lists

Sometimes I have the attention span of someone who has just come off a three week crack binge and is told they have to immediately sit down and write a thesis on War and Peace. I often read several books at once and finish approximately 1 out of 3. The difficulty doesn't lie in my comprehension but in the fact that I feel claustrophobiac and overwhelmed that I am missing out on some yet to be read great American novel. One of the books that I deviated from in search of some obscure collection of early Bukowski poetry was High Fidelity. The book was pleasantly sardonic and the main characters sexual and social awkwardness hit close to home yet I wasn't able to finish it. However, one thing that has stuck with me was his tendency to insert sporadic and quite random "lists" between segments and chapters of trembling prose. Here are a few of my own lists.

Good albums that inspired other artists to make great albums

1. The Seeds- S/T: A few burnouts in the 1960's who seemed to prefer ampthetamines to LSD and inadvertently cut the trees to make way for the highway that would become punk rock n' roll. The majority of the songs sound as if the Stooges shot enough dope to maintain their composure and were fucking around playing some Beach Boy songs to piss off some rednecks at some divebar they were forced to play at. Some sounded like the Hollies if they were angry because someone stole their lunch money. The angular and raw rock n' roll of the Rolling Stones prior to their later day pretension after Patti Smith declared them true poets. The Seeds made music that I would imagine Quentin Tarantino would play while jerking off on ectsasy to Asian girls in high heels.

Television- Marquee Moon: When I was younger my father had this album laying around and pulled me aside from whatever stupid fucking little kid thing i was doing to play the song Torn Curtain. I remember seeing Tom Verlaine's gaunt Nasferatu hands on the cover. I knew why my parents told me not to talk to strangers after hearing this album. This album has an underlying sense of impending doom. It doesn't quite erupt raccous and molten, but it is enough to leave one with an erection and visions of the Lower East Side when it was dangerous.

The Vaselines- Dum-Dum: So yeah, Kurt Cobain liked them but that doesn't mean anything to me because I like them. Son of a Gun is just as good as (almost) any Beatles song. The female vocals melt like chocolate icecream. The drumming is a primative mantra that tells me "everything sucks but it's okay". Feedback bursts like boils concealing a beautiful, angelic face.

Lou Reed- Metal Machine Music

I finally had a room all to my own. I wanted to write a poem and I figured i'd put in Metal Machine Music as a soundtrack to forcefully vomit some stanzas as if I was a literary bulimic. However, I was constipated, battered and molested by the album. I had listened to the album before but it was background music as I lay in a strange bed, young, drug addicted, hypnotized by persuasive thoughts of shoplifting and hungry. But when the "music" began the other evening I was pink, pants down exposed. Metal Machine Music isn't an album someone can "like". Anyone who says they do is a fucking liar. But on a somewhat contradictory note, anyone who doesn't recognize it as an avantgarde, symphonic, cacophony minuet masterpiece is a fucking mongoloid.

The sounds preserved on the record consist entirely of feedback. If you listen you can hear beautiful, beautiful, BEAUTIFUL arpeggios and metal crescendos and mercury whispers. I closed my eyes and waited to see what images and emotions the sounds evoked. I saw a tree growing very, very old and nobody realizing that trees lead miserable lives as men do and are plagued by madness, starvation, greed, agony and love too. I saw someone awaken from a dream to find that everything turned to static and he was told that he would live forever and ever and watch everyone around him die and it would continue until he learned to meditate completely and honestly and disregard the insanity and find true love within himself admist the chaos. i saw a black and gray image of my father standing alone along the ocean looking down, pensive, broken, vulnerable. and the waves. the waves. then i paused the cd and went outside to smoke a cigarette.