The Hammock Papers: Fagen

Showing posts with label Fagen. Show all posts

26 July 2026

More.

More leisure time for artists everywhere ...

25 May 2025

Released.

Donald Fagen released Kamakiriad on this day in 1993.

"Florida Room"...

26 November 2024

Mine.

Sweet music

Tonight the night is mine

15 November 2024

Realize.

Donald Fagen on yacht rock.

Stick to the nachos, kids. The differences are subtle, but once you've tried it, you'll realize that an extra side of ranch'll never let you down.

Got any quarters?

10 January 2024

Happy Birthday, Lester

Lester The Nightfly was born on this day in 1948.

23 July 2023

02 August 2022

Sing.

When he's crying out

I just sing that Ghana Rondo

El era del terzo mondo

He's a third world man

01 August 2022

Whim.

Sure he's a jolly roger

Until he answers for his crime

Yes I'll match him whim for whim now

31 July 2022

Bodacious.

Bodacious cowboys

Such as your friend

Will never be welcome here

29 July 2022

Perfect.

Drive west on Sunset

To the sea

Turn that jungle music down

Just until we're out of town

This is no one night stand

It's a real occasion

Close your eyes and you'll be there

It's everything they say

The end of a perfect day

Distant lights from across the bay

27 July 2022

Again.

Call in my reservation

So long, hey thanks, my friend

I guess I'll try my luck again

26 July 2022

Yesterday.

It seems like only yesterday

I gazed through the glass

At ramblers

Wild gamblers

That's all in the past

25 July 2022

Angular.

Chinese music always sets me free

Angular banjoes

Sound good to me

24 July 2022

Holy.

No I'm never gonna do it without the fez on

Oh no

That's what I am

Please understand

I wanna be your holy man

23 July 2022

Anything.

Agents of the law

Luckless pedestrian

I know you're out there

With rage in your eyes and your megaphones

Saying all is forgiven

Mad Dog surrender

How can I answer

A man of my mind can do anything

19 July 2022

King.

Hello one and all

Was it you I used to know

Can't you hear me call

On this old ham radio

All I got to say

I'm alive and feeling fine

If you come my way

You can share my poison wine

No marigolds in the promised land

There's a hole in the ground

Where they used to grow

Any man left on the Rio Grande

Is the king of the world

As far as I know

18 July 2022

Double.

My poison's named you know my brand

So please make mine a double, Sam

Stir it up nice I'll eat it right here

This highway runs from Paraguay

And I've just come all the way

We warned the corpse of William Wright

Not to cuss and drink all night

Ticket in hand I saw him laid to rest

But zombie see and zombie do

He's here with me and you

17 July 2022

Talkin'.

A world become one

Of salads and sun

Only a fool would say that

A boy with a plan

A natural man

Wearing a white stetson hat

Unhand that gun begone

There's no one to fire upon

If he's holding it high

He's telling a lie

I heard it was you

Talkin' 'bout a world

Where all is free

It just couldn't be

And only a fool would say that

In 1964, long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH, and so on. All the telephones worked, and they sounded good, too. Rarely did anyone ever lose a call, and that was usually on an overseas line. Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. By then, just about everyone had an aerial on the roof, and the signal was strong: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties, all day and most of the night. No soul-deadening porn or violence. Decent news programs and casual entertainment featuring intelligent, charming celebrities like Steve Allen, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, Jack Benny, Rod Serling, and Ernie Kovacs. Yeah, call me old Uncle Fuckwad, I don’t care. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindfuck. The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People. For example, those people in the audience who can’t experience the performance unless they’re sending instant videos to their friends: Look at me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I’m filming this shit. You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say. Wake up, ya dope!

Donald Fagen, from Eminent Hipsters

21 November 2021

Released.

Steely Dan released Gaucho on this day in 1980.

Sure he's a jolly roger
Until he answers for his crime
Yes, I'll match him whim for whim now

Donald Fagen and Walter Carl Becker from "My Rival"

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL