Hybrid (ft John Graham) - "Choke"

Dark rock, beats.

coding playlists

breakpoints-on-spacetime
"The speed of light exists because that's the maximum speed this simulation can buffer environments for rendering and collision detection."

nice instrumental playlist
http://8tracks.com/pingfromheaven/breakpoints-on-spacetime


void Focus()
http://8tracks.com/legnus/void-focus

with Saltillo - "A Necessary End" - violins and beats



slowly it moved to more uptempo playlists without my explicit doing

running-life-in-music

• Thomas J. Bergersen & Nick Phoenix - "Heart of Courage"
  uptempo film climax music
• Shaka Ponk - "Palabra Mi Amor"
  near punk song, almost gypsy! Cool!
  

Shirley Jackson - [unknown]

Still on 2read list, better get it out here:


Tell me about your sister, the little boy said. Was she a witch?
   Maybe, the man said.
   The little boy laughed excitedly, and the man leaned back and puffed at his cigar. Once upon a time, he began, I had a little sister, just like yours. The little boy looked up at the man, nodding at every word. My
   little sister, the man went on, was so pretty and so nice that I loved her more than anything else in the world. So shall I tell you what I did?
   The little boy nodded more vehemently, and the mother lifted her eyes from her book and smiled, listening.
   I bought her a rocking-horse and a doll and a million lollipops, the man said, and then I took her and I put my hands around her neck and I pinched her and I pinched her until she was dead.

Neil Gaiman - "The Graveyard Book"

Had this for a few years, never bothered to read it. I noticed I have become a bit... less interested in his writing. It's great writing, don't get me wrong, but... maybe I read too much of it in too short a time. Two books I would reread: "Neverwhere", that one never fails to amaze me, and "American Gods", which I am not sure I understood completely.

The Graveyard Book, besides some wonderful drawings, is nice. Finished it in two days. It bothered me a bit though. it was... too simple. Why is Bod that special one? How does the Honour Guard and the Jacks relate? Jack Frost I got... but are the other Jacks famous Jacks?

But, the writing was well crafted and it was a lovely little story.

Wanderers

short film, words and voice by Carl Sagan. Very well done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6goNzXrmFs

Chrysus ft Solar Scape - "Massive"

On soma.fm's The Trip. Good for coding? Definitely powerful.

In Bruges (2008)

Great fun film with Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson (remember that name) and Ralph Fiennes (small role). Feel good in semi Guy Ritchie style. Good soundtrack, too!

Carter Burwell created the original score: somebody to look out for.

• Carter Burwell - "I Didn't Want To Die"
• Townes Van Zandt - "St John The Gambler" (melancholy)

the King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters

Documentary about two world's (well, America's) top classic gamers. Mostly focussed around Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell. Didn't like the latter, found the former a bit awkward at times (seriously, his kid screaming "dad! stop playing donkey kooooooooooooong!".... but dad was on a winning streak, ...) it was amazing. Think "Room 237" but for computer game nerds. Classic computer games.

Loneliness, solitude, desolation, alienation, disaffection, estrangement

Loneliness, which refers to a lack of companionship and is often associated with unhappiness, should not be confused with solitude, which is the state of being alone or cut off from all human contact (the solitude of the lighthouse keeper). You can be in the midst of a crowd of people and still experience loneliness, but not solitude, since you are not physically alone. Similarly, if you enjoy being alone, you can have solitude without loneliness. Lonesomeness is more intense than loneliness, suggesting the downheartedness you may experience when a loved one is absent (she experienced lonesomeness following the death of her dog). Desolation is more intense still, referring to a state of being utterly alone or forsaken (the widow's desolation). Desolation can also indicate a state of ruin or barrenness (the desolation of the volcanic islands). Alienation, disaffection, and estrangement have less to do with being or feeling alone and more to do with emotions that change over time. Alienation is a word that suggests a feeling of unrelatedness, especially a feeling of distance from your social or intellectual environment (alienation from society). Disaffection suggests that you now feel indifference or even distaste towards someone of you were once fond of (a wife's growing disaffection for her husband), while estrangement is a voluntary disaffection that can result in complete separation and strong feelings of dislike or hatred (a daughter's estrangement from her parents).

First of all, Concise Oxford American Thesaurus, I love you. I want to have your babies. All of them.

Secondly... I love your long explanations. It's how I came to learn and love (all at once, it was a bang for sure) "sempiternal".

Also... curious how it's "you" here, instead of "one" ("one now feels indifference...") A Thesaurus thing? I wish a Concise Oxford American Thesaurus employee would read this and tell me why the tone is different from the New Oxford American Dictionary.

But, just to drive the point home, I did not have a car at the time of buying this and it was absolutely worth every penny cycling up the hill with these hundred thousand pounds of words in my backpack. As well as the shipping costs when I moved.

La Luz - "Weirdo Shrine"

Surf and psych, and very echoy voices. Not too much though.

the Married Monk

• Brother J - parlando, per usual

Chelsea Wolfe - "Abyss" (2015)

Dark singer-songwriter. Between folk and drones? Should listen to more of her stuff.

• After the Fall
• 
  

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.