ilx posts with striking imagery

maybe not the strikingest imagery but i wanted to commemorate this post somewhere

Always think about the middle-aged Silent Generation couple dressing up and getting a sitter so they can go see the latest Peter Sellers movie.

― pplains, Wednesday, September 16, 2020 12:03 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean sure in a just universe we would never have gotten here but i'm trying to apply occam's razor somewhere other than my wrists

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Tuesday, September 29, 2020 12:47 PM

From Bands whose fans were their own subculture

My only more personal interaction with a Juggalo was with a Juggalette in a small town in mountainous northern California.

We'd hopped off a boxcar the evening before, grabbed beers and food, and found a good place to camp by the river. But later that night, it began to rain, so we had to pack up all our shit and hike in pouring rain to an overpass, where we slept in dust for a few hours.

Eventually we wandered back into town, ending up at an oddly placed gazebo along the main street. It was still pouring, and we were exhausted, and then this young woman came up to us and asked us if she could help us in any way. She also asked whether we had gotten in on a freight train and we said yes. We were a little suspicious, but we followed her when she said we could dry off and cook food at her house.

Which was a small, bleak apartment in an old apartment building that used to be a whorehouse, in sight of the river and the train tracks. We were hanging out with her, she kept packing bowls of ditch weed and talking about how her kid got taken from her. There were lots of legal papers scattered about, and she had two very young kittens living with her. We had our stuff in her dryer and cooker up some chili ramen.

Then, she answered her phone with a "whoop whoop" and we knew immediately that we were in the presence of a Juggalette.

Her mom came over and asked us why we were trying to get her daughter to run away from the small town. We told her we were doing nothing of the sort.

Eventually, it cleared up and our stuff got dry, and we cleared out. We talked about her sometimes, the kindly Juggalette.

Two years later, we're at the hobo museum where we eventually lived for a while, but that's besides the point. She was there! It was near the town where we'd first met her and during a party weekend, and I recognized her immediately. She had a hatchetman tattoo on her foot. She didn't recognize me at all but kept hitting on me all weekend even when my now-husband showed up and we were being all gross and queer hobo.

Anyway, when we moved to the area for a bit and I worked in the grocery store in town, she came in while I was cashiering, and my co-worker watched her try to steal a bunch of supplements. So, the last time I saw her, she was telling me that I was cute but that my co-worker was a terrible cunt who could get fucked. Never saw her again, a lost soul in northern California mountain towns.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Saturday, October 3, 2020 5:15 PM

Raymond Carver meets ICP.

Woop woop

i love that post very much, it’s so good

Spaghetti models keep shifting west, with current landfall in largely uninhabited wetlands of Vermillion Parish. If they keep shifting, its another hit (after Laura) on Cameron Parish. Possibly the least developed part of the US Atlantic coast, just what's left of wetlands after the oil companies were done. Abandoned canals through wildlife refuges, only gas stations and gun shops on the highway.

― Sanpaku, Tuesday, October 6, 2020 9:21 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

j.g. ballard up in here

Paint that post

My uncle's band played for years at The Howling Dog in Fairbanks, Alaska, which is technically not in Fairbanks but in Fox, the next town over. It's huge and drafty and impossible to heat, so it generally closes for the winter right after Halloween. It's a longish drive, and you risk hitting a moose every time you drive out there on a dark icy night in late fall. I miss it a lot.

It kinda looks like a huge ramshackle cabin with a stage and dance floor, and it's got the usual dive bar decor - bras, signed dollar bills, album covers, weird-ass art projects - but the centerpiece is the red carpet on the stage, which was originally rolled out for a historic meeting between the pope and the president at the Fairbanks airport in 1984. I asked my uncle once how the carpet got to the bar, and all he said was, "My buddy Steve. He lays carpet," which didn't really answer the question.

