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caltropspress · 1 year ago

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FEEDBACK LOOP #14: Voodoo Macbeth: Armand Hammer's "Windbreaker"

…Each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face…

—Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth (1623)

They use me wrong, so I sing this song to this day.

—Nas, “I Gave You Power” (1996)

Once upon a time, woods “had a gun once.” “Windbreaker” is woods’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedie Macbeth. Stories retold and resold—twice the first time, like Saul Williams once said. Not until you’ve listened to Rakim on a rocky mountaintop have you heard hip-hop. And not until you’ve staged Shakespeare in a sludge-slicked 150th Street Harlem sewer have you heard hip-hop either. A young Orson Welles directed what became known as Voodoo Macbeth on behalf of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project in 1936. Featuring a full African-American cast, the play took place in a quasi-Haitian setting complete with tropical-cum-skeletal stage design—palm fronds and bone altars. We live in Storyville where the population density reaches hypersensitive levels and the murder police can’t keep up with the homicides. (Meanwhile, the Second Witch busies herself with “Killing swine” [1.3.2] in Macbeth.) We’ve been here before, before. Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” (1988) told us to bite our tongues, that this ain’t funny so don’t you dare laugh, it’s just another case about the wrong path. He warned, in a playful and pajamaed manner: “Straight and narrow or your soul gets cast.”

“Windbreaker” is a [re]mixture in the witches/bitches brew of Nas’s “I Gave You Power” (1996), too. The power, you could guess, is a wily one capable of possession. “Possession” in a legal sense—nine-tenths of the law and so forth; possession of a firearm [see: S. Carter, B. Sigel, Shyne, et al.]—but also the possession the gun holds over its owner. Those finding themselves possessed by the gun—a weapon which “made you buckwild,” in Nas’s terms—should brace for berserk behavior modifications. We can splice together epileptic seizures and Santería and call it spirit possession just the same. The possession is pervasive—everywhere. The ubiquity of guns in the collective imagination takes up serious real estate—we’re talkin’ eminent domain land grabs—and Nas’s psyche is no exception:

I was around a lot of guns then. Guns were in my sleep, in my car, in my home. Guns were on my person, guns were on my friends. That’s how much they were around. There was so much around me that I rapped about it. It’s crazy to think about that today, but it was my reality. It was in my head 24/7.

“Windbreaker” functions as an exorcism of that exact sentiment.

3. RECKLESS WHAT

Blow wind! Come wrack!

—Shakespeare, Macbeth (5.5.58)

The wind forebodes. woods gets handed the gun “late night, right on the porch,” and it must be windbreaker weather. woods’ jacket rustles in the gusts. “I’ll give thee a wind” (1.3.12), the Second Witch says to the First, and the “wind” she refers to is what the witches bestow upon each other to exact revenge. woods, though, breaks their wind (true to the song’s title and his heroic epithet, likely). He’s not susceptible to their marshy shufflings, their murky hells. He “speak[s] things strange” (1.2.52-53), as Lennox says of the worthy Thane of Ross.

But the winds are everywhere (like guns)—they be blowin’ like Maceo Parker in a buhloone mindstate. They blow the horrid deed in every eye and “tears shall drown the wind” (1.7.24-25). Word to the RZA and Wendy Rene: after the laughter comes the tearz. But the winds swirl and cyclone and gyre skyward. woods, “like a naked newborn babe,” survives by “Striding the blast” (1.7.21-22) as a cherubim might, riding the breeze. He’s Kong learning to stop worrying and love da bomb. He straddles and hoots and hollers from the hydrogen missile. A hard acid reign’s a-gonna fall [RIP to Gajah].

Of Macbeth’s poor murderers, the second says: “I am one… / Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world / Hath so incensed that I am reckless what / I do to spite the world” (3.1.121-124). Shakespeare knows the sway of poverty over moral decisions, like the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet whose “poverty, but not [his] will consents” to selling illegal, poisonous drugs to Romeo. woods gets beat back by the gale-force winds, but he bests those “buffets of the world.” Everything’s for sale except for the Beaufort scale.

4. YO-HO-HO

The gun, in the case of “Windbreaker,” is equivalent to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Black Spot. That is to say, the song isn’t so much a billy woods metanarrative as a twice-told tale of Billy Bones in Treasure Island (1883). Passed from pirate to pirate, the Black Spot is a black-sided death sentencing, a Last Judgment on a scrap of paper. Biblical bad luck. A Book of Revelation back-page pressed into a fist. Maritime connotations aside, the Black Spot signals that it’s marring time, so make yourself scarce or knuckle up.

woods claims to have only had the gun “for about a month,” and he was none too keen on keeping it. The gun, we assume, had traveled many travails and trials, tribulations too; that it had “been in the hands of mad thugs,” as Nas puts it. Mad meaning “many” but also “crazed” and “deranged.” Mad like diaries maintained by gravediggaz. Pick, sickle, and shovel-wielding men. The gun, the “brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution” (1.2.19-20) is bequeathed to woods as it was to so many others. Less a gift than a curse. “Sick of the blood,” Nas-as-gun raps, “Sick of wrath of the next man’s grudge.” This gun—like any gun, perhaps—is one that harbors a self-consciousness. Maybe it is the guns that kill people, personified with malevolence [male violence].

