Don't you wanna get out of Cape Cod, outta Cape Cod tonight?

So this Vampire Weekend band. Most blogged about band of 2008 so far? Some of my more loquacious indie friends informed me prior to getting this album that it sounded like the Beatles meets Fela Kuti. Which was basically either a.) a lie to get me excited, or b.) a statement said by someone dying for the indie-hipster Graceland.

Considering that in a couple days it's not going to be cool to like them, here's your chance to get on the train. They're just a fun, catchy, mellow pop band. They're the definition of indie pop- pretentious and precious all at once, catchy and purposefully arranged - see the second track, "Oxford Comma," a rant about a person who uses their language pretentiously. The track kinda mirrors the topic, so let's hope that's sarcasm.

The thing is, I could close my eyes and very easily imagine that all these songs were on some 80's pop record. Almost all the tracks, save "Walcott" (which contains the title of the post), seem forced and self-aware of their own project - Oxford Comma is an island flavored jam, A-Punk is post-Clash reggae flavored punk.

But a couple of songs are timeless, so maybe all the blog freak outs are just looking ahead to what could happen. "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" is arguably the most "African-flavored" cut on an album hyped to sound very african. It's not, but it's a bunch of boss pop songs. If you can get over a bunch of white kids from Columbia University appropriating African and Latin music wily-nilly, then you'll get to enjoy a really trippy summer day pop album. But that's what i think about it. Ain't even cool to like them anymore.

A spin-off of the Susan B. Anthony Reenactment Project and my Weird Science, Hard Poems class

The Ladies' Cosmology Club

Currently Listening to:
The voice of Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon in my head.

a note:

Regarding the otherworldly
Om, Mrs. Shallott wonders
circles around & between

the subject. Her matter is
at the crux of falsehood &
comprehension, therefore

best solved before lunch.

Next, is the cosmic-egg
theory plausible? Studies show
cyclical universes are unpopular

demographically. A tidy cosmos
is always preferable.

everyone knows about this but...

thought I'd put it up regardless. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies are a bunch of notecards with maxims on them regarding the artistic or musical process. They're designed to eliminate blocks and stalls and to reimagine the work in a new light. This rarely works for me - instead it causes me to start something drastically different than the original work but that's cool too. Eno's very big on hard work - art should be hard work, but not the creative agony and turmoil it turns into for many (including me).

You've got to buy the notecards, I believe, to see them all, but a website online has a selection of them, randomly picked whenever you reload the page. Occaisionally they are intellegible maxims - "when faced with two choices, do both" - but most are koan-like, a bit of calculated riddle absurdity to get the brain frustrated enough or inspired enough. "Change nothing and continue consistently." "Give way to your worst impulse." "Always give yourself credit for having more than personality." "Accretion." "Lost in Territory."

http://www.thraeryn.org/strategies/draw.cgi

They're really fun, actually. And a handmade deck makes a wonderful birthday gift to the aspiring soon-to-be-23 year old writer in your life. Not that I want lots of gifts (yes).

And yes, on Jan 14th, I will officially be the world's oldest man. Can we do something soon to make me feel young and alive again, like I did in my salad days of youth?

lung genesis

the intake at the start, jet-engines in
the stone age, the oxygenated awakening,
the half life of fatigue, the entropy of process

Steve says that it started with naming, it started
with creative taxonomy, with the demarcation of joy.

language like joint compound on brick, like Pollock
in a paint factory. the creation of referents, the weight of
context hanging albatrossly. who has more power – the one who
creates, or the one who points to say

Babs said it was dark, light, wet, dry, crowded, delicious,
empty. Adjectives forming a mass of suffering, a pain
fashioned only from qualifiers, Progressing through
qualities only to be slapped back into nothingness.

As though our inflation needed qualification.

Lauren said, while no one was listening, that a kind word
spawned the start of sin. Salmon leaping up waterfalls. It was not.

It breathed too hard for airless sin, taxonomy
it was not the start of samsara.

after the bubbles percolated, it respired.

I don't know what this is....

soft outro // the world ends in snow.

everywhere i look, there are portents of demise:

a rag and dirty doll with bug eyes of tiny button,
twisted paper tetrahedron spunk rag, once balled
unfolding.

//

It snows the sky as if stained with flecks of
static, the pulse-thick hand of god. Sight
obscured before the Lord of things white
and clean, like genocide. Hungry wolf-eyed
God says,
nothing.

she said, [writing exercise]

I've got to figure the universe is on fire, I've got to figure it fast and loose. My hands on the wheel and the highway like stars, the vroom vroom infinity. I figure it's reckless to be a woman, it has to be, otherwise women go mad from waiting to become themselves. My grip on the wheel is tight but not tense, I know the secret to the everything is how you hold it.

..His hands were like vice grips on my hips, his hair in my fingers like seaweed, limp from sweat. This is not pleasure. He asks if it's good, I moan from another body, one he is not burrowing into. Maybe I answer from Audrey Hepburn's body. I imagine that I'm the 60s sex-kitten, with pouty lips and a micro-mini and not with a pair of jeans around my ankle and a cotton sweater sticking to my back. In the other body, there is an orgasm building: my mind follows suit and I yell like..

I'm an archer and my quiver is empty. This is the state of the whole fucking world. Once I met a woman who had lost her baby, she was disappearing into nothingness holding her stomach. In two months, she wasn't anything. Half-dead, half-alive, completely invisible. Women are meant to be more than mothers. Women are soldiers and the war is.

..the universe on fire: cosmos like mouths and we're standing at it, praying broken prayers to the void. There is one body and one must use it. I was lying on the hood of his jeep and his skin pressing against mine was like fire. This is pleasure. Everywhere sparks were click-clicking into stars and I was full of a feeling like falling. I am not Audrey Hepburn. I am not a washing machine. I am

your girl, and I will protect you.*



*line from Xiu Xiu's, "Sad Pony Guerilla Girl"