Sideways Block The Catholic Maneuver

You see, in 1987, I had moved back home to help my dad and the visiting nurses take care of my mom, who would die of pancreatic cancer in the early morning of Christmas Eve that year...Now, I won't get into all the frightening details of her decay, except to say that the Sister album by Sonic Youth was the soundtrack to the trip, for me, anyways, and that's what's relevant to S4TW #87 and these subsequent sideways maneuvers...

1987 was a crazy fucking tuff year, to be sure, but it had it's good moments...My mom and I spent a ton of time together...Talking, reading to each other, watching movies, listening to records...

I didn't spin the Sister LP around her, because she didn't like anything remotely like Sonic Youth...So I kept a cassette dub of the album for my commutes to UWM and back, or when I made a buzz run out into the country late at night, trying to get away from everything for an hour or two...

I listened to this album sooo fucking much in the latter half of that twisted year because Sonic Youth more than any other band at that particular time, had found the perfect mix of magic pop riffs and atonal bliss, harmony and noise, beauty and decay...For me, this was/is the music of life itself (and the fact that death is always in its midst), the sacred and the profane, waves of madness and love, and eruptions of anger, it's all there in the music...

Music that underpins a loose song cycle about ghosts and regrets, drugs and faith, insanity, Nazis, a static future, a kinetic past, aliens, entropy, death, decay, and the healing powers of Rock'n'Roll...Words that spoke directly to my life and experiences that year, right down to the Christmas tree, it's mirrored bulb ornaments reflecting my dying mom a dozen or more times in miniature...

Come back to me awhile.

Hotcha! Hank