April 20, 2006

from an interview with Frank Zappa’s piano player, Don Preston:

interviewer: When John [Lennon] died, I wrote Yoko the most thoughtful condolence letter that I could come up with. She responded, but she also sent my family Christmas cards for a couple of years after. I have them framed.

Preston: Really? Wow.

January 10, 1996

He appeared to be deep in thought, then suddenly he said “Oh! Ooooooooooo! OHHHHHHHH! Guess WHAT!!” and started jumping up and down, really high in the air, and waving his arms around.

June 5, 2006

“Both Father Christmas and Roy Orbison are completely wrapped in clingfilm.”

December 28, 2005

Maybe this is a personal matter, but I think “killed” is a bit hyperbolic, as if Mao personally slit their throats — and I don’t say that out of love for Mao.

March 6, 2007

The reviewer is adamant that CEREBRAL HARD WORK is required, but I think getting drunk first serves equally well.

November 1, 2003

I think Frequency Curtain should do a cover version of "Dung Chen Nyithu Panglep Two Notes Prolonged to Medium Length".

September 30, 2008

Instead of asking for permission beforehand, you should ask for forgiveness afterwards.

September 29, 2008

Josh: My giant spider can eat your giant spider.

There’s only one way to settle this.

July 1, 2003

Austrian kezboards have the z kez where the y should be, and vice versa. Plus all the punctuation marks are in the wrong place ++ its verz annozing

May 24, 2003

Do you mean gauntlets? Sometimes I run a gauntlet to order my gimlet.

August 25, 2008

Those kittens look like she could get a lot of useful work out of them.

January 7, 2007

I got Find of the Day: http://www.foundmagazine.com/comments/954

August 4, 2005

Nothing can tarnish the coolness of being the city where an anarchist shot the President.

September 3, 2006

“I was against surrealism even when I understood something about it, and I am even more against it now that I no longer understand it at all.” — Andrei Tarkovsky

April 10, 2007

I like this part of the interview:

AltCritic: What do you like in Roeg? (a friend of mine confessed the real reason she liked Bad Timing was her crush on Garfunkel hehehe)

Jim O'Rourke: Well, that's mine too! No kidding.

There seems to be a comma missing after "No".

March 27, 2006

“Look here. Being intelligible is not what it seems. You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way that you have a habit of talking... but I mean by understanding, enjoyment. If you enjoy it, you understand it. And lots of people have enjoyed it, so lots of people have understood it... After all, you must enjoy my writing. And if you do enjoy it, you understand it. If you do not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it?” — Gertrude Stein

May 14, 2006

Like most ferrets, they were named after Sex Pistols members and Monty Python characters.

April 12, 2007

I could have reached up and tugged on a violinist’s pant leg without losing contact with my chair.

June 18, 2004

I played to you and Jennifer quietly, as you slept.

July 28, 2004

Ivor Cutler was a teacher at Summerhill.

December 13, 2005

I always wondered how armadillos felt about that Swell Maps song. (I also wonder how real cake shop girls feel about “Cake Shop Girl”.)

April 21, 2007

from the Wikipedia entry on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan:

“Apparently, when Nusrat toured in foreign countries, he would watch television commercials in order to identify the melodies and chord progressions popular in that country. He would then try to choose similar sounding songs from his repertoire for his performances.”

August 18, 2008

"fans can't be wrong"
Results 1 - 10 of about 200,000 for "fans can't be wrong". (0.36 seconds)
[...]

"ceiling fans can't be wrong"
No results found for "ceiling fans can't be wrong".

May 19, 2004

From the New York Times today, this sentence:

Iran is a dazzling smorgasbord, from its “Death to America” murals to its winding bazaars.

June 8, 2007

My drinking habits have been immortalized in the Boston Globe (last paragraph).

May 22, 2004

from section 8.1.15 of the nuclear weapons FAQ, describing the construction of the first American atomic bombs:

“The lens system had to be made to very precise tolerances. The composition and densities of the explosives had to be accurately controlled and extremely uniform. The pieces had to fit together with an accuracy of less than 1 mm to prevent irregularities in the shock wave. Accurate alignment of the lens surfaces was even more important than a close fit. A great deal of tissue paper and scotch tape was also used to make everything fit snugly together.”

February 18, 2005

“What’s a swarm of gnats got to do with a pile of rocks?
What have a bucket and a clean slate got in common?”
— Mayo Thompson

February 11, 2005

Was Ligeti photographed wearing a T-shirt with just that one word on it?

May 11, 2006

First the crocochickens will take out the owls and the serpents, then they’re coming for the humans.

