self help reading + music

from The Midnight, Susan Howe:

Often a well dressed stranger with obsessive compulsive disorder par excellence used to pace the sidewalk outside our building for an hour or more at a time. He appeared to be proceeding in the direction of the water, but at each line of transition between pavement slabs, he halted in a frenzy of anxiety. There followed an explosive colloquy between himself and the concrete. Where philosophy stops, poetry is impelled to begin. He was a man, far away from home, biting his nails at destiny. Pavement to the west which must be crossed, pavement to the east which must not be left. Forward the minutely particular thin line. “Jump at it!” With the stride of a giant, or like any artist attempting a leap in a single direction, he propelled himself forward; but some rigidly elaborate rule having nothing to do with realism from him (praying, counting, gesticulating) back. A ghostly skeptic. Overcompliant. . . . “We’ll hang together – or together we’ll hang.” The direction is always towards the middle. There are people who can challenge transition on its own terms and people who cannot. He was one who could not. As I watched his inertial journey, the murderous aphorism “Step on a crack – break your mother’s back” continually inserted itself into my thoughts. I wondered about the relation between one concrete slab to another concrete slab.

(think: that Elmwood Ave. feeling)

The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist. (video) or mp3version. The LP is Since I Left You.

self help reading + music

from “Flesh and Blood”, Louise Erdrich:

“I just put the wax down,” I said. “You have to wait.” He stood there looking at me over that long, shiny space. It rolled and gleamed like a fine lake between us. And it deepened. I saw that he was about to take the first step, and I let him, but halfway into the room his eyes went dark. He was afraid of how deep this was going to become. So I did for him what I learned from the nun. I put my hand through what scared him. I held it out there for him. And when he took it with all the strength of his arms, I pulled him in.

-----

from Impossible Exchange, Jean Baudrillard:

Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. (now ya tell me)

(in that case) Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna (“have fun”) (mp3)

Is it not our constant desire, in the absence of God, to convert this accidental world into something intended for us . . ? And it matters little whether the outcome is good or bad, provided this fatedness transforms us into strange attractors, which is something we all dream of. (ouch) Just because a tile falls off a roof, there isn’t necessarily someone underneath it at the right moment: that would be too good to be true. . . Yet we feel (we who?) that everyone somehow dreams of such a fateful conjunction—if not, perhaps of being the person right underneath the tile. –It reminds us of the days when the powers of heaven and hell did battle over our souls.

Bishop Allen – Vain (mp3)

-----

From “Love Medicine”, Louise Erdich:

We filed in that time. Me and Grandpa. We sat down in our pews. Then the rosary got started up pre-Mass and that’s when Grandpa filled up his chest and opened his mouth and belted out them words.
HAIL MARY FULL OF GRACE.
He had a powerful set of lungs.
And he kept on like that. He did not let up. He hollered and he yelled them prayers, and I guess people was used to him by now, because they only muttered theirs and did not quit and gawk like I did. I was getting red-faced, I admit. I give him the elbow once or twice, but that wasn’t nothing to him. He kept on. He shrieked to heaven and he pleased like a movie actor and he pounded his chest like Tarzan in the Lord I am Not Worthies. I thought he might hurt himself. Then after a while, I guess I got used to it, and that’s when I wondered: how come?
So afterwards I out and asked him. “How come? How come you yelled?”
“God don’t hear me otherwise,” said Grandpa Kashpaw.
I sweat. I broke right into a little cold sweat at my hairline because I knew this was perfectly right and for years and not one damn other person had noticed it. God’s been going deaf. Since the Old Testament, God’s been deafening up on us. I read, see. Besides the dictionary, which I’m constantly in use of, I had this Bible once. I read it. I found there was discrepancies between then and now. It struck me. Here God used to raineth bread down from clouds, smite the Phillipines, sling fire down on red-light districts where people got stabbed. He even appeared in person once in a while. God used to pay attention, is what I’m saying.
Now there’s your God in the Old Testament and there is Chippewa Gods as well. . . . Our Gods aren’t perfect, but at least they come around. They’ll do you a favor if you ask them right. You don’t have to yell. But you have to know, like I said, how to ask in the right way.

