My daughter and I saw solo Destroyer past Friday night at The Blind Pig in downtown Ann Arbor (I dig Ann Arbor). Bejar came on promptly at nine (following a truly awful opening act whose name I forget if in fact I ever registered it), finished his set at ten, played two songs for encore, off the stage by 10:10. Was acoustic, setlist included songs from across his career, and did include my single favorite Destroyer song, which because of the title I did not expect an (excellent) acoustic version, thank you fake drums
Before the show started when I was getting a beer I heard a few people next to me at the bar talking about last week's New York Times article (google it if you want the stupid, I'm not linking) naming the thirty greatest living American songwriters and the subsequent fury in general from many at what an incredibly shitty list it was and in particular the resulting fury from Billy Joel fans that he didn't make the list over others that did. We all agreed that Billy Joel, shitty as his music is, is no shittier than 9/10ths of those who made the list. At that moment Bejar walked by, zombie-like, refusing eye contact, emanating a do not talk to me, don't ask me to shake your hand dark vibe. C noticed it too and said WOAH! when I got back to our table when she saw I had seen it
I told her about the conversation at the bar about the list of 30 songwriters then added, you're Dan Bejar who's created a corpus of music boundlessly deeper, wider, better than any and all shitty songs Billy Joel has written and you're performing solo in a dive-bar in Ann Arbor Michigan before 300 people to pay your bills, all of which may have had everything, something, nothing to do with him zombie-walking through said dive bar hoping no one tries to talk to him. C remembered the Lambchop show fifteen years or more ago at Rams Head in Annapolis where after the show Kurt Wagner yapped with us for fifteen minutes while he chain-smoked four cigarettes. He wasn't on the list either, was he, she said. Hopefully I see another Lambchop show with my daughter in the near future. Bejar played this during his two song encore, the fucking lunatic
Cheapest gas in Michigan was $4.99 a gallon, funny that Democrats in unison aren't calling it Donald Trump's Iran War of Choice Tax constantly and relentlessly, yes? I saw four anti-Trump yard signs, no pro-Trump yard signs, and the house on Wooster Road that every time I've driven by on all of our trips over the years to Michigan was always festooned with pro-Trump and anti-Libtard flags but was flagless this trip (though the same fleet of pick-ups was cluttered the driveway and front yard), read into that what you will.
I have a new reflecting ball for our garden statuary collection that I bought at an estate sale Saturday in Tecumseh (pronounced to-come-SEE), I'd never been at one, my son-in-law works the circuit for his personal business and I was curious, those fuckers are locusts, they stripped the house in half-an-hour. There was one piece of pottery on a counter, an old water jug with an interesting face painted on it, I took off the lid to look at the price ($46), and when I put the lid back on and started to reach for it a woman nudged me aside, grabbed it, and ran. Happens all the time, I'm told. Speaking of people who should be listed as one of the 30 best living songwriters, there's a new Lambchop album dropping in August, the one song already released is below the grid, it's Holyfuck. I listened to the new Notwist album once a day when driving to and from the courses, the entire album is kaboom, this song is KABOOM!
DECOY
John Ashbery
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That ostracism, both political and moral, has
Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;
That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,
For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a
Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total
financial upheaval
And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply
A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated
By acts of corporate vandalism every five years,
Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its
own standing
There is every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of
commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom
Over the imminent lateness of the denouement that, advancing slowly,
never arrives,
At the same time keeping the door open to a tongue-and-cheek attitude
on the part of the perpetrators,
The men who sit down to their vast desks on Monday to begin planning
the week’s notations, jotting memoranda that take
Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows
Above the city pavements, turning and wheeling aimlessly
But on the average directed by discernible motives.
To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries
And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next
Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit
Until the day it spreads out all its accumulation, delta-like, on the plain
For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out.
But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other.