― Lily Dale, Monday, October 19, 2020 9:58 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Excellent

yeah that's great writing imo.

agreed

from K Malone:

i have pissed in a nightmare tent in absolute darkness with dozens of men all around me, at a beer festival in tianjin, in swampy, piss-logged grass

I’m with you in Rockland

We were trying to get north from Portland and were getting tons of conflicting information about where to hop out, so I insisted the three of us hitch, since it had been three days since we'd moved at all. We began late in the day, and of course, ended up in a stripmall in Vancouver, WA, just across the river from Portland. It was drizzling lightly. We posted up at a gas station that sold beer and hotdogs, went to an on-ramp, and one of us went back to grab beer. No rides, too late in the day, weather too shitty. The beer mission yielded four cans of Camo Black Ice, a malt liquor that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, but we drank some of it anyway. We ended up hidden in some bushes in a grassy strip right next to the on-ramp, curled up in our sleeping bags with a tarp tied over us as the mist continued throughout the night.

The next morning, it was Father's Day, and we awoke covered in dew. We shared the final Camo Black Ice, then walked for a while through the stripmall, trying to find a spot that was open for food, and it turned out that all the stores were closed— that is, much of the mall had been deadmalled years previous, and few of the stores were actually operational any longer. It felt, quite honestly, like a horror film. An expanse of empty mall parking lots, shuttered and boarded up stores, and three skinny crusty kids with huge packs wandering in this fever dream. But then we stumbled upon a single open store in this long strip: a Subway.

They had just unlocked the door when we walked up, and as we entered, the opening notes of Paula Cole's "I Don't Want to Wait" began, and I felt like I was going to faint because it was just too fucking weird. The guy behind the counter was amused by us and asked us some questions, then ended up giving us a ton of free food and chatting with us. Keep in mind that at this point, none of us had showered in four days, and we'd been sleeping in bushes and garbage-strewn train yards while hiking around and drinking beer in the heat of the day.

Then, as I was tearing into some sort of egg sandwich approximation, Rod Stewart's "Forever Young" came on, and we were all sort of silent, and it remains one of the most oddly spiritual moments of my entire life— listening to this cheesy power ballad in a deadmall's Subway at 7:30 am on Father's Day after sleeping in a bush, I felt like something was watching over me, or us.

Anyway, that's why I fucking love Rod Stewart.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Wednesday, October 28, 2020 4:05 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Amazing post.

it warms my heart to see table's poetic talent get props here

One of the many things I like about ILX is that unlike most parts of the internet, it encourages and rewards effort, and so we get posts like the above and threads like this one.

Magnificent post. I have been trying to find a non-gawky way of asking but can't find one so: Table, where can I read some of your poetry? (By all means, call this out if it's intrusive!)

Not at all! Thanks for your kind words. Work from the most recent published book is here.

Also my webmail works!

i was also curious. thanks for sharing

This is one of my favorite threads because it's just a series of quick hits of often excellent writing.

ja es ist gut

weirdly i looked up "I Don't Wanna Wait" on YouTube for the first time ever, three days ago. Never knew it was about a granddad and not some bratty teens!

There's also the whole saga of Paula Cole not wanting it as the music for DC on Netflix then changing her mind and so on and so forth

but we want to know right now Paula

where have all the fuckin' cowboys gone

lol

and i loved it too, table!

Table, you have webmail! (How does one know if one has received webmail?)

I got it, Chinaski, but unless you also have webmail, there's no way for me to respond to you! So send yr email if ya like!

I thought I did! I'm turning into my dad.

Welcome to the club.

One of us, one of us.

the tear in the anal fissure that is Trump's GOP is widening, soon there will be two distinct assholes

― Lover of Nixon (or LON for short) (Neanderthal), Friday, November 6, 2020 12:19 PM

This was uncomfortably easy to visualize.

every 5 months or so i have a complete meltdown and then speculate about how impossible it is to be a working artist these days, more than ever. because yeah, there are a thousand mozarts running around now, for real, at this moment. and in order for it to make sense for them, financially, they have to compete globally. there are still local scenes and it's possible to make things and sell them locally and to friends and family. but for the most part, you're competing against the internet. part of the promise of the internet was that it would open up the audience, that you'd be able to find some dude across the world, or he would find you, and that wasn't possible until now, etc etc. and that's technically true. but they forgot to throw in the co-efficient of 0.0000001. 0.0000001% of dudes across the world will find you, maybe more like 0.000000001 if we're being real. and you have to be in the top 0.000000001% if you want to make more than $15 off your youtube streams (paintings, sick beats, choreography, whatever). eh, whatever. i'm sure this will be interpreted as a eugenics argument, and/or the point will be made that no artist has ever been successful, there is a long history of artists working for absolutely nothing and hoping that they can break into the 0.000001% of the world that has enough money and cares enough about art to give it to the people who make it and that the internet has actually made things better.

