All You Touch and All You See is All Your Life Will Ever Be

I am, by disposition, the type of person who holds onto tickets. When I go to a show or a movie, I tend to hold onto the stubs I have until they’re accidentally thrown out or disappear into a pile of other small scraps of paper. I’m not entirely sure why I keep my tickets, but an obvious answer suggests itself: Like the giant broken condom that resulted in the birth of Christ, the event this object was a reminder of had imbued it with its sacred magic and made it special to those who care. This doesn’t quite explain why I keep the stubs of movies I didn’t much like, but there really isn’t a good reason for that, and all it evinces about me is that I hold onto more trash than I should.

But for the good shows, the ticket is the souvenir, one of those rare French words that are just perfect. I don’t actually need it to be able to remember the show, but every time I come across it I’m reminded, and in that moment get to savor my experience anew. That’s really the magic of certain objects; that, beyond and despite their dumb uselessness, they can actually store a certain amount of meaning that we’ve given to them, and always make it available to us. This isn’t really profound at all and I’m sure everyone who’ll ever read this already has this little insight, but it’s still their magic.

So it is that, in one of my favorite novels, Life: A User’s Manual, almost every one of the hundreds of little stories that are told during the course of the novel is told only when the narrator comes across the object that centers it during a description of the rooms of some apartment in a fictional building on a fictional street in Paris; a journey through the world of objects always points us back towards ourselves. Moreover, whatever we may think of our metaphysical natures, we’re firmly rooted in the physical world.

The object that, aside from this assignment, got me thinking along these lines, and which is now in my possession, is my ticket to a Roger Waters concert on September 20^th, for his Dark Side of the Moon tour. While by no means the best concert of my life, it’s certainly on that list, and was an exhilarating experience despite my execrable seats and the feeling – which Floyd fans know generated The Wall – of an incredible, impenetrable gulf hanging between any member of the audience and the artist on stage much greater than the handful of measurable yards separating the two.

The ticket itself is remarkably generic, and through an unfortunate twist of fate (I bought my ticket the day before the concert from an online reseller and was forced to buy two, neither of which I could scalp well enough at the arena) I have two. Through a wholly different set of circumstances (I traded tickets with a stranger to sit with my friends for the second set) I ended up with two tickets for seats in different roles. Both look exactly like all Ticketmaster tickets do (5”5/8 x 2”, with vertical perforations at ¾” and 3”3/8 from the left), are somewhat crumpled, untorn (they scanned, rather than tore, it at the venue), and retain only the slightest traces of the odor of cigarettes and pot that all such concerts come with. Now that the concert’s long over, they’re no longer capable being used in the one way they were designed for, and are in almost all conceivable ways totally useless. Obviously, if they have some magic, it has nothing to do with their physical properties or utility.

The magic is that the simple act of looking at them gives me the feelings I felt that night. I can relive, rather than simply recall, my enjoyment at simply being there, my disappointment at finding I wouldn’t be able to scalp my extra ticket, my delighted surprise when songs like ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ or ‘Mother’ were played when it would have been incredibly obvious to play something like ‘Hey You,’ which wasn’t, my boredom when it got to his solo work and my disgust with the lyrics to his latest song, ‘Leaving Beirut’ (‘O George, O George, That Texas education must have fucked it up when you were very small’ and ‘We were the English dudes … But now an Englishman abroad is just a U.S. stooge’ are excrescence by any standards, but when you’re arguably one of the best lyricists in the history of rock music and have written ‘Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage,’ ‘It’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around,’and ‘Day after day, love turns grey like the skin on a dying man’ it’s a fucking travesty). The whole experience is there for me when I consider a small, useless strip of paper. That’s the magic.

You'll Never Walk Alone

I began my last piece by stating the two, non-female related, loves of my being: Music and football. If music was the theme of that essay, then this shall concern – somewhat earlier than expected – football, and more pertinently the Premiership trophy.

The Premiership is the most watched football league in the world and is by some margin the highest grossing in terms of revenue. In fact, when one considers all sports only three leagues turnover more than the Premiership and all reside in the sponsorship-happy sporting climes of North America: The National Football League, Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association. So, there is much global kudos to be gained in one’s chosen club becoming Premiership champions.

