Swing the Heartache

Can Hold My Body Down

2010-02-25T11:33:00.002-05:00

I have been a busy bee lately, taking two classes, one of which requires me to learn a dead form of the English language and translate and act out plays, teaching one on the apocalypse, and preparing for an eight-hour exam on every possible topic in literature and literary criticism to get my Masters this semester. So, not much writing or internet dilly-dallying. If you have read Le Morte D'Arthur or John Bale's early sixteenth century morality-history play King John, you may be interested in the pieces that I wrote over at blogspot's competitor, WordPress, at Never Drab: Blogging the Sixteenth Century.

My friend Dan started up a new blog about fashion in London and New York, called Smoke + Rain; he did a profile of me in the Other Voices section. I also wrote a longish, intellectual piece about the concept of self-fashioning and the roles clothes play in that for him, but I do not know if he will be posting it.

Life has been good for me recently. I bought myself Johnny Cash's final (?) album American VI: Ain't No Grave on my birthday, 2-20, when it is supposed to come out on Johnny Cash's birthday, 2-26. The first two tracks are hair-raisingly amazing. After the power of the first two songs, the rest of the album feels a little weak and meandering on first listen, but I have been listening to it all week and it has grown on me a lot. I love it. With Johnny Cash, you have to be thankful for whatever remains. I remember trying to listen to American V: A Hundred Highways after he died and thinking he just sounded so frail, as if he was on his deathbed, and I found it unpleasant to the point where I did not want the album. While he is certainly weathered on Ain't No Grave, his voice is still full, deep, and rich, with that commanding presence no one else quite has. It has caused me to go back and listen to as many of the American Recordings as I can, as well as some earlier stuff. I finally came across a solid edition of all the Sun Records 45s in approximate order, and have been enjoying that greatly, although some of those songs are truly better live, such as on Folsom Prison and San Quentin, the first two Johnny Cash albums I owned. As far as what I have heard of his eighties stuff...well, almost everyone suffered in the eighties. So I might write more about the newest Cash album or his legacy or something later. But for now, it's back to work for me.

Let the Bells Ring...

Snow & Stone

2009-12-23T15:16:00.001-05:00

Brief

2009-12-21T13:37:00.001-05:00

The semester is finished and it is Winter Solstice. What a glorious feeling.

For the Dorks.

2009-12-09T21:02:00.002-05:00

Last year, I went over and over and over whar a top ten LPs album would look like and then even a top five EPs (#1 would be Agalloch's The White EP without a doubt) in my head.

Last year brought us more great music.

I bought several albums this year, from things as obscure and avante garde as Nels Cline's Coward and Arvo Pärt's In Principio to things as hipsterish as Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest (holy shit what a boring album and what an awful lead singer) and Yim Yames's (read Jim James's, lead singer of My Morning Jacket) tribute to—a lovingly crafted solo white EP of George Harrison, to things as poppy and popular as Bruce Springsteens Working on a Dream and Bob Dylan's Together Through Life & Christmas in the Heart and Dave Matthews Band's unbelievable comeback from a decade of shit, Big Whiskey & The Groo Grux King (fuck what you think; it's great).

But the best album for me is definitely going to remain Neko Case's Middle Cyclone and the best song of the year is the always too short "I'm an Animal" off that album.

I don't want to try to put my mouth all over it right now. I just wanted to state the facts.

Music as perfect as that album and that song do not come around all that often. Buy it, listen to it, keep listening to it, and imbibe it. Neko Case, Paul Rigby, and friends are gifts from God. Drink this music 'til drunk with divine ecstasy.

Something Refreshing From the Depressing World of Portishead

2009-12-09T20:01:00.001-05:00

Portishead - Chase The Tear from Mintonfilm on Vimeo.

Exciting Things May Be Happening

2009-11-29T23:40:00.000-05:00

BC

2009-11-26T18:20:00.002-05:00

I love the music of the smashing pumpkins. That music has been with me deeply ever since I set foot in the strange liminal at times scary world of adolescence and muc of it continues to move me today.

I don't love Billy Corgan, though. Who knew the conflation of Billy Corgan's superfat ego with new-age vague ideas about God, Self, and Consciousness could be one of the most noxious smelling things on the internet?

Ugh.

I will agree with him on one thing, though. I, too, am thankful for Ronnie James Dio on this, Thanksgiving Day.

An Undead Friend of Mine

2009-11-09T14:08:00.003-05:00

"Does life seem nasty, brutish, and short? Come on up to the house!"

In times of comfort, it sounds like Tom Waits's house, and the picture the imagination conjures is warm and grand.
When life does seem nasty, brutish, and short (was it Hobbes who said it first?), the house I actually do need to go to is Richard Bachman's, where we mix gasoline in with our whiskey, put snakes in our jambalaya, and the other way we feel about things, about life, about people, about women—you name it—the way people can't handle hearing about unless a paid comedian is talking about it onstage humorously comes out in our conversation over the kitchen table, which is made from the extruded teeth of our enemies.

It's Richard Bachman's house I went to last night, and, if I get enough work done in this day which is too short, I'll return to tonight. He's in the middle of telling me a good story. It's disgusting and unbelievable vivid and seems totally real, even though it's set sixteen years from now and they still use payphones. He calls it The Running Man.

We all run day to day to day. Always on the run. And you know what? It's never enough.

Things I Am a Fan of and Not a Fan of Lately.

2009-10-21T11:06:00.005-04:00

Things I am a fan of lately:
Tiny Vipers. Two albums on subpop: Hands Across the Void, and Life on Earth
Old Frankenstein Movies
"The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone," from Ray Bradbury's short story collection The October Country
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis's two-disc handsome release of soundtrack work and instrumental material from the vaults, White Lunar
Brown Clothes, such as my new boots, my new brown simple belt, and hand-me-down cashmere turtleneck sweater.
Walking through fall leaves
Apples
My folks' new coffeepot: The Moccamaster
Plaid
Dennis Doherty's new poem, "Epic"
Tuthilltown Distillery's Baby Bourbon Whiskey
Stephen King's Danse Macabre
Stephen King's old manuscript from 1982, "The Cannibals," easily downloadable as a pdf file right here
The cover of the new Stephen King book, Under the Dome
Franklin Evans, or, The Inebriate
Sheppard Lee
Edgar Allan Poe (who loved the aforementioned novel when it first came out and he reviewed it)
The Sound and The Fury
Jane Campion's new film about John Keats, or more properly, his girlfriend, Bright Star
The show that never should have ended, Joss Whedon's Firefly
T. Rex, getting into his earlier albums with the full name, likeUnicorn
The original 1963 film adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, Robert Wise's The Haunting
A life with less argument and internet, and more contentment and reading
The typewriter I picked up at an old barn lately:

The black cat who has taken a shine to me and to her coat:

Zeugma.
My cat, Evie.
Noble Coffee Roasters' coffee. (I finally get it.)
And, as always, pumpkin spice lattes...

Things I am not a fan of lately:
The President getting a Nobel Peace Prize while the war in the Middle East continues. Horseshit.
Nick Cave's new novel (listening to his reading of it off my computer, with ambient and musical accompianement from himself and Warren Ellis)
Where the Wild Things Are, what Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers did with it.
Byronic Heroes.
Thom Yorke's The Eraser left-overs, being served cold three years later.
People who talk like they are on The Family Guy in graduate-level English courses
All the sensitive indie and not-so-indie musical chosen ones contributing to a soundtrack for the second Twilight movie.
Con men.
Sloppy road construction.
Interminable bridge projects in Rosendale.
Robin Furth, and all comic book adaptations and interpretations of Stephen King books.
Snow in October. Horseshit.
(I am blaming it on Bob Dylan for releasing an album of Christmas music in October.)
This fucking cough I cannot seem to get rid of.

I just can't handle it.

2009-09-21T23:22:00.001-04:00

In case you haven't yet, and this somehow slipped by you, too: these are my twisted words.

From Earlier This Year

2009-08-24T14:23:00.002-04:00

Here's a video from a reading I did at the end of March with some fellow graduate students, then teaching assistants. If you go to the English Blog for SUNY New Paltz, you can see excerpts from their readings, as well. Someone just reminded me of it the other day.

...to be born again

2009-08-24T10:45:00.003-04:00

Sometimes albums lionized and untouchable in the rock/pop canon are overrated. This is not the case with Astral Weeks. I got it a few days ago and my life will never be the same. It is one of those albums that doesn't seem like much on first listen, but the more you listen to it and the more attention you give to it, the more you realize how amazing it is and the more it grafts onto your soul, becoming an inextricable part of it, until you realize you can't believe you ever lived without it.

It is simply like nothing else out there.

Think About It/Do Something About It

2009-08-03T13:14:00.004-04:00

This is proof of three things: 1) John Lennon was a musical genius with a voice that can cut right to your guts 2) John Lennon and Yoko Ono were important to society, and 3) Yoko Ono was a lot better for John Lennon than the common ignorant asshole would have you believe. I don't like her singing voice any better than the next guy, but check out who John Lennon was, personally and psychologically, some time, and then get back to me about what a stifling bitch Yoko was.

This is one of my favorite Lennon songs, above most Beatles material.

Some Forms of Love are Eternal

2009-08-03T00:14:00.001-04:00

Happy Birthday, Papa. We still miss you.

Carmine Bagarozzo
1919-1997

Web Scrawl

2009-07-30T17:49:00.002-04:00

New article/interview up at NYC version of The Deli

Small errors are editor's, not my own. For those of you in the music world, you know how it goes.

Free at last, so here's a cross-posting from the book of face

2009-05-18T14:35:00.003-04:00

You have received this note because someone thinks you are a literary geek. Copy the questions into your own note, answer the questions, and tag any friends who would appreciate the quiz, including the person who sent you this. Don't bother trying to italicize your book titles. We know you want to.

1) What author(s) do you own the most books by?
Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, William Shakespeare, J.K. Rowling, Ken Wilber

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I have three copies of The Hobbit. I have two different versions of Ulysses. Between Jacki and I, we have three copies of The Sound and the Fury. I have two copies of The Dead Zone, Christine, Thinner, and The Stand (cut paperback and uncut hardcover). Dubliners (two) + "The Dead" (three). I have a couple copies of crossover of several classic books because my mother began a subscription to a series of special edition leatherbound books from a publishing company called The Easton Press when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I am still receiving books from them. The first two I received were Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans. I have still not read the entirety of either. So I have had three copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but gave one to a friend. I have two copies of the Odyssey, two copies of the Aeneid, as many as three editions of some of Shakespeare's play, two copies of War and Peace, etc. I tend to give someone the other copy of a book when I get a new one unless I am really attached to the old edition.

3) Did it bother you that both of those questions ended with prepositions?
I didn't notice at first. It bothers me when I am writing and I cannot figure a way to not make a sentence end with a preposition.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Well, there are different kinds of love. I love cranky, bitter old men, but not at all in a sexual way. So, I fell in love with Colonel Cantwell when reading Across the River and into the Trees. If a writer writes well, I usually fall in love with the protagonist's love interest. I was definitely in love with Sarah in The Dead Zone the afternoon she and John made love in the barn. Crush that burgeoned into love for Hermione. Absolute love of unbreakable frienship for Sam Gamgee. I was madly in love with Susan, Roland's amour in Wizard and Glass. I was so madly in love with her I can't stand looking at Jae Lee's too computerized, too perfect renderings of her in those Dark Tower comics in which I have less than zero interest. I had the hots for Rosa when I read Sacrament in ninth grade. And, of course, I have it for Death. Talk about a fundamentally unworkable relationship. That's me and my draw to futility, I guess.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children)?
There are so many books I want to read, and so many books that, for one reason or another, I only make it halfway through, that I rarely read a book more than once. I have read King Lear three times, The Thief of Always twice, The Hobbit twice, A Farewell to Arms twice, Huck Finn twice, The Gunslinger twice. Short stories I often read more than twice if I love them. I love short stories. And then there are books that I keep starting over and over again. Blood Meridian, Ulysses, The Stand, The Sun Also Rises, Genesis.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
The Hobbit.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
It's been a strange year. Last summer I read Hemingway and McCarthy, so there's nothing ill to speak of, but last fall semester I took two classes I absolutely loathed. I didn't finish anything I was supposed to read as my life and mind unraveled. So though I could list a history of rhetoric at colleges in the past hundred years or a polemical book about what the goals of a composition course ought to be and what the politics are behind those decisions are, or essays by French authors I cannot stand, I will not. The worst fiction book I have read in the past ten years and probably my whole life is The DaVinci Code. The worst literary book I have tried reading since becoming a graduate student in 2007 is Lord Jim. I fucking hate Lord Jim and I fucking hate Joseph Conrad.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Well, I just finished a course on Shakespeare, so that sets the bar pretty high. King Lear? Hamlet? It's pretty tough to go up against that. I read another play called The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy and that affected me deeply. Last summer I was reading The Sun Also Rises and Blood Meridian, so that's pretty hard to beat as well. But the best book I read the entirety of and read for the first time in the past year is Watchmen.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Watchmen or The Road. For some, And the Ass Saw the Angel. But most of them have probably read the first two or all three by now.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Last I heard, one of the people on that board had some pretty disparaging things to say about Americans and our culture, so fuck 'em.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
None. Please stop attempting to ruin great books. I don't even see my dork-stuff touched. A Sandman movie? Ugh. No thanks. American Gods? Hard to imagine. Dark Tower? Hell, no. Though if JJ Abrams and Damen Lindelof are involved, I would give it a chance. The high brow stuff I have been reading would be equally bad. There's no movie waiting to be made in Across the River and into the Trees. What makes Blood Meridian so amazing has only a little to do with the actions that occur. It would make one of the bloodiest movies ever made. I am looking forward, with slight reservation, to The Road, to movie I at first opposed, then realized John Hillcoat (The Proposition) was directing, Viggo Mortensen wasn't looking too good, and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis were doing score.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Um, Ulysses. I think they have tried it, which is ridiculous.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I've got two for you. One involved Stephen King. I was living down the street from the Boston Common at the time. I dreamt I went walking late at night, past midnight but before dawn, into the Common. I came across Stephen King. He was wearing a Red Sox cap, throwing baseballs into the air, and slugging them with a great wood bat. Every now and then you would hear a glass shatter in the distance. With the great amount of wealth he has, this was no problem. He had people who took care of that thing the next day for him. This was a meditative practice he did sometimes. He was not bothered by my intrusion. Instead, he continued tossing balls in the air and slamming them while he gave my writing advice. I do not remember much of the advice. Then, last year in the spring sometime, I had a dream with Faulkner in it. He gave me writing advice, too. Good advice, and a couple book suggestions, too, which I am going to get started on finally. He told me to read Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress. I have his advice written down.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
When did I become an adult? 18, 21. 26, never? I read the first of Anne Rice's smutty A.N. Roquelare Sleeping Beauty books at the age of 19. Awful. Again, I read The DaVinci Code six years ago. Worst book I have ever read.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Jen said Ulysses. I could almost agree with her, but I read much of Finnegans Wake. It is a book insofar as it is constituted of pages with black markings and discernible letters all over them, occasionally making words that are known to the English speaking person and words that are made of two or more words from languages or names one may know. But it is not a novel, a poem, a play, a non-fiction book or any other form you might know. It is its own thing: Finnegans Wake. Even reading a whole book on it by Umberto Eco, and buying and reading parts of two other books on it, A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake and Joyce's Book of the Dark, I still got absolutely nothing out of it. I deeply love Joyce but am at this time incapable of giving a damn about the final book he wrote. I think I will use it as bedtime lullaby reading for my children one day. In philosophy, the most difficult book I've read is Totality and Infinity by Levinas.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespearean play you've seen?
I have not seen that much theater, something I am working on with Jacki. I also do not like watching things I have not read yet, something I am personally working on. For example, I will watch Benjamin Button without having read the Fitzgerald story.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
And now begins a series of shocking revelations. I have not read the Russians. I have begun Hadji Murád, but that is it. This is something I have been getting around to for a long time. I thought I would finally get the chance in Graduate School, but my department does not allow for the reading of anything in translation, unless the chair of the graduate program is teaching it, and then we can read every willfully obscure, onanistic French fuck ever to set pen to page. So there's your answer. I am sure I will like the Russians, when I get to them, more than the French. Though I love Antoine de St. Exupery and eventually came away with something profound after wrestling with Levinas for a few months. The jury's out on Foucault. I like him a lot more than some of his contemporaries. I am going to try to continue reading him. And I have not read Camus yet, something I am planning on getting to this summer.

18) Roth or Updike?
Haven't read either yet. Oh, wait, I did read A & P. I like A & P.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Haven't read either. What?! The What is the What.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Was Milton for awhile, now it's definitely Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot?
I know this refers to George Eliot, not T.S., so I cannot answer it. I have read neither.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
See the past several questions. That, and that I haven't read the entirety of The Bible, and that I haven't read Moby Dick, and that I haven't read Othello, and that I haven't finished some books I have lead most people to believe I have, and that I haven't finished reading some books and series of books that I've gotten my friends into reading.

23) What is your favorite novel?
Impossible. When I was a kid, it was The Hobbit. Then it was Watchers. Starting around seventh grade, it was The Vampire Lestat. Then it was It. Then it was Imajica. Then it was The Scarlet Letter. Then it was One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then it was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then it was The Lord of the Rings. Then it was American Gods. Then I barely read any fiction for years. Then I read a bunch of Harry Potter and Stephen King that I loved, but none of which qualified as favorite novel ever. Then it was The Road. Then it was And the Ass Saw the Angel. Then it was Across the River and into the Trees. What will it be next?

24) Play?
King Lear.

25) Poem?
Another hard one. A few favorites: Song of Myself. St. Kevin and the Blackbird. Interrogation at the Womb Door. Four Quartets is my favorite book of poetry. I'm not going further than that.

26) Essay?
What really constitutes an essay? Can any article in a magazine be an essay? Can any piece of literary criticism be an essay? Can any postmodern exercise in self-titillation be an essay? What about things our students write that we find very satisfying? I am not passionate about essays as a classification of literature, though I am becoming increasingly passionate about literary criticism. I dabbled around in last years Best American Essays of 2007 collection, edited by recently departed Dave Foster Wallace, and didn't find anything that pleased.

Here's a few I enjoy: Poe's essay on the unity of effect in a short story, "On a Florida Key" by E.B. White, "Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "What is an Author?" by Foucault, "The WOrd Made Flesh" and "The Secret Life of the Love Song" by Nick Cave, "Nothing Under the Sun: Nada, Light, and the Grace of God in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises" by Mark W. Bellomo, and especially "Integral Art and Literary Theory, Parts 1 and 2" by Ken Wilber, collected in his book The Eye of Spirit. What I remember most is him writing about a painting Van Gogh made of shoes and Heidegger's misreading and projection on that painting. What Wilber informed me about that painting laid the gorundwork for me to suddenly become overcome looking at the painting in the Met, where I began, inexplicably to myself, to weep before it.

