4 Way Street – Crosby Stills, Nash & Young
Vinyl of the Day. Awesomeness.
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London artist, master of the small.
http://www.woostercollective.com/2008/11/slikachu_the_as_to_our_qds.html
White Noise — Don DeLillo proving himself to the New Weirds, I can write too, he says, well nothing wrong with that — it’s a good book, a powerful book — about middle age mediocrity, about the ring of fat that accretes around one’s midsection during one’s midsection (of life) — float away upon the seasection — premonitions of Bhopal, the power of TV, and the chilling naming that goes on in this new world where we invent new horribles everyday — “Airborne Toxic Event” / “Black Cloud” / the deaths we carry within ourselves — secretly not wanting to die first — however, me, knowing I will die, perhaps do — White Noise perhaps being the picture of a man who still yet hasn’t accepted the reality of —
Me — I accept it and don’t accept it, alternating by the day and hour.
What else?
The preternaturally clever child.
The massive eroticism of a modern-day supermarket.
Children’s cartoons.
All in all a good book — echoes of Pynch’s Vineland, but maybe better — still — the fat middle-aged — the fallen hero — he did leap out of the car — paterfamelias — pumped the gas so that they could continue their evacuation.
College-on-the-hill. Late-stage academic capitalism. Hitler Studies. I want to do to Elvis what you did to Hitler. Lampooning cultural studies and the raising of the low.
Dirty young hipster sleeping on the Philadelphia subway, one eye half-open, headphones falling down around his head, greasy hair sticking out from under his hat. Not a dime in his pocket. Once he was a student — now he works two part-time jobs — printing flyers is one of them, the one he sort of likes. He’s lonely — hooked up with a girl three weeks ago but she never called him back — probably because he’s poor.
His Dad died of cancer three years ago. His mother is struggling in a town upstate. He isn’t religious — doessn’t go for that sort of thing — distrusts that sort of thing.
He does drugs with people he calls his friends — he’s up late — that’s why he’s sleeping on the subway.
—————————–
Joe Lawyer. No stories there.
The Widowed Mother in a town upstate, receptionist at a print store — has watched the economy blow through and wipe out the companies that used to use them — staff is dwindling — young people don’t stay, head down to Philadelphia, but its hard to get jobs down there as well. She feels herself getting sick, getting creaky, there’s medical bills to pay off, the mortgage, her younger daughter’s college tuition — getting harder and harder — there’s a man who comes into the store every now and again — she doesn’t think she’s beautiful, she’s old and fat, and she doesns’t know this man from Adam and part of her is sort of happy to be done with it — but she’s very lonely without her children, who never want to talk to her — and her situation is precarious — she sort of wishes she’ll be asked out —
Castanets
Here I go now, feel myself pulling away — almost Thanksgiving, and oh I’m thankful
but is that enough to fill my empty bed? I don’t know, is it?
Once there was a black dress and soft touches
and the love is fierce and jealous, sure —
Life is hard, and I don’t want to make it harder —
I’ve been writing these notes now for going on two years —
sporadically, sure, here and there,
but still –
there are no characters in these stories
I’ve hidden them all away
And I lie here in my big red bed
alone on a Friday
(candles in the window)
America, I love you, I do
America, I love you.
Oh and the places we’ll go —
You showed me California
You gave me your heart
And sometimes I forget you
And I don’t want to forget you
But sometimes sometimess I forget you
Refractions of time; alone in the city;
my sadness could be an ocean, sure
or it could be a nothing, just anxiety in the funhouse
doubling back on itself over and over
Broken words, broken thoughts,
deep perspective,
I have death and sex in my toolbelt
what will I do tomorrow?
Terrible fear — need to get out of here out of this
hope for another life
what is the problem? what is the fear? debt? I’ll pay it back;
death — you can’t experience you’re own dying, you’re already gone –
still — so — anxiety — fear of pain — fear of loss — love —
unfulfilled, the ordinary life, it’s not enough — I am Jupiter in this body,
Semele, I am Jupiter, and I need to show you — —
Half cracked light bounces against dark velvet corners, in which men in suits sit with women in cheap dresses made beautiful by the soft light and their laughings at old jokes long forgotten by the turning — on the little half stage, old footlights shining up the red velvet suit is a tall and pale androgyne, with greasy long black hair hanging across his eyes, singing into an old 1940s microphone, circular with great big spokes like some pagan wizard’s staff – his voice is haunting — high pitched jazz — words beyond meaning in the smokey room — glasses on the tables vibrate, liquid amber shakes — visceral shivering as the voice crawls higher hitting higher and higher notes — the song is an old one — invented someone else, not hear in this city, but down many rivers, in the rice fields, in the cotton fields, brought here by a subject race from deepest furthest Africa, still a mystery to these white bankers and their ladies, drinking at the end of the world — the alcohol is an imperfect medium, but still, with enough of it coursing down their arteries and up their veins, pushing past the blood brain barrier and making vision skew and twist — out of the corner of their eyes, these sad humans, the audience, can see something else, some shadow vision of the world that will be, the world without them, the 21st century they won’t live to see, or the 18th, or before, but also, heightened sense of the now, that holy moment they’re usually too dead to feel — the alcohol clears some dead wood, and the voice clears some more, and the girl in their arms, living and breathing and looking back at them, maybe that clears the most. It is dark in the club, so dark, light bouncing out of the way, but they know that they are here, now, in this special place. They have some sense they are on a speck of dust floating in a vast unmeasurable cold emptiness — they have some sense that the religious tales they hear on Sundays may not be so different than the fairy tales of unicorns and dragons they read to their children at night — but the alcohol and the voice and the women — counteract these feelings, remind them of the present, here but not here, always slipping, held on to, but slipping — the voice sings on — carrying them into the next moment — eighty years from now this building will be gone and these people will be gone — there will be other people and other buildings and another singer — different lighting — but here they drink and listen, sitting in shadows, lights fragmenting —
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees 