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.

Sloop John B, as performed by the Beach Boys

"Drinkin' all nite, got into a fight. Well, I feel so broken, I wanna go home"

-Traditional, arr. by Brian Wilson

(Sábado, diez de la noche. Ciudad de México, una fiesta en la San Miguel Chapultepec)

E: ¿Ya puedo empezar?
R: Falta un cable
E: ¿Qué cable?
R: El cable que va de la laptop a la consola
E: No manches. La gente ya empezó a llegar
R: Pues que se espere
(entra el sr A)
A: ¿Ya?
E: No, nos falta un cable
A: La gente se está empezando a impacientar
E: A mí no me digas nada, dile a R
(R está visiblemente nervioso, fumando un cigarro tras otro)
R: ¡Cállense!
A: ¿Cuál vas a poner primero?
E: Tú espérate y vas a ver
A: ¿Rocanrol?
E: Algo así
(E toma un trago de su cerveza, nervioso porque los chiflidos afuera comienzan a aumentar. Entra J con un cable en la mano)
J: ¿Es este?
R: ¡Sí!
E: Ora sí.

And the show begins (right clic and then save target as to obtain the track, the file will only last one week)

One Hundred Years, by The Cure [A First Anniversary Post]

We started this blog exactly one year ago. The idea came up at Colin White's house in San Jeronimo, Mexico, one drunken Saturday night.

During January and February, we will celebrate one year of this blog by posting/selecting the songs that we have listened to a lot, particularly under the influence of alcohol. Because this blog is not only a blog, but a bar, or a series of bars, a pub crawl if you wish, and we believe that music saves and inspires, inebriates and intoxicates. Music can entertain, help to forget, but it also has the power to make us remember, not not let us ever forget. A song is more than a trace of an instant in time, it is a trigger, a time bomb, a machine that updates and activates itself whenever it is played, and which creates a series of effects on the environment and the listeners. Music creates time and space, while existing in it.

We began this collective project a year ago and here we are still. If you haven't already, we invite you to have a drink with us at each of the previous months. This is the post/song number 193. When we reach 200, this blog/bar's name will change to Three Hundred Bars, just as it once changed from One Hundred Bars to its present name.

Let's all play for today, because tomorrow we could all die.

A year only, but it feels like a hundred years...

Enjoy The Silence, as performed by Tori Amos

Sometimes I let you fall asleep. I make you think I'm sleeping too. The music has stopped, there's no one home but you and me. The TV's off. Sometimes we skip school and end up in my place. Sometimes I let you fall asleep. You sleep placing your head on my shoulder. You smile all the time while you're sleeping. And I listen to nothing else but your breath-in, breath-out. When you fall asleep, with your head on my chest it is as if my breath-in, breath-out would lull you. I wish I could see you sleeping all the time, but sooner or later you discover I'm watching you and you say: "Let yourself go". And I can't do anything else but following you. Sometimes I let you fall asleep and say to myself: "All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is here in my arms".

Empty Sky, by Bruce Springsteen

Empty sky, empty sky...I woke up this morning to an empty sky.

Not even a whole song, but a handful of lines:

I woke up this morning
I could barely breathe
Just an empty impression
In the bed where you used to be

And you're just sitting there, traversing the endless gridlock of smog and ashes, -and you look around you-, and somehow things tie in with each other. You swear you can almost see the knot of tears tightening in his throat. And yet, he keeps on singing, shaky voice and all. Suddenly it's you who, for no apparent reason, seems to be on the verge of tears. But what is he on about?, you ask yourself. You know it's not the endless tons of scrape metal and flaming stones. There's got to be something more. Something that causes the deep pain that hovers about your stomach, something that cracks your voice in a way nothing else can. And then you realize it's not something more, but something less. There is a void that can never be filled. An empty impression/In the bed where you used to sleep. You picture your hand outlining, in the still warm sheets, a crater that is an open wound, never quite a scar. You try to keep on driving, to hold on to the wheel, to normality and routine, but his voice won't leave you alone. It hits you like a hammer. Not the words themselves so much as their inflection. It is absence, the ghost you will never embrace. It hits you so hard because you think what everyone must think at some point, yet it is probably best to avoid at all cost: what is going to happen when they are all gone, when the sheets have grown cold? Will I wake up one morning to an empty sky?


----------
This being my first post, I would like to thank Ernesto Priego for the invitation. Nice neighbourhood you guys got here. Glad to be part of it. (Hi All).
Well, I guess I'll be seing you around.
Bilbo aka Luis Felipe Alvarez.

The Secret of Life and Punk Rock Girl, by The Dead Milkmen

The secret of a band's success or failure is still impossible to reveal. Some bands are bigger than others, but this does not mean that the former are always better than the latter. Before The Flaming Lips became THE Flaming Lips, The Dead Milkmen ruled my world with their melancholic psychedelia and their romantic punkness. I adored my Soul Rotation tee-shirt and treasured their recordings like my most precious and obscure comic books. Actually, their comic book aesthetics was one reason why I guess I liked them so much back in the mythical past, when things were still amorphous and the painful process of taking human physical and intellectual shape was still at its highest point. Only a few of the people around me knew who The Dead Milkmen were, and this gave them a cult status that heightened their cultural value for me. For me they had the sound of falling in love, of wasting time, of spending hours doing nothing with the people you liked. Even though they made me happy there was a structural sadness to their songs, something not unlike those nostalgic harmonies in The Cure's keyboards or the Violent Femmes' guitar arrangements. I can't remember how I found out about them, must have been through my younger brother or through Thrasher magazine. I remember we included tracks by them in our Skate Rock tape compilations. So recently, as one gets that age in which people expect you to do the stuff the people your age are supposed to do, when finding virtually innocent, mutual, disinterested friendship and crazy, drug-induced, alcohol-propelled, sleep-deprived love is nothing but fantasy or past memories, The Dead Milkmen come back with all their strength, their pure, immediate teenage intensity full of passion and silliness and sadness and joy.

No Somos Nada y Sin Pais, de La Polla Records

La Polla Records fue el primer grupo de punk en español que escuché en mi vida. Inmediatamente me identifiqué con su postura crítica, su actitud irreverente y su inclemencia lírica. Gracias a ellos me interesé más seriamente en leer sobre anarquismo, y también gracias a ellos supe que era posible pensar de otra manera. Sus letras parecían describir la experiencia adolescente en México también, y su música expresaba una energía épica sin límites. En comparación, los grupitos de rock mexicano que andaban tocando a finales de los ochenta eran la cosa más fresa y conservadora. La Polla era un llamado a la insurrección. A veces, cuando me topo con gente que jamás en su vida ha considerado dudar de nada ni cuestionar nada, me vuelve a la sangre la sensación de la primera vez en que escuché a La Polla "en directo". Esa energía vital que sólo se tiene cuando se es muy joven y que es difícil conservar cuando se crece. Esas ganas de decirle al mundo directamente que las cosas no están bien y que urge hacer algo al respecto, y que se tiene que empezar por la forma en que vivimos, por la forma en que somos y como nos relacionamos con los demás. Hay días así, en que el recuerdo de mis días de escuchar La Polla vuelven con toda su fuerza, y que dan ganas de bailar en un mosh infinito, mentándole la progenitora a todos aquellos que toleran y permiten que las cosas sigan tan terriblemente mal.