Friday Music: Mark E. Smith and The Fall

The times they are a-changin', just a little, I think. The music news site TwentyFourBit reports:

"Taking the stage in a wheelchair after your hip breaks for the second time is pretty punk rock, we think."

Image description: A black-and-white photo of Smith giving a grimacing smile or snarl to the camera. He's 52 now (though he looks older) and missing a couple teeth.

When Mark E. Smith, lead singer and sole original member of the post-punk rock band, performed with his current line-up for The Fall this past Tuesday and Wednesday, he sang first from the wheelchair he is currently using and then, for the end of the Wednesday show, from the dressing room backstage. NME has further details, including a somewhat less punk rock subheadline (in italics):

Recovering singer adopts unusual singing position as he recovers from hip injury

The Fall played London's KOKO last night (April 1), with Mark E Smith performing most of the gig from a wheelchair - before he abandoned the stage altogether and sung from his dressing room.

Currently recovering from a broken hip, the frontman, dressed in a black leather jacket, wheeled himself around the stage to alter settings on the band members' equipment before moving to sit behind a guitar amp for most of the concert.

The last three songs were performed with Smith singing from the dressing room, and changing the lyrics to 'Blindness' to say: "I refused to go onto the stage at one point / You'll get over it in the morning".

The song "Blindness", from the 2005 album Fall Heads Roll, has rather impenetrable lyrics (at least two previous versions) where the first-person narrator only has one leg. I am not enough of a cult follower of The Fall to know if this is or is not a reference to Smith's first hip injury in 2004 when he completed part of an American tour from a wheelchair before pain and medication reportedly caused some canceled dates.

Anyway, here are those lyrics:

BLINDNESS

The flag is evil
Welcome: living leg-end

I was walking down the street
I saw a poster at the top

I was only on one leg
The streets were fucked

And the poster at the top of street said:
“Do you work hard?”

I was only on one leg
The road hadn't been fixed
I had to be in for half six

I was only on one leg
My blue eyelids were not (?)
There was a curfew at half nine
For my kids

There was a poster at the top of the street
Encapsulated in plastic
It had a blind man

So I said: “Blind man, have mercy on me.”
I said: “Blind man, have mercy on me.”

The flat is evil and full of cavalry and Calvary
And calvary and cavalry.

“Do you work hard?”
It said, “I am from Hebden Bridge.
Somebody said to me: I can't understand a word you said."

Said: “99% of non smokers die”
“Do you work hard?”
“Do you work hard?”

I was walking down the street
And saw a picture of a blind man

The flat is evil
Of core? cavalry and calvary

Of core(?)
Blind man, have mercy on me
Said, blind man, have mercy on me

??
I am a ?
My blues eye get…ID/I get
My curfew was due half eight
Now its half past six

My curfew is at 9:30
I said. “Do you?”
Blind man! Have mercy on me
Blind man! Have mercy on me
Blind man! Have mercy on me

I’m on one leg
My eyes can’t get fixed
And my kids
Can’t blue eyes get fixed

Blind man! Have mercy on me
Blind man! Have mercy on me


BLINDNESS (Peel session version)

And all humans
Cavalry or calvary
And not a drop of water
Or paper
Or paper
J.W. said "walking bass, walking bass"
Don't forget, don't forget
He expected Aristotle Onasis
But instead he got Mr James Fennings from Prestwick, in Cumbria
Do you... reflect this evil?
Thought of cavalry and calvary
His first appearance was on Moscow Road
The poster came at first
At first I thought it was just a poster
I was talking to James Seymour
Eyes wide open
The neck was slightly dislocated
But then I walked up the street
There was a repellent plastic
Said poster with a picture
Do you work?
I was on one leg
At the top of the street
There was a poster
A plastic front
From Moscow Road it came
From Deansgate it came
From Narnack Records it came
I was on one leg
I had to be in by 9.30
I said walking bass
Paper times 2
Paper times 2
Paper everywhere and not a drop of water to be seen
I said
I was by the ocean
I saw a poster
I am [?]
I am [?]
Everywhere I look I see a blind man
I see a blind man
Everywhere I look
I see a...
I can't get my eyes checked
My blues eyes can't get checked
I'm only one leg
I said to poster, "When's the curfew over?
I said, "Blind man, have mercy on me."
I said, "Blind man, have mercy on me."
Blind man have mercy on me
Oh Great One I am a mere receptacle
The egg tester for your sandlewood and other assorted woods
In dark green
Blind man have mercy on me
I got a metal leg - truth
Flat is the evil of calvary and cavalry

Anyone want to interpret that?

About the times a-changin': If singing from a wheelchair is now considered "pretty punk rock", recall that in 1974 Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine, performing on the British TV show Top of the Pops just a year after an accident left him paralyzed, was considered "not suitable for family viewing" because of his wheelchair.