27) Short story?
Here's the good stuff. "Cathedral," Raymond Carver. "Teddy" and "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor," J.D. Salinger. "Young Goodman Brown" and "Ethan Brand: An Abortive Romance" Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "The Battler," "Soldier's Home," "Indian Camp," "Now I Lay Me," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway. "Araby" and "The Dead" by James Joyce. "The Deluge at Norderney" and "The Old Chevalier" by Isak Dinesen. "Smith of Wootton Major," by J.R.R. Tolkien. "Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo," The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," and "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" by Gabriel García Márquez. "Troll Bridge," "Murder Mysteries," "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories," "Snow, Glass, Apples," October in the Chair," "Bitter Grounds," and "Forbidden Brides f the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire," by Neil Gaiman. "William Wilson" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Midnight Meat Train" and "In the Hills, The Cities" by Clive Barker. ""The Reach," "The Monkey," "Children of the Corn," "The Last Rung on the Ladder" "1408," "Everything's Eventual," by Stephen King. And the two most recent additions: "Best New Horror" and especially "20th Century Ghost" by Joe Hill, who happens to be Stephen King's son and is trying to carry on in the name of his father, but to maybe improve what he did, in the same way Nick Cave, Jeff Buckley, and arguably Jesus have (as Nick Cave argues in "The Flesh Made Word."

Finally, I leave it to you to decide whether Go Down, Moses is a short story collection. I would include "The Fire and The Hearth," at least, if it is a short story collection, but I do not think it is. Others argue In Our Time is not a short story collection. I love In Our Time, I think it's thematic, it obviously has several stories with Nick Adams (as do later short story collections by EH), but I think you can take a story out of it, read it, and not miss the entire point of the story. Furthermore, if it is one thematic more-than-a-short-story-collection book, putting "My Old Man" in there is a huge mistake.

28) Work of nonfiction?
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber. That I have never finished the book is irrelevant.
Some others I have enjoyed. On Writing by Stephen King. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Chronicles: Volume 1 by Bob Dylan. Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger. Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises by H.R. Stoneback.

I am currently enjoying Will in the World and Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt a lot.

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Top Five: Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King. Neil Gaiman was in the top five for a long time, but he's losing hold. He's still in the top ten, though.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
That's a difficult question. I am hesitant to answer, though "overrated people" lists are frequently on my mind. I am in part hesitant because I have not read a lot of the authors who are living today that people seem to love. I did attempt reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and thought it sucked ass for a host of reasons. So he's up there. Jen was so bold as to list Chuck Palahnuik, her own favorite author. I do think he is overrated, but I also enjoyed teaching Fight Club to my students last year. No one is claiming Dan Brown is the new Joyce, but I think he is incredibly overrated on even a beach read level of aesthetic gauges. He is incompetent at crafting characters, at providing a rewarding or even shocking ending, making a plot that holds, writing a compelling sentence or a beautiful description, making me feel any kind of suspense and real danger, adequately playing with any of the huge matrices of meaning he tries to bring into his work, etc.

Okay, here's a ballsier, more shocking answer. I have tried again and again to get into Ray Bradbury's work. I am so resistant to the possibility that I may not love an author I feel so totally expected to love that I am still believing that I will get the right book or try again at the right time and discover how awesome he truly is. I do think he has some marks of a great writer. But I am yet to finish reading anything he has written. So I might say Bradbury.

31) What is your desert island book?
I would bring a book that is huge that I wouldn't mind using to start fires. So I'll go with one I already burned years ago. The Faerie Queen, by Edmund Spenser.

32) And... what are you reading right now?
Right now, the semester just ended. It's a transitional time. Do I jump into some light fare? Do I keep reading what I was reading? Etc. So, at the moment I am reading Julius Caesar, the last scheduled book for Studies in Shakespeare that Olsen cut. I am continuing to read Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt. I am returning to reading Cormac McCarthy's first novel The Orchard Keeper, which I began just before the semester reached the point where any extracurricular reading is an impossibility. I also left myself toward the end of the first half of Joe Hill's debut collection 20th Century Ghosts, so I will return to that. The Book of Matthew. And I'm in the middle of reading an interview with Dylan in Rolling Stone, which I am reading for the first time in years.

Now, I am going to add one more question to this list, because 33 is a much better number than 32.

33) What do you plan on reading this summer?

Before I answer, let me say this: I always "plan" on reading ten times as much as I end up reading. It is my job at this point in life to read slowly and write about or teach what I read. So when the summer comes, sometimes I am too busy playing guitar, hiking, swimming, working non-academic jobs, watching all the movies I put off watching, drinking without having to worry about not being clear-headed enough to write my paper, and so on to actually accomplish what I set out to read. So here's a bunch of books I am thinking about reading or reading again this summer.

I Am Legend, Duel by Richard Matheson
The Fall by Albert Camus
Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
From Hell by Alan Moore
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
As many Cormac McCarthy novels in chronological order as I can or feel like.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (haven't read it yet!)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Moby Dick, or, The Whale by Herman Mellville
Hadi Murád by Leo Tolstoy
the next two -thirds of Christine, by Stephen King

and you know what, maybe I will finally jump back into The Dark Tower and finish it already.

and maybe something by this Ellis fellow who I hear writes such tremendous comics.

To the Stars and Back, The Universe is a Celebrated Black

2009-04-21T23:43:00.002-04:00

With its minimalist cover evocative of early eighties Factory Records synth-classics, its impressive series of in-studio peeks, its disturbing promotional video for lead single “Wrong,” its numerous editions, and especially its playful yet enticing title, Depeche Mode’s new album Sounds of the Universe seems to promise a world of aural pleasure, maybe the right balance of Playing the Angel’s songs and hooks with Exciter’s lush textures and risks. Now that it is out, Sounds of the Universe suffers a bit from suggesting too much. The album as it stands is at first sadly underwhelming, but grows on the listener as familiarity with the songs increases. Often, hardcore fans insist that the singles are the least impressive work of their beloved band or artist, or maybe fall in the middle road. Sounds of the Universe’s first surprise is that “Wrong,” the album’s third track, really is one of the album’s best songs. While much of the album has the relaxed feeling to it that Exciter had (without verging into the sleepiness of “When the Body Speaks,” “Easy Tiger,” or “Goodnight Lovers”), “Wrong” is one of the few moments of intensity. It seethes with a dark urgency, as compelling as a suicidal drive on a rainy night down the wrong streets. Other songs that grab the listener’s attention and incite riotous hips include “Come Back,” possibly the album’s catchiest moment, “In Sympathy,” probably the album’s finest song, and “Fragile Tension,” a beautiful mid-tempo dance song with electronic flourishes and a delicate ache that shows what a perfect vessel of voice Dave Gahan has become in his older age. (The box set contains a “bare” version of the former that is all pounded piano chords and forceful rhythm, best enjoyed with a warm comforting beverage and a morose look on one’s face, staring out the window at a cold gray day—more on that later). For those who like Martin Gore’s voice, he only takes full vocal duty on one song here but it is one of his finest moments. “Jezebel,” along with many of the other best songs on the album, reinforces the idea of Depeche Mode as champions for the melancholic outsider. It holds up with “A Question of Lust,” “The Things You Said,” “Sweetest Perfection,” and “Breathe” as one of Gore’s finest moments as a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist of great tact, delicacy, and nuance. The song conjures images and emotions of a tragic romance either fantasized or realized, a compassionate man seeing the public abuse of a sad and gorgeous woman—undeniably sexy but also full of mysterious pain—and longing to heal her psychic pain through the art of love. Unfortunately, this penultimate song of the collection is ravaged by the closing song, “Corrupt,” a reverse of the same idea where everything that is good about the previous song goes wrong.

The album opens in a way that suggests maybe you will be given a sonic tour of the universe. The opening minute could be the new THX sound system check. It all sounds good, destination unknown, next frontier, space cliché of your choice…until the opening words of the album tread trodden ground: “The way you move/has got me yearning.” The title is “In Chains,” and it is the first indication that much of the album is going to lyrically retread the past thirty years of the band’s work. Sin, bondage, suffering, lust, love not going right, an opponent’s faulty viewpoint, and the general populace’s misunderstanding comprise the bulk of the album’s lyrical content. Depeche Mode have great strengths and weaknesses; this album emphasizes both. It emphasizes their tendency to lush full sound and perfect production, to layers of electronics and synthesizers buzzing beautifully, their penchant for minor motifs and slightly dissonant melodies, and their ongoing dedication to making dance music that isn’t stupid or flat. It also emphasizes their inability to radically change any part of their sound, their limited lyric-writing, and their increasing tendency to include utterly forgettable instrumentals (this album’s is called “Spacewalker”—hey, I only report the facts). The weakest songs seem to be “Peace” and “Little Soul.” “Peace” is a positive song, deserving credit for a new direction in lyrics, with a nice spacey sound to it; though rather innocuous and as retro as the cover, it seems to serve no purpose, forgettable after it has passed, barely noticed while it is on. “Little Soul,” however, is cloying in every possible sense, a textbook of all the things Depeche Mode should avoid, the worst facets of the band. “Perfect” also ambles along, pleasant enough in its warm synths, its crunches and squeals, and its ambient room, but not compelling or emotionally gripping either lyrically or musically. It is too bad that the many people who buy the album are going to have these songs and not the stellar music hiding out on the bonus discs of the box set.

Unfortunately for the casual fan or the newcomer, the real treat is the “bonus” (read “superior”) material in the deluxe box set. When Radiohead put together their special box edition of In Rainbows, they put together gorgeous artwork, slipped in two 180 gram records (that annoyingly spin at 45 speed) of the main album for the audiophiles, provided an extra disk of good music, but made sure all the best stuff was on the original album that everybody would have access to, perhaps part of the democratic nature of the whole project. Depeche Mode has done the exact opposite here. They have put out a good album, but reserved much of the best material for dedicated fans. Depeche Mode seem to be implicitly challenging their fans, as if saying, “If you’re a real fan, you’ll slap down the hundred dollars for the box set and get the real deal. You can even wear a badge to show your DM pride.” This is especially sad and alarming given the current economy and the number of artists doing it. It seems most albums by established bands and artists now come out in a mind-boggling number of options. One would think that now would be the worst time to count on people having the extra income to drop on a box set, yet expensive special editions come out every month. Depeche Mode do it right here. With the exception that there is no vinyl in the box, it is what the ultimate fan desires: extra tracks, demo versions of new songs and old ones, remixes, videos of the making of the album and in-studio performances, books, and aesthetically brilliant but also manageable packaging. Unbelievably, some of the “demoes” are better than the album versions. Martin sings on the “Corrupt” demo, the song which closes the album (on a rather ambivalent note for this reviewer —the lyrical matter seems to follow in the seedy tradition of “Little 15” and “We Are the Dead of Night,” but does not seem to be from a character’s perspective), and every impulse of the original is exactly right. Reworkings here did a disservice to the song. Other demo versions, if they do not surpass the original, provide interesting alternate possibilities of what the song could sound like. Some of yesterday’s favorites are here to be freshly relived. One of Playing the Angel’s strongest songs, “Nothing’s Impossible” is here in a quieter version that is just as dark and delicious as the original, and “Sweetest Perfection” and “I Feel You” demoes are here for interested parties. But the most stunning material is the first five tracks on the first bonus disc. If Depeche Mode decided to release an EP (as they had planned to do with Ultra), this would be a perfect one. “Light,” “Ghost,” and “Oh Well” are as fine as Dave Gahan dance/mood DM songs go. “Light” pulls the listener into the collection in the way “In Chains” intended to but failed. “Ghost” shows what Dave Gahan learned making his impeccable second solo abum, Hourglass; the sexy atmospherics, steady beat, and excellent vocal work are all present in magnificent profusion. “The Sun and The Moon and The Stars” is a sonic treasure-chest, layered expertly by Martin and rounded out with his wavering high vocals romantically swooning, underscored by Gahan. “Esque” is the possibly the best instrumental Depeche Mode have yet done. “Christmas Island” and “Headstar” are its only contenders. “Oh Well” is another very strong dance-based song. It attacks and slithers and builds and pulls back and comes back harder with deliciously occilating textures. These five songs deliver on the promise that the beginning review mentions, make good on all the bizarre, old, analog and synth equipment Martin Gore is said to have been constantly buying from eBay during the making of the album. The end result is that one has to make their own version of Sounds of the Universe. In our increasingly mp3-based, iPod-driven music world, each person is left to construct their own universe, choosing what sounds best represent their vision of a trip to the stars and back. Fortunately, it makes brilliant headphone music.

Sounds of the Universe.

2009-04-13T14:12:00.002-04:00

As I thought, it is growing on me.

I hope to get back to writing longer and more interesting entries here. Currently, I have been looking for work and researching, reading, and writing Shakespeare-related studies, so the time I can dedicate to the blog with a clear conscience has been nil.

If you are new to the blog, please scroll back to past months and years, where much more of value, substance, or interest may be found.

Upcoming: the long-delayed Chinese Democracy review (need to find it again and type it up) and a short piece about communication.

Why The Birthday Party had to end.

2009-03-28T18:27:00.002-04:00

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the recording of side a. Spin it and be reminded what awesome, original music truly sounds like.

[sound of non-existent breeze]

2009-03-19T18:11:00.001-04:00

This is a dustball

tumbling its way

leisurely

through an abandoned piece

of cyberspace.

The Wrong Ascendancy

2009-03-10T11:06:00.001-04:00

Wrong is growing on me. A thoroughly unnerving video always helps. Take that, Karma Police.

No Career On the Horizon

2009-03-07T10:08:00.005-05:00

I listened to No Line on the Horizon again last night, or at least tried to. If there is one thing U2 have proved on David Letterman this week, it has been that they can still create a massive amount of energy playing live and make it catch fire, spreading from person to person in the space before them. That's cool to see. But if there's another thing they've proven, it's that they're really over. I hate to say this. I don't take delight in writing negative things about deified bands on the internet. I really don't. But as someone who has passionately loved U2 for about thirteen years, I have to say that it is painful both to see what Bono has become (as a singer) and to listen to the new album.

Last night was my third listen, and it was also the first time I couldn't even get through it. Why was I trying to listen to an album that made me feel angry, disappointed, sore, and thoroughly upset the first time and that left little impression the second time? Because I had listened to Neko Case's new, wonderful, amazing, "magnificent" Middle Cyclone for the second time of the day (I usually listen to it four or five times a day, leaving the crickets playing maybe one of those times) and I had found many more reasons to love the album and also found myself unable to concentrate on anything else at the same time. So, tempted as I was to listen to what may well be the best album of the year so far (a mighty statement given how many great albums are already out), I wanted to read The Tempest and I was reminded of what I heard my cousin had said. A passionate U2 fan himself who also faced hard facts when he heard "Get On Yr Boots" and called a spade a spade, he reported that there was a lot more to get out of the album listening to it on headphones. Knowing Eno and Lanois had manned the decks, this seemed highly plausible.

But, alas, what I found was crap. I went looking for Larry Mullen, Jr.'s exceptional drumming and found utterly forgettable drumming smothered under a bunch of syrupy keyboards. I went looking for something fresh and I found U2 trying to recreate Zooropa and The Unforgettable Fire. They came close to the former with the agreeable "Magnificent," with the exception that there was some croaker fronting the band for that song while an Orpheic god had fronted the band for the earlier album, making it a sexy affair at the same time it was experimental. As for the second album, they didn't come close to touching it. Frankly put, Bono cannot sing anymore. It breaks my heart every time to watch him try or listen to this new album. Some people get broken that way, and move on in a way that inspires awe. Dylan sounds like he's about to send part of his lung in your face as he roars against his "Lonesome Day Blues" on "Love and Theft." I went looking for the voice that had lifted my unnameable emotions in my guts and heart over and over again in the past and found that voice gone. I went looking for the sexiest, most understated bass lines this side of the post-punk explosion of which they were a vibrant part and found something more like—dare I say it—noodling. I went looking for the shimmering, mountainous, occasionally surprising Edge and I found David Gilmour. Did they take the guitar parts from On An Island or The Division Bell and superimpose them? When he did sound like The Edge, he sounded too much like The Edge. I know: damned if you do, damned if you don't. I went looking for memorable lyrics you love to quote. I got "Force Escape Move to Trash," stuff about punching in pin codes in ATM machines, lines about submarines and gasoline, and most annoyingly, some line about ego not being the enemy but rather a baby trying to cross the highway. WHAT?! The ego is not a cute version of Frogger. It is almost indestructible, unlike the frail innocent vision he paints here. When things come along to correct or trash the ego, it explodes in a supernovaic rage, becoming more deadly and more all-consuming. The ego is where landslides begin. Remember, Bono? By track eight or nine, "Fez—Being Born" or "White as Snow," I still hadn't found what I was looking for and I had developed a headache from the effort of trying to like the album and trying to comprehend late-period Shakespeare syntax at the same time, and I ran screaming to the freezer for ice cream as a way to lick my wounds.

Now, many fans of the new album are going to speak up, "Oh man, you missed the best song—'Cedars of Lebanon.'" No, I did not miss the best song. I missed U2 running out of clean clothes and going to play in their father's closet. And it feels dirty. "Cedars of Lebanon" takes elements from ambient Eno music and puts down spoken word on top of it with a lazy, hesitant drum beat. The composition that Eno seems to be selling into slavery for U2 here is one of my all time favorites. It is the numinous conclusion to Ambient 4: On Land, "Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960"mildly altered. Since that is my favorite piece on my favorite Eno album, I have no interest in hearing U2 at the lowest point of their career messing it up. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, the song abruptly stops, and with it the album. I like abrupt stops, when done right. I end many of my songs that way. It especially works well for short, heavy songs. It does not work well for ambient album-closers. What it reveals is that the last song, like every other song on the album except the first, is an unfinished idea, an unrealized song.

I mention here the first song, so let me clarify. The album opens with wonderful strength. "No Line on the Horizon" is an excellent song that takes its worthy place among U2's career of excellent songs. It is by no means very original; it takes a very familiar musical motif that I love and does it well. Most importantly, Bono sounds like he is really trying with everything he has left in that song. I have no doubt that Bono is very conscious of the twilight of his powers and is rightfully depressed about it. In this song, he rages against the dying of the light. Had this album been eight songs just like "No Line On the Horizon," the song that gives the album its name, it would have been a great album. But the cover tells us everything we need to know.

The title of the album is No Line on the Horizon. Yet we see, very clearly, that there is a thick gray line on the horizon. This means the title is a lie. Therefore, whatever the title track sounds like is not going to be indicative of what the cover really represents. So what does the cover really represent?

