another ramble to pass the time
another kiss without flesh
another tori amos record through the floorboards
another lost ballot box
another envious complaint
it’s what you do when the world is sleeping that matters
let them read about it in the morning papers
the alienated wonder of what one is to do
when the clichés fit
and the profundity does not suffice
enter:
another chewed up pencil
another five minute nap in an office chair
another borrowed fax another fake hello
another greeting with stained teeth
another meeting more slides and more
each promising it it will be the immovable object
the thought is fixed and becomes truth
sadly this is not the case
young golf shirted white men
laugh and
the tweed jacket types (patches and all)
rub their chins as their girlfriends give any observers a
show with a worried look and an arm grab
as usual
it all hinges on the turnout
and it’s only late evening here
but there’s always a spin from the other side
and a drunk yelling
always makes sense
to the ears of the room
it’s gonna be a close one
it’s going to take a while to figure out what we’ve said
what did we expect?
when we’ve fed the projections
and the polls
gone to the booths split
spilt
letting another typo decide the fate of the nation
and i’ve left myself these dreams
and I waste one a night
it’s sweet background music for wasted plans
but they’ve taken a backseat
to dented cans
staring at me from the kitchen counter
what i’ve allowed myself
only what is required
they’re different versions
of different thoughts
the live one backspaced over
fixed
there’s always one more voice than I counted on
it’s nothing more than fiction
dying before the polls close
the question of leadership
hangs in the air with
all of the openings and closings
who knows anymore
anyway
two young men by a dying man’s bed
keeping him breathing until his vote counts
it’s gonna be a close one
In the tradition of the great Sunday Morning Funny Papers, Sunshine and Wind is proud to present an abstract cartoon. Classic one panel action happening here. Best caption gets a free sticker!
With all the crazy stuff we have going on leading up to the pub of What a Future we found ourselves extremely behind on the Audio Saturdays front. So we reached out to musician-in-residence La Sudar and asked them if they had anything they could share to help out. Here’s what they said:
funny you ask because i was just going through some of the archives today and found a three song EP called “erf” from 2011 that as far as i know, i never released or promoted in any way. not only that i have no memory of ever recording it. so you can have it.
all the best, l.s.
email correspondence, nov 2020
thank goodness! as a matter of fact we do have something big brewing on the audio front, and three weeks should buy us enough time to put it together. thanks buddy!
here’s the first track, simply called ‘erf one’:
Ephemera. We use that word a lot here on this site, generally under our daily poetry posts. There are several ways to phrase the meaning of the word, depending on which dictionary you ask, but a few general themes keep coming up. It’s a word used to describe things or writings that are temporary, fleeting, transitory. Things only intended to be used for a short time or not to have lasting value. It’s generally used to refer to paper collectible items, such as ticket stubs, programs, postcards etc. Collins dictionary categorizes it as an “uncountable noun”
Reading the dictionary entries, there are implications that these ephemera, collectively, can be used to give us insight into a time that no longer exists. Though something intended to be fairly limited in scope, a collection of concert flyers can tell us many things: the tastes of the times concerning entertainment, what font and design styles were in fashion, etc. And since all times are times that no longer exist, one can look at something like a band setlist, snatched from the stage by an eager fan, as something of a miracle, pulled from the ether, like Nancy pulling Freddy Kreuger’s hat from the dream. It’s proof, it’s evidence.
It should come as no surprise, then, that they can take on another life as collectables. If these discarded items as a whole can imply facts or relay certain atmospheric data to researchers, they can certainly transfer information to a deliberate eye motivated by nostalgia. Someone can hold a ticket stub in their hand as a method of focusing their powers of recall. They may keep it displayed because it reminds them of a certain person, or period of their life. We’re no strangers to this. We could make a post a day for the rest of our lives and not completely display all the ephemera we’ve collected over the years.
We feel like there’s also a warning here: items that were not intended to be reused or permanent nevertheless becoming valuable as memories or sources of knowledge might be something worth trying to look out for. Looking at old show flyers, it’s easy to think of all the other flyers out there, representing shows long forgotten.
We started thinking about, what video ephemera would look like. On one hand it could be a video of room full of dancers, either not knowing or not remembering they were on film, who were never supposed to be on film in the first place, but were captured by someone in a revel, trying to create a Freddy’s hat to bring back with her. Or it could be something filmed for no reason at all, something more accidental. Perhaps something one films that only becomes representative of a time or place after the fact. We found a lot of examples of these in our archives, and present some here for your viewing pleasure.
