I [heart] The Internets Roundup: 5.26.08 - 5.30.08

Hi hi hi!

I am completely addicted to playing DinoRun. Thanks, Ben. I think. I just like games that only involve running around at full speed. See Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto 4.

Speaking of games, who's excited about Spore? Me. You will be too, if you aren't already. We're all going to disappear the day this game is released.

Okkervil River reveals full details of the next album, courtesy Pitchfork. With new artwork by the lovely and talented William Schaff.

Skittles Vodka. Neat.

Sarah sent me this article about a frog that breaks it own bones to produce claws. It also has sideburns. Color me horrified and disgusted. I spent about half an hour in the BookPeople cafe yesterday showing this article to pretty much everyone that walked by and trying to reach a consensus that this thing rivals the Aye Aye and those creepy frogs that lay eggs inside their own backs in 'nightmare' factor. Yikes.

Cute Overload featured the most heartbreaking and, well, cute Warner Brothers cartoon EVER. I watched this a few weeks ago and it almost made me cry, you should watch it right now if you haven't seen it. Oh, Chuck Jones.

I like these prints by Frank Chimero very very much.

Buy me this watch, thanks.

BAGEL PARTY: My favorite Kochalka in a long time, yo.

And my favorite Softer World comic in a long time, too.

Jac blogged about my manifesto posts. :)

Totes killer Daytrotter session with The Mountain Goats. Mmm daytrotter.

Cool video for Noah and the Whale, courtesy It's Nice That. Those Noah and the Whale boys are the most adorbs, no?

Download and listen (click on the first track) to this awesome mix of foreign language covers of pop oldies. Brilliant!

This kid who got a dinosaur comics tattoo is totally my hero. My hero.

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH ('thanks' to Jeff Freeman, the brilliant mind behind my Re-Entry and a pretty good zombie)

Lastly, how much do we love this little guy?



Answer: lots. Lots and lots.

The Bored @ Work Generation.

Perks

Someone asked me the other day what the 'perks' of my job at BookPeople are and I forgot to mention the best one that's ever happened -- in five and a half years, mind you... Displays and art genius Claire drew this poster of me in the style of my favorite graphic novelist (kind of an impossible question, so I just picked one) Craig Thompson. It was on display at the store for awhile, where there's a father's day display now. It makes me want to cry because it's so pretty.

Miniature Soundtracks : Episode Four

Miniature Soundtracks is my small experiment in mp3 blogging. I'll be using a beloved image from my flickr photostream or favorites, reflect on it for a few sentences, and then give you a song that evokes the same feelings. If your photo or song is featured and you'd rather it not be, let me know and I'll take it down immediately.

Special Other People's Memories Edition! Mandy and Jen and I ("Another Day, Another Man") visited Uncommon Objects on South Congress on Memorial Day (in between mimosas at South Congress Cafe and swimming at Jen's apartment). Some of the sellers have bins and baskets of old greying mystery photographs for sale for 50 cents or a dollar. I've pawed through them and picked a few out every time I've ever been over the last decade, amassing probably about a hundred of these heartbreaking gems over the years. Once I spent a couple hundred dollars at the store -- mostly on pictures, plus three volumes of a mennonite girl's diary from the 1940s. Oops. The most beautiful and special displaced artifacts need a loving home and I can't ignore their call. Here are four from that most recent trip and the songs I want you to listen to while you stare at them and imagine the lives that surrounded these moments.


Sipping On The Sweet Nectar : Jens Lekman from Night Falls Over Kortedala


Sun Giant : Fleet Foxes from the Sun Giant EP


Bird : Jana Hunter from There's No Home


Wildflowers : Tom Petty from Wildflowers

I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality

Anais Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller:

"You are right, in one sense, when you speak of honesty. An effort, anyway, with the usual human or feminine retractions. To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.

I want to both combat you and submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain in engenders, I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity. I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.

This time you are not going to awake from the ecstasies of our encounters to reveal only the ridiculous moments. No. You won't do it this time, because while we live together, while you examine my indelible rouge effacing the design of my mouth, spreading like a blood after an operation (you kissed my mouth and it was gone, the design of it was lost as in a watercolor, the colors ran); while you do that, I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by (the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you), and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together.

