Don’t let those Sunday afternoons.
The things that happen when you’re altogether elsewhere: back in June, “somewhere in northwestern Europe,” Jane Siberry changed her name to Issa. (Metafilter reacted, including the Jar-Jar joke you’d expect, and a wry lick at Siberry’s second album, which, thinking about it, you probably also would have expected.) As I’m typing this, she’s workshopping new material in Vancouver; there’ll be a tour of the Antipodes early next year. (I did hear about how she was selling everything but her guitar, thanks; apparently, I fell into a very narrow window the last time I checked up on her.)
I’m not so much mentioning this to comment on name-changes in general, or this one in specific; I know from design that surface is important, and I know from magic that names matter, but in the end a rose is still a song is still a rose, right? You either know her already and love her, or you’ve never heard of her, or she just isn’t right for you, not now, not at the current juncture, and what do you care what I think about what name I have to look for on the lists of upcoming concerts? —But if at this current juncture you think she just isn’t right to you because of maybe the whimsy, or the quirk, can I just point out that seeing her live is as close as I ever want to get to church, these days? “I didn’t know we could do that,” says Dana Whitaker, in the sort of deeply embedded pop-culture reference I specialize in, when I bother to specialize in anything; when I forget we can do that, something usually reminds me. —She reminds me, as often as not. Whatever her name might be.
Mostly I’m mentioning it because it’s what I learned on my way to pointing out that Child, the third disc of her New York concerts from back about the turn of the century, is pretty much a must for the playlists of the sort of people who make playlists of holiday music but not until after Thanksgiving. It’s available from her online store, for whatever price you’d want to pay, and for a while there, you’ll be as close to church as you’d want to be. And if I have to explain what I mean by that, well. Go listen to “Hockey,” instead. Smile as she calls the band home, one by one. “Rosie…”
Get away get away get away get away
Get away get away get away get away
Break away, break away
Yeah. It’s a lot like that.
Well the way that song came to be written is, that I was watching a friend’s trailer down in Oklahoma. He lived in this trailer way out in the woods. Land is really cheap in Oklahoma, especially in the rural area. He’d had a trailer out there for just about forever and built a wood acroutements around the trailer, like he had a porch out front with a porch swing. So anyway, he was gone off overseas on some kind of journey and he left me there to watch the place. There was nothing to do. The TV reception was real bad and he didn’t have any books I wanted to read, but he had a video tape of the Marriage of Figaro, the entire opera by Mozart. So I spent days just watching the Marriage of Figaro over and over again and I didn’t talk to anybody for a long time, I was out there all by myself with no telephone. I would get kind of drowsy and you know how when you are by yourself for a long time, you’ll think I’m crazy, but the voices of your memory and your dream world start to become louder and louder. I think that is why people get a little nutty when they live off by themselves for a long time. But anyway I woke up one day out there in the trailer and I was kind of like living in this Marriage of Figaro universe, only I was still playing folk songs: I was playing Woody Guthrie songs to myself. So I went out and sat on that porch swing and started swaying back and forth and kinda fell in this trance. I had my old crummy classical guitar out there and was playing along. That melody came to me. First it was that melody that walks up the scale. so I don’t know it was kind of an impressionist mix match and I hear that other melody going along with it right at the same time. It all kind of… well, the combination of the mosquitoes, locusts all around, bees around the sound of the porch swing creaking, all that mixed together and having been immersed in the Marriage of Figaro for a few days. That is kind of where that song came from. It took me a long time to figure out what it was gonna be about.
—Dave Carter (with Tracy Grammer)
Oh, hell yes.
You’ve reached Logan Echolls, and here’s today’s inspirational message:
A journey of a thousand miles begins with an historic midterm landslide.
I’m sure I’ll find something to be disappointed about in the morning.
In the meanwhile, I’m enjoying this entirely too much. (—This one, on the other hand, is a wee bit too much on the triumphalist side for my delicate sensibilities.)
Hedless conspiracy.
Noted in passing, over at the irreplaceable Slacktivist:
(One, possibly minor, but real, contributing factor to the trend of failing referendums and, thus, cuts in school budgets: “Tax hike” uses four fewer characters than “school funds.” This is why, my headline-writing friends on the copy desk tell me, you are more likely to read a headline that says, “District to vote on tax hike” than one that reads “District to vote on school funds.”)
“...until the white thread of dawn appear to you distinct from its black thread...”
