Tag: clips
Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life by Anonymous
Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life by Anonymous
August 2, 2004
Anne’s apartment is kind of messy, and there is rarely food there, and nothing in the way of TV or video games or things like that. But that’s not the reason you don’t like to spend the night there. The reason you don’t want to spend the night there is stuff like this:
“Hey, wake up!”
“Mmph… wha… ?”
And that was the moment Anne dropped the snake on your face.
Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
Yesterdays Are All Around Us
Yesterdays are all around us as we sit in your paint-chipped kitchenette, playing Gin and drinking bourbon from the bottle. You have a newfound habit of disclosing to me every opportunity we’ve missed for things to turn out differently than this. A week ago you informed me of your aborted proposal last Christmas. You blamed the weather. The city had been ill equipped to handle so much snowfall, you reminded. I remembered the impassable streets, your father shoveling for hours. I remember every detail of that Christmas acutely: your hand slipping up my thigh in the front seat; returning your smile from across the dining room table; falling asleep on your chest in your brother’s bed, your arm guardrailing me in. The details of that Christmas are not so different from the details of every other day we spent together the last six years. They are no more or less bone-crushing than the other five hundred thousand I am involuntarily overtaken by at any given moment of the day. They are no more or less a cause of agony than the knowledge that our lack of matrimony may be a direct result of a city planner’s failure to purchase salt.
I’ve been waiting twelve hours to be allowed into your lap. In the meantime I’ve made a note of everything that is the same or different since the last time I was here. There are more sames than differents. I am unsure if this surprises me. When you are in the bathroom or otherwise occupied, I walk around, leaving little bits of myself as I go: an eyelash, a ticket stub, a sticky note onto which I’ve written: things fall apart. As I do so I take account of the items I’ve left on previous occasions: a bottle of Bailey’s, a plastic frog, a bag of dog bones. I am unsure about assigning a word such as “hope” to the fact that they have not been discarded.
I didn’t put up a tree this year. Nor did I cook a turkey or carve a pumpkin. This is probably obvious, but for some reason I felt the need to say it out loud.
At midnight you set down your cards, look at your watch. I take this as my cue. I make my way to you and you don’t fight me off. Every fuck now has the potential to be our last. Because of this I am unhurried and deliberate in my actions. I am conscious of remaining conscious. I am wary of drifting off. There is the pull towards last Christmas, toward the winery that was closed along with every other business for four days. I visualize us surrounded by barrels. Peter and Ashley standing on either side. I am unnoticing of your glances. I lean against you, your arm supporting my head. I breathe in your mother’s dryer sheets. I could stand like this for hours… if only the lack of snow.
I push forward; fill your mouth with my breast. The application of teeth ensures I remain. The second the pain diminishes I miss its reminder. I say, please, please, but my mouth feels flooded with wine. I procrastinate an ending. I remain completely still, cling motionless surrounding you. Every movement brings us closer to my departure. I will never know the words you were prepared to speak. I want to hear you say it one more time: for you, for you. Your eyes are closed when I reach inside my mouth to extract the gum, stick it on the underside of the table. I think about the person who will find it, what words you’ll speak to her.
A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer by Christine Schutt
A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer by Christine Schutt
“We were young.
At a pub once and under swags of weeds we were meant to kiss by, my young husband said I was a fool.
What could we have been talking about when he said, “You don’t know a thing about me”? He said, “You never did.” But I thought, I thought, I thought was the way a lot of my sentences started then with him, then with her. Youth and appetite! Something else about this part of my life, when I spent most nights with a man I called my young husband—I kicked him for not coming sooner to the rescue with the cigarettes. I called him names at restaurants when I was drunk with visitors. I said, “Who knows?” when anyone asked me what he was doing. I said he was a liar when I was a liar, too. I went out of my way to hurt him, spending too much money—I was mean to my young husband, and I often no more knew why that was than I knew what it had to do with our lives.
And there was more that was significant. Her teeth, her mouth. And more, more you should know, how, about to board the plane for home, my young husband broke the bottle of expensive wine that he had saved so conspicuously. The wine was red, of course, and ran under and around my shoes.”
Foghorn Leghorn by Big Bruiser Dope Boy
Foghorn Leghorn by Big Bruiser Dope Boy
Hologram Baby
Baby I’m a disposable camera.
Baby you stop me dead in my tracks, burn a hole in my brain.
Baby I’m your biggest fan, I’m wearing your t-shirt, can’t you read the pop-calligraphy?—can’t you recognize your own handwriting?
Baby I’ve got filing cabinets full of dreams you wrote, my office is dripping with dream-juice, my hands are holding fresh dollar bills, ready to spend on you.
Baby you make it all seem worthwhile, you get me out of bed in the morning, you make the coffee taste hopeful, you make me leave the house with confidence and go to the office where I fill cabinets with dreams of you.
Baby take these handcuffs off of me, now put them back on.
Baby your picture exposes the end of what I desire, which is the beginning of what I desire, a road paved in dreams.
Baby the cacti are singing me road directions.
Baby I’m confused, the world is changing—quick, tell me something I can trust even for a second because I can’t come up with anything good.
Baby stop hiding me in the utility closet.
Baby stop looking like an angel.
Baby don’t open your mouth, don’t ruin the suspense we’ve worked so hard to sustain.
Baby my hair is standing on end, my nerves scrambling to catch up with you, playing possum in the moonlight.
Baby the wise know their foolishness well.
Baby you were cast in bronze, racing headlong toward me through a hot glass tunnel.
Baby the glass is cracking, you’re humming in my ears like a flute.
Baby thinking of you like this is a holy tradition at this point.
Baby I see you across the room at the party, I can’t hear you, but from the look on your face I can tell what you’re talking about me—you’re talking about finding the disease in me.
Baby the world is hungry and so are we, but we’re harmless enough you and I—tadpoles in a puddle of tears.
Baby you may be my baby but I feel just like a child when it comes to you, I’m trying to stay warm in the nest you built.
Baby puke inside my mouth, tell me something I can strap my heart to with a horse-hide belt.
Baby fire is quiet and painless and ice is a punishing screech in the wild.
Baby our bodies are being destroyed and I can’t turn my eyes away from you.
Baby I’m sorry for being dramatic but the world, inexplicable and cancerous, moves like an insect across the ceiling.
Baby was that you on the side of a building, riding a golden wagon in the sunset?
Baby, I hope I’m right on target, hope I’m reaching you clear.
Baby are you tuned in?—is this making any sense?
Baby our kingdom has epilepsy, we live in a sensitive fortress, we might have to smuggle ourselves out in disguises to survive.
Baby you’re just over this hill, just around this corner, just through this door, I can see your shadow hinting safety from where I stand, I’ll follow the necessary logical steps.
Baby we’re ruthless when we talk to each other, do we really believe it’s fun to drag this cruel contest out?
Baby I have to go to the bathroom, if you don’t have an excuse to shut your eyes I’d be glad to give you one if it’ll help, because baby, I’m here to help.
Baby we are commas in each other’s breaths, hitches in each other’s steps.
Baby we only want to feel what we heard feels good.
Baby let’s put on the rubber gloves and go on a rampage, we’ll have the town talking for weeks.
Baby gossip flings off of us effortlessly: all we do is tell ourselves stories, we’re a force to be reckoned with.
Baby what are we doing now?—let’s find another problem we can’t solve.
Baby you remind me I’m not yet finished with the task at hand, your tent glowing on the mountainside, I can smell the smoke from the meadow below.
Baby I’ll be there soon, don’t fall asleep yet, it’s cold, I’ll make my way up the mountain in the dark.
Baby I have no way of knowing what I’ve done, I’m walking to you without a person to count on.
XTC
One of my dad’s many musical passions is just-left-of-center British rock from the 70s and 80s. As a middle schooler I was as likely to get into Eric Clapton as he was into Nero, but we could always agree that Brian Eno, Genesis, and David Bowie were good stuff.
Of all the bands he showed me XTC is probably the weirdest. I love it protectively. I won’t summarize this pretty accurate listicle but what made XTC so great, while simultaneously dooming them, was their inability to pick one sound and stick with it.
The XTC song I encounter in the wild most often is ‘Senses Working Overtime’. Twice this year I’ve heard it while shopping for clothes. ‘Senses Working Overtime’ is a catchy alternative track with cute-sounding but ultimately cynical lyrics: “My, my, sun is pie / There’s fodder for the cannons / And the guilty ones can all sleep safely”. It’s probably XTC’s most listenable song.
