“about” the first song:
British Leyland busses appeared on the streets and roads of post revolutionary, U.S. embargo hobbled Cuba. Public Transportation chariots from a far off place, forbidden and unreachable... Negro claims it was among the most beautifully comic, and comically beautiful images a lifetime could ever hope to be enveloped by... The Cuban government had decided not to waste the labor, or had the deep sense of humor, not to change the destinations listed on the front of the imported busses, so there, as the busses approached the waiting commuters, were destinations unobtainable: East London, Birmingham, Edinburg, LIverpool, Belfast, Roma, Athens, Jerusalem, Delhi, Cordoba, Kyoto... cities on the other side of the wall of suffocating isolation and poverty (erected by - well? the U.S. embargo? the horrors of Communist Party Central Planning? It depends on whether you talk to Negro or me). But there were the designated cities on the the front of the busses, and the people, the commuters, the Cubans, would scream for the busses to take them, the unhappy field hand, the ambitious boy and his stunning date, the freightened young father, to the promised destinations, outside the horizon blurring and collapsing walls of poverty... Man! Dublin! Man, Paris! Man, Yorkshire! but, of course, they’d end up where they expected, Camaguay, Matanzas, Santiago de Cuba... You can, of course, laugh off the question of which side of the wall was heaven, but it’s, as usual, a bitter laugh. Maybe all laughs are rooted in bitterness. I don’t know. Xio and Dafnis claim the momentary approach of the British Leylands with the unobtainable cities were moments of constant delight and a levity constructed among a constantly defiant people... Yeah, of course...
what the first song/s really “about”:
when it comes down to it, it’s really more about the Blackwater Guards patrolling the transports and gates of heaven than about the imagined night of love, grappa and freedom in Venice that Negro and his girlfriend were denied that evening. Or maybe I’m off, and the source of Negro’s, Alfredo’s and Yosvanni’s laughter is closer to it...
“about” one, some of the next songs:
In The Bronx, off the Concourse: The young, ephemeral and serious catholic school girl pulls her knees up, resting her heals on the next step up, and tries to conjure a warmth and calm as she sits in the apartment building stairway. If you’d have been there, you probably have found yourself focusing on the intense space between her brows as she concentrated. But that might have been because it seemed to become the center of her body or because she was described as serious in the first sentence and it would confirm the writer’s truthfulness. Thank you for your immediate faith. But you’re not there, and in fact, the girl doesn’t exist. Do you automatically have the same automatic faith and credence tn the sax player at the beginning of the record? Do you intuitively believe the angle and action / word of the record producer the same way you’d believe the story’s narrator? I wonder.
The catholic school girl realizes that a light panic, an open unformed fear is starting to settle into the back of her neck, into her shoulders. She doesn’t remember her mother saying anything about not being home when she got back form school. She was really startled when there was no answer to the doorbell downstairs. She didn’t know how many thousands of seconds or millions of minutes she had stood, adrift, in the downstairs hallway before the old man, some old man who lived somewhere on one of the top floors, let her into the building. She kept seeing the ghost of this one image, the one image superimposed on everything in front of her. The brass doorknob to the outside door had been polished. It shown, it sparkled. She had never seen it polished before. Who had polished it? Someone she couldn’t imagine had polished it so it shown for the first time in her life. She kept seeing the brass as the old man removed his hands after opening the door for her. There was moisture form his hand that she watched disappear and some oily trace from his hand that stayed. The image of the oily film remaining on the shiny brass added to her disquiet, to the slight rise of pitch, in sound that flowed through her body. She listened to every noise in the building for a sign of her mother’s entrance through the large door downstairs. Her shifting the packages and putting the keys back in her purse. Please, now. She listened to the TVs in the apartments and the sirens and the dogs in the building across the airshaft and the low rumble of the hallway itself, and the hiss of the florescent lights. As the panic settled in her blood, she realized the tone of all the sounds changed. They raised, some of them, they receded, some of them, they shifted place. Suddenly there was a bright a moment of stillness, she had heard and could remember a timid sound that was so clear and calm (and accompanied by an image, of all things ) that all the other sounds dissipated, not just for the moment. She, for the first time, had heard a tear forced from her eye, not by sadness or fear, but by the cold and had heard it roll down her cheeks and into the darkness of the stairway. There was a quiet in that sound that made her resign herself. Six minutes later, her mother returned from the store. Everything returned to it’s place, with small changes.
what the song’s “about”:
-Kip Hanrahan
Anyway, that was the printed (as in liner notes) text. Reading it again. Hmm.......
What I've been thinking about recently:
So, you're supposed to write what you know. Does that work (in any way, really?) in music? I was under the impression that the music that intuitively meant the most to me was music that either someone else wrote, or that I wrote, that made audible something I didn't know -well, didn't know as music, but possibly by heart. Does that make sense? So, I guess, the rule could be: write what you don't know, or don't know you know….
At least until I start in on the difference / distraction made / caused by the digital change....
ummmm......
OK, more tommorrow...
