ericg

(South Austin, TX)

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"I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good! I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too thin or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard travelling.

I am out to fight those kind of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.

I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world, and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down and rolled over you, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you."

-Woody Guthrie
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When all you know is sand, perhaps it’s too traumatic to consider pulling your head out of it. - Andy Whitman

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It's a drag when your girls a hurricane;
'cause you can't look her in the eye.
Now more than ever;
Just not forever;
and all you do is you make her cry.

- Dan Murphy, Golden Smog

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My SXSW 2009 Schedule!


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"It's a long way heaven; It's a short way to hell"

- Jay Farrar, Uncle Tupelo
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"America is a place of great contradictions. We're greedy and we're generous. We're very optimistic, but we're superstitious. We're materialistic, but our religious roots go into our very soil. There are all these contradictions in America, but we're the only country that could’ve given the world Johnny Cash."

-Linford Detweiler, Over the Rhine

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Now I'm losing touch with reality,
and I'm almost out of blow.
It's such a fine line;
I hate to see it go.
Cocaine, runnin' all 'round my brain

- Jackson Browne, Cocaine

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Pitchfork: I know you're interested in visions and dreams, and that you sometimes record other people's visions and dreams for your montage pieces. Do you remember many of your own?

Jeff Mangum: I did have a vision about a year ago that had an impact on me.

Pitchfork: What was it?

Jeff Mangum: Well, I was lying in bed slowly coming out of sleeping, and this voice in my head told me to go back in; to not quite wake up yet, but just to stay in that in-between place. So I did. I slipped back down and stayed in the halfway point. Then I was standing on the ocean. I saw a blur come around, from my right side to my left. It was a hand putting something next to me. When I looked closer I saw that what the hand had put there was a little sea turtle. I looked up to see who had put it there, and there was this mulatto boy looking at me, smiling. I picked up the sea turtle and put in my hand and it turned into a butterfly. And then it turned into a black spider. It kept turning into a butterfly, a spider, a butterfly, a spider. It would pulsate between the two. I put my hands around it to grasp it and blood ran out of my hands and fell into the sand. Then as I let go of it, the blood rose up from the sand and turned again into the butterfly/spider. It hovered about a foot above my hand, and turned into a little ball of light. So that whole sequence repeated two or three times: it would land back in my hand, turn into a creature, and when I tried to hold it, it would crush again into blood, and when I would let go the blood would rise back up and turn into a ball of light.

Pitchfork: Do you know what it means?

Jeff Mangum: Yes, I pretty much understood it right away. I didn't have to analyze it afterwards. The butterfly and the spider represented two opposing sides: all the things that I love and consider to be beautiful and gentle and wonderful, and all the things that threaten me... the things about life that I can't come to terms with because they don't fit into my nice, happy picture of the way I want the world to be. It kept morphing back and forth to show me that they're both one and the same; they're dependent on one another to exist. When I tried to grasp at either what I love or what I hate, I destroyed the very ability of being able to really penetrate the essence of either. By trying to understand it, I would just crush it. But when I let go and let it be what it was, it would turn into light to show me that both sides come from the same source. I think the vision was trying to tell me to just live and be joyful and stop creating these internal wars over all the pain that is within myself and that I see all around me. That's how I interpret it.


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"In America, there is nothing black or white about having to live from one paycheck to the next.

Hunger does not care what color we are.

In America, a conversation between parents about taking on more debt might be in English or it might be in Spanish, worrying about making ends meet knows no racial identity.

Black children and white children all get the flu and need the doctor. In both the inner city and in small rural towns, our schools need good teachers.

When I was in medical school in the Bronx, one of my first ER patients was a 13-year-old African American girl who had an unwanted pregnancy. When I moved to Vermont to practice medicine, one of my first ER patients was a 13-year-old white girl who had an unwanted pregnancy.

They were bound by their common human experience.

There are no black concerns or white concerns or Hispanic concerns in America. There are only human concerns."

- Howard Dean

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