"What's a stake?"

Three Things Bonnaroo Taught Me

1) The human digestive tract can hold one 12" Subway Italian sub, one small bag of Doritos, four apples, two oranges, three bananas, three salami sanwiches, four peanut butter sandwiches, 18 Nature Valley granola bars, one cheeseburger and french fries, one brautwurst, one Minute Maid italian ice, 1/4 a bag of Kettle salt and pepper potato chips, three packs of sandwich crackers, & two slices of pepperoni pizza. Once all this rests inside the intestine, a bacon cheeseburger, french fries and Pepsi will quickly force everything out before you can even finish it.

2) People will go w/o showering for five days if it means they can just get fucked up the whole time.

3) Sonic Youth, Stephen Malkmus & Mark Ibold all on stage at once = the culmination of a "perfect-for-a-peach" weekend.

Here's a song that I just listened to for the first time this afternoon while catching up w/ all the music that I had been missing whilst gone the past few days. Music blogs ruined my life.

Dondolo - Dragon [Shit Robot Firebreathing Remix]

I really dig the 12" that Marcus Lambkin released earlier this year on DFA. This new remix proves it was no fluke. I've never actually heard the original. Hype Machine, here I come...

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Buy Dondolo

I went down to the St. James infirmary / I saw my baby there

Well well well, it's been a little while since anything has happened here. Let's just say there's been a lack of motivation on my end. These last few weeks in this town I call home have been sucking all the vitality out of any action I try to take. Needless to say, I cannot wait to get the fuck out of this mosquito-infested swamp and wake up from the slow death that summer in the South induces. So with that in mind, here are two tracks that have kept me company the past few days. This first one is by Rekorder, and while this whole gimmick of releasing a series of ten 12"s and then revealing the producer is rather silly, there's no denying that this track will knock you flat on your ass.

Rekorder 4.1

Up next, Louis Armstrong does "St. James Infirmary Blues." Now, if good ole Louis were still around to hear everyone's favorite boys from Oxford do their take on this song with it's wailing and creepy-as-all-hell horns, he might be running down to the copyright office screaming about royalties. But I would hope that he might just light up a joint and laugh a bit. Not since Tangerine Dream recorded the soundtrack to Risky Business has an artist revealed their influence as directly. But back to Louis Armstrong. This song is fantastic. Fantastic in the way that makes you wonder how you could have gotten along for so long without hearing this song. I mean, how many goddamn times have you heard "It's A Wonderful World" throughout your life? That song made me hate Louis Armstrong. But then this comes along and makes you realize how wonderful he and the world really are but in a very different, stranger way. Anyway, listen to it.

Louis Armstrong - St. James Infirmary Blues

I was thinking about putting up a third track today, but I don't think I will. Instead, I'll talk a bit about the books and movies I've been reading and watching lately. I just watched Blade Runner last night, and it has held up exceptionally well. For a movie that came out nearly 25 years ago, its vision of the world only seems more accurate as time passes. It certainly has its cheeseball moments, but the bleakness of the rest of the rest of the film more than compensates. I do wish that a better DVD version would be released and hopefully it will soon. As far as books go, I'm about 3/4 through Gibson's Neuromancer and it is superb. I had only read Pattern Recognition and was only mildly impressed, but I guess impressed enough to try something else. Neuromancer kicks the shit out of PR and I only wish that I had gotten to it first because perhaps I would have enjoyed PR more. Gibson is writing right around the same time as Blade Runner was released and the two certainly contain thematic similarities, e.g. genetic engineering, all-powerful multinational corporations, fractured human relations. Both are certainly worth checking out or re-watching/reading.

OK. A rather diverse post but it had been a while, and I'll try to keep the updates a little more frequent in future.

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Buy Rekorder
Buy Louis Armstrong