lyrics

Hey, someone I know and work with musically posts blogs of his lyrics. This sounded to me like a good idea. I am appropriating it. Here you are; bajskorv + savage ideal. comment as you like.

Blood Like Rain/ Nihilism

Politicians telling lies
The culture breaks
Resentment down to size
Some things drag on and on
Some times faith misplaced
Our spirits raped

Maybe the doubts were right
Maybe never looked too hard inside
Maybe we'd better quit
Just fuck the world
And blow it all to bits

We understand the fighting
And all the things we see
Even though they never tell you
One word without honesty

In desperation
Lost our hope
No consolation
Broken Homes
Don't pay attention
Selling war
Is suffocation
You were born for

Things are just getting worse
And you feel so mutilated
Don't believe a word they say
Feels like there's no escape

Visions are getting worse
And you feel so mutilated
Don't believe a word they say
In a world with no escape.


(this song was written about military recruiters and how they lie to people and cynically exploit the fact that education, health care, child care, and many other things are neglected while the military budget dwarfs them all and grows without end. People are negelected and condemmend to a miserable future while the government's indifferent their whole life. Suddenly they turn of military age and all of a sudden the government's there to promise them money and heathcare if only they'd fight and perhaps die in a a stupid war that never should have started and probably will never end. Later as perpetual war became more and more of a seemingly immovable reality and more and more of us became desensatized to both it as well as violence and corruption generally; I added a more nihilist first verse to articulate more clearly what I and millions of others were thinking: Fuck it. Fuck everyone. There is no end to this madness. And fuck me for succomming to negativity.)


---------

No Escape



I see a life ahead
Each day more news of the dead
Lies politics
Alternatives
My faith drains
Like the holes in my brain

I think every day about
Going insane
I drive for hours at night
In the rain
I'm begging I'm crying
I'm asking I'm dying
I'm loosing my faith
I'm loosing my ways

I'm lost at the end of days
I made a mess I shouldn't have made
Alone in the world
we're all enslaved
And the future
Promises more of the same

A negative
Non-representative
Illustrated mess
of the world
I knew I hated
World that I knew
I change
My life
Fit to slave

Takes you in and
Change your brain
Slave, slave, slave away
Slave, slave, salve away away



Do we surrender
To our vices
Do we escape into
Fantesies and magazines
Meditate alone
Laugh at a club
Laugh like a fish
going extinct

Staring at the business end
Of a shotgun
Racing in a blind alley
Cutting off everybody
Looking out for number one
Fuck the rest you're having fun
Trying not to interfere
Global warming your career

Fall in love and start a life
Get a husband get a wife
Settling for less
Managing the best
What do you hate
What is safe
What do you hate
What is safe

Living a life
That's a lie
Nobodys' fate
Becomming the things you hate
Tell your kids
Its the best
They have to pray
To a god that doesn't exist
To a god that's fucking dead
Your crutch
Your weakness
A world that's fucking dead


How do you fight when you're barely alive
How do you cry when there's no one left inside
Where do you run its the same everywhere
Where do you fit in the world doesn't care

I see a life ahead
I see what I must do
You have no will to live
This time I'm cutting through

The next time
The last time



(I was feeling very overworked and socially isolated and depressed to a rather unhealthy extent. The only remedy I knew for this was to throw your self into work all day long and try and get your mind off your home life. This helped but it wasn't really working. Then I tried eating the drugs my friends at work used to get them through the day. This didn't work either. So I wrote a song about suicide. Before it was released a very close friend of mine committed suicide and made me think more about the whole process. I re-wrote some parts to make it seem less like it was glamorizing the whole thing and more just trying to articulate these feelings and discuss them. The idea is this: I see the negativity and problems in everything. Politics is of course fucked up and evil. It's demoralizing; and I'm losing my faith in my ability to contribute to any real change. You loose sight of your successes and can only see where you've made mistakes. You begin to feel that you yourself are part of the problem. But just trying to hide in your job is no answer either. You're still bombarded by the news, and a life in most medial or even semi-skiled working
class jobs is hardly worth living: slaving away all day just to make ends meet; working for fat cats; being fed chicken wings and rice right before you work for 16 hours serving lobster and filet mingnons. So how can you escape? You can't. The club is stupid; full of idiots poisoning their bodies catching std's and incapable of having a meaningful conversation about anything. Housewives more calming hiding
behind supermarket magazines is equally pathetic and repulisive. Even the outdoors can't save you: you can climb the highest mountain and there's still C-130's flying between the ridges practicing to go to Iraq. Blowing your head of with a gun and driving full throttle down the blind alley of corporate 'fuck-the-world-I'm-here-to-make-a-profit-and-climb-a-ladder' are two approaches to the same end. You'll kill yourself either way; by stress at you're job you'll have a heart attack maybe a few months after you've finally gotten your promotion. Giving up on ambition and just hiding in your lovers' arms is also no solution. All goes as planned and you've produced children who now you've condemmed to another futile life of pain. There is no escape and the status quo is intolerable. WHAT DO YOU DO?)


