Injunction: Put a Song on Repeat
[Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk
has a little trick he employs during the writing of each novel: he
picks one song to sum up the mood of the book (as best he can discern),
flips it on repeat, and plays it through the ENTIRE CREATION OF THE
BOOK. A sure recipe for madness (read his books if you don't believe
me), but also a fun thing to try. So here I took the shortest track in
my iTunes, a :28 filler piece from the Lightning Bolt album Ride the
Skys, and went to town....].
Bouncy aggravating guitar notes bending conscious awareness bending
breaking my nauseated self. They strike and wobble, strike and wobble,
like a greasy redneck fist on the side of my head in the kitchen scene
from Harmony Korine's Gummo. There will be tsunamis of
pain-noise in my sleep moments henceforth, when my head bounces on the
pillow it will bounce into a cloud of rusty daggers and unsharpened
spears, where whiskey rolls from the mouth of devilish little boys,
Germans are chopping things in half with guillotine clippers, and the
snowflakes slam into me like so much iron dandruff. Lightning Bolt, oh
Lightning Bolt, your noise-funk is lost on me, your flippant
distorto-jams render my soul even thicker, my sleep in this life even
deeper, my sense of separation from all that is even more intense.
You've rendered me blithering, idiotic, my type-words drooling on a
pube-covered laptop, white iBook stained vile long ago by work sessions
at 5am, work sessions at 5am, work sessions at 5am. The feedback in my
comments field will be more harsh than the cynical moiré patterns
emitting from your amplifiers, oh Lightning Bolt, let me banish thee
from my memoree with the ghostly sounds of Wilco, morning traffic,
steaming milk for coffee, and the shuffling embrace of my iPod, once I
have excised you. Drop dead dreaded repeat function, go bother-torture
someone who makes more money and has time for your BS.
[ps: just to note: some of these posts have funny line breaks due to the fact that I write the majority of them on my mail program, then
mail them in, moblog style. So blame my client, not me.]
posted by Paul S. at
4:08 AM
5 Comments:
I think I would go nuts listening to one song over and over again. Seems like an interesting experiment, though.
exactly. you can already see it happening at the end of my paragraph here, how palahniuk did it for weeks/months on end is beyond me.
haha, I have done that before. I listened to Dracula Mountain by Lightning Bolt, a 5 minute track for 4 days straight, and it never wore on me.
I DIG, which is testament to my own penchant for an ad infinitum repeat and your viscerally vivid virtuosity (as well as my appreciation for obnoxious alliteration.) ;)
Having a fondess bordering on fixation for Fight Club and the Dust Brothers, I will share that my brother - a rabid Palahniuk fan and aspiring writer - recently received a care package from Chuck, which consisted of (among other items) a handmade necklace beaded to read, "To Josh, Love Chuck," a handwritten letter complimenting and critiquing his work, an assortment of edible treats, and a stuffed, pink flamingo ("I am enclosing your power animal.")
brandy:
i am so jealous!!!! yeah i saw chuck speak here in town, he said he spends a lot of quiet time making poeple stuff. benefit of not owning a tv and living in the sticks i guess.
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