Welcome to the BsideWHORE Archive

2007-07-14T23:28:00.000-04:00

BsideWHORE, after a run of several issues over a couple of years plus one amazing and fabulous party, has come to a hiatus. With sadness at ending (at least for now) but great pride in what we've accomplished, we're moving the WHORE here to blogspot as an archive - all the articles, poems, stories, and pics have shifted. The main site (www.bsidewhore.com) will be closing down soon, so be sure to change your link to our new spot here at www.bsidewhore.blogspot.com.

The archive is set up in one post, with the most recent issue first, so if you're looking for our earliest articles, scroll all the way down. If you would like to contact any of our writers, or if there are any problems with this archive, please write to me at ccp5475@gmail.com.

Thanks so much to everyone who contributed, everyone who read, everyone who supported our little mag in all the many ways you did.

With much peace and love,
Claudia
_____________________________________________________________________________

June 2006

theEDITOR

just like starting over.
claudia pisano

it has been a full year and then some since our last issue. fitting for an outfit as underground as ours, no? ah well, that is okay, my friends. we will be rewarded who wait and all that, as they say. and as this issue here in your hands is so very many days past due, so are most of the words within - the impossibly diligent bsidewhore writers answered my call to 'write!' when i asked them so long ago, and the result now is that the pieces here refer to, sometimes, the end of a never-ending summer when of course we are just beginning all over again. this is my fault, not theirs. my apologies to all, writers and readers both.

apologies not withstanding, this issue shall both please you and signal the wrapping up of loose ends and the unwrapping of new beginnings. (all these beginnings. i am in a contemplative mood. and listening to abbey road, at the moment.)

and what are all these beginnings, you by now will want to know. well. that is the question, isn't it. what we're thinking about is expansion, in scope. we want to take in more, talk about more, open ourselves to and for more. (though underground as always, for who but the underground will have us, whores as we are, i ask?)

there is ferment. it is at the moment highly unsettled, as i believe it should remain. the very loosest of ideas are forming, ideas about activism, poetry, politics, environment, humor, art, film, and of COURSE, music (it is the driving force for me and is behind all i do).

so! take a leisurely browse through this june 2006-but-really-october 2005 issue of bsidewhore, and keep your eyes out and ears open for change. we shall return in some form at some time, when the ferment settles just a bit and we can see through the dust.

until then,
claudia

***

A-sideWHORE

Spatial Disharmony and the Body's Dissonance
George Fragopoulos

Perhaps of all the traits which inform the conception of an artistic work the hardest to trace or discover is the living and breathing space that resides outside of that very work. All aesthetic representation is very much of a space, and it is up to the reader/listener/onlooker to determine how so.

The city, for example, in all its myriad forms and sizes, shapes and pressures, has long been a muse to the artist. It has been a defining space for many an artist and has influenced works of art in a variety of medium. This is all clearly self evident; what is not so evident is how actual space itself makes its presence felt in any aesthetic work. A work of art, regardless of the shape it takes, created within the space of the city is very much a product of that environment, even if this is not made explicit in the aesthetic piece itself.

It would also not be a stretch to say that it would be much harder to find the city, or the city's space, within a song than in a painting or piece of literature, because, as we all know and need not mention once again, music is the most abstract of art forms. Even when it is simple, direct, forceful, we know that it speaks in a language that is just outside of language. Regardless of how much music theory we may have rattling around in our heads, there is always something there that can never be truly grasped with the language that we possess.

The questions remain: how does space take its place within song and how does it make its presence felt? What of spatial pressures? What of New York?

I believe that New York City is an interesting case to study for a variety of reasons. Of all the cities in the world, is there one that is more prone to shattering our conceptions of fundamental spatial relations? One can say that New York is at once the most unnatural and natural of cities. It contains all that makes the modern city the center of our modern preoccupations but it also is so completely unique that it stands apart from every other point on our ever shrinking globe. It is a city that exists everywhere and nowhere and only exists in its ability to be a center with no circumference.

Its disregard for human scale is something that many take for granted. Has there ever been a structure as disruptive to our sense of space as the skyscraper? What are we to make of buildings that turn people into marching ants, or tunnels that transform us into scurrying mammals beneath the world's surface? An architecture that transforms us into alienated creatures.

Then there is always the violent yoking of the heterogeneous. A quick jaunt can remove you from the uncomfortable confines of a building's shadow to the serenity of a Central Park. Whether the tree in the park is a much more 'natural' addendum to one's life or the building remains to be seen, for both were placed there for a reason and agency resides behind every object in the city. The world of inverted eyes, one might say. Regardless, the natural becomes that much more 'natural' because of its relations to that which is 'unnatural.' I would simply point out that the city, and this is true of every city, blurs the line between nature and culture. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but simply the way of the modern world. Take it as you will.

I would argue, and many would agree, that our conceptions of the world are very much informed by the way we view our bodies in relation to that world, and that to be living in a city which forces us to rethink our conceptions of our bodies places us, as creatures conceived and living within space, in a very peculiar position.

What of song? Take abstraction in song, or dissonance and the marriage of the two. Now apply that line of thinking to the music of New York. Why is it that so many songwriters from this part of the world are so concerned with bridging the gap between dissonance and melody? The point being that the contradictory space which resides at the center of this city makes its appearance as dissonance and abstraction within such songs. Melody is always easy to find, as is disharmony; the difficulty is combining the two to create something that resides somewhere in between. That is what the city, every city, New York in particular, provides for the musician with its disregard for spatial harmony: the ability to fashion of such a world a unique sonic representation. Concrete, trees, steel and miles of road are another interior world for the artist and we are all the better for it.

***

BEDROOMvoices

Dylan in the Colonies
Justin Rogers-Cooper

I
Watching Bob Dylan on PBS this week was as heartbreaking as the first time I saw D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, my first year of college, at the turn of the century, on the third floor of a dorm room. Six years later, cutting my own hair again, to see the young Dylan gracefully invent himself in the black and white edges of the early 1960s pushes my throat into my lungs. It's difficult to separate the perfectly handsome wizard from the bristle of the blissfully simple chord changes floating around the civil rights movement, the beat generation, the constellation of poets and artists attesting to his greatness from thirty or forty years on. My side of my generation has always suffered a certain envy over when and where our parents grew up, and how they, more or less, overturned western civilization.

Watching Dylan tell his story with self-conscious intensity summoned ineffable fatigue when the program ends. The contrast shrieks and thunders. We too live in age of pathetic political corruption, but our messengers came and went. Everything that's good came from then: open sexuality, equal rights, popular poetry, meaningful protest, constitutional revelation. The west was won when gas was cheap, young poets plentiful, and they crossed the country in heavy cars and scraggly hair. Flush with brave ambition, they combined art and audience on a scale rarely seen again. You may believe you've heard this before. You have. Go watch the Dylan footage anyway. It still hurts.

II
It amazes me that, in the last ten years, I heard most of my Dylan on cassette tapes. Full of awkward hisses, unprocessed and dumb, the tapes were appropriate for his voice, though perhaps not for the disproportionately barging pitches of the harmonica. Dylan makes less sense with iPods, the status twinkles wafting from their seductive, smooth rectangular pads, the sharp re-masters always promising us a shade closer. I made cassette "mixex" by the dozens, passed on Dylan to the uninitiated. I bought dozens of CDs from bootleg dealers in Columbus, shelling 30 dollars for discs of his early concerts and radio interviews.

On weekends, I drove through upstate New York for no reason at all in a used 1991 silver Corolla, faithfully attempting to memorize his lucid lyrics through the spits of the tape, the decayed popping static buffered through the old Toyota speakers since blown. The two lane highways weaved through bending bucolic passes over old state lines, between Saratoga and its satellites. Much was made that Dylan played at Cafe Lena, in downtown Saratoga, at the pinnacle of his blossoming mythology, before he made it. I walked up those stairs a few times to see local jazz. I'm ashamed I never found his initials carved under a table. Back then, with his poster on my wall, I could look at him and think: we're the same age.

III
I initially heard "Ballad of a Thin Man" that first year of college. I was working with heavy fever on a long paper on Fitzgerald's short stories. Everything was romantic and green; it must have been spring. You've been with the professors, they all like your looks-You've been though all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books-You're very well read, it's well known. I sat in shock at the appropriate lines, transfixed, ecstatic, silent. From there, shuffling through variations of the same work became my listening obsession, the sole desire of my attuned brain. At every opportunity back home in Ohio, I dragged my father to another independent CD store, searching for August 1964, or June 1963, or May 1965. Like my other previous and sequential fixations, he indulged me the depths of an unarticulated, repetitive search for an expression of a fundamental design, an artifact to satisfy my own lack. How does it feel-to be some kind of freak?

Since Dylan's words flay and flit all over, his voice sometimes overtakes you. The obvious strangeness of it, belonging to his time, to ours, and to an unapproachable past, strips you into the wild heart of nostalgia. He blends the magic of the 1960s with the pantheon of his characters and the pathos of their universe, surreal and forever young. Rarely do we feel closer to a place that remains otherwise so emblematic of enigma, burdened by history and personality. Like Shakespeare, he came from an unknown provincial corner to translate a nation, and to befuddle future cynics of his education and experience.

IV
In the early weeks of 2000, I wandered into a residence for an after party celebrating a lecture given by the visiting scholar from Boston University, Christopher Ricks. It's hard to reconstruct the details of the evening, aside from the colorful buffet in a room stacked with books wrinkled at their spines, except to say it introduced me to the special enthusiasms of English departments everywhere. Ricks seemed to inhabit the center of everyone's attention, due to his rapacious intellect, keen wit, and ready English penchant for drink. I respected his goals since they mirrored my own. At a moment's notice, he began reciting "Mr. Tambourine Man." This began, improbably, a few months of a memorable friendship.

After successfully jogging his memory by email a few months later, I met him at his beautiful shady house near Harvard that summer. His book on Dylan's lyrics had yet to appear, but he spoke at length about his intentions, and giddily recalled meeting Dylan himself. I briefly met his son and wife, and we chatted outside on a brick patio over tea before moving to his listening room. His own collection of Dylan bootlegs offered me an ideal beyond my means. He knew exactly what songs to play, from what albums, and had a flattering intuition about what I wanted. For the better part of an hour, we sat in silence, nodding our heads and tapping our feet. As a naïve student, I asked him before I left how he felt about Foucault, or Derrida. "I wouldn't advise it to my own son," he replied, and sent me off with six CDs of concerts for me to burn and return. He was right: they were great shows, and I mailed them back a year before he left Boston for Oxford.

V
Measuring sadness is an irrelevant task, because it's impossible. On a given day, we approach the logical routine of our lives with budding optimism and general appreciation for the kind comforts lifted from food, drink, humor, reading, intimacy, entertainment. On the other hand, these comforts can't replace the passing of our bodies through time. We feel compelled to wish for secret knowledge about our lives. Music is one way we can measure the impractical distance between life now and life then. Like the smell of familiar perfume or cologne long lost, we're infatuated by the blurry overflow rippling from the accidental blip songs recover from amnesia. For me, I suppose, Dylan now works through double effect. I am the epigone and the sudden old man, squelched by life I never saw, bereaved by missing life actually lived.

I trail the gusts always leading back toward a reluctant messiah, who arrived in New York forty-five years ago, confident as hell. There's plenty to see and do, undoubtedly, of course. You fall in love to Dylan only once, though, and that's happened, and I'm still in love, haunted by his whittled muses. In about four years, I'll leave the city no longer visibly or nominally young, and feel as distant to myself then as I do now. I quietly expect that Dylan may still reconcile the soft, final passage out from this world, into the next. I admit the rest will be fine, in any event. Though he may see me through, it's also clear he elevates the dementia of longing for the past because his genius exceeds other artifices that contain the history of myself. His presence represents the sacrifice of a dislocation, from the era of my open potential, from the hole where America still shimmers.

***

THEREareWORDS,youSEE

Garden Stories
Tim Keane

I
Virgin to the Garden: 1981

It was 1981, and I wasn't even fifteen. Listening to rock music was then strictly private liberation, even if Rolling Stone, NME, and Circus magazines and all the concert goers and the rock films and the radio stations--WPLJ, WNEW, WAPP, WLIR and Scott Munni--all somehow signaled to me that rock was finally collective, public and adult in its purposes: like getting laid, you had to go to a concert at Madison Square Garden.

Around that year I'd seen Led Zeppelin's bio-film "The Song Remains the Same," which immortalized Madison Square Garden as the alpha and omega of live, large scale rock music. So the very name "Madison Square Garden" stood for a forbidden palace, a musical indoctrination, a place where the "true" rock fan surrendered the private joys of music to merge into the dangerous mass public spectacle of it.

"How many people does the place hold?" I might have asked those who had gone to see The Rolling Stones "Tattoo You" tour that year. "16,000," I was told, "and almost all of them do drugs." Secondhand reports from others who had gone to shows there described returning half-deaf from the sheer volume - "Marshall Stacks, wall of sound," a souveneir brick from Pink Floyd's famously symbolic wall as it collapsed in the Garden. (But wasn't the film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall a satire of the rock artist-as-fascist, preening before a saluting audience? Nah, couldn't be, I thought, rock don't do allegory.)

Besides, many of the performers I'd wanted to see back then played in off-limits clubs and bars--The Ritz, CBGB, The Palladium. Yet to my fourteen year old ears, "Madison Square Garden" sounded like a dare, like sex, while small clubs like The Bottom Line sounded like, fooling around. The Garden was the big undiscovered country where you found your rock-n-roll manhood. It loomed in Manhattan, ³downtown,² where I was warned, drugs and crime and money thrived, that borough where I sensed some future I couldn't dodge was also waiting for me.

The Who, my "favorite" band back then, had played the Garden for five nights in 1979 and I'd had to settle for reading my family's copy of Time magazine which arrived with The Who on its cover. "Rock's Outer Limits," Time declared. Inside, under a long feature about the band, there was a capsule description of the stampede at Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium, the build-up to which began during the band's sound check and the breaking point of which came when that arena's staff opened only a few doors to let in the thousands of general admission ticket holders who'd been waiting in the cold for hours and who had assumed, incorrectly, that the band was already on stage. Eleven people died in that crush. Rock's outer limits, indeed. Arena rock concerts were as physically dangerous as they were sexy.

But what would I feel about rock music if I gave up the purity of it as a means of escape from the public, the group, the herd? Rock, after all, was The Who's Quadrophenia in my bedroom on my headphones. Rock was coming home to dial up 92.7 WLIR, that most cutting edge of radio stations, very late at night, so that I could tape (so long as I aimed my antenna in the direction of the Whitestone Bridge) a studio interview with the then virtually unknown Peter Gabriel, as he discussed in slow, professorial tones the making of his third solo record: Carl Jung, African rituals, rhythm samples. The rock star as artist, and thoughtful introvert. Rock was a secret transmitted into my ears, for me alone. This private relationship with music earned me, in my mind, sophisticated musical friends who I carried in my head and who were far superior to my "mediocre" schoolmates, the "brain-dead jocks", the preening "bimbos" and even the "pothead" Garden concert goers whom I secretly admired.

My own snobbery never trumped my desire to get to Madison Square Garden. It was a virtual way of being able to claim, at fourteen, that you'd, in a musical way, gotten laid.

The moment of my musical deflowering came when some friends and I got wind that Jethro Tull was coming to play Madison Square Garden. I didn't much like Jethro Tull. In fact, I didn't much know Jethro Tull. I thought they were a he - that guy in Shakespearean pants playing flute on the cover of my father's copy (!) of Jethro Tull's Greatest Hits. (Come on, Dad, were you actually a Tull fan?).

We got money and permission from our parents to go downtown to the Garden's box office--the word "box office" almost as exotic as 'arena" -- to buy tickets for the upcoming Jethro Tull show. The "danger" of the trip downtown now seems quaint to the point of pathetic but in 1981 it was palpable: the ten dollar bill hidden in a Velcro wallet bearing The Who's logo, the wallet shoved in the front pocket, or else you invited a mugger, the number 6 subway line with its earth shattering metal shaking and its ominous graffiti, all of which felt like premonitions of the intimidating experience of a rock concert. Add the grown-up rush-hour hustle of 7th Avenue, the ticket window tucked near the wide descending walkways of Penn Station, the Garden itself high above us like a black and gold space age Roman Coliseum where I'd be the sacrificial Christian to the lions inside.

The neon billboard flashed, informing us that there were still tickets to the Yes concert that night. Tonight? Yes. Who? Yes: the art rock band from England known for long bombastic mythie songs that I loathed -- New Age anthems about chess games and Druid dudes--that was Yes's curlicue logo on the Garden's neon sign, the favored rock insignia drawn on denim binders carried by certain geeks in my high school. ³Well, Fuck Jethro Tull,² the group agreed, "Let's see Yes tonight."

First, we had to get permission to go to the concert. We took turns using a phone booth on the corner of 7th and 34th Street. As I hung up the phone and opened the phone booth doors, a prostitute (dressed in white!) approached the booth, snaked her arms around my skinny fourteen-year old body and suggested in whisper that I "stay inside, sugar." I pushed her aside and slithered out of the phone booth. My friends howled and hooted. I had been propositioned before I knew what a proposition could possibly be. Friends re-told the story for years after. Tim had been with a prostitute --and he had even turned her away.

Today, I only vaguely recall that Yes concert that night. The sound of the audience itself was deafening, a kind of intensifying pressure which scuba divers must feel on their chests as they descend the waters. That pressure, followed by another level of volume from power chords and keyboard notes which cut into the ears even as the band seemed faraway down there, small and harmless, while bass and drums literally beat my chest. And rows and rows and rows of long-haired heads, all of them much older than me, some who near us talked of concerts from the 60s, early 70s, faces seated as high as The Garden's ceiling that wasn't a ceiling at all but a gold starburst draped with wires, spotlights, boxy speakers, stage smoke, Knicks' banners. Joints were passed to me by strangers who nodded paternally that it was okay. The audience stood, cheered, sang every song word for word, cheered at deafening pitches through countless encores.

Yet the experience itself was less important than its afterglow, already a memory as we filed out with the other thousands: we had it: a spontaneous decision to go to a concert, the prostitute in the phone booth, seeing Yes in the round performing "Roundabout."

No longer a virgin, I took regular trips to concerts to the Garden throughout the 1980s almost all of them, musically speaking, banal. A friend took me to see Ozzy Osbourne, just after Oz's guitarist had killed himself by crashing a plane into a house, at around the time animal rights activists were after Ozzy for biting the heads off live birds during his shows. I was scared shitless, surrounded by hairy Black Sabbath fans who carried black crosses on the walk into the Garden. And there was the snake Ozzy draped around his neck on stage. There was that pretentious Canadian trio Rush (ugh!) on my birthday in 1982. A Clapton-Beck-Page benefit at the Garden show for Ronnie Lane in 1983 where it was rumored that Pete Townshend (recently out of rehab and retired) was backstage and might actually come out and play. I spent the show waiting in vain for that.

My growing ease with the Garden won me lots of respect and many friends in The Bronx. I was even conversant with ticket scalpers. When Garden shows sold out, I would track scalpers down through ads in the Village Voice, meet them in front of the Empire State Building or the back rooms of record shops in the Village. Sometimes, the Bronx locals were scalpers. I recall standing in the bedroom of one, waking him up from cold stone sleep. He was ten years older than I was and ten times bigger. He'd taken our cash on the promise of securing coveted "red" seats for a Robert Plant concert. (The sign at that show said "Plant Show at The Garden Sold Out.") I took my supermarket boss to a Genesis concert. He was a Vermont hippy who had seen Genesis band play in New York City back when I was barely out of kindergarten, when Peter Gabriel was at the helm of the band. Before those Garden shows started, I often interviewed older fans around me, absorbing stories of earlier, better Garden shows: George Harrison's concert for Bangladesh, were Bob Dylan came onstage and played. Or The Stones at the Garden during their edgy Exile on Main Street-era. Even stories about other shows that somehow bled into my sense of what the rock-n-roll promise of the Garden was all about: Woodstock. Monterey Pop. The Filmore East. The Who in 1969 at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Other times, I felt I was betraying my rock-n-roll allegiances at certain Garden concerts. Like in 1985 when, trying to win over a girl I was forever losing, I scalped seats for a Phil ("No taste required") Collins concert---"SSSSSudio," etc, etc, and while she appreciated the experience, after we'd long left the Garden, she left it at where it had exactly been with us before the Garden: don't call us, buster, we'll call you.

II
Banished from the Garden: 1986

The true, vital, intimate pleasure of listening to rock converged with Madison Square Garden when "my"old "friend" Peter Gabriel hit it big in 1986. Rising the tide of his "Sledgehammer" Gabriel had graduated from clubs to playing arenas: he was performing at The Garden the day before my birthday. But tickets sold out in two hours. So I answered about 18 ads in The Village Voice until I found a reasonable scalper who sold me 15th Row ("red") seats for $50 each, which was well over twice their face value. (The equivalent of paying $300 for a concert today). My friend and I, longtime Gabriel-aholics paid that piper. Yet we were suspicious of Gabriel's new success. Suspicious not of the artist, but of his new "fans." The Garden that late autumn night was a flood-tide of Reagan-era yuppies, extras from Jay McInnerey's Bright Lights Big City -- oblivious clean cut guys making good with their gals by bring them to the Garden to see (who?) Peter Gabriel.

The opening chords of "san Jacinto" (to this day, my ultimate headphone song) plinked and spiraled and soared through the arena as Gabriel emerged from behind a wall of light and smoke. My friend and I stood up and roared, and as the song progressed, as Gabriel moved toward the edge of the stage, he seemed to be moving toward us, or so we were convinced, even as the sea of sitters around us heckled us to sit down. "Sit down!" they shouted. " Sit the fuck down!" Sit down at a rock concert? In Madison Square Garden? What?

My friend was pelted with beer cups and then struck on his back, shoved. He turned round, lunged, punches were thrown. Before I knew it we were (both) being hauled off by The Garden's "security staff." I could hear Gabriel and his band playing behind me, as if in some rock nightmare, as the guards muscled me forward, away from the stage. I looked up, scanned the thousands of faces who were seated, placid, church-like, watching me maybe as much as they were watching Gabriel, seeing a concert that I - now - would not.

We were taken into a small side room somewhere in the inner guts of the arena, and through the walls, I could hear the drums as Gabriel sang "Family Snapshot" -- a song about an assassin. The Garden goons took down our names: I signed their quasi legal complaint form "David Bowie" and told them I lived on West 4th Street. We were escorted down in service elevators and tossed out through sliding garage doors into a cold night's rain on 31st Street. If I try, I can still hear the Garden's metal doors closing behind us, muting the basso nova beats of "Shock the Monkey."

Alas, the pen slays the sword. The day after the Garden banishing, on my twentieth birthday, bitter, hurt, hopeful, I wrote to Peter Gabriel's handlers in London, explaining our side of the Garden's "security" detail. About six months later I received an airmailed letter from the UK, written by Gabriel's assistant-- "Norma Bishop" --her name still sounds like magic to me -- who informed us that Gabriel had read the letter, was "disturbed" by what security had indiscriminately done, and so, during the wrap-around leg that next summer, we'd be getting seats, courtesy of Gabriel himself. And so we did.

Many years later, older, and likely less wiser, a resident of Manhattan drawn to The Garden far less frequently, I bought tickets for Gabriel's "Secret World" tour. A friend who knew my story from the 1980s suggested I fax his people in New York, recounting Gabriel's generosity, all as a pretext to get backstage passes "to thank Mr. Gabriel in person." I did. And sure enough, his people delivered, again. After the Garden show (nosebleeds this time--300 level--not a bad view--and the tickets no longer, as they once were, color coded) we were shepherded respectfully into the bowels of the arena's backstage corridors, down halls and through a maze of concrete brick walls and long piping to a low ceiling'd room where a belly-dancer was entertaining mostly industry people: blonde models, session musicians, heavy-set producers, the drummer from Letterman. When Gabriel arrived, I followed my female companion's lead and settled at his table and waited for my chance to talk to him as he chatted with Laurie Andersen. What I most remember thinking as I waited for him to finish his chat with Andersen was the undeniable sense that I had now betrayed totally that secrecy, that intimacy, the private thrills of listening to and encountering rock music alone, the way I had when I was fourteen. Peter Gabriel was, really, not this middle-aged man in a loud blue jacket sitting two feet from me: Peter Gabriel was the face I had hardly ever seen, a singer on those bootleg LPs I'd hunted down at Bleecker Bob's and It's Only Rock-n-Roll shop on 8th street - obscure rarities that meant nothing to my friends who had, back then, never heard the name Peter Gabriel. The hissing and the crowd noise on a live from Cardiff, Wales, 1978, bootleg, played late at night on headphones while the oblivious, artless world slept. Rock music was not this backstage party, this Garden "access."

Or was it? And why not? Gabriel's performance had been strong, stirring. Now I was at his table. When my chance came, I steeled my nerves, shook his hand firmly, recited scattershot details from the Garden fiasco years earlier and I lauded him for his having taken care of his fans, and then I wished him well with the tour. He was quiet, gracious, exhausted. I let him move on. Trucks we saw on the walk out of the Garden where loading equipment down the arena's ramps for the tour's next stop (Toronto's Maple Leaf Arena, anyone?)

I might have thought about all this in scattered form last spring, just before U2 took the stage at Madison Square Garden, as I stood on the floor of the arena. I was likely standing on the very spot where nineteen or so years earlier I had been accosted by guards and then thrown from the Garden into the rain.

During U2's opening number, confetti rained softly on the audience as Bono emerged from the stage-boards, less like a mysterious rock icon than a familiar, hammy Irish friend I've seen in one concert hall or arena or stadium every four years for almost as long as I can remember. And as the band picked up steam and the smell of pot smoke finally started, I was distracted by thoughts about what the Garden had meant to me way back in 1981 before I'd entered it. Where was that fear-inspiring Madison Square Garden? The danger, the allure, the awe was so long gone I wondered had it ever been. And gone too were the memories of countless half-hearted shows I'd come to see here.

These random thoughts strike me often, even more vaguely than they do here, when, in my rush hour rushing, I pass by the Garden, from the west view, usually. Often there's a concert happening that night, with the neon sign announcing "tickets still available:" Neil Diamond. Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rod Stewart. On it goes. But I'm outside Madison Square Garden much more than inside it. I wonder about the various people I'd taken to see music in the Garden, and the ones who took me here. I'm usually listening to music on headphones when I walk by the place. That's how the music goes: at one with the song in my ears, outside the Garden, this time maybe for good.

