lullabies for the broken

premedicated meditation / amniotic crack
the most wounded, wounded deer
I Like America, America Likes JB (song for a caged coyote)
William Cowper's theory of fluid intelligence

Softer World
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The Flatmates- I Could be in Heaven
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"Breakfast in cemetery
Boy tastin wild cherry
Touch girl, apple blossom
Just a boy playin possum"
Beat Happening
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A Softer World Web Comic
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Lydia Lunch Interview

Michel (shelly) Borsits aka The Raw Artist®
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Jeffrey Lewis- A history of punk rock on the new york lower east side
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"I should love to do a novel... about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself."
Patricia Highsmith
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Obsessive Consumption
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Matmos-Snails and Lazers for Patricia Highsmith

Chris Getliffe
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Dustin's Bar Mitzvah- To the Ramones
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"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade or quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashed back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only."
-George Eliot
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Sissy-unreleaced last issue of Sassy magazine (now Blair)
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Ishmael by Daniel Quinn audiobook

(Follow video responces for the entire audiobook)
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Cute Band Alert! podcast
Go into iTunes and select podcast from the left hand side menu then from the top menu select advanced and choose 'Suscribe to podcast...'. In the pop up box paste http://playlist.citr.ca/podcasting/xml/cutebandalert.xml. Alternatively click here and select Cute Band Alert
from the eclectic section

Kid Koala
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The Pooh Sticks- Dying For It (Vaselines Cover)
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"The rule of that law was and is sufficient. Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world."
-Daniel Quinn
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Laura Groves Myspace Page
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Kid Koala Video

Maison Martin Margiela
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Gregory and the Hawk- Victorians (8 Track Demo)
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Elizabeth: He told me afterwards in terms of absolute value, sex and drugs were equally meaningless to him. Just two different ways to have fun. Which is all well and good, until a girl tries out the same approach.
Prozac Nation (film)
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RPM Challenge- Make an Album in Febuary
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Bearsuit- Steven F@@@ing Speilberg

-Aya Kato
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Parva- Good Bad Right Wrong
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"Right now, the mightiest meme striving to catch fire in the public imagination is the idea that we have to take this toxic, top-down corporate cool that we’ve been living in for so long, and replace it with a new kind of non-commercial cultural currency – a new kind of cool – one that bubbles up spontaneously from the everyday lives of people.

To some degree, we’ve all been conditioned by the consumer cool machine. From when we were babies crawling around the TV set in our living rooms, we’ve been lied to, hyped, propagandized, branded. As teenagers, we had our brains pickled by bogus erotic titillations, celebrity-driven marketing ploys, mindfuck ads that undermined our self-esteem. Now millions among us are hyperactive, anxious, moody, depressed. For years, the WHO has been warning us about the growing epidemic of mental illnesses washing over us; in reports like the The Global Burden of Disease (1999), doctors predicted that depression will become the second most debilitating disease in the world, right after heart disease. In many countries, the evidence has borne this out.

Our social and political lives are also suffering from an onslaught of systematically distorted information. One of the most sickening examples of this is how Exxon Mobil (the #1 corporation in the world) has used its financial might to misinform the public on global warming. In 2005, Exxon gave $2.9 million to 39 groups in the US that deny the reality of global warming – that’s in addition to the $15 million it has been giving out to shady spokespeople since 1998. This finely orchestrated smear campaign has delayed action against global warming by at least ten years. Similar distortions of critical information are happening right across the board, from the way information is kept secret by corporations and governments, to the way we have become coaxed into overconsuming unhealthy foods, to the way we are coerced into fighting wars.

Can we opt out of this theater of the absurd? Restore our clarity of mind? Learn to feel again? Sure we can, but it will take a movement to do it – a radical new way of looking at culture. Who generates it? Who controls the information flows? Who creates the meaning and to what ends?

One essential part of the movement must be a new science of the ecology of mind – a discipline to monitor and measure what is happening in our heads: the jolts, the shocks, the infotoxins, the erosion of empathy. As we develop this new science, we will come to the realization that infodiversity is every bit as vital to our long-term survival on this planet as biodiversity.

