ilx posts with striking imagery

buddy, get back to Guess the City

the crisp crunch and cheesy give of a pizza.

a few hours ago, a guy with a cowboy hat came in, looked a lot like don imus, and asked me questions about my life and he also told me: "i've got a son named dylan," bob dylan's birthday was on may 24th, and bob dylan is 72 years old. he told me that he divorced his wife on bob dylan's birthday. his wife was a canadian public radio personality whose name i recognized. he asked me if i was a musician. he gave me a cd, broke out the back sheet from it and signed it with a sharpie, THANKS FOR LISTENING. i'm listening to it right now and there's a song on the cd called "a lonely place called divorce" and there's a line on it about divorcing his wife on bob dylan's birthday. there's another song warning women to treat him well or they'll end up as a line in his suicide letter.

i was impressed with his commitment to his personal vision of his own character. but it made almost too neat an anecdote to share, black and white jim jarmusch short neat. maybe the one armed man story should have been filed in the same category.

― dylannn, Sunday, June 2, 2013 8:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its hard to avoid SOME level of nostalgia if you are looking at and using something that is 50 or 60 years old. or even 40 or 30 years old. but for me, the thrill is playing that old thing and hearing new sounds in the present. its very much a now thing for me. some people definitely try and evoke the past and that's their primary relationship with old things. or they want to be reminded of the past. their own or an earlier past. there are always going to be people who prize things based on age. and who will insist, sometimes ignorantly, that the old or the new is the best. we should just avoid those people altogether. my own bias toward analog and tape and records and older recording techniques, older microphones(!), older studios, and older mixing boards is based on the variety of religious experience i have witnessed over the years. i can play 50 records (or a hundred or a thousand) and they can all sound wildly different! how they were recorded, how they were pressed, when and where they were recorded, what the room was like, what gear was used, what mics, etc, etc, and on and on forever all play a part in why they sound so different. granted, i've got history on my side. over a hundred years of recordings. but out of every 100 CDs i play, i might hear one or two that are genuinely striking. sound-wise. and they are usually the ones that were worked on endlessly and hundreds of hours of time and effort went in to making them. whereas some of the greatest records i've ever heard, again sonically, were made in a couple of hours on the cheap. there is a digital uniformity that my chaotic brain rebels against. actual noises that you hear in real life are not free of distortion or separated from other ambient noises/sounds. you don't hear things in a vacuum. and i guess i've never really understood people who wanted to divorce musical sounds from the ambient hum that is all around us. one of the great joys of listening to old records for me is actually hearing the room that the music is being played in. the reverberations. the echo. 78s and 50's-era records are good for this. old jazz. it increases my feeling of intimacy with the music and makes me feel closer to the people playing it. and its a different feeling completely than the feeling i get listening to the clear reallyreallyclose fidelity of a digital recording. which can often be lysergic in its closeness. you can hear someone's uvula flapping in the breeze. i can see why people dig that though. tech-wise. geek-wise. that ultrahuman clearness. like HD or blu-ray. i appreciate it more when i'm listening to sound artists or electro-acoustic music. very trippy. can be a little jarring if its just some acoustic folk record and i'm sitting inside someone's guitar or throat. i appreciate a little distancing. and that's what i think people mean by warmness when they talk about records. voices have more glow on tape? i dunno. its certainly possible to make a pretty accurate recording of the human voice on tape. maybe its like the difference between old tube televisions and new flat screens. when everyone had tubes, you would walk down the street at night and little electric fireplaces beamed out of windows. the windows would actually glow. you could see what people were watching. you could hear the sound outside a window loud and clear. with flatscreens the flatness is supreme. you don't get the glow. you can walk by a hundred of them and never have your eye drawn to the picture. they are easy to ignore and hide. same with digital muzak and radio. very easy to tune out. the uniform levels don't engage the ear. nothing leaps out. having said all that, i absolutely LOVE the possibilities within the world of electronic/dance/rap and digital sound. and that, to me, is the greatest stuff to listen to on cd. that tooclose and ultra-clear vocal sound you can get with a computer is stunning when applied to rap. talk about hard to ignore and jarring and visceral. when i take off a record and put on a rap cd its like a bomb has gone off. and that's a good thing. and i've already talked a lot about my undying love for those Kompakt CDs that ILM made me buy years ago. they IMMEDIATELY draw you in. they are definitely a gold standard for me. no doubt anyone here could name a dozen other labels who have achieved similar results and created amazing sound over the last 20 years. warp, mego, etc. whoever. i've also mentioned that when i put a kompakt cd on in the store almost everyone without exception who walks in the store asks me what i'm playing. they quickly become addicted. because it sounds so undeniably good! and cool! and it IS sound that leaps out at you and is 3D in an amazing textural way. so the uses (and sci-fi potential) for digi sound are endless. and i'm gonna guess that in 20 years we won't know what hit us. binaural blu-ray friggin' death ray ridiculousness, i'm guessing. but whatever comes will always be - it can't help but be - DIFFERENT from magnetic tape and all manner of electrical recordings of the distant past. there's something for everyone. my own nostalgic defense is this: bad digital recordings are often just that, bad. and sometimes, to me, unlistenable. bad analog recordings, or cheap or amateurish recordings, often have SOME sort of charming or idiosyncratic quality that can make them either endearing in their badness (muffed use of fx or just dementedly poor placement of microphones) or even addictively listenable from a sound collector/lover perspective (nasty guitar distortion, epic echo abuse, etc.). and when analog recordings on vinyl are great - and arguably they reached their height all the way back in the 1950's - i think they rival any art or art form that the 20th century had to offer.