***

The Tie That Binds
Mat Kilivris

Engaging in random conversations regarding my apprehensions about being yet another Folk Rock/Country/Soul (or whatever you want to call it) musician in the big city has spurred a topic that has reverberated throughout my mind for some time now. This topic was presented multiple times mostly as a status issue of art, intellect, and skill. The argument was how "Classical" music compares to "Folk," "Rock," and "Country" music. I'm using Country to mean classic Country like Johnny Cash, not the modern "Outlaw" Bocephus stuff. Modern country comes from a much different place. I put these genres in quotes because they are not so easily limited to strict definitions. So, how does Classical music relate to that of Folk, Rock, and Country in terms of art, intellect, and skill?

Before we take a plunge, it is important to understand that these genres seem to be doing a lot of different things and also some of the same. From the little I know of Classical, like most music, it intends to evoke a feeling or emotion. Folk, Rock, and Country also aim to do the same. I tend to think that the aim of music is to transport a feeling or even a picture or story through sound. Classical composition creates such a dramatic and intricate sound that certain pieces often caused a frightening uproar among audiences the way bands like Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, and the Misfits did in the 70s. Classical is also set around various rules and traditions, including a specific set of instruments. Rock, Folk, and Country also have similar guidelines and traditions to their composition and instrumentals. Bob Dylan was following the legacy of Folk and Country legends like Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie the same way Classical musicians and composers follow the works of Mozart and Bach.

Early Folk, Rock, and Country music was largely a political vehicle backed by the acoustic guitar and often the harmonica. The music and lyrical meters disguised their message and captivated the listener's attention with catchy melodies and chord progressions. John Lennon has been quoted as feeling that his political album, Imagine, was so successful because he "sugarcoated" his messages with beautiful catchy tunes. Johnny Cash also used Country music as a political vehicle "for the poor and beaten down, livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town." The adoption of lyrics and poetry to music have almost taken precedence over the music itself. In other words, the role of vox is what separates Classical to Rock, Folk, and Country. The biggest example in our modern era is Hip-Hop. It is basically a beat with lyrical poetry on top. Another dynamic of expression, voice, has become most desired in modern music.

As for the first part of the original question: how does the presence of artisanship compare between Classical and Folk, Country, and Rock? In order to answer this we must ask: how do we define art? I've always thought of art as expression through a sensory medium: taste, touch, smell, sound and vision. We all express ourselves in different ways and we all therefore respond to artists in different ways. We find in art what we want in art. What makes some people like the Stones more than the Beatles? Some like it dirtier I guess. Can we really rank expression? We could try, but we'd probably end up sounding like self-righteous assholes. I guess this leads us to our next question: What is the intellectual comparison between Classical and Folk, Rock, and Country?

Without getting too far off topic, it seems the only way we can discuss intellect in this subject is through the issue of complexity. Classical music is very complex, and by complex I mean it involves various melodies playing simultaneously to produce a somewhat fluid sound, picture, or movement. These parts are studied through music theory, involving complex scales and notation. I'm not classically trained so I can't describe it any further than this. Although progressions in Folk, Rock, and Country are often rather simplistic and in one or two keys, there are also various melodic parts added. These ornamental melodies in Folk, Rock, and Country are either learned through scales or the ability of one to play what he feels and hears in his head.

Besides the traditional guitar, bass, and drums, Folk, Rock, and Country often add additional melodies with banjo, pedal or lap steel guitar, jug, harmonica, strings, piano, and electronic sounds. There is also the dynamic between lead and rhythm guitar. What would Neil Young songs sound like without the shaky scummy licks between chord changes? There are many more layers in Rock, Folk, and Country than we often give them credit. These layers can create entirely different moods, accenting and developing certain aspects of a progression. They can also often take away from an artist if not carefully composed.

We also often hear of certain studies that claim that listening to Classical music can increase your SAT scores, or in other words, your ability to concentrate and perhaps tackle complex subjects. But were we wrong in saying that the words of working-class heroes like Dylan, Cash, and Lennon have inspired an entire ideology and socially-forward way of thinking? Have they not inspired thought and complex thinking? Or perhaps those children who tend to listen to Classical pieces are more likely to be those who stay in their rooms and study at night. I don't remember the "cool kids" blasting any Classical in their cars in High School. And cool in High School typically meant something that is not cool to you now. But the sense of freedom, independence, rebellion, angst, and creativity are very much part of the Americana music tradition. Rhythm & blues (the root of Rock, Folk, and Country) comes from the southern black slaves who were deeply tied to these same sensibilities for obvious reasons.

Modern Classical composers are often tied to many of the same sensibilities, but Classical listeners are often not as open to change. Rock music is a genre that has evolved significantly in a short period of time compared to Classical. In other words, Classical listeners tend to be more conservative and bent on tradition than rock listeners. Although, sometimes it seems Rock would be better off if it did give more homage to older styles and artists.

Also, less is often more. Neil Young explains in Jimmy McDonough's biography, Shakey, that "you can get so hung up playin' a bunch of chords and changes that you lose the thing... You don't realize that the easy stuff is the hardest. To make the easy stuff be great." Personally, I couldn't agree more. Working with as little as possible and making it sound unique in a way that connects with people is often harder than trying to be complicated.

So what about skill? Does Classical require more skill than Folk, Country, and Rock? This depends it seems. Classical musicians are strictly trained, often from a young age, to master their instruments and learn the language of music. In other words, most likely they were the "Math & Science" oriented children who memorized and followed complex formulas. Some Folk, Rock, and Country musicians require less technical skill in comparison to songwriting ability. Some have it all though. This sounds like those weird kids in your art classes who constructed crazy art pieces. However, in music production, songwriters often do less of the playing and rely on skilled studio musicians. The Beatles and the Beach Boys had significant orchestrated parts to some of their albums.

How was Brian Wilson, a rock musician, able to orchestrate Pet Sounds (with only one ear) anyway? Wilson must have conceptualized the parts in his head, needing the orchestra to perform it. If he could orchestrate all those beautifully layered vocal harmonies in addition to the musical parts throughout his years in the Beach Boys, then complex composition must be an innate ability whether he directed it towards Rock or Classical. Classical composers are not expected to master every instrument that makes a full orchestra. This would take lifetimes of course. They are, however, expected to understand the various ranges and sounds of each instrument. Some Classical composers do not consider themselves concert musicians at any instrument, but are skilled enough on an instrument to write various melodies that are conceptualized.

In terms of skill, what is admired more: creativity or formulaic precision? I think this is where mindsets divide. There are those people who respect skilled playing and those who respect moving ballad-type songs. Personally, I would rather listen to Muddy Waters fumble around on his guitar playing his soulful bluesy songs than the finger twisting licks of Van Halen. I think it's cool that someone can play his instrument well, but in the end, I need it to sound good and move me.

Classical musicians are not expected to be songwriters, although Classical composers are. Most Classical musicians are only required to replicate pieces with the precision that the inventor intended. Of course this is still a challenging task! Rock, Folk, and Country artists are respected more as songwriters and storytellers. No one wants to buy a Rock album of a band trying to perfectly cover Beatles tunes like a Classical fan would buy different orchestras renditions of Bach. Of course there is a whole lot of covering in Rock, Folk, and Country, but it is often done in a way in which it is somehow modified to reveal the stylistic presence of the imitator. (You know you once owned or still own one of those Punk-bands-cover-old-songs albums).

A local Classical composer told me the other day that the chips fall where they may for musicians. Some are composers, some are technical musicians, and some are both. Kurt Cobain, for example, lacked in technical guitar skill what he mastered in songwriting ability. Some are performers and some are not. Elvis didn't write his own songs, but he could perform songs with such charisma that gripped the listener. Some like Classical, some like Jazz, and some like Rock. Classical composers cannot necessarily write Rock songs and Rock composers cannot necessarily write Classical pieces. Art is not about competition and hierarchies, but rather true expression, connection, and feeling.

***

David Meltzer
Angelize

Angel Lap Harps: Experience the Newest Technology in Sound Healing.
Uniquely tuned. Creates healing. Releases stress. Easy to play. No
lessons needed. Beautiful, Light, Portable, Affordable.

what is it about angels
fascinates poets also
hamster folk on
everyday wheels
steal Fate glances
to feathered folk
who lift them up beyond
___________ & then release them
back to the daily grind

rarer is a black angel
amidst blue-eyed
white robed white winged
____________ ineffable ETs
who tease sky w/
golden halo light
kissed by rainbow mists

never marred or broken
toxic blends descend to
___________ seal one's sure finale uplifted
into Reader's Digest four color heaven
of Rockwell moms & pops
stopping doubt w/ twinkle sequin sparkle
cherubim tinkle into gold bowls
upraised for tithe & lithe lives
grandma stitches the guilt quilt
your barefeet dance upon for praise
in heaven's klieglight
dead center on all your moves

angels are everywhere even in your hair
their wings woven from God's eyebrows

covered by an unseen hand: dove
angel cups baby face of Jesus
crone in cradle ladled into open
angel arms shed gold edged huge
feathers fathering great blizzards

angels descending bring
from above echoes of mercy
whispers of love

GBS: ³In heaven
an angel is nobody
in particular²

shadow of God's wings
scoop up my broken fate

when angels fly they glide

it wasn't her time yet
angel interloper
behind Chinese
screen brocaded w/ faded
lotus & threading Buddha

everywhere an angel
an angle
a corner turned
___________ a force pushes you through or
holds you back
perched like Wenders gargoyles
look over the city like
cop helicopters shining
night knife searchlights
on the hunted & haunted
in U. S. of A.

angels better help you
nobody else will

God help me drowning
yet emerges
wet from water
still alive
__________________ witness to a great miracle

The angel's got the angle
mangled in the tangle
of managed care & dare
when you descend
to humble uplift
you ascend to
99¢ stores where
cast & handpainted in China
angels galore
each one a craft work
a brush stroke
deep into art's
momentary heart

Taiwan Buddha hoods
sold at streetcorners
vanished blood
dubbed videotapes
out of cardboard cartons
cash only

blue eyed blond
_______ plump red lips
JoAnn Benet
androgynous
love goddess
bring angels
into the lives of
your loved ones all year long

someone is listening
standing behind you
before you
_______ waiting to catch you
before you fall
______ smashed by the airbag
opening your heart
to cosmo lights

dolphins couldn't frown
if they wanted to

paramedic angels everywhere
___________ sparkle w/ transit crackle

dance dolphin dance
freeflowing veils
mudras to pull down
cosmic feng shui Nasdaq
hard facts gauzed in nonallergenic
natural fabrics one burrows into
for deep cocoon saturated w/
aromatherapy & coffee enemas
releasing & realizing
shadow worlds & maya
shit it out
get the glut clot clear

loom up
behind around
surround the shadowland

Uriel angel of music
Ruhiel angel of wind
Watchers never sleep
Like debtors crunched in fetters
Nothing gets better
In the fall from all
Plastic laminated
Snakes in syzygy
Sizzle into barcode
Swiped over laser lights
To set alarms off

My Kinko's card reads Ariel
in a flood of Xerox lights
clone sacred occult
treasures grifted from
genizah stash of
everyday kabbalah

sudden faces appear
to disappear
to freak you out
& get you inside
the folds & unfold

Angel Therapy
A-Z list of Healing Messages
companions in magick
how to talk to Your Angels
'they want to to introduce themselves'
simple & fun

Turning to sanctified earth
awake to fiddle impossible of
double stops & harmonics

how to die alive & live to die

Spirit v the stuff
realms & zones
comfort v contrast
open v closed
law v freedom
unboundary v contain
&tc &tc
where is the smooth unclicked line
verse smoothly slips through?

imagining Doreen Virtue PhD
Angel Therapy Healing w/ Angels
Healing w/ Fairies & Oracle Cards
how sweet the sweat of transport
& fall into cookie pan tins
___________ from above so below & the bakery
admits no fakery nor fraud instead
seriously absorbs beyond voices
____________ fortune cookies of doubt

Angels mask up
slip into rubber suits
suite the deluded
w/ amazing flutter
of allergies dander sews
wounds together in hard lips
of scar tissue that issues forth
documents of recovery
discovery & assorted bylines
slimed into selling & spelling
obvious immortality

'Legend says Ireland is the place where heaven reaches a little closer
to earth than anywhere else, where the divine is close at hand'

& St Barry Fitzgerald
looks up & beyond his bifocals
to focus on auro & halo
surounding us heavy matter
who mutter in our passage
of a renewed world free of
fallen & arising saints & tainted ones
showbiz can't resist

Stand-ins
Angels bounce back
to protect or pretext
danger or injury
or disable wisdom

but who are the angels
even Rilke
couldn't undress?

they're back w/ the healing touch
from yr lips to God's ear
french kissing tongues galore
zip up the chakras w/ polity of oily lather
oooh may we pray for you

Rilke beyond knowing
intuited the flutes
spouting air up
sidewalk vents
balooning his silken robes

The terror is always the error of knowing
identifying the other
who is there to elevate not subjugate

in silk slide of breeze seduced nakedness

Folded into feathers entwine
floral display of crushed pastes
herbal floral microbial
wings of smashed insects
auratic & oracular

Angel of luck & paradise
unfold your Vegas neon wings
over bent hack inscribing
what escapes describing

Angel of luck & paradise
open up your showtime
strobe lit feathered wings
to light the page your hack
stabs into

__The other in the bother of clutter
out of Cocteau (Spicer, Duncan)
ariseth in poetry's paper winged flutter

rite of writing on paper
into air shattered by firecrackers
shredded ideograms
blast apart & announce
a new year a new moment
to begin again

On tour on earth
angels scout the turf
voyeurs & explorers
radiant rent-a-cops
unable to disable fate

That's the deal
the sad sack sorrow of it

Students
devotees
need a taste
of the honey bud tongue
to lure them on

I was a stranger
passing through your town
owned nothing
had nada to give back
when attacked by the devout

Faith devoured me
chewed me up into
bone shards sharp as knives
spit back at the infidels

Devotion demolished me
whoever that was
that self
inconsequential
to the struggle against
its faceless power
its embrace

The less devoted
flew w/out flightplan
into catastrophe

The less obedient
defiled the dazzle white
folds of feathers bracing
wings together in
amazing flight over
small blocks of
turf already blotted
by shadows of terror

Angels have no thought of returning you
Ra said some were from Africa
here as slaves

They want to take you away
irregardless

Then where do we go when they leave
& how can we forget they were here

³in the system²
descending ascending spiral
matter matters
if you're in the spirit liftoff
the motherleaves

gnostics says angels placed us
on the spot where
shadows open up
behind us

they say angels
play all the angles
& tangle spiritus
into matter

angels cough out stuff
that adds to itself
gathering weight & volume
until nothing gets away

they disorder cosmos
trapped spider meat parcels
³exposed to the enveloping system²

souls descend like snowflakes
drawing w/ them
'the torpor of Saturn' Mars' wrath
heat core of Venus
Jupiter power lust
confuse the souls
erase latent trance end
cross wire knowing w/
amnesia of unknowing

angels made us strangers
thru daily cycles of incompetence
alienated us
locked us into selves
incomprehensible

unknowable in exile
____ we imagine the divine
no longer at home w/in it

ancients in this rest home
sit in wheelchairs
asleep before TV
the ancient one
________ in a mechanical bed unknows
all she knew

her eyes are open
but look at nothing
to be seen

for the men
it was always about earth's solid engine
her enigma
broken down to parts
managed
sorted & sifted
needs breathing into

'Who has thrown me into the suffering of worlds?
transported into evil dark
so long endured
& dwelt in the world
so long I dwelt
among the works of
my hands'

'I am I
son of mild ones
mingled am I
& lamentation I see

'lead me out of
death's embrace'

mix & match
dark & light in
clots of turbid swamp

the angel artisan
too easily distracted by
the importance of work

incompetence is the hidden story

angel agnon
rush to their aid
in the known
we & they
nevertheless
act on orders

***

Manel Saddique
Soft As Silk

It was a few months after the invasion.
Summer was only a month away now. "Old Man Winter, go away!" the bluesy dude on the radio crooned a few days earlier. Weathermen (always a man) had declared that it was the harshest winter in 20 years. It was my first New York winter. With all the talk of seasons; I hadn't really noticed an arrival of Spring. I did hear about some cherry blossoms in bloom at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens... not too far away from where I lived. The powerful and freezing arctic gusts were now long gone. And that was enough for an Angelina to celebrate.

The evening had just set in.
There are no purple mountains or ocean horizon for the sun to set behind. Mountains of buildings here instead. Old buildings. Beautiful buildings built of stone. No wood-frame houses only to be ravaged by termites half a century later. My head ached from living too much in the mind. Ignoring my body, my soul. And no, there was no room for heart. The side-effects of elitist graduate school theoretical consumption of experiential life.

I was walking.
Hungry for some Cali taste. Mexican food. But I'll never find the real-deal here. So I opt for the local Tex-Mex place owned by Koreans. I love the contradiction? Irony? I love whatever the fuck it is. I'll order my usual: veggie nachos. Even gringos can't fuck up nachos.

One night, I went there late. Almost near closing. The Korean workers were all sitting together at the tables in the back. Near the register. Sitting near the front door means brisk night air will soon chill your steamy hot food. They were all congregated at two or three tables that had been pushed together. They looked like a family. They were all eating steamed rice with grilled fish and vegetables atop it. It smelled so good. It looked so healthy. Better than the Texan-Mexican grease they fry up for business.

I walked up to the register. A petite beautiful teen-age girl got up from her rice bowl of steamy hot fish and quickly walked behind the register. I felt bad for interrupting her dinner. I should come back later and allow her to finish her dinner first. But then they will be closed. I have to order now. Ashamed, I order my usual. She quotes me the price I used to have memorized. But, before I ordered my usual, I pressed my luck, "I'll have a bowl of what you are all eating. It smells so good. I want that."

They all stopped eating and conversing. They turned and looked at me. Their expressions blank. What? Had no-one ever asked for their Korean food instead? A middle-aged man with creases and hardship beyond his years pressed onto his face said, "It's not for sale." He turned and resumed eating. Everyone else resumed eating their delicious-smelling, healthy-looking Korean dinner also. I think he was the cook. Now I was more ashamed for having put my hungry nose in another family's dinner. I settled for my salty nachos.

I ordered my usual.
The girl behind the counter wrapped it all up to go, carefully folding the paper bag perfectly around the styrofoam edges of the box. Just like she always does. Then she placed my gift-wrapped meal into a white plastic bag with a yellow happy face stamped on the outside.

Now I will walk home.
Walk past the hospital and feel guilt for walking past the hungry homeless black people often sitting on the low brick wall at the sidewalk near the hospital emergency entrance. The homeless in L.A. are mostly black folks also. Now, we see it's the same scene in New Orleans. Descendents of slaves. Skid-row is paved black. And now I have to prepare myself to walk past the sad eyes of the local neighborhood skid-row. My Tex-Mex Korean nachos happy face steamy in my hands.

I feel a pair of sad dark-brown eyes noticing my approach. I had walked past this homeless man on many occasions, his eyes often looking lost, as if he were in some far-away land.

"Can I touch your hair?" he shyly whispers to me, his eyes now lowered to the ground.

Had he whispered his request so softly so that I may have the option to ignore him? So that I may pretend to have never heard him? He was prepared for rejection, as a gentleman should be.

I stopped right in front of him. I slowly began to lean toward my right in his direction, and angle the back of my head and neck toward him so that my long brown pony-tail would soon be dangling only a few inches above his fingers.

But then I hesitated. Fear quickly overtook me: Can I trust him? Why do I trust so easily? What if he's mad? Totally insane? What if he suddenly yanks my hair hard and rips it from my head?

Will he hurt me?

I quickly turned my face toward him and looked him straight in the eyes. "Be nice," I gently whispered to him.

Then I turned my face away and resumed allowing my hair to hang a few inches above his fingertips. He raised his right hand and began to gently caress my hair. I leaned over him for a few minutes as his hands continued to carefully caress my long brown pony-tail.

"It's so soft," he whispered, "smooth as silk."

He continued to gently stroke my hair, and I continued to be his purring cat.

Then he stopped. "Thank you," he said. His eyes still sad.

"You're welcome," I answered back as I resumed my upright position. "Goodbye!" I said, my heart breaking.

He did not answer me back. He had turned his head away, his eyes already lost on the other passersby.

I continued my walk home, listening to bits of Lou Reed's New York conversations dancing around my head. When I arrived home, I opened up my perfectly gift-wrapped Tex-Mex Korean nachos. They were now cold. As usual.

***

Eric R. Schwartz
Driving Away From You

Driving away from you,
life feels suspended in this digitally-lit glow
of my Mercury interior. I am caught
between you, the lack of a career, and a selfish
Manhattan dream where I will brand my voice
into a viable American product-
one to be popped, swallowed, and put
into manipulated bloodstreams.
Since every freelancer needs a focus,
I want mine to be loss:
the loss of an ideal that writing in New York
remains pure and organic; the loss for the words
that might make you smile after I've left.

I'm driving myself away from you
and, as I drive, the FM Jazz station fades
from a Miles Davis pause
(because the spaces are as perfect as the notes)
into Nirvana's Radio Friendly Unit Shifter
and for a moment I am hearing musical bliss
as the separate stations play
with each other and, then, mix into one tragic melody,
the low trumpet bending into Kurt's aching pleas.

I love you for what I am not:
for working nights in Randolph, Massachusetts
where you direct age appropriate activities
for autistic twenty-somethings.
I think of you bathing these dumbfounded souls
with their white eyes, peculiar language,
and dingle-berried behinds. It makes me not
sorry that I drink myself back into manic moments
because I believe that America cultivated autism-
the foreign policy that made those rusting call sirens
still wired to telephone polls, those former missile
warehouses with their square metal shells
that converted themselves to indoor soccer arenas.

I do not want what I have got:
this concept that inside Pop writing I can keep integrity;
this idea that a distant voice can cure diseased
intensions; and this love for the moments
when I find the right order of words to express
shame. I wish my politics could be like Kurt's
sarcastic definition of his music:
the fusion of punk energy with hard rock
riffs, all within a pop sensibility.
I wish there were moderate radicals
who were like mainstream punk bands
made up of art class drop-outs.
I wish that I could see you and feel comfortable
using the words that wouldn't die like you and I.

Sometimes there doesn't seem the time to murder
or the time to create, just enough time
to swallow, to shift from one time to another and hope
that there's still some of it left for a you
helping a me not to dwell on the empty time that pulls
at anxious, taught strings that want
only to buy more time before they unwind.
We need a ghost's time. We need a grey moment.
We need time and time and time and time and

Kurt's Cold-Heart! over the radio
leads me to believe that Tourette's (another disease
whose symptoms I can tie to politics) has followed Radio Friendly
and the college station (that is not broadcasted
from a college at all) is doing one of those:
The-Best-Records-of-the-Last-Decade shows.
Has it been that long? It's dark out
and the highway feels as narrow
and as unfriendly as its trees that hang with speculative intent.

Seems like just enough time to reconsider
what we've already done, to listen to it, but not hear
anything-hear the way you asked me not to leave,
hear the constant rebuilding that happens
outside my apartment, the making of the big
into bigger, hear the sound of a folk record through tall
stereo speakers that survived those seven yard sales.

When I drive back here, I wrap around it all
(the skyline looking like people
that raise their heads, that shake their fingers and wait). I take
the interstate to the Brooklyn Bridge into China Town,
which looks so red, I can think only of Mao
and see those neon letters that curl in wide windows
where, underneath, silver fish have mouths
packed with ice. But I guess I'm supposed to think
about buying a digital camera, the kind t
hat will make both our lives into a lit-up book.

XXX

Notes from Below:
This poem was written with much stealing, pilfering, and, of course, using (for that matter). But that's the point, stupid.

However, feel free to direct all complaints to the editor who will forward them to my address. You should probably also look into contacting Penguin and/or Dave Grohl about the publishing of Journals (they're a lot bigger and more important than me). And, shit, I guess look up Mr. Proof himself if so inclined. Try the Sunday Times. He'd be able to answer better than Eliot at this point. Eliot's dead, man. So's Kurt. God, help us! What are we to do, besides venture into politics, start a fucking revolution, and make the time needed to murder?

I'm in. I'm ready. Where I live in Cambridge, I'm positive that a protective wall could be built across the Charles River. We'll hire snipers to watch it. I've never shot a gun, personally. Well, there was that one time-a couple of my neighbors growing up were cops and we took target practice in the undeveloped suburbs. But, you get the point-I'm not adept with the steal. Not yet anyway.

How is the East River looking these days? Where will the dissenters go-to the burrows or to the island? I think we can use the water to our advantage. Sure war is different now, but it still has basic strategies, certain boundaries and guidelines like: land, water, and spirit.

I'm hiring a staff of editors and t-shirt artists in a couple months. They will be putting in hard hours. Money is low at the moment, but once this thing gets going, I think it'll spin like a mother fucking top and elevate. Just don't tell your parents-they'll be dead soon anywayss.

***

notREALLYreviews

Death Cab For Cutie
Plans
Justin Rogers-Cooper

For a summer that won't end, the new Death Cab For Cutie album, Plans, sounds like the kind of fresh autumn blues we normally don't hear until October or November. It's typically sentimental and deliciously structured. Like so many other bands in the genre, the overtly buttered pop song rubs well with the sharp grains of computer laced echoes. There's no dementia or obsession behind the sad minor chords or pinching piano notes, or hysteria just beyond the brushing percussion. It's not excessively perfect, either, despite the occasionally layered vocals, or because the lyrics somehow etch themselves like street signs in your mind - regular guides and warnings. The guitars generally rise to happy crunches, much unlike the crystal cobwebbed reaches of the last album, Transatlanticism. In fact, these songs whistle to older classic pop songs of the mid 1960s, when strangely gut-thrown choruses were laid over chirpy riffs. The better songs resemble the consciously crafted narratives of Revolver: depressed reflections grafted on bouncing rhythms, pulling you along nostalgically into ambivalent circumstances. If you're not familiar with "For No One" or "I'm Only Sleeping," think about Rubber Soul's "Norwegian Wood."