I see that David Cunningham, the crypto-Christianist hack who brought us The Path to 9/11, is on his way to Romania, where he’ll be directing The Dark is Rising. —Walden Media hopes to launch another kid-flick franchise to follow the success of its Narnia adaptations.
Sigh.
If he doesn’t mangle the book(s) beyond all recognition, he will at the very least be forced to acknowledge Cooper’s bracingly grim morality: the Light, in the end, is in its purity and extremity as inhumane as the Dark, dragons and nemeses locked in an abyssal conflict largely invisible to us of the track. We can no more directly identify with the Light than we can wholly condemn those who succumb to the Dark. It’s one of those Important Lessons a kid really ought to learn. (Even if I did stay up late on my eleventh birthday. Just in case.) —Heck, maybe Cunningham himself will learn something, wrestling with the material. One can hope.
And even if he doesn’t, and even if he does mangle the book(s) beyond all recognition, at least those books will get into more kids’ hands. So there’s that, I suppose. —Whichever; I’ve got a sex scene to rewrite and a long-overdue boar hunt to choreograph, and a comics convention to attend. Bygones.
“It’s a terrific view,” Jane said. “Worth the climb. But the wind’s made my eyes water.”
“It must blow like anything up here,” said Simon. “Look at the way those trees are all bent inland.”
Bran was gazing puzzled at a small blue-green stone in the palm of his hand. “Found this in my pocket,” he said to Jane. “You want it, Jenny-oh?”
Barney said, gazing up over the hill, “I heard music! Listen—no, it’s gone. Must have been the wind in the trees.”
“I think it’s time we were starting out,” Will said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
Um.
So, it’s been a crazy month, September. Stupid busy. Did I miss anything?
You cannot fully understand Colin Meloy’s art unless you know that he is white.
Oh, yes: from the Hans Christian Kalevala murder-ballad that falls into the chilliest lullaby I’ve heard in a good long while, to the endless sloppy drunken jam-band encore we finally (cheerfully) walked out on (“Wooden Ships on the Water,” Jenn informs me; my education is lacking in some odd respects)—the piercing cry of “Sing O muse of the passion of the pistol!” over a fleshy Talking Heads vamp—the majesty of the Crane Wife herself, with that syncopated oceanic lurch of the band in the chorus that shakes the foundations out from under your moving feet—oh, yes. It’s going to be a good one.
Catechism.
“I’m not making a joke. You know me; I take everything so seriously. If we wait for the time till our souls get it right, then at least I know there’ll be no nuclear annihilation in my lifetime.” —Me, I’m still not right neither. Further bulletins soon enough. (I’d thought my anger at the traffic hot enough, but then I saw the Yes on 43: Protect Teen Girls bumper sticker. Such filthy eloquence! Her ears would have been flensed from her skull, had our windows been rolled down, were we not been traveling at such wind-whipping speeds. —I’m sleepy, and punch-drunk; hurry home, Jenn. The cats won’t leave me alone, and the words aren’t doing what I want them to.)
We wish to register a complaint.
Since when did y’all let new car keys get so dam’ bulky?
The golden age of analog sci-fi.
Matt Zoller Seitz on the awful, awful Trek cosmetic.
Torture, working.
Since the Moscow trials of the ’thirties, in which so many of the Old Bolsheviks confessed to almost every possible crime—an actual majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee that had made the October Revolution were capitalist agents if the evidence given at the trials was to be believed—we have all grown considerably more sceptical about evidence extracted under torture. There is a remarkable similarity between, for example, a young German girl of the sixteenth century confessing that, naked, she had attended the Sabbath and there indulged in every variety of perversion and some of the confessions produced at the Moscow trials. One remembers that one of the Moscow accused confessed, in a fervour of self-recrimination, to having met and plotted with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen although, in reality, the hotel had been burnt down some years before; this is very like the fervent repentance displayed by some accused witches for impossible supernatural crimes to which they had confessed.
—Fancis King, Sexuality, Magic, & Perversion
It still stops me, gobsmacked, on the street, when the thought crosses my mind: I live in a country that seriously argues whether torture is justifiable.
How thin and threadbare civilization is.
Remember this: they tell us our constitution is not a “suicide pact,” that give me liberty or give me death be damned, some things are more important. —Such as keeping them in power. That, it seems, is worth dying for.
“Self-correcting blogosphere,” my ass.
Three days I’ve had “onamatopoetic” down there. Three days. And not one of you said a goddamn thing. (And anyway, the actual “onomatopoeic” is even better rhythmically than my oh-so-cleverly factured “onomatopoetic,” to spell it properly.) —Is this thing on?
Location, location, location.
I was wondering what Pitchfork had to say about the new Mountain Goats, so I went to my browser bar and started typing—
Appositional.
This isn’t a picture of Wormwood.
I’m not sure why I keep coming back to the decadent espionage thrillers of the ’70s for popcorn reading, these days. Maybe because we were much more sophisticated then? We handled it all—oil crises, Mideast flareups, terrorist hijackings, the existential struggle of the individual against an inevitable subsumption within this bureaucratic matrix, or that—we handled it all with so much more aplomb then than now, it seems. (This is as false as any other comparison of one decade to another. Allow me a minor pecadillo.) —I’m not sure why I keep coming back to Trevanian and MacBeth, in particular. The one so appallingly heartsick beneath its po-faced satire; the other so inadvertently ridiculous beneath its literary pretensions. (That one still managing to naught itself in the belly of the whale Annihilation, but I’m inexcusably referencing an inside joke hermetically sealed. —The first, of course, seeks to return to God by moving shibumily with God, knowing all the while it never can, but like I said, inexcusable, and dragging God into this will not help.)
It?
He? His? (She, hers?) (Penn’s?) —Both of them, of course, united in their queerly doomed battles, taking up the master’s tools against that 20th century grotesque, Bond. James Bond—
The explosions going off today world wide have been smoldering on a long sexual and emotional fuse. The terrorist has been the subliminal idol of an androcentric cultural heritage from prebiblical times to the present. His mystique is the latest version of the Demon Lover. He evokes pity because he lives in death. He emanates sexual power because he represents obliteration. He excites with the thrill of fear. He is the essential challenge to tenderness. He is at once a hero of risk and an antihero of mortality.
He glares out from reviewing stands, where the passing troops salute him. He strides in skintight black leather across the stage, then sets his guitar on fire. He straps a hundred pounds of weaponry to his body, larger than life on the film screen. He peers down from huge glorious-leader posters, and confers with himself at summit meetings. He drives the fastest cars and wears the most opaque sunglasses. He lunges into the prize-fight ring to the sound of cheers. Whatever he dons becomes a uniform. He is a living weapon. Whatever he does at first appalls, then becomes faddish. We are told that women lust to have him. We are told that men lust to be him.
We have, all of us, invoked him for centuries. Now he has become Everyman. This is the democratization of violence.
That isn’t a picture of Wormwood, either. (It may or may not be a picture of Jerry Cornelius, but then most things are. I can’t decide, though, if it’s a picture of Mister Six, or King Mob. It must be one or the other, right?)
But this isn’t about that; not yet, anyway. It’s mostly about Wormwood. Or at least the last few paragraphs of his life. —I was 11 or 12, and looking for something to read, and picked up The Eiger Sanction, because, hey, more spies. And was introduced in the opening bit to the hapless Wormwood, whose foolishness, while contemptible, still seemed to draw an undeserved measure of scorn from the ostensibly neutral third-person omniscient. What a prick, I said to myself, taking Wormwood’s side against a narrator he would never know. (And thereby learning a lesson it would take years to recognize.)
But, as I said, his last few paragraphs in this vale of tears:
As he climbed the dimly lit staircase with its damp, scrofulous carpet, he reminded himself that “winners win.” His spirits sank, however, when he heard the sound of coughing from the room next to his. It was a racking, gagging, disease-laden cough that went on in spasms through the night. He had never seen the old man next door, but he hated the cough that kept him awake.
Standing outside his door, he took the bubble gum from his pocket and examined it. “Probably microfilm. And it’s probably between the gum and the paper. Where the funnies usually are.”
His key turned in the slack lock. As he closed the door behind himself, he breathed with relief. “There’s no getting around it,” he admitted. “Winners—”
But the thought choked in mid-conception. He was not alone in the room.
With a reaction the Training Center would have applauded, he popped the bubble gum, wrapper and all, into his mouth and swallowed it just as the back of his skull was crushed in. The pain was very sharp indeed, but the sound was more terrible. It was akin to biting into crisp celery with your hands over your ears—but more intimate.
Damn.
Okay, “but more intimate” is arguably overkill, but still: Jesus. I shuddered (then and now) and dropped the book and haunted for years by that onomatopoeic image, I didn’t pick up Trevanian again until high school, when I read Shibumi, and kept saying, damn, this is like The Ninja, only better.