It represents U2's fervent desire to go back. To recreate the past. To be back at the peak of their powers. A return to the boyhood of their band. The first album's cover is also done in soft shades of gray and white, with a minimal amount from the black side of the spectrum. A circular shape occupies a little over half of both covers. A horizontal line intersects the middle of both images. The darker, grayer side of theBoy image occupies the upper half of the picture. This makes sense for the album because the songs on Boy explore the transition from childhood to manhood, from innocence to experience. This transition has everything to do with the observations the maturing mind makes and what it does with them. For many, it creates a darker reality. On the new album's cover, we see the patterns of the image's reverse. Here, the mostly white, mostly light space occupies the upper half and the mostly dark space, oceanic, occupies the bottom half. The light circle reflects the upper half. Whereas in childhood, the body's natural curiosity and love of play is so much a part of the innocence that Bono is mourning the loss of on U2's unsurpassable first album, now the body is dark because it represents sin, and the mind, conventionally located in and around the head, is united with soul as animus, the body's and self's only link to God. The body is liberated from this sinful nature when it relfects God's light. This is the old Western duality anyway, and we can see it all over the new U2 album. On the first song, Bono quotes some woman as saying "Time is irrelevant; it is not linear," before she goes on to stick her tongue in his ear. The woman's tongue that says something interesting and wise before going on to hit up my ear with some pleasant action is usually a source of joy for me, but Bono does not sound happy as he sings these lines. Is it because the woman is not Ali? This would give creedence to a notion that the lower half is the darker half, only capable of light when governed by the mind unified with the soul. U2 has always sung about God and God as Love. In the past, they have done this in interesting ways. Stuart Davis once described U2's work in the eighties as a Trojan Horse sneaking mysticism into the pop world. On this album, it becomes very simple. Love, Love, ohohoh. "Only love can leave such a mark." Boy is an album for the body and the darkening mind, and it succeeds on every level. The new album is supposed to be an album for the soul, a soul that transcends time and wants to occupy the same moments as when it participated in the creation of Boy, The Unforgettable Fire, and Zooropa. But the past is inaccessible to and irreproducible. U2 wants to have it both ways. They want to make experimental albums and be revered as the greatest band on earth. They didn't get that treatment after Pop, which is a good album. They want to make saccharine pop-by-numbers pop albums and still have the respect of long time fans who know what the band is capable of when they take chances, songs like "Your Blue Room" and "Miss Sarajevo." Caught in a circle of response to inevitable criticism and lacking an actual direction, the new album tries to both and succeeds as neither. There is nothing truly experimental about the "experimental" songs, and there is nothing catchy and moving about the pop songs. We got neither the radiant white of the sky or the dark depths of the ocean, just a barely discernible straight gray line on the horizon.

What the cover tells us about the new album is that it is an attempt to go back in time that went horribly wrong, like Jeff Goldlbum trying to teleport in The Fly. It took the wonderful human elements out and gave us failed high-art pretension. It took the youthful vigor out and gave us something dull. So we get an inverse image of the first album.

Having gone to bed feeling sick again from No Line, I woke up this morning and decided I needed to do something to remedy what I was feeling. I can't stand being mad or feeling upset by a favorite band. Feeling like I had a bad piece of steak for dinner and spending an ill-rested night, I made myself a piece of filet mignon for breakfast—I listened to Boy.

And you know what?

It never gets old.

2009-03-05T20:19:00.001-05:00

How much do I love Middle Cyclone

I.....................................................................................................................................I

Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssss much!

About Today

2009-03-02T10:58:00.002-05:00

So it all comes down to today. I either have thirteen more pages of critical analysis and theory written by the end of today or I don't. I either have a future that involves a Masters or I don't.

It is time to "welcome responsibility like a long lost friend."

There's only one answer: get in a trance and listen to dead can dance.

Write until the blood turns to ice in my veins.

Severance

2009-03-02T09:54:00.003-05:00

Severance,
The birds of leaving call to us,
yet here we stand
endowed with the fear of flight.

Overland
the winds of change consume the land,
while we remain
in the shadow of summers now past.

When all the leaves
have fallen and turned to dust,
will we remain
entrenched within our ways.

Indifference,
the plague that moves throughout this land
Omen signs
in the shapes of things to come.

{Tomorrow's child is the only child.}

Today's Listening Part II

2009-03-01T14:07:00.005-05:00

The Velvet Underground and Nico (First time in nearly three years)
The Smiths: "Strangeways, Here We Come" (Recent obsession. Can't stop me, stop me, stop me. I know it's serious.)
Arvo Pärt: Miserere (In the face of this, I have nothing to say.)
The Cure: Faith & Carnage Visors (Remaster, which kicks ass, upping the bass on a bass-driven album)
Scott Walker: The Drift (How did I forget about the Donald Duck passage at the end of "The Escape" and get totally scared again?)
David Bowie: "Heroes" (Sounds painfully tinny after the previous two)
Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (Vinyl Remaster)
--------long period of silence----------------------
Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile (Quite possibly the best album ever made)(stopped mid-starfuckers, inc.—easily worst song)
--------long period of silence and conversation---------
David Bowie: Low (New Career—>Some Are)
Arvo Pärt: Alina (bedtime. my lullaby)

Serious work requires serious listening.

Now Bleed for Me...

2009-03-01T10:22:00.002-05:00

Sunday Morning. Velvet Underground & Nico on the stereo. Trying to figure out what esle there is to say about composition and literature's relationship. Trying not to be too irked by the fact that composition is seemingly the only discipline that doesn't even fully know what its purpose is and how it can best proceed to accomplish its purpose. Six more pages to go. Then on to the next one.

I am tired.
I am weary.

A Six-Part Suite Dedicated to the Biblical Progenitor of All Masturbation is Just the Beginning.

2009-02-28T22:12:00.005-05:00

I am as far away as possible from the time and ability to write a review. But trust me. Did Ghosts make you feel smart? Are you looking for something different? Do you want something for contemplative moods and something that might blow your mind?

Nels Cline is both a true guitar god and a creative genius. His talent is currently being squandered in the blandness of the current incarnation of wilco, but it may be that successful gig that allows him to make albums like Coward on the side, so I'm not going to complain.

Do yourself a favor. Head over to Systems and Sounds and download Coward until you get a tangible copy.

Once Sweet and Tender

2009-02-25T21:59:00.002-05:00

In the midst of life we are in death, etc.
In the midst of life we are in death, etc.
In the midst of life we are in death, etc.
In the midst of life we are in death, etc.
In the midst of life we are in death, etc.
ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA!

ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! ETCETERA!

And now I know how Joan of Arc felt

2009-02-25T20:11:00.004-05:00

Friends, things are not going well. Fortunately, I have you good friends, my great family, and God's grace.

But you all should know, things are definitely not going well.

Miserere

2009-02-24T13:40:00.004-05:00

Miserere
Festina Lente
Sarah Was Ninety Years Old

Perfect music for devastation of the heart, ongoing darkness and purgation, and utter and complete loss.
In other words, perfect music for right now.

Dark Was the Night

2009-02-13T13:01:00.002-05:00

Tried to get an embedded mp3 player here but couldn't. Sorry. Go check out: www.darkwasthenight.com

One more record to go at the time of this writing. Worst songs: easily "Lenin" by The Arcade Fire, which is of the same awful quality as the b-side ot "Keep the Car Running," "Mimizan" byt Bierut—hipster tripe—, and "Die" by Iron & Wine, which is not bad, just slight and forgettable. Picking favorites is too hard: there is a lot of good stuff here.

Dark Was the Night is wonderful. Go get yourself a copy and help fight the AIDS epidemic.

Cold Plagiarism?

2009-02-09T09:50:00.006-05:00

Just thought I'd put my two cents in on this Coldplay plagiarism scandal. I'll let it be known upfront that I think Joe Satriani is a joke, and what he possesses in guitar-playing skills he lacks in the ability to write an emotionally gripping song. He is the proverbial guy for whom his guitar is an extension of his penis. You have to chuckle reading his "I nursed it, loved, it, took care of it, then played it on stages around the world" and "a dagger through my heart" quotes. I'll also let it be known that no matter how profoundly uncool it is, I like Coldplay, though I disliked all of X+Y except the one plagiarized song, "Talk" which was written by Kraftwerk as "Computer Love;" both songs are cool—they take very different approaches to a wonderfully catchy succession of notes.

Here's the thing: "Viva La Vida" is a cheesy, simple, stupid song. It is four notes played in four-four time. It lacks all complexity. It is easily the worst song on the album that unfortunately shares its name (should have been called "Cemeteries of London"). When two people put together the same four white-key notes, it is not plagiarism, it is just the natural occurrence of what happens when people create unoriginal, unexciting, bland pop music. I wrote a song called "Electrified" back in high school. It is as poppy as poppy gets. I think it's a good pop song. I have obviously never recorded it professionally and released it. If there isn't a song that is the exact same as it now, there will be one in the future, and not because someone somehow heard one of my fourtrack recordings of it. Someone else will write it because it is a simple unoriginal pop song. Four notes. That's all you need, and keep them all in the white keys. G-D-Em-C. There. Hell, two or three songs off the new Bruce albums might be "plagiarized." "Surprise, Surprise" "This Life" and "Working on a Dream" don't sound original to me, but I don't care. Why? Because they're good songs, good pop songs. And in pop music, we're all drinking from the same stream. You can't own four chords played in a row. As songwriters, we are all swimming in a river of chords and trying to get some of them back to shore. These chords preexist us and we are lucky to play them.

I mind artistic plagiarism when someone takes music from the genre he or she is working in and barely changes it, so that I have to notice it. Ray Lamontagne has done this so many times now that he has lost my respect. If he had lifted stuff that wasn't by Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, I would feel better, but when the people you are plagiarizing or idolizing are that famous and important to the music you're working in, it's just insulting to your audience.

Reading about plagiarism in a historical perspective has probably changed the way I see it, but I think the degree to which we feel we own certain things and how quickly we wish to become engrossed in soulsucking litigiousness in our culture saddens me. Especially songwriting. How can I own something that was given to me from a mysterious force that has no face or name? In literature, we call plagiarism "allusion" and it merely testifies to our wit. Look at Gaiman: the guy has barely ever written anything original in his life; I have read him admitting this. He changes things just enough and adds a mild twist to it, and writes in a simplicity that took work to become as unobtrusive as it is. The key to his success, he once wrote, is pilfering very obscure things, and reading interesting history books. Even his recent book, "The Graveyard Book"—it won the Newberry Award and it is a retelling of "The Jungle Book." Should the estate of Kipling sue him? Should Disney sue him? If all ideas are God's, existing in God's mind, as Plato, or more accurately, the neoplatonists would state, then how do any of us own them? We are simply taking different steps toward imitating these forms.

If this is the case, the four notes of the pedestrian made-for-supermarkets song that Coldplay and Satriani have taken attempts at imitating is neither of theirs. Furthermore, it is not one song. It is at least two. Coldplay uses mechanically pumping strings and lyrics. Joe Satriani uses acoustic guitars and bunch of his wanky electric guitar. They have different verse stuctures. Having listened to it (It's called "If I Could Fly"—google it if you dare), they are not even similar until about half the chorus, which is also a predictable and unoriginal formulation. But these are more than two songs, because they are wildly different songs to as many ears as there are to hear them. There are undoubtedly many undergraduate men and women out there who would say that "Viva La Vida" is one of their favorite songs. It invigorates them and makes them happy in a way most other songs do not. There are Satriani fans out there who hear something beautiful and resonant in "If I Could Fly" (which, by the way, is an incredibly lame, insipid, unoriginal title). These songs are different songs when I hear them than when they hear them. I would love to know what Stephen King is hearing when he listens to "Viva La Vida," or when he listens to Wilco's last album "Sky Blue Sky," which I gave away. When I hear these works, I hear boring, tired, unoriginal songs that simply remind me of other songs I don't much like. When he hears them, he is moved to declare them best songs and best albums of the year in his EW column.

The dagger that Satriani felt in his heart was this: he heard his own unoriginality confirmed and he was made intensely aware that even if he had written, nurtured, cared for the whole fucking album by Coldplay, no one would care, because he's Joe Satriani, and the public at large does not care about him, his black Ibanez, his outdated sunglasses, his dumb hat, and especially not his self-serving masturbatory solos. Even if it was note-for-note the same album, it wouldn't have been produced by Brian Eno, and so it already would only be about half as good. What's the best thing about "Lost!"? The textures of the echoing percussive clacks. Then, it wouldn't have Martin's half-baked universal lyrics and his pretty falsetto which begs to be sung along to, so now it would be about as quarter as good. Finally, it would be covered in boring solos. So, even though it would be the same series of chords and notes, it would be 0% out of a possible 100% of goodness. That is the dagger Joe egomaniac Satriani felt in his heart, and so he is trying to remedy the discomfort of this experience by making a bunch of money he doesn't deserve through the legal process. Congratulations, Satriani. You already sucked. Now you suck more.

Kids doing Pulp Fiction: Does it get any better?

2009-02-09T09:31:00.001-05:00

Why This Shakespeare Course Is Mine

2009-01-29T23:43:00.001-05:00

Every semester, Professor Thomas Olsen asks his graduate students to write what their previous experiences with Shakespeare have been, what their interest is in his Shakespeare class are, and what their scholarly goals are regarding his class. Here's what I wrote:

The first play I read by Shakespeare was Romeo and Juliet. I was in ninth grade. I was a solipsistic romantic whose heart was too big for the school. Baz Luhrmann’s ultra-cool adaptation with Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio was just coming out. I saw it with my first girlfriend at a discount cinema. I was developing my poetic skills. And yet, I did not care much for the play. Fixated on the story itself, I did not care for the tragedy, the unstoppable movement by which it reached its conclusion. I found it lamentable that two young people who I did not consider to be really truly in love should have to reach such an end so soon due to the explosive nature of their chemistries, their families, their tempers. One line did stick out, though. Early in the play, one of the characters comments that he has lately seen Romeo, apparently hung up on an unrequited love—my usual status in early high school and the preceding couple years—out walking by himself in the early morning, his tears augmenting the fresh dew. I can remember the exact moment I read it. It was early morning. I was sitting next to a window in an institution dedicated to education, like I am now. My new object of affection was hopeless; she stood before me: the new English teacher who had come in from nowhere to relieve the old teacher who had become terribly ill. The new English teacher was young, had dark red hair, drank tea from a metal portable cup every morning, listened to David Bowie. I was smitten. I longed to perform Romeo’s passionate passages on Juliet’s beauty for her, on bended knee before her and the class. Shakespeare had found his way in to another human. That one line was enough to let Shakespeare into my heart and mind. With that line, he had a foot in the door.
The next year, I read Hamlet. By the time I read it, I had already watched the Branagh version with my next girlfriend, who had me join her in running the school’s arts and literature magazine, which I became the sole leader of in a couple years’ time. I liked Hamlet a lot more. My grandfather had died, I had railed against and forsaken God, I had begun to wear black occasionally. I had had my heart truly broken for the first time. Things had changed, and quick. I had also begun to feel conflicted feelings toward my parents consciously for the first time. Hamlet had come at the perfect moment for me. But to be honest, it was mostly over my head, no matter how well I faked to the contrary. (I had also read Twelfth Night on the beach the summer previous to my sophomore year. I had forgotten this fact until beginning the next page of this reflection.)
By the final two years of high school, I had become a full blown literature fanatic. In eleventh grade, I spent every free period in the library, reading literary criticism on Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had become my obsession. Engrossed in American Literature my junior year, I read no Shakespeare. My final year, I swapped out my obsession with Hawthorne for one with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I also read two Shakespeare plays, one quickly and by myself (a term A.D. Nuttall makes interesting remarks about in his book Shakespeare the Thinker), the other slowly and with other people. The former was King Lear, and it truly was the book that made me a lover of Shakespeare. I would not come out of that book once I went in. For a weekend, all I did was read it, think about it, write about it, and repeat the cycle, absentmindedly shoving some food in my mouth every so often. I wrote an abysmal poem about it, and pondered Nature vs. nature to the extent of my young mind’s ability, which at that time lived on a diet of Stanley Kubrick films and dark music. I even neglected to notice the candle I was reading by had spilled its wax all over the floor. The most touching moment in all the play to me was Edgar’s speech beginning “When we our betters see bearing our woes” (sorry I chastised you for its absence in the recent production on campus). I wrote out the monologue in a card to my step-mother about a year before she died. The latter play was Macbeth; the raw power of its poetics, of its language, of its bleak vision and its bleak characters and its bleak ghosts gripped me and would not let go. I was made to memorize the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliliquy and recite it to the class (I was an actor with lead roles two years in a row at that point). Lines became so deeply woven into my mind I no longer knew the author. Lines from Macbeth spilled out into almost all the poems I was writing at the time, and I was writing a lot. Three years previous, I cordially admired poetry. Now I was dancing in its fire, trying to expiate my every scalding thought. All of my poems were full of sound and fury; all of my poems signified nothing. Lear’s themes obsessed me; Macbeth’s words obsessed me.
But I changed rapidly back then. You could say I still do. By the time I was attending Skidmore less than a year later, my love affair with Shakespeare had quelled. My assigned advisor was the school’s Shakespeare expert, a man by the name of Murray Levith. He even made it a point to look like Shakespeare. I was assigned to read The Tempest as the conclusion of his unsatisfying first half of Skidmore’s classics of Western Literature course, Evolving Canon, and I honestly don’t think I read past the first scene. The next semester I became obsessed with Blake and Milton. And my fantasies gripped me more and more—the ones I was writing (“Heirloom” and “Fragment from the Life of Fyck”) and the ones I was reading (The Lord of the Rings and Gaiman’s works). I never went abroad, as Professor Levith was frequently urging me to do, and I didn’t read another play of Shakespeare’s until finishing my undergraduate degree two years ago here, although I occasionally attended a performance (a good one of The Merchant of Venice at Skidmore comes to mind, one I walked out on, I think of Twelfth Night, at Emerson also comes to mind) and saw film adaptations. Eric Salehi’s class introduced me to Richard II, I Henry IV, and Henry V, had me revisit King Lear, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice, and acquainted me with “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis.” The two plays from the Henriad I found especially interesting, and at moments, resonant. Hal’s stirring soliliquy at the end of I.ii. of how he has thus far not lived up to his potential and has squandered his talent, his name, and his time in bars and with women and with rogues moved me and struck a deep chord, on a personal note. That’s another moment where I remember where I was when I was reading it—it stirred the actor who I killed and buried inside of me after high school. I would like to stand on a stage and deliver those lines to a dark room with a hundred pairs of ears. I felt every one of those words, though Hal’s later actions alienated me. I’d rather continue squandering my time in bars with rogues than threaten to assault, rape, and kill an entire village of people.
Anyone serious about literature, and especially Western Literature, knows that there are a few works with which one must be familiar. The Bible and The Plays of Shakespeare are chief among these, though earlier epics are of course also of paramount importance. It has become a fervent desire of mine to more deeply and comprehensively familiarize myself with these two pillars of Western Literature, but not just to catch allusions in contemporary works. I wish to engage deeply with these works because of what they illuminate about humanity, what they might teach me about myself, what they might do again to the smoldering poetic fire in me, what great unending questions they open and explore or invite the reader to explore, and what they ask of us. I wish also to use this class’s particular angle—how Shakespeare exploited and joined other preexisting works by other hands and minds to create something startlingly new and everlasting—as a learning opportunity for myself as a would-be writer of fiction on how I might compensate for a lack of complete imaginative vision by using twice-told tales in the creation of something new and worth reading. It is the perfect time for me to take this class because I am weary of the modern world and all its vanity and lack of focus, and I wish to dive headlong into the past to feed my ravenous soul. I wish to study and learn as much as I can about the bible and the works of Shakespeare, for reasons both scholarly and spiritual. I am best as a scholar when my spirit is most involved. I am at my worst when I am detached or repulsed by my subject. At SUNY New Paltz, there are teachers who I know by first-hand experience and by reputation to be as wonderful at teaching these two major touchstones of the Western Literary Tradition as they are erudite respecting their areas of specialty. I have been waiting to take this class with you since I began as an undergrad here in 2005. I am focusing on only this one course so I can give it my full attention and get the most out of it in such a small period of time. I consider it an honor to be your student and I appreciate the grace the English Department and the Administration has shown me. My boots are on and I’m ready to roll. 29 January 2009

Good/Bad

2009-01-23T12:48:00.003-05:00

What have Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, Steve Lillywhite, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr, and Bono Vox been up to in their several studios across the world as they prepare to make another album that untold millions of people will buy whether it is good or not?

