Who are you, Elle Mary?
Please "like" our new band The Manna Tease on facebooks here.
I'm sorry, I botched a key word in the lyrics, 'gutter' should be 'trucker.' Here are the lyrics & chords tho, to this short song:
C
F F7 C
Who are you, Elle Mary?
F F7 D/F# G
How far have you followed me?
amin C/E F D/F#
My surprise at your disguise.
C/G G
A trucker whore or so much more?
Bb F C
Ooo- - -
We will start premiering The Manna Sustains at some point, hopefully soon!
Today's recording we refer to as the "Red Hook" version, for obvious reasons.
If you require to download this mp3, the album Stuck Home Syndrome available here! Friends around the Campfire on facebooks here!
Remember when we played guess-the-director for the upcoming weird "Bad Lieutenant" movie. Mr Quill just sent me an article with an update on the movie, the headline in Paste: "Werner Herzog's Bizarro Nic Cage Flick Railroaded on Theatrical Release." We weren't sure what that means:
Some more of my film has been developed (using an ancient chemical process), & I'll sort them out thematically. A lot of our time in Eastern Europe this summer was spent bumming around by bus or train with a motley entourage, some of them you know as contributors to this website. The first three are en route to the Big Little, & the latter four was our slow local train out from Vratsa to Lom.
The All-California Sacred Harp Convention was all day today & tomorrow, at San Carlos just south of San Francisco. The turnout was great & the singing was loud & the weather was hot. I'm sure tomorrow will be great too, & there'll be an after party with a new music sing, including some tunes from the Western Harmony.
I had fairly large plans for my belated Christmas week in Lake Tahoe: go skiing, recalibrate my life's direction for the new year, don't drink too much & do my stretches.
Of course I did none of these, all I did was record an earth-shattering debut hip-hop album & watch television. Today I'm taking the No. 5 California Zephyr train West back toward Berkeley, & I leave the blogosphere with several thoughts while I'm on this famously beautiful slow late train.
First thought: Televisions that can rewind & fast forward are completely revolutionary. I thought it was really slick programming. There's also a computer hooked up to my parents' weirdly large tv, so I was able to pause the Daily Show, go onto Netflix an watch an episode of 30 Rock, then go back to Comedy Central, & fast forward thru all the ads. Also, why are there so many commercials for body products? These may seem like mundane observations, but I haven't had a tv since before high school, when my parents had one of those box-shaped thingies that only had like thirty channels.
Second thought: 30 Rock is super high quality comedy, & it's especially good if you watch about twenty-six episodes in a row in one sitting.
Third thought: Don't worry about the Daily Show: they've been joking about how Jan. 20th is the End of Comedy, but one of the writers made some comment about how, with Democrats controlling all three branches of government, they may have to do two shows a day.
Fourth thought: Rep. Barney Frank was on the Rachel Maddow show, & he's hilarious. I had no idea. Also, everyone's been singing Maddow's praises, & it's true that she's charming & witty, but she & a couple of her regulars all talk in the same inflections that Keith Olbermann does - - is MSNBC in some sort of lost fifty-eighth state with its own accent & emphàsises, a televisional subculture of mainstream liberal righteousness? Do they have strawberry zeppelins there? In conclusion, I don't see her as as much of a refreshing break from mainstream talking heady punditry as I've heard her heralded.
Fifth thought: If they had television on the zephyr train, we wouldn't have to stare out the window at the Sierra Nevadas & listen to podcasts...
Sixth thought: I was ugly in Middle School, I found a whole drawer full of embarrassing photos:
On second viewing, it looks like someone's found the ugliest imaginable image of my brother & I & photoshopt it on one of Mr Quill's Siberian photographs. This one, for instance, is like less than two years later, when I got cool again:
I wrote these lyrics on the California Zephyr train this morning, & post them here as a tentative coming out for the genre of Celestial Hip-Hop, with beats by the DJ Gold Diamonds. (Download the mp3 by clicking on either thing, or just play below).
"The MC Pseudo-Pseudo owns his own microphone!"
Update: Okay, the semi-final remastering is up, along with the full EP. Download it now!
Good Morning, It Was Lost Nation. Many of you, our loyal readers, will know that in previous years, we have stayed quiet thru elections, perhaps subtly hinting at things to undermine candidates like Richard Pombo, but never wishing to alienate a portion of our diverse demographic by going all hippy-lefty & outright suggesting to vote for the Democrats. In breaking with tradition, the Editors at Itwaslost.org, after not sleeping for most of October & chain-smoking cigarettes on black & white 35mm film, have collaborated on this short argument for the difficult choice you must make on November 4th. It is a close election, with the Democratic Challenger running a mere 14-points ahead in the opinion polls, & conservative pundits acting like albino wallaroos, dabbing their bleached rhinariums with their handkerchiefs & wishing they were kangaroos.
