The Boy Who Giggled so Sweet, by Emiliana Torrini

I do not want to remember. Their births, the dates, their faces. I do not want to remember. I refuse, I resist, I renounce to remember the imminent motionlessness that befell upon them. Time has not uprooted their deaths, the dates, their faces. I do not want to remember—again.

Songs that Sorrow Sings

I will make a brief interruption in the way this blog has traditionally presented its posts by dedicating this one not to only one song but to various songs. These songs are songs I have realized I always seem to end up singing no matter what (but usually under melancoholic circumstances). I want to note how when there's a song that really touches you there are certain words that you wait for more than others and that one gives a special emphasis to when singing them. These are not, of course, necessarily the songs I like the most nor the ones that are necessarily most significative in my life; they just happen to be songs that are constantly played and replayed when booze has ignited passionate remembrance. So here you are, in no particular order, just a bit from my own personal, endless playlist of afterhour drunken classics, to you, dear and loyal reader.





"don't carry the world upon your shoulders"



"but all the things that you've seen
will slowly fade away"



"it's such a shame for us to part"



"I'm tired of the song that sorrow sings"




"and if a double-decker bus
crashes into us
to die by your side
it's such a heavenly way to die"



"...if I thought that you would stay..."



"...and the whores like a choir
go 'Uh!'"

Life On Mars, as performed by Neil Hannon and Yann Tiersen

Hay canciones a las que recurrimos como remedios milenarios. Son armas secretas, refugios seguros, salvavidas, extinguidores tras cristales que rompemos una y otra vez. Hay canciones que son plegarias y mantras. Nos recuerdan quienes somos y de dónde venimos. Cuando las cosas se ponen borrosas y las emociones son demasiadas y casi olvidamos quiénes solíamos ser volvemos a ellas como el sobreviviente se aferra al pedazo de madera que ha quedado del naufragio.

Maps, by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

She knew that tequila wasn't really his thing, but still that cold november night, she opened a bottle of Herradura. The reason? Maybe there was no reason. At least not for her. They had been at a mutual friend's party earlier. Around one in the morning she grew bored and told him: "Let's go to my place". So, they drove across the city, small-talking. When they got her place, she went to the kitchen and took out two glasses. Caballitos were never her thing. While she was pouring down the beverage, he observed her. They went out to the garden and drank. Not a word was spoken from either one of them. They didn't look at each other. They just sat there, drinking, feeling the cold breeze. She always out-drank him. No matter what the beverage was, he would always lose when he was drinking with her. By four in the morning, he rose and told her: "Gotta go". "Don't you want to sleep over?". He smiled and said nothing. They were too drunk. That would make them break their truce, their pact. He just kissed her goodnight and stepped out of the house. While he was driving home, radio threw away "Maps", he just pulled over and took him one hour to get himself together. After that night he couldn't see her in the eyes again.

Click for video

Ceremony, by New Order (live, 1984)

Se sabe que la música es como el alcohol: quizá por eso se lleven bien. Quizá, además de sus mutuos poderes contradictorios, productores de recuerdo y de olvido, de ofrenda y de venganza, de placer y de dolor, música y alcohol compartan su capacidad de medium: a través de ellos también hablan los muertos y a través de ellos, en el fondo de una botella o en el eterno playback de una canción, buscamos las respuestas a los enigmas irresueltos del pasado y a las posibilidades del hubiera. Por eso música, poesía y alcohol comparten esa semilla aristotélica: el poder de imaginar, la construcción de discursos de lo que sería posible pero no es. Así, en noches de vino y de preguntas, de reflexión contemplativa, buscamos respuestas en los vasos o en los discos. Y pienso que esta canción -en este video de aquí abajo- fue interpretada cuando ella apenas había nacido. Y me pregunto qué pensará ella si la escucha, qué diría si la usara yo, como nosotros los alcóholicos melómanos solemos hacer, para decirle un par de cosas. Está el eco del pasado en cada pixel y en cada onda sonora de esta grabación, pero también la posibilidad de redención que nos ayudaría a imaginar futuros luminosos. Sabemos en qué acabó New Order, sabemos de dónde viene. Lo que no podremos saber, ni borrachos, ni locos, es qué tantas cosas le podría decir, a ella, esta canción. He vuelto a esta canción interpretada también por Echo and the Bunnymen y por Galaxie 500, y vuelvo a la versión original, a versiones en vivo, y encuentro en ella las posibilidades de la búsqueda. Solamente. No hay respuestas, sino enigma, posibilidad. Eso es la belleza, quizá: lo por siempre irresoluble, indefinible, pero que reconocemos, cuando la experimentamos, cuando la vivimos, cuando la amamos.

Taken, by Eluvium

...en un viernes no muy lejano...


Destapo una botella de vino argentino:

Te recuerdo caminando en la arena: parece que cuidas tus pasos mientras el tiempo se confunde con las olas que ignoras y que hormiguean tus dedos interminablemente. Descubro que puedo contemplar esa danza misteriosa por tercera y cuarta vez. Quiebras el agua que regresa al mar. Atraviesas el agua entre las curvas de arena y la precisión de tu cabello no existe ya entre las nubes encaladas.

¿Conoces el instante de la caída de tu sombra en la arena? Es un hechizo de luz que desaparece enloquecido cuando asoma una ola resucitada. Tu geometría es de otro polvo, otro viento te hace invisible.

06-taken.mp3

Just Like Heaven, by The Cure

It's a song we could have hated when we were young, but that we find ourselves coming back to recently.

Yes, there is a lot to say about this song: the lyrical ballads, the phantom of delight, Hölderlin, the wuthering heights, the raging sea, the ghost bride, the wave of mutilation, Lautréamont, Ophelia, excepto el pececillo.

