New Breed of Pig

In a pet store; overlooking puddles of newborn animals. They’re huddling little piglets, pink fur with dark brown and black spots. They squirm and warm-up against each other. They start like red mice babies and grow into their crucial period where their short and soft fur is as dirty pink as their skin.

“The babies are used for fur. They line jackets, purses, and gloves.” I was horrified. The pet store was a ranch, a breeding ground for these animals to use their skins as fabric. “Not only are they useful in the creation of couture but they are a delicacy among the Chinese youth.”

Outside, on the street, I saw two young girls in school uniform walk by gnawing on the open neck of one of these piglets. The heads are removed, their necks soft, juicy and sweet. Like an ice cream cone but for winter.

Challengers

Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum! I smerll der blud of an Engrishman. Whaddya know? If you haven't heard this album (or bloody own it) then you better well should. As a friends of mine told me in the strictest of confidence: "Don't worry about the state of the world. The New Pornographers!" and that's about it.

Highlights? The whole disc is special. Lately I listen to it on the shuttle bus when I'm clearing the heights of the oil-rich San Francisco Bay, gliding over the lubricated surface on a bridge about to come down. It's magic.

Buy it. The New Pornographers: "Challengers"

5.6

I skipped class last night. I had to. I’m in school for writing and I haven’t written anything meaty in weeks. Lately I’ve been oversaturated with the amount of reading I’m supposed to be keeping up with. So I skipped class, went home to write and rest.

I was in the kitchen, cutting up a baguette before it went stale to eat with hot salami and Manchego. I was slicing through the bread and I heard the Jesus fountain on the fridge shaking against the coffee maker. I thought to myself, Christ I must be really cutting this up pretty hard. Then I noticed the fridge itself shaking. I thought, what the hell is exploding or trying to come out of there? Then, from her bedroom, Erica exclaimed that it was an earthquake and that’s when I felt the floor tremble and the sound of everything around me rumbling against each other. We both made our way for the doorframes and waited. I felt dizzy, like vertigo.

The quake went on for a few more seconds after that, the dizziness didn’t subside right away. We were both excited to get the report on its magnitude and where it struck. KRON 4 interrupted the Dr. Phil broadcast of people with body dysmorphic disorders and spent the rest of the hour discussing the 5.6 tremble that happened 9 miles out of San Jose.

What I love about earthquakes is their unexpectedness; you never know when they’re coming. When they do, you don’t know how long they’ll last or where the epicenter was. We’ve felt stronger quakes in our apartment before but they had been so close (practically just below us).

This was the first one that was far away and yet we still felt it. Last night’s quake was also the strongest in the Bay Area for a while.

Michael? Who's Michael?

As I walked through Yurba Buena, past the Moscone Center, I heard three whistles come from behind me. Then, “Is that you, Michael?” was screamed at me by a woman. “Swinging your butt on the wrong side of the street?” I chose not to turn around. I don’t know anyone around here, especially who would be up at 7:30 in the morning. As traffic roared by the voice kept screaming and I realized that the person must be crazy.

I got to the light at 4th Street and waited. Then the woman came up from behind me saying something about how she doesn’t know who I am or knows that I don’t know who she is, talking to no one in particular. Ignoring walk signals, she made her way into the intersection, stopping a van. The driver said something to her and she turned back with a “Whore! Bitch!” and crossed 4th. I crossed and made a left, to avoid running into her again.

After a few blocks, on Folsom and 5th, she walked up to me. “Do you know where Bryant Street is?” she asked me. I asked her if it was up that way, closer to Market, unsure. She said no. I looked towards the freeway and said, “Oh yeah, it’s two block down that way.”

With her arms crossed, she thanked me and walked on.

Nagamuko is a Eunuch

A.G. let Nagamuko out. He left the screen door open. He’s living with us now, we forgot to tell him which cats can stay in and which can be put outside. We lived in a big, white farm house. It was evening and there were cats all over the lawn. The grass was slightly overgrown, lush and wet. Trees with Spanish moss, perhaps. I saw Nagamuko running with other cats like him, orange and striped. From a distance, I watched Noggi run and jump up at Andrew, swatting at his face. I went to chase him.

