love is long (when you're wrong)

so..i have recently gotten really into listening to paul & linda mcCartney's album Ram. if you don't have a copy it is eminently score-able at a thrift store near you. the album is also readily available for illegal-but-ethical download using google's blog search feature

Ram was pretty much ravaged upon it's may 1971 release. it's obviously impossible for me, born in 1981, to project myself into the Beatles breakup hair-tearing artistic/critical ecosystem...but when i go back and look at Primary Sources from this era it really boggles the mind the john or george or paul-colored glasses (no such thing as ringo-tinted specs—NO, WAIT!?) through which everyones either embraced or savaged post-Beatles stuff (see this horrendously nauseating robert christgau—NB: i would fucking love to dunk the head of "XGau" in harrison's "fountain of perpetual mirth"). err i guess more like everyone craved that SHATTERED TOTALITY?! moving on. Jon Landau in Rolling Stone called Ram "the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far" (how far should 60s rock have been decomposed by 1971?) i am kinda feeling like maybe it was the first Elephant Six (remember?) album or something?! though that makes me puke in my mouth a bit...

getting into Ram took me back to early 2004 or so when i first heard the first Wings album Wild Life and was hugely entertained and baffled. i think the weird "conventional wisdom" that had always mellowly assaulted me from the æther was that john & yoko were actually an intense artistic couple in love and that paul & linda were some sort of ham-fisted rejoinder to that. i communed heavily with Plastic Ono Band and Imagine ~20 years old, which obviously jam extremely hard, but which are also bitter as all hell. superst00pid to simplify the target of that bitterness—semi-analysis of john & paul solo albums doesn't reveal the complete truth of the complexity of their relationship SHOCKERRR!!! but listening to Ram has made me really want to reframe these double-binary rock couples.

it made me feel like maybe some sort of teen/early 20s angst of mine had calcified, cracked open and revealed inside of it something which i desperately do not want to term a New Sincerity. the weird conceptual frame that kept springing into my head relates to Lord Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god seen as the embodiment of devotion, sacrifice, and all-out selfless indebted-atude. at the conclusion of the Ramayana, having played THE instrument role in reuniting Rama & Sita, Hanuman is given by Sita a necklace as a gift of gratitude. Hanuman breaks the necklaces and proceeds to smash open the precious stones making up the necklace. onlookers express their horror, but Hanuman tells them that unless Rama & Sita are actually embodied in the necklace, its of no use to him as a loving reminder. he is mocked, onlookers begin to question the extreme-but-clumsy ontology of Hanuman's sincere devotion. at this, Hanuman famously tears open his own chest to reveal Rama & Sita literally inside of his heart.

john, practitioner of a historically unique brand of hateful buddhism, reminds me of the court loiterers teasing Hanuman. devotion can be clumsy and literal and is inherently unclever. Ram and Wild Life kind of strike me as albums actually recorded in a mutual gaze, with a kind of corniness perhaps their defining virtue. famously, john performed some paranoid close-readings of some lyrics from Ram. officially babbling: BHAKTI shouldn't be competitive. too much of john/yoko's devotion seemed to spray outwards, love looking over its own shoulder. we're almost done: here are 8th century philosopher Adi Shankara's famous analogies for bhakti:

• the seeds of ankola tree, which merge with the roots of its parent when they fall and begin to mature
• iron filings drawn to a magnet
• a chaste wife's devotion to her husband
• a creeper winding itself around a tree
• a river bound towards the ocean

HANDS ACROSS THE WATER: linda's hand on paul's shoulder. linda's foot touches water. water ripples.

Comments

[Publicado por: mcMüller]

Wow. What led you to this album?

[Publicado por: Tim]

Infinite Jest / DFW:

"The portrable CD player started in with poor old Linda McCartney as C held Gately and the asst. pharmacist tied him off with an M.D.'s rubber strap. Gately stood there slightly hunched. Fackelmann was making sounds like a long-submerged man coming up for air. C. told Gately to fasten his seatbelt. Urine had turned part of the apt.'s luxury-hardwood floor's finish soft and white, like soap-scum. The CD playing was one C'd played all the fucking time in the car when Gately had been with him in a car: somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings—as in the historical Beatles's McCartney—taken and run it through a Kurzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. When the fags called the grass 'Bob' it was confusing because they also called C 'Bob'. Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing—her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups' voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney—in his Staff room's wall's picture a kind of craggy-faced blonde—imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband's pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C's depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom. [978]"

[Publicado por: fenris ulf]

good call on e6 except i love that album "science fair" by the apples in stereo.

[Publicado por: photographs by blind teenagers?]

Steven Villereal
G > P > J > R