July 17, 2003

God just put a checkmark in a box in a gigantic spreadsheet.

August 4, 2008

“Oh, I’ll just stay home tonight and clean out the glove compartment of the Batmobile. Gotham can cope with Envelope Head all on its own.”

October 8, 2004

Your search - "greasy soul food breakfast" - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

• Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
• Try different keywords.
• Try more general keywords.

April 27, 2005

Heard even less often: “I have 14 kilometers of magnets in my pants.”

August 4, 2005

Josh: It could have been UofC prof Michael Turner who (theoretically) studies the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.

I’m picturing a bunch of shy fat guys.

October 13, 2006

You haven’t mentioned Cybill Shepherd recently. Is something wrong?

October 8, 2005

Braxton had the largest sweat towel I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Bath towel sized.

January 7, 2005

My favorite trick is to wait until someone’s download has one second left to go, then log out for two months.

June 16, 2005

headline from today's Chicago Tribune:

Women astronauts hit glass ceiling

March 13, 2007

from http://www.signandsight.com/features/1090.html:

interviewer: You deliberately keep your distance from other living writers.

Thomas Bernhard: No, not deliberately at all. It comes naturally.

I: What, in your view, is a conversation?

TB: When talking is supposed to become conversation, that's when things get gruesome. There are collected conversations, hundreds of them, books full. Entire publishing houses live off them. Like something coming out of an anus, and then it gets squashed in between book covers.

...

TB: You can sit at home, put your books on the shelf, and when you look at them, you think: "Sad".

October 12, 2006

10:07:49 [D—] Hello, are you there?
10:19:02 [Seth] yes
10:24:17 [D—] I usually dont ask priviledges but you have a song I have been trying to get for a while and whenever you're on the queue is huge and when I get closer to top either you log off or i "lose" places in the queue
10:24:32 [D—] Is there a way i could get it? maybe a trade of songs or whatever?
10:30:17 [Seth] sure, I'll cut you to the front of the line
10:30:23 [Seth] you know about the Portsmouth Sinfonia, right?
10:34:39 [D—] nope
10:34:43 [D—] and thanks a lot!
10:35:03 [D—] I just had like 15-20 seconds of piano music on my computer
10:35:06 [D—] unidentified
10:35:23 [D—] so I asked a pianist for some help identifying the music
10:35:32 [D—] and odds are it is that song that you have
10:35:58 [D—] I am far from knowledgeable when it comes to classical music, but I did find this one beautiful :)
10:45:48 [Seth] this probably isn't the version you want; the Portsmouth Sinfonia is made up of people who don't know how to play their instruments
10:46:11 [D—] oh
10:46:40 [D—] thought it was "serious" since its bach
10:46:56 [Seth] I dunno, the piece might be recognizable... barely
10:47:24 [D—] guess the original will be hard to find
10:48:06 [D—] lol yeah thats definitely not the song I was looking for

January 24, 2006

I am drunk.

August 16, 2005

quotes from Thomas Dolby customer reviews on Amazon:

Thomas Dolby inspired me to create one of the first Floppy Disc files I ever owned

Another thing about this is that it was used in a Pantene commercial

I give it 4 thumbs - not pointing thumbs, just thumbs.

It still holds up, boys, never fear.

it has been an integral part of my life, the soundtrack to my inner thoughts and perceptions.

How I miss those electronic drums!

like Neil Armstrong's moon walk, a cul de sac

Pity poor Thomas Dolby.

November 8, 2005

They’re trying to determine if Philip Best is wearing any pants.

October 14, 2006

interviewer: But maybe you can work with these other media, write music for a ballet...

Misha Mengelberg: I hate ballet. [silence] It's very... athletic... The kind of ballet I'd like to see is... very old ladies knitting or something... Not a lot of... jumping about...

June 30, 2004

The one case where Clarence Thomas votes with the liberals is — of course — the pornography case.

July 6, 2007

how the Ryoji Ikeda review at http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/18695-op?artist_title=18695-op actually begins:

Recently, the mouse problem at my apartment has gotten out of control. They run up the walls and crawl into my bird's cage to eat seeds, nibble through unopened loaves of Orowheat, and most heinous of all, they ate out the crotch of my roommate's old panties.

how it should begin:

They ate out the crotch of my roommate's old panties. They run up the walls, crawl into my bird's cage to eat seeds, and nibble through unopened loaves of Orowheat. The mouse problem at my apartment has gotten out of control.

Isn't it much more entertaining in that order? I think so.

