Li: Heaven on a Popsicle Stick

Track Listing: 1. Hole, 2 Awake, 3. freak, 4. The Trip, 5. Hank Aaron (lyrics by Dana Kletter), 6. Luke’s Feet, 7. Beeper Will, 8. The Pond, 9. I Do, 10. Ballet, 11. Guilt, 12. Abigail, 13. Curtains

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If you put on a Smoke or Opal Foxx Quartet record, you might think Tom Waits is on lead vocals. Comparisons are inherently boring and meaningless and can never—certainly not in this case—begin to capture the unique essence of an individual. So what? I offer it up as a lame frame of reference. A starting point.

Far more interesting than any comparison is how you begin to resolve the deep power of that voice to the image of Benjamin himself.

“Frail body, frail body, frail body
Frail body, frail body, frail body
Frail body, frail body, frail body
So I gotta get it up, gotta get it up, gotta get it
And show you I’m a man
So I gotta get it up, gotta get it up, gotta get it
And show you I’m a man
That’s right I’ve gotta get it up on the outside
Cuz inside’s caving in”

-from the Opal Foxx Quartet song, “Frail Body”

The voice is as deep and raw as a severed nerve, but the thing of it is, it’s coming from the sassy, puckered lips of a dirty ol’ drag queen.

“You don’t want it tomorrow
If you got it today
Tomorrow never happens anyway
If you know me at all
You know I’m at home and at ease with my pain
These exciting giddy moments well they’re hell to explain
And I know that any second
The whole situation might up and change”

-from “Awake”

Life and death. That you can hear both in the brittle but unbreakable voice, and that you could see both in the ravaged but unflinching body … it only underscores the truth: time does not exist. The boundaries between life and death dissolve in a beautiful reality. There is no more fear.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a banjo creeps in and out like a starving scavenger, methodically plodding along ashy remains, scouring for any scraps. It finds an interplay of an electric guitar and cello. The resulting embrace of the three instruments is a delicate balance that never implodes, just a rising smoke that soon clears to reveal its source. The eternal light of Benjamin is dancing over the horizon in torn stockings and a sundress. I think he’s on his way to a cocktail party.

-G

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