Our pal Victor Scott stealthily put out his album Good Times in November. Either that, or we just weren't paying close enough attention (sorry, Victor, we've been a bit busy). It's a great album and one song ("High Fructose Corn Syrup") was inspired by our first meeting with the man. It's all Melissa's fault if you get that song stuck in your head. And, if you haven't yet, you can check out his video "Gotta Go" and see us dancing with our cat Mushi Mushi Gila Monster among other things.
So, go pony up the $6 Canadian (which, unfortunately for the Americans in the crowd, is worth more than it used to be).
Love and happiness,
H and M
Other evening highlights: Tori covers! Tori costumes! Tori drag queens! Prizes for Tori Q & A! If you ever wanted to die and go to Tori heaven this is probably the closest you'll ever get, so come one, come all.
One of my favorite song poems ever is called "Junkies and Monkeys" and it's sung by Kay Weaver, who was not only a song poem singer, but a feminist filmmaker! One of the best songs about marijuana use vs. heroin... and I mean that in a good way.*
*We would, of course, never advocate such things as drug use on a blog.
This morning I have been going through the 2007 version of the 365 Days Project. This is how I like to spend quiet mornings... yeah, I know. Anyway, I found the song 9-11 Warning by Wayne and Liz after clicking on their September 11th entry. I'm not sure what to say except it's about 12 minutes long and after listening to it a couple of times I both love it and I still don't know what it's trying to tell me. The post title is from the "song," and is a play--or is it just a misquote?--of Matthew 25:33.
I lurve the 365 Days Project and don't have time to tell you about all that is wonderful there, so spend a quiet morning checking it out (the 2003 stuff is great as well--here's the greatest version of "Love Hurts" ever).
This also reminds me that I've gotta find the mp3 of "Junkies and Monkeys" in our collection and put it up here. Woo boy, it's probably one of the best American Song Poems ever (and the mp3 link on the site hasn't worked in forever, which is a pity).
This is Melissa. I work from home and Hiram doesn't and this alone makes me feel sufficiently guilty enough to make his lunch for him most mornings. Now before you go calling me a hero, you should know Hiram is a man of simple lunch tastes, and generally wants the same thing for weeks on end. Right now he's on a cheese/fruit/crackers kick, and it is the cheese that keeps life exciting.
I used to be one of those what the hell is the big deal about cheese people, but that's before we moved to Portland with all its fancy grocery stores -- I would call them grocery boutiques -- and started having mystery cheese expeditions. Where we are from cheese is not much loved. It comes in big orange bricks or sad pale shreds or peelable tubes. (Though I won't lie: sometimes string cheese hits the spot, and we have hot velveeta with Ro-Tel every New Year's, holy shit that's good.) People out here love their cheese. They love their wine and love their fruit, so it all makes sense. So now we know just how delicious grated Gruyere is, and what a nice sandwich a little Gouda makes: your cheese basics.
But it's mystery world cheese that's the best fun. We buy it in tiny bricks to see if we'll like it and because it generally costs more than dental work. This week in mystery cheese, we got a nice Emmental from Switzerland. Real Swiss cheese! It has holes and everything. It's a bit rubbery, but with that familiar sweet Swiss cheese flavor with a nice higher taste behind, sort of Gruyere-y, which makes sense since Gruyere is also Swiss. It goes well with raspberries.
But that is not the big cheese story. That is something New Seasons calls Queso Baaaa from Spain, which I think is just a funny name for Queso Fresco. What a goddamn cheese! It's the texture that makes it: spongy and light, almost like a firmer angel cake, and as white. So sweet, so mild, so good. It's making me crazy, this cheese. It's a mix of cow, sheep, and goat milk -- is there nothing miscegenation cannot make more delicious? -- and the best thing about it is how clean it tastes, with none of that stink mouth some of your fancy moldy cheeses tend to impart. I don't care if no one ever reads this, because I'm not writing it for anyone else. I never want to forget this sweet lovely taste.
Hi, this is Melissa and you should stop whatever you're doing and read Poor People by William T. Vollmann, whom I love because he is such a wounded tough guy mensch and so brave. I love him because he loves people made invisible by hunger and disease and criminal pursuits and lost causes best. I love him and no less so because he is unafraid of exclamation points and uses them with extraordinary grace.