-----------

Don't Stop Screaming



Avail
A lie
Dirty
Finally
Reach
Across
The wave
Ice
Of ice
Back
Quickly
Painfully
All the way
Pain
Penetrate
Corruption
Whole thing


Hey yah
Light
Listen
Now
Pain
Light
Running off
Pain
You
At
Believe
Annihlate
All eyes
Smiling
At me
All eyes
Painfully
Painfully
Painfully
Pain
All eyes

DOn't stop
Stop
Stop
Stop
Don't
Sick
Stop
Don't
Await
Don't
Stop
A lie
A lie
Alive
Don't
Stop
Painfully
A lie
Screaming
Cry
Try
Try
Try
Painfully
Don't Stop
Screaming
Don't
Try
Try
Try
Try
Try


Awake
Alive
Trying
Finally
Its
Across
The way
Ice
Eyes
Back
Finally
Painfully
Alive
Pain
Penetrate
Illusion
Fell asleep
Pain
Back
quickly
slowly


Always
back
onward
Try
A lie
You're in
Only
A
A lie
This one
A
Lie
Desperately
Across
A lie
Do or die
Run away
Endless
Crawl
Asleep
A sea
Demonstration
Along
Across
Finally
Break
Break it
Believe



(Self explainitory. The pain and difficultly. Nonetheless; responding to and indulging in only to your own subjective reactions to universal social reality is; even though genuinely painful and angst-ridden; an ultimately narcassistic excercise. Don't stop screaming. Don't run away to crawl asleep in the bottom of the ocean. You have to try.)

Student Tazered.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CheY0jYXJjY&NR=1


When Nancy Pelosi declares that "Impeachment is off the table," for the most impeachable president in the history of the Republic; when half a million Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers have been killed in a war based on lies; when voter fraud and the political disenfranchisement of minorities persists into the 21st century; all the while Democratic politicians fall in line, repeat the lies, don't bring attention to injustice, are on the biggest issues indifferent to both their own oaths of office as well as the lives of their own citizens: it IS right that the citizens should be outraged, and it IS natural that the manner of speaking in which they confront the leaders of this party of collaboration is, shall we say, 'belligerent'. The use of police violence in this case is clearly unnecessary...

To those who might say the kid brought this violence upon himself for the way he asked the question, I ask you how much more violence do we as a nation bring upon ourselves and the world each day we're silent, polite, and complacent, with the manipulations and betrayals of the Republican and Democratic parties.

It's a sign of a free society that citizens are unafraid of their politicians, and that they are unafraid to apply pressure when needed. This video, my friends, is not the sign of a free society. But the seriousness with which the student intents to hold our occasionally elected leaders to account is, in my view, more of what's needed to win one.

my album reviewed, interview with me about music, dc generally

This is pretty cool:

http://www.regenmag.com/Artist-Spotlight-36-Bajskorv.html


The reviewed the second Bajskorv album I did, and have pictures of us. Also, I'm interviewed... if you wonder perhaps why I had to leave DC, some of that is touched on... frustration with things... but also some worthwhile observations here and there, I think.

Cheers.

Europe: Premiers Impressions

(Disclaimer: Due to my not being able to find my camera all pictures on this site are pictures other people have taken of themselves on their own vacations. However, thanks to images.google.com, we can vicariously imagine travel through them. Just pretend the people in the pictures are me, and you won't tell the difference. -LF)

Going to Europe is like....







Seeing this shit for 1,920 miles.

Or at least, that is the first leg of one's journey, should moving out of your craftily sublet apartment prove difficult when losing your drivers' lisence is added to the end of your two hour wait at the U-haul place on 29th K ST NW. NEVER go to that place. EVER. Let's just say that any company whose store on a day in the middle of its busiest season opens with ONE employee capable of helping the many customers in line does not deserve to be a company! You should not be open then! You should close the store and tell your customers to go to one of the many other DCentric U-haul locations, or else to just fucking fo'get abowddit!

