"What if you knew you'd be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line's crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn't signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won't say Thank you, I don't remember they're going to die.
A friend told me she'd been with her aunt. They'd just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt's powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon's spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?"
Although there is an inevitably expensive new life entering the atmosphere of my own, slightly older life basically any week now, I have not been able to stop myself from dropping a few bucks here and there on two truly wonderful picture discs.
The first, a pre-order of CocoRosie's "God Has A Voice, She Speaks Through Me," which came with a digital download of the single and also a direct download of the song's new video. I have pretty high hopes for the upcoming album this song is on, but am becoming increasingly skeptical about it. Why? I'm not too sure. Does it have something to do with this video, although it's beautiful? Maybe.
and the second, the David Horvitz picture disc released by my beloved Parenthetical Girls, featuring an OMD cover ("Maid of Orleans: The Waltz of Joan of Arc") and a remix of a song from their not yet released new album "Entanglements," which (according to their website) is coming out September 9th on Tomlab!
Here's the OMB cover below:
Rumor has it the album also features a cover of "Windmills of Your Mind," known best to me by having also been covered by my soul twin Dusty Springfield, adding only further proof to my assertion that I was meant from birth to love this band more than any other. I've got my fingers crossed (in vain?) that another east coast tour is forthcoming. September 9th cannot come fast enough for me!
If I wasn't currently a giant baby house on legs I'd be doing everything in my power to be there, since I love LaBute's work (ignoring, of course, his 2006 remake of "The Wicker Man" which I shall henceforth never speak of again). Although it's often perceived as controversial and usually pretty hard to stomach, I appreciate his writing for it's honesty. Most of it can be classified as dark comedies dealing with the capacity for evil that reside in all of us, no matter how righteous we may struggle to be. "Reasons to Be Pretty" is the last installment of a trilogy LaBute's worked on (the two other's being "The Shape of Things" and "Fat Pig") that deals with our society's obsession with physical perfection, how it manipulates weaknesses in all of us regardless of how we look, and what it costs us all in the long run.
I was first exposed to LaBute after I caught "Bash: Latter Day Plays" on HBO a long time ago, late at night when I couldn't sleep. What I remember most (aside from honestly almost vomiting during "A Gaggle of Saints") was how deeply "Medea Redux" touched me on this universal, purely female level. (What his perfection in writing about women could say about men, based on the other two plays, is too scary for me to comment on.) I'm constantly impressed by how well LaBute writes women (as complicated, emotionally textured and human), though he's been accused in the past of misogyny. Even the "merciless" and "cruel" Evelyn in "The Shape of Things" was relateable to me, in an almost uncomfortable way. Although I guess it can be argued that uncomfortable relating is sort of LaBute's shtick, it still really impresses me how well he taps into the darker, scarier parts of characters representing people who are perceived as "normal" and "good."
If you're in the area and want to check it out, you can use the link above to find a code that will knock some bucks off the price of admission. And let me know how it goes, too.
"The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.
Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.
“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.
After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”
My first reaction when reading this, honestly, was "duh." Not as a criticism to Dr. Taylor necessary, but to people who don't seem to understand the basics of how their brains work. I'm not a neuroscientist but I know about left lobes and right lobes. It's completely logical to deduce that stress, anxiety, panic attacks and general strife come from living inside a society hellbent on forcing us all to be left brain dominant ($$$), while those who exist on the fringe- religious figures, artists, "hippie dippies," etc seem to achieve a sort of deeper peace/release from focusing more on their right lobes.
