Richard Laviolette — All Wild Things Are Shy (You’ve Changed)
Richard Laviolette’s last album weighs a ton, emotionally. From the first ripped-ragged guitar chords of “Milkweek and Motherwort” to the closing lift of “Constant Love,” these songs reach deep into the gut for the real stuff: the moving power of music, the companionship of other people, the certainty of death someday and of life right now. Laviolette didn’t have time for superficiality. He wrote this album near the end of the five-year gap between his mother’s death from Huntington’s disease and his own. It is a harrowing document, full of courage and defiance and human connection.
The music has a hard country kick and a fevered yowl that places it somewhere among the Mekons, Uncle Tupelo, Neil Young and the Replacements. “Ragged stray, I was on my own, I was saved by rock ‘n roll,” howls Laviolette, against a dirge drone of organ punched blood by drums. It’s a confession, a baptism, a Job-like agony. It rages and lurches and batters the sides of the righteous cage of its melodies.
Laviolette is no generalist. He calls out, by name, the music that inspires him, “George and Tammy, Bob’s the king, Nashville sound and Western Swing,” in “Constant Love,” the outlaw country king and queen in “Carter and Cash.” And even when he’s not giving the nod in the lyrics, Laviolette expresses his love. The clangor of the guitars in “Milkweed” all but pledges fealty to Neil Young. There’s a nod to Magnolia Electric Co. in “Catacombs.” This is a guy who spent an all-too-short life listening and playing and appreciating music, and he wasn’t about to stop just because he was under a death sentence.
You have to think about what it would mean to watch your mother succumb to an awful disease and know that the same would happen to you. The kind of courage it would take just to get up in the morning is hard to fathom. To make a record, a good one like this, with your hands growing clumsy and your mind fading in and out is unimaginable. “Don’t quit on me,” Laviolette sings in a wavery voice whose imperfections encapsulate the human struggle against failing flesh. He’s singing to himself as much as anyone, but we can all take some courage from it. This is a gorgeous album even if you set the backstory aside, but when you consider that, it’s truly remarkable.
I started ace attorney and played the beginning with my 73 year old landlady (who is a retired lawyer). It was pretty great and at first I figured it was a relatively straightforward lawyer game but
With the entrance of Edgeworth suddenly I feel like there's some actual... story lurking here...
page 179 - After a number of false starts and dark nights of my soul I realized that an enormous quantity of drugs might prove beneficial. Not for me. The quantities of drugs I consumed on a regular basis meant that I had long experienced diminishing returns of all types when upping dosages.
But what if I gave drugs to a machine?
Terence McKenna, and others I’m sure, suggested that the human consumption of magic mushrooms was an inciting factor in the creation of language, arts and religion; in short, all of human culture. I wanted to see if something similar could result in a non-human setting, so one night before removing this oscilloscope from its electrophysiological apparatus I introduced an enormous dosage of DRUG X to the system.
At first nothing changes, but before long one begins to see something taking place. Here the oscilloscope’s readout doubles.