Unlike countless others, woods doesn’t choose to use the gun to cement his masculinity. As Macbeth tells his wife, woods is already man enough, and “who dares do more is none” (1.7.52)—a negation of that manhood. Overkill, let’s call it. Mac daddies and MAC-10s: Nas is like the phallocentric Asian, half-man, half-guns blazing. “The barrel’s my dick,” he explains, “Uncircumcised, pull my skin back and cock me.” Macbeth, meanwhile, questions his hallucinating senses, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” (2.2.44-45). The blade is bloody, possibly with menses, yet he still grapples for control: “Come, let me clutch / thee” (2.2.45-46). In doing so, he’s giving mics menstrual cycles. “The game is so irresistible to touch,” LL Cool J once said of the mic phallus, “You should see me when fiendin’ for microphones that I can clutch.”

In a letter to his wife, Macbeth writes that he “stood rapt in wonder” (1.5.6), explaining what he witnessed held him in thrall. On the porch, billy woods is likewise “rapt withal” (1.3.60). Banquo knows “instruments of darkness tell us truths” (1.3.136). But woods is “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” (1.5.17) to use the gun; he doesn’t have “slaughterous thoughts” (5.5.16). And even if he does, his ignorance and mystification prevent him from reaching for the strap.

A dagger of the mind, a false creation…

—Macbeth (2.2.50)

The story told in “Windbreaker” raises questions of realities and false narratives, actual fears and imagined ones, authenticity and authorship—in short, the friction that exists between fiction and figment. woods mixes up the simulacra of hyperreality like the guy Quelle Chris knew on “PSA Drugfest 2003” that “mix[ed] up a spliff like witches with newt eye.” We’re pulled in by woods’ first-person point-of-view (“I had a gun once,” followed by a proliferation of Is) but put off by his reluctance to divulge the details. He bleep censors the name of who he “got it from.” By doing so, he protects the innocent, the guilty, and every gradation of conscience in between. The unidentified person who gives him the gun could be a peer, an elder, a mentor, a bad influence, or some combination thereof. Regardless, the nameless and faceless figure—a mysterious character, if we choose to lean into the fictitious realm—“showed [woods] how to load it” in the “same place [he] showed [woods] how to roll a blunt,” linking two illicit activities, both requiring punctilious attention to detail. Of gats and ganja; of heat and hemp.

woods demonstrates the blurry border between fact and fiction in the scene details. The gun is handed off clandestinely under the cover of “late night,” yet the location (“right on the porch”) is indiscreet. This doubling (call it down-low and out-front) plays out anadiplotically when woods says, “[They] was speaking soft, / Soft pack of ’ports.” The sibilance of “speaking soft” suggests secrecy (if worse come to worse keep this on the hush, Lil’ Cease might say), but the point-blank alliteration of “pack of ’ports” sounds like when your guns go pow-pow (word to Big L). Furthermore, the soft pack of stoges—though its connotation implies silence—has a plastic wrapping that crinkles like a windbreaker, attracting unwanted attention.

The gun given to woods is far from perfect, in fact, the weapon is “scratched and marred where the numbers was filed.” Like the bleep censors, the redaction of the serial number safeguards against snitching. But, as the pattern of the one-verse song shows, that which is criminal is liminal. Those defaced numbers, well, “you could still see ’em.” One thinks of Macbeth’s dagger cloaked in hemoglobin: “...on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood” (2.1.58). One remembers Nas’s encounter with “a wrecked-up TEC with numbers on his chest that say: / 5-2-O-9-3-8-5 and zero.” The TEC yearns to confess, “hoping one day police would place where he came from, / A name or some sort of person to claim him.” But with his “serial defaced,” the TEC shares the same fate as Lady Macbeth: beyond saving. Just as doctors can’t “raze out the written troubles of [Lady Macbeth’s] brain” (5.3.52), so too can’t you resurface a scratched-off serial number.

To include bleeped names and scratched-off serial numbers is to engage in a sort of scriptorium subterfuge. Historically, we’ve seen this in novels, as John Barth explained in “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967): “Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability. Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means.”

