pale blue coloured eyes

 

TUCSON.  MAY.  1994.

Somehow – between the festivities of the actual graduation ceremonies in the morning, after the pitchers and the families mingling and congratulating at Dirtbags late into the afternoon – between that and the Goldwater-Alexander extended-family dinner that night, i found myself floating face-up in the University Heights pool listening to this CD in its entirety. 

The big floor speakers from my poolside apartment were fed through the windows out onto the courtyard blasting sofa king loud i could hear it underwater.  I could easily justify the volume, for literally everyone in the complex was out attending some form of graduation something or other.  And insofar as my dinner plans were concerned – which i almost certainly was pushing late for – i could justify this excessive luxury-time to myself because i was screwed quite high on all the ### i had taken that morning.

I believe my plan was to intentionally scar this day into my memory in the loftiest way i knew how.  The LP had only just come out that week, and i had been singing various chorus’ from LIGHTNING CRASHES all during the ceremony as a talisman to keep me grounded.  I was singing them just loud enough for me to realize myself as a real presence on earth, but clearly loud enough for Anna to ask, then be deluged with whatever passed for verbal explanations of how fucking great i felt at the time.
 
This was one of the first times in our relationship when i recall feeling complete & total peace with the Truth to her.  About the #### mostly.  For i couldnt possibly have known myself enough then to show her the love & open doors i took a full year later to realize.
 
Funny how things unfold across the boardgame of life.  For the woman i was sitting next to in both that graduation ceremony, as well as the dinner that evening, would be the woman who would shape me as a man today.

THE ANGEL CLOSES HER EYES

THE CONFUSION SETS IN (my words, fuck you)

THE ANGEL OPENS HER EYES

PAAAAALE BLUE COLOURED EYES

my bloody valentine :: loveless

You’ re hereby strongly encouraged to get one ping down & pull up LOVELESS on Rhapsody. Listen to it only once.

Note the polyaural textures of fuzzy tremolo and crisp chord progressions.

Pay attention to the meandering on SOMETIMES.

And the reverse low altitude fly-bys on TO HERE KNOWS WHERE.

The mock intro to which is really the outro to TOUCHED, and how the mock intro to LOOMER which is really the outro to ONLY SHALLOW, thus tying their strong structure (for me anyway) to The Beatles’ song-strings on ABBEY ROAD. Fuck you ALL they CANT be played out of sequence.

And keep in mind the bridge on SOON is what dragged me into the old ROUGH TRADE on Haight that stony summers day in 1992 whereupon, it could be said, my mind was blown and nothing was ever to be the same.

For soon thereafter, it was the MBV sound that introduced me to the EXCURSIONS IN AMBIENCE series, which in effect was an acid-fueled mental mosh-shove into THE ORB, which coincided with my move to Venice & subsequent envelopment into PORK.

It all started with LOVELESS.

Nothing short of a SMITHS reunion could loft this anticipation higher.

music picks from 2007

Best of 2007, summed up solely upon Play Count, yet in no particular sort…

ALBUMS

BAND OF HORSES :: Cease to Begin
I will not apologize for how naturally well these hicks perfectly fit the notches in my musical tastes.  Nor will I apologize for my low-grade addiction to adverbs.

RADIOHEAD :: InRainbows
Only thing more beautiful then my surprise with how traditional and accessible this release sounded, was how I frak’d up the $/£ conversion and paid double.  Deserved.

FIEST :: The Reminder
Sucker for the woman with the lungs.  Double word score for the Canadian thing.  Slight demerit for shilling for Jobs.  Demerit cancelled out by that damn Busby Berkeley video.

TEMPO NO TEMPO :: The Get Down
Solid reminder that you should see as much live music in as small a venue as possible as often as possible.

SILVERSUN PICKUPS :: Carnavas
Yea, from 2006.  But I discovered this in 2007 and I loved this. So frakin’ keep sneering at me and my low-rise Chucks.

ROGUE WAVE :: Asleep at Heavens Gate
Regardless of what you think of them now, reminds me of the good-vibe repeat-playability of when I first heard Shins.

PANDA BEAR :: Person Pitch
Far and away the most original clutch of new songs all year.  Even if it did sound like a long weekend locked in Brian Wilsons bathroom with 4 parts Roland, 5 parts blotter.

