Best. Green room. Ever.
Flans had notes
Good thing I…uh…write things down.
Also? John Dickerson2.
Um.
Suddenly, my stomach hurts a little.
I probably need to sleep and stop hallucinating and whatnot.
They Might Be Giants - “They’ll Need a Crane” (Lincoln, 1988)
Inarguably, a fantastic song. But, wow. Talk about some candy-coated misery.
Linnell has such a genius for writing these incredibly sad songs that, at least on the surface, don’t sound incredibly sad.
But, once you actually listen, of course, you can see they’re ironic little short stories about a life falling apart.
Seems to me that, with Linnell’s adenoidal crooning as the perfect presentation medium, the distant tone and absence of mawkishness make everything feel twice as brutal.
The truth is, no one finds sad people all that interesting. But, sad robots and sad puppets and sad night lites — all of whom have no idea how sad they really are?
Man, that is Literature.1
Viz.:
Don’t call me at work again
No, no, the boss still hates me
I’m just tired and I don’t love you anymore
And there’s a restaurant we should check out
Where the other nightmare people like to go
I mean nice people—Baby, wait!—
I didn’t mean to say, “nightmare”
Lad looks at other gals
Gal thinks Jim Beam is handsomer than lad
He isn’t bad.
Call off the wedding band
Nobody wants to hear that one again
Play that again
They’ll need a crane
They’ll need a crane
To take the house he built for her apart
To make it break
It’s gonna take
A metal ball hung from a chain
They’ll need a crane
They’ll need a crane
I mean, come on. Fucking ouch.
Addendum @ 2010-08-22_12-02-03
“As far as I’m concerned, for what we do, it’s not interesting just to publicly cry, you know? It’s not—it doesn’t even have the effect of making me sad if somebody else is doing that. I think the thing that’s really sad is when somebody represents some kind of inner sadness in some other way.” - Linnell
And, there you have it. Thanks, Valerie!
They Might be Giants - “Man, It’s So Loud In Here” (Late Night with Conan O’Brien, 1993)
You have to carry all your things
You can’t misplace them
There’s nowhere to place anything
John Linnell may be the most important Dada poet working today.
In other news, The Johns are playing for free a few blocks from our house tomorrow.1 Guessing the crowd will be insane, but, hey, you can’t deprive your child of her heritage.
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Mere steps from where this photo was taken. ↩
