Friday 14 March 2014 - Filed under Dreamscenes
Upon examining our host’s turntable, I noticed that it had at least four tone arms in various degrees of deployment. A moment’s reflection made it obvious that this was to provide optimum oversampling.
Friday 7 March 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
Early spring in Texas, out in the parking lot of the apartment complex I called home. Cool day, cloudy mostly with some patches of sun glinting through the branches of the trees above me. As sunset deepened, the clearing sky lit up the neighborhood with a diffuse orange glow. 99.9 F° was playing on my car’s tapedeck so I could assure myself that things were still working.
I’d been working all day to repair the elderly black BMW I had managed to score through a convoluted series of events involving a woman without her insurance card, two kids not in car seats, insurance estimates, replacement values and the largess of the owner of a local repair shop. My beloved little green BMW 2002 had been a casualty of those events, but this was a decent consolation prize. I called it Humbert, because it was large and responsive and smoothly accelerated to 80 mph with the understated grace of a loyal butler, but had enough undertone of subtle menace that I could imagine it seducing a young Honda Del Sol just for thrills. It was also wildly at odds with my demographic at the time, and I was constantly getting annoyed at people assuming that my father had given it to me. And by annoyed I mean livid with frustration. But such is the life of a young punk with a yuppie ride.
As it was, indeed, a machine with many miles of service under its hood, it was in those stages of elegant decline you find in higher-end automobiles. It would be a couple years before the paint started to peel in the Texas sun, three before the air conditioning would literally blow out at a stoplight, and five before an incident involving loose gravel, a malfunctioning traffic light and a red Beretta made it necessary for me to secure the hood with a thick chain and padlock, so it was not quite yet a “Beater-W”. However, the electronics behind the dashboard were beginning to fail, the speedometer was occasionally blipping out on me, the sunroof motor had locked up and the actuators for the rear door locks had burned themselves out. The door locks was the straw that had sent me to the salvage yard for replacements.
So I got actuators, a sunroof motor, and speedometer without too much problem. Salvage yards are actually fun and interesting places — I’d used their services for my Diesel VW Rabbit and my 2002. For this car, I had already replaced the passenger side window after some neighborhood kids decided to remove my stereo without my permission late one night. You clomp along through the rows of dead cars, admiring the various ways they’d met their demise, looking for some sign that the part you need was available and removable, and then attempt to remove it. Most importantly, you could get it for much much less than a BMW repair shop would charge you. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
The weird part, of course, is actually operating on the patient. As an uninitiated civilian, you think of an automobile — and especially a high-end automobile like a Beemer — as an inviolate whole, something of a large black box that does its thing through some magical alignment of forces. Not so! You can take your trusty ratchet set and remove the dashboard from a BMW just as easily as any other car, see how the designers intended for it to go together and how they managed the look-n-feel on the surface, and uncover the same wires, chips, clips and screws that might be inside a toaster oven or alarm clock. You also see up-close-and-personal how automatic door locks are basically solenoids connected to a pushrod, and how between one model year and another they might switch their polarity so that the electricity that unlocks the door one year might lock the door another year. (Fortunately, a quick wire splice fixed that particular annoyance.) And you can see firsthand how accidentally touching a screwdriver to ground at the wrong time can blow the fuses that control the stereo, speedometer and dome light.
So, it had been a full day of twisting, swearing, splicing and contorting oneself into various odd angles to obtain a clear view of the mess under the steering column. The abrupt lack of music had been a real pisser. So after I’d replaced the fuses and rewired the harness and checked the speaker response and finally closed up all the open paneling, it was nice to sit in the driver’s seat, doors closed for proper stereo visualization, and just chill. The soft sunset light and the cool air let the music seep through the space with clarity and grace. It was lovely.
I’d been a sometimes fan of Suzanne Vega ever since I’d heard the DJ announce her new single “Luka” while I was starting up the lawnmower one hot summer’s day when I was in high school. She was folky, singer-songwritery with a shade of social commentary — not quite the expected spin for a young punk to enjoy, but it worked. I liked the construction of the song, I liked the not-too-folky feel of the arrangement, and I especially liked her voice. That was the clincher, actually — most of the female singer-songwriters in that 80s flowering of the style had been strident, emotional, mannerist, and melismatic, at least in my estimation. Suzanne Vega was not. There was emotion behind the voice, but it was unadorned, simple and unassuming. She allowed her timbre to be the main channel for expression, rather than sheer volume and high-flying vocal theatrics. There was also a hint of deadpan humor, a hint of layers beneath the surface that, for whatever reason, were not being completely expressed. It was a refreshing change from the overheated therapist sessions the other musicians were committing to wax. And instead of a preachy, self-righteous, finger-wagging sermon about child abuse (a la Natalie Merchant some years later), Vega let Luka speak for himself. That’s the kind of songwriting I could get behind.
