Top Ten Songs of the Naughties #1 (For McG)

#1 TV on the Radio- Wolf like Me

Top Ten Songs of the Naughties #'s 2-4

#2 Staralfur by Sigur Ros

Few bands can offer up a purely subjective experience with their songs. To individuate modern music means to transcend genre and lyrics and in doing so elicit a reaction in the listener that is as abstractly unknowable as it is instinctively known, a comprehending on the far side of your gut. Sigur Ros produces just that. Each of their teeny-weeny symphonies presents a song that builds like every indescribable moment in your life plucked out of chronology and jammed into sequential order, with respect to dynamics. Whether their songs are woeful or jubilant, demolishing or inspiring is entirely up to the listener. Every song means everything and every song means nothing, but, regardless of what each song means, the overarching message of the band is nothing but celebratory, revelatory, brilliant. IT'S LIKE LIFE OR SOMETHING.

#3 Brother Sport by Animal Collective

Nowadays, originality is rare. Nowadays, what people deem original is thievery billed under a different name and shown in the right lighting. Yet, Animal Collective is wholly, confoundingly original. Few songs are composed of intergalactic jungle beats backing a heartsick boy's choir with lyrics like monolith haiku, plus man-child howls. What arises is as phantasmagoric as it is simple, as accessible as it is obtuse. By the song's mantric outro, the listener is so awash with disorientation and physical/mental overload that the disparate emotions begin to bind and converge and by the time the song fades out you're at a point of complete cohesion because originality demands nothing less.

#4 Do You Realize? By The Flaming Lips

Everyone you know has no idea. Everyone you know sells themselves short. Everyone you know is floating in space. Everyone you know can cry from happiness. Everyone you know someday will die. Everyone you know will say goodbye. Everyone you know will let life pass them by. Everyone you know will let everything good go to waste. Everyone you know will see only darkness in night and you have to realize that night is just day without light.

Top Ten Songs of the Naughties #'s 5-7

#5 Steam Engine by My Morning Jacket

Permanence. As much as this song is a celebration of the band's lustrous oceans of sound and Jim James' battered, towering vocals and humming twilight rays of slide guitar, it is about permanence. It is about recognizing the toxicity and transience in all the things we ascribe meaning and substance to. It is about how these things mean nothing. It is about how the awfulness that falls through a person exists wholly, is inherently designed, to end. And how the irrevocable instances of our lives, the ability for songs to sink through our skin and set our blood alight, everything that matters, really truly you-know-it matters, that those things know no end. They go on and on and on and on, like a steam engine. Get it?

#6 Heartbeats by The Knife

Heartbeats is a love song, through and through. In most cases this would entail a harkening to better days passed, or a lamenting of futures unrealized, perceptions betrayed, emotions unreciprocated, but this song is none of these things. This song is a refutation of these things. Through the unrelenting backbeat, the ever-ascending synths, the exalted siren vocals, The Knife construct a love affair that exists outside of the aforementioned. In this song, love isn't a sum of moments, or an escape to another place, it exists entirely in the moment, in a moment of pure reciprocation, of two heartbeats fighting for synchronicity, of silent minds and furious bodies, a moment of two people actually loving each other enough to fold solely into that pocket of time together and to live so much within that moment that nothing exists beyond it and nothing can make it end. It is great.

#7 Reckoner by Radiohead

This song is pure audio sublimity. This is the hypnotic lullaby that plays in your most immersive dreams to loft you back to reality. It gets to a point that the lyrics' importance is almost entirely negated. Eloquence aside, who gives a flippity frak what this song is about. For Car Car, it's about the 2007 Hillary Swank movie, The Reckoning. Hillary Swank is the Reckoner, because she's real gross, but she can act. Which is something to reckon, he supposes. To CP, certain things aren't meant to be intellectualized, because it undermines their ineffability or something or the other or the what-have-you. This is certainly one such case.

Top Ten Songs of the Naughties #'s 8-10

#8 Wake Up by Arcade Fire

After its marching, choral buoyed intro, Win Butler sings that "Something filled up his heart with nothing." What he refers to is unidentifiable, something symptomatic of the times but entirely free of condemnation. Well, in part, it's about full-growed adults acting like blubbering babies and how this poisons everything and how people should slaughter the charade of preservation and politeness and say what they fucking feel for once, but there's other things there, too! The song is not about placing blame, but recognizing the ways things is. In the first verse, "Wake Up" brings examination from Win's perspective, segueing into the second verses almost didactic collective "you" POV, and by the time these perspectives converge on the dementedly incredible lyric of "We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good thing to rust," you can't tell if that just is meant to signify limitation, or if you're meant to hang on that just, because to be flawed and childish is to be a human being, and that's something outside justification.

#9 Good Girl/Carrots by Panda Bear

For not-brief stretch of Best Summer Ever 09, Carmen was convinced that this song was the sonic approximation of his soul. With its hybrid structure, engrossingly enveloping ethereality, and lyrics that are at turns incomprehensible and poignant, the song never strives to be understood, only enjoyed. It presents itself as convoluted cochlear assault for headphonaphiles, but at its core, it's a song about simplicity hidden within the folds of words and relationships and Mitch Hedberg's death and negativity and lameness. At the climax of "Carrots," a section that tiptoes into the outer ear, plays like harps on your wedding day played with the feathers of some great prehistoric birds, Panda Bear joyfully chucks artifice into the bleachers, with audacious abandon, and identifies more than presents the ways things is, crooning:

Get your head out of those mags,

and websites that try to shape your style.

Take a risk just for yourself,

and wade into the deep end of the ocean.

