Jarvis. Pitchfork. Yes.

The first minute of Jarvis Cocker performing “Black Magic” at Pitchfork 2008.

yummy yummy good

So last night, after Eric Z’s show at Schuba’s (lovely lovely), a band called Hopewell came on before Canasta comprised of some former Mercury Rev members. Have you ever seen a band that was so good and so…together, that at first you were snarkily tempted to not like them? Yeah. It was one of those. I kept looking for chinks, trying to be annoyed by things, cranky sleepy lady that I was, but man oh man, there just wasn’t anything to grab onto, and down I slid.

They came on, and Petra and I discussed that they were one of the most buttless bands we have ever seen. Very skinny. Like 60’s Stones skinny, significant daylight between the legs skinny, the guitarists and bassist, anyway (the keyboardist and drummer–man, were they great–were a little burlier). The singer squalled–whoops, there he went, a little bit higher–guitars crunchy crunched, drummer kept us all in suspense, then gave us just what we were waiting for, and the keyboards were exactly what we didn’t know we were missing, and the whole thing sailed right into my little heart. Rock rock rock. It was so easy to like that I was suspicious at first, that’s all. I don’t usually fall so quick. I got over it speedily.

During the first part of the set, the singer kept calling out the main themes of each song, and he’d list them off on his fingers: “Love, People Leaving, and now, God.”
“What about Murder?” Someone heckled.
“We’re gettin’ to that!” he called back, as the drummer counted off.

pasando

I can be okay with music alone, with alcohol alone, with one emotion-tapping stimulus at a time. But put ‘em together, even in moderate amounts, and estoy perdida. I’m lost. Meltdown.

Went to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs with B and E, and spent most of the not-even-particularly-great opening act crying, trying not to cry. In the middle of the crowd, the all-ages crowd. B and E took turns hugging me, hugging me like I was a falling-down building and they could hold me up with the sheer force of their love. B kept tugging out the hem of his black t-shirt and holding it out for me to wipe my face on, like a little hammock for sorrow. And B kept saying, Be here with me, be here now.

Karen O had her fingers dipped in something shiny and black, and her hair in a short kinda slick little Dorothy Hammill cut, and this Cheshire grin, and her arms swung and swayed out in these elegant slow little poses, but the best was every so often the elegance would just slip from her like a shawl and she’d bounce and dance and windmill her slim little arms over her head and she looked about ten years old for a minute or two, then stomp and wail like a factory machine stamping stainless steel parts. And then it was back to all vampy glam.

You’re leaving. You’re never gonna come back.
C’mon, I’m gonna come back.
(Sure, sometime, but maybe not to live. And maybe not. I won’t be able to talk to you or see you whenever I want, and maybe you won’t be at our Bible meeting every week anymore, and you won’t sit at the kitchen table while I cook dinner anymore, and maybe B won’t have someone to play Madden with anymore, just like that.)
(K, you won’t be there to tell me to have some tea, to go to sleep, to go put on some sparkly eyeshadow. Maybe no one will tell me what I should say the next time that mean person bothers me, maybe no one will help teach me to take care of myself.)
(We help each other feel more human, all of us.)
(I’m afraid.)

R?
R_grace?
Be here.
Be here, now.

First moments

Driving home from the party last night, I listened to U2 and Mary J. Blige singing a live version of “One.” Always loved U2, keep them in a little spot behind my ribcage right next to my heart; and I like Mary too, but out there somewhere on the radio, if you know what I mean. But I love this recording. I fucking love it. You would love it more than you would think.

We’re one
But we’re not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other
ONE

(Last night someone told me that they like reading my journal because it’s compassionate, and because not a lot of people are compassionate like this. Or something like that. I hope I am. It made me feel better.)

It is a hidden track on a mix CD that Ian made for me, entitled White Stripes and Blues. It is inspired. A track listing later. Just as we were pulling up, the CD started over, and the first song began, “Glory, glory, hallelujah, when I lay my burden down.” Something about that song starts a deep ache in my guts. I’ve been thinking ’bout burdens, what that means. What my burden is, how to carry it with joy. How to keep my eyes up and be so dazzled that I forget that I’m carrying anything. My dad gave me a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress when I was home for Thanksgiving. I’m going to read it soon. I’m reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf right now.

I got a lot of compliments on my stockings last night. I responded each time, “Thank you; I’ve decided that I have nice legs.” I am done with false modesty and self-hatred. In 2005 I stumbled over my sexiness. It’s about damn time. In 2006 maybe I will dissolve it into my psyche and forget it, I hope, like a meal that you eat and becomes part of you and disappears. I think that C.S. Lewis said something like that it was better to know that you’re a good poet and then forget about it, than to try and convince yourself that you’re a bad poet. Or something like that. I could use that lesson, too.

