Fleur de Lethal by Nico Bella

R.I.P Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.

Here is a little love- RIP Jim

Music...

I 've been really obsessed with music as of late.When I say obsessed I mean obsessed in a 14 year old girl call the radio station compulsively until they replay the song jumping over the sofa to hit record on the pink white and green Sony tape player sort of way -- The kind of recording where it warbled in the beginning and you may or may not get a few words from the DJ introducing the song on it.

I remember those days-- My best friend and I used to stay up all night in the summer and harass the Z100 DJ's until they would play our songs- 9 times out of 10 we slumped over asleep after marathon talking in my overheated room at the top of the house and missed the song all together. I remember my song of one summer was "Hands To Heaven " by Breathe- I think it was the summer between 7th and 8th grade.

I was entirely obsessed with a boy who was 18 , I think my mom and her co-workers talked him in to paying attention to me-- Little did they know it set the groundwork for my first god awful earth shattering crush.

Funny to me now that my job is to make a spectacle out of my self and be a (sexy) dancing monkey for attention -- back then I would have had to have been seriously injured to get attention and even at that- I still might have been stepped over.Hmm...explains alot.

However I digress-we were talking about music.
I have always liked ballads better than fast songs-
Fast songs get me up and bouncin and in fighting form but the slower the song the more it gets in my bones.
I stay haunted by a good many things in this world.
I see lights trek across power lines ( which I find I am missing in the land of underground power) and the way it cuts a vista in the sky stays with me for a day.
I actually miss more than anything watching the lights of the buses snake along the cables in Seattle ( for you los angeleans a good many of the buses in Seattle are electric and they are on cable systems)
I miss wet streets and the sounds of rain - gutters, drains, puddles, windshield wipers and the the wonderful sound of radial tread tires on a wet street. I have been gone so long I think my bones have dried out, I miss the rain.
Some may know the definition of my "Rain Doll" tattoo, basically the term "raindogs" is affiliated with people who are part of the clan of Tom Waits, the whole idea behind the term it was that when it rains very hard more dogs tend to get lost because they navigate by olifactory senses and when it rains it washes away all their markers...Where it became connected to Waits was it was the name of an album , how it directly connects to the stories on the album , I am not entirely sure , but it is full of hard luck stories , lovel gone wrong, derelicts, bums and crazies...and Gun Street Girls. Basically it refers to people who live in the streets- who have no home,no markers, no real place.
So when it rains they start to lose their way, their memory of where they have been- where they come from, they wobble along to the next place.
I on the other hand can only remember who I am and where I am from when it rains.
I am getting brittle I need a soaked to the skin rainstorm -- when I was in Austin I got one - lightning hitting the streets and me walking down Congress in my flip flops ankle deep in warm water...
my clothes and hair were entirely soaked and I was listening to the iPod...Nada Surf's cover of "If You Leave" on repeat again and again. I was happy.
There are moments like that I would never trade for the world and somehow the fact that I was there in it alone makes it all the more lovely-- sorta sad, but lovely.
I guess that could sum up a good deal of how I see the world. Lovely- sorta sad- but lovely.
But lately I have been entirely obsessed with songs that wreck my guts ( check out my iRock the iPod list on the side of the page) and drive me crazy.
As things fall away/apart in my world there seem to be so many songs that slip in to the aural hemisphere and imbed themselves in my heart and mind. I hear a verse- a phrase- a word- a chord change and tempo flux and all the sudden I am gone, I just am able to listen to Gary Jules cover of Mad World again-- it made me choke every time I heard it last year- Damn Donnie Darko, after Scotty's funeral it made too many things bloom to bright, I still can't listen to Jeff Buckley right now Nada Surf sorts smarts too - it hurts too much, when you miss and mourn someone, it hurts too much. The body count of too many gone and long gones in my world makes me so very sad some days.
I haven't been able to listen to music at home for months. Only when I am in the world- I have a better filter of not crying when people are watching. Sometimes things are just too moving. Sometimes they are just so big and vivid the world stops for a second. The more I keep my headphones on the more lovely the world gets -- sometimes I almost audibly gasp when I see how the palm trees sway and this city lumbers along in time to so many songs.
Everything is dancing all the time , you just can't see it- cars stop and go in time- people wait on corners like dancers in the wings waiting for the cues, people raise their coffee cups at the second a song fades away...everything is choreography when you have headphones on , everyone becomes a dancer, the city becomes a set, clothes costumes...Shakespeare was so very right. "All the world is a stage..."
So I continue on my quest of looking for more heartbreaking songs- I'm stocking up for the next big rainstorm.
Any suggestions?