Sarah’s Song

So I just discovered Scott Walker. What the fuck? Why didn’t anyone tell me?

Anyways, in case you don’t know, here’s “Bouncer See Bouncer” from his crazy as shit 1995 record Tilt. He hadn’t released a record in like 15 years, and he just drops this.

Bouncer See Bouncer

1) The Gossamer Thread You Fling

the gossamer thread you fling

I was in love with Megan for a long time. We met when we worked the same bullshit job in the town where I grew up and where she moved when she got sick of her bullshit parents. We never kissed, but we shared a few moments of magic: phosphorescent algae tracing our footsteps behind us on the beach at two am, an empty mountain lodge with fire still roaring, glow worms on Mount Tabor.

I drove up to see her in the Vagina Monologues at PCC Sylvania and wrote this song about it.

A while ago, almost a year, I sent her the album and told her the song was about her. It’s funny because it’s not really a love song at all. Just a song about a thing that happened and she happened to be involved.

The title is from Whitman — “A Noiseless Patient Spider” — and actually relates to the subject of the song, unlike most of my pretentious literary titles.

2) The Pastures of Heaven

the pastures of heaven

This one, for example.

3) One Year In Every Ten

one year in every ten

I envisioned this song as a letter from my self to myself, almost a resolution or call to arms, telling myself to live the life I want to and stop being a turd. I’m still not sure what a lot of it really means, and I get really embarrassed about the “fountains of immortality” bit, but I like it.

Ironically, the title is from a Sylvia Plath poem about suicide.

4) Man Versus Machine

man versus machine

It’s “I Hear America Singing” set to music.

5) I Pour the Cream

i pour the cream

I wrote this song about the time a girl flew me to Spain to make me fall in love with her and then ran off to Vienna to see the opening of her Austrian boyfriend’s opera, leaving me alone with no Spanish to speak and no idea of where I wanted to go. I ended up in a little town called Antequerra. We met back up in Madrid and careened across the city in a mad two day dash and fucked awkwardly in a too-small bed before our planes whisked us out of each-other’s lives pretty much for good.

The title is a reference to one of my favorite poems ever, “Vacation” by William Stafford:

One scene as I bow to pour her coffee: —

        Three Indians in the scouring drouth
        huddle at a grave scooped in the gravel,
        lean to the wind as our train goes by.
        Someone is gone.
        There is dust on everything in Nevada.

I pour the cream.

Funeral Song

A poem by Adrienne Rich called “Song” from her excellent book, Diving into the Wreck:

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

Often, when deciding where to go for food or drinks, I find myself paralyzed by perfectionism, unable to settle on even the most obvious place — there is always somewhere better to go.

Often, when putting on music to work to or walk to or shower to, I find my thumb yo-yoing back and forth across the click wheel, scrolling infinitely without stopping — there is always something better to hear.

Often, when talking to you, I find my mind fumbling a little clumsily for the words, like an old carpenter’s worn and trembling hands sifting and casting off not quite the right tools — there is always some way to say more.

[Love Will Tear Us Apart performed by Dragging an Ox through Water from an unreleased performance on the Jimbo Show on KWVA 88.1, Eugene, OR]
Love Will Tear Us Apart

It was a few blocks back to the hostal, the Paz, just off the Puerto del Sol. Their shoes clicked a lilting time on the cobblestones, an easy polyrhythmic metaphor: the musicality emergent from the out-of-time-ness of their footsteps paralleled the wonder that seemed to emerge from the out-of-time-ness of their lives.

The whole thing was crazy; they knew it deeply, as one knows colors. But they didn’t have the words to say it. Just the galloping click-clack of a slightly longer stride meeting a slightly shorter one.

He drifted forward through time, seeing places he’d go now that he knew he could: the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, the wild ferocity of a thunderstorm in the Rockies, the T over the Charles and down under Harvard Yard to see the ghost of the old Harvard stop, and just days from now when she’d be gone back to Vienna and he’d catch a bus south to a little town in the hills and stay in that sparely beautiful room with a balcony overlooking Calle Toril and the clouds rolling like a constant wave over the mountains, El Torcal de Antequerra, and the old man who called him crazy for eating breakfast in the courtyard in January, but who would shake his head and bring out a basket of pastries and a cup of coffee all the same.

He saw the end of the week, when she’d return and they’d trace this same route back to the Paz, their steps still out-of-time but now also heavy with the urgency of leaving. They’d eat chocolate and drink wine on the rooftop balcony, watch the city shrug and shift and settle in for the night.

The world would be out of time with itself. There would rise a sharp shuffle from busy hammers of laborers, the doleful bells of all the endless churches, the horns of cars and thrum of the occupying army of motorbikes.

And they would dance to and around and through the cacophony. The world would suddenly hit those same beats, the one and the three, for a few moments.

When I’m Gone

This is a song my parents used to sing. I sometimes cry now when I hear it and think of them, Mom strumming her 40-year-old Yamaha her mom bought her and which my brother now has, dad plucking at the mandolin and singing those high, mountain-style harmonies.

Once, on a family road trip to California, we stopped at a cafe somewhere in southern Oregon. Through some bribery or nepotism with the highway department, the sign at the exit reads, in plain white block capital letters on standard highway-sign green background, “HEAVEN ON EARTH” with the exit arrow pointed right. Maybe they get away with it because the place really lives up to the name. Cinnamon rolls the size of your head, steaks and potatoes, big mounds of greens. It’s the only thing there. It seems to sit on its haunches by the freeway, waiting for something or someone maybe. Watching the cars get sleeker and brighter year by year. Watching the people get more hurried and harried, less curious. Watching more of them drive straight past the green sign and the block letters, unconcerned about missing something the Oregon Department of Transportation deems truly to be Heaven on Earth.

We weren’t there yet, my family. We lived in some bubble of anachronism, a little sphere of public radio, 80s era Bob Dylan, road trips and cassette tapes. We stopped for dinner.

As we were eating, a somewhat beat looking woman, a waitress there, recognized my folks. Apparently they had been in a christian commune together. She was living there now, at Heaven on Earth, having left the commune, drifting on and off drugs for a while, and landed somewhere south of Roseburg and north of Grants Pass on a bend of I-5 as lonely as any place can be on that strange strip of concrete. She lived out back, there was a farm with goats. My brother and I petted the goats. She asked if my folks still played music. They did. She asked them to play some songs there, at Heaven on Earth.

So they did.

And I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here

Somehow, it’s come to this: watching the life gurgle out of me from two feet up.

I didn’t see the other guy, didn’t anticipate the glint of metal, the sudden sharp invasion of the flesh. I didn’t hear, or heard but didn’t listen, when you said to be careful. This neighborhood, you said, this neighborhood is no place for a fuckup like you.

A fuckup like me. An artist like me. A child of privilege like me, living his days in denial like me of his class. A coarse, loud braggart like me, mouth like a missile launcher. A dreamer like me, of wild landscapes and dull people, of twisted pasts and tortured metaphor.

No place.

But I walked out anyways, threw my pride and my cigarettes in my shoulder bag and shouldered the screen door open with studied nonchalance. You could fuck off, I told the street, loud enough for you to hear. But I was the one fucking off.

Cabs are a mathematical abstraction here, odds to short to try for.
I didn’t know which way to walk. Towards the city, I guessed. The buildings leaned in.

Maybe I conjured them, these secret assailants in the dark. Maybe my guilt and my fear got together and manifested themselves a pair of somewhat scruffy human bodies. Maybe I told them what to do, handed them the winking blade, retraced my steps and rounded the corner again.

Fear blocked the way, told me to hand over my wallet. Guilt lurked behind me with the knife and as the steel split my ribs he whispered in my ear. I’ll never forget what he whispered as long as I live.

[image from leena on Flickr]

Here’s a song that kills me:

Kind of Like Spitting – Line and Sinker Line and Sinker

despite what you recommend
despite what you implement
this just can’t stand anymore
3 A.M. at my door
with no one to tell you that it’s wrong

drugged for some seasons
sure we were pure
like cancer’s quick miracle
or resin chalk spectacles
party after party
the laughs they just told you that you were on
and the luckiest asshole I’ve ever met
is playing music on my bed again
sharing wings and boulders
bringing me back in

those who all give advice
those who all recommend
those who know everything
kitchen philosophy
those who speak quietly
words wide and sympathy
they don’t know of your eyes
six inches from mine
or the taste of your hips
with the windows wide open

so here we hang loosely
and dry on the vine
I put my hair up and think of us marrying
this garden’s the same but these fruits have new names
I have wanted you for so long
and the luck of the lasso, for once I wept
never seemed to get more than a glance
and the feathers and boulders I once possessed
they found a home in age and circumstance

Rosemary infusion lemon drops (thanks Bye and Bye!)

Bloody Marys

Balsamic kale with spring onion over hash browns

To come:

Shitake and Chard cheese sauce over wide noodles

Fried tempeh portobello sandwiches

Braised baby artichokes and garlic spears

“This is kind of a unique case,” Severe said. “Her convictions were all misdemeanors. Obviously, there is an issue with her hoarding rabbits but she does not pose any danger to the community.”

