excuse me

I may have actually suggested that "Diary of an Unborn Child" is an enjoyable song. It certainly is not. That's what I get for blogging in a rush before I have to leave for work.

Still, in spite of its awesome horridness, there is something backwardly reassuring about "Diary". Maybe it's the keyboard flub on the third line in the "sung" part of the song, which proves that Lil' Markie is not Satan. Satan would've asked for another take.

No relation to Biz Markie, unfortunately

So disturbing. The song's called "Diary of an Unborn Child", from an album with the tragically hopeful title "Volume 1". The mp3 is provided by show and tell music, a rather amazing outsider music resource I found through kittyspit.

Kittyspit, incidentally, is outstanding. To think I never would have found out about it without hitting that top right "next blog>>" button a few times. And "Lil' Markie" would never have been able to sing me his horrible song.

How to wrestle with this unbelievable exercise in creepiness? Here: what it most of all calls to my mind is a two-sentence bit from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that's been kicking around my head for the past couple of weeks, since I finally got around to reading the book. Here it is:

"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause."

That last bit stumped me when I read it, and it still sort of stumps me now. The "secret cause" of what? "Diary of an Unborn Child", in a most general sense, is a song about a death. Joseph Campbell, writing about Joyce's aesthetic sense as expressed in this quote, says that the secret cause of death is destiny: "...your own life course is the secret cause of your death... The accident that you die this way instead of in a different time and a different place is a fulfillment of your destiny.” (Thou Art That, edited by Eugene Kennedy, Novato, California, New World Library, 2001, pp 34, 35)

So. When the tragedy of "Diary of an Unborn Child" is assumed to be the termination of a fetus, the secret cause of this tragedy is therefore the course of the fetus's life. All through the song, Lil' Markie is carefully noting his physical development inside the womb. The tragedy of the abortion, announced with a fairly gastrointestinal key change, brings the listener's already queasy aesthetic sensibility to a fever pitch: "Today, my mother killed me". The listener is now encouraged to make a choice between pity and terror; to identify with the sufferer, or with his destiny.

But then Lil' Markie starts to sing.

This awful, awful voice breaks into song, to consider remorsefully and with gut-churningly inappropriate bathos, his "tragic" destiny. The melody is ludicrous, the lyrics ("I wonder what I would have grown up to be? I guess I'll never know, cause Mommy, you killed me") are grossly sentimental, icky, insincere. The song, which so far has been nothing but an extremely bad idea, a sort of musical nerve disorder, is now vaulted into a rarefied plateau: it is an instance of sonic terrorism.

Lil' Markie's omniscient little narrator has strapped this casiotone monstrosity around his waist like a bomb. The issue that is really at stake here is not the tragedy of abortion. It is the meanspirited ugliness of bad art. This song does not describe a tragedy so much as it is one.

So the choice that Joyce gives us - identify with the human sufferer or with the secret cause, pity or terror - is, in the face of "Diary of an Unborn Child", really as follows. The most facile choice of sufferer in this instance would seem to be the listener - you and me, bub. But there's something false about identifying with yourself as victim. That's one reason why we are moved to laugh.

In fact, the true sufferer is Lil' Markie. His bathetic unwholesomeness as a songwriter is a crippling social disease. His gift is to be irretrievably unfortunate. The ridiculousness of his song divides him from his message. Can we pity Lil' Markie? Some may choose to, but there's a malodorous intent at work in this song that keeps me, personally, from making that choice. I am forced to choose identification with the real secret cause: the basic, human inadequateness experienced by everyone who falls between Li'l Markie and James Joyce in the spectrum of ability to craft our emotions into art. Our own mush-mouthedness, limited vocabulary, stunted palette, whatever.

It's such terror as this song engenders that finally moves us, and makes us able to even enjoy it. Man, I wanna watch Eraserhead again.

dear golyadkin:

Please stop with the pop culture skewerings. This is not your metier. Also could you please start writing about music someday like you promised? Thank you.

Sincerely,

golyadkin

The ninth most loathsome person in America

No shit. Maybe if you did it would occur to you how complicit you are in a lot of really horrible things, beginning with (but not limited to) your music.

I think ninth is a little harsh myself, but pretty funny anyways.

Best Everything! Best Caterer! Best Goddamn Trash Removal! It's The BEST! Say it! SAY IT...

When I saw the ridiculous "jars of urine" set piece, I knew the art direction of this movie was going to get a nomination. ("My god, it's full of piss!") The screenplay was about as subtle as a Judas Priest riff. As a film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker has been responsible for some truly genre-recreating workmanship and deserves her nomination for that, but if we're going to get sticky, she has been getting away with some real bloated nonsense for ten or twelve years now. Cape Fear was the last truly great editing job she did.

Honestly, I've never seen such a bunch of crap be so thrust upon with accolades. The best thing I can say about this film is that Scorsese resisted the impulse to trim the "The" from its title. It's nice to see a "the" showing up on the marquees. Hunnnhhh... maybe if Marty would just go bankrupt again...

inauguration inoculation

I composed the following bit of prose from words and phrases cut-and-spliced from the text of Bush's inauguration speech. You're welcome:

Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the mercy of bullies.

You have seen that we have determined to give the ultimate control of ownership of retirement savings and health insurance to the narrowed and few; that the weak, the unwanted, and the unwilling have the urgent requirement of belief in our strength.