Noggi turned into a boy wearing khaki shorts and a khaki shirt. He looked like Prince Harry with his strawberry blonde hair, pale skin but in a Boy Scout uniform. I said, “I’m sure glad you changed into a human because now I can tell you why we have to keep you inside.”

He said, “What does ‘fixed’ mean?”

“Why are you fixed?” I asked.

“Yes, what does that mean?”

“It means your man-tubes have been cut off.”

Proof (2004)

Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hope Davis
April 28, 2007



Another movie about tons of notebooks and the obsessive people that write in them. When I see movies that involve a character writing all the time in composition notebooks, “Seven” for instance, I immediately want to go out and buy a pile of them myself. From there I’ll write into retirement like a burning clipper ship on the horizon. There’s something very satisfying in those bound, almost square books that spiral notebooks can’t come close to. Also, being left handed, spiral notebooks are difficult to use without branding yourself with hieroglyphs of red, continuous dashes.

Are your friends and family really real? Can a cute guy with a PhD in Mathematics secretly have a crush on you, and stick around even during your craziest moments and still exist? Ask yourself these questions. A beautiful house. Books piled in the hallway. People without actual jobs. Working through a comfortable night. Even the crazies are well groomed with clear skin. I want an older sister to fly in like a mother hen and buy me a little black dress.

Too many facial close-ups. Why use widescreen when you’re going to fuzz out the background only to focus on the perfect, statuesque alignment of Gyllenhaal’s mouth or Davis’s hair? I can see all that on dlisted. If I worked on set design I would’ve wanted a full, actorless walk through of the house that Jack built in the Special Features section. Oh, and BTW, can Davis do any wrong? I’m right now in the kitchen, melting all the gold I’ve stolen over the years (watches, lockets, teeth) and constructing an award better than the Oscar. I’ll call it Betsy and it’ll be a hermaphrodite donkey standing inside a crystalline orchid. Betsy will stretch out on her tip-toes, extend out her arms. Held in her manicured hooves will be a revolving star that will measure barometric pressure and shed gold sparks when thunderstorms are approaching. I’ll give this statue to Hope Davis as thanks for being in “Proof.”

Dream Diary: The Last Train and Instant Rice

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Originally uploaded by Covet Canyon.

I was in an underground train station. This particular stop was similar in construction to 12th Street BART station (imagine a place slightly Escher) except orange, yellow and cream colored. Two men behind me were speaking Russian or some other Eastern European language. I decided to take the stairwell to the right which, I already knew, required me to duck a little. Why would they make this stairwell so short? You'd have to be 5'9" to pass comfortably, I thought to myself. I descended the stairs and went to duck but the slanted ceiling had gotten shorter. I had to put my bag down, lay on the ground, and slide on the tile to get into the stairwell. Making it down the stairs was just as tight. The passage became smaller. I could see the train tracks and I was pulling myself through the passageway. I was very thankful that the walls, ceiling and stairs had recently been polished which allowed me to not get stuck. At one point I wondered if I'd even fit and make it out the other end.

Once on the platform I decided to make instant rice. As I put the rice on, the final train arrived which I needed to take. I got in the final car, expecting there to be a box of rice (usually someone always leaves a box of instant rice behind on the final car of the last train) but there was none. I sat down and looked at the people around me. There was a guy sleeping in a bunker. He had taken this train all the way from New York and he was going to the University of Southern California, at least that's what his hat said. He had a bureau, an alarm clock, and a television. I wondered what that must be like, riding in the train across the country. What did he do all day? I knew he was on the final days of his journey that must've taken a week.

Outside the window I could see leaves and brush. The sun was shining bright and yellow. We were moving at a very slow pace. I could hear the rhythmic thudding of the train's wheels on the tracks.