What is more touchingly real than your room. The iron bed, the hard pillow, the single glass. And all sparkling like a Fourth of July illumination because of my joy, the soft billowing joy of the womb you inflamed. The room is full of the incandescence you poured into me. The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberated against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you to me. I could stuff my ears ad it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

I am impervious to the flat visual attack of things. I see your khaki shirt hung up on a peg. It is your shirt and I could see you in it -- you, wearing a color I detest. But I see you, not the khaki shirt. Something stirs in me as I look at it, and it is certainly the human you. It is a vision of the human you revealing an amazing delicacy to me. It is your khaki shirt and you are the man who is the axis of my world now. I revolve around the richness of your being.

'Come closer to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.'

You keep your promise.

Listen, I do not believe that I alone feel that we are living something new because it is new to me. I do not see in your writing any of the feelings you have shown me or any of the phrases you have used. When I read your writing, I wondered, What episode are we going to repeat?

You carry your vision, and I mine, and they have mingled. If at moments I see the world as you see it (because they are Henry's whores I love them), you will sometimes see it as I do."

swear I was born right in the doorway.

Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz's first wedding dance was 'First Day Of My Life' by Bright Eyes.

... I really have nothing to say about that, I guess, I just needed y'all to know.

Naked: I've forgotten.

Persimmons
by Li Young Lee

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

Miniature Soundtracks : Episode Three

Miniature Soundtracks is my small experiment in mp3 blogging. I'll be using a beloved image from my flickr photostream or favorites, reflect on it for a few sentences, and then give you a song that evokes the same feelings. If your photo or song is featured and you'd rather it not be, let me know and I'll take it down immediately.


Matthew, by me. March 15, 2005 (was it that long ago? really?)

There are photos. Rare ones. That capture a second you remember so perfectly that it's time travel to look at them. The smell and the feeling in your heart and the music you listened to that day, the way your cat acted, the way it was at the airport, and later walking across the town lake bridge, and later still playing pool in a dark place. The sun and the gate of the apartment and the tiny sidewalk in front of it. It's even weirder when a person is like that, where just looking at them brings on a wave of senses and feelings and sounds so intense that you feel like you're drowning in it just to see them. It's weirder still when a person does that to you right at first, when you barely know them, when you've ended up at their apartment and you're stepping on their feet dancing to Sigur Ros. Then a week later you're on a bus crying over a Prince song and everything has been rearranged. The world feels like a tetris cube in and after those precious moments. You just turned a corner you didn't know was there. Suddenly, there's a whole side of red! And then, the moment or the week or the person is gone and you flip the cube over and realize the other side isn't matching at all, and you have to start over again.

When those times happen, you lose your sense of time and space but grab on tightly to everything else in the world -- the wooden attic, the shoulders, the way the words sound like 'it's you' even though they're actually in a foreign language, the people outside and the memories wrapped up in them, the tiny pieces of skin you're biting off of the inside of your lower lip. I posed Matt for this picture and it was a time when I knew as I was pressing the shutter that it would be this beautiful, because I knew it was one of those days and Matthew is one of those people. Before the picture was ever developed in a darkroom, it was stamped behind my eyelids forever. Sometimes, still, when the world is dark and cold and scary, I can close my eyes and be right there, right then. And that, my loves, is forever.

Sometimes In Snows In April : Prince from Parade

I [heart] The Internets: Weekly Roundup

Brad's miniseries - China, Illinois - debuted on Adult Swim last night! It's now up in it's entirety at the link. If you don't 'get it', we're probably not friends. Not safe for work. Not one bit! I went and read a bunch of reactions on the adultswim forums because I was curious. That was a mistake. People aren't very smart sometimes.
On a thread titled 'brad neely':
Person A: why does that name sound familiar?
Person B: wizards
Person A: o yeah that babycakes guy.
I love it when people ask things like why the name Brad Neely sounds familiar while they're ON. THE. INTERNET. Let's make wikipedia bookmarks the law!