I got to record music with my friends yesterday, a tiny long-held dream that God dropped in my lap like a plum in the waning hours of 2005. I would like some more.

familiar routes

Drove home to Detroit this weekend, separate from benjyman (he drove the truck, and I drove the car, so that we could leave the truck in Michigan with my dad to get sold, where trucks are better loved and not ticketed and taxed more for just existing). The sun dropped amazingly fast. I took my secret route, LSD past all the museums, down to 41, all the way down to Indiana before I got onto the 90. I know I just posted an entry asking for new music suggestions, but fall (fall, fotw, fall) is a time when I cycle through the few things I know by heart, and just let them go back to track 1. “Left and Leaving” by The Weakerthans. Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I just found this in-between spot in my voice, kind of an undiscovered vocal cord, where I can yell real high where I couldn’t before like Karen O in that one song, “Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick time you take IT!”

I listened to “Seven’s Travels” by Atmosphere because I thought it would wake me up, and when it didn’t–it never does–I called E instead, deciding that talking on the phone was slightly less dangerous than the risk of falling asleep on the road. And talking is the best way to keep me awake. He was at the LAN center killin’ Nazis, but laid down arms for a li’l bit to talk to me. Being on the road, I ended up talking about getting out of Dodge, about these weird flashes of fantasy I get sometimes of getting in the car, buying a ticket and vanishing, and how in certain moments that idea is so overpoweringly seductive. And how hard I find it to explain that it has nothing to do with wanting to leave B, you see. It’s an impulse that I get from time to time for a split second, and I can’t explain it. It’s just that sometimes a picture flashes in my mind of myself in a foreign marketplace, in some landscape, and that thought liberates and excites me so deeply, and my next thought (like the moment when a dream becomes a nightmare), is noticing that I am alone in that place.

E pointed out to me that the only time I’ve traveled abroad was when I was alone, when I was single. Now I have benjyman, now is the time to make a new picture, a new memory. And he’s right, and I do; I want to see everything, I want to do everything, and I want to do it with B. I have a hard time not feeling guilty for panicking sometimes, for the solitude I crave and call by other names. I felt a lot better. I laughed so much, I laughed so much.

I passed Kalamazoo and wondered if it would feel like it did. It did.

We hung up, and I started to get sleepy again almost immediately. I called C, and silently thanked God that I can talk to Memphis or Chicago or fucking whomever I want while I’m blazing down I-94 in the dark. Can’t wait until B has a phone. He was out at a show. We talked about the entry where I wrote about Jesus and someone like me talking on a back porch. He said he’d wanted to comment, but felt it would have trivialized the subject matter, something like, “I think it’s really cool that Jesus says, ‘dude.’” I told him that would have been the perfect comment, and that that interchange was the seed of the whole piece, and that I realized that I was trying to get at the humanity of Jesus, that Jesus got tired, Jesus got thirsty, Jesus needed time to himself. The part of him that crouched on the beach and cooked fish for his disciples (with nail-scars on his hands) who were pulling their boat up on the shore bewildered and frightened, who didn’t know what to expect after his death, and now here he was alive, and then they sat around the fire and ate together, and that was the first thing they did. The man who was also God, the expressed word of God, this eternal force, who had just been killed and resurrected from the dead, saw eating a meal together with his friends as a priority. This might be my favorite scene ever. If I could be present for any event, it might be this one.

I also told him that the voice and personality of Jesus in this poem was maybe 40% inspired by him, and conversations we’d had during his last visit. He responded, “I saw that, but I didn’t want to presume.”

There was pumpkin pie in the fridge when I got in. When B arrived, I put a bite of pie in his mouth and me in his arms. This man. This man.

Need some refreshing

An idea I got from a comment I left on x77tigersxus’s journal: I would like to get some must-have recommendations of your current favorite CDs, please. They don’t have to be new, or of any particular genre or or anything, they just have to be awesome. Awesome to you. They just have to give you joy. I need some refreshment. Freshness. New blood.

I would give you my recommendations, but all of you are so darn hip that anything I would recommend, you’ve probably already grown tired of and given on permanent loan to your younger sibling so that someday, they can be almost as hip as you. Almost.

(Geez. That sounded snarky. I didn’t mean it! Curse you, cold, cold, medium of the internet!)

Well, okay, I guess I could name a few that are on high rotation for me right now…for examplllllle, ummmmmmmm, okay, “Black on Both Sides” by Mos Def (which is only, what, seven years old now) is completely rocking me currently. “Come On, Feel the Illinoise” by Sufjan Stevens (that man makes me weep with joy). “The Beautiful Struggle” by Talib Kweli. Joni Mitchell is always on the turntable. U2’s latest, “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,” (I’ve been playing “Miracle Drug” and “Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own” over and over and over). Ooh, ooh, “Clap You Hands Say Yeah” make me so happy that I’m alive right now, that I was alive to hear them play music. I also just ordered two new salsa CDs: “Dicen Que Soy” by India, this fucking fierce salsa lady, and Marc Anthony’s “Valio la Pena.” That’s a good cross-section.

Okay, guys, lay it on me! Tell me the one, maybe two CDs that are obsessing you, haunting you, screaming away your commutes, beating on your steering wheels, staying in the car way longer than necessary in front of your apartment (engine off, CD player on), imagining that the rain collecting on the windows also loves this CD.