I don’t cry because of sad things. I cry because of happy ones. Movies, songs, dreams, people. Couples find their hearts together at 24 frames per second. Rhythm, melody, beat, verse chorus verse of shared joy. Nighttime fantasies of holding hands, kissing smiling lips under warm blue skies. Women in the full bloom of pregnancy, and brightly spirited toddlers tumbling over brightly colored playgrounds.

Taunting visions of happiness lost or never achieved. Hopes drowned in a cascade of tears. I don’t cry because of sad things. I cry because of happy ones. Yesterday it was raining, and I was fine, but today the sun is shining, and here I am writing this.

It might sound silly
For me to think childish thoughts like these
But I’m so tired of acting tough
And I’m gonna do what I please

My heart was shattered when I was young, by the most beautiful girl in the world. She took a piece away, and never returned it. When I put what I had back together, my heart was smaller than before, but my dreams were the same full size. Every day since then my heart has burst, over and over and over, trying to hold those dreams in. I’ve gone out with other girls, hoping they might have the glue that would keep my heart together, but it’s never held.

I don’t think she knows she has this piece. I don’t know if she even would have thought it worth keeping. I would do anything, I would be anything, for her. But I doubt I’ll ever get the chance.

The truth is: I don’t want her to give my piece of heart back.

The truth is: I want to give her all the pieces she left behind.

Obtain this record

Arcade Fire
Neon Bible
Merge Records
Released: March 6, 2007

Doom hangs over the new Arcade Fire album. A nameless dread, omnipresent and consuming, from the oceans and the skies, by infernal means and by human hands. A lack of control —over our world, our countries, our destiny, even our individual lives —and a fearful impotence that comes from knowing it preoccupy the songs of Neon Bible. The components from the band’s previous album, Funeral, have been reassembled here into a more claustrophobic work. The result has fewer dance grooves than its predecessor, but stands, along with Max Brooks’ book World War Z, as one of the most acute figurations of our times.

The desire to know the future is the desire for control. It is no wonder, then, that divination and prophecy play such a central part in the record, beginning with the first track, Black Mirror. Storm clouds hover over a building guitar. An implacable, moonless, darkened ocean takes on the aspect of that titular ancient scrying device. Out of the water bubbles a primeval chorus (“Their names are never spoken / The curse is never broken”). In a terrifying invocation of forces that Disney could only joke about, lead singer Win Butler wants to know “Mirror, mirror on the wall / Show me where the bombs will fall.” It’s a brilliant, layered line, simultaneously summing up our collective desire and reminding us that our will to know, like the Queen’s, is ultimately vain.

As the song fades out, the sound of storm clouds seems to change, briefly, into static, as if to point out that a dying television screen, too, looks a lot like a black mirror, reflecting back to us the truths we want to hear. The accumulated popular media of the last century has crowded out more eldritch ideas of our ancestors. In 1937, the Mirror was still a restrained demon, the tool of an evil Queen that would murder to appease her conceit. By the time Shrek was made, it had metamorphosed into a catty fashion consultant. This confluence of images, of an ancient, deeper force, with our diluted, mediated conception of them, powers the album’s quiet title track, Neon Bible. The real Bible may be under there, somewhere, buried under our electronic perceptions of it, but it’s hard to discern, and what we find may not be what we want (“A vial of hope and a vial of pain / In the light they both looked the same”). In the absence of that effort, we have the Good Book filtered through televangelist sound bites and Hollywood action sequences: a plot device instead of Providence. We may not have read John, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a Gospel. The words we have received are uniformly hopeless. “Not much chance for survival / If the Neon Bible is true.”

Tension builds throughout the record. Windowsill is a kind of American Woman done right: a bitter lament from our closest neighbor (Arcade Fire is Canadian) that they’ve been drawn into America’s existential crisis (“Don’t wanna fight in a holy war / Don’t want the salesmen knocking at my door / I don’t wanna live in America no more”), while acknowledging that the problems and struggle will inevitably also become their own. The confusion between Media and Revelation becomes explicit on Antichrist Television Blues, where a “Good Christian man,” pushing his daughter harder and harder as a religious singer, suddenly comes to wonder whether he has become the opposite of his intention. Similar is the soldier spoken of in Intervention. Over the expansive sweep of pipe organs is told an ambiguous story, a man crusading while everything he fights for disintegrates. The implication is clear: as nations and as people we have become powerless to do good in the world, our desire corrupted by our own, semi-conscious, conflicting motivations and the unresolved problems we have at home. If we do break free, momentarily, then like the family in Black Wave-Bad Vibrations we will be swallowed again by the deep, dark things we forgot during our moment in the sun.