At the Checkout

At the Checkout
Originally uploaded by smartsetpix.

80 Carolina parking lot, around five o’clock, cool and cloudy skies. My cousin Andrea walks from her car and into the building to work. “I didn’t know you’d work this late,” I said. Our desks were supermarket check-out stands. Our computers were where the cash register should’ve been. K. A. demonstrated how this new set-up was going to work.

Monday Morning, Riding The Bus

The page of the book I’m reading (Geraldine Kim: Povel) glows in a fragment of peach-light. I’m on a comfortable and smooth-riding bus and it’s seven-thirty in the morning. The top half and tips of the Port of Oakland crate movers are covered in thick and gray fog. Greens and Reds, coming mostly from the logos of metal shipping boxes and stop signs, are vibrant and alive. when I decide to stop reading a paragraph and look out the window I see that sunlight finds the cracks and crevices in the clouds. Ships and barges from this distance look like model toys. The sun’s light glows ominous. Itself is reflected in the bay’s water as if it were an omen, the approach of a boiling comet that’s specifically reaching for San Francisco; a city asleep in its own gray doldrums.

Today's Playlist

The Cardigans: Long Gone Before Daylight
Whiskeytown: Pneumonia
Some Girls: Crushing Love
The Blake Babies: God Bless The Blake Babies

Today's Playlist

Mazzy Star: Among My Swan
The mix I made for Brendan that I haven’t mailed yet
Tribe: Abort
The Breeders: Pod

Today's Playlist

Broadcast: Tender Buttons
Gorillaz: Demon Days
The Mendoza Line: Full of Light and Full of Fire
Madonna: Confessions on a dancefloor

People Were Cutting Themselves!

“During the recent sidewalk redo, Rodeo Drive ‘looked like a war zone; there were piles of dirt for six months,’ said Bijan's assistant manager, Marjan Townsend. ‘People were cutting themselves’ on construction debris as they walked.” – LA Times, Seeing Granite as a Paving Grace, Bob Pool, August 25, 2006.

I would link the rest of the story but the L.A. Times website won't let me get to it. I'm I got to it when I did. Rodeo Drive wants to tear up the runway of their walk and add slabs of granite. I know the homeless faction is pissed. Have you ever tried sleeping on granite on a cold, LA night?

I bet someone's Prada shoes would sound like claps of thunder on a piece of mineral like that though.

But, that quote is the best. I see tanned skin, gold lame, rivulets of blood.

Today's Playlist

Death Cab For Cutie: Plans
Rufus Wainwright: Want One
Madonna: Confessions on a dancefloor
Hole: Celebrity Skin

Today's Playlist

Cat Power: The Greatest
Whiskeytown: Stranger’s Almanac
Rasputina: Thanks For The Ether
Curve: Pubic Fruit
The New Pornographers: Mass Romantic

Epistolary #1

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Originally uploaded by Covet Canyon.

Come home now, we're all waiting.
The family has noticed that the artichoke dip is getting cold.
Leave the holy wars behind.
It's not good on the gums.
Battles of your caliber cause shin splints.
There is nothing on television and we need your DVD collection.
Love, Mom.

Today's Playlist

Liz Phair: my own B-side mix
Neko Case: Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Radiohead: OK Computer
Pet Shop Boys: Fundamental
Liz Phair: Somebody’s Miracle

Today's Playlist

Trembling Blue Stars: The Seven Autumn Flowers
Liz Phair: Whip-Smart
Neko Case: Furnace Room Lullaby
His And Her Circumstances: Act 1.0
Lucinda Williams: Essence

Today's Playlist

Death Cab For Cutie: Plans
Radiohead: Amnesiac
Aimee Mann: self-made mix
Ladytron: Witching Hour

Today's Playlist

Lucinda Williams: Essence
The Sundays: Static & Silence
Liz Phair: Whip-Smart
The Prissteens: Scandal, Controversy and Romance
Cranes: Forever