It’s the End Of The World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

That's great it starts with an earthquake birds and snakes an aeroplane- Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane listen to yourself churn world serves its own needs don't mis-serve your own needs feed it up a knock speed grunt no strength no ladder structure clatter with fear of height down height wire in a fire represent the seven games in a government for hire and a combat site left her wasn't coming in a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck team by team reporters baffled trump tethered crop look at that low plane fine then uh oh overflow population common group but it'll do save yourself serve yourself world serves its own needs listen to your heart bleed tell me with the rapture and the reverent in the right- right. You vitriolic patriotic slam fight bright light feeling pretty psyched.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

Six o'clock TV hour don't get caught in foreign tower slash and burn return listen to yourself churn lock him in uniform and book burning blood letting every motive escalate automotive incinerate light a candle light a motive step down step down watch a heel crush crush uh oh this means no fear cavalier renegade and steer clear a tournament a tournament a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions offer me alternatives and I decline.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

The other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide Mount St. Edelite LEONARD BERNSTEIN Leonid Brezhnev Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs birthday party cheesecake jelly bean boom you symbiotic patriotic slam but neck right? Right.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine….

-Michael Stipe

Go On Ahead

You go on ahead, honey
You have a good time there
You make me feel funny
I'm no ordinary lover or friend

I believe we have things to do
I believe in myself and I believe in you
I believe when I sleep you are near to me
When you sleep I am near to you

You walk out of the room with your hands so deep
in your pockets, I don't recognize you
You say you're a ghost in our house and I realize
I do think I see through you

So, you go on ahead, honey
You have a good time there
You make me feel funny
I'm no ordinary lover or friend

It's a death in our love that has brought us here
It's a birth that has changed our lives
It's a place that I hope we'll be leaving soon
And I fear for the year in his eyes

And it goes around in circles
One night is lovely, the next is brutal
And you and me are in way over our heads with this one
It's hard to admit it
But you hold me and I can't feel you
We hurt but we smile
I promise I'll make it back when the summer has warmed me awhile

You go on ahead, honey
You have a good time there
You make me feel funny
I'm no ordinary lover or friend

I believe we have things to do
I believe in myself and I believe in you
I believe when I sleep you are near to me
When you sleep I am near to you

-Liz Phair

Mouthful of Cavities

(Listen, man, I’ve got the window open- hear the cats? Listen….)

Mouthful of cavities
Your soul’s a bowl of jokes
And everyday you remind me
How I’m desperately in need

See, I got a lot of fiends around
And they’re peaking through nothing new
They see you
They see everything you do

Seeing everything on the inside, out

Oh, please give me a little more
And I’ll push away those baby blues
’Cause one of these days this will die
So will me and so will you

I write a letter to a friend of mine
I tell him how much I used to love to
Watch him smile
See I haven’t seen him smile in a little while

Haven’t seen him smile in a little while

But, I know you’re laughin’ from the
Inside out
Laughin’ from the inside out
I know you’re laughin’ from the
Inside out
Laughin’ from the inside
From the inside
From the inside, out

-Blind Melon

Oregon Symphony

There is nothing quite so effective at reminding one of how much they love something as watching it being destroyed. Halfway through The Oregon Symphony’s highly ironic arrangement of Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” which opened the concert I went to last night, tears began streaming down my face. I have been brought to tears by music many times before, but these were not tears inspired by sublimity, these were tears for the dead. It’s not that I hadn’t been warned- the title of the concert was, after all, Soul of New Orleans. But there was no second line happening this night. This was nails being pounded tight enough into the coffin to ensure no soul would escape. After that first tragic song, the conductor, Jeff Tyzik, smugly quipped, “I can guarantee you’ve never heard that song played like that before. And I can guarantee there’s more of it to come!” And he was oh, so right.

The featured artist for the evening was a trumpeter/vocalist named Byron Stripling. His forte was witty between-song banter. And he thought he was really funny. As a musician, he was strikingly boring and conservative. He stuck to the melody, and the arrangements conveniently removed virtually all improvisation. In fact, he played all of one extended trumpet solo the entire evening, in “Honeysuckle Rose,” during which he had obviously no idea what to do whatsoever. He ended a full three measures short of the turnaround! His intonation was tight, avoiding blue notes and vibrato. He had an interesting habit of moving his pinky up and down- obviously pretending that there was a valve under it. “What a showman!” the middle-aged white people in attendance will say….

Before beginning one of the great classic blues songs of all time, Stripling did a routine overtly making fun of the blues. This was redundant, to be sure. What was the point of this concert? Why spend an evening going out of your way to ruin a truly original American classical art form? Why not just stick with playing Mozart and Elgar? While making fun of them, Stripling struggled to name some blues singers. He did come up with James Rushing. James Rushing? He is always called JIMMY Rushing! Even the guest musician had not bothered with getting an education in the true version of this music before dismissing it.

During the first set, they made a few ill-advised attempts at small group playing, but with the piano shoved practically off stage left, and the scattered trombonist and clarinetist, it was obvious that even if they had bothered to try listening to each other they wouldn’t really have been able to. There was also a guest drummer who was about as competent as a senior in any reasonably proficient high school jazz band. He was buried behind the violas with a plexi-glass screen in front of him, presumably because he can’t control his own dynamics or there’d be no such thing as getting him subdued enough.