When the deep commitments that unite the families of communities with standards came under attack from a broader definition of liberty, we proclaimed that the union of a man and a man is always wrong, and we do not accept the possibility of women and women in unity and pride. Yet I will strive in good faith to protect the global appeal of a man in love with a bear.

By making every citizen an agent of intelligence, we will extend this vision: our nation relies on a neighbor who sees fellow citizens as emerging threats. On this prelude to Americans' accepted obligations, we will defend our control of the participation of the governed.

We will persistently clarify a moral imperative to every mind and every soul. We have proclaimed the choice before all Americans: an ownership society, the edge of subsistence, or prison.

Free nations have questioned the swiftest advance of force of arms in four decades. Yet we do not accept the existence of the concerted effort of tens of millions who doubt our policies.

We have seen the history of the United States: advancing grudging concessions to the rulers of outlaw regimes and the future leaders of dangerous and necessary governments, which persistently gather in destructive power. From the day of our founding, America's vital interests in dark places came like a single hand over the hopes of the decent and tolerant.

Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world: the soul of an ancient nation deserves to be a slave. Though freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, the wealth of your country will serve the urgent needs of our time.

May Vice President Cheney watch over the unfinished promise of his own destiny.

Where did you go so lonely, where?

Phone numbers are falling from the sky, from a fissure in the sky, saint peter is floating you his digits. It snows them everywhere you go. Inside a door, and a phalanx of left shoes sit cheek to jowl, tamed. The street outside is patiently waiting, but it ends before it reaches what it wants to show you. Tectonic plates approach and kiss below the ocean. The world is remembering itself. Your hand is clutched around one key. Explosions ring the air: buenos aires, buenas noches, bueno, bueno. It is time for you to leave. A single mote of dead skin has slipped to your eyelash. Dine, dine, and be resplendent. The Father is picking up the check.

Scribblings from lagoon-ah beach, minus fifty-one degrees celsius

When there is no stimulus left anymore with which to keep myself awake - no radio, no book, no porn, nothing to really even do besides move the dredge back and forth once an hour - I have to write. It's that or just sit out here becoming a tiny bit more stupid with every passing moment.

So I'll write, and if I remember, I'll tear these pages out. If I don't remember, my fellow dredge operators'll have some reading material to enjoy. Barely legible though it may be.

It's inhumanly cold at the moment, and plates of fog are moving across the lagoon. Pinpricks of ice float in the glare of the lights on the bank. I open the door to spit and the heat floods from my closet of a shack over the door jamb, a guilty trail of smoke, to disappear into winter. In five seconds it is gone, voided, destroyed.

If I stare too long at the lights on the dredge the image begins to swim through the darkness - the dimensions stretch lengthwise. I blink the bleariness away and the lights snap back.

Sherwood Park is a dull orange haze in the distance. Carcinogenic particles are frozen in the urban light pollution.

I sit and contemplate my cigarettes, trying to hold myself to one an hour.

Man, am I glad this night-shift bullshit will soon be a thing of the past. It gives me such a sour mood. We composter employees are kidding ourselves if we think we're immune to shift lag (here, under the shack's naked hundred-watt bulb, my swimming retinas transpose the words to "shitflag"). It's turning all of us into beaten animals. I used to get carded in liquor stores and bars all the time. In the past few months, nobody's asked. I'm finally beginning to look my age.

Two songs are running laps around my starving brain. There's the Cocteau Twins' "Cherry-coloured funk", a swirling bit of 1990-or-so pop impenetrability, with Liz Fraser's angel voice at mid-gallop over guitars run through a dozen chorus pedals. Then with the bumpy seam of a nicotine-and-solitude-addled synapse, it jerks into the theme from "The Facts of Life", which I'd found planted whole and unbidden in my head when I woke up this past morning. I'd terrorized my girlfriend with it, amazed that I knew the whole thing.

If you hear it from your brother, better clear it with your mother
Better get it right, call her late at night

Seriously, what the hell kind of advice is that? How totally implausible. You're living away from home, and your brother somehow imparts to you some bullshit factoid pertaining to sex - let's be clear, the show is called "The Facts of Life" - and this person wants you to call your mother at three in the morning with a question about penises and vaginas? Come on. In the first place, you're living away from home! You haven't got it figured out yet? And secondly: at three in the morning? Just make sure he wears a rubber and save your question for the daylight hours, okay? Your mother does not need wee-hour phone calls about venereal disease, you thoughtless cow.

YEAH!

YEAH! ####### Verily %%%%%%% HOTLIKKAHERMANNELSONaaaaaahhh &&&&& ohwwwwnoaaeiudidunt ####### partly partly UUUHHH!

YYYYYEEEEAAAAAHHHH!

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god's foot upon the treadle of the loom

The night before last I dreamed about my life as it is now. It was really sunny and colourful and very home-movieish, moments with my girl, success at my job, nothing too specific, but, you know, good feelings. Then the dream breaks through the fourth wall and there's old Joe Pesci, wearing glasses like Lew Wasserman's. My dream is a film he's screening in his study. He turns away from it and says to the projectionist: "This isn't working. We have to do something." When I woke up, it was 2005.

Don't fucking tell me that. I'm not ready to have a bad year. Give me at least a couple months to brace for it.