#10 Everything in Its Right Place by Radiohead

In the wake of releasing arguably the most influential album of all time, Radiohead toured and toured and abated the world's rabid anticipation to OK Computer's follow-up, finally delivering Kid A, an abstract monolith of blips and reverb mountains and modulation and pure, unfiltered genius. EIIRP's opening mellotron chords play like an exhalation of Sisyphean relief, a thousand sonic breezes blanketing a body fevered by expectation and unwarranted distress. It plays like the funeral song for what rock bands were capable of, up until that point, set to diminished ivory tickles and Thom Yorke's interstellar echolalia. If anything the song is an assurance, a reiteration that life will provide you neither what you expect or entirely desire, how things are the way they are because they have to be, not because they choose to be, and how that isn't necessarily that awful.

power music, electric revival

Back from his three-month sabbatical of lechery and bacchanalia, Car Car has returned to the blogosphere entirely self-actualized and sporting a tan life-shattering in uniformity and shade alike. To ease back into the swing of things, and in honor of Pitchfork Media's 500 Best Songs of the 00's, CP has organized his list of Top 25 Songs of the Naughties, the first fifteen of which will be catalogued right here after this sentence ends.

Car Car's Top 25 Songs of the Naughties #'s 25-11

25. My Body is a Cage by Arcade Fire

24. Ashes of American Flags by Wilco

23. Staring at the Sun by TV on the Radio

22. 3 Peat by Lil' Wayne

21. Boys You Won't by The Wrens

20. Lateralus by Tool

19. Mykonos by Fleet Foxes

18. Inni mer syngur vitleysingur by Sigur Ros

17. There There (The Boney King of Nowhere) by Radiohead

16. Bros by Panda Bear

15. Street Lights by Kanye West

14. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) by Arcade Fire

13. The Whale Song by Modest Mouse

12. Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of) by The Mars Volta

11. Two by The Antlers

The forthcoming Top Ten Songs will be accompanied by illuminating and confounding justifications a la CP's Top Ten Album's of All Time List, but until then here's a look into what's to come, in the future.

COMING SOON

What's Better? The Pixar Edition: (Wall-E or UP!)?

The Ecstasy of the Small Fan

Thus Far: CP's Favorites of Everything of 2009

Which Actor Most Resembles Car Car (or the other way around?)

Most Anticipated Movies of the Fall

Is It Still Permissible to Like Batman?

The Taxi-Cab Hat

Sneak Peaks of Original Works by CP including and not limited to:

In the End, Everyone Dies

Coming Together

Resort!

and...

GET GROWNED UP!

A 500-Part Series in Which Car-Car Unlocks and Dismantles Life's Great Mysteries

What Happens After Death?

Living the Just Life

Adulthood

The Persistence of Memory

Time as Phenomena, Entity, and Whatchamacallit

Religion

Art, Defined

The Untethered Embrace of the Unknown

Belly Sadness

and

808's and Heartbreak: Masterpiece or Brick of Shit?

Here's Hope Everyone had the Best Summer Ever!!!

The Most Handsomest Boy in School.

Car Car on his big first day! He learned so much!

the weather.

Sure has been hot, lately!

and the meek shall inherit the earth

Few pseudo-people in the modern world are acquainted with Internet Deprivation Disorder (from here on referred to as its more colloquial moniker: IDD (not to be confused with Freud's infant sex cokefiend brain demon)).  In a locality as technologically and culturally advanced as Seaside Heights, the high levels of IDD come as a surprise to most, and, much to the bemoaning of his humble and sometimes outspoken and most of the times non-existent readership, CP contracted one of the afflictions most deadly strains: blogger IDD (from here on referred to as its more colloquial moniker: BIDD (not to be confused with what your tech-savvy great aunt does on eBay).  BIDD's ill effects are twofold, first denying the blogger his/her ability to blog, then afterwards leading the infected to reflect on his/her status as a blogger, which in turn results in some pretty awful reflectionitis concerning the caverns of depravity one must reach to be morphed into a blogger in the first place/the existence of nearly every reality show/bro culture/guido culture/pretty much every culture excluding that of said reflecting blogger, which is blogger culture.  Wrap your head around that.   Things just go downhill from there, as you can imagine.

Symptoms of IDD/BIDD

1. Alcoholism

2. Sadomasochistic Watching of ESPN

3. Doing Laundry

4. Organizing of sufferer's iTunes Library

5. Acute Racism

6. Constant Consumption of Quizno's

7. Visual/Auditory Hallucinations

8. Irritability in regards to characters talking to themselves in TV shows/movies

9. Taking Nappys

Carmen has taken to living a colonial lifestyle, more or less.  Lots of thinking about the Articles of Confederation, the Stamp Act, harvest, stuff like that.  Here are some movie micro-reviews:

UP: 5 Strawberries

Terminator Salvation: 2 Strawberries

Drag Me to Hell: 4 1/2 Strawberries

The Hangover: 4 Strawberries

Away We Go: 4 1/2 Strawberries

The Limits of Control: 1/2 Strawberry

Adventureland: 4 Strawberries

If BIDD persists, the world may never know if Carmen preferred UP to WALL-E, or how many strawberries Veckatimest received, or how the entire NBA Finals depends on Orlando's outside shooting, or how bad Zadie Smith is at writing dialogue, or which Goslin kid is cutest, or so many more ors.  Things could be worse, though. Toodle loo.

NEVERMIND

the ghost of christmas past from the future

Since weathering the calamitous effects of reverse-culture shock, CP has been blessed with a lot of time to reflect on requisite mind junk that gets all muddled between the ears and screams for sorting; including and not limited to his once sour relationship with the Radiohead song "House of Cards."  Upon the release of In Rainbows, Carmen cited HOC as a low-point, a mired, superfluous track that disrupted the album's overarching flow and demanded almost a .8 drop on his infamous rating system: "The Strawberry Criterion."  If prompted this CP would have most likely described the track as, "a total suckfest that sullies all its bordering tracks with its suck and pretty much fistfraks itself for the entirety of its five minute twenty-eight second run time."  Shockingly, he was wrong.  When examining HOC as a stand-alone track, it becomes easier to admire its ambiance, the hypnotic guitarring and swirling woo's.  Lyrically HOC holds its own against cerebral-detonators like "Videotape" and "Bodysnatchers," while in no way surpassing the aforementioned, it still manages to convey that sometimes we build mountains of worry on foundations of hot air.  What the listener is left with is a song that's nowhere near as superfluous as "Faust A.R.P." or as drab as the first three minutes of "All I Need," but at the same time never aspires for the sonic brilliance of "Reckoner" or "Jigsaws Falling Into Place." So you can see how one can mistake the thing.  