Uncertainty abounds. woods can’t even accurately identify the weapon he’s handed: “.38, .22—I’m not even sure.” It could just as well be Nas’s Desert Eagle, a “semi-auto with lead.” These redactions, this unknowingness, inevitably leads to confusion. One must forgo epistemic approaches and settle for feels. Nas’s aforementioned Desert Eagle, as an example, measures at “seven inches” and weighs “four pounds.”

Emotional liftin’—please use the proper form: / Bend at the knee.

—“spongebob” (2019)

But little and heavy as a dead child. The game is the game, but the gravity of the situation increases with woods’ somber simile. That uzi, or .38, or .22— weighs a ton. But it’s the emotional weight that’s so exhausting. “Windbreaker” opens with a bevy of words with short-u sounds—words with heft, words that carry bend-at-the-knee weight: gun | once | month | blunt. A significant weight, like Biggie’s ubiquitous uh adlibs. woods throws haymakers, heaves shots. By all accounts, he’s acting “wild truculent” (as Breeze Brewin once said on “Weight” by the Indelible MC’s). woods holds the gun with “Macbeth hands,” a phrase he drops on Armand Hammer’s “Duppy.” Macbeth speaks of “dread exploits” (4.1.164), and woods works in dread[ed] talk (s/o to Velma Pollard), that Iyaric, a protest language and flexi lexicon, to ward off the weight of what violence he might have the capacity to engage in.

You show loyalty; they learn loyalty. But Macbeth disregards the value of his commander Banquo even after leading Duncan’s army alongside him. He keeps the plot to murder Banquo “from the common eye” for “sundry weighty reasons” (3.1.141-142), most of which are purely practical. The Thane of Cawdor doesn’t consider the guilty conscience he’ll have to carry. He doesn’t contemplate “that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart” (5.3.54-55). woods does.

On “Heavy Water” (emphasis on the heavy—we’re talking some brine pool shit), woods told us “the play-within-the-play was G. Dep as Macbeth,” and thus hands us a key. G. Dep, who confessed to killing an innocent man seventeen years after the fact, couldn’t function under the weight of what he’d done. “I didn’t feel free and clear,” he said from prison where he’s serving 15-to-life. “Everyday I was faced with this memory, with this heinous act, that didn’t really have to happen….I had to do what I had to do to get that burden off my chest.” That burden off his chest. “Burden” from the Old English byrðen, meaning “load, weight” but also “a child.” (But little and heavy as a dead child.)

G. Dep endeavored to lift the weight off his chest, but woods prefers to hide the weight in a chest. woods secretes the gun—and his shame at even accepting it—in various places, all of which prove porous. He “had it hid under bed”—those deadweight d’s burying any misdeed deeply—but he “couldn’t sleep” like some Princess and the Piece. He’s a sensitive soul, feeling it penetrate his back leaving him black and blue all over his body. Mattress upon mattress upon mattress, and he still felt its presence. No quitter, woods seeks other unseen spots—ahem, hiding places—like “in the shed, somewhere Moms couldn’t reach.” I was made to kill, Nas rapped, and “that’s why they keep [the gun] concealed.” Nas tried to squeeze “under car seats” and sneak into clubs. By verse three of “I Gave You Power,” he’s “still stuck in the shelf with all the things that an outlaw hides.” As we see, any attempts at avoidance are mostly ineffective.

8. THE WEÏRD TURN PRO

woods is unsettled. Who can make sense of machine gun etiquette? The man feels damned. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” he raps, noticing “both shoulders had demons.” Can’t brush ’em off. As Macbeth says, “Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.144). Out, damned spot, out, I say! One. Two. (5.1.37). But the spot is blown, and Lady Macbeth can’t do a damn thing about it. She can try to sound like Biz Markie as much as she wants (“...a one-two, a one-two…”); she can make like Special Ed and fetch the Cascade, but there’s no getting those red stains off her hands.

“I was scared,” woods tells us, “’cause [redacted] heard [redacted] was tryna rob me.” But even self-defense shuffles closer to self-destruction. “I was more scared,” he explains, “when I took the gun, to be honest.” He fears both the threat on his person and the weapon intended to ward off any such maneuvers. He feels stuck: “By then, too late to say I didn’t want it.” We can assume his “dome was aching” like the man in Nas’s song who reaches for the gun, finally. woods “walked home in the darkness,” in his frantic thoughts. Somewhere along his route he was detained by “three witches on the marshes.”

