darrinarmijowardle:

Calavera!

There are a lot of reasons to join or start a band. Friendship. Loneliness. An excuse to drink more. To get sounds out of your head. A quest for musical innovation, to defy the confines of genre and create a complex arrangement of measures and beats the likes which have never been heard or understood, to push yourself toward the unattainable goal of perfection and achieve some spiritual enlightenment?

Whatever.

As Itunes was doing a particularly bad job at shuffling it suddenly landed on a song that remind me of the one reason I almost never started a band: pure fun. The song is one I wrote for Idaho (a lyrical genius) and he called it Master Blaster, after his love of Mad Max. All the joy of starting a band that was purely about having a good time, not taking anything seriously, no records to be made, no tours…and guitar solos, flooded back.

I recorded this on garageband in a garage with bare walls and a bare concrete floor…with a radioshack mic and that’s exactly what it sounds like. If you try you can hear cans of Keystone rolling around the floor.

To me it will always sound like big, dumb, fun. It’s a good thing to remember.

My roommate, Jason Brown, left a typed story on the fridge that he said was a morality tale. I instantly went on the defensive and said, “Is this about the banana I stole from your girlfriend? I planned on replacing it later tonight.” No, it wasn’t. Instead it was a two foot long piece of letterpress paper with the story contained within it’s narrow margin:

“jared awakes &

decides its a good day

for

top speed.

he makes oatmeal

& a shot of

tequila and

eats them with top speed!

on the street a man asks

for a dollar-round house

to the solar plexis at

top speed!

at work he sweeps at top speed.

but the night is long so he

must fortify his blood

with quiet rage & warm tecate

con mucho rapido!

as he returns to his lair, out

comes a gang of Man Diegans-

fear not…with a flurry of beard

and fists they are vanquished

in a pool of blood that spills at

top speed.

half satiated, now comes the

part of the evening that requires

not speed. But on top speed.

now beware the resting force

that tomorrow will bring

mas speed!”

cinemaminimal:

welcome to winter, my friends!

the +winter+ ep is complete and ready for your ears.

download it for free, right here!

http://cinemaminimal.wantstogiveyou.com/

this was art directed and letterpressed by aaron robert miller. THANK YOU!

featured on this recording are victor paul…

(Written in transit over Brazil, parts of the Atlantic and Washinton D.C. Found in a notebook 12/1/10.)

As a kid, on the verge of sleep, I remembered my room, covered in darkness, expanding in size, the ceiling and walls pushing away into a soundless void. Several times I would turn the light on and inspect the walls and found my room very much intact, probably to the confusion of my twin brother. 

I felt a similar weight while gazing, for years now, at the unofficial altars through out my Abuelita’s house. A giant echo looking back at you, made of nostalgia and unanswered prayers, multiple generations gone. The singular image is that of my great grandfather, Francisco Martinez Armijo, holding my twin brother and I on his lap, the demanding life of a rancher evident in the skin of his broad smile. 

No one enjoys asking themselves about the origin of their motivations and most of us stumble through life continuously surprised that our patterned behavior never generates different results. As my friend Bill has said, “People experience the majority of their lives like someone lost in a dark room with a flash light, all that they can see is in that small spot of light.”

The faces of Francisco, Ameila, Tomas, Pablita, and Fidel looked at me and I saw expectation and a nostalgic loss for a language that, on a good day, I can barely understand. Living out their lives on the ranch in rural New Mexico, near a town that population counts in the hundreds, did they see the inevitability of English as they sent mi Abuelita off to school not knowing English? Did they believe Español would remain the language of the house, transmitted to us in the same way they did for their hijos? Did they really even care?

Even in between the disconnect of language and pieced together memories, I always felt my relatives eyes and felt that weight through the years when people either inanely or innocuously, questioned my ethnicity. After all these years would the resurrection of a language tell me what they sounded like or what they wanted? No. Unless, like so many people, the power of memory lies its malleability and our rationalizations for its rearrangement. 

Like so many humans, they probably wanted nothing more than to be remembered. And what you are left with is the certainty of your projections onto all those photographs and the lonely knowledge that you are only one who gives a shit what language you speak.