Archives : all posts by Dan

Mean Wind - "Gleam Leaf Green"

In an interview that never took place outside a gig in Hope, Carolina, Joel Tunnet, lead singer for Ginch Mob was covered in a thick paste of beer and coke sweat, and gave the following speech, half to a handycam half through a megaphone, to a bunch of fans he kept referring to as 'looters of the spirit': "Some people call me a revivalist, I say fuck them! I'm a SURvivalist! I bring water forth from the earth, I bring beauty forth from these speakers, I bring noise through the filter in your heads, I drag it through like cheesecloth and it's all dirty when it comes back to me. You know what grey water is?! I'm not a revisionist historian, man, but I do have a correctile dysfunction, I can't help being right! Hindsight is 20/20 and I'm way ahead of all you motherfuckers, so I can see it clear as day, this ship is going down and I'm not gonna go down with it. You all can quit bending over 'cause I'm done, I came, I'm gone, and you loved it!" He says more but the squeaking of the megaphone distorted it beyond salvageable. He's a genius. [Free. Oh yes.]

-------PALETTE-CLEANSING SILENCE-------

The Frogs - "I've Got Drugs (Out of the Mist)"

"Fuck him, fuck him if he wants you to, show him a good time. Get him drunk, do what he says, talk to him, fuckin' listen to him for fuck's sake, that's what he wants most of all. I mean, he's an alien for God's sake, I know it's not cool to call them that but that's what he is goddammit. He's an alien from outer space, plain and simple. And he works hard, he works hard so your kids can go to school and learn all the shit they learn and you can get your teeth taken care of, and your hair taken care of, and your goddamn tits taken care of, so the least you could do is listen to him when he talks. Take him to Joey's, get him a meat stick, take him rolling, maybe check out a Shakes Hall or somethin', fuck, I don't know, just show him a good time. You know what it means to show someone a good time? Do you really know what that means? Make eye contact with him, dammit, that's important. I know their eyes are all fucked up, so screwed up and disgusting it makes you wanna puke, but make eye contact with him, that's important. Smile. Fuckin' smile, that's important. Comment on what he says, have something to say about the things he's talkin' about. You know this is all common sense shit, but it's important, some people don't even know to do that stuff. And you're good at it, hoo boy. Baby, you are good at it when you want to be. So turn it on, baby, brighten up his day, his week, hell, brighten up his goddamn year. He could use it. And you could use it too, you look like you're still hung up on that dirtbag you used to call a husband. Show him a good time. And fuck him if he wants to." [Buy It's Only Right & Natural]

(image of the great Tune-Yards in Glastonbury)

Shyne - "Rollersong"

Young Bruce sat tear-eyed in the corner and sung
With voice sotto, his knees pulled up to his chest,
"The Good Lord's love has left me nigh wrung,"
He looked out the window, he'd forgotten the rest.

Bruce prayed every night for a change to arrive,
"Take my soul, my Good Lord, do not keep me alive,
Lest you pluck me from wand'ring this dark wild wood,
Please God grant me leave of my childhood."

But he had eaten no muffin and this wasn't a story,
He had drank no damn potion and had no crumb trail,
Bruce looked up at heaven and said, "I wish you'd ignored me,"
And poked his head out the window, looking quite like a snail.

Bruce dragged 'round that house for the rest of his life,
He'd wanted to be 'grown-up' but could now take no children, no job, and no wife,
Orphan Bruce had reached God, which is far more than most,
Only God had felt guilty, and so tripled his dose.

[buy old Shyne]

Swans - "Reeling the Liars In"

This song is about justice, doled out by the guilty. Punishment on all sides, reciprocal ruin. I am attracted to this attrition, it shows dedication, loyalty, grit. Recently, I heard one 12-year-old say to another "pain is only temporary, quitting lasts forever". Yeah, the fact that it lasts forever is what makes it so good.

[Buy]

The Intelligence - "Males"

In here it's a different world, in this world there's no Lady Gaga, there's no Ceelo, there's nothing fun and sexy. It's a damp dark basement, it's exposed brick and paint over paint over paint. You could take a core sample of the air in this place, and you'd see a rainbow of colours, the rings of age. There's no fresh fruit or new books, it's all mouldy old cast-off and dried preserves. And the lights buzz a noise that ruins your hearing. Take your pick: watch or listen, you can't have both. [Buy]

The Harvey Girls - "Smile Like Gwynplaine"

I will not argue over the merit of those minor chords, the moaning chorus. They are like that guy, when you're playing keep-the-beach-ball-in-the-air, they're that guy that pulls a fakie like "oh, I'm gonna let it drop" but he's got it the whole time? They're like that. [Buy

(image by Hilma af Klint)

John Cale - "Summer Heat"
Fela Ransome Kuti & The Africa '70 - "Swegbe & Pako"

BeatGrooves teaches a free drumming class in Pierre-Gérand park on some summer afternoons.

"I wanna go!" Jason wears cut-offs and a Dragonball t-shirt, and stands in front of the BeatGrooves banner.

"Do you wanna go, Ryan?" Jason and Ryan are staying with their grandmother in Pointe-Claire.

"No, not really," Ryan wears dress pants and skate shoes, a bit of dark hair on his upper lip and between his eyebrows.

"Come on, it'll be fun," their grandmother says, taking a long drag, dealing with the kids in one place is hard enough.

The next day all three of them are at the free BeatGrooves lesson, with assigned djembe in hand. The class is about 15 people, and it's attracting attention from around the park. The spunky instructors in tight t-shirts and radio mics.