These are three things I’ve been unable to stop listening to lately. They share little, yet all have been those songs for me that you love so much you feel obliged to play them for everyone you’re around. You hi-jack stereos, force headphones on unsuspecting friends, scream them into the rush of a passing train as you walk along the tracks. Those songs. These have been those.

Ok, so they share one thing: this crazy galloping drumming that I can’t shake loose. I love it.

Lake – I Look Up To You

I Look Up To You

God this is rad. It’s off Lake’s first, self-titled record, which is awesome. They also have a newer album called “Oh The Places You’ll Go” which is awesome in a more 70s pop way. The drums sound almost like they’re being played by a 5 year old, but somehow the clackings and thumps hit in the exact right wrong way to make glorious cacophony.

Margo Guryan – Someone I Know

Someone I Know

My coworker Chris (of Chris Robley and the Fear of Heights) recommended this highly on his awesome 60s pop podcast. I love how her voice barely exists. Like gauze. Or a spider web. I also like how the drums exist very much. Also I am in love with her.

Mount Eerie – Don’t Smoke

Don’t Smoke

An awesome list of possible reasons to smoke. I like songs that are phrased interestingly, and this: “is it because?” is pretty interesting. Also the way the drums are completely insane is pretty interesting.

[photo is Margo Guryan, from her MySpace.]

I first heard this song on the absolutely incredible Himalayan Bear album called Lo Lonesome Island, an epic paean to loss and island life. Here’s another of my favorite songs on that album, I’m On Sorrow:

I’m On Sorrow

There were ghosts, certainly, in the voice of the man by the window, asking for leftovers, and ghosts in the eyes of the thin boy with the ball-cap, just sitting there. There were ghosts in the motions of my brother’s arms, scars of over-medication in his musculature, surely, and ghosts in the tired voices and tortured steps of the nurses and assistants.

I came with gifts — two Mountain Goats CDs and a cheeseburger (apparently there is something of a fast foot black market in there — the woman with wild eyes and always headphones came into the kitchen as we were eating and placed what I assumed was an entirely fictitious phone call to a friend to order a Whopper). I came with expectations, vague ideas about what the place would be. I have been there before, but never in the main areas, and never by myself. I came on the bus, with my music loud.

I met Jimmy, the big man with the small voice who follows my brother around like a puppy, angels in his eyes. I met my brother’s budding love interest, whom the nurses said I resembled, much to my embarrassment. It was our cherubic cheeks, they said. I blushed.

We played cribbage and drank decaffeinated iced tea. A man yelled in broken English about Catholic church. Jimmy wanted a dollar for a Diet Coke.

By William Stafford

1
Many a time driving over the Coast Range,
down the cool side–hemlock, spruce, then shore pine–
I’ve known something I should have said one time:
“If we hadn’t met, then everything would have to change.”

2
We were judged; our shadows knew our height,
and after dark, exact, the air confirmed
all with its move or stillness:
we both were trapped on an odd-shaped island.

3
Sleet persuades a traveler: I all night
know no under the earth escape
even when the sky goes back remote.
Walking till the stars forget, I look out

4
And watch the smoke at Astoria and Seaside
cringing along the coast, and barefoot gulls
designing the sand: “Go flat, go flat,”–the waves;
the little boat, the mild riding light,

5
The sand going democratic, trading places down the wind,
everything distancing away. Finding this
took all this time, and you’re not even here.
Though we met, everything had to change.

That said:

Dumi & Minazi III – Mweya Dumi & Minazi III – Mweya

Sunshine is exploding out of the ocean, and the fishes and dolphins are all spouting little jets of water from their mouths in intricate patterns. You’re on a boat sailing through it but you don’t get wet, just tan.

John Nzenze – Ninamliya Susana John Nzenze – Ninamliya Susana

One guitar, some clackity sticks and two voices somehow become an orchestra. Every song on this album is between 2:30 and 2:50 in length. Presumably that is approximately the capacity of a 78 rpm record?

Marc Ambinder is a political reporter for the Atlantic, a card-carrying member of the Gang of 500. He writes insightfully, if somewhat conventionally, and I enjoy his blog casually. But his post about the recent White House news conference is absolutely phenomenal, the kind of insider-baseball I go gooey for. Here he is talking about the credentialing process:

Sometimes, if we’re interviewing senior officials, we’re given “A” passes. There two types; “A” alone, and “A” with the words “ESCORT”.” The regular “A” pass can get you anywhere in the West Wing except for the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room and a few other corners and crannies. Last week, as I sat waiting in the West Wing lobby for an appointment, I noticed that Ret. Gen. Scott Gration, the President’s point person on Sudan, had the same pass as I did. Richard Holbrooke, the increasingly powerful envoy to Af-Pak-everywhere else, rushed through the lobby. He wasn’t wearing a pass. He yelled at an assistant that he “needed to go catch up with Hillary.” Also — somewhat weirdly, as I waited, I listened to a Marine guard and the uniformed Secret Service agent on duty quietly argue about the torture memos.

And then this: an exchange between two white house correspondents:

There’s a moment — usually with about two minutes to go — where four or five network correspondents, standing feet apart, talk over each other, saying much the same thing. Then you hear the voice of CBS’s Mark Knoller, who gives a last minute radio update. Then the same from ABC’s Ann Compton.

Ed Henry finished his stand-up early. Only NBC’s Chuck Todd and CBS’s Chip Reid were left standing.

Chuck groaned. He knew that he and Chip were about to stumble over one another.

Chuck then realized that everyone was looking at him. He informed his producer of this.

Then he joked that someone was going to Twitter the conversation. (I did.)

Chip, who has sworn off Twitter and has never been on Facebook, dryly wondered how many people would read it.

Chuck misheard Chip, thinking that Chip was talking about ratings.

So Chuck struck back, saying something like: “Do we really want to get into a ratings comparison?”

Everyone from the photogs to members of Obama’s staff said “Oooooh.”

I don’t know why this stuff appeals to me so. Ultimately, none of this matters in big picture terms — no decisions are being made here, no policy crafted. But the machinations of this small cabal of politicos somehow seem to bear a deep relevance to my life. I follow them on blogs and tweets and podcasts. I know their names and who they don’t get along with. I can identify Chuck Todd, Mark Halperin, Ana Marie Cox (my love), Chip Reid (total dick), and dozens of other DC denizens not merely by sight, but probably by voice or writing style.

The way I follow politics, and more specifically political journalism, seems somewhat similar to the way some people follow sports. Yeah, I’ve got my team, but I also have an appreciation for the style and stories of players all around the league.

Don’t Stop Loving Me Now by Floating Action

What is that thing that happens when a song ambushes you? There’s usually not one thing. In this case it’s the whip like guitar lick that curls around the sharp edges of this driving chorus and slips into your bloodstream like mercury. It’s the tambourine that doesn’t stop. On this recording (available for free from the Park The Van Records website, where you can also buy their phenomenal new self-titled album) it’s the way organ and guitar shamble in almost sheepishly under the sounds of the club before building into a whole clattering mountain of high harmonies and southy guitars.

It’s the audience member who you can hear at the end of the song yell simply, “Good song!”

I’ve been thinking a little bit about songs and poems and about how line breaks can refine or create meaning.

Think of the song, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” Sam says,

IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIIloveyouIIloveyou,

and you fall into his spell. You could marry him.

You think about the life you and Sam will live–him singing “You Send Me” at your wedding and looking all the way through your eyes into your quiet places the whole time. Your honeymoon: Barbados. White sand. Your children’s glowing faces as you drop them off for the first day of school.

Aging, and the smoke that begins to cloud his voice as the years pile on. Your wrinkles, gentle at first and then severe, that his trembling fingers trace when you make love in that relentless tired way the elderly do.

His funeral, the tears carving canyons down your cheeks. The white rose you leave to wilt in the dirt by his headstone.

And then Sam says, “for sentimental reasons,” and it’s all gone in a flash.

“Please believe me,” he begs.

10) Hold your horses
Not strictly speaking a command to relax, but often used thusly. Question: in this allegory, where are these horses located. If I’m holding my horses, where should I lay my hands?

9) Simmer down
Simmer Down

8) Take a chill pill
Man, I just wish when people said this to me they had a Xanax in an outstretched palm.

7) Don’t get your panties in a bunch
I don’t wear panties, so I really don’t know about this. But if getting your panties in a bunch feels anything like getting your zebra-stripe butt-floss in a bunch, this is probably pretty good advice.

6) Cool out
The classics will never go out of style.

5) Don’t flip your lid
Among the most visual of the collection. Makes you think of Grover busting the fuck out of his garbage can and being all “GRRROWR!” That dude was a total dick, right? Grouch is just another word for “asshole” but the Sesame Street tried to pawn it off as some kind of charming eccentricity. It’s not charming, Oscar. Stop being a dick.

4) Keep your pants/shirt on
Some traditionalists insist on the more staid “shirt” as the article of clothing one is being urged to not remove. To me, pants tell a much more interesting story.

