Yeah. It’ll break your heart. Ben Lee covers the entire new Against Me album puts a whole new spin on it. Gut wrenchingly beautiful. Here is a link to the scenestars post and within it you can find links to download the tracks. “Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart” and “Thrash Unreal” are amazing even without the bombast and ire of Tom Gabel’s rough delivery. Ben Lee does some honest cover work here. This is happening now? I thought this whole covering a song thing was sort of what bands did in the 60’s? Let alone an entire album. Magic.
Category Archives: Ben Lee
Social Insurgent pt. 1
I’m in a crowded room drenched in red, drowning in glare
Where every whispered assumption and every silent condemnation
Is testament to the bomb strapped to my chest.
One might say, “he commands the attention of a room.”
As the nitroglycerin is kissed by cellular trigger.
Ring, ring, ring.
In appreciation
Thanks to the one-man on the bar stool,
You’ve given me a fresh supply of not being able to.
Its not bad or great,
Just a laundry list of what the fuck?
And whose to blame?
I can always hit mutate,
Replicate like bacteria and facilitate those situations
Where it feels like gravity is another investor in my demise.
Unwilling to let the overhead float above the margins.
We’re drinking the error
And I’m oh-so-consolable
By the amount of hope that has been shoved up my ass
Argument Tactics
Words as accidents
Covered by the assurance
They will be repeated,
Used as blunt objects,
Or surgical tools,
To reopen old wounds
How many stitches does it take,
To close up that hurt?
Does your indemnity plan
cover failure of internal editing?
Metastasized in the middle of an argument.
Better take out another policy
Once this is done.
Government of the Mind
Outsourcing torture.
Can you outrun the government of the mind? It’s all in the head, the diplomatic approach to talking yourself out of things. The kind of bravado reserved for youth and narcissistic types, who, at some point in the life cycle will put enough red tape into the daily affirmation of self-conscious behavior to sum up a personal coup.
That’s the distance put in place where your eyes see nothing but the self. Id is deleted. And where does the fight begin? It begs the question; what am I without my own backdrop, red carpet, limo chartered lifestyle? And is it set in place by the television, the media, the radio and Internet and advertisements that push skin? Its time to redirect our values, to move the congress of thought into a new paradigm. The one where fear is the reality of boredom.
You come home and turn on the lights after an hour long commute, listening to all the exposition on the radio or the ‘art’ of the music to your life’s soundtrack is based around. You identify – a thing that helps your justification of certain decisions like, ‘What would Calvin Kline do?’
Or, “Does this shirt make me look fat?”
Who decides and when does the order come down from the top administration officials?
How do you measure success?
You can’t outrun time! You only continue on a path that is wrought with danger and self-deprecation. And in the half-light of the evening, that blue glow of cathode rays from the television pulpit dictates your pattern(s).
A.) What to wear.
B.) What to eat
C.) When to wear it
D.) When to ingest it.
It’s a ritual based on culture – the culture of the corporation that has taken over your internal government. What will your peers think? What motivates their thought? You are insignificant so you compensate by posturing yourself to be amicable in all situations. Like a dog at your heels with a nose of shit, licking the hand that feeds in an attempt at intimacy.
We are the duplicates. Made of atoms, whispering individuality as a stage play based on someone else’s idea of what life is supposed to be. We are the lost. Emasculated by our mothers and wives.
Cut from the cloth of indifference.
Scavengers feeding on apathy. With a hidden agenda that makes us detainees of our own prison.
The gentle is our ghost of feigned chivalry…
From the Sons to the Sun – monkeys running things down here…
Bleak:
Some mountain top village, a villain peering from a tower down at the ant sized humans below. The all seeing eye burns, a magnifying glass in the hand of a giant, snuffing out lives for entertainment.
“Deadliest attack by insurgents since the fall of Fallujah.” Those lines leak into the system, cross the wires, disseminate their data into the farthest regions to be cast aside and remembered in the late hours, before complete system shut down. Flash of body parts, smell of diesel and burnt asphalt in desert sun. Oil skimmed off the top of the Euphrates, that artery of the Fertile Crescent, pumping more than blood from an ambushed convoy into those verdant hills and outlying fields.
Count the stars. Kiss the solar system. 98 million miles and one new planet discovered, or moon.
and those ceramic heat tiles on the shuttle; “it’s a clunker, piece of shit car,” in orbit, sent up by baboons and rhesus monkeys in starch white short sleeved button up and collared dress shirts, coffee stains, no more smoking in the control room.
It signifies our lack of importance.
It signifies our obsession with god.
To shoot the distance, close the gap to heaven and escape our earthly vessel to feel complete. And then it becomes clear for just a second through the haze – a cylinder of sun – that nucleus of us – shines down into a swath of land, half burned by incendiaries, the other half covered in elephant grass that sways in the low breeze.
It’s the Oreo effect.
It is this wishful thinking that will do us in.
one end to the other
chester shambleton jammed some good horn. pants triscari worked that mic like a pole dancer in a rap video. its all connected to a lynchian theme of sex and anticipation. what do we wait for? is it the skin? the endorphin rush of conquering new skin…or old skin peeling away to reveal the layers of 11 years spinning into a cacophony of something real. they tell you it matters. they tell you its all for naught. they tell you it makes a hell of a soundtrack to the apocalypse. we like the blue box. it warms us with its mystery . and then the days that we wonder what the hell it is we’re doing typing away, picking the flesh from our bones and selling our wares, we realize that those that came before came a lot. when they were fucking…ahem! right?
A Coat of Red Paint In Hell 