last note falls off your skin

I woke up this mornin' with the sundown shinin' in
I found my mind in a brown paper bag within
I tripped on a cloud and fell-a eight miles high
I tore my mind on a jagged sky
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

Drumroll....barambarambarap!
As promised, I deliver to your naked eyes:

Top 10 Kowalski-Approved* Albums of Two Thousand and Show-Stoppin' Seven

10. Pocket Symphony - Wow! Ok I completely forgot about this gem that showed up earlier in the year. This one nudged out Burial's Untrue and Seawolf; quite the one-two punch..eh? From the starting notes this one's a classic. God and my neighbours back in rez know how many times I fell asleep on my desk listening to this one.. while pushing papers n digits (well I don't work with digits coz I'm a life sci man..but whatevs you know the deal). I bow my head to the french duo who create such ...wait is that a japanese shamisen (instrument) they just used!

9. 23 - Blonde Redhead bought my soul and a pack of crisps to go along with it when I first heard Kazu Makino's crooning yet eerie voice atop of a mountain of soaring guitars and clockwork beats. Ace, ace, ace..exist, sweet and sugary existence. (something about impure hair just drives me nuts! - in a completely sexual and wholesome good way)

8. Year Zero - Ok so I've been a nine inch nails fan for a while now, but with teeth was predominantly a let down. According to my bro Trent had become too infatuated with his own voice. On this album the music takes over in some sorts.. and it is grand takeover indeed. It's like the Bastille is coming down again! If that wasn't good enough there is a yearzeroremixed as well.. top notch.

7. Tio Bitar - Love the Swedes! Go ahead love them. They're good.. this album is psychedlic heaven. I dug Dungen's digs when I first heard ta det lungt and when the new album came up I was there to catch it. This is such an acid trip of an album...ah ace! Så Blev Det Bestämt - swedish for "so it was settled" is such a nugget, dear lord I remember crouching in corner of my room, and then reeling on the floor when I heard the madness on this track.

6. The Shepard's Dog - Oh Sam Beam! If Jesus was ever to grow his hair out and sport a nice ol' beard ...wait he did: he would pick up a guitar and stum out "boy with a coin" or "white tooth man". This album is better than bavarian fruit beard with extra icing sugar on top! oh dear...

5. Voxtrot - Ever felt like kickin around in your room and ripping down post'its one second and then settling down thinking of a girl you want to crane your neck and kiss on the lips, the other? Voxtrot is like that chick you love in highschool but can never get your grimy hands on...!Yes voxtrot finally released their eponymous debut...and yes they ditched out on me when I stood outside the modclub trying to see them... You left me in the cloud/cold you bastards!!! But you still love 'em all the same.

4. Fancy Footwork - Kick out the jams - this is one for the times when you feel like you're dressed divine and you're out to tear the dancefloor down with your teeth. KICK OFF YOUR SUNDAYS SHOES.....UH HUH FOOTLOOOOOSE! Each song on this album took turns being my fave song of the week. Chromeo never let me down. Praise the lord!

3. Myths of the Near Future - I forgot this one was released in the glorious month of January 07. Rocked out to it in Montreal, in Toronto, Saigon and the effin' Brixton Academy. Well the latter two are untrue...but god is this music heavenly. David Bowie would put the Klaxons aka the fourse horsemen of 2012 on his top shelf..if he could reach it on his high heels.

2. The Boxer - The National are my saviours. 2007 came and went, but all I'll hear will be the drums on Squalor Victoria...
Underline everything, I’m a professional in my beloved white shirt
I'm going down among the saints
Raise our heavenly glasses to the heavens! Squalor Victoria! Squalor Victoria!

1. In Rainbows - Take a bow lads... I've been saving this one: Top Drawer!
Moments I'm proud of, looking back at this year with my retrospective specs' on:
Sitting on the couch with my roommate, sipping on earl grey tea, listening to reckoner! Radiohead will slip into the vacumm left by the corporations once their demise comes to fruition.

No matter what happens now
I won't be afraid
Because I know today has been the most perfect day
I've ever seen.

