Thank You For The Days

started a list of songs i want played at my funeral

to love somebody- nina simone
days- the kinks

now worst case scenario i die tonight and the songs played at my funeral are ones i would have wanted- not a bad scenario compared to dying tonight and NOT having the right music (which would be the real tragedy). i'll edit this as time goes on. the reason i chose the nina simone is because it's played at the end of the joe strummer documentary The Future Is Unwritten and it's the BEST ending as all his people around the campfire wind it down, it's so beautiful and it's really joyful and has become one of my favorite songs. it can be really happy but can also be like a light icing on something sad. days is the same kind of feel but the lyrics are almost too perfect. but i like it. i think of it as me speaking, to people and the to the world, but maybe one day it could be people speaking to me. WHEN I'M DEAD. ha ha i swear i don't fantasize about my funeral every day. all i ask for is the right music

I Thought You Knowed

i'm harvesting a secret woody guthrie obsession and no one knows. hard travelin' is punk rock. i thought you knowed.

Make A Grown Man Cry Like A Girl To See The Guns Dying At Sunset

I have a little something to say about Combat Rock. Two songs on this album, Should I Stay Or Should I Go? and Rock The Casbah were hits. They are fucking awesome songs. I'm so sick of things being taken for granted because of their commercial success, as though Rock The Casbah fell from the sky and landed in the hands of Joe Strummer. Thank you Topper, for this piano part. Thank you Joe, for your lyrics and for singing with such conviction - to this day I'm still trying to figure out what this is song is all about and it might be silly and it might be serious but whatever it is, we believe you. We really, really believe you. Thank you Paul for this bass line. Thank you Mick for the way it sounds when you sing, your drama and your poise and attitude and your brilliance. Thank you Don Letts for this ridiculous video, armadillos and all. Thank you Joe, for in the midst of this MTV thing you're in the same place, you're down on your knees in the sand, looking at us with the that same face, clutching yourself and the earth around you with that same fervent and unmatched urgency. When I first got this album I used to skipped those two songs because I knew them, and I needed the rest to grow on me. I also went through a "oh no those are the worst songs on the album" phase. Listen to them. Don't skip them. Take each song out of context and play them loud.
Every Clash album is different. And I really don't need to go into why the sound of the first album could never happen again do I? "Can we do the same thing all the time, this is the question. No. Because, then you're just dead. You know, you do the same thing, and who wants to know? After a while you know. Makes people sick in the head to do that. So we have to always try new things you know, and like everyones a load of like sheep going nehhh it's horrible, or nehhhh it's nice, but they don't fucking know. You know only we know what we're doing and obviously we think it's for the best. Anyway we can play- we can handle it better now so we don't disguise that, we try to play as good as we can." said Joe.
Combat Rock is really interesting! Knowing it so well at this point, I take a lot of it for granted. It goes off in some weird directions but there's just one and a half songs I don't love. And one of them is really, really, interesting and consists mostly of Paul just talking, about god knows what, and the song sounds like nothing else. Plus when do you get to hear Paul. The whole album, really, sounds like nothing else. Every section of the album (first two songs, second two songs, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, last four songs) is a chapter of it's own. The last four songs drip with emotion. Just so humid with it that they're drenched. They define what to me is the mood of the whole album - bittersweet. Bitter. Sweet. The end of the Clash. The subject matter. The imagery. Combat Rock, war. Maybe the militaristic tone The Clash had inevitably taken on was beginning to scare them. And what shows through on the album is vulnerability, the loneliness, the terror of these men who at this point were in a band that began to feel more like an army. They're empty, confused, conflicted. They're battling each other on top of their own inner conflicts. They're hollowed out and grasping for something. It's an entirely different emotion from the other albums. But it's not disaster yet, more of an eerie calm before the storm.
February junior year of high school I'm in Florida with my mom visiting my grandparents. I left with The Clash, London Calling, Combat Rock, and various downloaded Joe Strummer songs on my iPod (I'd only listened to London Calling at that point I think) I used to love going to Florida in the winter to get some heat and sunshine. I don't know exactly why but during those few days I felt so homesick in the weirdest and most bittersweet way. (Also Florida is weird and creepy anyway, I decided at that time. At least where I was.) But I was homesick for I don't even know what, homesick for this place I was taken to in this music. Sean Flynn is about Sean Flynn, journalist covering the Vietnam war who disappeared. The song starts and I think of heat, loneliness, displacement, and the strange urge to be back home in the cold normalcy of New Jersey or far away in drab and shabby London, just a need to be elsewhere. The first ten seconds are now like an injection of nostalgia and I ache with longing and a hunger impossible to curb.
I haven't even gotten to Straight To Hell, chapter six of this album and a true rare beauty. I can't really touch this one. If there's one thing this album does it's conjure images - images and feelings - of things completely unknown to me. As years go by I don't think it will ever feel familiar and that's how it should be. Some music by The Clash will comfort me and conjure happy and precise memories. This album will lay me down in a haze of conflicting emotions and disconnect the body and soul. Nothing else is the same. And as I wind this down I realize I've strayed, I wanted to say something about how angry it makes me that this is overlooked and dismissed as a "sellout". My succinct response to that is: Bullshit. Other than that you can see I don't really fucking care. Get on with it, listen to it. Cry like a girl maybe.