This is a few weeks old, but MAN I LOVE SHOWALTER!
Best Song to Do "The Rock Lobster" To: "Rock Lobster" by The B-52's
Second Best Song to Do "The Rock Lobster" To: N/A

I want this t-shirt, thx.

Also a few weeks old (sue me, I've been in a myspace haze), but worth reading, is my friend Cindy Hotpoint's blog entry on seeing Shearwater in NYC. I got chills a couple times while reading it.

I like Jax's post about how it's okay to vote for Obama because he's foxy. Just kidding, that's not what it's about. Or, well... Just go read it!

Have you looked at The Ones We Love?? It's a really beautiful photography project where several dozen young photographers were asked to shoot their loved one(s) in an outdoor setting. Just click on photographers and start randomly looking around. It will remind you of all the faces you keep in your pocket and what they look like in the sunshine.

I'm kind of obsessed with Jena Malone and how weird/awesome she is.

I posted this new mix for Rissa on artofthemix, which is an old old old school website for posting mix CDs. The mix owes a lot to the mix project people, especially Andy and Craig, and also to Said The Gramophone. Art of the mix is one of my favorite websites. It's been around for-ever and hasn't changed much at all. I know everyone is gaga over Muxtape, but AOTM will always be my sentimental favorite mix-related site. I recently re-discovered my old username on the site -- which I don't remember the password for, because it was That long ago. I posted mixes NINE YEARS AGO on this site. NINE YEARS AGO (for Joshua). Don't judge me, I was sixteen years old! That makes me feel craaaaaazy!

'Okkervil River' on Cooking with Rockstars, if you haven't. I'm totally gonna make that chocolate caramel tart Will Sheff has up. It sounds ridiculous! I've already used Zach Thomas's grandmother's buttermilk pie recipe from this weird book. It was excellent. Cooking recipes from your favorite bands is kind of the ultimate step in fandom weirdness, yes?

Craig Thompson's abandoned work. I would say it makes me feel better to know that Thompson starts things he never finishes too, except that nothing I've ever started OR finished is half as wonderful as that little rejected chicken. Sigh.

Last but not least, PICTURES FROM MARS!

Sorry In Advance

I made this very short, very terrible animated short short as a 'present' for someone last year. I don't see why you shouldn't watch it now and scoff at my (lack of) skillz. To be fair, I completed the project in about two and a half days and drew the frames on 3 x 3 pieces of scrap paper with a black felt tip pen. At least you can't call me a perfectionist!



Oh, life.

Oh, internet.

Oh man, one of my favorite things to do when I'm bored (is it sad to be writing about this during the prime part of a Saturday night?) is watch (usually adolescent) youtubers cover Okkervil River songs. It's simultaneously surreal, heart-warming, and terrifying. Y'know... learning to play & sing along with your favorite indie rock band is something that all of us probably did as teenagers, but it's not really something that I ever would have shared with, well, the entire world.

For the two people out there who care about this topic:


These kids, covering an old song called 'Auntie Alice,' are my absolute favorites. They are really, really, really genuinely good. I love the 'talent farm' banner in the back, the kid's pretty voice, the smattering of applause at the end that sounds like about a dozen old people, their clothes, and especially the fact that Auntie Alice is the song they picked. Cute! I love love love this without irony. The kid in the middle playing tambourine? Awesome.

This guy is who you would hire to do an impression of Sheff's voice on one of those CDs of pop songs covered by studio bands that they used to sell. But then you see what he looks like and it's totally a weird match. I would never see this guy somewhere and think that he was an Okkervil River fan. I guess that's my bad. Love.

Something about this whispered, Iron & Wine type version of Westfall kind of scares the shit out of me.

Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe as performed by a 16 year old Conor Oberst.

??????

BONUS! Okkervil River in Wales covering my second favorite ABBA song and splitting my heart open in the process:

for you, i'd be happy to repeat myself forever

Poem for the Name Mary
by Mark Cox

Like smoke in a bottle, like
hunger, sometimes light fits,
wraps itself around a person
or thing and doesn't let go.
The light becomes a name,
and that name becomes a voice
through which light speaks to us.
Maybe this is what a friend means
when she says there is a pair of lips
in the air, maybe this is desire
and need too. Or maybe
this is just how to love a potato,
how to see what the potato sees:
the childish, white arms that reach out
through it's eyes into the dark of our cabinets
to bless them.

