Click to listen to “Bleeker St,” performed by Mark Fullmer

Context: A couple weeks back, as I sat transcribing the lyrics for “Beijing Huan Ying Ni,” my mp3 player got stuck on “Bleeker Street,” a Simon & Garf. number from their pre folk-rock phase (and did you know folk-rock wasn’t even really their idea?). Well techically, I got my mp3 player stuck on it, but the point is I found a new appreciation for the song’s simple intricacy. The counterpoint melodies weaving back and forth above and below each other. The subdominant-to-mediant suspensions. Funny how it doesn’t sound nearly as nice when you put it into technical terms. Anyway. I figured I could write something like that. So I did, recorded it, listened to it, and promptly concluded that I liked the original song far better. Thus this cover, born’d.

Click to listen to “Beijing welcomes you,” by Mark Fullmer

Context:
I’ll be leaving for China in June for 2 years to serve in the Peace Corps. So. There you go.

The song title translates as “Beijing welcomes you,” and I think this is sort of the Chinese equivalent of “It’s a Small World.” It was composed for the 2008 Olympics and famously sung by 100 of China’s biggest celebrities, including Wang Lee Hom, Zhou Bichang, Karen Mok, Jang Nara, Li Yuchun, Zhang Zilin and yes, Jackie Chan. Apparently everyone in China knows it. It’s a catchy tune and good Mandarin practice, and I like to think of the lyrics as a good omen for my journey.

Lyrics (Transcribed):

Click to hear “Po’ Man’s Blues,” by Mark Fullmer

Context:
The musical inspiration for “Po. Man’s Blues” came mostly from The Beatles’ “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, with a dash of Sammy Davis Jr’s version of “Have a Little Talk with Myself”. Personally, the most enjoyable part of recording the thing was laying down the bass line. I would’ve thrown in a few rockabilly screams but I really didn’t want to concern my landlord who was next door painting. The lyrics began with trying to figure out how to avoid a mess of tired similes and the concept just got worse from there:
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Click here to listen to “The Crusades,” by Mark Fullmer

Context:
Ever since I was a kid, I always wondered what a David Lynch film about the Dalai Lama would be like. This is my musical realisation of that film.

I suppose the composition also has a personal meaning, as it imbricates three spiritualities I’ve dabbled with (in?) over the years.

The texts:
“Nam myoho renge kyoho” — Nichiren

“Door of my heart open wide I keep for thee” — Paramahansa Yogananda

“Dona nobis pacem” — Latin liturgy

Click here to listen to “Hot Kristeva (Rap),” by Mark Fullmer

Context:

Back when I was in grad school–near the end, clearly, when all of us second-years were a bit slap happy from postcolonial hybridity and the fictive imago–a murder of us flocked to our T.A. offices in a solemn effort to compile the most heady canon ever conceived by literary scholars. Hours we should have been scanning Pope and Donne and performing dizzingly rhizomatic readings of Irish brothel music we gave up to ProQuest, to WorldCat, even to the lofty MLA Bibliography–all for this very list.

We called it “Acadaemia’s Sexiest Theorists.”

We never really finished the thing–an impossible task?–but the person I personally put at the top inspired this song.

Previously:
AMR Music Month (Introduction)
AMR Music Month – Track 1

This one’s a laffer for all you pre-Valentine’s day <3 birds, lyrics after the jump:

Click to hear “My love,” by Mark Fullmer

Quick Housekeeping: All you folks participating in AMR music month, send me your mp3s! I just remedied my own recording situation so will start posting Courage tracks over the weekend, but so far Mark’s leading the convoy. Or, you know, whatever.

Context:

“I hadn’t at all expected to get to my second song on the list this soon, but after I got home from this Thai cafe I found myself playing around with ye ol’ guitar of yore and, well, this is what came out. I originally wrote the lyrics as a poem, back in those highfalutin grad school days. I sent it out to the literati, the intelligentsia, the hoi AND the poloi. One friend, a girl, a grad school buddy who shall remain nameless, wrote back something like “Please don’t send me stuff like this again. Ever.” So now I find myself putting it to music. Anyway. The chorus came first (from a tidbit I was humming on the way home today) and the verses followed pretty intuitively. -M”
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Click here to listen to “Vespers” (cover), by Mark Fullmer

The first installment of AMR Music Month, an updated version of the cover song you may remember resonating so profoundly with me in a previous post. Without repeating myself, this version – this version is darker and more hopeful, which seems like an impossibility, but never underestimate escape. It’s also more of a palimpsest. There’s some Plath, I think some Hemingway (?), an unmistakable Ginsberg. Definitely, in any case, a textured yearning, an almost – appropriately – ecclesiastical meditation reverberating with best-of-Tarantino atmosphere. For completists, the spoken word bit at the end is from a poem in Mr. Feather’s Flies Again, “PhDville burnt down”.