However, it wasn’t until the 1992 album 99.9 F° that I realized I needed to pay more attention. The album was (is) amazing, throwing some industrial, some beats, some oddities into the folk picture that completely turned all my previous assumptions on their heads. There was still that same sense of melody, songwriting and literary reference as the earlier work, but the 80s synths were gone and the pseudo-jazz veneer had been worn off. It was more brittle, more raw, more interesting. And the basswork! Good God, I must’ve worn out the pits and lands on my CD playing along with various tracks. Indeed, I could just put the album on and play to the entire run without skipping a song. It was a touchstone, it was a primer, it was a lesson plan. Back when people compiled lists of such things, it was one of my Desert Island Discs.
But even with all the fun and gingerbread and noise going on, one of my favorite pieces was the stripped-down, no-nonsense final track, “Song of Sand”. Okay, it had a string quartet as backup, but that was immaterial. The song was written for pure acoustic guitar and female voice. And it had the same unadorned phrasing, the same gentle touch on the dynamics that had won me over the very first time I’d heard Vega sing, but this later performance had more assurance and more strength. It was political, but it was not a screed. You had to parse the words to figure out the message; it did not insult one’s intelligence by shouting obvious tropes at you. It was bemused, wondering about the silliness and idiocy of our little escapade in the Middle East that was Desert Storm, again with a deadpan tone that hinted at deeper feelings lying underneath the even presentation. And I loved the central metaphor for the composition. I, too, wished to know what the amplitudes of Iraqi sand dunes would sound like, if turned into the crests and troughs of sonic vibrations.
One does not choose one’s epiphanies; they are simply given to you. The song reverberated through my car with as perfect a fidelity I was able to muster on a budget. My repairs were complete, crisis averted, normalcy restored. The evening was drawing close, and the light of the sunset was barely brighter than the security light mounted on a pole under the trees. And almost in time with the last fading, an acoustic bass added its voice to the final verse. I couldn’t have asked for a better denouement. The instruments recapitulated the main chord progression, and faded gently into the night. Finis.
Sunday 2 March 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
The excitement was palpable: my friend’s teenage brother had scored the deal of a lifetime. From the early fall heat he and his friends carried in the prize: a wood-paneled console stereo that must have been six feet long and could have held a small buffet and a sideboard of decanters on its immensity. My friend and I stared longingly as he set it down in the family room and proceeded to hook things up. The sunken turntable with the brushed steel, upward-facing controls was, to me, the epitome of savvy design. It was like it didn’t even exist, once you lowered the top down! And then the process was complete, and music emerged from the cream fabric covering the scroll-framed speakers. It was the sound of the future.
It’s the comedy of happenstance that a certain period of time always feels bright and new and open. Usually this happens when one is old enough to begin to understand the world but young enough not to have to deal with hormones or responsibility. Thus it was in 1982. Fun and amazing things were happening with computers, with cars,with movies, with toys, with TV, with everything. The general feel was that the 70s were over, let’s throw off some of that boring old anomie and depression. There were snags and hiccups — I was still preoccupied with the anxiety of nuclear annihilation, for one — but when I wasn’t worried, it was pretty cool to be alive.
“Cars” by Gary Numan had every piece that fit together to make The Future. Square-wave synth sounds, spiky percussion that was (maybe? hopefully?) played by robots, quirky vocals, lyrics that both celebrated air-conditioned comfort and mocked it, naked neon and fluorescent tubes, androgynous features and fashions, it was all there. It was catchy, it was fun, it had an odd little bridge to mix things up, it had swing. Perhaps the only other song I could think of that assembled all of these disparate pieces together was “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by The Eurythmics, but that video was waaaaay too weird to be The Future.
