I don't have flying dreams... I have running dreams. Or leaping dreams. I'll lope along at varying speeds, each stride taking me farther and farther until I'm at the verge of losing control. Sometimes I'm on the moon. More often I'm in one of my childhood neighborhoods at night, streetlamps spaced evenly along the eerily straight stretch of road, each casting its own pallid pool of light. I speed by, sometimes jumping high enough for my head to be on a level with the roofs of the surrounding houses. Sometimes I peer into windows as I pass, see myself sleeping in strange beds with strange parents hovering just outside the door, whispering in hushed tones.
Tonight the sounds of the wind remind me of something. I with I knew what it was. I just know that I want more... the feeling of the word gust just feels right in my mouth and in my ears, and each time the tree outside rustles with the renewed vigor of the wind, I feel equal parts thrill and nostalgia.
I've never been on a sailboat off of Cape Cod with the sea winds blowing through my hair, but the imagery seems appropriate for the kind of emotive flashes of memory I continue to have. It may have been a dream.
I don't know what I want.
Actually, I do know what I want. I want to own my own bookstore, with my very own bookstore cat. I need to start figuring out what I need to do to make that happen. Business classes, maybe? Some knowledge of the book trade? I don't know. I'm just aware of a growing desire to accomplish something, probably a holdover from driving across the country on my last dime. Once you pop, you just can't stop.
29 May, 2009
06 October, 2008
within a mile of home
There used to be a large vacant lot near my house in Colorado Springs. The older kids rode their BMX bikes there during the summer, riding in lazy loops over foot-high jumps, sometimes smoking the in the uneven shade of three stunted tress that grew in the far corner of the lot.
My friends and I usually kept to the street, patrolling culs-de-sac and the long dusty roads that butted up against the bluffs that formed one edge of our little neighborhood.
After school started one year, they put a fence up around the vacant lot, and while some of the big kids still snuck in whenever they could in the hours between school and nightfall, it became largely deserted. That gave us smaller kids - Myself, Mike Meyers, Jessie V., Christa - a chance to explore a little. We'd ride around the far side of the fence to where it ended abruptly about three feet from can only be described as a hatch. It didn't open for us, but we were scared of what we might have found if it had, and didn't try very hard. After the first couple of forays into the lot we just sort of ignored it, casting it sideways glances as we pushed our bikes over the rough ground.
The lot teemed with the sort of life found around that part of Colorado, which was really just an ridge of sandstone in the middle of the prairie, surrounded by small, grassy mesas and bluffs. We had rabbits and foxes aplenty, the occasional coyote, snakes. Hawks wheeled above, and it wasn't totally uncommon to see an eagle, a distant wing floating high and far away. The ground, anywhere it wasn't cultivated or landscaped, was covered in prairie grasses, yucca, and a fine smattering of tiny cacti that really hurt if you so much as touched one.
My friends and I would carefully wade through this sea of thick flora, using our bikes to check for any bits of nastiness that might be between us the blessedly bare dirt that made up the bike path, affectionately known as the jumps. Once we got there, we'd ride in circles for an hour or so, yelling over the wind to each other about something that we were gonna try, or some really cool thing we'd just done, or how lame the jumps were.
So went the fall of my ninth year.
One day late in the fall, I was out riding alone, bundled deep within an oversized coat and winter boots. It had snowed earlier in the week, and although it had melted off immediately the next morning, I had lived in Colorado long enough to know that once it snows once, snow is always in the air.
The vacant lot (and the jumps) had lost whatever appeal it had to us young kids, and generally we spent our time riding through puddles or playing with legos in my tree if we were going outside at all. But this afternoon, Mike was busy writing a report on the Brontosaurus and Jessie was staying after school for some reason, and none of us hung out with Christa alone because she was a couple of years older that us, and would sometime give us knowing looks that made us uncomfortable, especially it was just one of us.
So I rode alone, carving vast figure eights in the blacktop with my front tire, splashing through shallow puddles, trying to pop a wheelie. It all got kind of boring after a while, and when Mike told me for the fifth time that he still had a bunch to do on his Dinosaur report, I decided that I was going to go make up some awesome tricks on the jumps.
I taught myself how to a little mid-air tire wiggle thing, and I closed my eyes while going over the biggest bump (I was too scared to actually leave the ground), and was feeling kind of lame. The sun was starting to edge towards the horizon, and by hands hurt from gripping my handlebars too tightly, and the cold was starting to bite at my ears, and although I never actually did it, I had homework to do.
I started to walk my bike back through the grass, watching for snakes, prairie-dog holes, and cactus, and was almost to the hatch when I heard something that sounded uncannily like somebody crying. The lot's western edge was only about ten feet from a major road that bisected the neighborhood, with a deep concrete flash flood drainoff ravine in-between. We had all climbed down the steep, rough banks at some point or another, usually as a bet, but sometimes to scavenge a tennis ball or frisbee that had become mixed up in the gritty sediment that formed natural islands in the unnatural riverbed. So I was very aware of how hard it could be to get out of the ravine without some help or the right handholds or a good deal of inertia. I was very aware that some kid might be stuck.
The long grass and brambles were thick on the edge of the embankment, and so I left my bike propped up against a tree, and climbed/slid down into one of the easier parts of the ravine to access to see what I could find. The sound of crying had become almost inaudible by that point, but I could tell I was close. Walking quickly, I dodged low-hanging trees and tumbleweed bushes that had taken root in the sparse sandy soil. As I approached, I heard scampering, a startled noise, and then a weak sort of growl. The small dog held its ground for only a moment as I bent down in front of it, and then took off for the far end of the ravine, where a widely-spaced grating led into the sewers. I gave chase, trying not to scare the little brown dog more than I had to, trying to corner it before it went further than I could go to help it. As he neared the grating, it slowed, toenails scraping on the concrete, and stayed put, looking warily between the sewer and me, growling uncertainly, small tail tucked firmly between its legs. I approached as warily as I could, tried to pet it on its haunches, and got only a bitten hand for my trouble. I tried again, this time letting it sniff my hand, lick it, bit it again, but gently, and then I began to pet it on the head. The small dog looked at me uncertainly the whole time. It didn't have a collar, and it wasn't a dog I'd ever seen before, and as I sat patting in, the sun was starting to go down. Soon, it was going to be dark and cold, and my mom was almost certainly wondering where I was.
I managed to get the dog up into my arms on the first try before he started snapping at my hands and arms, and although he got me a couple of times, I held firm. He wiggled wildly, side to side, feet working like he was running already. I held him tighter, looked at the sides of the darkening ravine, tried to gauge my chances of scaling the wall without my hands. I made a test run, only making it halfway up the steep slope before having to slide back down. I tried again, running faster this time. I made it almost all the way up, but the struggling dog made it impossible for me to grab onto anything and haul myself the last foot or so. I gave it one more run, and this time I only got 3/4 of the way before having to slide down on my butt. I caught my breath, looked down the ravine in either direction, walked a little bit to see if there was any way that might have been more accessible (although I knew there wasn't), and tried running again.
This time I managed to get one of my knees up onto the top edge of the concrete embankment, but scraped the other badly in the process, tearing a large hole in both the knee of my pants and the flesh underneath. I was forced to reach out and grab at the ground with one of my hands so that I didn't fall backwards, and the dog took the opportunity to break free of my other arm, and go shooting off into the long grass towards a nearby row of homes.
I sat there for ten minutes, prodding at my wounded knee, getting chunks of gravel and dirt out of the worst parts of the abrasion, then limped all the way around the perimeter of drainage canal to where my bike was propped against its tree. I tried to ride it, but about halfway home I had to get off and hobble. I made it as far as Mike's house before giving in to the pain. Mrs. Meyers was more than happy to swaddle my knee in antiseptic and extra-large band-aids as I called my Mom. She was there two minutes later, declined the coffee Mrs. Meyers offered, proofread Mike's Brontosaurus report (which was all about how they actually didn't exist), and drove me and my bike back home. She made me grilled cheese as I told her about the dog I'd saved ("It was a Golden Retriever or something. Really big.") and how dark it was and how I bet there had been huge foxes in the sewer or something and how I thought I saw a couple of rattlesnakes and how I had to jump like ten feet straight up to grab onto the wall and how I really wanted a dog.
Two cats was apparently enough for my Mom, and not even reminding her that Dad also really wanted a dog and that Margo would probably love it would make her back down, and so for years I was left to idly wonder what would have happened if I hadn't lost my grip on the little dog from the ravine and instead had brought him home. Would we have adopted it, loved it as our own? Or would it have never found its owners who had been so desperately wondering where Spot had run off to? It was a topic on which I could never be satisfied, even to this day...
but here's how it plays out in my head:
The small dog scrambles from the arm of the boy that holds it, slipping into the tall grass and into the dark. He can smell home not far away, and he moves like a snake, avoiding the yucca and cactus as he runs wearily. He's confused, uncertain, glad to be in the grass rather than in that deep hard place near where the raccoons were. In his way, he is grateful to the stranger boy, who he bit because he was scared and didn't know what else to do. But now home is up ahead, under the fence, across the street, through the lines of yards, through the gate, and a scratch at the back door with thin forelegs, brown eyes peering into the warmth of the house, the light. The door slides open, large hands pick him up, and he is loved.
I miss my puppy.
My friends and I usually kept to the street, patrolling culs-de-sac and the long dusty roads that butted up against the bluffs that formed one edge of our little neighborhood.
