#getting into knives | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

owochimauwu · 1 year

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#tmg #the mountain goats #john darnielle #getting into knives #Barbie

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theoutcastrogue · 22 days

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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.]

"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.

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]

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.

#not that I'm particularly into TMG #but it's interesting #trs #The Mountain Goats #John Darnielle #Getting Into Knives #Wolf in White Van #only knives left #tools of the trade #bandit #prison ballads #tangentially

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fagm77 · 1 year

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#mine #tmg #the mountain goats #getting into knives #famous posts #my memes

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jennyfromthebes · 8 months

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happy national knife day, everyone say thank you to the album getting into knives (2020) by the mountain goats

#orig #txt #the mountain goats #getting into knives

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zoneitout · 1 year

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the dog from cadaver sniffing dog and the dog from corsican mastiff stride should be friends

#The Mountain Goats #tmg #in league with dragons #getting into knives

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cryptic-symbols · 20 hours

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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!

#tmg #the mountain goats #getting into knives #cryptic writings

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poppysplace-edits · 4 months

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assorted tmg album cover lockscreens! no shade if ur fav isn't here, some of mine aren't either, i just picked ones that worked well with the color background idea i had :-)

#hey there steepies!#a suite for the stash #lockscreens #the mountain goats #tmg #tmg sweden #nothing for juice #tmg tallahassee #we shall all be healed #tmg goths #getting into knives #tmg edit

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montrosepretty · 11 months

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And I heard a voice, from somewhere out beyond the freefall

ID: Collage style digital drawing divided into several scenes by a road map of Bell Swamp, North Carolina. On the left is a clearing framed by pine trees, with a stone altar in the center. The full moon hangs in the sky, surrounded by stars. On the right is a lobster floating in a cage underwater, a beam of light filtering down from above. The space between scenes is filled with rows of abstract symbols. Text in bottom center reads "GET OUT" in large, blocky capital letters against an iridescent background. End ID.

#the mountain goats #getting into knives #bell swamp connection #devo draws #aka: devo fucks around with brushes #anyways a non taz drawing can you believe it

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lamentablequeen · 1 year

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#pulling these from my twitter because i think i'm hilarious #the mountain goats #getting into knives #this was a bit i was actually listening to going to scotland

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fungi-maestro · 2 months

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#rat queen #the mountain goats #playlist #getting into knives #talking about this song with my tmg superfan brother and it's awesome #Spotify

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john-gosh-darnielle · 2 months

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and i am coming home

to you

#sax rohmer 1 #heretic pride #the mountain goats #tmg posting #tmg lyrics #the mountain goats fan art #tmg fan art #getting into knives #mountain goats posting #artists on tumblr #doodles #chalk marks show up on a few high window sills

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mountaingoatslastlineaday · 1 year

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I've adjusted my focus, I'm getting into knives

#getting into knives #last line #the mountain goats

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canisonicscrewyou · 1 year

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Okay after much deliberation by your humble gamehost, here we have it:

Beat the Champ! The Mountain Goats Album Herd Championship, consisting of 26 albums all well over 5 songs, all of varying quality and popularity and so have you. You can find the polls on my blog or in the post below, go hog wild, tell your family, tell your friends, tell your acquaintances in the bitter gay divorcee support group, tell your cat. tell my cat.