Ben Harper and The Blind Boys from Alabama – Mother Pray

self help reading + music

from Women as Lovers, Elfriede Jelinek:

contentment flourishes here, one can see that
whoever is not made content by the landscape, is made completely content by children and husband. whoever is not made content by landscape, children and husband, is made completely content by work.
but our story begins somewhere else entirely: in the city.

here too women sew, which they like.
they don’t sew what they like, but sewing in itself is already in the women’s blood.
they only need to let this blood out.
this is peaceful women’s work.
many women sew half-heartedly, the other half of their heart is occupied by their family, some women sew with all their heart, it is not the very best who do that.
our story, which will soon be over, begins in the urban island of peace.
if someone experiences fate, then not here.
if someone has a fate, then it’s a man, if someone gets a fate, then it’s a woman.
sadly life passes one by here, only work remains.
sometimes one of the women tries to join the life that’s passing by and to chat a little.
sadly life then often drives off by car, too fast for the bicycle.

------

from Drawn and Quartered: Stabs at Bewilderment, E.M. Cioran (I just cannot get enough of this guy lately. That deadpan tone, between a mortal thud and a littlebrotherly hard pinch to the upper arm):

In the usual boredom, we desire nothing, we lack even the curiosity to weep; in the excess of boredom it is just the contrary, for this excess incites us to action, and weeping is an action.

To be infatuated with lost causes leads one to suppose that they are all just that, and one is not entirely mistaken. (hahahah o boy)

Time, accomplice of exterminators, disposes of morality. Who, today, bears a grudge against Nebuchadnezzar? (I’m getting a t-shirt that reads “nebuchadnezzar”)

I have never been able to find out what being means, except sometimes in eminently nonphilosophical moments. (sewing?)

Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

We forget the body, but the body does not forget us . . .

Raintribe – Anyday Now (mp3)

self help reading + music

I can tell by your middle finger that you’re warming up to me.

Brad Sucks. He ran 6 miles with me today, and by the time we’d gone 4, I felt kinda crushed out like he writes this shit just for me, and I had to keep going along with him until I came to a shaky dead end of energy somewhere right next to weeping. I picture him looking maybe like Ed Nortony Bob Dylan young w more ass maybe. He's Canadian, and though it's a big place it seems like he's so right there nextdoorish in a basement with internet access waiting for a fan club to materialize out of nowhere into his lap (unless he's gay) (or, like, 12). When others fail, he helps me get to that endorphins-sweeten-my-fear-and-loathing place, and he can keep me there cruising the miles at a steady pace, making my mind up, sick as a dawg, a dirtbag under the weather, resting all by myself on the borderline. (O Brad, I could never forgive Requiem for a Dream either.) He’s playing a pub in Napean ONT tonight, wherever the hell that is, some middle of coldnoplaceville like most of the rest of that wretched country. Ah well. Passing him on is the best I can do . . . from an interview in Flak: I start off telling people, "Yeah, I'm on this fake Internet label that isn't good but new and different and they're not giving me an advance and they're not paying for my tour and they're not doing anything really for me." And people are like, "You're on a label? Wow, that's so cool!" . . . The arts are just fucked.

How can ya not love a guy who captures so effortlessly the ‘just fuckedness’ of just fucked, and who can do an Abba cover?

Fixing My Brain (mp3)
SOS (mp3)

I never wanted to learn my lessons. All I wanted was a little attention. (from your mouth to God's ear boy)
-----

Meanwhile, woopsie? From the [weird] news: A written report from Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago says Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting. Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions . . .

MC Frontalot - Rewind (mp3)

self-help reading + music

From The Temptation to Exist, E.M. Cioran:

“A life of intensity is contrary to the Tao,” teaches Lao Tse, a normal man if ever there was one. But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves.

“If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable” (Chuang Tse). A maxim as profound as it is invalid. The apogee of indifference—how attain it, when our very apathy is tension, conflict, aggression?

There are certain forms of wisdom and deliverance which we can neither grasp from within nor transform into our daily substance, nor even frame in a theory. Deliverance, if we insist upon it, must proceed from ourselves: no use seeking it elsewhere in a ready-made system . . .

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events, and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us into adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time. If I keep myself in a vertical position and prepare to fulfill the coming moment—if, in short, I conceive the future, a fortunate dislocation of my mind is involved. I subsist and act insofar as I am a raving maniac, insofar as I carry my lunacies to their conclusion. Once I become reasonable, everything intimidates me; I slide toward absence, toward springs which do not deign to flow, toward that prostration which life must have known before conceiving movement. I accede, by dint of cowardice, to the heart of all things, clinging to an abyss I would not dream of relinquishing, since it isolates me from becoming. An individual, like a people, like a continent, dies out when he shrinks from both rash plans and rash acts, when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within it, takes refuge there.

---

BluesRoute’s 5th “Daily Journey Into the Delta”, on Blind Willie Johnson here or skip the stuff and go right to the song

“Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” (mp3) (if you’re an alien, you can have this track for free--but I had a hell of a time finding it)

self-help reading + music

from Ray Davies interview (by Chris Heath), on the release this month of Other People's Lives, his first solo album:

So you think that by grasping international pop stardom you'd taken a wrong turn?
Yeah. Yeah. And I've been fighting against it ever since. The people around me are confused by it. This thing I did this weekend--a benefit in Stockholm for AIDS in Africa--I did on the condition that there were no cameras when I was performing. Consequently, no pictures were taken and I didn't get any publicity. But that's the way I am. As soon as I know it's a hype, there's something inside me that turns off. I think I was just obstinate and stubborn all my life, and it hasn't changed. [laughs] I was born that way.

You seem amused by it.
I'm trying to learn to live with it. I'll either laugh about it or I'll break down and cry. Because I really have missed so many opportunities for myself because I have refused to enter the door where all the lights are on and the cameras are rolling, some starlett on my arm. Play the game, go out and get the right awards. I find that very very difficult to do because there's a part of me that would rather be living in an attic somewhere, having meetings with fellow attic dwellers to overthrow the world. [looks at me curiously] Are you from Watford?

You know, that's about the rudest thing anyone's ever said to me. [Watford is a drab, unremarkable town just outside London.] Absolutely not.
Okay. Good.

Why did you say that?
I don't know. I thought I'd just break the ice.

Consider it broken.
Okay.

All She Wrote (mp3), the LP comes out this week.
Lola (mp3), for old time's sake (love this so, too--and here's to Linda Florentine while I'm at it, because who could ever look at a chainlink fence the same way again, speaking of not-girly boys?)




from GQ, Feb 06, bio/review Cat Power and the new cd The Greatest:

There are only two kinds of Cat Power shows. There are the good ones, when Marshall managed to overcome the paralyzing discomfort she feels onstage and plays her songs--which tend to be either slow and winsome or slow and bone-chilling forlorn--without false starts or abrupt endings. And then there are the bad ones--the ones where she fixates on some small issue, like a buzz in her monitor or the thought that she may have replaced her keys, to the point that it makes her unable to perform and she ends up backstage on a couch, exhibiting many of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Tonight's show fell into the latter category . . . The diehards stayed rapt and quiet, as if they had stumbled upon a grazing unicorn and didn't want to spook it, but the casual observers stopped listening and started ordering more drinks. . . "I'm sorry" she says . . . I just feel crazy and weird right now." She says it again, in a loud whisper: "I'm sorry." [forgive me]

(She talks like that girl we all went to college with, the ninth-semester pottery major with the good heart and the acid-cured synapses, who always had some crucially important but inscrutable point to make about freedom or the sun or a rainbow in a puddle outside a Bob Weir concert.)

The bandleader at the Greatest sessions was Teenie Hodges, who was Al Green's longtime guitarist and co-wrote "Take Me to The River." On the first day of recording, Hodges brought Marshall a bottle of Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey. "It's not like giving somebody a bottle of Jack Danniel's," Marshall says. "He has asked where I was from, and on purpose gave me Georgia moonshine." This meant more to Marshall than Hodges could have known, since she'd recently discovered a clause in her tour rider forbidding club owners to provide her with liquor. "I was like, really?" Marshall says. "It was, like, a protective measure that they took because I'd, like, lost it, I guess and was drinking too much. As people do sometimes. So [the gift] made everything warm and friendly." I wonder why she's telling me these things. I'm not sure if she's the most self-conscious person I've ever met or she's utterly devoid of the basic self-awareness that keeps most people from acting weird (and saying potentially self-incriminating things).

There is talk of going to a bar later that night, but I start to feel like I've gone about as far up this river as I'm willing to go . . . On the way back, I'm thinking of [the photo shoot]. We were on a narrow street where the photographer has been taking pictures of Marshall sitting in a chair on the lawn of a rotting two-room house. Poloroids from the shoot were spread out on the hood of the photographer's rented Gran Torino convertible. Marshall thought her arms looked fat in all of them. Finally, she found an image she liked. It was an early test shot of the lawn and the chair, without Marshall in it. "That one's good," she said, and I could have sworn she smiled.

In This Hole (mp3) (whoa, love this so)
The Greatest (mp3)