Tim Lane's Blog, page 39

New Order's "True Faith" Rings True

I didn't obsess on this song too much when it came out. As a pretty huge NO fan, I liked it, I listened to it, but I didn't add it to my Top Ten New Order songs list. I also don't remember paying much attention to the lyrics. My bad. It's a good song. The lyrics are not shallow. And, now, they really resonate.

This cover of "True Faith" by Flunk is only going to appeal to a certain fan, but I dig it.

True Faith

I feel so extraordinary

Something's got a hold on me

I get this feeling I'm in motion

A sudden sense of liberty

I don't care 'cause I'm not there

And I don't care if I'm here tomorrow

Again and again I've taken too much

Of the things that cost you too much

I used to think that the day would never come

I'd see delight in the shade of the morning sun

My morning sun is the drug that brings me near

To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear

I used to think that the day would never come

That my life would depend on the morning sun

When I was a very small boy

Very small boys talked to me

Now that we've grown up together

They're afraid of what they see

That's the price that we all pay

And the value of destiny comes to nothing

I can't tell you where we're going

I guess there was just no way of knowing

I used to think that the day would never come

I'd see delight in the shade of the morning sun

My morning sun is the drug that brings me near

To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear

I used to think that the day would never come

That my life would depend on the morning sun

I feel so extraordinary

Something's got a hold on me

I get this feeling I'm in motion

A sudden sense of liberty

The chances are we've gone too far

You took my time and you took my money

Now I fear you've left me standing

In a world that's so demanding

I used to think that the day would never come

I'd see delight in the shade of the morning sun

My morning sun is the drug that brings me near

To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear

I used to think that the day would never come

That my life would depend on the morning sun

I used to think that the day would never come

I'd see delight in the shade of the morning sun

My morning sun is the drug that brings me near

To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear

I used to think that the day would never come

That my life would depend on the morning sun

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Bernard Sumner / Gillian Gilbert / Peter Hook / Stephen Eric Hague / Stephen Paul David Morris

True Faith lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Briefly Philosophizing the Cover Song & Soccer Mommy

How should a band approach a cover? As with most things, I’m torn. Nothing is simple. Life is a multiplicity of ideas and realities.

Sometimes I like a cover that is very straightforward and true to the original. But why, you might ask, when we already have the original? I don’t know. Sometimes I like it when an artist has extended the idea of the cover the same way a composer might reinterpret another classical composition. But if it’s too exotic, well, sometimes that doesn’t work for me. I don’t know. I don’t know why I bother with covers, when there’s always the original. I guess it’s a need for novelty, from time to time. I guess it’s because some bands really do a good job of paying tribute to a band or a song they really love. Maybe that’s it: love.

Love looks everywhere. Or it at least looks. Because it is hopeful.

I hope you enjoy these new playlists. You can find me on Spotify as Tim Lane and follow my playlists.

I am especially fond of covers of The Cars song, “Drive.” Be sure to scroll all the way down for the vid of Soccer Mommy covering this tune.

Your Silent Face Available Now














Galleries

fiction, art, poetry

Your Silent Face: The Playlist

Lila, Deftones, Sade Cover

It’s hard to explain the bond between humans and animals. #mainecoon

A New Amazon Review, Aimee Mann & Avalanche

Dan Cronin and I have had a few moments in our formative years that we will always cherish. He left this review of Your Silent Face at Amazon. Below the review, I have left the Spotify playlist which is the companion to my novel, as well as links to all the places where my digital novel can be purchased.

Check out other reviews of YSF at Amazon, and find me on Spotify for more 80s playlists.

Oh, I’ve also left Aimee Mann’s single that came out in September—a Leonard Cohen cover of ‘Avalanche.’

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2020

Terrific read in these covid times. Take a walk back through the mid 80's as a young adult trying to navigate what it means to leave the family home and establish his (or her) identity. Go back to the underground punk rock shows, the alternative music bars, scraping together the change in your pocket for a final beer at last call.

Clock in at your minimum wage job bagging groceries at your locally owned market looking at your co-workers with equal amount distain, dread, and camaraderie.

Walk through the doors at the clubs. Bask in their music that made the 80s: Joy Division, the Cure, Depeche Mode, or whatever is blasting in your mental playlist.

Who are your friends, your peers? Who do you emulate at the scene? Who have you misjudged and who are you going home with when the bar closes?

I loved being able to revisit this time and this place in my life. Thank you Mr. Lane for picking me up in a beat up Buick Skylark and taking me back to downtown Flint for another visit.