3) Don’t have a cow [man]
Bart Simpson implores you not to experiment with animal husbandry.

2) Cool your jets
You are burning me with your exhaust, and here you are, already on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Can you please turn down the gas a little? KTHXBAI!

1) Curb your dog
King of chillax, because it makes the recipient feel ridiculous for getting worked up. Your anger? It is a yappy little chihuahua. Kindly keep it from pissing on my sneaks.

Bonus Material:

Honorable Mention) Get a grip
Would be in the top 10 if the top 10 hadn’t already been written when we remembered it. For the perfect visual interpretation, Aerosmith has you covered.

Also, here are the original lists of our favorite idioms that were the point of departure for this wacky list:

Deafkitties:

“Now we’re talkin!”
“Hard to say”
“Jump the gun”
“I’ll be damned” [often preceded by "well", commonly shortened to "I'll be"]
“Up shit creek without a paddle”

Ben Moral:

“Flip the script”
“Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes”
“Throw it against the wall and see what sticks”

and the consensus pick for greatest idiom of all time:

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it”

Ceci n’est pas une peep by ~Amantxfantome on deviantART

I was the guy who calls you, the guy who asks if you’re a registered voter, what kind of scotch you prefer, how much money you make, whether or not you were aware that Al Gore is a communist, etc. One of the most common questions we would ask is this:

“Overall, would you say the country is headed in the right direction, or are we off on the wrong track?”

I had a lot of time to ponder the construction of this, as it appeared on almost every political poll we would run. Word for word. Right direction. Wrong track. This is the extended metaphor we use, as a society (or at least the one used by the political media that represent our society). We are some kind of locomotive. There are two ways this locomotive could be going: the right direction, or the wrong track. The question turns what is clearly a fuzzy and gray issue into a nicely black and white answer. There are no shades. There is no maybe.

For a long time, the train has been seemingly irreversibly on the wrong track. Things have been bad. But they are better. Even in the midst of the worst economic collapse in generations, they are better.

But despite the binary formulation of the question, things aren’t suddenly better. Disbursed across the aggregate of the mass of American thought, that shift, that very real moment of epiphany becomes a curve of discovery.

For me, it all flipped on November 4th, 2008. In one joyous moment, or one joyous evening, the sins of the previous eight years were washed away and America was born again, into this brave new world mewling and wet. For some it probably flipped on Jan 20th, 2009, when we ogled Aretha’s hat and cried as the promise was kept. I guess for some people it flipped some time before or since. But look at it. That is awesome. That is people believing again. That is progress. Shit man.

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
- Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

I feel blessed to know so many people as good as spring itself. Thanks for being wonderful, gang.

I’m going to make some kind of baked pasta dish with sautéed kale, tofu, tomatoes, rosemary, and peppers. Garlic, of course. Cracked black pepper. What else should I put in?

Mozzarella! A splash of red wine!

I’ve got good paesano bread and herb salad greens to go with.

The problem is, once I open the wine to put in the sauce, I’ll have to drink some. Alas.

I’ve got this delicious red wine with a pun in the name:

Anyone hungry?

[photo by Phil Gilston]

Iraq’s Swords of Qadissiya (aka Hands of Victory)

[photo from the fairly incredible abandoned blog, Survivor]

but not hard,
not brittle, a crawling and writhing
neon

anthill. My head
is far from clear and these shifting lights,
almost incomprehensible

except taken as a whole,
signify nothing but themselves: Portland.
I want to shout:

“Here I am!”
and have the city scream back at me,
or maybe just nod.

These woodwinds are legion.
An invading army, they liberate
large tracts of reverie. The strings

have pushed out awkward memories
and staked claim to
certain expanses of hippocampus.

Timpanis and tubas thunder,
honk and rattle back by where
my spine meets my mind.

A chord forms and rises,
swells almost to bursting,
and recedes. Tuning complete,

silence ripples like a sheet and drapes
over them. As he raises
his baton to begin, the conductor’s

tails brush the floor,
the roof of my mouth. I wake
with trumpets bragging in my ears.

Want to join my new bands?

Dead By December – Emo. I need tight trousered screamers and criers.

Gato Perdido – Swelling, discordant orchestras. Hushed fingerstyle guitar — you can hear the frets. Songs about open spaces. I need strings and horns and timpani drums.

Vancouver, This Is It! – Big clanging singalongs. Lots of percussion, lots of fun. I need ten rowdy kids with things to bang on.

Sans Bros – Math rock. I need patient polyrhythmists.

[image from this incredible collection of medical pictures in the creative commons]

The Ordinary Times is on Facebook, if you’re nasty.

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

There’s a group of street artists painting condemned buildings “Tiggerific Orange”.

Jimbo sent me this article about the collapse of newspapers and what will replace them:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

The internet has made newspapers the new Detroit — hulking, condemned skyscrapers. People will inevitably start painting them orange.

In one theory of the ultimate fate of the universe, known as the big crunch theory, it is hypothesized that the universe will eventually collapse under its own weight. One possibility is that from the resulting singularity (the point at which the universe collapses to a single point with infinite mass), a new universe is formed from a new big bang. Because of the nature of singularity, this new universe can have entirely no relation to the universe that preceded it, in fact it is almost certain not to. Events that happen within the first nanoseconds after this second big bang will determine the ultimate shape and composition of the resulting universe. The smallest shift of atoms or electrons can mean the birth or death of galaxies.

It makes me feel that in this collapsing world, I should be out doing things. Big things. Little things. It doesn’t matter.

I also saw this poster (via. Boing Boing):

He orders gospel CDs from us occasionally. I imagine that he is tall, stilt-like, that he embodies his name.

My curiosity gets the better of me, and with a little digging, I find out he is the organist at Trinity Episcopal Church in Hartford, CT (pictured below).

I went to see Phosphorescent last night at Holocene and Casey was good enough to let me write about it for Local Cut:

From whispers to bombast, late autumn frost to spring thunder, they stomp and clap, strut and shiver their way through a two-hour set (including encore). Houck’s quavering and cracking voice flutters above the fray, buzzing and sputtering, here and there alighting on notes that seem almost unable to bear his weight.

Read the whole pretentious thing over there.

Here is a different song from the same album. This song is about abortion. I think the whole album is, actually — and about the failed relationship that caused it. Uplifting.

City Song

I guess this Herman Düne song is about New York, which is a city about which many songs have been written. But maybe this one is about leaving somewhere and then leaving it, and that moment when you realize you’ve fallen in love with a place.

I like the horns. A lot.

Take Him Back To New York Ciy

Phosphorescent is playing tonight at Holocene. I am amped on this show. He just recorded an album of Willie Nelson covers. This one is about knowing why you should be good, but not doing it.

Reasons To Quit

How many numbers would it take to describe me? How many numbers to pinpoint this circumstance, this awkward hallway waiting zone and these 4 people with whom I share it?

You’d have to know my shoe size (13 Mens) because you’d need to know what sound those huge shoes make as my feet drag them back and forth across the floor. You could perhaps draw useful information from the price ($1.50) of this salad purchased for me by Josie, my dad’s girlfriend, as a sort of gesture — sandwiches and vitamin water used for words in this clumsy argot of comfort. The supposed start time of the commitment hearing (11:30) seems pertinent, as does the actual start time (3:30).

My experience of this particular manifestation of my brother’s illness has been, on a purely percentage basis, mostly waiting. In with him in his apartment, waiting for the crisis response team (1.5 hours, ultimately they weren’t in time) in the ER (2.5 hours) and now here, in this hallway by the elevator that goes up, for 4 hours.

I read some number of pages of my book (50-75).

The Sheriff, brushing down the hall in his forest green, gets me thinking about uniforms and about how we all wear them. This morning when I was picking a shirt from my wrinkled laundry, still unfolded in the basket, I consciously avoided the Johnny-Cash-is-flipping-you-off shirt and the more strident of my political shirts (e.g. the vaguely threatening Longshoreman’s Union shirt with the slogan “AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL” and a picture of a very sharp looking gaffer’s hook.) My brother, when they bring him out of the elevator and nudge him past us down the hallway to the makeshift courtroom, is wearing the uniform of the damned — thin blue hospital pajamas. Josie is wearing all black except for her green tassled riding boots. My mom has a scarf with patterns like expensive rugs. She compliments Josie on her boots. My dad wears his usual uniform — a tee-shirt from the bins, tennis shoes (one an inch taller than the other due to the therapeutic lift he must install), and a vague sense of indignance towards the world that is so clearly treating him, all of us, unjustly. Miller, who is in a way the catalyst for all this — the initial contact point between my brother and his amazing network of concerned friends who ultimately reached out to my mom — wears a brown embroidered pearl-button shirt. He is nervous, perhaps. He fidgets.

This building hosts the burn unit on the bottom floor and the Behavioral Health unit on the upper. We talk, the 5 of us do, about those words — “Behavioral Health” — the ones printed above the elevator and on signs throughout the building. If the illness is mental, the symptom is behavioral, and it seems odd to explicitly advertise this facility as one addressing merely symptoms. They will make you act properly, they say, but promise no treatment of the underlying disease.

