April 2022 Vinyl Spin Challenge - Intertextuality and You

April 7: Richard Selzer, The Knife

I absolutely loved this one, I'm a surgeon and this short story really touched me. I found it very poetic and it really got me thinking (or maybe overthinking) about what I should play.
In the end I felt this was about understanding, respecting and ultimately being humbled by one's craft.
So I am playing this, a master of his craft, to me, a towering figure.

Leonard Cohen - Greatest Hits

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April 9: Roberto Bolaño, Gómez Palacio
  • “On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into the hills. Night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.”
I've driven from San Diego to Sedona a number of times. Calexico is always the perfect music for long, lonely desert drives.

Calexico ~ Carried to Dust

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April 8: Kanai Mieko, Rabbits
  • “Every day since then I am haunted by the ghosts of the dead rabbits and have behaved like a large, one-eyed rabbit. In short, I have clearly confirmed that I can never again return to the world of human beings. Looking back on it, I see that I had lived like a normal human being until the fourteenth of that month several years back. Up to that time, I had been like any normal schoolgirl and had kept hidden from my classmates everything about my father’s strange tastes—that he killed rabbits and cooked them. And I cannot say that I did not feel somewhat guilty about eating the cooked rabbits. If they had known that I had calmly eaten the rabbits I myself raised, my classmates would have surely nicknamed me Tiger Lily.”
The Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs
“Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits”

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April 9: Roberto Bolaño, Gómez Palacio
  • “On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into the hills. Night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.”
Tom Petty - Highway Companion

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April 9: Roberto Bolaño, Gómez Palacio
“On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into the hills. Night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.”

I'm sticking to a surface level connection with Nebula's Live in the Mojave Desert which has the band in the desert at night on the cover.
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April 6: Octavia Butler, The Book of Martha
  • “She stepped away from God, and already God seemed to be fading, becoming translucent, transparent, gone.
  • “I want to forget,” Martha said, and she stood alone in her living room, looking blankly past the open drapes of her front window at the surface of Lake Washington and the mist that hung above it. She wondered at the words she had just spoken, wondered what it was she wanted so badly to forget.”

Blue Sky Black Death - NOIR

I'm going digital today, and playing this one due to the track "In the Quiet Absence of God."

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April 10: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited
  • “He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.”
Knowing the context of this story, the first thing that popped into my head...

Angry Strapontin




Alice In Chains - Dirt

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April 10: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited
  • “He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.”
Serge Gainsbourg "No. 4" (1962 Philips; 2001 reissue)

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April 10: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited

I figured I'd go with something French...

Françoise Hardy ‎– The "Yeh-Yeh" Girl From Paris!
4 Corners Of The World ‎– FCS-4208, 1966

Thrift store purchase - wrong LP in sleeve

Pressed at RCA, Indianapolis

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This is what the cover should be...

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April 10: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited

“He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.”

This is tough. This text is utterly baffling. The best idea I have is to try to figure what record expresses the feeling of a blank stare.

Taku Sugimoto - Tori (2001)​


 
April 7: Richard Selzer, The Knife

  • “One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip--by the stem. Not palmed nor gripped nor grasped, but lightly, with the tips of the fingers. The knife is not for pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin. Like a slender fish, it waits, at the ready, then, go! It darts, followed by a fine wake of red. The flesh parts, falling away to yellow globules of fat. Even now, after so many times, I still marvel at its power--cold, gleaming, silent. More, I am still struck with a kind of dread that it is I in whose hand the blade travels, that my hand is its vehicle, that yet again this terrible steel-bellied thing and I have conspired for a most unnatural purpose, the laying open of the body of a human being.”
The Mountain Goats - Getting into Knives

Too obvious a choice?

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thefsb said:
April 10: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited

“He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.”

This is tough. This text is utterly baffling. The best idea I have is to try to figure what record expresses the feeling of a blank stare.

Taku Sugimoto - Tori (2001)​


Click to expand...

Check out Josephine Baker. There's surprisingly video of one of her famous performances. NSFW though.
 
April 9: Roberto Bolaño, Gómez Palacio
  • “On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into the hills. Night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.”
I decided to soundtrack this one....this would accompany the story nicely I think.

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April 8: Kanai Mieko, Rabbits
  • “Every day since then I am haunted by the ghosts of the dead rabbits and have behaved like a large, one-eyed rabbit. In short, I have clearly confirmed that I can never again return to the world of human beings. Looking back on it, I see that I had lived like a normal human being until the fourteenth of that month several years back. Up to that time, I had been like any normal schoolgirl and had kept hidden from my classmates everything about my father’s strange tastes—that he killed rabbits and cooked them. And I cannot say that I did not feel somewhat guilty about eating the cooked rabbits. If they had known that I had calmly eaten the rabbits I myself raised, my classmates would have surely nicknamed me Tiger Lily.”
The Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I

Opening line of the song "What Do You Want Me to Say?": "I lost my membership card to the human race."

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April 9: Roberto Bolaño, Gómez Palacio
  • “On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into the hills. Night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.”

M83 - Saturdays = Youth

I'm playing this for the track "Highway of Endless Dreams," which opens with a voice saying "7 A.M., dusty road. I'm going to drive until it burns my bones."

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April 10: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited
“He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.”

An ideal night in Paris were I to have a the ability to time travel would be watching Josephine Baker perform while I indulge in too much wine and escargot. Then Oliver Nelson plays over dessert and a nice little spliff smuggled from Amsterdam.

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