Opted for the title “Desolation Angels” instead. “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven” was too lengthy.

On my way back to my car after class on Tuesday night (and in route to The Soft Boys show at First Avenue) I came across scores of middle-aged men and women, dressed in black, making their way down the streets of the University of Minnesota campus on their way to Wellstone’s memorial. It was a nice site. I was rather content that they should come and pay their respects to a politician of unwavering conviction, even though he and I rarely had consistency of view on issues.

The next day the news was a-buzz with how the Democrats commandeered Wellstone’s memorial and turned it into an event for political gain. I saw a clip on the evening news that showed Governor Ventura sitting in the stands, shaking his head, while his wife did the same and rested her head on his shoulder. They later walked out on the memorial, calling it a disgrace to Wellstone’s memory. Sometime later I saw a clip with a reporter asking Ventura whom he would name to fill the Minnesota senatorial seat in the interim. Still miffed about Tuesday nights proceedings, Ventura growled that he wasn’t sure he was going to name anyone, and that he is also thinking of appointing an average citizen — an old friend from high school (named Joe or something forgettable) who is currently a garbage man in the Cities. Apparently “Joe” had expressed interest in the job.

Ventura cracks me up. Sometimes I love the man, other times I find him reprehensible. Definitely a wild card, lowerer of the bar, least common denominator sort of bloke, and yet at other times, very admirable.

And then there is the whole GOP being angered over the media giving Mondale free campaign time. I sympathise; but then, what was the media supposed to do? I would assume they did not know what was coming. Cutting off the broadcast prematurely is sort of bad etiquette. One of the most obvious slips the local media keeps making, in regards to subliminal, unconscious liberal bias, is that they keep referring to Mondale as Vice-President Walter Mondale. My, my. They certainly don’t apply that epithet to Gore, and he is in the same boat as Mondale, a more recent boat at that.

But anyway, this whole Wellstone debacle. It makes me want to write a novel or screen play about a goodly politician, unwavering in his convictions, and affable even to his severest political adversaries, who suffers an untimely, tragic death, only to have the scum-of-the-earth self-agrandising politicians converge on his memorial like vultures and co-opt his memory for their own politician machinations. In the vein of All the King’s Men, I suppose.

Speaking of national leaders: I read this article in the Atlantic Monthly in the beginning of the year. It is just one more reason why Saddam Hussein is my favourite dictator, and ought be yours as well. Tales of the Tyrant.

List of Titles and Their Sources Which I Almost Swiped for This Blog

1. I am with You in Rockland (Ginsberg, Howl)
2. O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here. (Ginsberg, Howl)
3. Subterranean Homesick Blues (Dylan)
4. Invitation to the Blues (Tom Waits)
5. Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters (Salinger)
6. The Rum Diary (Hunter. S. Thompson)
7. How to Disappear Completely (Radiohead)
8. Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky)
9. All Tomorrow’s Parties (Velvet Underground)
10. Famous Blue Raincoat (Leonard Cohen)
11. The Holy or the Broken Hallelujah (Cohen, Halllelujah)
12. My Dark Life (Elvis Costello)
13. Verse Chorus Verse (Nirvana)
14. About a Girl (Nirvana)
15. Endless Nameless (Nirvana)
16. A Candle to Light You Off to Bedlam (C. Churchill, The Skriker)
17. Paint it Black (Rolling Stones)
18. Desolation Angles (Kerouac)
19. The Art of Dying (George Harrison)
20. I Will Not Eat the Darkness (Over the Rhine)
21. The Deadly Theatre (Peter Brook)
22. The Holy Theater (Brook)
23. Till human voices wake us, and we drown (T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock”)
24. The Muttering Retreats (T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock”)
25. I Will Always Be the One in Need of a Palinode (Jetenderpaul)
26. The Phenomenological Rhetoric Of Summer Lingers On (Jetenderpaul)
27. Waltzing Matilda (Tom Waits)
28. You Said Irony was the Shackles of Youth (REM)
29. Queen of Eyes (The Soft Boys)
30. Day Sleeper (REM)
31. Letter from an Occupant (The New Pornographers)
32. Your Funeral, My Trial (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
33. Earth Died Screaming (Tom Waits)

I think that is about it. There were probably more. I think I am likely settled on the title “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven” (Godspeed You Black Emperor!). However, I do quite fancy “Desolation Angels” (Kerouac). More succinct. As far as the book goes, it’s pretty good. I think Kerouac’s chief works are probably Dharma Bums and On the Road. However, I never managed to make it all the way through the book, as I absent mindedly forgot it at my parents’ cabin in Crosslake, Minnesota, and consequently had to begin another novel. One of the most intriguing things in the book is Kerouac’s perception of The Void. As was sometimes his habit he spent a summer alone on a lookout post somewhere in Yellowstone (I believe) keeping watch for fires. For days and days on end he looked out across the gulf at Desolation Peak and developed a perception of The Void; namely, an immutable, everlasting, all-encompassing presense, or reality, that sat there, and by Its existence mocked everything that the poor Kerouac was, his transient. fleeting existence and all. In someway his revelation (of sorts) of this ultimate concept (or Being) is somewhat reminiscent of Reformed Theology’s idea of God as I AM. Ah, it was probably just old Jack’s Buddhism kick.

This is the review I wrote some two years ago for Lift Your Skinny Fists for Bandoppler Radio (which is since defunct, yet soon to be reborn). My writing has since, I think, improved.

Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven
Kranky, 2000
Sarah M. Jones

Welcome to the end of western civilisation, or the last 87 minutes and 27 seconds of it, anyway. Canadians Godspeed You Black Emperor! forcefully return with an infinitely expansive offering of epic proportions (literally) the two disc Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven, the follow up to ’99’s Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada.

The four songs, best described as, perhaps, orchestral rock indoctrinated by space rock, start out slow and sparse and gradually brew into furious stormy crescendos, often fluctuating back downwards from a storm rent sky to a mere airy drone with complex arrangements of harrowing strings and guitars, rumbling drums, wobbly pianos, twinkling glockenspiels, and roving horns with an infusion of several indistinguishable instruments, and unnerving samples.

A jaded, restless Godspeed wanders across the continent in the dead of night, down vanishing deserted highways while on the periphery trains relentlessly thunder down worn-out tracks, static from the radio fuzes out of broken speakers, and muffled disembodied voices rattle across the airwaves of the “Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-way.” Eventually while pausing in the rain at a gas station, overhead speakers emit a corporate monotoned voice warning customers not to associate with any individuals not clad in the station’s uniforms — they’re lurking about and they’ll only do you harm. And on Godspeed rolls through ghostly cities of urban decay where an old man recalls the Coney Island of his youth and hauntingly contrasts it with today, dejectedly muttering “They don’t sleep anymore on the beach….”

The four songs, two on each disc, are finely wrought and average at just over twenty minutes in length, with sections of the songs bearing such foreboding denotations as “Terrible Canyons of Static,” “Atomic Clock,” “World Police and Friendly Fire,” “…The Buildings They are Sleeping Now,” “Edgy Swingset Acid,” She Dreamt She was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She was Alone in an Empty Field,” and “Deathkamp Drone.”

The first track alone makes this record worth buying. If Sigur Ros is heaven, Godspeed You Black Emperor! is the Four Riders of the Apocalypse. The destruction of western civilization amidst the cacophony of postmodern paranoid apocalyptic musings never sounded so beautiful.

ordering info: www.brainwashed.com/kranky

Welly, welly, well. I think I have everything finished now. The trials and toils of learning HTML.

Is this it.