What then is the difference between this and a jail, my mom wonders — what have those we call criminals done but to prove that they are a danger to themselves or others? We ultimately are incapable of drawing a solid, unbroken line between the two.

The judge does not wear a robe. She has straight, greying hair. She really likes to have things stricken from the record, mainly hearsay. She instructs me, immediately after I take the oath, that I am only to speak of things I saw or things my brother told me. Everything else is hearsay, and inadmissable in this court. I talk about a bottle of champagne my brother stole and she has my words stricken from the record — it did not happen because I did not see him steal the bottle, merely heard from my mother (who heard from the storekeeper) that he had.

As I try to rephrase my testimony to avoid those things I know but have not see, I think how wonderful if things could be stricken from my record so easily. This pain in my lower molar. This string of failures I wear like pearls. This incessant and nagging and unpleasant feeling I get in my stomach when I think about my ex girlfriend with other men. Middle school.

The things I can see can stay, but the hearsay — the things that live at the edge of the truth — must be stricken.

Back before Josie brought the food, in the hallway, we are very hungry. I think about my job, how I need to keep it. I think about the free lunch I am missing. I think about the air that exists in between things, how it flows silently out of the way as objects approach each other. I think about, and poke at, the scabbed burn on my left index finger knuckle. I joke that since we are in the burn unit, they could maybe just take a quick look — slap some fucking aloe on it for me or something. We laugh, the 5 of us do, too loudly for a hospital hallway.

My dad’s leg is getting worse, while we’re addressing injury. He broke his femur when he was 20. He was in the army and driving a truck but he wasn’t driving it very well because they found it wrapped around a telephone pole and him with his leg looking Not Quite Right in the way that things do when they are broken very badly. He got it fixed then, by the army doctors. They put screws in his leg to hold it together. When I was 8 or so he had it fixed again — the original screws were rusting apparently and needed replacing.

But they botched it. In removing the screws, they broke his hip again. He spent the hottest summer in years in a full body cast, reaching for things with a mechanical grabber stick and pissing in a plastic jug. When it finally healed, all was well for a while, but it has regressed some recently and is apparently exacerbated by stress, of which we all have full burdens. He says it twitches or spasms sometimes. He doesn’t sit down because standing up again is difficult.

I think about on Sunday when I ran off towards the train tracks after my brother, the fire alarm still screaming behind me, and felt the bump and flutter of a spasming muscle in my jaw. I stopped in my tracks, tritely enough, and just put my fingers to the spot (just below my ear) to feel the dance of tissue.

There are moments, in the hearing, when I find myself trying to turn my testimony into an explanation or an excuse, or to turn it towards myself. Maybe because at first, when the state’s attorney asks why I’m there, I can only manage to express that I am scared:

“I am scared.” I say, and I am sure they can hear it in my voice — the fear tearing off the edges of my consonants and shattering the fragile shells of my vowels. This is not an explanation of anything other than why I can’t say anything else. The machinery of my mouth and throat is Not Quite Right and the words that normally pour so eagerly forth have flowed up against some dam or stoppage.

But as it progresses the picture I paint is more elaborate, and more sympathetic to myself. I guess maybe that’s the (or a) fundamental flaw with our system of justice — witnesses always have their own interests in mind even when they don’t intend to. I probably perjure myself when I say I saw him 3 weeks before the day in question. It can’t have been less than a month.

Or this: at times I think I am using the setting as an opportunity for therapy. I attempt lengthy explanations of behavior in paragraph form with metaphors and hand gestures. I have to stop myself, remind myself that this hearing has nothing to do with me, except to the extent that I am a vessel for information which these professionals need to extract from me.

The professionals need this information as fuel for their machinery of expertise, they must refine it into these scrawled notes, these nonsensical marks and numbers. Ultimately, they must process and distill it into their product — expert opinion. My brother is, or is not (in their expert opinion) a danger to himself. He is or is not a danger to others. He is or is not capable of meeting his basic needs. I know these answers. He is. He is. He is not. But my answers are not professional answers. These doctors, these attorneys, this judge, they are negotiating the truth between them. The sheriff behind me, he and his gun make it real.

My brother coughs up mucus on the table when I first come in. He’s coughing up mucus because they don’t let him smoke in the hospital, and that’s what happens when you stop smoking, ironically enough — you cough up all the nasty tarry mucus your lungs have accumulated. The judge is not pleased, tells him to stop. He says “you think between the two hospitals I’ve been in, they’d have fixed this!”

One of the medical examiners and I share a quick and furtive laugh between our eyes, hands covering our mouths to emphasize the fundamental seriousness of the proceedings.

Before this, in the hallway, we are waiting for the hearing to start. Sgt. Hogan joins us in the hallway. I thank him for coming. This is the man who shot my brother with a taser. When they pulled him out of the squad car, his feet and hands bloody, his lips stained with vomit, he had turned his wild and wide open and Not Quite Right face around to yell at me: “does it bother you that the Portland police almost killed me?”

I know he was exaggerating. But I don’t know if he knows it. The molded plastic of the back seat of the squad car was a mess. Vomit pooled in the indented seats.

We talk with Sgt. Hogan, the 5 of us do, in the hallway. We talk about the crisis intervention training the Portland police force was recently required to undergo. Josie, who is on the police review board, drops names of commanders and their secretaries. Hogan testifies first.

The skittish state’s attorney comes out after his testimony and seems thrilled. “He might just do it himself!” He says. Sgt. Hogan hands his card to my mom.

“If you have any questions about what happened, please give me a call”

The Sgt. looks scared. I feel for him. I feel for all of us.

We are here to testify and to witness this commitment. Excerpt those words, cut them out of this muddle and paste them into a reflection on another experience, and maybe we are at a baptism, at a wedding. Maybe these ceremonies aren’t that different. That promise of fidelity and devotion in the interests of a relationship, this removal of personal freedom in the interest of societal harmony, that acknowledgment of fealty to the divine. The state’s attorney even asks us if any of us has any objection to his commitment, offers to prompt us in our vows, to guide us to salvation.

We lower our heads in thanks, in reverence, in prayer.

Her hands traced and amplified the dirt and wrinkles on his skin — a needle hissed and crackled over the dust and scratches on an old record.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/todays-tangled-metaphor/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/in-the-wilderness http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/in-the-wilderness#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:10:39 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=296

I’m loving my long fingernails. I’ve grown them out on my right hand to serve as plectra. I’ve found, though, that I like them for all sorts of reasons. I rap them rhythmically on the table. I scrape them through my ever-growing beard. I scratch my itchy back. I slice through packing tape on boxes and shrinkwrap on CDs.

They give me an extra layer of the inanimate to work with — a little more me that isn’t me. I guess it’s comforting. These are made of the same stuff as shells.

The commitment officer wants me to testify on Friday. There is a lawyer whose job is to convince the judge that my brother is not a danger to himself or to others and should be released from the hospital. Our job is to convince the judge that in his various discordant acts on Sunday is contained a thread of danger or threat and that the thread is still bound about him.

I understand that commitment is the best thing for him. I understand and know this. It sits in my head, and sometimes in my stomach, this knowledge, this understanding. It is a domesticated but moody animal I live with. Mostly it sits around and suns itself, but if I get too near it, the offending hand or face gets clawed. This knowledge is edgy, sharp.

Here it is, I suppose, the claws on that cat: I am betraying my brother. I am testifying against him.

Today at work I answer the phone, “You’re talking to Ben.”

It’s wonderful. People hear and appreciate my need to get down to business.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/in-the-wilderness/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/estacada-part-5 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/estacada-part-5#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:17 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=258 continued from part 4.

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Maps. Oh boy. Fucking maps. If you know me, even a little, you probably know how I feel about maps. Even if you don’t know me, you can probably guess by the way these entries have begun. I fucking love maps. A shit load. I love old maps and new maps. I love star maps and ocean maps. I love the maps on Family Circle when Bobby gets in all the trouble. I love topographic maps and temperature maps. I love CIA world factbook maps of GDP and infant mortality rates. In books that I own, when there are maps in them, they will always fall open to that page. I love Google Maps, MapQuest and Yahoo Maps. Although Google Maps is the best (true that. Double true.) I can literally waste hours just looking at it. For Christmas 2 years ago, my mom bought me a book called You Are Here that is just full of interesting maps, personal maps and unusual maps and to this day I think it is the best gift I’ve ever been given. This year she got me a topographic atlas of Oregon. This is how I know my mom loves me. I love elevation maps and property maps and political maps and blueprints. I hate malls, but I love maps of malls. I love maps of the body, maps of hell, maps of cities, maps of rivers. One of my favorite poems follows:

FICTION
- William Stafford

We could get a map of our farm as big
as our farm, and unroll the heavy paper
over the fields, with encouraging things
written here and there–”tomatoes,” “corn,”
“creek.” Then in the morning we would
stick our heads through and sing, “Barn, be cleaned.”
“Plow, turn over the south forty!”
But while our words were going out
on the paper, here would come rumpling
along under the map Old Barney,
just on the ground–he couldn’t even
read–going out to slop the hogs.

