1) I read the latest TRC spoilers since I figured I'd never manage to catch up on the manga before the grace period expires anyway, and now I am DYING. CLAMP YOU SPAZZES WHAT ARE YOU DOOOOINGGGG XD XD XD

2) One peculiar side-effect of Libs fandom is that people (RL people, that is, or online people who may as well be RL) feel impelled to keep me in the loop re: happenings in Pete Doherty's life. Like if he's in jail, out of jail, on the front page of Youtube, frolicking through fields of bluebells, that sort of thing. It's... kind of heartwarming? I mean, I know, hence being in the fandom, but the thought, etc. XD

The manager of Babyshambles ought to write a best-practices handbook on Dealing With Batshit Fandom and send a copy to LJ's customer relations management team (that is, assuming LJ actually has a CRM team and not just LIES). It's rather inspiring to watch competence in action.

3) Sororial unit returneth tomorrow in good spirits, having fulfilled her mission of getting glomped** by Carl Barât. Man, I remember when I used to go the extra mile for fandom, now I'm way too lazy.

4) This (linking ladysisyphus's post for context).

5) I hope at least some of you people knew Tada Yumi does My Chemical Romance doujinshi.


** Somehow I managed to get this far before I figured out the right word for it

Have been writing this entry for days on end. ^^; Updated the Muxtape, but that was a week ago and I'm liable to change it again soon. XD; Will make some of the songs downloadable here... eventually.

( Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies' Man. Kind of a long and excessive rant. )


* Actually I was going to post the awesome live video from 1979 (in which Len sings the song like a robot while trying desperately not to crack up, and his backup vocalists do the proto-macarena) but Youtube took it down. D: The bastards!!! I knew I should've written this post earlier. Anyway you all have to dl this for Leonard Cohen's TOTAL RONNIE SPECTOR STYLEE FREAKOUT at the end, which has got to be one of the most traumatizing yet hilarious moments in music ever committed to record.

** It occurs to me that I should have used my story about the dude who wanted Up The Bracket to be produced by Phil Spector as a lead-in to this. XD; MOAR MELLOTRON.

Which is just as well since I started it during a protracted anxiety attack over last evening's three-hour Finance final. XD; (The prof brought milk, juice and cookies to the exam room. She was voted best lecturer of the year by the class, and not just because she feeds us, either.) Feeling a lot more normal now that that's over and I've gotten some sleep. Still one more paper to write, and I haven't found a summer job yet, though at least taxes are filed and I've registered for next year's courses.** And Monday it starts again - two full weeks of seminars over here, then Brazil.

The sinusitis has turned into a bronchial contretemps, as it were. And sororial unit's run away to England. Oh well; ONWARD AND FORWARD.


** As follows:

( 2 x strategy, 2 x organizational behaviour, 1 x entrepreneurship, 5 x marketing. )

If that works out it will be a double concentration in Marketing and Global Leadership. I like Marketing: it's Applied Semiotics really, and you get to make polls and fake ads and things. XD Maybe I'll write up my "The Libertines were to the NME as the Razr was to Motorola" rant in case study format, that should generate some lulz.

Updated the muxtape. ^^; The idea is to maintain it as a more condensed/structured version of the ever-protean current playlist. For instance, the "tape" can be started at any point and plays on continuous loop unless stopped, so it actually goes "Cherry Cherry" -> "B.U.R.M.A." -> "Love Vigilantes" (arguably the most definitive New Order cover of all time, if only because it was intended as country-folk in the first place). Which is how I actually listen to these songs, so it makes more sense to me than discussing them in a vacuum. Alternately I just like making fake singles. XD

I haven't listened to New Order for so long that a lot of the tracks sound drastically different. That and I've never had, say, the single version of "Round & Round" - with NO the difference between mixes is subtle but critical.

The STP of this software is rather interesting. XD I mean, I don't actually know the starting point(s) from which it was introduced - I first saw the thing at poptimists - but thus far the user base seems very, very hip in an mp3blog way.

