Eye Land, My Son (3:30)

Manhattan is an island. It is in the sun. And it is a holiday. So what the hell?

Hip hip.

I am a big proponent of a simple plugged in guitar riff to open a song. All hail Chuck Berry; for who doesn’t love the way Johnny B. Goode starts? It’s invitational; the roots of music; one instrument starting with a melody as the other players pick up their own tools of the trade as if to say: “Alright. I can get with this. I can come along.” It has its own technique of drawing you in to an experience, a journey—-like a holiday.

I consider myself to be a minimalist and as much as I become awed by collaborative jam-bands in some cases, the purity of Rivers Cuomo’s opening five-note sweep sets the tone for a holiday-specific reverie. I once counted seventeen musicians on stage during a Broken Social Scene concert. It was a symphony more than a band and while it was spectacular in its own method, Weezer encapsulates the antithesis just as fantastically.

On an island in the sun. We’ll be playing and having fun. It makes me feel so fine I can’t control my brain.

At what point do we control our brains? Or is our brain always in control of us? It is often said, especially about love, that you can’t help what you feel. Perhaps the saddest example of this is when our brains stop serving us completely, like in age and disease. Maybe this is why we take so many pictures, or for the rest of us—-write.

When I’m on a golden sea, I don’t need a memory. I guess that what makes it a place all my own. Am I too exisistential? Does the refusal for the past make me miss something else that is a part of me?

Selective memory is a powerful thing. My sister is always reminding me of sad incidents in our childhood past that I seemed to have completely wiped clean from the slate. But I wonder what else I have forgotten? Years spent traveling without a camera is devastating to some people when I tell them: “Yep--been all over the world. Got no pictures.”

And just when you think you have settled into the calm drifting of Weezer's golden sea, the repeated melody of the song, it crescendos to signature 1990s ‘grunge.’ Introduced with once crash of the symbol, the feedback on the lead and rhythm guitars take you into a new dimension of the track, elevating the opening simplicity to a much more complex collision of sound. As the song ascends into the electric frenzy of 1990s nihilism, Cuomo reminds us that it doesn’t matter how good or bad it once was, but more importantly, we’ll never feel that anymore.

Hip hip.

It is difficult to know exactly what this song is about. It can be interpreted in dichotomous ways. Is Cuomo happy about the memories he has of himself and his heroine? One has to wonder if they are memories at all. The continuous spinning of verb tense intentionally confuses the listener. Is this a mystical place in the future or a metaphorical island once visited that he can never get back to? Or is he there now?

And yet he always returns to his island in the sun. His safe place. The sea of memory can offer the calm drifting his lyrics so poignantly describe, but it can also place you in the middle of a climactic (or is it climatic?) tempest just as the thrashing interludes suggest.

Ultimately, the song seems to be about the hope and serenity that only reclusion and companionship can offer. The first-person narrative longs for escape, and every time he thinks he is getting close, the musicians backing him thunder down their storm, spinning his vessel further away from his sought out utopian island in the sun.

The ending melody is Beach Boys in vocal harmonic style and there is the optimistic assertion that the two refugees “will never feel bad anymore.”

Hip hip.

What is there to feel bad about? The protagonist seems determined to reach his imaginative refuge without regret. Compiled with closure, memory, and joy in reminiscence, we find ourselves desiring to not join Cuomo on his island, but seek out our own tropical sanctuary.

Hip hip.

Slow down sailor. Take a breath. I think I see the shore.

Hip hip.

I Will Not Buy (4:43)

Oh to be alive on the Friday of a long weekend. And in New York City with its springtime gorgeous weather. Dare to rise with the sun, and with Walt Whitman, and with Henry Miller, and with Norman Mailer, and with Allen Ginsberg, and with Bob Dylan.

