Zen

A punk asked John, "How can I find Heartbreak Hotel?"
The head of the chicken landed in his Pimm's. At that moment the punk was enlightened.*

What's Welsh for Zen? is the title of John Cale's incredibly weird and often nauseating 2000 autobiography, and it's an interesting question. (Cale isn't really one to speak in koans, but the book is, like his life, an exercise in apparent contradictions and bizarre paradoxes.) In any case, the book's title foreshadowed this song, which would emerge three years later as the lead track on HoboSapiens.

And "Zen" has got very little to do with Zen, really -- the song is built around a litany of "Zen and the Art of" variants (Bollywood, forgery, sorcery, reality, algebra). I'd have called it "And the Art of...", but then how can the lotus bloom without pond scum? It's a very loosely connected series of images, but - aside from a few bum lyrics - it works well. There seems to be a political political edge to it, though possibly more with hindsight; there's the germ of a relationship song in there, too. I tend to mentally emphasize whatever angle I'm more interested in on a given day, but I always love the opening verses: "It's midnight, and our silver-tongued obsessions come at us out of the dark, scrambling to be recognized before tearing themselves apart." (As my coauthor can attest, it's something I often mumble come 12AM.)

A lot of the song's appeal comes from the dazed, stop-time track: bodiless female backing vocals being cut in and out artificially, a subterranean bassline, atonal piano twinkling, multiple treated Cales singing in unison. It sounds like a subtle nightmare, one without any outright horrors that just makes everything feel wrong. It loses that live, and becomes less interesting (though more pleasant) because of it.

I feel as if the song deserves more. ("Keep talking," said the snow-white Mandarin.) But I've got nothing to say.

* Like Mumon said,
Without revealing his own penetration,
He offered another's words, not his to give.
Had he chattered on and on,
Even his listeners would have been embarrassed.

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Magritte

I love the drums on Magritte. They feel jerky, like clattering boxcar wheels. (I'm sure there's a technical term for this, since it's a technique I've heard in many places). And sometimes they switch places with a really synthetic drum machine. This track collects all of Cale's performing instruments into one place: the lead instrument is viola, with bass adding violence and piano connecting the verses with the middle eight. There's more, of course - on HoboSapiens Cale tends to layer on instrument after instrument, sound after sound, until the song almost suffocates. It makes the songs in question hard to really appreciate on first (or fifth) listen, but as a result they tend to be growers. After my fifteenth listen I loved the album. I don't know how many people made it that far, though.

Violence, yes. It's a violent song, and I'm not sure why it should be. It's a covert violence, sort of reminiscent of the incredible violence that sits in plain view in much of Magritte's work. He's a gimmick painter in the popular perception, with his floating faceless bowler-hatted men and his endless blue skies. His work almost seems too easy to enjoy, to me - it doesn't take any work to look at his paintings and feel fear and recognition and some semblance of understanding. Everything seems there on the surface - maybe everything is the surface. (It certainly is for his imitators.) But his work is irresistable - I can't not look.

Which is sort of how I feel about this song. The sonic picture is evocative, but feels a little shallow, somehow. The lyric mentions some of the icons of Magritte's oeuvre, umbrellas and bowler hats inside a canvas of blue, saturated with beauty. It seems like a fairly literal and not very meaty evocation. But like Magritte's work, it's laced with half-hidden questions of memory ("how often we forgot Magritte"), perception ("pinned to the edges of vision"), and violence ("someone's coming that hates us"). These questions make me wonder if I don't give the song and the painter enough credit for depth. Maybe someday it will all click.

The live version on Circus Live hews very closely to the recorded version. It's a pleasant listen, but I don't think it offers anything new. I don't skip it, but I don't really skip to it, either.

P.S. I love the suggestion I've read somewhere that it's a depiction of an art theft - I don't know that I agree, but it's given me some enjoyable thoughts. I think it's appropriate, anyway.

Here's a cool little fan video that juxtaposes the painter with the song.

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Things

The "Most Generic Song Title" award for the John Cale catalog goes to Things, the third track on 2003's HoboSapiens. It also ran a strong second in the "Most Improbable Reference To Another Songwriter" category, taking the very distinctive title phrase from Warren Zevon's "Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead." ("(I Keep a) Close Watch" narrowly beat it out, despite this judge's objections.)

Cale claims ignorance that the phrase was Zevon's, says he got it from the film that ripped off Zevon's title. Sure, John. All I know's that Zevon's ode to hotels that never change the sheets was played over the end credits of the film after some repentance and bribery from the guilty filmmaker. But if Cale didn't watch the movie all the way through, I've never seen it at all, so I can't speak much to connections between the film and the song. If there are any, please let me know.

This is a very hard song to judge. It's a song about sex, and Cale's are never subtle. They are always weird, though, and this one doesn't disappoint. The initial lyrical gambit, which may or not be a typo, sets a really bizarre scene: "Elsewhere in the Temple, the llamas are gearing up / to assault Tiger Mountain when the sun comes up." Other than the Brian Eno/Maoist theatre reference, it conjures up an army of meditating warrior ungulates. Maybe he meant lama, maybe not.

It's a heavily-referential song full of great one-liners (appropriate for a Zevon jumping-off point), but the lyrics don't really hang together - he jumps from Tibet to Dixieland ("talked about the difference between North and South / keep your gun in your pocket and your tongue in your mouth") to Charles Schulz ("I saw the way you looked at her Charlie Brown... good grief.") to Crete without any apparent connection. Except doing the things you do in Denver when you're dead.

And yet as much as the dirty-old-man feeling and the lyric disconnects make me want to dislike it, it charms with its breezy and vigorous melody and instrumentation. The rhythm track isn't that special, but it gets to me. The xylophone accents are delightful. There's an electronic squiggle here, a heavily effected guitar there, even some backwards guitar, if my ears don't deceive me.

His effective use of woo-woo girls continues here on the chorus - very few artists use them so often without becoming insufferable. The lead vocal vocal really makes the song, though - he may be singing phonetically rich nonsense, but he's singing it with gusto. I hate to say it, but I think he sounds... cute. (!) It could be that this is one of those great performances of mediocre songs.

So: Things is definitely a guilty pleasure. There's really not much to it, but it's a song I find myself singing too often for comfort. Guess I'll go toss back a shot of rye.

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