“One Amusing Miracle within a Larger, Dystopic Miasma of Capitalism”

I just had the weirdest thing happen to me.
I don’t know of you noticed, but sometimes great rock albums are like onions — there’s so much there to peel off than you might discard some of it for some period, then to go back to it when your initial favorite might have lost some of its earlier zest. This is how Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ The Brutalist Bricks is for me (which is good, considering how terrible Leo’s 2017 outing was) — as I’m sure many would agree with “Even Heroes Have to Die” is consistently the most rewarding listen but for some reason today just called for “Ativan Eyes,” just the result of passing of time and things naturally changing.
Leo, to me, is an overall fine artist, to an extent a guitar virtuoso but perhaps even more so a poet, what with the semantically levitational ideas already at hand on his breakthrough album The Tyranny of Distance in songs like the first one and “St. John the Divine.” With this being the case, with him being almost like a “poet” sort of like Sarah McLachlan and Mike Doughty [1] who just happens to love rock and roll more than poetry, I thought maybe the importance of the world “Ativan” might be of interest (I’d ignored it for so long just for having other things on my mind the last eight years and change, most of which are embarrassing) [2]. For some reason instead of just typing “Ativan” into Wikipedia, which would have been the smart thing to do, I debated between googling it and looking it up on Wiktionary, eventually choosing the former. I grew irritable, though, when I envisioned that there might be a brand name (which would OBVIOUSLY be totally separated from Leo’s artsy, poignant connotation of the term). I was envisioning like “Ativan Heating and Air Conditioning,” or something thereabouts.
Much should be astonishment swell, then, to look it up and find that… it is a fu**ing brand name! And it’s a brand name which is wielded in the lyrics in a way that makes it even cooler: it’s actually the name of a sedative pill, sort of like Paxil, or whatever, the way I understand it, Leo then standing as the artist willing to let on that he NEEDS such a thing, and as a receptive, malleable and unstable agent of RAWK implies that he was lucky to find it the all natural way. From what I’ve gathered and read, Leo has been in a relationship now for quite some time which is still healthy and prosperous.
.
[1] I say this but the Soul Coughing frontman actually does have a poetry collection published, Slanky, which for what it’s worth is a dark, crisp bombshell.
.
[2] Ah I do love this album though: I still remember hearing “One Polaroid a Day” when it first came out in March ’10 and thinking, why doesn’t this Dandy Warhols song suck?

11 thoughts on ““One Amusing Miracle within a Larger, Dystopic Miasma of Capitalism”

Leave a Comment