"Nails Dig In" writing-soundtrack....

I recently finished the first completed draft of a piece of short fiction that I'd had in the works for quite a while. I'm in the process of sending it out to some gracious readers willing to provide some feedback for future edits, help me get it out of my own head for a bit...

In the meantime, I figure I may as well share an idiosyncratic yet essential aspect of my writing-process. Many of my pieces of writing are composed to a dedicated "soundtrack;" as a musician and a writer in whose writing music and sound tends to play a large role, it's essential for me that the piece that I'm working on maintain a particular "sound" in the style that it's written in. Most of the "tone" of my writing is based first-and-foremost on sound. Therefore, I make a playlist of the sound and tone that I'm trying to achieve (often, like this one, including songs of my own that were composed exclusively for the purpose of capturing and understanding the "sound" of the piece of writing at hand [not all of my own pieces on this list were composed explicitly for that purpose however, some just fit the mood well] ) and listen to that exclusively while writing and editing.

Here is, then, the "soundtrack/ playlist" for a piece titled "Nails Dig In (In The Mouth of the Wolf)."

(wink/ hint/ wink to those who stumble on this while helping me edit/ reading for submission/ reading the work if it happens to get published somewhere; these tracks also feature/ include a few easter-egg internal-references within the work that add additional layers of meaning.)

1) LeVautourEnsemble- Physical Consent

2) The Stiletto Formal- ...tastes like black licorice

3) Placebo- Protect Me From What I Want

4) LeVautourEnsemble- Hybrid Eyes

5) Crystal Castles- Not In Love (feat. Robert Smith)

6) Miike Snow- Plastic Jungle

7) LeVautourEnsemble- Mamihlapinatapei; Searching For Words In Other Tongues. 

(Sorry, this one is currently unavailable. It's slated for a forthcoming compilation as a "previously unreleased" track, and it wouldn't quite be "unreleased" if I dropped it here, now would it? ;) )

8) Bright Eyes- Lover I Don't Have To Love

9) Yeasayer- O.N.E.

10) LeVautourEnsemble with Antoine 518- Wave (Our Confusion Is Just What We Need)

(this is another in the previously-unreleased category, this one a recent collab-track, but I'm dropping this one here. That's right, this is exclusive-type-shit. Brand new, just for you.)

11) Bloc Party- Like Eating Glass 

12) The Strays- Life Support

13) The Mars Volta- Ilyena

Crazy Chicken Prints now available on Etsy!

Because the logistics of selling mail-order art baffle me a bit, I finally broke down, revived my long-dormant Paypal account, and started an Etsy shop.

At the moment this shop is just for the variations on the Crazy-Chicken photo-reproduction prints that I've recently posted about making available (there are two different designs now!), but in the future I may or may not make one-of-a-kind pieces available here too, if there's interest in that sort of thing.

Check it out, here-

"Watching the Bridge Come Down; A Tribute."

(I haven't posted any poetry here in a while... largely because my writing-output mostly veers in alternate directions these days. I do have a couple pieces in the pipeline for attempted publication at the moment... but here's one that I wrote off-the-cuff after watching a Portsmouth, NH landmark, the Memorial Bridge, being dismantled last week. Figured I'd post it here as a sort of an homage.)

Watching the Bridge Come Down;

A Tribute.

We take a pilgrimage to the port,

It seems like it just has to happen.

There’s something symbolic, as we’re

Standing in the crowd on the pier,

Watching the trusses taken apart,

Broken down and placed onto the barge below.

We’re loudly cracking jokes, saying how

We want to see an explosion,

Something cathartic,

Pissing off the old-people,

Keeping their odd and silent vigil. 

But that’s our role here,

As we retreat to a bar to follow

Our own sort of vigil with beer...

Our own sort of tribute.

This is our city, our pier,

Our bridge, our bricks,

Our own pieces of rusted, incompetent steel.

And none of us want to say

(but we’re all thinking)

That there’s something important

About the idea that the 

Bridge isn’t burning 

Or exploding

But being gradually taken apart, 

To be casually, slowly, cast down the stream,

That resonates for us in a way where

We don’t really want to

Verbally express the connections

We can’t help but draw in our minds.