( The Sweetest Little Song, Leonard Cohen )

(Accompanied in the book by an MS Paint doodle of a naked girl in the bath, stay true Len never change)

( Dolores, Algernon Swinburne )

TBH I wanted to come up with some shorter Swinburne piece and save you the ministrations of Our Lady of Pain but this is a lie, there's no such thing as "shorter Swinburne piece". The impression one gets with the man is that once he had the rhyme scheme between his teeth he saw absolutely no reason to stop, barring a brick wall in his path. It is SO EPIC THOUGH. By the hunger of change and emotion / By the thirst of unbearable things / By despair, the twin-born of devotion / By the pleasure that winces and stings / The delight that consumes the desire / The desire that outruns the delight / By the cruelty deaf as a fire / And blind as the night. I totally ripped this off to write Vagrant Story fic (among other endeavours), probably a good thing I never finished it. XD;

( After Love, Sara Teasdale )

I don't know her v. well - this is one of those things I found on the vast internets and saved.

(greykings, I apologize in advance if this gives you nightmares)

Arriving at finance exam at 10AM (usual start of class).

Discovering upon walking in that one had somehow missed all the times the teacher informed the class that the exam started at 9AM.

Managing to finish the exam anyway. I.e. it was a 2.5-hour exam, I made it in 1.5 hours.

...

APPARENTLY I ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT I'M DOING IN THIS CLASS???

Haaah whadda way to start the day. XD;;;

~*~PETRONIA.MUXTAPE.COM~*~

Tends toward unreleased acoustic demos, girls with charming accents, and the like.

(It can be occasionally wonky - reloading or switching to IE helps. As the software seems to belong to Amazon I'm sure they'll be adding more servers in no time.)

Let's pretend this is Friday's post. XD;

( From Jubilate Agno, Christopher Smart )

Was reminded of this in the Ezra Pound discussion thread. Possibly should have posted a lesser-known bit, but the online one is all hypertextual and Jeoffry is everyone's sentimental favorite amirite. XD

Really want to write poetry now. But that muscle's barely been taxed for, like, a decade.

What happened to my Edna St. Vincent Millay???

I've been trying to get my poems together, they're all over the place. In the process I discovered one of my favorite anthologies as a child was actually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrated with photographs of the permanent collection; the funny thing is I spent two whole afternoons there and could swear to seeing 0.5% of this stuff... Also this is making me remember how much I used to hate love songs and love poetry. XD; The "gross out" stage persisted for a long time, well into adolescence in fact - it wasn't that I wasn't personally interested in boys, but any poetic mention of romantic love seemed like the worst sort of emotional diarrhoea.** I liked poems about nature, and sort of imagistic stuff. Robert Frost, Wordsworth's daffodils and Li Bai's... pine trees or whatever. And wordplay. I used to cherry-pick the Romantics for non-love-related poems, that took some doing.

I'm not sure what fixed my stuntedness. XD;; At one point the pendulum swung way far in the other direction and turned into all fin-de-siècle Decadents, all the time. I do get the sense that my taste in poetry is fairly narrow. I seek particular effects and always have, though I appreciate other people's selections - that is, I'm really picky and unwilling to wade. XD;


** Ironically, the last time I can remember having this reaction was listening to "Can't Stand Me Now", sometime in '04. I just remember thinking CHRIST THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING. Lulz. I continue to grow as a person, or something.

( Canto II, Ezra Pound )

AND IT ENDS. I guess my thing for Pound amounts to the fact that when I read him I get this overwhelming sense of "Wow, I guess that totally made sense in your head, dude." Which is also how I write if/when I'm not careful and think I can get away with it, so, yanno. Kindred spirit. XD;; There have been people paid to sit there and analyze and tease out aaaaall the references; I have white papers downloaded from JSTOR, and shiz.

Apart from which the imagery stuns one into submission. Void air taking pelt... There was one bit in the Twelve Kingdoms anime that reminded me of this, hilariously I couldn't help thinking that if Pound were to - but actually let's not go there. For sanity's sake. XD;

( A Thousand Kisses Deep, Leonard Cohen )

The "poem" version, not the "song" version. Actually this is the version posted on the Leonard Cohen Files; Songs of Longing was one of the two books I bought in NYC, but I don't have time to look for it and check that the final text is the same. I rather suspect it isn't. XD;

Probably in a few days I'll post one of the funnier ones, I suppose this is what people think of as "classical" Cohen.