― scott seward, Saturday, 15 June 2013 21:36 (2 hours ago)

As far as imagery goes, that huge block of text looks pretty impressive.

the thing that kills me about the PUA craze is that on Road Rules: Semester At Sea there was a castmate named Pua and every time I see the acronym, I think of her and wonder if this shit is haunting her

― DJP, Thursday, June 20, 2013 8:57 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

hahaha

i don't have the heart to rewrite it in the style of people writing in tao lin style on the internet.

― dylannn, Friday, June 21, 2013 3:10 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but that will be the only thing that happens tonight. last night or the night before, i only slept a few hours during the day and came into work and, when everyone was gone, made a bed of towels on the floor in the back room and fell asleep until quarter to four. the night before that, i set myself up in an empty room and sat at the desk and wrote on the hotel stationary and drank a can of kokanee. i took a shower in another room, an early checkout. three women came in around two in the morning and i gave them a free room for no reason and they checked into their room and one of them came back and put two twenty dollar bills on the counter (american currency). there's a girl that works in the laundry room until midnight and she's started stopping in to chat before she goes home and i don't want to discourage her because i enjoy the ten or fifteen minutes she's here--in order to drive conversation with her, i checked her out on facebook but she seems to be really interested in soccer, and i found an introduction to sudanese arabic on youtube and i practiced the phrases with her, and we talk about cities in the united states that would be good to live in and food--but i simultaneously resent it because it subtracts time by myself from the night. with nobody coming by, no slow darkening of the day, the natural rhythms of life are absent and every hour feels like an hour but it still goes by too fast.

But Scheer and other experts believe a significant part of the problem with shift work is physiological. On a fundamental level, being awake at odd or irregular hours fights with our biological rhythms. Shift work disrupts the circadian rhythm -- our internal body clock that is keyed to natural daylight and darkness.

Because circadian rhythm affects how the body functions, disrupting it can throw everything out of whack -- including our cardiovascular system, metabolism, digestion, immune system, and hormonal balance. That appears to have serious consequences.

The short-term health effects of shift work are clear. ... Aside from the obvious fatigue, effects include:

Gastrointestinal symptoms like upset stomach, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, and heartburn
Increased risk of injuries and accidents
Insomnia
Decreased quality of life
General feeling of being unwell

― dylannn, Friday, June 21, 2013 3:38 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, was just scrolling down to c/p that part - mental image of a mutant Ocado van roaming the Oxford countryside running things over

― wakaflockinihilipilification (seandalai), Wednesday, 10 July 2013 00:45 (40 minutes ago)

Man was like a sponge, everything was grist for the mill. Was there a tune that he couldn't slyly smooch up to, grab by the short & curlies before it could resist, then stick it in a suit and fill it with so much coke until it was twitching and drooling like a sex-addicted cyborg sweating lizard blood?

― trippin' on brostep beats (NickB), Friday, August 2, 2013 8:34 AM

nickb is a high quality poster but that reads like something by stephen wells

does any of latour's newer theory stuff demonstrate that he's actually doing any research at all anymore? i get his theory is all about actual research methodologies. but is he actually employing those to study actual things, or just pontificating on them these days?

― "Dave Barlow" is the name Lou uses on sabermetrics baseball sites (s.clover), Wednesday, August 14, 2013 1:56 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's what you do once you're eminent, i thought, you shoot eminent rays out at things in order to unify them under one field of eminence

― j., Wednesday, August 14, 2013 4:37 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm strangely attracted to Natasha leggero

― chrisv2010, Sunday, August 8, 2010 1:52 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And Katy perry is obviously not an actress but I'd break it off in her ass

― chrisv2010, Sunday, August 8, 2010 1:59 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have been to SF only once (aside from the airport), back in April, for a work conference and some meetings w/my boss, who is based on the west coast. We went out to lunch, and on our way back to the office, there was a dead body on the sidewalk covered by a sheet, blood pooling from underneath it, surrounded by fire/rescue workers and emergency vehicles on the street. People were standing around taking video with their phones and Instagramming it. It was really weird.