This will never turn into a video blog.  

Youtube gives Carmen's computer panic attacks.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #1

Perfect.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #'s 2-4

#2 The Bends by Radiohead

After recording the vocals for "Fake Plastic Trees," Thom Yorke stumbled out into the London night, sobbing, and proceeded to drink himself into a drunken stupor.  This occurred because the album, that moment, wasn't only a culmination for Yorke after a long recording process, but it was a culmination for all rock music up until that point in history.   The song is about knowing, either consciously or sub-consciously, that the person you love isn't able to reciprocate that telltale emotion, knowing this and still being unable to wretch yourself from that person.  When the song crescendos with Johnny Greenwood's white-noise sound wall it is physically painful.  It's the sound of the limitations of rock music crumbling like an empire.  "Just" is about a really annoying person.  After The Bends, Radiohead chose to augment their sound both to evolve sonically and because they simply had no where else to go.  This is as good as rock will get.  And on "Street Spirit," the album's, and most likely any album's, most implausibly beautiful track, lush arpeggios carry Thom Yorke's pained musings on insignificance into an icy atmosphere populated by phantasms and half-speed remembrances, and he coos as the album eases to a regretful halt, the most simply perfect lyric that anyone could have wrote it and only Radiohead could have wrote it.

Immerse your soul in love.

#3 Frances the Mute by The Mars Volta

Covering over seventy-five furious minutes in five songs, Frances the Mute blends so many genres it forges a genre unto itself.  Songs traverse prog, jazz, metal, shoegaze, marimba within single movements, the lyrical pendulum swings from verbose English to blazing Spanish to dead as dead Latin without missing a beat, decibels oscillate like a bungee jumper.  This isn't mind-bending music.  This is music that wiggles into your axons and dendrites and sets C4 explosives at the base of the axon terminals and run for medula because of all the shrapnel.  Seeing the Mars Volta live is akin to watching a fireworks store on top of a skyscraper catch on fire.  Omar Rodriguez-Lopez composes songs with meticulous care and Jam-rock experimentation, all while shredding and power-chording like Carlos Santana's bad acid nightmare.   Cedric Bixler-Zavala's banshee falsetto lasers lyrics that are so esoteric and abstract they come off as the mad ravings of an Inquisition-era priest receiving plague revelation on a night drenched in moonlight.  It is incomprehensible and enlightening.  "Cassandra Gemini" is the epic to end all epics, over 32 minutes in length with 12 distinct movements and an ancient scroll of lyrics that are just so good Carmen can barely stand it.  LOOK.

Behind this snail secretion, leaves a dry heave that absorbs.

A limbless procreation, let the infant crawl deformed.

A bag replaced the breath of these suffocating sheets.

And now when the craving calls, I'll scratch my itchy teeth.

Come on and sing it now.

Sink your teeth into the flesh of midnight.

 

#4 Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan 

The greatest double album of all time.  No other artist, ever, has ever dragged language past its inherent limitations to the lofty doorstep of universality that all music strives for.  Dylan's lyrics aren't good because of their guile or delivery or topicality or emotionality; they are good because they fill the listener with the hot goo of recognizing that they are playing audience to something that is entirely, undeniably true.  From a certain  standpoint, esthetics aside, art seeks only to give rise to notions and musing that are already present in its audience, yanking the veracity out like teeth and holding the bloody kernel up for everyone to see and saying, "You see, this was part of you all along, and you're not not alone, not by a long shot."   Four decades later, Blonde on Blonde's most extraordinary feat is that it says this with such lucidity, simplicity, woefulness, bombast and assuredness that time melts away around the sound and you're left with nothing but yourself and the music because you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you know exactly what this maniac is talking about.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #'s 5-7

#5 Sea Change by Beck

     Being awesome, Carmen has never been subject to having his heart-broken, but with unflinching certainty, he can attest that it sounds exactly like this album.  On every strummed minor chord or cello moan, you can feel a heart shattering into a thousand jagged opaque heart shards and the wobbly sighs that mist out as the jagged pieces make their painful way through the rest of the self.  This is melancholia on a whole other plateau.  This is reassembling the abstract puzzle of the hopes and dreams of what you thought your life was while being constantly draped by wet towels.  Bottomless Sadness.  As "Golden Age" floats through your skull like a sound mist with a tinge of false hope, the promise of starting anew, but in the brain attic  knowing full well that starting again is the last thing you want to do.  Somewhere on here is the recorded sound of a soul being torn apart by longing.  Every soundscape is laced with reverb, every note has a heartbeat and its rhythm is failing and it is crushing.  Lyrically, there isn't a metaphor in sight, not a line of whimsy or lyrical presumption.  Sea Change is assured only in its confusion and drift, in Beck's inability to reconcile his wondering, tortuous thoughts and his busted, bleeding everything.  Turns out it's really, really, really sad and its sadness is matched only by its beauty, which is a metaphor if CP ever saw one.

#6 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie

     Sure, The Beatles invented the concept album, but Bowie brought the concept into reality, while claiming that he was an alligator.  The percussive fade-in of "Five Years" ushers in a messianic tale of apocalypse, love, madness, connection, loss, sacrifice, and the redemptive power of music.  Throughout, Bowie's voice is desperate and confidant, moving from surreal reservation on the opening track to fraught squeals as he howls "you're not alone, take my hand" as "Rock & Roll Suicide" fades to a close.  The up-tempo tracks are stellar and the slower numbers, like "Starman," are chocked with dreamful wonder and DB's incomparable understanding of rock melody and orchestration never falters, which is a feat in respect to the different modes the album shifts through.  As always, the horns are brassy, the Les Paul's furious, the acoustics soothing, and the xylophones are slinky as spinal cords.  Ziggy Stardust is a perfect rock song.

