Sometimes, Songs

Digging myself further and further into a genre which I am dubbing “limited appeal,” I have a second short story musical piece entitled After the Rats Have Run Away. Or, that was the title of the short story- the title of the song, on my iTunes, at least, is Complicit Filth Is the New Revilement.

I wrote this piece of prose senior year, for the fiction seminar teacher who was not Imbrenda (… which i am still bitter about). It’s a sketch of a story- the teacher argued it wasn’t a story at all, and now that I’m looking back on it, she can go fuck herself, there’s a full story in there, shrouded in poetiks.

The music is Sparrows Swarm and Sing, it cuts off kind of abruptly because I haven’t learned how to fade out yet. I saw this band at the Talking Head probably around the time that I wrote this story, so it’s fitting in that way. They were awesome- they have a myspace (http://www.myspace.com/swarmandsing).

AFTER THE RATS RUN AWAY

I woke up, hot, with the dirty film of my own crust starting to melt away on drips of sweat. I thought the sun was starting to leak through the shades; lines of dull orange cut through between the off-white plastic blades, but I focused my eyes and determined it was just light pollution. I coughed a little, caught some phlegm and hacked until it was out, sitting on my tongue with nowhere to go.     

At my left, she was lying still. I felt her shoulder; she wasn’t sweating. She wasn’t even warm. I swallowed the shit in my mouth and turned back to my other side. The orange glow seemed to bake on the layer of filth all over my body, so I picked myself out of bed and found my jeans. The oil and dirt on the denim rubbed against the hairs on my naked legs. I zipped the fly and patted down the pockets for cigarettes; I found a pack of matches.

Her skirt had a pocket and I checked it; Virginia Slims. Women’s cigarettes, but I took them anyway.

I cast one last look at the room, wiped a hand across my face to streak the sweat and grime away from my eyes, and stepped out into the hallway.

I didn’t notice the mumbling traffic noises until after I closed the door; there were no windows in the hallway. Just a series of doors, numbered by odds and evens. Presumably, there was a person dozing behind each, but the night felt in tune with my mood. Every door I passed housed another strung out skinny man, unable to sleep for the dirt and the drugs and the orange glow outside their window. There seemed to be a train of men, shirtless and sweating, following me in hopes that I knew where I was going.

I turned around every now and then, but the hall was empty. The stairwell was empty. The little lobby with the bell at the desk and the bars in front of the wall of keys was empt y.

And the street was empty; a passing car flooded light over me. I ducked into an alley to avoid the brightness; the morning would be along soon enough. The orange would turn to yellow and eventually bluish grey, but the alleys were dark.

I lit one of her cigarettes and realized how much it smelled like her; or, probably, the other way around. I wondered if she’d still be there if I went back, if she’d ever been there in the first place. I pulled out the pack again to examine it.

Virginia Slims. She was real. I wouldn’t have bought these myself.

My head went dizzy for a moment and I stepped back into a bag of garbage; a fleet of rats scurried away in a hurry. Even my blistered nose could smell the rot of the urine and decay, so I stepped back out into the street and folded my arms over my chest, hurrying towards anything and hoping there was something good at the end of the line. I tried to think of somewhere cool, or somewhere to wash myself off. I found myself obsessing over water, blue water, ice and rain. I looked up at the sky again, and tried to will a rain cloud to gather.

A bathroom somewhere? Or just a bottle of water, I could get one anywhere and pour it on myself and watch the filth run off into the street. Put it back where it came from. I scratched at my chest and left three red lines surrounded by scraped black dirt. I wiped at it and it smeared but it didn’t come off. 

I was trapped by the dirt… the city forced it on me and I took it without complaining. I examined my reflection in a passing window and couldn’t tell the film from the shadows, it was all dark and all cast over me.

I walked quickly. Even if I didn’t know where to go, I’d get there faster if I moved quickly. The rain wasn’t coming and the puddles in the streets were just another way to taunt me. I dragged my finger against a window as I walked by, and pulled up a black finger. The whole place was just a haven for grime and corruption. I walked faster, ignoring the buildings around me, until finally, I had to stop, out of breath and wheezing.

“Hey man,” I heard from the city.

“Hey.”

There it was again.

“You sho’ out late.”

I turned, and I turned, and I couldn’t see anyone.

“Down here.”

My spun around and looked down; there, sitting on a blanket against the wall, was a man even thinner than I; his teeth were blacker than mine; he wore no shirt and showed off his dirt without flinching.

“You look like you could use a somethin’ sweeter, man, you got that look in your eyes.”

I sat down in front of him, unable to stand and thirsting for whatever he had.

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a little glass tube with an orange plastic stopper-top. I felt my own pocket, pulled out the Slims, then found a balled up five. He smiled and showed me his purple gums, and we switched.

In the alley, lying against the bags of garbage that I could no longer smell, I tried to think about water, but I could not figure out what made me think I need the purity, the dirt all around me is all that I seek because after the rats have run away, the filth that remains doesn’t seem like such a pain. 

I was browsing old internet profiles today, and came across my writing.com account, and it has some stories and writing that I’d otherwise forgotten about. So, for the last couple hours, I’ve been trying to convert them into music.

This one is called ‘Raspberries,’ and was written for Mr. Lund’s 12th grade English class. I changed some of the words and phrasings for rhythmical reasons, but left them as written in the story below. It’s ten minutes long, all told- it opens and closes with melody, but the middle is just layered readings with an ear for rhythm.

The track to which I set the story is Damon Kvols, by Cex, off of his semi-recent album Sketchi. I would hyperlink his name like I see other people doing, but I don’t actually know how to do that, so I’ll just put his hyperlink in some parenthesies (http://sangennaro.tumblr.com/). At the end of the prose reading, I make some weird noises to conceal a poor cut in the music, so if something sounds funky there, don’t blame the beatmaker.

RASPBERRIES

It took Victor thirty minutes to walk through the field behind his house before he came to the edge of the woods; from the beginning of the trees to the raspberry bushes was another hour. When he went out, he took four sacks with him, just enough to make it worth his time, but not too many to make his trip home agonizing. It was on one September evening, when he was running low on jam and wine and tarts and preserves, that he decided he better stock up before the birds and the fall took the rest of the berries from him.         

Filling the bag, Victor found the forests’ light to be quite insufficient to meet his berry picking needs; he could hardly tell the rotten from the ripe, and as he struggle to determine which would be best plucked and bagged, he stepped through a  termite-stricken log and fell; he landed back first on a slope and rolled, knees and elbows and shoulders and hands slapping against the leaves. In a moments’ time, his bag was lost to him and his face was planted in the dirt.

He raised his head and found himself staring into the mouth of a festering corpse; a pus-white maggot crawled out of the gum, tickled a tooth, then slipped back under the flesh. Victor contained his terror, and quickly picked himself up into a sitting position, where he could inspect his surroundings without a noseful of rot.

The forest was just as it had always been; old trees, branches to the sky and moss covering the trunks; the floor was composed of small plants and decomposing foliage; a canopy of green covered the whole sky; the corpse, however, was very new to him, although it appeared to be a few days old to the ground.

“Oh, hello!”

Victor turned around. There was a man sitting behind him, a tall thin man with short thin lips and long thin hair. He had on faded black pants and a grey t-shirt, both baggy on his boney self, and a grey wool skull cap with the words “Jim’s Hat” stitched into the brim in blue.

“I’m Warren,” he said, grinning enough to expose his poor dental hygiene.
“This,” he added, pointing at the pale naked corpse, “is Felicity.”

Victor looked at the man, then at the corpse. He felt at his hip, found that his knife hadn’t come off in the fall, and felt protected for a second. The corpse wasn’t going anywhere, so he focused his attention back on the man, who was still grinning, but nervously. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Warren, with an
awkward sort of nod of the head, asked, “What’s your name?”