― Karl Malone, Thursday, 10 December 2020 18:04 (yesterday) link

but imagine living in a cave with 200 of your smelly friends, and you are the drummer. or the painter. or the choreographer. there isn't some genius in another time zone who has mastered everything you haven't even learned about yet. it's just you, and since no one else can provide the sick post (pre?) apocalypse beats, the one rich guy in the cave who has access to velvet blankets decides to swaddle you up in one, and encourages you to make more sick beats. because in this cave, there is no internet

― Karl Malone, Thursday, 10 December 2020 18:07 (yesterday) link

damn, that speaks to me

Same. Which thread is it from?

Drum geek sick chops youtube thread

Thx.

Four years ago, and I haven't seen dylannn in a long time, but dammit:

GEORGIA MAX COFFEE / MY RATING: *

i drank this in the basement of a sort of mall below ueno station, down ameyoko. the only time i go to drink coffee, it's usually at ameyoko, one of the coffee shops across from the station that i guess you could call kissaten but maybe they're cafes or just coffee shops-- i feel like the difference was explained to me once and i believe it had something to do with smoking? but like lots of the finer points of DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE, i might have missed the point or it might be bullshit, or maybe the difference had something to do with food being served, but again, i think i've smoked and eaten food in coffee shops and cafes and kissaten, but anyways. if you've never been to ueno and the ameyoko side... ueno station, all around it, it's kind of a commuter hub and sort of the first taste you get of the old city, the low city, or the last taste if, like me, you commute into the city, pop up at ginza or kasumigaseki or somewhere. there's the museums, the park, and if you wander away from the station, you're in the REAL TOKYO, DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE part of town, you could wander to nippori, yanesen, asakusa, iriya, and you could wander even further to less gentrified shitamachi neighborhoods, hour or so walk and you could be across the river to mukojima, right under the skytree, or you could get up to sanya and minowa. ameyoko is kind of a tourist trap now, i guess, and i love DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE shotengai like (near enough to ueno) joyful minowa, jujo ginza shotengai, irohakai shotengai at sanya, but they're dead zones, even the most vital shotengai run to 40-50% abandoned unless there's some anchor property like a shopping mall or a 100 yen store and those places always feel like the most lively. so, whatever ameyoko, it's going to be full of tourists, especially on a sunny day in june but on a cold morning in late october, it's pretty dead. but anyways, i'll go there in the morning, when i'm on my way into the city because the only coffee option near where i work are places with french names on gaienhigashi dori or starbucks. the coffee places in ameyoko, very old fashioned, i guess, in that they're like most of tokyo trapped in like 1986? no espresso but you can get pourover, actually, and i usually just get iced coffee and i actually drink it with syrup and milk, so i should be more into GEORGIA MAX COFFEE but i'm not. ameyoko is lively, ugly. even it's a sunday today, it's noisy and the train runs right through it and you see it reflected in the dark glass four storeys up a hostess club or some shithole irish pub and then it disappears in yellow stucco and grey tile and appears again on more black glass across the upper floors of a pachinko place. in a city that's pretty sedate and homogeneous, ameyoko is a nice break sometimes. i just flew back to japan yesterday and i was in hong kong and across the border in shenzhen and both cities have a certain energy, a certain, you know, they're brash and bright? and hong kong, even in the meaner quarters of the city feels more modern than tokyo does-- in the sense of like, "this is what cities will all look like in a few decades." i always have a crisis coming back to tokyo after going to especially hong kong. i know the problems hong kong has but taking the morningliner from narita to ueno yesterday-- actually, right when you land at the airport, you get this feeling of, like, landing at, i dunno, somewhere that's transitioning from a command economy and stalinist bureaucracy to limited capitalism, all the grey and the dated signage and the weird appeals to appreciate japanese culture (there was this big bank of gashapon with the slogan in large: WHY JAPANESE PEOPLE LIKE THIS! and then a smaller explanatory note: DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE, which is where i got that phrase i've been repeating to myself for the last day), and it just feels like entering a museum, tokyo does, coming in on the train and it's... you've come in from narita before, it's not the most scenic trip, especially after you've done it a dozen times. like a museum to japanese culture, which feels weird, coming from hong kong, which is multicultural and multiethnic and multilingual. girls in hong kong wear shorter skirts than girls in tokyo. or even loud, grimy shenzhen, feels more lively and liveable than tokyo, i think. or more like a place that you could call home. i mostly work with people with east asia and southeast asia who came to tokyo mostly for the opportunities. but i wonder about what appeals to japan for mostly white westerners that come here, all the tourists you see in ameyoko with, like, anime shit on their messenger bags. i think the weird purity of DEEP JAPANESE CULTURE or its imagined purity, if that makes sense, has to be part of the appeal. like, there's that thing about the hopes and dreams visa, japanophiles in their 20s that dream of coming to japan, i never got that at all but i don't want to be too judgemental BUT japanese culture and tokyo itself feels so conservative to me. i mean, i live here and i probably will live here for a while so what am i complaining about but whatever, it comes into focus after visiting a vibrant, politically active, multicultural but still wealthy and sorta democratic city not so far away. but i do appreciate it sometimes, those coffee shops at ueno, where i actually feel sorta unwelcome and everyone else at the bar beside me is at least 50+ years old, it's nice but conservative and museumlike. so, the ueno ameyoko basement is kind of a hopeful place, where you have all these people that have come to tokyo from other countries kind of showing themselves in a way that they don't usually in everyday life, chatting in tagalog, buying groceries, and upstairs, across the road, where i went to get a breakfast of liang'pi, i shared a table with hunanese girls walked over from yushima just off work maybe and eating suanla fen. there's that poem that they have on a piece of iron in front of ueno station: i slip into the crowd at the train station / just to hear the familiar dialect / of my faraway hometown. ameyoko is where the city feels least insular, most international, least grey. anyways, i ate my breakfast and went down to shop, bought a pack of rough ground pork to make lurou fan like i ate the last day i was in shenzhen. there's a spot at the end, under the stairs, where people eat their lunches and there's a few benches and ash trays and an antique empty coke machine and a coffee machine and a cigarette machine. i bought a georgia max coffee and enjoyed it while smoking a cigarette. it tasted the same as every other canned coffee.