There is something very Caribbean about the beginning of this song. Listen to the way the bass leads in the timpani and organ. I don't know about you, but it immediately places me in a sunny place. Perhaps it is because I associate this song to the summer days of my youth, drinking keg beer and doing shots of Jack Daniels while playing volleyball and swimming at a friends house. Music evokes memories in all of us, and we all hold each of them equally as dear. Personally, this Grateful Dead tune takes me to the summertime Kid Rock sings about in All Summer Long (right along side Sweet Home Alabama, funny enough. But doesn't everyone associate that song with summertime youth?).

But this morning there was an amplified electric hum in New York. I know New York City is known as the "nucleus" of energy for all it's fame and glory, but specifically today there was added voltage.

It's a mysterious remedy. I can't help but know, I too, will get by.

Perhaps it is because it's the dawn of Memorial Day Weekend. Or maybe it is the promise of great weather ahead. Or perhaps it is a result of the hundreds of sailors who currently grace our latitudinal avenues and longitudinal streets in their pristine white pride uniforms. Whatever the cause, humanity was in the air today.

Even me, after reading last night's post, I decided to shift my attitude and seek for that lining of silver and juxtaposing touch of grey. Perhaps I was dreaming with a Grateful Dead soundtrack, I don't know? But I did wake with the melody in my head this morning, so I had to play it. Do any of you dream in song?

Or maybe it was the fact that I was stuck at home feeling sorry for myself last night--worrying about money and rent and groceries. Sorry that I feel that way. The only thing to ask is: What are those items in the face of breath, sunlight, heartbeat, and smiles from strangers? What is income when helping a stranger to navigate a foreign city?

Case in point--a friend today flipped me a Craigslist posting from a young man thanking "the kind couple who witnessed [his] getting dumped in Prospect Park." Apparently, these two strangers went as far as to bring him a flower after she [his ex] abandoned him. The reprieved went on to write: "Sometimes strangers can actually give you what you need better than those to whom you consciously give your heart." What wisdom! What truth! This is the general feeling of New York today. Who needs prescription pills when you can help a mother get her stroller through the door?

Switch into the minor. Did you hear it? The entire key of the song slides up half a scale. It's a subtlety that weaves its way into most rock/pop tunes. It's a lesson we all need to remember It's a little reminder to the listener not to fall victim to redundancy, a reminder we can all use every now and again.

So many great moments on this 'one-life-to-live' stage and most people let them pass by en route in order to not miss the last episode of Lost. Makes me chuckle at the irony of the pop-culture craze. Who, exactly, are the ones lost? The characters in the show or the millions staring into the screen with their jaws dropped wide and pupils dilated so more pharmaceutical companies can inform them of all the diseases they don't know they have. They are the only ones who can afford to host commercials at such a price. Them and insurance companies. Buy prescription drugs is the message. New York energy can't save you, nor can a stranger in the park. You are depressed. You need pills. What is that saying about our society? It is scary to think that 22 million people tuned into a program and the only industries that could afford the advertising space were insurance and prescription drugs.

The only thing there is to say, every silver lining's got a touch of grey. I will get by. Somehow, I will get by. I have never heard of a man dying from broke. Ha! There has to be a catalyst somewhere along the way. Maybe I should start selling drugs like the old traveling medicine man who skips from town to town selling voodoo cures to unidentified ailments. Is it any different than what is being done today by major corporations? Scam artists finding creative ways to gyp local-folk out of their hard earned money and talking in tongues above them. Its patronizing. I don't need your drugs. I don't need your television plots. And I certainly don't need your insurance. I will survive.

It's a happy song, peppered with cynicism. Notice it's not a silver lining, but a touch of grey. As if to say, its not that you need to go looking for the good in everything, but just that the bad just aint all that bad. You're not sick. Insurance won't make you happy. And things are gonna be alright.

Oh well, a touch of grey. Kinda suits me anyway. I would rather have a touch of grey in flannel suit hanging in my closet that I never have to wear than a colorful Ermenegildo Zegna tie that I have to put on every morning.

