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?