!!!!!

sweet.

If you missed it:

The "Gunecologist"?!!??!!!????!?!

With a name like that, with hands so glorious, with a song so sweet, how could I not post?

mavis staples

is shooting a potato gun or something. seeing her at bam was like a rainbow in the brain.

You Guys

Cadbury Creme Eggs. It is your time again.

The Grateful Ineffectual

These past few days have been some kinda ineffectual. Of the few important things that I have managed to accomplish, learning how to spell ineffectual is one. Discovering this record mysteriously on my itunes is the second. When did I do that? How did I know? Does that make it ok? I'm just letting you guys know what direction things are going in today in case you want to stop me. Anybody? Anybody?

Kulture Korner: bored meditations

Young Marble Giants: Best Band That Never Realized How Awesome They Truly Were (Cos They Would've Put Out More Albums If They Had); or Simply The Best Band Ever? Maybe they are more awesome for only putting out one very magical album? Here is a picture of them in a boat.

Colossal Youth keeps my morning coffee warm. I am trying to figure out a song upon which to bestow "best song" status. Right now it is a toss up between "Searching for Mr. Right," "Eating Noddemix," "Constantly Changing," "N.I.T.A.," "Choci Loni," "Wurlitzer Jukebox," "Salad Days," "Credit in the Straight World," "Brand - New - Life," "Wind in the Rigging," "Cakewalking," and "Ode to Booker T." (That list was really pointless.) I give you 5 stars in my iTunes rating system, Giants. You guys rule(d). I am feeling you so hard. You are like the inverse of my other love, Steely Dan: completely undressed, almost painfully literal, no attempt at singing, an almost faulty emphasis on simplicity. Here are some lyrics.

Yesterday we were always laughing
Always good for a laugh in passing
Stepping outside of the rules for asking

Misery passes and so does crying
Just look around
when you feel like dying
Stepping outside of the rules
when trying

Hopeless cases will drag you under
Fiery lovers will make you blunder
Tearing all the rules asunder

Trying to cakewalk but it's too boring
Coming to life at four in the morning
You think you're alive
But then you're just yawning

I don't completely relate to those lyrics, cos I go to bed at like midnight, TOPS, unless I am drinking bourbon, but that is OK, I totally dig what you are getting at. Elsewhere you told me, in a very beautiful way, that maybe I don't need to really know what you are on about to be totally rapt by what you are saying: "This doesn't mean that I possessed you / You're haunting me because I let you." And I think those two lines kinda sum up perfectly my relationship with this record? I am not sure how. But I think they do. Also, you have serious zings. Here is one: "I don't need you to love me / I don't need you to care / Take your body from by me / Be yourself over there." Crucial. That is like the kind of zing that makes my jaw hit the floor because it is so tight! So economic! So complete! Devastating. Please don't anyone ever say that to me directly. I think maybe this is kinda like what Kate Bush is getting at in "Running Up that Hill," except she's way more ambivalent about the whole thing, she kinda wants mindmeld, but she also kinda wants this d-bag to leave her, that's why she is taunting her addressee with rhetorical questions and stuff about bullets at the same that her most affecting couplet is on some serious death-drive type shit: "So much hate for the ones we love / Tell me we both matter, don't we?" But Allison Stratton is much more sure-minded, much more interested in singularity than cosmic and quasi-religious empathy. It's just a shame that I could never rock you (or for that matter find you) at karaoke. Kate Bush does have that going for her.

Open Letter

To the guy who keeps walking around behind me: I am in the library trying to do work that I should have completed, oh, about a motherfucking month ago. I would appreciate it if you would sit in yr seat like everyone else in this study area despite the attraction you so obviously have for something/one that I cannot see yet sense is somewhere near me. I guarantee you that it is simultaneously boring itself and bored with you. While I am not usually one to speak for another's desire, the boredom whom/whatever feels for you probably has something to do with yr bald head; why it is itself boring, I do not know, but I hope you take it to heart and leave it be. So what we have is actually a complete disinterest that you yourself seem unable to recognize but of which you deserve to be informed. Stop. For yr sake (which is covertly mine).

If you insist on continuing to move around behind me instead of staying in yr seat, I at least ask that you do not do the following two things: first, tap on the edge of my desk like one of those people who needs to touch everything they pass (you don't need to touch everything you pass although I do give you credit for a damn admirable job of doing so thus far); two, do not give me a dirty look when you see that I am reading Ne-Yo's biography on last.fm. Am I listening to "Because of You (Remix)" featuring Kanye West on repeat? Yes. But it is none of yr business. Do not look at my screen and do not act like whatever you see there is worthy of yr opinion. You clearly have a profound civic duty that consists of hating on fresh and sexy things - things such as Ne-Yo and good jackets. (That's right, yr jacket sucks. Stay seated.) So I ask that you put a collar on yr rabid sense of citizenship and not admonish me while also annoying the living fuck out of me. It is clear why you don't like Ne-Yo, but I was excited to learn that his friend nicknamed him "Neo" after Keanu Reeves' character in The Matrix and that he changed the spelling to reflect, in abbreviated form, his love for the city New York.

Also, even when you sit in yr seat, with yr legs propped up on the desk like you own this motherfucking place, you annoy me. You really should just go.

xoxo,
Melody

Something I Saw

We were transferring from the J train to the uptown F at Essex/Delancey on New Year's Eve and I totally saw this girl barfing into her plastic "Happy New Year" top hat. So incredible.

You guys. Happy New Year.