Rewind back to the beginning of the song. “And I know it better than before,” Fielded sings, “they want me to notice—even out the score.” Fielded becomes all three Weïrd Sisters in one: she turns to they. For weïrd read “fateful.” Depending on which Shakespeare folio you’re flipping through, the word is also spelled weyward and weyard. They all come from the Scottish form of wyrd, though—the Old English word for fate. The Weïrd Sisters, or witches, are tied up in some real Hussein Fatal/Fatal Hussein business. I’m pretty sure that I won’t be ready when they come through that door, Fielded sings with “the syllable of dolor” (4.3.9), evoking the lurking evil, the looming dread, that woods experiences. Fielded—whose stage-name is near-synonymous with the marshes and heaths on which the witches appear—sings of seething vengeance (“even out the score”) and simmering nervousness (“I got somebody coming for me in the night”).

Fielded, in their role as the Weïrd Sisters, is warmer to woods than Macbeth’s encounter with the witches. Fielded warns him, it sounds like, not to cross them. In an evasive move, woods goes metaphorical. He feels like a “dinosaur in the tar pit.” He marks sharks as “all cartilage.” (The witches include “maw and gulf / Of the ravaged salt-sea shark” [4.1.24-25] in their cauldron ingredients, by the way.) Sharks for woods; scorpions for Shakes. “O, full of scorpions is my mind” (3.2.41), Macbeth moans. woods feels his “blood cold as the water is,” while Macbeth looks to the “multitudinous seas incarnadine” (2.2.80), meaning the ocean turns blood-red. The arrival of Banquo’s ghost at dinner is likened to the approach of “the rugged Russian bear, / The armed rhinoceros, or th’ Hyrcan tiger (3.4.122-123). Bears, rhinos, sharks, scorpions, and tigers…oh my!

9. SLUMB’RY AGITATION

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, / And yet I would not sleep…

—Banquo, Macbeth (2.1.8-9)

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.12-13), the witches say in unison. woods hovers through the fog and filthy air thinking, Fuck a fair one—I get mine the fast way, like Biggie on the “Flava in Ya Ear” remix from ’94. On “Halloween Fell on a Weekend,” woods was talkin’ witchy: “Fair is foul, / Awkward smile.” Nas, for the record, noted how the intrusive gun thoughts were “making every ghetto foul.”

But what’s really foul and utterly unfair—a flagrant foul, a Flagrant 2—is the sleep troubles. “I slept with no dreams,” woods raps. But his dreamless sleep is more of an insomnia. “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!” Macbeth says, turning over in the sheets to speak to himself in the third-person, “‘Macbeth does murder sleep’” (2.2.47-48). woods looks a ghost now, a somnolent wanderer: “Asleep on my feet, / Awake when niggas sleep.” The repetition of sleep at the start of one clause and at the end of the next signals the circularity of the story being told.

We can’t help but summon Nas’s “cousin of death.” And Macduff refers to “downy sleep” as “death’s counterfeit” (2.3.88). woods is restless, “tempest-tossed” (1.3.26), enduring the night where “wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep (2.1.62-63). “Headlights splashed the curtains,” woods raps, and instead of sheep he’s “counting every car passin’ in the street.” He may as well be midnight marauding like Lady Macbeth with a taper. When the Doctor notes that Lady Macbeth’s “eyes are open,” the Gentlewoman clarifies that “their sense are shut” (5.1.26-27). Nas, Queensbridge-bred, opens his penthouse lids to “see some cold nights and bloody days.” If only Lady Macbeth had been as alert as Nasir Jones or billy woods.

10. BLACK MACBETH WILL SEEM AS PURE AS SNOW

The gun, which was described as “little and heavy as a dead child” (G. Dep’s debut was called Child of the Ghetto, as fate would have it), returns to haunt us at the end of “Windbreaker.” The baby image, in Shakespeare’s terms, becomes “doubly redoubled” (1.2.42). When the hurly-burly’s done, it’s the kids who suffer. A generational pain that folds back in on itself. An inheritance of the horrific. Look around: dead babies are everywhere.

Ross speaks of Macduff’s murdered household where he discovered “babes / Savagely slaughtered” (4.3.240-241). Nas delivers a choral ode about how he, as gun, “might have took your first child.” Slick Rick rapped of “a little boy who was misled.” That boy found himself in a woods-like dilemma, calculating the consequences: I’ll do years if I pull this trigger. If not a corporeal death, a death of the spirit.

