Lyrics Part 1: I Need Sunshine

So Wolf Parade has two lead singers. One sounded like a smoke-addict fresh off a fight, and the other prat out his lyrics like David Bowie probably does before he has his morning coffee. If those adjective riddled descriptions didn't make clear enough, I haven't the faintest clue what they are saying most of the time. And yet I am very moved by the intonation of their voices, the grimace of their face, and roar that comes from the mic.

For years I have clung to the view that melody is infinitely more important to a song than lyrics. Though I do admit a wonderful little couplet will help shape the meaning of a song, great lyrics sung without regard to musical accompaniment are worthless. I made out about three words the entire Wolf Parade concert, "I NEED SUNSHINE", which were sung during my favorite song of theirs. The name of that song? I don't have any idea.

This theory was shaped over many years, but has been chipped away over the past summer and fall as I'm starting to think that maybe I am just being rather ignorant. Watching the Bob Dylan documentary, "No Direction Home", was the most offensive attack upon my completely unprovable theorem, as his lyrics are his songs. I went back to songs like "Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna" trying to see if I was missing something life-altering, but along the way I got side tracked by a song I was felt ashamed of liking. "I Want You" is that song on the greatest hits that no serious Bob Dylan fan is supposed to like, or at least this is what I thought when I was 14. While the other songs sounded deathly serious, this one always seemed like just another love song. The chorus, the part that I always knew, could come from any love-lorn singer of the past 50 years.

I want you, I want you,
I want you so bad,
Honey, I want you.

Not exactly the deepest comments, honest perhaps, but just look at the verse the precedes it:

The guilty undertaker sighs,
The lonesome organ grinder cries,
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn,
But it's not that way,
I wasn't born to lose you.


We are immediately shown death, an undertaker and organ grinder cries, all of which conjure images of a funeral, and perhaps a lover's one. But I don't believe he's talking about a death of his lover, as the next lines continue the musical motif that the "organ grinder cries" started. The silver saxophones and cracked bells continue with the decay, but really are there solely to mock him, as they blow on his face. The last line, "I wasn't born to lose you", changes from a typical line about not wanting to loose a loved one, to one of defiance. He is trying to get past what everyone is saying to him.

By the time the chorus comes, it looks much different than it did a paragraph ago. Instead of a repetitive love song, this song about longing, has gone through a funeral, direct scorn, and defiance. It is a line of tremendous weight, of real conviction. This is no weepy love song.

So how much of my life has been wasted because I wasn't recognizing the meaning behind the songs? Obviously the indie rock that fills my ears throughout most of the day is almost gibberish, not in the actual words but through the voice that delivers most of the words. Most favorite albums of the year are completely indecipherable: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Animal Collective, Spoon, Sigur Ros.

Does this say more about me, that I'm unwilling to probe the depths of these songs to find the meaning, or that enjoyment does not hinge on the actual meaning of the song? Can a song can have completely different meanings to people and that is inherently okay, even if the original intent is mangled?

Moving on from Dylan I started examining other bands that I have known for a while, seeing if I could decipher a little meaning, all of which will be presented next time for my own particular enjoyment only.

This is Me

So I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about my temporary exile from reality. I am now a statistic in a New York Times article.

Then again some of these recent graduates created their own vehicles which run on vegetable oil, and I mostly worry about whether the 6 is going to run uptown on the weekend or not.

Bad Villainy

A villain is a bad person, especially in fiction. Villains are the fictional characters, or perhaps fictionalized characters, in drama and melodrama who do evil deliberately and work against the hero. As such, villains are an almost inevitable plot device, and more than the heroes, the villains are the crucial elements upon which plots turn.
- Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villians

I'd like to say that I enjoyed Oldboy, even if it did make me awful afterwards. Even if art doesn't give you absolute happiness, any kind of reaction should at least tell you the art had some purpose, right? I mean nothing is worse than completely irrelevant art that fails to make an impression.

I'd say that if I didn't fucking hate Oldboy, which unfortunately, I did very much. I really, really hated it.

