La Meglio Gioventu'

Amazing chronicle of two brothers, from the early '60's to beyond 2000.

Must learn to write like that.

Lana Del Ray - "Gods & Monsters"

Fun. Slow and sexy "fuck yeah give it to me"

I'm an angel / looking to get fucked hard

Nomads - "Where the Wolf Bane Blooms"

surf-y. But from Sweden.

Shocking Blue - "Send Me a Postcard" (Shocking Blue)

1969... electric '60s rock (with an organ!)

Full of energy.

Diane Cook - "Marrying Up"

short story. Not amazing, but pretty good.

http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/marrying-up/

CRIM3S - "still goin"

A lot like Crystal Castles in style and voices.

semi-instrumental playlist

and yes, perhaps good for writing, though it features a fair amount of lyrics and harsh beats.

http://8tracks.com/virtuoso/witching-hour

Son Lux - "Flickers"

Is this truly good for writing? It might, it might not.

Rather meta quantum, so to speak.

Oleksa Lozowchuk - "Please Remember My Name (DR3 Theme Song)

Curious song. Kind of interesting, partly cliche.

Ozark Henry - misc

I'm not sure what album is currently playing, but this is definitely an artist to pay more attention to. Strange and interesting.

redefining success (and a bit of writing)

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2014_01.php

Most of my tarot clients are writers, and the same quandary has been coming up again and again: they feel like failures. Despite the very good writing they are doing, despite their ability to build a loyal audience. All of the external markers a contemporary writer is supposed to acquire to display success -- the advance, the flashy agent, the New York publisher -- that's not there, and so they don't know how to look at what they have and feel good about it.
And you would think this would be an easy problem to solve, but it's not. If you accidentally give birth to a baby tiger instead of a baby human, you'd maybe love it and care for it, but probably you would scream and run around yelling TIGER and trip on something and fall down and hit your head. If you are collecting things that are suitable to you and good for you, but the rest of the world -- in the form of your peers, the literary community, the people on your television and in your music -- is saying, these are not things of value, it's so much more difficult than you would think to say, actually, my baby tiger is fierce, let's fuck some shit up.
It requires a change of consciousness. It requires altering your entire value system. It requires an ability to shut out other people's invasive ideas about what you should be doing. And that is the part of Blood of the Earth that I connected with most deeply, this idea that there are other ways to live one's life, but the biggest barrier to that is this very narrow cultural idea of what makes a life successful or good. And that is what has to change in order to make lasting changes, to really confront the ugliness of the way we are living now with our wastefulness and "well, we're going down anyway, may as well enjoy the ride" attitude. It's not a change of politicians that we need, and it's not another shocking expose of the evil being done in the name of oil.
Below is the conclusion of my conversation with John Michael Greer, you can read part one and part two.
I mentioned to a group of people that I was interviewing you, and I said the words "peak oil" and a guy there just reflexively spat out the word "fusion." I don't think he even knows what the word might mean entirely, but it was such a strange illustration of what you write about in the book, the irrational belief that something is going to take the place of oil, or that we will never run out of oil.
Utterly typical. It's basically an incantation; he's invoking the fusion spirits to take away the evil influence of the accursed words "peak oil." There are plenty of incantations like that -- the one problem being that peak oil isn't a supernatural force and can't be made to flee back to the underworld by the right set of magic words.
Anyway, somewhat related to that, is this idea you present that we have imbued things like a big house in the suburbs with magical qualities, that it is a symbol of success without being really a good thing to achieve, because it's inconveniently located and separates you out from the rest of humanity. I have talked to a lot of women writers lately who are needing to redefine "success" for themselves and are lost about how to do it. They are very skilled, intelligent writers, they have a small, passionate following, but they do not get those external markers of success (the big book advance, the New York Times style section feature) and so they feel like failures. So, how does one go about emptying out these cultured ideas of success and reinstall it with something more authentic, or how does one provide an example of that to others?
