Elastica, “Waking Up”
Unbelievable how this has remained my battlecry for nigh on fifteen years. If I owned a shield, this would be emblazoned across the front. And then I’d curl up and sleep under it.
Mary-Kay Wilmers reviews ‘Blue Nights’ by Joan Didion · LRB 3 November 2011
(This is just one resonant line in a beautiful piece that should be savored in its entirety.)
Saffron Hunt asked me to write a song for her about a friend who thinks she’s a witch. I won’t go into why or the background, but this is my favourite out of the 21 songs I’ve written for this so far. I tried to make it sound like the Byrds. The drums are from a Broadcast song off Tender Buttons and the whole thing is totally Gene Clark. Maybe a clumsy pastiche… I dunno
Johnny Says I’m A Witch by Jack Mazes
Jack Mazes will write you a song for £10. (Related)
Google Voice.
(Godboy, this is how I learned of the release of your latest comic in the year 2011.)
3. Chris Martin, Human Being Who Moves. -678
Nobody in popular music is more annoying to watch. What is he doing with his body? Ever? Is he in The Zone? (It’s even annoying when he shaves). Martin rarely walks when he has the option to skip.
” —Sasha Frere-Jones: Why Don’t I Like Coldplay? An Investigation : The New Yorker
I like Coldplay the same way I like Travis and Supertramp and Chicago and ABBA. They’re incredibly easy to listen to, and I will turn up their songs and sing along to them any time I hear them on the radio.
And come on: “Yellow” was a really sweet, simple, and beautiful love letter of a song. In many ways, it was the previous decade’s “Everything I Do (I Do It For You),” another song I can’t hate.
Their music is an instant Made for TV soundtrack to life, and everyone likes having a soundtrack. When that first album came out, I was reading The Hobbit, and happened to be listening to “Trouble” when Bilbo Baggins meets the big lady spider and it was the most perfect song-book pairing I’d ever experienced (“oh no, what’s this? a spider web and I’m caught in the middle”). Cheesy, but perfect. I have no idea if Chris Martin has any idea how well his music suits the more childlike and romantic side of Tolkien. I fear that if he did know, he’d incorporate it somehow into their live show, so maybe let’s just keep that a secret for now.
But this Sasha-Frere Jones piece hits the nail on the head. Chris Martin and his marching band uniform have been left unedited for too long, and absolutely need someone to say “stop that you’re making a Bono of yourself” to them once in a while. (Especially the incessant “oh-oh-oh-oh”s in the choruses. Not EVERY song has to be a singalong, boys.)
Chris Glass, in this great interview which contains so much good stuff. My friend James once said, “If yr from a small town in the midwest, work in the arts & enjoy a drink now & then, we’re pretty much immediately going to be friends,” and I feel that way with Chris—the minute we met, I felt like he was an older brother or something. He inspires the hell out of me. (“How do you put yourself out there online and make it meaningful? Right now in my photo album, if you hover over the photo, you can see it prior to editing. I do these things because I want everybody to realize that there’s no magic going on here. Pretty much every photo can be bad or good, but we have it within ourselves to do these things. I hope that at some point, I can put enough of the things I do into a legacy that encourages people to explore finding solutions for themselves….For the most part, I don’t care about what my personal legacy is as much as I hope that whatever I do can be remixed or remade into something that is useful for someone who is alive. If it can influence somebody in some way to make something new or take it from there, I’m cool with that.”)
(via austinkleon)
Chris shared this philosophy with us a year ago, and whether he knows it or not, it’s a huge part of why we ended up moving back to Ohio. (That, and I wanted him to take more pictures of me holding chickens.)
I know this sounds crazy. But don’t take my word for it. Last week I asked the online community if it had further proof of Cameron’s true nature. I was immediately inundated with terrifying eyewitness accounts.
Twitter enthusiast @djamesc wrote: “I went to school with Cameron. He used to curl up next to the radiator during lunch. He only ate once a week.”
Steve Hogarty said: “I once saw him behind a branch of Waitrose using both hands to squeeze a swollen pulsating neck gland (or ‘sac’) into a dustbin.”
Pianist Stephen Frizzle “witnessed Cameron slice off his finger whilst preparing vegetables, and it just grew back. No word of a lie.”
Rob Carmier from Brighton recalled that on the day the lift wasn’t working at the G8 summit, Cameron “merely climbed the glass exterior with flattened palms”.
Gareth James explained the recent hot weather was caused when Cameron “surrounded the UK with glass walls because he needs to live in a vivarium”.
While a few of Cameron’s lizard properties sound almost charming – as Betsy Martian pointed out: “if ever he thinks his backbenchers are conspiring against him, he can turn his head a full 180 degrees to check” – others are less attractive.
For instance Paul Yates recalled: “I went to a business lunch with Cameron once and he ordered spiders. We all laughed, but he just stared at us.”
This chilling behaviour was merely the tip of a deeply unsettling iceberg. Pete Strover encountered “a pack of feral dogs gathered in an underpass” which “barked Cameron’s name in unison”, Dave Probert “once saw Cameron vomit up his entire skeleton to avoid having to admit he doesn’t know where Wales is”, Tom Bain “saw Cameron put his entire hand through the hole in the middle of a CD”, while perhaps most damningly of all, Darren Smith said: “I heard he strips completely naked to have a shit.”
” —I love Charlie Brooker a lot.
(via iateabee)
These all made me laugh when he tweeted them last week, but the “strips completely naked to have a shit” made me laugh the hardest.
(via sarahb)
David Icke read this while nodding his head smugly.
John Lennon — Isolation - 1970
Alternate title: “Working From Home.”
People say we got it made
Don’t they know we’re so afraid?
Isolation
We’re afraid to be alone
Everybody got to have a home
IsolationOr a home office
I worry that we’re running out of ways to say we love something.
I love this more than most things. I love this SO SO MUCH. I XXXLOOOOOVEXXXXX this. I love this so much I could die.
At the risk of sounding like Woody Allen on a moonlit stroll in Brooklyn, this lack of new ways of saying it has my heart pounding. What if we run out of things to say? What if all that there is to say has been said and we are forced to sit there posting and reposting quotes from our favorite songs and Woody Flipping Allen? Or, worse, what if the kids start nipping at our heels, saying the things we said, the things we thought were so clever, claiming it as theirs, while we point to a tiny screen and in high-pitched voices say “but but but…”? I don’t love this idea of growing older and being replaced by younger things. Of running out of things to say and ways to say them.
All this because I wanted to tell you how much I loved the sight last night of J rolling like a log across our new shag carpet to ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All.” And I didn’t have the words.
I loved it so much I could die.