My club, Liverpool, is the most successful club in England both in terms of domestic and European honours. It has eighteen league titles from before the Premiership started with the nearest challenger to that record being Manchester United who by scurrilous means have amassed fifteen. Liverpool also has five European Cups etched onto its roll of honour with the nearest rivals to this record having won just two (Manchester United and Nottingham Forest).

So you can see that Liverpool is a highly successful football club. In spite of lean times during the mid and late 90s, the honours have continued to flow into the Anfield trophy cabinet with satisfying regularity. The League Cup, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup, the European Super Cup and the pinnacle in recent times: the European Cup, now known as the European Champions’ League, have all been welcome and much celebrated (just ask the manager of my local) additions. One trophy, however, has eluded Liverpool since 1990: The league title. Finishing above all else in the top flight of English football is, as legendary Red’s manager Bill Shankly put it, “Our bread and butter” and we Liverpool fans, whilst dining heavily on the sweet delights that cup competitions both at home and abroad have brought, have been starved of our staple diet for too long.

Sixteen years is a painfully long time without a league championship for a club like Liverpool. The thirst to be top of the highest echelon burns our throats like hydrochloric acid having a dust up with sulphuric acid while vinegar sits on the sidelines observing the whole sizzling melee. To watch Manchester United rack up eight titles without a solitary Scouse reply hurts like a rapier through the heart, particularly as no other club can match Man-ure for sheer arrogance and lack of grace in victory. Even Chelsea are not as conceited as That Lot at the other end of the East Lancashire Road and that’s saying something when one considers that Jose Mourinho is a walking ego.

My father is lucky. As boy and man, he has seen Liverpool win everything and experienced that feeling of a sporting empire being built, and then maintained, over the period of a quarter of a century. He was at Wembley when Kenny Dalglish – Liverpool’s greatest ever player and talisman – chipped the winner against FC Brugge to record our second European Cup success, he was at every game for a decade when Liverpool embarked on a procession of league titles, sweeping aside all that stood before us and consigning them to our all-conquering wake.

Unfortunately, he has also seen it unravel before his eyes, which must be doubly excruciating given the glut of success witnessed prior. I have only ever known underachievement in England’s domestic league, our last title arriving through the Shankly Gates when I was just a wee whippersnapper of eight years old. The memory is vague and the love for the club had yet to be fully forged in the atria and ventricles of my heart, but the burning desire for that elusive league title remains undiluted.

The Premiership trophy has become, dare I say it, the Holy Grail for Liverpool Football Club; the pot of gold at the end of the thirty-eight game rainbow that is the Premiership season. I’m sure one day it will take precedence in the Liverpool trophy room once more, but the emergence of Chelsea – financed by multi-billionaire ex oil-magnate and all-round dodgy dealer Roman Abramovich – has raised the standard to levels not experienced in English football.

It may just be a trophy. It may just be sport. But it’s this competition and this sport that has galvanised communities in Liverpool and countless other towns and cities across not just England but the world. When Thatcher was taking our jobs and our money, we had the escape of football at the weekend; we had the togetherness of 45,000 men and women united in common purpose regardless of race, religion, affluence and political leaning and despite the lack of league success, we never walk alone. We’re all the same in the Kop and we all covet the same thing: That pristine Premiership trophy, locked safely in the annals of Anfield and a nineteenth notch on the club’s bedpost.

Topic, Due 21/9 : Artifacts

Greetings from the desert.

The topic for this week is Artifacts. Perhaps an artifact you weild, an artifact you covet, or failing all else, some cutting commentary on the gronks that wave them about. An anthropological voyage into the world of things.

Due 21/9, in the neighbourhood of 800 words.

