Barbara & Michael Leisgen | Mimesis, 1972-1973
Finding a way to connect with the earth.
“On your first date, do not hand him your vagina, polished and thirsty. Do not allow him to rub your back or your shoulders. Do not overdrink. When he offers to come home with you, do not think of your ex-lover’s chest. How it peeked from behind the open neck of a pressed J. Crew buttondown. How you still masturbate to this. Over dessert, do not think how smooth this man’s thighs will be. Do not think how lovely their dark will lay against your sheets. Do not ask to touch during sleep, it smells like love and you have a suitcase to unpack. You have laundry and dishes and a dog to walk. You are busy. Stay busy. Don’t muddy your days with honey whiskey. When the boy at the club buys you a beer, yanks you hard from your disappearing waist, remember you owe no one. Even if he is all your favorite music. Keep your tongue inside your mouth. Stop his wandering hand even if it’s the only thing good in New York City tonight. Say no. When your boss suggests you meet Nate from Accounting who is recently divorced, say no. Say bones break. Say love is expensive. Remind him you have a dog and no time. You’re busy. When a friend explains, women have children at 45 these days, girl, you’re good, smile. She is lying. Press her rosewater skin under your nose. Press hard. Pretend it is the skin of a newborn. Steal this moment. She won’t mind. When Friday finally arrives and your friends leave early, let them go. Keep your tab open. The bar has been your longest friend. Churns out warm bodies like a factory. When the bar closes, remember you are busy. It’s time to walk the dog. When you dress for your first date in two years, don’t call it date. Call it friend. Do not let him pay. Share a bottle of your favorite wine, you deserve this. When the wine makes words slippery as butter, tell him everything you shouldn’t. Your diagnoses, how you have no insurance. Count for him all the men you used to escape your husband. The time you almost got a boyfriend arrested on West 4th Street. The tryst with a colleague. Describe the miscarriage at 13. Abortion at 25. The train engineer you fucked in Penn Station, how his son had Leukemia. Tell how you waited six hours at a roof party in Brooklyn one summer just to take the drummer home. How you ran into that drummer weeks later and couldn’t recall his name. Carefully detail your unending appetite for drink/fuck/fight, everything nasty you keep under your skin. Do it precise. Calm. When he runs from this quiet grenade, find the bar. Tell yourself you did it for his sake. Besides, you’re busy. Smoke another cigarette. Take another honey whiskey. Let it curdle your face. You haven’t been beautiful in years.”—
According to the series of reports from BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal), the makers of drinks like Gatorade and Powerade have spent millions in research and marketing in recent decades to persuade sports and medical professionals, not to mention the rest of us suckers, that a primal instinct—the sensation of thirst—is an unreliable guide for deciding when to drink. We’ve also been battered with the notion that boring old water is just not good enough for preventing dehydration.
If this topic interests you then you should really check out a book recently released called Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Overhydration In Endurance Sports by Tim Noakes. A very interesting read.
1,159 plays
Steely Dan — “Home At Last”
“So let’s go back and look at what it would have cost you to ethically and legally support the artists.
And I’m gonna give you a break. I’m not gonna even factor in the record company share. Let’s just pretend for your sake the record company isnt simply the artists imprint and all record labels are evil and don’t deserve any money. Let’s just make the calculation based on exactly what the artist should make. First, the mechanical royalty to the songwriters. This is generally the artist. The royalty that is supposed to be paid by law is 9.1 cents a song for every download or copy. So that is $1,001 for all 11,000 of your songs. Now let’s suppose the artist has an average 15% royalty rate. This is calculated at wholesale value. Trust me, but this comes to 10.35 cents a song or $1,138.50. So to ethically and morally “get right” with the artists you would need to pay $2,139.50.
As a college student I’m sure this seems like a staggering sum of money. And in a way, it is. At least until you consider that you probably accumulated all these songs over a period of 10 years (5th grade). Sot that’s $17.82 dollars a month. Considering you are in your prime music buying years, you admit your life is “music centric” and you are a DJ, that $18 dollars a month sounds like a bargain. Certainly much much less than what I spent each month on music during the 4 years I was a college radio DJ.
Let’s look at other things you (or your parents) might pay for each month and compare.
Smart phone with data plan: $40-100 a month.
High speed internet access: $30-60 dollars a month. Wait, but you use the university network? Well, buried in your student fees or tuition you are being charged a fee on the upper end of that scale.
Tuition at American University, Washington DC (excluding fees, room and board and books): $2,086 a month.
Car insurance or Metro card? $100 a month?
Or simply look at the value of the web appliances you use to enjoy music:
$2,139.50 = 1 smart phone + 1 full size ipod + 1 macbook.
Why do you pay real money for this other stuff but not music?”
—The Trichordist response to NPR intern Emily White’s essay about how she’s essentially never paid for music is a must read. (via tinyluckygenius)
One of many responses to our intern’s essay.
(via nprmusic)
Exactly.
People are understandably upset after video emerged of what appears to be U.S. Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. If they’re surprised, however, they need to pick up a history book. Soldiers piss on corpses in every war. On both sides. Soldiers rape civilians, as a rule, in every war that has ever taken place since time immemorial. Rape is a weapon of war. Piss, some people are now learning, is a weapon of war. Some fucked-up, disgusting combination of the two, plus shit and dismemberment, is a weapon of war. Bad guys do it. “Good” guys do it. When a country’s government decides to wage war, they are deciding to sanction piss, rape, and the torture and murder of women and children who had the colossally bad fortune to be in the midst of the war. When the U.S. decided to enter into Afghanistan and then Iraq, they (i.e. Congress and the president, and the myriad companies that profit from war) knew this. I’m not singling out the U.S. here; while we’re as good at implementing the more horrific, soul-erasing weapons as anyone, we’re not alone. Does your country have a military? In times of war, they kill people, and sometimes they piss on them.
If it isn’t clear why I’m detailing this, it is because I want to express an old thought: war is the very worst thing there is. And if you command an army, you better the fuck understand, in your probably cowardly, definitely privileged, likely draft-dodging bones, that when you send soldiers out to fight and die, they are going to do some unconscionable, irreversible things. And they are doing it in your name. Because you told them to. And pissing on a corpse is a FUCKING POEM compared to issuing an order for beautiful young people to go and kill other beautiful young people in a land far away, because you, in essence, “felt like it.”
Previously - On Hating Gay People
If it isn’t clear why I’m detailing this, it is because I want to express an old thought: war is the very worst thing there is. And if you command an army, you better the fuck understand, in your probably cowardly, definitely privileged, likely draft-dodging bones, that when you send soldiers out to fight and die, they are going to do some unconscionable, irreversible things. And they are doing it in your name. Because you told them to. And pissing on a corpse is a FUCKING POEM compared to issuing an order for beautiful young people to go and kill other beautiful young people in a land far away, because you, in essence, “felt like it.”
So true.
139 plays
Blake Shelton — “Drink On It”
it hoits doc
In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.
Tommy James - “Draggin’ the Line”
141 plays
Jen is bringin’ the drugs.
Kirk Lightsey & Chet Baker — “Everything Happens To Me”
Such a hot track, and to think it recorded in like, like last years of Chet’s life.
99 plays
Old Crow Medicine Show — “Big Time in the Jungle”
there’s something really home-hitting and humane about this song to me. i haven’t been touched by war, any war, in any real way, but this song sort of makes me feel something that I wish I couldn’t put into words.
And learn to hate your brother
Before you hate your foe