"Get A Shot of the Refrigerator"

He arrives through the doorway... with a knapsack over one shoulder and an "enviro-shopping bag" in the other. Apparently he's trying to reduce his ecological footprint? Trudges up the stairs, to the third floor. Kickin' off his boots he comes into the living room, positively glowing. It's been god-knows-how-long since his refrigerator held any food.

pause
...kettle is whistling in the background over the sweet kraut-inspired motorik beats of stereolab's acclaimed fab four suture; are they singing in french? ah he loves it

comes back now to his computer, tea mug in hand. Freshly brewed from the new batch of Earl Grey he has just brought back from his grocery shopping venture.

ah yet another pause!
..this time its his toast

ok no more intermissions, he decides. Sits down at his spot on the couch. The living room is flowing with euphonious melodies. Now the walls reverberate.. and a voice sings of john wayne gacy. jr's mom folding her son's clothes. Oh Sufjan!
The holidays are in their infancy and two or so weeks, stretch far ahead of him.
Okay I'm going to let go of the third person voice! I revisited an old picture american beauty with my room mate yesterday. I have decided to go through my collection of foreign movies over the break so I can cement my position as an ostentatious self-proclaimed elitist, but with a little more conviction than I possess at the moment.
Look out for an end of the year Top 10 albums in the future on this blog...hopefully before the year expires. Maybe I'll go over the list with my compadre from the suburbs, if he decides to come down from his lofty ivory towers.

Over and Out

Pirate Radio Transmissions

...waiting for the endorphins to kick in
radio crackles with some distant voice telling me that 10 more vietcong soldiers are dead
jean seberg makes a comment, something about how we are so desensitized....rubbish
if i had any more nerve endings, i would crash into a pile of smoldering embers...rubbish

"weird soul music, hypersoul, lovingly processing spectral female voices into vaporised, smudged 2step garage. Voices are blurred, smeared, pitched up, pitched down and pitch bent until their content becomes irrelevant and they whisper their saccharin sweet nothings into the void."

"I like putting uplifting elements in something that’s moody as fuck. Make them appear for a moment, and then take them away. That’s the sound I love…like embers in the tune…little glowing bits of vocals…they appear for a second, then fade away and you’re left with an empty, sort of air-duct sound…something that’s eerie and empty. Like you’re waiting just inside a newsagent in the rain…a little sanctuary, then you walk out in it. I love that."

i lick my lips with satisfaction
here is something to compare with in rainbows:
burial - untrue

Tendercrisp Death

Crispy on the outside, tender on the inside...
so declares the wrapping on the outside of a healthy burger I purchase at the ubiquitous BK

had work today,
woke up at 6:30
my bed warm with another
stepped out
stepped into snow
trudged forward
thought of norwegian death metal
"immortal"
barbaric face paint
,get to work
now my ears thaw
boots glisten
now hunger pangs...

...and thats how the proverbial cookie crumbles; you end up in burger king looking confounded. Why on earth am I contemplating dietary death? You grap the tendercrisp chicken burger and chump chump,bite away. Exceptionally salty fries...even for the persian that I am this is too much! What's this now?? You bite your tongue? It's bleeding... but apathy has long since taken over the golden reins

heavy rotation:
daft punk - alive
electric wizard - witchcult today (look up bongzilla meets sludge doom metal)

Le boudoir de la femme

“I thought I was through with this day. All I wanted to do was unplug the phone, pour myself a bourbon whiskey, glance through the clippings concerning that particular case, just to check, and switch off the lights except for the old lamp on my desk. Maybe I’ll fall asleep right here, in my office. So there I was, sitting alone in the feeble light and silence, when she came in. Annie. She did not knock before she entered the room but quietly closed the door and turned towards me. I was barely able to see her, but I could imagine her large eyes, her smile. She whispered, ethereal, “Hello”, her voice mingling with the plumes of smoke. The night had just begun...”

Mercury Tear, Catch Me When I Falter

There are three days, and four nights to go
And I won’t be with you anymore
Four nights like this to go

In the trees like a freeway without wind
A devil howling, silent again

And the chill of that sheet
On your skin

We ain’t free my love
We are not our masters
Without side looks faster
Drowned and distanced

Rest and listen
As I cross these miles
I try to tell you “I love you”

The walk we take
In the rain today
Your feet in your boots
Under mine are the greatest

The way we refuse to be saved
The way we refuse to be saved
The way we refuse to be saved

This Station is Non-operational

the robots have taken over
the soul is on hiatus
the last triarii has been breached


Forget about your house of cards
And I'll do mine

JOG ON!!!

