Two hours ago, a writer and poet, Bethany Jarmal, tweeted a prompt that interested me. She suggested picking one of the books in your collection at random. The author suggested looking at six to eight words on page 29 of the book and writing from those.
It sounds interesting, and I thought I’d check out Robbed of Sleep (Stories to Stay Up For). The eight words I liked on page 29 of ‘THEM IRON EYES CODY BLUES’ by JOHN BODEN were:
Brilliant orange in contrast to the blackest black
While touring Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain in 1994, Pavement played a strange composition titled Orange, Black. The band has performed on John Peel’s BBC radio show more than once (they’re excellent).
What does Steve Malkmus’ orange and black symbolize? He gets breathless singing those words on the track.
Once I burned this song to a mix CD for a friend of mine who enjoyed weird music. What she said hearing this was “What’s wrong?”
“Did he forget to take his medication?”
I just heard a rock musician being cool. The track is listed as Brink of the Clouds Brink of the Clouds
Yesterday The Smile released what I’m guessing is their sophomore album. I watched on YouTube the song Bending Hectic. The Smile – Bending Hectic
The lyrics include, “If you’ve got something to say, say it now.” The video presentation includes eyes on orange much like the cover for the 1997 Pavement LP Brighten the Corners. As Pavement has played loads of tour dates this year and last, Nigel Goderich, the unofficial “sixth member” of Radiohead (the band that preceded The Smile) produced the final Pavement record Terror Twilight in 1999.
I’m sure it was a lot of work, but it is well done. I wonder why The Smile would seem to reference Brighten the Corners in art from their new release.
As Reader’s Digest has been known to recount, laughter can be the best medicine. Laughter is a ready stress-buster. In fact, without a few laughs, the atmosphere feels oppressive and distressing.
Melodrama. Ivan Reitman comedies. Trailer Park Boys. Inappropriately inane emotional notes. Noisy songs that ignore rules of composition. Underwhelmed artists. Films with blissful dialogue.
Ridiculous Internet trends (the hive mind). Obscure Twitter highlights. The excesses of the most fortunate, who have strayed into bad taste. Beautiful, happy cats.
Stephen Malkmus. The Netflix original Flaked.
YouTube humour. The notes of sarcasm that Mutahar of someordinarygamers hits. Riverdale plot threads. Alex Meyers’ critiques of Riverdale. (Almost anything for young adults Alex Meyers likes to despise).
Unnecessary reboots. Well-highlighted irony in cinema. My best friend’s best moments. Being confronted by my own origins. “Postmodernist” or “meta” formula-breaking.
Jerry Seinfeld. Charlie Sheen. My brother sometimes gives me a laugh. His children have been known to give me a chuckle. My sister’s toddler is dear.
Bending reality to the will of the masses. TikTok comedians. What mainstream news opts to single out when the subject matter isn’t too grim nor necessary to be reported. Certain books on the market, whether inordinately silly accounts of common obstacles or cheerfully oblivious celebrity opuses. Faking spectacle to hold on to celebrity status.
Social turbulence. Sometimes optimism in the face of distressing evidence requires a sense of humour in the wake of steep inclines. The last laugh.
Steadfast resolve to succeed. Motivation messages for Generation Z champs. Productivity cult nonsense. Promises of the four-day workweek.
Tim Ferriss. Mark Manson. Bad decisions by Mark Zuckerberg. Really cool, grim scenarios. Characterizations in videogame cut scenes.
Hayden Christensen’s shift to the Dark Side of the Force. Lucasfilm decision-making. The decision to make superhero films unnecessarily dark. What passes for fantasy in the realm of three-act cinema.
Ontario is on target to meet its objective of getting 65 percent of grown-ups before the month’s over, and there is good faith it very well outperform.
They expect that May 24, around 2,490 drug stores provincewide will offer Pfizer and Moderna. There ought to in the long run be around 280,000 traveling through the network every week, authorities said.
Here on WordPress, occasionally I find specific bloggers to be interesting for me. One guy like that is Jim Adams, who has a blog and who has planned blog prompts.
Jim has an interest in music and knowledge to share.
I recall the previous winter when my father brought up to me that the sharing I was doing online didn’t appear to be excessively important, as should have been obvious. I help out my father with his business.
While I enjoy Facebook and Twitter, the day he offered that criticism about my content, I was a little miffed. I know that my dad clowns, but I tried to look past that, to see if I could think of a better approach. I tried chancing to utilize the focus right now that Jim has been providing.
I’ve been blogging since MySpace, kind of a wow. On WordPress, I have done some posting with a bit of humour to it, and in the months since my dad said that to me about how I seem on social, I eventually decided I still wasn’t too far off the mark.
There aren’t too many “rules” for running a social presence.
For November 29, 2020, Jim’s prompts include: “bird.” The late Leonard Cohen made the song Bird on the Wire.
By the mid-1960s, Cohen started to form rock and pop melodies. He had already written an expansive amount of writing, both poetry, and novels.
He studied at McGill in Montreal and made a name for himself through the sixties. Cohen kind of burned out about that stuff in the early nineteen seventies, but music came to him his whole career. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame enlisted Cohen in 2008, and Leonard Cohen got a Grammy Award in 2010.
Bird on the Wire is on the record Songs from a Room, released April 1969, and is like a poem set to the sound of Cohen’s guitar. The title Songs from a Room is very simple, understating the mastery of the music.
Songs from a Room LP
Being able to enjoy something from the years before I was born is lucky, as hearing Bird on the Wire is an experience that has power to it, sentimental. Strange song title, eh? A listener feels like the hardships of life have been met by others just the same, whether more talented, or more fortunate.