Of course, there is little of the erotic irony of Lennon's reminiscences. In the same sense that the acoustic "Norwegian Wood" stood against the electric impulses of Rubber Soul and the adolescent infatuation of earlier records, however, Death Cab's first single "Soul Meets Body" accomplishes a similar dissonance with Death Cab's former intentions. The acoustic rushes at the beginning, accompanied by a burgeoning beat finding itself, quickly transform into a more straightforward rock song. The clean air of the ballad combines with picked archeries to form an indirect connection to REM's feature release from 1991, "Losing My Religion." The early part of "Soul Meets Body" could easily come from that album. Ben Gibbard enjoys Michael Stipe's similar ability to say things like "I want to live where soul meets body/ and let the sun wraps its arms around me" without infantilizing his material, much how Stipe could yearn and interchange "This one goes out/ to the one I love" with "fire" so effectively at the end of the 1980s. Like REM, Death Cab can also urgently direct their focus to the obvious regrets embedded in swooning appeals to purge loneliness. "In my head/ there's a greyhound station/ where I send my thoughts to far-off destinations," they sing in silver steady emphasis, "so they might have the chance/ of finding a place where they're/ far more suited than here." For the next few bars after this statement, which essentially ends the watery "cool and cleansing" rippling of the song's open desire "to be new," the song returns this to a throw-away vocal from the early 60s: ba da ba, ba da ba, and on.

The song then pauses for rest, returning to the opening acoustic chords. Images of digging and discovery appear, and with "palms cupped like shovels," Gibbard thinks aloud how "I know our filthy hands/ can wash one another/ and not one speck will remain." It's an interesting declaration, not just because it's full of an obscured hope, confident and insistent. There's a mutual dependence between the speaker and his listener, gentle and parental. It's ambiguous whether Gibbard believes that nothing, no dirt, will remain after washing. In this moment the song is a hymn, eerily cathlolic in purity, the body at the center of vision. In the consonant thrush of Stipe's 2003 "Imitation of Life," another song that swells, Stipe felt estranged from reality and caustic toward those in it: "This lightning storm/ this tidal wave/ this avalanche/ I'm not afraid/ No one can see me cry." What "Soul Meets Body" has in common with "Imitation of Life," "Losing My Religion," or even "Norwegian Wood," is its generation of ripe gestures toward the transcendent. Lennon and Stipe snipe variously at the vulgarity of consumption, the ebb of the human under the shells of dollar-lubricated modernity. "Soul Meets Body," by contrast, eventually sheds the catholicism for romantic notes on the eternity of the imagination. The soul meets the body in the song: "So brown eyes/ I'll hold you near, you're the only song I want to hear/ a melody softly soaring through my atmosphere." Here, a beloved face dissolves into the twin pools of nature and music. Since the face isn't gendered, just essentially human, it broadly invites a triangular conflation of love, the sublime natural scene, and the artifice of song on equal terms. No house burns down, no objects stand in for real feelings, no faith fades.

On the song "Photobooth" from the album Forbidden Love, Gibbard promises a young lover that "as the summer's ending/ the cold air will push your hard heart away." Among adolescent imagery and nearly naïve memory, he dwells on hands that "cup" mouths, skinny dipping, and speaking the "truth" in a photobooth. Here, a lusty remote past rebounds with the alcoholic shills of an obvious summer fling. Death Cab's talent for songwriting outpaces the content. Transatlanticism contained a few powerful experiments with form, though sincerely consumed with loneliness and heartache. So "Soul Meets Body," among a few others, represents a legitimate stretch in subject. "If the silence takes you/ then I hope it takes me too," he chants quickly, running over the words only to repeat "a melody soaring through my atmosphere" several times, the response to "Losing My Religion" echoingly indirect. Heard over and again, the line charges the final phrase with darker edges, especially "you're the only song I want to hear." Here, it's apparent that belief nudges away knowledge, that there is no relief in facts. Our doubts cling to moments of assurance like clothes that don't quite fit. These trails appear on Death Cab's other new tracks, on songs that also drop aching wishes for panoptic perception, magnetic comprehension, and melancholy desire.

The same cast may be drowned in the same toxic shale, moaning with lost loves, but on Plans the summer ends differently. In "What Sarah Said," he begins, "It came to me then/ that every plan/ is a tiny prayer/ to father time." The lost past has become less important than the space where people meet, and the contingency of their presence. In a hospital, he reflects how "there's no comfort in the waiting room/ just nervous faces/ bracing for bad news." Everyone looks up when the nurse enters. In a macabre and Victorian supplement, he thinks how Sarah once said, "love is watching someone die." Since Death Cab angles the genius of bleak break-ups, we assume the speaker waits for her, Sarah: another glacial love to recede with grand curtain. But in the trembling shatters of the reprise, he quietly asks "but who will watch him die?" There is no answer, no clue that identifies the relation to the male body.

For Death Cab, this is a different mourning, not just for its reference to gender. For first-person songs abashed with self-recrimination and nostalgia, the question removes the speaker from the tragic center of the piece. Love, personified and Platonic, watches over the body of the hospitalized figure. Whatever our squirms about floating ideas, it's significant because someone else occupies the song's grace. Like "Soul Meets Body," what's important here is imperfect reconciliation, not remembered desire. Out there in the clouds, something beyond the body, beyond the speaker, inherits the chill of longing. The cool art of seduction eventually dries out, from fever to whisper - there comes a night, apparently, when we realize our own thoughts never left us, numbed from routine. Those mingling voices alone seem capable of renewing the esoteric redemption we wish was visible on the riddled frame in the mirror.

http://www.deathcabforcutie.com

***

Circus Devils
Five
Marc Woodworth

We tire, don't we, of reading how Robert Pollard is short on quality control and long on self-indulgence? That often repeated criticism in almost every case translates, however roughly, into something like this new release - whatever name is on the cover-doesn't have on it descendents of the songs I like best from Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. Let's assume for a moment that when Mr. P chooses not to be particularly tuneful, he is in fact making a choice, not a mistake. He's earned that much understanding from his audience, however devoted to this or that version of his gifts as a songwriter many of his listeners may be.

The exquisite and sometimes deliberately uneasy-making soundscapes on Circus Devils Five are almost uniformly amelodic. They stay away from pop-song structure, operating instead by a bracingly strict inner logic of sonic accumulation to make moods ranging from the pensive ("Artheroid Vogue" and "Thelonius Has Eaten All The Paper") to the darkly aggressive ("'In The Mood'"). There's nothing careless or slapdash about this release (another pet complaint often lodged by the young and restless scribes of the alt-rock moment). Studio whiz and fine multi-instrumentalist Todd Tobias has made and recorded the sounds (heavy on found rhythms, ebbing washes of synth, off-kilter percussion, relatively light on guitar) with impeccable clarity and focus-most tracks are brief, absorbing creations that have depth, variety, and beautifully nuanced modulations, however dense or openly ambient the music becomes.

If you can - and you must - think of this record entirely apart from the usual pop-rock paradigm and, instead, as the active progeny of a long line of experimental art-noise predecessors like paradise warts-era Amon Duul or Can's Delay 1968, you'll readily hear that Five extends the genre, often brilliantly reviving it for the contemporary moment. If Pollard the Popsmith and Pollard the Arena Rocker are absent here, you'll still recognize Pollard the Impatient-rather than lengthening each piece as his Kraut-rock heroes would have done in the late sixties and early seventies via psychedelic flourishes and stretched out noise-jams, on Five Pollard and Tobias make a virtue of economy and the brevity of the productions, instead of giving them a fragmentary or aborted feel, lends them drama and grace as well as a post-rock aura all their own.

When Pollard is free to add vocals over an established bed of sound (an old and continuing trick in a very full bag of them-see the indelible sing- and shout-along that made ³Hot Freaks² [1994] out of Tobin Sprout's wonderfully skeezy instrumental or any number of the songs on the similarly constructed Lifeguards collaboration with Doug Gillard on 2003's Mist King Urth), he seems to relish the opportunity to use his voice as an instrument rather than the streamlined vehicle for a hook. On Five, his voice is focused and emotional, offering performances that don't sound at all like mere add-ons but become integral to the music. Listen to the clipped and intense vocals on "Future for Germs" or the moody, quasi-Sprechstimme turn on "Tell 'Em The Old Man is Coming Down" and you'll understand that as a singer Pollard is extending his reach and incorporating his wayward influences with greater poignancy and complexity as he continues to mature as an artist.

The Guided By Voices / Robert Pollard canon brings back into the light of our attention long-eclipsed bodies of work that once sparkled and glimmered in a rock heaven that's a lot darker these days. Just check to see how many of Pollard's favorite records aren't available on iTunes or haven't been released on CD to get an idea of how narrow the present moment's sense of the usable past has become. While other Pollard projects and much of GBV's output restore our link to the great and infectious glory of pop-rock history we may or may not know already, a release like Circus Devils Five is not only absorbing, accomplished, and demanding as a self-contained work of art, but serves as well to carry on a nearly forgotten progressive art-noise tradition that, reinvented on these tracks, makes for what, paradoxically, is perhaps the least nostalgic and most forward-sounding music in the Pollard archives.

http://www.gbv.com/fadingcaptain.html

Marc's new book Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand will be released in September by Continuum's 33 1/3 series.

***

theB-side

claudia pisano

a dream of john and yoko

white-yellow hair halfway covered
in a seethrough purple scaf,
bent over a shopping cart bearing
a sign repent, jesus saves on
astor place trying to navigate crowds
moving too fast to keep up or cross the
street but patient anyway, maybe a
little frustrated

it is hard to see through eyes
grasping at fragments of expressions
just beyond my fingertips, this makes me almost
lonely but maybe my face is unreadable too,
impervious to the touch of grazing sweaty forearms
clinking bracelets a glistening
tattoo only half understood in this haze of
bodies

music in my head giving shape to
pretzel stands books for sale incense smoking
half a block away
and i notice there are no
skateboarders at the cube and wonder why
standing at the orange truck waiting for coffee

too romantic about this place loved you too
long for anything else, bits of conversation like dreams
mark my brow so we stand on the corner and talk
again in blue jeans and a faded tshirt soft
under my lips as talk becomes love and we sit
in the empty triangle plotting a revolution

so that
when i reach my fingers out they connect, and
feeling your rough palm on my cheek comforts my
sensation of disconnect

whispering into your ear
like being naked on the street,
your skin is my secret
through the most difficult truths we say across
no space at all, contemplating what we need to know
when so many turn their
minds away

so
i watch our touching knees,
tattered shoelaces falling to the ground without
pretending even though i am tired and there are
aches, leaning my head against yours
heat of the day lifting the tiniest bit off my hunched
shoulders and
i can hear you calling my name

________________________________________________________________

May 2005

theEDITOR

what if the robots come to execute you?
claudia pisano

science has found its way into B-sideWhore this month, almost at random. i put out the call, write what you want, and science, among other things, came my way. a science geek since always, this strikes a chord with my own roots. caught up in music, poetry, and the inability, despite the desire, to avoid thinking about politics, i'd almost forgotten (not deep down though, only front brain) the perspective of a scientific way of thinking. in a climate of desperation on many levels, when political rhetoric is going in circles and the only outcome seems to be imminent disaster, scientific process - itself of course not immune to imminent disaster - stands in a slightly different space.

apocalypse, disaster, memory, sadness, and attempts at recovery also showed up. such is the state of things. but also: much laughter and MUCH drunkenness. what else but to have fun amidst insanity? trust me on this one.

so the conversation started early in the day, in the park (to escape the confines of the rather spaceship-like school). we'd read the 3-part new yorker article (4/25, 5/2, and 5/9) on global warming and climate changes, and were more than a little freaked out, trying to process what will happen, working out the possibilities - these articles are about possible (probable) coming massive climactic - and therefore cultural - changes, and the picture is radical, wild, like a movie but for real. we begin wide-eyed frightened and make our way to laughing and hysterics. this is so absurd, but real, and almost normal, it's insane, so we start to laugh while hearts race and panic threatens to set in, because this isn't a joke.

it continues later that night, there are more of us now, and we plan, randomly, in fragments as things occur to us. what would we do with our records? an insistence, i think on my part, that we'll have to have generators, because there's no way we can do this without music. acoustic guitars are mentioned but i'm not so sure, pictures of hokey on-the-quad at college scenes pop up and we all agree that there can't be any hackey-sack playing, and someone also vetoes frisbees.

guarding the perimeter, food raids, we get world-ranging as we contemplate climactic apocalypse - apocalypse for us (i.e., human beings), or most of us, anyway (but not our little us). we stake out land way up in a new warm and fertile north as the equator blazes and an uninhabitable belt grows from the middle on out. imagining that this place we call home - nyc in our case - will be underwater sets us on a caravan away, toward some hoped-for safety that's miles, literally and figuratively, away from the midtown bar we're sitting in, a bar where we're sometimes liked and sometimes not, and where there is never any music playing upstairs where we can smoke despite bloomberg (a lesser tyrant to the larger ones at loose) - it seems we have to choose, can't have all our pleasures at once.

the border guards protect our perimeters against the things that threaten our lives, which adapt very quickly, as we understand we may have to be violent, that we will have to fight for everything, but hold on to what we already know, too, make concessions to the clothes we'll wear (there'll be a secret trunk full of elegant and beautiful dresses) and a near-demand for clean-shaven faces and legs. we may have to fight people, of course. but will there be new (or maybe old, revived) species to contend with? (the conversation devolves into delirium VERY quickly... and we are not, i might add, any of us taking anything stronger than beer and whiskey... ahem...) or it may be remnants (developments? can't quite tell yet whether this is new or old, depends how long all this takes) of man-made tyranny (which moved us along to this point to begin with) - the robot wars may be upon us. how will we fight the robots we know are out there? in our dickies pants and wifebeaters we patrol, we hunt, protect. will we call each other comrade? companero? will there be lipstick with the secret stash of dresses? here's the thing, though - we have to stay happy or it won't work. the conversation is exploding with laughter, we can barely speak by the end - we like to think it will work.

so. standing on the brink of some massive change that is becoming less not-real and more and more present, b-sidewhore's writers attempt to find their way through all this anxiety. ammiel alcalay goes back, finds poetry from his past, as we are facing losses all around us and trying to cope. daniel lazar faces a past also, and eric schwartz does the same, while george fragopoulos goes poetically forward, imagining a lovely and not-lovely future for local loved rocker julian casablancas. justin rogers-cooper struggles with an attempt to live as though we'll wake up tomorrow, because what else can we do? todd barosky goes back in science, to how we might have gotten here; louis bury goes forward with technology, to where we might be going. this issue is about music, too, a little slimmer than last time around and a little heavier, but still, and always, in love with the life around us, and generators or not, playing music.

peace,
claudia

***

A-sideWHORE

Julian Among the Reprobates
George Fragopoulos

Young Julian was born beneath the threat of ash, but came out of it all spot-less and positively clean. He spent his cavernous youth listening to I-Pop and other Detroit area-minded miscreants. What beauty.

While a young man, Julian went to live amongst the reprobates. He was all glass at the time but came out all stone.

At the age of sixteen, he helped write and circulate a pamphlet: it was called On how to remove stains from your vinyl stage pants. It had a limited circulation.

His hands.
Here, a deck, shuffle.
Strangers sighing byes.
Things to hold dear.

Another night, another stranger's stomach to rest the head on. He was all opposed to the life monastic.

Let's wait here.
Use other side.
Water circles.
Natural phenomena at the dinner table.

The gods took an eye, the gods gave an eye. He reached, failed and struck the ocean in anger. Weeks later, all was forgiven.

A hinge to a board game.
I wonder who will be left to televise the apocalypse.
And an oil tycoon.
Scenes from an uncle's life.

At the age of 23 he wrote an instructional manual: On how not to fucking suck: stage fears and the men who love them.

Having sinned, he asked for the most demeaning of tasks to perform. When cleaning latrines wasn't enough, they exiled him to Suma to live with the fishermen. He wrote verse and sent it off to the mainland, just to let his friends and family know he was alive. When his poetry began to spark rebellions, they threatened to cut off his hands.

He wrote a memoir at the age of sixty. It was called On Vocalizing.

I once saw him shooting cats out of trees in order to save them; the trees, not the cats, that is.

And with the last on my sleeve, I heard how Julian died; alone, unloved, forgotten, with only the moon by his deathbed's side. There were no more cats to be shot, no more books to be sold, no more records to be pressed. It was a damnable peace. Outside, doves erupted in flames and the chambermaids hurried with the funeral plans. They found, nestled under his pillow, a manuscript. It had the peculiar title of On friendly ghost language, place letters anywhere.

BRB.

***

BEDROOMvoices

The Here and Now
Justin Rogers-Cooper

I. Terrible Horrible Things

The world is not the same today as it was a hundred years ago, though we rarely probably consider it besides our occasional nod toward the past, a shrug in the direction of something unimaginable, but something we feel deserves our distant and obvious respect. In that hundred years, it seems like every young American generation faces its own apocalypse, whether on the killing fields of France, Germany, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. Each new decade seemed to bring with it another possible version of destruction, and as each successive generation responded to the intensity of those cumulative escalations, more and more extreme artistic and personal reactions seemed to surface in the corners of the country where the young people didn't have to actually go out and face the mutilations and machinations of America's brutal wars for resources and empire. The classic relationship between the carnage and its articulation may be Jimi Hendrix's troubled and psychotic blues in the jungles north of Saigon, although it seems for nearly every trauma occurring somewhere some connection broke somewhere else, as if information itself has a conscience that worked through people. For every Sex Pistols or Miles Davis, there were those goofy or happy performers who desired nothing more than to bring us away from it, like the Monkees or the Bee Gees.

In the 1980s, we grew again to rely on music to bring us news; not headlines per se, but the mood of an American administration, or the feeling of the Berlin Wall. U2 and the Talking Heads served this purpose variously, and the 1990s famously began when Smells Like Teen Spirit protested Bush I and the Gulf War and a shitty economy not through its message, but through its disturbing, caustic mood. Rock n'roll has always forced that meaning, through its attitude and aggression, but the best artists seem actually threatening; loud musicians have always functioned as America's answer to the revolutions of young people that sweep the streets of cities like Budapest (1956), Prague (1968), Gdansk (1981), East Berlin (1989), Tbilisi (2003), and Beirut (2004), where young flag-waving would-be college students cheer and cry, changing the world. Here, the revolutionary violence stays planted in the past (Chicago 1968, Birmingham 1960), and since we all have too much to lose today, we channel it into less physically destructive forms. Americans form crowds to celebrate sports and listen to music: we drink to symbolic war and symbolic demonstrations. The electric guitar and deep percussion of American music is the soundtrack to the 20th century, and it's too late to ever divorce it from the rise of the new empire's wars. The rise of rock is concurrent with the rise of America after 1945.

Our small war in Iraq is the perfect war for our decade, unprecedented and without a true analogue, because it mirrors perfectly every other anxiety accumulating for our generation. Nothing feels safe, and yet we wake each morning the same as yesterday. We are warned daily that horrible terrible things happened yesterday, and that something large and terrible will most likely happen tomorrow. We force ourselves to categorize everything, and if we have a box labeled "Things That Kill," we can avoid it until we finish our never-ending "Things To Do." When we do approach the darker chapters of the news that await us every few hours, should we desire it, the consolation that allows us to sleep rests eerily in the same general justification: if there is no tomorrow, I'm going to live like there is one anyway. We drink on Fridays and work on Mondays. We seek out new books and bands, and call our parents. We kiss each other and sleep together without sex, as if that extra body lying there beside us promises us that the strangeness can end, if only momentarily. And we choose to feel less alone, and rise above the curdling frustrations of our bodies and our limitations, and so attend concerts and sports games, and sort of flow into other people doing the same thing. We allow ourselves a time to share the burden of believing in our American optimism; our devotion to good luck, to the commercial mantra of everything is ok if only. We lift this burden each time we can just stop thinking.

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Listening to the New York three-piece Demander a half-dozen occasions the past Winter and Spring, I can finally feel that thinking blend next to the exploding, escalating rhythms of their short outbursts of turning melodies. Their songs return to the simple and powerful effect of epic and playful hooks, and croon louder and louder, returning you in circles to the same changing scene, like a person driving past an old house over and over and never seeing anyone home. Each song is urgent; when the pace quickens and the beats pound even faster, your heart can't help but spread, pounding, into the rest of your body. The songs dissolve into smaller moments in stops and fits; they are momentarily protests and the next moment serenades. Demander's singer and bass player, Karen Correa, sings like she's speaking to someone close to her, intimate and vulnerable. Her lyrics waft off into the room, bouncing off the walls and through you, far away but clear, seductive but guarded. The tunes stick to you, catch you for hours after a show. She sings, memorably, over and over in "samthurman" wait, and then, I cannot. Wait wait wait wait. Demander reveals the stealth interruptions of a certain version of young life by circling around the confused anxiety of living in the early shadows of national mourning and half-remembered trauma. Let me explain.

Samthurman is the name for an asteroid that nearly collided with the Earth. The narrator of the song looks up at the night sky and utters some kind of poetic, idiosyncratic conversation to the asteroid, confessing, as it were, to a vague, uncontrollable power. You sense that I'm emotionless, she reveals, you go by. Behind these edging motives, Demander's meticulously gifted drummer, Sivon Harlap, starts to brace and peel her set, as if something is about to hit. We've nothing to lose, she now begins, the song starting to pound, building. The guitar is relentless and unsettling, handled by their quiet showman, Jared Scott. Wait wait wait wait. I cannot. His guitar zips and dances and carries the eddying impact, switching between scratching and squelching, rough and final. Karen begins to really sing sweet over the sheer heartache of Sivon's beats, which seem to demand the narrator of the song come to terms with her feelings, now. Breathless under Jared's charge earlier, she says stop. We've nothing to lose, she repeats. Samthurman it's totally up to you, she admits, the things that we might and we might not do. This is about making peace with a possible destruction, but with focused personal insight. This is really not a song about not waking up tomorrow, but about how to live like that's possible. When she cries out nearer the end, she trails off loudly, I want you to walk through the door, but she doesn't quite mean it exactly. It feels like she just wants, like us, for the uncertainty to end. Soon afterward, touched with a lover's riddled promise, she adds that if you ever feel at home, (short pause) I'll never leave you alone. This is the only moment of the song that she doesn't seem to sing to the asteroid, when the narrator searching the sky seems to reassure someone else that she has actually decided to comfort us, whatever else she fears. When the song ends, it falls apart at its hottest point, and she can only say, once more, I cannot wait.

Demander's songs sound mysteriously insistent, though veiled in intimate codes and behind thick and improbable layers. They write important messages as honest and intimate strangers, willing to become resolute and embedded with you quickly, like they know something they can't keep close another second. Their songs are neither happy nor depressing, but distorted voicemails from an old lover, saved years ago during a day of great importance, whose crying and castigations now seem prophetic. Couched as they are inside milky and memorable chords, the songs bleed together verses that feel like sex with choruses that complicate them. In "Wicked World," the song's narrator interjects, I can't take you no, not anywhere/ but this old story is already told, like someone who's loved someone and argued with them too long about the same things. Surprisingly, then, the bumping drums and dreamy feedback also suggests something else. While Karen's voice sounds comfortable and relaxed, breathy and seductive, she channels someone slightly uncertain: Just tell me/ Are you beautiful? But this one's different/ this one's different. Like their other songs, the band members are consistently impatient throughout their sets. Each song and note stimulates a distinctive importance, and thus the early and middle parts of the song that approach the crescendo prove necessary components to the close, which rushes and gushes at the end of their songs, sweeping and exhaustive, terrible and shattering, full of heat.

II. Generation Shock

Karen and Sivan, Demander's core phenomenal bass and drum combo, founded Demander in Winter 2003. They have been playing together in their current line-up since November, when their well-traveled guitarist, Jared Scott, joined the band. Their first show together was at Piano's in December, and they've performed subsequently and regularly at the Delancey, Lit, Luna Lounge, the Knitting Factory, Sin-e, and Rothko, though Karen and Sivan have played most of the popular New York venues, such as Bowery Balroom or Mercury Lounge, numerous times in different bands or in previous projects. Each has been working with instruments since adolescence, and each grew up outside New York. Karen grew up in Denver, went to school in Connecticut, and lived in Chicago and Brazil during summers. Sivan was born in Israel, raised in California, and spent a year in Tel Aviv before moving to New York. Jared is from Ohio and went to school in Indiana; he came to New York with the intention of staying for a couple of days. The geography of their collaboration seems symbolic of New York's magnetic arts and music scenes, which continually draw a population of young persons from elsewhere, a veritable drain on the interesting and the ambitious from nearly every county east of the Mississippi, and sometimes even farther west. New York is a city for the deeply thoughtful, the sadly intelligent, and those who enjoy the meritocratic ethnic combustion of sincere, necessary competition in every discipline and every skill. It enjoys the combined effects of the States' largest immigration from Africa, the Americas, and Asia, as well as those middle class fugitives seeking the distinctly millennial thrill of post-apocalyptic Manhattan. The titanic constant of midtown, the black tourist pit at Ground Zero, the three-story impending gentrification of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, the PATH train commute from Jersey: New York is not only the dreamscape of Hollywood and the liberal media, but a destination for anyone pursuing something serious. It contains a different kind of emotional and psychological circulation than the urban student clusters of San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and certainly draws more scale than the miniature citadels of liberal thinking in the red and swing states, like San Antonio, Columbus, Madison, Ann Harbor, Bloomington, Iowa City, Boulder, or Sante Fe. New York's sister cities are London and Washington DC, the only other two coastal outposts that connect, through small but powerful skylines, to a kind of rich dark pathos of the west.

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Demander would humbly deny any connection between their sound and some peripheral, indirect connections to the news, or to other bands that accentuate the hard, memorable soundtrack that accompanies the iPods of urban life. This is understandable. Some of the most appropriate music to define an era or a decade happens accidentally, without intention. In fact, ideology isn't ever explained by politics-ideology exists just below the radar of what headlines acknowledge, and lies precisely in those forms that we don't acknowledge as novel. The things we take for granted actually produce the core of popular culture: crashing cymbals, punching bass, ringing tones on the electric guitar, the sleek female voice lingering against drifting feedback. What separates Demander from each band that might easily draw them into comparisons is the profound urgency of their songs. Each standard set they play consists of simple, direct, and energetic appeals to their audience. They are not writing songs for consumption, but to communicate the oblique messages riddled just behind the humming thumps and radically confident hooks that center each track. Each song presses the listener to listen intently to an escalating, repetitive verse-chorus-bridge structure that peels itself away at surprising moments, only to resurrect a slightly different line toward the end, charged with loud conclusions, foaming with incessant clarity.

