Dancing in the Dark Read Online Free Page B
Author: David Donnell
buses plunging off cliffs in Peru. Lebanese rebels blowing up embassies with car bombs. Somebody says something about children being given heart transplants in Utah. This is wild, isn’t it, or maybe it’s what you talk about all the time over 6 o’clock dinner.
“Books never stay around,” Ned says to somebody who has said something about books. It’s dark and I’m lying almost flat on my back with my head resting against an old pillow with some sort of cover around it.
Samantha says, “The Great Books stay around.” She must be a reader, maybe she’s a student, and she just works part time at the little brass fittings store. That sure is an attractive pink dress, with big splashes of green print you can hardly see, even with a moon, up here on the roof, in the dark. But, I think to myself, we’re not in the dark. We’re in the light, or maybe we
are
the light. What the fuck. Who can say we’re not?
I’m going out with a girl right now, Alice, who works in the UofT library, knits macramé, that’s something she does, okay? and smokes some very good dope. She has lovely breasts. We take showers together. She seems to like Mozart a great deal, but we get along and she seems to like the guys I hang around with fairly well.
Punk is very kicksy. Very trendy. But it’s also very principled. Punk concentrates almost entirely on immediate attitudes. Punk songs are deemed successful if they do a good job of simply making a hook – take a single word, sometimes a phrase, and then play it with this catchy sound mix that sort of completes a basic take on that one attitude. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the philosophy courses at UofM when I went there, but I think what I’m describing here is a fairly complete aesthetic. It’s complete, but the bass is all-important, that’s where I come in, and I’m hot right now, 2 or 3 groups have come on to me in the last month, I’m a bit of a star. And according to Ned, or what he was talking about 5 minutes ago, of course, and this is an interesting comment on people who say, O so&so is just going to be famous for 15 minutes, that, itself, was 5 minutes ago, and his remarks have sort of passed, like cigarette smoke, gone up in air, they’re drifting off into the dark night air above Richmond south of Queen.
What makes Alice so attractive to me, I think, the librarian with the wonderful breasts, is that she’s not a punk, she’s this beautiful, easy-going, everything more or less in order … librarian. Which is comfortable. We don’t have any problems.
“Well, it’s like dope,” Ned says, “what does dope do for you? It makes you feel relaxed.” I think every social area has guys like Ned, who have todefine and over-define the different things that are going on, without necessarily really understanding them very well. But sure, that’s what dope does, generally, for most people.
But what the bass does is sort of similar and almost opposite. Bass opens up the whole body to a simple idea – an idea which the singer has to be in command of, and which he, or she, I’m crazy about this girl Mary Margaret O’Hara, for example, is responsible for getting across. But when a good bass does that – it has to be a hell of a lot more than just an extension of percussion, it has to be playing some wild and complex lead notes down at the level of percussive rhythm, and sort of flirting with the back-beat, or maybe, in some cases, doing away with it altogether, but anyway, all at the same time.
You need to know something about language, melodies, engineering terms, different kinds of sounds.
Maybe we will be famous for 15 minutes. Or maybe we’ve already changed a number of attitudes – to things like body language, or dope, or what certain attitudes mean. A lot of kids are just going to wind up on the street, you know, wearing those silly red bandannas over their heads, or funny haircuts, the whole head cropped grey & stubbly and just a patch, like a big
“Books never stay around,” Ned says to somebody who has said something about books. It’s dark and I’m lying almost flat on my back with my head resting against an old pillow with some sort of cover around it.
Samantha says, “The Great Books stay around.” She must be a reader, maybe she’s a student, and she just works part time at the little brass fittings store. That sure is an attractive pink dress, with big splashes of green print you can hardly see, even with a moon, up here on the roof, in the dark. But, I think to myself, we’re not in the dark. We’re in the light, or maybe we
are
the light. What the fuck. Who can say we’re not?
I’m going out with a girl right now, Alice, who works in the UofT library, knits macramé, that’s something she does, okay? and smokes some very good dope. She has lovely breasts. We take showers together. She seems to like Mozart a great deal, but we get along and she seems to like the guys I hang around with fairly well.
Punk is very kicksy. Very trendy. But it’s also very principled. Punk concentrates almost entirely on immediate attitudes. Punk songs are deemed successful if they do a good job of simply making a hook – take a single word, sometimes a phrase, and then play it with this catchy sound mix that sort of completes a basic take on that one attitude. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the philosophy courses at UofM when I went there, but I think what I’m describing here is a fairly complete aesthetic. It’s complete, but the bass is all-important, that’s where I come in, and I’m hot right now, 2 or 3 groups have come on to me in the last month, I’m a bit of a star. And according to Ned, or what he was talking about 5 minutes ago, of course, and this is an interesting comment on people who say, O so&so is just going to be famous for 15 minutes, that, itself, was 5 minutes ago, and his remarks have sort of passed, like cigarette smoke, gone up in air, they’re drifting off into the dark night air above Richmond south of Queen.
What makes Alice so attractive to me, I think, the librarian with the wonderful breasts, is that she’s not a punk, she’s this beautiful, easy-going, everything more or less in order … librarian. Which is comfortable. We don’t have any problems.
“Well, it’s like dope,” Ned says, “what does dope do for you? It makes you feel relaxed.” I think every social area has guys like Ned, who have todefine and over-define the different things that are going on, without necessarily really understanding them very well. But sure, that’s what dope does, generally, for most people.
But what the bass does is sort of similar and almost opposite. Bass opens up the whole body to a simple idea – an idea which the singer has to be in command of, and which he, or she, I’m crazy about this girl Mary Margaret O’Hara, for example, is responsible for getting across. But when a good bass does that – it has to be a hell of a lot more than just an extension of percussion, it has to be playing some wild and complex lead notes down at the level of percussive rhythm, and sort of flirting with the back-beat, or maybe, in some cases, doing away with it altogether, but anyway, all at the same time.
You need to know something about language, melodies, engineering terms, different kinds of sounds.
Maybe we will be famous for 15 minutes. Or maybe we’ve already changed a number of attitudes – to things like body language, or dope, or what certain attitudes mean. A lot of kids are just going to wind up on the street, you know, wearing those silly red bandannas over their heads, or funny haircuts, the whole head cropped grey & stubbly and just a patch, like a big