Anyways, should this happen to you, don't give up and let those bastards win. Nothing is worth another year inside the beltway, not even 20 hours less of your life spent on I-85. So...neatly packaged up shit was unpacked, thrown in car, driven to ATL.. then I drove back, got the rest of the shit, drove it back, and then went to the airport... TO FLY TO DC!!! hahahaha.... that was the first leg of my trip, isn't it nice? Well, at least the Hillsboro, NC police department let me go with only a warning for lying down exhausted on the grass outside of the Chick-Fil-let.

Incidentally, the global-warming induced erratic weather pattern which left the Mid-Atlantic with approximately one half of its normal spring rainfall this year had some pretty freak effects I got to enjoy along the way, like, almost completely drying up Falls Lake. I was never more ready to pull over and hop into a lake until I passed that dried up sad excuse of a reservoir that used to be. I mean, you had grass growing where the water used to be; the smell of death everywhere and birds hovering over the few ponds left that still had fish. A massacre. Damn. The good news, however, is that while doing a search for Falls Lake, a picture of this cute DOG turned up instead.



This plane flies to Dulles Airport to get onto an Aer Lingus plane that boards 4 hours after we get there. Five hours later we're on this plane feeling kinda weird about the fact it hasn't moved yet. Three hours after that we're in a hotel in Washington, DC because there was a technical problem the flight was fucked. Maybe you would feel... nervous? Then you should feel the cool taste of DUTY FREE, BABY!!!!



Some more few hours after this, we are back in an epic line, and finally on a plane. While at least we did not have a month long voyage with storms, scurvy, and maggoty biscuits; this was still frustrating for obvious reasons. And if the Highways, Delays, and generally irony of your predicament is not enough, the Americans will take your toothpaste. They will take you toothpaste, and they will do it to make you safer, because you may use it as a terrorist weapon. Seriously.

This actually happened to me. It also happened to this guy.

When you fly to Europe they take you to Dublin, Ireland first because Guinness Beer is the first thing you need to know about Europe. Dublin Looks like this:



Ireland's pretty cool, it's got lots of countryside



We hung out with this family of 2 kids, boy and girl, and a wife and a husband from an hour outside of Birmingham, UK. They were pretty friendly and nice and generally supportive of the fact that I don't like George Bush. Apparently the English don't like him or the war either, so if you are an American and you go there the odds are making friends will be easy and you'll have lots to talk about.

At this point in time I will let you know that my traveling companion is Peter Wright, my father.



My father looks kind of like that, but just, less sort of like the wolf man, and with less hair.

After you drink this Irish beer you sleep and then wake up again. This entails a very nice breakfast compliments of the airline who screwed you up :) It was good. Their hotel breakfast is just like our hotel breakfast, but their bacon looks like Canadian bacon and they have these baked beans I thought looked gross. The last thing to say about the Irish is that they are hot, like really hot. I haven't seen that many hot Irish people in a while, but they had them out and on display. I mean, if I wasn't traveling with Vincent Price's nephew, I'd have wanted to hang out and really get to know the place, dig?

Airports and related matters continue until you get to Geneva, Switzerland.



Geneva is pretty. It's by a lake and surrounded on three sides by France, which means it is pretty easy to get around. They give you a car which is made by FIAT, an Italian maker with a big, scary, authoritarian sounding name. With images of this and these guys in mind, you might be surprised to find that the thing is actually very, well, cute!



This, my friends, is the future. FIAT, Renaults, no such thing as Chevy or Suburban over here, though I did see one Ford Focus. Gas prices will go up, cars will get smaller, more efficient, and cuddly like. They will also be made in Europe.

If you've come all the way to Europe just to climb this big fucking mountain out of some macho necessity to deal with your own issues, well, the place to go is Mt Blanc, Europe's highest mountain in the French Alps. It is 4808 meters, or 15,782 feet high.



We stayed for two nights in a four bed hostel room along with some dedicated Scottish climbers in the picturesque town of Chamonix.



Chamonix however rips you off. Things are kinda over priced and its a bit touristy. HAVING THE TIP INCLUDED IN A BILL IS A BAD IDEA. It makes waiters lazy. From now on when someone tells you about how 'in Europe service is so great.... restaurants are so awesome..." you need to ask them if this person has ever been to Europe. They short staff on waiters and don't care. The guy is weeded and doesn't even work all the tables at once (at 3/4 restaurants we ate ate), and passes by you several times when you're just trying to toss at him your card to get the check. Their prioritization gets all fucked up because they're not focused on the bottom line. Also, their hustles make our Sequoia hustles look like cheap change.

W:"Would you like water with your meal?"

C: "Uhh.. sure."

What do you get? A 1.5 L bottle of Evian for two people, with is 6.9 Euros (like, 9 or 10 bucks), and to top it off the guy rips off the top and doesn't leave it so you couldn't finish the thing the next day when you're climbing up a mountain if you'd like to... lame.