As a wearyingly literal kid, something I loved about XTC was that no matter how well I knew the words, I never had too strong a grasp on what Andy Partridge was actually saying.
Pulsing pulsing,
There’s a beat in his arm still.
Pulsing pulsing,
Like the throb of an anthill.
Pulsing pulsing,
No death in the rain.
I’ve been washing my hands
In the stuff I wash my brains.
When the songs had a clear message they were rebellious in ways I could understand and sympathize with: fuck organized religion, fuck whispering neighbors, fuck authoritarian middle-class parents.
And when I wanted to dance, I could really throw myself around the living room to the tune of ‘Ten Feet Tall’.
As I got older the songs that resonated were the ones about trouble in romantic relationships. “Why on earth do you revolve around me? / Aren’t you aware of gravity?” There are plenty of lovely love songs XTC’s catalogue, but the stories are never easy.
Punch and Judy
Did it truly
And were married in a haste.
In love, maybe,
Using the baby
As a kind of romance paste.
She’s grown fatter,
Her hair cut shorter,
Looks much older than nineteen.
My dad relinquished his XTC CDs to me, though retained sovereignty over the vinyl. Criminally underappreciated, Mummer was the disk I carried in my backpack and forced my friends to listen to. It opens with the aggressive, plucky, Middle Eastern inspired (?) ‘Beating of Hearts’. There’s a fair amount of chanting. It closes with the least convincing pop song of all time, ‘Funk Pop A Roll’. I can’t defend listening to the entire album and haven’t done it in years, but a few bars of ‘In Loving Memory of a Name’ always made my dad emotional—and now me.
But my favorite XTC CD, the one that barely left my CD player, was Rag & Bone Buffet. Not until later did I find out Rag & Bone Buffet is all B-sides and radio versions. That means that the versions of XTC songs I have in my head are not the ones that were popular. I still find it disorienting to hear the unremastered version of ‘Respectable Street.’
There’s absolutely nothing cohesive about Rag & Bone Buffet (if you couldn’t tell from the title). I loved it because every song was a new stab at songwriting. There’s the totally ambient ‘Over Rusty Water’ and the dubby ‘Cockpit Dance Mixture’. Andy Partridge’s voice may be the unifying feature, but it’s not powerful enough to hold XTC’s discography together.
I would never have been able to come to XTC as an adult because technologically my approach to music is so different. These days I’m never stuck listening to the same CD over and over. If I hadn’t had to listen to each song so many times, I don’t think I ever would have been able to hear the lyrics. And the lyrics are where XTC truly shines.
A song that speaks to me more today than it used to is from the first on Rag & Bone Buffet, ‘Extrovert’. It goes:
No hidden message, nothing political,
You needn’t listen, I just wanted to show.
I’m feeling extrovert.
I am the lion who’s roaring, not the mouse that gets hurt.I feel like someone else,
Yes I do, yes I do, yes I do.
I feel like someone else,
I feel new, not so blue.
I feel.
Tollbooth by Bud Smith
Tollbooth by Bud Smith
“Fuck the past and all of the chains it wrapped around my heart and the webs the spiders spun around me while I was idle. Fuck what the werewolf moon did to my brain as I laid in wait for it to rise again so that I could head oblong towards oblivion. Fuck all the yawns of suburbia, the myths, the legends—the folklore of eternal life. Instead, war cry into the wind, we’re all gonna die. There’s no excuse for not kicking up the icing on birthday cakes while dark angels traced my life in doomed flight. Fuck the future, it meant nothing. I say bomb blasts to anybody who denies me. I say: I’m ripped apart down my spinal column anyway, I’m a thousand shards of ribs, I’m wayward planets thrown out of orbit—lost of magic. I’m on my way down.
Timing it just right, I released the videotape from my fingertips. It exploded against the side of the tollbooth: streams of film marked a black passage behind me, shards of plastic landed in the basket, loops of magnetic tape and sticker decal rapped against the toll window. I screamed in the face of some poor substitute girl. She lost her breath, falling over in tears.
I was four miles up the highway by the time she closed the booth, walked into the building, told Larry she needed to go home. She couldn’t explain what it was she’d seen; it was too horrible.”