Sergeant Butterman, the little hand says it's time to rock and roll!

Okay this day in my post-exam life ..aka brief interval between the next shitstorm of an academic session, was somewhat eventful.

Woke up relatively late..ate.. and headed over to the pub (duke of gloucester) to settle down for a good pint of ice tea and watch the match with my mates. The game in question was man utd away at fratton park against portsmouth. Now following a draw on the weekend at old trafford, picking up all the points was imperative. I don't want to dwell too much on the details of the game... we played exceptionally, especially scholes who nailed his 96th goal for manutd. But alas...

What was most frustrating was this american guy in the pub. This yank would not shut up with his america uber alles accent...shouting out such ignorant comments as would appear to him appropriate. It was like hearing asians talk about hockey.

Anyway as a demulcent measure... I watched "Hot Fuzz" ..following the disappointing draw. It certainly lived up to all the hype. As a longtime fan of british slang and Snatch-like humour, this film was well into my list of enjoyable flicks right off the starting reel. Quick cuts and lots of editing might not appeal to some of my bourgeois faux film critique friends (aka the nags), but it was a solid watch. In the end I was left with a happy after-taste and an impulse to shout out all the wicked british catch phrases I had just learnt. It also had some hilarious segments, where our brit protagonists ripped apart bad boys II and break point (classic yank guy flicks). Despite all these positive elements I am hesitant to put it on the shelf next to Snatch and Lock Stock... in all honesty I don't think Hot Fuzz can wrestle in the same ring as the aformentioned heavy-weights. Hence, Hot Fuzz = KKK/kkkkk, which makes it a pleasant eye candy for one watch ...maybe two.

DS Andy Wainwright: We're just hoping to talk to the last people to see Mr Merchant alive. Namely a Sergeant Nicolas Ass-wipe and Cuntstable Fanny Batterbum.

Danny Butterman: [Smiling] Hey, that's us!

En Passant

"there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or the bourgeois disturbance of full stops" - the buddha of suburbia

let me turn on some sonic youth (circa daydream nation) to help me create the required zen for this post

okay that's better

now let me paint a picture:

a coquette - elegantly poised, meticulously adding salad dressing to her ready-made salad, that she must have purchased only minutes ago from some cornerstore

me - watching from a couple rows away, drinking in the sights and sounds of a city abuzz with vibrant energy that has only just gone under the dark embrace of the night

we are on the streetcar that is carrying us away from the harsh and oppressive heat of the heart of chinatown towards the more plaintive and sullen harbourfront

the day has only left its ruins along the road
vendors are collecting their livelihood and closing up for the night
chinese neon signs still offer me their fried goods and their banking services
I watch it all in a blur
flitting images

back to our coquette; she indulges now in her salad, from time to time adding a dab more of dressing
while asobi seksu that is blaring in my eardrums from my mp3 player lays on pounds more of jarring guitars and beautiful ebullient vocals that steer me carefully into the abyss

Circa July

I'm hesitant today.

I've been waiting for the right moment to bring my blog back into the daylight. It's become akin to a low-budget indie movie that has the critics rattling in their cages and cafés, waiting for the next self-acclaimed scantimonious prick out of paris to declare their new, 6 minute, black and white, silent movie, worthy of the palm d'or.

Well I knew the timing would never be anywhere near perfect to launch my coup de grace (for all the illiterate plebians that read my blog that's the french term for a death blow), but the weather today had me thinking.

Toronto seemed to have been covered in a deathly pall of oppressive humidity, an incubus of grimy heat, foreshadowing the looming disaster that my day would turn out to be. It had me thinking of the story "Death in Venice". Especially since the last few days, a certain putrid smell had filled the hallways on my floor; probably from the garbage not being emptied. Mr. Venezuela must have been attending his son's wedding down in el paso?!

Anyhow, this stench dominated the air and impregnated it with a sort of impending doom. I was weary to leave my room and it was thus that I spent most of the hours of the day locked up in my abode, reminiscing on the past or debating on the future; which brought me to think how closely this situation mirrored that of the man in the aforementioned book (minus the fact that he was lusting over a young boy). His condition and his final death followed that of the city's slow demise (after the introduction of a plague into the venician canals).
Was the foul smell in the hallways and the humid cocoon of air that had beset Toronto a sign of things to come?

to be continued...