With addressing personal relationships or asteroids, the voice of the songs remains consistent and lucid, splicing together haunting premonitions about the future through straightforward, almost conversational language, seemingly addressed to someone close. The incredible cyclonic pace of Sivon's drumming, rattling in your heart, echoes the intimacy of the singing, almost like the song's unconscious revelations, the landscape that reveals the true ambitions of Demander's intentions. Jared's guitar often hooks and hangs, sometimes hitting one hard note at a time, and then perhaps lingering in rawls and drawls, pacing faster, then surfing the chorus home. These elements combine to significant effect in "Lovelife," the final track on their soldout first EP. Karen repeatedly sings in varied tones, if it's not going just the way that you like/ I'm still going to see you tonight, and then, later, she plaintively remarks, this is what/ it's what we've got. The beautiful hesitation between "this is what" and "it's what we've got" reveals a speaker still divided inside, somehow uncertain of the very thing she's reassuring the listener to believe. The lines typify the song as a whole, which suggests a kind of relaxed and satisfying resignation about a relationship, a quiet comfort shared between two people about the limitations of life and the future. Atypical because of a slower time-signature, but typical in its broad ambition and cascading theme, "Lovelife" is a love song for friendships just past the idealism of youth. Solid and reasonable by itself, it takes on a tinged meaning set with their other songs, such as "samthurman," where the speaker reassures the listener of similar positions, urging to the listener to understand, if you feel at home, I won't get you out tonight. Although the language and expression is similar, "samthurman" is set against the powerful concentrations of a possible end of days.

The comforts of a close body in the sweeping paranoia of an impossible possible cataclysm makes Demander's songs perfect, if completely unintended, parables for New York. After she states openly that, It's a wicked world, Karen's voice returns to the words half-way through the song, the song's riff turning over and over, Sivan's drums exploding joyfully louder, before exclaiming euphorically just tell me/ are you beautiful/ this one's different/ this one's different/ this one's different. The song ends ecstatically, the band shredding the air, Jared's fingers fretting up the neck, the lead hook splitting into a dozen fast fragments. You can hear the words sung invisibly through the climax, behind the tight rehearsal of the chords, "this one's different." As in "samthurman," when the speaker seems at times ambivalent or perhaps threaded through a lethal event, in "Wicked World" Demander seems strangely attuned to moments that mark the space between dramatic events; they are, in short, writing songs that simultaneously celebrate a deserved peace and search out an inevitable terror. You can note the effect in the structure of all their songs, which stop, break, tremble and erupt, probing the high, low, and the penultimate sensuality of pleasure on the brink of exhaustion. Each of their songs are memorable because of the melody and their deceptive simplicity, but the repetition of chord and lyric cycles is so fierce that you listen to the refrains as immediate, happening moments, not like something you've heard before. Because you know what's coming, though, the chorus always seems soothing because it explodes, because you expect the fire.

IIII. Nervous Redemption

After comparing the symmetries of the songs that may have the least in common, highlighting the similarities of three other songs, "Raise a Glass," "Something More," and "Elijah," reveals the depth of their themes and the growth the band articulates on their forthcoming EP. The first two, from their first EP, signify Demander in the early moments of their project. "Something More" has fallen out of their latest sets; it exhibits a forthright, even spunky, pop. Sivan and Karen's timing is already deeply interwoven. As in their best work, the drums anchor the controlled hysteria of the chopping, tinted guitar, and the pulsing sinews of the bass. The song's speaker begins immediately, framing the middle of the night: "I was up at 4 AM/ Sleep used to be my friend." The characteristic urgency is obvious by the chorus: "Why do I feel that/ they're always waiting for/ something more/ exciting to happen?" The song fakes an ending, which the band resumes after a measured pause, to Karen's repetitive bridge, "we know/ we know/ we know." Like "samthurman's" wait wait wait wait, the speaker is at once anxious, awoken from bed after not sleeping, and the center against whom others fracture, "waiting for something more." This is the same speaker who later reassures those persons that "this is what we've got," and the same artful expression of patience in place of restless wonder.

The struggle against that approaching, impending hour, already so latent in their other songs, grows most successful in "Raise a Glass," which follows "Something More" on the first EP. Clearly one of their finest tracks, the song begins with a harrowing guitar clapping a red chord over and over. It leads into a mingling yellow riff, tinged with eccentric coughs, that hover behind Sivan's brash slums. Floating through domestic themes, the chorus is clear and purposeful. "I can raise a glass to things that are long gone," Karen offers, but then turns, asking, "but what's so wrong with here and now?" The song slows down for these words, and the words hang just beyond the beats, and she repeats them with a vague, authentic accent on the phrase as a question. The emphasis is on the present moment, though not because the future waits. Instead, it is the past that threatens its utopian place, its melody of perfection. Yet, just as the speaker of Demander's songs approaches the future with an intelligent dread, there is no wishful thinking, nor easy answer. The things we promise each other, the distance between us, stretch only as far as our arms. Our common language is not even love, but space and time; we are neither guilty nor saved, and our home is the space we share, not the place we imagine for our dreams. It is, in fact, the knowledge that this ends that surfaces in Demander's work, but, tragically, they seem to be the sole voice that understands this: hence the urgency of their songs, the intensity of their playing, the link between their work.

Justin Rogers-Cooper

The song "Elijah," from their second EP, mutates from the pattern set out in "Something More" and "Raise a Glass." Although it may not be intentional either, the name Elijah both connects the song back to Demander's references to a time before end-time and to their speaker's voice as a source of important information. Elijah, after all, was the old Hebrew prophet who provided comfort to the Israelites in a time of distress, because he figured as a precursor to the coming of the Lord. His appearance to communities did not signal the end days, but the era before the end, a calming presence that promised that the burden of judgment may actually be the time of redemption. This mood slightly opposes Demander's role in other songs, which is precisely to cull the radiation from the heart, and save the moment for intimate, conscious knowledge. The parallel is not exact however; in "Elijah," Demander addresses the prophet without necessarily inheriting his duties. The relation appears clear, though; Elijah haunts the speaker from "Something More," awakening her in the middle of the night, jettisoning her into a gulf of anxiety. An argument is taking place, and a version of the future is at stake. "Elijah, why do we still fight," she asks. The prophecy is clear: "I've seen it once, I've seen it..." The restlessness is obvious, and, turning over in the sheets, she huddles through the "trouble just to sleep light in our beds." The chorus erupts, simple and exclamatory, cathartic and defiant, hopeful and cursing, repeating the same phrase over and over. We are in love! We are in love! We are in love! The questions then continue through the haunted landscape of a nightmare: "It must be cold in the chemical light/ of these places deep inside." The defiant rejoinder. We are in love! We are in love! We are in love! The speaker herself dissolves, "not for myself anymore," before announcing, with great and fantastic clarity, "we are trying our damndest to be/ the thing what's in our heads but/ it seems like so much trouble/ just to sleep light in our beds." The thought lingering before you, before she tries to convince us yet again that we are safe with her, the thought that glides into your chest and pinches you as the band declares its dissolute solutions, her agonized promises, the thought that you can't shake spits in your mind through the chorus, the repeated words, we are in love, we are in love, but then, just when it speaks, the words fail, the song stops without the last syllable, without the most important word: we are in. We are in . They cut off, end the song before it should end-and in the blinding silence, you realize suddenly what mattered, what mattered was that she loved us while she could. When the end arrives, they seem to say, you will understand, confronted with judgment, that you were loved and safe-and you were told so.

www.demandernyc.com

***

THEREareWORDS,youSEE

Ammiel Alcalay

Resolved in music (a few from the vault, early 1970s to mid 1980s)

CARAVAN OF DREAMS

1. I was a junkie all wrapped up in blankets maybe watching tv or reading magazines or just staring into empty space - the person with me looked like someone I knew from school, very computer-like, robotic, he just sat on a chair with his feet dangling in the air, like a little kid reading a magazine, afraid to get his hair cut. I got scared and wondered what the fuck I was doing lying around all day so I jumped out of bed and grabbed the kid by the collar, demanding the best cure as soon as possible. He just said: "Yankee scag, no chance," and went back to his infantile, moronic position scanning a magazine with his feet in the air and his idiotic helpless barbershop expression.

2. I was in the Carleton Pharmacy looking at a magazine that had articles about Jack Kerouac and Rosie Greer in it. I couldn't find the articles but there was a lot of paper, carbon paper and handwriting in it like it was some writing contest or something. A girl walked towards the door and said she knew me from somewhere. Something about eight years ago. She was walking her dog. We started to talk and I asked her where she was going. First she said something I didn't catch and then she said Oak Bluffs. I said I would walk with her. We walked down Beacon st. and down what could have been Hawes st. near 1101. She was running very far ahead of me and I couldn't figure out why. I also started running before I realized she was chasing the dog. She was wearing tan pants. She caught up with the dog and tried to put the leash on it. Then she asked me to help and I did. Then we went to her apartment and down the back stairs which looked like Nora Dooley's but that must have been from some other dream because I've never been there. Or maybe like at Karl's house. So we talked for a while and I remember while she was running I asked her what the hell she'd been doing for the last eight years. She had to go in because her parents were calling her. I went out the back door and I had the distinct feeling I'd been in New Jersey. I hopped a steel fence to another yard to get to the street and as I was doing it I could hear somebody open a window to look out towards me. I went out to the street and now I was in the city. It was about three blocks west of the Bowery where there was a little trucking district. A small sign with the arrow pointing uptown said Union Square. I started walking up that way and the street I was on looked a lot like West st. Past all the trucks and the loading platforms and then I walk by this truck and Al drives by and says "Lousy time to do it, while the Sergeant's watching you," and drives off. Then in the next truck there's a whole bunch of drunks just laying out all over the cab and I can see a couple in back. The one in the driver's seat calls me over and says "Here's the negatives and contacts, all you need, will you take it." I say no and keep walking. I guess he meant everything I'd need for breaking into the truck. A little further I see two guys on bicycles talking to him and it looks like they'll take the job.

Jaffe locked himself in the closet for a week
said Tony the drummer put a spell on him
put his adam's apple in the back of his head
so he couldn't turn around or bend to see the keys

he drives the iron shift -
36 hours - and sleeps, cash in the
trunk, doors locked, in
front of Store 24

caravan of dreams

in Shirley Clarke's film about Ornette Coleman
the moon looks like a white woman's body
with wide pink nipples - in the story
of the circumcision Ornette concludes
that male and female exist but
man and woman are

____________________scarface and fratricide
____________________homesick time speaks
____________________under rocks and
____________________says everything

_________________________(I wanted to
_________________________and couldn't)

_________________________and the insistence

_________________________echoed everywhere

_________________________to renounce

_________________________dreaming

life's rich pageant

reflect upon life's rich pageant -
in it the poet alludes to death,
madness, distance and loss:

_______________tonight, sitting in the bathroom
_______________with the door wide open
_______________looking through the courtyard
_______________at opal and azure glass blown
_______________by magicians and alchemists
_______________tonight, the air fresh
_______________against the body, thinking:

suppose it was an odd place to be
trudging through the snow on Charles St.
no I never did find your place on the other
side of the Hill where you said the junkies were
I was with my own that night under the El waiting
at the doorway Steve kneeling in the middle of the
room with a needle John and someone else shielding the entrance
and that whacked out old hunchback coming down the stairs
ready to have a go at me with a useless Colt-45 cocked in
his right hand of course there must have been a cause
for the reading we were on our way to I mean it must
have been for a good cause in those days when
a lot of people were getting their
heads bashed in
or broken
open

I've gone a long way myself
it was only later I could
give shape to the lie -
clothe the colorless
in light

***

Ammiel Alcalay
VALSE TRISTE (for Art Pepper)

I say I am a shade
of my former self.
My legs barely carry me
among the gowns

of women no one
introduced to me.

I see them twist.
I see them spin.

I fall. I see
and all I do
is see and fall.

MAMBO DE LA PINTA

This is a dance of death
there is no ritual left
no shaman or protectress.
Nursery rhymes dull in a
young man's mouth old and
dry in need of what he
knows won't help in time.
Steel permeates this
dance of clang and drill.
There is no ritual left
save this shrill mad mambo.

For more on Art Pepper, go here: www.jazzprofessional.com/interviews/art%20pepper_1.htm

***

Mitochondrial Musical Eve
Todd Barosky

An assortment of statisticians, mathematicians, and geneticists working around the world have recently come to some sort of tenuous concusses as to where and when humanity's most recent common female ancestor lived. The knowledge that such a women existed is obvious; the mathematics of genealogies make her inevitable. The number of your own individual ancestors increases exponentially each generation: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents (unless, that is, your parents were cousins), sixteen great-great-grandparents-and so on, until, about thirty or so generations into this regress, you have over a trillion theoretical ancestors. Which is plainly an impossible number, as during the entire course of human history there have not been nearly that many people who have lived. So there must have been, along the way, some mixing and mingling of various lineages. Trace your own and mine back far enough and you'll see exactly where-which is to say, in exactly who-those lineages converge. That person is our closest common ancestor. It is certainly a human being; and chances are, it is a male.

Mitochondrial Eve is the woman who is the most recent direct female ancestor of everyone alive. She was first posited as a theoretical necessity; but by taking samples of various people's mitochondrial cells-which are passed along the maternal line alone-some scientists have guessed that the actual woman lived in Africa less than three hundred thousand years ago, or approximately twelve thousand generations. These geographic and temporal results have been contested, but we do know for sure that when or wherever Mitochondrial Eve lived, she had at least two daughters. And whoever she was, she was in no way remarkable when measured against her peers. She was not the First Human, nor was she the smartest, strongest, prettiest of the humans who were alive at the time. She is only retrospectively remarkable: since she lived, her descendents have, for whatever arcane and innumerable reasons, peopled the earth.

Although not she nor any of her contemporaries could have known, she was indeed the start of something huge-a genetic shift, or, we might more mundanely call it, a trend. But even today, we have no idea why it was with her that this trend started. Only looking back, can we judge her accordingly. And even then, we cannot say exactly what it was about her that was so special.

The same is true in the study of the various species, except here the lines are a bit fuzzier. Consider a brief argument, drawn from philosopher David Sanford:

a. Every human has a human for a mother.
b. If ever a single human has been, there have only been a finite number of them.
c. Yet, if ever one has been, then by our first proposition, there have been infinitely many, which denies our second proposition, and leaves us with no recourse but to conclude: never has a human been.

But this is patently absurd. Of course there are-and have only been-a finite number of humans, of Homo sapiens sapiens. And yet equally evident: no monkey ever gave birth to a full-blown human. The problem here is that unlike with Mitochondrial Eve, we cannot locate a First Human from which we all descended; and such a First Human is by no means a theoretical necessity. Although we can differentiate rather easily between present day humans and present day monkeys, we cannot explain in anything but the most general terms how the speciation of humans occurred. There must have been a subtle genetic trend which was amplified by certain historical or geographical particulars-a small but fortuitous accident, a shift in climate, a mountain chain, a canyon, a migration, an ice age, a phenotypic benefit. Some of these environmental conditions sufficiently isolated the nascent genetic trend so that it could stand out and develop of its own accord. Until, finally, we have the human species. And as with Mitochondrial Eve, the individuation of her species can only be inscribed well after the fact.

Distinct cultural trends, be they in music or poetry or fashion, seem to be similarly accomplished. A sort of speciation occurs within the various artistic domains by which new genres are born. This tenuous analogy begs the same question of origins; and the same argument can be applied to help us ascertain the futility of trying to answer such muddled questions. Every musician, it might be said, had at least one other musician as an influence; there have only been a finite number of musicians; and so, by a contradiction in terms, there have never been any musicians.

What this argument points the way to is a certain prudence in our anthropological investigations, in which it sometimes seems imperative that we must ascertain different categories which we term music, proto-music, or meaningless and discordant sound. We do this not authoritatively, but only to reach an consensus for purposes of classification, in order to sort things out so that we might speak of them with a greater fluency. And the best we can do in this regard is to draw arbitrary, diaphanous, gerrymandered lines of distinction about these categories which we invent. As with the speciation of Homo sapiens sapiens, music as a form of expression did not happen in a single generation: no mute bird ever produced a hatchling that could sing as elegantly as a nightingale can. But it helps if we can draw the line somewhere.

However gradually human music was accomplished, it is a question whether or not it was accomplished only once. Perhaps music is more like the eye than the feather. The eye, or the capacity to differentiate between wavelengths of light, evolved independently at least twelve different times (which means that every creature with eyes today shares as a nearest common ancestor an organism that was blind), whereas the feather evolved only once, so that every feathered bird shares a common feathered forebear. Chances are all animals who communicate through some sort of vocalization share a non-vocal nearest common ancestor. And so the chances are similar with humans: that we invented music many times. But it is important to note that even if we do share a common musical ancestor, that person's coronation can only come retrospectively.

The Tree of Life, as Darwin first drew it, consists of many divergent branches all growing from one trunk. All the genetic information is passed on only through direct descendents. Once one branch diverges from another (and a new species is established), that divergent branch never returns to the one from which it split. The very reason we would draw it as divergent in the first place is because it can not in principle return: the two genotypes can no longer effectively combine to produce a viable organism. But on the Tree of Culture, divergent or disparate branches often reconnect, and exchange their information laterally. Whereas a bird cannot communicate the genetic instructions for feather-growing to a human, but only to its fledglings, an American blues pianist can easily (if not deliberately) convey his musical ideas to a rock guitarist in Britian.

This fact has caused a veritable explosion of speciation in music, and makes the tracing of the numerous musical lineages difficult indeed. Often times we might look back and say something like Beethoven stood on the cusp of Romantic music, or that he was the last of the great Classical musicians, but these distinctions are increasingly arbitrary. One could just as easily argue for Mozart or even Bach. And as we come into the present, such distinctions are all the more confused: who was the first rock, blues, jazz, pop, folk musician?

But, thankfully, we are nowadays assisted with the making of these distinctions, as the speciation of genres is gratuitously announced by the very people who purport to begin them. Imagine if Mitochondrial Eve had one night stood upon a stone beside the fire-pit and announced to her fellow nomads as they ate that she, with the birth of her second daughter, was ushering in a new wave of humanity that would begin with her, and which would sweep across the earth, consuming it. Of course, as has been noted, she never could have known that this would eventually be the case. But this sort of proclamation has become somewhat commonplace today. It seems that we cannot be bothered to stand by waiting for a time when with confidence we can proclaim where and how and why a trend did start. Instead, behind ever confident countenances, we announce the very moment-very often a Tuesday-when a trend is born. It is oftentimes the case that, in fact, a trend has not begun; rather, only a record has been released for sale. In the same way, the birth of Mitochondrial Eve was simply the birth of a rather ordinary baby girl. But what if a few days or weeks before her birth, a bunch of people gathered together and began to proclaim that this baby would be, in due time, the next big thing. The prophesy might prove self-fulfilling. A genre can be announced so that it becomes a genre. And Mitochondrial Eve's peers might have slain themselves in order to precipitate the sweeping success of her genetic information-just as the masses might scramble to their nearest record store and buy the newest highly-acclaimed record.

Consider the poetic manifestos published during the years contiguous with the world wars. They are a bit brazen, and a bit off-putting upon a first reading-as most manifestos are, which perhaps explains the negative connotation of the word: we approach manifestos skeptically, almost expecting to find some form of exaggeration or even outright falsities. But we have no reason to think that even the most audacious of artists are not sincere when they conceive of themselves as at the vanguard of poetic or musical speciation. Perhaps we might ask for a bit of modesty, or irony at least, as John Lennon certainly had when he compared the Beatles to Jesus. But nevertheless, announcing your nascent genre is an effective way of creating space for it to exist. It is a good trick, an art-form even, that has in recent years been so perfected that when such a manifesto is manufactured, we hardly notice it.

Creating space might be thought of as the creation of a market place. Remove the singular document, the manifesto, and replace it with cascades of advertisements which serve the same purpose, but which aren't responded to as negatively and can't be descried or ignored as easily as a barefaced manifesto often is. Andre Breton, in peddling his Surrealism, would not announce his own movement, but rather employ others to pen press-releases which would be strategically placed, and which would praise the movement obliquely. Instead of Breton telling everyone how liberating it is to think and write and paint surrealistically, a reviewer from Le Monde would be quoted as saying he had never experienced a such a truly emancipating movement in all his life-and believe you me, the said reviewer has tried and turned on many.

Genres are impelled into existence only as they are marketable, or else existent genres are commoditized to make them so. The geological coincidences and the random mutations which acted as catalysts in biological speciation have been entirely reversed. Nothing is done haphazardly. Coronations are made before the child comes of age. Indeed, many such children are anticipatorily crowned, in hopes that one will prove the Eve. All others perish, and their loss the market can readily absorb.

This global trend itself might prove frustrating after a time. But take heart, its even worse elsewhere.

Very nearly all of the species that have ever lived are now extinct, and very nearly all of the humans who have died could not count among the living a single descendent. This is of course most natural, as the creation of successful lives in essence depends upon the sacrifices of the masses. And those lucky few who are successful, are wildly so. Various abstract mathematic inquires into the nature of human genealogies have implied that we as individuals can count among our ancestors nearly everyone alive only a few thousand years ago; and, a few thousand years hence, we (you or I) just might count every living person to be one of our descendents. That is, every living person, or no one at all. Passing on your genetic information seems to be an all or nothing thing: either you are, after a few millennia, the forebear of everyone on earth, or of no one at all. Take for example Mitochondrial Eve's milieu. All of the people sitting around her fire: unless they married into Eve's family, they either died childless, or their children did, or else their children's children did. In fact, the overwhelmingly vast majority of bloodlines of people alive on the earth at that time have long since ended. Unless your descendant mated with a descendent of Eve's, your blood was doomed to fail.

The same applies to music. Passing on one's musical offerings over many generations seems an all or nothing thing. Bach's music is alive and well, and perhaps will be well into the foreseeable future. But Sweelink, Frescobaldi, and other no-names who Bach very much admired have faded fast into relative obscurity. Perhaps a fire at a library or two somewhere in Central Europe could spell their doom, rather like Umberto Eco fictionalized the doom of the second book of Aristotle's Poetics in The Name of the Rose. Looking toward the future from our present, perhaps the lucky few will not be the most talented, gifted, original, or the truly inspired, but simply the most marketable, and will be selected to survive on that account. In what sense is this natural, as the selection of Mitochondrial Eve's descendents was? When we are asked who the oldest or best classical musician is, we might guardedly answer Bach; and perhaps we would be correct in some respects. But who will our great-grandchildren answer when the question is asked of them, who was the Mitochondrial Eve of Latin-American music: Jennifer Lopez? Perhaps some are of that opinion already. And even scarier: perhaps, in the future, they will be right.

It becomes a matter-as it has become the singular matter already elsewhere-of conservation, and of holding out against destruction. There are still a few thousand distinct languages being spoken daily across the planet, but the majority of them have entered dire straits. As habitats are destroyed and various cultural populations dwindle, or as English sweeps across the globe as Mitochondrial Eve's genetic information did so long ago, languages and the cultural heritages they embody (music included) vanish. Biological diversity is similarly threatened: species are going extinct at a rate one hundred-thousand times faster than before the arrival of Homo sapiens sapiens. That rate is climbing steadily, and the continual loss of biodiversity is approaching that which the Mesozoic Era witnessed some sixty-five million years ago, when a giant meteorite struck the earth and wiped out all of the large reptiles-the dinosaurs included.

As we are the species who initiate these appalling, even downright frightening trends, we are those who can begin to counteract them. I am by no means qualified to speak of reversing these trends in biodiversity, or in linguistic and cultural diversity for that matter, but perhaps new and independent forms of communication might precipitate a certain awareness, might allow people furtive peeks through the proverbial wool. But how to make them effective? How to ensure their independence? How to make them subsist, in the face of such egregious and shortsighted onslaughts? How to make a singular musician subsist who we, as individuals, think deserves it? How to make a Mitochondrial Eve out of anyone besides J-Lo?

***

Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Louis Bury

We do not know what we lose by all our labour-saving appliances.
- D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

I don't consider myself a Luddite, but several people close to me have had their suspicions. My mom found my post-September 11th refusal to get a cell phone incomprehensible. My sister has long believed that I want to emulate Thoreau and go live by a pond in relative seclusion, away from people, cars and modernity, this in spite of the fact that I have chosen to live the cushy life of an urbanite for all six years of my adult existence. And my fiancee has listened, with a raised eyebrow, to my half-baked theories about the robotic fate of humankind (theories mostly pilfered from The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, a book by the keyboard guru/entrepeneur Ray Kurzweil, a book long on prophecy, shock-value and self-promotion, and short on content and modesty, but fascinating nevertheless). So I admit I may be overreacting when I express my distrust over my new iPod. It was a recent birthday gift from my fiancee, who received it for free from her job. I say this not to expose her as a re-gifter (I actually think it was a very good gift idea since I'm notoriously difficult to buy for anyway), but to point out that I never asked for it. The pod was thrust upon me and I have to figure out how it will fit into my listening life.

The first thing I've noticed is that it doesn't look like it was meant to play music. The particular model I have is called the "iPod shuffle," which is white, sleek, and compact, about an inch wide and a finger's length long. Depending on your perspective, it looks variously like a travel toothbrush, a thermometer, or a suppository--anything but a device that plays music. It has made me realize the importance we place upon size in our listening devices. Largeness implies seriousness, if not coolness, on the part of the listener. Home and car stereo systems, headphones, amplifiers, instruments--the bigger these contraptions are, the better. I'm sure one of the reasons why size matters in musical equipment is because it effects acoustics, but it seems to me that it possesses a significance apart from quality of sound. We value size for its own sake when it comes to music; it lends spatial presence to a predominantly aural form. A grand piano doesn't just sound better than a keyboard, it looks better, more imposing.