& relatedly

Here's the venn diagram I made a couple months ago that has been at the forefront of my brain lately:

More from the Manifesto.

See original posts here and here. This is still but a small chunk of the full text... These little ideas and affirmations are written as Me talking to Myself, so please don't read condescension or ego into them. They are things that I am working on, not things that I'm actually telling anyone else they Should do. If you're inspired, I hope it's to come up with your own manifesto, not listen to little me. Heart.

..

Be healthy and reasonable. I am a firm believer in ‘overdoing it’ – occasionally. So called benders, all nighters, and codependent relationships have comprised a good chunk of my favorite memories and best times. However, don’t underestimate the less exciting joys in life – days where you feel clear-headed, well-rested, and you can breathe deeply. Running without having to catch your breath is one of the best things in the word. The occasional spell of living balls-to-the-wall is taking advantage of life; taking your body for granted is wasting it. Being tired, hungover, regretful, and aching is not carpe diem. Morning can be just as special as nights. Not drinking can be just as fun as drinking. Things that can be a lot more fun than parties include swimming, sleeping outside, and spending a day laying under the sun.

& drink water, as much as you can. It will make you feel better than coffee in the morning, it will keep your insides happy, and it will occasionally, like magic, remind you of how just special and lucky you are to be alive on this planet.

-

Share beauty. Be like the grandmothers who send newspaper clippings about movies to their film student grandkids. Keep your home stocked with blank CDs and postage stamps. When you hear a song that reminds you of someone, play it for them. When you read a poem that rearranges your insides, mail it to all of your friends who’ve moved away. If a stranger sees you drawing a picture and compliments it, give it to them. Don’t let ambitious ideas about delivery keep you from passing on small joys. Tell jokes that made you laugh. Lend out movies that make you feel high. Bake cookies. Give away stuff you don’t use that someone else can. It’s the best rule from kindergarden: share. It makes everything more fun.

-

An informal study shows that these are the things that people talk about at parties and bars: TV shows (either synopsizing ‘good shows’ that are out now, or for the more elite, reminiscing about shows we all watched as children), romantic relationships – usually other people’s and usually in a fairly shallow way, music – usually other people’s and usually in a fairly shallow way (‘I know this band and you do too’ as opposed to how songs or sounds make us feel), work – almost always negative, and how drunk/fucked-up/tired/wired they are. My suggestion is that you force yourself, as much as you possibly can, to talk about something else. Talk about your favorite birds, talk about interesting places you’ve seen and what made them different from here, talk about the worst haircut you’ve ever had, talk about death, talk about coffee, talk about sex, make original jokes (quoting ‘The Big Lebowski’ is almost never funny anymore, I’m sorry to say), or even try something other than talking: drawing, dancing, or playing a game. Obviously the topics mentioned come up so often for a reason – they’re easy things to discuss in a diverse range of (white alternative twenty something) people… but I’m starting to get déjà vu. All the time.

-

Never be depressed at a wedding. Allow yourself to be happy for others instead of feeling sorry for yourself. Don’t compare your life to your friend’s lives. Not only will it almost inevitably lead to self-deprecation, it’s also unfair to your friends. Happiness can come from lots of places, and if you only allow it to occur when something ‘good’ happens to you, you’re being a selfish jerk. Additionally, you have no idea what other people’s life and situations really are in any kind of detail. Comparisons often = be careful what you wish for. That skinny girl with big boobs on the arm of the boy you think is neat? She probably envies your confidence and creativity. Maybe she’s jealous of your easy, fun relationship with her dude. Maybe she thinks that your haircut is a lot cooler than hers. Point is that both of you would be a lot happier, and maybe even become friends, if you weren’t thinking about yourselves in relation to someone else.

