Shaking the Rust Off

I guess I'm going to start using this again. I tend to have a lot of things wandering around in my head that don't really leave if I just write them in a notebook. Maybe it has something to do with private vs. public bastions of consciousness, you know? Like, if I write something on the internet, no matter who reads it (if anyone), it is somehow gone from me...or, more accurately, no longer solely mine and can then be contextualized and re-evaluated in some sense-making kind of way.

On the myspace there's another finished recording, a psych-ballad entitled "Xenia." I'm incredibly pleased with how well the recording worked out. I spent a long time watching Mike Rocha do all sorts of crazy shit to and with other people's songs and recordings before recording any of my own music with him. He's brilliant. He's given many of our unfulfilled ideas a sonic legitimacy that we were never able to achieve on our own. (i.e. the crazy ass tape echo all over Xenia).

There are two more songs that are complete and one more that is a hair away from completion. I'd say the record is at a good 70% now, pre-mastering anyways. It's taken forever.

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"Shaking the Rust Off"

In what direction will our flesh wander
when the Other's not around?
senile skin
an aged growth,
a page divided where I loaf
and change
deranged
perverse
unsure
silent seeking validation
stupid concept of a cure.
Twisting turning combi-nations,
find the numbers in the words,
level-headed consternation,
what is said is never heard.
What's been hiding in between the moonlight and the frozen shore?
(line deleted for embarrassment)
Are we just a horror movie,
humanoid and hungry forms?
Where's the beauty in remarking on the beauty of the norm?
Adept in death I dance deliberate dodging doldrums dumbly drab
Askance I glance in gardened grievance gripping grizzled gaping gaps
between the modern and the ancient
between your technophilic loves
No body's made me write like this since I said I'd had enough.
Willow, start to shed your branches,
I can offer comfort here,
boundless depth of autumn answers freely for the fallen fear.
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Onwards and Funkwards.

Human Resources

So, here is what is. Everything else still isn't, but almost is. I'm almost positive that you'll like everything else better than this one, but this one exists just as surely and more stubbornly as a result.



"Human Resources"

My album almost exists and my whole life is different.

Something I'm trying out:

text or something. imagey. imaginary. look at the imageyness of it all.

Song Memory #1

A few years ago the dusk was tight and powerful. Waiting and waiting; no ideas: dreary glorious middlecity uptown surrounded everything. All I wanted were the drugs, really. At that time he was my friend…
A man inside himself so deeply that even the inside was on the horizon of his actual location. Wonder if any of us can claim differently, to the superior or inferior consequence; Regardless.
Whatever the case, his apartment (the old one), draped in flags of sub-cultural nationalism, was filling with the smoke of two expertly constructed blunts, one peach and one cherry, when you called to check up on my progress. In all decency (which I pretend to have) and 20/20 hindsight (which eludes me), I should have told you to make other plans.
Wait for hours—Take the ride—screaming fight in front of strangers and friends—the dusk I never knew could be the glassy eyes of meteorological ancestors, toiling, toiling, building storms, chinooks, the warm wind from where the cold wind should exist—I resided myself to take the bus. There was no middle ground of acceptability.

Note: One thing I have definitely learned is that there is always a middle ground of acceptability. My back problems seem too easily exploited to be used as a suitable metaphor.

The fateful walk home from Bathurst and Sheppard, enjoyed and loathed on a million days before and since, was solipsistic glory. The world and I were created to exist in relation to the walk itself, the mid-album lull, the cold reader’s wall, the glass ceiling in the stone pantry filled with berries and preserves for the coming season. My tongue on your legs taking careful note, drawing blueprints, writing treatments for the purpose of deep scene by scene analysis at a later date when the script can be incorrectly reconstructed and raised to a level of monocultural ubiquity (quit me, quit me, quit me). I reach to you in non-physical media with fingers of saliva that taste for burnt pages who’ve never seen fire. My face curling inwards upon itself, lips and nose and teeth are blips, closed and sheathed by a RADAR unit that never I met nor ever met me or you or us. My grandfather’s service record is the same sky that could not be a memory yet; I flew high and friendly (thank you Marvin) towards your rage and disappointment.

The feeling was significant if the aftermath was not. Thank you.

A Valley Of Giants

The last time I ever did sit in this place
we drank by the moonlight
I dissolved in your face
A vibraphone badder than sound in the silence
floating in space like a waterless island
decrepit intrepid, a beautiful violence
loveless, unique -- the last of decidings

A new home enraptured
A distance uncaptured
A life that you lived that might not have mattered --
the particles flash in and out of existence
and foreshine the movement,
they can't ever prove it,
but the fact is that pathless there is no resistance
the fact is that pathless there is no resistance.

A garden of heathens
A garden of time
gives meaning to meanings
but nothing to mine --
and leaving the loved ones that formerly were
we step into endlessness, nouns without verbs
our bodies as copies claim us as our own
never to read by the Rosetta Stone
original dwarfed in the face of the clone
now a valley of giants that must be our home --
has arrived.

Usurper

So, Alex Chilton of Big Star died today...well, yesterday now. We listened to their whole discography and wrote a 70s pop song.

Usurper:

Stop writing songs about Jesus
I don't want to hear them anymore
our thoughts are so impure
and I'll never know for sure

Maybe I'll meet you again someday
in some glass the world has stirred
I don't need you anymore
but I'll never know for sure

We'll go to your house in our motioning bodies
and try not to sing "You Really Got Me."
Spent so much time moving forward and back
I could draw a map of the sidewalk cracks
Usurper

You've been feeling underwhelmed
and feeling so uncertain
oh, a shell's such an interesting kind of a person
And what is the source, my friend
of the desert's desertion?
And what is the world if it's not a diversion?

We'll go to your house in our motionless bodies
I started to sing but your expression stopped me
Spent so much time moving forward and back
I could draw a map of the subway tracks
Usurper

Usurper, Usurper, Usurper.

And if our bodies never touch,
I don't know what I'll do.

And if our bodies ever touch,
always searching, never rushed
heated, supple, at full blast
the flags are rising from half mast.