graveyard club - cellar door

August 29, 2016

dolly parton - the bargain store

August 28, 2016

bleu - sunshine

ask me my age, i punch you in the face

August 27, 2016


It's my birthday and i am Linda Belcher.

marcus gunnar pettersson

August 26, 2016

Bi-Poster2

stranger things

August 25, 2016


If you're a heavy duty font enthusiast or you're just fond of the printed word like myself then this article about the design process of the Stranger Things title sequence is for you.

Also, having much fun with this generator:
And yes, i'm hungry.
And also, yes, this is now my desktop.

kleinart // varley

velvet

'What we will remember—we tried to take the dog,
packed around him, making a cozy spot
at the back of the Subaru, blocking out the sun,
resisting the obvious—
he was too old, he would not make it.
And when he died in Minnesota,
we smelled and smelled his paws,
arthritic and untouchable these last many years,
took those marvelous paws up into our faces.
They smelled of dark clay
and sweet flower bloom decay.'


Packing the Car for Our Western Camping Trip

stranger things

You know i've fallen hard when it earns a spot on my desktop.

Current favourites:

Dustin (i wish to squish him)
Eleven (mini superpowered Ripley, i adore thee)
Hopper (if Jim dies, you riot, i sob in a corner)

Added props for Winoni being back in her wheelhouse and killing it.

ashley yeo


vancouver sleep clinic - lung

August 24, 2016



I've not just listened to this 8 times in a row.
Totally haven't.
Can't prove it.

onitsuka tigers

August 23, 2016

It's been an Onitsuka kind of day.
Which means my ankles are slightly annoyed but my feet are in squishy soled heaven.

death in vegas


For some reason i have a complete mental block with this song and always think it's The Jesus and Mary Chain (not so far a reach, no?) and forget that it's actually Death in Vegas.
Same goes for Blur and She's So High.
My brain has been senile since conception.

clara lieu

These elderly nudes drawn on tissue paper by Clara Lieu are beyond lovely.
The blend of graphite with such a delicate surface displays a thoughtful sensitivity to the subject matter.
The sort of thing you wish you'd thought of first.

dan hipp

Stranger Things

stranger things

August 22, 2016

Oh.
Damn.
And i'm only three episodes in.
...
I foresee a sweatshirt in my future.

Dear Tumblr artists, i have a mighty need for a Stranger Things/Over the Garden Wall mashup. Sort me out?
Greg is the most precious unicorn of them all.

Also, i have a mighty need for an amigurumi Jason Funderburker:
Because of reasons.

jon hopkins - the wider sun

we fell to earth - lights out

magdalena lutek

All I wanna do is fly next to you

rocko // nuernberger

August 20, 2016

inside out
Cody Rocko
inside out


'When the strange girl skips rope her hair flies
like a porpoise. She collects things that melt
and things that tick, circles and cubes
and checkerboards in a drawer

she can pull out from her navel.
Other children, alerted by the rumble
of marbles in her chest, chase her
across the field. She insists she is only

hungry, but they pin her down and open her
up. Cockroaches rush out and bullies run
and squeal, crushing carapaces underfoot.
She gathers as many as she can,

tells them she’s sorry there is no lock. She’s sorry,
but good children shouldn’t have secrets.'


The Strange Girl Asks Politely To Be Called Princess

james vincent mcmorrow - get low

August 19, 2016

roxy jules - rubies & blood

kevin garrett - precious

ysursa // greenberg

At Thirteen
Antonio Ysursa
At Thirteen


'In the peach orchard in an old bathtub
the children are standing someone
in a bath of salt water, and one
gently attaches electrodes
to the nipples of the one
in the bath. Out of the weeds runs one
with a rescued battery from the old
motor home, which they had gotten
to rev its engine like the sad bleating
of a goat. If, later, anyone asks
how they learned to do this, in a striped shirt one
will say, Oh, I was looking for science
experiments in those old textbooks someone
got from the library book sale last year.
I have been baking all day,
and in a few minutes will start to wonder
what happened to that box of coarse kosher salt
I got just last week.
The children are all singing
some ditty from a musical
we saw at the community theater
a few days ago, and, in the tub the one
with electrodes affixed so gently
to his chest is calling
out little mews of uncertainty,
is calling and calling into the sundown
past the knotted trees with their hairy
fruits, green and hard. Hush,
hush, don’t worry, another one
is saying, fingernail following a line of text
in a complicated book. I think this one
is called the Brazilian Telephone, one
says, connecting finally,
after all this build-up, the ends of two
wires to the battery terminals
which, with steel wool stolen from the kitchen,
they had cleaned so carefully
earlier in the day.'


Brazilian Telephone

SaveSave

cloud collision feat. helena deland - would you

helena deland - baby

the animated adventures of firefly


christian klute

August 18, 2016

Ulmer Münster II

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lord huron - she lit a fire

August 17, 2016


Hearing Lord Huron play in some distant room in the house* and remembering how much i fucking adore this band.



