Long Live The Kings

There are people in your life who are going to love you for all of the wrong reasons. They will love you for the best part of your face, the best part of you naked, the best mood on your best day, the best story you ever wrote, the best outfit you ever wore.

They are going to miss the scar on the underside of your nose from the time your older brothers dared you to run across a pile of logs. They won’t know that you fell on a hidden nail just as you completed the challenge. They’ll miss the scar on your finger, too from the time you were seven and closed a swiss army knife on it. They won’t understand that these are two of only a handful of things you can remember about your childhood.

They’ll notice that you have great tits, but they’ll miss that your thumb tucks into their palm when you’re walking together and that your eyes have darker circles when a migraine is coming. They won’t know you get migraines. They won’t ask where the story you wrote came from, so they’ll never know that it was true. They’ll love it because it feels real to them. They’ll miss knowing the sweatshirt full of holes that they criticized you for wearing was your dads. You might tell them some of these things along the way, but they will remember the best things instead.

They will love your good moods, your energy, your sense of humor, but miss that you never turn to them, but rather to a shower or a pillow or the back of your throat to shed tears. They won’t ever consider you strong.

When the parts that aren’t your best come out, some people will shield their eyes as if you have just forced them to look directly into the sun for hours until their irises burn. They’ll silently make you promise to never show them that again. Those things are not to be shown. Be at your best so I can love you. I would love you more if only you never show me those things.

And you do not marry those people. You do not sit and sleepily drink coffee with those people. You leave those people and you remind yourself that they missed the better parts of you.

Source: givemeajobplease

Alex Prager

'Noose of Jah City' by King Krule

Bear Lake, WI

We've been doing lot of road-tripping lately, most recently to Kansas City for the final, must-anticipated and glorious marital uniting of two of my very favorite people. I'd say we perfected this drive between Chicago and KC by taking route US-54. (Which, if we're so inclined, will take us all the way down to El Paso... Noted.) Driving through the night, we passed illuminated drive-in theaters, judged rural bars by their neons, and marveled at the lights of power plants reflecting on the Mississippi. While in town, we stopped to pick-up a running—yes, running—motorcycle, and Sean earned himself some nice biker bangle tan lines on the long drive back home. And somehow found time to enjoy some K-9 company at the dog beach.

This host is a real ass—at the very least, enjoy a side of Tom I can only describe as "bashful."

'It's Better In The Wind'

It's Better In The Wind - Short Film from Scott Toepfer on Vimeo.

Paris, by William Gedney

Fictitious Dishes

For every schmuck "foodie" that ever took a photo of their meal. (Guilty as charged.) From nedhepburn, by Dinah Fried.

Big Easy Express

The best tour bus ever isn't a bus at all.

What We Do On Sunday

Cornett Family, Kentucky

"William Gedney made two trips to eastern Kentucky. In the summer of 1964, he traveled to the Blue Diamond Mining Camp in Leatherwood, Kentucky. Gedney [then] met Willie Cornett, who was recently laid off from the mines, his wife Vivian, and their twelve children. He soon moved in with the Cornett family, staying with them for eleven days. Twenty-two of the photographs from Gedney's 1964 visit to Kentucky were included in his one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (11/68–3/69). Gedney corresponded with the Cornetts over many years, and finally returned to Kentucky to visit and photograph the family again in 1972. In his notebooks Gedney writes about these lives he witnessed and photographed, the complicated relationships within such large families, the importance of the automobile. Gedney made notes about a creating a book dummy of the Kentucky work, but no completed dummy exists in the archive. With the exception of one image, the Kentucky photographs were never published during William Gedney's lifetime."

I urge you to read one of the letters Gedney wrote to the Cornetts. More from Ahorn Magazine. Photographs by William Gedney, courtesy of Duke University Library.

Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine (Newman) had a party one night—a great party, at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. (Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain.) The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people—and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she'd already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn't seen her in a long time. And she started doing, "I've got to go..." and she was just going to leave, and I was like, "Going to leave?" It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for awhile. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, "She's leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda's leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?" We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, "She's leaving, I don't know if you said goodbye to her." And we said goodbye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we'd drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there. It was just one of the best parties I've ever been to in my life. I'll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner.

'Feelings' by Nina Simone

"God damn. You know what, what a shame to have to write a song like that ... Feelin—I'm not making fun of the man. I do not believe the conditions, that produced a situation, that demanded a song like that! ... Well, c'mon clap, damnit, what's wrong with you?"

Happy Father's Day

Makeup and Vanity Set

"MAVS sounds more like the soundtrack to an imagined ‘80s sci-fi midnight movie; if you close your eyes and let it all wash over you, his music emits a very specific otherworldly feeling—like what would happen if you took the work of David Lynch, set it in the dystopian world of Blade Runner, and let your imagination wander. 'I made a nine-minute score to a short film, the film influenced a 42-minute album, which then gets turned into a physical artifact that’s particularly nasty and degenerative, where the end user has to have a television and a VCR, has to sit and has to experience it, even in places where it’s just the analog tracking in front of them. The screen glows for the entirety of the record. There’s something really horrifying and exciting about that to me—that people would sit in a dark room and experience it that way.' To accompany the album, Newbolt created a parallel release for the album in the form of a limited edition VHS cassette and poster that echoes Ciccoline and Pusti’s combined affinity for a bygone cinematic era."

The heat has been oppressive, truly. Not everyday, but when it's here it lingers (or so it seems). The only time of relief is right around dawn, just after night has allowed everything to cool off for a few hours and a light breeze makes its way up this old building.

Sean just finished building all the bar tops and tables at a new taco joint in town. They have the most amazing, fun food. We were invited to their soft opening and test-drove just about everything on the menu: corn masa biscuits with lobster gravy, chorizo chili and beer cheese curds, and—my favorite—cilantro and mint chip ice cream. The place is really beautiful, and they just got the okay for patio seating. Go there, now.