Here is what happened to the villain (SPOILER ALERT!!!):
The villain had a sexual romp with his own sister, which the main character just so happened to find out about and spread around the school, ruining the reputations of both, and causing the villain to accidently let go of his sister, who was dangling off a bridge, because she told him to.

So obviously the villain is mad, and when villains get mad they do very strange things...like lock their victims in a room for fifteen years, hypnotize their daughters to become phenomenal sushi chefs, make the two unwittingly fall in love, have rompous sex, and then wait till the very end of the movie to tell the main character all of this, causing him to cut off his tongue and act like a dog. You'd think that after all of this the villain would feel pretty good about himself because he had orchestrated such a mammoth, 15 year project, which undoubtedly cost millions upon millions of dollars. But no, he shoots himself on the way down the elevator.

I'm sure it's much deeper than that. We never really learn how he has so much money. Neither did I quite grasp why the villain has a shower in the middle of his apartment which he likes to use quite often--TO CLEANSE HIS SOUL!--proceeding then to walk around naked for a while. He is quite a striking man, in that South-Korean-kind-of-way, so maybe the screen time for his ass is to get the asses in the seats, but I think they were trying to touch our souls.

But I'm tired of villains, and I think more people should be, too. There are too many horrible acts done in the world by perfectly sane people for us to need to create a completely evil being to blame them on.

But what I think is most imporant is for more people should read wikipedia. Why is it suddenly the savior of the internet, distributing out such high quality information for us to use in blogs? It's like the new Jesus without all of the saving your soul bit.

Battered

"There are parts of yourself you will not know fully until you know, as well as you can, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza."
- Harold Bloom How to Read and Why

It is no secret that Harold Bloom loves Don Quixote. He calls it "the first and best of all novels", and has managed to trace back almost every written work back to either Cervantes or Shakespeare. So I approached the book rather excited. "This will completley change my perception on life?" I thought, "I'm in."

It took awhile, a long while, a few months to be exact, to finish the book. Stretched out over these 940 pages is five different jobs, two months, a breakup, and lots of scotch tape that is now serving as the binding for the cover and back.

So I had a lot of time with Quixote and Panza, and I quite like them. Especially Sancho Panza, who Cervantes even admired, because when he opens his mouth inevitably something funny happens as a result. There aren't many four hundred year old novels that are this humorous.

But why is it that as a novel seems to have as many faults as it does strengths? Numerous mistakes and typos are made, including a rather important one on whether Sancho Panza loses a donkey or not. Panza's wife has at least four different names. And the novellas! Three are placed haphazardly through the first book and so obviously bad, one wonders whether Cervantes went out of his way to make them so. Nearly everything that makes the novel so enjoyable is let go, meaning they ill-paced, wordy and misogynistic. They are drowned in male fantasies of women saving themselves and even killing themselves for pure love. We live in a post-modern world, I read M Butterfly, I don't care.

The book could have been safely trimmed to 700 pages without missing a single word about Quixote or Panza, because of these ridiculous novellas that don't have anything to do with the story. My advice to anyone reading this is to skip any pages where the two main characters aren't present. You aren't missing a thing.

As well, I don't feel changed as I thought I would be. Nothing is quite like reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Sun Also Rises, or even On the Road for the first time. Last night I had a religious epiphany when I read a short story by Flannery O'Conner. This novel exists as something else. It really is only about character. The plot is of little importance, because the only thing that matters is Quixote and Panza talking to each other. Luckily the second book eschews the novellas and focuses on this pair.

It's a fascinating book, one that I'd recommned to people with a lot of time, but I still can't shake the feeling of unease that I have about it. Maybe my personal life got wrapped up in the adventures, maybe all the evil in the world that Quixote was fighting didn't mean anything to my own troubles, but this book never had the importance that I would have liked it to have. There are no cliff-hangers, nothing to push the reader forward. Just two wonderful souls who can talk for hours.

Maybe that's all I should have hoped for. In a rushed world, where every story has plots that only race frantically to the end trying to prove something the entire time, wandering around with two vagabounds through the Spanish country side seems a little tedious. But I got to know them more completely than I could have any other way, and in that way are as real to me as some friends. Maybe I just need some distance from them, we have been spending too much time together I think. Like interesting friends you've meet through social groups you no longer care to keep in contact with, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza will always be tied to stressful times. That doesn't lessen their impact but does shape my view of them.

