The Strokes are back in the atmosphere. They just released a good single from their new album, Angles, which comes out on March 22nd. They were on Saturday Night Live last weekend. But right now I'm listening to one of their songs that was released a while ago and featured in Sophia Coppola's latest movie Somewhere. It's a demo version of the song You Only Live Once, called I'll Try Anything Once. You can hear it here:
http://noisenarcs.com/2011/02/25/oscar-madness-nominees-film-song-2010/
Just scroll down a bit.
What if the song makes me feel sad? What if it that feels good? What if my life was a flying airplane with empty engines? What if it was all beautiful? The blazing sun: backdrop for the falling plane and the life inside. See that's the thing. Even when life is shitty. It is life and it feels amazing. Blood is literally pulsing through your veins. You are alive in the great spectrum of mysteries. To take one entirely insignificant example, how do my feet stay in contact with the earth as the earth travels ridiculously around the sun? Why is there psychic pain in my stomach? Does the psychic pain in my stomach rotate? Does it spin like a washing machine? Will the clothes come out clean? I added the Tide, so hopefully. You can be underwater. You can fall to the bottom of the pool, breathe out all the oxygen in your lungs, then smile and have a tea party. And come forcefully, shooting back into the atmosphere with Mephistopheles driving the team of horses through the sky. You just a passenger. Sitting next to Beelzebub in the small pew of the chariot. He's taking you to a lake. A lake reflecting the snow-capped, jagged mountains. Your tea party with Lucifer is calm. He is a gentleman, a black-magic magician, cloaked and freshly shaven. Lucifer disparages the intelligentsia. Poor professor all alone in his words. Satan plays badminton with the professor's words on a lawn court near the lake, in the English country side, not far from Oxford. You and the Devil hear the stormy music coming from the College. It keeps me down. It keeps me from going down any further. It keeps me and collects me and rotates me. I like to be in love and one day have a wife with children and that white picket fence. "And but for the sky there are no fences facing." But what does the Devil mean? What is his significance in the modern atheist order? to the Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew? What is his representation now? Disorder? Hate? Evil? The Dark Lord? But isn't that from Star Wars? What if the Devil is simply anger and underneath that anger is sadness? What then? The Devil as sadness. Do we as a society push the Devil away when we should really bring him close, and let him melt into tears. The Satanic Verses and The Master and Margarita are two of my favorite books. If God is Dead then is the Devil Alive? and more importantly
is that okay?
I hope you are happier. But if you are happier, I ask you this. Have you felt the sadness? Have you really felt the sadness, the sadness of a loved one passing or the death of a pet or a poet or magician? One billion human movements create sadness. The subtle, nonverbal communication from one person to another, crushing pain. Have you felt that?
Love,
Anthony
