You know there is something wrong with your life when Amazon sends you an email recommending a book entitled Valences of the Dialectic. Not that I don’t enjoy Frederic Jameson, Marxist dialectics, or Amazon.com. Or email.
July 2010
16 posts
I have learned recently that if the reception on your cell phone is poor, you probably want to avoid saying things like, “Hey, you’re breaking up” to your girlfriend while your voice fades in and out.
“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn’t bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.”
—The Long Goodbye (by Raymond Chandler) (via ewilcox)
a bright wall in a dark room.: Summer Movies Week: Spirited Away (2001) →
brightwalldarkroom.tumblr.com
GROWING UP AS ANTI-ADULTHOOD
by Mike Rowe
If you’re an adult, you probably don’t sit in the backseat much anymore. When you drive you probably drive alone. Occasionally there’s a passenger. If you or someone else actually ends up in the backseat, the impromptu conversation becomes vaguely…
My Spirited Away piece is up on A Bright Wall in a Dark Room. What a fine film!
Si, Paloma
Sun Kil Moon
Si, Paloma by Sun Kil Moon
Is it just me or is this song the end of Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen? I can see it. Maybe you’re driving in the car with no A/C, and maybe you’re coming through the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina, and you and your girlfriend are pretty young and you’re going to stay with some friends of her parents, an old pro-Labor Marxist-type guy and his pro-Labor Marxist-type wife, who are both pretty wonderful people, and you will all a little get drunk on red wine, which you will always hate probably, and sleep in a hot spare bedroom in a converted attic, and you’re moving to Minneapolis and the song doesn’t have any words and then it all sort of fades to black? If you are even slightly nostalgic, wordless songs like this one are so generous and kind.
Yesterday I saw a bus that had the word “Desire” written on the ad stamped across its side, and I was all like, “Haha!!! A streetcar named Desire!!!” Then I noticed it was actually an advertisement for a theatrical production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and I felt really, really fucking stupid.
Squares
The Beta Band
Squares by The Beta Band
Somebody somewhere once wrote that Steve Mason, lead singer of The Beta Band, had the most compelling voice in contemporary music. I generally don’t go in for superlatives, but man his voice is like smoked honey.
Green Grass
Cibelle
Cibelle - Green Grass (originally (?) by Tom Waits)
I wish the football and the tennis were always on, I wish it were always summer, I want mild evenings and never to get any older. I left the pub to wash my feet in the sea. I miss my love.
Originally Tom Waits, yes. Wouldn’t have thought I’d hear a cover as bewitching as the original.
And not sure I’d wish for eternal summer, though it’d be nice to dream of the sea.