On the good side, we have this: Eno, Lanois, and The Edge sitting around the lunch table seemingly impromptu bursting into an a capella harmonized version of an old favorite song of theirs. It is wonderful. They should have put it on the album.

On the bad side, we have this: the first single from the album and a major turn-off. It continues to do all the things we don't want U2 to do—churn out generic and uninspiring rock riffs comprised of tired power chords and set to Bono using a voice that is not as thrilling as his falsetto nor as moving as his baritone, rapping through idiotic free associations like "I got my submarine/You got gasoline" and self-consciously Bono, Cosmopolitan, lines like "I don't want to talk about the wars between the nations" before bursting into the songs chorus of "Hey, Sexy Boots!" Now, if you know me, you know I love sexy boots. I wrote a poem about ten years ago called "I Love Girls in Big Black Boots." But if U2 want to make sexy music, they have other options, like the "let's sit around my European flat and casually get it on" feel of "Babyface," the sweltering climaxing intensity of "Exit," or the sincere Joshua Tree b-sides "Walk to the Water." The absolute last thing U2 should be doing at this juncture of their career is writing more songs like "Vertigo." This song may be even worse than that one, and has immediately spoiled my hopes for a return to form from one of the world's greatest bands, now about seventeen years from their last truly great album.

The Beatles Perform A Midsummer Night's Dream, Get Heckled

2009-01-23T12:44:00.001-05:00

The Collected Works of Yours Truly

2009-01-21T18:39:00.002-05:00

Dan said he only had my Tom Waits cover. Frank has lost some stuff, and he is my archivalist. So here is what I do. Two folders. The Music of Kevin Larkin is old stuff, songs recorded in high school and maybe the beginning of college, several with Frank, some with Mike, others with John and Josh(es) and other oddities and relics of the past. The Music of Kevin Larkin Angioli is everything that is not complete shit that I have recorded with my MacBook, not including music I played with Eric, although there are a couple Nachtmusik songs in there (ones recorded by me but musically written by Eric). There are some quite old songs that I recorded for the first time, written back when I was Kevin Larkin, in this latter folder. Confusing, I know. Be sure to check out Limbo—it's really cool. In a way, I think each of one of my friends and myself is in limbo right now, so I wrote it with you in mind.
Secrets & Loss, when it's all polished and professional, is going to be the greatest song I ever had anything to do with when it is all done. The home demo version is the best I've been able to do so far. Eric and I usually play it last, after the bottle of wine is empty, and it shows. Got to work on doing it up front sometime, maybe tonight. Anyway, here you go.

1. The Music of Kevin Larkin
2. The Music of Kevin Larkin Angioli

Limbo

2009-01-21T16:29:00.000-05:00

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A Change Would Do You Good

2009-01-20T13:39:00.001-05:00

So. Barack Obama is President of the United States of America and Joe Biden is Vice-President of the United States of America. Feels nice.

El Bandido

2009-01-18T15:28:00.001-05:00

Another rough draft: El Bandido

All the Bees are Named in Babel

2009-01-17T14:22:00.004-05:00

Just finished recording one of my "experimental" numbers. Recorded the guitar a few nights ago, inspired by Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 third movement. Added the rest today. Three vocal tracks, woodsaw and cedar, music box, the flipped pages of an old volume of Poe, two Garageband synthesizers, a hip-hop built-in beatbox...I had to delete four of the tracks, leaving the final one at ten. If you'd like to give it a whirl, go here.

Don't expect a catchy chorus. It's a swirling threnodial whirl of chaos and it probably has something to do with how much Alan Moore I have been reading.

Spin the Black Circle into the Void

2009-01-09T15:50:00.004-05:00

I keep trying to support the music business, when sometimes, it doesn't deserve to be supported. Since getting into Black Sabbath for the first time since I was 13 (and much heavier than I was then), I have bought several of their albums, mostly used, from Rhino Records. On CD, I bought: Black Sabbath, Master of Reality, and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. I already owned a used copy of Paranoid, also from Rhino Records. Well, buying used CDs is all well and good, but I bought Master of Reality new, and you know what? It sucks. Not Master of Reality. The tired old lame CD Warner Bros has out of Master of Reality and all the other Sabbath albums. Same little slip of paper with the same mildly reworded bio of the band with the same white inside with the same numbers in boxes and writing credits and song titles, some broken into five parts as though Black Sabbath was prog-rock band, and most importantly, the same shitty mastering and dull flat mix. I thought I wasn't a big fan of Master of Reality, but a lot of my feeling was a result of the fact that the album sounded flat and hollow and like it had been sitting stagnating in a pool of bong water for thrity years.

Instead of buying that copy, I should have just looked around the internet, read about all the fabulous remasters and downloaded higher quality versions that did the albums justice. The band has millions of dollars and the old Warner Bros CDs should not even be on the market anymore. (They even have incorrect information on them, like a tracklisting time length of 8:08 for Solitude, which actually runs for 5:02). Only remasters that live up to the important heritage and quality of these important albums should be available, which reproduce what the original vinyl was like. I bought a new vinyl pressing of the first album for Christmas and was wonderfully surprised to discover a gatefold opening with an upside-down cross inside with over-the-top gothic prose pieces written within it, begging to be read in one's best Vincent Price impression, ending with a passage about tolling bells and soflty falling rain, which is exactly what one hears when one drops the needle on this classic, amazing album. Since not everyone has a record player to enjoy them the way they are meant to be heard, consumers should not even hnve the option of buying these tired old Warner Bros pressings from when CDs were first invented. If I had known, I would have saved my money.

Master of Reality is an important album. It was released in 1971, only four years after the cloying sounds of "Penny Lane." I can not conceive of most drudge, doom, or even basic metal existing without it. "Children of the Grave" is the first song I know of to use the basic chugging palm muted power-chord sound. "Into the Void" seems to be a precursor for all drudge, doom, and drone with its C-sharp tuning and its slowly moving riff which descends into the darkness the song's and band's name promise. Offsetting these metal masterpieces are two beautiful instrumentals, one of which ("Embryo") is barely anything more than a brief segue, and the other of which ("Orchid") is a lush acoustic finger picked piece of neo-classicism. This kind of contrast prefigures the classical virtuosism of metal and the neo-classical flourishes of black metal. As a nice contrast to black metal, this album has a unfied Christian theme. Accused of being Satanists (by idiots), the cross-wearing Sabbath blokes wrote several tunes about saving your soul; death's inevitability; judgment and reckoning; the wrongs of war, greed, and pride; and other obviously Christian themes for this album, as well as balancing it out with songs again from Satan's view about how humans have made him "Lord of this World," which Sabbath is obviously not celebrating, just observing. Unfortunately, the opening track is a paean to marijuana, which I can't get behind, so the album starts off—dare I say it—weak for me, saved only by the infectious, crushing riff by Iommi.

Along with the instrumentals, co-creating the balance of darkness and light, heaviness and sofness, (heaven and hell) is the very sixties-like oddity "Solitude," the penultimate track. First time listeners won't even recognize it as Ozzy. It sounds like a Moody Blues song, or one of King Crimson's slower lilting earthchild kind of songs, with the mandatory flute playing. Played loud off this remaster with some incense or dim lighting late at night while relaxing, it is an easy song to let oneself drift off to before the crush of this album's closing song and masterpiece arrives. The remaster of "Into the Void" sounds like it was recorded this year. This speaks to both the quality of the remaster and the timelessness of the song. Though the album ends quickly, barely over a half hour, "Into the Void" does not leave you wanting. If it does, just put on Vol. 4 (Snowblind) afterwards; it is even better (arguably). But first find a good remaster and download it.

As an afternote, if you nine inch nails fans think the shared title of "Into the Void" is an accident, check out the later Black Sabbath (Heaven and Hell) album, Mob Rules, which features a song "Slipping Away, " which is the title of...the remix/remake of "Into the Void" on Things Falling Apart. If you're reading this blog you probably like several artists influenced by Sabbath. This is one of their most influential albums.

Download this fantastic 24 bit remaster here.

Eureka!

2009-01-08T19:51:00.002-05:00

I've been reading a long work by Edgar Allan Poe that I had never even heard of (despite having a Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe since roughly the age of ten) for several days now. I came across it in another Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, this one called Edgar Allan Poe, Complete and Unabridged Fiction and Poetry and published by Barnes & Noble in China. It's an interesting work, to say the least. It is also very difficult reading. Poe is a very interesting character who has been reduced in public conception to some one-sided raving drinking maniac who only wrote over-the-top gothic poetry and fiction. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Though Poe considered Eureka a prose-poem, it is actually something of a quasiphilosophical-scientific proposition on the nature of the Universe, how it came to be, and how and why it will end, as well as our place in it. Sound ambitious? It is. He wrote it a year before he died and was more proud of it than anything else he had ever written. People scratched their heads and mocked him for it. There were several people bent on defamation of his character. One of these wrote his obituary. They had plenty to say about Eureka and they are part of the reason why we think of Poe the way we do these days. In the beginning of Eureka, Poe inserts a fictional construct—a letter from one friend to another from a thousand years in the future in awe and derision of humans of the previous millenia who had crawled toward truth laboring under the misapprehension that there were only two valid paths to knowledge: inductive and deductive reasoning, the ways posited forth by ancient men named Aries Tottle (Aristotle) and Hog (Francis Bacon). This part is humorous. There is a lot of humor in Poe's work, but the more humorous stories are not canonized. His sense of humor is so odd that we miss it sometimes. Poe argues that blinding leaps in intuition, which he describes as incalculable processes of deductive and inductive reasoning that have occurred unconsciously, are even more valid ways of finding Truth. The theory for the formation of the universe he puts forth in Eureka—a theory that comes from his intuition—sounds astonishingly like the Big Bang Theory (as named by its opponents). The funny thing is Eureka was published eighty years before the Big Bang Theory. People deride Poe for his hyperbolic enthusiasm, his bold and bald ambition, his Romantic grasping, and his complete disregard (which he acknowledges) for the empirical process, but amongst Eureka's fans were Einstein, a man who made many important scientific discoveries by intuitive leaps. More on this as I plod through it.

Forgetting How Good Amnesiac Is.

2008-12-21T14:10:00.003-05:00

Oh, that Amnesiac. He is one dirty, sick, bleak little bastard. He is a nasty, perverse, mean-spirited hopeless little fucker and I have no business spending time with the likes of him.

That is always what I think, anyway, when I think of Amnesiac (Radiohead's fifth album, released in 2oo1 before September 11, for those of you are lost—their fourth album in my book, because I ignore that Pablo Honey exists except when I'm making my Joyce-Radiohead analogy; when I'm making my Joyce-Radiohead analogy: Pablo Honey=Dubliners, The Bends/OK Computer=Portrait, Kid A=Ulysses, and guess who, yup, you guessed it, the impossibly dense Amnesiac=Finnegans Wake).

This would not be a case of "I Might Be Wrong," but I amwrong. Amnesiac is sublime. It is not uplifting, at all. I have that right. But "Pyramid Song" is so unique, so amazing, that it carres its own transcendence to it. When the antique, hermetic "You & Whose Army?" erupts into a blaring wail at the end, you can raise your fist and say SURPRISE mofo, you got more than you bargained for with this harmless intellectual. And "Morning Bell/Amnesiac," which features some of my favorite Radiohead lyrics—"Cut the kids in half, cut the kids in half"—releases your spirit when it beautifully chimes "release me." Plus, it is a hundred times better than the Kid A version, one of the only Radiohead songs I ever skip (I sometimes skip a song or more on Hail to the Thief.(The Gloaming.)). And it ends with "Life in a Glasshouse," the virtuosic and colorful hornplaying at the end of which causes me more and more to smile in admiration.

So, I used to be able to rank Radiohead albums, but I don't think I can anymore. I certainly can't give a definite number to each. Having just finished a two-day marathon wherein I played every album, EP, and b-side except for pre-My Iron Lung , I only hesitantly put forth this ranking system:

First Tier: The Bends, OK Computer, In Rainbows

Second Tier: Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief

Third Tier: Pablo Honey

Merle (Die Elecktrik)

2008-12-20T09:29:00.003-05:00

Let it be known that I have begun listening to Drawings of Patient O.T. from the beginning for the first time and that my life will be henceforth forever changed.

Gone are the days of only listening to "Armenia" over and over and over and over again.

I am writing a paper on how destruction is necessary for creation when done correctly, comparing Neubauten and Descartes, but can be perversely twisted for wrong reasons and misapplication, such as by the fictional character Tyler Durden in Fight Club, and how paradoxes like these can be extrapolated to their most useful in the use of darkness for the production of lasting art and the union of the soul with God's love, drawing on interviews with Nick Cave and the book Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross.

Tabula Rasa

2008-12-19T19:20:00.002-05:00

1. Fratres

2. Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten

3. Fratres

4. Tabula Rasa

Enjoy.

Three Random Pieces of Information

2008-12-19T13:14:00.005-05:00

1. With this much snow falling and this much work to get done, there is only one thing to do: have a shoegaze marathon. Halfway through slowdive and three-quarters of the way through love spirals downards. Up next: my bloody valentine.

2. I imagined last night what the effect would be on Christmas/holiday sales if every store in America were to play nothing but

Threnody

to

the

Victims

of

Hiroshima

all day everyday they were open.

3. Talk Talk's final album Laughing Stock, though very good, has very little to do with OK Computer. The comparisons are way overdone and OK Computer is exponentially better (maybe 11 times better?). The biggest influence I can see of this album in Radiohead's work is the free-jazz "Life in a Glasshouse" and maybe the acoustically spacious soundscape of the drumming on "Reckoner." It is certainly the kind of album that you know from the first listen is going to grow on you. It is as far away from "It's My Life" as "Pyramid Song" is from "You."

Best Songs of 2008

2008-12-17T14:30:00.004-05:00

10. Spring Break 1899
I didn't care much for Murder by Death's newest album, but its final song is a work of beauty. It has a dust-trodden downbeat whiskey-hangover feeling to it, and its ending is a perfect evocation of how longing can go on and on and on. Its final haunting full-heart sung words "Could it be you?" ring on and on and on in your head when the album finishes.

9. White Boy
"Too old for Hamlet/Too young for King Lear." Every song on james's massively good new album Hey Ma has its great line or two, and that is this one's. The chorus is an eruption that bursts through your chest. Its uneasy phrasing is part of its charm. This song is one track that proves why the new james album reminded me that trumpets can be used to wondrous effect in pop music.

8. Cats R People 2
This song is fucking fun, through and through. While probably not the best song on Qutizow's wonderful Art College (which Christopher Wheeling wonderfully reviewed, leaving me feeling like I had nothing to add to what he said and hence writing nothing), this song has made its own warm nest in my heart. Knowing Quitzow as a friend, this song just seems to emanate the kooky, eccentric loveability of who she is and speaks well of her love of cats. I like to picture cats shaking their heads back and forth, scratching turntables and singing "Treet dem wif respeck!" while listening to it. For people who like to dance and who love cats, this song offers it all, right down to the Prince spelling of the oxymoronic title.

7. Overjoyed
I've been loving this song for a few years now, since I first saw Gary Levitt perform it an open mic he was hosting. I remember one night there were these two people who did old-time country kind of songs, a guy and girl from the middle of the country. The guy had an old twangy guitar. Outside, I taught the two of them how to play the song and the three of us stood outside in the cold, playing and singing it. Gary walked outside into this sight, which must have been pretty strange: three people covering a song of yours when you haven't even released it yet. He worked hard on it, bringing it through several drafts which I offered some critique on. While I listened to it the most in 2007, it finally saw release this year on Setting Sun's Children of the Wild Not many songs truly capture what it is to be child-giddy filled with joy, but this one does. And yet it has its moment of frailty, admitting in its quietest moment, "We climbed up too high/We're falling."

6. Yes (Second Half)
Coldplay came back with a vengeance this year. I was done with them after the atrocity that was X+Y. But this album is really good. It is genuinely good. It has undeniable pleasures. Even people who didn't want to admit to liking Coldplay had to admit that with Brian Eno on the decks, this album had some pretty delicious moments. The most delicious moment for me was the second half of track six, "Yes." The album has an annoying tendency of jamming two completely unrelated songs together on one track, and such is the case here. The first half of "Yes" finds Chris Martin using his lower register (finally) to sing his typical almost-there lyrics (unfortunately) over a vaguely Eastern-tinged musical backdrop. The second half is blissed-out bright and fuzzy drum-pummeled goodness. It has the potential to transport me into a happy place just above the earth where I sit or stand whenever it comes on. Martin is singing, but we don't know what. Which is a good thing.

5. Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH)
This song is perfect. I have listened to it more times than is good for my health. The HEALTH outro makes it, serving as the perfect juxtaposition to the perfect artificiality of the rest of the song. The vocal/vocoder melody is perfect, simple, yet unsingable, and, as with entry number six, undecipherable. Which is probably a good thing.

4. He Doesn't Know Why
Fleet Foxes might actually deserve the hype they're getting. They are the first hippieish band I have enjoyed in years. Their Beach Boys/CSN vocalizing and harmonizing are amazing, perfectly swooping into strange shifts in key. They conjure a world of connection with nature and innocence on the verge of loss. This song is my favorite of the bunch on their debut album from this year. Why? The middle part where the music stops and gets understomped in the midpoint with two bass drum kicks in unison with two thrusts of full band as the chords move up the scale, while the singer's voice rides high on the silence in resignation: "There's nothing I can do." Countless times I have made up songs to myself walking and driving around alone with similar sentiments and words. What can I do? I don't know what to do. I don't know what to think anymore. There's nothing. There's nothing I can do. Whether there's anything Fleet Foxes can do to top this remains to be seen.

3. Better
#1: I never thought Guns N' Roses were actually going to come out with another album. #2: I never would have thought anything as cool as this song would be on it. While many people may have been let down by the new GNR, I expected very little from it, and was blown away. This song, co-written by Robin Finck, has numerous parts to it, shifts in tempo and key in numerous sophisticated ways, struts like a pole-dancer in its verses, rocks in your face in its choruses, tears you open in one of its bridges (which shows that it has been written by the most widely beloved guitar player Nine Inch Nails has ever had), and is built around a haunting, fragile chimey sing-song part. This song rocks. The end.