I sometimes wonder what my adult self would have thought of that particular time, how optimistic or depressing life in 1982 would actually have been, had I been old enough to get a job and a car payment and an apartment. And then I wonder if that’s the wrong way to look at things. Every single year has another crop of kids opening their eyes to the world, beginning the process of comprehending and understanding without having to risk immediate repercussions and failures, seeing what is cool and exciting and awesome as well as scary and foreboding. And it doesn’t matter what year it is. 2014 has just as much of The Future mixed in it for ten-year-olds today as 1982 had for me. Dare I make the obvious connection? Dare I speak in greeting card platitudes? I don’t know if this Gen X veteran can make that leap. But I’m pretty sure, out there, some kid has dug up a ten-year-old iPod and is listening to The Song of the Future on it right now.
Friday 28 February 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
Quick and to the point: along a winter’s day, with the tap-tap-tapping of the furnace minutely echoing through the floor registers through the house, this little scrap of blue-eyed soul would get me stop what I was doing and crowd near the speaker of my stereo. I liked the song — the vocal interplay, the funky undertone, the chorus dynamics, the analog string synths — but my reason for suspending play was to catch the little one-two punch at the beginning of the last verse: the simulated Doppler-shifted traffic noise, and the line about carbon monoxide. I knew all about chemistry and stuff, so that was a thrill for my technical heart, and the sound effect put me into a little urban daydream — skylines, dull steel buses, rain-soaked concrete, and leafless tress sprouting from iron-clad grates in the pale gray sidewalks.
Friday 28 February 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
When you’re stuck in a musty filing office running credit cards for the Accounts/Receivable department of a high-tech equipment manufacturer, there’s not a whole lot you can say about the situation. So you tend to try to focus on the positive. Nobody bothered me much, the invoice printer would loudly do my job for me, and I could explore this new thing called The Internet without too much fuss. When I was able to download a map of the Cologne subway system to help me place the characters’ movements in the Euroslacker novella I was writing, I was sold.
But running credit cards had to be done on the swipe machine, which was over by the phone jack on the other side of the room, so I had a portable CD player, borrowed from my roommate, to entertain me while I was waiting for the charges to be accepted. “Wildflowers” had just come out, and it was something of a revelation. Rick Rubin, of all people, had helmed Tom Petty’s solo project, and the audio landscape he created was something to be analyzed. I was thinking about music, about playing bass, and about recording, and I needed a template to examine. Through the brown smoked plastic of the CD player, the disc spun and I listened, thoughtfully, attentively, inquisitively.
“Wildflowers” was a recording that I would say was the first I ever encountered that finally answered the question posed by digital recording: what does one do with this cold, glassy perfection? You use the clear highs to expand the aural space; you use the lack of crosstalk to firmly fix instrument locus; you warm up your stacks of tubes to add just that little touch of fuzz and glow to these carefully-placed players; you use your immaculate control of EQ and frequency response to slot the various tracks into their proper positions in the auditory spectrum. It was both digital and analog, it was both warm and clean, and it was a pleasure to listen to. The very sparse and minimalist approach that Petty took to songwriting made these decisions even more appropriate. Finally, the technology had matured from its tinny, thin, fragile and frigid beginnings into something beautiful and compelling.
And “You Don’t Know How It Feels” was a talisman for that time. Cool, smoky, minimal, with a touch of Hammond, some phased chorus, sonic Easter Eggs, stripped-down beat and simple vocals, it was Tom Petty doing what he does best. It was a song for driving down to see my parents in San Antonio, it was a song to cruise through a twisty Farm-to-Market road on the way to work, it was a song to contemplate how I was actually going to fill my space. Was it through writing? Was it through music? Was it through photography? Was it through something I hadn’t thought of before? The future was as unclear as the CD spinning in the player, and I was trying as best I could to read the song titles through the dusk.
Friday 28 February 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
It was fall, the summer heat was fading, and there was a family of toads living in the rock garden under the windows behind the patio in our first house in Texas. It was the perfect time to be out in the backyard tear-assing around with LEGO spaceships blowing things up, even though you really had to watch for stickerburrs that would cling to your socks and hurt like hell to pull out. When repairs were necessary, you could crouch on the patio reaffixing wings, missiles, thrusters or laser guns, listening to the radio coming through the sliding glass door open to the living room, screen in place to keep the bugs out. “Hold Me” was a goofy little ditty, nothing too serious, a side-to-side sway with lots of silly gingerbread in the multitrack. A little barroom piano, some strummy chords every now and then, some syncopated drum fills, odd little vocal riffs. I liked the interplay between Christie McVie and Lindsey Buckingham as they sang the main verses, and I really liked the sound of the guitar in the lead break. It had a crisp, rounded, steel-gray tone that pulled itself from the gold and black of the rest of the song. Even though the lyrics were somewhat sardonic, they still had a touch of hope, a bit of measured optimism rounding out the snark. I’d been in Texas for a year, then, and was finally settling into the new situation, so measured optimism was probably called for. And, really, nothing could be too bad playing with LEGOs out back where a family of toads lived.
Friday 7 February 2014 - Filed under Snapsongs
2003. I’d heard Son Volt from a friend in the late 90s, and I appreciated what I’d heard, but I didn’t really get into Jay Ferrar’s solo alt-country project until a few years later. In the interim, a girlfriend of mine had owned Straightaways, which I found intriguing. Much later, after we broke up, I found Wide Swing Tremolo during a CD-buying binge at a local record store, and figured, what they hey?
It was a good purchase. I already preferred Ferrar’s vision over his former bandmate’s style in Wilco, so if there’s any residual feud over the two halves of Uncle Tupelo, you know where my loyalties lie. Son Volt was more country than most of my music, but by this time I had made my peace with my earlier stylistic chauvinisms, and had embraced all manner of music that my younger selves would have snubbed. Roots, early country, electronica, techno, some dance, some folk, I had become more catholic in my choices. The only genres that were still anathema (and still are) were pop country and R&B. Pop country was easily enough avoided, but mindless R&B with mind-numbing vocal layering and simple, repetitive lyrics had already secured its place at the pinnacle of the pop idiom. What radio I listened to quickly dropped to zero. The radio was out, so it was albums all the way. Even to this day, I retain a preference for 44.1 KHz 16-bit CD audio over compressed iPods tracks.
As with many of my musical memories, this one centers on driving. This is not all that surprising. Even as this is a car culture, various points in my life have involved long commutes or long travels alone behind the wheel of whatever conveyance I had available to me. I’d driven to Mount Rushmore, Las Cruces, and Chicago alone, and I’d lived for all of my driving life in a large, sprawling Western city. Music came naturally to such spans of time. For this particular situation, I was commuting daily between my apartment in San Marcos, Texas to my job in Austin. This involved at least an hour and a half of traveling per day. Quite a few albums’ worth of music is necessary to negotiate the distance and the traffic involved.
So… the open road. To make it even more cliche, I’ll even capitalize it: The Open Road. Vast Texas skies, tan fields, the typical detritus that collects around interstate intersections: billboards, gas stations, XXX video shops, churches and strip malls. This was something of the perfect backdrop for Son Volt and the vaguely weary-but-persisting endurance that alt country portrays. But it wasn’t whiskey, women, God and trucks in Jay Ferrar’s universe. There were travels, philosophies, murders, decisions, tears and epiphanies along the way. It was this deeper layer to the lyrics that really attracted me to the genre. Nashville pop is porridge for patriots, cliche after cliche in a repellent celebration of a stagnant status quo with hollow verities. This was much different, much chewier. There was thought behind the words, despite how low to the ground the speaker was crouching.
It was surprising how relaxing I found it. I was finally over the earlier unfortunate relationship that had taken my heart for a dive; I was moving out of the era of personal anomie that had surrounded my failure as a small businessman five years earlier; I was successfully melding my schedules of art student, freelance designer and prepress technician; I was slowly settling in to the realization that I actually could be an artist, could actually explore the more esoteric desires of my curiosity without hiding, apologizing or deprecating them. I had been able to purchase a band-new Honda Civic hybrid, and I felt like George Jetson as I cruised along I-35 playing little games with hills and the accelerator to try to maximize my mileage. (The best I ever got was 46 mpg, but I was never a hard-core hypermiler: my average was around 41-42.) It was an interesting time, still a little tender and wounded, but finding strange optimism and enjoying a brand-new feeling that the future might not be all that bad.
“Medicine Hat” is perhaps an odd place to find optimism, but it was there. The lyrics present a litany, a cadence of set-pieces, a sequence of truisms in a vaguely sing-song list of bullet points. Careful craft had been paid to the scansion and rhythm of the words and phrasing, and each line encapsulated a single idea, a single observation before moving on. There was no direct narrative link between lines, but the pensive and descriptive musings were similar in feel. It was a cataloging of human situations, some good, some bad, some indifferent, some luminous, some dark. The choice of language made it exquisite.
