before the brain has hardened

Oh I love this tumblr: teenagebedroom.

Kids are so scary obsessive, like the bedroom with 30 pictures of Julian Lennon. And there's nothing like the ridiculous juxtaposition of leftover glossy white childhood furniture sets now graffitied or covered in angry jaded teenager accessories.

My favorites.




My bedroom was constantly full of stuff, cds, old food plates, garbage. There was nowhere to step. I would just make small clearings on the floor to sit on and do whatever I did. Reading, making mix tapes, cutting magazines apart. Candle wax was melted into the carpet. I was so busy all the time, focused completely on personal pursuits and living inside my head. I wouldn't hang out with my friends after school and usually didn't want them to come over either. I just wanted to be alone to write or sit in the dark listening to stuff like this.



My friend Vickie's room was the opposite, it was like a furnished dorm. She kept nothing. She had a bed, a dresser, and I think there was one photo of Courtney Love taped to the wallpaper by her light switch. A couple of cds splayed on the floor. I've always envied people who don't want to keep anything. Stuff is such torture.

Also this is the best flickr set:


monkeylaundry: goth past



heh

Recommendations

My favorite guy

Jarvis' Sunday Service

This is the sort of sweetly generic mellow song that reminds me of dust motes and looking through heavy-papered magazines and National Geographics from the 70s on my grandmother's living room floor.



This week's broadcast reminds me - what the hell am I missing about Scott Walker? He has a great voice but it has a sort of absurd-sounding pitch sometimes, although a lot of great voices do. Tim Buckley? Or like the first time someone does a Morrissey impression for you in Marvin the Martian's voice and you realize there is actually no fucking difference between the two.

Actually, that's a whole thing for me. I always hear about artists first and then once I hear their voices, I am often disappointed. I would never admit it in mixed company (cred), but that's how I felt about Billie Holiday. I can say that now because I got over it and loved her and usually my favorite things/people are ones that I did not like at first. They prove you wrong and suddenly you find that you are fixated with something really foreign, which is brutal/incredible.

I love the way he writes. Unsentimental but still pretty in its perfect word choice, not just because it reads well but because it imparts perfect imagery, vivid but blurry and half his, and half yours.

You Should Date an Illiterate Girl by Charles Warnke.

"Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship."

frat house located inside a barn next to a brothel

is where i work and where my co-worker amber was born but this is not news.

this morning i was standing in the kitchen at work, quietly pouring coffee into my cup when i heard a loud crash and the sound of breaking glass coming from the owner's office directly outside the door. this is not that unusual and i didn't look up until i noticed people rushing in there and pulling the other owner out, red-faced and struggling. they had a fight and one tackled the other and started beating him into the floor. still not really sure what it was about but perhaps our company will be liquidated and i can go live on the floor of my gangmate's apartment in san francisco (fine - oakland).

i didn't realize how numbed i had become to the crazy atmosphere at work until one afternoon in a grocery store. a guy a couple of aisles down had a seizure and took out some shelves of items as he fell. people were screaming. i continued to idle along my way, only dimly registering the ruckus, and didn't realize that something had actually happened until i tried to walk past them. over two years of ignoring screaming, fighting, cubicle-jumping, vomiting, drinking and feats of strength at work has completely killed off my natural reaction to human panic and alert sounds! if this was the wild i would probably die.

at home in bb manor

Anita Belle

I've been listening to a lot of Glenn Miller lately, and in an old folder came across some files of Anita O'Day with Gene Krupa. I had forgotten that I love her. She dealt with a lot of shit that I'm sure would have permanently shattered a weaker person, but remained as authentic and interested in being alive as ever until her death.

Here she is high on heroin at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958.

Everything she did was good. I would perhaps put some stuff on Soundcloud but I have to go crochet and watch Bette Davis now.

There was a great interview with her on Fresh Air in the 80s. Here.

Come on, let's go

NPR says Trish Keenan of Broadcast has died.

Very unfortunate and untimely. Anita and I saw them play in 2003 or something in some restaurant in Tempe (incidentally, where I met the sons of Glen Campbell - not what you'd expect). These photos were taken by her. I loved that time, sort of.

my favorite broadcast song.

my second favorite.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

oh noes! astronomers rip the carpet from astrologers when they inform them (snidely) that the zodiacal chart is outdated. and why shouldn't it be? it's from 100 BC or some shit. that would make me a cancer and not a leo, which would make sense. i have always hated gold, and attention.

and i have always been fond of being sensitive and bitchy. and pinching. it makes perfect sense.

source.

eta: might be bullshit. not sure. this ain't the news.

homecrafts

Made from this recipe. Pretty great but polenta is intense. My great-grandmother was full Italian and the only distinctly Italian thing I recall her making was polenta. I refused to eat it back then. Unlike other kids, I was not into paste.


Making this for myself. But no stripes - that would be ridiculous! It was hard to decide how much larger to make it because I don't really know how much bigger my head is than a baby's. The only model for comparison I had was the cat.

7th St & Awful

My grandparents lived in about 7 homes in the north central and central Phoenix area in the 50s and 60s. They started in a very modest three bedroom home facing 16th street and this monstrosity is where he ended up, having also traded my grandmother in some years before. I had neither seen nor heard of this thing before. He died just before the house was finished.

A Grecian-inspired pink stucco eyesore, really an abomination when you see it in person. It's located in a very genteel and snooty neighborhood of austere ranch styles which stretch endlessly upon perfect acres of lawn. I am sure the current neighbors hate it as much as the originals must have.

yeah dude