“I’m Victor.” Victor stepped two steps back from the man and the body and observed the scene again; there was a thin pale man sitting ten feet from an aged dead body in the woods. Victor though to himself for a moment, then asked, “Did you, uh, did you kill Felicity?”

Warren shook his head.

“No, just found him like this. Really boring sort of guy, but he’s the only company I’ve had all month.”

Victor shuddered for a moment considering what the word “company” could mean, then walked up to the corpse. It was most definitely a man, a hairy beared man with a long black pony tail, lying face up in the leaves. He was covered in small scrapes and cuts, holes from the worms and grubs, but he was otherwise unharmed and with no clear cause of death.

“Did you know him?” Victor asked, wrinkling his nose.

Warren shook his head again.

“Nope. He’s got a tat, though, on his arm. The heart with the scroll?”

Victor squinted in the dark, and, sure enough, there was a tattoo of a heart with a banner in front of it reading “Felicity.”

“I don’t see what the point of getting your own name tattooed on your arm is,” Warren commented, playing with a twig.

“I don’t think that was his name. Probably a girlfriend?”

Warren shrugged and stuck the twig in his mouth, working between teeth and popping out bits of old food. “I’ve been calling him Felicity, he doesn’t seem to mind much.”

There was a silence, as Victor, Warren and Felicity weren’t quite sure what to say to one another. It was almost entirely dark in there in the woods, although their eyes had adjusted with the faltering light. However, Victor was not planning on spending his whole night between the trees with a stranger and a corpse. He spoke quicky, and rather louder than he intended.

“We should bury him then! It’s not right to leave a man without a grave.”

Warren groaned, and with a pout, replied, “I knew you’d say that.” Then he got up, walked out of sight behind some trees, and came back with two shovels. They were old and the handles were moldy, but without question, Victor took his and tore into the earth; the ground was soft with death and was easily lifted up; they spent an hour splitting roots and throwing scoops of dirt into a pile. Neither of them spoke, and when the hole looked deep enough, they took their shovels and rolled Felicity over; he fell into his grave and left behind a pile of bugs.

“I can take it from here,” Warren said, a small tear welling up above his dirty cheek. It was hard to see in the night, but his eyes were beginning to sparkle a little bit, and Victor stuck his shovel in the dirt and nodded. He made his way up the hill to the sounds of dirt hitting corpse, then collected his bags and headed home without any raspberries at all.

I finally got my music collection off my iPod (thanks Senuti!), and now the Nappa Valley Space Ranger collection, Space Man Meat, is mine again! I’m going to periodically upload songs that I had something to do with, starting with Fatal Insomnia, a song I wrote with Mac and Sam and Dan; this is the second version, with instrumentals by Mac and Sam and probably other people, but with the same vocals we recorded originally.

Aladdin:

The last time I woke up
was the fifth of november,
since then, I can’t remember
how to hold it together.
Not sleeping got me
seein’ shit you wouldn’t believe,
so I drove with my friends
down to chill at the beach.
It was cold, it was dark,
I was kind of strung out
by the time we hit the boardwalk
I was talking out loud
with the zebra at my side,
with the unicorn horn,
and the goblins all around us
spitting laughter and scorn.
I saw dolphins in the sky,
and a crow in the tide,
and the moons were setting
all together
fucking with my mind.

Sam:
I’m leaving my minds position
by holding open my eyes
72 hours without sleeping
now the clouds aren’t in the sky
they’re an extension of my spine
and fireflies, swimming in their own green light-

in my position,
I’m covered in (?)
I start to trust the green light
I see them swimming through their teeth
and form a rope,
winding and binding my mind
to these images and lines.

Aladdin and Dan
It was getting kind of heavy
I was feeling kind of sweaty
I got needles in my eyes
and a weight on my mind
at the beach I’m not sure
if it’s June or January
it was time to break a pillow out
to shut my eyes until I’m down
and lost in the light of the night.

I’m supposed to be polishing a cut of a documentary right now, and I am instead making wicked tits music. Today’s track came to me from Efraim, from several weeks ago, and only just yesterday did I sit down give it a vicious listen. It turns out, it’s fucking sweet, and works perfectly(ish) for these words that I wrote about Hamden, the neighborhood in Baltimore in which I grew up.

Black white and red banners hang in anger in a second story window in Hamden, insignia to signify threat of death from Aryans, but at four and six we didn’t know much about it, we were more involved in battles and powers, playing heroes for hours.

In Nellie’s yard with dogs and ponds, upon a tree with  parchment bark I drew a monster. In that house the kids and dogs all got jerky at once, and were wary to be careful of the temper of Faust. And outside past that chain link fence, autumn heavy with sun and bugs;   the gravel garbage forest dense it lured us hence to find a world apart, our very own uncharted heart of darkness.

So there it was, where guns don’t kill, and all the kids assert their will, where plastic shrapnel soon becomes the matter of an arsenal, bringing bottles to glass city sets the scene for smashing blast the wall with shrapnel watch the silvers fall and glimmer in the sun don’t break them all at least save one who knows in this dark woods what lurking doom may come, we’ll have our fun, but don’t you be afraid to run.

In the past couple weeks I have begun to try and turn my prose into music, and have had several seconds of success. However, for the most part, that has consisted of finding the rhythm within the prose and bringing that into the melodyscape; today’s project was simply a reading, over top of some grating electrodoom from Gentleman Ben Korman.

Next collaborative tracks: Efraim and Danny, coming up in the next couple of days!

A Hypothetical Situation

Hypothetical situation: say I’m broke, but I know a guy who pays a lot of money for a baby, and I happen to have come across a baby on my way to class, and I happen to have taken it and brought it to this guy, but he happens to have shot himself in his bathtub presumably to find redemption for his terrible crimes- would it be immoral to just leave the baby there? Because I already stole it- hypothetically- and there’s nowhere else that I know of to sell it, and I don’t want to risk getting caught for kidnapping, obviously, so if they find the baby when they find him they’ll just assume he did the kidnapping, right?

The second and last Empty Picture Frame track I had, “Dramatic Track,” now finished and ready to get all up in your ears. It would be polite to clean that shit first, maybe get yourself a q-tip or something.

This is titled “Thunderpunch,” for some reason.

The twine of this world
is curled around the spine
of an excavated girl and our
universal finger runs along it
let her linger with the fibers
and higher kings of triumph
tactile refractors of the scion

Cast of the power
of the clock
and its
incessent ticking hours

Let the thunder tell the night
to let us conquer as we might

Intention is the name of the plague
and exposition is embodiment of pain
and I will see you again
for just a moment at the end
you’ll be the highlight
of my lifetime
flashback dream of your smile
that’s all that’s left, and I expire.      

From the wrap of that cord
and the cracks in my voice 
I want to be indeterminable
and yet friendly and approachable.
people should recognize my goodness,
while remaining assured of my darkness.
I have darkness within me,
when I let myself be taken by the night
but, we want to always walk in the light.

Volition is at stake, it’s a shame and
Providence is just a name
and I will see you again,
and I will hear your amens.

I am back, after a hiatus. I have a few tracks from friends waiting for my vocals, but here’s the first: the instrumentals were sent to me by The Empty Picture Frames, and I have worked my tasty lyric sauce into all the measures.

Too Much, Too Soon

I want to eat you like a peach,
to skin you bare with my teeth
and press into you a kiss
the wetness sweetness on my lips

I tried to hold you up
but my arms weren’t strong enough
and i pine for your affection
so forgive my recollections
In my head, I build you up
because you mean so fucking much
And my dreams don’t mean to haunt you
but it seems that’s all they’ve got to
do with all the memories of you and me

But please don’t look at me
with pity in your eyes
I know it’s shitty but we tried
it’s tough cuz I’m just too much
and yet I’ll never be enough   
But I’m just fine, I have resigned
to hold back time in my mind

Here’s the second part of the ghost cycle- one more song tomorrow to wrap up the story!

Where are we now? Well, it all takes place in Mexico, for starters, because they have graphic news stories where they TOTALLY show the bodies; it’s sweet, unless you know the corpse, and in this case, dude definitely knows the corpse. So he’s bitter, but resolved to stay forever fixated on feeling bad for her.

In the meantime, Chica is all about murdering strangers, because she’s a ghost, so what the fuck else is she gonna do? And she’s all like, “When are you gonna come back, dude I fell in love with?” about him and he’s all like “damn yo i don’t even know you’re a ghost yet, chill,” because he doesn’t find out she’s a ghost until in the next (and final) song in the cycle.

I got kind of lazy with this track. Although dissatisfied, I rolled my eyes and said, “fine, whatever, it’s been a long day,” and in fact it has. I’m about to finish a duty shift (way less awful than last time!), and then it’s up to my room to relax before getting up tomorrow to take care of a bunch more shit that’s piling up.

Anyway. My “tumblarity” is sky-rocketing- 28 points, more than I’ve ever had. Once I disclosed the project to the world, this became a significantly less safe place to say whatever I wanted- although I won’t be pouring my heart out into the words of the blog itself, I have resolved not to compromise the music. If there’s something I want to say in a song, fuck it, I’ll say it.

Anyway, I put the call out for some back-up tracks to aid in my project (so that I wouldn’t have to make the music all by myself every day), and I got some sweet responses that I’ll get to once this cycle is all wrapped up. Thanks to everyone who emailed me, you’ll see your track up in this bitch in no time.

Gray Girl Waiting. Lyrics: When he got back he saw her face on the news when they showed her displaced by the views of her floating how he hated them for taping her but the years fell off he held on to the rock though his rage subsided all the woe remained inside of him and all the while the girl stayed put to torture those who wandered through the cove they freeze when they see her her lifeless stare induces seizures and choking on the water they sink to the bottom (oo-oo-ooh (X2)) the world is getting darker getting colder all the while he’s getting older all the while she’s going nowhere hoping he’ll come back to see her again hoping he’ll come back to see her again.

Okay, so I’m trying something new- I’m going to write some story-based song cycles, because I like telling stories as much as I like writing music, so why not?

This cycle is about a boy who meets a girl at the beach and then she dies, and then he spends the rest of his life obsessing over her, unable to move on. Luckily for him, she isn’t dead at all, she’s a fucking ghost! Holy shit. She’s still in love with him too, which is sweet, but it’s also totally fucked up because she’s all dead and shit, so it’s probably not going to end that well for them.

Actually I know exactly how it ends… I’m not one hundo percent sure on the middle, but I’ve got an ending.

This song, in particular, is the rumination of the boy at the beach where they met and where she died. He’s all pissed as shit at the water for killing her, and she’s all hanging out just watching him. Also, he’s a werewolf, but that doesn’t really come up in the song cycle, I just think werewolves are sweet.

Darker Getting Colder. Lyrics: Crying in the ocean just to make himself feel small, stepping out on the rocks at dusk to watch the day dissolve. He cries out over breaking waves, (the tide roars on the same), until his voice is just a whisper; though defeated, he remains. The world is getting darker, getting colder in the sand; when he touches his palm to the grain of the beach it sucks the heat right from his hand. He looks to where he saw her first, sunbathing near the dunes. He looks to where she washed ashore, upon the cove of rocks hidden from the moon. Making his way toward her grave: to weep, to dream, to grieve, to pray. They’d only met for one full day, before her life was ripped away. At the cove, he heaved and moaned, and resolved not to forget; and, in the sand he found a heart-shaped stone which he took that he might keep it and reflect. When he left the beach that night, he’d never felt to alone in his life… but there were eyes that were on him and a ghost that was haunting of a girl who fell in love with his smile…

A WhaleHammer theme that would be too embarrassing to attach to an actual video, I might release something more starkly ironical to this song as a redux. It’s late so I’m not going to title this or put up the lyrics. Maybe I’ll do it later.