I'm regular, I'm treble kicked


Richard Prince, Untitled (check painting) #11, 1999–2004

* Nuemu discusses the Silver Jews. berman:

-- "In my experience as a reader of interviews, the focus is rarely on the songs. If you laid all the different issues of Rolling Stone, with hot young actresses on the cover, side by side on the bathroom floor, and spattered them with spermdrops you'd have the underlying agenda of nearly all entertainment reportage revealed at your feet. Except what gets written in Blender. That shit's for real."

-- "If there was a call to do so I could write hundreds of pages of footnotes to the songs I've written, sourcing the images and references to things I've experienced or read about."

-- "Songwriting is, much of the time, like addressing a crowd. Writing poetry is like passing a note inside that crowd."

excerpt:

-- "Malkmus, whose wandering guitar is all over the co-written 'Farmer's Hotel,' was waiting for his first child to be born during the recording sessions. 'I had bought this 99-cent jug of water at the drug store,' said Berman, when asked about the father-to-be. 'It was a clear plastic gallon jug with a picture of a baby and the brand name Baby Water in faux crayon. I just had it because it was weird. It was on my workbench and he kept drinking from it during smoke breaks. I finally noticed and called him out on it. I sent a six-pack of it to his baby when she was born.'"

* Harold Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech. excerpt:

"Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

"I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

"'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

"A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician."

* Rejected, Spike Jonze directed, ad for the gap.

* In DC? Seahorse Staircase opens up for Mike Tamburo tomorrow night at 611 Florida.

* "anti-semitism, like patriotism, is the last refuge of a scoundrel." -- lou reed