snow ii

yessssssssssssssssssssssssssss, working from home on a snow day is indeed the ultimate perk -

[insert picture of snow falling over the yard as seen from the lodge window]

this extremely budd + eno + max/msp album "cendre" by fennesz + sakamoto has been a constant companion this winter and is so very app, every song a field of shimmering, slowly-falling digital snowflakes -

fennesz + sakamoto - cendre (album)

see also the previous julee cruise/snow vibes post -

why don't you come over to my house... please

since apparently all this snow is turning to shitty rain in like 7 hours, and who knows if these are the best snowy vibes we'll get all year?, I would also like to take this opportunity to demand that you take advantage of the opportunity to really fucking deeply feel Julee Cruise's "Floating into the Night" album, amazingly available for free track by track here. without a doubt my #1 obsession of the winter, and an utterly perfect soundtrack for a snowy evening. these first two especially, seriously seriously mandatory:

julee cruise - floating
julee cruise - falling

bonus chiasm flashback!
"a beautiful, tranquilized hybrid of new age textures and vaguely '50sish pop melodies stretched out into ethereal sighs, lyrics by David Lynch, music by Angelo Badalamenti, and otherwordly singing by Ms. Cruise... it's kind of like an enigmatic, melancholy, xanaxed-out Hal David/Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick situation, three amazing talents complementing each other perfectly to create a TOTAL VIBE "

michelle o

nice WSJ profile on official green lodge feminine icon Michelle O, noteworthy just for that but also for

1 - the semi-implication in the article and in the 'interview outtakes' posted online that Barack maybe still hasn't totally quit smoking (update: might be reading too much into it, but the tenses seem a little cloudy...), which is unfortunate from a health perspective but also humanizing and kind of interesting. I've been curious, both b/c I feel bad for the guy to have to try and work on ending a stress-coping addiction in the middle of the most stressful time imaginable and because the (well, almost) total non-mention of his smoking in the press is a nice and weirdly old-fashioned reminder that there are still some lines, albeit totally random lines, wrt personal privacy and respect that they generally don't cross. did you know that Laura Bush is a smoker, too? but there's some kind of deal, spoken or unspoken, where the press never takes pictures of her smoking or asks or writes about it. I'll give 2:1 odds that if dude becomes president, that'll be another barrier that gets broken

2 - the WSJ's casual and totally gratuitous use of "vibe" in a supposedly serious article - not to be too blatantly carrying the torch for the much-missed and obviously ahead of the curve Internet Vibes, but I feel like this sentence would be unthinkable for the Journal in, say, 2005 or 2006, no?

"Friends and campaign aides describe them as a high-powered team built on contrasts: She's the heart to his head, the enforcer to his lapses, regimented to his laid-back, critic to his ego, details to his broad strokes, sarcasm to his sincerity, toughness to his cool vibe."

fuck that w00t bullshit maybe I am just too like not a total fucking internet nerd but I feel like 'vibe' was obviously the true breakout word of 2007

maybe I'm still stuck on this whole david lynch vibe

but can someone please do a movie with a really fucked up and disturbing scene set to rod stewart's "tonight's the night"? is kind of creepy, no? "stay away from my window / stay away from my backdoor too / disconnect the telephone line / relax baby and draw that blind," uh, ok? you can really hear it spiraling into depravity from there, "tonight's the night... ain't nobody gonna stop us now," horrific screaming over the saxophone solo, etc

vibe music

there is this new rap 'micro-genre' comin outta south FL called "VIBE MUSIC" and it is basically like super chilled out, midtempo strip club anthems with pretty synths, lots of hooks and only occasz rapping, what more do you need to know it is obviously awesome - Alexis, as usual, has the details and links you need to understand this important new vibe vibe*

also conveniently a youtube of Snoop's infinitely rewatchable/relistenable "Sensual Seduction" video, which as you probably know by now is one of the best videos ever, and which you might not know (I didn't!) was produced by VIBE MUSIC mastermind Shawty Redd. Doggystyle was what, 15 years ago?? who would've guessed Snoop would still be so relevant, not to mention so fucking avant-garde and awesome, in the 08?

* also in vibe news, I'm sure the frequently missed Internet Vibes is having its biggest day of traffic in a hot minute! we are opening for those Vampire Weekend knuckleheads tonight at the Bowery, excited and totally bracing myself for extreme failure, potential psychological meltdown, etc

time

oh man, via wayne, please watch and worship with me this vintage live vid of a Miles Davis rendition of "Time After Time" from the mid-80s, which sr. wax had previously posted an mp3 of on his blog (I think it's the same version anyway...?) some months/years (who knows anymore??) ago. I loved it then but the vid adds some extremely heavy layers!