-

Don’t rely on the internet (read: face/space) to get to know people. This often leads to making the High Fidelity mistake and assuming that what people like is more important than what they’re like. Sure, it’s fun to notice that a boy you like shares the same taste in movies as you, but in reality it’s next to meaningless. Everyone hears, reads, sees, and likes things differently and for different reasons – and those reasons, which are impossible to summarize on a website, are what make people unique and amazing. There are thousands if not millions of people in the world who have the exact same favorite book as you. What makes you interesting is the why. It’s much more signifying to play a song for someone and see if they care to pay attention and if they have anything interesting to say about it than it is to simply note that they like the ‘right’ songs. It’s also fun to learn new things about people as you spend time with their actual faces. It’s a lot less fun to already know everything they might be excited to tell you about. Lastly, and I say this as a very enthusiastic and overt lover of lists and surveys: keep in mind that people are infinitely more complicated than any set of questions and answers. Studying someone’s myspace profile obsessively not only takes a lot of the fun surprises out of getting to know them, it can also lead to an unfortunate faux-familiarity that can lead you to be disappointed by what should be their actually much more exciting authentic self.

Apropos.

"There's nothing the least bit sinful about it. Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt. Life is like that. [...] You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow. I'm just a powerless and imperfect woman, but still there are times when I think to myself how wonderful life can be! Believe me, it's true! So stop what you're doing this minute and get happy. Work at making yourself happy!"

- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood.

Miniature Soundtracks : Episode Two

Miniature Soundtracks is my small experiment in mp3 blogging. I'll be using a beloved image from my flickr photostream or favorites, reflect on it for a few sentences, and then give you a song that evokes the same feelings. If your photo or song is featured and you'd rather it not be, let me know and I'll take it down immediately.


Photo by reallycrumby, whose photostream is beautiful and worth looking at before you read on.

I collect ephemera. Every time I look inside a drawer, empty a purse, or check the pockets of my laundry, I come across scraps of paper representing laughter, sadness, and secrets. I have boxes full of birthday cards, photographs, notes, ripped-out journal entries, pieces of poems, letters, post-it notes, and crappy sketches spanning the entirety of my twenty-five years. It's strange when a part of your life closes and there are still physical manifestations of it falling into your hands every time you open anything. It's as though you're reading a book that's filled up your brain and as you turn the page, it explodes in your hand, showering you with confetti. There are so many pieces that you could never hope to collect them all in one handful and you don't even try. Sometimes you find pieces and try to remember what the ending you were waiting for was. Years later, you'll walk past the place where it happened and find a single scrap and unfold it to find the final word, and it will all start to make some sense.

The Things That Bind You : Rock Plaza Central from The World Was Hell To Us

Falling in love all over again...

with the internets!

For those who may have been speculating that I would start doing all kinds of exciting things in real life after quitting myspace (they still haven't taken my profile down but I can't login, which is kind of bizarre), FEAR NOT! I've spent most of the last 24 hours re-branding myself on the internet and giving some love to the neglected (by me) websites that I actually much prefer.

To get specific:
- I've started using Del.icio.us again, mostly for personal reminders / to-do list items such as homebrewing how-to's and volunteer work camps I'm interested in. (real life creeps back in slowly...)
- I've started updating Twitter, which is a website I totally didn't get the point of when I joined it and I'm still not completely sure I do, but it's real fun anyway. I've synced it up with my facebook too, so now (thank god!) I can update my fb status from my mobile phone. I'm sure you're all breathing a sigh of relief knowing that you will literally be able to know what I am doing at any given time. Creepy!
- I've started using the new Google Reader to keep up with blogs and news. Easy peasy, it's already replaced myspace as my default homepage.

I was a super geek in pre-adolescent's clothes. It's all coming back to me now.

Another Short Short Story From The Impossibly Over-Saturated Brain-Heart Of Summer Anne Burton

Beholder:

When I asked David what he saw in me, it wasn’t related to the blindness. I didn’t mean for it to be. I was just fishing for something endearing to hold on to the nights he chose to spend at his apartment, or the weekends he went out of town. Something like “You are a magical girl, Shelly. Your laugh makes my stomach warm,” or “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met and you challenge me in a way that forces me to be a better person,” or “you’re really good with your mouth, it feels like the real thing, it really does.”

