i am here out of habit

tsotsi is, in my opinion, not such a great film. but this isn't a negative post, because there's this one line in it, 'i like to feel the sun on the street'. i have 'party' written on one side of my hand, and 'non-bio' on the other. i guess what i'm saying is, things could be worse. avoiding essays has never been as fun as over the last few days. hardly an original sentiment, and probably a pretty useless one.

my dyslexic friend has just cut the top of her thumb off.

arguably, i swear too much. but there are moments when its totally applicable, no matter what your opinion on the loading of language. like:

i just noticed that you can see the opposite coast on one of my pictures of the sea.


fuck, that felt incredible.

calla - fear of fireflies

the wrong feelings

the best bits of the tindersticks are when stuart's voice cracks. when the surface is split like a crème brulée, and it's completely covered in this manky sheen, like the glow of a lonely pub or the way the wine creates a red amoung the shadows; the way the smoke fills the room, and you know it's romantic, but you also know that it's deadly.

tindersticks - tiny tears
tindersticks - waiting for the moon
tindersticks - until the morning comes
tindersticks - she's gone

you can feel that he's consumed by the stuff he's singing about. the only thing that detracts from it is the fact that they're not all on the same album. i would crystalise that thing. i would cover a room in wet paint, and craft a museum in the middle for this artifact - i could say, this is where it happened. this is where he was fucked over, this is when he walked into the studio and stubbed a cigarette out on the microphone and spat on his shoes, this is when he bought a bag of apples and locked himself in, because he genuinely thought he would spend the rest of his time here. this is where he poured hot coffee into his guitar to disrupt a perfect take, and fiddled with his bracelet when the new year turned over.

mediator mixtape #4 - crooked polar night

one of my earliest memories is doing that thing where you bump into someone on a street, and you're both trying to get past, but you keep dodgeing the same way to get round the other person. but it wasn't on the street, it was at the very end of a grassy dirt path in the countryside, which was just about to open up onto a big field. he was a lot taller than me, and i only ever saw his midrift, stepping where i was stepping. he was getting stuck after having all this room, and i was getting stuck just before having too much room. i also remember the birds screaming in the skies, and that i needed to go to the toilet.

that last sentence isn't all true.


mediator mixtape #4 - crooked polar night

tracklist:
1. mugison - salt
2. sufjan stevens - alanson, crooked river
3. growing - primitive associations/great mass above
4. black moth super rainbow - hazy field people
5. colleen - i'll read you a story
6. joanna newsom - only skin
7. belong - i never lose. really really
8. labradford - midrange
9. tindersticks - miles davis' funeral
10. august born - more dead bird blues


i made a cd of this, but the newsom track was replaced by the decemberists' the tain. i felt a bit guilty about putting that whole thing up here, though. so, change that if you want, but only skin is an amazing, amazing track from one of my albums of the year.


like little monuments. gets a bit like an addiction.

friendly displacement

i wonder what people think in the library, when i am about to serve them, but i sit and rub my eyes for a while before calling them over. if they think about it at the time or after, if it's not what they expected - or if it's exactly what they expected from a student, or from a young male, or from a library worker or a low level worker. in terms of rising up, rubbing my eyes isn't really cutting it. but the thought is there - why am i rubbing them? do they itch, will it be long before i can no longer see? am i going over the events of the previous hour in my mind, wondering how it escalated to such a violent level? more importantly, will i snap when i serve them? am i regretting...that moment where you can change things, how i let it slip even though i had the feeling in the pit of my stomach. and now, that i am tired, and i cannot sleep, and when i do it just gets worse.


or maybe they think, it's not that bad, it's not that bad. maybe they think you can change anything, slowly and carefully.




mixtape tomorrow.