Fifty years ago, a bunch of fired-up visionary writers and documentary filmmakers shocked us into realizing that our natural environment was dying, and this realization launched a wave of environmental activism that changed the world. Now, the time has come for a generation of culture jammers and creatives to shock us with the realization that we are also dying mentally and culturally, and thus to launch another movement to change the world. As journalist Sally Kempton once wrote, it’s hard to fight an enemy that has outposts in your head. If we want to win this battle for the mind, our first task will be to take those outposts back."
-Kalle Lasn (written for Adbusters magazine)
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Adbusters magazine
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Ladyfuzz Documentary

Stairwells January Mix


LULLABIES FOR THE BROKEN

Includes- 1- Regina Spektor, 2-Broken Spindles, 3- Maximo Park, 4- Arab Strap, 5- Mu, 6- Gentle Wave, 7- Black Box Recorder, 8- The Pastels (remixed), 9- Looper,10- The Indelicates, 11- Patrick Wolf, 12- Saint Etienne, 13- Cocorosie, 14- Looper

Phil Frost
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The Moldy Peaches- Bunny Foo Foo
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" I'm drifting
I go nowhere
because love is not as obvious
my map then will be constructed from aromas,
undetectable coffee shops, mood altering alleyways.
I visit routes as you visit lovers.
Stairwells... for wishes and secret messages to you.
Distance implies respect - now let's move a little
closer... it's a GIRL/BOY thing- a QUEER thing that
alienates all those who detest difference.
It's a personalisation of politics and the
politicisation of personal.
The soundtrack: rocket launches and the Guns of
Naverone.
It's the desirable state of emergency and the future is
ours now.
CAN SUCH A WEAPON AS YOU AND ME BE DISMISSED AS MERE
NUSANCE?
-Huggy Bear
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Artkip art magazine
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Lenore

Jeffrey Brown
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Kat Flint- Fearsome Crowd
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"So I talked to Geneviève and almost cried when she said
That the giant on the cliff wished that she was dead
And the lemmings on the cliff wished that they were dead
So the giant told the lemmings why they ought to live instead

When she thought up all those reasons that they ought to live instead
It made her reconsider all the sad thoughts in her head
So thank you Geneviève, cause you take what is in your head
And you make things that are so beautiful and share them with your friends

We all become important when we realize our goal
Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole
And yeah, rock and roll is fun, but if you ever hear someone
Say you are huge, look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky"
- Kimya Dawson (I Like Giants)
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Jeffrey Brown Strips
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Death Cab For Cutie- Your Heart is and Empty Room video (directed by Jeffrey Brown)

Henri Michaux
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Field Mice- Between Hello and Goodbye
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“And opening my eyes I am afraid of course
to look--this inward look that society scorns--
Still I search in these woods and find nothing worse
than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns.”
-Anne Sexton quote
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Boy Least Likely To blog
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Before Sunrise

-Unknown
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Nico- These Days
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"People can be cruelly changed by sudden fortune. My dismissal from JT's inner circle had hurt. But it was so long ago. Two years past, I had sent him a copy of my new book, and asked if he would like to comment on it. I had never asked him for anything before, and like most writers, I dreaded asking my peers for compliments.
But such favors are something publishers beg authors to do... to ask your pals who have a buzz if they would say a kind word about your new project. It makes a significant difference in sales. I'd done it for him, and hundreds of others.
After I sent him my book, Mommy's Little Girl, with a note, he called me up, whacked, late at night.
"Oh my god, your book, it's the most incredible thing I've ever read in my life! Oh Susie!" Then there was a lot of gasping and mewing, as if we were crowded into a Studio 54 toilet. Then the line went dead.
I snorted. I think my book is quite good, but it's not the most incredible thing I've ever read in my life, and I'm sure it's not Leroy's eternal flame. My impression was that he hadn't read it at all.
I emailed him in the morning to ask if he could write down a line, however modest, that I could send to my publisher.
I never heard from him, and I was too embarrassed to ask any further. I knew he didn't need my help anymore to tell him his work was good, that his spelling was fixable, that I believed in him. At one time he was comforted to know that I had faith in him, that he could survive and flourish, despite HIV, his own personal demons, the works. But he didn't need anything from me anymore.
Then, in October, JT wrote and asked me to help fundraise for his son's private French immersion school, Lycee Francais La Perouse, the most prestigious and expensive grade school in San Francisco.
THUD.
I had just come from a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser before I opened my mail. JT's plea to support his dream of higher education seemed... just plain high.
In the years since I first knew him, JT had made film and book deals galore, with celebrities fawning at every gesture. I felt like writing him and asking if he'd like to donate to my gas bill, which is suffering more of a hit than Lycee Francais's current endowment fund.
But I didn't write back. I didn't want to say I felt ignored and used, because I felt silly that I had ever thought it was anything more than that.
JT never forced me to help him; I wanted to! He never took an interest in me, so why would I imagine he would change? It's not unusual for kids with abandonment and abuse backgrounds to be narcissistic. I blamed myself for being attracted to those qualities. He pushed my rescue buttons, which are large and soft. It was me who needed to change.
The week after this incident, which I told no one about, the hoax story came out in New York magazine.
I sat at my laptop reading it, with my mouth hanging open. It turns out JT is: a woman near my age named Emily Albert.
Ms. Albert actually DOES know me, because we worked together on an erotic spoken word album in the early '90s called Cyborgasm. The mind reels. No wonder s/he seemed so familiar with my work.
Emily Albert, not looking a thing like her protagonist, has all this time arranged for her blonde sister-in-law, her husband's kid sibling, to "play" the role of JT in public. This explains why the "Physical Version of JT" always sounded like an inarticulate boob in public, because it really isn't Emily, who has a way with words.
All the money from JT's work has gone to Emily's family, a corporation in her mother's name. Emily certainly does have a son in private school, which explains why "JT" acted more conventionally bourgeois and maternal about "his kid" than any teenage homeless runaway I ever met.
I have never been frauded by an author before, and I have to say, it feels like a punch in the stomach."
-Susie Bright on JT Leroy

