Elliott Smith - "Needle in the Hay" from the Album Elliott Smith

Just another workaday peon, that's me, another schmuck living a life constructed around sensible decisions, going to bed by 11:00 PM, so he can wake up by 7:00 and sit in rush hour traffic for 70 minutes, doing it over and over and over again, exchanging his life for a paycheck to exchange for a mortgage for what.

So as a person who has spent the majority of his adult life habitually fleeing from risk, and forever requiring of myself a moderation in indulgence, in behavior, in emotion, I have no idea at all how someone can become the vessel that a song like "Needle in the Hay" is poured from.

How is it that a man can be so stark and so desolate, how can he give himself so much over to the cold emptiness in constructing and conveying something so paradoxically beautiful?

When I hear Elliott Smith's music, when I hear the music of those like him, like Nick Drake, and Skip Spence and Syd Barrett, I don't think so much of fragility as I do of elasticity.

When I hear "Needle in the Hay" and think of Elliott Smith's life, I consider how we're all rubber bands, designed to expand and contract within reason, within the limits of our coefficients of expansion and retraction, never getting too crazy, never getting too melancholy, except for our artists and our insane, who stretch past the sensible limits habitually, in their ecstatic paroxysms and in their torturous depressions, and their band gets degraded, then they just snap.


File under: Live Fast Die Young

John Denver - "Calypso" from the album Windsong and The Butthole Surfers - "Bar-B-Q Pope" from the album Butthole Surfers

My Melanie is going through another one of her Heino phases. For the past two weeks, she's been running around saying ridiculous things like, "Heino is the greatest singer of the free world," and "I can't imagine a world without Heino."

And just this morning, after having posted the cover image on her Facebook page earlier in the week, she cracked open Great Hits No. 5 and started playing it at a volume so that the cats and I could hear it loud and clear. "Who could forget this great hit?" she called out ecstatically to me--to the world, really--as one of the German language tracks began to play, the cheese oozing prodigiously out despite the linguistic barrier, maybe it was "Das Alpenrosenlied" or perhaps "Es zogen auf sonnigen Wegen."

That's right, folks; it's been schlagers up the wazoo, here at the La Historia main offices.

And needless to say, it's been irony overload, too. I mean, more power to Melanie. If you can't have fun with your music--or actually someone else's--then what can you have fun with? Other than sex and booze and drugs and movies and cats, of course.

But never mind all of that: just so I can be square on the subject, I'll ask Melanie whether she really likes Heino, and it's infuriating because she won't give me a straight answer. She'll look me in the eye, though, and tell me "Heino's the BEST," and "I won't have you making insinuations about Heino."

It's as if I'm trapped in a recursive loop of irony; I can't escape. I'm like, "OK, honey, I love you. Now step outside the funny joke for a moment and speak plainly, without the ironic detachment. Just so I can know one way or the other whether you really like this artist, this horrible, horrible artist."

And she'll say "Heino's GREAT!"

If Melanie doesn't cycle on to a new phase, Tom Lehrer, Esquivel, shoegazer, Pee Shy, the early 80's New Wave, whatever, sometime soon, I think my brain's gonna explode.

But if or when the old cranium does go kablooey, it won't be Melanie's fault, not really. I'll instead blame it on the postmodernists, through whose baleful influence we have now arrived at a place where it's strictly optional, for your lovely girlfriend, or for anyone else, to say when making a reference whether they actually like the thing they're referring to or not.

It's all about the obscuring shroud of the blithely disengaged, baby.


Christ, it can get frustrating. Ever wonder what Bret Easton Ellis actually thinks about Huey Lewis and the News, or about Genesis? He gives each a whole fucking chapter in American Psycho and you still don't know!

Or switching from books to music, how about our lovable and unquestionably postmodern Butthole Surfers? "Bar-B-Q Pope" literally calls out snippets from "Calypso." But the ironic and bemused detachment the band wears like some kind of psychedelic shawl prevents the listener from figuring out what the band really thinks about the source material they've just ripped off! Talk about a fear of commitment . . . .

Come on guys, just come down on one side of the fence or the other, just once, you know? It can't possibly hurt.

Check it out: Just broadly speaking now, Genesis were ambitious, but arch and pedantic early on, then became, with some few exceptions, a load of crap. Huey Lewis and his band were so generic in concept that it precluded greatness, but they were still able to make some pretty good singles. "Bad is Bad" is good, if you know what I'm saying.

And "Calypso," despite its unapologetically lush orchestration, and despite its singer's decidedly uncool granolahead reputation, gives me the chills everytime I hear it, it's so very pretty.

It's all about the music, people. If I can disregard the fact that Sid Vicious made a habit of kicking his fans in the balls, and still enjoy "Pretty Vacant," or if I can at least get past the sad fact when I hear

"Lipstick Vogue" that Elvis Costello called Ray Charles a "blind ignorant nigger," then why the fuck should I care what the skinheads or the Talking Head snobs think about John Denver?

Gibby, Bret, let me tell ya: it kind of feels good, letting the world know where you stand.

I don't care what those waffling postmodernists say. It may indeed all be grist for the mill; nonetheless, there's no reason at all to hedge your bets. This blog (along with most of the others) is proof enough.


John Denver - Windsong - 11 - Calypso.mp3

This file was removed May 22, 2010. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Granolaheads, Singer-songwriter

The Butthole Surfers - The Butthole Surfers - 04 Bar-B-Q Pope.mp3

This file was removed May 22, 2010. If you're still way interested in coming up with a copy of this--and really can't figure out where you might get one--drop me an email and I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out for you.

File under: Pigfuck, Postpunk, the Dreaded Ironic Detachment