If there is something surprising in a sentence, it should go at the end. Thus "They ate out of the crotch of my roommate's old panties" is better writing "The crotch of my roommate's old panties was entirely eaten out" (and not only because the latter uses the passive voice and ends with a preposition). Conversely, and this is my main point: if there is something surprising in a paragraph, it should go at the beginning — especially if it is the first paragraph.

I am willing to give Pitchfork writers this kind of advice for free occasionally, but if they want it on a regular basis, they'll have to pay for it.

May 19, 2008

I hope he still has a pet snake.

May 30, 2008

Miles Davis interview, 1968

interviewer: Do you have any particular hobbies?

Miles Davis: Making fun of white folks on television. That’s my main hobby. That’s about it.

December 26, 1995

We are crossing the South Side on the Dan Ryan. At around 35th street, as the rows of boarded up CHA high rises slide past us, R—’s mother screws up her face and asks: “What subdivision is this?”

March 20, 1996

They are from New Zealand, an island where everyone lives in one building owned by the government.

May 5, 2008

Sing it out loud, as loudly as possible, to everyone you encounter.

May 15, 2008

We are now the #3 hit on Yahoo Image Search for “schnauzers”.

May 19, 2008

He didn’t have a monocle and the tips of his mustache weren’t waxed into curlicues.

August 9, 1997

Don’t sell your Joan Jett records.

January 3, 1998

“Mayor Daley announced another major upgrade in 1973: $7.50 million would be spent to replace the fourteen-year-old bluish white mercury-vapor lamps with yellowish high-pressure sodium-vapor ones. Some of the first efforts centered on high-crime areas like Lawndale, while sodium-vapor advocates cited their higher energy efficiency and greater illumination. In spite of objections, the program moved forward and was completed in 1981 with the installation of high-pressure sodium in all the alleys. For several years, the debate over the lights sizzled. But it was clear that being the 'best lighted city' now meant being the 'most lighted city'. Even areas that were traditionally treated with great attention to design felt the change... The urbane ranks of globe-topped standards have been replaced by what Harry Weese has called 'a marching column of rickety double bracketed orange-tipped fruit gibbets,' whose 'orange pools of late night light are wasted on empty stages waiting for crime.'

“The sodium-vapor controversy also reached into the suburbs, especially those with architecturally or historically significant street lighting systems... The controversy raged most fiercely in Oak Park and Evanston... In Evanston, the city council's efforts to scrap all 6,800 lights in 1976 were met with immediate and widespread protest... [Eventually,] the city decided to reject crime as a reason for bright, high-pressure sodium vapor lights, and to allow neighbors to decide on the wattage of bulb to be used...”

— Mark J. Bouman, “‘The Best Lighted City in the World’: The Construction of a Nocturnal Landscape in Chicago”, Chicago Architecture and Design: 1923-1993

October 13, 1995

If I stub my toe and yell “ouch!”, is the “ouch!” expressive?

February 4, 1998

You challenge another person by naming an Anthony Braxton album title, but you leave off the year at the end. That person has to name the year. If they get it wrong, they have to drink. Or, they can challenge you back, and if you were bluffing and didn’t know the year yourself, or if the title you named wasn’t even a real title, then you have to drink. Whoever drank then challenges someone else. And so on.

April 1, 2000

Happy Birthday, Badtz-Maru!!

January 7, 1997

“Gorky was touched deeply and soaked my vest with his tears. I started to feel a bit proud. But then, Gorky soaks the vest of every poet with his tears. Nevertheless, I will keep the vest as a souvenir.” — Vladimir Mayakovsky

January 9, 1997

I should start taking photographs at shows.

September 27, 1995

Grim surroundings for the young aesthete...

June 4, 1999

I took R— to the Bertoia sculptures in front of the Amoco Building and we played them for a while (nervous that security guards would come oppress us).

September 25, 1998

“Sometimes when I’m flying over the Alps I think, ‘That’s all the cocaine I sniffed.’” — Elton John

December 21, 2007

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” — Ambrose Bierce

March 27, 2008

Who will comfort the crying monk?

January 17, 1999

“In the future we’ll invent more junk!” — Gang of Four

October 16, 1994

There are no NeXTs left at Ryerson and only one, lone, pathetic NeXT here at Usite.

November 2, 1994

I did my first jazz show at WHPK. The DJ before me was this 75 year old guy named "Captain Bill". Here's how he introduced me (more or less): "OK now, next up is a young man named Seth... These young guys, they think they know. But they don't know." After putting on his last record, he proudly informed me that "The singer on this record is the same age as me!" I put on an Andrew Cyrille record and he warned me, "You'll never get any audience playing stuff like that!" At one point as he was lecturing me he actually drooled onto the floor.

