nika states

Posts

  • August 21, 08:35 AM

    My room is a terrarium, a big cat enclosure, a blue-half-bird-cage. I have all the light and the heat and the neigbour’s Shakira and the wind fucking the palm fronds together outside, me supine on the soft carpet, the deflating mattress. At night from one wall of windows I can see into the backyard of the people on the next block over, there is a plastic chair beneath the green porch light, above the grass that fails to be green, sandwiched between the hard silhouettes of two low outbuidings, and in the mornings the hills lie wet and spiny, lady-like beneath the fog somewhere, where I have family on a twisting upper road. I cannot see their house but I have called their voicemachine, and I am waiting for their advice. I have ninety-nine-cent plates and glasses, I have my underthings in a heap in the corner, I have a shiny new toothbrush. The girls that walk by the house all seem to be chewing at gum and there is something funny about the boy with his hydraulics crawling over a speedbump, bass going humpahumphump. Earlier down McArthur there were men in the middle of the street with their shirts off, they almost looked oiled but it is hot out, so they are really just like me, only smarter. There are other things, but I haven’t found them yet. There is time.

  • August 15, 01:44 AM

    selene states

  • August 14, 04:10 AM
  • August 11, 04:25 AM

    I’m flying to England tomorrow (today) to watch my big sister get married. Jeff is being warm somewhere in the other room, and my things are in boxes. When I get back in about a week I will pack them in my car and drive them to my new place in Oakland (tiny room, all windows, space for a full sized mattress, wonderful) and maybe stress out about where to put them and when I’ll have time to look for jobs and what the hell kind of classes I’ll be taking in two weeks time, when I start at Mills.

    Holy Moly.

  • August 04, 08:46 PM

    Celeste Deruisa

  • August 04, 08:34 PM
  • August 04, 07:06 PM

    “AUDREY IS A HOBAG”

    feat. Celeste Deruisa

  • August 04, 06:53 PM

    Celeste Deruisa

  • August 04, 03:55 PM
  • August 03, 10:18 PM

    I do hope none of you were laboring under the delusion that my work is in any way dignified. Sasha Volynets, who took this, knows the squatty truth.

  • July 31, 05:42 PM

    Sasha Volynets

  • July 31, 05:19 PM
  • July 30, 03:33 AM

    Sasha Volynets

  • July 27, 06:11 PM

    Our friend Jon recently had his second annual 30th birthday. I (typically) made a fuss about our being late 20 minutes, which turned out to be wholly unnecessary. I used up the last of the first roll during dinner, though I was not able to save any frames for the adventures of Mitsubeero and his nemesis Vinyard, mighty warriors fashioned, respectively, out of: a beer bottle, napkins, chopsticks, chopstick paper/ a wine glass, napkins, chopstick paper, maraschino cherries, melted ice-cream, and american spirit rolling paper. I felt a little sorry for our servers, who were undoubtedly a little confused, but I am young and therefore always totally complicit in these things. 

  • July 27, 05:36 PM
  • July 27, 05:30 PM

    jeff lindsay

  • July 27, 03:49 AM

    cool heather

  • July 27, 03:49 AM

    i lost my camera battery. shooting exclusively in analog until the new one arrives . a few shots from a few weeks with a canon ae-1 and some fuji superia reala to follow.

  • July 21, 02:18 AM

    This morning I dreamt I was in a stone city, a drunk place high in the mountains, with little air and creepers raking the walls. I laid the guitars, dulcimers, awkward wooden flutes, and myself against them, bare legs on tiles walked too many times and then left too long in the distance, turning now to gravel. Others were there, but I didn’t bother with them. A little bird came to me - or maybe it was not small. The size of a young cat, but downy, sweet and brightly tottering. A little bird. It pecked at my fingers with a thin beak, a little kindly, a polite request. Peeping. I led it into my lap with breadcrumb thumbs and it settled there, lightheaded and hungry, I rummaging in my bag with one hand and offering the other for more pecking. We were both very happy, resting in that place. Then the blurry man in the bed roused himself and took his fidgety hand from mine, went into the living room for cereal. I tried to go back to the city with the old stones and the fluffed bird, but I could not find it anywhere. I slept without any more stories. Only I am a lucky one, and when I woke properly I went out to find him tapping at a laptop, and good things were had.

