Categorical Aperitif

For the occasion, a live version of "Shipbuilding" that's just lovely—even without the Chet Baker solo:

This dark, sad little song was written during the Falklands War of 1982. I think I first heard it sometime in the early Nineties. If you'd told me then that one day I'd be listening to it in an America mired in an endless war on an abstract noun, guilty of invading a country that did not attack us and which posed no serious threat to us, and slowly hemorrhaging lives and money in an occupation that's already outlasted our involvement in World War II, I'd have asked what you were smoking. Listening to it just now, I thought about how, rather like Dylan's "Tombstone Blues," it shouldn't sound timely—but it does. And I got quite depressed. So forgive me if I try to thin out the darkness by spreading it around a little.

It's just a rumour that was spread around town
A telegram or a picture postcard
Within weeks they'll be re-opening the shipyards
And notifying the next of kin
Once again
It's all we're skilled in
We will be shipbuilding
With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls

// posted by nash @ 5:26 PM