The music was a perfect accompaniment, not too rushed, not too overblown. Simple progressions and solid craftsmanship provided the setting for the words. The rests and simple drumfills between verse and chorus allowed the ear to breathe. Bass and drums were well within the pocket. The guitar had in its overtone hallmarks of other “heartland” tracks from Tom Petty or John Mellencamp. It was not a flashy song, but it was an excellent song.
And the basic summation of the feeling of optimism comes from the chorus: when circumstance conspires to make things happen, let’s hope that the hat that drops is medicine. May the headgear that falls into your lap be a feathered and beaded shaman’s cap, one that allows you to channel the energy of the universe and of nature into a healing vibe. Regarldess of where you’re going, where you’re traveling, may the Great Spirit come into your life. And in the summer and fall of 2003, I felt that maybe, just maybe, I could feel that finally happening.
Friday 8 November 2013 - Filed under Snapsongs
Five bored young men, stuffed into a borrowed BMW, driving around Austin, Texas in the late afternoon in the late autumn. Windows down, air cool, sunroof open. I can’t remember if it was a Thursday or Friday, but nothing was going on, nothing was on the slate, nothing was happening. Nothing except burning gas and talking smack.
It is through situations like these that interesting things happen. It is my own personal theory that one does not need to posit alien civilizations or occult powers for the construction of the pyramids or of the Nazca lines; you simply needed to get a group of young punk Egyptians or Incas together with no cable television or Internet MMORPGs, and someone will be bound to suggest a crazy, yet compelling idea. None of us built any obelisks or crop circles that night, but we managed not to get drunk and wrap the car around a telephone pole, which is probably half the battle right there.
One of my personal entertainments at the time was to load up some Tri-X into my Minolta SRT-202 and go shoot stuff. As I didn’t want to be pretentious and artistic and annoying, I referred to such photographs as “Stupid Pictures”. At a remove of some twenty years, after wrestling with and winning over the demons of doubt, fear and self-deprication that kept me from accepting my artistry well into my thirties, I sometimes wish I’d been more assertive with my impulses. However, I look at the book of negative sleeves I amassed during that time and realize, regardless of the public face I put on it, I was still burning film at a regular rate. I’d done it before with my friends, and this time we decided to do it again. Except we wouldn’t do it in Austin, we’d do it somewhere else. Where? Anywhere. Uh–how about Corpus Christi? Who knew what there’d be to see in a small Texas coastal city? Well, why not?
So we went to get my camera and lenses and some film, and we set out for the coast. This is about a four-hour drive from Austin, so we’d be in it for the long haul. As we rounded the highway cloverleaf from the 35th Street entry (last seen in this entry), the driver popped in one of his favorite tapes to get things rolling. It was the Gipsy Kings.
At that time, the Gipsy Kings, a loose family of Roma from the Spanish/French border who played an engaging quasi-flamenco style, had just blown up in America and were riding the wave of Adult Contemporary airplay. We’d gravitated to the music because of its energy, multi-layered acoustic guitars, and seductive foreign-language vocals. It was pretty much party music for the more intellectual set. And whoever programmed their first album made the perfect choice for the first cut. Using Bamboleo was pure genius.
The intro was delicate fingerpicking, followed by fast-paced, assertive unison guitars and powerful singing. That was all fine and dandy. But it was the pause before the chorus that really sold the song. The verse would end, things would sound normal, then a violent strumming would announce a break: silence. Then the whole band (or most of the band, but I’m sure all of them could sing in some capaciy) would belt out the chorus, along with the bass player waking up and giving us a nice arpeggio to bounce around to. And bounce around we did.
So we merged onto the freeway with the entire car screaming itself hoarse in Andalusian Spanish and bopping as best we could behind our seatbelts. Our night was secure, we would drive across the south Texas coastal plain and back before morning, stopping to take staged artistic photos whenever possible.
Thursday 22 August 2013 - Filed under Snapsongs
I was most definitely too young to embrace disco in the way it was intended. Although I did wear polyester at times, it was more often in the form of blue-and-red striped ZOOM shirts than pleated flares, and my mother didn’t let any soft drinks in the house, so I rarely got any Coke. But there was no way to be completely oblivious to the phenomenon if you were alive and conscious in the late 70s. When “Saturday Night Fever” blew up in 1977, it took everything with it. I remember having debates in third grade over whether disco sucked or not, even though none of us was entirely certain what disco was, except John Travolta and the Bee Gees were involved. When my Dad took me to see “Star Wars”, a seminal moment in every young man’s life, the things I remember from the movie theatre lobby were the glossy brown tiles on the walls, the blinking clear glass bulbs on the marquee behind the ticket counter, the smell of popcorn in the air-conditioned air, and the sound of “Stayin’ Alive” on the PA system. I was even given a copy of “Sesame Street Fever” for Christmas, for Chrissake. Disco was everywhere.