Quick Marks

I thought of Anna then, long long sessions, twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes and even as long as half an hour daily. I obtain these figures by the addition of other, lesser figures. That must have been my way of loving.
- Samuel Beckett "First Love"

I arrived a little early, and was kindly shuffled into a large conference room with a table and many chairs. It was as stern as it was long. I barely had time to decide which of the many seats I should sit in, when I heard a noice at the door. She walked quickly, and landed a stack of papers on the desk, straightened them, then took out one sheet before she ever looked up at me and introduced herself.

"Good afternoon, Nick."

"Hi," I said, not sure how formal or playful I should be. This wasn't the first time we had met, but it seemed like this one was especially important.

"Well, let's get right to it. Having been present in many of your dreams over the course of many years, I'd say it's about time if we see that whether we should actually pursue this further. Do you agree?"

I agreed.

"Wonderful," she said. "Question One. Do you find me merely attractive, or do you see some character trait that has led me to be in your thoughts?"

I thought deeply about this question, knowing how I had to justify her inclusion in my thoughts. It was a tricky business. At once I had to be painfully honest and not creepy, a surprisingly hard thing to master. "I would love to say that I fell in love with both, but over the course of this relationship, if that's what we can call it, I don't think we've ever talked for more than three minutes at a time. I keep attriubting imaginary traits to you, but really I just think you are very attractive. You have a wonderful face."

"People don't just say that and expect people to believe them."

"Well, you are a dream, and in this particular one, I'm going to say what I mean."

When I finished she looked down at the paper, and with the flick of a wrist, made a mark on the page. "Right. Question Two. Do you find it weird that we haven't talked very much?"

"No," I said. "I find it weird that you continue to show up in my dreams. Anyways, it's like the movies, where everything is changed by two characters who only have to catch sight of each other for the musical soundtrack cue in and show they are in love. Not entirely practical, but romantic nonetheless."

The quick flick happened again, and with the pen still raised in the air, she asked another one. "Question Three. What are your politics?"

"Don't you check facebook?"

"Are you online right now?"

"I don't particuarily want to explore the online accessibility of people in dreams."

"Right," she said. "Question four. What do you want to do?"

"I want to travel right now, then probably go back to school."

"So you won't live in the same area?"

"Probably not."

Flick. She shuffled her papers, aligning the proper corners, and then stood up, raising out her hand for me to shake.

"Thanks so much. Well, here you can keep this paper. I won't be needing it."

"I can see my score? Great."

I shook her hand and she smiled. She smiled like she did every time she stole herself into a scene, like an actress given no lines except directions to garner attention. It was soft and silent, and aimed brightly at me, specifically for me. Like she had done all of those times before, for all those years before. When I fell in love with her slowly, over those many small incidents that suddenly had piled together.

"Does that mean we are compatible?" I asked.

"Oh no, you failed miserably. But don't worry, I'll be around."

The Special Tonight

Apt. 4D - 1374 York Ave. Apt 4D

It's no small secret that Apt. 4D chefs, Blake and Nick, thrive on simplicity, but a better word is thrift. Given a menial supply of vegetables and starches (rice, potatoes, noodles), they have shown in the past to offer quite a variety of options for the food loving public and mainly themselves.

Ah...but what about if they are given fine ingredients, filet mignon, a bottle of wine, and hours of time, to pull something off? Having been bought out by Blake's father, they were finally given the chance to step beyond the poverty level and try their hands at something more refined.

It was a controversial move. Many wondered whether the new corporate-owned version of Apt. 4D would retain the charm that had drawn the crowds to this exceedingly hard to find spot in the Upper East Side.

I was welcomed into the apartment, and luckily none of the stylish simplicity of the sparsely decorated white walls and wood floors had been changed. The entrance is still through the small hectic kitchen, one of the many quaint facets they are renowned for. As well, the charm-filled, low-ceilinged eating area is still cosy. I was shuffled into "Nick's Room", the illustrious dining room, so-called because of the elegant lighting and master table.