If this were Funeral, the tension would break suddenly into glowing reverie. But the band seems deliberately to have decided against this, forgoing the illusory end of No Cars Go in favor of the more meditative My Body is a Cage. The pipe organs return prominently on Cage. It is part mantra, part prayer. The body of the title is more than just one man’s flesh and bones. It is the time we live in, the entire preexisting structure of the world we have come to inhabit. “My body is a cage that keeps me / From dancing with the one I love,” Butler repeats over and over, “but my mind holds the key.”

“My body is a cage,” he says. “But my mind holds the key.”

“My body is a cage.” Marching drums appear with the organs.

“My body is a cage,” he screams, cut off by the crescendoing organ.

And then, finally, a plea. To forces outside merely human agency. Not a demand, as in Black Mirror, but a crying appeal.

“Set my spirit free. Set my body free.”

There will be no quick fix, no easy answer, no simple solution to our struggles. That idea is another mediated projection, a story arc we placed over the lives of our forebears. There is only hard thought and a long, hard fight for us, just as for them. And at the end, if we are lucky, a true answer to our prayers.

Originally published in LAist

Listening to your ipod on the subway is great and all, but for us there’s still nothing that beats dropping the top off the car and flying down the freeway with some White Zombie cranked to 11. That’s why we were so intrigued when we saw (thrice named) Steve Luke Hanson’s series of rush hour photos.

Daytime joyriding has almost become an oxymoron, but in Hanson’s photos even the 405 at 5pm is blissfully free of traffic. With a tripod and a grip of neutral density filters, Hanson has revealed the spare forms hidden underneath our daily drive. Some find the pictures eerie; we find ourselves salivating. In our dreams, the imminent Carpocalypse has come, leaving the city’s concrete thoroughfares empty of commuters, minivans, and hippo-like SUVs. We blow our last tank of gas barreling through cloverleaf interchanges, fishtailing across 6 deserted lanes, and jumping ramps over K Rails. In the end we take the 10 to PCH to Malibu. On a deserted cliffside we lay down our last bit of tire tread and sail right off the edge, just like the Pixies song.

At this point things get hazy. Whether we end up flying away ala Grease or drowning like A Star is Born must depend on what we were eating. But you don’t have to share our admittedly anti-social gasoline-drunk dreams to appreciate Hanson’s photos. Check them out, at least, to see what things will look like after post-Peak Oil has turned the 101 into the world’s largest skate park.

Photo by (of course) Steve Hanson

Originally published on LAist

The silence here these last several months has been like that of two lovers when a great secret has passed between them. Neither has the courage to speak of it, but small chatter seems idle and vain. So a curtain of silence descends, not to be lifted until one overcomes his shame and confesses his guilt.

Of course, this site has never shied away from the confessional. But then, there is no romance in this confession, no beauty or longing or poetry. Just small, grinding stupidity.

Last September, just after my birthday, I made the second stupidest decision of my life: to drink and drive. I was caught, as I should have been, and thankfully in the best circumstances possible: no one was hurt, or put in danger. I pulled off the freeway safely, and cooperated with the police. I took their test, and failed. I spent a day at Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles.

There is no way to objectively know your blood alcohol level. And though you may guess at it, alcohol itself clouds your judgment. The only prudent decision, when you have drunk, is not to drive at all. Unfortunately that was a prudence I did not have the night I was arrested. I thanked God then, and I thank him now, that I had no accident. Providence, maybe, consists not in preventing us from making mistakes, but in averting as much harm from them as is possible.

I am sorry. To my friends, and family, who I have become a burden to. To my sister, who was in the car with me. To God, whom I sinned against with my lack of temperance. To the public, who I put in danger. I am sorry.

Since that night, my life has been much changed. I lost my license, of course, and along with it a great measure of my independence and control over my own life. My apartment, though a twenty five minute commute from work by car, was two hours away by bus. An untenable proposition. So I’m writing this from my parents house. I can bike to work, from here, and I do. When I am not overcome by an overwhelming sense of futility.

Biking, and ignoring despair, are both things that have gotten easier with practice.

Still, a larger portion of my life now is spent waiting than ever before. Waiting for the bus. Waiting for rides. Waiting for the courts. Waiting for and through meetings, and classes, and consultations. Waiting for the ramifications of my decision to finally resolve.

But one thing I should not wait any longer for: to write more here on Angst Dei.