Bardo Pond and synaptical misfires at Louise Point

Bardo Pond is the best and only ones who do what they do - which is create panic attack at the club music... the drugs kick in and everything gets slow and weird and you're surrounded by weird beautiful loving people, but the guitar-=-slowed to an alien crawl by your push into timelessness--slowness, blanking - wha? The guitars of the Gibbons brothers cut in and out of tempo, the way a brain stuttering its dehydration S.O.S. might cut in out of your aural perception. Is not hearing just illusions of coherence the way the eye fills in blind spots and the memory remembers what it wants and buries the rest under thick layers of carpet and yet can still hear the hideous beating of its miserable twin? This is music for when you're in love with someone and its like a druggy sickness. You smoke cigarettes to fill that void the way a kid tosses a rock in the ocean. But love makes that cigarette a surfboard. Bardo Pond find you on the floor in the corner of the Knitting Factory and reach down with one jangly hand to pull you off your wave like a lifeguard in reverse. Blacking in and out of consciousness downstairs at the dance shouldn't be so easily condemned as a bad thing. In the end they're all just experiences. As Isobel Sollenberger puts it in "Sunrise" (off of Dialate): "Watching it happen / watching /
it / happen
And then this chunky distorted fuzz guitar so tasty you can feel it in your saliva comes spiraling out of the yellow distance and when Isobel suddenly starts singing again "When words to breath / and silence reigns golden / the sky is falling / ... watching it happen."

The bass and drums just keep kicking over the same can and almost catching themselves from falling into the basement foyeur of the nearby apartment house. It's music to swoon too, and while Isobel and the brothers swoon these guys keep grabbing your arms right before your head smacks the concrete.

Rock and roll is ultimately, the devil's music, and its appalling when acts like U2 and Green Day profess to have ins with punk and the devil crowd. People like that don't even KNOW what they're missing when they just say no all the time. How could they? It's a war of realities, and between where they sit, you look like squares. Uh here comes a rant, and one more thing, let's talk about peace and Buddhism and shhit and who the real posers are now, it's the new generation of hippie gurus, beware the carpetbaggers that would be the mouthpiece to "your generation" every time you make a collective swing towards the light.

Beware the prophesizing and brazen attempts to be cool and religious at the same time. Be a leader of yourself and you no longer need to put yourself in a superior position to others. When the object is humility, this is even more important, which is why a book title like HARDCORE ZEN smacks of "More Humble than thou" histrionics. A true Buddhist hardcore path would be to make your book as intentionally mauve and tacky as possible "Love Affirmations for Mom" or something like that. What about writing something about how to understand and embrace the hobbies of one's unenlightened parents, such as golfing, drinking, going to church, sewing, and television watching? Warner's book should be called "If I'm enlightened why can't I finally can't let go of wanting to be a badass" That would be hardcore if for no other reason than all the hardcore kids are afraid to do it. I know I am.

Even in being "open" there's pitfalls, so don't think I blame the coming wave of plastic fantastic shamen. Emotional openness and a posture of universal love and acceptance of all things as inherently good, but judging not by any pair of opposites or dualities, this stance is the most fearsome of all. Kids will jump off cliffs or empty out their wrists just to avoid being loved. The tattoos and piercings and fight clubs are just extreme forms of distraction from the whirling hole of raw forgiveness that is the full you, the you who blows parent's minds with your raw positive acceptance and creates room for dialogue so heartfelt it would make Hallmark Cards writers sick in the hallway. Hardcore kids can't even make eye contact half the time, let alone say I love you with eyes moist like black velvet puppy dog eyes. Plus, the minute you're noticing other people not living with their whirling raw hole open as wide as yours, then man you may as well admit it: it's closed again. Mine's closed again. Can you tell? My book would be "It Closed Again, but I can still get off to BArDo PoNd.

#1 Greatest Rock Moment: Joe Cocker, "With a Little Help From My Friends," at Woodstock 1969

"All we gotta do is love now," he starts croaking, the bass starts sliding away then comes back with a spine-tingling acceleration, every cycling piano thirds, pounding drums, Cocker just roaring along like a big Welsh punter on his first acid trip. The charge of "getting together with all my friends" was huge at Woodstock. The recording levels are amazing, and that's part of why Woodstock is so remembered, it's a glimmer into a time when being on acid and being a moron weren't one and the same. Alcohol-free super competence reins. These are the kids who already knew stuff before they dropped their first hits. They already knew guitar, or sound mixing, or bass frets, and then the acid came and blew them to the next level, and beyond, wafting them to the pinnacle of their crafts the way a wind might blow leaves up the steps. I forgot that myself, when I was in a band. As Coppola sez to Dennnis: you learn the words first and then forget them... in fact I forgot the cords to the songs, where I was, all that jazz.