Not to sound presumptuous, but Bird on the Wire is great that way. Leonard Cohen got into music as a popular singer when he was losing interest in writing. Wikipedia says that Bird on the Wire is a country song, a detail which surprises me, and reading that, I thought additionally that the song just has a simplicity that sets it apart from other country songs.
The country genre of music isn’t something I understand, and maybe neither is the language of love, but when I was in college, I got to study, one semester, Canadian music. Country music in the Canadian Prairies is a favourite choice of many resident Canadians.
I can infer that Bird on the Wire could be a favourite of many who can remember 1969. It was years before I was born.
There is something about cowboy music, that we’ve adopted in Canada, that reflects how life in the Prairies shaped up. The first herders calling themselves “cowboys” got to the Canadian prairies in the 1870s, riding up from the US territories of Idaho and Montana.
The romantic image of the cowboy emerged around this American subculture. British Columbia “buckaroos” likewise sooner or later adopted the cowboy appearance.
I doubt that Cohen identified with being a cowboy; he was a novelist, poet and musician. He identifies, I think, with the archetype of a cowboy’s passion. I think of the scene in the Hollywood movie City Slickers, where Billy Crystal’s Mitch Robbins character plays the harmonica at the campfire.
Curly, Jack Palance’s character, interrupts the music.
Mitch Robbins: [Playing harmonica]
Curly: Put that away.
Mitch Robbins: [Stops, then resumes playing harmonica]
Curly: I said, put that away!
Mitch Robbins: Hey you know, the first time I tried to talk to you, you embarrassed me. So I teased you a little bit which maybe I shouldn’t have done, so I’m sorry.
And now you’re sitting over there playing with your knife, trying to frighten me – which you’re doing a good job. But if you’re gonna kill me, get on with it; if not, shut the hell up – I’m on vacation.
City Slickers
Wikipedia explains that before writing Bird on the Wire, Cohen carefully structured the song, before committing it to tape. To tell the truth, before I read Wikipedia’s description, I hadn’t thought that the song would be identified as a country song.
Cohen’s music is usually in the genres of folk, and soft rock. Romantic country music doesn’t meld with the other interests in music I have thought of. If Bird on the Wire is a country song, it breaks, I think, with the tradition of country music that country music fans enjoy.
It’s unique that way. I wonder if a country song should be simple, but distinctive. The answer isn’t straightforward.
Sometimes answers to questions like that turn up unexpectedly, even if it isn’t initially clear where to begin, to get an answer to the question. A post like this one, doing the research and writing the content, helps me understand better something that already interests me, the music. Also, maybe somebody else interested in this blog challenge thought to say something about this specific song.
I first heard Bird on the Wire when I was in high school, the twelfth grade or so, on a simply dubbed audio cassette.
Leonard Cohen passed on November 7, 2016 (aged 82).
I saw him once in concert. It was terrific.
Here are the lyrics to the song, followed by the song itself, in a video.
Did you know you had to leave that at home when you took the job? I’m afraid you might have to. That being said, let us proceed.
The problem-solving skills of a teen sleuth would benefit the team, but trying to emulate those same skills, in the office, will get you a reboot.
The radiant physical beauty of teen heroes and heroines often softens the hearts of even the fiercest opponents, while your limited charms, in the office, will bring up excuses.
The ability to resolve a dilemma in three-quarters of an hour, TV time, is completely impossible to replicate in the office. Three-quarters of an hour is the time it takes to install an operating system update that covers special keys, for languages of other continents, or an app checker that asks if it does check apps and the updated catalogue of word processor fonts.
TV reprobates who are secretively pulled in by bravery and beguile, that have envisioned frightful closures for interfering adolescent heroes, and have gone the mile to complete such business, don’t measure up to how your supervisor is five to seven minutes late every morning for a ten-minute opportunity involving those last wisps of transmission that still don’t light the psyche.
Spending your dollars for the drive, trying to forget genuine youngsters applauding, your data bill at home in the back of the kitchen drawer– leaves you mentally stranded until you are miles away, each day you show up for the privileges of cubicle life.
Instagramming shock, in light of a most recent debacle of separation gossip, places you in the washroom crying, holding a paper towel to your face while attempting to quit hyperventilating.
Remembering hands to your cheeks, in the wake of being checked for hang-ups, has you on the ground, showing you further inadequately made a decision that demonstrates those no-longer-so-charming goons truly came from that side of the tracks.
Getting back on your feet, your jacket is torn, which while for you is quite embarrassing, to turn up back at the office in such a state, the more chivalrous task of lending a friend an intact garment, translates poorly between what’s on TV, and what your understanding is of the psychological underpinning of those same gents, who just turned your boxer briefs into a flowerbed.
You’ll be back for that most recent five minutes of compromise throughout the show after work’s accomplished for the afternoon, a valiant effort to promise your supervisor that you won’t be in the vacant office much longer from when the last youngsters got terminated in the few hours on the clock that you expect to fill without one final fix of physical magnificence, and the sort of ability that simply the best and the most splendid have in general, which also excludes ensuring the addresses in the BCC: bar of the unforeseen doesn’t end up a large portion of an inch higher in CC:– Unlike real life, which stops the last minute of the same day that began the same time following your coffee, the TV episodes promise a forty-minute resolution, not the selfsame resolution that must be repeated dozens or hundreds of times over as part of reality.
They said that could never happen in the course of teenage heroism, celebrated with such a passionate kiss that you can do yourself, of course, as soon as you find another job.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 