#7 OKONOKOS by My Morning Jacket

      A flawless, massive live album from the Best American Rock Band in History.  Every song sounds like a twelfth encore, punctuated by epic, melodious guitar, dripping with psychedelia, Bonhamized drumming and Jim James' seraphic wail.  His voice is otherworldly (See JJ's covers of "Rocket Man" and Dylan's "Going To Acapulco" for sonic validation).  The band bashes the cochlea into concavity with its leaden cadence with gems like "Run Thru," a with schizoid haiku lyrics and a density of sound approaching neutron star levels.  Shimmering epics like "Gideon" and "Dondante" are volatile and cascading and splendent.  "Steam Engine" massages the soul with its reverb waterfall and slide guitar heroics, calmly telling you of the soul's permanence, lullabying you into utter agreement before pounding certainty into your self-core with its pulverizing outro drum solo.  "Dancefloors" is fun.

CP'S TOP TEN ALBUMS: #'s 8-10

Carmen intended this list to be an epic, sprawling dissection of his favorite all-time albums, giving each masterpiece its very own special post rife with insightful insights and artifice-smashing interpretations from whence a subtle, inherent showing of heartfelt appreciation would arise for these beacons of wondrous light shining through reality's all-encompassing shroud of mirk and woe.  This is his failure to do that.  These shallow blurbs will not even scratch the unyielding surface of justice that these albums deserve.  Keep that in mind.  TADA.

#8 In The Aeroplane Over The Sea- Neutral Milk Hotel

Outside of claims of constructing a boat for 100 USD, or joining the National Marching Band, or starting a blog entitled "My Tummy & The City," or persisting that he would eat out of freshly cleaned toilet bowl, or describing his Mom's body as "tight," or refusing to admit that drinking orange juice while eating pizza is unnatural, or allowing his sophomore year bathroom to develop its own ecosystem and primordial civilization of micro-humanoids, NS's greatest gift is this album.  It is perfect.  ITAOTS is totally unique in vision and mode, a smorgasbored of picaresque imagery and lyrical quadruple meanings and twangy guitar and simply complex ear-magic.  It sounds like a circus-trained troubadour playing his death march as he charges through WWII Dutch country-side outrunning V-2 shellings.  It sounds like a love affair through decades and death, bridging time and dreams and reincarnations and pianos made of flames.  It sounds like ceaseless joy and bitter ends.  LOOK AT THESE LYRICS:

And it's so sad to see, the world agree,

That they'd see their faces filled with flies,

All when I want to keep white roses in their eyes.

There is no reason to grieve.

The world that you need,

is wrapped in gold, silver sleeves,

left beneath Christmas trees in the snow.

I will take you and leave you alone.

Watching spirals of white softly flow,

over your eyelids and all you did.

We'll wait until the point,

and you let go.

And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle.

God is a place where some holy spectacle lies.

And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle.

God is a place, you will wait, for the rest of your life.

#9 Lateralus by Tool

"Lateralus" is the best metal song ever written.  On the album Tool unleashes an onslaught of audial sludge and stacked time-signatures, lyrics that are harrowing and transcendent, visceral and ethereal.  Danny Carey's percussion seizes reality by the throat and folds quintessence into itself.  Dynamism doesn't even come close to describing what goes on here.  Tool's sound is a living, breathing vessel of mortal flesh and extra-sensory self-discovery.  Every song is as long as it is thought-provoking, mind-shattering in its orchestration and all-encompassing scope.  Maynard James Keenan lyrics are illogically good.  And when the time-signatures fall into interstellar alignment, and Justin Chancellor's slap bass is moist and rattling as Swamp Thing's furious pulse, and Adam Jones' spectral Les Paul roars up, and Danny Carey lets loose drum fills like anti-air fire in a holy war, and Maynard's voice is an instrument to itself and more than words and everything words can stand for, and Tool comes together in illustrious crescendo, Carmen's whole Carmen warps into a full-body suit of gooseflesh and he leaves himself and sinks into knowing without thought or hesitation.  Look at these lyrics:

This body holding me,

Reminds me of my own mortality.

Embrace this moment.

Remember.

We are eternal.

All this pain is an illusion.

#10 Who's Next by The Who

From the clustersex sound orgy opening of "Baba O'Rielly" to Roger Daltry's lupine howls in "Won't Get Fooled Again," this is The Who bridging their early career as a singles machine to their elder statesmen role as rock opera stargazers, and it is pretty much incredible.  "Bargain" fully expresses the joys of simple gratitude, and "The Song is Over" plays like a singular ripple of hope on a black, churning sea.  Carmen typically hates jaunty, upbeat classic rock (see "Rock and Roll" by Led Zeppelin) preferring more atmospheric, slower tracks(see "No Quarter" by Led Zeppelin) but The Who somehow sidestepped that, and this makes CP appreciate the album even more, as tracks such as "My Wife" and "Going Mobile" don't come off as throwaways but as necessary parts of a pastiche that segue perfectly into the longer, more orchestrated tracks.  "Getting in Tune" is the band's most overlooked masterstroke. Keith Moon died a glorious death.

CP's TOP TEN ALBUMS: JUST ABOUT MADE ITS

Carmen's taste in pretty much everything is so eclectic and perfect it more or less has its own mythology: where the ancient God of Pretension, Ivarius, and the Dryad of Commercial Viability, Mariah, come together in mythological coital union to only seconds later give brilliant birth to CP's Itunes Library.  With his hyper-defined taste, Carmen feels it necessary to share his acquired, divine likes with the world, and these are the ones that just missed the cut (#'s 11-15).