― Here's the storify, of a lovely ladify (Phil D.), Friday, August 16, 2013 7:22 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The thread reminds me of when 22-year-old me moved 500 miles away to follow my 18-year-old girlfriend to her freshman year of college. Yeah, plenty of people warned me against it: "How's life? You need to let that go, man. She's about to go through a different life phase. It will go horribly wrong." And yeah, she was in a different phase. It went horribly, horribly wrong. Like, worst, WEIRDEST relationship bullshit to happen to me ever. But I don't think they were necessarily right. It happened to go all wrong. But I think there's room out there in this wide world for early-20s dudes to follow their incoming-freshman girlfriends to school and make it work and I will ALWAYS recommend that course of action, if given choice. ALWAYS. You guys are gonna be TOGETHER. FOREVER. Don't listen to them. They won't understand your love. You'll support her with your job at Blockbuster. Plenty of people do that. Plenty of people are young and poor and in love and get married and start a family. Poor people! They aren't any less loving! You can always shoot for Regional Manager or something, right? And once you've got that all sorted out, you'll be able to settle down and pursue your life's dreams of producing downtempo electronica. There's a mid-Atlantic Ninja Tune waiting to happen, and it all starts with this decision.

― how's life, Wednesday, August 21, 2013 8:36 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Almost makes me want to pack up and do something somewhere but I'm 42 as is my girlfriend and we're happy to let someone else release music for us, so.

Also, I mean, even though the relationship WILL crash and burn you HAVE to do that shit, both to live out the wholeheartedness that's harder to feel later in life, and to learn the lesson deep down of how dumb that stuff can be. Went through something similar, it was miserable and totally avoidable but if i hadn't done it I'd've made worse mistakes later.

sorry, i'm sure people have said that on the actual thread that comes from!

what thread

man how's life is really in full bloom these days

what thread

― socki (s1ocki), Thursday, August 22, 2013 4:06 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'that girls only thread is great'

when I see a dude in a tasteful plaid shirt, some raw dark denim, & red wing boots, i think to myself "that looks like a man of courage."

― your authentic guitar playing self (elmo argonaut), Tuesday, September 3, 2013 6:29 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Fucking weird my elementary school playground had the same "treehouse" as pplains & the same pee problem

If you're ever being buried alive, throw yourself into your panic with full gusto (you probably won't get much choice in this, but it's actually best not to keep a clear head). There are few moments in life when one gets to really unleash an all-consuming, sanity-rending panic. Such a level of primal terror is probably so overwhelming what it's debatable to what extent it can even be called a 'conscious' event. You're unlikely to experience thoughts anywhere near as lucid as 'Oh God, I'm being buried alive'. In the face of such an unpleasant end, panic induced insanity may shield from the full consciousness of your death.
You probably shouldn't take off your shirt and try to tie it around your face and mouth, that's kind of ridiculous.

― I have gathered no gaudy flowers of speech in other men's gardens (dowd), Sunday, September 8, 2013 5:30 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Voted Stingray. Saw one last week when out on the beach, and it was a magical moment. I used to dream about having a pet stingray when i was a kid. I would have it in a huge swimming pool and race it from one end to the other.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, August 27, 2013 1:51 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

should also go to cutecelsior!

I do wonder sometimes if my smoking annoys ppl around me...how many houses away can they smell it, just a little? Does it go in their windows? What about the ppl upstairs if I smoke on my fire escape? Do I have any ground to stand on if they object? It seems like with smoking the default "right" position is 0% tolerance of any inconvenience to others. What about the noise we all tolerate? Or the dogs, or the unsightly yards and garbage, or just every single other thing about living near a lot of people? Harrumph.

NB No one has ever said one single thing to me about it in my 2+ years here, I just worry.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Friday, September 13, 2013 9:47 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

But this is still just lousy: this the cloddish, rotten, stupid Eagles; the meathead Eagles, the pestilent Eagles. I can picture George W. Bush, driving around Midland in '75, knocking back a few cans of Coors, blasting this awful piece of shit while he tailgates someone. God, even the guitars sound hateful.

― col, Monday, September 16, 2013 8:10 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have this weird but salient memory of hanging out with him when I was like 11, and he insisted on playing me this Howard Stern video when my aunt went out, and it involved Howard Stern inviting women up on stage to have something called "Butt Bongo" played on them, and this one woman kept giggling and saying "But I'm a mother! I'm a mother!"

