I should add that, despite my polywog fondness for "The Ghost in You", Mirror Moves is embarrassingly lite compared to the first, even second album. Which is why it's probably the one pre-John Hughes album of theirs you're likely to have heard the most songs from without ever having listened to the whole thing. And it fits in well with the rest of the "not-quite-gold-but-something" I was panning from the radio back then. I know that Eurythmics, Tears For Fears, and the Police weren't exactly mind-blowing (although "blow" might pop up in some people's description of their music) but there was a feeling of loss in their music that I looked forward to like I do a rainy day, an intelligence and lyricism that stuck with me in a way the insufferable bleating of Whitney Houston never would.

lonely in a crowded room
the radio plays out of tune

Jump forward seven years to the last Psychedelic Furs album World Outside. It's like they made a cd for their Grandmothers. I'm not saying it's bad. Given the right mood, I could enjoy most of it. But it's the prettiest music they ever made. And I prefer pretty to another Heartbreak Beat. Ok, enough.

read the paper
rearrange the lies

Hey--Smallfry here, listening to Psychedelic Furs and feeling grumpy about the govt. Richard Butler's voice makes me think of trains at night and highway traffic on the overpass echoing downstream to my childhood shack by the river. Maybe it has the same timbre, same harsh melancholy. But also a bit like the "wanh-WANH" adult voices on Charlie Brown. However, I was nine years old when this album came out and it would be four more years before I would hear my first Furs song. There were no cool older brothers or neighbors to show me the way so my introduction to "not your parents music" was all-radio all the time. And like a phantom one day "The Ghost in You" appeared on my crappy fake-silver one speaker radio. Not a life altering event, but that song and Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" stand out as oddly exciting 1984 middle-of-nowhere radio moments. No hardcore-boy, me.

make a god of politics
make a god of police
worship it with automobiles
worship it with screams

Healthy Forests, my ass! Everytime I start to think that HATE isn't what I'm feeling for the Bushies, President Gas you might say given my choice of music this week, President Douche, tHEy go dragging out some new travesty, we know what's best for you crap. So the timber industry gets to log protected areas in the name of fire prevention. We get to pay them to cut down healthy old-growth trees and then they get to sell it as lumber. There's a reason this didn't pass Congress last year. There's a reason the timber industry has pumped millions into Republican campaigns and lobbying. I wouldn't be surprised to find them behind the fires that pushed this ahead.

Why not send in a group of experts with no industry ties to cut out the dead and diseased trees, to perform the proscribed burning and thinning of non-native trees, to help get forests back to the natural rhythm of smaller necessary fires. Must everything carry a profit beyond a reasonable, well-earned paycheck?

I know my friend DJ Hoodoo is shaking her head reading this. She says there's nothing we can do about this stuff anyway so why get riled? And I have to agree sometimes it does feel so very Kafka-futile.

we will be a part of structure
you will have a face of structure

A winter sky today. Ragged inky cloud-smudged cold grey. The night turned to rain, the cat hid in the kitchen. I've renamed her Fatty Fishwhiskers.

Walking around downtown with my armfull of mail, admiring the Christmas decorations, I passed an old guy in overalls and cap (much like my Grampa Clarence but with more pens in the chest pocket). He smiled at me and said "Heya Smallfry."
Old guy, wherever you are, you made my day.