Serial Experiments Lain
I’m late to this, but
here’s some crazymaking late night TV
Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual
I think back to this article more often than I care to admit, especially this part:
Perhaps you’ll be a dilettante: You’ll love what you think about and you’ll think hard about it, but you’ll be easily bored and won’t think about anything for long. You’ll read many things and (perhaps) write many, but you’ll read and write about disparate topics, and once you’ve read for a while about something, and perhaps written about it, you’ll move on to something else. Clever people—quick studies—are often like this. They have properly intellectual gifts, but they lack the patience for attention’s long, slow gaze, and so their intellectual life coruscates, sparking here and there like a firefly on the porch, but illuminating nothing for long. Some of the people you’ve read and delighted in have something of this about them. It’s partly true of Augustine and Newman, for example, and of Sontag.
I’d like to warn you against this tendency. It’s not that there’s anything deeply wrong with it. Suggestive and stimulating work can be done by dilettantes, and, as the label suggests, they tend to be true lovers of what they think about, even if they don’t think about it for long. Neither is there any sharp and bright line between the work of dilettantes and that of intellectuals properly speaking; the categories shade into one another, and it’s usually possible to find, even in the work of the most dilettantish, threads that make a single fabric. It’s not going to be easy to say when an intellectual becomes a dilettante or a dilettante an intellectual. There are, however, clear cases here, too, and the extent to which you embrace dilettantism is just the extent to which you won’t do serious intellectual work.
It’s a pretty Catholic take, sure, but it makes an argument for picking a field of study and sticking to it in a way I’ve found useful. I reword the last line to myself like so: “The extent to which you embrace [other stuff] is just the extent to which you won’t do [poetry].” I just went a month and a half without writing a single new poem and even though I got work done on other projects, including this blog, I wasn’t doing the work I’m committed to, and I did feel inattentive and distracted. I don’t take myself too seriously as a “poet” or “intellectual” but I return to this article periodically to remind myself what the habits of a thinking person are.
Nicotine Crisis
You guys, I agreed to take the late-late shift tonight, meaning I start working on the thing I have to do when it comes in between 1-1:30am. I’ve been here since 5pm with no actual work to do, but that’s normal. What’s n o t normal is that I didn’t realize I was out of juul pods. Even crazier, I forgot my ID card today (of all days!) which means if I leave the office to go to the bodega I won’t be able to get back in!
There’s no one else here.
Supplies:
- endless supply of clean water
- coffee but not the drinking kind, the caffeine-is-a-drug kind
- internet
- Doritos
- 1 cigarette + lighter
- Seasonal Associate and my Japanese textbook
- M & Ms
- phone (social media)
- chapstick
- driver’s license, ID cards, credit card, debit card, metro card, $23 cash
- juul + juul charger + 2 almost empty pods
- phone charger
- toothbrush + toothpaste
- unpopped popcorn and a summer roll
- pens + legal pad (+ unlimited office supplies including paper, staples, binder clips, tape, pushpins, etc.)
So it looks like I’m smoking my last cigarette in the C**** N*** bathroom kinda soon. Gotta pace myself. I found an extra juul pod in the bottom of my bag so I’m not despairing yet.
OK, I’m being really dramatic, but I am imprisoned in this office. Sure I could leave, just walk out, but I’d almost definitely be fired.
To my left, out the window, the Empire State building is lit up in the following colors: red, pink, orange, and green, in honor of, I shit you not, some fucking pharmaceutical company. It’s #RareDiseaseDay. If I sit still long enough all the lights will go off.
I’m listening to Samantha, that off-brand Toro Y Moi album. This song has a clip from The Notebook in it, Ryan Gosling saying, “I’m not afraid to hurt your feelings. They have a two second rebound rate and you’re back doing the next pain in the ass thing.” I’m playing it full volume on my very decent computer speakers because again, I’m alone.
I’ve managed to pass four hours. I texted a few people. I remembered a song I used to like but couldn’t recall the title or the artist, so I killed forty minutes searching. I bullied someone on Facebook. I sent an embarrassing DM to a poet I like, an informal solicitation, but I fucked up the name of his book (even though I genuinely loved it). I posted on Instagram. I tried to read more of Seasonal Associate but it was just too on the nose. There are a number of other books here that I could consume but it’s hard for me to read to pass time, I have to feel like it’s something I’m doing of my own accord or I can’t enjoy it.
Miss Forceful Wants You 