not bad for a dirty old man

FOR JANE: WITH ALL THE LOVE I HAD,

WHICH WAS NOT ENOUGH:-

I pick up the skirt,

I pick up the sparkling beads

in black,

this thing that moved once

around flesh,

and I call God a liar,

I say anything that moved

like that

or knew

my name

could never die

in the common verity of dying,

and I pick

up her lovely

dress,

all her loveliness gone,

and I speak

to all the gods,

Jewish gods, Christ-gods,

chips of blinking things,

idols, pills, bread,

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad

without a chance,

hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,

I lean upon this,

I lean on all of this

and I know:

her dress upon my arm:

but

they will not

give her back to me.

Charles Bukowski

if she tempts you with her charms

Get it! Tennis do The Zombies

the great stone face

heart-on for Buster Keaton

I wear my sunglasses at night

So The Informers is another movie about rich people behaving badly in 1980s L.A., in the fine tradition of empty '80s adaptations of the equally empty novels of Brett Easton Ellis. I actually like him, for what's it's worth, when I'm in the mood for amoral, coke-fuelled name-dropping and overprivileged kids failing to navigate the basics of human decency. (don't forget the obligatory threesomes!) The shiny surfaces of the Easton Ellis universe can be compelling, so I'm not sure why they've so often failed to translate into good films.

When you have a cast that includes Winona Ryder, Chris Isaak, a mostly naked Amber Heard and Brad Renfro (sigh) it's downright criminal that they don't do anything with them. Although, Lou Taylor Pucci shows up as some kind of physical successor to the best part of Pretty In Pink (outside of Duckie's sweet moves) - and for that we ought to be grateful.

Maybe they should have left in the vampire sublot?

didn't it just

travelling coast to coast

new mixtape!

I got a bad desire

lord knows I love a cover: AA Bondy does Bruce

Actual Air

Imagining Defeat

She woke me up at dawn,
her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels.

I sat up and looked out the window
at the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees.

A bus ticket in her hand.

Then she brought something black up to her mouth,
a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler.

I reached under the bed for my menthols
and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead
in the distance where it doesn't matter

And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,
so far behind his wagon where it also doesn't matter.

except as a memory of rest or water.

Though to believe any of that, I thought,
you have to accept the premise

that she woke me up at all.

- David Berman

'cause punk rock was too hard to sing

Like a million other people I've been kind of off-and-on with my relationship with Ryan Adams over the years. He was real cute when I was in high school and I got heavy into Heartbreaker, all the Whiskeytown stuff that came before. He knew his way around a broken heart and a harmonica. The Love Is Hell EPs. The Winona period. (c'mon now, who hasn't had a Winona phase?). Lots of concert bootlegs. He was prolific but there was always a diamond somewhere. The last record was rare 'cause it didn't have a single song that got me, but oh Ashes & Fire, we are back ON.

Beastie Boys x everyone I've ever loved

so this came out ages ago (April?) and I have no idea why I only just watched it now. The one after it with Santigold and zombie Ken dolls is a total winner as well. Beastie Boys, making music videos worthwhile since the mid '80s.

half-hour version here, aka the best 30 minutes you'll spend all day

Are you a Jackie or a Marilyn?

More words for russh, excuses to look at pictures of beautiful women. Mad Men costume exhibition comes to Australia (in years to come, Christina Hendricks' measurements will be as hotly contested as those of Ms Monroe)

let's take jesus off the dashboard

really into this one, and the new Kathleen Edwards.(pre)summer jams!

also -

I respect a girl who takes style cues from my highschool boyfriend, Stephen Malkmus

I love you, Amy Poehler

Apparently this was her idea

file under: amazing women being awesome

obviously, doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl

I'd like to think I was this on top of things when I was a teenager:

girls ARE running the internet - see rookie.com

fear & loathing in puerto rico

This trailer has many things going for it - the stylings of 1950s Puerto Rico, a semi-fictional account of the birth of gonzo journalism and maybe most importantly, Bruce Robinson behind the camera. In his past life you may have seen him in the background of Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet as Benvolio, or being unbelievably beautiful in Truffaut's L'Histoire d'Adèle H. He's a self described failed actor and thank god for that because he went on to gift us with the black gem of Withnail & I, and is back to capture Johnny Depp channeling Hunter S Thompson for the second time around in The Rum Diary. No one makes inspired lunacy quite so appealing as this unholy trinity.

I love to see the towns go crawling by

I heard this at a party on the weekend for the first time in a really long time and now I've had it on repeat for days. Goddamn it, Cat Power. Her covers are untouchable.

I'm not against collecting stuff

In the mail, the most perfect tee shirt in the world. All you need to know is that it has both Noah Taylor circa Flirting AND Harold & Maude era Bud Cort on it.(Sam has had one for years, natch)

you play that thing one more time, I'm gonna melt it down into hairspray

"1970s Jack Nicholson is THE man. He wins everyone over and gives the appearance of not trying. He walks into the room and pushes the needle off the record player. He looks incredible in clothes. He says something completely terrible and insulting and then is forgiven because he smiles to acknowledge that he knows he is being terrible. What he wants he just takes and if he can't get it he destroys property. He is charming but he is also evil. Are all charming people evil? Isn't that sort of what charm is about?"

