05 May 2010

The Windmills Of My Mind

I love Nico's "These Days".   Jackson Browne apparently wrote that song and plays guitar on it.  I thought it was put to good use in The Royal Tenenbaums.   And "We Both Go Down Together" is a really good song by The Decemberists.  "Here we stand on the cliffs of Dover..."  I have a cd I made with a bunch of random songs on it from the summer of 2007.  2007 is when I made it, not when the songs were released.  It has "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" by Genesis, and "Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta" by the Geto Boys.  Or is it Boyz?  Don't matter.  That song has some serious language in it.  I can't play it in front of nephews; that's for sure.  I had to look that one up after I saw Office Space.  "Give Up The Funk" by the P-Funk All-Stars is such a good song.  It feels really good listening to that song.  I feel like bopping my head up and down like Huggy Bear.  I hope that's not racist.  Right now I'm listening to Patty Loveless' "Blame it on your lying cheating, cold dead-beating, two-timin' double-dealin', me-mistreatin' lovin' heart."  I love the energy of that song.  Throughout the cd I also have some Dusty Springfield "Windmills of my mind..." and a song about making pies all day and a song about a girl who's mother works at the Motel 6, now she gets free guitar picks and that's how she learned to play and sing.  She is Catie Curtis and that song is "Memphis".  I recently wrote a blog about Joni Mitchell calling Bob Dylan a fake and a phony and a plagiarist that got alot of responses (11!).  Somehow I'm connecting the melding together of other people's work to create something new with the Joni/Bob argument and that's what I made with this cd.  It provokes different emotional responses from me and I don't really care if they all fit perfectly together.  Which made me think of Neil Young.  I think Neil just does what feels right and when his muse is gone, he's gone.  This cd came from an unconscious place in me.  Or maybe a drunken place.  Along towards the end is "Peek-A-Boo" by Siouxsie and the Banshees and then Rufus Wainwright's "Hallelujah" which seems to be required playing anywhere you go lately.  Local band Donna the Buffalo has a song called "No Place Like Right Time" that is laid back like "Memphis" and "Making Pies" by Patty Griffin.  People talk about Dylan as the preeminent poet of our modern time.  My friend D.J. thinks its Bruce Springsteen.  And when he says this he usually refers to "Blinded by the Light", a song with such non-sensical lyrics that who knows what Bruce is talking about.  I think The Raven is a good poem.  Maybe one of the best.  How did Poe get all those lines to rhyme?  Must've taken alot of work.  It's a story in a poem, which is nice, but not quite the same as The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot.  Poe was a prolific writer and I don't know that The Raven had to be dredged out of him with the same earnestness that Eliot put into Prufrock.  What is a poem supposed to do?  Provoke a response?  Create an image?  Recreate life?  I say a little of all of the above.  If it doesn't provoke a response, or any feeling whatsoever, then is it serving itself?  e e cummings was a good poet but lots different than Robert Frost.  I think Emily Dickinson had it write (whoops - right) when she said poems are foolish when compared to a tree.  I think that's what she meant.  The cd that I made feels like poetry to me; something good that washes over me with no particular agenda.  Parts of it, like making pies, make me think about the creation of life.  Other parts, like giving up the funk, make me feel life.  My favorite quote about poets and poems and my life philosophy:  "And the poets down here don't write nothing at all - they just stand back and let it all be."  After all, who can really add anything to a beautiful summer day like today to make it more spectacular nature-wise?  I can't.  But that's just me.  I like to stand back and let it all be.