GABRIEL YARED & UNDERWORLD :: Breaking & Entering soundtrack
Best most elegant pairing since Holmes and Soderbergh.

DARJEELING LIMITED :: Soundtrack
Andersons’ prowess with music patched & mapped to edits & slowmo is undeniable, regardless of how the film sat with you.  The album is by itself wonderful, and at times, a nice blend of plucky old-world and culturally grating.

ULRICH SCHNAUSS :: Goodbye
What My Bloody Valentine might have sounded like if they did heroin.  Oh, wait… Nevermind.

KILN :: Dusker
On Repeat, best music to which you should read No Country for Old Men during a 5-day jaunt from Houston to Austin to San Antonio then back to Houston.

TEGAN & SARA :: The Con
Again with the singer songwriting chicks from O Canadia.  And identical twins?  With sleeve tattoos?  [scurries off to bathroom]

UNDERWORLD :: Oblivion with Bells
Not as solid a post-Emerson release as 100 Days Off, but an incredible package of songs.  There’s a low-fi theme album in here somewhere.  I just haven’t yet sussed it out.

KINGS OF LEON :: Because of the Times
Made me want to throw a half-emptied jar of moonshine out the speeding window of a maroon Caprice with a black door.  Had me revisiting in-car volumes not heard since TURN ON THE BRIGHT LIGHTS.

RICHARD BUTLER :: Self titled
Old pipes & general homely-dood from Psych Furs/LSL.  You grew up to this mans voice.  Listen to what the man does with a home studio and all the free time those royalty checks must provide.

SINGLES

FUJIYA & MIYAGI :: Conductor 71

INTERPOL :: Rest my Chemistry (anyone else get those distinct traits of Pixies Where is my Mind?)

AMY WHOREHOUSE :: Valerie (insert however much credit to Ronson you wish)

 Some disappointments:

BLONDE REDHEAD :: 23

we’ve got one that can see

WHEN & HOW WILL DAP SHUFFLE BECOME AWARE?

I sometimes feel my ipod might in some unquantifiable way be aware. The math involved with the coincidence seems skewed. At just south of ten k tracks on perpetual shuffle, I often hear artists come up after having had a conversation about them earlier that day. Sometimes sooner.

I know its lunacy. Hell, its impossibe for a stock 4G ipod to carry that feature. But I also know it floors me sometimes.

Somehow parsing from ambient space either beat recognition & identification, or speech recognition. Then using that data as tags within my music library. Any given music library.

Is that gaming the shuffle?
Would there be a throttle?

love knows not your coincidence

i take it as one of the finest things on my current life to be able to spend as much time as i do with the woman who defines me as a man.

i get her basically every moment, waking or slept, that i am not at my desk at work. our commute together in the mornings & evenings are precious times because they are, in my world, an extra hour. said another way, i get to drive across that incredible bridge in the mornings sitting next to the wife.

sometimes, we listen to KUSF or KALX as we must do to get away from bob edwards and his baritone bad news about FALLUJAH. now, there simply is no median genre on these college stations. so you what you hear is what you get. you can go from an accordian-playing coven to raw barfeating berkeley punk and back again all in the span of 4 miles. either way, i seem to always take note of the songs whilst driving across that great span. its all about the bridge, you see. must be that view and those cloud formations.

however, one morning last week, perhaps friday, on comes this most painfully beautiful song, with a voice like a haunted version of kate bush with a finish of karen peris (innocence mission). now, it has been one of my life-long goals to play music that makes anna soar and happy and most of all, offer comments of praise upon the songs that i have gathered and rewarmed for her.

“how pretty is THIS?” not surprisingly, i was thinking my version of the same phrase. before i knew any better, the song had ended and they were on to a particularly abrasive punk ballad “cigarettes & alcohol.” i made a mental note to locate the song from the playlists KALX or KUSF must surely post on their sites in the coming days. note the time of day, 8.13am. note the song that came after it, cigarettes & alcohol.

i would spend the next 3 or 4 days combing those 2 site looking for something resembling a playlist. as most student-run radio stations go, there was a lot left to be desired. there were playlists, but not in so far as what was played at a particular time of in the past. just a lot of the DJ’s personal pages. no shortage of listings for the cigarettes & alcohol track. but nothing that would come close in-name to the pretty song anna liked enough to comment on.

so this morning, we are ON that same bridge coming in, and we are listening to KUSF or KALX and its an ugly song by the barfeaters or the angry amputees or something and i’m thinking to myself, then i’m speaking out loud.