I was indifferent towards one of my now good friends until I saw his BFA project involving mapping people on buses, at which point I decided he was one of the good ones. And I love these very maps before me, the glossy tri-fold brochures — one of the disc golf course and one of the various trails, campgrounds, model airplane fields, equestrian areas and boat-ramps of McIver State park.

Now, you should know, these are not lovable maps. They won’t be seen to don such fineries as compass roses, keys to the scale, or indeed any indication that they are drawn to scale at all. They are laid out awkwardly, with no indication as to the relative sizes of their various components or the distance between. But still, I love them. These are maps. They comfort me with their labels and certainty, their quiet and passive assurance that whatever might happen, wherever I might end up, I should be able to reason out where I am and where I need to go. Twenty yards down the entrance road I stop to do just that.

You can see what I’m looking at here [pdf]

The park is separated into two areas, northern and southern. The northern area according to the map, hosts the disc golf course, a small network of hiking trails, the model airplane field, various picnicking areas, and a boat ramp. To the south one finds the park maintenance offices, equestrian parking and trails, a boat ramp, campground, and a fish hatchery.

I decide to head south first, then loop through the northern area. The entrance road slopes down to a fork. I turn right and walk towards the offices and equestrian parking area. Just a few feet down the road is the “viewpoint” which seems to be a pretty mundane little view — the Clackamas river valley spreads out a hundred feet or so below. One can glimpse landmarks here and there — the frisbee golf course, the lazy curve of the river — but nothing much special. Then my eyes pan up and catch sight of Mt. Hood.

Estacada isn’t that much closer to Mt Hood than Portland — just 30 miles or so — but that 30 miles adds such impressive size and detail to the mountain that it takes my breath away. Maybe I’m just used to seeing it from Portland. I know first time visitors are often overcome by the sight of the mountain, maybe from this angle I’m seeing it again for the first time. But wow. The glacial scars tracing down her left flank, the casual shrug of her uneven shoulders, the soft swelling of her winter coat. A man could fall in love.

I fall in love quickly and quietly, and head down the trail. The path I follow is clearly a horse path. It’s deeply rutted, scarred with hoofprints and pocked with piles of horse shit. I remember not finding horse shit very offensive, but maybe that’s just dried old horse shit. In this case, fresh and fly-covered, it’s bad. I have a few near misses.

The path follows a ridge. To the left the ground drops off sharply in two shelves down to the river — about a half mile away. I can hear the gentle soothing sounds of leather and metal and hooves below me — the trail must loop around down below. I look at the hideous map for confirmation. Indeed.

The trail forks again, and I bear right again, intending to make a longer loop which will bring me up along the riverbank before following the Clackamas down to he fish hatchery and meeting back up here as the lefthand fork. As I near the horse parking area, it dawns on me (as it may have dawned on you by now, dear reader) that the trailers and metallic clankings I heard earlier, from the road, were none other than the horse trailers and saddle buckles before me. Back to the despicable map. It looks like the horse trails south of here probably lead all the way to the road, perhaps even the precise spot I stopped. The brown metal gates of the park match precisely the gate I saw up there. I file this away — perhaps I’ll return this way and shave some miles off the walk back to town!

For now I keep to the left around the earnest equestrian folk and their four wheel drive haven, heading for the river. The path stays level for a while, and forks — the other end of the loop I’ll use to exit the park branches off to the right. The left-hand fork is host to a hinged orange sign declaring the trail closed.

Crap.

I read the fine print. “Bridge unstable?” Bah, this trail doesn’t cross the river. Must me some minor tributary — I’ll have no trouble fording it. I take the left turn with artificial certainty of a snap decision in my step.

continued tomorrah

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/daily-bread/2009/estacada-part-5/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/two-sporting-items http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/two-sporting-items#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:50:10 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=248 Firstly, the matter of Sir Charles. Bethlehem got me thinking with his latest Sporting News column. Regarding Charles Barkley’s ascendance, Shoals writes:

Barkley could get away with anything because he made no bones about who he was. He wasn’t a lightweight rebel like Rodman, or the kind of surly bad boy who would soon invade the NBA in droves. Barkley was an antihero, who, in both his impulsiveness and authenticity, made the rest of the world look like hypocrites.

But what kind of antihero is he. Despite his amorality, Barkley is no noir detective. He doesn’t have the casual disregard for the suffering of others. His amorality is born not so much of selfishness but more of an active disdain for morality itself. “I am not a role model,” is not merely Charles’ abdication from the crown of moral rectitude, but an active refutation of the right of others to bear that crown. At the same time, Charles’ world is not the fragmented nightmare or amoral wasteland of the antihero, but the ordered and fundamentally ridiculous world of spectacle. The universe of Celebrity he inhabits is analogous to the circus of the Renaissance court — larger than life figures defined by their hollowness and hypocrisy. It is not the “rest of the world” as Shoals suggests whom Barkley shames. It is the shallow and ultimately non-real ghosts of Celebrity around him.

He is stubbornly, manifestly real.

The antiheroic character perhaps most analogous to this Barkley is Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Ultimately a tragic figure, Falstaff nonetheless is the most sympathetic of Shakespeare’s fools and was his most enduringly popular — his appearance in the Merry Wives of Windsor (and indeed, some scholars suggest, the very play itself) owes to popular or even royal demand (it has been postulated that Queen Elizabeth herself requested an encore for the buffoon). His role, and the role of most of Shakespeare’s fools, is to speak for the underlings — the poor people in the “cheap seats” — in criticizing the nobility and their exploits. Just as Barkley, despite his foolishness, consistently makes others look foolish (especially “stuffed shirts”) Falstaff parries the verbal rapier thrusts of Henry IV’s nobles with drunken and misleadingly clumsy ease. One wonders, just as when one watches Barkley (or another master of the form, Dean Martin) how much of his buffoonery is show, and how much his “true nature”.

I suspect in the end that Barkley may surprise us all with his savvy.

Secondly, the matter of Boom Tho. Rod Benson is a basketball player in the NBA’s Development League (basically the minors for Basketball). Nobody would know who he was outside of North Dakota except someone gave him a blog and he got famous. This is the kind of thing he got famous for doing:

In this, I encourage you to find your own meaning.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/two-sporting-items/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-4 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-4#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:51:27 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=242 continued from Part 3

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They don’t sell pens, it turns out, but the clerk gives me one. When I first walk in she’s talking to another customer about puppies. Seems
the customer has a pregnant dog and the clerk is interested in one of the litter. When I ask for a pen she squints a little.

“Like for a horse?”

I laugh, “No, like an ink pen”

She holds up the one in her hand. I nod. She holds it out to me.

“Can I give you fifty cents?” I ask. She shakes her head. I take the pen.

“What you need a pen for anyways?” she asks. I almost laugh again.

“Writing.” I say, “I’m going to the river to write.”

“Writing what?” she asks, apparently rhetorically, because before I can answer she piles on another question, “You from Estacada?”

I look at her again. She’s got a square but pretty face, a casual mouth that she talks out of one side of. She’s short.

“Portland,” I say, “Just took the bus down for the day.”

“To . . .” she pauses.

“To write, I guess.” I answer her implied question, “or just to get out.”

And all of a sudden I’m actually trying to explain.

“I guess the city is just too comfortable sometimes. Or not comfortable, but it holds you anyways. I mean, the noise. You don’t notice the noise until it’s not there.

“Sometimes I take the train up to the zoo and walk up into the woods of Forest Park. As you make your way up these gullies, the sound of the city retreats, becomes two dimensional. You can hear where it comes from, a direction. You go further and further into the woods and pretty soon it’s just a point. You can point to the spot where the city noise is, that noise that surrounds you all the time.

“I guess that’s what I’m looking for — just to get the noise outside of me.”

She is looking at me, nodding a little. “The city scares me.”

I shrug. We talk a little while longer, about the city, about where to eat in Estacada, about all the great spots she knows about on the river, none of them within walking distance, about the legendary Safari Room. It’s clear she’d be happy to talk all day.

“Better get going,” I manage to squeeze in at some point, “gotta get down to the river.”

I push open the glass door, bells clatter together, and step down the thick wood steps. My feet make great satisfying deep clomping sounds. I am wearing a flannel. I have a bandana tied around the handle of my backpack. My pants are dusty. I can, if I want, strike them with the palms of my hands to loosen and brush the dust off them. I do it. I feel pretty country. And now I have a pen.

It’s just a quarter mile more to the park, I cover it in just a few minutes. The sign says $3.00 per vehicle, but I don’t think my feet count. As I’m strolling in, past the tollbooth for cars, a park ranger is leaving. He nods at me knowingly. He understands the illicit thrill I’m about to get, traipsing in, beating the system. It feels good. Especially watching two cars pull up, their drivers get out and stuff worn bills into envelopes. Not me, man. I am free. Ha.