The Weïrd Sisters promise Banquo that he’ll father kings—bank on it, they say. And so Macbeth fears Banquo’s children will be the future kings of Scotland, usurping his throne. Macbeth decides: Banquo’s gotta go. Not only his brethren-in-arms, but Banquo’s son Fleance, too. Fleance “must embrace the fate / Of that dark hour” (3.1.156-157), Macbeth determines, all in order to assure his place on the throne. When Macbeth ambushes Banquo in Act 3, Scene 3, Banquo implores his son to “fly, fly, fly” (3.3.25)—he tells him to supa fly, to supa dupa fly. To be fresh, wild, and bold, too—like the Cold Crush would advise.

woods, as Banquo, is drawn into a terminal life, a posthumous life, when he is given the gun. That hand-off arranges his end. “Banquo when I think of my kids,” he raps. “Banquo when I kiss my son in his crib.” This is the Fleance farewell. But woods is unwilling to go the way of Banquo. He doesn’t only want to save his son—he wants to save himself. “Stunningly,” Nas says, “tears fall down the eyes of these so-called tough guys.” woods rebuffs the “heavy as a dead child” gun. The only weight he wishes to feel is his son asleep in his arms.

11. THE WOOD[S] OF BIRNAM

It felt wrong knowing niggas is waiting in Hell for him.

—Nas, “I Gave You Power”

“Here’s a knocking indeed!” remarks the Porter in Act 3, Scene 1. He considers the vocation of “porter of hell gate” and mocks the incessant knocking: “Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ / th’ name of Beelzebub?” (3.1.1-4). Careful what you ask for and be wary of the knocks you answer to. woods can knock the hustle. He’s none-too-anxious to join the mobb of “murd’ring ministers” (1.5.55) we hear about in the Scottish play or Track 4 on It Was Written. Still woods, eventually, commits to composing a kind of murda muzik—equally bloodletting and bloodshedding in its emotional registers and range. “[T]he blood-boltered Banquo smiles” (4.1.138) knowing he’s secured futures for his kids. He rests easy. It’s presupposed that the gun gives power, but on “Windbreaker” we learn that the weapon deprives us of power, leaving us with nothing to pass on but the curse.

Images:

Photograph of the Nat Karson design used to create the backdrop for the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1936 (detail) | Opening of the Federal Theater Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem (1936) | Winslow Homer, Hurricane, Bahamas (1898) | Andy Warhol, Gun, black, white, and red on pink (c. 1981-82) | Ravi Zupa, Mightier Than Guns sculpture series, disassembled typewriter, stapler, and scrap metal (c. 2016) | G. Dep, Child of the Ghetto album cover, 2001 (detail) | “Macbeth visits the Weird Sisters (Three Witches) on the blasted heath,” title page by John Gilbert for an edition of Shakespeare’s works (1858–60) | Canada Lee as Banquo in the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem (1936) | Photograph of the Nat Karson design used to create the backdrop for the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1936 (detail)

#underground hip hop #billy woods #armand hammer #fielded #backwoodz studioz

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mewwile · 2 years ago

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As much as I despise the humid heat and conservative atmosphere

I must admit the nature really goes off... Ive seen so many turtles and lizards and even a frog and dragonflies and cool sub tropical trees...

If not for the blazing heat turning me into sludge I would be out there every day looking at the multitude of delightful critters.

Look at this man. I was walking in the woods and this man is just out there! Living his life!!!! Goddamn!!!!!!

if god is real then explain the state of georgia

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leftoveraddiction · 5 months ago

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i had a dream about you last night.

we were laughing, giggling on the way out of the grocery store. they had おにぎり for some reason, even though they don’t in real life.

you looked at me, love reflecting in your eyes. i think they’re blue, but it’s been so long since i’ve seen you, they muddled into a sort of grey sludge.

your hair was long, even though it’s buzzed now.

your voice was full of mine, even though we haven’t spoke in a year.

you smelled like sandalwood, even though you often smelled fruity and tropical.

#poetry

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weisskalt · 11 months ago

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Some of our releases from Tropical Sludge, Ap Ducal and Mosaic Runes are featured on Grey Clay Radio, curated by musician and sound designer Thébru Čelet / Disorganism. Link below to check out their radio, news, affiliates and cool sonic obscurities.

#grey clay radio #weisskalt #weisskalt records #tropical sludge #ap ducal #mosaic runes #thebru celet #disorganism #experimental music

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all-the-fun-of-the-cirkus · 1 year ago

