Okay. Okay. I've been out having drinks with the missus and now I'm going to say a number of things that I've been way too sober to say (since I almost - ALAMOST! REMEMBER THE ALAMOST! - always accrete my entries over the course - COURESE! wait, never mind - of the workday, and I'm usually sober for work). First? First:

I miss bands like Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout. I taped Aztec Camera's High Land, Hard Rain from my uncle when I was twelve or fourteen and I'll never forget the sense of adolescent yearning that band generated. Hot damn.

1. Aztec Camera - High Land, Hard Rain


2. U2 - War
   
3. David Bowie - Scarry Monsters; Changes One; Changes Two

There may have been others. I remember visiting my father's family over Christmas, and while I was there I taped those albums. My parents gave me Paul McCartney's Give My Regards to Broadstreet and the Eurythmics 1984 soundtrack. Reviewers put it down, calling the album 'electronic yips,' but I loved it. I think I listened to "Julia" a million times. I remember that my father and my uncle Paul (even then sporting a huge moustache and thick braided hair) snickered over the McCartney album. I would listen raptly to his version of "The Long and Winding Road" while Paul would say: "Attention shoppers. Elevator now going up". I was only thirteen, too young for irony but not too old to listen in total rapture to lousy music.

This evening The Lotus and I went to O'Hanlon's and spent the night smashingly drunk and in love with each other. We hashed over the intricacies of our six-year mutual seduction, which somehow never gets tiresome. If you ever want the details, give us a call and offer us a beer. We'll spill the details readily and grin like guilty teenagers the whole time. You'll hit us and feel good about it.

You know, if I were David Sylvian, I could totally steal The Lotus away from me, but he's kind of old now anyway. Take that, David Sylvian. You sit in a corner with Robert Fripp and bawl.

HERE'S WHY THE KIDS LOVE WALTER BENJAMIN

A Klee painting named �Angelus Novus� shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

-- Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History"

Actually, this is why all the English profs love Walter Benjamin.

parode - exode