Showing posts with label Blues lyrics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blues lyrics. Show all posts

Friday, March 24, 2023

Blue Vine

 

Sinister blue vine

In the jungle of your mind

Reaching out to pull you in

Drag you down to blues again.

Sinister blue vine.

 

I am ashamed

To feel so bad

When life's all right

And things are fine.

 

Still sometimes sadness

Smothers me

Like a wicked jungle vine--

A sinister blue vine.

 

It grabs and grips you

On your path

And pulls you off

Your daily way.

 

It wraps you in

Its greasy branches

Sinks you, drowns you

In quicksand day.

 

Sinister blue vine

In the jungle of your mind

Reaching out to pull you in

Drag you down to blues again.

Sinister blue vine.


Grab a machete

Cut and slash

Rip away that awful vine

Find that path

Too feeling fine. 

Damn that sinister blue vine. 


hans ostrom 2023

Friday, January 2, 2015

"His Locomotive"


His locomotive was powered by
SHAME-AND-LUST, LUST-AND-SHAME.
Yeah, his locomotive was powered by
SHAME-AND-LUST, LUST-AND-SHAME.
He hauled that erratic freight across
a mighty muddy plain.


hans ostrom 2015







Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Sugar Blues

If I cry for the sugar,
that don't mean the sugar's mine.
Say if I cry for the sugar,
doesn't mean the sugar's mine.
But if you should own the sugar,
doesn't mean the system's fine.

Did you work for the sugar?
I bet your answer's Yes and No.
Ah, did you work for your sugar?
Oh, yeah: the answer's Yes and No.
You didn't do a lick of work,
but yes you put up half the dough.

Wealth don't have a conscience.
It gets as far as maybe guilt.
Wealth don't have no conscience,
only gets as far as guilt.
Right-and-wrong will never bother
the fortress that the wealthy built.

Sugar blues, sugar blues.
Somebody else has got the sweet.
Sugar blues, sugar blues.
I'll never get enough of sweet.
I'm a lost soul on a corner,
a fallen saint out on the street.


copyright hans ostrom 2014

Monday, October 24, 2011

Big Guitar Blues

Big Guitar Blues

   Inspired by three works of art (assemblage and acrylic paint) by Becky Frehse:  
Col Legno Battuto, Divisi รก Due, and Playing By Heart (2010)


An old guitar enlarges, disrupts my evening, goes
through the roof, and multiplies its frets on up. I fetch
a step-ladder and start climbing between the d
and f strings. In night-air soon wind strums strings
and they buzz me to my bones. It doesn’t take long
to climb past that circular cave-mouth (weird echoes)
and get  too high—nice view of city lights: I feel
as if  I had to mention  that. Knuckles numb,

I start to hum a song I think the strings imply,
as now I hear all six and keep on climbing. Where
does this neck end? Won’t neighbors have reported
this by now? Mist has wetted frets. I slip, barely
hook my elbow on the pipe-sized string, recover.

I’m old, cold, and tired. Now one by one, each string
groans like a different-voiced, mournful beast. Somewhere
in clouds, some picker’s  tuning up. O man, O woman,
I got me some of them gargantuan guitar blues,
and I got my slippers on, not shoes.


Hans Ostrom 2011

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Positionality?














If you hang around academics who teach in the humanities, then you have my condolences. Just kidding. Before that rude clause intruded, I was about to write . . . then you will eventually hear the terms "subject-position" or "positionality."

No, the words don't refer to yoga or Zen, or to grammar, or to sports, in which one may play different positions.

They refer to what used to be called something like "point of view" or "perspective."

Yesterday my point of view was pretty glum. In fact, I may have had the blues--or "the blue-devils," as Abraham Lincoln referred to the condition. But I managed to get some perspective on my perspective by evening (nice word, evening). Good grief, now the lyric, "I just dropped in to see what condition my condition is in," is in my head--Kenny Rogers and the First Edition--help!

Anyway, my perspective, a couple of close advisors, and I watched a film from the Eighties, Diva. French film, 1981. And--surprise!--it was as good as if not better than I had remembered it, and I hadn't seen it since 1981. It is visually superb without being mannered.