I grab two maps from the toll booth and saunter past.

more tomorrow

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-4/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-3 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-3#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:29:17 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=237
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Hayden Road immediately begins to climb. I’ve turned off the music now, my ears need a break. The relentless thrum of passing cars is growing tiresome though. My legs are getting sore, and the knee I’ve been worried about (the right one) for some time is beginning to hurt with a sharp pain that is somewhat unsettling. I am very hungry, but have promised myself I’ll make it to the park before eating lunch so I can sit by the river.

I climb past tree farms. So many tree farms. Christmas trees for miles. This must be the world Christmas tree capital. Looking at the trees I imagine the different Christmas each is headed for. Which tree gets starved by the dysfunctional family? Which tree gets strung with gold ornaments? Which of these will grow up to tower over Pioneer Courthouse Square some day?

The ground slopes away to the right, and at a clearing in the trees I stop to take a look. there is a barn, looking abandoned, and what look like campers or RVs. Is this a parking area for a campground? I hear metal clang on metal and men’s voices. It feels good to stop.

A few hundred feet further, there is a heavy metal gate blocking a road. No signs. Looks like picnic tables? Odd. This clearly isn’t the park, there aren’t any signs and it hasn’t been close to 3 miles. But whoa. What the fuck is that?

A twisted wreck of a red sedan has wrapped itself lengthwise around a tree about 20 feet down this gully. I head up the road to get a better look. Fairly new yellow caution tape flutters from nearby trees. The driver’s side is completely flattened. Someone died here. Recently. I imagine they’re still in there, that I can smell the rotting body. My stomach churns. I am not so hungry.

I keep trudging up the road. Station wagons usually give me a respectful berth. Big trucks are more likely to drive fast and close. I can feel the air they shove out of the way. It whips my hair in my eyes and blows eddies of road-dust into my face. Assholes.

Hayden Road finally crests the hill and intersects Springwater Road. The sign says “McIver Park -> 1″. Almost there.

Springwater is much nicer to walk along. The shoulder is wide, the road straight, and traffic light. I can see a farm supply store ahead — they’ll have a pen, right? If I’m going in there though, I should probably change out of my beadazzled carousel horse sweatshirt and into the flannel in my bag. It feels good to stop. I drink some water.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-3/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-2 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-2#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:12:46 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=223 This is part 2 of my serialized adventure tale. Read part 1 here.

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The suburbs slide by the windows and slowly fade into farmland and trailer towns.

I am squinting at the other people on the bus, trying to write their stories. The long thin man towards the front, the one with leathery skin and a bass-like mouth, is gibbering excitedly to a very quiet Hispanic man with a Genghis Khan style beard. Occasionally the tall one leaps up, grasping a pole for support, and crouches close to the silent man, eagerly explaining how DNA is like a mighty flowing river. We are all in tributaries, evolutionarily speaking, but soon enough our children will join into rivers, our grandchildren spill into the mighty Columbia, and our great great great great great grandchildren will roll gently into the great genetic sea of the distant future. At least this is what I imagine he is saying — I only catch incomprehensible fragments and attempt to piece together some lucid story from them. He may be mad. I want to write it down, but I realize I’ve forgotten a pen. Fuck. I’ll pick one up in Estacada.

When I’m not listening to his chatter, I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver — the first volume of his absolutely massive Baroque trilogy. It’s interesting enough — seems to be largely about the birth of math and money and how the two interrelate. A bit too clever at times, but Stephenson is a very capable storyteller. The ride, while bumpy at times, is never slow.

I have two possible adventures in mind. The first option would be to get off in Estacada proper, at the end of the line, and walk out to McIver park. It doesn’t look too far, and it’s on the river. The other option is called Eagle Fern park and is up Eagle Creek a little ways. I could either walk the Wildcat Mountain road, or try to work my way up Eagle Creek. Either way, it would be a couple of miles. Eagle Fern looks a little wilder, but smaller, than McIver. I consider these possibilities, and put my nose back in my book. When I look up again my dilemma is solved for me: we’re a mile or two past the Wildcat Mountain turnoff.

Estacada has a worn down but homey feel. The air smells like not-entirely-unpleasant burning. A huge sign forms a Romanesque gate over a gravel road “ESTACADA LUMBER” – 50 feet in the air. This place once had a purpose, I suppose. Trees felled for miles around would come here, to Estacada Lumber, and be stripped, cut, planed and stacked into neat piles. Builders would drive down from Portland.

Now Estacada is “The Gateway to the Clackamas”, which I guess means it’s just the place you stop for gas on the way out of town, or the place to get dinner after a day on the river. I get off the bus on Main street in front of Estacada Middle school and head south, towards “downtown”. As I crest a small rise, heading down into Estacada proper, I see the towering sign for the Safari Room — Estacada’s legendary taxidermist/karaoke bar. I plan to stop on my way back through if I have time, but they’re not open yet.

I haven’t brought a map with me (uncharacteristically) and I’m not entirely sure which direction I’m supposed to go, only that I’ll cross a bridge and then try to find the park. The highway forks at the edge of town, the right hand fork crosses a bridge; it’s a pretty safe bet. So I cross it.

The Clackamas is wide below me and a deep blue-green. It looks cold. I think about where it comes from and where it goes, wonder if you could put a raft in here and float all the way down to the Willamette, then float the Willamette all the way into downtown. Maybe get out at the waterfront and stumble, sun-burnt and dripping, into some hoity-toity Southwest Portland bar. Portland City Grill has a great happy hour. Mentally bookmarking this for the summer.

On far bank of the Clackamas, the thin sidewalk I have been following disappears, and it looks as if I’ll be walking on the shoulder of the highway from here. At first it’s not so bad. I put some tunes on and my step is light.

I realize I’ve forgotten a pen. I knew I’d forgotten a pen. I knew it on the bus and I meant to stop in Estacada. Fuck, man. My eyes scan the garbage strewn roadside. It’s possible. Empty Gatorade bottles, cigarette packs, bits of upholstery, shoes. No pen. But I’ll keep my eyes out.

Soon, as cars shoulder past like that rude asshole at the Crystal Ballroom who has to be in front, the highway wears thin. A sign says “McIver Park – 3 Miles”. Ah fuck. At least there’s a pony, a little Shetland in the front yard of a small house across the road. I soldier on past junk-strewn trailers, some so ramshackle I’m reminded of shanty towns.

Still looking for a pen, I spot some huge pine cones. Sugar Pines, right? Sugar cones? That’s silly. I pluck a single seed from one to bring home with me. Roughly triangular with the fat end light and the thin end dark. Looks like candy corn. I think I’m hungry.

I judge that the park must be somewhere to my right, as the river is over there. Presented with the opportunity to take a side road headed in that direction, I nervously do so. It doesn’t say “Dead End” so it has to go somewhere, right? And as long as I’m between the river and the highway, I can’t get too lost.

This road crosses a small creek and climbs sharply before connecting with Hayden Road. Looking left I can see the highway, and imagine I can see a brown State Park sign pointing this direction. Eh, what’s there to lose. I turn right and trudge upwards.

continued tomorrow

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-2/feed 3 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-1#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:17:24 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=216
View Larger Map

I don’t get started nearly as early as I would have liked. I had planned on catching the first or second bus, 6:30 and 7:30. The red wine I drank last night, however (along with Sparks, C-Note IPA, Beck’s Dark, and more Sparks) ensures that I feel ten kinds of terrible when I roll out of bed at 9am. I needed coffee. I need eats. I stumble to the coffee shop down the street.

I get back, drink the coffee, eat some toast. Better.

I shower. Much better. It’s 10.

Check the bus times. I can catch a 10:35, transfer twice, and be in Estacada by 12:30. Not bad. Time to pack.

First up, clothes. It looks warm, but it probably isn’t. I pack my christmas-colored thick flannel and put on my hoody. Good enough. Next, water. One 32 oz Nalgene, one 42 oz Crystal Geyser bottle. Check.

Now food. I have a third of a load of Ciabatta, an avocado, some leftover pasta, an apple and a banana. Looks like I’ve got lunch and dinner!

I’m out the door at 10:30 to catch the bus at 7th and Fremont. The bus is a little late, but I’m still on schedule to make my transfers. I’m listening to the Radiolab podcast. Jad and Robert are talking about how they make the show. Jad is illustrating his sound editing techniques, which are completely mindblowing. He’ll string together bits of sound culled from the actual interviews and manipulate them, twist them, distort them, stretch them to make almost all the ambient sounds you hear. It’s totally unreal. I get off at 57th and Fremont to switch busses. While I’m waiting at the stop, Emily drives by and honks. She rolls down the window and we have on of those obnoxious conversations people have when one of them is driving a car. She hollers for me to swing by her work tonight. Pizza!