There was never any excuse for this and perhaps there need be none,
For kicking out into the morning, on the wide bed,
Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them:
Husband and wife
Man and wife
speaking of self-evident truths, as ashbery's poem, does, I wish to call to your attention rev. hedges' latest stern homily
ReplyDeletehttps://consortiumnews.com/2026/05/12/chris-hedges-americas-suicide-pact/
illustrated by mr fish's clever depiction of a redesigned revolver
hedges begins by quoting toynbee, and goes on to anand giriradhiradas's analysis of the neo-liberal power elite
hedges links to an hour-long discussion he has with anand which is titled "how the epstein class fails to the top"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFgIRpGnUJA
1/this morning i admired the painting which resembled a red, yellow, and blue balloon [a reference to an advertising slogan aimed at children in the 1950s - raise your hand if you recognize it], listened to a dismemberment plan song and liked it, read a nemerov poem with the same title and liked that too, and encountered the following pithy prose about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy/Training/Thinking - ACT - pronounced as one word:
ReplyDeleteHayes’ Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) brilliantly flips traditional psychology on its head by recognizing that fighting our inner demons only feeds them, shifting the goal from symptom reduction to psychological flexibility. By utilizing mindfulness to foster a detached, non-judgmental acceptance of inevitable human suffering, ACT strips difficult thoughts and emotions of their power to dictate behavior. Ultimately, its genius lies in empowering individuals to stop obsessing over feeling better and instead focus on living better, channeling their energy into immediate, value-driven action.
2/yesterday afternoon i gave some consideration to the possibility that a relative's quite serious problems in living in the last year or two might be a product not only of emotional disregulation, for which they are receiving medication, but also intellectual deterioration that cannot be treated - perhaps there will be a discussion in which this possibility can be broached and its action implications explored - and if not, then so it goes
3/yesterday evening a young man, a recent college graduate with a latino name but gringo voice, called me on the phone to discuss the primary election - he is supporting the multimillionaire who wants to reclaim his seat in congress, taking it bach from the multimillionaire in the same party who currently holds it - the incumbent is receiving money from AIPAC, he told me, which - to me - is just one more reason to vote for the former incumbent with my mail-in primary ballot, which arrived yesterday - we spoke at some length - it was fun for me and i think carlos [not his full name] enjoyed it too
over the weekend, i was - as usual - complaining by email about how tough it is to be me, and got this response
ReplyDeleteOn Vonnegut's indifferent god and Winwood's higher love:
I think both are right, and the tension dissolves once you notice that Winwood's song is a yearning, not an assertion. "There must be some kind of higher love" — he doesn't claim to have found it yet, just that life would be unbearable if it didn't exist somewhere. And I'd argue it does exist, but not written in the stars for us. It exists as us, or rather as what conscious beings enact when they are fully present to each other. The universe is indifferent, AND consciousness within the universe is capable of love. These are both true. You don't need cosmic backing for your values; you need you to enact them. That's not a small thing — it may actually be larger than having the universe do it for you, because it means it's genuinely yours.
Michael Dowd's insight — which I think is real and hard-won — is that when you stop fighting the grief about what's happening and actually feel it fully, something shifts. The energy that was going into resistance becomes available. What emerges isn't happiness exactly, but a kind of clarified presence. This is the post-doom move, and it converges with what Hayes calls acceptance (not resignation, but a dropping of the useless struggle against what is already true) and with what the open awareness traditions call equanimity. You can face the fire and still love the people around the fire.
The only passably excusable excuse to use "Ai" would be to command They to read out the following (by you) in Franco Hera's voice:
ReplyDeleteI told her about
the conversation at the bar about
the list of 30 songwriters then
added, you're Dan
Bejar who's created a corpus
of music boundlessly
deeper, wider, better
than any and all
shitty songs Billy
Joel has
written and you're performing
solo in a
dive-bar in Ann
Arbor Michigan before 300
people to pay
your bills, all
of which may
have had everything, something,
nothing to do
with him zombie -walking
through said
dive bar hoping
no
one tries
to
talk
to
him