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Dark Winning

by Das Phaedrus

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1.
Turkish and Domestic Where to start? Let me explain to you what I knew About the threat without and the threat within, let us begin Come, come, here up on the bridge, watch the last of my fleet sink But don’t be scared, this is not a real boat – it’s just a plot device I hear it’s very nice in Venice – very nice Old man with a young wife – very nice Oh that, going bleep bleep bleep, no it’s not a fish finder It’s a baby MRI scanner, digital eggtimer Cos the tide’s going out, it ain’t coming back, my little necromancer And that pain between your shoulder blades – is that the T-bar rows or is it maybe cancer? Air raid sirens, cell phones chiming, every Black Death advancing – Turkish Cat-curled on the box seat, those long legs like they’re made for dancing – Domestic Last mast slips beneath the waves in this phoney war I bought my captain’s ticket in a dollar and dime store And so the threat without has passed, and the other is in you But someone’s been telling lies Yes, someone’s been telling lies And love’s got a ticket to ride on murder’s New Jersey rollercoaster And we were never bound for Cyprus, we were dead before we left the harbour We are Turkish and Domestic We are Turkish and Domestic And the best of your intentions that you Fed-Exed are lost in transit Set up the gallows in the town square Fire up the kiln on the Grassmere They’re gonna hang for this, they’re gonna burn for this They’re gonna hang and burn – Turkish Sealed with a righteous kiss, with a righteous kiss With a righteous kiss – Domestic When you cannot lie but the truth’s unwanted What is left for you my love? When you never lied, but that doesn’t matter He will come for you my love Ring the alarm, the marauding fleet (now underwater) is on our doorstep Washed up in pieces on the beach But your last question, yeah, had already been answered Are we Turkish or Domestic? Are we Turkish or Domestic? And your worst indiscretion Was bowing down to a power you once thought was benevolent
2.
This Land Wasn’t Made For You and Me Start the car and break my heart if you believe That I doubted you when I just doubted me We’ve been driving every road to any sea Maybe this land wasn’t made for you and me And I call out your name And it’s like I just found you And lost you again What if you turned off the headlights as we speed? Take your hands off the wheel, put them on me We’ve been driving any road to every sea Baby, this land wasn’t made for you and me And you call out my name And it’s like you just found me And lost me again And I call out your name And it’s like I just found you And lost you again
3.
Passing Through Ride… I have three minds that pull three ways So who wins out on a given day? I see you want to blame, you want me to pay But who you’ll talk to, who can say? You were just passing through You don’t know what you do Ride… So you want to come ride in my car? Like Christine – except it’s blue Does that mean I don’t read Stephen King? Or I ain’t no copycat and yes I do? Bury me in sight of my own home They’ve left the lights on – but they don’t know I’m content to know you’re out there still And if you can…then you will
4.
Dry Land 03:16
Dry Land Little slow tonight… Lloyd, I’ve seen better service In bars that were really sets Yeah, just assembled for the cameras And I’ve seen fewer lies Strewn through these screenplays of deception Than I read now in your eyes Than I see through your intentions And we took little vows of silence To avoid any verbal violence With the best of our time behind us anyway And the road behind, we’re still driving Looks different but the same old highway That you said was ever only my way, never yours So what do you want me to say that I haven’t said? What do you want me to do with you as we drive into This dry land? Prohibition’s here: so just stop whatever you’re doing Might have worked for you then Back when whatever you wanted Kid at the Hermitage Cigarette machine in the lobby In thrall to the lighted brands Wishing for some coins to play with And we took little vows of silence To avoid any further violence With the best of our time behind us anyway And the road behind, we’re still driving Looks different but the same old highway That you said was ever only my way, never yours So what do you want me to say that I haven’t said? What do you want me to do with you as we drive into This dry land?
5.
Are We Good? 03:32
Are We Good? Got my ticket from the parking thing The barrier arm came up and I parked up Put my fucking mask on, made the terminal semi-conscious: fucked up Pissed my general rage at the populace against the wall beside the urinal What’s with people in airports? What’s with this life when you don’t want to buy a slice? Have I even earned it? Is it even worth it? I know I gave birth to it But did I even mean it? And if she regrets it Is there any recompense that I can make That would be good enough? Am I even good enough? Am I good? Are we good? Made it home with a six pack That seemed to provide an outline through to night Night came with its own bag of tricks And so here I am again in the morning light Seen so many dawns like this before Is the kicker that gets you through to night Have I even earned it? Is it even worth it? I know I gave birth to it But did I even mean it? And if she regrets it Is there any recompense that I can make That would be good enough? Am I even good enough? Am I good? Are we good?