Hang-ups about its appearance aside, the main problems my iPod presents me are organizational ones: how will I go about transferring songs to my computer, compiling playlists, etc? And the related, and more pressing, concern: how will I go about purchasing music in the future? will I continue to buy cds? will I buy the occasional song online? will I revert to the underhanded methods of my college days, when Napster was in its heyday? In entertaining these questions now, it has occurred to me that the reason I never had the slightest interest in buying an iPod previously was because I hadn't wanted to bother with determining an answer to them. I was content with the way I bought and listened to music, and had no desire to tinker with a functioning, familiar system of operation. Which isn't a fear of new technology on my part, just plain laziness.

Take the seemingly simple issue of transferring songs from cd's to the computer. While by no means an arduous task, it does require a certain amount of foresight. When using an iPod, you can no longer simply grab a cd on your way out the door. You have to sit down ahead of time and transfer the music from disc to computer to pod. The required level of planning is entirely antithetical to the whimsical process of selecting a cd to fit/shape your mood as you're heading out for the day. And even if the music you want is already uploaded to your computer, there's still a good chance it won't be on the pod itself. And let's just say that you're already running late for wherever it is you're headed, and your computer happens to be shut off, and, like mine, is rather old and slow to boot up (and if yours isn't slow now, it will be in 3 months with the added weight of all those mp3s), then what do you do? Well, you just get out the cd you want and hope the batteries in your discman still work. Which solution raises the question of why you didn't just do that in the first place, cutting out the middleman - the pod - who's complicating what should be a very simple process.

But I guess I'm working on the assumption that you're still buying cds. Maybe I'm clinging to cds in the way some cling to vinyl. There's a certain romance to the old forms, not because they're inherently better and uncorrupted but simply because they're the ones we know, the ones we grew up with and collected, the ones that are familiar. Perhaps computerized music files are beginning to supplant compact discs in the way cds once supplanted cassettes, and I should just accept the fact as a natural part of the technological life cycle, a life cycle which, incidentally, structurally necessitates further consumption. And if it weren't mp3s doing the supplanting, it would be something else. So why resist the inevitable?

While I'm under no delusion that cd's will forever be the predominant mode of listening to recorded music, it seems that the shift to computer-based modes devalues the album as such. It's an obvious point, but albums - good albums, at least - are meant to be heard in totality. Each album has its own unique arc of movement that, over time, becomes increasingly apparent and seductive. It's a jarring feeling to hear a song from a familiar album in a different context - on a jukebox, say - because the songs preceding and following it aren't the ones you're used to hearing. As the familiar song fades out, you find yourself unconsciously expecting to hear the first few bars of the next song on the album, only to have those expectations defied. The larger rhythms of an album can literally ingrain themselves in memory, a point that should be especially apparent to those who listen to a lot of purely instrumental music.

Another obvious but important point is that when you make a practice of listening to albums in their entirety, you discover great songs you otherwise wouldn't have if you had stuck to the singles. Indeed, this could be the definition of fandom: knowing and loving the stuff that the superficial listener has barely, if at all, heard. (Which fact explains some of the appeal of underground music: all of the stuff is little known, hidden.) You can develop a more complex, perhaps intimate, relationship with a well-worn album than can be developed with individual songs. At the opposite end of the spectrum stands the greatest hits collection, which purports to distill a lifetime's worth of work down to a set of representative songs, the biggies. Though such condensation serves as an expedient introduction to the uninitiated, little else could be more pernicious. Even if you have only a slight familiarity with the group, purchasing a Clash greatest hits cd instead of London Calling represents something akin to a profound ethical failure.

Now there's nothing to prevent you from buying/downloading and listening to albums in their entirety on your computer and iPod. But the mediums discourage your doing so in a way that cd's don't. On the computer, you're likely to download only the specific songs you're craving, a process that eliminates much of the chance and accident that come with buying albums. What you're liable to wind up with is one big personalized greatest hits playlist, which, while certainly enjoyable, lacks the freshness and excitement of inadvertent discovery. The very title of the product - the iPod shuffle - indicates the greatest hits ethos being marketed: its draw lies in allowing the listener to shuffle through a handpicked set of songs that otherwise couldn't be housed in one device.

You can skip around on a cd, even put your cd player on shuffle, but you're much more likely, even if unintentionally, to eventually just let the damn thing play through. And that's when you're liable to get hooked, when the album as a whole is given the opportunity to work its way into your unconscious. In mp3 form, even if you buy it in its entirety, the album most likely will never get the chance. Sure, you may sit through the whole album on your first listening, but after that it's highly unlikely it will get played on accident. Playlists just aren't conducive to that sort of thing; they're inherently hierarchical, selective.

Cds also have the element of liner notes, which aren't just window dressing. Owning a favorite album without its original case and booklet is kind of like owning a computer printout of a beloved book - the thing in itself, the content, is all there, but it feels somehow naked, inadequate. Burnt cd's, for example, have always struck me as homeless and lonely because they lack the intended case and liner notes. The music belongs, especially during initial hearings, in the context of the cover art, the photos of the band, the song lyrics, and the zany essays that can often be found in the booklet. Even insert advertisements, when coming from a small record label, have a certain charm. As the first thing the listener reaches for when opening a new album, the booklet can be intentionally designed by the musician to be part of the listening experience.

My litany of grievances against the pods could continue for some time, but the basic point common to each complaint is that we lose quite specific pleasures and advantages when we opt for computerized music. Contrary to what D.H. Lawrence says, we do know what we lose by our labor-saving appliances: for every new appliance or invention, there is always a generation or two able, and most likely willing, to bear witness to the changes wrought for worse and for better by it. Then, for subsequent generations, the appliance, like ideology as defined by Althusser, passes itself off as natural - as essential - when in fact it is anything but. In this whole process, it isn't progress itself I object to, but its aura of inevitability and value as better. One day, mp3s may very well be the predominant way of listening to recorded music, and cd's, like cassettes and vinyl, will be anachronisms. If that day comes (assuming it hasn't already arrived), it won't be because mp3s and iPods represent an inherently superior way of listening to music, but only because they were once slightly different and new. More than anything else, the iPod is a product that, like so many other products, has created a need for itself. Maybe that's what products do by definition: create need. The thing is, some are genuinely useful and unique while most are derivative and redundant, mere niche fillers and tweakers. Whatever its other merits (and there are some), pods fall squarely within the latter category, and as such, should be recognized as essentially unessential.

***

Daniel Lazar

For Sherman August 30, 1928 - February 15, 2005

I was tasting fresh bluefish, some trout,
From off the grill
Sipping a cold beer
When Arik Sharon came slyly around the corner
He poked his head in across the porch
To see if it was really me in his neighborhood of
Venice Beach
Willy was changing the Dead cd
Walk Me Out In The Morning Dew had been playing
And as the cold brew taste mixed with the bluefish dip
Willy began to raise his voice
Sharon acted like the war was
Already over and Willy talked
of Lebanon & where the next big crater
would be
But Ariel finished his sentence for him
'Probably something with the Egyptians in...'
He said calmly
And it was then that I knew why Sherman had come
A free man named for an avenger who had
Set the Greek city/state on fire all the
Way to the sea
A tank with a scar of beauty along his jaw
Who had ridden like war itself through life
To teach us love and peace

[March 2005]

***

notREALLYreviews

My Dad's Glimpses of Real American Fame
Eric R. Schwartz

Today it was gray here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is almost May now, but despite a couple of unusually warm ones last week, the springtime is laboring through the aftermath of a long, cold winter. It was a good day to spend inside reading. It was also a perfect day to listen to a 1990 album, Loveless. If you listen to this record, you will know why it would be fitting for a day such as the one described. It is a beautiful work with a desperate, shifting sound. Track 8, "Sometimes," was featured in the film Lost In Translation. It is played during a pulled back shot of the Electric City at night. The confused and depressed actor, Bob Harris, (played by Bill Murray) has just spent a strung-out evening with Charlotte (his much younger love interest played by Scarlett Johansson). The two characters are both separately alone in their own lives and quickly learning that they share the same feelings of despair towards the overly glamorized world around them.

"Sometimes" is a perfect song for this moment in the movie the same way that Loveless is a perfect record for a cloudy day in Massachusetts. It would have also been a perfect album for the many more cloudy days that I know still exist in upstate New York where I grew up. Springtime isn't something that I miss here in Cambridge because springtime is something that always missed Rochester. When I listen to Loveless, I can't help but think of my gray upstate hometown and the notion that this album never touched my ears until fifteen years after it was recorded.

I have to give credit to my close friend from high school and current roommate for turning me onto such music. Mike is from Rochester, New York as well. He and I met in the eighth grade. We have lived together in Cambridge for a year now. Mike is the lead singer in a Boston-based band called Faces On Film. I have grownup musically in the past year of living with Mike. As a writer, I find it hard not to be a person interested in everything, but an expert in nothing. It's Mike's musical expertise that has opened my ears up to such wonderful and brutal albums such as My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Having seen Mike's own ideas about music evolve so intricately from high school through college up until today, I often wonder what he and I would have thought about Loveless years ago.

Would we have liked this record in high school? Would we have understood its distant yearning that I know now expresses the confusion that followed the 1980's-this post-punk, post-Cold War, Aids epidemic era that cultivated an anxious culture of Americans. Would we have understood it then? And the answer, of course, is: no. When you are young, you are too selfish to be culturally aware. If you were anything like me, you were listening to shitty music in an attempt to make friends in grammar school or build an identity in high school. You were also whole-heartedly rebelling against the music that your parents loved.

When I was growing up, the earliest music that I remember was the folk tunes that my father played on his old record player or put together on mixed cassette tapes. On road trips, my sister and I would listen to children's songs that included everything from Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Puff the Magic Dragon" to Terry Dalton's "Lodi Gocks and the Bree Thears" (a Pig Latin version of "Goldi Locks and the Three Bears" written by my Dad's old folk buddy). My father was a high school history teacher, but he was also a small-time local musician who managed to fill his life with continuous brushes with real fame. Without delving directly into one particular story straight off the bat, I will say that his list of famous friends included the musicians: John Denver, Steve Goodman, Harry Chapin, Tommy Makem, and Arlo Guthrie.

It was strange living inside this family that contained such distant tales of secondhand fame. When I went downstairs to our family room on the quiet nights that Dad played his records, he would tell me some of his stories. He had apparently been number two in the running to become Harry Chapin's road manager. One evening when my mother and he were hanging out at Chapin's Long Island home, Harry's wife, Sandy, came downstairs with the lyrics to a song that Harry was writing the music to. In their living room, the Chapin's played for my parents a work-in-progress called Cats in the Cradle. In Rochester, when my Dad taught a fourth grade class before I was born, he had Steve Goodman come in and sing for his students. Goodman wrote "City of New Orleans," a famous American folk song that many people think was written by Willie Nelson or Arlo Guthrie. And supposedly the first time that John Denver ever heard one of his songs played on the radio, it was in the passenger seat of Dad's 1968 Cougar. (It was a Peter Paul, and Mary version of "Leaving On A Jet Plane". Dad said that John had his wife, Annie, on his lap. When John heard the song, he turned up the car radio and the three of them smiled ear-to-ear).

Throughout my childhood, I remember trying desperately to distance myself from my father's music. I put on headphones when he had friends over to play. I wasn't present at the various local gigs where my Dad performed. I even had to rehearse exactly what I was going to say to John Denver when I met him backstage after a concert: The show was just as I had expected. (This meaning, of course, that it was filled with the songs that drove me crazy). I was young and awkward, though, and completely disillusioned about my taste in music. Through all this confusion, however, there was something that was still there, something that was unable to be denied. It was this idea that my father had undoubtedly had these definite brushes with real American fame. He had experienced the kind of secondhand notoriety that was used to write songs or put into folk singers' biographies. And he had the stories and photographs to prove it.

After Dad died in 1998 from a twenty-two month struggle with pancreatic cancer, his stories died a little bit too. Even though he had tried humbly to bring his family and friends together in the last two years of his life, there remained an undeniable hole in each of us after he died. Despite Dad teaching and writing songs and playing music in a selfless effort to lessen the pain of the situation, there was a great tension that followed his death-a death that occurred a week before my eighteenth birthday.

Dad taught at my high school (I had had him in class in the seventh and eighth grades). After he died, I was ready not to have my life be so opened up. I was ready for all the people who had helped us along the way to leave my house and leave me alone. I began to write more in an effort to express myself in a way that didn't need to be put on stage or performed. I took a creative writing class in high school and went to college and continued to write. I left Rochester. And besides spending one summer following my freshman year of college there, I have lived in places other than home.

When I was at school in Worcester, Massachusetts, a writer from our newspaper in Rochester (The Democrat and Chronicle) contacted me because he was writing a book about my father. His name was Mark Hare. He had gone to seminary school with Dad years ago and most recently become part of the many household visitors who helped the family during our Cancer Period. In 1998, Mark wrote a story that exposed Dad's insurance company for holding out on coverage that would allow him to receive experimental treatment in Houston, Texas. Thanks to Mark, the company gave in and Dad went to Houston. The treatment most likely prolonged his life. Now, Mark was writing a book about my father. I was to be part of the help.

The night that my Dad finally died after an extended battle with the pancreatic cancer, the deepest feeling that came from me was a sense of relief. I was tired of the sickness. I was tired of the stage, of going to the high school where he taught and hearing the passing whispers. I was tired of attending the 'farewell' concerts where he played with friends and sang songs that he wrote about his battle with cancer. In the last year-and-a-half of his life, my father became a small-time celebrity. He played out at local clubs owned by his former students where benefits were held to assist in paying the medical bills. There was a three-part news story that documented his chemotherapy as well as his live performances. In that last year, Dad even outlived his old friend, John Denver, who was tragically killed in a plane crash. Dad contacted Denver's Producer, Kris O'Conner, the morning following the crash and later spoke with him about playing at a tribute show for Denver. Kris made an honest effort and supposedly had Dad put onto the bill for the event until the higher powers that be scratched him.

These were the closing activities of my father's life-a life that was filled with significant brushes with real American fame. While at school in Worcester, I helped Mark Hare with the book. I sent him emails in-between homework sessions and on late nights. I didn't mention anything to my new friends about it. I liked writing the emails. It allowed me to cope on my own terms. I was also able to confirm something that I had expected: that I was much more comfortable communicating my feelings in print. I wrote Mark those emails just as much for myself as I did for his book.

A few years and drafts later, Mark Hare found a publisher. His version of my father's death came out this past April from a Chicago-based publishing house whose tagline on the book's cover reads: The American Catholic Experience. I won't comment on the way this tagline falls flat on my experience with my father's death. Still, I trust Mark's work. I appreciate all the help from everyone along the way, regardless of how they would like to categorize or classify what happened. (Americans love to be able to resolve tragedies with a clean and, if possible, spiritual thesis).

As part of the book releasing, a CD of past live performances was produced by my mother and one of Dad's old music friends. I wrote the CD's foreword. A few weeks ago in Rochester there was, of course, a tribute concert held at my former high school where Dad taught for twenty-four years. Mark Hare was there to sign books. I was there to speak with old friends and family about my future in Boston. The music bill included various local musicians who befriended my father along the way. The closing act for the evening was a Boston-based band: Faces On Film. Mike and his group played a four-song set of hard indie rock that followed an Irish folk act. The crowd was made up mostly of people their parents' age.

In the parking lot afterwards, Mike's bassist commented that it must have been an awkward experience for me. I told him that it was a situation that I had become used to. The truth was that I wasn't the one on stage that night. Mike and his band were the ones that were on stage and they had to prove their music in front of folk enthusiasts from a generation ago. Faces On Film was the closing act that introduced a new kind of music to my Dad's generation. Mike and I were back home again. And even though the crowd was filled with many of the same people, it was much smaller than if Dad were alive. He had a way about bringing people out, of making them feel a sense of obligation to see old friends or meet new ones.

People have often asked me how it was that my Dad knew so many famous folk musicians. My best explanation was always that he just walked up and started talking to them. There is a line in the song "Range Life" where Stephen Malkmus makes a direct reference to the Stone Temple Pilots and the Smashing Pumpkins (both hugely popular bands with America's youth at this time). The lyrics are: I will agree they deserve absolutely nothing/nothing more than me. This was Dad's idea too. I'm sure there was part of my father that wished he had written a really great folk song that he could have lived the rest of his life off of. But deep down, I know he was happy being a high school teacher with good stories of his secondhand experiences with legitimate musical fame. In the end, none of the famous songwriters that Dad met really deserved anything more than him. And the truth is that I'm not sure they actually had anything more.

This week, Mike and his band are recording their latest project. It is being done on equipment in their manager's house. This will allow them to save money and put more effort into recording without having a time limit on studio space and production tweaking. At my house in Cambridge next to my bed is a copy of Mark Hare's book: Watching My Friend Die: The Honest Death of Bob Schwartz. It waits there for me. On my stereo is My Bloody Valentine's "Sometimes." And I am looking out at the gray springtime in Massachusetts, remembering his stories the way that I heard them-these glimpses that he gave to me of real American fame.

Watching My Friend Die: The Honest Death of Bob Schwartz by Mark Hare is available from book sellers. For more information call (800) 397-2282 or visit www.actapublications.com. To purchase a CD of Bob Schwartz's songs, email robertschwartz1998@msn.com.

***

theB-side
claudia pisano

so, it’s been a rather drunken couple of months for me. several mondays, wednesdays, randomly, for a few weeks in a row now, out – though never by myself, i might add, not alone in this – having drinks enough to make me more than a little buzzed, bringing me to a slightly hazardous state on the subway ride home, headphones on to ward off the melancholy desperation of all this gray metal, ugly ads and colors and the tension of unhappy people constantly leaping out of their restrained facades into the violence they really feel. [‘they’ say crime is, or may be, rising on the subways again – i don’t know if this is true, but tensions are certainly high, and people’s faces are grim.] spinning though i may be, my headphones keep me clear enough to find my way to the right stop, by bringing me out of the tunnels and into these songs (lately? arcade fire, modest mouse, hot hot heat, bloc party, uncut, demander, controller.controller – strong, alive, intensely present. endless more, of course…). it’s a delicate balance, staying aware enough to stay out of the way but also escaping enough to keep desperation at bay. music does this, and i always feel sorry for anyone on the train without it.

there have been a rash of poets dying recently (robert creeley, philip lamantia, jackson maclow…), poets i didn’t know personally but am connected to through poets i do know who knew them, and i’ve been watching this loss of their community; the sadness – and worries about the implication of so many losses – is palpable. this has set me to realizing my need to see that there is also a community around me – we forget, sometimes, not having made it into anyone’s narratives quite yet, young and in the thick of things as we are - needing to keep my friends near, celebrating whatever it is we’re celebrating (and sometimes we aren’t sure, there are so many terrible horrible things, as writer j. rogers-cooper expounds upon in another article this month) with drink. in a 1969 interview with poet david meltzer, poet michael mcclure said this, in response to a question concerning the idea of moderation: “the [ancient] greeks went to extremes. you get drunk and have belladonna in your wine and have a feast and everyone talks euphorically all night long, and then, in the morning, you take your baths and go to the agora and to the marketplace and then to exercise. you go from the extreme of drunkenness to meditation to the body athletic. it was the development of both the body and the mind, the ability to sing, the possibility of being drunk and the possibility of soberness… you have to go to many extremes to form a center that is the true balance, a true moderation. from this balance center you have to have extensions to conceive of what the possible frontiers are.” this is not a particularly modern idea, and certainly not an american one, where, as mcclure says, “our moderation of today is like the relative confinement of your possible activities… and the only possibilities that are open… are the possibilities of checks and balances.” sometimes i am this very model, i get up early even though i’ve celebrated far into the night, while sometimes i sleep far into the day, but no matter, i still think, and i’m not the only one, that this euphoria needs to happen.

what it is that keeps us together? we are sharing drinks, changing our consciousness, finding a way to new thoughts, loosening the hold on this tight anxiety all around us – i think we are all feeling the intensity of the world around us, and we need a way to make our way through it all. so i share wine and cigarettes, food and music. we talk about what it means to be alive, and an older italian friend comes over and over to the idea of being open in whatever we do – we have to learn, to see, in music, art, film, food. we talk about these very small moments, the beginning questions, the little things we do and how these things are important. j. rogers-cooper talks about where the core of culture lies – ‘crashing cymbals, punching bass, ringing tones on the electric guitar.’ to this i will add the drinks we have in darkened bars, in our apartments, the cigarettes we share, how close we sit to one another as we debate everything – and argue over what music we play – and nothing, many conversations all at once that make the fuzzy train ride home bearable and okay.

in conversation with a friend: she says she’s always a little tore up, and i carry the thought to make it we, we’re always a little tore up, and we look that way i think because we are that way, a little disheveled even when attempting to be neat, which isn’t, truthfully, often. we smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of beer and whiskey in our not very neat clothes and hair not because we are cool, but more because we are uncool in our way – when we talk to certain people, they somehow seem to drift away, not quite sure what to make of our excesses, our ideas, our often seemingly impossible notion that we exist. i’m projecting, generalizing a little – not all of my friends feel this way to the same extent as some, but it’s an undercurrent with most people i do call my friends.

so, here’s to drinking in this life that is both beautiful and full of despair, learning how to make a way through it. coming to grips, as modest mouse does in ‘the view,’ from latest lp good news for people who love bad news: “life it rents us./and yeah i hope it put plenty on you./well i hope mine did too./as life gets longer, awful feels softer./well it feels pretty soft to me./and if it takes shit to make bliss, then i feel pretty blissfully."

___________________________________________________________________________

March 2005

theEDITOR

the business of music
claudia pisano

i haven't been in this business very long. writing about music, i mean. listening to music, since even before i was born, pretty much. my tastes have ranged all over the map and i'm usually playing some band or album to pieces (i thought cds were indestructible...), but i'm never without it. when i walk in the door before my jacket is even off the stereo is on, and from one end of the apartment to the other there're usually at least two going, not always playing the same thing. my father and grandmother, they leave a radio on when they leave the house, a sign to would-be thieves that the house isn't empty, because music is a sign of life. is life.

last night i went to northsix, saw three bands: madison strays, the prosaics, and kaiser chiefs. stood way up front for the openers, moved away for a minute in between and lost my spot for kaiser chiefs, ended up near the bar at the back. and found that that's where all the music writers were hanging out. saw at least three people lighting up little pads with their cell phones, and thought about the little pad in my pocket, untouched except for the name and website of the coatcheck guy, who chatted with me about his own band that had played the night before. i didn't want to write during anyone's set, was having too much fun (esp. during kaiser chiefs - have you heard them yet? find them, go see them!) to take notes. it's like the best sex - you don't think about what everything might mean until after; no analysis during. (well, at least not in the front of the mind, okay? underneath, yeah, but not too coherent yet, please.) that's how music is for me, at least when it's good (and good for me might definitely not be good for you. that's the fun of it, no music snobbery here, promise). i think some of us who tend naturally to think a lot forget that it's good to just feel music, to swoon over guitarists, bassists, drummers, singers, moog whores, anyone with balls enough to get up and play, to just fucking love these sweaty clubs full of blissed out fans, all of it, even the ugly shit, the screaming opening bands and the too-drunk guys rockin out all over our feet. there's a reason why we're willing (need to...) troll the line outside of soldout shows to pay twice as much to fucking cry we're so happy when our band, that one that breaks our hearts, finally gets onstage. right.

so. b-side whore is a tiny little adventure born out of encouragement from the right person and a couple of whiskey sours (it helps, right?), a place to riff about anything and everything music might mean. and to swoon, always. enjoy, hopefully. tell us what you think, send us letters, tell us what's good, or start a fight. we do whatever we want, you should too. (find all the contact info here.)

p.s. why 'b-side'? because the hidden stuff, the other side, has always got its own worth, good or bad, and is therefore always worth talking about. literally, on records, figuratively, in our minds. and also... because the founders and the writers of this little mag are perpetually on the outside of at least some things in one way or another, by choice and/or circumstance, so let's revel in it...

cheers,
claudia

***

A-sideWHORE
George Fragopoulos

An A-Side Whore Manifesto
(Plurality of purpose is always possible)

This is an examination by the wound's light. As always, knowledge is an enjoyable chore. Certain thoughts may be random or cribbed. This does not imply that they hold no validity or that their value is any more or less than an organized action of the mind.

_____Why not manifesto: 1. Authority is always not there.
1.a. That is the case with any subjective encounter and are not all such encounters with music subjective? Authority rests in the opinion.
1.b. Opinion is all we have but how grand.
1.c. Authority is formula. In certain doses all can be beneficial.

2. There is never a new-all beginning.
2.a. I am the object of circumstances and locality. All things have parents and the cracks never heal.

Why an Aside Whore? (In wave like rigmarole.)

Because even the surface must be exposed.
Because dirt is everywhere.
Because Aside is B-Side spelled backwards.
Because we scud against the obvious.
_____ (crash) Everything has depth

Because even the most obvious must be examined
Because obscurity does not always a truth produce.
_____(crash) The heft of an object must be felt before commentary can be applied to it.
A dive is a dive regardless of the depths.

An End, a listen to: a shore, a not so solid ground: does music require isolation?

I almost always like to be in motion when listening to whatever it may be. (In car, in stride, on the train.)
_____Take into account the headphones which kill the world but heighten the unique.
Listening is a center from the outside.
_____What of the necessary silence required to listen?
_____Where does community come in?

Conclusion: even Winners need the Med School student's exam table.
__________I is yet another Aside, or:
_________________________________1. depth
_________________________________2. where (return, release, a positive, a negative)
_________________________________3. opinion (the objective is subjective)

***

BEDROOMvoices

Locking Out Conor Oberst
Justin Rogers-Cooper

It's rare to find a New York music fan who doesn't have an opinion about Bright Eyes-his name alone is a kind of code word between the hipsters fresh from undergraduate dorms and those already on the scene in the Williamsburg greater metropolitan area. Conor Oberst himself splits his time between the flat About Schmidt landscape of Nebraska steakhouses and the warehouse flats and freshly brick-walled colonies of L-line Brooklyn. For some, Bright Eyes retains some of the stigma of those rural, bright eyed boy wonders known as Hanson: too young, too pretty. No matter, of course, that indie doormen from the Postal Service produced one of his last records, Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, or that the staid rock 'n'roll establishment has christened him as the latest link to the mid-western gothic, with the obligatory nod back to Minnesota's Robert Zimmerman and the carnival of his "Desolation Row." On a recent appearance on the shittily condescending Craig Ferguson show, even Oberst seems a bit pallid and paled by the comparisons and criticisms, which he's heard before. Yet there he was on the set, doing his own precocious protest song, half-yawling about a war fought "over nothing." Much to your chagrin, that counts for something.