October 24, 1998

from a book on Luis Bunuel: “Some fools have also written that I made a ‘smutty’ film. Down with smutty films! I hate them!” [Bunuel shouted this, as if he were barking a military command.]

March 15, 2008

from http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-charles-simonyi/:

INTERVIEWER: Do you associate with any other programmers who have developed major programs? Do you trade ideas with them?

SIMONYI: [...] We don’t have much to talk about. We feel good vibes and exchange three or four words. I know that if one of these guys opens his mouth, he knows what he is talking about. So when he does open his mouth and he does know what he is talking about, it’s not a great shock. And since I tend to know what I am talking about, too, I would probably say the same thing, so why bother talking, really?

January 15, 1999

“It’s important to know that I made Venereology while drinking lots of beer. These essences are all influenced by death metal. But not musically. I liked something more extreme than the death metal rules. Pulse Demon is back to my usual way. I’m not targeting death metal. I’m not drunk when I recorded Pulse Demon.” — Masami Akita

October 22, 1999

I’m going to dress in English-professor brown and pig out on free hors d’oeuvres.

October 5, 1999

At this moment, a raven lands on his shoulder.

December 14, 1995

The ones with only their legs stuck accept their fate after a while and patiently endure their slow deaths, but the ones with their antennae stuck are really upset about it and twitch continually.

March 5, 2008

In October 1989, Art Garfunkel read HIS OWN BOOK.

September 12, 1996

The 1.5 liter glass bottle of water slid out of my bag and landed directly on the head of the man beneath.

March 26, 1997

Keep the Oval bit and the stuff about bacteria. I laughed.

February 10, 2008

From the Wikipedia article on “flattop”: “The shape of a flattop is, by definition, not compatible with the round shape of a human head.”

February 20, 2008

Does this spreadsheet make my galaxy look fat?

January 25, 2008

If you Google “moribund buildings”, I am the #1 hit.

December 27, 1995

Once a minute or so, a cockroach decides it can’t handle the heat and bolts up the wall.

February 1, 1995

There was a lot of this:

J—: So what else have you been listening to?

Seth: Well, I've been listening to that Andrew Cyrille record, What About...

J—: Oh, yeah. GREAT record.

Seth: Isn't it though?

J—: Fantastic.

[silence]

Seth: So how about that John Cage triple CD, the 25 year retrospective? I've been listening to that a lot.

J—: It's great isn't it. I love that piece for turntables, “Imaginary Landscape”.

Seth: Me too. And "Williams Mix".

J—: Yup, that's great, isn't it.

[silence]

Seth: So have you heard... [etc. etc. etc.]

February 16, 1995

Josh: Braxton opera in Austin! Braxton opera in Austin!

I’m envisioning you shouting this to the tune of the Beastie Boys’ “Egg Raid on Mojo”.

August 2, 1995

I saw Jandek perform live at the Lounge Ax! In my dreams, that is. There were upholstered seats at the Lounge Ax like at a movie theater. You weren't allowed to smoke in the seats, and C— was going around trying to make people put out their cigarettes. At a table up near the stage they were selling about three or four different Corwood Industries LP's. One of them was by Jad Fair, one was a Jandek album I didn't recognize, and I didn't get to see the other two. I don't remember the buildup to Jandek's appearance, but when Jandek actually came out on stage, Jandek was a woman! She was young, short, short hair, thin, boyish, wearing a thrift store type thin green print dress, shy but self-possessed. She had a backup singer (a woman with long red hair), and I think there may have been on a man onstage too but I don't remember. She sang one or maybe two songs and started to leave. The audience protested, and she responded by singing a children's song (something like "The Wheels on the Bus") for about thirty seconds then left the stage. The audience was plainly disgruntled but applauded to try to get her to come back out. A bunch of people stood up. Jandek did not reappear and gradually the applause died down and everyone sat back down in their movie theater seats. I stood up and applauded loudly to try to get the applause going again; a number of people turned around and looked at me, and only a few people joined me applauding. My arms felt very heavy and weak and I was barely able to hold them up and hit my hands together. C— came out on stage and made some kind of announcement about trying to get Jandek to perform some more. Several people lit up cigarettes, and the person next to me commented that now we were never going to get to see any more of Jandek, because C— (or someone) was going to have to go around and make sure everyone had put their cigarettes out before Jandek could go back on, but this was going to be nearly impossible. I was upset with the audience for turning against Jandek so quickly.

January 10, 1996

I'm listening to Gene Ammons on the radio and he just quoted “Flight of the Bumblebee” in a solo. Now that’s jazz!

