Quick, before it makes sense!
Apr. 29th, 2004 06:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
I'm writing a song right now, and I thought it might be interesting to show it here in its completely unfocussed state. I have no idea what it's going to become at this point, and in a way this is the moment I love the most, when everything is molten and fluid and it could go anywhere. There are several little themes that I've been wanting to write about, and they're all jostling about, uncertain of how or whether to combine.
Theme 1: A Panda Who Just Wants To Be A Dog. This relates to my pluricide theme. The pandas just want to be dogs. The unique don't actually want to be unique. It's too tragic, too much hard work, too lonely. Endangered species aren't too bothered about surviving, they just want to lie back all flabby and munch bamboo like the giant panda I saw at Berlin zoo a few months ago. He didn't seem to know or care that he was one of the last of his kind. Just wanted to munch away, like a domestic pet. Happy to be someone's dog rather than an ambassador of 'the disappearing Other'.
Theme 2: The Party Was Fucked Up. I want to write about a really fucked up party, sort of exaggerating and satirizing people's accounts of parties that get raided by the police, make their heads hurt, were 'really fucked up' and so on. I kind of hate how people glamourize self-destructive behaviour.
Theme 3: A Japanese Garden in a Perspex Cube. I love the idea of a miniature utopia that people could crawl into to escape the toxic world around them. No matter how dark it is outside, in there a tiny sun shines down on moss and birds sing. I want to oppose the sensuality of a Japanese garden or an Indian erotic miniature to the destructiveness of some gothy party where everyone has tattoos and syringes. So I want this micro-erotic landscape cube to be near the party, up on the roof. You can crawl away from the decadence and refresh yourself in there. Of course, the danger is that the cube is just another drug. It's just a visualisation of the well-being you feel when you take that capsule someone gave you. You're not really up on the roof at all.
At the moment the music is 'Greensleeves' with the melody altered. It's running back and forth in the sequencer like a sleeve through a sewing machine. The lyrics are just themed scribbles, things I found and jotted down, or invented. Here they are, before they make sense and hang together:
Notes for the Song
It is a kind of contradictive relatedness which counts: 'High and low sounds make a melody' Heraclitus said
Make a garden song: sing the names of the flowers and plants, in clusters.
Giants, dolls, curious effigies, but also animals, dragons, serpents, fish and birds; and - quite unexpectedly - sacred artificial trees
Sacred Artificial Tree
rice planting dance
Snow festival
Always be prepared
For the arrival of a bear
a 'warp and woof' a weave of syncretism and separateness. 'In traditional Japanese religion, Shinto-Buddhist syncretism and Shinto-Buddhist separation form the warp and woof of an intricate weave.'
Monday in the African Media Village
Women are scratching my back and making me / dream
The past is sad, the present worse, but at least we have no future.
Spooky Girls
The world is full of spooky girls
Shuffling around in untied blue basketball boots
a famous line uttered by the sociopathic Roman emperor Caligula, "Oderint dum metuant" (Let them hate as long as they fear)
Mike and Debbie
Olefatisfaction
The smell of things
'I'm going to rape you.'
'Okay.'
'No, don't say okay!'
'Okay'.
A panda who wants to be a dog
'I found myself cutting my story short to explain to someone that I'd turned into a deer sometime last weekend. Laughed.'
The world in a perspex cube
Eat your vegetables and vitamins and don't be such a fool
To live and die for young animals
'My love is like' song Indian strings, Miniature Chinese
In praise of shadows
Cheerful greeting to a pine tree (Japanese children)
Flowery photography (nocturnal by flash)
Tropical nocturne
Moss gardens and fungus
Pinus japonicus
sempreverde
The party was fucked up
Black boy shooting spunk across a white girl's arm
But on the roof there was a Japanese garden in a perspex cube
I crawled in through a rubber tube
Tiny sunshine and a flock of birds
Pinus Japonicus
What do you mean, the roof?
You haven't moved
I put a drug in your drink
'all these moments will be lost
like tears in water polo'
the piss from under the toilet door was flowing into the kitchen
the music was so loud i couldn't hear my ears ringing
some tattooed slut singing
A panda who wanted to be a dog
Went to a party and got so drunk
What in the world is wrong with the world
Nobody wants to be astronauts
And the pandas just want to be dogs
A Japanese pine in a perspex cube
Gothic Lolitas eat babyfood
Black boys on bicycles sell qualudes
Take one or else you're a pansy
The past is appalling, the present worse
Thank heaven we haven't a future
CHORUS
Fiddle me blank, fiddle me blind
All the young girls, losing their minds
Mike and Debbie are selling drugs
And the pandas just want to be dogs
Blow the man down, take the white line
We might all be wrong, all of the time
Mike and Debbie are shopping in sales
I'm in the Japanese garden
Mike and Debbie are trimming the sails
I'm in the Japanese garden
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 10:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 11:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 01:25 pm (UTC)Depends if the tree has a Livejournal or not.