( Poem, Frank O'Hara )

Just to be difficult I was going to start with a full canto's worth of Ezra Pound, the Fascist neo-Confucian-or-should-we-say-neo-Confused pretentious such-and-such for whom I have an inexplicable weakness (I went to visit his grave! It is a massive flowerbed with a tiny little plaque buried in the greenery, on the cemetary island off Venice), but changed my mind. XD; Tomorrow perhaps.

The above O'Hara piece is one of my favorite poems of all time, largely because I would be reminded of it literally every single morning for years, while hurrying past the metro station newstand on my way to work. Like certain haiku it seems to say nothing, but.

A TRUE STORY: to make the mental jump from acoustic Pete Doherty bootlegs to Pretty.Odd.Punctuation.Strikes.Again. I had to go through Syd Barrett. In the process I discovered I find Ryan Ross's voice 1,000 times more tolerable than Brendon Urie's. What the hell, guys.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: so when are PATD going to cover "Waterloo Sunset"? Will someone get on this??? I hear they use the Internet and stuff.

( Public Image Ltd.: Yazawa Ai, statistical improbabilities, and vampires )

( Duffy: how I used to read about dance music before ever setting foot in a club, and an inevitable aside re Amy Winehouse )

Another week gone before I know it. Just talk to me or something!!!

Ricardo Villalobos - Enfants (Chants): if anyone feels like IDing some obscure minimal techno for my benefit, this dude uploaded a whole bunch of minute-long clips from Nuit Electronik (start here). No? XD I couldn't recognize anything apart from the "Sinnerman" remix, oh-hey-that-was-on-Fabric-36, and "MDMA" (on YTube), whereupon I was the only one who totally freaked out. Not that there's any point in trying to trainspot Villalobos. The crowd swung too far in the other direction from techno fanboi-ism, though, it was really... mainstream... for lack of a better word. XD; Lots of normal-seeming girls dressed for normal 3AM clubbing with high heels and shit, lots of beer and hooking up. And the vibe was completely mellowed-out. Suspect the latter could pretty much be laid at Villalobos' feet as over the course of the night he smoked, like, half a dozen spliffs' worth of premium-grade Canadian hydro - every hour, on the hour, switching varietals, like a wine-tasting party. OTZ I hate the smell of weed but even I could tell the difference. How dude remained upright is a whole other question. But he and Dandy Jack played some lovely stuff, float-y and expansive, more head than body, not at all dark.

I hadn't heard this track before, in fact, but I knew of its existence and there wasn't much else it could be. As per title it's mostly children chanting nursery rhymes, which is a sublime thing to hear bubbling up under and around one at 4AM. Downside is it's 24MB.

The Indelicates - We Hate The Kids: representative single, references Joy Division to better effect than that Wombats song, contains lyrics such as Pop had a beginning, it grew and was tended / Now it is rotten, let it be ended. Other song titles are "If Jeff Buckley Had Lived" (the thesis is exactly what you think it is) and "Waiting for Pete Doherty to Die" (the thesis isn't). And that's just how they feel about indie; they've also got songs about, like, actual life.

Julia Indelicate was a founding member of the Pipettes but quit to do this instead (the other unavoidable bio blurb fact but cool nonetheless). The album is out soonish and I'm rather looking forward to it. Pretty indiepop channels rage more often than one'd expect, but it's usually not my rage. XD

Martha Wainwright - Dis, quand reviendras-tu?: Martha does Barbara. It never ceases to amuse me how her French is magnitudes better than Rufus's. XD Suspect the short sibling age gap encapsulates the watershed moment where one Montreal Anglo generation turned into the next - or maybe Martha spent less time in NYC when younger (I think this is true).

The Streets - Weak Become Heroes (Röyksopp's Memory Lane Remix): Rave 1.0, lyrical content mirrored by aural semiotics i.e. Röyksopp going "you know what would actually be RILLY KEWL", hauntology(?). It's bizarre to me that I literally had never heard of this remix before I randomly ran across it on the internet. You would think, etc.

The overall effect is WAFFy to the point of cheesiness (the callouts at the end! no I've never heard the original either) but I have to smile. XD

Most hilarious case study to date. Please tell me there is a manga version of this, and I don't mean a stodgy seinen business manga but proper high-tension shounen crack. Honda Souichirou = 1x TOTAL PSYCHO WTFFF.

Honda x Fujisawa OTP

( One more for the road. )

For the comm's convenience (will be linked shortly). Feel free to respond.

( Cut for length. )