Junkie Freakshow

Spoof. Dope. Crank. Creep. Bomb. Spank. Shit. Bang. Zip. Tweak. Chard. Call it what you will. It's all methamphetamine. That's what I'm here for.

Opening lines from the movie: Spun

The main protagonist over here... going on a week-long binge of the shit is jason schwartzman. The movie also has in its cast, among others, brittany murphy (one of my favourite white-trash chicks). She can really fill those tight jeans, that go along with her look as the trashy vegas side-kick to the "Cook" - an overweight cowboy who lives in a motel cooking up the smack that has everyone hooked and enjoys watching a healthy dose of adult movies and wrestling.

I actually enjoyed this movie - I would describe it as a: a swaggering journey into hell, less heat more drugs; however ... and although I fully recommend it, I won't splash out my highest mark: KKKK (for information on the kowalski rating scheme, visit the blog entry of april 12)

I won't give it the four K's because I don't believe in handing out marks like sweeties..or in this case.. crank.

The movie will have you enthralled and on the edge, holding on .. like a rollercoaster flick gone bad. It has a lot of editing ...cuts and close-ups of ross (the protagonist) sniffing phet off the bare breasts of a stripper...etc. All good ... almost reminiscent of requiem for a dream. But where requiem was despondent and depressing ... harsh and brutal, this movie never releases the pedal... melancholia will have to wait on this one. Sure we get the usual riff about the girlfriend and the worries of the real world... but as long as Ross is in his cocoon of drugs (and the movie doesn't use the card that requiem frequently flips out - that is lack of money to buy the trip) he can stay at the helm of this binge... until of course he crashes.

All in all ..an enjoyable watch; and if you want to turn off your brain and actually enjoy something for a while, why not?!

The following excerpt is from the movie...towards the end, when the straits get...well.. dire.. for lack of a better word:

" tell ya, I remember a time when I was about... I was little, I don't know... 4, 5 something like that. We had this old dog that had a litter of puppies. And I walked in the bathroom one day and my Mother was standing there, kneeling down... Dog had a litter of about 8, and my Mother was bending over killing each one of these little puppies in the bathtub. I remember I said 'why?'... She said 'Im just killing what I can't take care of' - Then my momma said to me, she looked at me and she said 'I wish I could do that to you'. - Maybe she, maybe she shoulda."

A Modern Midnight Conversation

This will be a quickie...
I have a lot on my mind
most importantly in the music arena:

I'm currenty hooked on electro/psych/trance-mind enchancing trips...
There a few culprits to this crime...smeared with bloody dj-ing hands and a few pills to savour

A friterie in the back alley of a french rave club in the banlieue (aka ghetto/suburb/hotbed for exotic music spurning from barren concrete)

Two men intent on changing the electro soundscape or at least delivering it to me - hot to handle - a cockslap of a first listen.... ringing ears and such.

The two unlikely duo are:......DRUMROLL
Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay of the french electronic band JUSTICE
Good lord...and when you think the river had ran dry after daft punk's monumental Homework - go back to year 1993 if you missed out on the rush when it came.

anyway I'll let wikipedia to do the rest ...
go out n get Justice's album "cross"

in other news... oh dear: new CHEMICAL BROTHERS ALBUM (we are the night)!
and it has tracks featuring midlake and the klaxons!!!
What more can you honestly ask for??!

ok this was s'posed to be a short one.
I'm off

À bientôt

Goodbye Enemy Airship

Eins, zwei, drei, vier!

Rollback the camera now... slowly pluck the guitar strings

"I'll meet you in West Germany
October 1983
I know that freedom was a lie
And your husband was a spy
You say that words are impotent
But they can help us pay the rent
I knew for sure there was nothing left
Except the vodka on your breath"

More and more everyday the world appears surreal and rather bizarre to be honest. Well not my immediate surroundings; probably because they are closest to me, and appear blurry at best. I'm usually too enamoured with some new band or record to be able to be too introspective.

But today while fixing up some pasta and a broth of meaty goodness, the tele was on in the background... and they were advertising this new "reality" tv show: it was about this woman addicted to meth and she had a family with two kids at the same time. To cut to the chase the punchline was: will she choose meth over her kids?