In part in concerns electronic recording, and although the equipment is antique and therefore potentially laughable, the writers and directors don't make too much of the technology. Recording and plot mix with the ethics of recording, so you don't focus on extinct things like cassettes. Toss in just a bit of Zen, opera (and music in general), race, gender, wit, and exploitation, and you have a terrific movie, and one that knows its limits. It's one of those films that tries just hard enough but not too hard.

I did notice how much longer scenes from Eighties movies are. There's very little manic camera-work and editing-on-speed that characterizes most feature-films today. I think the attention-span of visual-image consumers now can't span very much.

Oh, and the diva happens to be a diva in real life: Jessye Norman, American opera-singer.

But back to "positionality." Why was a funny new word like that necessary to invent? Well, that's partly what academics do. They invent new words. Also, the emphasis is placed on what a person or a character in a novel or a writer does, as opposed to what that person sees or thinks, so there's a focus on power or (wait for it) "agency." Also, one may speak of "positions" in relation to one another. (Wow. Go crazy.) Of course, there's some recent post-modern, post-Structuralist history to the shift in terminology, but we needn't go into that.


Positionality

I've misplaced my subject-position. It happens.
According to the post-modernist rulebook, which
is only virtual, my default positionality is therefore
one of befuddlement, which could be a ruse, except
a ruse seems so pre-modern, even atavistic. One
thing's certain: I'm not a mystic. Positionality
is such a tricky business. If you write or speak

the word, "positionality," then you've pretty much
positioned yourself into a pretentious corner, and
the commonly insensitive Anglo-Saxon ax will fall
on your multi-syllabic Deluxe Latinate Impressor,
which comes with its two-speed abstractionator.

Cut to: a meadow. My subject-position transport-
system, a hot-air balloon, lies sideways and un-
inflated, mere fabric amidst flax-stubble. This
is Not A Problem. This is Laugh Out Loud.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Wheels, Money, Women, Soul


I think most poets have a tough time writing song-lyrics because song-lyrics have to be so simple and spare, and they have to have broad appeal. Not all of the songs Johnny Cash wrote were good, but when he was good, he was very, very good--because of the simplicity and honesty of the phrasing, and because he had a way of speaking to a broad audience without being bland or simple-minded. In fact, lyrics like those in "Folsom Prison Blues" are rather the opposite of bland.


At any rate, I give song-lyric-writing a try from time to time, mainly to remind myself I'm no good at it. I decided to write some blues lyrics, and let me be the first to point out, derisively, that a middle-aged academic blogger may not be the figure who springs to mind when one thinks about the blues tradition. At the same time, I'm not pretending to "sing the blues," nor am I suggesting that nobody knows the trouble I've seen. To some degree, this is a technical experiment. I asked myself what men--traditionally defined, I admit--tend to have trouble with. Of course, the list created in response to that question might stretch from here to the Mississippi Delta, so I tried to stick to basics, and I came up with automobiles ["wheels"], money [employment; prudent spending]; women [matters of the heart]; and soul [the spiritual dimensions]. With the basics identified, I wrote the lyrics, with mixed results, presented here for inspection. Can these blues be saved?! I suspect not. Robert Johnson, please pray for me. But I enjoyed the exercise.


Wheels, Money, Women, and Soul


I got troubles with my transport.
My car is broke. The bus don’t run.
I got troubles with my transport.
My car is broke. The bus don’t run.
If I was rich and had a limo,
I’d ride from dusk to rising sun.

I got troubles with the money.
It goes out but don’t come in.
I got troubles with the money
Going out, not coming in.
I’d pray to God for riches,
But they tell me it’s a sin.

I got troubles with the women.
They play me bad and do me wrong.
Always falling for a woman
Who plays me bad and does me wrong.
I’m waiting for the woman
Who’ll do me right and love me long.

I got troubles with my soul, now.
It’s tired of war and aches for peace.
I’m troubled deep in my soul, son.
It’s tired of war and aches for peace.
I don’t like to admit it, but
Sometimes I pray for sweet release.

[Bridge:]

Wheels, money, women, and soul.
The ride, the green, the girls, my soul.
I’m oh-for-four in these essentials.
Can’t cross the bridge, can’t pay the toll.