The guy with the fanny pack and the shirt that says, in iron-on Cooper Black, “Living in a world of cellholes with assphones.”
The best times I ever spent with my mother were in darkness.
In the glare of day and incandescence, things were difficult between us, adversarial and hostile in a way that went beyond adolescent tension. I was the most available object of/for her resentment, one of the millstones that kept her from living the life she wanted, one of the hated daughters who seemed to inherit the fruits of all her labors. All I wanted was to please her, but there was no way I could ever do that. Yet when I eventually withdrew from her, she was resentful and angry about it. Most of the time, there was no way to win, much less just love each other. Most of the time, anyway.
from the FAQ page of the website of jyoti mishra, better known as “white town”, the radical feminist DIY pop project responsible for the 1997 UK #1 pop hit “your woman”
AUTOMATIC “YOUR WOMAN” REBLOG
Wondering how much singing pop songs about breakups together in the car all the time had to do with the failure of my last relationship.
“U.S. Border Patrol” baseball caps.
An a capella version of Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do” playing in the Vietnamese restaurant.
Mistaking LFO for LMFAO on the radio.
a tree grown sideways
I wasn’t going to show you more of the too-Jewy-too-arty thing until it was finished, but I have seen more than enough on the Internet today about how being a mother means something special and particular about a person and about the quality of that person’s love, and I have to tell you that I am calling bullshit on that.
III.
We do these things to honor our parents for giving us the gift of life. I’m reluctant to push all the way against this idea—saying my life is not a gift is a line I’d rather flirt with than cross, because some part of me isn’t sure who I would be after—but there are days when I consider the gift pretty dubious. It hardly seems like a gift at all when she spent years trying to make it unusable. Am I supposed to say I’m grateful even though the life she gave me was one so shaped by trauma and abuse that I grew into something distorted and broken, a tree planted in shallow soil that exposes its roots and then trained to grow sideways?
So when you edit interviews or whatever for radio, you have to be careful not to edit out all of the breaths that people take, because otherwise the rhythm of their speech sounds weird and off. And sometimes you might copy a little slip of someone breathing so you can use it to patch sentences and phrases together. It’s all digital now, of course, but it used to be on analog audio tape, and in that case you’d physically cut the breath out with a razor blade and splice it in where you wanted it.
Anyway, I had the chance to study with a really great, very experienced producer for a brief time last year, and sometimes I think about something I saw in her studio. Pinned to the wall above her desk, she’d kept a row of little slivers of analog tape attached to labels that said “Julia’s breath,” “Ben’s breath,” “Andy’s breath.” They were the breaths of friends of hers, I think, that she’d saved.