Aside from the ill-timed shot from Eminem last year ("Mosh," anyone?), and excepting the actual raps from America's missionaries of capital over there actually dying (see the Sunday Times Arts section from 2-20-05), Oberst is the only relatively popular folkman making immediate, urgent provocations about the war. If love is the best non-offensive route to radio, aiming for the widest possible audience, Oberst spends his worried time anxious over something we actually should be anxious about. So why do key clients of his ideal community spurn him? In short, perhaps people don't pay him due because he's busy making whoopee over subjects like the war. Or, maybe, straight politics and straight emo don't mix-though, in his defense, the emotive male psyche has been publicizing political beef at least since John Lennon.

I believe it's not what he's singing, but how. One of the boundaries between Oberst and, say, Elliot Smith, lies in the latter's kind of electric masculinity, a melodic Beatlesque catalog sung by a mugshot as muggy as a distant Tom Waits cousin. Smith goes quietly loud and audibly soft in a contained melancholy, especially with his final album, From a Basement on a Hill. At times Oberst seems almost naïve by comparison. In his songs, his voice moves in and out of tone with the rhythm. He takes lyrical risks that at their worst sound like formidable journal entries: private but chaotic, thrilling but forgettable.

But remember: he's young. At his best, which he accomplishes with surprising regularity, Oberst translates an impressive range of worldly personas. His other last album, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, is deaf to the curt dismissals of monastic college and post-graduate cool kids. His songs stick to his commitment to a rainfall of confession, his almost amusing pathologies of romance. His fans find in his dramatic ballads a reason to celebrate a literate pathos, an idealistic sadness, a lament for an imbalanced identity and cultural hangnails gone stubby. Yet for his critics, Oberst's songs become ranting complaints, either narcissistic or invariably melodramatic: for them, his monologues belong only to him, and not to anyone else (these things were also said about an entire genre of white boys ten years ago, as if it was unique either time). If Smith can draw you down with an authentic screen of somber details each of which shed a crack behind his veil, Oberst removes the curtain in one sweeping gesture each time. His power and your reaction require a willingness to engage that confrontation, against your formed judgment or, indeed, because of it.

Ambition is not something to grow cynical over, especially in an artist. The young must be granted a chance to scout the land before the fences go up, which inevitably occurs in all but the best musicians. A few can accomplish a memorable canon in a short space-Smith comes to mind, as does Kurt Cobain. But a few albums are not enough to sustain a legendary set list, just the phantom memory of tributes and late releases-parties where the host is conspicuously absent. The muffler of pop culture eventually sets in, and the muzzles can only come off on oldies stations or college radio. For the next generation, the songs that maybe "saved" you, as Dave Eggers writes in the recent Spin, you maybe discover too late.

We need reliable figures that we can glance at over time, that we can expect will interpret more than just one time and space, and do so in that range of perception just beyond our own. Not just one, either, but many who will add their statement to the deluge. With Smith especially, there lingers a recent and profound sadness over an aborted, distant friendship we had struck with him. For people who want relationships, enough is never enough. When Smith passed, I went sick not for him, but for what I would miss. Oberst, to his credit, is deeply sympathetic to this idea. He goes there. He begins that awkward conversation you don't want brought up just yet, and doesn't always say it gracefully. For all his arrogance and confidence, he is trying to be your friend. And you spurn him in your careful, studied resolution against those who risk some of their precious coolness for some of their winsome heat.

http://www.saddle-creek.com/bands/brighteyes/

***

THEREareWORDS,youSEE

From Another Century
Ammiel Alcalay

An excerpt from Landscapes: a little history, coming out from Beyond Baroque, Fall 2005

First it was the schoolyard or the park - endless hours in which waiting for something to happen wasn't really the point, it was more simply being there, experiencing time pass, and if an older kid came by that we'd heard had done something dramatic like stolen a car and been in "reform school" or someone showed up with a plan to go somewhere else - the Paperback, George's Folly, Stan's, the Carleton, the bowling alley, the pool hall, Sears, the Fens, Fenway if the Sox were playing, the Commons, North Station, Mickey Finn's, the Combat Zone, the Square - so much the better. Alliances and allegiences were made and crumbled, heartbreak constant. Boston, Gloucester, the Vineyard, New York - my early geography was fluid: in a dream from 1970, at the age of 14, I record myself moving seamlessly between Beacon st., Oak Bluffs, and the Bowery. This geography was also always about places you could just hang out in, observe and participate in the ongoingness of things. Garages, gas stations, trucking terminals, workshops, bookshops, the general store, the fish market - any place people with some practical knowledge of common methods and materials congregated - these were the places where, I felt, if you spent enough time, you could really learn something.

How did poetry come into it? There was always music: the blues (my carefully selected collection of Chicago and Delta stuff bought at the Coop with money from snow-shoveling, my paper-route, and working in the basement unloading and wrapping produce at Beacon Supermarket, eventually made off with by a kid from Australia), Dylan, Hendrix (whom I saw at the Garden with my father), Roy Orbison, Roger Miller, Hank Williams, Aretha, Motown, Marvin Gaye, even "Ferry Cross the Mersey," and Eric Burdon's version of "House of the Rising Son," the soundtrack to our life on radio, singles, LPs, live at the Boston Tea Party, the Cambridge Common, Lenny's on the Turnpike. When I started going to New York as a teenager a friend's father took us to the Five Spot and Slug's to hear Ornette, Monk, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, and Archie Shepp. When I got to know my way around better and found the Vanguard, after almost wearing out the grooves in the Sonny Rollins record recorded there live, Max Gordon, the owner, would let me sit on the steps for the last set. Later, when I moved to New York, there was Stryker's with the Lee Konitz Nonet, Freddie Hubbard or Chet Baker, and Bradley's, with Jaki Byard or Mingus as regulars.

For years I copied out lyrics, writing them down in notebooks or on pads, seeing the magic of the music transformed to poetry on the page: "We met in the springtime when blossoms unfold / the pastures were green and the meadows were gold / our love was in flower as summer grew lone / her love like the leaves have now withered and gone / there's frost at my door / the birds in the morning don't sing anymore / the grass in the valley is starting to die / and out in the darkness the whippoorwills cry."

Pure transportion - to get taken someplace else by music and voice - sneaking the radio into bed late at night and listening to call-in talk shows, west coast ball games, WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia, back when signals were strong enough; the pure genius of Jean Shepherd reading Robert Service or endlessly talking about almost anything in perfect form, from invented or remembered stories about childhood in Indiana, to life in the steel mills, his days in the Army, ham radios, old cars, or King Tut.

But the poets were always around: I had Gloucester, Vincent Ferrini teaching me curses that greatly upset our neighbors, getting penny-candy from the giant when my mother or father went to visit Charles Olson at Fort Square, and tons of little magazines and books back home in Boston that I remember from when we moved out of the apartment and into the house: the Black Moutain Reviews, Yugens, Evergreens, and Big Tables I would later confiscate when I knew what they were. I probably passed the Longfellow place in Cambridge a thousand times without ever going in but I could draw a perfect map of a Lowell I'd hardly ever been to, from Pawtucketville to Moody st. and Gershom Avenue, because of Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy and Visions of Gerard. When Kerouac died in 1969 it was a local event. I still have the clipping from the Globe, an obit that could just as easily have fit in between the box score of a Red Sox game and the racing results from Suffolk Downs.

1969: after Kerouac died I was outraged, personally, that his books were out of print, even though we had a lot of them at home. I wrote to Allen Ginsberg, and he sent me back a postcard: "I've been pushing publishers to reprint J.K. (Grove will do new Mexico City Blues) but right now it's beyond my strength to do more. Write and ask his agent Sterling Lord in NYC maybe - regards to Ferrini." The idea was to get in touch, to take action, to make something happen. I'd already been sending some of my poems to Vincent in Gloucester, and had sent a fan letter to Kenneth Patchen which began a correspondence with his wife Miriam since Patchen was too sick to write personally.

So it went: if there was something I wanted to find out, I figured out who to start asking. I wrote to Diane di Prima about Poets Press and the little magazine she edited, Floating Bear, and got a long, detailed letter back with names and addresses of other people to get in touch with. While I was always thrilled to get such responses, I almost took for granted the immediacy, the lack of decorum, the sense of gratitude people I wrote to felt at being approached, and the idea that there was always a chain of transmission: one thing led to another.

***

Two Riddles
Maggie Dubris

Think blues...

Riddle the first:

My name is cold and wet.
My skin is ashen. In my garments
Gold and passion. A jelly bean. A diamond pin.
A minstrel's heart. I mislead men
Point the triflers down
That country road. I send them
Where time goes.
Now you hear me
Talking to you, but long
Have my lips been dust, my tongue
Unbitten. Gone.
I dream away my troubles
As my fractious child plays on.
A needle scrapes the black bottom:
The jelly shakes; "I heard it's really good,"
A monkey man claims. There's a whole lot left,
But you must tell me first my name.

Answer: MA RAINEY

If you aren't already familiar with "the Mother of the Blues," go out and listen! This is only the tiniest bit of what's out there.

Riddle the second:

The Sun once warmed Me, in My sun-lit House,
He held Me lonely in His Gaze. Then One Night
as He dove deep, I found My Place. On
a Cross made not of Wood, but of That
From which Wood springs. Dark born of Dark
My Desire-only to be Born Again. East and West
I rambled, from Kitchen to Mail-Train
that Cross on My shoulders, trying to flag a Ride.
A sweet Treasure Chest, its Drawers half-open
that was my Desire. Twenty-nine Spells
I etched into Wax, born the Fifth Month on the Fourth Planet,
the Eleventh Fruit to fall from the vine. My desire?
Only to Live Forever. One night that Desire
Turned its sweet Fangs My way,
and took Me in stealth to My Unmarked Grave. Can You tell Me,
Fellow Prisoner, even One of My Names?

Answer: ROBERT JOHNSON

Check out these albums and anything else you can get your hands on while you're at it. Johnson is the beginning of more things musical than you can even imagine.

***

A Slew of Blues
David Meltzer

1

got me a nothing
something wants to plunder

2

you talk to me baby
as if maybe there were something to say

3

woke up this morning & tomorrow was long gone

4

easy for you to say
you're going away

5

if I fall down on my knees
I'll just ruin my threads

6

said no to all the tricksters
said yes to nobody but you

7

if blues was black
I'd be gone before you awoke

8

when your skin heats up
honey melts all over you

9

saw you yesterday
happy with someone else

10

whatever I say
means nothing to you

11

desire vibes my nerve ends
lies inscribe my life

12

telegrammed my heart
Western Union got hung up on you

13

ashes & dust sprinkle in the air
cool shampoo rearranges your hair

14

if love was easy
how come I'm out of dreams

15

baby jumped salty
no mattter how I sweet talked

16

tears fill up & down my tin cup
on love's streetcorner

17

even loss is lost
w/out direction

18

early morning
mourns last night

19

empty bed
empty head
lonely baloney

***

Royalty, Of A Kind
George Fragopoulos

Tone. What is it and how does one get it? Or, better yet, and more accurately, how does one achieve a distinctive tone? Contrary to popular belief it does not come pre-ordained from the Rock Gods above. Like every aesthetic tool that distinguishes One from Another, you have to work for it. It must be worked on, chiseled into something physical. Whatever it sounds like, it always sounds like it's real. No magic involved here, nothing of the metaphysical sort. I'll give you that there may be some alchemy involved, maybe some magic of experimentation from days gone by, but no, no more than that. That's all I'm going to give.

Tone comes from two primary sources: the instrument and the voice as instrument. Anything else is sound. Dylan's tone was all in the voice. Who cares if the man couldn't play the guitar? Flubbed notes all over Blood on the Tracks? Who cares? You care? Nah. Man as Zeitgeist is what he was; voice as Zeitgeist. But like all Gods he was meant to be chewed on and eaten, and, at certain points, he has been. His voice has been taken for granted, his tone has been taken for granted, but it's still there and will always be there. But he is the difference, and how so? Tone is the particular within the general. Dylan's voice transcends tone in that it is the general as particular and particular as general; it's all and everything and nothing in between. So I think he's a good example to differentiate sound (general) and tone (particular) in that he includes both. The Beatles had no tone, they were/are the all encompassing general, the ideal notion of sound as pervasive system of belonging, although Paul on bass came close, but I'm not sure if one can strictly achieve tone on the bass. Perhaps Flea or Sting came close as well. As such, we will be concentrating on guitar tone for the time being. That's what tone is. And what it does. It stays with you. It follows you into bed after the music has died.

The key is in the wrist(s), at least for the distinctive guitar tone. Or, if not the key, an essential start to the whole thing. Without the physicality of actually playing the damn thing there would be no tone. There are motions to guitar tone, tried and true, the pressing of the strings, the motions of forming a chord, the calluses which build over time, it hurts at first but you'll soon learn. The hand that attacks the strings; the fingers that hold your pick; the fingers that lack the pick; all there as you play away. The signal gallops to the amp, the tubes are warmed as they burp and laugh. The speakers, preferably a wall of them-you don't expect us to go out quietly, do yah?- do what they do best, speak, and the controls let us know where it all goes: treble, bass, high, low, chisel it as you will. See? Physical, scientific even. But not simple, anything but.

Going back to the magic, I suppose it resides in the moment before the body tells the hand what it is it has to do. Mind to Hand: Buddy, you got a job to get done. The distance between conscious thought and reality. Places we can never get to, but no matter. They exist, trust me. It's a pain to get a distinctive tone, or at least one that sounds like it is distinctive. It's rare.

Josh Homme's guitar, and perhaps Mr. Homme himself, has that distinct tone. Homme, for those unfamiliar with his work, has been heading the Queens of the Stone Age for the past couple of years, as well as being involved in a variety of side projects-the Eagles of Death Metal, and the Desert Sessions. I'm still not sure where he begins and where his guitar (tone) ends. But that's the truth with all great guitarists, or tone innovators, they become one with the machine. Look at Jimi. The man, when faced with the prospect of playing a guitar built for a right-handed guitarist, didn't rush out and buy one made for a lefty such as himself. He removed the strings, turned it upside down, restrung it and turned it around; you've got yourself a new guitar. Man as machine, I'm telling you, or at least it seems that way to me. But that's for another time.

The truth is this: Yes, it sounds distinctive, but also almost always different from recording to recording. Go ahead, throw on any of the three full-length LPs, the Queens of the Stone Age stuff, that is. Yup, that's the same guy playing on all those Queens records. Yup, it always sounds the same. Yup, it always sounds different. What gives? Difference is essential for the great. Staleness most be avoided at all costs, but you always need a little of the same to have something to come back to. Confusing? Yeah. These things are not meant to be understood and that's why we have words for them: paradoxes. But just follow me, and this, for a little while longer; and if I'm wrong, feel free to say so.

So, we've figured out what tone is and we know Homme and his mercenary outfit, the QOTSA, have it.

Aside the First: And what the hell is a Queen of the Stone Age? Royalty of a kind yet to be found in fossilized form? A cross-dressing, possibly sexually confused, Fred Flintstone type? Neolithic stomping grounds that one day would morph into modern day Queens, NY?

The key is in the Stone Age, as in stoner, as in getting there with the help of drugs of a sort. This ain't got nothing to do with let him without the first stone cast it, as such. Drugs, part one of the holy trinity of Rock And Roll, the other two being . . . well, you know. Despite the label, Stoner Rock, whatever the hell that means, is not stupid as many have suggested. It's anything but. But what is it? Seeking to avoid a strict definition, which would place it within a genealogical frame-work and, thus, make it a some-what static thing, let's simply discuss what it is and does:

1- It's Low. And Heavy.
2- It's fairly masculine.
3- I'm convinced, again feel free to argue, that it was birthed by Tony Iomi's guitar.
4- It grooves like nothing in the near-before. That is, it primarily rests on Rhythm of the kind that takes you places.
5- Simple drums, for the most part. And the brand of Stoner Rock that the QOTSA traffic in is weird. It must be said.

It sounds like Sabbath but lacks (thankfully) the pseudo Black Magic and it does it all with a sense of humor, or at least the Queens do it all with a sense of humor. I've even heard it said that Nirvana's Bleach was a typical Stoner Rock album. Not so sure about that, but the fuzzed out guitars and reliance on rhythm over melody-although "About a Girl" is a notable exception, that's about as melodic as you can get-does make it an intriguing case. But back on topic.

Tone is the unique thread in the extensive web that is sound. Everyone can replicate sound. The White Stripes-God bless them-may sound, at times, like the Stooges. Radiohead may sound, at times, like the Smiths. Feel free to draw your own comparisons. But tone can't be touched. And few have a distinct tone. I leave it up to you to decide whether or not the aforementioned bands have tone. I would say, no. Sound? Yes. Genius? Yes, in bulk. Tone, no. (A case can be made for Mr. Jack White. The more I hear from the guy, the more I'm convinced he does possess tone. And he is a madman on the guitar. So, let's say yes, he does, for all it's worth and I retract what I just said a couple of lines ago. I tend to change my mind). Why?

Tone, to the ear, is the product of one person within a system/band. Particular in the general. Tone is crafted by the wrist(s) for the guitar. Either way, it's a physical process. No matter how good the guitar sounds, no matter who made it, what kind of pick-ups it has, you need a player of a special kind to birth its tone. Not necessarily someone who is a technically skilled player, but someone who has gone that extra distance to create something different. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine doesn't have great chops, but man did the guy create some tone on his guitar. Following me? Homme, White, Hendrix are all exceptional players, but it's also their urge to explore what kind of notes they can squeeze out of their guitars that places them in the school of tone. All notes are not created equally.

Aside the Second: This is not to imply that one aesthetic is necessarily better than the other. In fact, we tend to favor, as critics and listeners, the general ease of sound to the exclusive nature of tone. If there is one thing that worries me about tone it is the ease with which it smashes the general and how it tends to ignore the grander scheme. It's aggressive, and I'm not sure what to make of that aspect of it.

The Queens released a fairly standard, somewhat mediocre self-titled album back in '98. The only real transcendent moment on the record is the first one, that being track one, "Regular John." It starts off with a melodic riff, nothing special but try not humming it by the end of the song. It appears, stage left, and I could swear it sounds like a ghost sweeping up the remains of the night in some dusty bar. Homme asks a fairly simple question to get us started, Who are you, girl? He answers with another question, Who are you, boy? And the song just doesn't quit for the next four minutes or so. There are some rousing power-chords, some whispered, haunting lyrics and a good time is to be had by all. It's a great song. But let's forget the rest of the album.

Rated R, their next LP dropped from . . . who knows. The leap between their self-titled first LP and their second is one along the lines of Radiohead moving from Pablo Honey to The Bends: who knew the boys had it in them? From the funhouse madness of "Feel Good Hit Of The Summer" to the 'its got single written all over it' of "The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret" to "Monster In Your Parasol," the album sparkles, no matter what side you happen to be looking at. It is, without a doubt, one of the most important, or best, hard rock albums of the last ten years. It's all A-sides. Name twenty better, go ahead. We can always argue later.

Oh, and it's weird. Doubt it? What the hell is a monster in your parasol doing there anyway? Got something to hide? "Tension Head," ten minutes of sheer nonsense/brilliance collapses after five minutes into what sounds like a brass band having an orgy: nice! There are even a couple of moments of self-reflection and doubt, what every good encounter with the weird requires. That's Nick Oliveri, former QOTSA bassist and all around nut-job, asking in the start of "Quick And To The Pointless" the question we've all asked at one time or another during this ride we call life: I don't even know . . . what I'm doing here, before a group of sirens register their agreement with a round of Yeah!Yeah!Yeah!Yeah!, just like that, one ontopoftheother. The girls do us a favor, as they seem to be the ones clapping throughout the song and they occasionally provide some chilling harmonies. Like I said, weird!

Aside the Third: What does Homme's tone remind me of? It's low. It seems to come from out of nowhere and while listening to "Gonna Leave You" off of Songs For The Deaf I've never had so much fun being sucked into quicksand as I did while listening to that song. It comes from the deep, or a place that may be the deep, from a place where ears aren't meant to pick up sound. Spin magazine once called his guitar a Black Hole, and I can see that. Homme may in fact be recording all his guitar parts in some cave somewhere, a thousand or so feet below ground. I wouldn't doubt it.

What does all this mean for their follow up to Rated R, Songs for the Deaf? Was Songs meant to fail before it even was released? Did it fail? Well, yes and no. Good as Rated R? I would have to say no. Not even close for me. But much weirder and much, much heavier. And low. Not sure what kind of tuning(s) Homme used on the album, but it makes the low moments on Rated R sound damn high. The whole album, Songs for the Deaf, that is, seems to rise from a level of depths unknown. What are 'songs for the deaf?' Songs written and tuned to frequencies that normal ears are not meant to pick up on. Reminds me of something that John said about Sgt. Pepper, how they recorded a dog whistle bit at the very end, after "A Day in the Life," so some poor bloke sitting at home with his dog spinning the album would be pleasantly surprised when the pooch got all in a huff and ran out of the room. That's what Songs is: a dog whistle we can all hear.

And where are the moments of brilliance on Songs? Well, "No One Knows," the first single off the album is the first obvious choice. Just listen to those sliding octaves-I'm a sucker for octaves-and the solo at the end. And the silence which comes right before that solo; the dynamics are just insane. This album grooves in a much heavier way than Rated R, just listen to "First it Giveth" and "God is in the Radio." Wicked rhythms garnished with moments of melodic brilliance. But the album has a number of 'DJ' interruptions throughout, voiced by C-Minus, Twiggy Ramirez, Dave Catching, Blag Dahlia, Casey Chaos and Chris Goss, and they tend to detract from the great songs on the album. The difference being that Rated R succeeds in that it is an entire album of A-sides, whereas Songs fails as a concept album but works as a collection of songs; but most of those songs, in my humble opinion, are just not as good as the ones on Rated R.

As of this writing, the new QOTSA album, Lullabies to Paralyze By, has yet to arrive, but the new single, "Little Sister," has and we can all be thankful for that at least. But where did it drop from? And is its lineage more Rated R or Songs for the Deaf? It's hard to tell, really, and that bodes well for the album. When the single reeks too much of the same old and tired routine it cannot be but bad news for the entirety of the album. The single swings, as does Homme. The songs begins with a fairly simple riff (sound familiar?) and moves on from there. The last third, and easily the best third-always leave them wanting more- is one extended solo, letting us know that Homme is not one to shy behind great songwriting alone. The man can play, if that has not been made apparent already. If it can be said that the QOTSA drip sexuality, it's a weird kind of sexuality. It's like being attracted to that guy or gal you just can't put your finger on; why her/him and not someone else? The attraction that always gets us asking 'why?' in the morning. And "Little Sister" has that going for it. It's not even a date, its sounds more like an extended pickup line. Isn't that what singles are supposed to be, though? Pickup lines that allow the Someone to get through our doors? And that's what a solo can be, at times. The attempt to sell something, in this case the self and the album. 'Listen to this, I can play. Buy the rest.' Yeah, that's what its about. Just listen to the Clapton solo(s) on "White Room, Black Curtains." That thing can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.

And the question must be asked: What's in store for the future of Homme's tone? Does it go anywhere from here? What of the recently kicked out bassist? Oliveri, apparently, has issues that Homme can no longer deal with. This may include throwing beer bottles at audience members. It's never a good thing to alienate your audience like that. Wound them on the record, not on the tour. How much of the tone was Homme, how much of it was Nick Oliveri? He and Homme were the only two constant members in the revolving door policy that resides at the center of the QOTSA aesthetic. Every album, for better of for worse, has a new group of musicians attached to the project. But it seems that Homme and his songwriting chops always make it out alive. Would we have it any other way? Tone, unscathed by the fire. The kid should be just fine.

http://www.qotsa.com/

***

Wa(o)ndering around.
Claudia Pisano

A handful of random thoughts and observations from several weeks' (the several weeks, not incidentally, leading up to the November elections) reading and listening, absorbed through a ravenous appetite for music, poetry, and an almost desperate desire for revolution in an American landscape.

A very fucked few weeks, a real sense that things are wrong in too many ways and not quite able to pull it together, lost in my head.

"I'm going back to New York City/I do believe I've had enough.²

"Oh come on these are all protest songs. Aw, it's the same stuff as always - can't you HEAR?"

It starts with Bob Dylan. These are his words, from "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," and from a live show in London, 1966, in the same year as but after the concert, the one when he 'betrays' with the electric guitar that most people loved anyway, even the ones who called him Judas (just listen to that concert in Manchester - they're upset but not too much, they still clap and listen and stay even though some of them boo), and well after he's decided he can't be/won't be/isn't anyone's political poster boy. Through Dylan, Allen Ginsberg gets a reel-to-reel tape recorder, creates mad poetry across the country and is celebrating Dylan at this very moment, his poems connecting with Dylan's lyrics, but Dylan feels "impotent and immured." We never quite feel the way people talk about us, do we?

The conflict. The art we put out there that's no longer ours the moment it's created, the art that we create but don't own and that gets used for whatever purpose its audience wants. (Who is art for? Me, when I create it. You, when you read it. Both, no necessary cause and effect, thens/nows. We just need it.) And the selves that we are. Which space do we occupy? Many, obviously, of course. Dylan retreats but his work is still engaged, maybe despite his wishes, maybe because of them. There isn't any separation between the artistic and the political, not in a real way, not in the way we think there is when we say "I'm not a political person" (which is a political response in itself, isn't it?). Even if we live in self-imposed ignorance or denial or separation, we're still here. So it all matters, and even Dylan knows this, knows his songs say things: "can't you HEAR?"

I listen to Dylan, read him, read about him, and have only got a tiny sense of everything he's about. So I've started wa(o)ndering around, trying to find place and time and knowledge. Which is so much of what he does, too - searching out histories and people, remaking them into his own. It led me to, among so many, Johnny Cash. At Folsom Prison, 1968. Can't even begin to get over the dynamic here, the sometimes-outlaw himself, man in black onstage inside a federal prison singing the histories and peoples of this country, good and bad, to those marked by all kinds of shame and dishonor but who are as much a part of this place as any (because we all fuck up; they got caught, or chose not to play by the rules), even a revered part to some, and you can hear every now and again the guards calling out prisoners' names and numbers, calling them out to leave the concert for some other obligation (What other obligation? They're in prison. Isn't that obligation enough?).

