Archive: Ben Moral
It must have been 6 or 7 years ago I recorded these few songs and gave them as an album to a few family members for Christmas. My side project was called the Fuck Politics. Two of these songs were on a Morals album. Here, there is a lot of hiss, but I actually like these recordings quite a bit, considering. It’s very literary, I’ll try to disassemble my pretension for you a bit.
1) The Gossamer Thread You Fling
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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
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This one, for example.
3) One Year In Every Ten
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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
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It’s “I Hear America Singing” set to music.
5) I Pour the Cream
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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.
A song by Laura Gibson from her excellent album Beasts of Seasons called “Funeral Song”:
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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
|| To Be Of Use
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|| Utilities
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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]
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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.
Here’s “When I’m Gone” from Kind of Like Spitting’s Phil Ochs covers album Learn: The Songs of Phil Ochs:
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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]
Sorry I’ve been away. Summer makes butterflies of us all.
Here’s a song that kills me:
Kind of Like Spitting – Line and Sinker
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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
Made this weekend:
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
From today’s Oregonian:
“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.”
Deafkitties: i had the worst dream last night!!
Ben Moral: about what?
Deafkitties: scott and i were traveling through maine
Ben Moral: ew
Ben Moral: what an awful dream!
Deafkitties: and we went to some bbq and there was a girl there that i knew he would be attracted to
Ben Moral: uh oh
Ben Moral: was she a LOBSTER MAIDEN?
Deafkitties: and he basically ended up leaving me for her
Deafkitties: it sucked
Deafkitties: YES
Ben Moral: PINCERS!
Deafkitties: and she looked like his ex
Deafkitties: it was gross
Ben Moral: which?
Deafkitties: L••• [name redacted -ed.]
Ben Moral: CRAZY
Deafkitties: the only cool part was when i was driving through maine
Deafkitties: there were planets circling the sky
Deafkitties: and like 11 moons
Deafkitties: maine was another world
Ben Moral: my friend adam worked at a tool museum in rural maine for a summer
Ben Moral: it was just him
Ben Moral: in the tool museum
Ben Moral: in this town of like 1000
Deafkitties: tool museum
Deafkitties: hahaha
Ben Moral: yeah
Ben Moral: totally
Ben Moral: it was just busts of George Bush and the singer of Creed
Deafkitties: shut up
Ben Moral: man, i dreamed and remembered it for the first time in a long time
Deafkitties: how’d it go?
Ben Moral: ugh
Ben Moral: not great
Ben Moral: it was like
Ben Moral: did you see wristcutters?
Ben Moral: where they kill themselves
Deafkitties: i think so..?
Deafkitties: and tom waits is in heaven
Ben Moral: and end up in a place just like earth
Ben Moral: but a little bit worse
Deafkitties: yes
Ben Moral: the dream was like that
Ben Moral: it wasn’t a nightmare
Ben Moral: it was just….a little bit worse than life
Ben Moral: i don’t remember the details any more
Ben Moral: but i realized that it was WAY worse than a nightmare
Ben Moral: because instead of waking up scared and then chilling out
Ben Moral: i woke up feeling just kind of bummed
Ben Moral: and stayed that way for like an hour
