josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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OF POOR B.B.
1
I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother moved me into the cities as I lay
Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.
2
In the asphalt city I'm at home. From the very start
Provided with every last sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy
To the end mistrustful, lazy and content.
3
I'm polite and friendly to people. I put on
A hard hat because that's what they do.
I say: they are animals with a quite peculiar smell
And I say: does it matter? I am too.
4
Before noon on my empty rocking chairs
I'll sit a woman or two, and with an untroubled eye
Look at them steadily and say to them:
Here you have someone on whom you can't rely.
5
Towards evening it's men that I gather round me
And then we address one another as 'gentlemen'.
They're resting their feet on my table tops
And say: things will get better for us. And I don't ask when.
6
In the grey light before morning the pine trees piss
And their vermin, the birds, raise their twitter and cheep.
At that hour in the city I drain my glass, then throw
The cigar butt away and worriedly go to sleep.
7
We have sat, an easy generation
In houses held to be indestructible
(Thus we built those tall boxes on the island of Manhattan
And those thin arials that amuse the Atlantic swell).
8
Of those cities will remain what passed through them, the wind!
The house makes glad the eater: he clears it out.
We know that we're only tenants, provisional ones
And after us there will come: nothing worth talking about.
9
In the earthquakes to come, I very much hope
I shall keep my cigar alight, embittered or no
I, Bertolt Brecht, carried off to the asphalt cities
From the black forests inside my mother long ago.
I am looking for digital copies of all the songs on this old mix that Ethan sent me.
Except 'Come Sail Away'.
And 'Party and Bullshit', which was the first thing I tried to get my hands on as soon as I got my current computer (finally capable of finding and playing music).
When I write, every truism that inadvertently slips onto the page thanks to my effort to try to move things along, to have said enough that I am actually in a position to say something rather than mouth the words that will lead the reader on - every one stops me dead in my tracks.
'I didn't think it was Nelly, because it sounded so bad.'
'Oh - it's Christina!'
I wanted to post something about what I've been listening to for the past week or two, but there's so much of it that's so good that when faced with it all on the screen I have no idea what to say beyond giving an enormous list of titles. But here are, let's say, five of them:
Jadakiss f. Sheek, Styles P, & Eminem - Welcome to D-Block
Junior Boys - Last Exit
Houston f. Chingy, I-20, and Nate Dogg - I Like That
Muddy Waters - Long Distance
Jay-Z - S. Carter Collection
You have great hair, is what she said to me, and repeated for me after I paused my iPod and asked her what she said (I had just walked onto the elevator; I didn't know her at all). Really? Yes, she said - hasn't anyone ever told you that before? Well, a couple of times, I said, but I guess I didn't really believe them. I'm starting to. Thinking about it on the way home, though, I worried that perhaps I am not up to the responsibility of having great hair.
I felt so, so excited at the 'Housequake' bit at the beginning of Circus Music. And like Mia says, it does seem to have a sneaky deft lightness (while at the same time being sort of neck-snappy, like they say on the track). Though when they let the beat ride out for a long time just playing the carnival-slash-big-top-whatever melodic bit, the tension goes out of it in a way that feels dissapointing.
I'm still unsure whether Jim O'Rourke's bass parts are the source of the very slight reservations I have about Sonic Nurse - and by 'reservations' I don't mean principled ones, at base, but whatever lies behind the fact that I haven't given myself over to the record as much as I might have yet. It feels like I'm guarding myself. Typical primal reactionary cool-anxiety, perhaps - regardless of whether or not it's enjoyable, rewarding, the idea of liking, or more, formally approving of, a Sonic Youth album that sounds so ordinary - it gives me pause. And when I say that it's not that my reservations are principled, it's because I think what distracts me occasionally about O'Rourke's playing is not only that he plays bass like a fucking guitar player (not always a liability), he plays 'musicianly' bass - and thinking of it that way is surely sliding close, on my part, to a lame sort of identification of Sonic Youth's earlier beauty with their anti-musicality, their deliberate rejection of lots of conventional norms. Stupid. And that's not what I think, anyway. If anything I think they're probably all the more musiciany for it. But.