But he blinked his white pupils at me when I said it and I immediately clapped my hand over my mouth, not that he could see that. He looked at me, though. He did. It took me awhile to get used to how a blind person can look at you, but trust me – they can. He senses where I am. He never opens his eyes as widely as a normal – I mean, not-blind – person would, but he looks right at me, he does.

He spoke before I could apologize for my wording. “I see in you a fog. I see in you a picture I saw before, of a girl in a book with yellow braids because you told me your hair was long and golden.” At this point I felt a little guilty thinking of my matte, hay-colored curls. It’s easy to exaggerate when a cute blind boy asks you to describe yourself. “I see you surrounded by light but you yourself are always in shadow. I see the outline of you shine so bright that I close my eyes, again, and they never stop closing.”

At this point I really wanted to cut him off because it was starting to feel like a little much and I worried about what he would say next.

“I see you as soft. I see your smell… you smell like cat litter but also like honey and melons, so I see a kitten full of fruit. I see your voice as a kitten too. I see you all the time, whether you’re here or not, because nothing I see ever changes but you are standing behind my eyes, in my head, smiling at me and not-shining all the time. What I see in you, when I look at you – or whatever you want to call it – is a shape that softens every sharp thing.”

And then he asked me what I saw in him and I said, trying to hide the tears in my voice, “I like the way you speak and I like the space between your nose and your mouth and I like your mother,” and by that point I guess it was pretty obvious that I was crying and David had his arms around me. I know he thought I was crying with joy because he had said such nice things to me after I’d said something insensitive, but really I was crying because he had reminded me, once again, as he would every day we were together, that he would never simply say that I was “beautiful.”

Miniature Soundtracks : Episode One

While I'm in the mood to spend some time with this blog, I'm going to try an experiment in mp3 blogging. A couple times a week, I'll be reflecting an image I like -- probably from my flickr photostream or my flickr favorites -- and choosing a song I think you'll like to match it. Make sense? Let's try.


I was seventeen, Isaac was nineteen. We met at a grocery store where Isaac worked and where I bought strawberry popsicles as a lame excuse to talk to him. It's a movie theater now and sometimes I go there and walk by the counter where I would stall and flirt for months, before Theresa made my first move for me and invited him over for s'mores. After the night of our first kiss, he came over and told me he didn't want to see me romantically anymore and then a thunderstorm blew through and I laid in the front yard of my dad's house getting soaked to the bone. Theresa and Jerry were there and the four of us made tea in the kitchen and waited out the storm. I didn't see Isaac for a couple months after that night. Later, he told me that when we kissed he felt like I was attacking him. Then the night he walked back into my life, he and Rhymi and I stayed up until the middle of the night assaulting eachother with wet white chalk. We were together for more than three years after that. He hated this particular photo, which I kept in a frame by my bed for most of our relationship and a long time afterwards. I love it because he looks so alive that when I stare at it for more than a second, I get the distinct feeling that Isaac's nineteen year old self is going to jump out of the photo, take me by the hand, turn back time, and make everything simple again.
Kiss : Scout Niblett from This Fool Can Die Now

Reasons Why I Am Quitting Myspace (Tomorrow!):

- I like facebook, goodreads, and flickr a hell of a lot better - design wise and content wise - and I would rather support and encourage websites that match my aesthetic and my beliefs.
- I spend way (way way way) too much time looking at myspace and, specifically, unhealthily obsessing over a small set of people's profiles, comments, and updates.
- I think that rather than trying to articulate my personality with words in a way that will seem appealing or magical or sexy or cute or funny, I should just try to BE all of those things in real life. And, relatedly, I think it kind of takes the fun out of getting to know people naturally to be able to refer to a list of all of their favorites and a concise summary of who they think they are.
- I would like my 'internet presence' to be content based and myspace is definitively personality based.
- Top friends. Need I say more?
- It's kind of cool to not have it at this point, right?

All of that said, I'm kind of cheating. I put up a music profile awhile back with some of my silly songs, and for now I'm keeping it. I've been working on music again and planning a show (!), so I feel like it makes sense for me to leave it there. I have a fraction of the friends that I have on my regular profile there and I'm not going to promote it any further until there are songs I'm more proud of up. I'm hoping that since I've made the definitive move of canceling my personal account, I won't start using that one the same way. To safeguard against that I'll be turning off email notification on that account and only checking on it maybe once a week.

