Sunday, May 24, 2009

Song Of The Week: "Vertigo Index" (Discordance Axis)

I'm re-reading The Crying Of Lot 49 right now. For some reason Oedipa's futile scraping for the truth and her association of the San Narciso landscape with a circuit board reminded me of "Vertigo Index." Now that I've re-read the lyrics, I want to watch Brazil again. And re-read Neuromancer. Is summer vacation here yet?

"Vertigo Index"

Alienation washes over me, downloading world apartment horror
Wheezing through tea stained lungs comes a voice piped in from a
vacuum

A tiled grove of telephone wires, rabbit ears and power lines
Insinuated in the residential disintegration that assassinates the sky

And now my being is networked
To be shared among us all.
And my world falls back into place
Or do I fall back into place In my world.

3 comments:

Chairmaker said...

Good song- It's hard to go wrong with Discordance Axis.

Brazil & Neuromancer are definitely worth revisiting, I can't say that I've loved Gibson's more recent stuff (it seems to me the closer he moves to present time in his books, the less he has to say), but there's a sort of sleazy cool to Neuromancer that I loved when I first read it as a teenager and still do (though I have to say that after reading about Gibson's Chiba city, I found the real thing rather pedestrian- my expectations of Japan had been formed mostly by William Gibson, Akira and Blade Runner.)

Batguano said...

Yeah, I haven't heard anything great about recent Gibson stuff either. But Necromancer is a fave-- the "sleazy cool" you mentioned and that hard tech-noir language; just great!

Batguano said...

Oops, I meant NEUROmancer. I keep doing that! A Freudian thing?