uh...

In one scene J-Lo, 33, tries to seduce Affleck, 30, by laying on a bed and telling him: “It’s turkey time!”

When he asks: “What?”, she replies: “Come on, gobble, gobble”.

Matt Dye

death of potential

From Pitchfork. I'm honestly stunned dumb and much sadder than I thought I'd be over a dumb little band I liked:

At approximately six in the morning yesterday, Matthew "Matt Lock" Fitzgerald, Adam "Baby" Cox, and Jeremy "Kid Killer" Gage of the Pacific Northwest pop band The Exploding Hearts were killed when their van flipped over near Eugene, Oregon. The band was on their way home to Portland after a performance at San Francisco's Bottom of the Hill venue. They had also reportedly been in talks with Lookout! Records while in town about the possibility of a record deal.

Also in the van were Hearts guitarist Terry Six and manager Ratch Aronica, both of whom were treated for minor injuries. Ratch, who was kind enough to return our call while recovering from the accident, told us, "Terry and I don't know why we got out [alive]. I was sleeping, most of us were asleep when it happened. Matt was driving and when I woke up Adam was yelling just 'stop, stop.' Id my eyes and saw the van going back and forth. I could just see him trying to steer back onto the road. We were told we hit the shoulder, the gravel area, and we just started slipping..."

The resilient manager of the Hearts, Ratch Aronica was in nearly every way the band's mother. She was its biggest fan, its go-to shoulder, and its guardian in a music industry that otherwise preys on the young and talented. Ratch was tireless. During the entirety of the band's recent visit to Cambridge, MA, she slept not at all, opting instead to help smooth out the slapdash planning of two admittedly uncertain concerts, the band's only East Coast appearances. Ratch was reportedly the only person in the van wearing a seatbelt.

If you haven't heard their amazing album, Guitar Romantic, pick it up or order it. It'll, in light of the news, break your heart to contemplate what's gone now. Check out Pitchfork's interview from just a month ago and the Exploding Hearts' website, complete with pictures alongside Ike Turner, bios, clippings and boundless enthusiasm. Most importantly, there's mp3s, a sliver of an off the radar legacy they left behind.

"the world's first political snuff cartoon"

this was the week that was: 7.20.03

Weekends are a wash.

Spending the weekday struggling to go to bed at a reasonable time and get up with a slim enough window to get clean and get to work somehow warps my life ethic when it comes to weekends. Despite the urge to sleep in, I keep waking up at 7, 8 — wide awake when I all I really want is to destroy this lack I've built up for the last 5 days.

This week, especially, calls for long, uninterrupted stretches of rem sleep. Work kind of immediately turned sour on Monday, enough that I had a few hours of envisioning gathering my stuff and walking out, trailing obscenities and pointed commentary. So, my life running in odd circuits of fate, I get an e-mail from my friend Gina a few hours after that, asking if I still have any interest in a gig. A writing gig. Living off writing. It'd be a warped interpretation of my vision, not quite the free-willed, self-driven existence I envision, living off my writing. But closer than I've come before, if you don't count my last stretch of unemployment, doing trade magazine and other freelance stuff to pad out my severance pay and well-timed tax returns.

I can act given very little set-up and very small windows of time, but this sent me into a weird tailspin, perseverating and tearing off fingernails. What I'd gain in quality of worklife and (ostensibly) quality of writing would be offset by a dip in pay and the nature of my life going sideways for a few weeks. But that decision was taken out of my hands by a shortened schedule and my own need to train someone to replace me, so what coulda been seems will not be. Still, it was nice to be wanted, an experience new to me since I tend to stay with a job until it becomes a burned-out shell, filled with bad blood and anxiousness and then quit or get fired. I'm guessing there's a life lesson buried in here somewhere, but it's far too early and far too humid to brood.

Writing-wise, things are going pretty strong. Started a new project, about which I've been pretty unwilling to speak for fear of queering it in my head. It's still progressing strongly, constantly fed by each new piece of research I turn over, each natural evolution of the original concept. The collaboration with Vinny has produced 20 pages or so on my end, and seems, if anything else, to serve as a repository for all these odds and sods built up in my head and resigned to the margins of countless notebooks. The Twelve is almost done. Almost. I've started on some other side projects involving friends, not-necessarily-collaborative pieces that, in theory, I would finish and hand off to the other end to do what they wilt.

My new scheme is fishing. Me and Sanders are tenuously planning to go fish in one of the many cricks and streams of Missouri in search of garbagefish and whatever subnautical oddness. I somehow suspect that the peaceful contemplation that fishing represents will be lost to me in a flurry of impaled thumbs and tangled line.

I've got two Pitch pieces due this week, and am working on getting some more freelance work, enough to pad out the horrible spaces between me and work. The summer is just getting worse, it hit 104 on Friday without benefit of humidity (which bumped the heat index up to something akin to 110 or so), and beyond the miserable feeling the high-pressure dome erected around KC, I've never been a big fan of summer anyhow, notwithstanding the 9pm sunsets, which never cease to amuse and awe me. Writing seems complementary to hiding out from the heat, basking in high-powered air conditioning and cold water whenever I want it. It's due to hit 100 today, so, beyond breakfast, I don't forsee myself going anywhere unless mass amounts of money or drugs are involved.

The other big event is, as you can hopefully see now, the re-design of thoughtpeach. The new layout — laughing academy scrapbook — is the product of countless hours, days and weeks spent laboring over figuring out MT, making mistakes and fixing them and finally giving up and turning to someone for help. Thanks to Charity for taking my ideas and making them work, for intuiting what I was shooting for and surpassing what I ever expected this to be.

There are now sections, actual html pages separate from this blog, none of which have any content yet, as well as a photoblog and a reading journal/music journal. In the ensuing weeks, I should have a better handle on everything, have some of these sections done and actually get the content flowing through the blog at a quicker and more efficient rate. It's been a steep learning curve as it is, and messing with the intricacies of tables, Moveable type and photoshop has left me slightly brain numb and distant. I'd be interested to hear what, if anything, people think of the new design.

The heat's hitting 90 right now, at 9:30 in the morning, and the citronella candles on my balcony are melting down to huge tubs of permanent melt. God help me, I've got to move somewhere normal.

a memo from the bunker

Tomorrow: Sunday: 7.20.03: 9am CST (projected): Thoughtpeach 2.0 re-design unveiled. Gather your family before the warm glow of a radioactive cathode ray tube and revel in the excitement of the same old website wrapped in a whole new suit of skin.

bookglut: 7.18

what a gift certificate to amazon got me:

VooWeb.com offers web designing based on psd to html conversion. Designs offered are W3C compliant with semantic coding and cross browser compatibility that gives the end user high standards of project turn out quality. Using simple PSD formats to convert psd to html they help clients to dispense with the requirements of learning cumbersome languages and coding processes for use of the website designed and applications incorporated in it. No teletrack no employment verification online payday loan direct lender! . Dissertation writing service here is ridiculously cheap!

Photobooth - Babbette Hines
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace - Gore Vidal
Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists - Peter Straub (Editor)
Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages – Manuel Puig
Curiosa: Celebrity Relics, Historical Fossils, & Other Metamorphic Rubbish
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder - Lawrence Weschler
Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words/Male Edition
The Horned Man: A Novel - James Lasdun
The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories - Shelley Jackson
Dirty Havana Trilogy - Pedro Juan Gutierrez
The Day of Creation: A Novel - J.G. Ballard
Concrete Island - J. G. Ballard
Super-Cannes: A Novel - J.G. Ballard
Big If - Mark Costello
Syrup - Maxx Barry
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes (irony intended, thanks)

psychogeography

"Psychogeography is the study of the effects of geographical settings, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual".

Psychogeography research is carried through non-scientific methods such as the derive, aimless drifting through the city, trying to record the emotions given by a particular place; and mental mapping, the production of mood-based maps.

Psychogeography was developed as a critique of urbanism by the Lettrist International and then by Situationist International in the late fifties. Today, it is pursued by artists, radical thinkers and, on an academic level, geography researchers.

Chart Sweep pts 1 & 2

From 1956's inaugural #1, "Memories are Made of This" to Whitney Houston's 1993 "I Will Always Love You." Covering a complete era of the 45, beginning with the dawn of the age of pop charts and ending when major labels stopped pressing #1 hits to 45 and moved on to the sophistication of cassingles and CD singles. All in a little over an hour.

The web turns up nothing, except that it might be the result of someone named Hugo Keesing, Maryland archivist, culturist and owner of several collections regarding the history of popular music, and has been ripped from cassette to mp3 and unleashed on a forgetful public by The Evolution Control Committee.

There are lots of amusing crossfades, songs buttressed up against one another that you'd never think of as being separated by only a matter of weeks, rather than years. You can chart the emergence of disco, r&b, soul, cock rock, rap, hair metal, psychedelia, insofar as it applies to commercial american radio charts, a suspect machine if there ever was one.

part 1 part 2