  • July 20, 06:42 PM
  • July 20, 02:57 AM

    kevin johnson

  • July 18, 08:03 PM

    This weekend I am sorting boxes full of clothing, dresses from goodwill and the salvation army, smaller shops in Heidelberg, Walnut Creek, and Topanga. Some of these will go to consignment shops, and some will be donated. Most will hopefully go in the yard sale. Other things with which I am parting include the entirety of my old playmobil collection, a number of breyer horses, a dozen or so cloth-bound history books. From the driveway, my sneezes sound a bit like shrieks, and in a way they are that - my body protesting these old things, that the parting has taken so long. I am twenty-one and a few weeks old, sleeping in my mother’s spare room for a few days, asking things to leave me behind.

    Last week I was accepted into Mills College for the 2010-2011 term, and if all goes well - if I can afford the tuition, the cost of living in Oakland, the textbooks, and the time, I will be there at the end of August. I’ll move out of the little flat I’ve shared with Jeff and Grue right when the air starts cooling, with little trouble and less time, probably, because it’s just cameras, guitars and clothes, and half of those are closeted in my car. I’ll miss things, but I am so very pleased and excited - a little lightheadedly, and when I found out, in the car between Ben Lomond and Fall Creek, my camera battery disappeared. So I have been shooting with an older apparatus, a Canon AE 1, and have not yet had anything developed. There are pictures of poison oak, life jackets, people on pedal boats, smiling things. They will be telling, I think.

    Last night, after the heat died, a laid myself down with the skinny, blind-deaf dog at my feet, my mother in the armchair and Cool Heather all tight with energy, in and out of the room. There was something wrong, something ineffable and strange curling inside me. My mother said “You’ve been sorting through those things all day. Old things are hard,” but I hadn’t felt much of anything, even looking at old pictures. Wasn’t I nostalgic? “No, not really,” I said. “My life is so much better now. Nostalgia would be a little stupid, on my part.” 

    And I felt a little lighter then.

  • July 09, 10:26 PM
  • July 09, 09:37 PM
  • July 09, 07:55 PM
  • July 09, 06:29 PM
  • July 09, 04:28 PM

    fame

  • July 07, 02:18 AM

    Josh Comer

  • July 07, 01:57 AM
  • July 07, 01:35 AM

    Sam Rucks

  • July 07, 12:53 AM
  • July 05, 03:33 AM
  • July 05, 03:20 AM
  • July 05, 02:48 AM
  • July 05, 02:21 AM
  • July 03, 10:29 AM

    I am going north in an hour or so and leaving the light from the bedroom for the weekend. All of these walls and doors are white but there’s something transformative in summer and the right time of day. This apartment is mostly hotter than the outdoors, except when it’s much, much colder, but there are things I love, and I think about London and Nashville and Austin, other destinations, I think about these things but sometimes it is nice to stare at your wall and feel very fond, to stretch out your hand in the middle of the night and feel it beating cool against you. I have done this since I was a child, in all different places. Even with someone in the bed a hand splayed on a wall in the dark is a strong kind of solitude.

  • June 30, 04:49 AM
  • June 30, 04:32 AM
  • June 30, 03:26 AM
  • June 30, 02:58 AM
  • June 30, 02:52 AM
  • June 30, 02:40 AM

    julian perez

  • June 13, 03:25 AM

    Forest Devil

    In 2008 I stumbled upon a six-song self-titled EP by a band called Night Beds. I could find virtually nothing about them online, and worse, I couldn’t even remember how I came to possess the mp3s - only that one of the songs came up on shuffle one day, as if out of nowhere. I spent a lot of that year and the next racking up a pretty serious play count on those few songs, in the car driving La Honda to the sea, in the hammock with my arms and legs all wet with pre-dawn condensation, on many different sideways. Eventually I was able to find out a little more about the band; they made a more accessible myspace page. Matt Wilcox (previously of Matt and Isom) and Winston Yellen (at one point recording as Winter Boat) seem to do most of the work, though at least one other young man appears in a youtube video, and their myspace page recently has been changed to read a third member (Aubrey Swander). 