You hear Cash connecting with his audience, singing both serious and light songs, lots of murder, drugs and love, and they clap, yell, laugh with him. The tension of 2000 prisoners in the cafeteria is visible, it's there in pictures of the concert; and Cash is connected to it all, faces it (it's hard to face things as they are, at least we think it is...): sings a serious song in a humorous way called "25 Minutes To Go" about a man in his cell watching his gallows being built outside his window, and everyone laughs, cheers (laugh in the face of my own demise (self-induced? created by you? depends whether I agree to play or not, how much choice? either way...), no better way to say fuck you). He makes a joke about not getting any water, it's taking too long, and then it comes in a tin cup: "You serve everything in tin cups?" to much laughter. Like America? In an angry mood (running high lately), yeah - we're thrown here and there's some knowledge that we don't know how to be here and we've fucked it up and we keep fucking it up, and ultimately the results are served in a tin cup. But. Cash is genius, Dylan is, Ginsberg is, and on and on. We just have to find them, draw them out, choose to hear. As Dylan asks us to.

Dylan is a random starting point, it could have started anywhere. Wandering in all directions at once. Have been to a handful of concerts over these weeks, watching music videos like a junkie, blowing the rent money on records. Is there political/social/cultural engagement? Of course, there isn't any other way. Thinking about David Bowie: in New Jersey, at PNC Bank Arts Center (arenas are terrible places to see rock/ punk concerts) where I'm sitting too far away, not fully connected to the man on stage but with a good view. A mostly older crowd than myself, Bowie's fans from way back? Very suburban, SUV-driver, house and kids types, unexpected for me who comes to Bowie through Ziggy Stardust, glammed out in makeup and sequins and extravagant, in your face and a consummate punk. For me Bowie is dangerous, rebellious, a freak among freaks (even though he was always playing, because he was always playing) even now in his beautiful tailored suits and nice shoes (because of? despite? probably both.) The crowd unsettles me in its regular-ness, not only in dress/lifestyle (which doesn't necessarily have to mean anything, really (but of course does in some way)) but in their reaction to Bowie, taking it in stride like it might not be that big a deal, watching a put-to-rest past instead of experiencing a present. [Little aside: his opening band tonight is (pop? I'm not sure what to call them) group the Polyphonic Spree, that group of something like 20 singers and musicians who perform in colored robes - they're wildly off the 'mainstream' radar, way too offbeat (but without being sexual, so most people aren't responding to them). But: they remind me of Bowie's Ziggy era, have got a vaguely reminiscent sound... .]

Bowie is stunningly full of grace, owns the stage, sings with complete confidence, dangerous sexual possibility in his presence. This crowd, though. They're so restless, they get up and walk around to buy beer and food, make phone calls, whatever it is they're doing, I've rarely seen quite so many people unable to stand still and pay attention at a concert (but haven't really been to any concerts with this particular crowdŠ). They aren't all there with him, there's too much space between stage and audience maybe. He's up on high, literally removed from the seats (Why are there seats? This is a concert). Maybe the disconnect is philosophical - too many people here not living their punk moments anymore. Grow up, America. But they tear it up when he sings "Suffragette City." (Why? Because it means something to them or because it was popular, so they recognize it?)

My own breakdown: when he sings "The Boy Who Sold the World," because I know this song from Nirvana's cover of it decades after Bowie sings it the first time (I discovered Bowie after Nirvana) - Bowie and Kurt Cobain match each other's intensity, both bring their own context to it, from England to the U.S. What does it say that Bowie is still alive to sing it and Cobain isn't? Cobain, born here and with this mess of a place in his blood, couldn't face this America and left, permanently. He was made into a poster boy too, the face of the reemergence of punk and brilliant possibility in music and he didn't want it, backed off, got scared - it was huge, the way Dylan's fans barraged his house, entered his private space and demanded more and more from him. Cobain couldn't make a move either, felt like he couldn't breathe at all (He couldn't. We loved him so much we strangled him). Fans desperate for something to hold onto. Americans are always desperate, aren't we? Public and private, trying to make some kind of distinction between the two, helpless against it when it doesn't happen. Because there isn't so much difference (public, private, me, you, it all collapses). But we can't have people coming into our houses at will, either, can we? (Well maybe some of us can.) Why so extreme? Why the need to touch, to have the words and sounds embodied in a tangible person? The story might go: Well, this young America is searching for some real thing, but it doesn't know what it is, worries that it has no past, doesn't see and face anything real most of the time but ultimately wants just that, so when it comes along (except that it's always there) we're starving, so we cling tight and drown what we want. Maybe.

But. Thinking about concerts and this separation of space. Concerts where there aren't any seats and I stand way up front in the crush - it's a totally different experience, more complete, in a way. Saw the Pixies, Cobain's ultimate band heroes, all he really ever wanted to be like. Halfway through the show I randomly think (I hadn't (consciously) thought about the connection at all before the show) that this is the closest I'm going to get to a Nirvana show, sorry to the point of heartache that I'd never gotten to see them when Cobain was still alive (I was in high school when they were recording and performing, already a punk myself but nearly terrified of crowds - of people, really, I could never have stood in the squeeze of a punk show like Nirvana's; I hated Americans especially, never identified myself as such (and was planning my expatriate-hood) and didn't want to be anywhere near them if I could avoid it; I rocked out to Nirvana on my own, like a lot of other shy-punk types (of which Cobain was himself, in his way - a lot of people really connected to him for this; he was just as afraid and shy and fucked up as everyone else, called himself a misfit even at his biggest - it's a lot of what contributed to his suicide, right, when the crowds got way too big and the expectations of his loyal fans grew to be too much; and of course it grew too big, Cobain was fucking brilliant, watch anyone watch him play and you see dropped jaws and stunned faces - Cobain, Grohl, and Novoselic weren't kidding about their music, knew their shit. And always gave credit to their sources and inspirations, Cobain especially at live shows saying "this is a David Bowie song" or "this is a Meat Puppets song" or whoever it happened to be - Cobain follows in the footsteps of giants, knew the earlier punk traditions and also a lot of the early American music Dylan was drawing from too; Nirvana does a take on the "Pretty Polly" character which goes back through Appalachian America and out, to England (and who knows where else), has made its way through endless histories)).

The Pixies are intense, loud, screaming guitars and voices and unforgettable melodies (the songs they're playing tonight are at least ten years old, all of them, right? But no one in the crowd who knew them has forgotten the words (there's a girl dressed in a gorilla suit, silver halo above her head - because she (presumably) loves the song "Monkey Gone to Heaven")), the packed crowd (they played something like 8 shows in NYC in a week, all of which sold out almost immediately after going on sale) dancing even though there's no room even way in the back where we ended up somehow, we're with friends who don't want to struggle to the front, where I try to be (from hating the crowds to the frontŠ my take on Americans is different now at 29 than when I was 17; maybe as I realize (own up to the fact) that I'm a part of this even as separate as I feel from much of it, I have to face it for real (not really playing out the expat fantasies anymore, even in the thick of this hell)), falling into each other, and everyone's expression is fucking blissful. Blissful.

I talk to a friend after and he says the same thing to me before I get a chance to say it to him, makes the connection to Nirvana and I can see the relief, almost, that we've gotten to experience this - because it almost didn't happen, the Pixies aren't really making new records together anymore, haven't even been together in ages and it's been years since they've toured, and we didn't get to see them the first time around either. And you can hear Nirvana in them, hear where Cobain was coming from. (It always goes back and back: Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West. A picture of Jimi Hendrix listening to records, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde leaning against his seat - Hendrix even looks a little like Dylan, surprisingly(? - maybe not considering Hendrix's love of the electric guitar that Dylan caused so much uproar with), with a similar crazy head of curly hair and that dandy velvet jacket. Jack White, Detroit garage-punk-rocker (and sometimes outlaw, too, a man (in)famously quick to fight - poor Von Bondie frontman Jason Stollsteiner, he's never going to live this down, is he?), just produced Loretta Lynn's latest, Van Lear Rose; it's an outstanding record, he's found a way to bring her closer to herself than many say she's sounded for years. Lynn sings a song called "Women's Prison:" it's the voice of a woman on death row, awaiting, listening to, seeing, the preparations for her death. Lynn sings it straight, there's no laughter as there is in Cash's version; and both songs are fierce.)

Becoming cognizant of something instinctual: that music needs to be experienced this way, live and in front of you so you're in it. My body hurts after this concert, strained voice and neck, tired legs, my ears ring all of the next day, this music has fought its way inside me. So maybe that at least partly answers my question - we do need to have genius tangible, need to feel it for real. It's enough for me, though, the concerts and the records, I don't have any desire to (literally) chase these bands with my demands. Too much pressure, we don't work that way, most of us. Even if we're brilliant we're still people, right? We all fuck up, blow it apart, retreat. Maybe we get desperate because in this country music and poetry aren't always held in such high regard, but we need them, so we hold tight, suffocate, kill. Or we're greedy - we want moments to be forever, want more and more - go further and further west, right? But are we thinking about what it means to continually expand and consume, is anyone taking a moment to actually make sense of all we amass and all we lose, too, hand in hand, in the process? Some of us do it, sure. And they're (we're) the ones we grab onto, because they're attempting to make sense of it all, even in small ways. Musicians and poets are at the forefront, bringing back to us what we know, or don't know, or want, or whatever it is that we need. It's a huge burden, and too many are afraid to take it on, even though the genius is everywhere, it's just so hidden because it's safer.

I read NME (New Musical Express) (if you aren't familiar, it's a weekly music magazine from London) obsessively. At some point realized how local, how nationalistic it is; you always know you're reading a paper from the UK. And how all American bands/musicians are identified as such; bands I think of as from Seattle or NYC or Detroit are just called Americans; and are always called Americans. Reading this magazine completely puts you in a British space, there's no way not to remember you're reading a wholly different context and perspective. [And the London writers (some of whom are actually Americans) are expressing a huge fear of Bush's re-election by the way, it seems to come up pretty frequently for a music weekly, the running joke being how the world is now coming to an end. (We're all afraid.)] Why am I surprised at this ownership of space? I guess I'm not; I mean, I'm tied to my place, a lot of us are to some degree or another but don't usually think about ourselves outside our own perspectives, how we must look from another side.

Not wanting to be around people when I was a teenager, it was explicitly tied to not wanting to be around Americans. London was one of my destinations, I thought. Some fucking brilliant rock/punk bands have come out/are coming out of the U.K., plus lots of bloated 'I am brilliant' attitude, right? John Lennon (flippantly, not-seriously but seriously) said the Beatles would be bigger than Jesus. In the 90s Oasis said they would be bigger than the Beatles. Kasabian, coming out now and just making their way to America, say they'll be bigger than the Beatles. American historian/music chronicler Greil Marcus thinks punk started in London with the Sex Pistols; (usurping the authority I often grant to Marcus's language) I say it didn't, it started in NYC with bands likes the Ramones and the MC5. I've got just as big a hold on my space as anyone else, and I'll play humble against imperial Britain even though we're imperialists, always have been. So. The Ramones in the fucked landscape of Rockaway Beach, Queens, a hellhole if ever there was one, only said Judy is a punk and they didn't (need to) know why; fragile crazy Iggy Pop rolled around in broken glass on stage bleeding on his audience, who loved and hated him and let him bleed on their bodies and minds. But the (British) Sex Pistols bled all over the place too, and all they wanted was the right not to have to work. It doesn't do to get too high-handed (even though we all are; the Ramones wanted to be famous and rich too).

So. Where does this leave me? Still wa(o)ndering, I suppose, swooning over all this brilliant music and trying to figure out what to do with this place I've (we've) inherited... any ideas?

***

This is SARACEN!!! -aka: Sarah-sin
Manel Saddique

Saracen: n. 1. an Arab or Muslim at the time of the Crusades. (Oxford American Dictionary). 2. a name invented by 'Western' Orientalist fucks approximately around the Christian 4th century A.D.

SARACEN!!!-aka: Sarah-Sin: n. 1. a punk-rock group fronted by a pissed off Saracen terrorist ninja bitch-whore all clad in smut lingerie beneath her conservative black robes and veils with spiked steel-tipped heals ready to kick up any civilized motherfucker's ass. 2. an Arab or Muslim or any Person of Conscious at the time of The Now who opposes the Iraq War, the Occupations, and the Zionist Manifest Destiny of the Middle East.

LOS ANGELES-You've probably never heard of these motherfuckers-but yes, geeks come in all kinds of shapes and sizes-and shit, some of them might even be fucking cool. These freaky-geeks are SARACEN!!!-aka: Sarah-Sin, a New York band that uses the progressive medium of punk rock to shake their angry fists up in the air at belligerent American policies and fascist ideologues of the Middle East: who also cleverly function under the perverted auspices of "academic diversity" or "intellectual prowess" or just plain ol' bastard colonial master lies-("bringing freedom and democracy to the ME" blah blah)-ya know, the white-man's burden bullshit. Most of SARACEN!!!-aka: Sarah-Sin's (SARACEN for short) songs are probably an inside joke for Middle East Studies geeks-in which the essays of established ivy league fuKKKers like Bernard Lewis's "The Roots of Muslim Rage," or Samuel P. Huntingon's "The Clash of Civilizations," may be of little familiarity to some SARACEN fans... But that's no matter. SARACEN's fans are not without appreciation for the critical (and often satirical) responses and challenges to authority their songs provoke. Each song is in effect a response to the fascist attempts of elitist ideologues to control the dissemination of knowledge-and discourse of the Middle East-particularly within the American Middle East Studies "academy" along with the corporate media front. Laughable and often pathetic defamation campaigns combined with not so laughable slanderous witch hunts and ethnic cleansing attempts at various academic institutions have left SARACEN's lead singer/songwriter plenty to bitch about. SARACEN's band mates mostly consist of queer folk-except for the lead singer, Majnoone, who aside from being a devout terrorist bitch-whore-is also a self-proclaimed celibate spinster.

In a recent interview with SARACEN's lead singer at a Los Angeles stop of their latest tour to various shit-hole bars across The Homeland, Majnoone explained: "The present Neo-Con occupation of the White House and the long-time Likud infiltration of Congress and Big Media allow SARACEN's songs to reverberate with more fucking bloody timeliness than motherfucking ever!!!"

A few of SARACEN's songs (well, song titles, actually) were co-authored by Majnoone's onstage pimp side-kick, Shaykh Sham-Pain. Shaykh Sham-Pain is a hot queer Italian and Islamic Art History dude. He's also a self-proclaimed "old Arab" as he speaks classical Arabic beautifully for a white dude, aside from being fluent in 5 other tongues. He also functions as Majnoone's protective pimp-daddy as he regularly spits effigies in various tongues, ("Eh finnochio!!!"), at the raucous audience to keep them in line. The audience-which incidentally mostly consist of trannies or lady-boys-often can prove a life hazard, knocking over tables and smashing glasses from the emotional stimulations of SARACEN's powerful political messages of resistance. As such, it's been hard for SARACEN to find themselves re-invited to rock a venue. The Shaykh's been on a temporary hiatus from the band of late however, because "he's too busy whoring around with his new punk-rock singer boyfriend," according to Majnoone. She's supposed to be his ultimate primadonna "ho" apparently.

The two first met while both enduring the 'necessary torture' of the "Problems and Methods of Middle East Studies" seminar during the Fall 2002. They immediately hit it off when they discovered that they were both keen on chugging back a beer and singing David Bowie covers after class together. Soon after, they realized that they needed to move beyond their shared passion and side-hobby of doing David Bowie anthems, and instead form their own full-fledged punk-rock band-just like what other pseudo-hipster East Village fucks do. Only this band was going to be different... this band was going to take punk back to its original socio-political roots a la Johnny Rotten's anarchy in the [ME]. This band was going to kick some motherfuKKKers' asses. And incorporating the influence of David Bowie's 70's glam theatrics to their shows was going to be just the right formula this punk-ass bitch duo needed. And the rest was punk-rock history.

SARACEN is also akin to collaborations with other artists of various musical genres. The San Francisco Bay Area hip-hop poet, Islamin-Sistah, makes frequent guest appearances at SARACEN shows. Islamin-Sistah's smooth hip-hop flows combined with the band's aggressive punk-rock cuts often prove a refreshing and convincing mix. Islamin-Sistah is NOT one of Shaykh Sham-Pain's hos, however. The band was very adamant about stressing this point.

Here's an early fan testimonial about SARACEN's lead singer from a few years back:

Anjali, Friday, September 12, 2003:

"[majnoone] has an opinion, yeah! (unlike
those pomohipstertrash apologists for
colonialism). she's also in the most kick ass
punk rock band with songs about saudi
bedouin bitches (who stole her pillow),
foucalt and bernie lewis, and other assured
superhits. ahh [she] is the queen of
unbelievable adventures: crazy train
parties in syria, soft hearted pimps in amsterdamŠ
she's my favorite ever [singer-bitch-terrorist-
whore]!"

But the best way to really understand where SARACEN is coming from is through their song lyrics:

*History Repeats in the ME:

We don't need your bullshit promises...
Fuck you!
We are not barbaric animals to tame
In some fucking zoo!

Keep your filthy keys of promise
To unlock democracy...
Because in the end there's only more
Colonial hypocrisy.

How about trying to democratize
My cunt?
Because your master lies
Only rape me...
Rape my promised independence.
Or is Saracen too blunt?

We've seen these empty promises before
And Saracens ended up
French and British whores!
Now we know not to trust
Outside intervention
With our lives anymore!

Chorus:
Saracen!
Ain't gonna take it up
The ass again!

Fuck your hypocrite fifteen-fifty-nine
And get your cowboy boots off my bloody spine!

Take your DU Marlboro knives
And stick em in your own coward hides!

We don't need your smart-ass bombs
To loot our bodies and museums.
Cuz Hypocrisy has never been
A smart formula to win.

Our lands and bodies are not
Football fields to sack and tackle.
Oh yes, curfews, checkpoints, demolitions and sanctions
Have proven such civilized shackles.

You'll need a stronger pesticide
For our cultural genocide
Cuz cockroaches and refugee rats
Aren't easily transferred
Or walled in with apartheid CATS.

Chorus:
Saracen!
Ain't gonna take it up
The ass again!

So go turn your little pink dicks around
Surely there's alternative energy sources to be found

Take your endless wars and occupations
And start giving a damn
About your own fucking people and nation.

Take all your bullshit empty promises
And shove em in your expert book of lies
It's time you start making big promises
To your own poor and homeless little guys.

Art, Music, Education, and Healthcare
Are surely cheaper than pre-emptive warfare.

So watch your cowboy backs
Cuz Saracens' ready
For some fucking Blowback.

Yeah, Saracens won't take it up the ass again!
No! Saracen, won't take it up the ass again!
"Never again..."

*(Lyrics provided courtesy of SARACEN!!!-aka: Sarah-Sin).

***

notREALLYREviews

The Flip-Side
Alan Arbel

The music world lost a giant on February 8, 2005 when the great Jimmy Smith died in his sleep at his home in the Phoenix area. Mr. Smith, who was 76, was one the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century, with his revolutionary style of playing of the Hammond B-3 organ while recording albums for the Blue Note and Verve labels. Copping the sounds of the great horn players of his day, he would transfer what he heard into the newly designed Hammond B-3, composing and playing jazz in a way that had never been heard before.

Some of his greatest contributions came about after he recorded his music - through sampling. You can hear his work in the Beastie Boys' "Root Down" and A Tribe Called Quest's "Push it Along." His blending of styles (you can hear everything from classical, funk and soul in his various works), collaborative sense, and unique ear for music made Jimmy Smith one of the greatest jazz composers and musicians of all time.

In honor of Mr. Smith's passing, below are three albums by other artists who followed his lead in blending different styles of music to create new and unique sounds as well as two works by Mr. Smith himself.

David Axelrod, Songs of Experience

Axelrod, a Grammy award winning producer for Capital Records (he recorded such works as Lou Rawls's "Live!" and Cannonball Adderly's "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live") in the 60s and 70s worked on soul, funk and jazz projects, gaining a great respect for his ear and musical styling. In addition to his production work, he was also a musician himself, creating some of the most unique and eccentric albums of the 70s. His solo debut, Songs of Innocence, based on the mystical poetry of William Blake, was met with some success. However, it was his follow-up, Songs of Experience, that caused the real stir. Also inspired by Blake's poetry, it sounded like nothing from its era; with its melodramatic strings all tied to heavy breakbeats, Axelrod broke ground with this album. It was an album of sensations - tension, exhilaration, confusion, all created through Axelrod's complex use of horns, strings, break beats. Axelrod painted a lush and varied portrait through his meditations on the world around him. Songs of Experience is a truly wondrous listen.

Greyboy, Mastered the Art

San Diego producer and DJ Andreas Stevens, or Greyboy, was the first American producer to embrace the acid jazz movement that was sweeping Europe in the early 90s. Originally captivated by hip hop, but unable to find MCs to work with, he eventually hooked up with Saxophonist Karl Denson and recorded his debut album, "Freestlyin" for Ubiquity Records for only $4,000. It became a hit in Europe, and led to further collaborations with Denson and eventually the release of his follow up album Land of the Lost. With the popularity of acid jazz beginning to decline, Stevens drifted back to his hip-hop roots, forming a new label with Skateboarding Champ Rob Drydek called the P-Jays. He returned as Greyboy in 2001 with the amazing Mastered the Art, an incredible fusion of hip-hop, jazz, funk and world music. You hear influences of Italian cinema and 70s easy listening in addition to choppy electro-funk and amazing instrumentation courtesy of Elgin Park and Dave Pike (who worked with Stevens on his Greyboy AllStars albums.) Run, don't walk, to get this.

El-P, Collecting the Kid

Collecting the Kid is an album of orphaned tracks and melodies. El-P, founder of the influential Definitive Jux label (one of hip-hop's most risk-taking and creative labels), crafted together instrumentals not used, lost tracks that didn't find a home and work that El-P started on for his Bomb the System soundtrack and put them out on this album. Though this is not his least hip-hop album (listen to the under appreciated High Water, recorded for Thirsty Ear under the watchful eye of the equally risk taking Matthew Shipp), it is an illustration of what Jimmy Smith was doing back in the 50s and 60s on the Verve and Blue Note labels - often making magic out of nothing.

Jimmy Smith, Midnight Special and Back at the Chicken Shack

It's very difficult to pick only one album to illustrate Mr. Smith's brilliance, so why not pick two that were recorded on the same day. Both albums draw on his love of fusion, while highlighting some amazing work by his side musicians, especially Stanley Turrentine's tenor saxophone work on "Back at the Chicken Shack." Do me a favor - next Sunday afternoon, go to the park with a good book and play these two albums back to back and then realize how much better your day was because of Jimmy Smith.

***

Interpol: "Evil" from the album Antics
Rob O'Neill

For Interpol to work with Charlie White for their latest video "Evil," I've gained a new appreciation for the band. In an age of pretty boy bands that are positioned by their record companies to create videos that sell their look, Interpol freaks us all out with an eerily expressive puppet in a disturbing scenario. It's not so much that Interpol as a band is not in this video - that happens frequently. It's that this video was in the hands of the director to promote his own vision and to, in fact, create a film. Granted, music videos are commercials, but why do they have to be? Even MTV doesn't play them anymore. When I watch a video I want to get a sense of that band - I've heard the music, read the interviews, but when I see a video I want to see what they want to see - what might visually inspire them, make them pause. Do they want to stare at themselves dancing around on stage? Maybe; in fact, surely some do. But I don't - I want to be told a story that does or doesn't have anything to do with the song or I want to see something beautiful or amazing - but I want it to give me an insight into the collective mind of the band.

In the grand scheme of things, music videos have only scratched the surface of transcending from commercial to art (that's an article for another issue). Sure there are those who make interesting videos. There are superstar directors who have defined the genre. It's not for lack of artists trying - but how do we see these with music video stations scaling back the airing of videos? Most new bands need to get their faces out there, most huge commercial bands don't have the opportunity to be partnered with someone who's been given the opportunity to express their unique vision, and so we get the same video over and over again. Again, there have been exceptions, so let's talk about a contemporary one. In the case of Interpol, they write emotional lyrics, they deal with insecurity and confusion, they support filmmakers (check out their website, www.interpolnyc.com, which presents videos and short films), and so the pairing of them with Charlie White is perfect.

White's work typically involves the painstaking composition of photographs involving his puppet characters in real life, albeit awkward, situations leaving much to the observers' imagination. Case in point is his life size, humanoid, Joshua character that he uses to explore the themes of male self-image and self-loathing. The frail and grotesque Joshua is typically placed in vulnerable and ambiguous situations in a suburban nightmare. The images White creates take all the skill of a Hollywood production but the compositions, in a single frame, explode with drama and emotional power rarely seen in effects-laden films. "Fleming House," also by White, is a more traditional composition in the Ray Harryhausen tradition, compositing a statue into a plate of photographic elements. The scale of this work (a 4x8 foot print) gives it a crisp and chilling realism. When you see his work in person, particularly the Joshua pieces, some take a few glances at the realism of this everyday scene before realizing that something is off.

His video for "Evil" is equally so. White's work is confrontational. The character rarely ceases to stare directly into the camera and there is something alive about it. Much of this life comes from the illusion of the character being freestanding. We're used to puppets being controlled by a hand that although unseen is close by - this one (through the use of elaborate rigs and computer control for the face) has no master. The puppet is in that world, it's in shock, it's freaking out, and the manner in which the humans treat him normally adds to the insecurity for the viewer.

In terms of a connection with the song itself, it feels loose, but the song implies a tragedy and it seems White just went with that idea. The character himself is almost an analogy for a band member: with his black pants, white shirt, and straight hair you could almost picture him before the accident in a classic Interpol suit as one of the dapper lads. This might be a another reason that it stirs such a strong reaction in people: with the song being sung by a single entity with no backing band, it acts as a self-reflective soliloquy which brings an intimacy to the song and its story. Furthermore, this is the first instance (that I'm aware of) where White puts one of his puppet creations in motion. It's interesting, because although the motion is decidedly puppet-like and at times flailing, the story told of the main character's ambulance trip from the scene of an accident to the hospital maintains White's ability to bring life and urgency to the inanimate. It is refreshing for the music video world to see a band trusting the vision of such a remarkable image-maker.