Your Silent Face

By Lane, Tim



Buy on Amazon









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Your Silent Face Available Now

Photo credit: Greg Cristman

Entanglement

This is one of those rare paintings of mine that unfolds in one sitting over the course of a protracted afternoon. I lost track of time. After about two hours in, I began to struggle with it. It was a like a game of chess; I had managed the opening well enough, but I was floundering in the middle game.

I tried to adjourn the game for another day, but it nagged at me. I kept going. I pushed the painting until I was pleased with it once again, and then I decided to just try to finish it.

I hope you like it. It’s part of The Sublime series, and it is also in the shop (Art for Sale). The Sublime series reflects my preoccupation with quantum mechanics, first contact and the singularity.

Entanglement, 2020

The Sublime

art

Original Art for Sale

And I See Your True Colors Shining Through

Was able to put some more funds into new spray paint and brushes! Love it.

Love Cyndi Lauper, too.

New Review

There is a new review of Your Silent Face at Amazon!

“Great read

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2020

Verified Purchase

Your Silent Face follows the emerging adult, Stuart, through his first summer at home after his first year away at college. It is set in the mid-80’s in the struggling industrial midwest city of Flint. The novel beautifully weaves together the struggles of Stuart as he tries to figure himself out, with the 80’s new wave music scene. There is music, alcohol, drugs, dancing, fighting (including a basketball fight), graffiti, poetry, sex, chess, and a mysterious Viking. Read it! I loved it and am hoping to hear more from author, Tim Lane.

—Mary M”

You can check out the other reviews here.

Day of the Lords

New painting in The Sublime series. I always need the warm pinks and peaches in the winter.

I’ve been listening to a new Spotify playlist a lot lately: Should Have Known Better. Check it out and follow.

Been reading Animals, by Emma Jane Unsworth.

Day of the Lords, 2020

The Sublime

art

Sock Creature Challenge

Lansing Art Gallery’s education director, Michelle Carlson, created a sock creature challenge for local budding creatives and other community members.

Challenge accepted!

Michelle Carlson serves as Education Director for the Gallery, simultaneously coordinating robust educational programming for all ages. Michelle’s experience involves more than 10 years in the arts community in the greater Lansing area, including her previous role serving as the Executive Director for the East Lansing Art Festival. Throughout her professional career, Michelle has worked to improve communities, find the inspiration in every day, and to cultivate appreciation for the arts. Her practice is supported by academic pursuits including her undergraduate degrees in Spanish and Cultural Anthropology and a Masters of Public Administration degree. Michelle joined our team in 2016 and is leading efforts toward greater engagement and accessibility in programming.

"...the first piece of Urban Native Fiction I have ever read."

My daughter dropped by Amazon and left a review of Your Silent Face.

I have copied and pasted it below.

Jackie was a first reader, providing encouragement and straightforward criticism while I worked on the book. Her feedback was huge.

“Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2020

After a year of college, Stuart Page returns home to the senseless violence of the Eastside of Flint, more disenchanted and disoriented than ever before. Stuart’s need to sensationalize every interaction makes for an exhausting but endearing narrator — he’s a Ferris Bueller with none of the self-assurance. Prone to monologing, condescension, and self-aggrandizing, Stuart’s still a protagonist worth hearing out, as his starry-eyed poeticism & bleary-eyed narcotization are what ultimately allow him to grapple with the difficult questions so many of his Eastside peers skate around.

Your Silent Face is an adult coming-of-age story, as violent as it is tender, that tackles the improbability of the building (and preserving) a sense of self in a place that is designed to crush those who can’t or won’t assimilate. It’s a universal story, powerfully told, but key elements of Stuart’s internal struggle (an identity assembled through popular culture references, ever-present feelings of displacement, severed family ties, and the presence of the quizzical character “The Viking”, and more) make this a distinctly Native story; the first piece of Urban Native Fiction I have ever read. I look forward to more from this author and recommend his poetry on similar themes.

—Jackie Lane”

— https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HY7GVLC

*Scroll all the way down for a snippet from the novel.

Your Silent Face

By Lane, Tim



Buy on Amazon









[image error]







Your Silent Face Available Now

Dinner was like a weekday mass. No red cassocks, no incense, no organ music. No miracles, either. Off-key hymns, less reflection, no homily, no forgiveness.

Stacey had set the table with the collectible Burger King Star Wars glasses from 1977.

