Dan Deacon – Ohio

I saw Dan Deacon in May at Richards on Richards, in Vancouver. He puts on an incredible show. I got caught up in the dance pit and was nearly crushed by enthusiastic fans.

He’s genius. Pure genius.

Lyrics to Ohio :
I guess I sort of lied when I said it’s not that bad.

That dog, black cat, that little tiny man…

I guess I sort of lied when I said it’s not that bad.

I fly that helicopter, that red and white van.

Ohio, is it too late, Ohio?

We’re talking paper forks now!
We’re talking bacon cuts now!
We’re talking turkey, talking turkey, walking every ???? now!

We’re talking 16 ska bands!
We’re talking 19 ska bands!
We’re talking rooty suits and rooty boots and sooty moots do!

I guess I sort of lied when I said it’s not that bad.

That dog, BLACK CAT! That little tiny man…

I guess I sort of lied when I said it’s not that bad.

I’d fly that helicopter, that red and white van.

Ohio, is it too late, Ohio?

It Happens in Florida

A pal of mine’s pal of a pal. Just the song, no video, unfortunately.

What the hell was I thinking?

Suburbia is: dead hands hitting the keys of an overplayed song, or

live hands hitting a piano that has been tuned by a tone-deaf blind stripling.

It is proud and defeated.

(Unquestioning, always asserting: more curbs, more bushes, more grass – grass – grass!)

It gets into your blood.

(Does it get into your blood?)

It gets into your blood.

I SERVE NACHOS AT A SOFTBALL PARK

C’est vrais.

It is the beautiful life.

Burst

This is not my love song.
Your voice is aching through the afternoon,
throbbing against the diffident sidewalk traffic:

- they pause – they pause – they cannot pause longer.

I feel something like benevolence
hitting you.

The corners of my
cheeks raising – muscles tensed
with pleasure.

Your fingers are not dancers.
They are fingers, calloused against the strings,
striking strings

just strings
and I am burst.

First Thoughts

I thought I might toss in my first thoughts to the sacrificial burning-through of William Gibson’s Neuromancer to the gods of the Science Fiction book club.

The club has discussed the tendency in the science fiction novels we’ve read already to be written with a fluid, anglo-American machismo. Certainly in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, the perspective of the first-person narrator is composed with unripple-able emotional cool – despite the endless life-threatening proliferation of man-eating plants. In The Island of Dr. Moreau the first-person narrator is still mainly emotionally inaccessible, but has human responses to the horrors that surround him. He still maintains a level-headed, factual account of his traumatizing experience on the island. None of that feminized hysteria for him.

But gosh and golly, William Gibson created the Marlboro man of the future. For Case – the protagonist – money, women, body-health, personal-relations all come second to his fervent desire to hustle in cyberspace. The narrative tone is all bravado, quick-paced, jargon-heavy. You imagine a wily man behind a drooping cigarette, feet propped up on a beat-up desk, idly playing with a revolver as he tells you the story.

The story is essentially a compilation of wet-dreams collected from nerdy computer-bound boys or girls interested in lithe, dangerous women, technology and big guns.

You can’t blame the man for being emotionally calloused, spending his life as a street-savvy hustler. But, can you blame the narrator for the heady mix of future-street-lingo, the introduction of what seems to be an endless stream of peripheral characters, and the bloated egoistic tone?

Well, why bother, I guess. There is a measure of seduction that popular authors try to employ with tone. Gibson’s narrator has a bullying tone, a continually challenging machismo, riddled with mysterious terms – leaving you feeling diminuitive in the shadow of the prose. Just as the endlessly persuasive Robinson Crusoe (what I see as an essential piece of proto-Anglo-American popular fiction) assumes a tone of unquestionable authority, of indisputed superiority through the voice of the narrator.

And, we the readers – culturally primed by centuries of literature read to us by aggressive narrators which assume a perfect voice of reason, not desiring questioning or participation, enjoy having a bloated ego pushing us along through a narrative.

It is all the forbidden machismo, the runamok cow-boy attitude that we crave, dovetailing with our desire to be pummelled with new technology.

It’s very good entertainment.

in tandem to ‘for McSpadden’ by Haakon Jack

when you can’t get into a bottle of
Argentinian malbec you just need to take
a hacksaw to the top.

I’ll hold the body, while you work vigor
to weaken the neck

hack hack hack.

When next you take a copper tube
and crack it firmly and purposefully

against the glass,

make sure you have a plan for all the
murky red

that comes cracking out.

http://flowerstheeyesofleopards.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/for-mcspadden/#comment-24

WOMAN

Woman be an aesthete. Be tough as cartilage.
Wear jewels like a Maharajah, demand a ring left AND right.
Step on the throats of your men.

Woman paint yourself bronze,
agonize agonize over your

cellulite thighs.

Teach the children white teeth.

Woman snap. Crackle. Pop when you get the inclination.

Woman glow, woman darken your eyes. Woman watch Oprah.

Woman don’t let your hair grow wild. Snip snip snip.

Girl you are a woman.
Child you are a woman.

Man, you should be a woman.

Woman never break.

I woke up this morning

I woke up this morning wrapped up in an old blanket, with the orange living-room colours painted bright with sunshine.

I woke up this morning wrapped up in an old orange living room, with the colours sunshine-painted bright with blanket.

I woke up this morning wrapped up with-in an old sunshine, the bright blanket orange living room with colours painted.

I woke up this morning wrapped up in an old bright sunshine-orange living room, with colours painted with blanket.

I woke up this morning painted bright with living room in an old sunshine blanket, wrapped up with orange-colours.

every scar on my body

ocean you have licked every
scar on my body

you smell salty-fecetic.

you smell like a soft-breathing hymn.

ocean you sit large and bright
like a fluid star
flickering under the hard blue-black
skies

dissolving my image and choking
down rocks.