Whoa, flashback just thinking that. In fact I get one everytime I see or hear Cocker's amazing anthemic freak-out. To me it's like watching Jesus appear, the perfect blend of high, help and friends is all surging through his soul. One can't imagine a better moment in a rock singer's life - a big crazy stage, fans into infinity, the dawning of the age of aquarius; everything was going to be okay. There was no longer any doubt of it in anyone's mind. We, the freaks, had won. Cocker comes on with a little glass of beer or water or something, a little drunk, tripping, mystical, massive beautiful side burns, a colorful t-shirt completely soaked through with rain and sweat, hair wet. He howls like a deep banshee and all it's in the name of love, an electric feedback squall of pure transformative selfless but sexual, fratenral, familial, audiencial and balls out rock. Look at the picture up there, with his tie-dye exploding outwards like he just took a love bullet in the ribs, his wild English face is the mirror to the explosion on the shirt, from the depths of his diaphragm and soul, all 8 chakras blazing, out through the diaphragm to Woodstock, to and through the people, the past, the future, and to and through the endless masks of God.

The performance would be nothing without the Beatles original though, from the influential Sgt. Pepper's. Ringo's pleasant modesty in answering the spiritual questions: "Yes. I'm certain it happens all the time," it was all too much genuine open-hearted non-gender specific communal love for the unprepared ego to handle. Sgt. Pepper's lit the minds of anyone who heard it on fire, you didn't even have to lick the buttons on their tacky uniforms to get way high, it was in the wind, a wind which had fanned a big flame that was now a raging Woodstock bonfire sea. The words are like Poe's (and Zizek's) Purloined Letter finally and inevitably arriving at its full expression. Just one simple message in that letter: Love Everyone, Right Now. It's okay. We all love you. That was all we needed, and in that one moment, Cocker was its undeniable messenger, and his message was heard and embraced by all. *

Everyone, man, they spend so much time worrying about who loves them and if they are loved. Dig, it only works the other way around man. That's what the Professor was trying to tell Dorothy. Note in that final scene how ole Wizard turns the meaning to suit the status quo's banking agenda: "It's not how much you love, but how much you are loved by others." In other words, "don't look behind the curtain! keep doing what you're doing, coveting and over-spending, harvest more love, harvest it like grain, like blood from the Tom Cruise-splattered lawn.

Whoa, get back on track, man! Before that big 1980s sell-out there was one more echo of this great performance, John Belushi's hilarious, dead-on impersonation on the then-cool Saturday Night Live. Obviously loving and heartfelt, Belushi could clown it to the top with air guitar and staggering and still honor the greatness of Cocker's moment in time, a moment we all can still feel in our blood every time we watch it, especially loud. -

And there you have it, the decline.. into the raging rock manhood of today, the little boy losts with their therapy and their prescriptions. From the empathic outward feel good angelic possession of Joe Cocker at that one particular moment in time, to the narcissistic nightmare miasma of today, with Cruise our fetishistic icon, soon to be dipped in the volcano like a wick, and Bono still prancing around going "Take me instead, I'm ever-so mythic!"

Om Dada! The natives are unusually jobless tonight, my dear. Prepare the evacuation vehicles and toss the Christians to the wolves like Jesus paid us to. The only law is the Golden Rule, all is is phony and empty as late night Cinemax.

Joni Mitchell's "He Comes For Conversation" (From Ladies of the Canyon)

This song, from Ladies of the Canyon (1970) is a song about a love triangle, of which Joni is the unloved part. It discusses "he" who comes to her little Laurel Canyon kitchen to undoubtedly sponge coffee, wine and snacks off her--lady that she is, perhaps tea--while bitching about his girlfriend ("Why can't I leave her?")

He comes for conversation
I comfort him sometimes

Patiently she relates to us, the listener/s, what he says about his girlfriend-- the one Joni hopes to replace:

She speaks in sorry sentences
miraculous repentences
I don't believe her.

Mitchell's delivery of the last line is kurt, almost an aside.
It's a powerful song, she is a genius, I tremble to think of it. I used to listen to Ladies of the Canyon and Blue all the time while driving around Seattle, all lonesome and addled and lovestruck for whomever I wasn't dating at the time. I loved a girl named Flora (not her real name), she had long blonde hair like Joni, and on a big billboard along my courier route in downtown Seattle there was a Virginia Slims ad, the same girl, the Alice in Wonderland girl but is she chasing me or am I chasing her? Am I the Mad Hatter like I hope or just a thugged-out caterpillar? It was never a sex sort of love,but more chivalrous and ancient. The muse is seldom the same as the lover; the muse should always be far away, on the other coast. Flora was back east, still in school. I could let my heart melt in gushing Lancelot-esque tears for my queen back on the other shore with old King Arthur, my old guitarist. Ah the vaniglorious associative-depressive miracle of youth.


