Coinky Dink DJ #4 - Pearls of Wisdom

If you take away the politics, irony, caustia and imp from Leonard Cohen you find yourself leaving with Rod Mckuen.  McKuen is an American love poet every bit the word wizard Cohen portends himself to be, but who keeps his focus strict and tight on the problem of romantic love.  Setting his sights on Jacques Brel, Mckuen makes two translations of Brel that come to life at once as eternal standards.  Brel's Le Moribund becomes the well known Seasons in the Sun and Ne me quitte pas becomes the otherworldly If You Go Away.  Our interest is just a few words from Mckuen's translation of Ne me quitte pas.

Brel:  Moi je t'offrirai
Des perles du pluie
Venues de pays
Ou il ne pleut pas...

 

Mckuen: But if you stay, I'll make you a day
Like no day has been, or will be again;
We'll sail the sun, we'll ride on the rain,
We'll talk to the trees worship the wind.

 Then if you go, I'll understand,
Leave me just enough love to fill up my hand...



A transliteration of Brel reads like: I offer you// pearls of rain / from a land / where it never rains...  Mckuen's verse proposes the diametric image.  The hero of his song begs for a handful of silver moonlight where Brel offers to his love a cup of pearly rain.  They key term is Brel's "pearls", which Mkcuen interprets as a simile for "semen".  So, where Brel aims his rain into fertility and the tenuous future, Mkcuen, artfully masturbatory, conjures a monolectic whimsy of memory and perdition.

We propose that these twin images are the competing forces of agricultural paganism vs. dream realism.  Brel is the sincere romantic, who pitches his seed into the perpetuation of static cyclo-naturalism.  The pain in Brel is the natural pairing of death and sex.  His character infers the terrible problem of mortal love, love of the flesh, and the abject denigration of death.  By inverting Brel's original attitude, Mckeun leaps out as the derring-do of Zarathustra - to whom all that is real is nothing and the self.  The landscape of If You Go Away is one of surreal abandon and its hero muses upon the consequence not to disintegrate, but to become lost forever in the ripples of a dream.  According to Mckuen, the life immortal is the beginning of the both the problem and the eternally problematic.

Altogether my cup of rain.

Pax, Ye Crusty Carbuncles,

The PPPandava

Coinky Dink DJ #3 - The Gig is Up

This episode of Coinky Dink DJ is dedicated to Rob Ager and his fresh political promise, which as we understand is quite bright indeed.

For a while now and to passionate cries of "nay-nay!" yer old drinking buddy Da WWWiz has exposed an infamous meme what seems to insist that a) the real world is long ago destroyed in a quasi-nuclear apocalypse and b) the appearance of synchronous phenomena are a by product of the dreaming mind of a culture already way beyond death.  This perspective poses a stark contrast to the synchro-mystic set, and to its highly advertised new-ness of mind, body and spirit.  The Fortean School and the Twilight School of Downard and Hoffman would appear to predate synchro-mysticism by as much as a century of dazzling evidence.

The Old School is a simple maxim: There is no New School.  Everything Old is Older still.  It's all been bombed B-4.  Let's get bombed!

Doc/Strangle/Glove...Salt Peter Sellers

To prime the traxx, we remind of the already established connexion of the stated Apocalypse meme to that of Strangulation by a Gloved Hand.  Dr. Strangelove is Doc / Strangle / Glove.  The trio describes the Operating Room still born corpus of our seeming matrix in motion.

Our first number is the gut-groovy Swamp from the Talking Heads.  The lyrics are almost too clear without the Ray-Bans on yer peeps.  But here is a fucking corker.  I mean fah real!

from Swamp

...a medical chart on the wall
soft violins (sounds like: violence) 
and hands touch your throat
everybody wants to explode...

I'm mean c'mon people - have you seen Dr. Strangelove?!?



Next Up is a pair of waves from Phoenix, a band that seems to come right out of nowhere.

Lisztomania gives the throat key (lyric: ...jugulate, jugulate, etc.  To jugulate is to kill by cutting the throat).  Lasso implies likewise in both title and lyric.  But just look at the cover art for the album!  Three bombs?  One may speculate there are two gone by and one still cummin'. The Big One.

The best money is in sunscreen futures.  Bain de Soleil, good brothers and sisters!





To put it plainly, it's a sentimental recall.

The Understanding

The only thing worth understanding is that some things are nice to stand under. Trees when it's sunny, umbrellas when it rains... in general the heavens, in general the sky. We understand the sky. We understand the stars.