Another song idea!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 10:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 10:49 am (UTC)or not.
i like the panda idea.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 10:53 am (UTC)Will you ever undertake a (post)modern-day rendition of "I Can See Japan", or has the novelty subsided?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 11:12 am (UTC)I've been having fun w/ it off and on.
New Song
Date: 2004-04-29 12:22 pm (UTC)Does this relate to the "anomie" of your cute formalism essay ; certainly Pandas are very cute childlike and obviously endangered. The "pluricide" or the the desire to conform and become a dog and thus do as the peer group is the thing that might link the panda and the party-people. Do people seek out drugs to make themselves different or are they just self-destructive. Having never had the desire to mess with my head, I find these things hard to comprehend. Certainly I am reminded of the work of Philip K Dick ( surely a subject for a Momus song with a name like that ! ) with the "what is real" thematic. Check out the book "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" for the best elaboration of that in relation to your song..
I think perhaps at this stage that you are not clear on who the narrator/ observer is ? Anyway, it's great to be able to mull these things over with you and I hope this commentary does come across as a little half-baked.
RichardG
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 11:38 am (UTC)a) the interior monologue of the uniformed guard in the pluricide camp
b) "the danger is that the cube is just another drug"
c) "just wants to munch a way like a domestic pet"
d) Greensleeves with the melody altered.
Keep on doing your thing, man. I like it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 11:40 am (UTC)this, please. yes.
but won't vice fire you?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 12:02 pm (UTC)A.
process
Date: 2004-04-29 12:07 pm (UTC)Re: process
Date: 2004-04-29 01:39 pm (UTC)I knew there was a reason I liked going to banks!
I don't think process is more fun than product. Like everything else, it all depends.
I love all three ideas and I want to hear them all fleshed out -- the thought of them all having to elbow in and share the same song makes me a little sad. I guess I compartmentalize too much. My favorite is the panda one; I've been tossing around that idea for a long time now, that being radically Different in involuntary ways (e.g. mild mental illness) is more fun for everyone around you than it is for you yourself. I'm sure it would be much cooler Momusized than it would
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 12:09 pm (UTC)It's a fair point about fucked-up parties. I always wonder at people who say things like 'Wow, that was a great night out, I can't remember a thing'.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 12:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 01:21 pm (UTC)There's enough there for a concept album. I am available for co-lyricist / cover star duties!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 02:22 pm (UTC)An Infestation of Koala Bears
Date: 2004-04-29 01:34 pm (UTC)Re: An Infestation of Koala Bears
Date: 2004-04-29 01:35 pm (UTC)Berlin or Budapest
Date: 2004-04-29 02:17 pm (UTC)danube. my conference is over and i've got all of golden
week and a little more in europe.
there are a lot of pictures to look at and classical music
every night but the bourgeois feel is getting to me a bit.
haven't been to the freud haus yet or the hundertwasser place
either (nor the belvedere or the leopolds museum for that matter). off to linz tomorrow for a visit to the
ars electronica. then another couple of dazs in vienna then mazbe berlin or budapest or elsewhere.
any good exhibitions or electronic music events in berlin
next week?
Re: Berlin or Budapest
Date: 2004-04-29 03:22 pm (UTC)Re: Berlin or Budapest
Date: 2004-04-29 03:51 pm (UTC)Indeed , people are meant to enjoy themselves at a party but it turns into how comatose we all became ..and there was a massive this and a massive that ..and the people in the corner smiling and laughing that left at the first hint of dysfunction?
they were REALLY weird.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 08:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 09:16 pm (UTC)The art of parties (and pandas)
Date: 2004-04-29 09:04 pm (UTC)Of course, I can't resist butting in, breathlessly trying to get to the head of the line...
Momus has puts a lot of ideas into the song already--what about taking some out again? The careful edit: pruning the espalier, shaping the bonsai. Think like a panda. One doesn't really want to be a dog--dogs are all about struggle--to please humans, chiefly. Pandas are minimalist animals, zenlike in their philosophy: eat bamboo, worship the sun, exist. They don't even care if songs are written about them. Or, as Momus implicated, if they die out.
"The Party Was Fucked Up" sounds like an unedited Hank Williams Jr song. When pandas throw a party, they stay within their metaphysical perspex garden. Pandas don't like sex. Everyone knows that. And they probably wouldn't like drugs, either, except for the natural euphoria in a bamboo shoot.
The popular opinion of Lolitas, Goth or Nabokovian, is wrong. Humbert is the victim; all men are victim to their temptations. Lolita, in Humbert's opinion, has seduced _him_. Lolita is not cute; she's gone past that little-girl thing into premature sexiness. Are pandas just raccoons with extreme makeovers? In the future, people won't have plastic surgery to become sexier, but to infantalize themselves, to become perpetually cute.
My favorite idea here, partly because I can only guess what it sounds like (while I've already seen lots of pandas and been to too many parties), is "Greensleeves" altered through the electrosexual sequencer-sewing machine. Will those sleeves be ornamented, epauletted, braided and bangled--or simple and elegant? Indian strings with "miniature Chinese" instruments? The windchime-like sounds of bamboo leaves in the winter, in the wind, on a frozen mountainside?
Thanks for allowing us all to witness this act of conception, while on the other side, we voyeuristically press our noses to the glass, trying somehow to influence the process long before the little monster wakes with a wail.
To live and die for young animals
Date: 2004-04-29 10:06 pm (UTC)Whyness
Date: 2004-04-29 10:12 pm (UTC)"The staging of difference against the scenery of standardisation and globalisation"
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-30 12:14 am (UTC)While I've been sleeping, a mass of really interesting material has accumulated here. It really is fascinating to see the song going in so many different and unexpected directions in your (brilliant) minds. There's not one perspex box on the roof, but many, belonging to each one of you.
In fact I have a (fairly) finished lyric now, and a lot has disappeared from the song. The pandas are gone, for a start. It now seems to be a commercial for a soma-like drug called Sempreverde, which is the Italian for 'evergreen', the class which includes pine trees. (But 'pine trees' are not used up; I still want to do a separate song, a cheerful children's tribute to a pine.)
Sempreverde, like valium or ecstasy, makes you feel fine however little your surroundings or circumstances warrant it, which I think is exactly the problem with drugs: their severance from motive, from rationale. One has literally 'lost the plot' on drugs, because one's euphoria comes from nowhere and is connected to nothing, to no story.
Anyway, the song has become a sinister commercial (in the form of a sea shanty) for an escape drug, endorsed by the government and big business as an alternative to sorting out the actual problems of the world. A 'perception fix' rather than a 'problem fix'. 'Spin' voluntarily ingested. I want a robot voice to sing it rather than my own voice. The basic chord pattern still follows 'Greensleeves', but now, with the way the melody works I keep thinking of Brel's 'Amsterdam' too. Perhaps I've discovered a secret link between those songs, an instance of cryptomnesia linking Brel to King Henry VIII.
No doubt the song and final lyrics will appear here when finished. You've been as generous with your donations as with your ideas, and I want to keep posting stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-30 12:34 am (UTC)Sempreverde
The man from the north enters the tube
Wriggles his way to the perspex cube
The man from the south dissolves in his mouth
A lozenge of Sempreverde
The man from the north and the man from the south
One by the brain, one by the mouth
Climb through the tube into the cube
Of the perspex Japanese garden
And in the pines a tiny sun shines
Birds small as insects fly through the air
The panda unzips the skin of a pig
Flops himself down in the vibro chair
Ellen drinks heroin through a blue straw
I'm getting methedrine from some whore
An eye on her tits, Otto the Dix
Must itch to get into the garden
Fiddle me blank, fiddle me blind
All the young girls fiddle their minds
Jilly and Debbie and everyone's here
All for the Sempreverde
Giants and fairies and strange effigies
Sacred and artificial trees
Dragons and serpents and fish and birds
In the perspex Japanese garden
Otto the rich, Otto the poor
Spilling the stuff on the party floor
The past is so sad, and the present is worse
But at least we have no future
The world fills with trash and eskimo ash
Clouds of white gas floating in from the past
Crawl to the cashpoint and bring me the cash
And I'll get you the Sempreverde
I said 'I'm going to rape you'
She said okay
I said 'Don't say okay because then it's not rape'
She said 'Okay, I won't say okay'
After two tabs of Sempreverde
'Evergreen Sempreverde
Take a whole holiday or a half holiday
With Sempreverde
The tiny Japanese garden you can carry... in your pocket!'
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-30 01:00 am (UTC)Evergreen, it lasts forever...
Date: 2004-04-30 06:49 am (UTC)Re: Evergreen, it lasts forever...
Date: 2004-04-30 06:56 am (UTC)Pandas
Date: 2004-04-30 06:28 am (UTC)So do pandas dream of those long-gone days when they were fit, efficient killers?
Or was it a crisis of conscience, and they are vegetarians on moral grounds?
budapest or berlin?
Date: 2004-04-30 06:53 am (UTC)electronica.
well i think i'm going to do a tour of the inaka of various
bordering countries of austria, particularly those with
low per capita gdp.
btw your japanese garden looks like an portable affordance chamber - in the sense of jj gibson. step in and let it operate upon priors.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-30 11:12 am (UTC)amen.
'all these moments will be lost
like tears in water polo'
poetry, raw but frilly, beautiful.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-01 12:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-01 01:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-01 01:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-03 07:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-03 07:17 am (UTC)"The past is so sad, and the present is worse
But at least we have no future"
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-01 02:37 pm (UTC)I'm Mike. Whatever happened to Debbie?
Come to think of it, I haven't heard from
her sister, Jill in nearly a year.
I should get back to Chicago more.
Subject2
Date: 2007-05-09 06:14 pm (UTC)Bye