Mr. Bungle - California

In one of the first shots in Blue Velvet, the camera moves (with a few cuts) from the panorama of a mythic American small town to a close up of the swarm of milling insects hidden by one lawn's glistening, verdant surface. The sequence lends itself to textbooks as a description of Lynch's work in microcosm: the juxtaposition of seemingly non-compossible worlds to poke through the Capracorn crust and expose the noir core. There's a lie (at least one) that we've been telling ourselves, beating it home with movies and TV shows, and Lynch corrodes its foundation by introducing a darker strain of our film language to it like a phial of LSD to a city reservoir. The small town myth is shown to be as fake as a mechanical robin, but no less a necessary part of the small town reality than the robin is of the film.

An album that works on me in similar ways is Mr. Bungle's California. Bungle are known for pioneering, more or less, a style of music defined by cycling spastically through genres as though their boundaries had been erased, and California is probably their most restrained and sophisticated expression of this. Though no less eclectic than their previous work, here each song, and the album as a whole, manages to maintain its focus, changing sounds without altering the feel.

In conversations with my friends, I've singled this album out as among the darkest rock albums in my collection, but the reason why isn't immediately apparent: most songs have a saccharine surface structure reminiscent of the Beach Boys and rarely indulge in the agression or moody atmosphere that earn most labels of 'darkness' in music. But every song can turn at each moment from the Cali-pop base sheen to any number of genres' darker moments, or subvert it from within through the lyrics. When the glittering harmonies give way to manic yelping or thrash riffs, Bungle achieves for their home state what Lynch does for small towns. They show the child abuse hiding in the sea of green viewed from your passenger window as you drive north on the Pacific Highway, or that the City of Angels is also the City of Bukowski, gang warfare, and the base of the American porn industry. California, like small town America or anything else, is not just the shiny lie on the surface or the amorphous darkness beneath it; it's both together, and while everyone knows this about California in a time when every Hollywood stars' substance abuse and mental problems show like the organs of the Visible Man, this album makes the knowledge a tangible experience.

While the music moves in waves, lighter strands giving way to darker only to return again, without innocence, the lyrics often work against the music by highlighting and ironizing the typical hallmarks of a given genre. When the melancholy lost love ballad ends in suicide, the funky children's song turns out to be an updated version of the Golem myth, or the upbeat Motown gospel doo-wop lays out the theology of the Skopsi, a Russian sect who believed castration to be the only pathway to salvation, the irony is striking. When the lyrics don't introduce the extremes of reality into a comfortable and familiar fictional situation, they are written (usually by Mike Patton) along lines similar to those of the 'mad songs' of the Renaissance or Blake and the insane lyrical touches in certain songs by Roger Waters. Patton's vocal attack is, of course, appropriately schizophrenic.

So why does this all matter to me? Why is the only tattoo I have a lyric from (though not original to) this album? One answer is that I like art that presents competing views of the same base reality, especially when it suggests that every self-congratulatory silver cloud has, at the very least, its uncomfortably umber lining. Another is that I feel that the appropriate response to everyday madness is laughter of some kind. As a musician I appreciate the talent it takes to play so effortlessly through genres, and, more importantly, the skill it takes to compose songs that change styles like glasses, shifting the vision from Vermeer to Monet without changing its subject.

Finally, the album manages to do all this (and more; I'm not pretending to be comprehensive) while remaining fundamentally enjoyable on that gut level that music most quickly and fiercely attacks. Its funk is funky, its metal thrashy, its surf rock bouncy, and its ballads effectively sad. Where one would expect this kind of cerebral, deconstructive approach to produce arid and rarified results, the music is as verdant and lush as Bungle's Nor-Cal home and not over-analyzed in the least. It's alive with the enthusiasm for music that would manifest itself by this kind of encyclopedic approach.

It rocks.

Cave In - Jupiter

When I first read this week’s assignment, a sumptuously warm wave of joy washed over the shore of my sandy soul. Y’see, music and Liverpool Football Club are essentially my first loves, predating the fairer sex by some ten years or more, and so both have influenced who I am today to a quite considerable degree. My beloved Liverpool is one for another day, and so music takes precedent on this occasion.

So, in my giddiness, which albums railroaded through my head as possible subjects to be dissected? My initial thought was to select one of my favourites – Suffocation’s Effigy of the Forgotten or Nile’s magnum opus In Their Darkened Shrines, or maybe And Then You’ll Beg by Canadian maestros Cryptopsy – but then I thought about the impact that they have had on my life and what they have come to mean to me in that context.

The above are all great records resplendent with virtuosity at almost every turn. The impossibly precise bends from the screaming guitar of Karl Sanders that bring the solo in “Unas Slayer of the Gods” to an apocalyptic climax send shivers down my spine each and every time I hear it. As does the off-kilter breakdown in “Liege of Inveracity” – possibly the most pummelling, haemorrhage inducing riff ever committed to a record – and the wonderfully fluid solo to “We Bleed”. But what have they come to mean or what effect have they had on me as a human being other than admiration for the artists that created them?

The truth is that their combined impact is not as reverberant as my eventual choice: Cave In’s epic post-hardcore space odyssey, Jupiter. It’s somewhat of an odd choice, even to me, since I would describe my main musical preference to be death metal but this album invokes emotional memories, eventually coming to represent both love and bitterness, more than any other record I own. This contrast between light and dark is a recurring theme throughout the album with the brilliant light of “In the Stream of Commerce” juxtaposing delightfully with the bleak abyss of “Big Riff”.

“Big Riff” became a symbol of my bile and ire towards her, with Stephen Brodsky’s refrain: “You’re another coat of red in hell” being the manifestation of my feelings at that time. Nowadays, it’s more therapeutic to hear and the intensity has dropped somewhat. This subsidence is evident in the recording itself as the line is initially shouted over a down tuned riff heavy enough to disturb the Earth from it’s orbit before yielding to a cleanly sung reprise amid the backdrop of undistorted calm clarity.

This song attracts the most emotional attention from me because, in addition to the painful memories, it also offers a path forward towards catharsis via the lyric: “On a concrete road to recovery/’Cause I'm knocking over every cone in front of me.” To this day, this lyric is probably the biggest lesson in life that an artist has passed on to me; we as humans will make mistakes, it’s what makes us human rather than divine, but there is always a road back, always future events just waiting to happen that will bring joy and/or redemption. I couldn’t see this at first, but after many years analysing what it was that was so compelling about this one snippet of lyrical wizardry I am no longer blind and the song, nay the album, makes sense.

Musically, the album conjures images of the exploration of the cosmos by an intrepid astronaut with just the complete works of Arthur C. Clarke for company. At times it’s somewhat of a barren spacescape to drift through with eyes wide open in hope of just a solitary ray of light to provide reference of position or direction. This brings to mind the long bus ride to her house on dark, wintry evenings after work. I awaited the beam of her smile as I disembarked; the innocence of a face free from the worries of life made the voyage worthwhile.

Then it was gone. And its departure from my life was swiftly followed by that of Jupiter, until relatively recently that is. I’m older now, and wiser, and my rediscovery of Jupiter allowed me to face up to the inner turmoil that I thought I had banished many years before. Jupiter for me, therefore, marks a distinct change in my life; I’m not just dicking around anymore, taking everything for granted that it will work out just like in the movies and fairy tales. I had my heart ripped from my chest and bludgeoned to a pulp in front of my very eyes, an experience that is as essential to gaining passage to manhood as your first pint of lager or your first knee trembler in an alleyway from a girl that you hope to never have the displeasure of meeting again.

Jupiter presented this in beautifully crafted cold hard facts – none more so than on the aptly named “Requiem” with its melancholic beginnings contrasted with eastern-tinged, soaring guitar lines providing the geodesic between love and heartbreak. Again, Brodsky’s lyrical theme struck chords within me with each line of the verses ending with the phrase “…by yourself” almost as if he wanted to plunge the knife in just that little bit deeper and twist it just that little bit more excruciatingly.

And that is what makes Jupiter so vital to me and who I have become in the subsequent years after the break up. It is a reminder of everything good and everything bad about a relationship. A reminder, never to enter into anything, let alone a relationship, with my eyes wide shut; a lesson learned in the harshest fashion.

When I first bought Jupiter I was a boy.

Now I am a man.