There is no more important song than Regina Spektor’s “Ink Stain”. If it sucked it wouldn’t matter but it doesn’t suck. It is a hauntingly beautiful piano mori mortem and I hear it my sleep.
I am Arabic and sometimes my family thinks I’m a self-hating Arab because of my unswerving support for Israel. I’m not. I am simply and to this moment horrified at the attempted extermination of people of Jewish faith. A world without Ben Buchwald. or Steve Diamond. Or if Barry Kramer had never lived. Not to mention Bob Dylan… or Anne Rosen… or Larry Miller. Or Schneiderman!!!
Regina is Jewish as well and on “ink Stains” she deals with “the holocaust”. How do you write about the holocaust? What can you say? This is a memorial to all those people, they die as I write, with tattoos on the fingers.
We can’t get away from World War Two. We think it’s over but it isn’t. We walk on the bones of those who died to make the West the winners. The reason we don’t take terrorism seriously is because it’s in the middle east and we won. Give em a big mac and tell em to shut the fuck up.
But it is serious stuff. It is genocide. And this song doesn’t prod my conscious, it prods my memory. What sort of an animal are we? Regina looks into nothing and finds herself in a Brazilian steak house.
Maybe I am a self-hating Arab. Leave Israel the fuck alone. 6 million died for a fairy tale. The disease that makes us haters. Regina’s wordless moan at the end says it all.
Available on itunes by the way.