***

brits, hipsters, and four boys from tennessee: razorlight and the features at bowery ballroom, january 13
claudia pisano

before:
so will i be drunk alone at razorlight? it's before now, milling about (i'm sitting) in the bar downstairs with a beer. i know this is a soldout show but not too many here yet. i changed clothes a few times before i left. why? i guess i don't know what to expect. a lot of british imports/visitors here, young punkish, not hardcore, and not trendy lower-east-side either like i thought it might be. i've had my ticket for this show for ages, i'm itching for it all to start already... i've been listening to razorlight's lp up all night to death, telling everyone i know about them. this is one of those shows i've come to not on anyone's recommendation but because i heard the band's music and just fell.

i wish i could smoke a fucking cigarette. and people think we don't live in an insane wannabe-dictator-controlled society. okay maybe i'm exaggerating but a fucking cigarette.this is a bar, it's not even the concert floor yet.

jeans a tee would have been fine, would have worked here, which is what i thought to begin with. why did i worry about it though? we do that. getting pleasantly buzzed, wish... what do i wish? that i could smoke.

the portishead they're playing is mellow, lulling, a little strange before razorlight but maybe the incongruity works. the kids next to me can't place the band, want to say it's massive attack but know it isn't; i butt in to say it's portishead and immediately think, how pretentious of me to eavesdrop and then correct them too. jesus. returning to my pad and pen... i hope no one thinks i'm writing about them, that would be pretentious of me.

there is huge freedom in this... how to explain?

after, part one:
the lower east side hipster chickies do show up, in droves, like i thought. they come later, i imagine. i don't see most of them until after all three bands have played their sets and i go back downstairs. i find the space where they're selling band merch and there's one particularly loud girl in a brown (? i think) eighties-style off the shoulder tee and a lot of blondish hair and goldish makeup, full-on retro gear, totally dominating the space in front of opening band the features' section of the table in this little corner. she's not even buying their stuff, she's debating over razorlight tshirt sizes with another fashionista girl, not paying any attention to the fact that the features' drummer, rollum haas, is actually standing behind the table selling their stuff. he looks a little overwhelmed but digging all this too, and he should, this is lots of fun and they were fucking outstanding. i'd never heard of them before tonight and so stood in front of them as they walked onstage with the awesome thrill of that 'what will they sound like?' feeling you get when a band is totally unknown to you. during their set, i kept thinking that if the beatles were a punk band, this is what they would sound like. frontman matthew pelham has this wild scream, but he stands back from the mic so it ends up not being deafening, a scream that's got a sense of humor rather than spitting anger (really good punk always has a sense of humor, there's always a joke, even with the blood and safety pins; why do you think sid vicious was always grinning? you think it was a sneer, but it was also a grin...), and you can see pelham giving everything he's got. the songs are fast, they're fun and a little silly, and a couple are about pelham's twin sons, in a very punk sort of way. very interesting, and i'm totally enthralled. this music makes me happy to fucking be alive.

so. i push my way around the chick and buy their cd, exhibit a, and tell haas i think they're fucking great. what a smile i get in return, he asks my name, says thanks, seems glad for real that people liked their show. which they did, cheering and even dancing, never mind the rumored standoffish-ness of the feared nyc crowd (rumored, mostly - most shows i've been to in the last few months at places like irving plaza and hammerstein ballroom, the crowds are pretty attentive, they make a lot of noise. but i do stand way in the front usually; it's a different space than mid- to back-house. case in point - i got stuck in they waaaay back of hammerstein for the pj harvey show in october and there were just so many people wandering around, talking, drinking, doing everything but fucking paying attention to harvey. why be at the damn concert? to see and be seen? because someone said harvey was 'cool?' who knows... .) so i talked to haas just a little, suddenly starstruck and a little shy because i thought they were so great and actually had spent most of their set oogling at him in particular (he drums, rather fantastically, like a madman), not knowing i'd get to meet him later. this is part of that freedom i felt even before the show, i think - all this music made me feel fucking blissful and aching and here i am. the golden 80s girl almost knocks me and everyone else in the coat check line down a little later, by the way, in her tunnel-vision important rush to get past. of course.

but, i did see at least a couple of these 80s trendies upstairs during razorlight's set. which was also, not incidentally, fantastic. a really unpolished, let's just do this and see what fucking happens kind of attitude; you can't help but dig watching these guys play off one another, especially because when they play, they play. they played most of up all night, and frontman johnny borrell clearly loves what he's doing, singing himself into a sweat and indulging in the thrill of taking his shirt off onstage (yes, everyone screamed). and he's really really good, he sounds great and the band is strong, they're definitely a band, you know? the crowd loved them, no folded arms or cold stares here, just lots of smiles and yells and much drunken dancing. and during some songs this one super hip (according to some, anyway) chick in particular was obviously having a blast, dancing and singing, and not just to the singles, either, to tracks off the album that haven't been released. rushed judgments are almost never on the mark, like the famed nyc crowd.

[brief aside to the sometimes truth, however, of the fearsome nyc crowd: ghosts of pasha singer milo finch is quoted as saying that "the crowds in new york usually stare you down with their arms folded." they may, sometimes. they will also be very vocal if they think you suck, or are fucking with them; it happened at interpol's second hammerstein show in november to first opening band calla - they got a bit, ah, experimental with their guitars and nearly gave everyone heart failure, hence the very loud booing from the crowd (at least where i was standing) that i don't know if the band was even aware of since they were so into what they were doing, their guitars screaming so fucking loud, and not in a good way. we thought we'd be dead and deaf before interpol even got to the stage. but when they finally did come on and had been playing for a while and were just blowing everyone away, a kid turned to me and said, "it was worth having to stand through that opening band for this, huh?" fucking brilliant.]

i have seen these ecstatic crowds so many times - razorlight did it tonight, and the features did a pretty good job themselves, i'd say, not really needing to qualify them at all but nonetheless coming as an opening band to this supposedly hip hotspot of a venue in this supposed hotspot of a neighborhood without a huge fan base already in place here. especially considering that the bowery ballroom attracts these supposedly hot in-the-know hipsters or whatever you want to call them - they come to see shows here a lot of the time because of all this supposed hotness (or really, coolness, right?), not necessarily for whatever band happens to be playing that night, especially if it's saturday. i am not here for every show, obviously. but tonight, even if some people came to show their pretty selves off to each other, if they bothered to come upstairs, the shows they saw were killer; i found a new band to love, razorlight sounded even better than their album (and borrell is quite the frontman, totally likeable. and even though he's got one of the biggest mouths around (what is it with the rock superhero pose? man...), he's a very real person, subject to the same shitty breakdowns as the rest of us, recently admitting openly that he had to walk offstage in san diego because he just got overcome with stagefright, a pretty big deal for a band making fucking tidalwaves in their native UK), and even the cooler-than-you (ha!) lower-east siders had fun.

after, part two:
[okay, the dilemma: lester bangs said on more than one occasion that a rock journalist must be unmerciful, can never worry about making a band look cool or nice or smart or anything any one of us might want others to make us look, right? easy enough to do, maybe, in theory, but becomes much stickier when you love a band's music. now, whether i am actually a rock journalist is up for question, but here i am, writing about music...]

so, totally smitten with the features, i managed to finagle a telephone interview with lead singer matt pelham. when we spoke they were on the road, in chicago that particular night, driving around the country in a van that seemed to be pushing pelham to the brink. with too much cold and too much snow for my taste this winter in nyc, visions of a road trip under big skies and much sun (and immersed in music to boot...) had me asking pelham with stars in my eyes what kind of good things they were seeing as they traveled. the answer? "the van and hotel rooms and dark dirty venues, that's it... ." it's all about perspective, isn't it? tied to my city without a break for a long fucking while now, i'm feeling romantic about that mythical open road, right, when all pelham wants to do is be home and recording (good news for fans, though, as it seems they have plenty of material for another album). this is how the conversation started, and this is how it stayed, pelham sounding caught, trapped even, in the supposed obligations of being a band on a big label (or probably a small one, too): play, play, play, talk, talk, talk, right? woe is me, i might add.

okay, so what about the music? for me, music is an ultimate means of living, of expression, of being; i don't function without it. swoon baby starry nights, always. and in this ever more suffocating atmosphere of patriotactsnationalsecurityterrorviolencewardemocracy, it seems to me that to be able to chill at bowery ballroom with a beer experiencing this music is not something to be taken lightly. i pose the question to pelham: what's the importance of all this for you? why is it important to play and have people listening? "we just want to play music and put out records every now and then. ...i think it's... the three of us [pelham, bassist roger dabbs, and keyboard man parrish yaw; haas joined later on] grew up together, and i think around [age] thirteen started playing music together so i think it's just something we've always done. we haven't really thought of anything else, i think we've done it so long i just wouldn't know what the fuck to do." i agree, that's it, right, music just is what we do (listening, making...).

but: pelham's tone was hard to read - simple conviction, acknowledgement, some kind of passion that he just has to play music? or just that he wouldn't know what the fuck else to do because this was habit now? does it matter, though? this was a loaded question, asked out of growing impatience with pelham's own impatience and frustration (but never rudeness, to his credit) and short-as-possible answers to questions like what are you listening to? ("recently a lot of randy newman... i really like joanna newsom, i don't know, everything.") how do you explain why music is important when it comes down to it? okay: it's important because artists change things, push boundaries, express what we don't always have words for, bring us to spaces we want and need to know and learn and figure out, and oh yes, this happens dancing blissfully in whatever little (or big) venue, dirk and dirty or otherwise, mr. pelham, you happen to be. the harder question, though, is explaining just why i get overwhelmed and cry every time i see certain bands, and explaining just why during the features' set i felt so fucking happy to be alive, right? music hits somewhere deep and how can i explain that? i was trying to push pelham to do what i can't, what i didn't really expect him to do but shot for anyway in a conversation that was done before it even started, as i realized all of 2 minutes into it.

a friend said to me not too long ago that musicians can be really hard to talk to; because they have this other language, right, this music, they can't always express themselves in words (that's my job, i think...). fair enough, and pretty true, too. exhibit a, and the features' live set, are exhilarating and look to stay in regular rotation and desire for me for some time to come. so... let's hope that pelham and co. get back home before the road eats them up and deprives everyone, especially, i think, matt pelham, who sounded like he could use a little more bliss than he's currently getting.

http://www.razorlight.co.uk
http://www.thefeatures.com

***

Arcade Fire: "Tunnels" from the album Funeral
Justin Rogers-Cooper

...and if the snow buries
my, my neighborhood.
And if my parents are crying then I'll dig a tunnel
from my window to yours,
yeah a tunnel from my neighborhood to yours.
you climb out hte chimney and meet me in the middle, the middle of the town. And
SINCE there's no one else around, we let our hair grow long, and forget all we used to
know - then our skin gets thicker from living out in the snow. YOU CHANGE ALL THE
LEAD SLEEPIN' IN MY HEAD, AS THE DAY GROWS DIM I HEAR YOU SING
A GOLDEN HYMN
THEN WE TRIED TO
NAME OUR BABIES
but we forogt all the names that - THE NAMES WE USED TO KNOW. But
sometimes, we remember our bedrooms, and our parents' bedrooms, and the bedrooms
of our FRIENDS. then we think of our parents,
whatever happened to them?!
You change all the lead sleepin' in my head to gold, as the day
grows dim, I hear you sing a golden hymn, the song I've been
trying to say. Purify the colors, purify my mind. Purify the
colors, purify my mind, and spread the ashes of the colors over
this heart of mine!

The Arcade Fire

Our Bedrooms
Justin Rogers-Cooper

I used to lie awake for a few hours with all the lights off in my room, my stereo humming just soft enough to make out the percussion, which kept me awake. When I thought my dad had finally gone to bed, I'd quietly put on my shoes. Even though my mother went to bed hours before my father then, about two or three years before the divorce, she was the one to worry about: she never slept. When I was a kid, I could enter their room at any point during the night with an upset stomach, and just calling out 'mom' was enough for her to spoon me some Pepto-Bismol. In our split-level house on a cul-de-sac, my room was on the ground floor, so I just had to open the window and slither out into some fern or another, and try to avoid the mulch. Closing the window wasn't problematic--I usually left it open a crack, with a note on the bed below explaining I had only snuck out and was not running away. Leaving alone from my bedroom, the destination was obvious; in this case, her name was Molly. We lived about a couple miles from each other in the smirking white suburb of Upper Arlington, about three miles northwest of the Ohio State University.

We usually met with a clandestine, frank embrace on the Ohio State golf course, on a bridge that arched over a small stream. There were no fences to climb. You just walked through a few backyards that emptied out into the flickering overnight sprinklers and guided yourself against the purple sky. If it was summer, we'd wait on that bridge for the other one to appear, usually smoking Camel Lights so that the glowing ember acted as a kind of friendly signal. At 15, the paranoia was always vivid that some overzealous cop was going to intervene randomly on one of those humid midnights, when the streets trickled with high school students passing from backyard to backyard. On one occasion, an officer actually chased me into the golf course, then gave up. But usually, and on this vague December night I'm describing here, nothing like that happened. Molly would greet me with her fluffy, unstyled winter coat, the pale stench of second-hand smoke on her collar, and we'd probably kiss. I can't really remember. It was really dark.

Molly lived in a house full of nine or ten kids, and later it grew even larger. Her parents were true Catholics, if there is such a thing (as opposed to me then, a Unitarian-Catholic). Molly babysat constantly, and her parents only tolerated me a little, so sneaking out was our way of spending quality time together. They didn't allow her to hang out at my house, so I always had to go to hers. The house wasn't big enough. The kids were in every room. The kitchen smelled like old milk. Her older brother Patrick variously hated me or played kind. Her twin brother Michael, formerly a good friend of mine, stayed in his room alone. We'd usually gravitate to the piano room, where there was never any permanent furniture, but always a piano. I don't remember her playing anything specific, but I know she did. Her mother often abused her by telling her terrible things about herself and her life. Later, she'd inevitably give her a watch, or some other kind of present, as a way of making things right. After one particularly bad scene, Molly gave it all back to her. She said her room was empty.

I had gotten my driver's license a few weeks earlier, but we weren't allowed to drive around. We made stuff up and idled in parking lots, expecting something that never came. We were both depressed. She wasn't the first person I spoke with openly of suicide, but she was the first girl who understood the motivation behind it, which, from the news I read, now seems very Japanese. We were both obsessive about our music. I'm convinced that without music we both would have shriveled. There was no doubt to either of us that we were 21-year olds listing away in 15-year old bodies. We both talked about college a lot. We liked to make fun of other students at the high school, and say loyal things about our best friends, of whom we had few. We were pretentious, precocious, ironic, and intelligent. We took risks, and we laughed at ourselves a lot, as if we were watching ourselves from the future. I was closer to her at that time than I had been to anyone previously. During the winter months sneaking out was hard. Laying around the golf course counting stars didn't make sense in the Ohio snow. The urgency in those days was profound, though, and I hustled through the cold December air more times than I can recall. It hurt to wait in the darkest winter hours, the air the absolute coldest. You couldn't even smoke because your knuckles would freeze. We'd always find each other after a moment, shadows meeting at the bridge. Then, surprisingly, we returned back to her house.

We snuck in through the piano room window. We made a nest by her furnace. I can remember laying there exhausted at 5 A.M., wishing I could fall asleep. My heart always began to beat fast when her mother awoke to do the dishes and prepare breakfast. There was no easy exit. I just tip-toed up the stairs and went straight from the hall to the window. There is no doubt that if anyone had seen me I'd be dead. I'd climb through that window and run. In the light of the day-light savings, I'd zoom across the golf course, often stopping to catch my breath, hoping that the budding blue-purple daylight could protect me from whatever terrible mower was sifting the green for that day's deals. Back at my house, my mother would be in the kitchen making coffee and listening to NPR. I usually got about an hour and a half of sleep, then woke to drive my sister and myself to school, eyes bloodshot and head pounding. I would have failed science that semester if not for cheating, since by third period any coffee in the blood was pissed out and the body crashed.

I've had a few relationships that left with someone never speaking to me again, but with Molly it still makes me sad. She was so pale and thin, with enormous, watery blue eyes. Her hair was cut perfunctorily, endearingly basic, with bangs right above her eyebrows and the rest at her shoulders. Her breath tasted, impossibly impossibly, like milk. When I hear "Tunnels," it gives me one of those sinking lifts, because I can see my empty suburban neighborhood, caught in the frozen gray of garage lit, doll-house illumination. Long after I stopped hating the buried hypocrisy of that suburb, what still stops me is that vague, unceasing compulsion that I had to see her, that nothing could wait. I felt like the risk was greater than getting grounded, or being arrested for curfew, or banished from her castle. Some other life seemed to matter beyond mine. From window to window, those nights were about digging tunnels, to meet in the middle of town, to let our skin get thicker from living out in the snow. Sometimes we remember bedrooms and our parents' bedrooms and the bedrooms of our friends. Then we think of parents; whatever happened to them?

For all our independence and passion, for all the addictive mysteries of our nights together, Molly and I fell apart because we couldn't leave our families. In a strange way, you can't leave your parents, even at the age when you believe they're most gone from you. Two or less weeks before we broke up, Molly's dad confronted me in her garage. He didn't want her to go out with me in my dad's Camry, but there was no reason for her not to go, and no reason for him to be mad. I was half-way down the driveway when he yelled something, directed at me. In my vision, she falls off to the side yard somewhere as I turned around and went straight for him. He stood his ground, at the foot of the garage door, hands on his hips, straightening his back. I looked him in the face, and saw his eyes were the same color as hers, fierce blue, riled, panicked. He kept saying something but I didn't listen. I just stared at his face. I saw his fears; I saw his job and his wife and the house and the kids. His voice trembled with rage. He was unprepared that his daughter had already left in my car, that we were down the block, that she loved me more than I loved her. Yet his defiance and his fear were permanent, and I realized that there was nothing to be done. In my mind, I can't remember walking away, or the conversation ending. The memory ends there, next to their minivan.

This is not about romance, but about memories. In my case, "Tunnels" is about darkness, that hazy porthole that just wavers with its exit, like a promise that you can go forward, or go back. Our time together, Molly and me, the most important moments, they were spent in darkness, in makeshift bedrooms, in places no one could find us. Because of that, though, we never managed to get each other into our waking lives. For a year, we both were always moving toward the other, but never really came together except in the stillest hours. When I left her, the sun was always rising, and I think this cursed the relationship. The brightness was always separate; the daylight often exposed us as we really were: two confused kids, barely tall enough for high school, struggling with two very different families that had the kind of problems that we could never run from. In the end, those problems claimed us. Before the winter ended, I broke up with Molly in her parents' basement, and she hugged me, and within weeks we never really spoke again.

I feel the things I remember with Molly aren't the things I should; I don't talk to her anymore, so she isn't around to help me with the details. I've heard from our old friends that she's married with a baby, that she looks great, that she's going to law school, that her parents disapprove of it all. She left me with some valuable knowledge, however, that becomes clearer every year. I learned from her that love is what remains after the initial desire to love someone has faded. When I told her it was over, it wasn't because I didn't love her. I didn't know then that love is something that goes well beyond romance or love-making. Love doesn't ever exclude desire for others. It's hard to believe she already knew that then, but she must have. Looking back, it seems obvious. When you have parents like hers, you know. When you're young, your parents' bedrooms, somehow, always affect yours.

www.arcadefire.com

***

theB-side
claudia pisano

this isn't starting with music, exactly. this is starting with hunter s. thompson, who committed suicide on sunday, feb. 20. i found out the next day, sitting in on a poetry reading at the bowery poetry club. director bob holman announced the news before the reading started, and as writer justin rogers-cooper says, so full of hurt and perfectly on target in another article in this month's issue regarding elliot smith, i went sick; and i think, a week later, i haven't fully recovered yet. this column is 'the b-side' in a magazine called b-side whore, and all week long, whenever i think about what i might want to say, dr. thompson is what comes to mind. because he was definitely the b-side, if anyone was. but what does that mean? or what do i mean, really? i could wax poetic, throw around words like outsider and rebel, but that isn't quite it. on the libertines' song "what katie did" pete doherty (speaking of, rebel rebel anyone?) says "my safety pins are none too strong/they hold my life together/i never say never again...," and that's sort of it, seems a little bit right. really living however you actually are, inside, outside, wherever you are at any given moment, is hard and often threatening to fall apart, because the moments shift and change, they aren't static, and that's part of what's hard, because there just isn't any one thing about your life that you can pin down (or together), the boundaries are always challenged and this is fucking tiring, isn't it?

so the thing about thompson is that he held on to himself even if it seemed like no one else did, lived on both sides of the record, as it were, even if you didn't want to hear it. like the lennon/ono singles that came out of the double fantasy album, right? on those 45s, the a-side would be one of john's songs, the b would be ono, and most people really didn't want to hear that other side. and on the records this split is actually visually reinforced - the a-side is the uncut shiny apple, the b the open inside; how much fucking clearer can you get? ono was hard on the ear and on your mind too, people had issues, problems, she made them upset. but john's heart lived on those b-sides as much as it did on the a (and they weren't even separate things, really, ono singing with john on the a-side, right), and the question then falls to you: do you listen to what you might not want to hear? hunter thompson faced a lot of criticism for his ideas and way of life, especially later on in his life, when, as m. slackman in an early ny times article about his death says, "the generation he once courted - the generation that brandished the slogan 'drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll' - turned its attention to issues like property taxes and social security." because for a while, thompson was almost fashionable, in his way. all things uncool have their moment in the spotlight (punk, 'indie,' folk, drugs, sex...), when we're allowed to be awkward and live on the flipside - but the rules always seem to set in, don't they?

somehow we seem to be searching for some static, ordered thing - though we'd never call it that, right, we want to believe we're carefree, adapting, dynamic, whatever - but it seems most people want, or think they want, safety, control, some way to get a grip, have a handle on a life that is often out of control. out of control not just in personal ways (i must pay my fucking rent again...) but in the bigger places our lives reside, which we often shy away from but which affect us nonetheless. here we are, in whatever city or town or language we are, bearing the effects of past and present always, the effects of things we may not have had anything personally to do with but which we now own (even if you don't think you own them...). b-side whore's j. rogers-cooper put it this way, in a slightly different context but which has come back to me here on the b-side: "if part of the poetic projects of [poets] [john] wieners and [charles] olson are to variously fashion 'new' selves and forms of subjectivity away from the mainline of american darkness, to wrest a bit of salvation from a continent created from genocides, it seems that part of what i find compelling... is how we are going to negotiate poetics with this utter responsibility, or burden, to tragedy on this scale." poetics and music, to my mind, are not different things. and the b-side, the outside, punk, rebel, whatever its name might currently be, faces this, right, and no matter how cool it gets, there're always the ugly parts that don't quite fit (who thinks, even once in a while, about how the genocides, yes, genocides, upon which we stand contribute to who we are?), and what do we do then? kurt cobain once said about nirvana that "it was a random group of misfits - there wasn't pressure like 'hey, you're not the right kind of punk.'" this is it, i think - what happens when that moment passes and you still believe or act whatever it is you believe or act (and i don't mean this in the sense of being "idealistic," which inherently implies some static thing to which you can be left, then to be left behind when others forgo said 'ideals' in favor of real estate and social security; i mean this in the sense of whatever is real to you/for you at any particular moment)?

i came to hunter thompson pretty late, finally reading fear and loathing in las vegas for the first time just last year or so. (i'd seen the movie eons ago but had no clue...) i have since devoured a handful of his books, and whether i'm clued into the historical facts of whatever's he's writing about or not (the details of various superbowls and presidential campaigns are just out of my range of knowledge), i'm always affected by how he writes. well, wrote. as many of his friends have already started to put into print, i, who knew him not at all in person but only through his words, feel wrong putting him into the past tense. i'm affected now, here, in this present. it's happened to a lot of us, reading him. submerged in the real of any experience, not separating yourself out, affecting it as it affects you, bringing your reader along for the ride whether s/he's with you or not, right? the ny times even credits the current blogger movement (is it a movement? a phenomenon? a taking back of authority, more likely...) to thompson, as thompson gave himself the right to be a part of what he was reporting about. and you give him the right, too, because it's fucking urgent and necessary and you want to be a part of it too. bored, cynical, cool, maybe you think you are these things, but the truth is that life really is urgent and somehow, we have to figure it out.

so this being over? it doesn't work, doesn't make sense and hurts more than we want to deal with. well, in theory, anyway, because i do have to feel this sick because thompson is gone, and i do have to/want to write my column anyway, swimming in words and music, as always. from hunter s. to... the others, maybe. lead singer and persona of this band all on his own, really, dominic masters slurs/yells an important thing in what i think is an important album in a song called "the lackey:" "you need some way to be free that's not just a dream." treading the line until it maybe crashes down in chaos, making ugly faces at pretend-"indie"-but-actually-aggressive meathead-types who act what they aren't because they aren't brave enough to own what they are, drunk enough not to care that i'm baiting them with nasty looks, i've thought about this line over and over again.

said meatheads, by the way, in oddly high numbers at the kings of leon show at irving plaza on feb. 23. i've fallen almost desperately in love with the kings. for a while i couldn't figure out why, exactly - their first album, especially, is heavy on down-home southern rock sound, not music i often respond to so deeply. but i think i've got it now, courtesy of a friend who came to the idea before i did: kings of leon's music is fucking urgent, and it goes deep. and i didn't expect it to, so the fall is that much harder, i think. you can hear this urgency in their sound and in their words and especially in lead singer caleb followill's voice, and it's in these things that i come back to thompson, who said what he thought whether it was nice or you wanted to hear it. the kings worry about things that are personal and not-personal, because they are things that have a place in all these lives and we worry about how we're supposed to manage all of it, right, things like going bald and being desperate for company and being so fucked up you can't get your dick up, and they sum it all up, in a way, on "four kicks" with "this party is overrated,/but there ain't shit else to do." you have to face things, right, even when they make you fucking cry they are so desperately awful. there ain't shit else to do except live, so what do you do with it?

there are no brilliant conclusions, i don't think, at least not for me. and that might just be the b-side, for me anyway - allowing the safety pins to hold it all together rather precariously and living anyway.

BsideWHORE: The ARCHIVE

Welcome to the BsideWHORE Archive