hello, world.

Underslept and just surviving this haze of days.

ties.

eating a $5 plate of string hoppers, I think of my father
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

snoozing in front of Seinfeld on the beige on beige recliner
his belly folds after years
of american chop suey, hamburgers and Michelob
Nothing
he really wanted to eat
was ever on the shelves
of Iandolli's or the Big D
I think of that man
who cried three times in my life
once when appamma died
once when our dog died
& once when I sent him
a 99-cent package of tamarind candy
& he called me long distance after Ma went to bed
weeping from tasting tamarind
for the first time in thirty years

you haven't seen enough.

image courtesy museom of dirt.

this is really happening, happening, happening—

you're the one clear detail.

"They're more impressions really, they're fragments. I always saw it as the way that a drunk would see the city, walking through the streets. That seemed to be the key to a lot of the ways that we put text together; it's just these fragments that you're taking, you're picking up on all the time and I think that's the way we all do it anyway, that when we walk down the street, it's made up of fragments that tell us we're in a particular place."

two snakes in a bed.

image courtesy big screen satellite.

A little-known fact about electronic music act Underworld: before the release of their groundbreaking first effort, dubnobasswithmyheadman (a seminal record in the canon of dance music), there was a demo version of this first album that was constructed, then distributed among friends and family of Karl and Rick for feedback before they went back to the studio to finish it off, once and for all, that features a number of tracks that never made it onto the final album. Courtesy the lovely boys at RTSR, I managed to acquire a copy for myself and have been spinning it ever since.

One of the tracks on this demo tape that never made it onto the final record was titled 'Big Meat Show' - available for download here.

'Big Meat Show' makes explicit the overarching themes of wild, delirious sexuality running through dubnobasswithmyheadman - a breathless tribute to the fiercely dirty hedonism of midnineties electronica. A simplistic synthesiser and guitar loop meet the thumping rhythms that Underworld are synonymous with; Hyde's Beat-esque poetics are focused here on a dream of a "waitress working in a restaurant" that immediately delve straight into wild fantasy. She asks him to be on a quiz show, but instead, takes him to a makeup room and "starts kissing him all over". It's sex, viewed through the eye of a lens for the pleasure of voyeurs everywhere. Adult filmstars, channel sixty-nine: it's intensely charged and provocative, almost pornographic. Yet Hyde's lyrics are never explicit: he manages to retain an originality of expression that distunguishes Underworld as one of the most credible acts in dance music.

I find it intriguing (but understandable) that this piece never made it onto the final album - lyrically, it's quite a strong piece, but the very basic progression of the track, musically speaking, let it down - it sounds almost half-finished, and a letdown compared to some of the more polished, stunningly adventurous and original tracks such as 'Dirty Epic' and 'Mmm Skyscraper I Love You'. It's still worth a listen, however, for fans of Underworld, casual and obsessive alike. Mmm, yeah. Turn it up: welcome, one and all.

life's a gun that's always pointing in my face.

A few hours, lost in the alleyways and hallways of the city in the dying light of afternoon, behind the eye of a lens: the best thing I've done for my for my head in weeks.

love, death, and the changing of the seasons.

We are all our own ruin.

beneath the city.

For a minute there, little blog, I'd almost forgotten about you. Long, sleepless nights and endlessly grey days: it's been busy.

But today the sun is shining outside, I spent an hour in the city at quarter to seven, photographing the streets waking up, and things are kind of okay. I'll make the effort to update more often, I promise - armed with a photographic ear and a desire for words that shimmer on page, searching through relentless stretches of streetlit concrete and messes of barbed-wire and steel - beauty in the ugly and abandoned. Old comforts.