Of Wolf Loafers & Whispering Witches

BY LIZ

...Like Clockwork by Queens of the Stone Age comes out today. I bought it last night around midnight and listened to the whole thing, but listening to a new record on a laptop is ugly and disgusting, even when you turn off all the lights and light a pretty tangerine-red candle and lie in your bed in such a way that you can't even see your laptop. Right now I'm in a place of brattily resenting my "laptop dependence," and last week I made the decision to never again go to a coffee place and order coffee and sit at a table and drink coffee and do work on my laptop. It's soul-deadening and makes me feel like a robot, and already my life is so much lighter, now that I don't do that anymore.

Anyway I woke up very early this morning, ripped out of a moderately cool Rolling Stones dream* by the thud of a bird flying into my bedroom window. I feel like I'm probably the world's number-one person who's most frequently jolted awake by birds crashing into her window, but who really knows. It was gray and June-gloomy out but I got up and went for a big walk, to buy a cup of coffee at my favorite hamburger stand and to listen to Like Clockwork. The air was a little drizzly and I could hear the owls and the roosters, and the corner of the Echo Park Ave/Morton Ave intersection that always smells intensely of fresh paint was extra-narcotic: all in all, pretty ideal conditions for the first proper listen of a new Queens of the Stone Age album.

So I like Like Clockwork, very very much. It sounds like a Queens of the Stone Age record, all nasty and gloomy and boneheaded and dreamy and beautiful, and hearing it this morning spirited me back to when I'd just moved to L.A. and Songs for the Deaf was still sort of new. I lived next door to these three older musician-boys and they played that album all the time; I have nice memories of sitting around their living room, on the couch that was actually a row of seats ripped out of Andy and Matt's ex-band's van, listening to "The Sky Is Fallin'" and drinking wine out of a measuring cup because they didn't have many glasses. I'm still absorbing the album or whatever, but so far my fave song's "If I Had a Tail": the very beginning reminds me of "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers and in the opening lines Josh Homme does this "Lady Marmalade" thing that kind of embarrasses me, but mostly it's sexy and thuggy and scary and gets stuck in your head real good. There's a lyric that goes "When you own the world you're always home," which resonates with me on a heavy level, and the end sounds like witches whispering, like whispering witches.

Also this morning I discovered Y.R.U.'s animal loafers and I want them. I'm most into the wolf ones up top, they're definitely the most Queens of the Stone Age-y of the lot, but the tiger and panda shoes are adorbs too**:





I think a good early-summer look would be wearing wolf loafers, listening to "If I Had a Tail" stupidly loud, ON A STEREO NOT A LAPTOP, drinking wine or beer out of a measuring cup or a cute jar, with some new and lovely weird-smelling dudes playing the roles of my surrogate older brothers. I have one in mind but I still need two more, plus maybe an alternate. Please submit applications via bar-bathroom graffiti, or love letters written in red Sharpie on cheeseburger wrappers from whatever hamburger stand happens to be your personal fave.

*In the dream somebody said to me, "If you don't like 'Paint It Black,' you aren't cool," which is a really solid example of the sort of thing you hear in a dream and it seems really deep and important and life-changing and then you wake up and it still seems really deep and important and life-changing, and then you think about it for five more seconds and it's like, "Oh...well, yeah," and it's both disappointing and amusing. 

**All the photos came from Y.R.U.'s Instagram. I don't know if these shoes actually exist in the world yet - but I sure hope they do!