I've known more than a few people (am related to and have dated a few of them too, unfortunately) whose first and immediate reaction to someone attempting to live a peaceful, empathetic lifestyle is to denigrate them by labeling them "gay" or some other charming variant. That sort of woeful misguidedness is rampant within my generation, which prides itself on being the "most unique" as long as that title come from within a set boundary of what's already acceptably hip. They pride themselves on how WICKED DRUNK. BRO they can get every weekend, never bothering to give themselves more credit than that because having the other drunk people think they're "cool" means more to them. We've somehow defined the people who choose other, healthier-for-the-soul activities as "boring" or "lame. "Ours is a culture that hunts down loving, empathetic people and attempts to mold and shape them into something "stronger" and more "American" by calling them names and shaming them. Since when it empathy, caring and general pacifism something to be ashamed of? Since when is cruelty, sarcasm, cynicism and ego tripping something to be PROUD of? How can you PRIDE yourself on that? No thanks, America. I'd much rather be "boring" (aka "not drunk") or "gay" (aka "feeling") then get caught up in that defeatist meat grinder any day. The people with the inner strength to live outside of all that are much more interesting to me anyway.
My point is, we live in a society that is fueled by our anxiety. The very structure of our culture relies on it. Rushing to work, depriving ourselves of sleep, worrying about how we look, worrying about how others perceive us, rushing home from work, worrying whether we're making enough money, worrying about our stuff and things, dressing ourselves up for the bar, worrying about how well we can squeeze ourselves into the rigid definition of "acceptable." No wonder the idea of nirvana seems like a myth to most of us, right? No wonder there's so much scorn aimed at people who manage to find a way to live comfortably outside of all that posturing and worry. I'd be jealous too.
"When we find ourselves believing that killing a man makes us more of a man, but loving a man makes us less of a man, it’s probably time to reexamine our criteria for manhood." -Jay Smooth @ illdoctrine.com
How's that for a mouthful?
American society is a mess, a complete mess. And how "civilized" humanity at large didn't see the mess coming a mile away, I'm not sure. We've all but abandoned the greater, more powerful aspects of our humanity for money and nationality (both of which are man-made concepts anyway, completely dependent on society's belief in them to exist), and now we wonder why we all have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and can't relate to each other? The "greatest minds" of our species spend so much money and time (both left lobe controlled, btw) on trying to figure out ways to medicate our numerous psychological maladies. Depression, anxiety, personality disorders, ADHD, autism. Instead of pumping ourselves full of drugs, how about we (as a society) stop stressing the importance of ULTIMATE EGO and take the time to hang out with each other for a while? How about working for pleasure and self fulfillment instead of corporations? Is all this negativity and soul sucking worth the leisure of being able to stroll into a store at any time and buy whatever we "need?" How badly do we truly "need" designer clothes, giant cars, cheap plastic baby toys, and any number of things created in factories? Is pacifying our laziness really worth giving up our collective sanity? Do most of us even realize how fully involved in the rat race we are? I don't think we do.
You don't need to have a stroke to experience nirvana. You don't need to use drugs or join a monastery. You just need to give yourself the time, space and tools to go out into the fresh air, dream and create, regain the power of (and then trust) your natural intuition, and be empathetic to others who aren't exactly like you. Give yourself permission to be peaceful. How any of us can possibly manage to do all of that while still paying our bills and therefore keeping ourselves "alive" in this warped culture, I don't know.
Hello friends- apologies for dropping out of plain sight. David was in a moderately serious car accident last Thursday on his way home from work; he was about 2 minutes from home, stopped in a left turn lane, when a speeding car rear ended him and pushed him into the car in front of him. Both airbags deployed but he still managed to hit his head on something hard enough to crack open his head, though he doesn't know or remember what.
I got a weird, barely legible phone call from some girl at the scene who called me after David asked her too, saying he'd been in an accident on Roosevelt Ave. She claimed he'd call me in a few minutes, but I actually waddled myself, pregnant as I am and wearing a ridiculously giant floor length maternity dress (my "around the house" dress) and flip flops, all the way down the main road to where the accident was, half frantic and half in DO MODE. I didn't know how serious it was or what was going on, just that ambulances were flying by me and traffic was backed up as far down the road as I could see, on both sides.
When I finally got to the accident scene, David was already in the ambulance, sitting on a stretcher, with blood running down all over his face. There was skid marks all over the road and three completely wrecked cars. Luckily for us, the airbag and his seatbelt saved his life. He was the only person injured. I road in the ambulance with him down to the hospital, where he got 9 staples in his head and 8 stitches in his chin. He's concussant and has been out of work since- the doctors don't want him driving and his job requires him to drive most of the day. He had a CAT scan that came back clear and some additional x-rays are scheduled for tomorrow, but right now it seems like he's going to be fine aside from a few weeks of pretty bad headaches and a some nasty scars.