Yes. But, we said, because this is these bars' first birthday, we would only listen and play music we have recently gotten drunk with.

And when we come back to it, in the after hours, in the wee hours, after closing times, after all the late licences of the world, after the tube is closed and night buses take ages and bus shelters offer no comfort, we come back to it for a single phrase:

Why are you so far away?

Steppin' Out, by Joe Jackson

I moved to Tampa, Florida from Caracas in 1982 when I was 12 years old. During that first year in such an utterly new (suburban, isolated, comparatively dull) city, MTV was my translation machine. I would sit for hours on the weekends in front of a big screen TV watching seemingly endless loops of that brilliant channel. The list of videos was limited but this allowed me to get to know certain favorite songs intimately.

I recently rediscovered this song by Joe Jackson, which I hadn't heard in nearly two decades. I had never bought the album, nor had I thought too much about this song in recent years. But via YouTube, I stumbled across it a few months ago and I'm now enthralled by Jackson's piano playing, so sweetly underscored by the hectic bass lines and polished background voices. And the storyline for the video, with the maid's fantasy of a glamorous night fed by the desire to escape her proletarian situation, the debonair poet returning from his night out with the heiress, inspired by the echo of Jackson's song on the piano keys, the quick shots of taxi cabs on Manhattan streets, a wealth of images and melodies.

The song convinces me of the indelible power a single can have on us, a track you feel like playing over & over. Is the piano player a ghost in this video? Who is dreaming, the maid, the debonair poet, Jackson, the viewer? And who else could the protagonist of this video be but New York City, cosmopolitan greetings.

--Guillermo

For Lovers, by The Wolfman featuring Pete Doherty

After several mezcales on a row, late at night or early in the day (as you wish). There's always that phone call every drunk man makes at least once in a lifetime. I usually don't do this kind of things. But on my road home, this song is being played at a high volume. The headphones are about to explode. The early early morning cold air hitting hard against my face. And when Doherty says: "I forgive you everything"... It is the way he says it. It is what comes next. Let's just run away. Maybe it is the mezcal speaking. I don't know. Maybe tomorrow I won't remember anything. But no. I usually never forget what I do while I'm drunk. Not when one realizes that even Pete Doherty has a little heart. Not after tonight. We'll be perfectly ok, a million miles away. There, in the middle of nowhere we shall begin again. There, in the middle of nowhere.

Here's the video

[EDITOR's NOTE: This was our 200th post...!]

Love Will Tear Us Apart, as performed by Jose Gonzalez

Let's suppose that the rain had fallen so hard that.





Let's suppose.







Supongamos, pues, que la lluvia ha caído tan duro como hoy que.





(Qué bello -y qué doloroso- es dejar una cláusula inconclusa).

And today it is, still, Tuesday the 13th. Of February.

Así es.

Llegas tan borracho que no lo notas, y sin embargo no lo olvidas.

Qué difícil es olvidar.

A Man Called Sun, by The Verve

...three months ago in a strange white night:

The last cup of an argentinian red wine(a generous form of intoxication) is in my hands: insomnia is killing me. The future seems to be abolished in lengthy daydreams where I have walled myself off from the world. I remember your skin: a folded presence of time: I admired the evaporated fecundity of magic, the traces of the elemental forest: an illusion stumbled across the red wine...

I never had the luck to construct your inner weather...

Stranger Than Kindness and St. Huck, by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

Desire has the effects of drunkenness and drunken desire is desire multiplied. Shakespeare, in that tale of a murderous couple and the death of a king, gave us a drunken soliloquy of how drunkenness and desire relate in sometimes opposing ways. There is indeed a point where the effects of alcohol and the effects of desire conflate in an absolute conspiracy where everything is potency. Everything will be sweat and hair and skin will be sticky and love will be confused with struggle and eventually even sleep will be a battleground. And these songs reflect this stickiness, this darkness of the steamy room, this rarified atmosphere of two consciousnesses and two bodies intertwining each other. Kindness and force confusing each other. The body estranged from itself, a body becoming the other and two bodies becoming one while remaining strange to each other. The strangeness of intimacy: Dream and Life in the total conspiracy of love. The gasp and the scream and the rhythm. The chamber is full of Desire, as strange as it can get, as kind as it can become.

Desire, with a capital D.

Don't Stop Me Now,by Queen

Toda la banda esta repartida en la fiesta. Algunos brincan (o bailan, como gusten), otros sólo ligan alguna chica en algún lugar, otros asaltan la cocina en busca de comida, alguno ya perdió y esta inconciente. Pero siempre, alguno de nosotros toma el poder de la música y la pone. No importa lo que estemos haciendo, volteamos a vernos, y comenzamos a cantar (o gritar, como gusten), los demás nos miran y se ríen, otros se unen y otros se quedan asombrados viéndonos hacer todos esos movimientos extraños inventados a lo largo de muchas pedas, como el clásico pasito del sex machine ready to reload.

Es el momento de la fiesta, no nos detengan y sírvanos otra cerveza porque nos quemamos, doscientos grados, doscientas barras, es mucho.

A Case of You, by Joni Mitchell

Nos gusta tomar, como un aperitivo para amarnos.

Del bar, al cuarto, a la cama. Horas sin ojos y mil labios. De cuerpo fuerte, vigoroso y aroma frutal, dejas caer sobre mi el manto tinto de ti. Podría tomarte a cajas, amor, podría perderme. Dejar a los amigos, olvidar las responsabilidades, abandonarme a tu degustación como un maniaco, eternamente deseando, deseando fueras eterna; un río, la sangre del universo que es la vida.

Me gusta tomarte hasta perder el sentido.