Talking to a Stranger
"Souvent pour s'amuser les hommes d'equipage,
And it's like talking to a stranger,
Remember the panic in its delectable face when I touched it,
It was like talking to a stranger,
Venetian candles penetrated its heart,
It trembles like talking to a stranger,
And oh, Miss Jesus, tell me where are your black eyes?
Your baby was talking to a stranger, no, no...
Souvent pour s'amuser les hommes d'equipage,
And it's like talking to a stranger,
You tasted mustard when she painted your face,
And it was like talking to a stranger,
And oh, Miss Jesus, tell me where are your black eyes?
Your baby was talking to a stranger,
Souvent pour s'amuser les hommes d'equipage,
And it's like talking to a stranger, no, no...
Souvent pour s'amuser les hommes d'equipage,
And it's like talking to a stranger,
You tasted mustard when she painted your face,
And it was like talking to a stranger,
Remember the panic in its delectable face when you touched it,
It was like talking to a stranger,
And oh, Miss Jesus, tell me where are your black eyes?
Your baby was talking to a stranger, talking to a stranger, no, no..."
-Hunters & Collectors, "Talking to a Stranger", Hunters & Collectors, 1982
(I'm pleased that I can finally post this now that I've got the album. Oh, it kills! Dying animal sounds like 23 Skidoo? Subversive dance music? Dadaist non-sequiturs? The best song A Certain Ratio never made? Give me more o' that, please! Hopefully some of you watched the video when I posted it, too.)
I really haven't been up to much of anything until yesterday. I had my usual DJ meeting on Sunday and my regular shift on early Tuesday morning, but nothing really noteworthy happened until yesterday. Not that Independence Day was terribly interesting for me either -- all I did was go grocery shopping (and I heard The Church's "Reptile" at Publix, whoa!) and then borrowed a number of CDs from the professor's house and burnt them onto this computer. Oh, and I watched the first part of When the Levees Broke, too. That was severely distressing, and I wasn't even there. I actually wanted to volunteer with the Red Cross when Katrina hit New Orleans until I found out that the Red Cross wasn't even being allowed into the city, and then I felt really unhelpful and didn't know what else I could do, so I never did help out. I wish I could've seen New Orleans before then. In December 2000, my father, his girlfriend, my brother and I went to Houston to see my great-grandmother and my great-aunt, and we had originally planned to stop in New Orleans for lunch. However, we were making good time, so we bypassed the city around the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain via Interstate 12. (For those who aren't American or aren't too knowledgeable about roads, 12 is an 82-mile straight shot from Baton Rouge to Mississippi that saves time for travelers heading west and east on Interstate 10 because it avoids New Orleans and doesn't having to drop 20 miles around the southern shore of Pontchartrain. That's what 10 does on its way toward New Orleans.) We ended up dining at the western edge of the Atchafalaya Basin in some shack in Breaux Bridge that served gumbo and etouffee and we didn't go through New Orleans on the way back to Houston, either. I also found out in the documentary that Metairie and Kenner flooded, and I'd wondered how those made it through Katrina because my paternal grandfather lives in one of those cities. I'm not sure if he weathered the storm or lost anything at all because everyone on my father's side of the family hates/wants to kill each other and doesn't speak to one another, as most of you might know, so it's all supremely disconnected.
This morning on my way to the station, my city bus pulled off the side of Lafayette Street and the driver stepped out, followed quickly by two of the passengers, to get some Rally's! Ahh, only in Tallahassee. When I arrived at the DJ booth today, the 12 O'Clock Takeover book was missing -- and apparently has been for two days now, but luckily one of the girls on the bus (this cool goth lady who I see from time to time) and I ended up plotting out a potential Takeover after I worried that I wouldn't be able to pull one out since all but five of the listener request sheets are filled out by people who don't listen to the station/have no clue about what we play/have no knowledge of music outside of Korn and Rihanna/think independent music is all Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley and The Elected and Pixies and post-"She Don't Use Jelly" Flaming Lips and those awful honkies on the Anticon label who think they make hip-hop. So it was done in tribute of the bus driver and those aforementioned passengers who scored some fast food while I was worrying that I would be late for the 12 O'Clock Takeover, and together we came up with Gang of Four's "Cheeseburger", The Fatima Mansions' "Only Losers Take the Bus", Talibam!'s "Hungry Hungry Hemisphere", Medium Medium's "Hungry, So Angry", the band Cheeseburger (ended up playing "Rats"), and only Temple of the Dog's "Hunger Strike" and Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (it was in the beginning of The Hunger, get it?) didn't get played. We don't have the former of those two anyhow -- which would normally be a good thing, but today I would've been crazy enough to broadcast it for a laugh. It'd be like that time I found the 12" for TLC's "No Scrubs" and one of CeCe Peniston's minor hit singles in the hip-hop section. After finishing up my shift, I moseyed over to Circle K and came