After school started one year, they put a fence up around the vacant lot, and while some of the big kids still snuck in whenever they could in the hours between school and nightfall, it became largely deserted. That gave us smaller kids - Myself, Mike Meyers, Jessie V., Christa - a chance to explore a little. We'd ride around the far side of the fence to where it ended abruptly about three feet from can only be described as a hatch. It didn't open for us, but we were scared of what we might have found if it had, and didn't try very hard. After the first couple of forays into the lot we just sort of ignored it, casting it sideways glances as we pushed our bikes over the rough ground.
The lot teemed with the sort of life found around that part of Colorado, which was really just an ridge of sandstone in the middle of the prairie, surrounded by small, grassy mesas and bluffs. We had rabbits and foxes aplenty, the occasional coyote, snakes. Hawks wheeled above, and it wasn't totally uncommon to see an eagle, a distant wing floating high and far away. The ground, anywhere it wasn't cultivated or landscaped, was covered in prairie grasses, yucca, and a fine smattering of tiny cacti that really hurt if you so much as touched one.
My friends and I would carefully wade through this sea of thick flora, using our bikes to check for any bits of nastiness that might be between us the blessedly bare dirt that made up the bike path, affectionately known as the jumps. Once we got there, we'd ride in circles for an hour or so, yelling over the wind to each other about something that we were gonna try, or some really cool thing we'd just done, or how lame the jumps were.
So went the fall of my ninth year.
One day late in the fall, I was out riding alone, bundled deep within an oversized coat and winter boots. It had snowed earlier in the week, and although it had melted off immediately the next morning, I had lived in Colorado long enough to know that once it snows once, snow is always in the air.
The vacant lot (and the jumps) had lost whatever appeal it had to us young kids, and generally we spent our time riding through puddles or playing with legos in my tree if we were going outside at all. But this afternoon, Mike was busy writing a report on the Brontosaurus and Jessie was staying after school for some reason, and none of us hung out with Christa alone because she was a couple of years older that us, and would sometime give us knowing looks that made us uncomfortable, especially it was just one of us.
So I rode alone, carving vast figure eights in the blacktop with my front tire, splashing through shallow puddles, trying to pop a wheelie. It all got kind of boring after a while, and when Mike told me for the fifth time that he still had a bunch to do on his Dinosaur report, I decided that I was going to go make up some awesome tricks on the jumps.
I taught myself how to a little mid-air tire wiggle thing, and I closed my eyes while going over the biggest bump (I was too scared to actually leave the ground), and was feeling kind of lame. The sun was starting to edge towards the horizon, and by hands hurt from gripping my handlebars too tightly, and the cold was starting to bite at my ears, and although I never actually did it, I had homework to do.
I started to walk my bike back through the grass, watching for snakes, prairie-dog holes, and cactus, and was almost to the hatch when I heard something that sounded uncannily like somebody crying. The lot's western edge was only about ten feet from a major road that bisected the neighborhood, with a deep concrete flash flood drainoff ravine in-between. We had all climbed down the steep, rough banks at some point or another, usually as a bet, but sometimes to scavenge a tennis ball or frisbee that had become mixed up in the gritty sediment that formed natural islands in the unnatural riverbed. So I was very aware of how hard it could be to get out of the ravine without some help or the right handholds or a good deal of inertia. I was very aware that some kid might be stuck.
The long grass and brambles were thick on the edge of the embankment, and so I left my bike propped up against a tree, and climbed/slid down into one of the easier parts of the ravine to access to see what I could find. The sound of crying had become almost inaudible by that point, but I could tell I was close. Walking quickly, I dodged low-hanging trees and tumbleweed bushes that had taken root in the sparse sandy soil. As I approached, I heard scampering, a startled noise, and then a weak sort of growl. The small dog held its ground for only a moment as I bent down in front of it, and then took off for the far end of the ravine, where a widely-spaced grating led into the sewers. I gave chase, trying not to scare the little brown dog more than I had to, trying to corner it before it went further than I could go to help it. As he neared the grating, it slowed, toenails scraping on the concrete, and stayed put, looking warily between the sewer and me, growling uncertainly, small tail tucked firmly between its legs. I approached as warily as I could, tried to pet it on its haunches, and got only a bitten hand for my trouble. I tried again, this time letting it sniff my hand, lick it, bit it again, but gently, and then I began to pet it on the head. The small dog looked at me uncertainly the whole time. It didn't have a collar, and it wasn't a dog I'd ever seen before, and as I sat patting in, the sun was starting to go down. Soon, it was going to be dark and cold, and my mom was almost certainly wondering where I was.
I managed to get the dog up into my arms on the first try before he started snapping at my hands and arms, and although he got me a couple of times, I held firm. He wiggled wildly, side to side, feet working like he was running already. I held him tighter, looked at the sides of the darkening ravine, tried to gauge my chances of scaling the wall without my hands. I made a test run, only making it halfway up the steep slope before having to slide back down. I tried again, running faster this time. I made it almost all the way up, but the struggling dog made it impossible for me to grab onto anything and haul myself the last foot or so. I gave it one more run, and this time I only got 3/4 of the way before having to slide down on my butt. I caught my breath, looked down the ravine in either direction, walked a little bit to see if there was any way that might have been more accessible (although I knew there wasn't), and tried running again.
This time I managed to get one of my knees up onto the top edge of the concrete embankment, but scraped the other badly in the process, tearing a large hole in both the knee of my pants and the flesh underneath. I was forced to reach out and grab at the ground with one of my hands so that I didn't fall backwards, and the dog took the opportunity to break free of my other arm, and go shooting off into the long grass towards a nearby row of homes.
I sat there for ten minutes, prodding at my wounded knee, getting chunks of gravel and dirt out of the worst parts of the abrasion, then limped all the way around the perimeter of drainage canal to where my bike was propped against its tree. I tried to ride it, but about halfway home I had to get off and hobble. I made it as far as Mike's house before giving in to the pain. Mrs. Meyers was more than happy to swaddle my knee in antiseptic and extra-large band-aids as I called my Mom. She was there two minutes later, declined the coffee Mrs. Meyers offered, proofread Mike's Brontosaurus report (which was all about how they actually didn't exist), and drove me and my bike back home. She made me grilled cheese as I told her about the dog I'd saved ("It was a Golden Retriever or something. Really big.") and how dark it was and how I bet there had been huge foxes in the sewer or something and how I thought I saw a couple of rattlesnakes and how I had to jump like ten feet straight up to grab onto the wall and how I really wanted a dog.
Two cats was apparently enough for my Mom, and not even reminding her that Dad also really wanted a dog and that Margo would probably love it would make her back down, and so for years I was left to idly wonder what would have happened if I hadn't lost my grip on the little dog from the ravine and instead had brought him home. Would we have adopted it, loved it as our own? Or would it have never found its owners who had been so desperately wondering where Spot had run off to? It was a topic on which I could never be satisfied, even to this day...
but here's how it plays out in my head:
The small dog scrambles from the arm of the boy that holds it, slipping into the tall grass and into the dark. He can smell home not far away, and he moves like a snake, avoiding the yucca and cactus as he runs wearily. He's confused, uncertain, glad to be in the grass rather than in that deep hard place near where the raccoons were. In his way, he is grateful to the stranger boy, who he bit because he was scared and didn't know what else to do. But now home is up ahead, under the fence, across the street, through the lines of yards, through the gate, and a scratch at the back door with thin forelegs, brown eyes peering into the warmth of the house, the light. The door slides open, large hands pick him up, and he is loved.
I miss my puppy.
04 October, 2008
MORNINGTON CRESCENT
Hear Ye, Hear Ye!
Per the Second Bi-Coastal Ellingsworth Iteration of 1973, I formally and proudly announce that you WILL be playing Mornington Crescent.
If you need to brush up on the rules, look here. Keep in mind that there are no rules (only guidelines), and that if you disobey the rules, you may or may not be expelled from the game, disbarred (if you happen to be a lawyer from Illinois. Sorry, Abe.), excommunicated from the Catholic church, sent home with a piece of cake for your mother, and/or eaten by a grue.
Any questions?
This round will be played under the following sets of guidelines (aka: rules).
- We will be playing by rules dictated by the Lonetree International Consortium of 1999 as dictated by Lawrence Phigg. Unfortunately, that means that any moves allowed under the Kittredge Phigg dictation will not be honored. So no, you may not change lines at Evans, although it does allow for some of our players who are non-Denver residents to invoke the Bi-lateral decree of 2066 and go Universal.
- As I am in New Hampshire at the moment, Monadnock rules apply. So no gourd strafing.
- Also: No figging, no cheapies, no graveyards, and if you're over the age of 23, no haberdashery. Literature is allowed if used within reason. Funk and Wagnalls is encouraged.
Please refer to the classic play map, the Western Topographic Variation, and to expansions one, two, and four.
I'll start it off to get things going, but feel free to butt in and start your own round if you so desire.
ALAMEDA
and.... GO!
eta:
go here if you're still confused. you'll still be confused, but hopefully amused as well, which is the point anyway.
Per the Second Bi-Coastal Ellingsworth Iteration of 1973, I formally and proudly announce that you WILL be playing Mornington Crescent.
If you need to brush up on the rules, look here. Keep in mind that there are no rules (only guidelines), and that if you disobey the rules, you may or may not be expelled from the game, disbarred (if you happen to be a lawyer from Illinois. Sorry, Abe.), excommunicated from the Catholic church, sent home with a piece of cake for your mother, and/or eaten by a grue.
Any questions?
This round will be played under the following sets of guidelines (aka: rules).
- We will be playing by rules dictated by the Lonetree International Consortium of 1999 as dictated by Lawrence Phigg. Unfortunately, that means that any moves allowed under the Kittredge Phigg dictation will not be honored. So no, you may not change lines at Evans, although it does allow for some of our players who are non-Denver residents to invoke the Bi-lateral decree of 2066 and go Universal.
- As I am in New Hampshire at the moment, Monadnock rules apply. So no gourd strafing.
- Also: No figging, no cheapies, no graveyards, and if you're over the age of 23, no haberdashery. Literature is allowed if used within reason. Funk and Wagnalls is encouraged.
Please refer to the classic play map, the Western Topographic Variation, and to expansions one, two, and four.
I'll start it off to get things going, but feel free to butt in and start your own round if you so desire.
ALAMEDA
and.... GO!
eta:
go here if you're still confused. you'll still be confused, but hopefully amused as well, which is the point anyway.
26 September, 2008
a short reprise for Mary Todd, who went insane, but for very good reasons
While at the grocery store sometime last week (or the week before), my nose caught whiff of something so intensely cinnamon that I nearly keeled over from happiness. It ended up being a gaggle of cinnamon brooms, arranged artfully in an oversize white cardboard corral near the front of the store, and as I approached it I really did almost keel over from the sheer potency of the smell, and had to make an well-executed retreat to save myself from what could have been my doom. Which was reason enough not to buy one, I guess, even if I've been craving the rich warm scent of cinnamon (maybe with apples thrown in for good measure) for more than a week now as consequence.
Guys, my nose hurts. There's a little cut on the inside of my left nostril, and it's impossible not to touch it every few minutes just to make sure it's still there. Yeah, I know that makes little sense, but it's one of those things that's so deeply ingrained in human nature that you really can't stop yourself. It doesn't matter that all during lunch today I was gingerly sticking my finger up my nose, and wincing when it inevitably hurt really bad, and it doesn't matter that there's a 9-1 woman to man ratio in my office. And that they all watched me (painfully) pick (at) my nose for half an hour. I couldn't not do it.
I know you know what I'm talking about, so don't make that face.
While most of the women I work with are older than, say, thirty (to be kind), there're a few that fit somewhat awkwardly into the twenty-something category. They flock together hardcore, and yet somehow still manage to act some twenty years older than they really are. One girl - she looks to be 23 or so - wears cat sweaters, knits during lunch, drinks ensure, and reads romance novels. Another is 25 ans has four kids. Another is about my age, and talks about nothing but her cat and two dogs. It's as if sitting behind a computer all day processing bank forms ages you prematurely, sending you spiraling down into an abyss of youth-sucking awful.
That said, there's still an entire group of people who work at my office who I've never seen. Occasionally I'll hear a voice drifting across the space above the cubicles on an errant A/C'd breeze, but it's hard sometimes to put faces with voices, especially when a good portion of the people I work with are customer support types, who generally have much younger voices when compared to their age.
And so it was that when I ducked into the lunchroom around eleven to get some water, I met with about eight women who I've never seen before, all staring directly at me. It was obvious I was a new face to them as well, and so I waved a muted hello, got my water, and stared intently out the window for a few moments.
On the way out, I could feel their eyes.
For the rest of the day, I kept feeling the weight of people's gazes as they walked past my turned back (I was doing some mad sorting), and it left me feeling sort of dirty, sort of amused, and oddly... like I fit it.
Now all I need is some sexual harassment and I'll feel right at home.
Today's Friday, which means that it's my last installment in this week's series of ten albums that help make up part of who I am, and why
So without further ado:
Morning View by Incubus
High School is a series of half-memories for me; fragments of conversations, the way meals tasted, the smell of the hallway when the kiln was being fired, the drone of Mr. Galvin's voice, the sting of the cuts on the bottom of my feet after running barefoot in Shaffer Park on the last day of school...
This album fits neatly in with all of it, somehow. I don't remember when I bought the album or why, but I do remember listening to it on a bright, rainy day in mid-September, my nose buried in one of the countless Sword of Truth books that Johnny had let me borrow. It was during class, and I was supposed to be working on some assignment or another that I really couldn't afford to miss, and I was absolutely absorbed. Morning View, on first listen, doesn't seem like it would be a good match for the kind of sword and sorcery rubbish that makes up Terry Goodkind's novels, but I was steadfast in claiming that they fit. I didn't know how, but the intense vocals and lyrics rife with loneliness and angst clicked perfectly with larger-than-life heroes that strode, flew, and fought their way across the pages.
Because of that, I give this album some of the credit for the writing I did that year, which is very possibly some of the best I've ever done. It was as if that queer admixture of plaintive music and forcefully prose combined into a new sort of creativity, rife with strong characters and dramatic landscapes, deep solemnity and epic angst. I'd never encountered before. I've never met its equal since.
Tracks you ought to hear, yo:
11am
Circles
Aqueous Transmission
The Ditty Bops by The Ditty Bops
Since that very first day that sister Kate shimmied her way into my life, I've been hooked to the Ditty Bops, who are just about my favorite bike-riding, harmony-producing, folk-singing lesbians ever.
It was via some link or another on the WWWebernets that I discovered them on one fateful day in the spring of '05. I'm pretty sure I was less than happy at the time, probably because of a girl. I could go digging through my livejournal to make for certain who it was and why, but in truth it really doesn't matter. The fact is, I was miserable, and there was nothing to be done to lift me from my listless funk. I was inconsolable.
But then the aforementioned link made itself available for clicking, and I clicked it, and there were these two cute, very real looking girls singing upbeat folktunes about riding bikes and how the white people can't play the blues. I looked them up forthwith. Back then, nobody knew who they were, and Wikipedia pretty much said that they sang stuff and were maybe into each other. I wrote this last bit off as slander, found some more videos, fell a little bit in love with their tight tight harmonies and sometimes perplexing subject matter.
I bought their album online because I could, listened to it notstop for days when it arrived, and then I came to terms with the fact that these lovely young singer ladies were totally hot for one another. Which was okay, because the replacement for whatever kind of lady drama I was having at the moment couldn't (and shouldn't) be solved or even soothed by celebrity affection.
But in their way, the Ditty Bops did get me through the tough times, bouyed me up on giddy chords, made me fall in love with life a little.
Some songs you might dig:
Wishful Thinking
Sister Kate
So. What do you think? Do you feel edified, oh readers? Have I laid rest to questions you may have had about my character and disposition? Is a week-long exploration of music an adequate way to plumb the depths of the human soul?
I want reactions. I know some of my posts were better than others, and I know some had more relevance than others, but overall I felt it was a worthwhile little project. I'd just like to know what you think.
In other news, Gustav Klimt paintings as done through photographic recreations - here! (NSFW. There's a wee bit of nudity.)
Goodnight, kids. I'm feeling grumpy, and it's supposed to rain a whole bunch tomorrow. Wish me survival.
-James
Guys, my nose hurts. There's a little cut on the inside of my left nostril, and it's impossible not to touch it every few minutes just to make sure it's still there. Yeah, I know that makes little sense, but it's one of those things that's so deeply ingrained in human nature that you really can't stop yourself. It doesn't matter that all during lunch today I was gingerly sticking my finger up my nose, and wincing when it inevitably hurt really bad, and it doesn't matter that there's a 9-1 woman to man ratio in my office. And that they all watched me (painfully) pick (at) my nose for half an hour. I couldn't not do it.
I know you know what I'm talking about, so don't make that face.
While most of the women I work with are older than, say, thirty (to be kind), there're a few that fit somewhat awkwardly into the twenty-something category. They flock together hardcore, and yet somehow still manage to act some twenty years older than they really are. One girl - she looks to be 23 or so - wears cat sweaters, knits during lunch, drinks ensure, and reads romance novels. Another is 25 ans has four kids. Another is about my age, and talks about nothing but her cat and two dogs. It's as if sitting behind a computer all day processing bank forms ages you prematurely, sending you spiraling down into an abyss of youth-sucking awful.
That said, there's still an entire group of people who work at my office who I've never seen. Occasionally I'll hear a voice drifting across the space above the cubicles on an errant A/C'd breeze, but it's hard sometimes to put faces with voices, especially when a good portion of the people I work with are customer support types, who generally have much younger voices when compared to their age.
And so it was that when I ducked into the lunchroom around eleven to get some water, I met with about eight women who I've never seen before, all staring directly at me. It was obvious I was a new face to them as well, and so I waved a muted hello, got my water, and stared intently out the window for a few moments.
On the way out, I could feel their eyes.
For the rest of the day, I kept feeling the weight of people's gazes as they walked past my turned back (I was doing some mad sorting), and it left me feeling sort of dirty, sort of amused, and oddly... like I fit it.
Now all I need is some sexual harassment and I'll feel right at home.
Today's Friday, which means that it's my last installment in this week's series of ten albums that help make up part of who I am, and why
So without further ado:
Morning View by IncubusHigh School is a series of half-memories for me; fragments of conversations, the way meals tasted, the smell of the hallway when the kiln was being fired, the drone of Mr. Galvin's voice, the sting of the cuts on the bottom of my feet after running barefoot in Shaffer Park on the last day of school...
This album fits neatly in with all of it, somehow. I don't remember when I bought the album or why, but I do remember listening to it on a bright, rainy day in mid-September, my nose buried in one of the countless Sword of Truth books that Johnny had let me borrow. It was during class, and I was supposed to be working on some assignment or another that I really couldn't afford to miss, and I was absolutely absorbed. Morning View, on first listen, doesn't seem like it would be a good match for the kind of sword and sorcery rubbish that makes up Terry Goodkind's novels, but I was steadfast in claiming that they fit. I didn't know how, but the intense vocals and lyrics rife with loneliness and angst clicked perfectly with larger-than-life heroes that strode, flew, and fought their way across the pages.