"julian said...
Pretentious hipper than thou fame whores get fooled by faux-transgender transgressive bullshitter who knew how to press all the right buttons.
This is the way the literary world ends.
Phonies kissing the arses of phonies.
Seems a long way from genuine literature, don't it.
Yanno what? I really AM transgendered, FTM gay male ID'd.
I really AM an incest survivor.
And I really AM a writer. And a damn good one.
None of this has jack shit to do with kissing up to Carrie Fisher, Dave Eggers, or Susie Bright. Not now, not ever.
If pretending these people are anything is the price of admission, keep the ticket.
Here's a concept none of these people have one nano-clue about:
Integrity.
They are pathetic. All of them. The conned and the con(s). Even more pathetic is what they say about sorry gotta use the quotes "literary" writing in our gotta use 'em again "cultural landscape" (shitescape is more like it.)
Last time I felt this gloomy was when someone told me Tom Hanks is our greatest living actor. No, wait, when a trite piece of dung like "Brokeback Mountain" is praised as groundbreaking. No, wait, when people acted surprised King Kong didn't rival "Titanic" at the box office. No, wait, when they made a movie of the musical of the movie of "The Producers" where you were actually supposed to believe the painfully bad duo of Lane and Broderick were fit to pick TP dingleberries off the arses of the great comic geniuses Mostel and Wilder.
Sad little times, sad little people. It's the pictures that have got small."
Taken from Blog comment on leftcoastbreakdown
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Microcosm Publishing Zine Distro
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Tilly and the Wall- Sing Songs Alone video

-Tokidoki
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Skinned Teen- Pillow case kisser
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"Mathew: I was one of the insatiables. The ones you'd always find sitting closest to the screen. Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh. Before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us. Before they'd been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator; until worn out, secondhand, the size of a postage stamp, it returned to the projectionist's cabin. Maybe, too, the screen was really a screen. It screened us... from the world. "
- The Dreamers film
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tokidoki
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Cloud Room Documentary

Peter Callasen
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Help She Can't Swim- Are You Feeling Fashionable
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"This writing is all fake (copied from other writing) so you should go away and not read any of it."
-Kathy Acker
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This is Fake DIY music reviews
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Unknown-Fire (Kimya Dawson Cover)

Unknown
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Gay Unicorn- Gay Against You
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"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
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Twee Grrrl Share riot grrrl/ indie pop community
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The Bobby McGees- Kill Yourself

Craig Thompson
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568- We Got Bored
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"My desire to write has presently been consumed by my desire to understand — and perhaps anticipate — what is going on.
At present, I know a lot.
I know more than I have ever known in my life about U.S. history, foreign policy and domestic policy.
I know names, dates, places, events.
But I have not felt much like writing, even though I know very well what kind of book I should write. I have been working on it for three years.
Pointlessness is my biggest enemy.
According to the freaky little white men running the show right now, my job as an American is not to concern myself with big, faraway things like the rest of the world. My job is not even to concern myself with my country. Most certainly, my job is not to spend endless hours scouring the Internet for actual news, and piecing together the fragmented hints reported in the mainstream “media.”
My job is to consume the products that the world produces for me at breakneck speed, in sweatshops where folks are fired for failing a mandatory pregnancy test, or killed for trying to organize a union. My job is to watch teevee and allow it to shape my view. My job is to keep on the look-out for suspicious Muslims in my neighborhood.
If I adhered better to my job description, the desperation and pointlessness that haunts me would surely go away.
Conversely, part of the pointlessness I experience is directly related to how very well my fellow Americans are following the freaky little white man’s idea of a job description.
We are ass-deep in shit, but the “media” keeps telling us that new, improved, compassionate shit no longer stinks. A gaping disparity between the daily myth and the daily reality is producing a form of collective schizophrenia."
-Inga Muscio
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Brain Love TV- Indie Music Videos
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Germlin- YOUTH PIXXEL live