So I would listen to Joni while driving and thinking of Flora, and suddenly the tears would start. "All I really really want or love to do / is to bring out the best in me too," she sings the very first song. "I want to shampoo you / I want to renew you again and again." I wanted her to do that, the sunshine was her shampoo as it flooded through my windshield on my route.

1977, my mom was working in a runaway shelter, and brought home for Xmas weekend one of the runaways, Toots was her name, because "everybody calls me Toots." She was Joni Mitchell in mood, and Venus-like in pristine 16-year old beauty, and denim. Nothing much happened between us. It didn't need to. I remember my mom gave her two packs Marlboros wrapped up for Xmas, and it took me like five minutes to croak "Hey Toots, do you want to do Doodle Art?" All this came rushing back to me with joni's witty but genuinely heartfelt declaration of wanting to shampoo me. The tears came flooding out, I almost couldn't believe it. I hadn't cried for years, and even then only in violent spasms. This was genuine emotional release. It was a private discovery, reminding me instantly of other sorts of releases. It got me really high and relaxed, crying did, and I became a junky for it. Now I know it's called "depression!" In my case, alcohol-related, bro. Pills took care of that, and then other pills took care of those pills.

And that brings me as well to "He Comes for Conversation" and our place as the listener in the little love qudrangle we share with Joni. That's the zinger of course: he comes to her to talk about his abusive girlfriend, completely oblivious to her affection for him and that is just what she's doing to us with the song. The confessing to us of her attraction for another implicates us in this schemata of confession. That's fancy talk, but what it means in simple terms is... she's punking us out.

If anyone ever does a rap version of "He Comes for Conversation" I hope they will bear this in mind. Joni never mentions any particular reltaionship she has with the intended listener of her song; and as we know, even the most private diary is really a letter, but to whom? For me it's always a girl like Joni, my beautiful Other, and yet while it is a letter of longing and needing it is not a case of actually "wanting." When the beloved is alone in the room with you, the love snuffs out, it is only when they are far away that love burns Joni-size.

APPLE

(The following was originally written for Amp Camp, a hipster-esque sub-division of neighborhoodies.com):

Sullen, pouty 19-year old piano prodigy Fiona Apple seemed to fall from the skies with her first album, "Tidal" a preternaturally assured collection of songs that slunk languidly between smoky jazz and Alanis Morissette alterna-angst. Assuring her success was a series of videos demonstrating her waifish sex appeal, particularly "Criminal", where she appears as a strung-out, underwear clad Alice lost in a tawdry lime-green carpeted wonderland of implied sexual misuse, drugs and wood paneling. Her erratic behavior at shows drew some flak from the press, eventually presaging a brief nervous breakdown, and we knew she was trouble when her sophomore album came out with such a long name that no one could say it all the way through. But youth, beauty and genius is a rough combination, and we have no choice but to forgive her. Extraordinary Machine was thought to be in limbo due to record executive nervousness, but when it finally came out it showed the brazen Apple had matured without losing a shred of her gorgeous sorrow. Her jazz-standard crooning sister Maude Maggart is pretty cool, too.

TIDAL
The first thing you hear is a voice that's so deep compared to your expectations of what a 19 year old ingénue should sound like that you think you put the record on the wrong speed. But it's a CD, and so the sound is so clear you can hear her every soft breath in between hitting these great deep notes that slowly evaporate at the end of stanzas (check out the 3:29 mark in "Slow Like Honey"). So yeah she's popular, she's the poster girl for the self-cutting crowd, but she's also as disciplined and regal as Nina Simone and twice as well recorded. If there is any flaw at all it's just that at 19 she doesn't have the sensory gravity, the "soul" that Nina or Sinatra could bring to a lyric. Her style is seductive for the sake of destruction, or as she puts it on one of the albums chart-topping hits, she's a girl who "can break a boy / Just because she can." She's that beautiful anorexic girl who lures you into her bed just long enough to break up your marriage, just long enough for you both to realize there is no "there" there outside of taboo-busting. It's her gift for expressing the bottomless melancholy of a 19 year-old beautiful loner grown way-too old before her time due to the evils of older men. She still finds an inner wealth of maternal comfort for whoever of her listeners are in need, filtered through the slow motion duck and jab of "Shadow Boxer" or bathed in the Joni Mitchell-style piano and whispered solace of "Never is a Promise."

EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE
The spookily talented Ms. Apple's third album came with a lot of strange mythologizing behind it. Was the label not releasing it, or was the demo just floating around the internet before it was finally mixed down to the artist's exacting specifications? Whether it was all just ingenious hype or something else, it hardly matters, as the album is encompasses everything that was great about her first two works, and then expands from there, managing to be even more quietly assured than "Tidal," and more pumping and assertive than "When the Pawn…"