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next album, neil young's trans. and on behalf of everyone i'd like to say how proud we are of her for finding herself

this album... hoo. for a long time, this might have actually been my most hated album of all time. my dad played it in the car when i was very young, and to me it was one decent-ish song followed by a nightmarish sludge of synths and weird dizzying vocals and endless jamming, and it honestly made me kind of ill. i did my best to blot it out then, and every other time my dad played it i tried to avoid it, and now i'm giving it a proper go

trans has a, uh, fairly mixed reception in general, from what i can tell. some people think it's an unmitigated disaster, an embarrassing failure of lame experimentation. others think it's a tuneful, brave and quietly visionary gamble that didn't quite pay off. what do i think? as usual, something in between

the eighties were a weird time for neil, and i have some Opinions on it, but i'll be saving them for whenever i get to everybody's rockin' (i have a feeling i'll be struggling for stuff to talk about there). suffice to say that he was doing a lot of Weird Shit and this is where it begins

so if you know neil young you'll know there's two relevant details behind this album. the first is that it's two albums spliced together, one lightweight and tropical-tinged, the other weird and electronic. the second we'll get to later, but the islands tracks are actually the weak links. little thing called love is a fun, energetic throwaway, but like an inca is utterly interminable. neil can get away with repeating the same thing for ten minutes when he has a good riff, a decent level of energy and some cool melodies/soloing (see about half of ragged glory); other than a nice chorus and a decent solo about eight minutes in (which sounds to me more like nils than neil) this has none of that, and it clearly should have been less than half the length

as for the electronic tracks, are they embarrassing? eh... we r in control is, i think, very cheesy pulp sci-fi, without the decent melody to carry it through, and i don't think much of the mr. soul remake either. beyond that? nah, these are decent songs. actually this album makes me want to get my guitar out, bc i think i'd have a lot of fun rearranging these into a more crazy horse style. which i appreciate is sort of besides the point of this album, but i can very easily hear how it could be done. also the unplugged version of transformer man is gorgeous, so, y'know. he did it first. i think the vocoder's what bothers people most tbh, it does sort of drown out the feeling, and goodness knows neil's voice is high enough already. i... kind of like it? there's this nice ethereality to it. i think it's a bit omnipresent though

but i'm not trying to say "good songs, shame about all the electronic bullshit," bc obviously the second important fact about this album is that it's inspired by his son ben, who has cerebral palsy, and the therapy they underwent together to communicate with one another. i must admit. i don't know a huge amount about neil's personal life. tbh by-and-large the more i know about rock musicians the less i like them, so. as far as i know neil's not an abuser or anything, which is nice, but i admit i was surprised to learn the efforts he went to to talk with his son. i shouldn't be, it should be the bare minimum for a parent, but it really isn't far too often. i don't know how far neil and ben got together, and if it did all go well i don't know if they still talk. i hope they do

i don't know how much i'd appreciate this album without the context, but i found sample and hold in particular had a surprising impact on me. neil's shtick of pairing ambiguous lyrics with dark music to set a mood works on me a lot, but here the words about (i think) robot, uh, "companions" become really effective. the lyrics about getting the perfect partner, "not the lonely/angry/jealous one" could be a snide and vaguely misogynistic statement (goodness knows you see people on twitter say shit like that), but the icy music gets across the intended emptiness and hollowness. there's a glorious moment at the end where there's a snippet of lead guitar, and it's like just an outburst of emotion finally breaking through the repression and coldness, and it's wonderful

and i can't help but think about the railing against sterile perfection. about how someone might be messy, imperfect, but that's what makes you love them. and in the context of the album it just becomes a lovely sentiment to me. i'm not disabled, but i've had my share of mental health issues that've seen me clash with my parents a lot. and (i don't think i've explicitly said this on tumblr yet so) i'm a trans woman, and i'm yet to tell them. and frankly i hope they're as willing to try and understand me as this song conveys

anyway, enough personal stuff. computer age is a real good song, except for the trite canon in d bridge, and i can't remember how computer cowboy goes but i enjoyed it while it was on (i wanted to extend the trans joke with a "cis crusher" joke here but it's late and i'm tired). i'd put this in the lower tier of his albums, but it's decent, and i'm glad i gave it another go

#if i'm honest i worry this comes across as a bit ableist #i'm not trying to pat him on the back for having the good grace to engage with his disabled son #i just appreciate seeing someone from a less understanding time and a very not-family-oriented scene doing his best #i hope that comes across #if not i might have to take this down or at least reword it #also this got real fuckin long lmao #neil young #synthpop #i guess?

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wanderingandfound · 1 year ago

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Well, I finally finished Steven Universe (main show, not the movie or Future). I was not expecting that the second half of the big showdown would be a horror movie. It was good. I haven't seen seasons 1–4 since it aired, and I know the show was cut short because of the wedding, but I think one of the inhibitors to enjoying it is believing that because the show uses the words "empire" and "colonies" and "dictator" etc. in a negative way, that it must be wanting to engage with those concepts. I haven't given this any time to dwell on it, so maybe I'll change my thoughts, but my immediate impression is that it is really not interested in any of that. It's all setting, relevant but neither the point nor the focus.