Much could be written about the other guests who showed up for this event (Oh! the women that dined there), but I must keep the topic to the food.

The handsomely dressed server suggested the special, and I accepted, not even needing to look at the menu.

Filet Mignon with Merlot Sauce
Green Beans and Roasted Onions
Crusty Puffed Potatoes

It came promptly, accompanied by a Chilean Wine.

The steak was supremely rare, though it could have used a better sear on the crust. But it was the sauce that stole my heart. Distilled from a combination of chicken broth, beef broth and red wine, the smooth potent tickled every part of my tongue. The roasted onions provided the perfect compliment to the fresh green beans. And the crusty puffed potatoes, while standard, where nobly and perfectly done.

As the guests left --they apparently don't serve dessert-- all cheered the chefs for the audacious menu, and wanted to take both out for drinks. That was until they were all rounded up to help clean the dishes, which stretched from one side of the apartment to the other, and took a proper hour to complete. I for one, didn't mind drying the large baking dish while carousing with the other notables around the room. And I especially didn't mind the lovely Italian actress, Luisa Anselmi, who I tried like hell to work on, but like I said before, that is of no interest for a food review. Needless to say we had a wonderful time.

Nick Buys a New Pair of Jeans

I did. They are nice, too. Guess Jeans. Just take a look:



I'm not sure if that is a good brand anymore, but they were on sale at Macys. Then I found a shirt on sale for $20. Here is the shirt:

Not as good as the jeans, but I got suckered in because of the price.

I feel good now, but I didn't then. We got a half day for Roshashana at the Creative Artists Agency, so I figured I'd just head up to midtown and buy some clothes. Really, I thought it would be simple.

I think it was while I was standing in line with an armful of denim in H&M, surrounded by nothing but old ladies, that I realized something. Shopping is tough. How can this be something that people enjoy doing, the browsing, the absurd prices, the insane crowds full of old women who won't move? I've got places to go, I need some jeans. I had to go to five different stores: H&M, The Gap, Levis, another H&M, and finally Macy's, where I went to three different departments.

I don't know why I really need them, call them an extravagance, the needs of someone in need of something. I just figured after three days of moping around, when I had played out Ryan Adams, Wilco, and the Smashing Pumpkins, and none of them had eased my stomach, and the cigarettes and alcohol just felt like a sham, and the thought of seeing people still shook me, I needed something to do. Heartbreak doesn't come with great tragedy, shaking of fists and momentous world events. It's all rather boring and dull. It is, after all, not something happening but something ceasing to happen.

So the idea that I needed jeans sounded like a good chore.

At least I thought that before I stood in front of the display and saw all those freaking styles, I don't know if I want jeans with rips or splattered paint. Workmen jeans, jeans with the crazy lettering, black, white, grey, faded jeans, washed jeans and finally just really expensive jeans. I don't want to spend $200 dollars. Why do levi's look like shit when I put them on? Why can't I find my size? I can't be that skinny. Why do 30-32s look like I'm trying to wear great bags on my legs? I know I'm not the skinniest male. How do people survive.

It was compounded by my feeling of helplessness, the inevitable notion that I had no one to call, that no one really cares that I am buying jeans, that this whole charade is because I'm trying to feel better about myself, because right now I don't. So I'll build a facade.

I kept searching, kept picking through the sales racks of Macy's, trying clothes on in a dressing room without a door where old English tourists would walk in and apologize. I found some I kind of liked, but when I showed them to the checkout they were in the wrong sales pile, and were still $90. I took them back. And when everything was building up, with no one to call, no jeans and a splitting headache, I just looked over found some, tried them on and bought them. Then I walked downstairs, saw a fifty percent off section, found a shirt, and then bought it.

All the frustrating search, the endless roar of my empty stomach (I don't know why it feels empty, I'm not hungry, but it just does), just disappeared. I could very calmly walk to the subway. I just bought some jeans.

The End of Times

Or as Austin called it, where Advertising went insane. Here are some pictures: