The mid-period Cale track to stop your next social function cold.
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A trying-hard-to-be-critical review of the works of John Cale.
Fragments of a Cale Season by Inverarity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
a heap of broken images
The Man
A trying-hard-to-be-critical review of the works of John Cale.
The Music
Albums
- New York in the 1960s
- The Velvet Underground
- Vintage Violence
- Church of Anthrax
- The Academy in Peril
- Paris 1919
- Fear
- Slow Dazzle
- Helen of Troy
- Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
- Sabotage/Live
- Honi Soit
- Music for a New Society
- Live at Rockpalast
- Caribbean Sunset
- John Cale Comes Alive
- Artificial Intelligence
- Words for the Dying
- Songs for Drella
- Wrong Way Up
- Fragments of a Rainy Season
- Last Day on Earth
- Walking on Locusts
- 5 Tracks
- HoboSapiens
- blackAcetate
- Circus Live
- Extra Playful
- Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood
- Soundtracks
- Non-album Tracks
Blog Archive
- November 2013 (1)
- October 2013 (3)
- September 2013 (7)
- August 2013 (1)
- February 2013 (1)
- March 2012 (1)
- January 2012 (1)
- December 2011 (2)
- November 2011 (1)
- November 2010 (1)
- November 2009 (1)
- September 2009 (1)
- June 2009 (1)
- May 2009 (1)
- March 2009 (1)
- January 2009 (4)
- November 2008 (3)
- August 2008 (3)
- July 2008 (1)
- May 2008 (2)
- April 2008 (4)
- March 2008 (7)
- February 2008 (8)
- January 2008 (5)
- December 2007 (10)
- November 2007 (6)
- October 2007 (6)
- September 2007 (11)
- August 2007 (18)
- July 2007 (16)
- June 2007 (13)
- May 2007 (19)
Essential Cale Resources
- Fear is a Man's Best Friend (is #1)
- FIAMBF (Facebook)
- I Bet I Can't Find 100,000 People Who Know John Cale! (great Facebook page)
- We Know John Cale (twitter)
- Cale official site
- Cale official Facebook page
- The John Cale Homepage (useful older site)
- The making of Honi Soit (fascinating)
- Cale on Wikipedia
Other Single-Artist Blogs
Creative Commons License
Fragments of a Cale Season by Inverarity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
CONTACT: phonetically, arr dot pii dot in-ver-rar-i-ty. At geemail.
6 comments:
...or, "Waiter, there's a c**t in my eye."
Oh come on, details!
hahaha. We think he used to read this to his daughter as a bedtime story.
This is a great song. It manages to be creepy and compelling at the same time. Slow Dazzle is such a brilliant record. It is definitely one of my favorites.
I think “The Jeweller” is an interesting piece in the way that—considering where it sits in Cale’s career—it simultaneously looks forward and backward. In one sense it’s a callback to the VU (“The Gift”), while also anticipating the monologues of future records, leading up to Music For A New Society, where he probably took the “difficult listening” angle as far as he could.
It’s a neat bit of body-horror—a make-believe David Cronenberg movie, maybe an imaginary outtake from Dead Ringers—but such things usually work best when you play them deadpan; and ultimately Cale oversells it, being (as always) too in love with the sound of the language to simply let the images lie.
My favorite/least favorite thing about the track is the way he randomly throws in nonsequitur words and phrases: erotic existence (unless this is in the Platonic sense), "What does this word mean?" "Nothing for dessert, sir?", in Hawaii only 10am, "follicle and perfectly formed."
In general, though, compared to the tight, wry, splattery humor of (Lou Reed's) The Gift or the straitjacketed epiphanic ascension of Sanities, indeed compared to other microstories of metamorphosis and madness by authors like Kafka and Stanley Donwood, this one's ponderous and pretentious ("like the flow of substance, however varied, into thatlysergic entity known as the black hole").
I'm sure it's intended to be satirical - the ludicrous egoism of the character and the parodic wordiness of his inner monologue are too extreme not to be - but like Jack said, it's oversold.
I do quite like the drone, though!
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