"Touch of Grey" is a song about taking your lumps and riding them out. It's telling us that you aren't sick like the TV ads will sell you or not to worry about the future like the insurance companies brainwash you into believing. Its about being human, like the couple in prospect park, and the young men and women of our armed forces celebrating Fleet Week in New York City and the family barbecues scattered all over the country this Memorial Day Weekend.

There is something extremely clever in the way that The Dead changes the chorus from the isolated "I" to the collective "we" at the end of the song. It's as if Jerry Garcia recognizes the fate of the whole world is beyond his own troubles. In typical blues fashion, the troubles of the lone troubadour are not personalized at all, but mutual. It's not just about me and what I have to do to survive, it's about all of us. Oil spills and collapsing European markets. Middle Eastern conflicts and ignored genocides.

We will get by. I don't know how or when, but we always have. We will get by.

Dirty Bowl of Art (4:49)

So many people tell me they admire what I am doing. If only they had the courage to piss in the corner of their cubicle, laugh manically in the face of their over-bonused executives, and walk out on everything they have been brainwashed to believe since America's great education system began socializing and conditioning them at age five. I appreciate the praise. But it's easy to say from the comfort of a bi-weekly pay cheque. The truth of it is, life can be scary as hell when all the education in the world can't even get someone to call your name.

When I accepted the concept that I would begin writing a blog, I made myself two promises: 1) No matter what, all honesty all the time. 2) This will be my voice. Any temptation for fiction or caricature shall be avoided. This will be a window into the soul of man who has never stopped believing in the notion that the less sense something makes, the closer to the truth it must be.

So tonight, I write in fear. How is it that a man with a degree from one of the top school's in his country, a Master's degree from Columbia University, years spent traveling the globe on his own, and four years professional experience in finance cannot even warrant a response from anyone? No email, no phone call, no nothing. And I am talking your most basic employment. Is our economy really that bad? Or is it just a case-study proving that the old adage "it's all who you know" is more accurate than any Ivy League recruitment video could ever be?

It is not that I have any regrets about quitting my job in a bank to pursue my passion, because I don't. I also believe that if there was no fear, and this was all coming easy, there would be something false about the whole experience. Therefore I embrace nights like this, where I write another monstrous rent cheque and feel vomit climb its way up my digestive system when I think about how I am going to eat this weekend, let alone have a Memorial Day brew with the rest of them.

It is just like some of the nights I had when I was traveling. I can remember curling up for sleeps in bus stations in New Zealand or on the side of the road In Syria and thinking as scary as it is, these are the moments that will be most remembered when I get home. And there was no doubt that I ever would make it home, it was just a matter of how and when.

And so it is today. How and when will I be able to get out of this crushing pressure of no income and an ineligibility for unemployment? The truth is, I have no idea.

I guess I have my art. Since the theme of the last 60 days has been that "old sayings come true," I can put faith into the notion that artists produce their greatest work when they are left with no other choice. I march on, with no other choice but to look ahead. I am like Pedro in Lou Reed's "Dirty Blvd." I am like that man you read about at age sixty and wish you had the courage to do what he did, forgetting that on Memorial Day Weekends while you were golfing with your pals and hosting barbecues, he was spending days in the New York Public Library living off a health bar his mother bought him because he can't afford his lunch. Perhaps even more accurately, I am like that man you will never hear of. The one who puts all the effort and risk in but collapses exhausted at the end of an anonymous legacy.

The question is, how much is regret worth in a pension fund? Would you sell all your regrets for your financial legacy? Because at times like this, I think I would buy it.

But then I listen to Lou Reed and recall why I am doing all of this in the first place. Fuck debt, right? It's just a number. Especially in today's climate. I am Greece, I am Portugal and Iceland. I am Enron and Worldcom. I am the collapsing DOW. But at the end of the day I know I am left with my soul in tact. And to me, that is worth everything money can and can't buy.

I'm going out. I want to fly, fly away.