first, a plug - the new Boxing Issue of Stop Smiling is out - get it!

Also, my stories on the Main Squeeze Orchestra and The Tiny are out now in Venus...

I've been out of touch, and probably will be some more - sxsw rambling begins tomorrow when I fly out to san diego. Geographers will note that this is not a great commute, alas, at 20 hour drive through the desert stands between this so called fiesta of beef and beer. will i live through it? well, that is a matter for me, my driver, and the frog eyes CDs i will likely have to toss in new mexico.

One of my favorite daydreams is the genetic modification of my favorite pop bands into the perfect daphne c. fronted hybrid, and I have recently decided to add 1981-1985 era Pet Shop Boys to my mixture, which I think tosses the whole dream straight into dance rock. I think I'm a few years too late on this, and for that I fully embrace my post-nostalgia. I would be happy with just deadcenter bullet of one lyric like "We've got no future, we've got no past. Here today, built to last."

Other stolen articles from = Richard Butler, vocals from Talk Talk Talk; timbral sensitivity from Jason Pierce, Lazer Guided Melodies and Xtian Fennesz, Endless Summer; sense of suspended time "No Clocks" (more than a pun, listen to it) by Pylon, Chomp; guitar bite - T. Moore and L. Ranaldo, Sister; timid fierceness, Mary Timony Dirt of Luck (maybe even a little of that Ash Bowie bass sound)...
(okay, this might not sound like a dance song to you, but it does to me)

IN OTHER NEWS

Went to the Dali exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with my dad today - what a ridiculous spectacle. And you thought art was dead! I would like it if the curator was actually a contemporary artist whose happening it was to get a bunch of stoned teenagers to walk around with headphones on bumping into 80-year-old bluehair aristocrats looking at paintings about masturbation. (confession, I've been to both Figueres, Spain and Coral Gables, Fl. - the two more famous spots of his work, umm, when I was a little younger, beautiful and...) Well, I did like it some, mostly for the ants. They say decay, but I'd like to think of ants in that case as all the thoughts that run in the mind, seemingly independently, though they appear in clusters - the conscious mind wandering. The ants appear when lurking thoughts get made real, and Freud said that the surreal only makes us think about what is conscious, not unconscious. Ants are the grotesque, fear, interior - decay?

Philly was beautiful, forgiving and soft today - the flags flapping and the City Hall looking very regal. Sometimes I miss it.