A good time with good friends.

Friends

This past week, two of my dear friends made their way over to Coeur d'Alene to spend some quality time with me. Kyle was my best man, and is my best friend. And my friend Greg was one of my groomsmen. Both of them are wonderful men, with robust hearts. It was wonderful, however, brief. Though it always is. When you have a limited amount of time to spend with friends that you are unable to imagine not having, the time you are given, never seems long enough.

This got me thinking about just how many people I have known across the span of my life; and I am only twenty-three years old! I have dear old friends from Seattle, friends from my time in Yakima (some of the best I could hope for), and others still in limbo here, in my home of Coeur d'Alene. But how fleeting these years have been. I say I have had many good friends. I recall years of bliss, of rolling around in the mud, playing prince and princess with many of my lady friends, running wild in the urban jungle I grew up in. I will always remember and be reminded of the great figures who raised me, and nurtured my wild little heart. Those that have passed, I respect with an unknowning. But now, I feel there are many answers to be sought out about my past. I can't help but feel hopelessly lost, disconnected from myself...whomever that is.

All I have are fragments and many contradictions.

Were we so great of friends? Perhaps. It is just not a friendship that lives on to this day. I suppose I must learn to accept this. It is a difficult pill to swallow, when I want so desperately to know and relate with all those I have known, to find out for myself (at this point in my intellectual development) just who these people were.

Interpol : "The Heinrich Maneuver"

I have put off posting "The Heinrich Maneuver" for quite some time. My only reason for not making this post until now, had something to do with the idea, that saving the best, for the absolute last minute, is ideally the best possible thing to do. Much like when we were younger, all of us relished our bag of goods after a visit to the candy store. Some of us ate only a small portion daily, but stowed away larger quantities for a special day. Likewise, it's time this immensely disturbing video got some air-time.

It is as haunting as it is intriguing. With broad strokes and the help of Paul Banks' choice of cryptic symbols for words, "The Heinrich Maneuver" is dazzling. The story unfolds slowly as, frame-by-frame, our perception pans out in impressionistic bravado.

I can't help but feel this video flirts with some sort of symbolism, as its emergent characters divert, and regress back into the frame.

"In Cold Blood"

Today the new U2 album is released. And for those of you who no longer purchase digital discs, there are more than a few alternatives available. I will say no more.

Now to business.

In celebration of the day, I've decided to post something I stumbled across a couple of months ago.

Following the success of U2's seventh studio album, Achtung Baby, while still on their (now famous) Zoo TV Tour, Bono sits in the studio for a one-on-one interview discussing the thoughts and delves of the band as they put the finishing touches on their follow-up album, Zooropa. It is August 1, 1993.
During the heart to heart, Bono discusses the nature of the new songs: the band's fascination with the overstimulated, media-driven world of technology. He then relinquishes this gem to the interviewer:

I read a book once, called In Cold Blood.
Pages of fact did me no good.
I read it like a blind man, in cold blood.

So the story of a three-year-old child.
Raped of soldiers, though she'd already died,
Made the mother watch as they fucked her in the mud.
I'm reading the story now, in cold blood.

More now coming off the wire
City surrounded, funeral pyre
Life is cheaper than talking about it
People choke on their politicians' vomit.

On cable television I saw a woman weep
Live, by satellite, from a flood-ridden street
Boy mistaken for a wastepaper bin
Body that a child used to live in.

I saw plastic explosives and an alarm clock
And the wrong men sitting in the dock
Karma is a word I never understood
How God could take a four-year-old in cold blood.

I live by a beach, but it feels like New York
I hear about 10 murders before I get to work.
What's it going to be, Lord, fire or flood?
An act of mercy or in cold blood?

He then tells Mr. Jackson of his interest in reciting the poem over the backdrop of U2's then unreleased song, "Numb" while the audiovisual loop of an 11-year-old Nazi plays the drum, at the 1936 Olympic Games. Very eerie stuff.