Sing You A New Song
Tweed
2004
for Jackson, for his birthday
Clearly the work of a young man. It has been some years since seeing this last, and upon reviewing, there is something I feel requires reflection. Something outside of sex between the wall and love, lives like a street, compact and endless. The middle of the end of something living in cupped memory. Chiseled as long deceived and coupled too. There is efficiency in the downward scope, the rise of strings that lower in doubt, but their synthetic quality and sympathy make them somewhat sad. Off the cuff, a lack of tone, growing stronger as more desperate, the more tired it becomes, the I becomes contained in a rumble of ruffle feather and fuss. It neither affirms nor denies the quieter moments. The grafting of the soft spots to the soot of it all, the weary and the weathered, Chicago gets such ugly weather (but appears nice this given day). This is young stuff, sure, and acts and aches like the young often do. I’m glad to have held onto the archive. The battle between stable an un- is tangible. The car, while so on the ground, is desperate to fly. The obvious twinning effect (Gemini) makes the self and the other futile and ends in a split and a merge. As Genet on the train, I am the same as the other. and the general difficulty in the ability to praise or critique the other artistically, it’s always just you. Personality becomes itself and its other, splitting further from itself (but only for a second). Aren’t all love songs please of a sort? a tendency toward self-doubt and requiring that moment of half-burdened and baddened bits. There is tension, kept mostly in the car, that speaks of a lived in void and a shared humor. An urge to get some pleasure from the rivals, yourself amongst them. As always, the detail of birds. The wanting to be free and nested, of flying, rhymed with a plane that is not a bird. Birds are the most like humans of any animal, one could suppose, or at least attend to the thought. The camera motions that tend upwards continue this reflection as a maybe-thought, a tremor for the shaky happiness that is always up in the air. It is noticeable, once the song reaches it’s climax, that the previously downward movement of the bass turns upward, in a hopeful movement like a practiced ambition. This is coupled with images held in darkness, brief flashes of flesh, and rests on the stop sign on a one-way street. The joke, as intended, was to stop showing the flesh. I think it speaks a bit broader, handled clumsily. Intentions of the sort intended here tend to be misspoken and made plain in mumbled griefs. The plainness of the lyrics, while intended tender, hold missives that hold the trigger tightly. This is my youthful love-folly, held like enough rope. The band name is dumb enough. The other, another, more the merrier, made simple fact. The fact that this song was written on an Adderall bender begins to make more sense. Drugs have a tendency to do that to a person, and there are clear examples held here within. I’m positive the director would like to apologize for the passive-aggressive plea held dear. Life was aghast with nouns and verbs we were just putting into place. The needs were nowhere to be met. There were things still left to flush. Time meant nothing and everything, morning was coming so quickly. There was time left to jettison the approach, but not then. There is some unwholesome and dirty privacy of the city that is attractive and obsessive. The fact that the object of affection appears only at the half-way mark can either be read as a Hitchcockian gotcha(!), or the narcissistic complex of the director. The video could almost be read as a love-song to the city of Chicago before this point. It is only after that one can assume it’s a love song about not being able to love someone the way they need to be loved, and the astonishment you realize at it being made real, so many years before, even as intended otherwise. It’s hard to know how to relive memories in your mind, when presented with documentary footage. There can be strains of “I don’t remember it like that” or “I felt differently then than I do now, so...” and it all still comes back to the same item, the past. I now look upon this with a wry fondness, a smile, and a bent head, still bewildered and alive.