On the other hand, when has punk rock ever been suitable for family viewing?

Further sources to enjoy:

BBC News interview with Smith in May, 2008

The Fall wiki

Mark E. Smith wiki

the band's website

YouTube video of "Victoria", perhaps The Fall's most recognizable hit, from the 1988 album The Frenz Experiment

YouTube video of a live performance of "Blindness"

YouTube video of a concert performance of "Totally Wired" from the 1980 album Grotesque (After the Gramme)

Sara

There are those people online that you never get to meet but suspect could be your very best friend if they only lived closer. I tend to work them into daily offline conversations sometimes, with references that don't sound as strange as they used to ten years ago: My Friend From Chisago County (only she doesn't live in Chisago County anymore), SuezBoo in South Africa, The Dancer in NYC, Sara in Massachusetts (you know, the one who takes photos of love potatoes).

You hope to travel, meet for lunch. You trade notes and laugh out loud, long-distance, at their clever crush-worthy minds.

You are heartbroken when you finally understand that the small portion of their greatness that you already got to see is all you will be so lucky to share.

Friday Music: Bradford Cox, Deerhunter, Atlas Sound

"I've always been a leader of awkward people," Bradford Cox says.

Cox, lead singer (and also guitarist, keyboardist and player of various other stuff) of Atlanta band Deerhunter and solo-project Atlas Sound, is a musician whose personal appearance, live stageshow presentation, music media critiques and band song lyrics all bubble over with a freakshow differentness developed from the experience of adolescent illness and disability. Cox has said as much himself.

Image description: A color photo of Cox against an all-white background. He's sitting, knees bent and arms upraised, facing the camera and smiling. He wears jeans, tennis shoes and a striped sleeveless shirt that reveal long limbs and skinny biceps.

Cox was born with the genetic connective tissue disorder Marfan Syndrome. He's 6'4" and so shockingly thin that his appearance has been the relentless subject of music reviewers' commentary. And he's turned that around and used it for dramatic effect with about as much ease as possible. In an interview with Rodney Carmichael at Creative Loafing, Cox says:

"I hate my body just as much as everybody else comments on it or hates it, you know. I mean, I think most people [hate their bodies]. . . . [Marfan Syndrome] affects your personality, because a lot of your personality is a product of your self-image."

But he also says, (and I so love this):

"I'm not trying to exploit myself to provoke people or shock people. But I'm not shy at the same time. So I guess I started realizing what effect it has on people. ... I say 'fuck it' and try to hit the ceiling with everything you do. And if you have something that one person would consider a handicap, I would say, like, just try to make it explode, you know?"

What Cox calls hitting the ceiling or exploding is his live band performances. From Seattle Weekly's Andy Beta:

Cox believes Deerhunter's reputation is partially founded on this freak-show allure. "I can just walk onstage and people will be, 'What the fuck?'" he says in between drags on a cigarette. "If anything, I wouldn't mind representing something for people, representing sickliness, fucked-up-ness. . . . At least it comes natural to me. And I'm not Marilyn Manson."

From the Phillyist:

[Deerhunter's] stage presence was interesting. There was no banter, but they didn’t need it. The guitarist, who wore a shirt that read “Just Say YES” in the tradition of the famous anti-drug campaign, attacked his instrument with the same intensity as his counterpart, who wore a black and white striped shirt that called to mind the Hamburglar. Lead singer Bradford Cox was wearing a dress. Yes, a Laura-Ashley-minus-the-lace sleeveless number with green and earth tone-colored print. His wig was draped over his face so he appeared to be an apparition of hair, limbs, and grandma’s housedress.

It was one of the oddest concert experiences we’ve had. We were equal parts attracted and repelled. Trying to make sense of it in our mind, we kept coming back to an image of Carrie, doused in a bucket of pig's blood. Horrifying, and yet wouldn’t that warm, viscous liquid be kind of comforting?

That's maybe an apt comparison, since Deerhunter's critically-acclaimed 2007 album Cryptograms is very much about an adolescence spent in hospital. On the band's blog, Cox explains the lyrics of the song "Spring Hall Convert":

So I woke up
In a radio freeze
Occupied by a couple of girls
I knew from
Way back when, where
Oh, I had my face like the ocean
So I’d radiate but
Too much radiation
I walk around like a walker
And like a walker
Always choosing where to go
And where to be

