...

[lapsedmodernist]

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, 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.

Comments

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. From a Basement has been on the cd player pretty near permanently for the past 2 weeks. Don't need to talk about; glad you understand, though.

Send my love to the Sloth.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

It's weird, with Basement I am revisiting last autumn when...well, for one, a lot of things were different in my life. I was in an intense relationship, and my former best friend was still my current best friend. Politically every day was a new nadir, although I suppose that has not changed. So in the middle of this Johnny Cash and Elliott Smith up and died within a month of each other. Now, I'd had a trifecta of singers/songwriters (in English, at least, there are others in Russian) who were it for me: those two and Leonard Cohen. When Johnny Cash died I felt like a vestige of Another America, the one on the margins of our Empire died. The timing seemed symbolic. I was obsessed at the time with the idea of History being treated as an old, "crazy" grandpa, who spews contrary narratives, and who is kept away from the guest and is brought out only on, like, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July, with a caveat of "nobody listen to him!" So Johnny Cash was History and he died as Empire was flooding my television screen and, seemingly, people's eyes, like in those X-Files episodes where Mulder's eyes gradually fill with black ink after he is injected with some shit. And then Elliott Smith died and that seemed symbolic too, it seemed that it meant that a part of my life that couldn't possibly exist without/outside of the narratives of his songs had to come to an end, and, in fact, it did.

Anyway, I guess this is as much of a response to the end of your post today as to your response to me.