Theme In Yellow

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

Nothing Left Inside

Charles "Biscuits" Montgomery

Rest In Peace

"Legendary hard rock drummer Chuck Biscuits, whose lengthy résumé included stints in such flagship underground acts as Black Flag and Social Distortion, died Saturday after a prolonged battle with throat cancer. He was 44." ... Story continues here: Chuck Biscuits: 1965-2009 (JG2 Land)

A.I.T.A. is happy to announce that Chuck's death was apparently an elaborate hoax. The MP3s will remain posted to now honor, rather than eulogize, the great drummer.

Download: "What Can You Believe" ('82 demo) - Black Flag

Download: "Yes, I know" ('82 demo) - Black Flag

Download: "My War" ('82 demo) - Black Flag

The Deuce

Dig: Forgotten NY Neighborhoods

Buy: Tales Of Times Square: Expanded Edition

Buy: Ghosts Of 42nd Street

Quote Of The Week

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."

Because I Could Not Stop For Death

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Favorite Buildings

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2009

Another Brother Gone

James "Dash" Costello
9/7/69 - 10/16/09
Rest In Peace
Recalling the good times, like singing "Summer Wind" at the top of our lungs in some dive bar in the city... Hanging out on the streets of upper Manhattan — or in the 14th Street tunnel — when we should've been in class... Goodbye, my friend.

Photo property of CHINO BYI

Quote Of The Week

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

Like A Snake Calling On The Phone

"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth."

From Being And Nothingness, 1943

Nothing Means Nothing Anymore

Brendan Mullen
Rest In Peace
"Brendan Mullen, the founder of the Masque punk rock club in Hollywood that helped launch that vibrantly anarchic music scene on the West Coast in the late 1970s, died Monday after suffering a massive stroke two days earlier. He was 60." ... Story continues here: Local Punk Champion, Masque Founder Dies (LA Times)

Buy: Live At The Masque: Volume One (CD)
Buy: Live At The Masque: Nightmare In Punk Alley (book)
Buy: We Got The Neutron Bomb : The Untold Story Of L.A. Punk
Read: Brendan Mullen (Swindle Magazine profile)

Quote Of The Week

"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

The Days In-between

Download: "The Great Train Robbery" by The Little Boys Blue
Download: "Night Train" by Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames
Download: "The Trains" by The Nashville Ramblers
Download: "The Train Kept A Rollin'" by The Dogs
Download: "Two Trains Runnin'"* by Bob Dylan
Download: "Stop That Train" by Keith & Tex
Download: "Trains" by The Vapors
Buy: Steel Drivin' Man

* Live at the Finjan Club, 1962

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

What Are You Reading?

Anais; An International Journal

© 2009 Chris Arnade

Quote Of The Week

"All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."

Nietzsche Family Circus #3

Surreptitious Kissing

I want to say that
forgiveness keeps on

dividing, that hope
gives issue to hope,

and more, but of course I
am saying what is

said when in this dark
hallway one encounters

you, and paws and
assaults you — love

affairs, fast lies — and you
say it back and we

blunder deeper, as would
any pair of loosed

marionettess, any couple
of cadavers cut lately

from the scaffold,
in the secluded hallways

of whatever is
holding us up now.