New Medium lyrics © Faded Paper Figures 2010
1. Invent It All Again 2. Limelight 3. You Know What I Mean 4. Rewind 5. Small Talk 6. One More Crash 7. The Cold Wars 8. Bookends 9. Kodachrome Earth 10. Changed 11. New Medium Dynamo lyrics © Faded Paper Figures 2008
1. North by North 2. B Film 3. Logos 4. Polaroid Solution 5. Future Self 6. Metropolis 7. Fell Off My Name 8. Geneva's Gone 9. The Persuaded 10. Being There 11. Speeches 12. Red State
Iron bridges, melodic chimes
Things I made for you back then.
All these clocks are only marking time
Let's invent them all again.
Folding chairs and building blocks
magic mirrors to pretend.
Seismographic data in our hearts
Let's invent them all again.
Rocket arrows chart the motion of the stars you see,
Paper money on the go (go go)
Cartographic lines will mark the place for you and me
And we can change the things we know
Yeah, we can change the things we know
Climbing ladders to polar stars
Things I did for you back then
All these fires are only casting iron
I'd invent them all again
Folding chairs and building blocks
magic mirrors to pretend.
Seismographic data in our hearts
Let's invent them all again.
Water mills conduct the rivers to the wider sea
lovers moving with the flow
Watch the compass mark the broken lines from you to me
See, we can change the things we know.
Yeah, we can change the things we know.
I'll remake my works of art
I'll reward your restless heart
From the Kid to the Gold Rush
You can see the Modern Times
From the Rink to the Pay Day
You can see the City Lights
From the Count to the Circus
I'm still here behind the screen
One a.m. at the pawnshop
I'm the champion in your dream
Gotta get to England
Someday I'll get even
Washington's a boys' club cabaret
Cinematic treason
If Hollywood's a kingdom
Jesters get their justice either way
In the park, I get shanghaied
In a prehistoric past
I get caught in the limelight.
So bring on the laughing gas
Take a shot at the keystones
take the squareheads to the queen
Water cures for McCarthy
Talking pictures, silent scenes
My patents are pending
For me to say what I wanted to say,
Your message confusing mine.
Technologies talking,
Hear them say what I wanted to say.
My parrot is mocking all of my
mechanical lines.
These instruments obsolete
Words are false industries
You know what I mean.
My printers are knocking
moving type into blocks into lines
and sidewalks are chalking signs.
But my poetry's failing,
Can you see what you cannot define?
Are you deconstructing all of my
Derridean lines?
("This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it")
I'm on my way
back to the time, before we were wired.
I'm on my way
back from the light of switchboards and dials
back from chaos, rewind
I'm on my way
back from the time, of mainframes and lines
I'm on my way
back from the bright, and neon designs
back from cell phones
back before we were moving so....so
Summers, open the curtains
Mornings, I can recall
One string linking our houses
Tin cans taking the call
Sunlight, snapping the picture
clotheslines carry the sound
Augusts making the fiction
Your voice always around
Analog dreams, recording the scene:
we're wiring the trees,
stringing the sky, to play off the light,
these wild frequencies
And dreams of defiance
the follies of science
can make you feel so . . . so
Mapping out the Interstate
My finger prints a figure eight
We come around, we've seen this place
before.
And climbing up the empire state
you hold my hand and hesitate
A camera shot, we've seen this place
before.
We're welded in gridlock
We're watching the wall clock
All the literate small talk keeps us sane.
We work by the windows
Feels soft where the wind blows.
All the literate small talk keeps us sane.
In cubicles we simulate
A broken wall, a city state
We're lost in files, we've seen this place
before.
A counterculture elevates
We cross it out, we can't erase
a sous rature, we've seen this place
before.
I wake up, I see the cracks in the walls
I think this building is gonna come down soon.
I step out, I breathe. I'm back on the street
I think this body has got to come down soon.
And in my machine, as cold as routine
I think this city is coming down soon.
Watching the light on the dash
Warning that we're gonna crash
One last time let's drive round again.
