There was a creepy old, false-eyed villain in a movie I watched last night who, while getting berated by his prisoner for being greedy, responds with an answer that applies to many more things than money. He says, with a steely and cold gaze, "Enough is never enough. We take what we can get." In a way, he's tipping the scales and in another he's describing something close to just taking advantage of opportunities, to evening the scales out in a perverse way. He's a bad guy, but he has a point. We can see a person like this as a man who knows what he wants out of life and grabbing for it isn't evil. It's the manner in which a man grabs that can become evil. Here in the last week of January, the brutality of a sick and taunting winter, is still potent. We want more heat, more proximity to heat, to people who can provide it. We want Australia. We would have no gauge for the limits that we should accept heat or sun. If tomorrow we were blessed with balminess, we would be disgusting hogs for all that it could give us. We would greedily partake.
Ari Picker and his North Carolina band, Lost In The Trees, creates an illustrious world of spectral movings and gusts. He suffocates us with his intentions, with the sensations of lush love and longing. They are tantalizing stories of drifting people who find that they can isolate their their most intimate desires and there most cherished relationships, letting them roll forever as some form of blazed, golden loop. They are trusty sentiments, while still full of anguish and absence, but they make you feel like you'll always take more, even as you sit back and pat a hard, full stomach.