so much to say here... I liked the 'original' song OK before but this is really some other level of emotional reality than that cyndi lauper bullshit (sorry I love cyndi lauper obv). obv wardrobe = fucking amazing, miles's blood red trumpet (!) and intensely sequined black smoking jacket (!!) with the Japanese characters and a fucking dragon on the back (!!!), powerful sunglasses, Miles himself looking hunched over, balding, sweaty and busted as shit, his tone corroded but still fucking expressive as shit, every judiciously chosen note really fucking sings, and it's just devastatingly... yearningly... achingly... bitter? am I imagining this? or otherwise being overly influenced by the unbelievably intense vibes of the man and the outfit and the staging and the lighting and the vintage 80s filmstock? does it even make sense to talk about being 'overly' influenced by a vibe? plz check out the quietly heartwrenching bit about 6:20 in or so when he starts walking off to the side of the stage, away from the band, slowly gliding between the chairs and video cameras and the spotlights etc, so fucking alone in this thing... seriously, some of these close-up shots of him all by himself up there, glittering faintly in the night just like the dying star he basically was, are just so fucking epic, watching this makes me feel like I am learning some great secret about life and living and dying and eternity etc -

on a more comical note, check out the amazing guitar face during the solo at 5:30, it seriously helps me 'get' the solo to see how he is so fucking into it that he can hardly bear to touch these notes etc! do like serious jazz/miles davis fans find this period like depressing or bad or whatever? I don't know anything about this stuff but am really fillin it

the green lodge

it's saturday night in my room, and I'm surrounded by 6 cans of Coke arranged around my desk and floor, I am trying to figure out which one is the 'current' one and which are half-kills that have potentially been sitting around for as long as two days. I put my ear to each can, listening for the carbonation level, I'm pretty sure it's this one, but it doesn't sound quite fizzy enough. is Coke less fizzy than Pepsi - my usual cola of choice until recently, for some reason - i.e. are my fizziness expectations just too high? did I put it someplace weird that I haven't noticed yet? how horrible would it be if I accidentally drank an old one! should I just drink a beer instead? within arms length of my computer on my desk and on the floor there are

- 5 empty vitamin water bottles (3 formula 50, 1 b relaxed, and 1 rescue)
- 2 empty beers (Budweiser and Kronenberg)
- 1 unopened beer (Kronenberg)
- 2 mostly empty glasses of water
- 1 almost completely full glass of water mixed with one of those vitamin C powders that was acai berry flavored and disgusting
- 1 half drunk bottle of Very Old Barton bourbon, a birthday present from Alexis, who is officially in blog limbo thanks to the new blog-city redesign - will she bother to make a new site at teenjeoparty? will she blog on a new site? will she ever bother blogging again?
- 1 mostly drunk bottle of Chilean wine, appropriately enough
- 1 half-drunk coffee

because I am just lazy, and NOT a disgusting person lacking in personal hygiene, there is no old food anywhere in my room, thank you very much, although there IS 'current' food, a recently-delivered general tso's chicken that I am eating with a knife because there are no clean forks and mr. wonton never provides plastic forks (should I feel bad about hating this environmentally conscious measure? isn't not having to do dishes one of the joys of ordering out? would I order out less if I had a dishwasher?), and I was hungry and didn't want to commit to doing dishes because there are a bunch right now.

I am slightly confused about the placement of my current beverage b/c I just came back to my room after a failed attempt to watch some of the Democratic debate on TV. I heard it started at 8:30 so I checked it out then but there was just a lot of NFL pregame-esque bullshit, I felt bad enough for wanting to watch it in the first place but staring into this fathomless abyss of punditry and politics-as-shitty-entertainment (literally like 'here is what political consultants are saying about the storylines that the campaigns are likely going to be pushing to spin the news tomorrow') really just made me feel terrible, so I came back to my room, which has an exposed green light bulb and green-painted walls, where I work and eat and record music and occasionally sleep, where I have lived for four and a half years, which is longer than I have blogged, and I ended up writing this blog.

actually there was kind of a cool moment in the pre-debate coverage where Democrats were shaking hands and exchanging whatever (undoubtedly psychotic) pleasantries politicians exchange in these kinds of situations with the Republican candidates as the former took the stage directly after the conclusion of the latter's debate (giving the false impression that it was just gonna start right there with maybe a quick bathroom break for the moderator and not like a half hour break for pundits to talk about questions posted on fucking Facebook). the liberal elite just stays up later, it is what it is! anyway it was kind of like when the cast of one TV show meets the cast of another TV show on one of their respective TV shows, like Flinstones meet the Jetsons, which I thought was funny.

I was right, it IS this can.

I'm going to read the NYT liveblog of the debate to see if it will be worth leaving the room to watch a little bit of it, just to sample the flavor. then I'm going to work on some music, possibly with Aron, who has been doing something I barely understand to a set of bike handlebars and also knows how to spend a quasi-productive Saturday night at home alone, even though he has a girlfriend, which is a powerful and frequent testament to his quintessentially masculine dedication to solitary, obsessive pursuits. he's been working on the handlebar thing for hours, and it involves a saw somehow. later I hope to watch "Lost Highway" which I was inspired to rent by Timmers G on New Year's Eve, it's his favorite Lynch, and Dav also recommended it the other day. I'm interested to see my reaction to it after spending a couple of days in the past week researching just how fucking psychologically damaged Lynch prob is due to his terrifyingly deep involvement with Tr*nscendental Medit*tion. also on his audiobook thing he mentions how he thinks the movie was heavily influenced by his obsession with the OJ trial, which was going on while he was writing it or making it or whatever, because he was seeing OJ playing golf and shit and wondering how he could be so chill (with the implication of course that he really did kill her), and ended up researching fugue states, where something awful happens and then you just kind of split off a new personality and life. the video's already 2 days late, and after racking up a really embarrassing late fee on the last disc of Twin Peaks I am keen to not draw too much more attention to my weird renting habits, but I might be too late and the only thing I really want to watch after this is "Fire Walk With Me" (again)