& so that this post isn't solely an over-analysis of a trivial matter, here's a list of fake bands I've been a 'member' of:
- Shock The Nation / Shark Attack (third grade - me, Andrew, Jackie, Julia)
- Megalife (me, Isaac, Josh, maybe Robert/Mona/Jen?)
- Quicksilver Stallion (me, Sarah, Michelle, Isaac)
- The Poison Vixen Trio (me, Sarah, Michelle)
- Magic Action (me, Michelle)
- Man-Boy (me, Meaghan, Sarah Bear - 70s cover band)
- Another Day, Another Man (me, Mandy, Jen Mo)
- The Post-Sunset Muffins (me, Andy, Craig - possibly not-fake someday?)
- Slow Little Oranges (me, Mandy -- name coined by Kathleen in reference to a tree full of baby sloths (!!))
- Sloth Cabinet (me, Patrick)

mix.

Sorry to have two mix'tape' related posts in a row, but, hello, I'm Summer, nice to meet you. I was telling Ryan last night about how sometimes when a situation gets to a point where I'm still thinking about it all the time but I've said everything there is to say and talking doesn't seem to help anymore etcetera etcetera, I make a mix - for myself - about it, just so I can continue to excavate my heart parts and 'let it out'. It's like writing a letter you'll never send, or talking into a tape recorder in your bathroom, or taking pretty pictures of yourself for someone who will never see them, or kissing a pillow, or punching a wall. It's like that. You should try it, it's good medicine.

Drink Myself Sober.
1. Bang On : The Breeders (Mountain Battles)
2. No Christmas While I'm Talking : The Walkmen (Bows and Arrows)
3. Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime : Beck (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Soundtrack)
4. Everyone Else In The World : Stina Nordenstam (This Is...)
5. The Wolves (Act I and II) : Bon Iver (For Emma, Forever Ago)
6. Sleep : The Notwist (The Devil, You + Me)
7. Pretend : Marvin Gaye (A Tribute to the Great Nat King Cole)
8. Here Comes That Feeling : El Perro Del Mar (El Perro Del Mar)
9. The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be : The Magnetic Fields (69 Love Songs)
10. He Don't Care : Kelly Willis
11. Love To A Monster : Okkervil River (Overboard & Down)
12. Milk Thistle : Conor Oberst & The Mystic Valley Band (Live At 400 Bar, 12.29.07)
13. 'Iron and Sun' : Billy Harvey (unreleased)
14. Strange Empty Hollow : Jr Corduroy (Amos House Compilation)
15. Archipelago : Mirah (You Think It's Like This, But It's Really Like This)
16. Make Me Down A Pallet On Your Floor : Gillian Welch (Soul Journey)
17. Figure : Richard Buckner (Devotion + Doubt)
18. Baby Blue Sedan : Modest Mouse (Building Nothing Out Of Something)
19. Get Me : Dinosaur Jr (Where You Been)
20. Middle Of The Night : What Made Milwaukee Famous (What Doesn't Kill Us)
21. Roll On : DNTEL w/ Jenny Lewis (Dumb Luck)
22. Good Start : Maria Taylor (Lynn Teeter Flower)

Wooooo-ey!

All of that aside, I feel really good today. My yoga this morning was excellent despite bruises from wrasslin' and falling down stairs. Oh and I'm deleting my myspace tomorrow, so keep an eye here for more updates, writing, pic-shures, etcetera. Love love!

Mix Projects.

Hi. Sorry I have been lax in updating; life happened to me and I haven't fully recovered.

However, I will let you in on the best idea we [Mandy and myself] ever had.

Project Mix Tape!

It started at Hole In The Wall a few months ago. We wrote out a list of 'categories' and people we knew loved music, had lots of it, and actively make mixes. (Btdubs, we had to keep the list of people pretty short to accommodate party plans, and many of the people including were Mandy's friends, so please don't be hurt if you meet those criteria and you weren't part of the original group...). We sent the list out and everyone made apropos mixes, and then we had a party where we listened to some of the categories and drank and danced and loved each other's faces off. The party for the second go round happened Friday night. Both have been two of the best nights of my life. As I've explained it to some people -- "this is what parties would be like if everyone always acted exactly how I want them to."

