Comments on Fragments of a Cale Season: Chinese Envoy

Yeah, Moore cited it as "Santies," with no second ...

2007-07-27T14:28:00.000-04:00

Yeah, Moore cited it as "Santies," with no second "i". And so did I, just there.

Now: compare and contrast with "Wilson Joliet."

Heh, I've been meaning to pick up Watchmen. Gives...

2007-07-27T13:30:00.000-04:00

Heh, I've been meaning to pick up Watchmen. Gives me an idea for my Sanities post.

Plagued by typos, that song: misspelled on several issues of the album as "Santies", misquoted by Alan Moore (though I misheard it as "stronger" for a long time), and the kicker is that it was titled "Safeties". An archivist at the studio misread Cale's label, and Cale liked the mistake better. So do I.

Ah, yes:"It would be a stronger worldA strong thou...

2007-07-27T13:10:00.000-04:00

Ah, yes:

"It would be a stronger world
A strong though loving world
To die in."

Moore actually misquotes it (according to the site that Inverarity and Asphodel use, at least), but those lines struck me powerfully at the time. Unfortunately in a small Canadian town, pre-internet (or at least pre-Napster) there was no way to follow up, although Watchmen did send me scrambling back to my dad's Dylan records.

Funny: I always heard that line as "bland miserabl...

2007-07-27T10:49:00.000-04:00

Funny: I always heard that line as "bland miserable life." I never had any problem with it whatsoever. When you were alluding earlier to glitches on "Chinese Envoy," I assumed you were referring to the occasional clams in the guitar part—which I personally love precisely for its first-take, fumbling quality. (In fact, I never liked later piano-based versions of the song, which seemed a bit too facile, and actually emphasized the Charlie Chan cliché nature of the hook.)

New Society was my first Cale record—I came to it because comics writer Alan Moore had used a line from "Santies" as an epigram in WATCHMEN—and my first listen traumatized me a little, I think. "Envoy," like "China Sea," is a song of sheer beauty in the middle of a deeply unsettling/unpleasant album—but the end effect is very different, yeah?

I forgot a "collaboration" in "Lou Reed tracks" - ...

2007-07-26T14:37:00.000-04:00

I forgot a "collaboration" in "Lou Reed tracks" - it's one of the finer moments on Songs for Drella.

Also, "Calling out her name / You'd be surprised at what came / galloping out of the darkness just like furniture" has always left me with the impression that it's "her" who appears suddenly in the darkness. The substitution of "what" for "who" and the inanimate nature of the comparison is probably what makes me think of an empty-eyed wreck of a person or a corpse. It's the most surprising and effective part of the song.

Proverbs for Paranoids #3: If they can get you ask...

2007-07-26T12:31:00.000-04:00

Proverbs for Paranoids #3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

I don't know what the song is about. It has echoes of coups d'etat, love triangles, lovers and politics. I have no doubt that the "she" the song is about is either dead or destroyed (ala "Damn Life", my favorite song from the album, which I'll be getting to soon). The Chinese envoy is apparently a former lover.

I like the "In his broken-hearted pagoda..." fragment the song is tagged with. I just wish Cale hadn't used the word pagoda, is all. The fragment hints at some future, and not a happy one. It's very Tarkovsky, sculpting time.

This must be one of Cale's favorite songs from Music for a New Society - it's appeared on four albums! On the original album, it forms a heartbroken diptych with "Broken Bird", my candidate for Cale's most gutted song. However, the intentional vocal error ("in one person's li... miserable life after another") in the studio take really confuses me. It's possible that "miserable" popped into his mind at that moment and he wanted to commemorate that (inspired) change to the lyric, but it sounds odd and sloppy. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't.

On "Fragments" the song forms an "invisible cities" diptych with Buffalo Ballet and sounds much more detached - you never get the sense Cale is involved with the action, he's just a third party observer. The segue to "Style It Takes" - his favorite of the Lou Reed tracks - works, but it really shouldn't.

I can't comment on the "Cale Comes Alive" version off the top of my head. I really need to get a vinyl-ripping setup together.

Believe me, it's much better to appreciate conspir...

2007-07-24T12:50:00.000-04:00

Believe me, it's much better to appreciate conspiracies on a meta level than to actively be theorizing them up!

Up until the Calvino reference I was thinking of P...

2007-07-24T09:05:00.000-04:00

Up until the Calvino reference I was thinking of Pynchon's V. I'm not so much a former conspiracy theorist as a fan of conspiracy theorists, but I think I get what you mean.