Month: June 2018

Cover up – Random gum of July 2018 soundtrack

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Cover up – Got just enough to cover you – Random gum – July 2018
www.comraderadmila.com / Follow me on Spotify

01 Alberteen – “We Are the Mods”
Big thanks as usual to Ade – never in the same place. One of my favorites from Alberteen
02 U.S. Girls – “Rage of Plastics” …there’s no telling how long you’ll be paying…
Relatable sadness and all the nods to plastic. “There are scores of us born in the silent spring/Whose wombs won’t take, won’t bear anything”
03 Alice Skye – “Friends with Feelings” …I hope that tomorrow/won’t be like today, anyway…
04 Depeche Mode – “Cover Me” …Way up here with the Northern Lights/beyond you and me/I dreamt of us in another life/one we never reached…
Memories of some entirely other life. “Better take cover…”
05 Flesh for Lulu – “Postcards from Paradise” …And I fell under your spell/And I lay where I fell…
Weird memories of junior high school and that awkward, fragile friendship with Terra; had no idea until right now that the lead singer died about three years ago
06 Ultra Vivid Scene – “The Whore of God”…But a kiss on the lips is far too much for anyone…
This is like a taste of sophomore year in high school, the weekends of Leighanne, Gary and Terra
07 Bruce Springsteen – “Cover Me” …Promise me baby you won’t let them find us/Hold me in your arms, let’s let our love blind us…
I have no real love, but plenty of respect, for Springsteen, but the ‘cover’ theme must be covered, right?
08 Huri Sapan – “Karanfil Ocak Ocak”
A Turkish delight, naturally. I love how unnatural this sounds directly after Springsteen
09 Julia Jacklin – “Cold Caller” …Will I be a mother or will I always be a child?…
Oh, Julia among Julias. One of my favorites lately. “And some cold caller decides I’m not Ready to change Oh what if my body is but my mind remains the same?”
10 Trashcan Sinatras – “Obscurity Knocks” …Owner of this corner and not much more…
For SD rocking the Maryhill Tesco – but happily not shirtless
11 Love and Rockets – “Ball of Confusion” …Eve of destruction, tax deduction, city inspectors, bill collectors/Solid gold in demand, population out of hand, suicide/Too many bills, everyone movin’ to the hills/People all over the world are dying in the war…
Perfect for these tragic, confusing, bombastic times
12 TV on the Radio – “Love Stained”
“In the middle of the night, when fear comes calling/Singin’ it all dies, awfully scared, alone/I’m looking into your eyes to feel your call/Pretty thing that catches me so strong when I fall”
13 The Shacks – “Blue & Grey”
“What did you really mean to say?/I’m tired of waiting because/All we have is blue and grey”
14 Brandi Carlile – “The Joke”
“Let ’em laugh while they can/Let ’em spin, let ’em scatter in the wind/I have been to the movies, I’ve seen how it ends/And the joke’s on them”
15 The Fernweh – “The Liar”
Liverpool
16 Coco Morier – “No Pressure” …Let’s mess around…
17 AURORA – “Life on Mars”
Because I don’t know that we’ll ever know how to live without Bowie, though he got out just in time
18 Peter Perrett – “How the West Was Won” …If I ever get really depressed/I’ll download Tor, buy a suicide vest/Leave a dirty bomb at a Wall Street address/Gatecrash a Rothschild party and leave it in a mess…
19 Savoy Motel – “Sorry People”
Groovy Nashville
20 Belle & Sebastian – “Your Cover’s Blown” …Thus starts the lonely walking/There’s always too much talking/I should have stayed home…
Glasgow… don’t blow my thicker-than-ever cover. Love to all my Dear Green Place folk & to Inga
21 Terry Bush, United Forces – “Maybe Tomorrow” (radio edit remix) …So if you want to join me for a while/Just grab your hat, come travel light, that’s hobo style…
For every person of a certain age in the UK who knows this theme song from a dog-led Canadian tv show, The Littlest Hobo, that Americans never had the dubious treat of seeing
22 Grupo Mogambo, Carlos “Chacho” Ramos – “Dime”
Because… MOGAMBO!!
23 Amber Coffman – “Kindness”
24 Red Lorry Yellow Lorry – “Monkeys on Juice” …laughing at such pointlessness…
25 Tom Waits – “Gin Soaked Boy” …Well, I’m on your tail/I sussed your M.O. …
26 Conspiracy of Owls – “A Silver Song” …You open your heart/And I drift right through…
“We’re not above it all/And we’re in love again”
27 Drapht, Indoor Fins – “The Come Down Was Real”
28 The Julie Ruin – “Just My Kind” …Don’t you know I really like how/You know my mind/But even more to the point is the fact/You’re just my kind…
29 The Moonlandingz – “The Strangle of Anna”
30 Rival Consoles – ”Ghosting”
I’m not too good at ghosting
31 Samara Lubelski – ”Soft Focus”
32 Värttinä – ”Kylä vuotti uutta kuuta”
A wee folk taste of Finland
33 Modern Studies – “Disco” …I used to be a totally different kind of person/and the difference it made…
Scotland Scotland Scotland
34 Triathalon – “3” …help me get myself in the groove…
35 Xmal Deutschland – “Feuerwerk (31.Dez)”
The old days in Hamburg
36 Klaus Johann Grobe – “Geschichten aus erster Hand”
The big Z-city in CH
37 Sonic Youth – “Bull in the Heather”
38 Coda Conduct – “Love for Me” …my love for you, boy, comes after my love for me…
Australian lady hip hop
39 Gwenno – “Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki”
Wales
40 Chapterhouse – “Pearl”
Driving through a painfully hot late spring day, suddenly feeling all the aimless pangs of teenage pain and insecurity stabbing me from the inside, again and again. Ugly. Uglier. Ugliest. Time.
41 Hovvdy – “Thru” …Cover for yourself all the time…
42 Au Revoir Simone – “A Violent Yet Flammable World”
Wondering whatever happened to Aurélien, to whom I owe the Au Revoir Simone debt. Twin Peaks reboot but makes me think of those days in 2008-9, the bittersweet of Paris, misery of Oslo, homesickness for Reykjavik
43 Siouxsie and the Banshees – “Spellbound” …We are entranced…
44 Phantastic Ferniture – “Fuckin’ ‘n’ Rollin’”
It’s no wonder I fell in love with this almost immediately – only after I was hooked did I wake up to the fact that this is another Aussie darling, Julia Jacklin, vehicle…
45 Grover Washington, Jr – “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)”
46 Goldfrapp, Dave Gahan – “Ocean” …People collector/I’m on the move/For you…
47 Kings of Convenience – “Know-How”
“Just a little bit of danger/When intriguingly/Our little secret/Trust say trust me/Cause no one will ever know/That this was happening”
48 Class Actress – “Journal of Ardency” …You think I’m living it, living it, living it, living it up/In the spotlight/It’s a lie, lie…
“This game of cruelty/Hardly becomes me…/…’Cause everybody knows/Everybody sees/That this is the thing you do to me”
49 Air, Gordon Tracks – “Playground Love” …Yet my hands are shaking/I feel my body remains/Time’s no matter, I’m on fire/On the playground, love…
50 Emmit Fenn, Yuna – “Modern Flame” (acoustic) …Don’t tell me this doesn’t feel right/’Cause I’m thinking ‘bout it every night…