And The Clouds Are High In Spanish Mountains

And I was gripped by that deadly phantom
I followed him through hard jungles
As he stalked through the back lots
Strangling through the night shades

The thief of life
Moved onwards and outwards to love

In a one stop only motel
A storm bangs on the cheapest room
The phantom slips in to spill blood
Even on the sweetest honeymoon

The killer of love
Caught the last late Niagara bus

By chance or escaping from misery
By suddeness or in answer to pain
Smoking in the dark cinema
You could see the bad go down again

And the clouds are high in Spanish mountains
A ford roars through the night full of rain.

The killer's blood flows
But he loads his gun again

Make a grown man cry like a girl
To see the guns dying at sunset

In vain lovers claim
that they never have met.

All Hail The Phantom Bear

Just finished reading Into The Wild, which made me feel so many different things; really conflicted... Obvious: sadness a la the final chapter (in which his parents visit the bus he lived and died in). I didn't know until I started reading the book that it was actually an extension of a magazine article (I saw the movie first, and assumed the book was just a sort of biography) Okay but there's lots to say; the story, Chris himself, it's all very intriguing. I was drawn to so much of it, even the passages from famous writers, emphasizing the importance of alienating oneself from human contact and society (not exactly into the idea of that but couldn't help but be drawn to everything writers have to say about it). I do identify with Chris in small ways but in more ways I admire him for traits I lack. (Traits most people lack if we wanna get technical...) Of course, there are "faults." It isn't that I personally find "faults" in him, maybe because the place I find faults in people is in their interactions with others. Chris's were amicable, (and when it came to those he didn't know and those less fortunate than himself, charitable to the extreme) but he was really himself when he was alone. His courage, ambition, persistence, extremism and passion are the traits which make up the aspect I admire most. I'm not going to make a mockery of this and say I thought about Joe Strummer the whole time, that would be a lie. But I did think of him at one point, when reading what some Alaskan natives had to say about Chris. It's some bad stuff. Stuff about being stupid, self-absorbed, unprepared. (Dying a slow death by drowning in his ego and unrealistic expectations of himself. As one could aaarrggguuue The Clash did) Some claimed, most hurtfully and ironically, that it was downright disrespectful to the land to traipse in overconfidently thinking he could handle anything thrown at him. So I'm thinking about Joe, because when I think about people so intensely intriguing and admirable to me, I think about Joe. People who I could conceivably call heroes. You know. Anyway I happen to be going through a bit of a Clash revival period, or at least little bits of the Clash phenomenon have been revived to their fullest. For example, Joe. Joe as an everything. Joe as, to me, the most fascinating intriguing beautiful multi faceted human being and representation of everything I hunger for in life. I'm really "in love" with him in every way. Really. Another aspect is live performance, and I found myself in a familiar place, obsessively youtubing; this time there were some performances I hadn't seen since it had been a while. The first album sounded brand new again out of nowhere. Janie Jones. White Riot. What's My Name. Garageland. Reborn. I also decided it was time to listen to Cut the Crap. I'd gotten over all the shit about the ending of The Clash, all the shit about Joe's mistakes and Joe's "ego" a long time ago, (I don't want to get into that shit) but I still hadn't listened to Cut the Crap. So I did. It was crap. It was really absurd. But it was pretty much what I expected. Nothing worse. And I was actually strangely into maybe two of the songs. One of them I'm like so into that it scares me; Are You Red...Y (or something) and it sounds militaristic in a creepy way (militaristic in a creepy way, just like The Clash post-mick) Joe Joe Joe. I will never again question how could you let this happen. Joe you were a human being and if you weren't you wouldn't be my hero. There I said it, my hero. I didn't mean to get so into this subject; let's bring it back to Christopher McCandless's great Alaskan adventure. I guess, among other things, it was his cut-throat attitude and passion that reminded me of Joe. But the main parallel I drew was the way people criticized them. It's inevitable that people who accomplish great things and have such ideals set for themselves will be hit with criticism. Much of not most of the criticism of both men is credible. I could agonize over it forever, weighing both sides and trying to justify but I won't anymore. Of course I'll still think about it. But when my mind wandered into these territories while reading it came to a conclusion in the form of a Mary Oliver poem. The final truth is this:

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them -

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided -
and that one wears an orange blight -
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away -
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled -
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -
that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.


The light is their visions and their ideals. More generally, the light is all that's positive and passionate and beautiful about the world. And it's subjective, it's what makes life worth living for each individual person even if it hasn't yet be attained (and even if it never is). So most of all it's their lifelong efforts toward their own light (after all it's their efforts that count. And I don't mean that in a stupid "A for effort!" "At least you tried!" kind of way. I really mean the effort IS the light, it's the only thing. It's what's to be learned from. It's the one thing Joe would have wanted someone to take from him. And I hope that when the criticism ended, the praise that mattered most reached his ears and penetrated his shame which is the praise of his effort to be the change.) Now, further into it, I will not go. Because I've now read a good deal of literature on the downfall of The Clash, the downfall of Chris, and the complexities of these two characters, and I think it does a better job. And so this is my conclusion on heroes in general too. I am fine with the word, the way I define it at least. I love it.
"ALL HAIL THE PHANTOM BEAR, THE BEAST WITHIN US ALL. ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP. MAY 1992."

O Night Divine!

in the 13th floor elevators documenary roky erickson's talking and says something like "i'd be in church and there'd be certain songs that would just knock me out like 'o holy night' thats like some rock n roll song man like pluggin in your favorite station", such true words! i am not religious, god is not a thing that exists for me, but the fact that religious music is supposed to be coming from some source of divinity, just the idea of that, hell what could be better? i mean some christmas music really "knocks me out" haha but i also thought of this.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRLus8mD1kI there are things like this, that make me want to go to church. just to sing. like a black church. that only sings. i could get into it. by that i mean i could really pretend to love jesus if i could really get down with some great gospel music.

Let Me Go Boys

there was nothing like this then and there is REALLY nothing like this now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X9OfMA3A4
do i have time to talk about seeing the pogues? i don't know, probably, i will later

The Knife That Cuts Through My Guts

"Lou realized early on that all you need to do is touch the other's cheek and just give them some small recognition and then let them be and maybe record it and thereby perhaps justify their tragedy through art. And all art is an act of love towards the whole human race. Aw, Lou, it's the best music ever made, the instrumental intro to 'All Tomorrow's Parties' is like watching dawn break over a bank of buildings through the windows of these elegantly hermetic cages, which feels too well spoken, which I suspect is the other knife that cuts through your guts, the continents that divide literature and music and don't care about either." -Lester Bangs from Untitled Notes on Lou Reed 1980