June 9, 1997

“Like most other composers, Schoenberg had more or less constant money problems. The thought arises whether these are not the true subject of music.” — John Cage

October 17, 1997

The upward spiral of intimacy could turn catastrophic.

April 17, 2002

“The flashy Roth, dressed in black nylon trousers and shirt, was accompanied by three bodyguards, three masked catwomen in fluorescent unitards and a beer-drinking midget sporting an Andy Warhol wig. Hagar turned up solo in jeans and T-shirt.” — CNN

September ???, 1994

I drove home muttering “Oh boy” under my breath the whole way, like Braxton at Stonehenge.

April 2, 1995

Their saxophones were extremely shiny.

May 24, 1995

Every item is carefully selected by my staff to appeal to your exact sense of humor.

July 16, 1995

The zipper on my shorts broke so to cover up my wide open fly I had to buy a Melt Banana T-shirt, size XL.

April 3, 1995

I mean, discussing Billy Idol on a Jackson Browne mailing list is one thing, but...

May 24, 1995

I’m sliding naked down a beer-slicked escalator median.

July 19, 1995

I think he’s more like a cross between Buster Keaton and William Henry Harrison.

August 7, 1995

I got a machine gun cartridge case. It’s just a small thin hollow brass metal cylinder. I saw the big machine that stamped out thousands of them per minute.

November 25, 1995

Whenever anyone has a question about Cheap Trick, Rush, or Steve Martin, he’s right there with the answer.

May 27, 1997

If you know of any other albums that could reasonably be described as “the half-conscious moanings of a drugged thunder god”, please let me know.

December 15, 1999

A— mailed me a painting of a Christmas tree. I would never have guessed that’s what it is, but after he told me, I can see the resemblance.

August 5, 1999

He’s thinking about becoming a long distance truck driver or a mailman.

April 15, 2003

Only the acrid odor of the singed pot finally breaks the spell of the harmonium.

June 1, 1994

The Swedish Stockhausen guy is supposed to send me some Aphex Twin.

June 1, 1994

This kind of attention to detail is likely to impress even the unsophisticated reader.

May 8, 1994

D— sat in a chair and never smiled except when he made a mistake on the guitar.

December 19, 1995

He drew up a short list of words, e.g., bottle, factory, fish, gun. Then he wrote out of all the combinations of two: bottle factory, factory bottle, bottle fish, fish bottle, bottle gun, gun bottle, factory fish, fish factory, factory gun, gun factory, fish gun, gun fish. Then he asked 100 undergraduates what each one meant.

December 29, 1995

He paid three times as much for his copy and his didn’t come with the 30-page booklet. Gloat gloat.

January 4, 1996

After the show he said that he had been half asleep during the performance and this is his new custom, to perform while half asleep.

January 9, 1996

Here’s a rough draft of my New Year’s resolutions:

1. Eat more tangerines.
2. Ride around more on the CTA.
3. Read more Japanese novels.
4. Drink more coffee in more diners.
5. Discard more unnecessary possessions.
6. Gaze more at Lake Michigan.
7. Buy more Cecil Taylor albums.
8. Learn more German.

It’s going to be a pretty existential year.

August 29, 1996

...so there’ll be this statue of a woman with a flowing robe and long flowing hair, looking goddess-like, except in her arms is a giant squid.

October 17, 1997

Can I run my old DOS programs on it?

January 9, 1997

What I ate for dinner: a can of pineapple chunks and a bag of microwave popcorn.

January 28, 1997

“World-weary” is the operative word here.

July 22, 1997

To: Greg_Ginn@cyberden.com
Subject: Re: Fwd: GREG GINN TOUR DATES UPDATE
Date: 1994

In article 175370143.6682585 you write:
>GREG GINN with Transition Tour Schedule
>08/22  ATOMIC MUSIC HALL  ATHENS, GA
>[etc.]

Mr. Ginn,
This has nothing to do with alt.zines.  Please
confine your postings to appropriate newsgroups.

== Seth Tisue (s-tisue@anl.gov)

August 17, 1998

Did you know that both senators from Hawaii are named Daniel K. something?

January 30, 1995

I should have realized that “the war between the lampshades and the lichens” was far more logical.

January 30, 1995

The first six minutes or so are overlapping, gradually louder layers of insectlike buzzing, which by the time it gets really loud is suddenly ZAP! cut off by a zapping noise, followed by that running-water-and-schoolchildren stuff (I think you know what I mean).

April 5, 1999

That’s the second time in three days I've been accused of being pretentious. (The first was when my friends A— and M— saw my fabulous new thrift store raincoat.)