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about a movie we didn’t make. This would have been 2012-2013. The idea was to do a novel, and album, and a movie all with the same three characters, but telling different stories for each medium. They would still be interdependent on each other as a trilogy. The whole concept is actually sketched out somewhere on paper and the plan is to revisit it at some point fairly soon – but that’s the not the point of this post. This post is about the movie: PRICK (tagline: it’s all in his bed)
We had a bunch of these sketched out: not 17 of them, but maybe eight or nine. These are the ones that survived. The movie basically revolves around three characters: Genevieve, Maxwell, and Deacon. Maxwell is the audience surrogate, a blackout drunk criminal who receives a strange gift. Genevieve sort of presents as a riptide to a stabilizing power, and Deacon is the manic, scheming, chattering in his ear, a sort of mix between Iago, Kramer, and Ratso from Midnight Cowboy.
Maxwell’s gift also comes with a judgement. In the movie, it’s bedbugs. So many great horror and existential mindfuck movies have some insectoid element. Them, The Fly, Creepshow, Naked Lunch, Arachnophobia, even slugs and leeches have had their moment. But there had never been an a movie that explored the existential mindfuck of bedbugs. As victims of an infestation in early 2012, we felt inspired. After it was over, we were eager to channel the dread and anxiety from the experience into our art. We’d been doing a lot of freewriting and that translated into a lot of rambling, philosophical monologues for Deacon.
Obviously the video quality is not great. Clearly our prepaid phone’s camera had problems in low light settings. We knew that there was obviously no way, with everything else going on, that we were going to be able to learn enough about video to do anything more than a back of the envelope sketch. But to us at least they come fairly close to the feel of what we were going for in those scenes.
We would still like to make the film someday, or at least finish the screenplay. Screenplays are hard, though. We have no idea where to even begin. The whole trilogy deserves to be finished in some form. We have maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the novel written, but it’s in poor shape due to only being worked on sporadically. The album is written, but not recorded (though demos of all of twenty songs and decent recordings of maybe twelve of them do exist). We’re grateful, at least, to have something to do.
Many years ago, an iPad 2 was purchased. This would have been 2011-ish. At the time things were going pretty good and Apple was at the crest of its cultural rise. We ourselves were for our main computing needs using an outdated but still very useful Mac tower and were having good results filming open mic sets with our new iPod shuffle (with camera). It seemed a full transition to Apple products was perhaps inevitable; the iPad 2 was intended to make music recording mobile. Instead of dragging around the 4 track or relying on Zoom handhelds, we figured it might be useful to have a portable recording studio around. We thought it would be perfect to record practices, shows, or do pro sounding tracking in the rehearsal space. It wasn’t.
Call it a lesson on doing research in advance. The iPad 2 did not come with GarageBand preinstalled, and had to be purchased as a separate app. When we finally got it on the machine, it was clear, and obvious in hindsight, that it was not the full version, but one specifically tailored for the iPod 2’s capabilities. Downloading beats and instruments was a whole frustrating process that we never really finished. Connecting the audio inputs to the iPod 2 was near impossible. We bought and returned two $40 adapters before giving up entirely. We’d basically just wasted $400 on the machine. Things were better those days, but that was still a lot of money. Six years prior, this would have bankrupted us, but we managed to absorb the blow with just some wounded pride. We emerged stronger, wiser, and a lifetime hatred of Apple products. We have not bought one since.
One thing we could do with our very expensive paperweight, however, was basic animations. We did a handful over a couple months before moving on to other things, and here are some of the best. We set them to some of the early ambient music that was coming out of the studio at that point, as we halfheartedly tried to get good at animating. It was ultimately too time consuming for what we would have needed to do with it, and it fell off as so many things do.
This is fine, of course, we were grownups at that point and had come to understand that artistic projects come and go like waves, some come in and some go out, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, but always cycling. There’s always more coming, and there are always some that will just be gone forever.
We used the iPad 2 periodically over the next few years until the summer of 2016, when it fell off a bedside table in the Washington DC suburbs and its screen cracked, rendering it unusable. We made a couple of uninspired attempts to sell it for $10 on craigslist before putting it in a drawer and forgetting about it. By the time we moved out of the Apartment it was gone – nobody was really sure quite when we got rid of it or how, but thanks to the sturdy construction and robust constitution of Apple devices, it is probably in some landfill somewhere, buried under sludge but likely still mostly intact.
Sunshine and Wind 