6.
The Infinite 02:51
The Infinite The infinite is finite now Is that such a bad thing now baby? You were more afraid when it didn’t hurt Less scared in the days of maybe Shine a light on where you fall Make it better for the moment The infinite is finite now
7.
Stop at Nothing I bought a bomb shelter – the most expensive kind Plenty of room for you if you’re so inclined Smaller than the smallest house Definitely larger than the largest coffin It’s the middle way: the middle underground And if I never even get to use it I know they’ll say, Christ he was prepared He was so well prepared for almost anything So how come? So how can he be dead? I guess he wasn’t well in his head I guess things weren’t right in his bed But you’d better believe he’s sorry now Or else what are we doing? Or else, are we going downstairs? I hear you could live for thirty years or more down there If you cared to Lot of coin for something you can’t see A lot of time in the hole Long day with the hired crane man Now I hear your footsteps overhead Hear you call out my name Sounds not so much far away as long ago And if I never even get to use it I know they’ll say, Christ he was prepared He was so well prepared for almost anything So how come? So how can he be dead I guess he wasn’t well in his head I guess things weren’t right in his bed But you’d better believe he’s sorry now Or else what are we doing? Or else, are we going downstairs? I hear you could live for fifty years or more down there If you had to You tell me you’ll stop at nothing Well, everybody stops at nothing
8.
All My Mother What’s the big beat up on lies? Lies are just the story you felt like telling at the time And lies, they can change your mind: Make you see that they were right and you were wrong Most of the time My favourite one has to be: things look better from a distance Well that’s the only view I’ve had Seems the entire budget’s been torn to shreds: Paid over to a bounty on my head This establishing shot was pretty well established Long before we ever met Your landscape loves the camera But I fear the human element is one you may regret But now all my… And all the crime’s off-screen but it walks back in as you walk back out on the street tonight Have you ever thought of ‘love interest’ as an oxymoron, a paradox that falls in flight? Drama and disaster: validation for the leading man, if you can stand him Let’s feed him his own intestines until he admits his best lines were never in the script Nor were they natural talent: they were the fine print in a redacted contract Which if you ever find, you’ll discover my name listed as a party to this But now all my… I’ve been so long undercover I can’t remember any other life before this I know I was at your audition – telling you to undress first, then we’ll tell you about the role I also played the state trooper in the marshland Late on the second day when they found you A dis-establishing shot, shot low to take in the burn of the city skyline Just another dead actor, making love to their own cellphone camera Checked your folks at the service, in between a beer and several of those catered sandwiches Your folks were pretty much like those: edges cut, white bread, filled with what the fuck you don’t know with Had you up there on the screen: 2, 7, 17, 23: so that’s a life then Nothing funeral IT couldn’t rustle up for a grand or 3 – and so that’s a wrap then But now all my… Decamped to the car to smoke and reflect on my only three words to you: take it off To be honest, I expected better…but it’s all in the expectation anyway On a whim, I trailed your motorcade to the clifftop ashy dust dance for a laugh Full frontal Pacific…on reflection, you were still a potential romance Totally miscast though, I have to say in your role as a human freelance I’ll head back to my den, find your screen test reel And we can have that last dance But now all my… But now all my mother’s coming out of my eyes I’ve been so many men, told so many lies But now all my mother’s coming out of my eyes I’ve been so many men, told so many lies But now all my mother’s coming out of my eyes I’ve been so many men, told so many lies But now all my mother’s coming out of my eyes I’ve been so many men, told so many lies
9.
When I am King When I am king I will do whatever you say Don’t want to be resented as one of those kings Who was just born this way I’ll have an escape hatch, if you will: A private jet with a seat reserved for you We’ll fly to the islands where they filmed The cigarette ads that informed our youth We’ll be the ones who just walked away… To embrace the sun and the king sized filter tip… But before I go, There’s a couple of things that I’d like to do: Let’s can the hangings in the town square OH YEAH Get that shit back indoors where it belongs And free farms for all Just bring your own sheep When I am king…I can do anything Fuck it: Cancel everything

