Leonard Cohen Cover

"Bring Back the Bards, Chelsea Hotel 2007" by lornagrl on Flickr

Alright, so this is sitting somewhere in my Tumblr queue to post sometime next week.

I’m going to post it here anyway, because I can’t edit it  between now and then, and I’m okay with that – I recorded a cover of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Chelsea Hotel No. 2″ on my phone yesterday, while waiting on Kerry to get home so we could run some errands before skipping town for a couple days.

Chelsea Hotel No. 2

This is one of my favorite songs, has been for a long while. I’ve never really learned to play it until now, and I’m not really sure why.

This might be my favorite breakup song ever. Every bit as casually dismissive as Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” but with a sweetly remembered fondness for the subject that makes the dismissal all the more brutal. And human.

Enjoy.

Fiction: Preternatural

It’s not as if Frederick wasn’t proud of himself or what he’d accomplished, but accolades never suited him. You could call him A Great Lover or World’s Best Dad or Tri-State Wrestling Champ of the Years 1995, 1996, and 1997, and, looking in his eyes, tell him that the one record that his high school band released only on Maxell 60-minute cassette tapes, recorded on his Sony jambox, and duplicated on the drummer’s dad’s Very Expensive Please Be Very Careful No Wait Let Me Load That For You Pioneer Dual-Head cassette deck, during the winter of 1994-95, this record, now with the wow and flutter and wandering pitch of a decade-and-a-half of car stereo stopping, flipping, and brutal auto-reversing, this record, with it’s brittle, semi-translucent plastic shell and hand-written but xeroxed nonetheless album cover insert, is a Pristine Document Of Mid-90s High School Culture Without Par.

photo credit: ondressingup/Flickr.

You could say all of those things, and you’d think he’d blush or smile or play it off, or say Yeah I know, but there, in the living room of his home, surrounded by chipped Dura-Stay faux-wood-paneled wainscoting applied floor-to-ceiling, sitting on a tattered Lay-Z-Boy love seat that leaves only three feet for endtable and passage, Frederick barely blinks. He says, very slowly, with what seems like more deliberation than a human being of his accomplishments should, strictly speaking, require, something about how the idea of Capitalized Superlatives seem so juvenile as to cause acne upon thinking them.

Frederick’s skin is flawless.

As Frederick sits there, unblinking, you’ll notice how well his eyes pair with the rich oranges and deep browns — chocolate, you’ll think, everybody always thinks of chocolate, though it’s closer to espresso — of the Dura-Stay wood panels of his walls, and you’ll notice that they don’t quite share a fascination with your eyes, whether talking or listening, though for 15 seconds, before you notice this habit, Frederick will deliberately sustain contact, but with just your right eye. Sitting face to face, like this, across his coffee table, you crosslegs on the floor, that right eye contact is just enough shy of normal to make you feel uneasy, or would be, if he didn’t speak in such warmly hushed tones, as if every last phoneme was a potential bumper-sticker honor student, sent bittersweetly off to that first day of kindergarten.

And it’s these sounds, sent off with carefully packed peanut butter and jelly sandwich lunches, that tell you that while he is grateful for the committee’s recognition, no, he will not be accepting any grants for his ornithological research, which, once, the British newspaper, The Guardian, hailed as Revolutionary, that he is perfectly content to make due with what he can when he can, and to keep that as it is, though a new set of binoculars would be nice, seeing as he lost his in the divorce.

I had big plans for 2010. Not making contact, exactly. I don’t have many encounters with monoliths in my daily life.

I can click back about four pages in my blog – which is set to only show 3 posts per page – before I get to a post I made a year ago. This is untenable.

There are a lot of things I had wanted to do in 2010 that just didn’t happen: spending some serious time with friends in Indiana, starting a band here, playing out more (even if the band didn’t happen), and working on a serious grad school poetry manuscript, and it seems that a lot of my grander schemes for the year escaped me too: Read the rest of this entry »