Ron Lynch
&
Eleni Mandell
From ANDRAS JONES: For this Pop Oracle session ELENI MANDELL invited comedian RON LYNCH to join us. Turns out these two met at the old Largo on Fairfax where so much great, world shaking, comedy and music got it’s start. I played there once. It didn’t go well. There was a miscommunication. Someone was talking loudly to me in the back of the room after the show and it looked like I was the one doing the talking. The owner Flanagan, was a real stickler for silence during the shows, and I am too! I was trying to get the person talking to me to be quiet but it didn’t matter. I was marked as a loud talker. My last conversation with my old friend Josh Clayton-Felt involved him telling me how he’d heard about how loud I was from someone who worked there. It wasn’t a happy call, and if I think about it too much it might bum me out now, but those days are past and most of my memories of Largo are of seeing artists like Jon Brion, Elliott Smith, Paul F. Tompkins, Aimee Mann, Sarah Silverman, Double Naught Spy Car, Fiona Apple, Rhett Miller, John C. Reilly, Benmont Tench, Gillian Welch, Grant Lee Phillips, Elvis Costello and others I’m forgetting right now. Sometimes what I remember most about a Radio8Ball reading are the things I don’t say while it’s happening. I think we can all agree that keeping this particular story to myself during the taping was probably for the best.
Artificial Fire
Found the treasure at last
we have to count backwards
We start at the end
‘til we find what we’re after
There are two kinds of men
he could never be true
But am I just like him
am I unfaithful, too?
I was drawing a map but I couldn’t have known
Take a right, take a left, you’ll know when you get there
The puzzle will fit late one night, Montreal
With his clothes on the floor and his artificial fire
Is there anybody counting
This mathematical equation
Could there be another answer
Could I change his mind
Or could he change mine?
Why can’t there be one?
he tried to explain
In the dark I would laugh
We were talking and naked
Reading my map
late one night, Montreal
Found the treasure at last
It was artificial fire
Is there anybody counting
This mathematical equation
Could there be another answer
Could I change his mind
Or could he change mine?
It was new, it was old
From the start it was both
And a year nearly passed
In one night, Montreal
I’m a killer at heart
And I wanted to feel
So I laid out my trap
With my artificial fire