I would be a member of the Vollmann club except that I have not seen the man with my own two eyes. That seems a little mean, Vollmann club, but it's your damn club so I can't complain. I will instead be a Vollmann club of one, me and my dusty set of Rising Up and Rising Down, which because of my far less brave nature I can only digest in small sips, like a kid trying to impress his peers drinks whiskey. Membership is open and free as a bird.
An excerpt, from a chapter titled Numbness:
That woman from besieged Sarajevo who told me that because she lost a friend a week she'd grown numb to death, in her phrase cold to it, resembled the little girl whose mother compelled her to play the piano for hours and hours, setting back the clock for this failure and that lapse. If one asked her how the practice had been for that day, the child would cheerfully, sincerely say, sometimes with the tears still wet on her cheeks: Great! --Well, aside from a few Stoics, don't we all do the same? We believe, for instance, in saving for the future, but in the future we'll be skeletons. We look forward to the weekend, meaning that we seek to overlook much of the remaining five-sevenths of life. When survival requires drudgery (or, if you prefer, when labor becomes alienated), then experience can be improved by further diminishing consciousness, either selectively or entirely. Does the patient prefer a local or general anesthetic? As helpful as the Stoic approach may be when anesthetic is absent, wouldn't most of us rather have the choice? The one who refrains, do we admire him or find him freakish?
(I should also mention in relation to the previous post that I know perfectly well who sang "Girl Don't Tell Me." It's just that I enjoy marital vaudeville to an unseemly degree.)
Scene: M and I driving while Summer Days and Summer Nights!! plays. "Girl Don't Tell Me" comes on.
M: Who is this?
H: The Beach Boys.
M: This sounds like every song that guy from the Shins* has ever written.
H: Huh, you're right.
*We have nothing against The Shins, they're fine. It probably helps that I refused to watch that horrible Zach Branff movie. Also, instead of the "Ticket to Ride" break, they probably would have stuck some sweeping Echo and the Bunnymen strings or something. Still, I can't hear this song without seeing in my mind James Mercer instead of Carl Wilson singing. Damn you Melissa and your astute observations!
Hey look, it's a new video from The Harvey Girls. This one is for the song "Faster Peach" from our EP Declinate, which you can download at SVC Records (all proceeds go to RAINN). This one is cat free, although Mushi was a little hacked off by that (freaking ingrate). Actually, the original youtube video that we used is here, in case you were wondering. Hooray for crappy editing software!
In other news, we've finished another EP (almost album, missed it by a minute and some change), which is being mastered by our pal Steve and includes help from DJ Sku and the newly relocated Approach (along with genius drumming from our pal Brent Piepergerdes) and we're playing out again soon with new songs written with the help of Josh and Matt. Yay us! Also, the long worked-on collaborative EP between The Harvey Girls and Feedle is in the mixing stage. We'll stick up a song soon. Yay us again! Also also, our pals Wow and Flutter are finishing up an album that may or may not include some singing and sax playing by us (we recorded it, we're just not sure they're using it). Yay W&F!
With love,
THG
So, the other day while heading for the bus, I needed something to read since I just finished Saramago's Seeing (not as good as Blindness, but there's a speech by a president in it that reads exactly like one from Dubya and it creeped me out a bit). Anyway, I see Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird and grab it. I didn't know anything about it really, except that it was a book about WWII and the Holocaust/Shoah. Here's my literarily-minded review if you haven't read it:
FUCKING DON'T READ IT.
I've read some disturbing books, but this one disturbs me more than anything I've ever read. If alternately wanting to cry and throw the book out the window (I can't, it's Melissa's copy), feel free. Read it. Man. Holy hell. It makes Blood Meridian, The Wasp Factory, The Butcher Boy, or Yonnondio read like Beverly Freaking Cleary (did you know there's a Beverly Cleary sculpture garden in Portland? Yeah, we've got to go sometime). It makes Apollinaire's satirical pr0n look like Punch and Judy.
Of course, I'll have to finish it since I'm already half way finished.
--Hiram