I like to dissect women. Did you know I'm utterly insane?

All great civilizations have their great heroes: the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA has Tom Cruise, Australia has Mel Gibson, and Canada has Ryan Gosling.  For the Roman Empire this superhuman whirlwind of the incredible was Caligula, the son of Germanicus, Rome's third Emperor, and a Godsend of such blinding magnificence it is hard to fathom.  At the beginning of his reign, Caligula was a kind, moderate leader, well-liked by the populace, a fosterer of infrastructure and culture.  Then Caligula became gravely ill because of EXCESSIVE BATH-TAKING, and emerged from the sickness as a raving lunatic of the highest order.  To list the entirety of his feats seems impossible, but a few of the highlights include and are not limited to:

• Dressing up as Greek Gods and ordering the death of citizens on whim
• Castrating peeps
• TALKING TO THE FULL MOON
• Partaking in day-long, elaborate orgies, sometimes with his sisters
• Turning his then orgified sisters into prostitutes
• Erecting a costly and elaborate FLOATING BRIDGE that he RODE ACROSS ON HIS FAVORITE HORSE to PROVE SOMEONE WRONG
• Later, Caligula MADE THAT HORSE, INCITATUS, A SENATOR
• Once a Senator, the horse would HOST DINNER PARTIES FOR FOREIGN DIGNITARIES IN HIS MARBLE STABLE that featured entertainment by OVER 50 SLAVES
• HIS HORSE, THE SENATOR, HAD FIFTY SLAVES
• HORSE, SENATOR, SLAVES
• IUDFSYDFUHIAOHSUIUSIYDHOU{YIUWEOUDSF
• YES

Berry's Paradox

     Imagine your favorite Bob Dylan songs as the people  you love, those that you've come to adore and admire over years, the people that still manage to surprise you with their ability to change your idea of love and livelihood.  Now, imagine watching these people, these wondrous, majestic people that have shaken so much inside you for so long you scantly remember where it began and pray for it not to end, imagine these people getting methodically raped onstage for twoish hours by a gargoyle creature that slightly resembles Bob Dylan dressed as Southern Gothic Colonel Sanders, with help from his backing band, a misinformed group of Blues Brothers impersonators, and, at the end, everyone claps and you want to die.

     This is what a Bob Dylan concert is like, circa 2009.  Where one would expect the previous century's most anachronistic, polymorphic, and inspired persona, he finds the aforementioned mumbler, a heebie-jeebies factory gargling from behind a Casio, spraying rockabilly Hiyatt lounge music like turret fire.  CP doesn't want to fall into the ranks of the naysayers that sharted themselves when Dylan went electric back in the Sixties, but, come the frak on.  Aging is tough on everybody.  It is difficult to watch the people that you love deteriorate with time's undertow, but with that said we can still cherish our memories of blazing youth and phlegmless laughter, whereas Bob Dylan seems content here to drag his past out into the street and curb-stomp it into unintelligible puree.  As much as Carmen wants to admire BD for always reinventing himself, for doing what he believes his right and not what the public demands, CP can't help but see young, bleary-eyed BD shaking his head, through time.

     But all is not lost, because certain things are beyond tarnishing, certain things even two-hours of celebrated defilement can't defile.  CP can shrink himself and enter the highways of his brain and unpack the wondrous, before times with BD like snow globes, giving them a good shake and forgetting about the chilling badness:  Listening to Blonde on Blonde the whole way through, over and over, perched over his stereo because of wire length restrictions, hearing every intonation and shameless lyric through tarmac worker headphones.  A rain-soaked drive in Willy Z's Jeep to who knows where, set to "Positively Fourth Street."  At fifteen, taking his Dad's car out on "cautious" neighborhood joyrides to a CD that boasted solely "Highway 61 Revisited."  Dead of winter mornings in Sidesea with "Fourth Time Around" and melting breakfast sandwiches with SAR.  The leaden atmosphere that descends upon him every time he hears the skeletal waltz of his favorite BD song, "Ballad of A Thin Man."  Sitting in the stripped, posterless dorm at Water Street, 24 stories up over the BIG CITY, listening to "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and waiting for his momma to pick him up, shelp all of it back home.

Pretty Awful

Still reeling from the calamitous horribility of last night's Bob Dylan concert, Carmen chooses instead to quietly celebrate his own bearable, semi-sucktastic creativity.  White people love thinking they're creative.  All CP can ask is that if you judge, make it of the poisonous, in-head judgment variety (things you say about people as soon as they leave a room).  This was inspired by Tool and Andrea.