Because of that, I give this album some of the credit for the writing I did that year, which is very possibly some of the best I've ever done. It was as if that queer admixture of plaintive music and forcefully prose combined into a new sort of creativity, rife with strong characters and dramatic landscapes, deep solemnity and epic angst. I'd never encountered before. I've never met its equal since.
Tracks you ought to hear, yo:
11am
Circles
Aqueous Transmission
The Ditty Bops by The Ditty BopsSince that very first day that sister Kate shimmied her way into my life, I've been hooked to the Ditty Bops, who are just about my favorite bike-riding, harmony-producing, folk-singing lesbians ever.
It was via some link or another on the WWWebernets that I discovered them on one fateful day in the spring of '05. I'm pretty sure I was less than happy at the time, probably because of a girl. I could go digging through my livejournal to make for certain who it was and why, but in truth it really doesn't matter. The fact is, I was miserable, and there was nothing to be done to lift me from my listless funk. I was inconsolable.
But then the aforementioned link made itself available for clicking, and I clicked it, and there were these two cute, very real looking girls singing upbeat folktunes about riding bikes and how the white people can't play the blues. I looked them up forthwith. Back then, nobody knew who they were, and Wikipedia pretty much said that they sang stuff and were maybe into each other. I wrote this last bit off as slander, found some more videos, fell a little bit in love with their tight tight harmonies and sometimes perplexing subject matter.
I bought their album online because I could, listened to it notstop for days when it arrived, and then I came to terms with the fact that these lovely young singer ladies were totally hot for one another. Which was okay, because the replacement for whatever kind of lady drama I was having at the moment couldn't (and shouldn't) be solved or even soothed by celebrity affection.
But in their way, the Ditty Bops did get me through the tough times, bouyed me up on giddy chords, made me fall in love with life a little.
Some songs you might dig:
Wishful Thinking
Sister Kate
So. What do you think? Do you feel edified, oh readers? Have I laid rest to questions you may have had about my character and disposition? Is a week-long exploration of music an adequate way to plumb the depths of the human soul?
I want reactions. I know some of my posts were better than others, and I know some had more relevance than others, but overall I felt it was a worthwhile little project. I'd just like to know what you think.
In other news, Gustav Klimt paintings as done through photographic recreations - here! (NSFW. There's a wee bit of nudity.)
Goodnight, kids. I'm feeling grumpy, and it's supposed to rain a whole bunch tomorrow. Wish me survival.
-James
25 September, 2008
early morning singin' songs
I've been spending some quality time with my DS lately, mostly with the gloriousness that is Lego Indiana Jones. I mean, what other game has you hyperventilating from blowing out all the freaking torches in an entire level in hopes that maybe there's a secret door or something, maybe a hidden cache of blue studs.
If we've learned anything from turning George Lucas franchises into Lego-based video games, it's that Harrison Ford looks all sorts of hot as a little blockman. I mean, watching the cutscenes, seeing Lego Indy tipping his hat back, smiling that rakish smile, giving the girl his best "I'm so going to block you later" look, it's almost better than the movie.
I'm also a geek.
Today, my iPod decided to regurgitate some songs that aren't its usual fare. There was more from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers than I'm used to hearing, and a good deal of Islands, really old Beck, and one or two Coldplay songs I don't believe I've ever heard before. It was enough to break me from my reverie each time it happened, to press the back button, to listen again to make sure I heard right. I really ought to reformat my iPod; it was starting to guess at what I liked, which is kind of not the point, in my opinion. I'd rather hear a song I like, remember how much I liked that song, listen to it on purpose a couple of times over the next few days, and then move on. To have my iPod preempt me by playing the songs I've played manually more often than other songs is kind of bothersome.
Either that, or I'm crazy and totally made up a function that my iPod does not in fact possess. That would work, too.
Alright. So far this week, I've pretty much exclusively listed albums that I still listen to on a regular basis, or at least don't skip over when songs from the album come up when I shuffle my music collection. The albums for this evening fall into another queer category altogether, which is albums that have shaped me, but I don't hear much of now that I'm older. You'll probably understand why. The next two are as follows:
Rebel Rock by Various Artists
In fourth grade, I was really getting to know what it meant not to be an only child any longer. Margo had been born a couple of years before, and Marielle was nearly brand new, and it became obvious with each passing day that life was no longer going to revolve around me. My Father was working extra to support his growing family, my Mother was constantly busy with baby things, and any assorted relatives that may have come over before, pinched at my cheeks, asked me how school was... well they were too preoccupied with the girl children to bother with an increasingly awkward boy-child with large teeth and a proclivity towards speaking softly.
Not that I wasn't adorable, 'cause I was. I was a blond little runt until the age of twelve, at which point I shot up a couple of feet and darkened perceptively. My towheaded features betrayed their part-Scottish origins like a sleeper agent gone rogue, and suddenly I had brows full of spiky hair and a jutting chin.
But at ten, I was still fair, still a little chubby, still a soft-spoken germanic boy. And more and more each day, I was discovering that I would never be an only child again.
My Father had a case, large and hard, built specifically to hold some thirty-odd cassette tapes in. Never much a man for music, his case was filled with self-help tapes, some free Garth Brooks albums he'd scored off of Ty England (who he had a sort of awkward friendship with. It mostly involved name-dropping in my father's case), and some of my Mother's tapes she'd made when they were still a young, enthused couple. These last tapes were mostly songs recorded off of the radio (as mixtapes used to be), with a couple tracks of poetry or bad jokes. I don't think my Mom ever knew that I found them, although they did disappear as I got older. I wish I knew where they were now.
But no - the real gem of my Father's collection was a gray and blue tape in a clear case on which someone (not my Dad) had written 'ReBeL RoCk' in magic marker. It was so cool. I'd sit on my bed with my half-brother Chad's old Walkman and groove out to what can only be described as, well, rebel rock. Children of the south writing music that wasn't quite country, wasn't quite rock & roll, wasn't quite poppy enough to just be... and I loved it.
I have a very vivid memory of being in the back of our monstrous old minivan (Ford Aerostar, I think), driving down the side of Pike's Peak after half a day spent at Santa's Workshop. I loved that place, loved feeding the reindeer, flying the little clapboard biplane ride, loved the giant slide and the place where you made candles. And even though I now had to share one of my favorite places on earth with two sisters (one of which wasn't even old enough to get it! Jeez!), I'd still had an awesome time. Feeling the afterglow, I slipped the big fuzzy headphones of my Walkman over my ears, rewound the tape, and listened to Rebel Rock for a few minutes until the joy was just too much to hold in and a ridiculous, pre-pubescent laugh bubbled up and escaped. I can't remember another time I've felt that sort of pure glee to be alive.
Tracks to listen to:
Gregg Allman Band - I'm No Angel
The Fabulous Thunderbirds - Tuff Enuff
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego
by Rockapella and Various Artists
I was a PBS baby. My Mom would set me down in front of the television while she sewed or read or whatever it is she used to do way back when she still believed in free time and having an attention span. Sometimes we'd watch soaps, and sometimes we'd watch reruns of Star Trek or the Outer Limits, but more often than not there'd be a pledge drive on PBS, featuring some Operetta or another, or an eighteen-tape set of Beethoven symphonies recorded live at the Philadelphia Philharmonic. And I ate it up. I sat straight and hunched at the same time (like only babies can do), rapt as large women in yards of silk and furs sang. I emulated with sounds at first, then with words as I got older and understood that they weren't just singing gibberish (which I thought would have been kind of cool, to be honest), but simply expressing themselves in another language.
I never stopped watching PBS as I got older, but simply changed time slots. After I started school, the daytime operas were no longer on when I could watch them, and so I was forced to adapt to the likes of Wishbone, Ghost Writer, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? And when I say forced, I don't mean I watched them unwillingly. I loved my demographically targeted children's programming like a fat kid loves insulin. But I didn't love it quite enough to be overjoyed when my mom bought me the freaking soundtrack to a quiz show for my birthday, however much I may have liked singing along to the theme song.
But over time, that little tape grew on me, especially the tracks that weren't really the headliners. I found that I had intense desire to visit New York and Indiana, and I didn't really mind being called Jim Boy. And so it was that I was devastated beyond consoling when the car's tape player made that telltale sickening 'schlurp' sound, and ate my Carmen Sandiego album. I think I was fifteen or so at the time, and although I hesitantly asked my Mom if we could replace it maybe, I knew that the end of an era had come, and that I was one step closer to growing up.
Tracks to listen to:
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (with end credits!)
Capital
More to come, if I can find them...
That's all for tonight, folks. Leave me love, cookies, small children. I don't discriminate.
-James.
If we've learned anything from turning George Lucas franchises into Lego-based video games, it's that Harrison Ford looks all sorts of hot as a little blockman. I mean, watching the cutscenes, seeing Lego Indy tipping his hat back, smiling that rakish smile, giving the girl his best "I'm so going to block you later" look, it's almost better than the movie.
I'm also a geek.
Today, my iPod decided to regurgitate some songs that aren't its usual fare. There was more from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers than I'm used to hearing, and a good deal of Islands, really old Beck, and one or two Coldplay songs I don't believe I've ever heard before. It was enough to break me from my reverie each time it happened, to press the back button, to listen again to make sure I heard right. I really ought to reformat my iPod; it was starting to guess at what I liked, which is kind of not the point, in my opinion. I'd rather hear a song I like, remember how much I liked that song, listen to it on purpose a couple of times over the next few days, and then move on. To have my iPod preempt me by playing the songs I've played manually more often than other songs is kind of bothersome.