anesthetizing

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Marshes
–Rolf Jacobsen
Screen Shot 2018-04-07 at 17.52.22

Original

Myr
Spettet ut over landet ligger de gule myrer
som flekker av pest.

Gråbleke i regnet og med tåkehette brer de sin
tristhet som endeløse hav mellom tynne skoger.

Rødflammet og mosegule ligger de i solskinnet
med stank og slikker himlen med sin tunge
av søt os.

Og noen kranser sig med unge bjerker, som
flokker av lyse piker står de og grer sitt hår
over lyngtuene.
Og noen hyller sig i en krave av brennende
blomster som de lokker til sig ut av
skogene, i en have av mjødurt, storkenebb
og hvit skogstjerne.

Og alle har de denne besettende ånde,
og denne bitre lukt av søt vin. Mange mil
gjennom skogen kan jeg kjenne den som
en bedøvelse for min tanke.

Photo by Troy Taylor on Unsplash

scribble

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Illegible Scribble
–Charles Simic
These rags the spirit borrows
To clothe itself
Against the chill of mortality.
O barbed wire of crossed-out words,
Crown of thorns,
Camp meeting of dead wall reveries,
Spilled worry beads,
Fortune-teller’s coffee dregs,
My footholds in the abyss.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

grieving giants

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Perhaps not so many were familiar with Donald Hall – no more so than most are familiar with poets in general, poets laureate of the United States or not.

But somehow, the passing of poet Donald Hall this week has stirred me… in a very different way from how I am stirred by the horror show of current events or by my daily life and its little ups and downs. No, the poetic life and its slower, more contemplative timbre force me to calm down as well, to look back over the life, the writing, the voice of Donald Hall. To reinfuse my daily life with poetry (which is something I give thought to daily but don’t slow down enough to fully appreciate). It is perhaps my own form of meditation.

“Then I had the night
to myself. No moon, no starts, no trucks, no heifers,
no friends, no stories, and no sound. Only dark fields
and darker road, black on black, and I was alive, older
than my dark-haired father ever got to be, sleepy,
not wanting to sleep, happy, startled by happiness”
-Donald Hall, from “The Night of the Day”

 

already gone

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The Present
–Billy Collins

Much has been said about being in the present.
It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next
until you fall exhausted back into bed.

Plus, there’d be no past
with so many scenes to savor and regret,
and no future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

The trouble with the present is
that it’s always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period – already gone.

What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing
you are in a whole lot of pain?

What about the one that occurs
after you hear the punch line
but before you get the joke?
Is that where the wise men want us to live

in that intervening tick, the tiny slot
that occurs after you have spent hours
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you give up and head back home?

Photo by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash

mind-space into shape

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Apophatic
–Dan Beachy-Quick

for Peter Gizzi

nothing changes nothing
grows wild nothing grows
tame nothing bends weird
the mind-space into shape
of tether and memory of
ankle gone lame the whole
hurt song called irony can-
not know how chaos aches
beneath the facts it wears
for a face the fact of a
blank page being a form
of a map that is a kind of
mask missing a mountain
or a mouth or a marble
pedestal from which the riddle
pours down and you know
a man is the answer a man
but nothing changes nothing
bends absence bright into a
silence called paper white
sun circle or solar sail or lonely
wind across vast despair or
blank hope bearing small repair
that this finger I point at
myself answers the question
what is not is everywhere

Photo by Anomaly on Unsplash