James Salter - "Light Years"

"The room was silent, that was what set him thinking; it was suddenly calm. His father and mother were lying beneath the earth, brown as the relics of asints, their funeral clothes rotting. He was thirty-two, alone in the world. Dreams and work."

"A perfect day begins in death, in the semblance of death, in deep surrender. The body is soft, the soul has gone forth, all strength, even breath. There is no power for good or evil, the luminous surface of another world is near, enfolding, the branches of the trees tremble outside. Morning, he wakes slowly, as if touched by sun across the legs. He is alone."

"But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun."

". . . One must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea. We had children, he thought; we can never be childless. We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives . . ."

"His wife - people found her strange - was in the last years of her youth. She was like a beautiful dinner left out overnight. She was sumptuous, but the guests were gone."

"An artist should live with an uncomplicated woman, a woman like Bonnard's who would pose in only her shoes. The rest of it would follow."

"Well, perhaps Gaudí, who lived to that old age which is sainthood, an ascetic old age, frail, slight, wandering the streets of Barcelona, unknown to its many inhabitants. In the end he was struck by a streetcar and left unattended. In the bareness and odor of the charity ward amid the children and poor relations a single eccentric life was ending, a life that was more clamorous than the sea, an everlasting life, a life which was easy to abandon since it was only a husk; it had already metamorphosed, escaped into buildings, cathedrals, legend."

Carmelo Carone - "Anxur"

On SomaFM's "The Trip"

Hypnotizing house track. Quite minimal. Good for coding.

Richard Brautigan - random poetry

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

...
I like to think
  (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.


Love Poem

   It's so nice
to wake up in the morning
   all alone
and not have to tell somebody
   you love them
when you don't love them
   any more.


A CandleLion Poem

           For Michael

Turn a candle inside out
and you've got the smallest 
portion of a lion standing
there at the edge of the 
   shadows.



I Live in the Twentieth Century

            For Marcia

I live in the Twentieth Century
and you lie here beside me.  You
were unhappy when you fell asleep.
There was nothing I could do about
it.  I felt helpless.  Your face
is so beautiful that I cannot stop
to describe it, and there's nothing
I can do to make you happy while
   you sleep.



The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
   lost inside of you.



The Nature Poem

The moon 
is Hamlet
on a motorcycle
coming down
a dark road.
He is wearing
a black leather
jacket and
boots.
I have 
nowhere 
to go.
I will ride
all night.



It's Raining in Love

I don't know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl
   a lot.

It makes me nervous.
I don't say the right things
or perhaps I start
   to examine,
             evaluate,
                      compute
   what I am saying.

If I say, "Do you think it's going to rain?"
and she says, "I don't know,"
I start thinking:    Does she really like me?

In other words
I get a little creepy.

A friend of mine once said,
"It's twenty times better to be friends
   with someone
than it is to be in love with them."

I think he's right and besides,
it's raining somewhere, programming flowers
and keeping snails happy.
   That's all taken care of.

         BUT
if a girl likes me a lot
and starts getting real nervous
and suddenly begins asking me funny questions
and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
and she says things like,
"Do you think it's going to rain?"
and I say, "It beats me,"
and she says, "Oh,"
and looks a little sad
at the clear blue California sky,
I think:   Thank God, it's you, baby, this time
   instead of me.

Moderat - "Seamonkey"

It starts as nothing special, but around minute three the synths start and things get amazing.

Quite different, but a great track as well: "Sick With It"

"A New Error" ...mesmerizing, both in sound and video (two hands, black and white)

The Kyteman Orchestra - "The Jam Sessions"

• "Jonas" : a lone (alt?) violin, only after minutes joined by piano
• "Overpriced": though the rap does not drive me crazy, a great jamming slow down and build up
• "The Page - Part II": parlando, classic piano

Richard Brautigan - "In Watermelon Sugar"

'In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done is watermelon sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.'

'We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.'

'One of the crew turned off the switch and Fred had me come over very close and get down on my hands and knees and crawl under the press until we came to a very dark place and then he lit a match and showe me a bat hanging upside down from a housing.
   "What do you think of that?" Fred said.
   "Yeah," I said, staring at the bat.
   "I found him there a couple of days ago. Doesn't that beat everything?" he said.
   "It's got a head start," I said.'

'Of course we used a lot less tombs when the tigers where in bloom.
    But now we bury them all in glass coffins at the bottoms of rivers and put foxfire in the tombs, so they glow at night and we can appreciate what comes next.'

'The bridge was made from stones gathered at a distance and placed in their proper order.'

'I saw Margaret climbing an apple tree beside her shack. She was crying and had a scarf knotted around her neck. She took the loose end of the scarf and tied it to a branch covered with young apples. She stepped off the branch and then she was standing by herself on the air.'


Liked it a lot. I did not trouble myself finding the underlying images, the thoughts behind the words. He has a nice way of repeating a sentence, usually something that is said, a few lines later, which really works.

