Poetry Visualized - Willie Lepers

Willie Lepers

A song from our Razorwire 'n Voodoo CD, 'Desert Run'. Music by Paul Millington, lyrics/vocals Norman Ball. Available here at CD Baby:

http://cdbaby.com/cd/razorwirenvoodoo

The lyrics accompany the song here in Soundzine #4:

http://soundzine.org/index.php?option...

Teleologically speaking, our culture has come off the rails. Careening ever further from our quaint original Fallenness, we are now irredeemably negated. In the strictest epistemological sense, we have crawled up our own ass and are now negotiating the contours of our nether regions. I explore this cultural-intestinal-vacuum in a different vein in this Oxford magazine piece, 'The Intermittent Man':

http://community.muohio.edu/oxmag/nod...

The Dancing Lady is America --fat, gloriously oblivious and held aloft by an improbable mountain of Chinese-made nerf-tennis balls which, for a long time, provide the squishy veneer over a looming sub-prime debacle. Quoting Don Henley somewhat, 'all she wants to do is dance with no closing costs.'

The angel of reclamation is clearly distraught and out-danced amidst the profanations of the burlesque faux-angels. Her theophanic interventions arrive courtesy of 'Angels in America'.

Like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History (Rilke's too), angels are radiant yet powerless entities unable to affect the future. Celestial cheerleaders, they can only appeal to our better instincts --God help them and us. Here's Benjamin:

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay...But a storm is blowing in from Paradise...irresistibly propelling him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

The last segment is from Charlie Chaplin's final scene in the fabulous movie 'Circus' (1928).

Stylistically, a debt is owed to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.