It sickened me to my stomach to see to what new levels they stoop to grab airtime and ratings! To quote one of my friends back in helsinki its "social pornography" (of course he said that about Dr. Phil... a man who is on my deathlist. Truly repulsive individual!).

Is this the new stage in our psychological evolution? We've become so detatched and desensitized that we can enjoy full-on self-destruction and tragedy.

The question is this a new thing, born of urbanization and people jacked up on meds and lack of faith or whether its just the institutionalization of a sick tradition. Should we just blame corporate tv companies for cashing in on our tears?

If we take a retrospective viewpoint on the matter... a parallel comparison could be drawn to the Greek tradition of tragic theatre. The pinnacle of Greek literature are the works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. A favorite theatrical device of many ancient Greek tragedians was the ekkyklêma, a cart hidden behind the scenery which could be rolled out to display the aftermath of some event which had happened out of sight of the audience. This event was frequently a brutal murder of some sort, an act of violence which could not be effectively portrayed visually, because the theatre was also conisidered a holy place?!

The Greeks for whatever reason, thus omitted the image and the actuality of death and the climatic execution of a tragedy. The reality tv show drew back the Greek veil over suffering and rolled the cart so-to-speak on to our Flatscreens. Without any tangible restrictions we get to enjoy even more of the gory details of a woman shooting up, while her kid is growing up in a world where he might as well have been victim of an abortion.

To be honest...we do enjoy tragedy, its the most sincere form of sympathy.

For 45 minutes we can feel like we share some of this woman's ordeal and can feel her pain. But we don't! We have enough commercials in between to distract us and tell us to buy more ford SUVs.

But the woman in the tv show...if she's actually real, can't take a break from her miserable shit-storm of a life. No it's a bottomless pit and she's the star!

"Shoot to kill, I dropped a pill
Then I threw a bottle of drink down my throat"

Lost in a Supermarket

So I nearly lost a friend to the coup de grâce of electricity... and that before he could give me a leather-bound gospel!

I will recite his requiem if destiny beckons, pay the priest for the ceremony and duly coordinate a swedish chamber pop band to do the honours.

On to the mundane matters of life...
I was browsing through Dominion today shopping for groceries and whatnot... my staple diet of pasta and muslix, and suddenly all I could hear in the secret aeons of my head was that tune by the Clash: Lost in a supermarket

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for the special offer
A guaranteed personality

In the dreamy state that I was, I walked around, humming to myself, just tapping my feet twice and then knocking on a can of tin soup...how andy warhol of me?!! Oh mys... I surprise myself sometimes with these little quirky oddities.

Tomorrow I have decided that I will travel long and far along bloor and reach some distant indie shop which I have set in my sights...followers are free to come along, equipped with pens and cameras!

No pictures today.. no fancy quotes... no frenchness
I don't want to belabour the point! (ooh belabour...god I love that word)

Desert Sessions

Musings:

lines from nausea ~

A perfect day to turn back to one's self: these cold clarities which the sun projects like a judgement shorn of pity, over all creatures - enter through my eyes; I am illuminated within by a diminishing light. I am sure that fifteen minutes would be enough to reach supreme self-contempt. No thank you, I want none of that.

Sometimes I read a passage like that and I stop to think of myself, almost attempting the existential climb outside my own body to take on the third person outlook at God's creation which I have so debased. I see myself in dim light, in a moonlit cafe of awkward jarring sensibilites. Crouching in a dark corner, satisfied... satisfied with the mediocrity that I have brought upon myself. I do not labour to achieve anything worthy of the mantle so polished in childhood. Forgotten the splendour of the day.

.. and then I shrug off the doubts ...actually the facts. Rationalizing that what I accomplish now is actually respectable. But then you come upon the works of my buddy ... jean-jacques.. the big rousseau. He says:

"A man who will be all his life a bad versifier, or a third-rate geometrician, might have made nevertheless an excellent clothier. Those whom nature intended for her disciples have not needed masters."

Then you stop think ... oh no! My doubts are clear as a blue sky of deepest azure! My imperfections lie manifest upon destiny's door! ...am I destined to be a third-rate life science student? But no time for such thoughts... no the day is too narrow for such questions. To loiter is to extirpate oneself!

Such musings shall only remain on the drawing board.. never to be published.

That was the first part of my blog!
Let's move on to lighter matters:

Les Chansons de Ma Vie:
So what's occupying the airwaves in room 468???

