Pizzeria Luigi, 2023

I was in San Diego last week for my friend Gabe's memorial. Here's what it looked like. The photos are by me except the one of me which is by Justine from (and at) Verbatim Books. 

1) Locust House.

2) Golden Hill.

3) Me at Verbatim in North Park.

4) Gabe Serbian forever.

5) Saguaro's.

6) So many of my stories have scenes set outside this Golden Hill 7-Eleven.

7) Golden Hill flowers.

Friday, March 1, 2024: Today marks the second Bandcamp Friday of the year. In honor of this event, we would like to share a collage of some images we crafted on the eve of the release of our album Take the Train to Manchester.

On December 28, as we began uploading the album's master WAV files to Bandcamp, S.A. Morin noticed that each song could receive it's own unique artwork. Corduroy Institute had made custom images for 2019's Guilt in the Faithless Age, but we hardly recalled this fact four years on.

In a spur of creative gusto, S.A. Morin decided to digitally collate text and photographs so each song could posses a unique image. The text came from scans of cut-ups which W. Ruiz had begun making in late September. The pictures were outtakes from the November 12 photoshoot with cover model Sara Prieto in the Golden Hill neighborhood of San Diego. Rarely seen outside of Bandcamp, these collages manage to present an additional dimension to Take the Train to Manchester.

We hope you can visit our Bandcamp page and download Take the Train to Manchester on this special Friday. Indeed, we also recommend revisiting Guilt in the Faithless Age as well. Both albums are the only ones to feature unique images for each song, and we would be pleased if you downloaded both on this unique occasion.

https://corduroyinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/take-the-train-to-manchester

https://corduroyinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/guilt-in-the-faithless-age

Books Read in April 2023

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

A BANGER. I was recommended this after I mentioned to someone I head read Light Perpetual. It’s such a good book. Set in NYC in the 1700s a mysterious British man rolls into town with a ton of money. Is he a scammer? Is he just rich? Who knows! Mysterious and wonderful and FUN.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

Oooh boy, did not like this one. O’Farrell writes a fictionalized version of the life of Lucrezia Medici, who was also the subject of Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess. The characterization of her early years and then the way O’Farrell writes her later doesn’t really match. Also there’s a really grotesque final twist I could see coming from a million miles away but is like...morally disturbing and she ignores the complexity of it completely! Disappointing. 

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

I really struggled to see why this is such a classic and I guess for the time it must have been pretty progressive. The novel is historical fiction loosely based on the life of the first Bishop of New Mexico and how he struggled to establish his congregation. It’s a set of very loose stories really, each very brief. But the way she describes the indigenous and Latino people who populated this area is really offensive. It’s not like the Catholic church was all noble and meek. They did horrible things and were terribly disrespectful. This white washes a lot. 

Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White

Problematic Catholic book part deux. I went into this blind and I regret everything. It’s basically a passion book set in Australia about a group of loosely connected people in a small (fictionalized) town. They all see religious visions of a chariot and one of the characters is Christ re-incarnated. 

INCREDIBLY anti-semetic. I don’t think White was trying to be but wow does this play into offensive tropes about Jewish people and the Holocaust. One of the characters is a German-Jewish man who sort of meekly accepts his fate. It’s horrible. Do not recommend. It was actually darkly funny to read this after reading the Passenger by Ulrich Boschwitz. Because both men write about German Jews living through Kristelnacht and the takes couldn’t be more different. 

Do not recommend. A sour note to end April on. 

PENDING - Golden Hill

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Under contract in LESS than a week! 🔥🔥🔥

Go to BreeSoellner.com for more details.

He led him through a door in the panelling, and Smith found himself in what was plainly the hall-way of the merchant's private residence, for it ran perpendicular to another street-door, whence fell the faint remaining light of the day; and where the counting office had smelled of ink, smoke, charcoal and the sweat of men, this had the different savour of waxed wood, food, rosewater and tea-leaves, with a suggestion of (what is common to both sexes) the necessary-house. At the end of the hall a stair spiralled steeply up in the dark. At each turn it passed a window but, the outlook being to the east, little came in through the glass but roofs and spars in black outline, upon the ground of a slice of heaven but one degree brighter. Stray gleams of polish showed the placing of the banisters and newel posts; picture frames set faint rumours of gold around rectangles of darkness or curious glitters too shadowed to make out, as if Lovell had somehow collected, and drowned, a stairwell's-worth of distant constellations. This being Lovell's home, it might be expected that the merchant would put off the weight of business, and resume the legerity of domestic life, yet on the first step he paused for a moment, and Smith saw the level of his shoulders fall, as if they had taken on them some effort, perhaps the effortful thought of the thousand pounds, and Smith anticipated a slow, perhaps a wheezing, ascent.[...]The long room it opened on did have western windows, a pair of them letting in the day's last glow of light, rather the silver of rain than of the metal, streaked with a faint crimson admitting to the distant existence of the sun; brilliant light to Mr Smith, and it burnished with borrowed brilliance the faces of the three young women in the room, plain-dressed among the plain furniture.

Golden Hill, Francis Spufford

Saturday, sep 24 fried dumplies at golden hill

-blonde horror protagonist's abrupt and incorrect assumptions about blonde people

[id in alt]

Having Daniel grow up and turn into Sophia Petrillo was such a big brain thinking on the writers part

by Alex Burke

I must live where I am, or I will have no heart in my chest.

Francis Spufford, Golden Hill

ROUND #1

ogata's bizarre adventure in silent hill