Radiation

Too much radiation

So long loneliness

So far from home

(When I was sixteen I was hospitalized for extensive surgeries on my chest ribs and back because of marfan's. That entire summer was like completley erased. I was in a coma for a couple of weeks. I got to really understand what its like to not be well. I've always sort of understood, growing up with marfan's, but this was hardcore shit. I wrote this song transposing this high school acid trip where i saw my two best friends back then, Sarah and Chrissy, bathed in this golden spring light in the hallway of my highschool and felt really close to them, like we were sisters. I always felt genderless around them. I actually took a photo of them in that hallway that day which i will find and upload. If the song could be captured visually, this photo would be it. Anyways, I was trying to transpose the concepts of illness (in this case I was writing from the perspective of someone going in and out of conciousness during chemotherapy, and how they would miss their friends, their past experiences, and anything that reminded them of normalcy, or a time before misery. Nostalgia as anesthetic)

And the song "Hazel St.":

There was no connecting my actions with words
In the bright sunlight, the movement of birds
The car ride home, was blinded again
The light would not focus the light would not bend
There’s no use calling I know what you’d say
Over and over it ended today
Worlds lost their meaning and could not explain
Why the subject was always just out of frame

I was sixteen
I lived on Hazel Street
Protect me from the scene
And guide me with your heat

Ice forms in sheets
There melting in the street

(This goes back to the whole sixteenth year of my life spent in a hospital bed thing. I have major issues about it and have recently started going to therapy and am back on antidepressents. Obviously as so many of you have noticed, my body is fucked up. I never really recovered from all that surgery and stuff. This song is kind of like a jack off fantasy about what it would have been like if i had been the person i wanted to be physically (i.e. healthy, cute, whatever...) and lived on Hazel St which is this quaint little street of the town square in downtown Marietta, Georgia.. It's just a fantasy about being normal. Its kind of prefaced with an argument or a conflict or a relationship breakdown, the kind of things that make me fantasize about having been born normal even more.)

Cox's solo-project Atlas Sound's 2008 album, entitled Let The Blind Lead Those Who Cannot See includes the song "Quarantined," with these brief, repeated lyrics:

Quarantined and kept so far away from my friends.
I am waiting to be changed.

Deerhunter's 2008 releases are the (again) critically-acclaimed Microcastle and it's full-length companion Weird Era Cont.

Creative Loafing's Carmichael writes:

To his credit, Cox has turned his inherent weakness into a strength. And the result is as vivid as Deerhunter's sound, which is way too hypnotic and eerily transcendant to be overshadowed, even by Cox. On the contrary, the lead singer's physical appearance is the perfect complement to the wonderfully weird music the band makes. Whereas one without the other would only be plain old weird at best.

Weird is how I feel about the music. Some of it I really enjoy and other songs seem like mostly noise to me. But I'm interested in seeing if repeated listening will alter that at all.

Check out some YouTube if you like:

Music video for "Strange Lights" from Cryptogram

Music video for "Agoraphobia" from Microcastle

"Spring Hall Convert" and "Hazel St." live in Chicago

"Quarantined" from Let Those Who Are Blind Lead Those Who Cannot See


And other resources about Cox and his bands:

Wiki on Deerhunter

Wiki on Atlas Sound

Deerhunter blog, also Atlas Sound, mainly written by Cox

Rolling Stone magazine bio of Deerhunter

Winter at the Gimp Compound

The holidays and the new year went well for me, though my computer needed some repairs that kept me from writing here for about a month. Happily, and for the first time in my 40 years of experience with expensive electronic equipment, my computer was still under warranty (by about five days!) and I got the disc drive replaced for free. Merry Christmas to me!

I had my feeding tube removed just before Christmas because I haven't needed it in so long and it seemed like the right time. In retrospect, I might have had it taken out a while ago if I'd understood the size and shape of it inside me a bit better. I have less indigestion and nausea with it not there to tickle my insides, so even though I expect to need the feeding tube again some day as my muscles continue to weaken, it's great to be without it for now.

Today was sunny with a pure blue sky and the snow melting off driveways. For much of the past six weeks I've kept inside and away from below zero temps that give the vent a worrisome little wheeze when out in the raw air. There's no way I know of to protect lungs from frigid air being pumped directly into them, minus the miraculous upper sinus warming system. So, I've been hibernating, reading, listening to audiobooks, watching LOST and Battlestar Galactica. And managing some little home care dramas I won't be talking about here.

I finally read Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism, which provoked so much blog controversy when it was published in 2007. It's a little anti-climactic to read it now, so long after all that discussion. I found it to be very basic, and almost entirely lacking in even the knowledge that disabled women exist -- disability is included in a U.N. laundry-list quote of women's issues, and near the end of the book Valenti mentions ability and age as two interests she won't get to talk about. But disability isn't in any other rollcall of women's issues elsewhere in the book, even when the other standards are named: race, religion, sexual orientation. Nor does disability come up when exploring the flipside of "choice" and how race and class (and disability) often mean that women in these categories are coerced out of parenthood rather than being denied birth control and abortion. None of the extensive resources at the back of the book were aimed at women with disabilities. Accessibility as a necessary part of all the activism Valenti touts was never brought up. Disabled women are invisible in this book.

