connexion: the selector

Submerged Series, Part Seven (In Bed)

Maybe if I whisper soft enough, in just the right way

you’ll feel it right behind your ear.

I may be far away, but (right before sleep) listen closely for me dear.

(I’m thinking of you.)

(promise)

Download: Sawako - Incense of Voice / Bjork - Stigdu Mig
Buy the Album: Sawako - Hum / Bjork - Venus as a Boy (CD Single)

Photo from http://notebooks.morgaine-lefaye.net/shoes/ (Thank you Google Image Search!)

Today was an uncharacteristically good day. I really just sailed through, good conversation, excellent listens, even a good meal to end the night.

On the way to the market tonight I was just driving along, smiling to myself thinking of my sweet Babies, who have seen fit to make my last few days so much less lonely. Such good hearts, these ones.

And then, thanks to the magic of iPod shuffle, this first song came on and I became positively giddy because it made me think of my dear ex-Lothario, that wily scamp. I sang my heart out, thinking of how hard he’d blush knowing that I adore thinking of him this way, a shamefully trampy young man, all winking glory in a scarf and clothes too old for him, wooing all the ladies with serious poetry and lascivious intention.

I can’t help it, dear, in my mind you were the Belle of St. Mark in another life, just a few (or ten) years ago.

As if that weren’t enough, the iPod God saw fit to play me the next song immediately after, and don’t you know, it perfectly fit for my beautiful Puppy?

My sweet, darling Puppy, with the soulful eyes and chic strength, a vision in boots or Yamamoto, such a serious expression on that face. You just get me, gurl, you know what I mean. I know you can imagine me, 11, standing in my mirror with a hair brush, torch singing my heart out to Bedtime Story, feeling it with all my little soul, crying my eyes out about that prince. If there was such a thing as Deep Sheila E karaoke, I would take you there, and sing this song to you, with absolutely no irony, because that’s just not how I roll where First Ave. Minneapolis is concerned. I would serve it.

You don’t know, Babies, how often I wish now there was that secret door I could slip through to come to see you. These are the ruby slippers I’d click to get there.

Download: Sheila E - The Belle of St. Mark, Bedtime Story
Buy the Album: Sheila E - In The Glamorous Life, In Romance 1600

Get a dose of my brand new twist,
for your tape or your compact disc

I’m back again

No words.

Download: Savath & Savalas - Victima Belleza
Buy the Album: Savath & Savalas - Apropa’T

Tonight I miss my brother like crazy.

Download: The Beatles - Because (Acapella)
Buy the Album: The Beatles - Ultra Rare Trax Vol 6

Gene is a Southern California autumn that only the natives can sense, the end of Santa Ana winds throwing curtains and shutters around and heat pressing you straight down into the ground.

Listening to Gene reminds me of private reflections while driving midnight roads down into Fillmore and whipping around corners so fast that it would put a chill into my parents’ bones if they ever found out.

After long nights at the donut shop playing backgammon and chain smoking, sometimes I would take those corners alone and go to that secret spot by the side of the road just so I could feel the quiet before dawn without the claustrophobia of my house bearing down on me. Sometimes I laid down on the rocks and counted the rings around the moon, sometimes I just sat in my car and listened to Olympian and Drawn to the Deep End from beginning to end because Martin’s voice has always been inexplicably, soothingly, beautiful to me.

I have always adored this band beyond reason and to the consternation of just about everyone I know.

But I distinctly remember that one of the very first times I ever felt good inside my own skin was a fleeting moment leaning against my car and tossing rocks over the edge, “Fighting Fit” coming softly through my window.

So I drove around by myself up the grade and back down, singing at the top of my lungs.

It’s so strange and also true that Gene reminds me that it was this same period when I crawled so deeply inside myself that I am just now starting to completely unfold.

They just meant so much to me, you know? In that young, copying down lyrics kind of way.

