Sometimes I feel like that optimistic and annoying purple cat when it comes to the way I discover music and stay persistently behind the curve; I remember an image from one episode of the show that has always stuck with me. Though I don’t remember why this happened, the main character, the purple cat with a horrible voice, ended up in Hell; he was given the requisite punishment of cleaning out the largest litter box in existence. When I’m trolling around the internet looking for music or driving in my car squirming through the awful dreck that pads the good songs on “The World Cafe” I feel like that ridiculous purple cat, wandering around and scooping up finds. 

\”Stillness is the Move\” by Dirty Projectors

A world of sunshine, bubblegum and vinegar. You’ll want to dance there, but you won’t know how at first. After much reflection, you realize the only appropriate rhetorical response in the form of dance would take the form of a gradual rising motion after which the dancer would jerkily float off into the clouds. This is dance music if dance floors were litter-covered streets with endlessly open skies colored by chemicals.

If it isn’t a dance track, its a love song between ideas. What if Plato’s cave fell in love with Foucault’s Panopticon?As ideas, would they date and compare their respective levels of profundity?  Would they question one another’s discourse and potential hegemonic agenda? If things went sour, would they complain passive-aggressively about how their own respective metaphoric structure is built around a series of ill-formed premises and fallacious arguments?

This song is not what it sounds like when ideas break up. I think I’ve heard that song once or twice, though. 

JCH

She goes on drifting among great, sterile, transparent jellies. Nothing keeps her steady and stable, but the glass-bright mass keeps her in a constant state of suspension, she doesn’t touch the ground. Sophie too will be like that one day, if something isn’t done to prevent it in good time, now. Love will prevent it (p. 91).

Dear John Darnielle,

I fear that I’ve patterned the worst parts of my relationships after your songs, perhaps desiring to be one  of those desperate narratives in my own self-consciously tragic way. I suppose it all goes back to Nick Hornby’s eternal question: Do we listen to pop music because we’re miserable, or are we miserable because we listen to pop music?

See you on the 18th, we’ll talk about all of this then.

Sincerely,

J.C.H.

*thanks to Karen for this particular nuanced revision of my long held contention of being just a “sad bastard”

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls

Assignment:

Write a piece of fiction for the duration of a single song, without revising. You may revise afterwards.

The song: Fredo Viola – “The Sad Song”

The fiction:

The first time she said my name, she half-sang it to me; each syllable filled her mouth with a slight longing, a desire to make me manifest out of the darkness, as if from a corner. The second time she said it, I tried not to well up; I’m overly emotional anyway, crying always at movies, at sappy love songs where the girl or boy dies and the singer is left wanting. The third time she said my name, I couldn’t hear her anymore; the sound of crowd around us had risen to a din. 

I realized three months into our affair that I had fallen in love with her voice. I lusted after her sonorous tone with its fragile breaks in emphasis. I longed for her giddy inflection on her “can”s her “am”s, those verbs that indicated abilities or possibilities. 

The night before she left, I crept into our house while she was in the shower. I came in quietly to listen; she would sing to herself in there. I wanted to hear the language she used in her songs, the nonsense lyrics that spilled out of her while she rinsed her hair, newly greyed, down the drain.

Karina and I were quite a few rows behind this fellow; though this presentation of the spectacle during the finale is remarkably accurate for everyone on the floor.

I highly recommend following the link in order to watch the video in high quality.

Happy Thursday!

\”A Change is Going to Come by Sam Cooke\”

We’ll mark a year past and look towards the bright future. 

What a year it was.

She made a Cindy Lauper-esque video, which is just as ridiculously captivating as the song (the album’s first single, natch):

Sometimes the most broken thing reminds us that everything else is mostly broken too, and that there’s nothing wrong with any of that. 

Maybe I’ll get this tattooed on an arm after the Emily Dickinson poem:

Creo quia absurdum.

Sometimes you’ll read an interview with a Pulitzer Prize Winning novelist and you’ll know that you’re looking for gems, for tokens of wisdom that sparkle at the corners of their words like so many paltry trinkets a simple thief would be attracted to, as if these things were strategically placed there, jangling about the hip, to detract from the real golden watch in the left breast pocket or the ornate heirloom locket tucked safely in a bodice. Marilynne Robinson managed to dispense with the pleasant costume jewelry at one point during her recent interview for The Paris Review, giving a brief glimpse of her riches:

“The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: Stop doing this to yourselves.”