Bruce Cockburn
You Pay Your Money And You Take Your Chance

On May 1st, at Milan Central Station, the Woman I love will step off a train, and I will be there waiting for Her. It's now half-past two, and She will only arrive at three. No matter, I exit the station and lounge on a cold stone, soaking up some of the pale sun that intermittently shines beneath the Pirellone.

A few clouds pass in the sky, like shadows in the heart, and I think of many things. Solitude, love, doubts, taking risks, May 1st, politics, the two guys making out in front of me. Meanwhile, I listen to this "You Pay Your Money And You Take Your Chance."
I really like this live by Bruce Cockburn. I like his simplicity, his guitars, his riffs. I like how openly politicized he is. I appreciate the strength and optimism that shine through some tracks. I enjoy the dark and pissed-off vibe of "Strange Waters" or "Stolen Land."
I like the electric and angry atmosphere that lashes the skies of the soul - a beneficial storm - in the opener "Call It Democracy."

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology

I think of the subway I just emerged from, that intestine of Milan in perpetual motion, yellow, green, and red train cars expelling hordes of people, like a constantly diarrheal bowel. Today, the subway hasn't blown up. But I can't forget that damned July 7, 2005, in London. That London where She would like to go one day. I think that if the subway had blown up today, I would, in a way, have died for love.
What a stupid thought. And yet it brings me a tenderness and intensity that almost drives a tear to my eye.

This album is intense. Intense like a love you feel in its entirety even in the distance. A love where you sense a feeling of fusion that almost frightens, that almost hurts, as it grips you inside and you feel it close by.

Across the concrete fields of man
Sun ray like a camera pans
Some will run and some will stand
Everything is bullshit but the open hand

Bruce's guitar weaves its phrases, precise, skillful, in "Strange Waters." Arabesques of notes suspended in a gloomy, threatening, sparse atmosphere at times. Sweet, harsh, seductive guitar, Bruce's. Like in that long, Spanish-like introduction that preludes the title track, "You Pay Your Money And You Take Your Chance." A track that almost smells of the East. A sulky, sensual, and unripe song like a girl who grew up too fast.

You pay your money and you take your chance
When you're dealing with love and romance
Confused and solo in the spawning ground
I watch the confusion of friends all numb with love

A child races by on his skateboard as I enter the station. A swarm of protesters disembarks from a train under the watchful eyes of a few policemen who look at them calmly, while the groove rises like a tide in "Birmingham Shadows."

Policeman studies us, finds us confusing
More amusing than threat
Moves on, bemused
Pavement spirals down ahead like the fossil of a giant shell
Along the kingdom's midnight marches
I wear my shadows where they're harder to see
But they follow me everywhere

A guy from the procession shouts "Bella Ciao" at the top of his lungs as soon as he sets foot on the platform. He's got an unbelievably gorgeous woman attached to his arm, looking at him adoringly. I smile thinking about how sometimes the "leftist intellectual" air can be quite appealing.
I watch them smiling as they leave the station while listening to Bruce's voice smoothly delivering the splendid "Fascist Architecture"

Fascist architecture of my own design
Too long been keeping my love confined
You tore me out of myself alive

There She is, she's arrived. She approaches me, lips brushing. It's not just the beauty of the bodies; She is not only beautiful, She is the Woman I love. Of the roughly 320,000 passengers who transit daily from the "Fascist Architecture" of Milan Central, today one of them is Her. I'm no longer listening to Bruce, I have better things to do now. I am happy now.

Your shadows don't follow you everywhere when happiness is by your side. Sorry Bruce, but it's not as you say. But your voice repeating the chorus

I've been in trouble but I'm ok
Been through the wringer but I'm ok
Walls are falling and I'm ok
Under the mercy and I'm ok

I still hear it even now. And for the first time, I think, I understand it.