2. Discipline
This song is the perfect dance song. It is stupid and sexy and endlessly catchy and addictive. When I first heard it, I was like 'this is cool, but kind of forgettable, and certainly nothing to write home about after the awesomeness of Ghosts I-IV.' But then I kept listening to it. And listening to it. And listening to it. Dancing around my living room. Nodding my head to it in the office. Singing along to it in the car. I could not get enough of it. It makes me stop thinking whatever I'm thinking. My head drops down to my butt and starts moving. It is more proof that Trent Reznor is a singular genius who does not consider himself above making good, catchy pop and writing the occasional song about sex. While The Slip's "Head Down" is more accomplished and interesting work of art, it is not as addictive and innately enjoyable as this seemingly throwaway gem. I've listened to this song over forty times this year. That has to count for something.

1.Chemtrails
If every song on Beck's Modern Guilt was as good as this song, it would have been the best album of the year. Unfortunately, this song was a tease that had nothing to do with the album Beck put out a week later. This song has a different producer, a different band, a different feel—everything. The guitar solo at the end is amazing. The ecstatic bass-playing, coupled with the vigorous everywhere drumming make for an orgasmic climax, starkly juxtaposing the song's initial quiet creepiness. Organs and Beck's novacaine-removed vocals, singing about conspiracy theories and mass death, like the future cousin of "Five Years," the prophecy made complete. I listened to this song thirty-three times before the album came out on my computer alone. That's not counting walking around Vassar Campus with my headphones on. And then the album came out and I listened to it a bunch more times. It is one of the most genius creations Beck has made in a long career of genius things. It may be his final hurrah.

We Call Upon the Author
This song is too good to rank. It came at me like a fresh left hook of "What the fuck?!" to the face. I played it for my class in Lyrics as Literature and handed them the lyrics photocopied from the lyric (poetry) book(let) that came with the album, and they had the same reaction: What the hell is this and what are you doing to us? Unfortunately, I wasn't able to follow it up with the lesson I had been planning because life got in the way, but I'm glad I was able to crack open their minds a bit more with it. This song does things that haven't been done in music before. Rambling sixties-organs; cycling whirly-gigs of nothing recognizable; a stomping chugging drumbeat and bass line; a poem powerfully declared and half-sung in a way that Allen Ginsberg would have loved to hear, Cave reaching peaks of emotion, referencing his literary father and his astounding novel, the lack of unity in self-hood, the complex of terrible things happening on every level in the world right now and "what it does in your brain" and winds up talking about a friend Doug stopping by with a book of Holocaust poetry ("Hey Doug, how ya been?"), all the while sublty and ultimately tackling the issue of calling upon God, the author of the world, to explain this fucked-up creation of His, and how God does not and cannot answer (in any way more satisfying than Job; see "Kingdom of Ice" on Wovenhand's Ten Stones, which also spawned this year's bonus hidden best song—"Not One Stone"), anymore than Cave can answer the questions of kids all hopped up on And the Ass Saw the Angel, a book he wrote mostly on heroin in the late eighties—he was a different person then and his memory is not all there. In the meanwhile, the unstoppable juggernaut takes a few unexpected reprieves from its poetic onlsaught to provide a completely surprising electronic breakdown that would have sounded at home on Saul Williams's album from last year The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which hisses and shimmers away like a desert mirage at the end. If the rest of Dig Lazarus Dig!!! was this good, it would not only the best album of the year, it would not only be the best Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album, it would probably be the best fucking album ever made. Before the album came out, Frank and I were at the Plug Awards as Cave got the lifetime achievement innovation award, and we howled out the title of this song over and over again. Cave delivered. This song can change your life. Next time it rains and you feel beat down by time and circumstance, play this song loud and"shake [yr] fists at the punishing rain!!!"

Weekender

2008-12-15T12:09:00.003-05:00

Sitting in a dark car, boxes of organic groceries on my lap, listening to Bauhaus's "She's In Parties," I am me, I am happy. The hippie and the goth in me shake hands, sit at the table, and break bread. The hippie in me has good taste in food and the goth in me has good taste in music. They, and the other ghostchildren in me, can all work together to make my life right. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I am a community of selves past and present. Their border skirmishes have come to an end. Chopping crimini mushroooms, boiling soba noodles, I keep the Bauhaus on and crack a cold Guinness to enjoy with my meal.

Phil came over for the weekend. It was great to spend time with him. I've always cared more for him than I've had time to get to know him. Sometimes, people do the unthinkable. All you can do is try to breathe right next to the person who suffers these random crushing choices, tell them things that are true, and eat and drink the good things life gives us, listening to good music.

He likes to take pictures. We hung out at the house a lot, went to the galleries on campus where the permanent collections are on display and where the new exhibits by the BFA and MFA students are on display, wandered Water Street Market, and relaxed at the Muddy Cup. He took pictures and asked me to take others. Here are some.

Creepy

2008-12-12T07:35:00.001-05:00

Not One Stone

2008-12-10T09:42:00.003-05:00

And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings [are here]! And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. And as he sat upon the mount of Olives over against the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately,Tell us, when shall these things be? and what [shall be] the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled? And Jesus answering them began to say, Take heed lest any [man] deceive you: For many shall come in my name, saying, I am [Christ]; and shall deceive many. And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for [such things] must needs be; but the end [shall] not [be] yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these [are] the beginnings of sorrows. But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten: and ye shall be brought before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them. And the gospel must first be published among all nations. But when they shall lead [you], and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost. Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against [their] parents, and shall cause them to be put to death. And ye shall be hated of all [men] for my name's sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains: And let him that is on the housetop not go down into the house, neither enter [therein], to take any thing out of his house: And let him that is in the field not turn back again for to take up his garment. But woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! And pray ye that your flight be not in the winter. For [in] those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, neither shall be. And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh should be saved: but for the elect's sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days. And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here [is] Christ; or, lo, [he is] there; believe [him] not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if [it were] possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things. But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven. Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, [even] at the doors. Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and [that] hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. [For the Son of man is] as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.

So Saith I

2008-12-10T09:41:00.002-05:00

Everytime a computer-generated animal talks, an angel dies in heaven.

Pseudo-Dionysius

2008-12-03T09:51:00.003-05:00

Dead, dead, dead inside

Empty and nothing and snow

not here yet. Crackle

and drag and pull and suck.

The weight and sore.

Leaving, leaving mommies.

The smell of diapers and wipes

and cheerios and cream.

All these bundles now boulder-

heavy, now bunny-out-of-

hat in reverse—

Gone, gone, gone.

Bitchery and witchcraft

and dead, dead leaves.

Staring at haloed moon,

trying to find fight and soul.

"What is it you want to change?"

Where to start the more

relevant question.

Caverns of tears made into

stalactites.

Subconscious descent demons

ravage always death's

sanctified halls.

Losing and falling and failing.

Alice down this hole,

Pulling punch on my Judy,

As judicious as Judas,

The archetypal Suicide King.

A destiny of betrayal.

Writing one's way out

Writing one's way out of

Writing one's way out of the

[unfinished]

Tiny Apocalypse

2008-12-03T09:31:00.003-05:00

Like a world

Nearing its apocalypse

Remembering its early children

and the rites they

ecstatically danced

Feeling its exhaustion

its futility

its fuelless finality

Looking longingly

at the pitiful smallness

of the star it once circled

I gazed at the fire

Thinking back to who I once was

And the life I once knew

Abortion

2008-12-03T09:30:00.002-05:00

Sucked black zero,

Ghosting the edges of the night,

The night punched a hole in my face,

Whistling through the wind sockets.

Anything? Anything?

No. Nothing.

Nothing.

Observations on Women No. 2

2008-12-03T09:27:00.002-05:00

She's pretty when she chews,

When she's first touched by the blues,

When the overachiever

Leans back,

Becomes almost bovine,

And o p e n s to the muse.

Observations on Women No. 1

2008-12-03T09:23:00.004-05:00

You have eyes like a Botticelli blonde,

Rapacious examiner of the miniature world.

Small birds thread the invisible air about you,

But you are too concerned to care.

From whence do you come?

Middle-aged enchantress who sets

the air to hum.

Loss [Part I]

2008-12-03T09:05:00.003-05:00

Don't you ever fucking doubt

That April is the cruellest month.

And November, he kicks it in harder.

Specter-black clouds and

spiteful biting winds

Stripping the last leaves from

naked limbs,

vulnerable like adolescent

Calvin Klein models—

anorexic sex victims.

Summer days, summer nights are

gone.

The drinking and laughing

worms holes in the brain.

At night, months later,

the dream parasites burrow

through these holes,

tunnels of confused bruises,

red pear blushing

and plum-punched blues.

You must train yourself

not to take the rain

personally.

As persistent as construction

and eternal as destruction.

On a narcotic cotton candy

high, these raindrops

batter you, the top of

your head like the ground

in front of newly-dug grave.

Sing for us, devil.

You must be getting excited.

Or was this already boring

When you bet right on Job?

Is the sun a flourescent light

and the world a cubicle,

this your nine-to-five?

Jesus wept,

The saints all slept,

Promises are best kept,

But the blithering babe

is the bastard of the bardo.

Fix yr face &

back to bed.

Put the jester

back in yr head,

Eudaimonia

as elusive

& diffusive

as the smiling cheshire

and what he said.

Yeah, what he said.

In the Autumn of Our Voodoo

2008-12-02T16:19:00.004-05:00

Watching you

Drop your leaves,

Russet and golden,

Day

day

Less

and

less

Of your ornament.

These pieces of you

Are not all you shed—

This autumn has its rain,

Falling from your head.

Watching you

Drop your tears,

Hot and clear,

Drop

drop

and

Often you lament.

I try to hold you,

But can't hold myself.

I continue to love you,

Though I can't love myself.

You and I

Act fine,

Then fall apart.

With the pieces

left, we build

works of art.

Thoughts on the new Bruce Springsteen single

2008-11-30T16:43:00.003-05:00

Wouldn't it be nice if Bruce Springsteen made an album about being a famous rock star with a solid family and a beautiful farm in Jersey, looking great in his older age, hanging out with the President and stuff, instead of continuing to write song after song after song in the imaginary boots of somebody who has it hard? That would be a dream. It is enough that we have a slew of young scrappers unapologetically imitating Bruce, and some to better effect (The Arcade Fire's "Antichrist Television Blues">the entire album Magic), now we have Bruce imitating Bruce. A little diversity in style is usually good for a major rock star.

The White

2008-11-30T15:52:00.002-05:00

For all you haters, I am eight pages deep into my defense of Chinese Democracy and my refutation of all of your points. If you just don't like it, well, I can't help you there. I wish you did, but music is essentially subjective, no matter how much we might kid ourselves in all of our impressive writing on the subject.

But in the meanwhile, I highly encourage you to download The White EP by Agalloch if you can. Music this magisterial, lush, resonant, and evocative does not come along everyday. I say download because it is a limited edition of 2000, which is hard to obtain. I obtained one, and the cost was expensive and the packaging unimpressive. I would say there is almost nothing metal about Agalloch on this EP (it is longer than Nashville Skyline and a minute under Modern Guilt, Beck's new LP, so the whole EP thing is nebulous once again; The National's so-called Virginia EP was longer than every one of their albums), but I am no expert on metal. Think of it as Agalloch's Jar of Flies. It is thirty-two minutes and thirty-two seconds of lush pæans to Nature, so beautiful as to almost make one revert to Paganism. Their uses of audio samples from my current favorite movie, the 1973 The Wicker Man (not to be confused with the 2006 version) are appropriate and used to satisfying effect. Though the final one comes in abruptly and at first unwelcomed at the end of the seventh and final track, it would serve as a fitting epitaph for the band should this be their last release. If you want more of the beautiful, ruminating, austere music of the Nine Inch Nails "Still" half of Halo 17, this final track will do you well. It could become my favorite gray-day song for awhile to come. A matter of fact, as I type this, I am listening to it, and I look out my windows at the darkening day, all gray and somber, with the almost-black bare branches of the damp trees swaying in the cold forebreath of December, and I am moved to a feeling like love for them and all the trees surrounding my small humble home, left vulnerable after the grand matriarch of them all had to be cut down earlier this year. Indeed, this music may be pagan in its origins, but as the Christopher Lee sample at the end reminds us, there is nothing unenlightened about it.

Looking into a new home

2008-11-26T17:16:00.002-05:00

Can I live here?

This is me. Now.

2008-11-25T12:52:00.003-05:00

Adrift

1-Only When I Lose Myself (Dan the Automator mix)—Depeche Mode
2-To Forgive—Smashing Pumpkins
3-Adrift—Cranes
4-Beside You In Time—Nine Inch Nails
5-The Lodge—Agalloch
6-Take You on a Cruise—Interpol
7-I Wanna Go Home—James
8-The Bells—Lycia
9-His Loyal Love—Wovenhand
10-Façades—Philip Glass
11-Chemtrails—Beck
12-Means of Escape—Tones on Tail
13-Neuköln—David Bowie
14-The work of art in the age of cultural overproduction—Tim Hecker
15-The Pink Room—David Lynch
16-Antiphon: O eterne deus—Anonymous 4 [Hildegard von Bingen]

Chinese Democracy

2008-11-23T23:51:00.002-05:00

On the seventh day he listened; and it was good.

I can haz nu beetles song?

2008-11-20T12:12:00.002-05:00

Read this article and then respond to survey on sidebar, plz. Thx.

Some fun at Frank and Natty's last weekend

2008-11-20T10:55:00.003-05:00

He's touched your perfect body with his mind

2008-11-19T13:37:00.005-05:00

I'm done flirting with Leonard Cohen. I've been doing it since I was in my freshman year of college, if not seventh grade, when I got the Natural Born Killers Soundtrack. A little of the first album. Then stop and listen to immature shit like placebo and marilyn manson (both of whom can be occasionally awesome) or--God forgive me--The Grateful Dead. Listen to it again a few months later, but don't bother to listen to second and third album. Listen to "Waiting for the Miracle" again. Don't listen again for a year. Listen obsessively to Jeff Buckley's cover of "Hallelujah" and semi-obsessively to Bono's cover of it. Only listen to the original once and be all dismissive of it. Listen regularly to Nick Cave's cover of "Avalanche." Not even bother to check out the original. Recite the chorus to "Anthem" thrice as many times as you've listened to the song. Well, I've had it with that shit. I am now letting Cohen touch my naked mind with his voice, all day and all night long. Oh, yeah. Oh, baby. That's right. I'm in a kama sutra tantric type situation with Cohen's beautiful music, inspiring words, and body-filling voice right now.

In the spirit of this celebration of an important artist, and because this blog is nothing if not a collection of post about my intense relationship with music and the people I never meet who make it, I'm on to share a link to a very amusing, very informative, and potentially very distracting blog that is mostly about Leonard Cohen, who, I decided over the past week, is the man. Not just your man, but the man.*

*If you have any doubt about this fact, you can begin your path from denial to acceptance by reading this.

Grad School

2008-11-11T19:44:00.001-05:00

We were talking about signs
   and signifiers and their
   signified
And I was looking at my
   fingernails and their
   edgy lengths
And behind my trembling
   fingers and their
   curved knuckles
An azalea blossomed forth
   from my damp palm and
   I wanted to say
Look! A flower just bloomed
   from my hand! and
   Look, everybody look! but

I knew they wouldn’t care
   because they were post-
   flower and post-amazement
   and beyond the structure
   and the truth and the
   rawGodbeauty of the
   petals spiraling from nowhere.

-Kevin Larkin Angioli
10 November 2008

Election Day SAGA

2008-11-07T20:34:00.003-05:00

My election day was a saga. It started the night before when Renee told me about Starbucks giving a free cup of coffee to people who voted. I thought that was pretty rad. Just another cool thing Starbucks has done. Tuesday morning, I got up earlyish and drove down to Goshen. I figured I was registered to vote in Campbell Hall, where I’ve been voting since 2000. Plus, I had an appointment with my psychologist. That appointment certainly moved me from where I’ve been. It’s probably one of those things where you have to hit bottom to go back up. I’m not getting into that now. In any case, it was the first time that day I was on the edge of tears. Not a usual occurrence, and yet it happened for different reasons throughout the day before I clutched the pillow with relief and something like gratitude at 1 o’clock in the morning.

I stopped for a visit with my Pa, taking a walk around the back fields and environs of the house where I grew up and lived again as recently as last fall. He has made a path through what has always been fields of high grass. It was an enjoyable walk. I left to go vote.

At the Campbell Hall Town Hall, I went into the first of many rooms and approached the first of many tables. After giving my name (always have to give two—maybe under L, maybe under A), I found out I was not on the record there. So they sent me upstairs. While women chatted over pictures of weddings, I calmly waited to find out what the deal was with my voting registration. I bumped into Frank’s stepfather, John, and waited. Finally, the woman who was helping me told me that, according to the people she had been talking to, I was registered in New Paltz, potentially due to a change of address form I had at one point filled out. So I took off.

When I reached New Paltz, I didn’t know where I was supposed to vote, so I went to the Village Hall. Inside, a strange older man stood at the top of the stairs in the small dingy building. He wanted to know if I wanted to use the bathroom. I politely declined, and told him I wished to vote, but did not know where I was supposed to go. He told me to go to Huguenot Street; he couldn’t tell me the name of the building. I figured he meant Deyo Hall, the most voting booth oriented place in the historical district. He gave me a thumbs up and I was on my way.

I located the polls at Deyo Hall. When I approached the table, I tried to conceal that I no longer lived in New Paltz and instead gave my name. I had no idea which table to go to, since there were many voting districts and as of that morning I had believed myself to be a Campbell Hall voter. Once again, they could not find me. Let the condescenscion begin. Just where did I live? Well, now I live in Wallkill which is really Gardiner and yadda yadda but really I have lived in New Paltz, working there every day and so on for a few years, and I did technically live in New Paltz for a year, as late as last summer. Well, that wouldn’t do, but just to humor me, they asked where I did live when I lived in New Paltz. So a young woman and I went up to the district map and tried to find my old address. That took a while, and then it got even more complex. Depending which side of Route 32 I had lived on, I would have been in a different district. We reached the conclusion that I was in district seven, which was not in Deyo Hall, but across the town and quite a ways down the road at ye olde high school. Well-meaningly, I suppose, she offered the hint that I not tell the next people that I live in Wallkill and gave me a nice condescending little pat-pat on the side of the arm with the smile of superior wit and wisdom. Thank you very fucking much.

By this time, I had about ten minutes to get to campus and teach my class. I parked my car in town and walked up the hill. After teaching class, I drove off in search of the high school, to which I had never been. Once inside, I was plunged into memories of high school days long gone now. High schools are so similar. We forget those exact hall floor tiles and those endless lockers and those low-seeming ceilings and that smell. What it must be like for those today. The women at this table were more helpful. I walked into a large gymnasium with many tables and approached the seventh. I once again gave my name and—suprise of surprises—I was not on the register there. Again, a mysterious phone call was made. The pleasant woman told me to go to the Gardiner Fire Hall to vote. She gave me a a registration form to fill out, just in case. I was flustered, because I most certainly was registered to vote, and I was wondering if I had been “purged,” as many voters secretly have been.