I switch buses. The 71 takes a torturous route southwards, traveling almost as far east and west as it does south. We bounce back and forth through northeast, then southeast, into my old neighborhood (what, what Creston-Kenilworth) and finally into the grim expanse of Milwaukie. I’m off at 70th and King to transfer. Some kind of ruined structure slouches in a field just off the road, adorned with a faded red and black “KEEP OUT” sign. Abandoned clothes and bedding litter the grass. People have lived here. A squat stone wall lines the other side of the street, shading some squalid subdivision. I call Tri-Met to see how long I’m going to be here. 14 minutes. Not bad.

My friend Marie in Colorado texts me. I try, and I think ultimately fail, to convince her to come visit.

The 31 crests the hill.

The idea that a city bus goes so far out into the world as this one does (more than 20 miles!) is completely enthralling to me. I always wanted to, but never actually did, take the McKenzie Bridge bus from Eugene to spend a day hiking by the river and growing slowly older with the trees. I think I’d like to. Maybe I’ll live in Eugene again.

continued tomorrow

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/nightmoves/2009/estacada-part-1/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/bolder http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/bolder#comments Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:42:57 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=169 Bolder

Just for whatever. This might be on the next Morals record, but probably not this version.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/bolder/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/biblical-biology http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/biblical-biology#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:09:25 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=151 Jayber Crow – Two Short Stories

I wanted to write about how this Jayber Crow borrow not just their band name, but also their thematic gestalt from the work of Wendell Berry. But presenting the complexity of this text through the lens of a simple comparative literary analysis probably would short-change what might be a great album on it’s own merits. Great in the sense that one refers to the literary canon as “the great books”. This might be one of those.

There is a lot here:

There are two stories, one called “Freeze and Thaw” and one called “This Wilderness”. There is a point, about three quarters of the way through, when you almost get bored. There is a drawn parallel between the life, death and rebirth of Christ and the cycles of life, death and rebirth in the natural world. There is sincerity. There is a voice like a less self-conscious Colin Meloy. There are almost no drums. There is glorification, and condemnation, of the works of man. There is history. There is a possibility that I will hate this album in 2 weeks. There are beautiful, open-throated harmonies. There is the last temptation of Christ in the voice of the devil. There is a looseness to the performance, a galloping imperfection, that might turn you off or might freak you out (in a good way). There is a song on their previous EP called “Eugene, OR (Manifest Destiny)” which made me smile.

There is this, the opening track “Saint Anthony”:

Saint Anthony

There is Two Short Stories for sale on their website.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/biblical-biology/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-river http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-river#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:57:32 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=132 Big River

Just because it’s not January any more doesn’t mean I can’t record cover songs.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-river/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/now-playing http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/now-playing#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:32:42 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=120 Here’s what’s been shaking my eardrums lately:

Himalayan Bear – A Very Old Song

A Very Old Song

Listening to Ryan Beattis’ vocal acrobatics makes me think of what it would have been like to watch the great impressionists paint. Here’s this guy with a wild glint in his eye and his arms are moving all over the canvas covering it with oil in seemingly random patterns. His movements, while evidently virtuosic, seem separate from any larger purpose. Separate, that is, until the painting is complete and you pull back and see suddenly: a pond, raindrops, sunflowers, charming French countrysides, a bowl of fruit, all the variety of life in swirls of color and shadow.

Super Mama Djombo – Gardessi

Gardessi

These badass cats are from Guinea-Bissau and sing songs about their independence movement and the hero thereof, one Amílcar Cabral. If revolutionaries are like hipster bands, Cabral would be like the Wolf Parade to Ché Guevara’s Arcade Fire. He has all the cred of your Ché (idealogical Marxist, guerrilla fighter, heart of gold, assassinated by colonialist oppressor) but not all the distasteful fame. He was clearly influenced by his better-known predecessor, but a good argument could be made that a formula that was begun by Guevara was perfected by Cabral.

The Dodos – Red and Purple

Red And Purple

Actually, Amilcar Cabral is more like the Dodos to Che Guevara’s Animal Collective. A much apter metaphor.

Himalayan Bear MySpace
Super Mama Djombo on CD Baby
The Dodos on MySpace

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/lichen/2009/now-playing/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/it-doesnt-matter http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/it-doesnt-matter#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:19:29 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=118 You Thought You Were Quiet

Yesterday but with words and a complaining keyboard.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/it-doesnt-matter/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/departure http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/departure#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:38:59 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=115 1

So January has closed and February is creaking open on her cold and squeaky hinges. Open A tuning and the turbulent emotions stirred up by Bill Murray’s complex and virtuosic performance in Groundhog Day.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/made/2009/departure/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pop-song http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pop-song#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:32:04 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=113 Pop Song

I thought about choosing some sort of significant song or important song or meaningful song for this, the last I’ll be recording in January, but decided to just do a plain old pop song called “Pop Song”.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pop-song/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/five-years http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/five-years#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 05:25:02 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=106 Five Years

Singing this, I imagined it was about global warming. It’s really about aliens, right? But you know, maybe that’s a metaphor.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/five-years/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/jamie http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/jamie#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 05:23:22 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=109 Jamie

By request.

The fact that this — a cheesily and hastily crooned Casio reggae version of a relatively obscure Weezer b-side — actually almost works is much less a testament to my prowess as an interpreter of song and much more resounding proof that Rivers Cuomo (RIP) was one of the greatest songwriters of this (or any) era.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/jamie/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-moonlight http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-moonlight#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:05:31 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=91 Dancing in the Moonlight

Science has shown that it is impossible, given the physical constraints of our universe (barring outlier chaotic effects predicted by some of the more exotic string theories), for one to dance while remaining uptight.

Big ups to DEAFKITTIES for the assist on vox.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-moonlight/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-science-of-myth http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-science-of-myth#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:13:05 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=84 The Science of Myth

The story goes that this song is Ben Weasel’s final paper for a comparative religion class set to music. I don’t know if I buy that, but it is the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” of the pop-punk generation.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-science-of-myth/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/guestlist http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/guestlist#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:29:00 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=75 Guestlist

It’s flashback week here at coversong/day. The next two days highlight the extremes of Screeching Weasel, courtesy of me at 16. Today, the banal and feel-good, Ramones-esque Screeching Weasel at their very very best.

To my mind, the greatest lyric of pop music history remains (regardless of context):

Whoah oh oh oh oh

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/guestlist/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/an-attempt-to-tip-the-scales http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/an-attempt-to-tip-the-scales#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:15:06 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=72 An Attempt to Tip the Scales

Yeah, what.

Ok, seriously, I’m not ashamed. I was 18 and I had just graduated from high school and I was scared and lonely in the big wide world and I listened to this song and this album quite a bit.

Now I’m 27 and I’m just as scared and lonely only the world is smaller. And I still listen to this album sometimes. Fuck you.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/an-attempt-to-tip-the-scales/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-dark http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-dark#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:55:29 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=70 Dancing in the Dark

You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/dancing-in-the-dark/feed 1 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/in-the-wee-small-hours-of-the-morning http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/in-the-wee-small-hours-of-the-morning#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 05:24:51 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=67 In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

Torch song. Frank does it better.

You may have noticed that I’m tagging these songs with the artist who performed them rather than the songwriter. I really couldn’t tell you why.”

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/in-the-wee-small-hours-of-the-morning/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/im-in-love-with-a-girl http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/im-in-love-with-a-girl#comments Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:35:47 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=65 I’m In Love With A Girl

This song is a mixtape killer. Seriously.

Thanks to Casey Moral for the falsetto assist.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/im-in-love-with-a-girl/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pauls-song http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pauls-song#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:59:50 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=60 Paul’s Song

Blazers vs Cavs is on soon and I have to make food first. This is an indignity to a beautiful and amazing song.

But if you’ve lived in Portland and this song doesn’t remind you of how much you love it, you’re soulless or a liar.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/pauls-song/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-comes-the-sun-again http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-comes-the-sun-again#comments Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:38:20 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=57 Here Comes the Sun Again

A true story: one afternoon in June, 2008, the temperature climbs into the 90s and a group of friends set off for the Sandy river. Clouds drift overhead, and it briefly rains. But about 3 o’clock, as they head upstream to float back down, the sun breaks through the clouds and they cheer as they jump into the cold current:

Snow banks drift down the hillside for you
slides inside the Sandy river before the day is through
and before evening falls I may find myself there too
singing, “Here comes the sun again!”

M. Ward has set the bar high when it comes to writing about the town I love: there is no song that better captures summer in Portland than this one. There may never be.

Tomorrow, winter.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-comes-the-sun-again/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/gone-for-good http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/gone-for-good#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:33:08 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=53 Gone For Good

Listen, I have important things to do today. There are brunches to make and horses to bet on.

My ex-roommate Randall — an amazing, beautiful and (while I knew him) tragic man — made me learn this song and play it with him when his fiancé left him. He would drink Sparks (god rest their soul) and scream along “JUST LEAVE THE RING ON THE RAIL FOR THE WHEELS TO NULLIFY”.

