One of the greatest reasons to love the latest Hold Steady record, Boys and Girls In America, is for the way that lead singer Craig Finn says something so contemporary and modern about an unchanging subject: the effect of the opposite sex on each other and the innumerable times when alcohol and drug taking enter the story. Think about it. It really is a timeless thought. I watched most of the first season of Rome on DVD. Julius Caesar, Calpurnia and the rest of the lot didn’t get along with each other any better than we do these days. There may have been even more drugs and liquor then — great supplies. Looking for another purview into these matters of man versus woman (with love and squalor), the ears stop at Drakkar Sauna’s 2006 release, Jabraham Lincoln, an album that aims to get at the crux of the matter through a different perspective. It calls out the pettiness of love and exposes it as a fickle, fickle creature with ill intentions. There are so many ways love goes wrong, but it’s ultimately just the people who malfunction, not the feeling they originally fell under the spell of. The songs on Jabraham Lincoln — right up there with Okay Paddy’s album title: The Cactus Has A Point for best title of the year just ended — are more like correspondences of the early 1900s, as if Samuel Clemens were trying to woo a hot seamstress or the general store owner’s daughter, but doing it in a way that would never conceivably work on any available chick regardless of the era or the kind of cologne the suitor wore. They cut to the very quick of the matter and then throw in some death or death-like violence to make things interesting — ’scuse me — more interesting. Wallace J. Cochran, one half of this venerable pair of Kansans, whose voices play kissing cousins with each other like billowing smokestacks, appears to have cut the image of Buffalo Bill Cody (a hometown hero of ours here near the Daytrotter headquarters) out of a magazine and taken it to the local indie salon in town saying, “Make me like him.” But rather than snowy white hair and equal handlebar mustache, he goes for the brown as a grizzly look. He gives off the feel of a Wild West hotelier or the cheerful version of the man in town sizing people and constructing them their very own cedar coffins. His week just after Christmas — or a dream he had — reminded me of one I had when I was younger in which the Macho Man Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth ran out of gas on our farm and we filled up their tank. When I woke up the next day, realizing it didn’t happen, school was a bitch. Although I didn’t know that word then, that’s what it was.

Five Memories (12-28-06 – 01-04-07)
One: My nephew, Sam, is the middle of three boys. He is three years old and a preternatural insomniac. He looks like a smooth, blonde miniature of my grandpa John. When he throws a ball at you, as he is apt, he doesn’t bend his elbow, but slings it like a hobo chucking his bindle. He calls his older brother Dudey (rhymes with ‘booty’) and his younger brother Baby. The first best thing that happened last week was hearing Sam say, “Dudey, I have gum for you. Dudey? Baby, where’s Dudey?”

Two: I do not like being told that I have a sensitive stomach. I do not like being told that I am in anyway sensitive. I do not like it because it is too critical. Why this would ever come up is that I tend to vomit an awful lot. This happened last week, on Thursday. And as much as I don’t like opening myself up for criticism, I like, every once in a while, to spend all night vomiting. I like to dry heave until I’m delirious. I like to be delirious, I like to sweat and have chills. I like to pretend I’m dying, but then get well.

Three: Oliverio Girondo wrote a book in Spanish called, En La Masmedula, which I have heard is untranslatable. There is, however, a poem from the book called, “The Pure No,” that has been anthologized and last week I read it and it is this: NO/ the inovulate no/ the no-show no/ the no-o/ the primocosmic soup of polluto-zero noes/ / going no no no/ and no-o/ and no in multimono to the amorphous sicko no-o/ not Mephisto/ not in excelsis Deo/ soundless sexless not in orbit/ the obdurate non-osseous no-o in unisolo unmodulo/ non-porous and non-nodulose/with no ego nor furrow nor hollow/ the macro not from dust no/ the no more everything/nothing no/ the pure no/ minus no

Four: I had a dream while I was in Michigan and in the dream, I asked Jeff to stop taking drugs, for in the dream he was taking a bunch of drugs. To Jeff, in the dream, this violated a pact between us and our relationship was dissolute. He began to punch me. At first I tried to avoid the blows, but eventually I became offended and enraged and we began to fight. Almost every time either of us threw a punch, it would hit the other fellow’s fist, but continue to fight we did, until I awoke. This was one of those deep, intense dreams it takes you several hours to really get out of, upon waking. I had to be convinced it hadn’t happened. Even after being convinced, I was still angry with Jeff. I’m still angry with him, now, several days later. I’ve done this several times in my life; gotten angry with people for things they’ve done in my dreams and always take great pleasure in the consequences.

Five: Gerald Ford died the day I left for Michigan and was buried the day I left. The evening of the second, I stood inside the Gerald Ford museum in Grand Rapids with the rest of my family, looking at the fifty-seven thousand Michiganders who lined up to pay their respects to this decent man. No one in that building, not one of my aunts or uncles, nor any of my cousins; none of the administrators of his legacy or library, nor any member of the media allowed in that hallowed space were under any delusion that he had been a formidable President. But we mourn him all the same. Happy New Year.

Drakkar Sauna Daytrotter Session
Drakkar Sauna’s Official Site