Nov. 19th, 2004

...

Nov. 19th, 2004 03:32 pm
lapsedmodernist: (Default)
New ending for Eminem's "Mosh".

And while we are on the subject of music, I purchased several CDs that came out while I was in Ecuador. The two I've been coveting have been the posthumous Elliott Smith and the new Leonard Cohen.

I am not going to go into how the Elliott Smith album is devastating, because my sadness over Elliott Smith is private and not easily narrated without dipping into constellations of nights and people I would rather forget. People you've been before / that you don't want around anymore. So I will just say that his signature heroin puns, always chilling (you ought to be proud / I'm getting good marks) now feel like shards of glass mixed in with chipped ice. Shooting star indeed.

I love the new Leonard Cohen, and I am afraid, like I was with the two final Johnny Cash albums, that it will be his last. "Villanelle For Our Time" somehow reminded me of Pasternak's "Hamlet." I don't really know what to make of "On That Day" except to say that any other songwriter penning a song about 9/11 would immediately result in thunder and lighning in my mind, but Leonard is a State of Exception by himself, and the song is as deeply ambivalent as his "terrorist" track, "First We Take Manhattan" sounded once upon a time. I think my favorite song on the album is "The Letters": while I love his early songs of love and longing, his voice for such undertakings got only better with years, aging like wine into its underground timber. I said there's been a flood / I said there's nothing left. / I hoped that you would come / I gave you my address...

In other news San Francisco has been lovely. Both of our sessions went really well. After the 11,000 feet elevation of Quito I fly up and down the San Francisco hills like superman. Everything is very cute and diminutive.

Today on the way back to the city from Berkeley, [livejournal.com profile] twotoedsloth and myself were contemplating the BART upholstery.
me: how would they washed it if someone pees on it?
twotoedsloth: they build a whole system based on the assumption that no one will pee on it.
me: that's utopia, that's what Thomas Moore dreamt about.

yay!

Nov. 19th, 2004 06:57 pm
lapsedmodernist: (Default)
Paul Krugman
You are Paul Krugman! You're a brilliant economist
with a knack for both making sense of the
current economic situation and exposing the
Bush administration's lies about it. You
somehow came out as the best anti-war writer on
the Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate your
guts for selling out to the liberals. To hell
with 'em.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
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