#Getting Into Knives
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cryptic-symbols · 9 months ago
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ihavealavalamp · 7 months ago
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Bell Swamp Connection, The Mountain Goats [x]
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doctorskelegoats · 11 months ago
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Camilla Hect has arguably always been into non conventional munitions but nonetheless, this is her song. I kind of think of it as a twin to Pictures of my Dress, being both emblematic of very different responses to grief. Art Credit @rosenkranz-does-things
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theoutcastrogue · 1 year ago
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[From a 2014 article by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. He's talking about how a random spam email ended up inspiring a part of his book Wolf in White Van. Later, in 2020, the album Getting Into Knives came out, and I think it inspired its artwork too.]
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"It took years for me to be able to just reflexively delete spam, or filter it so that I never see it at all. I blame the spammers for this; the quality of their work took a sharp nosedive at some point. But during whatever period of the internet’s growth you’d call the early 2000s, it seemed like you’d still get some winners: things that had been typed up by a person, sent out to a bunch of email addresses they’d bought or rented for 5 or 10 bucks from the only guy who was ever going to make any money in this particular exchange. Most of them went directly, if manually, into the trash; but once in a while, there’d be one that seemed to earn, at the very least, the minute it’d take me to read it.
The one I’m remembering here was subject-lined SUPPLY OF KNIVES. [...] The subject line opened on an all-caps email that boasted, in ornate, antiquated English appealing to the reader’s more refined sensibilities, about the high quality of the knives on offer at an external website. You shouldn’t click on links in spam email. I live my life on the razor’s edge! I clicked the link.
I want to tell you about these knives: They were beautiful. They were weird. They had elaborate designs in the handles, moons or stars of wolf heads, and special grips, and a variety of points. They were made from metals whose pedigrees were described lovingly, and had been struck — smithed? wrought? — via processes I knew absolutely nothing about, but that sounded fantastic, difficult, arcane. It’s the joy of specialized language: When you’re an outsider to it, it can’t help but sound cool.
Of course this is the whole idea of any operation like this. SUPPLY OF KNIVES could well have been, and probably was, a company in Ohio who’d stumbled across an old warehouse full of knives, and knew enough about sales to describe these things in the most exotic terms they could find. I’m pretty immune to pitches: Who likes to feel like he’s being pitched? But somebody involved with SUPPLY OF KNIVES had had just enough authorial flair — that, or true faith — to caption each knife’s mysterious, blurry accompanying JPEG with a description whose constant recourse to specialized vocabularies seemed to say, “You’re not even reading this unless you already know about this sort of thing. Let us therefore speak like the fellow travelers we are.”
It was like a trade catalog for roadside bandits in need of knives.
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I can’t speak for everybody, but I know that when I was a child the life of the roadside bandit seemed like a pretty romantic way to go. I looked at all these knives and read the descriptions and was just generally delighted about the whole thing, so I saved the email in a “memorable spam” folder I used to keep that had maybe two other emails in it. A few years later, Apple came out with this robotic-arm-screen iMac you never see any more, and we were long overdue for a new computer so we got that; and then, after a while, I got myself a laptop, because I was traveling all the time, and eventually both the old iMacs ended up in the basement, and they were both asleep but alive until fairly recently, as far as I knew.
But when I went to check for the email, it was gone. The old blue iMac is dead, bricked, lifeless. Searches on the term “supply of knives” on this laptop and on good old robot-arm-screen find nothing. The backup CD for the blue iMac drive is probably in a drawer around here somewhere, but that’s like saying, “The coin I had in my swim trunks’ pocket is probably somewhere in the ocean.” There is no SUPPLY OF KNIVES. There’s only the memory."
[source]
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And this is the wonderful cover art of Getting Into Knives. Back cover and promo material below. Note that "Knives International" and "Knives Wordwide" are not real companies, they appear to be a callback to that elusive spam email.
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tmglineaday · 2 months ago
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I'm going to have to chase down the remnants of something special that you stole from me
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outofcontextgoats · 5 months ago
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an astronaut could see the hunger in my eyes from space
if your hunger shames you, never let them know
came all this way for hunger, may i be worthy of my reward
undying hunger deep in the bloodline
hungry for years, senses sharpened by the hunger 
when the hunger’s all that holds you together, who do you want by your side?
hunger: woke up new / tyler lambert’s grave / getting into knives / let me bathe in demonic light / pez dorado / january 31 438
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hiwerethemountaingoats · 10 months ago
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So this is a revenge fantasy, right, uh, and, uh, and it's a song, um—you know, I mean, revenge obviously is bad, right? I mean, this is obvious, this is clear, right? [inaudible audience yelling] No, it's bad! It's not valuable. Justice is good and revenge is bad, it's, it's just -- and this is just obvious and true. Right now, on my side politically, we kind of got blood in our eyes and we're like, no, revenge is fucking good! No, it's not. Because—the whole, if you read Greek tragedy, right, the whole theme of Greek tragedy is that when you take revenge, you're gonna overdo it. And then the other person you've been taking revenge on is gonna have a legitimate gripe, uh, that you overdid it, right, that you killed one too many when you, when you came to their town, so now they have to come back and get one. But they don't get one. They get five, right. And then you're mad, right. And that's how revenge works, and that's the nature of revenge, that you always take too much and so you never get enough, right, that's the nature of revenge. Uh, which also makes it a great thing to inhabit if you have issues, right. If you have—if you have things you need to work out. I may talk a good game about revenge being bad, but what I mean is that revenge is wonderful. It feels fantastic. It fills you with delusions of power, right, you sit there, you sit there dreaming of your revenge fantasy and you see the person upon whom you are going to enact this revenge cowering, begging you for mercy, and you understand that you, you alone possess that precious gift of mercy which you're not going to impart, and that's, and that's all delusion, and, uh, uh, but it's a pretty potent one, and this is—and so what happens while you're in the grip of it is that you're not just thinking that you're going to take revenge, but how. And that's what this song is about. It's called Getting Into Knives.
John Darnielle introducing Getting Into Knives (September 23rd, 2021)
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from-beyond · 1 year ago
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Bell Swamp Connection, The Mountain Goats + Sacrifice of Isaac by Andrea del Sarto
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iwhoneverbelievedinwar · 4 months ago
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Started listening to the silt verses exactly at the same time I decided to give Getting Into Knives by the mountain goats a go, and
is this anything?
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attention-all-pickpockets · 3 months ago
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" arise from the storm drains
take to the streets
we, who've never once tasted
the stench of defeat "
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fruitpunchnoice · 4 months ago
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Am I not a child of this Earth? I will be worthy of my reward.
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garishhhues · 1 year ago
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I think very very often about the line “I eat half my crispy chicken club, I get extra mayonnaise, it’s a mess” in Picture of My Dress. Something about it makes me go crazy idk. John Darnielle put some kinda secret sauce in that song.
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ihavealavalamp · 8 months ago
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Tidal Wave, The Mountain Goats [x]
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doctorskelegoats · 1 year ago
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Hollywood Hair Barbie is "Picture of my dress" incarnate. Getting into Knives week continues. Artist credit: @toughtinkart
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cryptic-symbols · 1 year ago
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“it’s not the destination, it’s the freight” “every card turned over remains in play, get used to this” okay john, now I’m crying at the gig about having ptsd. what do you MEAN “not every wave is a tidal wave” because I sure as hell am not weathering this one !! dude!
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tmglineaday · 3 months ago
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Us worms turn into butterflies, I guess
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