IT MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL

"That's just the power of Music."

In elementary school I'd sometimes sneak downstairs after my bedtime. Some nights I'd find my dad sitting alone in the dark of the living room drinking by himself. In my memories he's always listening to Tom Waits + I can tell he's been crying.

Thinking about it brings back all the hurt of loving someone but not being able to do anything to save them.

Sudden Sweetness

"I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to."
— Philip Roth (The Human Stain)

(i feel like that far too often, that sickening yearning to be liked by someone you already like very much. there is that fear that the other person can sense your enthusiasm + adoration, the girlish-boyish zeal in your eyes, and thus will be disgusted by you and your pathetic earnestness, but ahhh you can't help yourself!)

Dark Dayz.

In my head, The Night Porter was going to be a Southern Gothic. I was wrong. Set twelve years after World War II in Vienna, it's the twisted story of a SS officer and his obsessed victim. S&M, ballet, caberet, and lots of Nazis. The victim, a very beautiful and frail Charlotte Rampling longs to be victim and object again. She ends up locked up in a hotel room, bound and gagged. The Night Porter tried for some seriously high minded stuff but didn't pull it off and settled for some fucked up sex instead. Upsetting viewing fare for a Tuesday night when I'd considered watching Caddyshack. I recently watch The Swimming Pool and yeah, that Charlotte Rampling has a taste for a certain sort of psychological thriller.

He was promising...

"O.K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed "The Mau Maus of East Harlem," and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: "He was promising..."). "

- An Instant Fan's Inspired Notes: You Gotta Listen" (1980), from Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000, ed. Peter Guralnick (Da Capo Press, 2000, ISBN 0306809990), p. 100

Daring as Daring Do

"Q: Pick five words that describe yourself.
A: Oh, The Seven Deadly Sins."
— Leonard Cohen answering a query put forth to him in a 1994 Q Magazine article