Ramsayings

The Flam­ing Lips — At War with the Mystics

The Flam­ing Lips’ At War with the Mys­tics tells a pes­simistic polit­i­cal sto­ry. Begin­ning with the unfor­tu­nate­ly titled “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”, they ques­tion human nature and assume the worst: that baser ele­ments win out in the sec­u­lar cos­mol­o­gy and that our impuls­es are inher­ent­ly self-inter­est­ed, a cease­less cho­rus of annoy­ing yeahs seems to sig­nal acqui­es­cence. If that’s true, it’s a damn­ing indict­ment com­ing from a band hereto­fore so pre­oc­cu­pied with hal­lu­cino­gens that pol­i­tics seemed but a pass­ing con­cern. So has Wayne Coyne’s pro­tec­tive bub­ble sud­den­ly burst and let in the awful world, the one where the oth­er half lives?

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Nos­tal­gia trip­ping at the gates of Hell.”

Thus “style” was born: this was Flaubert’s sec­ond gift to nov­el­ists, and one they are as like­ly to curse him for as to thank him. Of course, writ­ers before Flaubert had ago­nized about style: don’t we feel that Jane Austen was a ruth­less cen­sor of super­fluity? But no nov­el­ist ago­nized as much or as pub­licly, no nov­el­ist fetishized the poet­ry of the sen­tence in the same way, no nov­el­ist pushed to such an extreme the poten­tial alien­ation of form and con­tent (a book “about nothing”).

The God­head, revealed.

Don­na con­sult­ed her twen­ty-dol­lar elec­tric Timex wrist­watch, which he had giv­en her. “About thir­ty-eight min­utes. Hey.” Her face bright­ened. “Bob, I got the wolf book with me — you want to look at it now? It’s got a lot of heavy shit in it, if you can dig it.”

“Life,” Bar­ris said, as if to him­self, “is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For every­one and everything.”

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Is it get­ting heavy?”

Minor­i­ty Report: First Quar­ter Sin­gles & Albums 2006. Com­ing soon!

Gene Pit­ney — 1940 — 2006