The Desert Sessions (Volumes 1 & 2, for the moment): founded by Josh Homme - guitarist and singer of "queens of the stone age", "eagles of death metal" and previously of "kyuss". The Desert Sessions began in August 1997 at the "Rancho de la Luna" in Joshua Tree when Homme brought together other musicians. The ranch is an old house filled to the brim with rare and unique recording equipment and instruments. Songs are written on the spot in matters of hours usually, and no place in the home is safe from the music.The first Desert Session was not actually a "session" per se, but Homme and his band at the time, playing for three days straight under the non-stop influence of psychedelic mushrooms. Since then the ranch has grown legendary and the Desert Sessions have grown in intensity and artistic merit.

"At Desert Sessions, you play for the sake of music. That’s why it’s good for musicians. If someday that’s not enough anymore, or that’s not the reason behind you doing it--that’s not your raison d’etre--then a quick reminder like Desert Sessions can do so much for you, it’s amazing. It’s easy to forget that this all starts from playing in your garage and loving it." - Josh Homme

That's it from me this morning... I hope you've enjoyed the clear cut outline to this blog - first some musings and then songs that I would put on a video documenting this chapter of my life!

Credits for the pictures to my brov!

-Ya hagh

Down at Queens Quay

Steel?

We have no butter,

But I ask you

Would you rather have butter or guns?

Shall we import lard or steel?

Let me tell you Prepardness makes us powerful,

Butter merely makes us fat? Lard?

Soviet Kitsch

A few clues for latecomers: Several weeks ago... A pile of money... An English class... A house by the river... A romantic young girl...

A season in hell.

I can almost smell the death-like sulphorous odour of exams; while the sun shines brightly outside on the vast canadian "concrete expanses laying fallow in the sun". I dreamt of long summer days, were I dressed in the softest of linen, lounging in a bed - a little sunshine through the drapes, a soft whisper of a wind - and kafka, sartre and black n white pictures of brooding young french actresses in army fatigue, laying strewn on my floor.

It will all come.. until then I share a desk with asians in the library, sipping silently with a hint of cynicism at my earl grey and english breakfast combo tea. One sip at a time.

Corinne: Didn't you hear what he said? Marx says we're all brothers!
Roland: Marx didn't say that. Some other communist said that. Jesus said that!

This blog has been bloody sporadic... which is what you feel like with a mouthful of valium and bottle brimming with obsession.

Anyhow what's on my playlist at the moment.. I think that should be a section I do each time.. yes! I'll make a note of that. Maybe that'll add some rigour and form to this blog...or an excuse for one!
Here you go (albums)

"Se Dice Bisonte, No Bufalo" ~~ by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (the amazing guitarist for the mars volta - he wrote this album and four others while in Amsterdam. A lot of the staple guest artists including Cedric Bixler are on this one, but there's one highlight: Damo Suzuki from the legendry Can. He features on the song: please heat this eventually - which is also on an ep that was released by omar, but that also includes vocals by damo which are missing on this album track. Anyhow when I am reading my physiology and genetics, this is what keeps me hacking away!!!)

"Volta" THE NEW BJORK ALBUM! ~~~ I got a leaked version for this one off torrents.. and it was substantially amazing. The first song Earth Intruders just sold it to me! Bam! I was like this woman is amazing! The beats are phenomenal.. !!! I'm running low on brain ink right now, but ask me in person and I will blow the trumpet for this one all the way to afghanistan!

Ok... I won't do anymore, because I wouldn't do the bands justice with less than 50 words.

Time for me to turn in with this line from Bande A Part:

My story ends here like a dime novel. At a superb moment, when everything is going right. Our next episode, this time in Cinemascope and Technicolor: Odile and Franz in the tropics.