We've just been sort of taking it slow all week, laying low and enjoying each other's company. I'm not really mentally prepared to discuss the "what ifs" or what they would have meant, I haven't even really wanted to talk about it with my family or my friends, I'm just so thankful he's still around.
After being a regular and enthusiastic user for 3 years (scary), I finally decided to try out a subscription to Last.fm. It was only $3 for the month, so we'll see how I like it. One of the many awesome things about subscription service is that it opens up all of my various radio stations to anyone who cares to listen. I embedded a few of them below. "Caitmary's Radiostation" just takes random tracks I've listened to since I was a member and throws them at you. "Caitmary's Loved Tracks" are tracks that I got so pumped about that I actually took the time to press a button and label as "loved." The other is various songs by artists I've seen live in my lifetime, not necessarily songs I've ever listened to. Enjoy!
Has anyone else caught that salad dressing commercial with Spank Rock's "Bump" in it?
Uhmmm. "All we're changing about salad dressing iiiiiiiiiiis everything!"
You know now that I'm thinking about it, whenever I hear "Just a dirty little grin when you dig it, dig it in. What the bitches think of this, when you stickin’ it in?" I always *DO* want a salad.
I spent the morning doing a written interpretation of the lovely Gillian's natal chart for her birthday (which is today! Happy Birthday again!), something I'd never done before. It took a pretty long time but it was really interesting and I learned a lot. I'm seriously continually blown away with how relevant astrology can be to self discovery, and also by how MUCH there is to learn about it. I'm constantly learning new things, it's like a constantly renewing Self-Help book. I can't believe it's already 2:30!
There's not too much to report here, other than my developing pretty serious PUPPP a week or so ago. I was going to write a long, tongue in cheek write up about it here but honestly it's just way too excruciating at this moment for me to laugh at, heh.
Somehow I've managed to experience just about every notoriously unlucky thing that could possibly happen to me during pregnancy, have you noticed that? I must be working off an extraordinary amount of karma here, so I'm trying to take it in stride. I'm buying the little boy a t-shirt from ragebaby.com that says "Sent From the Future to Clean This Mess Up" because at this point, after how difficult and trying this entire pregnancy has been, I'll be really, really surprised if he isn't actually the real life John Connor.
"Sorry about the 6 months of all-day puking, the 4 months of almost complete immobility, the flirting with gestational diabetes, the terrifying weight gain, the relentless insomnia and now the insanity-inducing rash, Mom. Although surely my inevitable saving of all humanity must be of some comfort."
Would that make me some semblance of Sarah Connor, then? Because for the record, that's a position I'm more than comfortable with.
Anyone who tells you that pregnancy is a completely beautiful and ethereal experience from start to finish is just flat out lying. The baby himself is awesome, but just about everything about the process of GROWING him is unpleasant. Feeling him moving around is neat, yes, but it's much less neat when he's moving around so much that he wakes me up at 4am and won't let me go back to sleep. This is the third day in a row, almost like he's on a very specific "messing with Mom" schedule that revolves around a.) waking me up at insane hours of the night doing jumping jacks in the womb and b.) refusing to move when other people who want to feel him kicking touch me, only to resume his cosmic dancing once they give up. I wish he spoke English, or I spoke his language, so I could ask him what he is DOING in there. Did you lose your keys, little baby? I promise they aren't between any of my ribs, so you can really stop prodding around in there, really.
Also, the rest of the world apparently already knew about this and didn't tell me, but CocoRosie released the first single from their next album, forthcoming in 2009, called "God Has a Voice, She Speaks Through Me." It took a few listens to grow on me, but I'm digging the new direction they're taking. Apparently folk artists from places like Madagascar and Reunion Island have been contributing to the record. According to Touch & Go, "CocoRosie is currently working on the follow up to their last full-length, The Adventures Of Ghosthorse & Stillborn, slated for release in 2009. This new work will continue in the vein of God Has A Voice..., exploring spiritual dance music, driven by oceanic and apocalyptic themes." I can't wait! Touch & Go is streaming the tune here if you feel like betraying the almighty Pitchfork and making up your own mind about it.
I've been wanting to write about the apocalyptic themes I've been seeing in SO MUCH music lately in general, but I'm way too exhausted right now to get into it as deeply as I want to. Has anyone else noticed it, though? Have you all heard that new Portishead single, "Machine Gun," as a quick example? It's like there's just something floating in on the air, getting into people's bodies, turning their minds toward a new order. It excites and terrifies me at the same time.
Speaking of CocoRosie, if you haven't already seen any of the performance CocoRosie did with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam last month, it's liable to blow your mind. The clip of "Black Rainbow" is my favorite:
Holy hell, little baby, please SETTLE! I know it's cramped in there, but I'm new at this, dude. Is it food? Is it breakfast you want? Can we negotiate?
Of course it was a disaster. The unbearable, dearest secret has always been a disaster. The danger when we try to leave. Going over and over afterward what we should have done instead of what we did. But for those short times we seemed to be alive. Misled, misused, lied to and cheated, certainly. Still, for that little while, we visited our possible life.
Once upon a time (or sometime in the year 2000, whichever intro you prefer) to celebrate the one year anniversary of our friendship, my friend Matt mailed me a copy of Tara Jane O'Neil's first solo record "Peregrine." Unbeknownst to me, it was the start of the longest lasting, most personally fulfilling musical love affair I've ever been a part of. Since then Tara Jane O'Neil's music has grown with me. Over the last eight incredibly formative years of my life, it's followed me from being an 18 year old girl, terrified and on the brink of everything, to a 26 year old woman, trying to preserve her individuality beneath both motherhood and adulthood.
"Peregrine" was one of the only albums I listened to during the summer I first lived in New York. I didn't know anyone there aside from Daniel, and at that point I even just barely knew him. I was (graciously) hundreds of miles away from everything and everyone I'd ever known, and my move there was one of the first and biggest steps I took toward solidifying my individuality. I distanced myself from two toxic, addicting romantic relationships, left my incredibly close-knit family for the first time in my life, and just literally disappeared. I took the time to recreate myself- a town where no one knows you is the perfect place to let yourself be the person you always wanted to be. I lived in a big house with seven strangers in downtown Rochester, paying $150 a month plus utilities. I had a Walkman then (remember those?) that I'd won out of one of those grab-it machines in an arcade years earlier- it was translucent blue plastic and covered in stickers. I'd walk around downtown Rochester daily, during it's summer which is more like spring anywhere else, listening to a taped copy of "Peregrine" and taking in my new surroundings. I'd walk to the library, down to Park Avenue where all the college kids hung out, up and down various Monroe County streets where even the book stores had bars over the windows, and the soundtrack was always the same. I even listened to the album at night as I was falling asleep- to this day the opening notes of "A City In the North" put me right back in that old attic room at night with the one window open to let the summer breeze in. It was a personality-forming time for me, my coming of age movie. In spite of the fact that my decision to move there was completely impulsive and I was equally as likely to have landed flat on my face, it turned out to be a time of intense positivity and constant reinforcement of my personal strength. I'll always remember those years fondly, as they were some of the best of my life, but especially that first summer. All of the uncertainty mixed with my naivety and enthusiastic anticipation for an unknown future was nothing short of magical. The dreamy, floating, meditative tone of the entire album meshed perfectly with my state of mind at the time. So much so that during a show at Hampshire College in 2006, when she attempted "Sunday Song" as her closer, my stomach knotted up so tightly and nostalgically that I thought I would throw up until I just gave it up and cried.
As I got older I continued to buy up every new release that TJO put out. I have every EP, every hand colored 7 inch, every strange overseas compilation, there are pieces of her art hanging in my house- anytime she released something new, I got my hands on it. Everyone has at least one band or artist like that, I think. Regardless of how my tastes changed (even when I was listening to essentially nothing but old 50's prom music) TJO remained a constant. It always seemed like as I grew and changed as a person, she was growing and changing as an artist as well, so that every new record (regardless of what was happening in my life during the time of it's release) somehow resonated with me. I won't go step by step through every album and contrast it with what was happening to me at the time, but trust me when I say her albums were always either a solace, a celebration, or some combination of the two. In all my life there has never been a musician who's touched me in as many ways as Tara Jane O'Neil has, and I say that without hesitation.
I try to catch her live every time she comes to Western Mass, which isn't often. I first saw her open for Ida at the Flywheel in 2000, touring for Peregrine, where she played the entire show with her back to the audience. The best show of hers I ever saw was in Montague, when she played at the Montague Bookmill (one of my favorite places on earth). Almost no one came- it had been raining or snowing pretty heavily that day, I think. Renee and I sat on a couch and drank tea while she performed, after dusk, surrounded by bookcases and in front of the open windows overlooking the river rushing by the mill. If I sound sentimental, it's because I am- I've seen too many live shows to count in my life, of varying sizes and in varying venues, but that show was something truly special. If you've ever been lucky enough to catch TJO live, you might have an idea of what I'm talking about.
It would be an understatement to say that the sort of music I gravitate toward has changed dramatically in the past 8 years. My taste (in most things, but most obviously the music I enjoy) has morphed into something much more abstract/bizarre and much less outwardly sentimental than it used to be, which (if you wanted to get philosophical) you could say has happened simultaneously with an identical change within myself. While that once infamous sentimentality still exists (of course), I'm not as straightforward about it as I used to be, for better or worse. The last few years have been especially rough for me, as many of you know. The quieting of my more personal urges is tied into all that; I'm not gone, just safely tucked away, growing, waiting for a time when I'll feel comfortable enough to share my voice again. According to her website, TJO is recording this month. My son will be born in July. I can only eagerly anticipate what this next stage of my life, coupled as usual with another new Tara Jane O'Neil release, will bring to me.
Fans of electronic/noise music, please do not miss! Silver Apples is legendary and mind bending, Loto Ball Show is entirely insane.
June 17 - The Empty Bottle - Chicago, IL June 18 - Scrummage University - Detroit, MI June 20 - Grog Shop - Cleveland, OH June 21 - 31st Street Pub - Pittsburgh, PA June 22 - Mowhawk Place - Buffalo, NY June 23 - TT the Bears - Cambridge, MA June 24 - Knitting Factory - NYC, NY June 25 - Cakeshop (Loto Ball Show Only) - NYC, NY June 27 - North Star Bar - Philadelphia, PA June 28 - The Velvet Lounge - Washington DC June 29 - Local 506 - Chapel Hill, NC June 30 - E.A.R.L. - Atlanta, GA July 1 - Hi-Tone - Memphis, TN July 2 - TBA - New Orleans, LA
Phases 2 & 3 of the renovation of the nursery are now *finished,* leaving just the fun parts left! The paint & wallpaper removal ended up taking us a lot longer than we thought it would (about two and a half weeks), and the drama didn't end there.
This is my father, most likely grateful that we're nearing the end of our two and a half week "removing 5 layers of paint and wallpaper" debacle
A different angle showing our progress
After all the paint was off, we sanded, spackled, and moved on to primer (none of which I took any pictures of, unfortunately). The bare walls actually soaked up two layers of primer, leaving some parts of it whiter than others no matter what we did. We wanted to paint the blue over a pure, white surface to ensure it's true brightness would come out, but the house just was not allowing it. Finally we gave up and just decided to paint the blue over what we had- and it worked!
Brightest Blue EVER!
After another coat of "Galactic Sky," we'll be putting up big, realistic wall decals of all the planets and a huge handpainted mural of a rocketship (painted by my dad) to break up all the blue. Also forthcoming (depending on how lucky I am bargain hunting) will be a large gray area rug for the floor! There's no way we can afford to rip up the carpet and put a new one in, so I'm improvising. Wish me luck!
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