― dylannn, Sunday, 30 October 2016 6:12 PM (four years ago)

that is fucking magisterial

That's a great post, it cuts esp. hard because I spent a hard decade or two slanging biz in that neighborhood and trying to gtfo that side of town as soon as I could "clock out".

There is one of the best no-nonsense curry rice shops pretty much right under the JR station that I do miss though, also the open-air markets were always worth a perusal on the way to the station.

I stayed in Ueno for a week one time, it's my favourite part of Tokyo. I was gutted when I learned they had cleared out the janky amusement rides from Ueno Park in preparation for the Olympics. Anyway, dylannn, if you're out there I hope you are doing well and if you have any major writing projects I would love to buy / read / follow them.

Yeah, excellent post.

I saw EB & NB in the summer of '89. My excuse is that they were on a bill with Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, and Cowboy Junkies. CJ went on first, and were shockingly effective in a 40,000-capacity outdoor shed, even if they didn't stray from the recorded arrangements at all. Brickell et al were interminable. For some reason, I had no idea they were a "jam" band, having only heard two songs on the radio. Imagine the auto-wah solo in "What I Am" drawn out for an hour, with absolutely no variation in phrasing, tone, or dynamics. It was like listening to an adult on a Peanuts cartoon for a solid hour, but it wasn't funny.

(Lou had broken his ankle a day or so prior to the show, and was replaced by Violent Femmes. EC's set was disappointingly rote.)

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, April 30, 2018 12:01 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

striking sonic "imagery"

PROMOTER: "hey guys. Lou broke his leg and won't be able to make it tonight."
NB GUITARIST: *wahmp - wahhh*

dylannn is a really gifted writer