Parabolas

     See the man on his knees in the morning. Feel the autumn air against his neck, his backyard’s hard topsoil pressing back through his jeans. Hear the dropped leaf-blower and its roaring mechanic drone. Respond to the unconscious jolt of fear, the man’s hand’s movement to his chest, as if pledging fast frightened allegiance to some collapsing empire, how his features go lax, droop from his skull for a moment before snapping back rigid and twisting and contorting in observance of the dead stillness in him where movement has always been, always and forever. Look at the day reflected in his eyes. Watch him slowly pitch onto the grass, the way the wind gets captured in his college-aged son’s abandoned batting cage, the pockets of air that balloon out of the mesh netting and flatten and bulge out again. Listen to the un-blown leaves crunch and fracture under the man. Realize what is going on.
     Try to fathom the grisly tempest silently raging in the man, as cries escape his dry mouth as sighs, as his forehead rubs a patch of dirt, as browning blades of grass tickle his cheek, as the leaf-blower continues to brashly hum only a foot away. Imagine. Imagine being intimately aware of how the man’s wife sleeps like the disintegrating dead. Imagine snot oozing from your left nostril and being unable to even sniffle because the stricture is that astounding. Imagine knowing that the man’s son had taken a day trip to NYC with his girlfriend of seven-months to see Young Frankenstein on Broadway. Imagine knowing this and hating musicals. Imagine an astringent wave moving through your entire body and not leaving, imagine that awful sensation bogging down in your heart of hearts and saying, “Not this time. I am here to stay.” Imagine regret filling you like false ichor, stinging as it flowed from head to toe, screaming madly as it went. Imagine that.
     Scan the backyard. Take in its covered, kidney-shaped swimming pool, the eggshell paint peeling from the perimeter fence, the colossal, spectral batting cage, storage shed, the tireless tire-swing and the sad fallen faded tire sinking into the earth. Watch as his piebald puppy, not yet a year-old or fully housetrained and secretly loathed by the man for its yappy bark and propensity to shit in his slippers, comes tearing through the newly installed flap in the backdoor. Remember what it’s like to be happy to see someone you can’t stand. Fight hope as it wells up in the man like young dumb love as the dog scampers across the deck and yard, barking the whole way, and circles the downed man once, twice, coming in and out of the man’s lurid vision. Discern how the leaf-blower’s howl drowns out the puppy’s yelping. Halt as the dog comes to a sudden stop, surveying the man, its nose moist and eyes black, and try to make out the whimpers that even the man cannot hear, because of the leaf-blower and a surging gust of wind that whistles in his ears and pelts his eyes with desiccated earth.
      Pray with the man as the leaves twist and cartwheel over the patchy grass. Pray despite your doubts. Pray for the man, with the man.
      Pretend to be unaware that at the exact moment the man’s knees hit the ground his wife drifts out of a dream and stretches making snow angels in the sheets and sits up and groggily wipes her eyes and puts on her glasses and waddles to the master bathroom. Take solace in knowing that the man couldn’t fully hear the hot water heater churn to life as his wife turned on their two-headed shower. Know that although the man had lusted for women at his work and entertained fantasies of said women, and that he had accepted that his attraction to his wife had waned with age, and that he had, on occasion, resented his wife for reasons that he now sees as petty, senseless in respect to the reverence she showed him, know that the man’s face grows hot and red in the cold in pure and searing want of his wife. Know that the man wants nothing more than for her to be warm and cuddled in their marital bed, gliding happily through dreams of better years. Hope with the man that someone else will find him, knowing that that will never happen. A pinecone falls from a tree and lands without a sound.
     Whimper with the puppy as it pulls with all its tiny might on the fabric of the man’s windbreaker. See the futility with the man and puppy, and with furious calm resolve with fate, as the man does. Seize up the last, the absolutely and truly last, vestiges of strength left, and see the man dig his nails into dirt, to grab the ground as if to give it a good shaking, and see how he slowly rises from the ground, his forehead shedding dirt clots as he moves into a push-up position, and see his legs work decrepitly for footing, see a vein explode over his pale temple, see his arms tremble, see his gritting teeth, and see him flop over, collapsing onto his back and letting all the air pour out of him. See the puppy run back towards the house. See the seamless wall of sky, with the man.
     Accept painstaking reality. Be proud and humble in your surrender. Un-tether everything. Let your paltry angers leave you like body heat. Cling fast to your memories. Remember. Accept.
     Follow the dog back through the flap and the kitchen and the den and into the bedroom. Nudge open the steam-breathing bathroom door. Bark endlessly. Arouse suspicions in the man’s soaking wife. Look at the man’s aged, naked wife with telling eyes.
      Come back to the man. Ignore the knowledge of his wife and the shower and the dog and be there with the man. Study the man’s face, its pallor, how pain slowly flows out of his features, how his blinks seem increasingly deliberate and mindful, how his hand falls away from his chest and darts out and grabs the handle of the leaf-blower. Struggle with the man to pull the howling device near, to wrap the cord around his shaking wrist, to begin to, literally inch by inch, begin to bundle the snaking cord. Cheer him on. Wait. See the cord shorten and tighten and tighten and go taught and rise slightly off the grass. Celebrate as the plug flies from the storage shed’s outlet with a pop. Hear the silence.
      Tend to the barking puppy as the wife wraps a towel around herself. Follow them back through the house, through the bedroom and the den and then past the kitchen. Go wild with the dog on the cool tile. Sadly observe the wife grab the puppy’s choke chain, how she leads him across the kitchen, gently as she can, and how she steers him into the laundry room and locks him in with the toddler gate. Wonder if she makes anything out in the laundry room’s tiny window.
     See the man on his back. Listen to his slowing breath. Feel the jagged rise and fall of his chest. Taste the spit he struggles to swallow. Brush the dirt from his hirsute knuckles. Suck up a lungful of the November day. Watch a formation of birds fly by, way up there, in a V. Let a breeze blow over his face, gently, with just enough force to dislodge a leaf from a tree, and watch with the man as the leaf eases down towards the earth, riding the soft curves of its descent, gradually, quietly, beautifully. Watch it as it goes.

Reality Folding Into Itself

                                   

War and Peace, or War: What Is It Good For?, or Having Your Face Bludgeoned with 19th Century Russian Literature Across Continents, Time, and Space

       Back in September, CP had the inspired idea of reading War and Peace, Count Leo Tolstoy's hulking, monolithic novel of love, war, Russian identity, religion, and pretty much everything.  The book spans 1356 pages of dense, explorative, sometimes enlightening and most of the time infuriating prose.  Framed by Napolean's thwarted invasion of Russia in 1812, the book contains roughly 1000 distinct characters, multiple digressions on topics ranging from societal politics in 19th Century Russian Aristocracy to the meaning of life, with a grave emphasis on the prior.  Some would say that the short, glimmering moments of profundity outweigh the endless expositional narrative one must transverse in order to arrive at them, that this endless, vexing trudge on the way to self-actualization is a fitting metaphor for life, but if CP has to read, especially after the furious exactitude of Madame Bovary and the ceaseless allegory of Camus' The Plague, about the existential conflict that choosing whether or not to attend Liza Bezukov's ball or not entails, he will blink into non-existence.

