December 2011
8 posts
Convergence for New Year's Eve
“But we need to forget. And we are enabled to do so. If it were otherwise, we should be in a terrible plight. We should never be able to bear the sight of our whole being in time.”
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 540
“Everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention”
Bill Callahan, “America!”
Same Old Lang Syne
Dan Fogelberg
Dan Fogelberg, “Same Old Lang Syne”
Suggested playlists:
Melancholy Christmas songs
Singers who wear blazers with pushed-up sleeves
Songs about grocery stores
Songs about life on tour
Self-referential songs
Self-aggrandizement
Story songs
Writing that tells, not shows
Songs about regretful married people
Songs about people getting drunk
Songs about people getting drunk in cars
Wish fulfillment for songwriters
Characters performing psychoanalysis on each other
Songs that reference “Auld Lang Syne”
Saxophones that suggest falling snow
CABINET // Caveman: An Interview with Michel Siffre →
cabinetmagazine.org
cool man lives underground to learn about what happens when we stop measuring the passage of time
Public grieving
If you figure that you can see the trajectory of a people based on who they revere—or mourn or tell stories about—then Steve Jobs and Christopher Hitchens make me way more depressed than Fox News.
West Palm Beach
Palace Music
Palace Music, “West Palm Beach”
I can’t get the sand out of my shoes
Being in Florida’s done a number on my blues
Just the way the women walk around here
It’s plain to see the way the sand and sea have done a number on me
I have been listening to this album a lot over the past weeks, but when he sings about the way the women walk around here, I feel exhausted—I don’t want to see it—and the thought of having to be some place where the women walk around in a certain way, presentationally, makes me feel dread. I am existing in a nearly transcendental state, and the state is too fragile to withstand preening.
I wasn’t planning to spend so long in town
But the break in the weather has got the partner down
She won’t get out, she’s shotgun, seems she’s sewn to the seat
It’s a dirty old trick that I’ve yet to lick and she’s yet to beat
I’d probably like to go to a beach in winter though.
