In Medias Res: Friday PSTSS: "Birdhouse in Your Soul"

Friday, May 23, 2008

Friday PSTSS: "Birdhouse in Your Soul"

This actually isn't my favorite tune off of They Might Be Giant's 1990 album Flood, which actually isn't my favorite TMBG's album either. For the former, I think, the answer is either the surrealistic "They Might Be Giants" (if only for the completely mad line, "Everyone needs to hang on tighter / just to keep from being thrown to the wolves"), the trenchantly minimalistic "Minimum Wage" (which consists of nothing but a whip cracking), or "Particle Man" (which I can't listen to now without hearing the Bob's brilliant calliope cover, complete with Matthew "Bob" Stull shouting out in the middle of song, for no apparent reason, "Waiter!"). Truly, it's a great recording, stuffed with brilliant, funny, weird tunes. But as I said, out of all their recordings, I'm not sure it's their best, I think; that title I would give to their 2002 kids' album, No!, if only because I love singing "Where Do They Make Balloons?" with my kids.

Still, here we go with TMBG's biggest mainstream hit. A tale of love and obsession, of history and theology, it's the sort of thing that Ray Bradbury could have turned into a fabulous, freaky sci-fi/horror/romance. ("Honey, our little night light has been talking to me, and I think it loves me, and I think it's going to kill you to get at me." "That's nice, dear.")

I'm your only friend--
I'm not your only friend--
but I'm a little glowing friend--
but really I'm not actually your friend--
but I am...

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
who watches over you.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.
Not to put too fine a point on it:
say I'm the only bee in your bonnet.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.

I have a secret to tell
from my electrical well;
it's a simple message and I'm leaving out the whistles and bells.
So the room must listen to me
filibuster vigilantly.
My name is blue canary one note spelled l-i-t-e.
My story's infinite--
like the Longines Symphonette it doesn't rest.

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
who watches over you.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.
Not to put too fine a point on it:
say I'm the only bee in your bonnet.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.

I'm your only friend--
I'm not your only friend--
But I'm a little glowing friend--
But really I'm not actually your friend--
But I am...

There's a picture opposite me
of my primitive ancestry,
which stood on rocky shores and kept the beaches shipwreck free.
Though I respect that a lot
I'd be fired if that were my job,
after killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts.
Bluebird of friendliness--
like guardian angels its always near.

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
who watches over you.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.
Not to put too fine a point on it:
say I'm the only bee in your bonnet.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.

(And while you're at it,
keep the nightlight on inside
the birdhouse in your soul.)

Not to put too fine a point on it:
say I'm the only bee in your bonnet.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch (and while you're at it)
who watches over you (keep the nightlight on inside the)
Make a little birdhouse in your soul (birdhouse in your soul)

Not to put too fine a point on it:
say I'm the only bee in your bonnet.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch (and while you're at it)
who watches over you (keep the nightlight on inside the)
Make a little birdhouse in your soul (birdhouse in your soul)

Not to put too fine a point on it:
say I'm the only bee in your bonnet.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: I would have to go with "Istanbul (not Constantinople)" as my "favorite" although I also strongly favor "Your racist Friend"

for me, Flood totally evoked the college years- it seemed that it practically was issued as part of the furnishings for all the dorm rooms (men's dorm rooms also got Jane's Addiction, and the women got the Little Mermaid soundtrack)

Now that i've got a little one, No is on fairly regular rotation- and especially "Where do they make baloons" As far as I can see, you have good taste.; Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Russell Arben Fox said...: Eric,

Your comment brings back all sorts of undergraduate memories for me as well. There was a campus acappella group that included some old friends of mine, and they did a wonderful "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" cover. "Your Racist Friend" was of course a big favorite as well. And I left out one of my favorite memories: a radical friend of mine giving a Marxist reading of "Particle Man," putting ironic emphasis on how Universe Man is "usually kind to Smaller Man."

Jane's Addiction and the Little Mermaid soundtrack...man, suddenly it's 1989-1991 all over again.

Glad your kids like No, and thanks for the kind words.; Tuesday, May 27, 2008

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"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Friday, May 23, 2008

Friday PSTSS: "Birdhouse in Your Soul"

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