― #fomo that's the motto (Hurting 2), Friday, September 20, 2013 12:00 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is that from the "saying goodbye to your pet" thread?

facebook

miley should change her name to Jah Cyrus and record a song with house of pain and naughty by nature called "gettin' my irish up" and have mc lyte and karen finley guest star. i would buy that.

― scott seward, Thursday, October 3, 2013 12:11 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if i learned anything during that today show interview its: she's never been happier and she's just being herself and if you are being yourself you don't have to worry about anything. also, be nice to people when you are not onstage and no matter what anyone writes about you its okay because you know that you are a good person who treats people well. also, matt lauer is a big dick.

― scott seward, Wednesday, October 9, 2013 1:09 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ fun and worth reading, but I can't find any imagery in those I'd call striking

read the last line as 'also, matt lauer has a big dick' at first, was it was pretty striking.

Same.

struck by another's jet

― deej snyder (Curt1s Stephens), Sunday, 25 April 2010 05:27 (3 years ago)

Very vivid dream last night that Whiney built a purple flying saucer and took off in California as US ilxors tracked him west to east, but it was revealed after takeoff that it was a suicide mission. Soon it was on the news and the Air Force was tracking him and all of ilx was posting with him, pleading for him to land it safely somewhere. Then he crashed it and died in my backyard (of the house in Alabama that I grew up in, not where I live now). It took about ten people to unscrew the lid off the saucer and retrieve his limp, naked body.

I know it all sounds really weird, and sort of based on the "balloon boy" thing, but it was very sad. Everybody was crying.

I did NOT do any drugs before bed.

― Johnny Fever, Saturday, October 19, 2013 10:31 AM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can u imagine meeting Oprah

― surm, Friday, October 4, 2013 1:11 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

<3

also Johnny Fever's dream was harrowing.

After I read Johnny Fever's account of his dream I was going to ask if he had felt the need to check that Whiney was actually still alive after he woke up, but then I looked and Whiney hadn't posted to ilx or his twitter for a couple of days so I was scared to ask in case something actually had happened to him (God forbid). I can see he has posted to his twitter since, so I will ask now if Johnny Fever is reading.

also, semi-related, i just woke up from a dream where a hot new novel was getting lots of critical buzz but the novel was just a chocolate cake that readers were instructed to eat. it was sold in bookstores, however, which distinguished it from cakes sold in bakeries. there was a lot of discussion about whether this was "really" a novel just because the author said it was and in the course of the dream i at first passionately defended it but then was convinced to change my mind and denounced it.

― (emphasis Treeship's) (Treeship), Wednesday, October 23, 2013 9:16 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao

hahahahaha

He woke up to find his bookshelf empty and cake crumbs on all over his pillow

treesh will do well to post as well as that again

we all will

http://s3.amazonaws.com/quietus_production/images/articles/1994/sir_patrick_moore_1246283574_crop_550x367.jpg

Where the hell does someone even buy trousers like that?

― 'scuse me, while I Rim the Sky... (snoball), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 11:42 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If he pulled them up any higher, he'd have to cut armholes in the sides.

― btw didn't i braek ur heart (NickB), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 11:50 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just remove the lining from the pockets and put his arms through the holes.

― 'scuse me, while I Rim the Sky... (snoball), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 11:52 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, that would also have the secondary benefit of stopping his car keys from chaffing his nipples.

― btw didn't i braek ur heart (NickB), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 11:55 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Legendary Hearts IS a better song record but it's so austere about its flourishes it's downright Presbyterian; when a solo shows up on "Make Up My Mind" or "Home of the Brave" it's like a favorite aunt serving you wine.

― the objections to Drake from non-REAL HIPHOP people (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, November 7, 2013 8:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The thing is, a lot of the appeal of vinyl is how cool it is. Not hipster cool, really, but it feels cool to put a record on cos they sound good and look good, and for sure there's a kind of joy in participating in a ritual of aural reproduction that goes way back, and a lot of record players - vintage and modern ones alike - look great in the home and blah blah blah.

When I go to visit my mum, a pristine woman whose house looks like a mid-range hotel, I'm always shocked to visit her bathroom. She has these air fresheners set up that periodically spray their stuff, often right at me as I'm doing a piss or worse. I don't know whether they're on a timer or there is some kind of motion detection going on, but it is definitely uncool. I can't really bring it up, but I am tempted to tell her that these attempts to obliterate all that is unpleasant in life make me feel weird. I gotta take a shit, mum, and I don't like to be made to feel unwelcome while I do. Furthermore, I understand that you have to take a shit from time to time, and if you're trying to use technology to hide this fact from everyone, it's failing - I can think of little else when I'm in there. I imagine you shitting and the panic you must feel at being revealed as a person who commits these violations of familial order. What's more, I'm inclined to introduce the smelliest, most virulent and unflushable shit into your bathroom and see how your systems can deal with that. It's really a provocation.