Jason taps timidly away at his djembe, smiling up at the instructor. Ryan pounds frantically at his drum, as if trying to patter through three lessons at once, some kind of double-speed head-down show off. Their grandmother, meanwhile, has almost no rhythm at all. She hits the drum at random intervals, and her sunglasses and half-smile are a sign to the group that she doesn't want to talk about it.

Jason closes his eyes and begins to feel the music. The boom-boom-cha and the dut-dut-bop and all of the noise together. He feels that rhythm is the great unifying thing that crosses all borders and differences like love or natural disasters. Even deaf people could feel rhythm for goodness' sake. Jason is smiling euphorically now, taking his small drumming steps as he's instructed and beginning to feel like he may be part of a whole system of energy called Mother Nature, that he may be in the blood that beats the pulse of the universe, and that today he has been shown that the light lives within him, trying to scrape its way into the world, and that he can let it out through his openness, through drumming.

An enthusiastic young girl down the row from Jason is showing lots of potential and commitment, she's shouting and adding an extra bap or tup here or there, the kind of energy that BeatGrooves likes to highlight. The instructor brings her to the front of the class to be the metronome for everyone else.

"Follow Julie, tout le monde, she's the leader now. Go Julie! Go Julie! Go Julie!"

Jason's brother Ryan, still trying to play a beat so fast he'll lap the rest of the class, takes no notice of Julie at all. Jason's grandmother is still a masque of medium enjoyment and zero rhythm. Jason, however, is losing steam. His smile is fading and within a few minutes he's tapping lazily with one finger, leaning back in his chair. By the end of class, when they're handing back their djembes and Julie is high-fiving Alex the instructor, Jason is holding back tears.

He stands in the bright hot sun, outside the drum tent, with his brother and his grandmother, suddenly looking dumb and pointless in the grass, like the Three Bears of BeatGrooves. Way too much rhythm, way too little, and Jason in the middle, with almost but not quite enough rhythm, to compete with the likes of Julie and her funky braids and her neon socks. The Julies of the world will always get the attention, the Jasons will always stand dumb in the grass with their dumb families and their dumb bodies in dumb clothes.

"Wanna get some ice cream?" another long drag. They head to the car and Ryan thinks about what it would take to make homemade fireworks.

[Buy Open & Close]
[Buy Sun Blindness Music]

Neil Young & Crazy Horse - "Ride My Llama"

"In the ongoing battle against sobriety and writer's block, just showing up with a drink in your hand is half the battle."

In college a young classmate of mine, who could not hold his drink very well, had one of the most peculiar, affected, and downright nerdy drunk habits I've ever seen. When he would have two too many rum & cokes, which was often, he would take to reciting, verbatim, the correspondences and arguments between famous writers. Playing both parts, he would storm around the room saying things like "systematization is a thing the literary world hasn't seen before!" and then answer back, "but a system is boring, like the clockwork of government!" It was embarrassing to say the least, people would usually watch for a minute, perched on the arm of a chair, and then leave to the balcony to have a real conversation. In one of these situations, I found myself penned in by his pacing. I would have had to interrupt his little script in order to get past, and I was too polite, and too unsure that a better conversation awaited me on the other side, that I just sat there. I thought about the idea that one must know as much about the creative works of one's time and the creative works of history in order to maturely add to the canon of new creative work. I thought about what it would be like to consume every conceivable piece of media in order to make an educated statement about the current situation of creativity, or to make anything truly new. It would be a lot of Law & Order episodes, a lot of Dean Koontz novels, plenty of Steely Dan, Zucker Brothers movies, freshman-year poetry compilations, Jandek albums, the works of all the Justins, for instance: Bieber, Timberlake, Trudeau, and Long. Ugh the non-fiction alone is staggering, but it would be worth it.

[Buy]

The Walkmen - "Victory"

I let myself in to the house on the hill. I went straight up the bendy staircase and straight into the wispy muslin bedroom at the end of the hall. I felt like a drowned rat served up on a gourmet dinner tray.

"You look like hell."
"You can't stay here. Call your mother or your sister or whatever goddamn relation'll take you in and I'll get you a cab to the station."
"Get out of my house. I told you I'd shoot you if I saw you here again."
I smiled at the thought of taking a bullet in the stomach, it'd be the only thing I'd eaten in three days. I took the torn piece of paper from my pocket and held it between my fingers. Suddenly she wasn't so chatty.
"You did it. You slept with him--"
"Denton!"
"--don't Denton me, not now. Just listen. I trusted you and you lied to me. You slept with him and everyone knows it 'cause you couldn't help but sign the back of your own goddamn photo. You had to sign every one of them, didn't you?"
"What do you care? You said yourself you'd never love a woman as cold as me."
"It's not me that cares, dollface, it's your husband. If I leave here without putting you in a cab headed to somewhere with real fast-moving locomotives, you'll be dead within the hour."

She cracked a fortune cookie and looked inside. I called for two cabs, headed to the airport and the train station respectively. I thought I'd better high-tail it to Nowheresville myself for a little while, something was telling me, with a thick and hearty throbbing in my lungs, that I wasn't too welcome in this town for as long as it takes to burn down my apartment and start a new identity. Perhaps I'll go with Banks this time. Dennis Banks.

"Hey look," she said, absently, the way an electric chair will absently tell you to have a seat, "this fortune cookie is all mixed up. The fortune is ripped in half, I can't read it properly."

[pre-order]