…and i’m paraphrasing here…

sean “so hey, i looked all over for the playlist from the other morning for that song and i couldnt find it.”
anna “well when i was pulling into the garage, the dj came on and listed all the previous songs.”
sean “aw! check out the farallons!”
anna “um, so yea, i listened for ‘cigarettes & alcohol’ but she was like 13 & kept fucking talking about the other fucking songs.”
sean “i ought to try on the search on the lyrics”
anna “yea, “right on” or “light on” or something like that”
sean “yea…”

and just then, one of the most all-inclusive case of the goosebumps was to wash over my body up my spine as we passed thru toll plaza. because right then, right at that very moment, the fucking song comes on, and there she is again with that haunting voice, harping on about “right on” or “light on” and “even when you touch my face, you know your place.”

the most precious moments in life are not coincedental. what makes them precious is when those coincidences occur in the midst of a bridge: a common thing linking the coincidence together. for if the song came on during a nissan or dockers commercial or some shit, there would simply be a comment. but it didnt, did it? it came on for the bridge. it’s all about the bridge, remember?

and we proceed to have the most pleasant 5-minute drive down into the great city of san francisco in wondering amazement at the perfect timing of it all.

oh, it was “The Book of Right-On” by JOANNA NEWSOM (‘alt-harpist’)

COMMENTS

i heard it on student radio here in new zealand.
i’m trying to find the lyrics but am not finding them online. i can’t figure out what she is saying, can you?

Posted by: nadia at May 13, 2004 07:25 AM
what a lovely little story. situations i’m all too familiar with. fumbling at a stop light to find a pen and try to scribble some phrases from a song so i can search for it later. hence- tons of sticky notes all around my computer at work with names like ‘pepe deluxe’ ‘buttless chaps’ ‘n.e.r.d’.

monte and i will go see this haunting chick in tucson this sunday.

(beautiful when a song overheard on a bridge can inspire a night out many miles away.)

Posted by: Lisette Sacks at April 16, 2004 12:05 PM

(Originally Posted: 2004_0416)

hot damn, my boy’s a brian eno geek!

hot damn, my boy’s a brian eno geek!
“be careful, man… because Raven slept thru the night until at like 5 months, she did a total flip-flop & was up at all fucked up hours of the night”– Brian Fortin

Oh yea, we were pretty cavalier about the whole sleeping thru the night thing. We werent cocky, mind you. We were just basking in the good fortune of having avoided the New Parent Buzzsaw of sleepless nights & screaming wee ones. We knew we were lucky. But we didnt know we were nearing the end of the line for this here Sleep Train.

Upon Jude’s 4-month peditricians appointment, we were asked some rather pointed, albeit familiar questions: “How are his sleeping habits” “Whats your process for putting him down for naps & down for the night?” “Tell me about your schedule so far”

Schedule? Process? What… he goes in The Swing at 8.30, he’s snoring by 9, and we’re opening the kind Pinot & watching another DVD by 9.15. The look on the doctors face was priceless. His body languarge was razorfish: “You silly amateurs!”

We had come to rely on the use of tools. The Swing! Long on the top of the list Desert Island devices that have come along with a new baby, this device is now to be cast aside as if it were the Rake of the Devil. Simply BECAUSE it worked so efficiently on putting the Lil Dood asleep is why it needs to be discontinued. Little did we know, the whole time we thought we didnt need a schedule, that damn Swing, night after blissful night, was establishing the worst kind of schedule we as new parents could have initiated: Dependence Upon Tools.

See, with 4+ months of Swing use under the bridge, the three of us have grown to such a state where the thought of putting him to sleep without the use of The Swing is folly. You’re a fool, man! It’ll never work. Putting him down in the crib, even when he’s tired from the day & drunk with milk, even under the best of circumstances would surely result in the blood-curdling screams of an Unhappy Cranky. But we knew that one day (soon), he’d physically out-grow The Swing and we would be doomed. DOOMED!

