DeVotchka - "Curse Your Little Heart" (Curse Your Little Heart)

Sad violins, his haunting voice. Slow Spanish guitar. Amazing stuff.

Red Sparowes - "a message of avarice rained down carried us away to false dreams of endless riches" (Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun)

instrumental. probably on GY!BE station (it's on shuffle station). Slow instrumental

red sparowes - "a message of avarice rained down carried us away to false dreams of endless riches" (Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun)

instrumental. probably on GY!BE station (it's on shuffle station). Slow instrumental

Todd Snider - "Forty Five Miles" (Happy To Be Here)

Grungy, gritty, interesting.

Not all his songs I can appreciate as much though.

"Statisticians Blues" - funny!

Michael Ondaatje - "Coming Through Slaughter"

(author of "The English Patient")

A jarred, struggling style, sentences that burst open with colour, sound and smell with every word that hits your eyes. I had to think of Leonard Cohen's style, Nick Cave's... madness in words, madness in story, madness in man.

Loved it from the very first page. Loved it for its craziness, its originality, its story of a man, a time and a place of which I knew nothing.

The confusion of the sentences jumbling down the page are not done as an artistic effect, the rereading of the dialogues in which you figure out yourself who says what are not an intellectual game, but the everyday uncertainty of the story itself. You get it or you don't. You go with the flow or you sink under the weight of paperless thoughts.

blurb at the back: At the turn of the century, the Storyville distrcit of New Orleans had some 2,000 prostitutes, 70 professional gamblers, and 30 piano players. it had only one man who played the cornet like Buddy Bolden. By day he cut hair and purveyed gossip at N. Joseph's Shaving Parlor. At night he played jazz as though unleashing wild animals in a crowded room. At the age of thirty-one, Buddy Bolden went mad.

But here there is little recorded history, though tales of 'The Swamp' and 'Smoky Row', both notorious communities where about 100 black prostitutes from pre-puberty to their seventies would line the banquette to hustle, come down to us in fragments. Here the famous whore Bricktop Jackson carried a 15 inch knife and her lover John Miller had no left arm and wore a chain with an iron ball on the end to replace it - killed by Bricktop herself on December 7, 1861, because of his 'bestial habits and ferocious manners'. And here 'One-legged Duffy' (born Mary Rich) was stabbed by her boyfriend and had her head beaten in with her own wooden leg. 'And gamblers carrying cocaine to a game'.

The final stages of an evening's drunkenness would see her reaching into her suitcase to bring out her copies of Audubon drawings. Hardly able to talk around a slur now she'd interpret the damned birds, damned, as she saw them, for she was sure John James Audubon was attracted to psychologically neurotic creates. She showed him the drawing of the Purple Gallinule which seemed to lean over the water, its eyes closed, with thoughts of self-destruction. You don't know that! Shut up, Buddy! She showed him the Prophet Ibis, obviously paranoid, that built its nest high up before floods came, and the Cerulean Wood Warbler drunk on Spanish Mulberry, and her favourite - the Anhinga, the Water Turkey, which she said would sit in the tree tops till disturbed and then plummet down into the river leaving hardly a ripple and swim off with just its eyes and beak cresting water - or if disturbed further would hide by submerging completely and walk along the river bottom, forgetting to breathe, and so drown. That's how they catch water turkeys, she said, scare them under water and then net their bodies when they float up a few minutes later, did you know that? Bolden shook his head. You tell a good story Mrs Bass but I don't believe you, you crazy woman, you're drunk you know that - you crazy woman. A week later Mrs Bass went for a drive and never came back. After lunch Buddy and Nora set out walking. They found the Envictor two miles down the road. Mrs Bass was sitting at the wheel and had been strangled.

Webb had spoken to Bellocq and discovered nothing. Had spoken to Nora, Crawley, to Cornish, had met the children - Bernadine, Charlie. Their stories were like spokes on a rimless wheel ending in air. Buddy had lived a different life with every one of them.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning. The heat incredible, we go out and buy a bag of ice, crack it small in our mouths and spit it onto each other's bodies, her tongue slipping it under the skin of my cock me pushing it into her hot red fold. But we are already travelling on the morning bus tragic. Like the ice melting in the heat of us. Dripping wet on our chest and breasts we approach each other private and selfish and cold in the September heatwave. We give each other a performance, the wound of ice. We imagine audiences and the audiences are each other again and again in the future. 'We'll go crazy without each other you know.' The one lonely sentence, her voice against my hand as if to stop her saying it. We follow each other into the future, as if now, at the last moment we try to memorize the face a movement we will never want to forget. As if everything in the world is the history of ice.

Lauren Hoffman - "Out Of The Sky, Into The Sea" (Choreography)

A bit like Marike Jager, melodious to the point of swinging, tinged with a tear

Fariborz Lachini - "What Must Have Been" (Golden Autumn 2)

Piano, a kind of easy listening, but in minor

Decemberists - "The Mariner's Revenge Song" (Picaresque)

Gypsy, fun.