Quick, before it makes sense!
Apr. 29th, 2004 06:57 pm
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
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-29 10:49 am (UTC)or not.
i like the panda idea.