Chalkmarks on windowsills

Image: Megan Whitmarsh

Hey peeps, I know I know. Every stolen moment I sit down to write a post, the words get sandtrapped somewhere between my brain and fingers. I hope to un-gum the machine with a new image & song mix in a couple days. So stay tuned for that.

What exactly have I been doing since I haven't been blogging?
Because you asked (or didn't): mostly disposing of inventory and supplies of a small business I used to have. Trust me, it's completely uninteresting, extremely time-intensive and absolutely necessary.

What else have I been doing?
Taxes.

Ugh. Anything fun?
I'm embroidering a wrap (shawl, whatever) with an elaborate flower and vine pattern of my own, increasingly elaborate, design. And making fingerless gloves from recycled sweaters. Crafty crap like that.

Have I at least heard any good music lately? This is a music blog, remember.
Yes yes, I know. I'm liking the new Mountain Goats record a lot. After the overslept, unshowered slug-pace of his last album, John Darnielle sounds like he's regularly consuming B12 supplements and falling a lot in love. Heretic Pride dons moon boots and a pom-pommed knit hat and leaps laps around town in below-zero windchill with energy and heart and momentum. I wouldn't say it's flushed with the same ruddy fever as the earliest material, so autodidactically enthusiastic for historical and mythological esoterica (Cicero wrote it allll down!). But what is? Opener "Sax Rohmer #1" is patented Mountain Goats -- finger-bleeding guitar hammer-strum intense, brooding and portentous as red clouds, and allusive as ever. Apparently, the title references the author of the Dr. Fu Manchu books. Do with that what you will. Actually, do nothing with it. Darnielle swapped out his clever, bookish, logorrheic runs with experience a long time ago. Home sounds like a real specific place these days.

Sax Rohmer #1 - The Mountain Goats

Also, I don't know if I can endorse everything on Oh:Io, but the cardboard cutout laser guns and mildewed-basement three-chord progressions of this Bearsuit sci-fi twee-punk shoutdown (surely not named after this) are holding my serotonin levels high and steady:

Jupiter Force (Recruitment Video) - Bearsuit

Oh hey: I actually wrote a (not very insightful or engaging) post.

Anyway:
I don't think you need to have weighed split vs. back stitches while working a stem to appreciate Megan Whitmarsh's embroidered art (see top o' the post). Whitmarsh exploits (in a good way) the tension between her demure and historically feminized-therefore-marginalized medium and her supernatural and popcultastic subjects -- yetis and elves and yetis and elves playing in punk bands (X-Ray Spex! Billy Idol! Really!).

It looks like Spoilt Victorian Child has (definitely? maybe?) called it quits again. A shame, but a crazy, great list of songs, eh?