MyNameIs

And then this came in, on return from Paris, where I played Burroughs for a while outside the old Beat Hotel (now posh, with the odd picture of dream machines and Brion Gysin dotted around the walls), Rue Git La Coeur (see the picture, further down - trying the Burroughs walk, one foot in front of the other, dead straight.... and failing, of course, and resolutely not wearing a hat....

and, anyway, this came in, another net freebie, a perk of this place, beautifully packaged, with a little card introducing herself and an explosion of colour - the record sounds like a rainbow, unashamedly immersed in joy and light:::::::::::

--- you'll know by now perhaps that despite my dark leaning towards Gristle and Sunburned and slur-folk and Industrial etc etc i've always had a weakness for the beautiful - female - voice ----

and besides, even in Coil and Nurse With Wound and all my longtime loves; it's the light coming out of the cracks that I've always really loved, the oboe coiling from the wind and the wreckage of Chaostrophy, the little yappy dog at the innermost heart of NWWs Cold...

So Leerone is playing in my kitchen , like it's jammed into the machine... someone who puts this much hope and love into her work deserves a few plays... the music kinda evokes a happier Regina Spektor perhaps, maybe a less mannered Tori Amos (you might say Feist(y) but you'd be a sadder soul than me - or, rather, exactly as sad as me) but others aren't really the point; the songcraft and the tunes put this above most of the singer-songwriter stuff that comes my way.... there's tunes you can whistle, tunes you can hummmmmmmmm....

the album title, Imaginary Biographies is important...helps to acknowledge, perhaps, that all biographies are imaginary; that we are what we do, as Sartre said...

---- looking like that, we could hardly be what we seem to be... in Paris we sat outside the Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots - the intellectual hubs of Paris, the places where Sartre wrote 'we are condemned to be free'; tried to soak some learning - headed to the Shakespeare and Co ex pat bookshop, which looks like you'd imagined it always looked; with Gysin and Burroughs and Henry Miller and Anais Nin scrawled all over it, etched in the shelves; ghosts lounging in the reference library upstairs---


Loki, Rue Git La Coeur, 2008

...that we imagine our lives as much as we live them...

more perhaps

which is why a photograph of william burroughs heading past the Beat Hotel on Rue Git La Coeur has been reimagined with me and by me for most of my post-teenage life... a stupid thing, a trifle, utterly self-pretentious but something that had to be done, the countercultural equivalent of putting your head through the holes on the Pier...



They've removed Jim Morrison's head from the grave at Pere Lachaise - I imagine someone has it in their garden, amongst the trolls and the fishing gnomes...

There's more tallying and yattling to get through but for now a simple message:

Thanks Leerone, I wasn't looking forward to coming back...

God knows what's next through the door...