That's how I would think of anyone who had one of these record players in their house.

― Eyeball Kicks, Sunday, November 17, 2013 5:59 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

...wait just a dang minute

if this father christmas guy only drinks sherry

and yr mom also drinks sherry, but only on christmas(!)

i need you to be brutally honest here, not only with me but with yourself:

have you ever seen yr mom in the same room as father christmas?

Boy, HAVE i

i saw mother mac n santa claus

kevin mccallister on the tv, pairing a chalice of milk with kraft dinner. your uncle sips a white russian while his newborn spits up the last bottle. mother sets a pitcher of milk on the table, and you wake up to your subaru interior. with your right foot, you instruct the machine to turn out miles. you grasp the wheel and place the miles between you and the milk.

― accordion folder full of Zoobooks (Sufjan Grafton), Thursday, 9 December 2021 18:13 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

when my gran moved in with my aunt in the 70s mum and dad inherited her freezer and found it full of frozen onions and lemons

― mark s, Saturday, September 17, 2022 5:51 PM

instant classic:

Today, I walked along the south coast, from the edge of the New Forest up into Christchurch. That whole chunk of coast has been monetised in one way or another, from £60-a-day beach sheds to tweely named and eyewateringly expensive seafood restaurants like the Lucky Lobster or the Oleaginous Oyster or whatever. _Everything_ was shut, each place with its own hand-printed elegy/notice as to why. I couldn't even get the ferry at Mudeford (only running two services, one at 10, the other at 5pm in honour of her maj).

Christchurch is, it turns out, the perfect town for totalitarian mourning. It's one of the most Tory places on earth and has a population all in fear of their lives, all ripe for some tea-towel out-the-window action. It felt like everyone was in competition. All the post boxes were decorated, people had blacked out their windows; each restaurant and cafe had huge signs up saying why they were shut. You could totally imagine anyone showing dissent having their windows caved in. It was a bizarre sight. Pretty much the only sign of life was in the doorway of the vast baroque Conservative Club, where an old lady with a frame and a trifle on her head was openly weeping into the street. The station was deserted and the ticket machine was wrapped in crime scene tape so I didn't buy a train ticket home. That one was on you, Liz.

― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Monday, 19 September 2022 17:36 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I had a vivid dream about two weeks ago... Jerry Orbach-era L&O, with Det Briscoe on the trail of some shirtless, leather-jacket wearing cat burglar. When he finally catches up with the perp and his associates, they're wearing "Stipe/Biles '24" lapel badges. "Good luck with that," says Briscoe.

So, there are options.

― Michael Jones, Tuesday, January 31, 2023 6:07 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I also sleep with half a dozen radios and television sets turned on like Roky Erickson. I can't fall asleep otherwise. The idea is to get a bunch of voices talking over each other, either in a languages I can't understand or at an unintelligible volume. And over that, I'll have a couple of devices playing variations of 'rain on attic skylight with heavy thunderstorm', and I'll turn those up pretty loud. It's a delicate balance and I have to get it just so. Absolutely no music of any kind because it holds my attention and keeps me awake.

― The field divisions are fastened with felicitations. (Deflatormouse), Thursday, 9 March 2023 05:58

“Hello, room service? This is going to sound a little strange, but…”

Ticket scalping should be legal-ish but you should have to pay cash to a weird guy in a dirty San Jose Sharks Starter jacket for two tickets a block away from the venue like the good old days.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, March 9, 2023 11:47 PM

i hope an elephant falls out of the sky and lands on him, and fuses together with his body, so that at his funeral, his loved ones will have to choose between an open casket funeral with everyone seeing his head buried deep inside a dead elephant, or a closed casket.

and because of the elephant and him fusing, the casket will have to have enormous proportions and they will have to pay like 300,000 dollars for it and someone will raise it for them and then steal the money and donate it to an LGBTQ+ charity in his name.

― the manwich horror (Neanderthal), Monday, June 12, 2023 4:09 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Get a six pack of Mountain Dew Code Red, a bag of Flamin' Hot Doritos, settle into your corduroy bean bag chair, and cue up their entire discography on random. You'll be sweatin' and shiverin' no matter what the season

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), Wednesday, December 6, 2023 8:59 PM