One of the best opening titles ever. That SONG.

see also

(FYI correct answer is Jack/Dustin/Warren, obvs)

you're a real cowboy

and while we're on this western kick - hello, Community!

just a country boy that combed his hair

I won't lie -

I like my cowboys via Hollywood. Soundtrack courtesy of Mixtapes for Johanna, as ever

earthquake weather

Ed Ruscha's Every Building On The Sunset Strip

"But the feeling feeling in L.A. that the place was not safe - that hovering earthquake in the air - was why anyone in the trance even came down long enough to learn to thread a camera at all. They had to take their eye off what was probably the apocalypse and invent Theda Bara out of a girl from Cincinatti to make sense out of the light."

(L.A. Woman - Eve Babitz)

Getting my surrogate summer feelings through literary L.A. dreaming with Eve & Joan Didion .

F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.

It's not news that Jarvis Cocker has been my #1 pin-up since high school, and I'm beyond excited to see Pulp in all their seedy cinematic glory at the end of the month. BEYOND. They hold the keys to my musical heart.

forget it, Jake

Roman Polanski's sexual proclivities might make me severely uncomfortable but personal politics aside, Chinatown shouldn't be missed. It's right up there in the sunshine-noir category, west coast crime where the bright light only serves to make the shadows darker. It knocks you out, this dirty tale of conspiracy and corruption set in the dustbowl L.A. of the 1930s, with Faye Dunaway all cheekbones and lipstick as the tightly wound femme fatale (there's always a woman)and a twist as black as they come. Most importantly, this is the film that made me suddenly realise why Jack Nicholson was a bona fide ladykiller back in the day: as J. J. Gittes he is morally dubious, impeccably dressed and ever so attractive. Chalk it up to my ongoing affection for fictional gumshoes perhaps, but there it is.

that obscure object of desire

Speaking of favourite things, Jeffrey Eugenides is finally coming out with a new book! It's been nine impatient years since the gorgeous odyssey of Middlesex, and I've been pining.

"To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic."

— The First Lines of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot via let us read and let us dance

oh boy

JTE covers my favourite Buddy Holly song. Swooning all over the goddamn joint.

the big man

As a good Boss-lovin' girl, I couldn't not tip my hat at Clarence Clemons' sad passing this weekend. As it so happens Saturday night (Sunday morning?) found me twirling in the divey-est of dive bars to Dancing In The Dark with a handsome man, which seems as fitting a tribute as any. Oh Clarence, you were the only sax player I could ever love.

out in Europe, spendin' Euros

the catastrophe of my personality

Don Draper reads Frank O'Hara, the very definition of heaven?

click through to listen

this is all we need: couple of smokes, a cup of coffee and good conversation

Sydney Writers' Festival for russh

reasons to be cheerful:

imminent jetsetting

ladies who speak their mind

Southern noir, courtesy of Justified

(hmmm, cowboys)

he's with the band

I've had this photo on my wall for years, I'm in love with the Keith Richards/Mick Jagger dynamic (Keith: "For some reason Mick has a hard-on about me...") and all the Villa Nellcote stories. I almost like reading about the Stones even more than listening to them. (Almost). What I never realised until today was that my cowboy of choice, Gram Parsons, was all this time sitting there just out of frame. 

And the Keef/Gram relationship is even more interesting. I'm halfway through re-reading Twenty Thousand Roads, a really excellent Gram bio, and I've started in on Keith's reminisces and I'm almost at the point where their two stories start converging. For the time being I'll leave you with the ever-astute Miss Pamela's observings of them, directly after Altamont: "Gram was there, leaning against the wall wearing black leather and eye makeup, nodding out. Keith was wearing cowboy clothes. It looked like they were turning into each other".

(photos by Dominique Tarle)

Debut Album

For the Melbournites here's an art opening worth getting out of bed for: the gorgeous Greedy Hen duo are puttin' on a show. Debut Album launches May 5 at Lamington Drive Gallery before hitting the road to Sydney and NYC. Go early so you can get a spot down the front. (BYO underwear for flinging on stage in the throes of hysteria)

the international language

Crushing out in a major way on the new Gruff Rhys record Hotel Shampoo (more fangirling on it for russh here)

And this song!

my life in boxes

Easter long weekend and I'm in a sea of packing. I'm not in love with moving house.

Maggie the cat

so far away

My BFF has relocated to Toronto, which is basically on the exact opposite side of the world (and up some). And I miss her.

'bout five seconds after her heart begins to break

There are, oh, approximately 1 x million songs called Codeine but this is the one I can't stop listening to. The new single from Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit, and a real heartbreaker.

(free download here)

Further along the same road is the new(ish) one from Isbell's old outfit the Drive-By Truckers, Used To Be A Cop. It kind of sounds like a fever dream, dark and yearning and urgent underneath. In other words: perfect. 

Slim Shadow

"Sam is a good name," I said. "It will work."

he said, "Eat your ice cream, Patti Lee."