But uh, man you're not beating the racism allegations with the penultimate episode being focused on nonverbal, warring "tribal" watermelon stevens on a tropical island. Holy shit, how did this make it to screen in 2018? I mean, besides the fact that racist tropes are deeply embedded in our media landscape and storytelling traditions.

I liked finally having a reason for why Steven's solution was "talk it out with the genocidal dictators and let them feel their hurt feelings" besides the meta reason that it's a children's show: Steven wanted to heal the corrupted gems and needed the help of all the diamonds. I had been wondering why the corrupted gems didn't seem to be part of the season at all, when my memories of this show was that it was literally about finding and bubbling them.

I'm so glad Bismuth was not only at the wedding, but then in the following episodes!!! I was so worried that like, she was part of the storylines that got cut when the show was cut short. Also Obsidian!!!!!!!!! So cool!

Anyways while I love being both a petty hater and someone who reads actual harsh critiques of things, I believe these two things must remain distinct and that they need to be balanced out with genuine love and enthusiasm. That is, if a blog is dedicated to being ""critical"" of one show it's going to quickly become a site of toxic sludge. So while I don't want to go digging for this because it's truly a waste of my time, I do wonder what all the people who thought fusion was a metaphor for sex and only sex and therefore a forced fusion is exactly the same as rape (because as we all know there's no other way for bodily autonomy to be violated /sarcasm) thought of Steven fusing with his family. Anyways I love the jacket Pearl keeps after becoming Rainbow Quartz 2.0.

That compilation post of people saying they would have become murderous if their giant wife of five thousand years married some lives-in-his-van rockstar and then killed herself to have their baby was sooooo right.

#personal #liveblogging stories

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hipposfashion · 2 years ago

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Pokemon Sludge Bomb Beach Outfits 3D Hawaiian Shirt Price From: 43.99$ | | [Buy it now at] : https://hipposfashion.com/product/pokemon-sludge-bomb-beach-outfits-3d-hawaiian-shirt/ https://www.facebook.com/HipposFashion/✅ https://twitter.com/hipposfashion✅ https://www.instagram.com/hipposfashionstore/✅ https://www.tumblr.com/hipposfashion✅ Introducing the ultimate fusion of tropical fashion and Pokémon nostalgia, behold the eye-catching Pokemon Sludge Bomb Beach Outfits 3D Hawaiian Shirt! This sensational garment transcends conventional beach attire, catapulting you into a world where Pokémon reign supreme amidst vibrant island hues. Crafted with meticulous attention to detail, this shirt showcases an array of iconic characters in...

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calcinedclay · 2 years ago

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Best Manufacturers & Suppliers of Calcined clay in India

Fillerboy Pvt Ltd provides calcined kaolin, also known as calcined clay, which is an anhydrous clay, thermally structured aluminum silicate made by heating ultra-fine natural kaolin at extremely high temperatures and utilized in industries such as paint, rubber, paper, and ceramic.

Fillerboy , one of the leading Calcined clay Suppliers in India, provides high-quality Calcined clay to a variety of industries around the world.

What is Calcined clay:

Calcined clay, also known as metakaolin, is made by heating a kaolinite source to between 650°C and 750°C. Kaolin occurs naturally in china clay deposits and some tropical soils, as well as in industrial byproducts such as paper sludge waste and oil sand tailings. It is a white powdered non-plastic anhydrous aluminum silicate). It is created when raw kaolin, also known as Clay or China Clay, is heated sufficiently to reduce its crystalline water content through a process known as Calcination.

Uses and Applications of Calcined Clay :

Cement

Petrochemical

Paint

Rubber

Ceramic

#minerals #calcined clay #fillerboy

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terribletraveler · 7 years ago

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Tar Jungle 14x20 inches Watercolor and acrylic

#art #artists on tumblr #tumblr art blog #abstract #geometric #portrait #psychic #chaos #parrots #tropical #sludge #watercolor illustration #watercolor #acrylic

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randomitemdrop · 3 years ago

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Table of Liquids

You find a bottle and it contains:

Pleasant fresh drinking water

Gross nasty stinking water

Seawater with a small creature swimming in it

Anti-water

Bubbling green acid

Real acid, which is frequently a still colorless liquid

Delicious fruit juice

Unpleasantly sweet fruit juice

Unpleasantly sour/tart fruit juice

Spoiled/moldy fruit juice that hasn’t quite fermented into drinkable alcohol just yet

Unpalatably savory vegetable juice that probably has vitamins and antioxidants and whatever but still. Ew

Coffee (roll d6: 1 decent black, 2 poorly filtered so it’s full of grit, 3 so full of cream and sugar it’s basically cake, 4 extremely fancy drip coffee with hints of aromatic spice, 5 Popular Coffee Chain Seasonal Flavor, 6 tepid office break room coffee)