Back in my car, I drove to Gardiner. I filled out the form in case they wanted it from me while standing on a slightly long line. A Stephen King-ish dude asked for my name. I gave them. Was I in the register? Well, dear reader, what do you think? Of course, I was not in in the register there, either. I explained that I had been to three previous places that day and that I did live in Gardiner, though my mailing address is Wallkill. I was asked to step aside and wait for a woman who was helping other people on the line who were not found (a surprising amount). This woman took me into the kitchen, which was filled with brownies and cookies and the like under a dull flourescent glaze. Keep in mind, dear reader, that I had not eaten anything the entire day, and now it was about five. I was tired and I desired food and coffee, but I was devoted—I was not going to eat or drink until I had voted, at which point I was going to gloriously go forward and get myself that free cup of coffee from Starbucks. Again, if you will believe it, I stood by as some mysterious people out God-knows-where looking at God-knows-what were contacted to find out just what to do about me. It was somehow finally decided that yes, I do belong there in Gardiner, but that I will not be able to use the polling booth. Instead, the kind woman who had been volunteering there since before six in the morning (eleven hours earlier) handed me some papers. One of them was an envelope I was to fill out. The other was a pamphlet-like folded large sheet of paper that, when unfolded, presents an exact replica of what is inside the booth, only one checks boxes instead of pulling levers.

As I gazed upon the sheet before me and read its infinitesimal print to make sure I did no slight thing that might provide sufficient grounds for the invalidation of my vote, I saw a proposition regarding New York State Veterans. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am a teacher of English. I teach Composition, the art of writing. This fucking thing was incomprehensible. The writers must have purposely constructed the most litigiously convoluted proposition they could possibly conceive so that readers of it would shrug and leave no vote—which is exactly what I did. I do not vote on matters on which I possess no understanding. I wish I had been notified ahead of election day what the upcoming propositions were, so that I could research them. Then there was a proposition regarding library funding, which for a book-lover like me who feels civilization in on the brink of destruction, was almost a no-brainer. I say almost because it was quite an increase. I licked and sealed my envelope with my checked votes inside and presented the package to the kind woman who had helped me. She signed her name to it and my civil duty was finally complete.

I went home, since I was close to it, and sat on my couch for ten tired minutes. Then, I picked myself up and drove to New Paltz. Again. I parked by the Starbucks. Again. And I went inside. In front of me was a fellow I often see in town, usually at Bacchus, usually drinking, and often with a Guiness hat upon his balding crown. He resembles George Carlin in appearance. Take note, dear reader, and behold how justice and fairness are illusions in this sad world. I shall present my tale of disbelief, horror, and woe in the present tense for dramatic effect, if you will pardon the unusual mid-tale change in prosetyling. The man before me asks for “[his] free cup of coffee.” Without questioning, our barista, one of three actors in this mini-tragedy of society’s fabric, turns to pour from the venerated fount behind him. Mid-pour, he asks the man before me if he voted. The man—O lend your ear gentle reader and recoil not at the horror—says, flatly, that he did not. Okay, okay, okay. Maybe—maybe—we can excuse this by saying, if the guy does not care that much, then it is better for all of us that he does not vote. Or, maybe—who knows—he is no longer able to vote because of some foolish act of dark consequence committed in his misguided youth. But, I will admit, it was difficult for me to accept after the travels, travailles, and hassles of my long day. But it was nothing compared to the horror about to follow. Our barista hesitates. He asks if the gentleman is joking. No, the man says. Well, Starbucks is giving free cups of coffee to people who voted. The man says that he arrived in hell just a couple days ago and he has found the weather surprisingly fair. I mean the man says he heard on the radio that he should go to Starbucks and ask for his free cup of coffee. Once he realizes that all he has to say is that he voted in order to receive his hot and steaming for free, he sticks to his story—admirably, I am sure you would wish to point out. Sure, sure, we’ll grant him that. He proudly denies that he voted thrice. Then—then, dear reader—the obsequious, confused barista hands him his cup of coffee for free anyway. Now, usually, as my dear readers will gladly agree, I am a mild-tempered man who keeps his unpleasant thoughts to himself. Well, Mr. Obsequious asks me what I would like. I say, “I’ve driven to four different polling places across two different counties to vote today for this cup of coffee and you just fucking gave him that cup for free.” When people do not behave in their prescripted social ways, shock is the usual response. Such was the case with our barista. He was confused by what I had just said. “What?” he asked me. “Nothing,” I said. “I voted. Give me a cup of coffee, please. Pike’s Place. Thanks.” Then I added a shitty, cold sandwich dressed up to be something gourmet to my order and I even—can you believe it—I fucking tipped the bastard. If that is not proof that I don’t care anymore and I am willing to play along in the world going to hell, I don’t know what it is. I did it just to hurt myself. I tipped him. I choked down my sandwich, ten minutes before six, the first thing I had eaten all day, and left to sit in class, participating often, of course, for three hours.

But that was not the end. At nine o’clock, I walked down to the Muddy Cup where friends and others were playing music until closing time as all assembled awaited the results of the election. In between each act, a well-meaning gentleman proselytized about the need for the “paradigm” to shift, and he continued to use the word “paradigm” approximately three times a minute. That’s one use of the word “paradigm” every twenty seconds. That’s when I tuned out. It had been a long day. I wanted music and I wanted Barack Obama to be president. In that order. Oddly, where I stopped and set my bag down was right next to Gary, and I hadn’t noticed him. Gary, Erica, and I continued to hang out for much of the night. The results that were coming in were projected onto a sheet by the front window. Erica Quitzow had dyed her hair very blonde and it was wonderful. She played “Cats R People 2,” which just about made my night. When Gary finished his set (and the night) as Setting Sun, the results were not in yet, but he played as if they were, playing “Overjoyed” in anticipation of Obama winning. While there, I saw my wonderful friend Erin, who tells me she loves me everytime she sees me and who was upset to see how I upset I was. I also saw Lena, who is always nice to see. She has a pleasant smile and a very affable personality. Erica, Gary, and I went next door for pizza. We split eleven slices. As Guns ‘N’ Roses’ cover of “Live and Let Die” emanated from the speakers, people started yelling and hooting in the streets. Young women were running and skipping by the windows, pumping their fists in the air, yelling “Yes!” Some young ladies poked their heads in to tell us the projection for Obama was so far ahead now that he had essentially won. We were very excited, and I finally began to allow myself to hope. But I did not believe yet. I knew to be wary of projection. After delightful conversation with my two dear friends and lots of yummy pizza, I departed home for the night. It was midnight.

When I got home, I turned on the TV to see if it was true. It was not turning on, so I pulled open my macbook and went—I don’t know why—to facebook for the results. I saw some recent friend status updates that suggested Barack had won. Then, I went to CNN.com. I watched live streams of Barack Obama in Chicago talking to his people. It was beautiful. I could see a sadness in him and it touched me. He went back and forth between sobriety, seriousness, smiling, and sadness. It was quite amazing. All of those people, shouting and cheering, and just him, him alone, on that stage, staring off into the sea of people. Joe Biden came out eventually, smiling brilliantly, all party time and triumph. When all the families came out, that’s when I started getting choked up, again. Tears welled in my eyes. Jesse Jackson, crying. Oprah, crying. People, crying. People, cheering. Flashing lights. Blinding lights. Parties and celebrations in all the major cities. When he finally walked off stage, “The Rising” came on. I sat and watched jubilant middle-aged balding men rocking out with a happiness their faces did not seem accustomed to. Then, “City of Blinding Lights,” one of the three best songs of the last U2 album. I was exhausted, relieved, and, yes, somewhat happy.

Yes. We Can.

2008-11-05T00:38:00.004-05:00

The Apocalypse

2008-11-02T19:43:00.006-05:00

The Apocalypse is a topic that has never been all that fascinating to me. The End of the World: (yawn). My usual reaction has been, "It's not going to happen; we're not that important; get over it." But then I realized I was ritually putting myself through apocalypse by watching certain kinds of horror movies (especially zombie ones). And two works of art within the past two years made that far-off apocalypse seem more real than ever before. Now it was not the bomb and it was not God; it was just inevitable. Cormac McCarthy's The Road depicted a world with a few stragglers left after an apocalyptic event, and it didn't look too appealing. The world was not over and humanity was not over. The former was irrevocably changed and the latter was a lot smaller and whittled down to its primitive necessity: overtake others for evil or transcend a meaningless existence of foraging and fire-making in fear by loving, only to have the one you love die.

The ambitious concept album by Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero, didn't enthrall me when it first came out. The music wasn't as good as I was hoping for and the subject was the bloody apocalypse. But this year, I got more into it, and when I saw them at the end of the summer, a near-revelation struck me. They finished their stunning show with a song stronger than almost any other of the evening and a visual setpiece that was stronger than any other of the evening. Given the strength of both their songs and their set design in their history and on this tour, those are both powerful statements. The last song was "In This Twilight" (in many people's minds, obviously the best song on the album). As the narrator of the song peacefully resigns himself with attachment to life since the world is ending in a final glorious gloaming, the screen depicted the husk of a metropolis smoking. As the song crescendoed, nuclear fire exploded, carving memorable destruction forever on the retinas of those in the crowd who weren't looking at their cell phones instead. I felt at that moment that the end of the world was a very real phenomenon, imminent and perhaps in the near future.

Last year, instead of listening to the new Nine Inch Nails album I had waited for, I was listening to my friend's ex-band's debut (and last album) La Fin Absolue du Monde. More than just a clever allusion to a recent and semi-obscure horror film, it was a title that reflected the album's lyrical concerns to a degree. The apocalyptic content of songs such as "Menlo Park," "Disconnected," "Nuclear Man," and "Blackout Days" gripped me personally. It was all part of the slow process of acceptance that the world—at least as we know it—might end. It's different for those of my relative generation. The boomers grew up in the Cold War, hiding under desks, watching their parents build bunkers, fearing the sound of a single Russian word, trying to wrap their heads around the thought that someone might press a button that would release a bomb that had the capacity to destroy all life except for potentially the most basic on the planet, and that they were completely unable to control that potential event. Stephen King gives a memorable anecdote about this way of living in the opening chapter of his endlessly interesting book on the subject of horror in film and literature, Danse Macabre (which I cannot recommend enough). Black Sabbath attempted to deal with this pressure in their song "War Pigs," and then Ozzy gave the subject a more interesting spin in his song "Thank God for the Bomb," from his underrated solo album The Ultimate Sin. Stanley Kubrick satirized the absurdity of this condition in his brilliant film Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Many artists found ways to express it. We grew up without that shadow. While nuclear weapons still existed, the world didn't seems to be at a breathless stand-off between two nut-jobs.

I realized fiction of the apocalypse compelled me: Stephen King's The Dark Tower and The Stand have long been of interest to me. Vexingly, I have also been unable to complete either of them due to other responsibilities. (It is perhaps the most tragic of a long series of terrible ironies involved in the shadowlife of a Graduate student of Literature that he is often unable to read as much as he would like). Without Revelations, that most puzzling book of The Bible (I think Leviticus would come in second, Job third, and possibly John fourth, but I am ultimately unqualified to speak of this subject at the moment), who knows how much horror would actually exist.

So, I have begun to devise a themed course in composition on the concept and potential reality of the apocalypse. I would like to look at scientific grounds for it and historical and religious perceptions of it, but I would mostly focus on depictions of it in literature, art, film, and music. Today, I came across this; I think it might make a good reader for my class, should I ever emerge from this stinking hell I am in now to endure another go-round of this abuse voluntarily. Interestingly, it is one of at least two anthologies in which a fellow I know who teaches at the college (though not at all in the position or at the level he deserves) shares space with Stephen King and other greats. John Langan has quite the horror cred—he also serves on the board that awards the Shirley Jackson Award for best new horror fiction of a certain sort, reading piles of stuff. I could have him into class to discuss his story, perhaps.

This entry feels unfinished, but I have to return at present to work on a twenty-page paper on the subject of whether literature should be used in the composition classroom. Believe it or not, this subject has been debated for nearly a century, and it boils some people's blood. I feel odd, guilty, and estranged. I teach composition, but fall under the category of people who Sharon Crowley eyes with disbelief and recrimination in her book Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays—I teach composition, yet am utterly incapable of caring about the subject of composition itself, which has made this semester very difficult for me. Teaching a class with no theme, tutoring SWW students in a different section, and taking two classes on theory, I am living a life I don't care about while separating myself from what I do, while furthermore being paid neither really for my work or my "product"—a strange no-man's -land of economic non-viability; when I tried to play my guitar tonight, nothing of publically displayable value came out of my hands or my throat. It is a hell. It is really a hell.

Halloween Award

2008-10-31T11:21:00.008-04:00

I would like to bestow an In Memoriam (completely fabricated and lacking any real substance) Special Hallowe'en Award to Philip Stone (1924-2003) for his mesmerizing unforgettable performance as Delbert Grady in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

This scene (Jack and Delbert in the bathroom)* makes me feel like a Teletubby**—"Again! Again!"

A couple other great scenes:

Last night, as I selected various wonderful scenes from a stack of (some of) my favorite horror movies to scare the kiddies (my students, I mean) in today's special Halloween-themes class, scenes that would demonstrate King's theory of the terror>horror>gross-out tactics an author or director can employ (see Danse Macabre), I found that some movies I could easily take specific scenes and jump right to them without the scene losing its effect due to the lack of context. With some movies, I knew I was jumping to the scariest scene. Other movies, I couldn't choose which scene to use. Some films have too many scary scenes to simply choose one or two. Films such as The Shining, The Orphanage, Pet Sematary, Hellraiser, and especially The Descent were compulsively watchable, full of too many great scenes. On second thought, The Descent is a bit different. While it is true it has too many scary scenes to feel secure in choosing one, it is not watchable. As I began to watch the scene where the tiny tunnel caves in on Sarah, I began to feel sick to my stomach. As I watched them throw their red flares over an imponderable dank cavernous abyss, I felt dread. As I attempted to watch the first attack, I was surprised again by one of the film's most shocking moments. It hurt all over again. I had to turn it off. And I noticed something: when the cave-in happens, dramatic stabs of film score are used to affect our emotional response to the scene and feel its urgency, as a film would usually do, but when the first attack happens, there is absolutely no music; it is just there in front of us, exactly as it would be in real life—the effect is deeply unnerving. It was the only film I perused for potential last night where I thought, "Maybe some of my students could not handle this."

I had an easier time choosing scenes from films that are not primarily horror films in nature. Chapter 12 on the DVD of Pan's Labyrinth, "The Pale Man," where she drawas a chalk door on the wall of her room and goes to the underworldish banquet where the pale naked man-thing that eats children sits with his eyes on a plate before him is awesome; I had no doubt I had to show them that scene. It gives away nothing, and it demonstrates possibly all three levels.
The scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth (contender for one of the most depressing films of all time) where Thomas Newton (portrayed by an almost translucent milk-white David Bowie) goes into the bathroom and stands naked before the mirror, then proceeds to reveal his true identity is still terrifying. Even though it is hard to relate with his woman co-star, we can identify with her when she is forced to confront that she doesn't really know the man she's built her life around. And for his part, maybe we've stood in front of that mirror and felt like we were concealing something from the world inside that pristine exterior, and it was time to reveal it. Obviously, I'm stopping that scene before she takes her dress off and tries to love the new thing in bed, a scene that drips with pathos.

Some films, I knew perfectly well which scene I wanted to use. John Carpenter's In The Mouth of Madness contains a scene that involves a kid on a bicycle in a light denim jacket. The characters are driving in the middle of nowhere (there's lots of corn—something that pops up in King's "Children of the Corn" and Barker's "In the Hills, The Cities," if I remember correctly), it is late at night, and they keep passing this figure on a bicycle. As they continue to pass it, it changes. Same bike, same denim, but now it's no longer a kid. It gets closer. It gets even closer. If you've seen this scene, and especially if you've watched it late at night, half-asleep like the driver of the car, and if you've ever seen strange things at night while driving that you've mostly forgotten (out of the necessity of sanity) but still lurk in your subconscious, you will never forget this scene.

I love the new adaptation of Stephen King's (or is it Frank Darabont's) The Mist, but I knew exactly which scene to use. While the religious revival may be the absolute scariest event in the film (until the end), it was the textbook gross-out I wanted from this film. The scene in the pharmacy next door is everything one can hope for in creatures that burst out of their hosts and spiderwebs that take over.

Whatever you do tonight, please have a not-so-safe and wonderful, scary Hallowe'en. Me, I'll be

over and over and over again*. It will be nice to give back to an institution of New Paltz Hallowe'en that I have enjoyed. Tonight is the night to go wild without hurting anyone. It is the night to let loose the beast. It is the night to gaze into the darkness. Just don't talk to the stranger in the long black coat. Even when he smiles kindly and offers to light your cigarette. When it gets cold tonight, tell yourself the moaning you hear is the wind. And wherever you go, don't go alone. Alone? That's right—you're never alone.

*One thing I noticed after watching scenes from Candyman, The Shining, and The Man Who Fell To Earth virtually back-to-back is that bathrooms are scary. Bathrooms—especially public restrooms—are very scary. And that's not getting into Psycho, What Lies Beneath, Ghost Story, Moaning Myrtle, or (as Frank promised, the now sadly not-as-good-as-when-we-were-younger) Event Horizon.
**

Mask

2008-10-29T10:29:00.003-04:00

Pictures of me in mask coming soon.

Dylan Carlson of Earth:

2008-10-21T23:26:00.003-04:00

"The ongoing musical project which is earth has always been concerned with repetition and the drone or THE NOTE. When I was younger and full of hubris I believed that a "pure" or "original" music could be developed in a static and removed state from other music. I now realize that music, especially music containing the drone or THE NOTE, and music that effects a spiritual reaction from the listener is a continuum. It is a music that has continued throughout time and manifested itself in a number of different forms or "genres" or"styles". I began to see my music as part of and a product of that continuum. I also began to see that continuum strongly expressed in historically 'american' forms. Specifically the "genres" of "country" and "blues". The truly 'cosmic american musics'. This specifically 'american' style also got me thinking of the history of this continent. A continent of formerly endless frontiers. I was heavily influenced by the book "Blood Meridian; or the Evening Redness In the West". A book that explores the real western expansion and real clash of people on this newest continent. It has been a continent that from the beginning has been alien and hostile yet posessing a bewitching beauty. " A land of some other order. Whose geology is not of stone, but of fear. There is an occult history to this continent, one of a continent evil in and of itself, a continent which the inhabitants have had to suffer mightily to carve their various "New Jerusalems" out of. An infernal landscape which requires, from us, a song. Dylan Carlson summer 2005.

{Everything must converge.}

Omens and Portents 1: The Driver

A Post Note

2008-10-20T12:02:00.003-04:00

If you choose to make your own Lucifer mixes, and you choose to do it seriously, be warned: you might start looking like this.