Now I see your face in the mirror
Fading like ruined careers
One last time, so drive round again
Postmodern and bored, exhaling with cool
like some hackers we're gonna break through soon.
Exhausting and burning these gallons of fuel
I think these systems are gonna break down soon
And in my machine, if you're my routine
You'll keep this body from coming down so soon.
Watching the light on the dash
Warning that we're gonna crash
One last time let's drive round again.
Now I see your face in the mirror
Fading like ruined careers
One last time, so drive round again
See the wrecking crews go by
Leave a broken piece of you outside.
See the smokers out to breathe,
Coughing secrets as you start to leave.
See your words hang in the cold
Clouds of chatter from inside your soul.
Every story stained in glass
Starts to shatter on your way to class.
The cold is nice, when love is ice
Our solitude will warm the room.
We'll melt here like icicles,
electric and lyrical
Our solitude will warm the room
So let's never leave the room.
See the Blakeans on fire
campus poetry or real desire?
Elbows covered for the freeze,
I feel it coming with your Western breeze.
The cold is nice, when love is ice
Our solitude will warm the room.
We'll melt here like icicles,
electric and lyrical
Our solitude will warm the room
So let's never leave the room.
My lips still unused to you
chaps all come on to you
Tongue on the icy steel
stuck like we used to feel.
These days
the letter's like a freeze frame
All the old ways
get cluttered in the bric brac bones of the day
Now the book lights
They flicker like the fireflies
In the long night
The xerox of our sheets bound back for the day
Will we sit like old friends
when the day of the book ends?
Will we sit like old friends
when the day of the book ends?
Feel the spine bend
the scanners light the loose ends.
When the letter sends,
Our voices become flash, like matches to flame
At your bedside
You're reaching for the outside
In the long night
Our copyrights expire like fires in the rain.
MCLUHAN: Instead of going out and buying a packaged book of which there have been five thousand copies printed, you will go to the telephone, describe your interests, your needs, your problems, . . . and they at once xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service. This is where weÕre heading under electronic information conditions.
It fell into place
the whole earth database
Kodachrome shots
our astronauts were hiding
Nomadic tribes, networks and beatniks on the rise
We wore the pins
We thought the whole world would begin
to finally see that it's
round round round
a tiny blue gem in the darkness gliding
round round round
borders and refugees barely surviving
round round round
civilizations and temperatures rising
round round round
Are we like gods or confused by the lightning?
If our Tesla coils
die out in the soil
batteries shot
And our dreams are caught declining
Mnemonic tribes, iConic complex on the rise
We shed our skins
We thought the whole world would begin
to finally see that it's
round round round
a tiny blue gem in the darkness gliding
round round round
borders and refugees barely surviving
round round round
civilizations and temperatures rising
round round round
Are we like gods or consumed by the lightning?
Our memories are now on view
The ocean skies return to blue
Changed
I feel changed
all unwound changed
Now.
Strange
voices strange
Hear the sound strange
Now.
Feel the ground shake
Feel the ground shake
Feel the ground shake
Now.
If every cell stayed the same
and seven years wasn't strange
then we'd be just like our names,
but even those tend to change.
There's a light on the floor
Shows your just out the door
In a Russian film we belong
like a gentle jolt of montage
where the mis-en-scene flies
back and forth into your eyes.
I can hear you writing
I read between the lines
I can hear you writing
in pictographic signs
There are shadows on the wall
in the caves where trains crawl
We can cut our indirect hearts
when the edits keep us apart
When the acetate lies
in the darkness of our eyes.
All of these memories collide
this is the medium tonight
you and me editing time.
I can hear you writing
I read between the lines
I can hear you writing
in pictographic signs
North by north— lest we have to settle down
we can sail without the wind in this town
Things that London never saw
Northern winters start to thaw;
To islands on the sea,
lands I’ve never seen,
things will get calmer—follow me.
You said a long long time ago
you were happy being someone
Let's go far far far from home
I'll be glad to be with someone
Land pneumonia, your engines in repair;
plant begonias, and orchids in your hair.
Continents all made of clay
Dreamers leaving every day
To islands on the sea,
lands I’ve never seen,
things will get calmer—follow me.
Someone told me you had oceans in your eyes
Cold as shadows over European skies
Coasting out the shallow day
Leaving London in decay
To islands on the sea,
lands I’ve never seen,
things will get calmer—follow me.
I can't pay today and I never will
I'm on the downside of the double bill
Here's where I am (no surprise)
A Monogram guy with Bela Lugosi eyes
So why did you say love is an act of the will?
to see something in me is to fall in love w/ a B film,
Detective on call, Columbia crime;
with you in the hall, and me on the line.
When you come in you're my only income
On Poverty Row, my silver screen someone.
So why did you say love is an act of the will?
to see something in me is to fall in love w/ a B film,
Camera's on, I read my lines
Up from the dead, I give you Plan 9
If you can say cut and live with the take
It's not much of a set; it's all I've got time to make.
So why did you say love is an act of the will?
to see something in me is to fall in love w/ a B film.
Signs on every mountain side
line highways, stitching desert thread.
Billboards break my spirits down,
sky writing in this shell over my head
My soul goes with your logos
From check-in to the flight
My soul goes with your logos
There's no place left to dream tonight.
All these colonies complete
All these visions come from you
Every space around replete
I can't think when you wallpaper my room.
My soul goes with your logos
From black-out to the light
My soul goes with your logos
There's no place left to dream tonight.
Give me radio time
On the wires in your mind
Keep transmitting, I will hear you…
My soul goes with your logos
Slavoj was probably right
My soul goes with your logos
There's no place left to dream tonight.
My soul goes with your logos
From knock-out to the fight
My soul goes with your logos
There's no place left to dream tonight.
I put on a disguise
And put out both your eyes
…you will not see me
…you will not see me.
So put on infrared;
Turn the light off in your head
…you will not see me
…you will not see me.
It's my polaroid solution
'till we sort out this confusion;
in a station at the metro,
holding out for revolution.
Train your lens down on my face;
Come kinetoscope my place.
…you will not see me.
…you will not see me.
When the train has disappeared,
Every trace of me has cleared,
…you will not see me.
…you will not see me.
Shadows, shot and framed in time, developing.
From Sartre to Lacan
You can keep your flashlight on,
But you will not see,
Or hear a thing from me.
So turn on your TV,
Pixeled faces on a screen.
…you will not see me.
…you will not see me.
Almost every thought
fits neatly on this card;
I could believe you.
I could deceive you.
Driving in my car
Horizons in the dark;
This dissolution
is our resolution.
Our future selves are free
Your future self will love me.
Our future eyes will see.
Your future self will love me.
Your plans are on display,
You’ve got a fail-safe dossier;
Are you electric?
Are you a skeptic?
When we try to comply
with no thought for our lives
Are we courageous?
Or are we contagious?
Loud, subaltern city streets,
bellies wild with discontent;
tall, glass buildings, where we meet
watching classes in descent.
Whoever made these robot angels,
made these urban trash crustaceans;
they occupy the same streets,
and we fill the day with locusts and magazines.
Just south of here, utopia
for sixty bones, euphoria
they're keeping cartoon main streets lit.
And all these puppet cultures learn
every first world has a third;
only love escapes this glass metropolis.
Now information without flesh
means your body's just a drive,
loading up with life and death:
the after-human has arrived.
Melancholy and relief
for the things we never know,
a constellation of defeat
in this sidewalk shadow show
Whoever made these robot angels,
made these urban trash crustaceans;
they occupy the same streets,
and we fill the day with locusts and magazines.
Just south of here, utopia
for sixty bones, euphoria
they're keeping cartoon main streets lit
And all these puppet cultures learn
every first world has a third;
only love escapes this glass metropolis.
