28 June 2011

Watching Windowpanes


 

Side A

Mickey Newbury: I Don't Think Much About Her No More
Looks Like Rain, 1969

Arthur Lee & Love: Five String Serenade
Arthur Lee & Love, 1992

Nina Simone: Lilac Wine
Wild Is the Wind, 1966

Tim Buckley: The River
Blue Afternoon, 1969

Nico: Afraid
Desertshore, 1970

Rainy Day: On the Way Home
Rainy Day, 1984

Ólöf Arnalds: Innundir Skinni
Innundir Skinni, 2010

Nancy Wallace: Sleeping Sickness
Old Stories, 2009

John Cale: Andalucía
Paris 1919, 1973

The Instruments: Early Lights
Dark Småland, 2008



Side B

Fairport Convention: Eastern Rain
What We Did on Our Holidays, 1968

Joanna Newsom: Does Not Suffice
Have One on Me, 2010

Movietone: 1930s Beach House
The Blossom Filled Streets, 2000

Brian Eno: Some of Them Are Old
Here Come the Warm Jets, 1973

Broadcast: Echo's Answer
The Noise Made by People, 2000

Sam Prekop: A Cloud to the Back
Sam Prekop, 1999

Little April Shower
Bambi OST, 1957

Mulatu Astatqé: Tezeta
Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974


 






22 June 2011

Literary Skiers 16



He told me that he'd spent the first twenty years of his life in Sweden, and often I tried to picture him against a crisp Scandinavian landscape. I tried to see him on skis, or living peacefully with his family in some cold mountain village. From the little he said of Sweden I gathered he'd lived in a small town and his parents had been comfortable people with enough money to send him to college in America.

He spent two years at NYU, living in the Village at one of those residence hotels that cater to foreigners. This apparently unhinged him. Once he was arrested on Sixth Avenue, he said, for pissing on a fireplug like a dog. It cost him ten days in the Tombs, and when he got out he left immediately for New Orleans. He floundered there for a while, then got a job on a freighter headed for the Orient. He worked on boats for several years before drifting into journalism. Now, thirty-three years old and looking fifty, his spirit broken and his body swollen with drink, he bounced from one country to another, hiring himself out as a reporter and hanging on until he was fired.

Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of a stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard.

--Hunter S. Thompson, from The Rum Diary, 1959




Photo credits:
Swedish Skiers
Sad Hunter