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Songs Of Our Lives: Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” And The Stooges’ “Search And Destroy”
I’d put on headphones and stare at myself in the bathroom full-length mirror, pacing back and forth while silently mouthing the lyrics, hitting my chest in the faint hopes that the pure rage of the song could wake me up somehow, make me alive again.
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The name evokes the old gods. Something exaggerated beyond all common knowledge or sense. His name in the Japanese is Gojira, a combination of gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale). A gorilla-whale. Or an alligator in the guise of a god.
He is a manifestation of fears, meant to evoke terror. After all, what does one do to stop an elder god or an ancient dinosaur reawoken? How does one stop an alligator-lizard with atomic breath and scales hardened by waves of radiation? How does one stop a gorilla-whale?
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“ We are used to hearing that our loved ones have forgotten. There has to be a metaphorical way to fictionalize it, but I would rather meditate on what has happened. She does not remember me → I remember her → When I think about calling, I remember that she has forgotten me.
What is this gap between her erased memory and mine that is intact?
”—0–9 by Lauren Eyler
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“My grandmother had broken every heart in New York, I told myself, and my mother had fought off wild beasts in every country in Asia, but England belonged to me. I took pride in learning new shibboleths, in the fondness I developed for cider in Sunday pubs. I scandalized my mother by informing her that I enjoyed baked beans.
“You’re becoming so English,” she would say, throwing up her hands at my perverse domesticity. For years I took this as the ultimate affront, a reminder of how I had failed to live up to the legacy of the Burton women, unencumbered by husbands or other disloyalties. Only now do I realize that she missed me.”—A Brief History of Swans by Tara Isabella Burton
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“As any recovering alcoholic can tell you, practice works just as well in the realm of not-doing as anywhere else. My not-singing skills grew by leaps and bounds thanks simply to the fact that entropy takes its cut. Musicians are a bit like sharks. If they do not keep swimming, going through the specific physical motions of their music-making, their skills wither and die. I could feel muscle memory getting fuzzy, my instincts growing less reflexive. When it saddened me, as it inevitably did, I told myself I wasn’t a singer any more, and it could not possibly matter.” — Hanne Blank’s Deep Throat #4: On Being and Unbeing a Singer -
“THIS IS REAGAN COUNTRY,” offers a wizened sign atop the roof of the town convenience store. This is Reagan’s country. Yes, but this is Reagan Country. It’s not political, not a GOP slogan. Nothing to do with tax reform, Grenada, supply-side economics. It’s a beckoning, a greeting—a suspension of reality. A 0.4-square-mile fantasy, or a national subconscious. There is a space that lies beyond Americana, that exists outside—apart from—the borderlines of memory and narrative and withered material artifact, where history tangles toward mythmaking until their threads seamlessly intertwine.” —Beyond Americana by Zach Schonfeld
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“(Which, don’t even get me started, half the fun of listening to music and possibly more than half is context, this is a very nearly religious conviction for me, all hail context forever, I know this battle is already lost however I will be waging it til my dying breath, “context!” I will cry from my deathbed, “context!” I will say to those whom I haunt later on, “I got haunted and the best my ghost can come up to scare me with is ‘context’” my hauntees will complain, everyone’s a critic, however not everyone is a ghost, yet.)” —I would buy a 1000-page book of John Darnielle’s parentheticals (via rachelfershleiser)
“However not everyone is a ghost, yet.” [Emphasis mine.]
(via rachelfershleiser)
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“I never saw the photograph, but I saw my reflection in mirrors: amphibian, my swollen lips like purplish slabs of liver. For the next week, as the photograph was passed around the neighboring high school where the Saturday night kids went, I wore turtlenecks. I told my mom I’d tripped running up the stairs and slammed my face. Isn’t that stupid? Turtlenecks, a beat up face and a story about falling: I’m not sure if there’s anything more cliché than that. I’m not sure what could be more obvious than that—lord, girl, come on—but no one said anything. No one asked questions. As if an unspoken contractual blindness bound us. And at the time, that felt like a mercy.” — So Raped by Megan Foley -
My first recorded journal entry is from 1998, when I was in third grade. It’s the only entry in the entire book, right there on the front page, transcribed after a muddy school field trip to Muir Woods. It begins:
When it rains the mushrooms magically appear! OR SO PEOPLE THINK. Banana slugs have eyes on their tentacles and tongues covered in teeth. They can smell a mushroom from THIRTY FEET AWAY!
I wince when I read this. I have never stopped wincing when reading something my younger self wrote, if only because it reminds me of what my younger self was like: an overly serious somebody, with severe bangs and a bowl cut that resembled Darth Vader’s helmet. What is a journal entry meant to do but bring you face to face with the person you loosely recognize as yourself?
Hannah Kingsley-Ma’s Exploring the Redwood Forest: Journals and the Private Self.
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“There are peregrine falcons around now. We have them here in San Francisco, in large part due to the persistence of some very brave ornithologists wearing the copulation hat for more than a decade.” — The Rumpus Interview with Jon Mooallem, who has a new book: Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.