Mind the Gap

"A revolution isn't a gala dinner. It cannot be created like a book, a drawing or a tapestry. It cannot unfold with such elegance, tranquility and delicacy. Or such sweetness, affability, courtesy, restraint and generosity. A revolution is an uprising, a violent act by which one class overthrows another. " - from the movie THE DREAMERS

...I thoroughly enjoyed that quote and I wanted to cherish it in communion with everyone, as that is the end towards which this blog was created. ...oh I nearly forgot this one.. oh uh..oh here you go:

"I was one of the insatiables. The ones you'd always find sitting closest to the screen. Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh. Before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us. Before they'd been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator; until worn out, secondhand, the size of a postage stamp, it returned to the projectionist's cabin. Maybe, too, the screen was really a screen. It screened us... from the world. "

Do I really need to elaborate on this movie... or... or oh you're not even there.. you left.. you lept out of your set to go and somehow procure it, like a medication for the ailement that beguiles the empty theatre of your mind. Let this movie and its images dance before you...for if it were likened to a dance it wouldn't be a waltz...this is the kinda stuff people go wild with on the dancefloor of some run-down club with euro-trash bleeding out of speakers... a couple of teens dancing on acid, high on the lethargic grip of life, allowing them to wallow in euphoric bliss.

The above picture is that of two tickets that will light up my summer!!!
I think I might devote two different posts to introduce the bands.
For the moment I would like to deliberate on the following:

The book you see in the picture... is "THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA". A book which I will devour with intellectual avarice previously unknown to man.

I've read other books by Nietzche, notably "The Birth of Tragedy"... and if his other works are anything to go by... this will definitely not be a cul-de-sac or minor work..but an engaging whirl of philosophy that will change me as a person and allow me to be even more of a self-acclaimed elitist.
They say once you read Nietzsche, you can't live inside the perimeter of a claustrophobic western society..you will flee to the embrace of the wild (actually I just coined that). As Aristotle would say Man outside of a community is either God or Insane. We'll see where I end up! Next stop: Existentialism... MIND THE GAP

Someone say GRINDHOUSE???

Ok! So I saw "Grindhouse".. and let me say it lives up to the genre from which it takes its name. Clockin in at 3 hrs & 11 minutes of gore, testosterone-fuelled car chases, rosario dawson's hard nipples... and rose mcgowan's half machine gun leg (which replaced the half that was bitten off earlier by zombies)..i must say i'm desensitized and aroused at the same time!

Personally I liked tarantino's flicker Deathproof better than rodriguez's Planet Terror. It was penultimate Tarantino... with all his signature images... you know the diner, the dialogues and the close-ups!

The downpoint in the end was that now EVERYONE knows about vanishing point and kowalski and the white 70's dodge. Film geeks and elitists, alike shall shed a tear for this loss to the mainstream. Overall the movie was good... it's a must see.. but it's not going to get the five K's ... OH SORRY... I forgot to introduce the scale by which i'll be going on, on this blog for rating movies and music a like:
KKKKK = excellent/cult-classic (with K signifying kowalski-approved...kowalski being moi)
KKKK = solid flicker
KKK = enjoyable one-time watch
KK = ok... can I be doing something more useful??
K = i'd rather cut myself with a rusty razor from the french revolution

ok people that's it from me ... at 5:04 am ...its my bedtime!

Voxtrottin Through Toronto

Voxtrot - Austin, Texas-based indie-pop five piece band is coming to Sneaky Dees on the 8th of June!!! (can i hear people going crazy on the other side of their computers??) if not ... let me heave a sigh of disappointment, brimming with an undertone of angst, somewhat reminiscent of the blow-up of grunge back in the days of nirvana.

Anyhow I digress...back to the matter at hand.. ramesh srivastava and his band of merry musicians are voxtrottin into 'our' city!
I've put up a video of their particularly raucous number entitled "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives", which was the sonic starting point for the band's sophomore epic EP!

Just yesterday I picked up their new eponymous album. Contrary to some criticisms a friend of mine had given, I was happily surprised. It seems they have been able to form a delightful marriage between the chaotic bliss of previous EPs and their new found calm reassuring touch. Lilting lyrics abound my friend... this record will consume you and replenish your strength at the same time.

"Listen to the sounds of ringing out around you

These are the cries of the dying beat

Politics of hate you'd never get around to

Blood over brains that we never need

I saw you in the back, studied and relaxed

Fixed in the post like a silent stone

Serenity in tact, it's the feeling that I lack

Life in the floors of a stable home "

- voxtrot - kid gloves

...

Anyhow I don't think I need to further elaborate on how quintessential it is to see voxtrot perform live this June. Put your pens aside critics...this is a band to truly applaud if there ever was one!

survivalism

should have listened to her

so hard to keep control

we kept on eating but

our bloated belly's still not full

she gave us all she had but

we went and took some more

can't seem to shut her legs

our mother Nature is a whore