That's an explosive question, because it requires grappling with the ways that our society has taught us to anchor our sense of self and self-worth on how enthusiastically we cooperate in our own exploitation.
The exterior marks of success you've named -- the big advance, the NYT book review, etc. -- are the exact equivalent of the little light bulbs that go on when the rat in the Skinner box pushes down the little lever. The rat has been conditioned to react to the light, and so it keeps on pushing the lever over and over again. If the psychologist knows his stuff, the light only goes on now and then, at random -- that makes the rat frantic, and keeps it pushing the lever all the more, to the point that it doesn't even notice whether the door to the cage is open or not.
If the rat's ever going to do anything more useful than pressing frantically on a lever, and feeling like a failure because the light just won't go on, it needs to stop and think: what am I actually trying to achieve? What does it actually mean when the light goes on, and how does that relate to the things that matter to me? Those are also the questions that people need to ask these days when it comes to the flashing lights of "success" as defined for us by the conventional wisdom -- that is to say, by the media and the people who pay the media's bills.
This is especially hard for women these days, because of the way that the feminist movement was derailed into harmlessness in the 1970s and 1980s. Before then, some of the more thoughtful feminists were asking hard questions about the broader system of which social and economic biases against women played a part. I'm sorry to say that their voices were marginalized in favor of a simplistic view that identified "what men have" as liberation, and focused on getting that without asking any questions about it. As a result, a great many American women gave up a life in which their worth was defined by husbands, children, and domestic culture, in order to embrace a life in which their worth is defined by bosses, coworkers, and corporate culture -- which is arguably not much of an improvement.
The crucial point I'd encourage those writers to consider is this: the system doles out its favors to those who advance its interests and support its agenda. That's what the big advances and the NYT reviews are: payoffs for those who do as they're told.
So what's the alternative? The usual option, and it's quite a workable one, is for a group of people who are tired of the manipulative nature of "success" as defined by their society to redefine it themselves, for their own benefit. That's what normally happens in a creative subculture -- a group of people who want to do something the mainstream doesn't support do it anyway, and give each other the personal and emotional support they need to keep going. Read up on the history of any avant-garde movement in any of the arts that wasn't just a marketing scheme, and that's how it gets going -- and if it's doing something worthwhile, the mainstream eventually has to come to terms with it.
There's another alternative, but it's a good deal harder. That's the alternative of learning how to take conscious control over the little internal buttons that keep us, like all other social primates, dependent for our emotional well-being on the responses of others. Social animals need those buttons; it's by way of them that the herd, the flock, or the avant-garde literary movement maintain the ability to work together for common goals and against common dangers. The issue here is simply that people and institutions that don't have our best interests in mind have gotten very good at manipulating those buttons, and so there's much to be gained by learning how to shut them off or redirect them at need.
That's vastly more difficult, though, than finding or creating a congenial subculture in which those buttons can get pushed in constructive ways. It requires the ability to cause change in consciousness in accordance with will -- that is to say, magic.

Mirel Wagner - "No Death"

In the category of southern gothic and folk... (via 8tracks.com)

Nice.

Neko Case - "Furnace Room Lullaby"

Slow, rocking a cradle in the rickety house near the woods.

The Master (2012)

Intriguing film of Joaquin Phoenix joining Philip Seymour Hoffman's "The Cause" cult.

It's not a big ending, large revelation, rather an epic telling, in the old sense of large, all encompassing.

I think I rather like it, but it's one that I have to turn over and over in my head a couple of times.

Deer Tick - misc

• These Old Shoes - wonderful melancholy roadtrip song with a rhythm
• Goodbye, Dear Friend - slow, and I think I like it, but not sure
• Blood Moon - not exactly swamp rock, but close

Hunger Games : Catching Fire

Not as irritating as the first one, or I knew better what to expect.

Man of Steel (2013)

Bit of a long intro, but a rather good film, all in all. Loved the metallic look of everything. Story was ok, dialogue was ok.