When sick in the soul, make mixes and contemplate the great deceiver

2008-10-20T10:14:00.004-04:00

One of my fellow TAs started a great initiative in one of our shared offices: a box to drop mixes and albums burned from computers that we could all borrow and contribute to. For a reason she could not identify, she had especially been making mixes with the title of Lucifer. Lucifer Vol.1. Lucifer Vol. 2. Etc. Another mix had the title "haunted" and featured "black wings" by Tom Waits. Well, I took to this Lucifer idea quite keenly. It was the first thing that has happened this month that got me to connect to this time of the year and some of the things I love about it. I couldn't believe I had never made one before. I tried to contemplate Lucifer/The Devil/Satan/The Adversary/The Great Deceiver/The Man in Black/The Bad Voice in my Head/The Antichrist from as many angles as possible, and I am ver satisfied with the results. But I already had another idea for a mix: When/If I die American songs. I usually don't get into those kinds of songs too much, but listening to Life Death Love and Freedom opened up something for me, and I got really into them. While working on those mixes, I got another great idea, but one too grandiose to do justice just yet—God, Death, and America. The first three mixes fit on CDs. The last one doesn't, and feels a little unfinished to me. Here they are:

Lucifer Antichrist

Avant l'Apocalypse...Gaë Bolg and the Church of Fand...Tintagel
Black Sabbath...Black Sabbath...Black Sabbath
Night Shift...Siouxsie & the Banshees...Juju
Antichrist Superstar...Marilyn Manson...Antichrist Superstar
Red Right Hand...Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds...Let Love In
The Man in the Long Black Coat...Mark Lanegan...I'm Not There
The Devil Had a Hold of Me...Gillian Welch...Hell Among the Yearlings
Me and the Devil Blues...Robert Johnson...Collection
Persuasion...Throbbing Gristle...20 Jazz Funk Greats
Jesse...Scott Walker...The Drift
Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)...The Smashing Pumpkins...Thirty-three
Rite to Death...Sleep Chamber...Musik for Mannequins
Mine...Kevin Larkin Angioli...Home Demoes
The Devil...PJ Harvey...White Chalk

Lucifer Morningstar

I See a Darkness...Johnny Cash...American III: Solitary Man
Alcohol the Seed...Swans...The Great Annihilator
The Christ in the Desert...black tape for a blue girl...this lush garden within
Blasphemous Rumours...Depeche Mode...Some Great Reward
The Arcane...Dead Can Dance...Garden of the Arcane Delights
Up Jumped the Devil...Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds...Tender Prey
No Devil Me No More...Setting Sun...Children of the Wild
The Devil's Own...David Sylvian...Secrets of the Beehive
Baptized in Blood...The Electirc Hellfire Club...Satan's Little Helpers
Sixteen...Iggy Pop...Lust for Life
After the Flesh...My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult...The Crow
Mr. Self Destruct...Nine Inch Nails...The Downward Spiral
Burnt Offerings...Christian Death...Only Theatre of Pain
Mutiny in Heaven...The Birthday Party...Mutiny/The Bad Seed
Children of Satan/Third Fig...Ciccione Youth...The Whitey Album
Exterminating Angel...The Creatures...Anima Animus
Deeper & Deeper...Dave Gahan...Hourglass
Change (in the House of Flies)...deftones...White Pony
Black Soul Choir...16 Horsepower...Sackcloth 'n' Ashes

When I Die

In My Time of Dyin'...Bob Dylan...Bob Dylan
If I Die Sudden...John Mellencamp...Life Death Love and Freedom
Horse Head...Wovenhand...Puur
If I Should Die...Anita Lane...Dirty Pearl
Lay Me Low...Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds...Let Love In
DIrt in the Ground...Tom Waits...Bone Machine
Milk It...Nirvana...In Utero
To Talk to You...PJ Harvey...White Chalk
Suicidal Thoughts...The Notorious BIG...Ready to Die
Carousels...mewithoutYou...Catch For Us the Foxes
Twenty Four Hours...Joy Division...Closer
In My Time of Dying...Led Zeppelin...Physical Graffiti
Ready to Go Home...Hank Williams...Hank Williams Golden Memories

God Death & America

God Loves America/(---)...Swans...Love of Life
With God On Our Side...Bob Dylan...The Times They are Deranging
The Man Comes Around...Johnny Cash...American IV: The Man Comes Around
Bullet the Blue Sky...U2...The Joshua Tree
The Love Song...Marilyn Manson...Holy Wood
Chest of Drawers...Wovenhand...Consider the birds
Birds Without Wings...David Gray...The EPs 92-94
Black Sun...Dead Can Dance...Aion
April the 14th...Gillian Welch...Time (The Revelator)
Windowsill...Arcade Fire...Neon Bible
My Father's House...Bruce Springsteen...Nebraska
Hey Ma...James...Hey Ma
Troubled Land...John Mellencamp...Life Death Love and Freedom
The Old Revolution...Leonard Cohen...Songs from a Room
God is in the House...Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds...no more shall we part
How Come...Ray Lamontagne...Trouble
Cowboys...Portisead...Portishead
How the West was Won and Where It Got Us...R.E.M...New Adventures in Hi-Fi
Raised to Be Lowered...Saul Williams...The Inevitable Rise and Fall of Niggy Tardust
God Given...Nine Inch Nails...Year Zero
Killer Cars...Radiohead...High & Dry
The Day After Tomorrow...Tom Waits...Real Gone

A Black and White Look into a Black and White Album

2008-10-17T12:19:00.002-04:00

Nothing equals nothing.

2008-10-16T13:06:00.008-04:00

I'm about as black as a crack of thunder at the dark end of the gloaming out deep where there is no civilization and the trees conspire against you in their leafy whispering.

So, not much to say.

Here's a couple of amusing internet distractions:

The National recommend some cool places they love to go in New York City.

Constantly cooler-than-thou hipster website reveals in usual condescending tone that Chinese Democracy actually will be released next month, and that its cover is really lame, or is it understated? Anyway, the music is what matters. But releasing your album exclusively through Best Buy is a really lame thing to do, and in my opinion, hurts music. But, that's Geffen's deal, not Axl's. I bet they're going to find a way to ruin something that doesn't need any promotion or marketing. The album already has, like, fifteen years of anticipation and frenetic, fanboy blogging (as you see here) built up for it, and all they have to do is release it, with a proper tracklisting, and it will get bought up by a piranha-hungry crowd that has been waiting for the epic brand of radio-friendly metal that has been absent from the world since Guns' N' Roses exploded in egotism, the kind of passionate hatred that only bandmates can develop for another person that they actually know, and an incident involving spaghetti.

Tom Waits is expanding his tour!
But he's still skipping our entire part of the continent.

My mom tells me Ray Lamontagne's new album sucks, but I don't know, because the record company hasn't gotten it to me yet. Awesome. It's getting lots of positive reviews. So we'll see.

Most seriously, perhaps, Ian Curtis's gravestone has been stolen.

Tell me about the graveyard you once called home.

Here's something of substance, to balance out the anemic emptiness so plainly betrayed by this post. Last night, I read Stoneback's 50 page poem/letter HOMAGE: A Letter to Robert Penn Warren and turned out the lights. It's an excellent poem. It's not a tight-assed poem with every lat word and line exactly where it shoud be. That kind of obsessive attention comes through in today's poetry and it bothers me, It's rough and rocking and rolling and it riffs on Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, Baudelaire, and Warren, and God knows who else. It has lots of good parts. But I want to share one part.

Blessed be betrayals that teach fidelity
Blessed be lust that teaches chastity
Blessed be shame and game that give us glory
Blessed be treachery that teaches loyalty
Blessed be retreats that instruct us in courage
Blessed be peace that precedes and follows outrage
Blessed be contempt that leads to compassion
Blessed be sloth that leads to action
Blessed be Nada that leaps into Faith
Blessed be brokenness that makes us stronger
Blessed be—

When the train slows and stops in a village
my eyes open on the pastoral idyll
and my wife, sitting next to me, knitting,
says: "You've been talking in your sleep, twitching"—
I try to wipe the web of sleep from my eyes,
whisper: "Je suis blessé.
I am acquainted with blessedness."
She says: "Good. Go back to sleep, My Blessed."
"Ask the blessing, so our hunger can be fed."

(23)

Weak Poetry Threatening Culture

2008-10-07T19:41:00.001-04:00

Here's a funny take on what it would be like if we compared poetry to the economy right now. Thank you, James, for passing this on.

Poetry Bailout

Debate

2008-10-03T10:55:00.003-04:00

If you watched the debate last night, feel free to leave comments.

I think that Palin did a much better job than she has been since being nominated. Whenever she went to the "maverick" defense, I was immediately incensed. Also, her kitchen-table folksy American talk bothered me, too. It bothered me for two reasons: it didn't address the issues and is a form of electioneering question-evading, and it works on many Americans, so it is dangerous and effective.

I think that Biden just solidified the thoughts I already had about him; he is a very experienced, very knowledgeable, very passionate, very effective, very competent, very learned, very patriotic individual. His only fault to me was his habit of referring to himself in the third-person.

Both candidates were honest about their positions on tough questions, though Biden more-so. I liked the amount of smiling they did. By far the most infuriating aspect of the evening was the stunning amount in which the two rivals disputed each other's "facts" about voting records and quotes. Biden struck me as the more knowledgeable and well-researched candidate, plus some of what he said about McCain matched up with the rather small amount of research I've done on McCain, so I trusted his answers and his facts more than Palin's.

Palin's frisky-dog we're going to get those sons-of-bitches because we're Americans, talk through her clenched jawline routine also bothered me. Her attribution of America being the city on the hill to Ronald Reagan, who she seemed to worship with cult-like unquestioning devotion, when it has been around since the Puritans set up their little black camps here just further cemented my sense that she has no roots in American history, that she is a woman who knows Alaska and who knows the roughly fifty years of her own life and what came immediately before. Biden, on the other hand, established that he knows the Constitution very well, 700 years of conflict history in the Middle East, procedures and responsibilities of various arms and branches of government, and the current military situation. As impressive as Obama is, I still wish Biden was going to be president.

Both potential vice presidents failed to completely satisfy me on numerous fronts: gay marriage, education, that most elusive ghost "bipartisanship," and one that is too explosive for me to write here. However, I thought Biden's anwers were more satisfying on several of those topics. Palin added some comment about her belief in "women's rights," which obviously contradicts her stand on abortion, if you consider abortion to be a woman's right. She acknowledged that No Child Left Behind is a failure, and built her ethos there by performing a charming, folksy "shout-out" to all the teachers in her family and their third-grade students who may be watching. Biden may have slipped once or twice, such as when he responded that some comment of his had been taken "out of context" but did not bother to briefly explain that situation. Palin managed to say copious amounts of nothing towards the end of the debate. It's amazing how people can say a lot of words and manage to express absolutely nothing at the exact same time.

To be a composition and rhetoric teacher about this and give awards in logos, pathos, and ethos on this topic, Biden wins all three. He had more detailed and logical plans about several of Gwen's big questions, though, as I said, Palin did do much better than previously. Pathos was almost in the bag for Palin, due to her winning ways, her family-centeredness, her funny comments, and so forth. But then Biden almost began crying as he vehemently rejected her implication that she understands the hard talks millions of middle (soon to be lower) class Americans are having around the kitchen table (a brilliant way of using a specific image that can memorably serve as a symbol for larger issues), speaking of losing his wife and daughter in a car crash and trying to figure how to raise his son alone, and then compounded it with the fact that his son is going to war, as if the man hasn't lost enough already. Hopefully, his son will return alive, and hopefully not too screwed up mentally and emotionally (this is doubtful). But after already losing children and wife, he now stands the chance of losing another son, an experience no parent should have to endure. So, yeah, pathos award goes to Biden. And then ethos is no competition. Biden has decades of experience in the Senate, writing and voting on tons of important legislation and clearly understands several important issues that the United States faces at the moment. Palin understands Alaska and what speaks to the hearts of heartland Americans. She also understands what an offsides is in hockey.

The man in black accessorized across the house, and the penslinger graded.

2008-10-02T15:06:00.006-04:00

A new hand-me-down has me feeling like dressing up like a western-movie cowboy, but feminized and with the wrong hat.
It's a comfort day. Getting my way through a stack of papers and dutifully eating even my greens as I go through my dylan marathon. Eff the critics and the haters—I love Self-Portrait. At twenty-four songs long, with many covers and live songs, some of it is terrible (especially his multi-voiced cover of "The Boxer" and the live version of "Like a Rolling Stone"), but I love his covers of old classics like "Blue Moon" and "I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know" with that Nashville Skyline voice and those smooth back-up singers, intertwined gently with pedal steel. Someone once described the album as a comfy old sweater you know doesn't look good but makes you feel like home. It's a perfect metaphor for the album in my mind. And it starts off with "All the Tired Horses." If that's not a beautiful American song, I don't know that I'm being ridiculous putting pictures like those above on the internet.

Oh, where's my "jolly saucy crew?"

Tell Tale Signs

2008-10-01T12:55:00.003-04:00

If you're interested, you can listen to the two-disc, affordable version of Bootleg Series Volume 8: Tell Tale Signs in its entirety here. I'm listening to it right now, as I grade papers, and it might turn out to be my favorite of the bootleg series. But I love the world-weary, still-in-love, scripture-quoting, rasping-n-rolling old man Dylan's become. I think his last three albums are better than his first three albums.

Every step of the way,
We walk the line.
Your days are numbered,
So are mine.
Time is pilin' up,
We struggle and we scrape,
We're all boxed in,
nowhere to escape.

I don't understand why his lyrics are some of the best poetry ever written and some of his poems are some of the worst poetry ever written.

Bitter Old Bastard Too Young

2008-09-30T12:59:00.004-04:00

I'm writing about a bitter old bastard. I'm listening to a bitter old bastard. I'm feeling like a bitter old bastard. I'm acting like a bitter old bastard. As long as I don't start drinking like a bitter old bastard, I should be all right. Apologies to all who may be hurt by my bitter old bastard ways. The stress gets to me sometimes.

Ain't Talkin'

2008-09-29T11:52:00.000-04:00

Ain't Talkin'

As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden
The wounded flowers were dangling from the vines
I was passing by yon cool and crystal fountain
Someone hit me from behind

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Through this weary world of woe
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
No one on earth would ever know

They say prayer has the power to help
So pray from the mother
In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell
I'm trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others
But oh, mother, things ain't going well

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
I'll burn that bridge before you can cross
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
They'll be no mercy for you once you've lost

Now I'm all worn down by weepin'
My eyes are filled with tears, my lips are dry
If I catch my opponents ever sleepin'
I'll just slaughter them where they lie

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Through the world mysterious and vague
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Walking through the cities of the plague

The whole world is filled with speculation
The whole wide world which people say is round
They will tear your mind away from contemplation
They will jump on your misfortune when you're down

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Eatin' hog eyed grease in hog eyed town
Heart burnin' – still yearnin'
Someday you'll be glad to have me around

They will crush you with wealth and power
Every waking moment you could crack
I'll make the most of one last extra hour
I'll avenge my father's death then I'll step back

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Hand me down my walkin' cane
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Got to get you out of my miserable brain

All my loyal and much loved companions
They approve of me and share my code
I practice a faith that's been long abandoned
Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
My mule is sick, my horse is blind
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Thinkin' ‘bout that gal I left behind

It's bright in the heavens and the wheels are flying
Fame and honor never seem to fade
The fire's gone out but the light is never dying
Who says I can't get heavenly aid?

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Carrying a dead man's shield
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Walkin' with a toothache in my heel

The suffering is unending
Every nook and cranny has its tears
I'm not playing, I'm not pretending
I'm not nursing any superfluous fears

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Walkin' ever since the other night
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Walkin' ‘til I'm clean out of sight

As I walked out in the mystic garden
On a hot summer day, hot summer lawn
Excuse me, ma'am I beg your pardon
There's no one here, the gardener is gone

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Up the road around the bend
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
In the last outback, at the world's end

Weather Not Fit For Man or Beast

2008-09-29T10:25:00.002-04:00

Dylan is a bitter bastard of the American apocalypse on "Love and Theft" and it suits me fine. Great autumn music. I'm writing a paper that is giving me a fucking tumour; I'm having such a damned hard time with something I thought was in the bag. Colonel Cantwell, protagonist of Across the River and into the Trees, is a bitter old man in love with a darling young thing. Not much different than the Dylan of his past three albums, then. I have found the soundtrack for finishing this paper. For all intents and purposes, consider a "Do Not Disturb" sign temporarily placed up around me.

A Reply

2008-09-27T14:08:00.002-04:00

100 Things I Love in Music

1. Bruce Springsteen’s howl-moans at the end of “Jungleland”
2. Phil Spector’s Christmas Album
3. The part of Interpol’s “The New” that starts at 3:14
4. Intelligent, dark songwriters’ ability to get me to reconsider Yeshua
5. The opening three piano chords of The Boatman’s Call
6. The punching drums juxtaposed with the fragile melody of “The Eternal”
7. Nigel Godrich
8. Brian Eno’s ability to rescue artists fading in reputation and talent
9. Einsturzende Neubaüten’s gift for transforming the ugliness of urban life into divine music that speaks to all that is
spiritual, primal, and poetic in me
10. The sound of Jeff Buckley sighing at the beginning of “Hallelujah”
11. “Hallelujah”
12. "The Song of the Seraphim” being equally appropriate in my candlelit bedroom, a cathedral, and The Mist
13. One of the worst things—drugs and adrug addiction—having some redemptive value in contributing to the states of mind
that produces albums as great as The Top, Last Rights, Station to Station, Magical Mystery Tour, and Bobby Digital
14. the appropriation of “crystal japan” as “a warm place” on the downward spiral
15. the appropriation of “hurt” as “HURT” by Johnny Cash on American IV
16. The opening drumbeat of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
17. "17"
18. Jim Morrison inspiring the occasional morning brewski
19. Jim Morrison in leather pants
20. Jim Morrison acting out Freud’s darkest theories about humanity for our communal ritual catharsis
21. “Blackout Days”
22. The lyrics to the chorus of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”
23. Matt Berninger’s subtle and unsnobby literary allusions
24. Matt Berninger’s low, warm, slightly wine haloed voice
25. Songs and their lyrics precisely synchronizing with your life in strange wondrous moments
26. Crying during “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”
27. How much Stuart Davis’s laugh at the end of “Immanence” sounds like Frank’s
28. Siouxsie building up and then cackling like a she-devil-witch ready to steal babies and your heart on The Thorn version of
“Red Over White”
29. Hearing everything that happens inside Tori’s mouth and soul on Boys for Pele
30. Stanley Kubrick’s unfailing ability to pick the exact right music for every scene
31. The Italian passage in “with my sorrows”
32. “The Lie Which Refuses to Die”
33. “Thirty-three”
34. Simultaneous cello and string droning, à la “Variations of Pachalbel Canon” and later-day black tape
35. When “world” music goes right, such as Passion and later Dead Can Dance
36. Danny Elfman soundtracks pre-Corpse Bride
37. Trying to hit high notes sung by men that I cannot reach
38. Bono’s “fly” persona
39. "39". Or, more precisely, driving to it at the age of eighteen, listening to it loud
40. Mezzanine’s immediate effect on my libido
41. “#41” (every moment of it—I made a tape in eighth grade of the song over and over and over again, on both sides, and
listened to it obsessively; listening to it recently, I still feel every moment of the song deeply)
42. Waking up to “Revelator” before it is fully light outside
43. The cover of Low
44. The superior, awe-inducing sound of “never let me down again” on vinyl
45. The chills “In Power We Entrust the Love Advocated” never fails to induce
46. The opening chords and line of Sea Change
47. The ability of great old songs, such as Roy Orbison’s and Patsy Cline's, to unite everyone’s disparate musical taste when
pressured to choose music to please everybody
48. The sound Nivek Ogre makes about halfway through “Killing Game”
49. Every single fucking thing about Wovenhand
50. The Blind Boys of Alabama’s wordless vocals on “Sky Blue”
51. The whispered “witch” in the score to Suspiria
52. The ridiculously repeated bassline in They Live
53. The driving, psychotic strings in Psycho
54. My inability to ever listen to only Better Than Ezra's “Under You” without “Live Again” right after it
55. The ghostly emanations Natalie Merchant makes at the beginning of “My Skin”
56. The nested textures, music boxes, and intimate breathing of Björk’s Vespertine
57. Polyphony
58. “God Only Knows”
59. Actually hearing “Lost in the Supermarket” when lost in a supermarket
60. Kraftwerk seeming like a group of four naïve, simple German schoolboys
61. The drum solo in “The Perfect Drug”
62. Trent’s improvised drums at the end of “piggy”
63. The refrain at the end of “Ashes to Ashes” combined with the ascending keyboard solo
64. “doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo” at the end of Pearl Jam’s “Black”
65. The opening strains of Funeral
66. Successful spoken word: “Bullet the Blue Sky” “E-bow the letter” “Bottom”
67. The immensely healing effects of “Welcome to My Party” after I broke up with Leah
68. 45-parties with Frank
69. The immaculate and strange harmonization of “Because”
70. How everyone eventually gets won over by Tom Waits, even though they always think he is too weird, too gargly, and too
much of an oddity at first; that I was no exception to this rule
71. Albums so good I turn up the volume a little more each song that comes on
72. Drunken sing-a-longs to “One”
73. Shitty, irresistible pop songs that are as equally irresistible as they are shitty
74. Bush’s raw, sloppy perfection on Razorblade Suitcase
75. That album’s lyrical uniqueness
76. Siouxsie’s repeated “Listen” at the end of Juju
77. “The Great Intoxication”
78. The harmonica solo on “white chalk”
79. Paul Banks’s repeated insisitence, “You don’t hold a candle,” at the end of “Pace is the Trick”
80. The way everybody gets excited and shakes their butt—me included—when “Hey Ya!” comes on
81. The woop-woop-woops in Paul Simon’s “I Know What I Know”
82. Neil Young’s imprecise and scorching solos that don’t get old or boring even after 17 minutes or three decades when
backed by Crazy Horse
83. The first minute of Bauhaus’s In the Flat Field, as the band prepares to jump into four amazing LPs that will change music
forever
84. The fake skip in Television’s “Elevation”
85. The immortal ability of a simple acoustic guitar and a person’s voice to penetrate to the heart of everything that matters
when done right
86. Keyboards that don’t try to be other instruments; keyboards being keyboards, which can be as satisying as dudes being
dudes
87. The string of albums by the Rolling Stones that began with Beggars Banquet and ended with Goat’s Head Soup
88. Hits by one hit wonders that never lose their power
89. David. Fucking. Bowie.
90. When an MC busts into a torrent of improvised rhymes so powerful you have to realize you could never do that
91. The fact that Peter Gabriel made both “Intruder” and “Sledgehammer”
92. The fact that punk, thankfully, is dead.
93. Radiohead coming back from their post as another band prophesying and readying us for the end of the world to make
music everyone can like that doesn’t suffer from being overly simplistic as a cost; how “Reckoner” never fails to make me
smile and “Videotape” always brings me close to tears of gratitude and joy.
94. “I TOLD YOU FIVE OR FOUR TIMES!”
95. Sure. You hate metal. And misogyny. And maybe even the eighties. But there has got to be at least one song you get
down with by Guns and (f’n) Roses.
96. “Okay! I believe you!” (Is that what makes “Jump in the Line” more than just a good song?)
97. The candle is brightest right before it goes out. In Utero. Closer.
98. Nirvana ending the period of Motley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Poison, etc. with four power chords, a dope bassline, and some decent
guitar.
99. Prince rocking out the half-time show and proving how much he rules. Still.
100. That there are at least another four one-hundred lists I can make on this topic.

[R E S T]

2008-09-25T10:42:00.002-04:00

After a long day, it is important to try and lay down on the couch in the dark and let music take you away without being consumed in anxiety. I almost succeeded. Almost.

Tailor to your own purposes. This is a revision of the original. I had to get up to delete some songs and add new ones. The thirteen songs part is important to me for a nameless reason.

Rest My Chemistry...Interpol...Our Love to Admire
Spring Break 1899...Murder By Death...Red of Tooth and Claw
Everything That Happens...David Byrne and Brian Eno...Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
The Fatal Impact...Dead Can Dance...Dead Can Dance
In Your House...The Cure...Seventeen Seconds
September...Cranes...EP Collection
Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love...Coldplay...Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends
Showroom Dummies...Kraftwerk...Trans-Europe Express
Sabrina...Einstürzende Neubauten...Silence Is Sexy
Your Funeral My Trial...Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds...Your Funeral, My Trial
Peeping Tom...Placebo...Black Market Awesome
Behind the Wheel...Depeche Mode...Music for the Masses
13 Ghosts II...Nine Inch Nails...Ectoplasmic Manifestations of Deceased People One Through Four

Are things getting hot in here?

2008-09-25T10:15:00.002-04:00

Maybe I'm slow on the uptake, but I just found out about this talking with my mother, who is more attentive to politics than I am. If you have not seen what happened with McCain and Letterman last night, check this out. My respect for Letterman just shot way up.

Letterman Drubs the Absent Hero

Grace

2008-09-22T09:02:00.002-04:00

I heard a deafening crack as though of thunder. I may have still been in bed at 8 o'clock this morning, but I was awake enough to know that it was a blue-skied day out. I also knew it was too loud to have happened in the house. I leapt out of bed, pulling on my jeans from the floor, and ran to the front windows, where I saw most of the front field eclipsed by an immense section of the tree in front of my house. It was easy to quickly do the math. Had it been the branch nearest the house, it might have busted the house in, potentially harming me, my laptop, my Hemingway and McCarthy collection, and maybe even my guitar. If it had been the bracnh closest to the driveway, it could have done a significant amount of damage to both my car and my fiancée's. Had it broken a few weeks ago at the same time, it may have very seriously hurt the children who were camping on our side field where the branch (and its many other branches) fell. The only other branch that may have fallen would have taken out the power and telephone lines. So, basically, the immense amount of tree that just cracked—seemingly out of nowhere—and trenched up the side field was the only nonharmful branch at a nonharmful time. Call it luck if you would like; I've got a different word for it.

I love this tree. It has a bell hanging from it, tiles at the bottom, a wonderful tree swing hanging from its branches, a hole on the side by the driveway where I put flowers occasionally. It is beautifully thick and ancient. It has its own spiritual gravity. The last thing I would want is for it to be cut down. The old pagan in me dies hard. At this point, though, it would seem there are no other options. It has apparently been dying inside, unbeknownst to us, and it took only the smallest thing to trigger its devastating crack. Kind of like a person, then.

Pictures later.

Writers at Work Part 1

2008-09-19T13:28:00.002-04:00

Interviewer: How about people who've gone into the academic career? Do you think the large number of writers who hold teaching positions have compromised their literary careers?

Hemingway: It depends on what you call compromise. Is the usage that of a woman who has been compromised? Or is it the compromise of the statesman? Or the compromise made with your grocer or your tailor that you will pay a little more but will pay it later? A writer who can both write and teach should be able to do both. Many competent writers have proved it could be done. I could not do it, I know, and I admire those who have been able to. I would think though that the academic life could put a period to outside experience which might possibly limit growth of knowledge of the world.

That's not the end of his response but that has been some of what has been bothering me a great deal lately.

New Gadget

2008-09-19T12:14:00.002-04:00

I've been trying to read a poem to my class every class. Sometimes we talk about it; sometimes we don't. I've been into adding new gadgets on the side, as many of you have probably noticed. Today's new gadget is "Poem of the Day." Expect at least two a week. If you click on the image of the book, it will most likely take you to another webpage where the poem is written in its entirety. Most of Sylvia Plath's poem get under my skin and do something visceral and a little bit scary to me. It's a scary I recognize as my own. Something that's visited both our houses, maybe. This song, though it disturbs some people, always makes me a little bit happy. I've been obsessed with babies, lately, like a woman nearing her forties. I've been wanting to buy baby clothes all the time and doting on my co-workers' little ones. Maybe that's why "Morning Song" is the poem of the day. If you don't immediately memorize without any effort the first line of that poem, you probably don't like poetry. Enjoy.

Input always appreciated

2008-09-19T11:27:00.003-04:00

Oops, meant to throw up a new playlist I made this morning. I enjoyed it very much. Again, though, as Frank pointed out, the best Bauhaus songs sometimes take too long to get going in a mix context. You think that's the case here? This mix got started because I knew I wanted to hear "Sister Midnight" and I thought "2:19" would sound good after it. Last night, I was looking for news of a possible third (!) new nin album this year, and the internet doesn't get updated sometimes, so google takes you to pages that have news of the new nine inch nails album when the "new" nine inch nails album is the fragile. Untouched websites from 1999—you have to love it. So I came across some quotes of Mr. Reznor talking about what he thought his new as-yet-unreleased album sounded like. Here was my favorite quote: "Imagine Tom Waits on a bayou filtered through a funk blender and slowed down." I loved that. So I thought the song that might sound the most like that description was "Into the Void," and put it after Tom Waits' "2:19." At that point, I had to keep going but didn't have a vision of where to go. Also, putting two endsongs back-to-back doesn't always work out. I wanted to put "Mr. Sandman," the doo-wop classic, on here, but didn't have it.

Sister Midnight—Iggy Pop
2:19—Tom Waits
Into the Void—Nine Inch Nails
Pail Blue Fever—Wovenhand
Nagorny Karabach—Einstürzende Neubauten
Youthless—Beck
Cannibal's Hymn—Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Rejoice—U2
Smothered Hope—Skinny Puppy
Baby, We'll Be Fine—The National
Nerves—Bauhaus
The Darkest Star—Depeche Mode

In other news, I began reading a philosophical zombie novel called Dying to Live by a local author. It's pretty good so far. Check it out here. Or, check out the author's blog. Expect a full review here in the future.

Obstacles

2008-09-19T11:14:00.003-04:00

Call me a corporate bitch. Call me a consumer sucker. I don't care what you call me; when the leaves start falling and there's a brisk chill in the air come early morning, that first sip of the widely-imitated but rarely-adequately-reproduced Starbucks Pumpkin Latte elicits only one appropriate response: fuck yeah.

I'll be in my office with that latte and Interpol's first album if you need anything. Oscar Wilde might have been correct when he said there was no cure for the soul but the senses.

Ingratitude? Not intentional.

2008-09-16T17:43:00.003-04:00

So, I insulted a favorite teacher and something of a role model of mine lately. The whole experience has been very painful. I will not use this blog as dumping ground about this experience. Instead, I offer a very good poem. I don't have the time to write right now. I have lots of other writing that is of more importance to do. This poem is used as number 72 in Billy Collins' Poetry 180 program. Robert Bly is an interesting man who also writes on the human shadow, psychology, and the need for a man's version of feminism. Masculism? I'm not sure what he calls it, but he's right. We need to think about the mess we're in and all the useless ideas of masculinity there are right now. Here's one of many good poems Bly has written:

Gratitude to Old Teachers

Robert Bly

When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?

Water that once could take no human weight-
We were students then-holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

from Eating the Honey of Words, 1999
HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY

Copyright 1999 by Robert Bly.
All rights reserved.

Sounds Good

2008-09-12T11:40:00.001-04:00

Apparently, james are back. And about time.

Nantucket (better late than never)

2008-09-10T15:37:00.005-04:00

almost all pictures by Vincenzo

A Night on Huguenot

2008-09-10T14:14:00.004-04:00

Last night, I spent the night alone at Dawn and Eric's, feeding and doing my best to care for their three darling (and fighting) cats. Though I have spent many nights there, it was strange to live in their house, even for just a night, without them. It had been a long day. I have kept a lot inside lately. Graduate school and teaching has not been inspiring lately. Teaching is wonderful at times during the moment, but it doesn't linger afterwards. I've been trying to remain grateful and outwardly positive but feeling pretty negative and at times a little dead inside. I have once again realized that my life without making music is simply not my life; it is the life of a stranger who took over my body, tied my soul to a chair and stuffed its mouth with crumpled pages of Derrida.

I used the night to my advantage. Though thirsty for a pint and with an invitation to join a group of fun girls to get one, all expenses paid, I chose solitude and solace in Eric's Les Paul. My interest (obsession) with Wovenhand as of late has also reawakened an urge to use older, stranger instruments. Eric has several, though I possess only intuitive, guitar-based ideas on how to play them. When I went to Dawn's and Eric's house the night before last, something kind of magical happened. Having recently gone to a concert of The Cult, they had a pick the guitar player threw out to the crowd and a drumstick the drummer had thrown. I put the pick between my fingers and—after months of not writing anything and with a pick that is much softer than my preference—instantly wrote a few new songs. Sketches of possible new songs. Eric played along and improvised some lovely stuff.

Below are the recordings I made with garageband last night of songs in birth mode from the previous two nights. They all lack titles, definite lyrics, definite arrangements, and so on. They are ideas recorded so as not to be forgotten. I've lost too many songs from not recording the idea. Though I wish I had been recording our lively interplay (stronger lyrics on "cure type thing" for one thing) on Monday night, I appreciate these rough little sketches. The one provisionally titled "ghost tarantella" is comprised of a riff Eric came up with playing lead on the one provisionally titled "cure type thing" the night before. I tried playing the same riff and chords over it with a small reproduction old-style classical guitar Eric has and improvised some lyrics. "Cure type thing" is called that because it sounds like a latter-day cure song to me. Since that was the feeling I got from it, I went for Robert Smith style of lyrics. As you might expect, it is therefore probably the worst of them, in my opinion. It also displays that pop-song writer that keeps popping out of the box when I hold a guitar. "Shimmer thing" is lovely, but much more so when Eric plays low, bottom-string solos on it. "New Jam in B" was entirely improvised last night, beginning, like many creations I enjoy, as an accident. I slipped my fingers somewhere else while playing "October Dirge" and took it as far I could. It is probably my favorite of the new ones, because, as the cop in Magnolia says, "It's good to rock out now and then."

As usual, the songs are long, except for "shimmer thing," which is a musical idea documented. The links below will take about 24 minutes of your time, like an EP. I hope you enjoy.

"ghost tarantella"
"shimmer thing"
"new jam in b"
"cure type thing"

and here is a small intimate acoustic thing is daddad i've been playing with for seven years to no end and recorded with words finally for the first time the other day

"grace"

*For those unaccustomed with divshare: you can download the song to your iTunes by clicking on "download original" on the right-hand side of the screen when you follow the links.

Ten Stones, One Interesting Fallen Leaf, and a Lot of Surprises

2008-09-07T10:57:00.003-04:00

Recently, I was remarking over at my friend Chris's music blog that I was excited about what a nice surprise it was going to be when the new Wovenhand album appeared in my mailbox, since I did not know when it was coming, but it was probably before "official release date." It was a nice surprise; I was so excited, I ran back into my house like a kid home from his first day of school eager to tell his mom everything, eat some cookies, and play video games. It was an appropriate way to get the album, because, as surprising as receiving a new album on a soggy Saturday is, the surprising sound of Wovenhand's fourth official LP of new material is much more so.

The biggest surprise about Wovenhand's new album is that it doesn't sound like Wovenhand; it sounds like 16 Horsepower. Each album of David Eugene Edwards' post-16 Horsepower project has progressively gotten more unlike anything you've ever heard. He has been slowly constructing a towering sculpture of sound and devotion comprised of bone, twine, American wood, Native American tapestry, awe, terror, angst, anxiety, twigs, bible-black leather, love, grace, bird feather, compassion, law, church organ, "story and pictures" and "bleary-eyed duty." Most of the time, he has been holed up in a friend's basement studio, Absinthe Studio, constructing this overpowering work of beauty alone, laying down one instrument at a time.

Not so the new Wovenhand album.

Ten Stones rocks. It was recorded live at the New Jerusalem Recreation Room in Clarksboro, New Jersey with the exception of tracks two, eight, and nine, which were recorded at Dust Bowl Studios in Glade Park, Colorado. For those familair with my DADDAD sound, that intense, octave-driven quality permeates the album. Former 16 Horsepower bandmate Pascal Humbert plays bass on this juggernaut of Middle America journey music. Unlike previous Wovenhand albums, there is a lot of contribution to the composing of the music from other people; Humbert wrote the final song on the album, "His Loyal Love," which at the time of this writing, is my favorite. Peter Van Laerhoven contributed deep, trembling, reverb-drenched guitar and co-wrote two songs. Emil Nikolaisen managed to play everything from a beehive to a bossa nova guitar, as well as engineered the beast. Percussion and full drum kits are constantly employed throughout the album, courtesy of Ordy Garrison. Garrison sometimes creates a sheer texture of many cymbals and brushes in constant and random use, othertimes pounds with the sound and the fury that this Faulknerian Southern Gothic band deserves. As usual, God helped out a lot on this one, too. His book, Job, served as the inspiration (very clearly) on "Kingdom of Ice." Every song, except the A.C. Jobim/Lees cover song "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars" (have you ever heard Edwards croon before?) and the Native American Plains Chant "Kicking Bird" (don't worry; it rocks much harder than anything on Spiritchaser and is as far removed from "Lipan Conjuring" as one could hope for), passionately evokes David Eugene Edwards' deeply felt and lived Christianity. WIth a cover on the first album ("Ain't No Sunshine") and a traditional song on the second ("Down in Yon Forest"), as well as heaps of drone and ambience on Blush Music and even Mosaic, the album's use of other writers' talents, pre-existing material, and pointless drone added to the end should come as no surprise. Nonetheless, all of these factors do.

With their/his fourth/fifth album, Wovenhand leaves the world of meditative prayer and cloistered darkness for a sound that is as epic as the bloody, cold, star-splattered American Western past. I cannot help but envision galloping horses on hardpacked earth, Native Americans, black cowboys, and Mexicans at war. Yet I also cannot help but imagine myself, perhaps as someone else, on one of those horses, head raised toward the night sky, filled with the yearning for God.

If nothing else, it is the perfect soundtrack to read what may be the great American novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. It inspired me to do just that. But, of course, it is much more than that. For me, on my fourth listen, and for you, who may not have heard it yet, what that more is and what its place may be in your music collection and your soul time will reveal, as it does all things.

*As a note, the artwork is beautiful. A similar design continues on the back of the sleeve, which is a paper digipak with a plastic holding tray glued inside. There are no words on the back of the case. Opening it up, the song titles have an aged, woven appearance. Withing the sleeve is a booklet containing all the lyrics and information on sturdy, thick paper with a bit of gloss. An aged-paper look with a font that seems woven in the nineteenth century permeates the entire package. DEE did the cover art design, as he did for Mosaic and I think the previous ones (he did not paint the cover to Consider the birds; a friend did). It is a beautiful object to have and it intensifies a desire to own official copies of each of these very special albums.

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2008-09-05T11:46:00.000-04:00

You know you want it. Do yourself a favor.