Archive for January, 2007
Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Cathedral Parkway
“Cathedral Parkway” was me pouncing on a readymade more than anything else. Just looking up at a street sign one day and thinking, “Wow! Is it really possible that no one has ever used that? How did I not see this before?” From there it wasn’t very hard to plug in the hottest spots from [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Loft Demo, The Lockhorns by Philip
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007
Bandits
The other night, a bunch of us were sitting by a window in the cafe at MoMA and we somehow got to talking about the difference between sadness and depression. The consensus seemed to be that sadness, no matter how severe, is a clean emotion, while depression is dirty, toxic, full of impurities. Eventually, someone [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Non-Musical Devastionalisms by Philip
Saturday, January 20th, 2007
It Comes and Goes — Sandy Rogers
No song I know of better captures the fleeting but unbearable intensity of certain terrible urges. The urge to die, to do yourself in, of course, but also the urge to just obliterate yourself with cheap rot-gut alcohol and filthy, loveless sex — to try and hide your soul from the eyes of god behind [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Devastationalist Masterpieces by Philip
Wednesday, January 17th, 2007
Jazz Song
This was the last song I think the All-Girl Band ever did. Not the last song we physically played before crawling off the stage at our final gig (which, incidentally, was opening for Lobster of Hate at the Continental), but the last new song we wrote, rehearsed and performed with any regularity.
Fittingly, this song [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Amazing All-Girl Band, Live by Philip
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
Aloha, Bobby and Rose
This is the All-Girl Band live, another negative-fi audience cassette. This song was always a good showcase for what was so lovely and personal about Tex’s guitar playing. Well, not always. The arrangement had a lot of tricky (for me) two-guitar stuff and hazardous transitions, and sometimes it fell apart completely, but when we pulled [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Amazing All-Girl Band, Live by Philip
Friday, January 5th, 2007
Kerguelen of a Cartoonist
The Kerguelen Islands are a forbidding, rocky archipelago lying in the southern Indian Ocean, somewhere between the horn of Africa and Antarctica. A territory of France, they were discovered by (and named after) the French explorer and navigator Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Trémarec in 1772. Kerguelen had been commissioned by Louis XV to find a southern continent [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Other, Recenter Music by Philip
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007
And When I’m Sad, I Slide
It’s good now and then, especially when life won’t stop surprising you in the worst possible ways, to be reminded that music literally has restorative powers. As I was reminded by my iPod this morning while racing for the train. This song, written by Kathleen Hanna, is as beautiful as anything ever conjured up by [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Devastationalist Masterpieces by Philip
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
Baby Talk
As I go back through old recordings, it’s amazing how many songs amount to stern & scary warnings to myself. “Shape up! Get it together, man!” Good examples all, of why self-awareness is by itself an inadequate mechanism for healthy change.
And I keep trying to remember the mind-set behind songs like these, to try [...]