The second set was to begin with “King Porter Stomp,” another of my favorite tunes. In his introduction, the conductor mentioned the Fletcher Henderson arrangement then bragged, “We don’t have Fletcher Henderson’s sax section, but he didn’t have OUR string section.” Oh, hell no! Fletcher Henderson assembled many of the greatest musicians of the 20’s and early 30’s to be in his highly innovative band and was probably the greatest arranger of all time, sacrificing his career as a bandleader to become Bennie Goodman’s full-time arranger. The Oregon Symphony is a bunch of hacks. I seriously wanted to punch Mr. Tyzik in the teeth.

As I scanned ahead on the program, I grimaced at anticipation of Flat Foot Floogie, because I knew this guy wasn’t going to be able to scat or was just going to act like a jackass while doing it. After all, he had already derided music with words you can’t understand. It did not escape me that the program misspelled Slim Gaillard’s name, nor did it pass me by lightly when Stripling referred to him as a “one-hit wonder.” Uh- hello? You’re seriously going to call a popular live entertainer and master of his idiom with a 40 year career a one-hit wonder? Stripling’s attempt at scat lived up to its name.

Up until the last one, every song had ended with the high tonic being held surprisingly short on the trumpet, followed by Stripling pumping his fist in the air at his own brilliance. It was forgivable that he didn't have Armstrong, Gillespie or Fergusen's range, but I doubted he had the ear to even play the fifth above or something interesting. Well, he finally went for it, but we'll never know what “it” was, because he flubbed it ENTIRELY. He quickly took the horn out of his mouth while grinning slyly as if he’d meant to do that. Is there any way to make a deal with the devil to trade this fucker’s soul for jazz back? Long live jazz; jazz is dead.

Just Like a Woman

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain
Ev'rybody knows
That Baby's got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls.

She takes just like a woman, yes, she does
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.

Queen Mary, she's my friend
Yes, I believe I'll go see her again
Nobody has to guess
That Baby can't be blessed
Till she finally sees that she's like all the rest
With her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls.

She takes just like a woman, yes,
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.

It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what's worse
Is this pain in here
I can't stay in here
Ain't it clear
That I just can't fit
Yes, I believe it's time for us to quit
When we meet again
Introduced as friends
Please don't let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world.

Ah, you fake just like a woman, yes, you do
You make love just like a woman, yes, you do
Then you ache just like a woman
But you break just like a little girl.

-Bob Dylan

Classical Music

Cooking

Although I have a solid reputation as a loner, it is a well-known secret that, going back to high school, I have almost always had a girlfriend. Recently, however, I’m thinking, “fuck ‘em,” and not in the sense that I usually mean that.

When I break it down, girls are useful for four things: conversation, haircuts, cooking and physical contact. (If you look closely enough, that last one is really two things.)

I've seldom found good conversation to be gender-specific, except I DO love to flirt. True; haircuts and cooking aren't actually gender-specific either; I just find it sexy when women do them and not men. Is that sexist?

Since my hair “style” consists of me never combing my hair (an ex from college is the genesis of this, by the way), giving myself haircuts is pretty easy- I simply stand in front of a mirror with scissors and hack at it until it is sticking up everywhere.

So now I’m teaching myself to cook. Like everything one doesn’t know how to do- it’s not as hard as it looks. I’ll never understand those who say they “can’t” do something. My experience is that most humans aren’t actually very clever- if someone else can do it, then so can I. Perhaps I can never do it expertly, but that’s a different thing entirely.

The first thing to do when acquiring a skill is to recognize your weaknesses. One thing I know about me is that I have a very poor sense of volume and clock-time. I have to measure and time everything; if I try to guess, I fuck it up. Another weakness when cooking is that I can’t stand untidiness. Cooking makes a mess! I get OCD about cleaning everything all the time, which distracts me from the cooking part of it. I honestly don’t know that I will ever be able to leave all the dishes until after I’ve eaten, but I can find a balance I’m sure.

The second thing to do is recognize your strengths. I am a master of taking copious notes. Every recipe needs fine-tuning, and I love that part of the process. Also, “undaunted” could be my middle name. I don’t mind fucking up a dish, because I figure out what to NOT do next time.

Anyway, I’m still eating. The whole physical contact thing though; I don’t see myself joining a convent anytime soon….

Bad Reputation

I don’t give a damn ‘bout my reputation
You’re living in the past- it’s a new generation
A girl can do what she wants to do
and that’s what I’m gonna do
An’ I don’t give a damn ‘bout my bad reputation

Oh no, not me

An’ I don’t give a damn ‘bout my reputation
Never said I wanted to improve my station
An’ I’m only doin’ good when I’m havin’ fun
An’ I don’t have to please no one
An’ I don’t give a damn ‘bout my bad reputation

Oh no, not me
Oh no, not me

I don’t give a damn ‘bout my reputation
I’ve never been afraid of any deviation
An’ I don’t really care if ya think I’m strange
I ain’t gonna change
An I’m never gonna care ‘bout my bad reputation

Oh no, not me
Oh no, not me

(Pedal boys!)

An’ I don’t give a damn ‘bout my reputation
The worlds in trouble; there’s no communication
An’ everyone can say what they want to say
It never gets better anyway
So why should I care ‘bout a bad reputation anyway?

Oh no, not me
Oh no, not me

I don’t give a damn bout my bad reputation
You’re living in the past- it’s a new generation
An’ I only feel good when I got no pain
An’ that’s how I’m gonna stay
An I don’t give a damn ‘bout my bad reputation

Oh no, not me
Oh no, not ME…
NOT ME, not me
NOT ME!

-Joan Jett

Technology Dependence