joe posts

I didn’t get Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! right away – The first few times I thought it sounded completely off. Then I remembered I felt that way about pretty much every Bad Seeds album. It was “Moonland,” “Night of the Lotus Eaters,” and then “We Call Upon The Author” that quickly turned me around – the lyrics in the latter are hilarious and awesome:

——-

We Call Upon The Author

What we once thought we had
We didn’t
And what we have now
Will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain

Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets
We’ve shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things, they look so sad and old
As they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain
And then we call upon the author to explain

Rosary clutched in his hand
He died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals
Chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain

He said everything is messed up ’round here
Everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy
Against the likes of you and me
In this idiot constituency of the moon
Well he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

Well, I go guru-ing down the street
Young people gather ’round my feet
And they ask me things
But I don’t know where to start
They ignite the powder-trails
Straight to my father’s heart
And once again I call upon the author to explain

Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing
That mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner; a complete sucker
It’s fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain

Well rampant discrimination
Mass poverty
Third world debt
Infectious disease
Global inequality
And deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
And we call upon the author to explain

Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window
“Hey Doug, how you been?”
[...]
Brings me back a book on Holocaust poetry
Complete with pictures
Then tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain

I say prolix! Prolix!

Something a pair of scissors can fix!

Bukowski was a jerk
Berryman was best
He wrote like wet papier mache
Ah but he went the Hemingway
Weirdly on wings
And with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Down in my bolthole I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“Well the waves, the waves, were soldiers moving.”
Well, thank you. Thank you! Thank you!
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

————-

He’s a hero. They should put those shoes on display in an Iraqi museum. Unfortunately they were blown up by the bomb squad. Really. I guess they were worried the shoes might be thrown again and not blow up again. There’s nothing more dangerous than a non-exploded non-explosive.

It sounds silly to deify a shoe-thrower (seriously, who throws a shoe?!) but it certainly worked as an attention getter as he called Bush a bitch and reminded him of all the people he’s murdered with his neoliberal crusade to remake the Middle East. I hope this reporter lives a long and healthy life and gets to enjoy all the benefits of being ‘the guy who threw a shoe at Bush.’ But not before the goons torture him and we have the obligatory false confession – pretty much the regular War Against Terror Treatment:

He said he visited his brother Sunday and found him missing a tooth and with cigarette burns on his ears. He also said his brother told him that jailers also doused him with cold water while he was naked. – AP

So rest assured, America, that your pResident will not be harmed by this shoe-thrower ever again. If he survives American-sponsored torture and sexual assault and imprisonment he’ll certainly be traumatized and possibly very very angry at those who’ve ruined his country and his life.

And here’s exactly what he said, and why it matters. Who else has gotten away with ten seconds of truth with this pResident?:

Contrary to most media coverage, the 28-year-old TV reporter Muntadhar al-Zaidi made history not by merely throwing a pair of shoes, the highest expression of insult in Iraqi culture, at the US president, but by what he said while doing so and as he was smothered by US and Iraqi security men. He groaned as they dragged him out of the press conference. They succeeded in silencing him – and according to his brother he was beaten in custody – but he had already said enough to shake the occupation and Nouri al-Maliki’s Green Zone regime to their foundations.

Strip the words away, and his and the Iraqi people’s cry of deep pain, anger and defiance would amount to no more than a shoe-throwing insult. But the words were heard. “This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” he shouted as he threw the first shoe. The crucial line followed the second shoe: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” Once those words were heard, the impact of a pair of shoes became electrifying. A young journalist has put aside the demands of his profession, preferring to act as the loudest cry of his long-suffering people. If one considers the torture and killings in Iraqi and US jails that Muntadhar often mentioned in his reports for al-Baghdadia satellite TV station, he was certainly aware he risked being badly hurt. – The shoes we longed for