Mew – Special – Brand new baggy shoegazey post punk and pop.
Hanne Hukkelberg – Ease – Charming oddball nordic songstress
Stephen Malkmus – Phantasies – Yeah you know…

You Can Have It
My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labours, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it… Philip Levine

Anonymous amateur fluke, found object…lovely composition.

I definitely recommend ‘The Accidental Masterpiece – On The Life of Art and Vice Versa, by NYTimes chief art critic Michael Kimmelman. Captivating, beautifully written without pretense, I was up half the night reading, shaking my head yes, and surrendering a multitude of AHA moments. The conviviality of his tone, the dry wit, and his marvelous capabilities are insightful. The text is humorous, and utterly without pretense, as this is author not as critic, but author as art aficionado, art lover. The books is Kimmelman’s own point of contact with art, artists, the everyday, the accidental and things greater than himself. The life of art, an artful life, and the improbable yet marvelous ways of seeing this hybridization, less ‘ways of seeing’ than say, alertness to what other’s may not see? Not to say that ‘everything’ is art, as I greatly appreciate his toughness of judgment, and the difference between taste and personal interest as cited from the work of Kant and Hume, Nietzsche and other twentieth-century writers. This is a broad swipe, and exciting stuff, a wild ride from the art of Picasso and Bonnard to Bob Ross and Matthew Barney! There are the known, the unknown the remembered and the forgotten, the could of, should of, would of, if only and damn this title is chock full of cool stuff! Solid art writing to say the least and enough new ideas to hijack your brain for quite some time. Just damn brilliant, 230 some pages, and 300 too short.

Today is the 5th Anniversary of Jockohomo, WOO HOO!

Gang of Four – To Hell with Poverty (GoHome Productions Remix)
Gang of Four – To Hell with Poverty (original version)
Go Home Productions gives Gang of Four the once over twice. The boys from Leeds produced some of the most exhilarating and lasting music of the early post-punk era of 1978-1983. Fueled by the fury of punk rock, art rock and funk mixed up with some political theory, Gang of Four successfully welded the their influences into an inspired display of polemics and music that addressed the vagaries of life in the modern world. GoHome spins them right round and up.

Hawley Elementary Whips It In To Shape

Just in case you missed it the first time, and since I got so many inquiries, I thought I would redux a little soft core smut. Once again, I Love surfing MOBLOGS, especially DUDEPECS and SOMEGUYSBUTT. Thinking, I’m kinda’ partial to this shot.

A band of eco-vigilantes is taking a firm but gentle stand against fast-growing SUV sales in France and Europe, deflating the tires on gas guzzlers in a protest against conspicuous waste. From Wired

A big thank you to Antonio Pasolini who wrote a piece for London’s QX Magazine on gay bloggers and blogging. He was kind enough to feature my site, you can read the article in a PDF file here. ( Joe My God and Oliver’s Thought Not were also mentioned) Please check out Antonio’s site, The Filter a Film Newsletter for London, which is just amazing.

Susanna And The Magical Orchestra – Believer
Music for Tuesday nights
Susanna Wallumrod and ex-Jaga Jazzist Morten Qvenild
Put The Kettle On
Lists of Lights and Buoys 2004
Sparsely furnished
Hushed, guileless beauty
Reedbeds of Eno-like spooky boom
Ghostly electronic melancholia

Additive Art, I have a real need, a desire to continually update Del.icio.us

It’s easy to write about rock; it’s nearly impossible to write well about rock. But those who care about literature and rock and roll never stop hoping for the great rock novel, does it exist? From Bookslut.

Belle and Sebastian – The Boy With The Thorn in His Side (live)
When two of my favorite things cross pollinate you’ll find me singing out really loudly while pulling on my shirt…go ahead, I won’t mind if you do the same…if you’ve forgotten…

The boy with the thorn in his side
Behind the hatred there lies
A murderous desire for love
How can they look into my eyes
And still they don’t believe me
How can they hear me say those words
Still they don’t believe me
And if they don’t believe me now
Will they ever believe me
And if they don’t believe me now
Will they ever, they ever, believe me
Oh no …
Oh …

More, oh dear…

Here’s a 7-minute capture from a Japanese variety program featured on Kung Foo TV. The story-line of this sketch is as follows, A character called ‘Hard Gay’ (aka comedian Masaki Sumitani/Lazer Ramon) thinks that the ‘HOO!’ in Yahoo! is stolen from his often used exclamation and goes to visit Yahoo! headquarters to try to get a deal. He wants to be in their ads, even goes to prove that he’s popular by auctioning off his hat to Yahoo! online auction site. Sure enough, the hat’s bidding jumps to about $250 pretty quickly. It’s obvious Yahoo! cannot use this character for promotion, so ‘Hard Gay’ goes off to prove what he can do. There’s no shocking material in this beyond some funny hip-thrusts. Note that Yahoo! Japan offices sport a massage room. Pick a mirror below…

http://joharisportsnetwork.com/mirrored/hardgay.mov
http://netnews.nctu.edu.tw/~gslin/tmp/HG.mov

Jesus came upon a small crowd who had surrounded a young woman they believed to be an adulteress. They were preparing to stone her to death.

To calm the situation, Jesus said: ‘Whoever is without sin among you, let them cast the first stone.’

Suddenly, an old lady at the back of the crowd picked up a huge rock and lobbed it at the young woman, scoring a direct hit on her head. The unfortunate young lady collapsed dead on the spot.

Jesus looked over towards the old lady and said: ‘Do you know, Mother, sometimes you really piss me off.’

Competition to find the funniest and most offensive religious jokes, in response to the British government’s proposed anti-religious hatred legislation, is finally over. And there are two winners. The funniest religious joke is about sectarianism gone mad, while the most offensive is a sick tale of tragedy on a clifftop, as voted for by Ship of Fools readers. There are others that are equally tasteless and hilarious. Read on for the jokes.

Writer John Scalzi has written an accurate and brillaint account of what it’s like to be poor, this would be extraordinarily funny, if it weren’t so damn true.

Poverty is about survival. it’s about the tyranny of the moment, and yes it’s about knowing exactly how much everything costs. Unfortunately, some of us are born into poverty, and as children have very little say in the matter, that feeling of knowing that you are poor seldom ever leaves you.

I’m neither proud nor ashamed of the fact of having been poor; it is what it is. In some ways, I value the experience of not ‘having’, it has given me a broader scope of vision, and at the very least, empathy.

When you are poor, you are in daily survival mode, you live in the now. There is no plan-you survive. When there is no planning, there is no future. If poverty is generational your decision making is different, your values are different. Middle class is about work, achievement and material security. In middle class, things are possessions. Wealth spends its time on connections, political, financial and social connections, because they keep you safe and well. In poverty, the only possession you really have are people, and when people become a possession, the rules change, drastically.

As specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas. Human Props Here

The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered. Too late, the BBC was all over this last night, it was an unfortunate montage of dead bodies strewn about the streets and bridges of New Orleans. When the BBC reporter asked about the indignity shown the dead, the ‘guardsman’ just blew it off, saying that it wasn’t his job, shocking.