Now he’s in an incredible band called the Great Northwest.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/gone-for-good/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/grassblade http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/grassblade#comments Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:25:52 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=51 Grassblade

An embarrassingly sincere song, sung embarrassingly sincerely.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/grassblade/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wave-of-mutilation http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wave-of-mutilation#comments Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:40:09 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=49 Wave of Mutilation

So, I mean, I did it.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wave-of-mutilation/feed 2 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/olympia-wa http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/olympia-wa#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:38:59 +0000 Ben Moral http://www.ordinary-times.com/?p=47 Olympia, WA

Notwithstanding recent offenses to humanity, Tim Armstrong is probably the most underrated songwriter of the last 50 years.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/olympia-wa/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wolves http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wolves#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:07:32 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=43 Wolves

II.

Always remember that there are people who will take advantage of you if you let them.

It’s not their fault; it’s their nature. They are born wild, strong, hungry.

It’s your fault if you feed them.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/wolves/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/lay-it-down-slow http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/lay-it-down-slow#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:06:05 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=40 Lay It Down Slow

I.

So I don’t like the term “resolution” because I don’t think much of anything can be resolved on an annual basis. There is very little worth changing that can be changed in a year.

That said, around the first of this year I found myself with two projects. You are reading and listening to one of them. The other project — the one that probably more closely nears the thing that people talk about when they use that word I don’t like — is much more personal.

See, I’ve begun to realize the way I use people: I use people to feel useful. I insist that they lay it on me, so that I can be needed — the thing upon which things are laid.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/lay-it-down-slow/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/a-change-is-gonna-come http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/a-change-is-gonna-come#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:37:29 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=33 A Change Is Gonna Come

Barack Obama is your new Sam Cooke.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/a-change-is-gonna-come/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/you-or-your-memory http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/you-or-your-memory#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:36:46 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=31 You Or Your Memory

How to fake it? Come home drunk and half-ass a version of the best song ever written about wine coolers and chewable medicine. You are shitting on what made you great. This took literally 9 minutes. Don’t bother.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/you-or-your-memory/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/personality-crisis http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/personality-crisis#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:34:32 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=28 Personality Crisis

“Your mirror’s getting jammed up with all your friends.”

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/personality-crisis/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/these-days http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/these-days#comments Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:32:24 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=25 These Days

This is a song about my feelings.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/these-days/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/that-was-your-mother http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/that-was-your-mother#comments Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:31:39 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=23 That Was Your Mother

With one verse, Paul Simon cements his status in my mind as one of if not the greatest songwriter of all time:

“Along came a young girl, as pretty as a prayer book, as sweet as an apple on Christmas day. I said good gracious, could this be my luck? If that’s my prayer book, lord let us pray.”

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/that-was-your-mother/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/her-dress-so-green-in-the-moonlight http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/her-dress-so-green-in-the-moonlight#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:27:56 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=21 Her Dress So Green in the Moonlight

The greatest ever love song about a one night stand. Three takes at once.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/her-dress-so-green-in-the-moonlight/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-chauffeur http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-chauffeur#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:27:04 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=19 The Chauffeur

I was telling my buddy Jim how doing these covers is like taking the song apart from the outside and then trying to put it back together around yourself — it’s harder than you might think at first and it really makes you appreciate the craftsmanship of the thing. Especially true of The Chauffeur (which, incidentally has one of the greatest music videos ever [warning: contains boobies])

This wasn’t easy. I’m epically hung-over today. But I think it works!

Tech notes: I’m finding that the WAV files I’m mixing down end up with much hotter (louder) vocals than the Audacity files I start with. Can’t figure it out. Will try to work around it. Am increasingly attempting to view technical limitations as touchpoints for creative adventure.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/the-chauffeur/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/to-beat-the-devil http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/to-beat-the-devil#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:26:25 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=17 To Beat the Devil

There’s really not a lot to say about this song that it doesn’t say about itself:

It was winter time in Nashville, down on music city row.
And I was lookin’ for a place to get myself out of the cold.
To warm the frozen feelin’ that was eatin’ at my soul.
Keep the chilly wind off my guitar.

My thirsty wanted whisky; my hungry needed beans,
But it’d been of month of paydays since I’d heard that eagle scream.
So with a stomach full of empty and a pocket full of dreams,
I left my pride and stepped inside a bar.

Actually, I guess you’d could call it a Tavern:
Cigarette smoke to the ceiling and sawdust on the floor;
Friendly shadows.

I saw that there was just one old man sittin’ at the bar.
And in the mirror I could see him checkin’ me and my guitar.
An’ he turned and said: “Come up here boy, and show us what you are.”
I said: “I’m dry.” He bought me a beer.

He nodded at my guitar and said: “It’s a tough life, ain’t it?”
I just looked at him. He said: “You ain’t makin’ any money, are you?”
I said: “You’ve been readin’ my mail.”
He just smiled and said: “Let me see that guitar.
“I’ve got something you oughta hear.”
Then he laid it on me:

“If you waste your time a-talkin’ to the people who don’t listen,
“To the things that you are sayin’, who do you think’s gonna hear.
“And if you should die explainin’ how the things that they complain about,
“Are things they could be changin’, who do you think’s gonna care?”

There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind,
Who were crucified for what they tried to show.
And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time.
‘Cos the truth remains that no-one wants to know.

Well, the old man was a stranger, but I’d heard his song before,
Back when failure had me locked out on the wrong side of the door.
When no-one stood behind me but my shadow on the floor,
And lonesome was more than a state of mind.

You see, the devil haunts a hungry man,
If you don’t wanna join him, you got to beat him.
I ain’t sayin’ I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing.
Then I stole his song.

And you still can hear me singin’ to the people who don’t listen,
To the things that I am sayin’, prayin’ someone’s gonna hear.
And I guess I’ll die explaining how the things that they complain about,
Are things they could be changin’, hopin’ someone’s gonna care.

I was born a lonely singer, and I’m bound to die the same,
But I’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul.
And if I never have a nickle, I won’t ever die ashamed.
‘Cos I don’t believe that no-one wants to know.

I tried to practice but it didn’t feel right so I just kind of winged it. On his recording, Kris opens by saying the following:

A couple of years back, I come across a great and wasted friend of mine in the hallway of a recording studio; and while he was reciting some poetry to me that he’d written, I saw that he was about a step away from dyin’ and I couldn’t help but wonder why. And the lines of this song occurred to me. I’m happy to say he’s no longer wasted and he’s got him a good woman. And I’d like to dedicate this to John and June, who helped show me how to beat the devil.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/to-beat-the-devil/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/sunday-morning-coming-down http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/sunday-morning-coming-down#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:21:11 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=11 Sunday Morning Coming Down

There’s very little to say about this Kris Kristofferson song that Johnny Cash hasn’t already said better. His shadow (Johnny’s) looms large over the song.

I recorded it in one take, without really practicing or knowing the song, so you can hear me fuck up. What is more interesting is that despite the fact that I start the song making a conscious effort to sing in MY voice, you can hear Johnny come through in the wavering huge vowels in the chorus. He owns this song now.

Tomorrow, part two of a Kristofferson double-header.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/sunday-morning-coming-down/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/woody http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/woody#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:20:38 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=9 Woody

Today: more Casio, less song.

At first listen, I made the default assumption (as I find myself doing with so many songs) that this song is about a girl. But a girl named Woody? Surely not. What, then? A friend? A roommate? A child?

No, none of these. It seems sweet little Canadian singer/songwriter Hayden named his cat after Woody Guthrie. An act which endears him to me almost as much as his ability to write a solid narrative pop song that clocks in under a minute, giving me a nice little rest.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/woody/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-dipper http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-dipper#comments Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:19:32 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=7 Big Dipper

No, not Built to Spill. This is the “Big Dipper” by Cracker, a band for which I owe my adoration of completely to my friend Aaron (recently of Thailand, now of Berkely). Of those people I know who said, in 2003, “if Bush wins again, I’m leaving the country,” Aaron is the only one who kept his word. For this, for forcing me to listen to Cracker despite my strong dislike for their only radio hits, and for many other good reasons, Aaron is one of my favorite people.

Interesting facts about this recording:

* It took a really long time. Like 6 hours.
* I was not consciously trying to make it sound like Casiotone. That just happened. But also, I just happened to use a Casio keyboard for just about everything you hear. So that might explain it.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/big-dipper/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-in-california http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-in-california#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:17:40 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=5 Here in California

I grew up with the songs of Kate Wolf. Along with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and the Beatles, her quiet folky little songs were one of the few things our whole family could abide listening to on our frequent road trips. This is perhaps her most iconic song, and contains most of the lyrical themes that are her trademarks: epic narrative verses, big choruses, a bittersweet and bipolar relationship with love, and the state of California.

]]> http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/here-in-california/feed 0 http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/oh-me-oh-my-im-a-fool-for-you-baby http://www.ordinary-times.com/archives/coversongday/2009/oh-me-oh-my-im-a-fool-for-you-baby#comments Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:14:37 +0000 Ben Moral http://ordinary-times.com/?p=3 Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby)

In high school, my friend Brady introduced me to the Buster Poindexter verson of this song. Only recently have I heard Aretha do it. In looking for the Aretha version, I found the original version by Lulu. Rediscovering the song made me appreciate how well-crafted a song it is.

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