A little something to brighten your day

You know, sometimes you look through old folders and you find cool things. Like this:

Brooding stare from behind the guitar? Check.

Pinky ring? Check.

Awkward mystical title? Check.

Day brightened? Check.

Open Sesame

About once a week Sam makes me breakfast. It's a real treat. Today I requested steel-cut oatmeal. He looked around and ran in and out of the bedroom with various bags of assorted grains, none of which were steel-oatmeal. Finally he comes in with the right bag, at least, it appeared to be the right bag and I approved. I came into the kitchen about five minutes later to see the oatmeal merrily boiling on the stove top. After showering I came out of the bathroom to find him tasting the oatmeal. He grimaced and told me it wasn't ready. I took the spoon and stirred, only to realize that it wasn't steel-cut oatmeal at all, but sesame seeds. In case you're wondering, we didn't eat them.

Self Portrait of the Writer as a . . .

Total weirdo.

So, awhile back Gabe posted about the upcoming weirdness/amazing noir/modern dance/(with Kylie Minogue?) film Holy Motors, which I have to say, I'm really excited to see.

In this post he happened to reference Aaron Neville which took me back to the days of yore when I was a weird, somewhat solitary kid who was completely ignorant of pop culture and listened to whatever her parents happened to be listening to at the time. At this time in my life I remember a lot of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Nottingham Hillbillies, and most importantly, the Neville Brothers. 

In the year 1990 the Neville Brothers came out with an album called Brother Blood. It featured predominantly in our car trips, dinner parties, and day-to-day lives. I was totally obsessed with this album. My obsession centered on a song called Fearless that featured the angelic voice of Aaron Neville (here). It's so inspirational! And romantic! And weird that I loved this song at nine years old!

I have a very clear memory of lying on the floor on my stomach next to our entertainment center (which featured frosted glass which would later be broken), listening to this song on repeat through my dad's huge puffy headphones, and writing down the lyrics in my tiny spiral white cat notebook so that I could, I don't know, walk around singing that song whenever I wanted.

Which was all the time.

People I Saw . . . Near Zupans

There have been few times in my life that I have thought I wanted children. One of them was this time. Back when I worked on 30th and Belmont, I took a lunch break and walked to Zupans. It was a gray day and I was probably feeling a little morose. But I passed this family. A mother and her two sons. Really typical in that neighborhood. But the older kid was like, "C'mon! What are you doing?" and was standing there staring incredulously at his younger brother. The younger kid was just kind of softly singing to himself and clinging to this tree trunk. But as I got closer I realized that he also had this massive green marker beard and mustache. All over his face. I made eye contact with the mother and we both just kind of cracked up. And I thought, I want that kid.  

Living Room Pop

Haim (one of my new favorites) just posted their first video. Here it is:



Living room band practice, bike tricks, R n' B synchronized dance moves, childhood video footage, and sweet lo-fi pop that somehow reminds me of our childhood babysitter who had a massive Kewpie doll collection and used to drive us around in her CRX and play "Hold on to the Nights" over and over again. Like, she would just rewind that tape and play it again. A quick Google reveals the singer of that song to be Richard Marx. I always thought it was a woman. Anyway, Haim and their modern ballads. I'm not saying that I'm planning a breakup, but should that ever happen Haim's entire library is going on my Breakup Mix.