04.02.06

Life balance… and a couple reviews…

Posted in Music, Personal at 2:07 pm by Moody

The world is restless, unceasing in its motion, never still even in its longest moments of apparent stillness, and forever creating and raveling out patterns. Life is myriads on myriads of patterns, some so great as to be unknowable in their full extent, even when they are inferred by our meagre intuition from our personal experience of life. Put more simply, although we may know ourselves as existing along some threads of the web of life, we shall not ever see the whole web as it is.

Of late, I’ve not been able to talk of anything through the medium of a keyboard and Internet connection. My blog has been languishing for what seems to me like millions of years, drifting like a ghost ship or the space-bound fragment of a planet with a lone handprint on it. I’m not trying to be melodramatic, maybe just the tiniest bit poetic; these are simply the images that come to my mind to describe how it feels.

Though I’ve been reading a lot (mostly online), and working a lot, and Kisha and I have been sharing our lives with each other, my ability to string words together in a meaningful fashion, and the gumption and steadfastness to act on that ability, have been sorely lacking. Numerous times I’ve sat here and tried to write something, only to delete or abandon the result (if any). I honestly don’t know why this is the case. I suspect that it has something to do with my current job situation, especially as that relates to my debt situation. But I think I’d be less than totally forthcoming, if only to you, dear reader, if that was what I pinned my writer’s block to, because there is certainly more to it than money worries. There is, in fact, something existential to it, something of the existents-forhold ( the ‘condition of existence’). I’ve been caught balancing between two opposed points, and the strain of being so balanced has nonetheless become rooted in inertia. Perhaps it even grew from the inertia of just living day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, paycheck-to-paycheck.

All entirely unsatisfactory as any kind of real explanation, this. Perhaps it’s not writer’s block at all. Perhaps it’s that I have nothing, really, to say. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…. But let’s leave that at the quay for the time being. Let me, instead, address something more illustrative of the “opposed points” I mentioned.

Music, as ever, has been a major component of my daily life. What have I been listening to lately? What have I recently put on my iPod? Two recent additions spring handily to mind, which will also serve here as handy reviews for those so interested.

A band that is no stranger to controversy and vehement disparagement over their awesomely graphic, ultra-violent, perverse lyrics, Cannibal Corpse are most parents’ nightmare. The cover artwork for the majority of their albums (done by Vince Locke) has been, in itself, frightful enough for many. Bob Dole went so far as to blame the band (along with two other groups) for contributing to the moral decay supposedly ruining America’s youth, and Germany banned outright the group’s first three albums, Eaten Back to Life, Butchered at Birth, and Tomb of the Mutilated (disallowing even the performance of any song from those albums). Many would assert that, thematically, Cannibal Corpse far exceed what would usually be called “going too far”.

Their newest release, simply titled KILL, is another exercise in high-speed hardcore metal mayhem, saturated with staccato bursts and prolonged growls of “cookie monster” vocals and replete with ear-splitting shrieks of demonic cacophony. It can but hardly be called music, honestly. The blistering pace almost never slows throughout, from the first track (”The Time to Kill Is Now “) to the last (”Infinite Misery”), and if you can catch any of the lyrics along the ride then you are sure to wonder how you’re going to get to sleep that night.

I love it.

I also love the second recent addition, Cristina Branco’s Sensus, which is an album of beautifully sung and gorgeously played modern Portuguese fado. Recently interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered, she proves herself to be a shy, friendly, gifted artist and loving parent. Her voice is phenomenal, exhibiting a clarity and delicacy that are intimate and immediate. Sensus is a work of loving, passionate, sensuality, and Branco easily touches all those points whose presence makes us blush not with embarrassment but with anticipation and desire. If the music is the strawberry, she is the pure gourmet chocolate it is dipped in. Her work is not simply a dessert treat, however, it is nourishment for the yearning heart and energy for the mind.

I love it.

So what does that say about things? What does that say about where I stand? Oh, well. Whatever it says to you, what I know is that I am managing to live my life, and I’m doing better than I ever have in the most important ways.

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