Here are the lists & my picks:

Volume One:
The Theme Song To The Movie Of Your Life: That Summer Feeling - Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers
A Song That Always Makes You Happy: Love Power - Dusty Springfield
Your Favorite Song When You Were 13: Runaway Train - Soul Asylum
Your Mom's Favorite Song: What A Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong
A Song You Remember From the Best Live Show You've Ever Seen: Westfall (live) - Okkervil River
The Song You Would Most Like To Hear Live, But Haven't and Can't: Summer Babe (Winter Version) - Pavement
Your Bender / Lost Weekend Anthem: Kiss Off - The Violent Femmes
The Song You Want To Be Playing The First Time You Kiss Your 'One True Love': Astral Weeks - Van Morrison
The Ultimate Doin' It Song: Come On In My Kitchen - Robert Johnson
Your Favorite Beatles Song: Blackbird
A Song You Wish Was Written About/For You: Love And Some Verses - Iron and Wine
A Song For Riding Your Bike Around After The Apocalypse: Wake Up - The Walkmen
High Speed Car Chase Song: Let The Poison Spill From Your Throat - The Faint
'Guilty Pleasure' [A Song You Love But Would Never Put On A Regular Mix For Someone]: Bathwater - No Doubt
A Song You Should Have Written But Someone Else Did It First: A Better Son/Daughter - Rilo Kiley
A Song In A Foreign Language You Wish You Spoke: Tengo un Trato - La Mala Rodriguez
The Song That Always Makes You Cry: Two-Headed Boy Part Two - Neutral Milk Hotel
A Love Letter To Someone Specific: I'll Be Yr Bird - M. Ward
A Song You Want Played At Your Funeral: When I'm Gone - Phil Ochs
The Ultimate Dance Track: Let's Go Crazy - Prince

Volume Two:
Your Fight / Duel / WWF Song: To Hell With Poverty - Gang of Four
Your Favorite Song From The Last 12 Months: Paper Planes - M.I.A.
Explain 'Rock and Roll' To Aliens: Good Lovin' - Young Rascals
Your Father's Favorite Song: Be Here Now - Mason Jennings
Your Favorite Cover: Dancing In The Dark - Mirah
The Vocal Performance You Wish You Could Replicate: Bye Bye Baby - Mary Wells
The Ultimate Singalong Song: If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out - Cat Stevens
Your Favorite Instrumental Song: La Valse d'Amelie (piano version) - Yann Tiersen
A Song That Reminds Someone Of You: New Slang - The Shins
A Song Dedicated To Your Current Crush: Season Of The Shark - Yo La Tengo
The Ultimate Breakup Song: Do What You Gotta Do - Nina Simone
Your Favorite Country Song: Blue Wind Blew - The Flatlanders
Your Favorite Bob Dylan Song: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
Your Favorite Holiday Song: Rebel Jesus - Jackson Browne
The Ultimate Summertime Roadtrip Song: Jogging Gorgeous Summer - Islands
The Best Fast Skate Song: A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturday - De La Soul
Your Favorite Song About Death: Black Eyed Dog - Nick Drake

Volume Three is in the works. A slightly different format has been called for, and it might go something like this:

1. What does the place you're from sound like?
2. What does your heart sound like?
3. What does your brain sound like?
4. What does your body sound like?
5. What did being little sound like?
6. What did high school sound like?
7. What did college sound like?
8. What does DRUNK sound like?
9. What does winning sound like?
10. What does an orgasm sound like?
11. What does eye contact with a stranger across the room sound like?
12. What does falling in love sound like?
13. What do your dreams sound like?
14. What loneliness sound like?
15. What does your best friend sound like?
16. What does waking up sound like?
17. What does your future sound like?

We'll see! Do it with your friends! It's the most fun ever!

Pictures from the last party to give you an idea just how much fun we're talking here: