and now for something slightly different.

in the series: simon bangs some culture into your unwilling heads, we shall now discuss some new music i got my hands on! yay.

the blow’s new album paper television is way better than their 2003 concussive caress. thalia zedek somehow got her hands on a groovebox, and it shows. her songs are still the cocorosie-on-speed thing they were, but they groove more, and the synthpoppy sounds are fully integrated in her wailing delivery of slightly awry love stories. it’s psapp, it’s cocorosie, but featuring a drunk housewife who hides three bottles of cheap sherry behind the family’s set of reader’s digest books. esp. recommended: ‘bonjour jeune fille’.

the blow might be all about sullen resignation to being single and addicted to vicodin, but deerhunter’s cryptograms plays an entirely different game. this album was apparently made by three colourful, dancing indian totem poles who adore mark e. smith. the first half of the album is rather noisy and unlistenable (unless you like your dose of teen angst well done every now and then), but the second half is rather wonderful, tracking back to slowdive and other ethereal pop, and making for a very nice listen.

in other words, these are both good albums if you like your share of:
a)  percodan and  ‘me, depressed? i’ve never been depressed a day in my life!’-style manic outbursts of swooning pop
b) totems, campfires and early Fall albums.

the abridged ‘the fountainhead’

for your viewing pleasure: ayn rand’s abridged fountainhead.

THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Dominique Francon’s luscious body fluttered with lust as she walked into the Hopton Stoddard Temple For The Human Spirit. Ah, what did it matter if she was a bitch who didn’t do anything right? What did it matter if even her father, that obese pimp, architect and hustler, didn’t love her? Nobody deserved to be loved by her. She gasped as she saw the pinnacle of architecture that blissfully stretched out before her. She needed to find and fuck the Creator of this Temple. Could it be that guy she once instructed to rape her with a slab of marble, that time she was bored in her country house?

YES, it was HIM. She saw his lean and graceful figure sketching… sketches… in one of the corners of this Place of Worship. AH. What should she do? She KNEW, she KNEW. She would sensually demand those losers at that crap newspaper she worked for to DESTROY this man. Mankind wasn’t worthy of him anyway. Look at his autistic satisfaction in DESIGNING things! He needed to be stopped.

Dominique’s insatiable sexual desire was still raging though, so she needed a quick rendez-vous. She decided to marry her father’s associate. Not that he was any good in bed, but what does a girl do when she’s as smart, perfect and shiny as Dominique Francon? Suddenly, Ellsworth Toohey, the famous newspaper columnist, walked in in his usual, sarcastic way.

‘Ellsworth, what are you doing her? I need to go to Reno, Nevada, to get married. Can you give me a ride?’
‘Nah Dominique, I’m busy perfecting my master-plan for world domination,’ Ellsworth exclaimed smirkingly. I’m going to promote a stream of bad books, screenplays and other downright awful influences on society, which will convince the nation that altruism–’
‘Cut it, Ellsworth, I just need a ride and some cocaine,’ Dominique huffed, crouching down submissively, like the sex slave she had become.
‘My dearest, sexual desire is not a reasonable impulse, I myself personally swear by mastur–’

They were suddenly interrupted when Gail Wynand, the grandiose Newspaper Tycoon they both happened to work for, patriarchically burst into the Temple.

‘Who is this bitch? Fire her!’
‘Gail, it’s Dominique Francon. She wants to marry someone.’
‘Why don’t you marry me, Dominique?’
‘Okay then Gail, but I will make your life a hell on earth. You see, I was raped by an architect once, and ever since then I’ve had this slight penchant for SM, and I want to destroy him. Oh what the… I’ll just destroy you in the process. YES! I’LL MARRY YOU! I’m a woman and what else do I want anyway?‘
‘See me care about what you want, Dominique, see me care! Actually I brought this fellow to build me a country house just like the one you were brutally victimized in. Miss Francon, meet Howard Roark.’

It WAS the architect! Dominique didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, Howard Roark autistically started body-painting her.

‘HOWARD! Stop that! This is too much! Not in this place of worship,’ she exclaimed sensually yet unconvincingly, until she laid down on the Temple floor in her usual sarcastic manner. ‘Okay, I know now. I’ve mastered the whole philosophy of objectivism. In the novel I need 800 pages and 23 stages of mind to reach this conclusion, but I think we better just run off together right now. Screw my marriage plans with two different people, this girl just wants to have fun, for this is what all girls automatically want ANYWAY,’ she smirked mockingly.

Wynand’s eyes were capitalistically filled with tears when he proclaimed: ‘Forget about that marriage of ours! Howard, I give you the best wedding present a Tycoon like me could give a Maniac like you: build me a giant phallic symbol! I shall call it the Wynand Building in my own honour…’

And so our friends were united once again, not in the Temple of the Human Spirit, but on the Wynand Building construction site. Wynand watched Roark standing on top of the modernist structure, commanding workers around. He wiped his tears with his sleeve, which in turn was a potent display of the best Harris tweed money can buy. Dominique was pretty tired after 800 pages of self-imposed restraint & abstinence, and started rubbing her nipples under her Laura Ashley top. Everyone was soulless and happy.

THE END

conjugate the verbs.

ha, i was thinking. about what happened saturday night, mainly, since i really don’t remember all that much. also, i think no one will ever love me, since i’ve been listening to the magnetic fields’ 69 love songs again this morning. if that wasn’t enough, when i finally got in class (i managed to miss TWO successive trains), the laoshi was talking about 人生的十字路口, the crossroads you have in your life every now and then, where you have to take decisions. decisive decisions!

so i kind of feel like a complete loser. i studied the wrong thing, have the wrong life and dabble in chemically enhanced illusions of physical grandeur. i’ll become an egghead dilletante with greased-up hair and thick rimmed glasses, waving my sonic youth and stereolab vinyls around while my eccentric clothes flutter around my body, all this to seduce more young asian boys, just like uncle john… zoe… ben… aunt annie…. am i really predestined to become a pretentious, overly intellectual tart?

ah well, so be it. nobody is capable to love anybody either w… must… stop… listening to the magnetic fields. but i can’t. ‘he calls me baby says kiss me like you mean it’ - AH, damn you, stephin and claudia, for conjuring such a beautiful, ideal world up and then snatching it out of our reach.

frenchy i’m faking.

so yesterday evening we went out to ‘celebrate’ the fact that frenchie’s leaving. i will let the pictures speak for themselves. may they tell their own & stupendous story.

this afternoon we went to our sunday institution for brunch, the diner, and to the flower market to adore the cherry blossoms.

and that was just about it. ta ra.

life is a succession…

… of people saying goodbye. so frenchie’s byebye dinner was last night. i don’t know about the others… oh wait yes i do, we will all miss her. HORRIBLY SO. who will dye claire’s hair cyclamen pink? who will chase me to the gym and back? who will get us all together anyway? we are helpless children. schnick schnock bouhou.

to quote aimee mann: maybe it’s one where time will tell, maybe it’s one where it’s just fare-thee-well. unquote: j’attendrai, nuit et jour, j’attendrai toujours,…

no to jackie o.

a new sloganesque campaign in casa claires-and-simon. judge for yourself:

we fight for our right to keep frenchie! yes! she cannot elope to paris! all kinds of 歹徒 men live there, or so i was told. =( it’s like in days of our lives, when marlena goes to maison blanche because stefano imprisoned her there. now if stefano isn’t a villain, WHO IS?

shameless picture time.

when miss wandels tried on something that the queen mother would have approved of:

i rather like this picture, and it gives me something to participate in the current ‘let’s throw mud at each other with compromising pictures on the world wide web campaign’, mercilessly started off by… cough someone who lives with me cough.

ipod = simple pleasure.

i have my iPod back! yayayayay. it looks so much better, and is so much better, than that crap microsoft pod in its irresistible brown and mud green colour combination. BOOO microsoft. we all hate you, commit corporate suicide. eh em. anyway.

sooo, i’ve had some time to listen to good new music. the first track off the lcd soundsystem’s sound of silver, ‘get innocuous’, is a fabulous, stomping mix of bowie in his berlin period, front 242 and giorgio moroder.

my second acquisition, the shins’ wincing the night away, is just a typical shins album, if that’s saying something. i like it, especially ‘australia’ and ’split needles’ (just that poppier than chutes too narrow), but it’s not very surprising. their new use of electronics is surprising though.

last and least as well, sally shapiro’s disco romance. it’s on pitchfork’s best new music list and it’s a bit sordid. sophie ellis-bextor with a swedish accent? raaaahr. and i think i’m in love with a shopkeeper boy.