[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Guided by Voices - “Blimps Go 90” (Alien Lanes, 1995)

This is not a vacation, there is no place to go.

(Source: thehalloffantasticallyfinethings)

Talking Heads - “Don’t Worry About the Government” (live on the Old Grey Whistle Test, 1978)

The soundtrack of my apartment hunt.

“My building has every convenience! It’s gonna make life easier for me…”

(Source: nancyishappy)

On Silence

Aldous Huxley, 1946. Desire is suffering, kids. Sleep tight.

I just noticed the milkshake at 2:00. Beautiful.

(Source: maura)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Zammuto - “Shape of Things to Come” (Zammuto, out now)

D. Perezcassar, “Turn Up the Vibe Dial”

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The Walkmen - “Heartbreaker” (Heaven, 6/5/12. BBC Radio rip)

It’s not the singer, it’s the song.

"

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly … but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, superkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

The memoir-relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. Learned about it extensively, exquisitely, in my interrupted year. And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull. Of those parts of life that must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it’s because the subject is, in and of itself, dull … only then we’re again right back to where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it…as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size.

"

The Pale King, p. 85. Now in paperback. Some David Foster Wallace for your Tax Day hangover.

Real ultimate dandyism.

(Source: suicidewatch)