8tracks - triphop list

http://8tracks.com/10-korriku/to-a-simple-time

• Doctor Flake - "Only You"

there was more good stuff that I did not log

http://8tracks.com/ziggie-t/electronic-soul-u-need

• Boztown - "God Father"
  hints of the theme

http://8tracks.com/lparufier/welcome-to-the-street

• Boztown - "Candy's Gun"
  intriguing vocals

"Page Eight" and "Turks & Caicos"

First two films from a trilogy (last one: "Salting the Battlefield") about Bill Nighly as Johnny Worricker as an (ex) MI5 agent, doing the right thing.

First one was nice. Second one (with Christopher Walken) was ok.

Spinnerette - "All babes are wolves"

Rock rock rock! arwooooooooooo

Amatorski - "Come Home"

Slow soft, late summer evening music. Strings, humming.

somaFM - covers

• Doveman - "Let's Hear it for the Boy"
  Very slow, piano low-key version of Deniece Williams' "Let's hear it for the boy" (no, do not check the original. Yes, you know it.) It isn't even exactly good. But I liked it.
• Scarling - "Creep"
• Dungeon - "Call Me"
  a screaming Judas Priest / aaaaaaaaaah metal version
• Arno - "Knowing Me, Knowing You"
  Slow, raspy voice
• Honeydippers - "Guns of Brixton"
  swinging
• 
  

Shokuzai

Five hours telling about the murder of a young girl, the curse that her mother puts on the head of her four friends who were there when it happened, and what happened to each of them fifteen years later.

The past in bright colours, the present in faded grey.

Mother turns out not so innocent herself. All is resolved in the last chapter.

The first two episodes were very slow and they made me wonder if I'd enjoy the rest. Hardly any background music. Slow scenes, but different than those of the best anime. The latter had more pace, music and engaged me more.

All in all a good watch.

Tetris

Tetris does not bother to offer its players the mercies of explosions or of dead aliens or of graceful, leaping arcs. Just blocks and more blocks, an unforgiving rain as predictable as the mounting seconds of the petty pace that creeps to our last syllables.

The sharply cornered right angles of the game’s shapes, and the Russian folk music in the game’s typical score, contribute to the atmosphere of cold, mechanical inhumanity (at least to American ears). In the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, Sam Anderson wrote:

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

All of that is true about Tetris, but if it were all that is true about Tetris, we would not find the game so captivating. Tetris might be the purest distillation of what a video game is. Devoid of story, character, navigation, even metaphor, Tetris isolates an interaction among player, machine, and screen and commands our attention with it. Nothing about what is best aboutTetris translates to another medium.

Dutch songs

• Jaap Fischer - "Sprookje"
• André Manuel / Krang - "Kraaien"
• Frans Halsema & Jenny Arean - "Vluchten kan niet meer"
• Wim Sonneveld - "Lieveling"
• Boudewijn de Groot - "Strand"
• Stef Bos - "Wodka"

Ray Bradbury - "We'll Always Have Paris"

The Visit

[about a young man who had a heart transplant, and the mother from the donor]

    She might have cried out, but did not. She might have exclaimed something, but did not. Her eyes were also shut now and she was listening. Her lips moved, saying something, perhaps a name, over and over, almost to the rhythm of the pulse she heard under the shirt, under the flesh, within the body of the patient young man.
   The heart was beating there.
    She listened.
    The heart beat with a steady and regular sound.
    She listened for a long while. Her breath slowly drained out of her, as color came into her cheeks.
    She listened.
    The heart beat.
    Then she raised her head, looked at the young man's face for a final time, and very swiftly touched her lips to his cheek, turned, and hurried across the room, with no thanks, for none was needed.


All in all, not bad stories, but nothing special either. Finished about 75% but did not care enough for them to read them all.

Die Antwoord - misc

• "Strunk" (Donker Mag)
  the closest to a ballad they want to come I guess. Strange and still very much Die Antwoord
• "Girl I Want 2 Eat U" (Donker Mag)
  I never realized but, yes, indeed, sushi rhymes with pussy. Sorta.
• "Happy Go Sucky Fucky" (Donker Mag)
  Oh yes

• Lady Gaga vs Judas Priest - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ZlRl1_4Ws
• Die Antwoord - "Ugly Boy" and "Happy Go Sucky Fucky"
• David Hasselhoff - "True Survivor" (Kung Fury soundtrack)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTidn2dBYbY

"What we do in the shadows"

Fantastic fun documentary about vampires sharing a flat in New Zealand

Hunter S. Thompson - "The Great Shark Hunt"

Collection of essays. Some better than others. Good read.

Robert Jackson Bennett - "Mr Shivers"

Dustbowl years. A bunch of hobo's chase Mr Shivers, who has taken (killed) somebody dear of each of them. Nice. Not as Carnivalesque as I hoped, but a good good read.