about

There seems to be a tendency, even amongst members of the band, to refer to the second Das Phaedrus album as ‘Dark Winnings’, as though it constituted the haul from a do or die punt at the Boxing Day races, or the proceeds of a clandestine meth empire, perhaps run out of one of the labs at my high school. The awkwardness of the singular disappears slightly when the title emerges as a refutation of Rust Cohle’s uncharacteristically upbeat assertion at the end of the first season of True Detective that ‘once it was all dark - if you ask me, the light’s winning’. Of course, there is a limit to how much starlight you actually want up in your grill: a supernova is plenty light. The void might seem an odd place to look for answers as to how things play out down here. There just isn’t a lot of life up there - or even a lot of death. A couple of the songs on Dark Winning are inhabited by people who were alive when the songs were written and dead by the time the record came out. One was expecting this, one wasn’t. I had just finished recording the third Das Phaedrus album, The Stars Are Real, when the one who wasn’t died in her sleep. I wrote an obituary for the paper titled A Sky Full Of Stars, the song playing as she left work for the last time, and a heavily edited version was published making no reference to the song and with all of my jokes removed. So the night sky thing is definitely a thing, all that cold space, the twinkle in death’s eye.

But if Rust, the poster boy for pessimism, can find it in himself to place a bet on light in his ‘oldest story - light versus dark’, then why beg to differ? It might be a mistake to underestimate the effect of the dopamine hit afforded by Marty’s gift immediately prior to Rust’s happy thought - a pack of Camels and a lighter, marking the end of a lengthy nicotine drought up there in ICU (someone should look into getting stabbed as a smoking cessation tool - anything has to be better than vaping). I had an old Camel advertisement up on the wall in the band room - sadly, just a For REAL Smoking Pleasure one, not a More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette one, although as a teenager, I did politely ask my father, who was a doctor, if he wouldn’t mind removing the Smokers Please Suicide Elsewhere sticker from the dashboard of the family Kingswood - and after staring at the words ‘Turkish and Domestic Blend Cigarettes’ a few thousand times it became clear that this would have to be a song. But it is not a song about cigarettes (I realised at a very young age that writing songs about smoking and drinking is a terrible idea: much better to utilise the power of smoking and drinking to write songs about things other than smoking and drinking). The song was written without a guitar or piano, just sitting in the sun in a deck chair with pen and paper for about ten hours on a scrappy back lawn in the tiny village of Toko Mouth, an hour south of Dunedin, drinking Parrot Dogs and smoking about a pack and a half of Camels…that is why it is so hard to write this now, with just black coffee and a black spoodle gnawing on my arm to find my way: you miss that lateral shunt, that consuming fire.

But at the end of 2021 the dark WAS winning, and the dark was whatever you wanted it to be: the virus, the government, Pfizer, the anti-vaxxers, the experts, the protestors, the mandates, the shitmud of the parliamentary lawn. No one was happy. And Turkish and Domestic was not a blend of tobacco, it was Othello facing down the Turkish fleet, young wife at his side. Foreign peril and domestic bliss. But maybe the dark isn’t out there: maybe it is in here, and has been all along. The big scary armada is just so many matchsticks on the beach, your wife is dead and no one is going to tell you to Please Suicide Elsewhere: here is just fine, thanks. People had done the state some service and they knew it. And they were going to make damn sure you knew it. No more of that. The one who wasn’t expecting it was not vaccinated and had to take a lengthy enforced vacation from work. Some of these old galleons are prone to rodent infestation and some wondered if there was a rat in the BAND! Was it possible that one of us was…unsound? Were we Turkish or Domestic? For the record, the vast majority of Das Phaedrus were very pro-covid measures and very anti the third and final Das Phaedrus album, The Stars Are Real.

In The Information, Martin Amis asks the reader whether they could picture wannabe novelist Richard Tull crying in the (highly) unlikely event that he should ever win a beauty contest: “Can we see him there, on stage, with his bouquet, his swimsuit and his sash, and with all his mother coming into his eyes?” I have a great admiration for Amis, although I have vastly more in common with Richard Tull, and this line informs the song All My Mother, which climaxes with the Weinsteinish narrator finally succumbing to great gouts of self loathing and weeping himself to death over his delay pedal. The song’s vibe, if not its literal narrative, does however inhabit the gap left by the one who was expecting it. Well, the title too. And then Amis died, too.

The end of the obituary that didn’t get published went something like this:

On her final day at work, the Friday, the one who wasn’t expecting it conducted a parent tour of the school, in which she met a teacher and student in tears, someone negotiating a mould issue, another teacher engaging with a non responsive computer monitor with expletives, taught her Media Studies class, met with a Member of Parliament, prepared for a meeting with the Education Review Office, had a meeting with the Education Review Office, grappled with the issue of paper towel wastage in various bathrooms, wished good luck to the chamber music group heading off to their competition as the sun was setting behind the bush and the kereru that lives in the kowhai beside her car park nodded its goodbye and somewhere an after hours office stereo blasted Coldplay’s ‘A Sky Full of Stars.’

She was the brightest.

Which reads well, but as Marty pointed out, ‘I know we’re not in Alaska, but the dark seems to have more territory.’

Rust doesn’t care: he has his Camels, he’ll say anything.

Are we Turkish or Domestic?

We’ll fly to the islands where they filmed the cigarette ads that informed our youth.

Dark wins, every time. No contest.

credits

released May 27, 2022

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