The girls picked at the stringy roast beef and pushed the caramelized carrots and potatoes around their plates as if the vegetables would disappear if they slowly spread them out.

“Jesus, how rude, tell them to go home,” Stephanie grumbled.

A couple of kids with no home training were waiting on the front porch for Stacey to finish eating.

“Oh, they’re fine. They’re just kids.” My mother: channeling St. Philomena. “Eat your meal. And watch your language.”

Stephanie quickly rolled her eyes before my father could catch it.

I found it interesting how select shit like sending a wet bathing suit down the clothes chute or picking the stewed tomatoes out of the spaghetti sauce was unthinkable in this house but allowing the neighborhood kids to press their gross noses against the screen while we tried to eat dinner in peace was acceptable.

Stacey tried to eat fast without drawing my father’s ire for eating too fast.

“Where’s Darth Vader?” It was Stacey’s favorite glass.

“Stephanie broke it. On purpose!”

“Nunh uh!”

A squabble broke out. For a minute, it appeared that my father was completely oblivious to the bickering, but then he laid down the law with the flat of his hand.

“That’s enough!” The butter knives jumped.

“Burger King should totally do a series of drinking glasses of cool bands, like New Order or The Smiths or Echo & the Bunnymen.”

Stephanie and Stacey responded in unison, “Like, totally, dude! Fer shur.”

They cracked up. It was like they had been rehearsing it for days. Even my parents smiled.

“Echo and the what, dear?”

“A Joy Division glass featuring an iconic image of Ian Curtis at the microphone would actually be very cool,” I thought while my father opened up a dialogue with my mother about recent developments at the union hall, announcing big news. He wasn’t happy. He did not appreciate how he and his fellow plumbers and pipefitters were being managed at the local level. He had always planned on running for office, but not for years to come. There were men with more seniority who needed to retire.

“I’m thinking about entering the election.”

“What would you run for?”

“Business manager.”

“Already? Not treasurer or president first?”

“Gonna swing for the fence.”

The conversation switched to unemployment. My father was seventeenth or eighteenth on the list but work in Flint was scarce. Construction was going to hell in the whole state. And it wouldn’t make too much sense to run for anything other than business manager—the only paid office—if he was trying to avoid hitting the road.

I wondered if the dinner table side bars and late-night conversations about work and unemployment and the union hall gossip swirled around in the girls’ subconscious the same as it lived in mine.

“Did you hear me?” my father asked.

I chomped on a gob of roast beef while staring over his shoulder at a robin framed by the pink blossoms on the crabapple tree in the back yard.

“What?”

“They’re taking applications at Grand Daddy’s. You’ll probably have to go over to the warehouse.”

“Who is?” How did he know these things?

He had caught me daydreaming about The Viking. Once the robin flew off, the petals had reconfigured themselves to form an effigy of his bearded face. Unlike me, The Viking wasn’t under any pressure to look for a summer job. Work was what my father understood. He had started working at the age of twelve at his father’s party store, until it burned down. Or was it the family cabin that had caught fire? Whichever, my father had been smoking cigarettes and working nights and saving money for his first car—on top of going to school—by the age of thirteen.

I assured my father that I would check into these grotesque rumors.

“Tomorrow morning. Bright and early.”

I nodded.

I wondered how I could get in touch with Burger King about a series of New Wave and punk rock collectible glasses.

The number of kids swarming out front had grown.

I stood up.

“Stuart, is there somebody here? You haven’t finished eating!” My mother had a tone which always awoke in me a feeling akin to the nagging persistence of a car alarm.

“I forgot to wash my hands,” I lied.

I studied my face in the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, ran cold water in the sink, lathered, rinsed, lathered, rinsed, dried my hands, straightened the towels, rifled through the contents of the Reader’s Digest.

Passing through the laundry room, I noticed that there weren’t any dirty clothes beneath the chute.

Not one pile.

Nada.

No wasted moments during the day. When my father was laid off, he adopted all of our chores but continued to hold us accountable.

Work was what he knew.

“He’s preparing to leave,” I thought. “He’s hitting the road. He’s gotta get back to work.”

It was a lose-lose situation when he was laid off, but it was not his fault.

Carefully, as if it were a gang initiation and I had been forced to break into a house full of sleeping people, I stole down into the cool particle-swirling darkness of the basement. That was, at least, how the light, or lack of it, appeared to me; all of it crumbling.

The basement was directly beneath the dining room. I cocked my ear toward the nail-studded planks, but I couldn’t make out any conversation.