We like Barack Obama’s compelling candidacy because we believe that he reads books. He has shown himself to be a human being of exemplary intelligence in a nation & an era where intelligence is considered suspect. Is it some mistake that Senator Obama reads? That he urges us to read? That he reads to his children & urges us to read to our children? What does reading have to do with future generations (beyond ensuring that they will know which bus they are riding on)? Senator Obama has repeatedly, in his writings & in interviews, emphasized the importance of empathy. Didn’t Charles Dickens spread empathy to the British people by writing intimately of the lives of London’s poor & then selling his writings to the middle & upper classes. Literacy is a gateway to the empathetic capacity. Thus, true intelligence, & the preservation of our nation’s promise, depend upon the literacy of the people. In one of Norman Mailer’s old letters published in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, he mourned the loss of JFK because “Kennedy was giving a great boost to the arts, not because Jackie Kennedy was inviting Richard Wilbur to the White House, but somehow the lid was off, & now I fear it’s going to be clamped on tight again.” Has it really now been on for forty-five years?
We're picking our own president in our own election. We need to listen to ourselves. Maybe if we met ourselves today, we wouldn't like ourselves. Weigh up the presidential tasks, calculate their impact, throw in Abu Ghraib photographs, affix an occupation of Iraq, add Gitmo, append oratory skills or complete lack thereof, & you'll see the sum of presidential decision-making is a part of our own self-image in that old modernist way, the imagined community called nation, or Nation. Two-hundred thousand people turned up in Berlin to tell us they know we used to be better, nicer, & smarter. They want to friend us on Facebook. They'd like to share a pitcher at pub quiz sometime. They want to cat-sit when we're out-of-town. So they held an intervention.
It is true that we fly several large American flags outside of the itwaslost.org hq in Imaginary America, & that our pet interventionist eagle is named Woodrow, but these are mere superficial displays of our love of American iconography. We are patriots but not nationalists. Nationalism & the Fascism it spawns shadow the horizons of America today. The line between Patriotism & Nationalism is drawn by intelligence, which acts as safeguard against Fascism in it’s many manifestations. We are almost certainly elitists of course, but abundant, generous elitists with ties to our community, both our Hood & our Imaginary Community.
Community is Not a Word. Community is a life force, like a plant or an ant or a little boy, or yogurt. I know that recently words & communities have been reduced to punch lines of the scornful & lonely, the desperate & angry, those in the shadow of the current sunshine we will call Barack Obama. Well we am here to tell you that what Barack "Sunshine" O'bama cares about are communities, not words. If he had a choice, he would certainly leave words where they belong: pinned up under Karl Rove's dark cloak of infinite meaning, not within the public sphere or even in casual conversation.
Obama is not a wordologist, as some may have us believe. He is a community man & as I have pointed out "Community" isn't even a word, it simply is. Words do not even exist until some foolish wordy wordsmith forces them into our comfortable word-free living rooms, & we am talking about things that exist, like Barack Obama & America's Democracy &c. Community is a natural phenomenon, a constant. Barack does not actually speak or write, he believes in communities & the operating functionaries of these systems - me! you! your mother! your plants & your goddamned brother & all those people who live very close to you but who you would never dare speaking to. Senator Obama just believes & suddenly so do other people. Nobody talks, Nobody recites, Nobody tells jokes, Nobody mistakes Muslims for terrorists, or Christians for Muslims, or critical thinking for anti-americanism, or being sexy for irresponsibility and naïveté. No! Nobody uses words. Words use us.
So, what creates a robust new economy? Communities! What is ever more important in this rapidly expanding network of lives? The smallest of those networks: Communities! (& fungus) What will make us happy & teach us what to remind ourselves of? Communities! What will it take to understand that we are not our own terribly misunderstood joke? Barack Obama! Senator Obama is a flower on the dubious fruit that’s come from centuries of Western thought. He is the marvelous crystal left in the track of colonial & imperial histories (his Kenyan grandfather, a cook to the British nobleman)- these histories which proved to be mighty perversions of the bejeweled & transformative potential of Western thought.
We want to tell you why you should vote Obama-Biden using the only physical word in the English language: because. Because Barack, like you, has moved around a lot & doesn't like the sound of his own name. Because Barack has what all Americans increasingly have: multiple origins, fluid identities, the arduous state of being many things while never wholly one thing. Because Barack Obama reads books.