I don't think it's a bad or useless book. Just rather alienating if you're not part of a specific young, white, straight, middle-class (or better), nondisabled sorority girl constituency of women it's meant for.

Anyway, my computer works now and I'm possibly staying home until Spring hits. So more blogging.

Music Friday: Antony and the Johnsons

My newest music obsession is Antony and the Johnsons. Antony Hegarty is, as described by SignOnSan Diego, a "brawny-looking, transsexual Irish-American maverick with a wonderfully androgynous voice and a tremulous chamber-pop style all his own."

One song on the newest album, The Crying Light, is called "Epilepsy is Dancing." To fully appreciate it, read the poetry of the lyrics first:

Epilepsy is dancing
She's the Christ now departing
And I'm finding my rhythm
As I twist in the snow

All the metal burned in me
Down the brain of my river
That fire was searching
For a waterway home

I cry glitter is love!
My eyes pinned inside
With green jewels
Hanging like Christmas stars
From a golden vein

As I came to a screaming
Hold me while I'm dreaming
For my fingers are curling
And I cannot breathe

Then I cried in the kitchen
How I'd seen your ghost witching
As a soldering blue line
Between my eyes

I cry glitter is love!
My eyes
Pinned inside
Sea green jewels
Hanging like Christmas stars
From a golden vein

Cut me in quadrants
Leave me in the corner
Oh now its passing
Oh now I'm dancing

Then listen to the song. Many songs by Antony and the Johnsons have an operatic, cabaret feel, with Antony's soaring voice. This song is delicate, with piano, guitar and strings.

After just hearing it, if you're able, then watch the video from Pitchfork TV (NSFW):



Video description: From the record label: "Antony asked his friends the Wachowski Brothers to work with him on a video for his new single 'Epilepsy Is Dancing'. They in turn invited painters Tino Rodriguez and Virgo Paradiso to create costumes and a mystical environment and choreographer Sean Dorsey and his dancers to bring the dream sequence to life. Antony's artistic partner Johanna Constantine stars as herself in the role of 'Deer Monster'. The video was lit and shot by the up-and-coming directors of photography, Chris Blasingame and Banker White, and produced by Jim Jerome. The production team collectively named themselves AFAS. Please enjoy the fruits of their San Francisco art party."

The video begins and ends in an alley where a woman walks alone and sees a deer many yards ahead of her just as she has a seizure and falls to the ground. A colorful Midsummer's Night Dream-esque world of half-nude body-painted dancers awaken the woman, now painted silver and wearing a headdress of leaves and deer antlers, in a sensuous little orgy of dancing. Some wear carnivale type masks, as does Antony, whose head appears superimposed and flowers flow from his mouth as he sings. The dancers cradle her, carry and writhe with her, then set her down in a leaf-covered woodland with a male dancer very reminiscent of Shakespeare's Puck leaving her last, their outstretched fingers slipping from each other's grasp as the seizure causes spasms and the woman's hands curl. She wakes back in the urban alley with the real deer nuzzling her hand. Then she's all alone and rises and leaves, smiling.

Here's an alternate, touching live performance of "Epilepsy is Dancing," along with a brief interview and "Another World," a second song from the new album, from The Culture Show of the UK.

For another song about an epileptic seizure check out Joy Division's "She's Lost Control."

When the wheels make the man, part 7

From newsday.com, we get this headline:

Woman accused in wheelchair death faces homicide charge

Yeah. The death was actually that of a human being, a man using a motorized wheelchair. It was a hit-and-run. The woman appears to have been intoxicated. Also, the man who died, Ranford Beckford, 51, was driving his wheelchair on the road's shoulder about a mile from his home.

My personal opportunities for driving along a roadside usually were caused by either lack of curb cuts or lack of adequate, accessible transportation. Or both.

Because you are nothing without your assistive equipment. See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of this series.

When the wheels make the man, part 6

For the first time in this series, the wheelchair makes the woman instead of the man. Not really an improvement.

From the Australia Courier Mail, a headline about a man stalking a woman:

Man, 82, accused of stalking wheelchair woman, 65

Actually, both people in this report use wheelchairs though the headline characterizes only her as a "wheelchair person." If the news report can be trusted more than the headline, the woman's request in court to have the man designated as a stalker is based on one experience where the man "drove straight at her, swerving away only at the last moment."

That's understandably frightening. But in itself it could indicate the man's lack of driving ability of own wheelchair rather than stalking. The report doesn't indicate he followed the woman or repeatedly drove at her. If malice was intended, that would be reason to mention a wheelchair in the headline, with respect to the suspect and not the victim. It would be nice, when a news agency covers a story, if they'd not selectively use one person's status as a wheelchair user as a de facto indicator of victimhood.

Because you are nothing without your assistive equipment. See parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of this series.