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Two Albums with Horses

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  There’s a great deal of comparative and reciprocal artwork that naturally relates to Amando Chapa and Laura Carlisle’s credit for Shallowater’s 2025 God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars. Starting with Viktor Vasnetsov’s 1879 painting, The Knight at the Crossroads , a reasonable extension of this line of thought would be to Nikolai Ovchinnikov’s Bogatyr at the Cross Roads , painted nearly exactly one hundred years later. Take this further, even to Einar Baldvin’s 2025 ink on paper Black Knights . Shallowater describe themselves as from ‘where the dust bowl never died,’ and it’s not hard to hear this in the sound of their debut album. You can understand the horse on the cover — you may question its visage, or its imposing avoidance, but the connection between sound and geography can be a familiar recognition. For another album from the same year, the horse is an interjecting figure. Oslo’s Honnigbarna is vivacious on the cover of Soft Spot . It’s as hard punk as you’re gonna get....
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Surround by Hiroshi Yoshimura from 1986

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  I was at a desk on the big campus. It was coming round to Christmas again, and getting colder, but you couldn’t really feel much of anything in here. I never, ever left. It was an office, but nobody was coming through. None of the clocks worked, but you could rely on the certainty of night to strike itself. In whatever hours there was daytime, I sorted the incoming post, then reorganised it for the convenience of whoever my next colleague would be. This became quickly inconvenient. I knew only my own system, my own series of tracked motions to form a memory game. No queues formed. No stranger passed by.    To keep it from complete isolation, there were a few of the guys from Security posted up in the back office. They kept to themselves, except when they cooked. They always ate red meat: bacon at breakfast, microwave burgers at lunch, mince for dinner. They created fumes that kept the building in a saturated air. Nothing new came through this place. The parcels were t...
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NO SKIN OFF MY BALLSACK, YOU LITTLE FREAK!

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This is going to strike a variety of tones. It’s going to end with an obituary for a wrestler. I would like for you to read it.  Listen, I never promised that this was a place where I’d communicate myself clearly. I’d like to occupy more of a presence here, especially with the aim to keep in touch with writing while I’m shifting into some new phase or season of my living. I’m scared of becoming a shallower thing, right? Like, all of this musn’t be without a cause or purpose. Let me have a space where I can remind myself what I am. Please.  After a really sprawling, and recklessly messy blog post , I want to enforce some order. Something I did back in the March that got me into trouble was add a list to the end of my monthly post. There were five intentions. It doesn’t matter which of them got done, but that they were worked through. For October, here’s what I’m looking at.  First, I am going to post twice to this blog.  Second, I will finish reading some form of l...
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to be honest / sept 26

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  So, it comes to you on a Wednesday morning. This is while you’re still dreaming your last dream, before the Sun’s up. Your body isn’t yet your own. You can’t remember the last time you’ve eaten. All the same, you’re feeding a cat who’s sicker than she knows. You don’t know if she’s been fed before, but all you want is another hour of sleep. You don’t particularly want to return to the dream, but in that small and darkening garden, you know your role. The cat asks if you could sit with her while she eats. She lets you brush and scratch and bother her. In return, she makes you promise to kill the thing that plagues her. You don’t want to get sick yourself but you pet and comb and bother until she says she’s had enough. She asks how long she’ll be living here for, and you don’t have an answer. You add a little water to her food, and position yourself at an angle against the cupboards. There’s the smell of a cold gravy of fresh meat. In the corner of your eye, you can see the corpse ...
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