This Is Your Cold Discovery

...Find a soft place on your body and rub me with it. This I won't soon forget...

I am downright certain that the first blog post after the intro is the hardest. This is the one that sets the tone and initiates the trajectory. Intros are child's play; how tough is it to formulate an agenda? Cake. It is the execution of said agenda where laziness can intervene. It's probably going to be damn hard to maintain a cognizant blog with savvy Bill Callahan (and/or other musical) references galore. Whatever though. Here goes nothing.

I have something scary on my mind. Thankfully, it is the kind of unrealistic fear that is so off-putting that it is enjoyable. There are some feelings, some emotions in this world that my life has most thankfully been free of. I will be the first to admit that life has spoiled me. There is always a sunbeam seeping in during my darkest hours, fixing everything. Thus, I resort to what I am going to have to call "emotional slumming." Damn, that's atrocious. Allow me to explain:

No Country For Old Men. Scott Walker's The Drift. The animated version of Watership Down. Through all of these unique pop culture entities, I can derive a feeling comparable to elation. However, said feeling is most potent when I am most horrified. The suspense, the string sections, the 9/11 imagery ("Nose holes caked in black cocaine..."). The collective sucking in of breath, bracing for the blow. The moaning in agony, the disbelief in the unnatural nature of it all. Through violence, visualized, implied, and prophesied, I feel closer to God. The heaviness of these entities is one that I know not in my life and I can't help but believe it is supernatural, granted subtly.

Now, I hope it goes without saying that I am a delicate little flower and violence is the least-present trouble in my life. I am literally surrounded by joy and down comforters. Also, any reality behind the evil I am describing doesn't do it for me. I can't day-dream about the suicide bombers in the Middle East and derive from it anything but sorrow, sympathy and regret. The violence that fascinates me cannot be real, because the emotion to me is surreal. It comes from a world apart: the art world. Art, to me, is that which can evoke emotion unfamiliar to the observer. And thus, the art that brings me the most pleasure that which is most strange and remote from my own existence.

When I caught Bill Callahan at the Echoplex in Los Angeles this past Autumn, he graced us with "Cold Discovery." A somewhat ineffectual track from Dongs of Sevotion, I was taken by how quickly it sucked me in and evoked this very feeling of which I speak. The integration of Thor Harris' masterful percussion launched the song into a menacing maelstrom of pain and pleasure. The simplest invocation of violence ("Bust a lock/With a rock./ Don't need a key/ To have me." and "I can hold a woman/down on a hardwood floor/ and her teeth can gnash right through me.") shot chills down my spinal cord. There is a pain that I like to pretend feels like pleasure, and Bill spoke to it masterfully that night. That, my friends, was art at work, paralyzing people into believing in it.

Anyway, all creepiness and S&M aside, I am still quite impressed with how well artists can move me without gratuity, without overt preaching. Scott Walker, Angela Morley, Joel and Ethan Coen, and of course our Bill Callahan. Elliott Smith and his obsession with the ghosts of soldiers harassing/pleading to nurses. Okkervil River's Will Sheff writing a love song about relishing in the feel of his own blood being spilled ("For Real"). Even (and I hate to give this to him, but I can't help myself) goddamn Steve Albini and his funernalistic "End of Radio" in which he dedicates his last show to the apocalypse. I can't get enough of the barren wasteland, the chilling, haunting, bloody-ass rage and frustration and stark black leafless trees against red skies.

Here in the city of angels, with all the potential and youth and eager hit-the-ground-running peers surrounding me, I can use these works of art to escape to a world bereft of all things me, and relish in it.

*After rereading this post, I really don't think I emphasized enough how much actual violence and human tragedy is awful and regrettable and repulsive and sad. Mothers losing their children, AIDS, religious violence, all that jazz... I loathe it and hope to someday reduce its presence in the world. Seriously, the school shootings, the boy soldiers in Sierra Leon, they are far to tragic to derive any form of pleasure from. When it comes to creepy, terrible, violent things, they must exist in the realm of fantasy, music, lucid dreams for me to appreciate (and thus blog about) them.