ohhhh no this was great until it made me crazy. you know i could be missing the point entirely and just not understanding what he's saying but. i think it's true. the fact that he says "which feels too well spoken" is so funny because everything he writes about music is so well spoken obviously, and is that too much? is it supposed to be done at all? is it a contradiction altogether? music is one single entity which speaks itself, in fact it's the only thing that can, no matter what "literature" surrounds it. i guess that's not enough for some of us. maybe just for the ones who don't play music and need to express - i just can't take it as it is, and with that said i'll continue the endless futile lifelong struggle of trying to explain even a inch of the magnitude of what happens what when music happens. assuming there is a point to all this i think what helps is just having a varied vocabulary which i don't. not even big words, just for example i was watching a video of You Really Got Me on youtube and someone described the bassline as "one of the filthiest basslines in history!!!" ha! filthy! i don't know if i'd necessarily call that bass line filthy but it's certainly a useful word and i can see many bass lines being filthy i don't wanna get into it or this could get filthy. but a lot of clash and talking heads comes to mind... like "Mind"

Blue You Radiant Blue

oh my god it's all about the color blue i'm starting to realize; not in the sense of representing sadness necessarily, just that it represents something more pure and intense than anything. the sky is blue the ocean is blue blue you radiant blue i don't know how you can stand next to me, if there was ever a color it was blue. blue blue 'lectric blue that's the color of my room where i will live. in conclusion i just don't think any other color really conveys as much. when i hear the first line of bizarre love triangle "every time i think of you i feel shot right through with a bolt of blue" i feel the bolt you know, other colors are weak in comparison

What The Fuck Is Goin' On I Can't Go To Sleep

i have to stop having caffeine or i will again stay up in my bed with my ipod thinking "i will go to bed when this song is over" "no i will go to bed when this album is over", only to put my ipod on shuffle after, be reminded of Wu-Tang, discover i'm really really in the mood for Wu-Tang, and not go to sleep after i've listened to every favorite Wu-Tang song, every favorite song from the solo albums i have by the members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and the highlights of Wire's 154, which i was reminded of because Wire is two artists away from Wu-Tang Clan in the artist list.

GLORY HALLELUJAH

i was looking for another quote in psychotic reactions and carburetor dung and found that one and i liked it. and what i want to do actually is avoid the pressure of trying to say something worthwhile about music and instead just focus in on the experience of acquiring a new cd ha BECAUSE: ONCE UPON A TIME dan sent me some mekons songs and i really, really, really liked them. they stayed at the top of my mental list of music to purchase for a long time but i faced many obstacles and many months of torture and longing because there's nothing like having a little taste of something and not being able to have any more. i finally ordered an album, fear and whiskey, which seemed like the right one to order for now and i had the highest hopes and only got to listen in little pieces in little car rides to work but driving home i was halfway through the album and the happiest person in the world. when an alubm exceeds your high expectations and is so good and fresh and the beginning of something new it's almost a joke, i was laughing to myself. not the way i laugh maliciously as i rip the packaging off a new album, this is a laugh of pure exaltation and appreciation, throwing back my head and shouting to the heavens above in appreciation. oh God. how did you know? you're too good to me. thank you for shining your light on me. things were really getting good as i was driving home and i was thinking how happy i was that i made such a good purchase. it wasn't time to think though, or form anything like an opinion or try to make comparisons (even though i couldn't help thinking what a poppy punky fun 80s post-punk snythy alternative country cousin of the pogues they were even though i think i only say the pogues because of the fiddle) it was time to just appreciate. i've had the album for 24 hours now and although i know it better than the back of my hand already it's still not a time for discussion. but now what i was going to say was this that i remembered reading in psychotic reactions and carburetor dung, i'll just write the end of it because it's very long... "... i saw myself on a thousand occasions walking toward my car with a brisk and purposeful step, turning the key in the ignition and varooming off high as a hotrodder in anticipation of the revelations waiting in thirty-five or forty minutes of blasing sound soon as I got home, the eternal promise that THIS time the guitars will jell like TNT and set off galvanic sizzles in your brain 'KABLOOIE!' and this time at least at last blow your fucking lid sky-high. Brains gleaming on the ceiling, sticking like putty stalactites, while yer beserk body runs around and slams outside hollering subhuman gibberish, jigging in erratic circles and careening split-up syllables insistently like a geek with a bad case of the superstar syndrome." he goes on to describe how that's the fantasy and often the reality is you're disappointed. but i was thinking how wonderful it is when you're not...... everything's really cookin lately. along with discovering new bands there's been a real resurgance of old favorites who've come back stronger than ever to kick my ass like elvis costello, don't know why this happened; why it wasn't a full blown obsesssion until now. two albums that are new for me which have added to this greatly are Get Happy!! and Imperial Bedroom but i'm not ready to talk about them.