Sub Rosa
A covert operation
In the bedrooms of the world
A lowly dedication
To the lonely of the world
In the middle of the night
In the heart of every desperate night

A hunger to feel welcome
Out in the bedrooms of the world
I see the implications
The betrayal and the hurt
But in the middle of the night
In the heart of every desperate night
Who’ll know

Download: Fighting Fit, To See the Lights, Dolce and Gabbana or Now’t, Nightswimming (R.E.M. Cover), We Could Be Kings, Sleep Well Tonight (Live), Sub Rosa (Live)
Buy the Album: Drawn to the Deep End, To See the Lights, We Could Be Kings (CD 1), Where Are They Now? (Cds 1 & 2)

It’s not fair to say I’m not here. I am here, on the living room couch in the sleepy old house. So many late night keystrokes have sifted down into these cushions. I’m not having much luck, though, reaching farther out into astral travel. I can sit in the glow of those same screens, same sites, and there is abundant evidence that there are many others there. And I can type words of my own and they appear to end up in that same “there”. But it’s not the same place, the words and minds just shoot past each other like spacecraft whose docking plans were the tiniest bit off.

And every time it gets harder to summon up the energy to try to reach someplace else. “In the room downstairs he sat and stared; I’ll never make that mistake again.”

But sometimes music lets me hear someone singing, very close, only one paper-thin wall away from where I am.

Under Byen - “Hjertebarn” from Kyst (I do not know where to obtain this album)
Under Byen offical website …. fan-site

Did you hear it too?

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Emails about olive trees and throwing paint lead to handcrafted letters and nightly conversations that cracked open my sternum so that everything I had been hiding could seep out, in color.

I used to think that I wouldn’t be able to do it again, the stitching back up took too long and it just hurt too much.

Even though I still have the scar, I am not afraid anymore.

Here are songs from that time, another mini-mix:

. Jeff Buckley - Mojo Pin (Live at Wetlands, 1995) from Last Goodbye EP
. Red Stars Theory - September from Life in a Bubble Can be Beautiful
. Catherine Wheel - Girl Stand Still from Like Cats and Dogs
. Q and Not U -Kiss Distinctly American from No Kill No Beep Beep
. Hayden - Nights Like These from The Closer I Get
. Spinanes - Den Trawler from Arches and Aisles
. Lamb - Feela from Lamb

Pontormo’s Sky & The Unknown (End), Aaron Drew

Serious melting. Teeth, bones, hair… all of it, evaporating.

Kimura Michiko

Shaved head, Chocolate Skate Co beanie, walkman cassette player, mix-tapes from hometown friends, brown rice and sweet tofu from Long Life Veggie House, Mod Lang between classes and scuffed up shell-toed Adidas sneakers got me through the first six months.

This is what I remember about Berkeley 1998 tonight, a mini-mix for you:

1. Unwound - Dragnalus, from Fake Train
2. Juno - A Listening Ear, from This is the Way it Goes and Goes and Goes
3. Cat Power - Metal Heart, from Moon Pix
4. Superchunk - Animated Airplanes Over Germany, from Here’s Where the Strings Come In
5. Ida - Best of the Belated, from Losing True EP
6. Modest Mouse - Lounge, from This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About
7. The Velvet Underground - Venus in Furs, from The Velvet Underground and Nico
8. Red Stars Theory - I Thought About You, from But Sleep Came Slowly
9. Boys Life - Painted Smiles, from Departures and Landfalls

Fuco Ueda

Oh, I most certainly used to be this kind of girl, all awkward closed mouth on campus in headphones and rolling around on my bed with argyle socks sticking up in the air while I read mix-tape liner notes written special by friends.

Sometimes, at my most giddy (with a secret place in my heart for boys dedicated to Dinosaur Jr), I still am.

Download: Kicking Giant - Fuck the Rules / Lois - Spray / Beat Happening - Indian Summer / Henry’s Dress - Winter ‘94 / The Dambuilders - Colin’s Heroes / Dinosaur Jr. - In a Jar
Buy the Album: Various Artists - Throw: The Yoyo Studio Compilation / Beat Happening - Jamboree / Henry’s Dress - Bust ‘Em Green / The Dambuilders - Encendedor / Dinosaur Jr. - You’re Living All Over Me