So, with the stern admonishment of the Infamous Doctor Dow, we began a torturous regimine of putting him to sleep without the swing. For this, anna began to seek the advice of some Tracy Hogg & the advice outlined in her “Secrets of the Baby Whisperer.” This woman, Hogg, teaches that the use of tools is bad bad bad, the pacifier is a-ok, touch & patting but not rocking, and basically to walk that humanistic line between “rescuing” baby from night-time sobs or, letting them cry themselves to sleep. Thus, there we are at the side of the crib & patted & rubbed a Fussy Monkey for close to an hour at a time until he’d fall into a fatigued sleep. Only to repeat this process 90 minutes later, regardless of how ridiculous an hour it was for an adult. Welcome to NORMAL SLEEPING HABITS!

No longer were we able to flop around with Jude at night only to plop him into The Swing at a reasonable hour to start our dinner. No longer could we rely on the fact that he would sleep straight thru till 7am like last night & the night before. No longer would things be the same. And all of this could be traced back to the Regime of The Swing. Or lack thereof. Regime Change does begin at home, apparently.

We were about solid week into this new Swingless Regime when we were about to lose our sanity & our firm belief that Jude was a very atypical baby. We had been trying various things in conjunction with The Baby Whisperer’s recommendations. Most significantly however, was my use of Jason Falkners BEDTIME WITH THE BEATLES. This amazing compilation sees him covering classic Beatles tunes in gentle lullaby tones & chords. Not gentle enough as it turns out. That was when I happened upon a notion, a recollection.

Back in 1993, I became smitten with a genre of electronic dubbed AMBIENT. Compilations such as Astralwerks EXCURSIONS IN AMBIENCE were, to my palette, a wholly more provocative sound then anything else i could get my Tucson hands on. Research on the genre naturally pointed me at the Godfather of Ambient, Brian Eno & his seminal 1978 release MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS. Here we have tones. Just tones. Beautiful soothing tones. But they cover so much more then that. Simplistic yet moving harmonic studies. Kevin’ll remember that i coined this mans music as “sonic wallpaper,” with the sparse tones acting as ignorable patterns that hint at aesthetics we see, but cannot really express. He may also remember how instrumental this CD was in bringing us down to earth at sunrise from some recreational evenings. Which reminds me of how a wise man once said that John Bonham was such a genius percussionist by what fills he DIDNT fill; your musically-predictive mind never missed the beats he paused over. But i digress…

Anyway, back to Eno. I thought this CD, one of the oldest in the collection, would be perfect for the process of soothing the cranky and inducing the parental patience. The first track, titled simply “1/1” is about 16 minutes long. The first time i played it, i used 2 hands on Jude. My left had held his right arm fast so as to prevent him from rubbing the eyes and ripping the Nancy out of his mouth. My right hand stroked his hair forward from crown to brow. Now, only once before had i tried so brazen a technique, and he nearly took the roof off the place with what i interpretted to be complete & utter displeasure. but i sought to try again. this time, with Mr Eno & his “counterpoint to the frantic arcs of travel” By the end of that 1st track, he was in such a deep sleep that i feared he was having me on, just waiting for me to cease the head-rubbing. But he instead strung his old Sleeping Habits flag back up the pole & slept straight on thru until morning. We couldnt beleive it. SUrely this was a fluke, a mirage, a trick of the light or a result of fatigue. But I tried it again, this time on a muggy & cranky saturday night much later then usual. Once again, before track 01 has played out, he was sound asleep with me rubbin his head. Again, this time employing some testing strategies: swapping out the rubbing of the head for the rubbing & patting of the chest. Again, asleep by the end of the first song.

I want to write Sir Eno a letter. Once again, this CD changes my life. Now I need to figure out what to do with that damn Swing

COMMENTS

i believe that DISINTEGRATION was their best album
i believe that no one can ever really prove to you where pregressive house end and trance begins
i believe (now) that oswald acted alone
i believe danny boyle donated the most significant asset to the zombe genre: the passage of time

Posted by: unknown at March 28, 2004 12:09 AM

(Originally Posted: 2003_1021)