Jon Cogburn's Blog

New York Dolls - Looking for a Kiss

devil in my pocket youtube playlist

I just figured out how to make a playlist for the weird videos I've been making using public domain content and music from me and Emily's rock band. The playlist is HERE (the one's that work best video-wise are probably Santa Sangre, Zombies, and the Zoo). The general webpage for the band with lots more MP3s of songs  is HERE. I"m decent at playing guitar and writing melodies, barely adequate at singing, bad as a lyricist, and even worse at getting a decent mix and timbre when recording these things on my computer.

When playing live I can keep an audience's attention if I am wearing a wrestling mask. Once it comes off they start drunkenly talking to one another and ignoring me. There's probably some Levinasian reason for this.

Music has mostly been on a hiatus with very young children. During the sabbatical year I could be a decent father to a baby, play music, and write philosophy. When we came back to Baton Rouge and I had to teach again while trying to be a decent father to a toddler it took me a year just to figure out how to write philosophy again (as much as possible do it two hours every morning very, very early- then the rest of the day is grading, teaching, prepping lectures, administrative stuff, helping students, and being a dad). I think it's going to be another year at least before I can work realiably rocking out back into the mix. Other musician friends of mine with full time jobs tell me that when your youngest hits three things open up in a way that gives you one or two hours a day rocking out time without being a bad father.

Alice Cooper - Is It My Body?

more navel gazing and great cover of Daniel Johnston song

I also find that I have much less to say when I'm reading something that I really agree with, especially if it's non-trivial. This semester I'm teaching three of Noel Carroll's books and I find myself writing things like "Yes!" and "Cool!" in the margins with distressing frequency.

You can also be silenced in a far more paralyzing manner by something that seems so wrong to you that there's no place to start.

I guess the sweet spot is where you find something that you think worthy of improvement. . . Maybe this is why philosophy professors can be such unpleasant people. If you think your vocation is to constantly improve other people's beliefs then your sense of self-worth can end up completely out of whack with reality.

Anyhow, here's punkrock super group Osaka Popstar (John Cafiero – Lead Vocals, Jerry Only (The Misfits) – Bass, Dez Cadena (Black Flag, The Misfits) – Lead Guitar, Ivan Julian (The Voidoids) – Rhythm Guitar, Marky Ramone (Ramones, The Voidoids, Dust) – Drums) with a great cover of Daniel Johnston's "Wicked World."

Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat

Which is stupider? (1) I actually own a blue Burberry raincoat, and make dumb passing references to it either being famous or not having a torn shoulder every time I get to wear it, or (2) only one person in my department has ever understood the reference?

I cant's decide. The first one is lame because: (a) my wife probably could have spent the money that went to getting the same kind of raincoat that Leonard Cohen had (he described it on Terri Gross) for a much better purpose, (b) it's a depressing (though beautiful for all that) song! Why would anyone want a sartorial association with it? The second one is lame because Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs from a Room, and Songs of Love and Hate should be part of everyone's cultural repertoire. If philosophy professors don't wallow in these songs, what hope is there for anybody else?

Heidi Silcox called my attention to this video. It's funny because I've just started rereading the Old Testament and my prime reaction is just how weird the early stuff Bowers is talking about is. I kind of interpret it along the lines of the philosophy professor in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, as the fallible record of people's attempts to make sense of a just and loving divinity. No sooner had they thought of a God who demands fairness and love than that they portray that God as telling Abraham to sacrifice his son. [Another really interesting take is Jack Miles' excellent God: A Biography. If you read the stuff in Hebrew in the Jewish ordering, God comes across as very fallible and somewhat pitiable. He just doesn't forsee much of the stuff that happens and often responds badly.]

Here's Leonard Cohen's take on the Abraham/Isaac thing. It's preferable to Kierkegaard's take I think, and has particular resonance in a country and age where the destruction of the New Deal social contract over the last thirty years just is the unconscionable theft our children's inheritance (environmental destruction, unsustainable debt, radical failure to invest in infrastructure, increasing income disparity, etc.).

Angry Samoans - Highway to Hell (AC/DC Cover); Gas Chamber/Not of this Earth

It's actually really, really hard to cover any AC/DC song and not have it sound terrible (try typing "AC/DC cover" into youtube's search field). This is as it should be, since AC/DC are the greatest rock band of all time, actually of all possible times in all possible worlds.

But now somebody captured a recent show of the legendary Angry Samoans actually doing justice to Bon Scott era AC/DC.

And here they are from twenty five years ago, putting the rock back in punk rock (where it belongs?).

Natalie Merchant - Motherland

Where in hell can you go
Far from the things that you know
Far from the sprawl of concrete
That keeps crawling its way
About 1,000 miles a day?

Take one last look behind
Commit this to memory and mind
Don't miss this wasteland, this terrible place
When you leave
Keep your heart off your sleeve

Motherland cradle me
Close my eyes
Lullaby me to sleep
Keep me safe
Lie with me
Stay beside me
Don't go, don't you go

O, my five & dime queen
Tell me what have you seen?
The lust and the avarice
The bottomless, the cavernous greed
Is that what you see?

Motherland cradle me
Close my eyes
Lullaby me to sleep
Keep me safe
Lie with me
Stay beside me
Don't go

It's your happiness I want most of all
And for that I'd do anything at all, o mercy me!
If you want the best of it or the most of all
If there's anything I can do at all

Now come on shot gun bride
What makes me envy your life?
Faceless, nameless, innocent, blameless and free,
What's that like to be?

