From the monthly archives: June 2010
Night blares on, cabs fill with sorry lovers
spilling confessions like exorcisms
like Nina Simone getting out a blues tune:
I know the awful ache.
Her gritty tones rise, reaching out into dead air.
Her voice curls like a lover’s back.
I’m dressed-up as the Pretenders,
the whole early-80’s punk rock group,
all four of them, at Chi Psi’s Drink-
A-Thong costume party in this cliché
LL Bean catalog liberal arts college.
I’m just back from a summer backpacking
through Europe where I’ve discovered
…how to live confusion, how to be a cute desirable girl frustration, indoor confusion, among crowds of people frustration, humor confusion, and of course the monumental frustration of not being able to fit into a cute suburb of America where it’s all about the football studs and sweet-voiced chicks who dress in spring colors, all who’d listen to the slimy idealism of sparkly pop stars (who are, when you actually dissect their purpose; products) rather than to D Boon sing over jazzy punk, words that endure sophisticated resistance…
I just keep a camera around me all the time, and photograph every cool thing I run across. That’s always been the plan, and it will remain that way. I love it man, it’s all Iwant to do for the rest of my life. Music, friends, strangers, things in the street, things in nature, everything, all of it. I figure after 20 or 30 years, I’ll have this amazing body of work to look back on, such an exciting prospect.
And while we’re on the subject of vampires…. while driving this morning, the T. Rex song “Jeepster,” came on the radio. Like most of Marc Bolan’s repertoire, the song is infectious, it’s sexy, or as one YouTube commentator puts it, “ If it’s possible for a song to have testicles (is that word allowed here?), this song has ‘em!”
Shaking intern, and resident vampire buff, Francesca Macchiavelli shows lovers and haters of the Twilight series that perhaps we do have something in common, the music behind it all. That said, for better or worse, we wonder…. Can Stephanie Meyer be considered a shaker? And if so, how do we feel about that?
We have loved our nation a long time. When we view America as a metaphor, say a woman, the affair starts to take shape through song. Here, interpreting the works of others, is that love affair from 1975 through 2009.
Why would Taylor Dayne—D-A-Y-N-E—
be standing outside Penn Station,
& why would she need bodyguards anymore,
dumb ass?
The song nearly wrote itself and yet I released it with great reluctance.
Oh, did you know, when you were setting down
these stirring beats, the comfort of the sound
of drumming in the frosted autumn fields?