Let your eyes go
To Llano
Out the window
To the last maypole
The self that is wholly comprehended by civilization resolves itself in an element of the inhumanity which from the beginning has aspired to evade civilization. The primordial fear of losing one's own name is realized…
–Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
I write heresies and sign my name,
publish and perish all the same.
You ask why should I not stay?
Your sobrieties are all a shame
If you have pills on the candle flame.
Tell me, where's your doubter's face?
Your anxieties caught in a pill
Makes you feel like you can feel
When your religion is all DeMille
Just wash it down, wash the lies out from the real.
With your doubts, it's all the same
Now you see how it feels to say,
"I fell off my name."
Your computer says your time is gone
You've been idling for too long.
You give up now, and turn away
And when the virus makes your blood start to decay
With your doubts, it's all the same
Now you see how it feels to say,
"I fell off my name."
Geneva's gone, like forgotten songs
in a country sleeping warmly in the night.
We believe Exxon, and we play along
the water getting blacker as we fight
Geneva's gone, like a faded song
an extra-legal table-turning dream
where one record speaks and another dies,
writing memos that are never as they seem.
We will hear again in the years ahead
you've no memory of these many crimes
but these microphones tell of missing bones
and cameras capture weapons in your mind
Geneva's gone, like a foreign song
Just how many held you cannot say
And when organs fail, it's a small detail
Your pious eyes are showing no dismay.
We will hear again in the years ahead
you've no memory of these many crimes
but these microphones tell of missing bones
and cameras capture weapons in your mind
He won't know Adorno
He's an adult with an adcult
You can buy your way into his head
He was never better
Wearing sneakers and a sweater
Made by 12-year-olds sweating in Shenzhen
He says,
Let's drive, drive, drive
Till we burn, burn, burn,
We can choke on it later on tonight
And we'll fumble with the planet
Dry the river and then damn it
Just persuade me that everything's all right.
This was his reality,
says the stupid love equality
And he's never seen a car he didn't like
On code like a reptilian
Pays Rapaille another billion
From your cortex to the page is just a hike.
So
Let's drive, drive, drive
Till we burn, burn, burn,
We can choke on it later tonight
And we'll fumble with the planet
Dry the river, then we'll damn it
Just persuade me that everything's all right.
Because things…we've got to have our things.
We're not persuaded by the Omnicom
We're not persuaded we're the only ones
We're not persuaded by hegemony
We're not persuaded we were ever free
Is that your conscience, or are you alone?
Is that Noam Chomsky on the telephone?
Moving days are coming
Like the traffic, full of broken worlds.
Being there
is harder when you feel it,
when your self is long deferred.
And when you talk to me,
don't talk through me.
My remote control
keeps you lit up on the screen in my soul.
Typing in your office
while I am holding up the line.
And when you talk to me,
don't talk through me.
Your remorse is code
But you talk right to me
talk right through me
My remote control
keeps you lit up on the screen in my soul.
That's what these zeros and ones are saying
that's the code.
That's it.
Zero as a place means one
Zero as a place means...
Absent-minded on the freeway
Just pull over on the shoulder.
I’ve been trying to watch this thing,
but the truth is truth is a bit obscene.
If they said everything,
then they lied.
And at the fall fire line
They bought time
On your TV screen
So some white-haired guy
Can give speeches
On and on and on through the night.
And if you’re watching again
(I don’t know now)
it’s not half as strange as it’s been
(or will be).
Channel 66 and I still can’t see
what the things they said
have to do with free.
If we left everything,
we’d be fine.
At the last free side
I brought my revelation dream
Of a gun-less sky
And I gave speeches
On and on and on through the night.
We missed the last peace train
We’ve gone insane
A radiation cloud starts to rain
And you hear speeches
On and on and on through the next fire line
They’ll buy more time
On your TV screen
So some white-haired guy
Can give speeches
On and on and on through the night.
I will be blue in a red state
all the long day with you.
And when iron curtains start to fall,
foreign lovers reaching through the wall.
These policies will freeze,
But hearts are warm technologies
In failed democracies.
I will be blue in a red state
all the long day with you.