Vote for Barack because of the Obama-Biden ticket. Because Joe Biden commutes to work on the train, which means Joe is clever & reads a lot, because when you commute in a car or bus, you can't read without crashing or getting motion sickness. Because Joe reads. Because Joe's son is on the board at Amtrak. Because Joe doesn't just appreciate public transit, he depends on it to get to work & back. Sure, trains are rarely profitable, but highways have never been profitable & they waste a lot more money than trains & they ugly up our cities. The average interstate junction costs thirty million dollars per year to maintain, which is far more than it costs to run those tiny platforms that Amtrak calls a station. Have you ever communicated with your neighbor driving next to you on the freeway? No! You can’t! So when you walk to your polling center on Tuesday, November 4th, think of your children’s futures, think of the Imaginary America, & most of all, think the words you have memorized in this essay & this inexorable argument.
-The Editors
Stop barking at the impressive few! Stop holding hands with princesses!
If apples immunize you from doctorates of theology,
Whence comes our American mythology?
Our ears are bended upwards towards the silent hurricanoes!
On the distant horizon I see a staggering stentorian bucket of wishes!
But I've forgotten the appropriate terminology,
And she lost hers studying visionary mycology.
Can you rhyme with the goddesses? Can you appreciate Pluto's distant credibility?
The shaman is kneeling before our ancient trance, a silhouette.
And apples & bananas & oranges grow carcinogenically
From this barren desert dirt, nourishing, organically.
I am in Nevada! Our Lady of the Deep Mountain Lake is lost in annunciation,
I am in the Western Zephyr! At least I glanced the graces chasing her magic shadow.
And railways remember to comply fiscally
With demands of the land & its fecund buoyancy.
But whence comes our American Symphonies? Where's our newest cultural mecca?
Like in Mauritius, the rats & pigs ate the last Giant Turtle egg.
Like in the hills of New Zealand, they had to relocate that inflatable parrot.
Like in Canada, men with puppets & cycle-planes are rehabilitating whooping crane chicks.
Like a pot of golden toads in Central America that has been boiled & evaporated.
And like the reefs - O my God, I can't go on.
O bless the corral & may its descendants bear fruit perceived by the voyager,
Forever & ever. Amen.
Start singing the blues of futurity! Start reversing the rapture, pending an antepenultimate postponement!
If apples are the first cessation in a chain
Of metempsychosis, ending with the resurrection of Cain...
But no! The verses will grow longer! Longer than the queues of transcendental poetry at the market!
Off the page she'll blow you furiously! Down the circular library thru the craters below the Earth!
But I've forgotten where the escalator takes the rain,
And we'll finally be done with these damn'd biblical allusions, the pain.
Can you dance with harps on your loins! O can you understand these made-up words!
I have recently completed a three-movement sonata for solo marimba entitled “Three Chapters from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; Or, The Whale”, which was composed at the behest of Mr Jonathan Shapiro. It was conceived whilst on the California Zephyr train, slowly descending out of the Rocky Mountains along the Colorado river, earlier this month. In the beginning of January, I sat awake for twenty-two of the twenty-five non-stop hours of the annual Moby Dick reading at the whaling museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, so located because that’s where the book begins (except it actually begins penniless in a noisy New York City). Hearing this bizarre book out loud, without a pause, with over a hundred readers ranging from the eloquent to the stuttering, whale bones hanging abovehead, was quite an experience. As any familiar to the book will know, after about a hundred pages (four hours), & the ambiguous narrator is aboard the Pequod, the plot simultaneously heightens & disintegrates. There are long rambling chapters about the grace of whaling, the majesty of whales, written in a parodic sublime, which is both tongue-in-cheek & massive – I mean, both ironic & not – I mean, both a joking pseudo-academic blabber, & language with a Shakespearean grandeur & Miltonic range of allusion.
in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
middle-class vagabond with his guitar. Amtrak often contains an incredible cross-section of American society, racially & economically. If anything, it over-emphasizes the eccentrics & the margins: there are certainly more crazy old men eager to start a converation, there are more Mennonites, more retards, more whatevers. In our country of diversity, do we have to either move to New York or pay $200 for a train ticket to have this kind of social experience?
I have been away from the Internet all week, following around Mrs Bonnie Anne Whiting Smith, of Indiana's Tales & Scales, as she performs contemporary classical music in elementary school assemblies (including a commisioned piece by Jerome Kitzke! with texts by Whitman & Langston Hughes!) I take the California Zephyr back to Tahoe first thing next week, at which point, loyal readers, keep an eye out for a review of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, & whatever else I happen to read on the train.
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