This is just impossibly cute. [Buy.]
Everything this person has written for TUNETHEPROLETARIAT
OR I’LL EXPLODE
1:52am: bored teenagers gather around the public bathrooms on the north east corner of Hyde Park. Some lie down, others light cigarettes, and the rest stand hands in pockets in the cold murmuring. Nothing is happening tonight; even the rats hidden well throughout the scraggly bushes aren’t rustling. The bathrooms are empty, washed in graffiti and urine.
Across the door of the third stall from the left, someone sometime earlier had scrawled Shakespeare in Sharpie ink.
R: Is love a tender thing? It is too rough,
Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.M: If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.
Below that somebody drew a picture of a dick in red marker.
In one of the stalls there’s a half-eaten ham sandwich wedged between the pipes and an assembly of ants marching to and fro with bits of bread and ham, marching for the Queen. Are there rogue ants? Ants that cry for revolution, sitting by the wayside with torn abdomens and lazy eyes screaming YOU WANT ME? FUCKING WELL, COME AND FIND ME, I’LL BE WAITING.
[$$$]
IT’S ALL GOOD BABY BABY
It’s mid-May, ’94. “Juicy” is throbbing from stereos in every avenue. Somehow it’s as if this is exactly your life. Toes tapping, shoulders swaying to Mtume’s sampled mid-tempo instrumental. “Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis / When I was dead broke, man, I couldn’t picture this.” Knocking fists with your friends in the backseat of their beat-down ’71 Chevy Nova, laughing when you meet lines (“Now honeys play me close like butter plays toast!”). Alleyway steam muddling fantasies of extravagant living, golden-bottled alcohol, and a kind of papered freedom. Years away from worrying about men in blue suits and bow ties clutching 9mm pistols. [Ready To Die.]
…or else you gotta stay all night.
Bob Dylan – If You Gotta Go, Go Now
Dylan, for whom many have sacred feelings, is cocky here. Cocky, presumptious. “It ain’t that I’m questionin’ you / to take part in any quiz / it’s just that I ain’t got no watch / and you keep askin’ me what time it is.” And the crowd laughs. They know it’s true. Is she hanging around, is she going to take off her shoes? Whatever.
The song is simply constructed. Verses in meters ticking over. Dylan is acclaimed for his elusiveness, his well constructed lies, his appropriation of the poetry and music of his elders with an acerbic bite, shoving it down the mouths of his contemporaries thinly-suited and smoking, but here we’ve got a kid that just ain’t worried about nothing. “It ain’t that I’m wantin’ / anything you never gave before / it’s just that I’ll be sleeping soon / it’ll be too dark for you to find the door.” When the song ends, a woman in the crowd says “What do you do for a living?” and Dylan, I’m guessing he’s meeting her eye, laughs. “God, hey, anything you say!” [The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Concert At Philharmonic Hall.]
REVOLVER
I spent a few nights with Billy the Busker every week. He would set up, a microphone and guitar his only ammunition, along the boulevard and play songs from the 60s, ignoring the occasional requests for Oasis and Jason Mraz from stumbling passers-by.
He was playing Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” when I sat down in front of him, legs crossed. Drink Sangria in the park. He asked for my name, asked if I knew the song, smiled when I nodded, allowed me one request, I said “anything Dylan”, he laughed and started plucking away at “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.
I couldn’t help myself. I sang along.
He stopped singing, turned the microphone towards me, nodded. I sang into it, felt the crackle of my best Bob improv, felt embarrassed and empowered and happy. Billy kept playing along, chuckling when I would forget the words.
People would watch, nod, throw coins, then chase something somewhere else.
Most nights we would finish sitting on the curb, sharing a beer. Then he would go home and I would go home.
This one story Billy told sticks to me. He was playing in a band, meant to be opening for some songstress – I can never remember the name, I usually make it up – when she pulled out because she was tired or a Communist or stuck on a bus somewhere or something like that. Anyway, his band ends up headlining the night to make up for it. They sing a few songs. Get a few cheers. One of the songs was The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”. He said they slowed it down, balladified it, made it better.
I laughed.
The story goes that Billy had the bartender slide him a drink at the club’s counter, and was sitting there mulling over the night’s events when he felt a kind of presence on his shoulder. When you know somebody is there but you’re not sure what and can’t know if it’s safe to check. So he turns around. It’s George Harrison. And George tells Billy, “Outside of what we did with it [Eleanor Rigby], that was the best version I’ve ever heard.”
I would never have believed him, except he did play that version of “Eleanor Rigby” for me, and it really was that fucking good. I’m almost goddam sorry to give you the original when I know, on a curb somewhere, there’s Billy with his guitar and his microphone and that song in his lungs.
Handsome smile, wearing handsome shoes
WINTER …these fingers grow brittle and cold and hold tightly fisted the letters you sent one week from your birthday, underlining all the truths you weren’t ready to say.
SPRING …the flowers bloomed scattering pollen while the bees carried paranoia to and fro. People, scared and impressionable, asking questions they didn’t want answers to.
SUMMER …the beach called home and asked if we were in. It hadn’t seen us in a while. Salt in the air and water in the lungs, drowning in nonchalance.
AUTUMN …the leaves fell steadily in a stream from their branches. Your phone was unhooked. Strips of your torn summer frock sat on the dresser.
electricity comes from other planets
The Velvet Underground – Temptation Inside Your Heart
When the shaman crawled into her ear canal and pried her brains apart with his chipped fingernails, he whispered into the mess:
I know where temptation lies, inside of your heart.
“You can talk during this,” he tests. He digs his fingers in, presses his lips to the fleshy bits of brain, licks her neurons. He burrows into her fear center, bares his teeth to the pulpy crevasse, bites into the terror.
If you’re gonna try to make it right,
you’re surely gonna end up wrong.
(wrong wrong wrong wrong)
[V U.]
It’s pretty much that your head works like this: when you’re young, your brain soaks in memories like nobody’s business; they come in, sinewy and impish, and evaporate within seconds. All the details – the genuine smiles, the uncomfortable hands, the waiting to tell you something you won’t enjoy glances – all that shit soaks in.
And then you get older, and like your genitals so too does your memory sag and wrinkle. It stops processing, stops mincing each moment down. They come in, ropy, hanging from end to end. Recollections sprawled atop memories, crossing paths, sometimes melting into each other.
TWOKS
On the evening her hair fell away, Alia felt the air around her scalp, soothing her pores. The linoleum floor was littered with red strands, curled in bundles around her ankles. She knelt down and gathered each thread, running her fingers through. She licked the tips and tied one to her arm, starting at the fore and crossing the elbow all the way to her shoulder. She tied the other end to the buckle of her belt. Soon she had hundreds of strands strung from belt to outstretched limb. Sitting quietly on the corner of the kitchen counter, knees swinging, she strummed each one with a purposeful calm. And the sound that came whirring from her makeshift harp set the sun alight.
If the arthritic trees in the charred forest bend too far forward, their branches dig into the ashen soil and fuse with the screaming nutrients. The dew on the remaining leaves bubble. Steam rises from holes in the ground. The parakeets whistle melancholic tunes. Children once played here.
[If you ask, they’ll mail you the album. Or go to a show.]
Drown your fear in me.
[ Kiss. Death. Love. Come. arrives November 8th.]