Hem

Old short story.

Busenitz

Ken Norton

 

“Ali defeated everyone mentally first. With Frazier, Ali had him so mad Joe was trying to kill him with every shot. With Foreman, he tried to kill him with every shot. Mentally, Ali could not defeat me and physically I felt I was as much a physical power as Ali was. He couldn't upset me in any way.” RIP

Sirens

Hesitation (high) Marks

 

After a few days of solid listening, I can’t think why many people are calling this Nine Inch Nails album underwhelming or in some cases, boring. If you’ve pretty much created – and then reigned over – a music genre for 10 years, you have the ‘right to do what you want’ card. Maybe some people wanted a Downward Spiral follow-up? That would be equivalent to late-career hip hop albums made my millionaires, still rhyming about shooting people in drug deals… fuck those records. 

Among other achievements, Trent Reznor is sober, older and a parent and goddamn if the latter two alone aren’t enough to change your outlook and output. There is still an underlying bleakness to the record, partly due to the production being a tad sparse, closer to Pretty Hate Machine than say With Teeth, though obviously much more refined than the former. 

Which leads back to the point of Hesitation Marks being an evolution… if this was a How to Destroy Angels release, everyone would love it I’m sure. But putting that NIN logo on the cover creates a huge expectation from most ‘fans’ and less importantly, music critics. The album as a whole is admittedly pretty ‘mid-tempo’ and also more electronic/less organic than others, but so what? It’s not a Downward Spiral or a Fragile because those records regardless of how ‘timeless’ they were, are, like all art in one respect, a snapshot of their time and of the mind of their creator. Also from a personal point of view - you buy the vinyl and get a free CD version with it. #winning.

It’s about everything, as usual.

The radiators click and whine

As the air bubbles slip around inside the pipes
And I bury my head under a mound of feminine pillows
Rub my feet together a few times
To warm my cold bones

The outside world has begun its annual attack
The front door creaks while the glass in the windows
Quietly vibrates from the coming storm
I force myself up to find clothing, armour

Then I can see for miles - across the city one way
And over houses and hills to the back
There are great cracks and holes in the darkness
Blue light shining through here and
There

The real turns to abstract
Turns it back on you
Like walking through a mirror
From the other side

Any sense of control is lost
You are caught in a silent maelstrom 
Carried on the wing of all your anxieties
And so you swim with it
It is instinct to not fight

Then a moment
Grey and formless
You see a razor slip of white light
Passing and then gone
And that moment of clarity keeps you in check
Sane and grounded
Charged and ready and waiting for the next go round

And the sky begins its descent as you look up, face it and
Breathe and breathe and
Breathe
It
In.

Dr Hfuhruhurr..?

 

Once you know what it is, this apparently innocuous picture of a blob assumes a terrible gravity. It is an adult human brain that is entirely smooth – free of the ridges and folds so characteristic of our species' most complex organ. We can only imagine what life was like for this person. He or she was a resident of what is now North Texas State Hospital, a mental health facility, and died there in 1970, but that's all we know. While the jar containing the brain is labelled with a reference number, the microfilm containing the patient's medical records has been lost. From NS.

The flux of white butterflies

He said the world was full of white butterflies

And footsteps of blood

He said

Bigger did not mean better and that

White walls and obvious juxtaposition

Though useful to the artist,

Should never be considered art

He said we were never meant to live beneath the sun

But rather, burrow deep within ourselves

Consume and ultimately become eternal fire

He said the world was full of words

Masquerading as images and vice versa

That

Some of those words were made up of colours

Only ever seen at the

Heart of an exploding star

And some images, seemingly deep

Were in reality wading pools of bleach

On white canvas

Of all these things, all I could find to

Convince myself anything was true -

Were the butterflies in the sky and

Blood red tracks

On the staggered concrete behind me.

countdown (again)

 

Off to Brixton next week to see these lads. At least this time we'll be indoors out of the rain...