across slunkie sitting outside Panchero's, so we ventured into the convenience store before heading down to All Saints for a few hours and finally walking back up to my mother's office. Lindsay left to study and I went with my mother to buy Publix subs before returning home and watching this DVD of performances on Later with Jools Holland that my little brother actually had the good sense of renting! Which is weird because -- oh shoot, I didn't mention that he came back from Panama City on Wednesday, did I? No? Silly me. He complained about how crap the music was over there and how his cousins were always online (not that he's any different, nor am I these days) but made a bunch of money by watching over his second-cousins and then spent it on The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Linkin Park. I swear, as soon as he starts to develop a bit of taste and borrows my CDs or something -- I recently wowed him with the similarities between Bloc Party's new one and Long Fin Killie, par example, and just last night we were grooving to Happy Mondays -- he turns around and destroys it by doing something like that or playing System of a Down on repeat (oh Kashina, you'll love that one!). I don't write that from a sense of elitism -- after all, he's not the one who's been listening to remixes of Cathy Dennis lately! -- but more out of amusement with how he wants to shed adolescent cliches and then runs back toward them. Me, I've just been trying to understand why people love pop singles after reading Bill Drummond's 45 and trying to rediscover my affection for popular songs that I didn't particularly mind. I've been out of the mindset I had about four or five years ago where all music had to be serious and needed to be compounded by meaningful lyrics that read like poetry, so it's the next step, although I definitely appreciate a well-penned lyric de temps en temps and personally try my damnedest to strike a balance with writing literate songs that people don't feel stupid for singing while refining them enough to not suffer from any sort of pretense. Even then, some of my lyrics still feel a bit too unwieldly because I'm great at coming up with one quotable line after another and end up cramming as much as I can into one line so it reads well, although it consequently becomes nigh on impossible to sing! (Well, for others to sing anyhow. I can make it work for me, barely.) Luckily, I don't seem to encounter that issue very often anymore. I would hope so after writing songs for ten years! I can't believe it's been that long. I think I've written well over 1000 songs since then, although I've become less prolific and have only completed about 100-150 sets of lyrics in the past three or four years. And I've thrown all but 25-30 completed ones away and fragments of another 75-100 that I've been working on or trying to mesh together. I treat it all like that practice of burning your first 500 paintings before you become any good at it. Lord, I'm king of the ramble today -- how did I get onto that? I never discuss my songwriting habits! I'm usually too embarrassed to mention them because I feel like others might consider me some sort of bigshot when I say that I make music and write songs. When I went to New York a few years ago and visited Lucy, apparently I never mentioned to any of her friends that I made music, so when her friend Bronwen heard one of my songs she was rather shocked that I didn't make a note of it. And she liked what I did (and I hadn't even broken out of my lo-fi phase at that time!), which was extremely flattering because Bronwen is a fucking sorcerer on piano, self-taught and playing as colorfully and conjuring as many emotions as Julian Swales of Kitchens of Distinction would. Even then, she was still more complex. I don't think I'll ever hear piano like that again in my life.
My brother just came back briefly from Raphie's a little whole ago to collect some belongings because he's staying the night over there, and Raphie's sister apparently liked the Hunters & Collectors album I'm listening to. I hadn't bought any CDs in a while (save for Gal Costa's 1969 self-titled), so I ordered their self-titled 1982 debut and Oh-OK's The Complete Recordings for a pretty cheap price, and they finally arrived today. Now that it's Friday, I suppose later today (or rather, in the evening hours) I'll attend First Friday. On Saturday I'm doing the Time Machine program, and I have a feeling it'll be my best one yet. I'm trying not play anything that I've broadcasted before. Sunday I'll likely submit some music into rotation and I'm not too sure what I'll be up to in the following week. Wow, I wrote waaay more than I thought I would this evening, and I didn't even start my proposed essay on my take on politics and why I think the way I do and what it says about (the repression in) modern society when the individuals in it concoct concepts as sordid as 600-man bukkake.
Two more for the road.
The Verve - "Country Song"
(It was released as one of the "Bittersweet Symphony" b-sides but was recorded as a demo for A Northern Soul. It could've made it on that album. It should've been on Urban Hymns, too.)
FK9 - "All That Fall"
(The rips I obtained of their two lone releases are pretty poor, and this is probably the cleanest one of them all, so I figured I'd post it. Great band, should've been around longer than two years, shouldn't have been relegated to extreme obscurity. I'd reissue their output if I had my Primary Benelux record label. LTM, are you reading? Words on Music? Anyone?)