Motherland cradle me
Close my eyes
Lullaby me to sleep
Keep me safe
Lie with me
Stay beside me
Don't go, don't you go

Devil in My Pocket - Babylon; Devil in My Pocket - Snake

These are the last two I'm going to do for a while. All the rest of the ones on the band web page in the second set are just acoustic demos (and they are harder rock songs so it does not work very well). The first set are all non-demos, but I'm going to let making movies for them be rewards for getting papers finished.

Devil In My Pocket - The Zoo

The theme here is borrowed pretty liberally from Adam and the Ants' "The Idea." If the lyrics irritate, please note that Johnny Cash didn't really kill that man in Reno, Nevada.



The reason I've been up to so much mischief with Windows Movie Maker this week is that I have a philosophy-I.Q.-reducing cold and it's something to do instead of think about Schopenhauer and modality. I also did some redesign on the band webpage HERE. This school year, I'm going to make little movies for most of the songs that are available there.

In the next couple of years I want to record decent versions of all the songs through the set I wrote in Oklahoma (the "third set" on the web page), then I'm going to take up piano again and learn Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, P.J Harvey's White Chalk, and the White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan. I'd like to write a set of songs around the piano instead of guitar. That will take a few years, at which point the kids will be old enough for Emily and I to practice regularly together again and maybe perform some.

It's very nice for a whole host of reasons to have hobbies that you are passionate about but on which nothing whatsoever hangs.

Devil In My Pocket - Zombies

I just started reading Noel Carroll's fantastic Philosophy of Horror, so I thought I'd do a video for this song.

musings on Queen

I just discovered my colleague James Rocha's fantastic interpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody (possibly the best rock song, and hence possibly the best song, ever) that he posted last year on his blog. It's HERE. And here's the original video for the song.

My older brother Chris turned me on to Queen and the Beatles when we were kids in the early seventies. He had the red and blue Apple greatest hits Beatles albums and a whole mess of Queen 45s. He, my sister, and me used to have long discussions about whether Strawberry Fields Forever or Penny Lane was a better song (Strawberry Fields was ultimately proclaimed better by a unanimous vote; and I'm pretty sure we'd all vote the same today). Bohemian Rhapsody sort of hovered over everything though.

Most of my friends' older brothers ended up in the Kiss Army. We stuck with Queen and the Beatles, and expanded into Elton John and Cat Stevens (both the influence of our Dad). And though I'm jealous of my friend Neal Hebert's good standing in said Army, I still think we ultimately got the better deal. Here's another 45 we wore out with repeated playing.

I remember being incredibly impressed by the fact that Freddy Mercury had the cajones to admit to not liking Jaws or Star Wars. It was scandalous, but also my first intimation of real freedom.

Devil in My Pocket - Santa Sangre

This song rocks my socks. It's one of only three things I've recorded with backwards masking (a guitar track), and the only song where it really works. [I realize that the vocals are bit too loud and the overall sound is tinny. I'm not very competent at getting decent timbre. Someday I'd like to move up to protools and maybe also take a class in how to record things.]

The song is about the movie of the same name. I initially used footage from the following trailer for a video, and it was perfect. But I did not want to violate copyright law so I used a public domain Superman movie instead. I think this works pretty well though. Anyhow, you can run the below without sound while running the above and see what I would have liked to do.

Two nice examples of pragmaticly secured self-referentiality

Both of these songs have artistically satisfying performative tautologies. Fiona Apple tells her ex, "you were always good for a rhyme" and after a series of upsetting conditional antecedents Jack White concludes, "then make sure to never do it with a singer because he'll tell everyone in the world." And Fiona Apple's ex is good for a rhyme, and Jack White is telling everyone in the world.

Mostly though, both songs (and the albums from which they come) totally rock out. This was Jack White at the height of his powers, just before the muse's withdrawal of her catchy-melody-writing gifts became all too evident on "Icky Thump" and his other band's second release. Maybe he'll get right with Jesus or something and the muse will return some day. . . If Fiona Apple can ever again equal the sustained brilliance of "Extraordinary Machine" it will be a surprise, but that's just because that album is so amazing.

The last year has been pretty dry for me in terms of musical fandom. In the preceding five years I'd discovered the White Stripes (complete brilliance all the way through "Get Behind Me Satan") and Marilyn Manson ("Anti-Christ Superstar," "Mechanical Animals," "Holywood"). Then Apple's "Extraordinary Machine" and P.J. Harvey's "White Chalk" came out, both of which I listened to obsessively. But since "White Chalk" nothing. . . I scour the Onion's A.V. Club trying to find new C.D.s worthy of that devotion. I ask my students what they're listening to. But nothing combines the rocking out power with the ability to write catchy melodies (Jet and Wolfmother at their best come very close; though the albums have some egregiously useless filler tracks).

There's always a little embarrassment when I don't like bands that students are really into. Or even when I recognize that they are good, but don't think their albums are worthy of devotion. It's exactly the same feeling as when I tell the Mormon or Jehovah's Witness to get off my porch.

David Bowie - Queen Bitch

Saint Paul (with assist from my favorite Hari Krishna ensemble - The Cro Mags)

All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong;
no one does good, not even one.
Their throat is an open grave,
they use their tongues to deceive.
The venom of asps is under their lips.
Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood,
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and in the way of peace they do not known.

Rollins Band - What Do You Do?

If it's Sunday, get myself to church. Any other day the yoga studio.

Mance Lipscomb - Aint It Hard

Mohsen Namjoo - Ro Sar Beneh (Live)

Jon Wayne - Texas Funeral