    Occasionally someone creates music that instills in me a sense of real thirst - both for more of the same and for a train of imprecise images, something else I would not be able to identify or talk about. The Night Beds EP is exactly that, and I waited what felt like a very long time for what I wanted very badly, but now it’s here. This week saw the release of Every Fire; Every Joy, which is every part what i hoped it would be. You can download it for free at everythingthatisnothere.info. Please do so, and then tell your friends.

  • June 13, 02:46 AM

    jeff lindsay

  • June 13, 02:23 AM
  • June 13, 02:19 AM
  • June 13, 01:40 AM

    jeff lindsay 

  • June 09, 10:29 PM
  • June 08, 05:36 PM

    • Sometimes the flat has a fainting heat, and I stay as low to the ground as possible, shower sitting down in shirt and underwear, in cold water, again, again. In the afternoons a mad herd of suns undulates in the black glass on highways, the hills leonine again, softly alarming. Young men in big shirts come down Chiquita with their jingling carts, I am always going somewhere else, with sad eyes for popsicles and bottled water gone sweet in the passenger footwell. I have been waiting for all of this somehow, to come home with thick air and sparse clothing, to lay face down in the dark with dying ice-cubes between ribs and sofa, for the girls downtown to wear their tube dresses without shivering, for us all to be bare and nonsensical, swallowing that glare all day until the evening settles and we let it spill right out of us. This is rightly called a golden place, but it needs the summer. It never knows how much.

  • June 03, 05:07 AM

    liminal edition - hard work

    Paul Baribeau writes the best folk-punk songs ever. I can’t use a plectrum, or even strum at all, so the pads of my fingers are whitely calloused things, like you’d expect someone hardcore to have. The illusion always spoils. I like bells, and glass beads hitting tile floors, and tiny things. I think you can maybe hear that, here.

Audio

  • Forest Devil In 2008 I stumbled upon a six-song self-titled EP by a band called Night Beds. I could find virtually nothing about them online, and worse, I couldn’t even remember how I came to possess the mp3s - only that one of the songs came up on shuffle one day, as if out of nowhere. I spent a lot of that year and the next racking up a pretty serious play count on those few songs, in the car driving La Honda to the sea, in the hammock with my arms and legs all wet with pre-dawn condensation, on many different sideways. Eventually I was able to find out a little more about the band; they made a more accessible myspace page. Matt Wilcox (previously of Matt and Isom) and Winston Yellen (at one point recording as Winter Boat) seem to do most of the work, though at least one other young man appears in a youtube video, and their myspace page recently has been changed to read a third member (Aubrey Swander). Occasionally someone creates music that instills in me a sense of real thirst - both for more of the same and for a train of imprecise images, something else I would not be able to identify or talk about. The Night Beds EP is exactly that, and I waited what felt like a very long time for what I wanted very badly, but now it’s here. This week saw the release of Every Fire; Every Joy, which is every part what i hoped it would be. You can download it for free at everythingthatisnothere.info. Please do so, and then tell your friends.
    104 plays
  • liminal edition - hard work Paul Baribeau writes the best folk-punk songs ever. I can’t use a plectrum, or even strum at all, so the pads of my fingers are whitely calloused things, like you’d expect someone hardcore to have. The illusion always spoils. I like bells, and glass beads hitting tile floors, and tiny things. I think you can maybe hear that, here.
    92 plays

Posts

  • August 14, 04:36 AM
  • May 16, 11:41 PM
  • May 03, 06:58 PM

    As it is I can make only ill-informed assumptions about the roles of flexibility and clarity in one...

    As it is I can make only ill-informed assumptions about the roles of flexibility and clarity in one language or another, and absolutely no assumptions about the greater efficacy of either. I am forced to take pride in small remembrances – suddenly I know the word for toe or forgiveness or candle and hope that I will one day have learned and relearned enough to foster a healthy habit of linguistic hopskotch. I have taken charge of my sister’s library card so that I can borrow Amerikanishe Lyrik and muddle through secondhand Longfellow, and I listen to too much Einstürzende Neubauten. In a track on ‘Silence is Sexy’ they say in English: Your arms would not be able to stretch as far as necessary to form an adequate gesture for beauty.