However, on the bright side, Chamonix has an awesome Pizza place. Some of the best pizza ever. Just one guy there, takes the order, rings you up, opens the wine, and bakes the pizza to order. I had an awesome calzone. The place is called Pizza Salsa.

Other cons however, exist. It's weird. People dress like people in Georgetown, Aspen, or anywhere else you find Paris-Hilton lookalike Americans with money. Everyone dresses like this. Guys all dress preppy. In Zürich I saw two punks with hawks but that was it. Another weird thing about south east France is that a lot of folks support the Front Nationale because they don't like immigrants, darker-skinned people, non-Christian religions, or some combination thereof. I met some of these people, they're pretty creepy, and not exactly the counterweight to Eurotrash that I need to get through the day.

The other problem is that stuff opens too late and closes to early. Being jet lagged and in a tourist town at the tail end of season I expected something weird but this was abnormal: at 5:30 pm it was still too early to sit down and eat dinner while at midnight all the bars were already closed. Weird, huh? Well, even weirder! I did wander around the sub-freezing temperatures to find one pub where I entered. The bartender didn't understand French, oddly... or at least, oddly until I realized the bar was an English-pub themed place. Huh.. all that way and I'm drinking an Amstel Light in an English pub. Weird.

The day we climbed after icing off the windshield and driving to where you climb. It was literally that cold, hot enough to wear t-shit and shorts in the sun during the day, yet frosty at night. If you see the picture of Mt Blanc above, the large glacier on the left, which is called the Mer Du Glace, is where we started, then we walked around the side of the mountain and up a bit to the right, where there's this hut you can buy a Heinekin at until you take the cable car down. The cable car was cool, however, if you have got something wrong with your ears be careful because they pop several times as you descend thousands of feet quite rapidly.

Breakfast in France is weird, because you can walk to 10 restaurants and all of them make the same thing. It's baggettee and croissant, with a very small cup of juice and coffee or tea or hot chocolate. The chocolate is good, drink it. If you are lucky, some places will do more fun stuff, like make you an egg. My favorite place in Chamonix fried up some cut in half sausages and put them inside of the bagguette. That rocked. Last point here with food, portions. Portions are VERY small. Half the size of American portions. With juice, meat, pasta, everything. The bottled juices you buy in the store are half as big and the cups of juice you get for breakfast are half as big. The shrimps in a shrimp cocktail are LITERALLY about twice the length of a man's fingernail. Seriously. They are too small to sit on the rim of the glass, so they must be thrown into a nasty mayo-heavy aoili of some sort that swims around on a sea of lettuce. Everything in Europe is smaller, more cute, and generally less bad for you or the environment. However, to skinny guys with high metabolism and a plan to climb the mountains, this can be a problem. I need a *meal*, dammit.

Way cooler than Chamonix is Champex, where we went next. This place is in Switzerland. Crossing the border from France to Switzerland is as easy as, um... driving a car forward while this guy with a police hat smiles and waves you on. Forget your passports, you don't even stop! Champex looks like this:





Champex is way cool, and a lot more low key. There's trout in a lake you can catch, a mountain right behind your hotel to ascend, and a weird old de-commissioned swiss army fort to check out. It is also located at the far east of the long mountain that Mont Blanc is part of.

What we climbed there was The Aiguilles Dorees: a 3519 M set of peaks jutting out above a glacier 2,400 M above the valley floor. VERY scenic! There's this cabin thing you hike up to, which is sort of what people do around here, hike cabin to cabin. You can sleep in one, eat food, and go to the bathroom in a toilet, as well as buy a beer or glass of wine. They are supplied by helicopter- pretty impressive.



Above is the glacier I traversed. Have you ever traversed a glacier? It is pretty awesome. You get to wear metal spikes on your feet, carry a ski pole, and potentially die! The ice is very very blue and there is melt water coming out from it, so much in fact that I got nervous as my companion re-called, "Boy, there seemed to be 10 times as much ice up here 20 years ago as there is today."

Also interesting is the crumbly nature of this rock. Hard enough by itself, frozen mountains like the alps crumble as evidenced by large moraines of broken rock. What happens is that water gets into tiny cracks in the rock, then freezes and expands, forcing the rock open. Eventually pieces of it break off, and fall down to wherever or upon whomever. Basically, you can be sitting there putting the metal spikes onto your shoe and you here noise from the cliff above. You can't see anything though cause the falling rock is small, you so kind of ignore it and get back to what you were doing. A few seconds later maybe a rock the size of two fists tied together combines bouncing down the cliff around head level at high velocity some feet from you. Very very interesting...