Liner notes, care of Mark: “This was put down over three states — the guitar and main vocals in CA, the poetry additions and harmonies in AZ, the final mastering in NM (one time zone closer to Brooklyn).”

Addenda: Mark is currently making his way eastward from California en route, ultimately, to China for two years. The catalyst in the crucible of this particular cover, I think. Relatedly: Last night, before Mark sent this on, I was watching a BBC documentary on China and thinking vaguely about Mark’s future life there. Today an editor friend sent me a picture of one of our authors with Quincy Jones’ daughter – whats-her-name – and my immediate Rorschach reaction to their admittedly impressive foreheads was “the limestone mountains of Hunan” and, of course, Mark among them.

Which feels reflected here, everything all together – the tension between self-mythology and mounting history, the impossible abnegation of a primetime oversoul that recognizes itself in world wonders and facebook doppelganger shots. Sort of the opposite, really, of the solipsistic original (in the player at right as “younger”).

Also see: Mark’s take on MarkFullmer.com

Related:

Friend of a Friend Interview: Mark Fullmer

“The Right Shadow Spoke”: A Facebook App Novel Shout-out

Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey

So the novel is called 1337: A Videogame Novel About Videogames and it’s an honest to goodness facebook app by Friend of a Friend Mark Fullmer, drawing on your friend-base for characters and fully interactive in a post-modern but also old school text adventure sort of way. Points for Ennui and Whimsey! A refreshable Lustiness index!

I work in publishing where we’re always talking about harnessing “New Media” and a nowhere lit. e-zine just became a major player because they tweeted a short story – badly. This is pretty much the most fun thing I’ve seen in a while, and the least specious re: actually utilizing new media (not counting “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: A Google Maps Essay”).

But unlike “Plimp’s Revenge” this is a whole novel: serialized and super-fun – launched on David Lynch’s birthday, 1337 (pronounced: “leet”, for I guess my octogenarian demo) has a sort of William Gibson down the rabbit hole meets Cory Doctorow in Little Brother feel to it. I hope you give it a chance, because I <3 this stuff. And while you're at it, check out the context, both wiki – linked – and “developer website“, which is extensive and more Hackers than Hackers. This, folks, is Mark Fullmer Overdrive.

Heads up! February is RPM Challenge month, which is basically the same concept as NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – except for rock and roll (or, you know, whatever). The challenge: 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music by the end of February. Which isn’t that wild by AMR standards, but a few of us have decided to do a thing anyway and will be posting the results here. So watch this space!

So far, expect to hear from: Mark Fullmer, Mighty Amy, Scott Davis, me, and you, if you think you’re up to it. If so, you know where to send your mp3s! Also, hey – I think friend covers are okay.

Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey
by Mark Fullmer, A Mutual Respect Books and Music (2009)

This collection of documentary micropoetry – the first of its kind! – features 56 twitter poems of exactly 140 characters composed on the road from Brea to Flagstaff to Taos to Denver to Provo to Ferdley to Big Sur and back.

amutualrespect.org

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The first – amazing! – submission to the AMR YouTube Contest, by way of Mark Fullmer (whose book of micropoetry, Tweet Tweet: a mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the american open road odyssey, is coming out shortly).

If you’re interested in participating, here’s the invitation! Fun!

forthcoming from Mark Fullmer, my comrade-in-arts:

Friend of a Friend spotlights people of interest to the greater AMR community: poets, rockers, artists, aesthetes, and assorted bon vivants. The series is called Friend of a Friend because all the interviewees are my friends, and hopefully you’ll be their friend too once I introduce them to you. – Nick Courage

DISCUSSED IN THIS INTERVIEW: origin myths and the dessicating santa ana winds; making suckers out of the Ayn Rand Institute; aesthetic revolution (and your place therein); self-obsessed soul bearing/a Taiwanese pianist; the sun-drenched coasts of Ios and the girls with their pouty breasts; moving eastward; tweeted roadtrip manifestos; GK Chesterton; Mark Fullmer quantified; creative output v. thanatopic fear; light pornography; what you think about when you think about nothing; cathected life-as-art moments; childhood aspirations; when the tree exploded; description… in lascivious detail; interrobang hypotheticals; drinking grappa with davy salinger; &c.

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