Slapping On Sides And Feeling Good

"So perhaps the truest autobiography I could ever write, and I know this holds as well for many other people, would take place largely at record counters, jukeboxes, pushing forward in the driver's seat while AM walloped you on, alone under headphones with vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs in the brain through insomniac postmidnights, or just to sit at leisure stoned or not in the vast benign lap of America, slapping on sides and feeling good."

I Am A Poor Man But I Have My Riches

Yesterday i took two books from the library, ones i've definitely taken out before at some point in my life but maybe didn't get around to or didn't appreciate. one is lester bangs' psychotic reactions and carburetor dung whatever that means and one is "rock and roll: the 100 best singles" by paul williams. the 100 best singles is really suspicious and ghetto looking. psychotic reactions is good so far, it will take a while to get through 'cause it's dense as anything and supersaturated with the type of psychobabble one might expect from lester bangs. as far as the other book goes, i think i have found my soulmate. although my best 100 singles would be different (and i don't know all the songs in it either... but as he explains at the beginning of the book everyones lists would be different of course, but also because of the exact date in which he was born... if he had been born 10 years earlier different things would be significant to him. so it's just better that way to just say what you think are the best and acknowledge that it's only your list) anyway he is my soulmate. i get a the same kind of pleasure from reading what he says about songs as i do from listening to them (i don't mean that though). it's basically this very straightforward, observant, confident way of describing what's there. it's how i wish i could write about music! the way that music sometimes says what i wish i could say, he says what i wish i could say about music. and it's emotional. and sometimes it's weird and vague and it's funny because i've always said my writing is so fluffy and that's true but his writing is sometimes like pure fluff in the most genius way!
i mean listen to this fluffjunk. i mean the first sentence is the word "elsewhere"
"(title: Marquee Moon) Elsewhere. Let me take you away from this. A good poem, a good record, pulls you up by the roots in its first sweep of words, sounds, images, and you let go oh so naturally and easily and allow yourself to be transported. In music we travel. Where? Here. Place that sounds like this. Oh. I like it. Is there some other way to get there? No, man, only this record..."
He uses a lot of personal experience to relate to Ray Davies' feelings in Waterloo Sunset and ends the piece with this "This is what music is about: direct transmission of the most profound secrets of the human heart. This is the source of its healing power. The singer's undisguised anxiety, his fiercely imaginative and intuitive songwriting techniques, the beauty of his voice and the brilliance of his band's supporting performance, all these things open the door. But what comes through at rare moments like this one is beyond any possibility of explanation. The only word for it is grace."
He writes about Don't Worry Baby by the Beach Boys, which over time i've come to realize is probably undeniably my favorite song in a world where i never thought i could have a favorite song. i could never explain why. it was too pure to touch. too heavenly to bring to the ground and take apart. but he does it. "At a certain level of intensity there is a complete lack of artifice. Don't Worry Baby is one of the pinnacles of rock and roll artistry because of its utter unselfconsciousness, its innocent, unmatchable power and sincerity. 'Well it's been building up inside of me for oh I don't know how long...' This first line is self-referential; it describes the music we're hearing, the feelings that are being shared. What's been building up is the speaker's need to confess his anxiety to the listener..."
But here is where i really get the soulmate idea:
"(Title: Please Please Me) Start over. Follow these simple instructions. Get a set of headphones and sound system with some kind of decent amplifier, and a copy of please please me (album, single, cassette, cd, whatever you can find. If you don't have it, knock on the two or three doors closest to your domicile, you'll come up with a copy, guaranteed). Turn off the speakers and listen to the song on headphones a couple of times. Then turn up the volume as high as you think you can bear and listen to it a few more times.
Keep going. Louder. Crank that sucker up. Push your limits.
Louder. Come on, you could be saving yourself thousands of dollars of psychotherapy here. Louder! That's it. Over the top. Breakthrough. Bliss. Release. Your heart is pounding, your bones are vibrating, your spirit wants to push away the walls of the world and scream to the far galaxies 'come on (come on) come on (come on) come on (come on) (come on) come on (COME ON!)- I swear to god, it's like I've never heard this record before, never really understood what the Beatles were all about until this evening. It's not that I haven't gone this far, but I guess I was just too proud to let those absurdly popular, universally palatable Beatles be the ones to bring me here.
I was a fool. This record is as tough and as revolutionary as anything any punk or heavy metallist ever attempted. It could kill you. It could set you free."
In reference to The Last Time by the Rolling Stones he writes: "I am a poor man, but I have my riches, and one of them is the sound these guitars make when I listen to this single (no cd, no album or cassette track, not the same I tell you) with the treble up. It's a sound that calls forth the life in me. Always has a still does. Music everlasting."
His writing is like... soul to paper. nothing in between. in the same way that music should be soul to... sound, i guess. i can't even insult it by using the word genuine, it's too genuine to concern itself with a word like that which suggests that some things aren't. and what transpires most is how much he loves music. that's what makes it so good to read. and he really acknowledges the fact that music, no matter what, is a personal experience. no matter what there is a listener who is having their own personal experience with it, that's what it is. if a tree falls in the middle of the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound. what's also great is the way he weaves lines from the songs into his own writing, without quotes, it's so so effective i can't explain why. and he jumps around with structured thought and random babbling and lines from the song and it's perfect. and i mean you'd have to read the pieces in full to really get it. and there's a lot more (a hundred of them in fact) and i haven't read all of them. but now i've gone and written the longest entry ever using someone else's writing!
and now i'm going to end it with his last paragraph from his piece on You Really Got Me. yes. and how else could this end but this.
"You really got me. I am really caught by you. This is truth for me, at this moment. I am filled and bursting with it, intoxicated by it, bleeding from it, can't live without it. Play the song again, please. I am starting to have a sense of my own existence."

Psychedelic Sounds

okay i was watching a documentary on Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators but i didn't finish yet. roky was diagnosed with schizophrenia really early on i think. although i haven't gotten completely into them as of now (although i do like them a lot) i can appreciate all that was unheard of. his voice, the amount of drugs, the feedback, that jug thing (what is that? i didn't know what it was until now, it's like the greatest sound ever added to music and it's unique to them exists throughout all their songs and that guy is just making the noise into a jug the whole time bdaa bdaka btgaa btka tka). i don't know, i feel like i always say things like this ha ha because i want to say everyone is just ground-breaking (so sometimes i'm wrong) but who else was playing anything that sounded like the Psychedelic Sounds and You're Gonna Miss Me in 1966? at one point in the movie, the present day roky walks into his home, turns on cartoons on the tv, turns that way up, turns on some weird sound effects, turns that way up, turns on one of those automatic songs that comes on a keyboard, turns that way up, turns on some more sound effects, some music, some fuzz (i lost track) and sits down in a chair and puts on his sunglasses and goes to sleep. his mother says he falls asleep that way every day and only wakes up when she turns the sounds off. i went through a phase where i thought i was on the verge of going crazy just because of how much went on in my head, how i couldn't fall asleep before 4 for a couple months and the extent to which i was able to let myself delve deeply into an obsession of music while letting everything else fall apart. (quite a MILD form of insanity looking back on it) sometimes i hated the way it was and sometimes i loved it. i blurred the line between sanity and insanity by coming to a conclusion- if we're not living to do want we want and love what we love in whatever manner we feel fitting then what are we living for. better to be insane. things have changed since then, that's just how it is for me. i still believe in that idea though and i'll to hold onto it forever but i need balance and peace. it's just interesting... witnessing the remains of a man who sacrificed himself to my favorite kind of insanity. it's the kind of thing that's fascinating in theory but of course everyone knows... eeevverryyonne knows the reality, the ultimate cliche. it's so sad but see also i'm torn because that's what he wanted. i probably am just romanticizing as usual though even after all that