    This is how I feel about the intricacies of human communication, and the color of the butter’s rim when it’s been left out too long, and the candles that have started glowing through the condensation on evening windows. There are songs gestating in the raw spot between my belly and my lungs that could one day deserve translation. And with all the beauty, and the wearing my boots into scrap leather, there is something that still extends outward. Today I walked past a rank of needled trees that to some people might smell of Christmas – to me it smelled of the playground in the Geiberg woods when I was growing up, and that nauseous satisfaction of swinging on your stomach for a little too long. It was the kind of olfactory experience that makes you howl a little in the back of your throat because you can taste home there. It is the same when I smell under-watered lawns and splinters baking in old decks, and bay fog. We do not howl for a loss; it is a greeting. I belong to these things more than they belong to me, and I feel like it is possible to be in all the important places at once if I am not running away. I use English to best explain this thing that is happening to the trees in Germany. My whole life I have said shrank instead of cupboard. These things find me.

    eight-oh-twelve in the evening. november thirteenth. two-thousand-nine.

    It is sunny. the patios are wafting hot wood smell. I am reading Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy for the first time. My copy has been translated into German as Rastlose Nähe, or Restless Nearness. I am thinking it is a nice thing, to understand which things make my life larger to me than those in the novels I read, and to feel a happiness unmarried to complacency. Nowadays I like to reread the dated, quiet things I have written; they are hopeful, seeking stories, when before all the dated, quiet things were made of fear and refusal.

    three-forty-three in the afternoon. may third. two thousand ten.

  • April 14, 12:49 AM
  • April 04, 09:58 PM

    It is so deep this, enough to coat and weigh the uvula, something sour and foul stuck in our wigs,...

    It is so deep this, enough
    to coat and weigh the uvula, something
    sour and foul stuck in our wigs, between the
    peacock scales in the mermaids cleavage
    and the fibers of the scallywag’s sash
    a rat battered in acerbic acid and
    baked in the fog machine. No breath in the tent
    no breath in the mass of bodies in the alley
    by the dixie toilets. They are so drunk
    they are laughing; they are dressed as animals
    and cannot remember their fear, only feel
    and stampede in and out, beer, knees, breasts
    blinder now than in the nebel, the crushing lungs
    I am going back in, Hannah says to me
    her pink eyelashes are slumped in the stuff
    and the tent has been aired, but
    I am afraid to die.

    february tenth, seven twenty-eight AM to seven thirty two AM, 2010

  • March 25, 12:48 PM
  • March 12, 12:43 PM
  • March 12, 11:06 AM
  • March 10, 06:45 PM
  • March 10, 06:24 PM
  • March 10, 06:11 PM
  • March 10, 05:57 PM

    the aspiring coroners are all women. I am here for other reasons; we watch an eductational films...

    the aspiring coroners are all women. I am here for other reasons; we watch an eductational films about dead or dying babies.the heights o fmy old elementary school have chamged. So few children, though this is where they should be, but young men with curled sideburns loping between offices, asking how to handle them. We have lots something in this town, obviously, and replaced it with impossible livestock, yoking megafauna to our suburban utility vehicles when the gas money runs out. The imginary horse with dusty thigh meat still strains before the mustard hulls of these fat tugboats. We have lost our fossil fuels or forgottem and returned to our old was. Soon we will torment mammoths in the oakland zoo, our children picking their noses, the lady coroners tweezing the snot from the fur between its eyes. Ah, but then, then. Nobody will be jailed anymore.

    -

    february 19, 2010, eight thirty nine AM until eight fifty two AM, waking.

  • March 08, 07:55 AM
  • February 23, 05:20 PM
  • February 23, 04:52 PM
  • February 23, 06:58 AM
  • February 16, 05:58 PM
  • February 07, 05:33 PM
  • February 06, 09:15 AM
  • January 29, 07:35 AM

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