Gordon Brown is a character from a tragic opera, twisted by ambition and a Presbyterian sense of fateful destiny. He has waited 13 years, mostly in Tony Blair's shadow, for this poisoned chalice and has a pessimist's luck.
It's a terrible poison, writing.
In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'
Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.
Even as a kid, I was a businessman. I figured out that if you plucked all the berries off my neighbor's tree and smashed them up, they made a Nickelodeon Gak-type consistency. I sold them to all the neighborhood kids and made stacks of quarters. Of course, the berries were poisonous, and I got in all types of trouble.
In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend.
For the poison of hatred seated near the heart doubles the burden for the one who suffers the disease; he is burdened with his own sorrow, and groans on seeing another's happiness.
If you have an embarrassing story, and it's a source of shame, keeping it in just compounds the shame and turns the story into something poisonous. And if someone knows about it, then it can be used against you.
I think about it as not so much 'I need to get it out of me,' it's not that my thoughts are poison, I just want to write good music.
Now that we're poisoned with the culture of superheroes, I think it's important to laugh about it.