       But it's important to finish what you start.  CP doesn't regret quitting Ranney School or the Cello, but seeing those things to their painful culminations could have forged a stronger, more resilient Carmen.  But that Carmen would have been a homogenized, soulless ninny that played the cello, and instead the world gets the partially insane Carmen that reads War and Peace for fun and nearly gets reduced to tears watching Starcraft 2 Battle Reports and has professional grade guitar amplification equipment.  Sometimes you have to do things for yourself despite yourself.  Sometimes you have to quell your Attention Deficit Disorder and bear down and accomplish something.  Gut shortsightedness.

Upcoming Posts, to Follow the Completion of W&P:

Caligula: The Greatest Historical Figure Ever, EVER

Bob Dylan: How A Jew That Couldn't Sing Wrote the BaJesus Out of A Zillion Songs

Carmen's Top Ten Albums of All-Time (A Ten Part Series)

bayonet trails rust propellors await

Once a year Carmen is blessed with the crazed, phantasmagoric gift of a new Mars Volta CD.  While the album doesn't come out until June, popular demand demands that CP give an insightful and speculative rundown of the disc's tracklist, which will simply consist of looking the bizarre, archaic song titles up in the dictionary.  Sacrifices must be made for pure, blistering sonic genius.  For starters the album, Octahedron (a three dimensional shape possessing eight place faces), offers up eight (hence the titular prefix) new tracks of indulgent, abstract, confounding and enlightening and mind-erasing madness, clocking in as the shortest TMV CD ever (49 minutes), and having a lead single eerily reminiscent in title to a Kelly Clarkson song, and song titles that contain neither Latin, Spanish, portmanteau monstrosities or demon-possessed gibberish.

1. Since We've Been Wrong: See?

2. Teflon: Polytetrafluoroethylene

3. Halo of Nembutals: The drug pentobarbital sodium (LOOK at the title of this song)

4. With Twilight as My Guide: The closest this band ever got to a intelligible song title was "Drunkship of Lanterns."

5. Cotopaxi: The world's highest active volcano, located in Ecuador.

6. Desperate Graves: Other song titles include: Roulette Dares (The Haunt of), Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus, and Tetragrammaton

7. Copernicus: Polish astronomer who developed model of planets revolving around the sun.

8. Luciforms: Forms of light.

What do these new comprehensible song titles denote?  Only time will tell, until then, magic:

                             
                             
                             

YOUTH, PETER FINCH, AND THE PEAKO POWER PLAY

      Few things set fire to the heart and buoy the anima like professional sports.  For CP, this means the Flyers of Philadelphia, the ragtag group of never-do-wells who built their reputation and menace in the Seventies by beating people to death on the ice and sacrificing their victims to their orange and black wargods and riding this blitzkrieg to two Stanley Cup victories.  Since then the team has been marred with constant playoff underachievement, the specter of Lindros, and goaltending that almost defines the meaning of pedestrian (in hockey goaltending terms at least).  Carmen is a gargantuan opponent of sports fans using the first-person plural when referring to their team of choice (e.g. I can't believe we managed to sign Cory Lidle.  We might be able to salvage this season, if Joey Cora ever gets off the D.L.), but he can understand it.

     The single greatest sports moment of CP's short life came during Game 6 of the 2004 Eastern Conference Finals.  Facing elimination, down 4-2 with two and one half minutes remaining, hope was waning.  Uncle Frankie was destitute.  Then came a penalty, an inconsequential tripping call.  Unfortunately for the Lightning of Tampa Bay, then Flyer Captain Kieth Primeau was about to unleash a soul-shredding maelstrom of pads and wrist shots.  This happens in sports, when one player dials in, enters the metaphorical zone, where every little contact sends the contactee flying off in wild vectors, where every tennis ball smacked rockets to consequential corners laced with top spin, where one can launch three-pointers from the Dolphin and watch the ball wisp through the netting silently and gorgeously, where through the smells of freshly cut outfield grass and rawhide you can make out the seams of the ball coming off the bat and sprint towards the green expanse and snowcone the fly in a full run and rolling the ball back to the pitchers mound feels like you don't even know.  

       On that night, Kieth Primeau, for once, played with mythological furor, working off the stadium's stentorian roar, Peter Finch's mad extortions of window screaming frustration, scoring twice in that two minute span to knot the game as the third came to an end.  Then he scored the game winner in a scant OT, and the entire stadium exploded into hysterics, and father's and son's and men and women and time and space and right and wrong came together in brilliant, gleaming radiance of a moment that belonged to everyone in that stadium and no one at all.

The Flyers flew down to Tampa Bay the next day and lost 2-1 in an uneventful Game 7.  The Lightning then went on to handily defeat a tired Calgary team.  CP did not care.  By that time, he had seen the Flyers lose more times than he cares to enumerate, most times simply imploding before his eyes, right there on the ice, much to the infuriation of Big Gun and all the slurring people that call up the AM station after the games to bemoan God and fate.  Sadly, sports have subtly sank under the mire of statistics, categorical knowledge, and an unflinching obsession with the past.  Moments like the Flyers and Game 6 get lost in the fold.  In ten years time, especially with the disintegrating popularity of the NHL, no one will remember that game, or Keith Primeau's heroics, or the car-top celebrations afterwards, or the rippling, impossibly pleasant sleep CP had on the car-ride home as his Dad and Uncle laughed and joked at the lunatics calling in to rave at AM 610.  And after seeing six out of seven "experts" predict the Flyers to lose handily in the first round this season, Carmen can't help but grasp to the slim rungs of hope's ladder, provided kindly in this manifestation by the King of the Hockey Haircut Barry Melrose, because when Keith Primeau netted that goal and pure victory broke over the city of Philadelphia, every fan knew why they sit through the blowouts and scream like banshees at the television screen and hate the trap defense and they knew being dialed into whatever Keith Primeau was dialed into and completely surrendering yourself to the ferocious, Godly power of it as it takes you away and why you can still love people that refer to their team as we (us).

