because you don’t look like Jane Fonda at all.
I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.
It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930’s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.
There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.
Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.
It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio “… the President of the United States… ”
I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio….
And that’s how you look to me.
via janicza
The Shivvers - Teen Line (Live on WMTV, Madison)
A rare live performance from the Milwaukee power pop band that should have made it big in the early 1980’s. Teen Line is pretty close to a perfect pop masterpiece.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“House (Featuring Neil Young)”
A product of the Canadian folk scene of the 1960s, Elyse came to LA to record her debut album, which combined both folk and psychedelic sounds. It was released in 1968 to significant critical acclaim and even record healthy sales. However her second album was shelved as her label folded, and folk become somewhat passe in the early 70s. After her third album was also shelved she left the music business and moved to Sante Fe New Mexico, changing her name to Cori Bishop.
When Andrew Reiger of Elf Power and the Athens based Orange Twin Records discovered her long out of print album at Montana thrift store in 1999 she was living in Ashland, Oregon working at insurance office.
House, originally recorded for her unreleased second album, was included as a bonus track on the 2000 Orange Twin re-release.
"An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair."
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (via davidfosterwallace)
George Mitchell, the music historian, record producer, writer and photographer who recorded scores of blues musicians like Furry Lewis, Cecil Barfield and Mississipi Fred McDowell, discusses the the unique sound of the Lower Chattahoochee.
"Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up. We love you so."
— Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
From RATCATCHER (1999), directed by Lynne Ramsay.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“She’s Not A Little Girl Anymore”
This is excellent track from the Chicago power pop band Green, led by Jeff Lescher, is from their 1986 self titled album. Lescher’s rough around the edge vocals distinguish Green from the smoother sounds of their power pop contemporaries.
"We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who were."
— Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”