*the pater is watching A Walk in the Woods

savesave


Blogger, why?

monster & madman

Monster & Madman


Short and creepily sweet.
There's so much Dave McKean in this work.
Speaking of which, this is going to be incredible:
I fell in love with Paul Nash's work during my second year of art school, in the midst of trudging through the undergrowth to formulate my own botanical body of work.
Like Nash, i found my "inspiration" in the anthropomorphic aspect of nature.
Don't leave me alone in the woods, i'll find monsters everywhere.


images sourced from Paste Magazine

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preach

The sun deigns to appear and i shuffle my daylight deprived body out from its house-shaped cave and indulge in a couple of hours of debauched stories in the sunshine.
It's how i roll.
Apparently.

This panel brings me much joy.

This monster also brings me much joy but before i took this i had to chase him - distract him with a stick of bamboo because he's a simpleton - away from a frog he was making emit a series of unholy squeaks.
He's a devil and leaves us corpses presents on the regular.
Hopefully my webbed friend won't be found on the doorstep tomorrow morning.
Monster.
It did make my bookmark somewhat prescient, however:

ozean - fall // porcelain // scenic

August 13, 2016



So... i'm going to need a copy of this as soon as humanly possible.


courtesy of Dex, my dreampop dealer

22 (OVER S∞∞N) // 10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄



"...caught daylight, god damn right..."



And then there's this:

"22, A Million

Ever since the door swung shut on that north woods cabin, we all felt like Justin entered a future we had imagined as kids. It was an obsessive, simple dream we shared as teenagers growing up in Wisconsin: just music, always. For me that started with Justin asking: “Trev, wanna be in a band?” as we passed each other in the hallway in front of our high school’s trophy case. From then on, along with five of our closest friends, we played anything together, giving everything a go. From jazz standards and ska vamps, free improv freak-outs and marching band anthems to writing our own music. Through these musical experiences, we began to find and form our hearts collectively. All together we assembled musical materials that reflected and produced a shared consciousness that continues today: how we respond to certain tonalities, how to create atmospheres and what we want them to do, which harmonies bring forth places we seek out, how particular articulations can explain more than words can even begin to attempt. Motion and thoughts aligned. Collective goals formed piece by piece. This was how the dream began.

But dreams adjust in new realities. Bands came and went. Time passed in Wisconsin, people moved apart and pursued inner impulses that had been set-aside during our youth. Maybe we should have trusted ourselves more, but all we knew was music and being together, so we rightfully questioned how we could stand as individuals. Many of us moved to North Carolina, I was on the other side of the ocean. For a few years I only heard small vignettes of my friends’ new life down south. And then my heart split when I heard that Justin was leaving North Carolina to return to Wisconsin. I watched from afar as my friends began to tear apart. What could have happened? I felt helpless. And then For Emma, Forever Ago emerged. When I read the album title, my heart sank again. My reaction was more worry than anything. I knew Justin’s recourse to isolation and the past, almost a crippling nostalgia that prevented him from moving onward. This title was a beacon looking back. But when I finally heard the music, I felt relief – it was Justin, raw and vulnerable, as the music had always been. In fact, it was almost normal in how extraordinary it was. Something had shifted with this set of music, something had been lit. For Emma, Forever Ago broke open that fantastic dream into a reality. And before the harness could be thrown over that realized dream, Bon Iver, Bon Iver cemented its animation.

Throughout these last years I have met many people in different parts of the world who have been enchanted by Bon Iver. No doubt it has been thrilling to witness but it has also been odd at times. Perhaps it is the widespread exposure of our lives, this community of friends. Hearing someone sing along to “I’m with Hagen”, a sign of our personal alliance, or “3rd & Lake, it burnt away”, a disappeared place of countless hangs, makes one curious about how a thing can be shared. In my most cynical thoughts, I wonder: How can this be relevant to someone else? However Justin has managed to connect such intimate, banal, and forgotten moments to many people. These moments are now shared widely and no longer belong only to us. But who owns a memory?

When your voice is responded to in the world’s cosmic conversation, when your words and sounds travel to the depths of strangers’ souls, life’s dream can carry you forward at a pace you had never travelled at before. The collective excitement pushes your foot to the gas because isn’t this the only thing to do? Isn’t this exactly what we had imagined or hoped? It became too much to handle for Justin. Something was left behind in such a mad dash over the course of these recent years. The music stopped giving back. The acceleration, repetition and exposure transformed that coveted dream into what felt like a mind-numbing theme park. What is this for? What are we even trying to accomplish here? The teenage fantasy, that shared memory of the future, was now in disguise. A shapeless figure, present but unrecognizable.