Tea (roll d10: black, white, green, yellow, oolong, sassafras, hibiscus, mint, patchouli, cannabis)

Boba (see Table of Flavors/Scents)

Spruce beer

Fairy Drink

Zooper Dooper Bubblegum Milk

Peg Nog

Punker Punch

Crystal Pepsi

Dr. Nut

Chicken Partner

Masochist Cider

Salty potato-flavored Soda

Pancake and syrup-flavored soda

Bird-nest-flavored soda

Iron-girder-flavored soda

One of those weird Jones Soda savory flavors. Go around the group and everyone say what they had for dinner last night, then the DM decides which would make the worst soda flavor

Crass Soda

Energy Potion (roll d12: Original, CodeRed, Livewire, Voltage, WhiteOut, PitchBlack, Baja Blast, Spark, GameFuel, Supernova, VooDew, Flamin’ Hot)

Capri Suns of dubious flavors

Coca Cola of dubious flavors

Asparagus-water

Clamato

The Sludge

Frobscottle

Meat drippings

Milk (DM’s choice of source)

Clotted cream

Grungnort

Lamp oil

Cooking oil

Baby oil

Snake oil

Ink (roll d6: black, blue, red, pink, luminous green, invisible)

Booze that makes you raucous and boisterous

Booze that makes you sentimental and melancholy

Booze that makes you lose all sense of balance

Booze that is basically a Potion of Irresistible Dance

Booze that makes you hallucinate fairies and sing Baz Luhrman jukebox musical showtunes

Angostura Bitters

Wine of Mystery

Non-Alcoholic Vacation Juice

Soup broth (you choose the flavor idk there’s thousands of soups in the world and I don’t think any of them will affect the gameplay more than another)

Pickle brine

Reeking Smatch

Onion juice

Garlic Cola

Potion of Skill or Proficiency or Ability or Whatever; a creature that consumes it gains a skill of the DM’s choice or roll d100 on the Table

Very Cool Pirate Juice

Cowboy Juice

Disinfectant

Mouthwash

Old man cologne

Potion of Damage Resistance (roll d12: Acid, Bludgeon, Force, Fire, Cold, Psychic, Radiant, Thunder, Lightning, Poison, Necrotic, Slash/Pierce)

Potion of Damage (use as a splash weapon or trick someone into drinking it; same table as above)

Bone-hurting juice

Metal polish

2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner

Potion of ___ Friendship (roll d20: 1-7 Animal, 8 Monstrosity, 9 Undead, 10 Ooze, 11 Aberration, 12 Celestial, 13 Construct, 14 Dragon, 15 Elemental, 16 Fey, 17 Fiend, 18 Giant, 19 Humanoid, 20 Plant)

Potion of ___ Repellent (causes the indicated type to act as Turned. Roll d20: Arthropod, Birds, Magical Beasts, Horses, Ooze, Shark, Beholder, Elemental, Undead, Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic, Fey, Draconic, Human, Goblinoid, Psychic, Aberration, God)

Potion of ___ Attractant/Pheremone (same table as above)

Potion of Giant ___ (roll d4: Strength, Weight, Height, Head)

Potion of Gaseous Form

Potion of Animal Form (Table of Animals)

Potion of Healing

Potion of Monster Alarm

Potion of Data Compression

Potion of Shit the Bed

Potion of Boob Have

Potion of InfantSee

Potion of Regalia

Heroic Brew

Potion of Animate Object

Potion of Stat Swap

Rose-hibiscus tropical probiotic THC-infused Elixir of Love

Beard tonic

Anti-beard tonic

Sleeping Potion

Poison/venom (roll d10: Cobra, Scorpion, Centipede, Black Widow, Pfeffer’s Flamboyant Cuttlefish, Platypus, Cane Toad, Doll’s-Eye Plant, Hemlock, Death Cap Mushroom)

Love Potion

Hate Potion (as Love Potion but instead with hate)

Indifference Potion (as Love Potion but instead they are indifferent to the subject)

Potion of Resting Face, compels a creature that consumes it to display a particular emotion (roll d10: blank, happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, :3, Dreamworks face, Gary Busey, DM’s choice of RageComic/emoji)

Potion of Sin, filling a creature that consumes it with a compulsion to act on the urge (roll d8: Envy, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Pride, Greed, Blasphemy)

Phlogiston

Alkahest (universal solvent)

Ice-Nine

Lethe-Water (Potion of Forgetfulness)

Humour (first roll d4: Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, Yellow Bile, then roll d10: Human, Dwarf, Elf, Dragon, Weird Bug, Unicorn, Displacer-Beast, Rust Monster, Demon, God)

#tables

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