August.
This month will be a year.
It will already be a year.
I have made no headway in trying to get any of his writings together. I have barely cracked the surface of copying and pasting all of his blogs over the years like he asked me to do. One blog was shut down since it was on a pay site. Luckily I happened to look in his email the day before I would've had to pay something like $60 to reinstate the site on top of renewing it. It's probably still too early, but the problem with the digital world is that it can disappear. One Yahoo email address that he had for 15 years or more was completely wiped out. They said that he hadn't logged in to it in over a year. Having your email connected on your smartphone is not considered logging in, I suppose I learned that the hard way.
I feel in some ways that I am the only one who will ever see the things that I find and put together. I know I want to do it for him and for me, but it doesn't stop you from questioning if it really matters or not. It's like all the cassettes of "music" that I have recorded dating back to high school, no one but myself wants to hear any of it. And that's fine, I'm ok with that. I just wish that the feelings that I have for the time period that the things were recorded could be attached to the music also. Like listening to certain music that you grew up with. Our children will never fulling get feelings that one has for certain things. I look at Harry's books or CDs for example, and wonder which ones held special places for him. Certain phrases that stuck with him. Like for me there is a song by Depeche Mode that always sticks in my head from the song Judas. "Is simplicity best, or simply the easiest". For some reason that has always stuck in my head. I think about it when I record any music. Am I just being lazy or is some of it best left "simplistic"?
That leads me to "August", the guitar track that I recorded this past Sunday. I recorded it, but had no idea what to name it or what to do with it. I have a fellow musician from the Linear Obsessional label that I am friends with on Facebook. He had a post about how August holds bad memories for him. Like him, Harry did not like August. Harry said that a lot of the bad things that happened to him, happened in August. A few weeks before he was gone, he said that he wasn't going to make it through August. Apparently he was correct. So with all these thoughts on August, that seemed like an appropriate title. William S. Burroughs was found of the line from the poem "Flammonde" by Edwin Arlington Robinson "We cannot know how much we learn / from those who will never return"
The accompanying photo was found in Harry's phone. The photo is taking by Harry looking out from his back porch.
In 2007, the year before my stroke, I figured out how to use FL Studio and VST Host to turn my computer into an effects box, and using the stereo outputs of my Zoom 9002, use Ableton Live on an ancient Mac G4 as the other side, and with some VST plugins named "Spat-" render the whole mess in 5.1 sound in my room at the warehouse space where we lived, and the result was somewhat similar to your recording. Only slower because of the annoying latency.
ReplyDeleteI have had a mental tendency to plug events into the music I listen to for pretty much ever. It can sometimes be annoying to the people who know me, but after doing it for so long I just sort of flash on lyrics that feel connected to events and sometimes, upon examination, eerily so.
These are the lyrics to the Rilo Kiley song "August":
August
I'll see you soon
Under yellow moons
Where i'll gather what's left of you
And august
I'm on your side
Or did i speak too soon
Now we cross the great divide
Someday we'll meet beyond the stars and it'll be
Away from here
Someday we'll meet beyond the time and the bars and it'll be
Away from here
August
August of last year
Before the leaves disappeared
Told me you were not the one
August
Something in your eyes
Or was it that you lied
Told me not to take it to heart
Someday we'll meet beyond the stars and it'll be
Away…
Thank you for posting again, and I hope you are surviving the apocalypse as well as could be expected.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
I still miss him, and yet I didn't know Harry at all.
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful and appropriate photo by Harry to accompany this post. A year already? Hard to believe. Yet here it is.
ReplyDeletewhat Debra said.
DeleteBlogwalking here from Malaysia :)
ReplyDeleteAt least it wasn’t dragons....
ReplyDeleteHe's still part of us. He'll always be.
ReplyDeleteI spent the day at Fascist Dyke Motors the other day to reminisce. An original fellow your brother, who's still with us in more than memory ...
ReplyDeletebj in CO
Every so often, I read an old blog and see a comment from Harry, and then I come here to see if the whole thing was just a bad dream, but he's still gone and I miss him. Thanks for posting here every once in a while.
ReplyDelete