Anyways, I traversed this thing and got to the "top", or at least, as much of a top as you can get to without killing yourself. These peaks are basically formed by two continental plates colliding and forcing the rocks against each other until they rise up. Basically you see on peaks a rock face of different layers of rock running vertically up and down. Rock layers however are formed horizontally, but they are pushed straight up to the sky. The 'top' of these things is really maybe one five foot long, six inch wide slab of granite, feldspar, and quartz sticking straight up into the air, with a 70 degree angle you've just climbed a hundred feet up on one side, and an obtuse precipice into a glacier 900 Ft below on the other. Pretty freaky stuff.



Coming down, was fun, and as usual, harder than going up. I did not fall off the cliff. However, I did fall into a cravasee. Allow me to explain.

When I was a boy scout I learned that respecting the earth and taking care of it for future generations is very important. Later, when I broke politically with the programme of this group, I retained this bit of ethos. Thus, whenever I am out and about, I like to follow the rule that "not littering is great, but picking up after others is even better". So, if you see an old water bottle or plastic wrapper or someone something else carelessly left behind, just pick it up, and take it to the next trash can. The next guy appreciates it, just like you appreciated it when they guy before you did this already. Basic stuff.

Anyways, I've come down the steep part of the glacier and before I traverse to where it is rock again I'm just kinda hanging out, taking my time, and learning about glacerage. I have avoided falling into all previous cravasses. Now I approach one cravasse which is very interesting. It's only 10ish feet deep, and about two feet wide, going down at about an 80 degree angle into the ice. There's some weird bright orange sign in official looking letters that is tied to something about 5 feet down into this thing. So I approach it very carefully to see what it is. Putting my foot down at the base of where the cravasse splits from two solid pieces of ice, I find that the ice was not solid at all, and all of a sudden I am falling into a cravasse. Lucky, the opening is very narrow, and by putting by arms out and using my spiky feet into the walls I am able to stop myself. Unfourtuantely, all of my weight landed at the point of where my left ribcage made contact with the ice. It really hurt then, and I have still got this terrible pain there. Should this continue, please look out for the next installment of this blog which shall chronicle my experiences with the Swedish national health care system.

After this, we found out that we sure took a long time to climb the mountain, and the ski lift that took you part of the way up is closed. So, we have to descend 4,000 feet to the valley over a very steep trail that descends the Combe (ravine) D'Orny. Very steep and painful to the ribs and to the feet. My traveling companion is 61 years old. Yet we make it!

A good thing happened as a result of this long painful ordeal: we got to see wildlife! This stuff had been remarkably absent in our earlier hiking. I do not think they have deer here, but they do have this animal called the Chamois.



The Chamois is very cool and very cute. We saw a herd of approx 15 of these in the gorge on the step and probably very rarely used path, as well as one other later on by himself.

That night we ate Spaghetti Bouglanaise at this very nice restaurant that was chill, not a hustle, and run by some very nice lady and her husband. With this I had a very nice vanilla tea and then cub of some red wine from the valley here. All this wine is great. They also had many kinds of artisanal ice cream, and we ate that too, it rocked.

Next day we drove approx 200 km to Zürich, which is a very scenic drive. We stopped off on the way for more slow weeded service (but good food!) and the exploration of a medieval castle. There was anarchist graffiti here, changing the sign in the the femenin apparel shop to feminist apparel. Also there was anti-nazi graffiti.

Zurich is pretty interesting.... people all once again look like people in Georgetown, though there were a few more semi weird people. Also lots of very attractive young people out drinking, as well as adult movie theaters and sex shops. I'm almost dreading another two weeks of this, I need to be here alone, or with a travel companion my age.



NEVER GO TO EUROPE IN YOUR TWENTIES WITH YOUR PARENTS.

Zürich also had 'fight capitalism' graffiti. That was neat. And it had an airport with a hotel, that has the internet.

Anyways, that's that, so far. Tomorrow I go to Gothenburg, Sweden. I'm ready for the Absolute and the Akvavit. Also, I need to shave and maybe get a haircut.

STUFF I MISSED:

-The papers here talk about Sarkozy trying to privatize the GDF. Apparently many people don't like the idea.

-The radio here plays mostly in English pop, American jazz, and in English pop from America. Needless to say it sucks, just like ours... except for the jazz. Sometimes they sing in French or German over country music, which is pretty cool, but for the most part I will conclude with two things

1) Visit SE France and Switzerland to climb the mountains, but visit London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid to visit EUROPE: the society, politics, and music

2) Travel alone or travel with people you really like, can relate to, and have long conversations with.

Cheers