Thing of the Week: Sea Anemones & Lana Del Rey, A Salt Lamp

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Sea Anemones & Lana Del Rey

Before I fell in love with Alex Chilton, I had a couple of days of thinking that maybe my new thing would be Lana Del Rey + sea anemones. A few Fridays ago I went to El Matador beach and took this picture:



And a few nights later I was looking at that picture and listening to "the Paradise edition of Born to Die," which I'd just bought on iTunes. I had a good half-hour to 45 minutes of listening to Lana Del Rey while looking at pictures of sea anemones and reading about sea anemones; it was all very dreamy and creepy and spellbinding. I learned that sea anemones are predators, that they like to eat shrimp, that they get around by somersaulting. I read this cool/horrifying sentence: "The mouth, also the anus of the sea anemone, is in the middle of the oral disc surrounded by tentacles armed with many cnidocytes, which are cells that function as a defense and as a means to capture prey." And I found out that sometimes sea anemones let clown fish live inside them, and in return the clown fish fight off anemone enemies and let the anemones snack on their leftovers. Overall, my review of sea anemones is that they're cute and disgusting, and also totally beautiful. Here are a few more pix, from Tumblr:







And I'm still listening to Born to Die pretty often and it still sounds good: sexy music that feels like being asleep is one of my favorite genres right now. I'm also into that "Chelsea Hotel #2" cover that was a big deal on the Internet yesterday, and I think it's nice that she changed the "babe"s to "baby"s. Basically the whole reason I brought up sea anemones and Lana Del Rey in the first place is that hearing her version of "Chelsea Hotel #2" was the first time I realized that the last line of the song is "That's all, I don't even think of you that often." I'd always thought it was just "That's all, I don't think of you that often," and now I'm annoyed at Leonard Cohen for putting that "even" in there. Wouldn't it be so much more powerful without the "even"? The "even" seems like overkill, but in a way that somehow softens the sting of the whole thing. And I don't want the sting to be softened - so I think I'll probably just pretend he's singing it my way, every time I hear that song for the rest of my life. I just want the last line of "Chelsea Hotel #2" to be mean as mean can be. 

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: A Salt Lamp



I am finishing my taxes today and I want a salt lamp.