Unrelated Side-Note: While on the topic of sports, CP feels it important to state that Kobe would wipe the lacquered court with Michael Jordan, even Prime MJ.  Nothing distorts the mind like nostalgia.  Remember that, realistically.

How White Are You?

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like

Check out this nifty site to see how much of a white stereotype you are.  According to his calculations, CP likes 39 of the things that White People tend to like, making him black.  It should be noted that this list really only pertains to whites North of the Mason-Dixon Line, and in more exact terms NRKOK (See #22).  #96 gives CP hope that some stranger out there understands him in a very profound way.  Good Luck.

How To Obliterate All Sadness In Your Life Without Really Trying.

 

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FIVE EARTHS

Cinque Terre (roughly translated "Five Earths" or "Five Lands" or "Five Grounds") is/are five villages situated along the coast of the Italian Riviera.  The towns are renowned for their beauty, panoramic walking path ((Via dell'Amore (roughly translated "Way of Love" or "Love's Way")), and cats.  All the meandering felines presented Carmen with more than enough opportunities to make that "spip-spip" lisp noise that people produce whenever around cats.  Carmen & Co.'s hostel was made up of three bedrooms and four beds and a living room and eighties furniture and hulking cabinetry and an amiable landlord named Simone.  At night, as goes for the whole of Europa, the villages go straight abandoned-mining-outpost, so Simone gave CP & Co. a flashlight.

In keeping with his main photography motifs (flowers, old couples, cobblestones) Carmen snapped this pic.  If CP had to guess he'd say that these old farts had just gotten over a rough patch in their relationship and had sojourned out to Italy's littoral hamlets for a couple days of R&R, seagazing, and realizing how wrong/short-sighted they'd both been.  The husband ((Phillipe (a Frenchman with a slight limp)) had propositioned separation three months back, not being able to cope with the ailments of aging and impotence.  Elle, his wife, who had been wrestling with existential qualms of her own, suggested that they make this one last trip to Cinque Terre in hopes of repairing what once was the source of so much sunshine.  On the way, they rediscovered their love in small, inconsequential things about one another, and decided to throw themselves into the Ligurian Sea, together.

The Italian graffiti pandemic extends even to more isolated parts of the countryside.  If somebody was holding a bazooka to his face and he just had to, Carmen would title this piece: Monster Banquet.

Since he possesses the maturity level of a 12-year-old child and the corporeal characteristics of  a 16-year-old man, CP embraced his innermost manchild and scaled this rock, as his child's mind loves to climb things, and his man's mind demands conquest in even the most ephemeral of ways.

It's easy to forget that bees get down coitally with flowers, after all the interesting dances that they have to perform with other bees before hitting the bar scene.  David Foster Wallace's dog's name was The Drone, which is an amazing name for a dog, and bee-related to boot.  Excluding Ralphsar, Carmen doesn't approve of giving dogs human names, unless their fictional humans, or historical figures.  CP's given a lot of thought to his eventual dogs' names.  When Carmen becomes a pseudo-adult and enters the "real" world his Newfie will be named Snorlax, his French Bulldog, Cousteau.  His cat will go by David Bowie Petaccio Jr., after his son, David Bowie Petaccio I.

Greyhound Skill Cranes in Popular Music

Although mostly overlooked, Greyhound Skill Cranes have played an integral role in the popular music of the last one hundred or so years.  The skill crane has always been an icon of Americana and a source of nostalgia, and musicians have drawn on this.  While most will be familiar with the influence of the skill crane on the oeuvres of Sinatra, Patsy Cline, and Soundgarden, here's one you might have missed.  Be sure to check the backside of Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American for a close-up of a Grayhound Skill Crane!

                             

At around the 3:30 mark, catch the jumbo Grayhound's in the back, and Sidesea everywhere.

BLOGTEMPEST TEN: FAILURE

Blogtempest Two Thousand Nine started as a silent promise from Carmen to inner Carmen that he would have a blog post for each of March's 31 days, partly for himself but mostly for the betterment of the world at large, but it ended up as this pathetic, pile-up of suck.  Like water shoes, failure is a tough pill to swallow.  Luckily, due to a malfunctioning gag reflex, CP can't swallow pills.  So instead he spends his post-fail sulk time considering how out of an infinitely expanding universe a cold rock found its improbable way into the gravitational pull of the tiny star that could and that rock churned with belts of cinder and molten rock for centuries until the fiery lashings cooled and hardened and absorbed the star's miracle rays and gave rise to the only functioning ecosphere in millions of light years in every way and the hollow, bottomless crevices of the world were filled with cool oceans that gushed with life and millions of years of unimaginable animals killing and doing mating dances with each other resulted in organisms so unfathomably complex that their processes laid the foundations for even more complex organisms to arise and kill each other and perform mating dances until a race of insane apes claimed hold of the once charred and ashen world and developed crude tools to fashion dwelling places and atonal instruments for their own petty amusements and then these hairy mammalians made quaint civilizations and bizarre mating rituals and this went on and on until the space rock was so chocked full of insane, mega-apes and crocodiles and computerized music devices that the super apes had nothing better to do but produce negative energies in relation to their failed blogging practices, completely ignoring the trillions upon trillions upon zillions of coincidences that resulted in their simple existence in a vacuum filled only with black, glacial nothing and how every lost second of their fleeting, decomposing being was such an unabated miracle in its own right that getting upset about almost anything is a veritable crotchshot to the thousand upon thousands of forgotten strangers that came together over the mammoth course of history to produce them, a drop kick to the universe at the center of all this and the endless universes locked inside every last blog-bemoaning person, and this isn't even considering non-bloggers.  Let's Go Flyers.