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Wednesday, September 26, 2007
BUM LEG
posted
8:38 PM
I got this scar above my eye from a dirty little shit who tried to love me underneath the bridge. I broke a bottle on his ear as the sun came pouring out. I never stopped to see if I was dead. About half a mile away in a pile of broken things, he hid a green jewel bigger than my hand. When I find it I'll be gone, down to Florida so far from this frigid rain that kept me here so long. Hey could you walk a little slower my legs don't work so good in this cold weather. I tore myself open. If I only had a dime or just a minute of your time. I'm a ghost, I'll be fading with the light. I got this lump growing in my neck that somebody ought to see. Got a rattle in my chest, the way it sounds, like a barrel full of broken bottles rolling through the night, hitting every fucking pothole in this town.

-- Joe Pernice , on his album Big Tobacco. Joe came by my signing in Toronto and said hi and gave me the CD, which made me very happy. Thanks, Joe!

Saturday, September 22, 2007
TRAIN BLOGGING
posted
12:30 PM
Post from VIA Rail en route to Ottawa. Kind of steampunk, this wired railroad thing, but definitely handy.

The Canadian leg of the tripodal Spook Country tour is well under way. Decided to leave the camera home, but there are fewer beds involved in this limb anyway.

Thanks to the Usual Suspects who conveyed the Nice Thing to the event in Toronto last night.

I re-met someone, there, who actually had a camera in Yorkville in 1967, and claims to have prints of me as I looked when not pretending to be a hippy philosopher for the CBC. We shall see. Perhaps.

Sunday, September 16, 2007
SPOOKY CELLARS OF THE LONDON PLUTOCRACY
posted
8:43 AM
Yikes.
Thanks to Bruce Sterling.

Saturday, September 15, 2007
JAPANESE HUMAN
posted
12:07 PM
Art

Wednesday, September 12, 2007
RICHARD HARRIS
posted
10:10 AM
The Savoy hotel’s most famous permanent resident was Richard Harris, who lived there while in London. Hotel archivist Susan Scott recounts an anecdote that when he was being taken out of the building on a stretcher shortly before his death he raised his hand and told the diners “it was the food”.

--BBC, via Warren Ellis

Monday, September 10, 2007
SO HIP
posted
1:19 PM
Lightin' Hopkins's nasty, sidewise "I saw you ridin' around, you was ridin' around in your brand-new automobile," from his wry, lie-down-hip 1949 "Automobile," somehow becomes, in 1966, Bob Dylan's nasty, sidewise "well, I see you got your brand-new leopard-skin pillbox hat." Some people are so cool, *so* lie-down hip, that they can steal the right breezes simply by breathing: the pranayama of holy theft, the pranayama through which Virgil drew into himself the air that Homer had breathed, and through which Dante drew Virgil's.

For it is all the same air, passed to the living from the dead: an errant whisp of a sigh from Sappho in the drawn breath of a lover thousands of years down the line. Brand-new automobile, brand-new leopard-skin hat. *Das Ewig-Weibliche*, and her bitch-daughter, remain eternal: in a Mesopotamian skirt of snakes, in a brand-new car, or a brand-new pillbox hat, they, like all the dieties of our creation, remain eternal, in whatever guise. Sometimes the hat indeed, as Max Ernst said, makes the man. Sometimes the man is the hat; sometimes the hat is the man. And sometimes the hat is simply a good place to aim the gun.

--Nick Tosches, in Where Dead Voices Gather, 2001

Tuesday, September 04, 2007
"SEVEN FILTERS ON THE REALITY"
posted
8:46 PM
Russian ASCII goggles.

KKKLOUROPHOBIA!
posted
9:58 AM
Awesome.

Monday, September 03, 2007
BACKYARD STONEHENGE
posted
10:00 PM
Awesome.

LOUD HEADPHONES
posted
4:05 PM
"In the library, take control."

Sunday, September 02, 2007
"DRUGS?"
posted
2:00 PM
"I wait for you."

Saturday, September 01, 2007
BRAD SUCKS
posted
4:59 AM
People sometimes ask what I was listening to during the writing of a given book. For Spook Country, I've usually cited the complete ouvre of Drive By Truckers (whom I happened to discover for the first time just as the book was really getting started), and, toward the end, Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. But I've been forgetting Brad Sucks, who I discovered when I was somewhere in the middle. Anesthetic's remix of "Dirtbag", in fact, came to have much to do with the tonality of my character Milgrim. I'd drive around and listen to that if I felt I was losing the peculiarly floaty grip that Milgrim required.

Thanks, Brad!