This spectacular upheaval of life after these albums provoked an inner storm, a mental sickness of anxiety for Justin. Of course it did. The dream had taken on its own life. It all came to a head on an empty Atlantic beach. I bore witness to my best friend crying in my arms, lost in a world of confusion and removal. Justin could barely even talk. It was only days before, on a misguided solo trip to an island off the coast of Greece, that he had recorded the opening words of 22, A Million, “It might be over soon”, into a portable sampler. The forecast that begins this next Bon Iver undertaking is a reminder of our fragile existence. How when everything appears stable, it may crumble and fall through our fingers. How do we hold on to what is important? How do we make sense of the events that rip us apart? What choices do we have and how do we make them? It was the beginning of an unwinding of an immense knot inside. When confronted with daemons one must hold up the mirror in order to see the other side. For Justin, that begins with 22.

22 stands for Justin. The number’s recurrence in his life has become a meaningful pattern through encounter and recognition. A mile marker, a jersey number, a bill total. The reflection of ‘2’ is his identity bound up in duality: the relationship he has with himself and the relationship he has with the rest of the world. A Million is the rest of that world: the millions of people who we will never know, the infinite and endless, everything outside one’s self that makes you who you are. This other side of Justin’s duality is the thing that completes him and what he searches for. 22, A Million is thus part love letter, part final resting place of two decades of searching for self-understanding like a religion. And the inner-resolution of maybe never finding that understanding. When Justin sings, “I’m still standing in the need of prayer” he begs the question of what’s worth worshipping, or rather, what is possible to worship. If music is a sacred form of discovering, knowing and being, then Bon Iver’s albums are totems to that faith.

Yet when it came time to make a new album, the music was all exhausted. After Bon Iver, Bon Iver, it felt as if the well had gone dry. Confronting himself also meant facing this loss of direction sense in his music. Through different groups of friends—close, passing, new, old—he began to assemble proto-melodies, vague textures and specific moods from hundreds of hours of recorded improvisations. These were the skeleton keys to unlock not just how 22, A Million could sound, but how it was felt, what it was for, what is was about: the power of human connectivity through music. The poly-fi record formed at the congruence of a bold yet delicate sonic palette. These sounds were the way out from the suffocating enclosure and captivity of anxiety.

The ten songs of 22, A Million are a collection of sacred moments, love’s torment and salvation, contexts of intense memories, signs that you can pin meaning onto or disregard as coincidence. If Bon Iver, Bon Iver built a habitat rooted in physical spaces, then 22, A Million is the letting go of that attachment to a place. “I’m taking deeper consideration in another kind of place–our friendships and connections to other people.” Justin proclaims this shift in ’33 “GOD”’: “These will just be places to me now”. Rather than places we encounter a collection of numerical relationships: binary code, mystic ages, Bible chapters, math-logic, repeating infinities. Inside these numbers are a sonic distillation of imagery from the past years of turbulence and how to recover. We hear about positionality (“Down along the creek”, “In the stair up off the hot car lot”), strategies (“I’d make myself escape”, “Steal and rob it”), situations (“Carrying his guitar”, “Sent your sister home in a cab”), new lexicon (“Astuary King”, “Wandry”, “Paramind”) temporalities (“The math ahead, the math behind”, “It might be over soon”) and repeated visuals (“Five lane divers”). These words reveal the riddle of dualities: pain and love, suffering and redemption, omens and happenstance. Such ambiguity and interpretation is the core of how Justin composes words: there are always two ways to see something. Beneath this Daoist-impressionism, we hear the footsteps of a process, the relationships that have kneaded the album’s cause. A locked horns angel, empathetic ears and sagely blessings—friends who have provided themselves in different roles to mold this music into form.

To narrow this album down to the next step within an “artistic career” would be to miss a far grander purpose of this music—or any music for that matter—and the cultures of friendship that sustain us in our capacities to even play music. Although 22, A Million emerges from a swirling context of transformation in Justin’s recent life, it is based on how we have always approached what music can be or do. It is not the perceived power of money and fame that will change the course of events in one’s life, but empathy. Music is a pathway that allows us to listen to ourselves and the people that surround us. It is a pathway to understanding that actively creates change in real-time. Music, even in its most intimate moments, is a pathway between us all. It is the nuts and bolts of humanity as well as its totality. It is made sacred between people and in return makes those relationships sacred. It is the buoyant substance that we grab onto when the water rises above our heads. The answer has been here the entire time: just music, always.

Trever Hagen
April Base, Wisconsin
1 August 2016"


My eyes seem to have sprung a rather serious leak.

I'll never forget discovering Skinny Love on one of The Word's free compilations (fuck, i miss that magazine) and being crushed by Justin Vernon's... everything.
And he was mine.
Truly mine.
It didn't matter that hundreds of people knew about him before me or that in a year's time the rest of the world will have cottoned on to this ethereal being laying his heart out for all to see.
From the second Skinny Love started playing, that music belonged to me.
It crept inside my bones and it's been dozing there ever since.
I don't play musical favourites, there's too much out there, but if i had to keep one, just one, it'd be Bon Iver.
You can't give back what belongs to you.

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