In The Days Of Perky Pat

I'd finished cropping some screenshots for a follow-up post to Wednesday's "Working With Fire And Steel". I was ready to write but it felt too quiet in the room. The ambient sound of passing cars. Occasional birdsong. Oppressive.

I opened YouTube. I have it configured always to open on my subscriptions. Most days it's a sea of yellow/turquoise banners from Elefant Records, occasionally interspersed with Ardwulf unboxing something or the latest burst of PR static from Poppy.

Ah, Poppy. I may be over Poppy, by the way, in case you were wondering. There was a time, not that long ago, when I seriously considered buying and wearing a pin so other members of the church of her poisoned mind could recognize me. Quite glad I didn't do that.

She's free of outside influence now, reportedly, taking things in the direction of her choice. Her new path leads her away from the glitched hyperreality of post-postmodernism towards the studded leather uplands of pop-metal. I think I'll pass.

Not Poppy, then. My gaze shifted to the latest drifting dream fix from my enablers at Elefant: La Bien Querida feat. Los Planetas with their new single Domingo Escarlata. (Do we say "single" any more? I doubt it).

Elefant Records runs out of Madrid, Spain. Many of their acts map the Spanish diaspora, although you might not realize it from that anglocenteric Wikipedia list. Now, my Spanish is not good. Tourist Spanish plus. I can read some, though. I studied Latin, the key to any romance language, and I know French. One romantic tongue is much like another, on the page. I at least know enough to translate "Scarlet Sunday".

And look, more of those tropes I love so much; a color and the one day of the week I favor so strongly I once wrote a song about it. I called it "Everything's Sunday" because I wished it was.  There's even a visual trigger in the thumbnail - red hair. I have a lot of triggers.

But I was not prepared for this:

Watch and wallow. That's pop perfection, that's what that is. I wrote a whole, elegaic paean of praise to its drifting, mesmeric beauty in the draft that was lost. Oh, did I not mention that? I wrote this post and then lost it right at the end. Don't you hate when that happens?

I don't think I'll try to recreate it. Just watch the damn movie, alright? And I do mean watch, not just listen. Because, glorious though the music is, it's the images that carry the weight. That drugdealer opening under the bleak bridge. The vials. And the blue. All that blue. Her fingers in the soft wool's warp. Oh my. Oh my. Continuará. I hope so. I really hope so.

And, look, the timeslips, the juddering. Books skittering on shelves. The telephone changing form. Isn't it the game I was playing and posting about just a few weeks back? Californium. Yes. Yes it is.

It's all pure Philip K Dick. Unless it's just me. I read a lot of Philip K Dick at an impressionable age. I was ahead of the curve, an early adopter. I see his influence everywhere, have done for decades. Now it's his vision we all see, coming clear around us.

If I don't see you again I won't understand
Because life showed me that you existed
And all hope I'll lose
My sky will cloud, the seas will dry up, alas!

If I don't see you again, if I don't see you again
For I want nothing, if I don't know what to do
If I don't see you again I'll never know
Everything you and I could have done

Because when you kissed me the sky would open
On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you
And when you touched me I would come back to life
And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine

If I don't see you again I will die of grief
From black sorrow I die because I can't see you
If I don't see you again I'll never know
Everything you and I could have done

Because when you kissed me the sky would open
On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you
And when you touched me I would come back to life
And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine 

How Kabiria Films or Ana Fernández-Villaverde herself, whoever took the lead, made the leap from these sad love song lyrics, rendered into English with surprising feel by Google Translate, to that saturated, entropic feverscape... well, it beats me. I'm just so glad they did.

Elefant Records, like me, have history with Philip K Dick, it seems. I already had another of their roster earmarked for a post I've been marinating on music inspired by the great man. But why sit on it? These aren't times to wait. Let's have it now.

There's no mystery hanging over the provenance of this one. La Monja Enana lifted the title wholesale from a Dick story first published in 1963. All they've changed is the language: Los Dias de Perky Pat.

There's a squelchier version I much prefer but it doesn't have a performance to give it visual heft. The real kicker, though, is the lyric.

A few years after the short story The Days of Perky Pat appeared in Amazing. Dick reworked the premise for one of his greatest novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In the lyrics, Ana Vaquero and Juan Alonso twist that narrative once again, to their own purpose.

I don't know what made me accept the transfer to Mars
A higher salary, an exciting destination
It was my great chance to get away from Earth
I wanted to start again, make a blur and a new account
And it is that in advertising everything was so beautiful
A natural paradise, how have I been so lingering?
The air doesn't smell the same, the sun shines without force
I can't take another day, I'm going to lose my mind
At night, in the neighborhood, none of this matters
Everything is solved by taking a dose of soma
And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal
I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat
I'm not going to work anymore, I spend the day locked up
Next to Perky Pat, in a more human world
But I begin to suspect that nothing is what it seems
Everything around me trembles and fades
I don't care about the time, none of this matters anymore
Everything is solved by taking a little more soma
And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal
I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat
And I no longer want to distinguish the real from the unreal
It's so much better like this, living with Perky Pat 

This is where I lose out, not speaking the language. Google does its best but falters. Worse, the tension between the bouyancy of the music and the desperation of the words is lost. Even so, though, eh? Even so... 

I won't point out the synergies and synchronicities between those lyrics and our current situation. Oh, I just did. I'm sorry about that.

Third, because good things always come in threes and bad things too, there's this, about which I can find nothing. The song has the same title and it sounds quite similar, really quite very similar, although I can't convince myself it's a cover.

The lyric is in English but I can't make it out. Comments on the thread are blocked and the band seem to have no internet presence whatsoever.

How very Philip K.