Verses

From-a-babe, I've felt a spiritual affiliation with WWI dead and mourning (likely past life residue). So this morning (nostalgic?), I returned to my collected Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon has never impacted me like Wilfred Owen, never appeared to be as fine and musical a poet (or as tragic a figure). But he was certainly more prolific and . . . journal*istic? The war poems are best taken whole; severed from the pack, they are sort of naive, the satirical diary entries of a well-educated boy encountering misfortune for the first time, reactionary and freshly political. When read one after another, they impress with honesty, render one incapable of cynicism for their earnestness and for the trauma through which they were penned. That said, here are two, set aside, both on the subject of rough amusements, a persistent grotesque (I hope they haven't been criminally airlifted from context . . . they're definitely Brit-priggish):

"When I'm among a Blaze of Lights"

8 January, 1917

When I'm among a blaze of lights

With tawdry music and cigars

And women dawdling through delights,

And officers in cocktail bars,

Sometimes I think of garden nights

And elm trees nodding at the stars.

I dream of a small firelit room

With yellow candles burning straight,

And glowing pictures in the gloom,

And kindly books that hold me late.

Of things like these I choose to think

When I can never be alone:

Then someone says, 'Another drink?'

And turns my living heart to stone.

"Blighters"

4 February, 1917

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin

And cackle at The Show, while prancing ranks

Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;

'We're sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!'

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to ragtime tunes, or 'Home sweet Home,'

And there'd be no jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Baupaume.

singles

"Sweet Dreams"
Beyoncé

Last week, my co-worker was playing a video linked from FB, some throaty, grey shoegazer with a haircut covering "Single Ladies." It was 'ick. He said, "Why is everybody raving about this?" I said, "...because they're racist." And then I watched the for-real "Single Ladies" video a few times--still good, still a call to arms not a snooze, not even a little bit. Occasionally I wonder if, we spectators get lazy about newness and give the establishment too much credit/obeisance (that "...to be pleased means to say yes" business). Sure. But Be is never not working. She works to make our lives easy, to provide us with half-familiar/half-fresh treats, soundtrackings, jams--21st Century POP MUSIC, red-blooded, healthy post-Modernism. This guy, "Sweet Dreams," the most recent single drawn from I am...Sasha Fierce (the 6th or 7th off the record since last autumn?), is Be's Gothic number, as Industrial as our bright Aughts R&B gets (cousin to Rihanna's "Disturbia") and with lyrics like, "Tattoo your name across my heart so it will remain/Not even death can make us part/What kind of dream is this?" and "Clouds filled with stars cover the skies/And I hope it rains/You're the perfect lullaby." I really dig her invocation of dreamstates. Dreams are--as soon as we become aware of them, waking--histories, passages, memories, inaccessible. This angle lends the song a deal of regret, glances backward. She opens with a loosely cast phrase, "turn the lights on," that is applied as a portion of the driving beat throughout the song. In the track's present tense, Be is no longer falling into soupy, dark love, but attempting to reconstruct and measure it 'in the light'...after.

"Sally"
Sam Sparro

I picked up this dude's album because...um...a gay teen played it for me at an American Apparel, saying, "You wouldn't believe how he looks: cute white boy with a side bang, wearing our shit." Whatever. Ain't no shame. This and the U.K. hit, "Black and Gold," are supreme and smart dance songs, despite their hipster cheese (Sparro is an Aussie living in El Lay....so....). And "Sally." I mapped out something like five music videos (starring me?) for it as I rode the train into Manhattan this morning. My favorite was a tour of the Financial District, dead at night with Christmas decorations on the lamposts, dancing in and out of empty dives and office tower porticoes in a 91/2 Weeks, off the shoulder, creamy Irish cable knit sweater and nothing else (shoes?). The lyrical take on stripper dadsums-issues is a touch ham-handed. But Sam's throwback politics are in the right place (I loathe the fourth-wave approach to sex industry-as-empowerment).

Pure redux--tragic heroines/social issues+gay soul singing+slap-happy synths, a track to get riled up to, to dance yr emotions to. Bless our hearts. Disco isn't ever gonna die again!