BRMC

My boyfriend's band is opening for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club tomorrow, and I am so excited. For them. And to see the band, who I have loved since 2000, when I heard their first album. That's not my favourite one though, rather, it's Howl. Titled for Ginsberg's infamous poem, it's a paean of sorts to the beat poets of the city the band grew up in. I saw 'Howl' at the film festival the other night too, incidentally - it was wonderful, inspiring, if tainted with some kind of incongruous animation.

"Howl", along with the rest of the new songs played tonight, has a near animal intensity-- a sharp contrast to the icy detachment on previous records. Hayes breathily whispers "ha-ha-howl" over Jago's lurching, shuffling beat while Turner's bass line creeps close behind. Even the older songs throb and pulse with instinctual fervor.

And just to finish, here is an excerpt from Ginsberg's poem. It's been rolling round in my head all week.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
              madness, starving hysterical naked, 
       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
              looking for an angry fix, 
       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- 
              ery of night, 
       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
              contemplating jazz, 
       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 
              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- 
              ment roofs illuminated, 
       who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 
              hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 
              among the scholars of war, 
       who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
              publishing obscene odes on the windows of the 
              skull, 
       who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- 
              ing their money in wastebaskets and listening 
              to the Terror through the wall, 
       who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 
              Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 
       who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 

torsos night after night...