Proof of Me

Tune-Yards - hypnotized (Official Video)

tUnE-yArDs - Bizness (Official Video)

tUnE-yArDs - Gangsta (Official Video)

tUnE-yArDs - My Country (Official Video)

Hole - Doll Parts (Live from Big Day Out 1999)

Tori Amos - Cornflake Girl - Oxygen Concert 2003

Zero 7 - Take My Hand Ft. Lou Stone (Live Session)

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Hell is Pop Country

Musical taste perfectly sets us further apart from each other, and for good reason.

"Long life, state your case." Joanna Newsom - Occident

The narrowing of life in the third act shrinks the outer flesh of supposed reality while emboldening the bones of honesty so that all comes clear as death draws near. The narcotic assumptions about supposed realty gradually wear off, revealing the utter insanity of the human species and the wars created by the underpinnings of wars fully chambered awaiting their waging to flags flying. How the species adopt definitions through this patriotism, religion and neo-materialism (like ordering shit from Amazon), hoarding and consumption, silly tradition and assumption, which assumes so much so utterly, so errantly, and so ridicuous. How human interaction fuels egocentric lofts among even loftier regions out of reach, which intensifies the pangs of the desire that distances us from salvation's simplicity. These truths are revealed through observation, suffering, and the concommittant narrowing of act three, dying to leave the theatre.

"Be not like dumb driven cattle." H.W. Longfellow

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Tom o' Bedlam

Sufjan Stevens - Fourth Of July

Joanna Newsom the Book of Right-ON

Joanna Newsom - Peach Plum Pear

Joanna Newsom Austin City Limits 2012 (Full HD Episode)

The poetess' hands her fingers the talents of two writing spiders dancing across the networks.

Architecture Secrets of the Swiss Re Building (Gherkin) City of London

I have marveled at this structure for years and years, created by what R.G. refers to as "chimps with heads the size of planets," specifically the architectual firm of Foster and Partners.

From So Human An Animal, by Rene Dubos

"Environmental ugliness and the rape of nature can be forgiven when they result from poverty, but not when they occur in the midst of plenty and indeed are produced by wealth."

Timbuk 3 - Just Another Movie

"Now my freedom's bought and paid for,

lights up my living room."

Thom Yorke - Has Ended

My client's water broke from behind the lectern

May it please the Court: "Your honor, my client just sprang a leak." She was wearing blue jeans that would have to be thrown out. I smelled it. The filthy portent of another baby who would would slide from her mother's ninety pound body and require detox before her tiny life begins beneath the canopy of the Tennessee Department of Child Protective Services. My client's wafting filth, her fifth such enterprise. This is Appalachian American Ennui.

Lightning in the Bottleneck

Bottleneck Holler held the Bottleneck creekbed, fed by branches cascading in crevices from coldwater springs inside the Cumberland Mountains. No one dared live in the Bottleneck proper, which consisted of two tapered mountains that formed a killer squeeze, or bottleneck, which formed one of the deadliest places in the woods where we played when we was boys. Legends, (plural), held that one of the many "events" was signaled by an early purr of soon-coming floodwaters that would wash away what progress we might have made by the settler families in the deadly cove. Above the below rained down unionized waterdrops that washed the babies away as the purr rose to the sound of a thousand freight trains pulling ten thousand empty coal hoppers.

Prison Tourism

Maybe I'm too subjective on account of my chosen profession, but I've vexed at what drives subhumans into the world of prison tourism? Prison tourism has to be some kind of indicator of the decline of humanity. I mean people pay money to enter penitentiaries. Exactly who are these people? No doubt they're the gas guzzuling, brain-crippled phat set fixated on serial killers and sick mysteries. But why? Is my astonishment the result of having known too many of these ghosts and their old homes. These are the worst places in the world, for god's sake. I keep coming back to the Why of it.

Ecclesiastes 5:3 - A fool's voice is known by its multitude of words; Ecc 1:18 - For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Excerpt from Conan O'Brien's Mark Twain Prize Acceptance Speech

Wiley Arms Mountain, Wartburg, Tennessee

In the Appalachian region that is defined, not by grant writers or statisticians, but by topography, the vertical becomes the rule, with horizontal the tempering exception.  The rises and falls in the Appalachian nation follow the rise and fall and rise of its denizens.
And, in my youth, Wiley Arms Mountain was a colossal sight from below.
My mommy let me dip my head into the icy mountain water when I was a baby boy and it has kept me nearby.  The smell of dying apples on the ground.  The smell of coal smoke.  My grandmother's intoxicating wafts from the frock folds of her plain and sleeveless house dresses that revealed the black hairs she did not shave beneath her arms on goddamn purpose.  Pork meat.  Creasy Greens from the Emory Riverbed.  Highway 27.  The Cord House.  Coal trucks.  Hollers.  Deep ones.  Mountain Laurel.  That odd sensation that rose when we passed the garage and junk yard just south of town.  My Daddy.  The word, "PENITENTIARY" that I learned so early on.  Shotguns and pistols and more cash money that I have ever seen.  Secrets.  There were secrets in every closet and beneath every made bed.  We mined the hollers to find that dead baby in an empty dynamite box.  These were the tickets torn in two -- I was illegally admitted to an NC-17 cinematic masterpiece that still haunts my many musings.

So now, post modern, post mumblecore, I spend the nanoseconds and half hours reflecting upon "the way things came to be this way."  I now conclude that I cannot ignore the hollers and the shotgun blasts of my youth.  The thrill of the fall.  Clouds came down and misted up the mysterious people who hung tight to the bluffsteep sides of tectonic rises.  I did not then know that I was deep inside the belly of Appalachia.

I would eventually dare to open my eyes under the icy water and look to the rounded creekstones for some meaning.  I would eventually realize that I, too, was in a state of constant change, constant flow.  From whence came the icy water.  I would learn to question the etiology of the flow.  The mountains.  Wiley Arms mountain in particular was my focus.  I remember climbing to a point near the top and being chased away by a large dog with a chain looped around its neck.  What was it guarding?

FORCE MAJEURE by Ruben Östlund (2014) – Official international trailer

Hilarious. At first.

Sufjan Stevens, "Should Have Known Better" (Official Audio)