philip sherburne

Apropos of absolutely fucking nothing

One of my favorite songs ever, or recordings, anyway, must be Gray Matter's version of "I've Just Seen a Face," which I think is a Beatles song, but really can't be sure. If I'd bothered to chime in to Jane Dark's listeners' project -- which I started to do, but then held off, because for a frightening moment I couldn't think of a single goddamn song with words that I ever sang to myself, ever, with any kind of regularity -- this would have been the song. Last time it popped into my head, before this moment -- and for perhaps the first time in years -- was sometime in June, walking along Colón in Barcelona, headed towards Barceloneta on an afternoon so sparkling it felt almost delusional. I didn't think about the words then, and don't exactly now, but maybe that's not true either. Such a song of optimism and delirium I'm not sure I've ever heard. I first heard it when I was perhaps 16 and I suppose it's been with me ever since, crawling a smooth and rutted circle somewhere deep in my, um, gray matter. A perfect verse and a perfect chorus do-si-doing endlessly towards infinite bliss, in spite of the inevitable unidirectional arc implicit in the "falling." Enough to make believers out of the most jaded and degraded of us. Enough to make me think, yeah, I can be maudlin -- like I'm being right now -- and fuck it. I've just seen a face...