Dynamo
1 - North by North
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.
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
2 - B Film
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.
3 - Logos
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.
4 - Polaroid Solution
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.
5 - Future Self
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?
6 - Metropolis
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
7 - I Fell Off My Name
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.”
8 - Geneva’s Gone
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
9 - The Persuaded
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?
10 - Being There
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.
11 - Speeches
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.
12. Red State
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.