My folks owned a copy of the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, which meant that I did, too. The rough mono needle on my Fisher-Price record player ruined the grooves of more classic vinyl than one would care to believe, and that album was no exception. Of course, some people might say that perhaps nothing of value was lost. To be sure, it wasn’t a seminal, important artistic work of its time, but it had its moments. Yvonne Elliman’s version of “If I Can’t Have You” is pretty much a classic. And where else are you going to get tracks like “A Fifth of Beethoven”, “Calypso Breakdown” and “Night on Disco Mountain”? Nowhere else, that’s where.
But the track I wore to transparency was the instrumental “Manhattan Skyline” by David Shire. I suppose Mr. Shire went on to some sort of musical career, but I don’t think he ever again impinged on my consciousness in any way. But what a way he did! It was dynamite for my young brain. Listening to it now, I’m not sure exactly what the intent was, but it definitely is interesting. It’s like a bunch of disco dudes put acid in the cans of Miller High Life served to the Lawrence Welk Big Band Orchestra one night and everyone started jamming. The Vegas-worthy opening bars gets you moving! You’ve got bouncing, bubbling brass and suspiciously sighing strings behind a jazzy guitar melody and upfront four-on-the-floor disco beat. There’s a slow buildup in the volume and sound, some bass and funky guitar starts popping up in the background, everyone gets more excited, an analog synth takes over the melody, the brass gets more encompassing, and then BAM — three step musical takedown, repeated at half-time for good measure, resolving all the harmonic tension of before with the catharsis of ginormous string power chords. It’s not terribly innovative or even difficult to compose, but it’s like sonic macaroni and cheese — warm, gooey, simple, satisfying. And then you have French horns repeating the former jazzy guitar! More synths! More horns! Organ! Main theme resolution again! And again! And again to fadeout! Oh my God I feel like I’ve flown over Manhattan in a Pan Am 747 on New Year’s Eve!
I loved the song to death. I hope my parents did, too, because at that point in my life my ears were usually blocked with fluid buildup (I had to have tubes inserted five times). I remember sitting rapt in my room, window open to a lovely spring day, the volume knob on my record player cranked to eleven. It didn’t help that one of the TV channels in Toledo had a Sunday Afternoon Movie programming block that used this song as its intro music bed, coupled with a perspective title crawl that had more than a vague resemblance to the prologue of “Star Wars”. Sometimes I watched the movies (I remember “Geronimo” being quite excellent) but I always watched the intro. It. Was. My Favorite. Song.
Perhaps it’s bombastic, overblown, melodramatic and even somewhat silly today, but there were lessons to be learned there, and I can’t fault the song or the composer for bringing such joy into my young life. It was impeccably scored, the repetition and resolution of the themes were competently done, and, most importantly, I learned what you can do with a stable of sounds at your disposal. Why repeat the melody in guitar, synth and French horns in succession? Why not? If you’ve got the ability, use all textures and colors in your canvas to create something interesting. And small pieces, bits of sonic gingerbread, can reward the attentive listener. One of the reasons I had to crank the volume is so I could catch every little nuance, deaf as I was. There were all sorts of little things going on in the corners. It made me look for those nuances in other songs, and appreciate the thought processes that went behind including them.
So, here’s to you, David Shire. It might have been a tossed-off work for hire, it might have been your Magnum Opus, it might have been just another paycheck. Whatever the case, it worked for the seminal disco movie of the ages, and it worked for my seven-year-old self. And for that, it’s awesome.
Saturday 17 August 2013 - Filed under Squibs
In a properly-arranged cibation, there is no acceleration, no feeling of movement until you look around and you’re already gone. But the difficulty is arranging it properly. If the congelation is too slow, or there is residual xanthosis on the chalk disks, or one of your bodies has moved out of trine and into quadrature in the minutes it took you to set things up, then there will be a jerk. And sometimes it will be major.
I usually carry an extra flask of liver of stibium to try and mitigate this, if I’m under stress and haven’t had a chance to consult my almanack properly. It helps shield the interface from any melancholic flow from my hands, especially if Saturn is ascendent.