Either that, or I'm crazy and totally made up a function that my iPod does not in fact possess. That would work, too.
Alright. So far this week, I've pretty much exclusively listed albums that I still listen to on a regular basis, or at least don't skip over when songs from the album come up when I shuffle my music collection. The albums for this evening fall into another queer category altogether, which is albums that have shaped me, but I don't hear much of now that I'm older. You'll probably understand why. The next two are as follows:
Rebel Rock by Various ArtistsIn fourth grade, I was really getting to know what it meant not to be an only child any longer. Margo had been born a couple of years before, and Marielle was nearly brand new, and it became obvious with each passing day that life was no longer going to revolve around me. My Father was working extra to support his growing family, my Mother was constantly busy with baby things, and any assorted relatives that may have come over before, pinched at my cheeks, asked me how school was... well they were too preoccupied with the girl children to bother with an increasingly awkward boy-child with large teeth and a proclivity towards speaking softly.
Not that I wasn't adorable, 'cause I was. I was a blond little runt until the age of twelve, at which point I shot up a couple of feet and darkened perceptively. My towheaded features betrayed their part-Scottish origins like a sleeper agent gone rogue, and suddenly I had brows full of spiky hair and a jutting chin.
But at ten, I was still fair, still a little chubby, still a soft-spoken germanic boy. And more and more each day, I was discovering that I would never be an only child again.
My Father had a case, large and hard, built specifically to hold some thirty-odd cassette tapes in. Never much a man for music, his case was filled with self-help tapes, some free Garth Brooks albums he'd scored off of Ty England (who he had a sort of awkward friendship with. It mostly involved name-dropping in my father's case), and some of my Mother's tapes she'd made when they were still a young, enthused couple. These last tapes were mostly songs recorded off of the radio (as mixtapes used to be), with a couple tracks of poetry or bad jokes. I don't think my Mom ever knew that I found them, although they did disappear as I got older. I wish I knew where they were now.
But no - the real gem of my Father's collection was a gray and blue tape in a clear case on which someone (not my Dad) had written 'ReBeL RoCk' in magic marker. It was so cool. I'd sit on my bed with my half-brother Chad's old Walkman and groove out to what can only be described as, well, rebel rock. Children of the south writing music that wasn't quite country, wasn't quite rock & roll, wasn't quite poppy enough to just be... and I loved it.
I have a very vivid memory of being in the back of our monstrous old minivan (Ford Aerostar, I think), driving down the side of Pike's Peak after half a day spent at Santa's Workshop. I loved that place, loved feeding the reindeer, flying the little clapboard biplane ride, loved the giant slide and the place where you made candles. And even though I now had to share one of my favorite places on earth with two sisters (one of which wasn't even old enough to get it! Jeez!), I'd still had an awesome time. Feeling the afterglow, I slipped the big fuzzy headphones of my Walkman over my ears, rewound the tape, and listened to Rebel Rock for a few minutes until the joy was just too much to hold in and a ridiculous, pre-pubescent laugh bubbled up and escaped. I can't remember another time I've felt that sort of pure glee to be alive.
Tracks to listen to:
Gregg Allman Band - I'm No Angel
The Fabulous Thunderbirds - Tuff Enuff
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiegoby Rockapella and Various Artists
I was a PBS baby. My Mom would set me down in front of the television while she sewed or read or whatever it is she used to do way back when she still believed in free time and having an attention span. Sometimes we'd watch soaps, and sometimes we'd watch reruns of Star Trek or the Outer Limits, but more often than not there'd be a pledge drive on PBS, featuring some Operetta or another, or an eighteen-tape set of Beethoven symphonies recorded live at the Philadelphia Philharmonic. And I ate it up. I sat straight and hunched at the same time (like only babies can do), rapt as large women in yards of silk and furs sang. I emulated with sounds at first, then with words as I got older and understood that they weren't just singing gibberish (which I thought would have been kind of cool, to be honest), but simply expressing themselves in another language.
I never stopped watching PBS as I got older, but simply changed time slots. After I started school, the daytime operas were no longer on when I could watch them, and so I was forced to adapt to the likes of Wishbone, Ghost Writer, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? And when I say forced, I don't mean I watched them unwillingly. I loved my demographically targeted children's programming like a fat kid loves insulin. But I didn't love it quite enough to be overjoyed when my mom bought me the freaking soundtrack to a quiz show for my birthday, however much I may have liked singing along to the theme song.
But over time, that little tape grew on me, especially the tracks that weren't really the headliners. I found that I had intense desire to visit New York and Indiana, and I didn't really mind being called Jim Boy. And so it was that I was devastated beyond consoling when the car's tape player made that telltale sickening 'schlurp' sound, and ate my Carmen Sandiego album. I think I was fifteen or so at the time, and although I hesitantly asked my Mom if we could replace it maybe, I knew that the end of an era had come, and that I was one step closer to growing up.
Tracks to listen to:
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (with end credits!)
Capital
More to come, if I can find them...
That's all for tonight, folks. Leave me love, cookies, small children. I don't discriminate.
-James.
24 September, 2008
the power is ON
I have so many ideas for stories, novels, plays, songs... they back up like flotsam washed up on a barren shoreline, intermingled and indistinguishable as a whole mass, meaningless.
Considered one by one, however, I can almost tell where they come from, what foreign port of thought set them adrift. It's as if distant events jettisoned their effluvia onto to the sea of dreams to float and intermingle and copulate, and time and distance worked their arcane science to bring the resulting mess to me. Maybe this seems an overly dramatic metaphor to you, but you haven't had the occasion to be inside my head when I've got my guard down. If it weren't for my apparently innate ability to automatically sort the dross from the rough gems, I'd be bogged down in so many useless ideas that anything I wrote would read like an ADHD-ridden fifth grader's wet dream.
Some ideas of note:
-A story wherein werewolves are descended from a runt wolf pup who survives a winter by eating an Eastern European girl's boarding school... er... rags. Bloody rags. Came to me after a dialog in which a woman and her werewolf beau discover their cycles have aligned popped into my head fully formed.
-A man discovers that he is gradually moving faster and faster through time compared to everyone else. The first ten years or so are okay - he marries, has a child, gets media attention when it is proved his body is aging slower than anything else on earth. But then things get too fast for comfort. He can no longer drive safely, is unable to focus on current events, things like birthdays and anniversaries go by before he realizes they've come. The time between the twentieth and thirtieth year go by in the space of a matter of months. He is rendered room-bound by his concerned family, who have long since come to terms with how slowly he seems to move in their perception. He struggles to eat, to sleep, to maintain his relationships. His wife divorces him what seems like moments after a touching reconciliation.
Eventually, he watches as everybody he knows dies in a flash, as decades start to pass as days, as the world becomes nothing more than a protracted blur with the only constants remaining a spoon that he watches tarnish.
-A novel about Destination Imagination/Odyssey of the Mind and just how screwed up and wonderful that world really is, all through the eyes of a twenty-something college drop out-cum-assistant coach. Complete with awkward teenage romance, crying on swingsets, and references that only we old DI freaks will ever understand.
-etc.
Tonight's Albums That Make James the Way He Is is brought to you by microwaved kosher hot dogs and plaid pajama pants. Because sometimes you're too tired to make real food and wear anything decent.
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
by The Flaming Lips
It was an unremarkable day in mid-July. Clouds hung heavily above the mountains, portending a great deal of rain that would never come. My car's tires sounded as if they were adhering to the pavement with each revolution, and the windows of my poor creaking Jeep Grand Cherokee had been rolled down since eight that morning. Margo was riding shotgun, slouching in the faux-leather seat, careful not to touch anything with bare skin. The world sweltered.
I don't remember where we were going; why. But I do remember the vast plain of a parking lot off of Kipling, filled to a tenth of its capacity with minivans like silver fishes flocking to the deep end of a rapidly-sinking puddle in black desert. I remember driving contrary to parking spaces, and I remember afternoon light slanting off of the display windows of the Mervyn's down the stripmall.
And this memory is the sharpest of all, the clearest in my mind after all these years - I remember seeing the solitary, temporarily blinding light of something small and round and out of place, cast up against a yellow line. I slowed to a stop beside it, opened the door, walked the five feet to where the CD sat on the blacktop, picked it up. The bottom was scratched to hell, almost certainly ruined... but I turned it over anyway, and boggled a little bit at the title curving along the edge of the disc.
Yoshimi Battles the Pink what now?
I carried it back to the car bemused, amused, and definitely curious. The Flaming Lips were vaguely familiar to me even back then, but I don't think I remembered ever actually hearing them. Margo was equally clueless, if less excited. Whatever kind of music it would have been, the playing surface was almost certainly ruined, making our ruminations moot.
There was only one way to tell. I popped out whatever had been living in the car's prehistoric CD player, cleaned the bottom of Yoshimi as best as I could with the corner of my shirt, and gave it a go. After a minute of silence, I thumped the dash with my fist and pressed play again. After another minute, I ejected the disc, thumped the dash again, and re-inserted it. This time, music came almost instantly, and continued to do so for the next 47 minutes and 25 seconds without so much as a skip, a pause, or any interruption besides laughter, vocal approval, and Margo asking me who this was by again?
The Flaming Lips ended up being older than I was, and the discarded album I'd discovered ended up being their tenth. I balked a little when I realized that if I were to enjoy their music as much as I thought I was beginning to, I had a lot of ground to make up in old albums, b-sides, and music videos. It was daunting to think that a group so strange, so full of awesome, so instantly beloved was also so prolific.
The rest of the summer had me humming psychedelic chords and considering melancholy abstracts to the tune of Yoshimi's constant battle against those who would do The City wrong. And it made me realize: Abstract only means the story isn't laid out for you. It means that at some point your imagination has to awaken itself, make its own meaning out of the hodgepodge.
Tracks to listen to:
Do You Realize??
Flight Test
X&Y by Coldplay
Sometimes an album sneaks up on you, even after you've known it for years, and hits your right in the emotional kidneys with an eight-by-four of memories and nostalgia. You fall to your knees, physically unable to stand, wanting more than anything for the pain to go away, even if it means death.
The summer of '05 found me working in a small textbook store tucked neatly in the far corner of a community college near where I'd gone to High School. I was hired as a register jockey for what's known in the textbook business as 'Bookrush' or 'Hell'. My touted experience in customer service was utterly wasted on the ACC bookstore, as was my experience with books themselves. My job, put simply, was to take students parents money and tell them "No." And sometimes pass off the rare pertinent question to someone who knew what they were talking about.
I only spent a month there, and only made maybe $800, before bookrush was over and they kindly told me to get out. I was to attend in the fall as a student, and so even after I had ceased to be employed at the bookstore, I continued to drop in and talk about nothing with the full time employees, who spent a good amount of time restocking the drinks and being bored.
One hazy August morning saw me groggy from a night spent talking to Jenny in lieu of sleep. It was a custom to swing through the bookstore before class to find something to eat (usually a snickers), but this morning I spent a few minutes more than usual carefully reading the tracklist of X&Y, the case cumbersome underneath five layers of extra plastic and a hefty, clear clamshell of a theft deterrent. Jenny and I had spent the last evening discussing music, and when I admitted to liking the couple of Coldplay songs I'd heard (Yellow, a bit of Speed of Sound), she had a bit of an attack of the enthusiasms. And so it followed that I was considering spending five dollars too many on an album I wasn't sure if I was going to like or not, based sole on the fact that it may inspire AWWW in a girl I had affections for.
I bought it reluctantly, spent fifteen minutes prising the packaging apart in the hallway before class, and fiddled anxiously throughout the length of English Comp. 101 with the liner notes, which did relatively little to disclose what kind of music I was to expect.
An hour between classes was my usual lunchtime, and I jogged down the stairs and out into parking lot, which was already starting to fill up at the corners with brown leaves and looseleaf paper. I listened to the first couple of tracks of X&Y in my car, decided that I liked it alright, and went back inside to buy some food.
That night I talked to Jenny again, and she was thrilled beyond measure that I'd bought (another) album because of her (The Understanding was the first one. See Monday's entry). I listened to it the entire time we talked that night, and the next night, and the night after... and it wasn't long before each and every song on the album was inexorably tangled up in all sorts of emotions and perceived meaning. We'd quote lines at each other, tell each other of dreams we'd had, send each other B-sides and covers we'd found on limewire.
And then we moved on.
I carried a torch for another couple of months, wrote depressing poetry, took some moody photographs of mountain lakes and snow drifts, and then got better. Even after she came out and I saw her in person and we said we were in love. Even after we watched Gilmore Girls and cuddled in her aunt's basement. I got better. I learned to listen to Coldplay without having intense emotional reactions, and I met other girls and life goes on.
Only, instead of being better nearly a year later, I broke down. The aforementioned eight-by-four came out of nowhere and rendered me an emotional mess while in the cab of my bosses truck on a cold April morning, and it was all I could do to save face and pretend I had been violently ill so that I could go park in the library parking lot and cry. It was the weight of one song that broke me, the weight of all that lost emotion.
Tracks to listen to:
Talk
Fix You (live)
The Hardest Part (with bonus X-men footage!)
And that's that for tonight. I'm going with Ali to an STD meeting (honor society, not cooties) tomorrow evening, so the next of installment of this week's introspection into James through music may be a little bit late, or at least may be a little shorter.
Word to your Grandmothers (they love it when you write),
James
Considered one by one, however, I can almost tell where they come from, what foreign port of thought set them adrift. It's as if distant events jettisoned their effluvia onto to the sea of dreams to float and intermingle and copulate, and time and distance worked their arcane science to bring the resulting mess to me. Maybe this seems an overly dramatic metaphor to you, but you haven't had the occasion to be inside my head when I've got my guard down. If it weren't for my apparently innate ability to automatically sort the dross from the rough gems, I'd be bogged down in so many useless ideas that anything I wrote would read like an ADHD-ridden fifth grader's wet dream.
Some ideas of note:
-A story wherein werewolves are descended from a runt wolf pup who survives a winter by eating an Eastern European girl's boarding school... er... rags. Bloody rags. Came to me after a dialog in which a woman and her werewolf beau discover their cycles have aligned popped into my head fully formed.
-A man discovers that he is gradually moving faster and faster through time compared to everyone else. The first ten years or so are okay - he marries, has a child, gets media attention when it is proved his body is aging slower than anything else on earth. But then things get too fast for comfort. He can no longer drive safely, is unable to focus on current events, things like birthdays and anniversaries go by before he realizes they've come. The time between the twentieth and thirtieth year go by in the space of a matter of months. He is rendered room-bound by his concerned family, who have long since come to terms with how slowly he seems to move in their perception. He struggles to eat, to sleep, to maintain his relationships. His wife divorces him what seems like moments after a touching reconciliation.
Eventually, he watches as everybody he knows dies in a flash, as decades start to pass as days, as the world becomes nothing more than a protracted blur with the only constants remaining a spoon that he watches tarnish.
-A novel about Destination Imagination/Odyssey of the Mind and just how screwed up and wonderful that world really is, all through the eyes of a twenty-something college drop out-cum-assistant coach. Complete with awkward teenage romance, crying on swingsets, and references that only we old DI freaks will ever understand.
-etc.
Tonight's Albums That Make James the Way He Is is brought to you by microwaved kosher hot dogs and plaid pajama pants. Because sometimes you're too tired to make real food and wear anything decent.
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robotsby The Flaming Lips
It was an unremarkable day in mid-July. Clouds hung heavily above the mountains, portending a great deal of rain that would never come. My car's tires sounded as if they were adhering to the pavement with each revolution, and the windows of my poor creaking Jeep Grand Cherokee had been rolled down since eight that morning. Margo was riding shotgun, slouching in the faux-leather seat, careful not to touch anything with bare skin. The world sweltered.
I don't remember where we were going; why. But I do remember the vast plain of a parking lot off of Kipling, filled to a tenth of its capacity with minivans like silver fishes flocking to the deep end of a rapidly-sinking puddle in black desert. I remember driving contrary to parking spaces, and I remember afternoon light slanting off of the display windows of the Mervyn's down the stripmall.
And this memory is the sharpest of all, the clearest in my mind after all these years - I remember seeing the solitary, temporarily blinding light of something small and round and out of place, cast up against a yellow line. I slowed to a stop beside it, opened the door, walked the five feet to where the CD sat on the blacktop, picked it up. The bottom was scratched to hell, almost certainly ruined... but I turned it over anyway, and boggled a little bit at the title curving along the edge of the disc.
Yoshimi Battles the Pink what now?
I carried it back to the car bemused, amused, and definitely curious. The Flaming Lips were vaguely familiar to me even back then, but I don't think I remembered ever actually hearing them. Margo was equally clueless, if less excited. Whatever kind of music it would have been, the playing surface was almost certainly ruined, making our ruminations moot.
There was only one way to tell. I popped out whatever had been living in the car's prehistoric CD player, cleaned the bottom of Yoshimi as best as I could with the corner of my shirt, and gave it a go. After a minute of silence, I thumped the dash with my fist and pressed play again. After another minute, I ejected the disc, thumped the dash again, and re-inserted it. This time, music came almost instantly, and continued to do so for the next 47 minutes and 25 seconds without so much as a skip, a pause, or any interruption besides laughter, vocal approval, and Margo asking me who this was by again?
The Flaming Lips ended up being older than I was, and the discarded album I'd discovered ended up being their tenth. I balked a little when I realized that if I were to enjoy their music as much as I thought I was beginning to, I had a lot of ground to make up in old albums, b-sides, and music videos. It was daunting to think that a group so strange, so full of awesome, so instantly beloved was also so prolific.
The rest of the summer had me humming psychedelic chords and considering melancholy abstracts to the tune of Yoshimi's constant battle against those who would do The City wrong. And it made me realize: Abstract only means the story isn't laid out for you. It means that at some point your imagination has to awaken itself, make its own meaning out of the hodgepodge.
Tracks to listen to:
Do You Realize??
Flight Test
X&Y by Coldplay Sometimes an album sneaks up on you, even after you've known it for years, and hits your right in the emotional kidneys with an eight-by-four of memories and nostalgia. You fall to your knees, physically unable to stand, wanting more than anything for the pain to go away, even if it means death.
The summer of '05 found me working in a small textbook store tucked neatly in the far corner of a community college near where I'd gone to High School. I was hired as a register jockey for what's known in the textbook business as 'Bookrush' or 'Hell'. My touted experience in customer service was utterly wasted on the ACC bookstore, as was my experience with books themselves. My job, put simply, was to take students parents money and tell them "No." And sometimes pass off the rare pertinent question to someone who knew what they were talking about.
I only spent a month there, and only made maybe $800, before bookrush was over and they kindly told me to get out. I was to attend in the fall as a student, and so even after I had ceased to be employed at the bookstore, I continued to drop in and talk about nothing with the full time employees, who spent a good amount of time restocking the drinks and being bored.
One hazy August morning saw me groggy from a night spent talking to Jenny in lieu of sleep. It was a custom to swing through the bookstore before class to find something to eat (usually a snickers), but this morning I spent a few minutes more than usual carefully reading the tracklist of X&Y, the case cumbersome underneath five layers of extra plastic and a hefty, clear clamshell of a theft deterrent. Jenny and I had spent the last evening discussing music, and when I admitted to liking the couple of Coldplay songs I'd heard (Yellow, a bit of Speed of Sound), she had a bit of an attack of the enthusiasms. And so it followed that I was considering spending five dollars too many on an album I wasn't sure if I was going to like or not, based sole on the fact that it may inspire AWWW in a girl I had affections for.
I bought it reluctantly, spent fifteen minutes prising the packaging apart in the hallway before class, and fiddled anxiously throughout the length of English Comp. 101 with the liner notes, which did relatively little to disclose what kind of music I was to expect.
An hour between classes was my usual lunchtime, and I jogged down the stairs and out into parking lot, which was already starting to fill up at the corners with brown leaves and looseleaf paper. I listened to the first couple of tracks of X&Y in my car, decided that I liked it alright, and went back inside to buy some food.
That night I talked to Jenny again, and she was thrilled beyond measure that I'd bought (another) album because of her (The Understanding was the first one. See Monday's entry). I listened to it the entire time we talked that night, and the next night, and the night after... and it wasn't long before each and every song on the album was inexorably tangled up in all sorts of emotions and perceived meaning. We'd quote lines at each other, tell each other of dreams we'd had, send each other B-sides and covers we'd found on limewire.
And then we moved on.
I carried a torch for another couple of months, wrote depressing poetry, took some moody photographs of mountain lakes and snow drifts, and then got better. Even after she came out and I saw her in person and we said we were in love. Even after we watched Gilmore Girls and cuddled in her aunt's basement. I got better. I learned to listen to Coldplay without having intense emotional reactions, and I met other girls and life goes on.
Only, instead of being better nearly a year later, I broke down. The aforementioned eight-by-four came out of nowhere and rendered me an emotional mess while in the cab of my bosses truck on a cold April morning, and it was all I could do to save face and pretend I had been violently ill so that I could go park in the library parking lot and cry. It was the weight of one song that broke me, the weight of all that lost emotion.
Tracks to listen to:
Talk
Fix You (live)
The Hardest Part (with bonus X-men footage!)
And that's that for tonight. I'm going with Ali to an STD meeting (honor society, not cooties) tomorrow evening, so the next of installment of this week's introspection into James through music may be a little bit late, or at least may be a little shorter.
Word to your Grandmothers (they love it when you write),
James
23 September, 2008
Sway
The sky was a steely blue this morning, reflecting in streets still wet with last night's rain. Clouds clung to the midsections of the hills in wispy veils, wandering among trees just beginning to flare up in their gaudy autumn coats. I walked to work with my sleeves rolled up to my elbows, bag bouncing against the small of my back with every step, little ghosts of breath rising from my mouth.
Fall's here.
I hear stories of tourist season from all the New Englanders: Blood-curdling tales of SUVs with Jersey plates destroying and backing up small town roads; Carloads of tourists camping out with cameras along the highways, never bothering to photograph anything but the trees that line the road; Vacationers who never leave tips.
I sympathize with the townies, with the full-time students, even with the summer folk who go down to Florida in the winter and swap allegiances between the Patriots and the Dolphins like changing a hat. I really do. I'd hate to have my home invaded by hordes of uncouth southerners every fall with the changing leaves, regardless of the fact that my town may or may not make all of its money for the year in this three-month span.
Then again, I am still a fairly recent transplant, and I still have yet to see the full glory of an autumn in New Hampshire. We're used to fiery foliage in Colorado, what with our mountainsides of Aspens and capital city known for it's tree-filled parks, but Ali does nothing but foll her eyes and say "You'll see" whenever I assume I know even a part of the glory I will be beholden to.
And yet... people here seem oddly aloof about the autumnal transformation. It's not that they don't like the trees; they love them, and the tourists do nothing to dampen that. But nor do they really look at them with any real obvious affection. You'll never actually see someone who lives here take a picture of a tree in full colored brilliance (although you will certainly see plenty of photos), and you'll never see anyone bending down to pick up any fallen leaves.
It's as if... maybe when you live somewhere this beautiful, you almost have to take on a businesslike detachment about the entire thing.
"Yes, the leaves are beautiful. No, I no longer look at them. I simply represent them. "
Like the stories you hear about the citizens of New York city, about how they always look forward or down, never up to the tops of the skyscrapers around them, because that's what the tourists do.
People are strange.
Continuing from yesterday's entry, I'm bringing you the next two installments in my series of albums that have etched themselves into the meat of my soul.
Fur and Gold
by Bat for Lashes
Something about Natasha Khan's voice draws me in completely. It's plaintive, it's British, and it sings about the sort of dark, perplexing things that I thrived on as a teenager. And while I didn't hear anything by Bat for Lashes until a year or two ago (Fur and Gold didn't come out until 2006), it was in time for it to completely take hold of my heart via my imagination. I mean, one of the instruments featured is a harpsichord, which we all know speaks directly in the language of dreams, Nordic myth, and mystical masques in mist-filled mausoleums. I get shivers at the very thought.
I listened to nothing but Fur and Gold for a week in the middle of last winter, driving to and from work in the bitter cold, the drive just long enough that the heat never kicked in until I was at least 30 seconds away from the front doors. I'd do little shivery dances in my thin pea coat half to the music, half to the ward off the cold. And yet, when it warmed up again, I found I still got little goosebumps every time I listened to the album, and I'd reprise my shiver-dance to ward them off. It became a sort of talisman, a ritual of the truck.
Since, the truck has been sold, and the only time I have to listen to Natasha's voice is at work, where a tiny bit of dancing in your cubicle is smiled upon, but full-fledged shiver-dances would probably earn me some odd glances from the folks across the hall.
Tracks to listen to:
Horse and I (Live)
What's a Girl To Do?
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
by The Alan Parsons Project
No, really.
In seventh grade my mom diagnosed in me a serious need for some Alan Parsons. We were in a shopping mall (probably Southwest Plaza) at the time, and I being such a little opportunist, dragged her into the Sam Goody while she was at least sounding charitable.
The album she had wanted to buy me was I, Robot, but the only thing they had was this plain-looking, pseudo-Victorian woodcut monstrosity done up in green, with a CD case like I'd never seen.
I'd heard of Edgar Allan Poe before, but only in a loose sort of context. I knew he was British (although he wasn't) and I knew he'd written poems about things like Ravens and Starry Starry Nights, but that was about it. Also, I was an ignorant little seventh grader, and while I may not have known much about Poe, I wasn't about to let an opportunity go by to expand my very very small music collection (which, at the time, consisted of a compilation of Star Trek theme songs, a pilfered Simon and Garfunkel CD, and a tape of very good irish music that I miss dearly), and I said yes, please.
My little mind, it was blown.
We only had one CD player in the house, an old black square thing that had one busted speaker and a switch that you had to operate with a pair of pliers. But it worked well enough, and I dragged it into my room that night with the intent of sampling my new CD while I read. I think I put my book down about midway through the second track, and didn't pick it up again. I only moved to start it over again when it got to the part with all the rain and thunder (a favorite part, now), and I guarantee you that my dreams that night were filled with cryptic images and repetitious soundscapes. Synthesized voices followed me, hysterical exhortations resounded from empty rooms... it was as if a door had opened. The idea that not only had great things been created, once upon a time, but I could experience them was a brand new one to me. Up until then, I'd got by on Star Wars novels and Goosebumps, and anything old that I consumed just sort of was; I had never thought seriously about how it had come into being.
But this album, this collection of poems set to Rock & Roll, was inescapably two things that I'd never actually experienced mixed together: Old, and Good.
Tracks to listen to:
The Raven
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Fall of the House of Usher (in part)
And... that's all for tonight. I'm going to go snuggle under blankets and enjoy the delicious chill that's settled into the apartment. Tomorrow, when I come home, I'm going to put some apple cider on to cook a little, maybe with some mulling spices, make the entire place unbearable with good smells.
-James.
Fall's here.
I hear stories of tourist season from all the New Englanders: Blood-curdling tales of SUVs with Jersey plates destroying and backing up small town roads; Carloads of tourists camping out with cameras along the highways, never bothering to photograph anything but the trees that line the road; Vacationers who never leave tips.
I sympathize with the townies, with the full-time students, even with the summer folk who go down to Florida in the winter and swap allegiances between the Patriots and the Dolphins like changing a hat. I really do. I'd hate to have my home invaded by hordes of uncouth southerners every fall with the changing leaves, regardless of the fact that my town may or may not make all of its money for the year in this three-month span.
Then again, I am still a fairly recent transplant, and I still have yet to see the full glory of an autumn in New Hampshire. We're used to fiery foliage in Colorado, what with our mountainsides of Aspens and capital city known for it's tree-filled parks, but Ali does nothing but foll her eyes and say "You'll see" whenever I assume I know even a part of the glory I will be beholden to.
And yet... people here seem oddly aloof about the autumnal transformation. It's not that they don't like the trees; they love them, and the tourists do nothing to dampen that. But nor do they really look at them with any real obvious affection. You'll never actually see someone who lives here take a picture of a tree in full colored brilliance (although you will certainly see plenty of photos), and you'll never see anyone bending down to pick up any fallen leaves.
It's as if... maybe when you live somewhere this beautiful, you almost have to take on a businesslike detachment about the entire thing.
"Yes, the leaves are beautiful. No, I no longer look at them. I simply represent them. "
Like the stories you hear about the citizens of New York city, about how they always look forward or down, never up to the tops of the skyscrapers around them, because that's what the tourists do.
People are strange.
Continuing from yesterday's entry, I'm bringing you the next two installments in my series of albums that have etched themselves into the meat of my soul.
Fur and Gold by Bat for Lashes
Something about Natasha Khan's voice draws me in completely. It's plaintive, it's British, and it sings about the sort of dark, perplexing things that I thrived on as a teenager. And while I didn't hear anything by Bat for Lashes until a year or two ago (Fur and Gold didn't come out until 2006), it was in time for it to completely take hold of my heart via my imagination. I mean, one of the instruments featured is a harpsichord, which we all know speaks directly in the language of dreams, Nordic myth, and mystical masques in mist-filled mausoleums. I get shivers at the very thought.
I listened to nothing but Fur and Gold for a week in the middle of last winter, driving to and from work in the bitter cold, the drive just long enough that the heat never kicked in until I was at least 30 seconds away from the front doors. I'd do little shivery dances in my thin pea coat half to the music, half to the ward off the cold. And yet, when it warmed up again, I found I still got little goosebumps every time I listened to the album, and I'd reprise my shiver-dance to ward them off. It became a sort of talisman, a ritual of the truck.
Since, the truck has been sold, and the only time I have to listen to Natasha's voice is at work, where a tiny bit of dancing in your cubicle is smiled upon, but full-fledged shiver-dances would probably earn me some odd glances from the folks across the hall.
Tracks to listen to:
Horse and I (Live)
What's a Girl To Do?
Tales of Mystery and Imaginationby The Alan Parsons Project
No, really.
In seventh grade my mom diagnosed in me a serious need for some Alan Parsons. We were in a shopping mall (probably Southwest Plaza) at the time, and I being such a little opportunist, dragged her into the Sam Goody while she was at least sounding charitable.
The album she had wanted to buy me was I, Robot, but the only thing they had was this plain-looking, pseudo-Victorian woodcut monstrosity done up in green, with a CD case like I'd never seen.
I'd heard of Edgar Allan Poe before, but only in a loose sort of context. I knew he was British (although he wasn't) and I knew he'd written poems about things like Ravens and Starry Starry Nights, but that was about it. Also, I was an ignorant little seventh grader, and while I may not have known much about Poe, I wasn't about to let an opportunity go by to expand my very very small music collection (which, at the time, consisted of a compilation of Star Trek theme songs, a pilfered Simon and Garfunkel CD, and a tape of very good irish music that I miss dearly), and I said yes, please.
My little mind, it was blown.
We only had one CD player in the house, an old black square thing that had one busted speaker and a switch that you had to operate with a pair of pliers. But it worked well enough, and I dragged it into my room that night with the intent of sampling my new CD while I read. I think I put my book down about midway through the second track, and didn't pick it up again. I only moved to start it over again when it got to the part with all the rain and thunder (a favorite part, now), and I guarantee you that my dreams that night were filled with cryptic images and repetitious soundscapes. Synthesized voices followed me, hysterical exhortations resounded from empty rooms... it was as if a door had opened. The idea that not only had great things been created, once upon a time, but I could experience them was a brand new one to me. Up until then, I'd got by on Star Wars novels and Goosebumps, and anything old that I consumed just sort of was; I had never thought seriously about how it had come into being.
But this album, this collection of poems set to Rock & Roll, was inescapably two things that I'd never actually experienced mixed together: Old, and Good.
Tracks to listen to:
The Raven
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Fall of the House of Usher (in part)
And... that's all for tonight. I'm going to go snuggle under blankets and enjoy the delicious chill that's settled into the apartment. Tomorrow, when I come home, I'm going to put some apple cider on to cook a little, maybe with some mulling spices, make the entire place unbearable with good smells.
-James.
22 September, 2008
like a rickshaw getting pulled around by another rickshaw
While working I have a wee bit of time to think amidst all the pure zone-outs that define my day, and the occasional spats between my fingers and the keyboard in which everything is mis-typed and silent cursing in time with my music is the norm. It's kind of sleeping, coming and going in stages that I'm really not aware of: I start typing and slowly fall into a steady rhythm, my speed increasing in degrees until I'm not really aware of what exactly I'm doing any longer. A half-hour to an hour in, something will come along - a song I don't want to listen to, a series of errors, a twinge in my leg - and suddenly I'll start to think about whatever it is I'm doing, effectively dooming me to slowness and second-guessing. I'll toss and turn a little, try to throw off my conscious self, and I usually succeed by forcing my mind to wander. It's this stage characterized by rambling thoughts chewing contentedly on the cud of my consciousness that's the rarest and coolest part of working somewhere so utterly boring. Unfortunately, it's relatively short-lived, and before I know it (literally), I've slipped into complete autopilot again; productive, dreamless work.
Today, in my lucid moments, I authored a list of the ten albums that have most left a lasting impact on me as a person. Not my top ten favorite, mind you. That's a much more difficult list, with all sorts of potential hang-ups and a guaranteed addendum of some fifty-odd runners up, all all different depending on the mood that's struck me.
Nor are they albums that have "changed my life". Nor are they albums I think you might enjoy, even. Nor are they even albums I listen to all that often. They're simply albums that have left a trace of themselves on my soul for one reason or another.
So, without further ado, the first two, in no particular order:
The Understanding by Röyksopp
As a young'n, I was never much into techno (as we called it) or electronica, or any of it's various subgenres. Not consciously, anyway. At dances, I'd kind of shake along to Sandstorm, sway self-consciously to Castles in the Sky, knowing that on some guilty level that I enjoyed the heavy beats and angelic voices of the faintly accented European variety, electric twinge and all. And so it was with some trepidation that I tried out Moby... and liked it. Matt gave me a sampler that had (among other things) a track entitled (in his uneven handwriting) ASIAN RAVE that ended abruptly at two minutes and one second. At fourteen, I was enthralled.
Some two years later, my aural sights had moved on to other things, a lot of it piecemeal from various friends. I maybe owned ten complete albums, and some 500 unsorted songs drifted around on my parent's PC, playing on a loop through Winamp. Even as fledgling as my growing musical diversity remained, I was still painfully aware of how little I actually had to listen to. So I began borrowing money from my parents, saving quarters, spending hours searching sites that promised 'FREE MP3S' (almost certainly giving my computer a couple dozen viruses in the process), attempting to discover what sort of musical taste I could scrabble together.
Cut forward two years.
Jenny and I started talking when I was 19, fresh out of a chain of uncertain relationships and raring to get into another one. She had amazing taste in music.
One of the first songs she made me listen to was a track off of The Understanding, and I went the next afternoon and bought the album for $22 (it was an import) . It was love at first listen.
Steady beats, catchy lyrics, totally danceable and utterly Norwegian. It defined me for the next year or so, playing out along with the drama around Jenny and I. We eventually parted ways, but I never fell out of love with Royksopp.
Tracks to listen to:
Only This Moment
What Else is There?
Come on Feel the Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens is one of those people who I love unconditionally, despite not actually knowing them, knowing what they look like, knowing how to pronounce their name. It doesn't matter. I hear his voice, and I can't help but love him. It could be argued that this a great way to love someone, but I would then point out that it's a little bit creepy. It's the same sort of cloth stalking and fan-obsession is cut from, and while it contains a great deal of shallow regard, it leaves no room for the person whose voice it really is.
That said, my really super love for Sufjan began when I heard this album. I'd seen his name plenty of times before that fateful day, bouncing to and fro throughout the blogosphere, but the inpenetrable shine of indie smarm pretty much turned me off to wanting to give it a *go.
But lo!, the library happened to have a copy of Illinois hidden among the software and DVDs, and one moderately warm fall day I took it home with me. It didn't get any attention all that week, nor the week after... it wasn't until I got an e-mail from the good people from DPLD collections that it was a week overdue that I decided I ought to pop it into the 'ol player and give her a spin.
Oh, my ears. I listened to nothing but Sufjan for days, finally burning the album onto my computer after the physical disc began to skip. I listened to him croon about Chicago, Zombies, and Predatory Wasps through the winter (long ago returning the CD itself, along with $3 in charges), letting it alter me in subtle ways. It made me calmer, more poetic, more aware of the beauty of suffering.
Since then, I've collected everything I could find by Sufjan Stevens (including the five-disc holiday collection), and still listen to him an awful lot. But Come On Feel The Illinoise! is something set apart. Srsly.
Tracks to listen to:
Casimir Pulaski Day
Chicago
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!
The next two will come tomorrow, with the two after that on the next day, etc., with Friday featuring the final two albums and some assorted other.
I love you all, two people who read my blog, and wish you a happy Monday evening.
-James
*I have since learned from my mistakes. Thank you.
Today, in my lucid moments, I authored a list of the ten albums that have most left a lasting impact on me as a person. Not my top ten favorite, mind you. That's a much more difficult list, with all sorts of potential hang-ups and a guaranteed addendum of some fifty-odd runners up, all all different depending on the mood that's struck me.
Nor are they albums that have "changed my life". Nor are they albums I think you might enjoy, even. Nor are they even albums I listen to all that often. They're simply albums that have left a trace of themselves on my soul for one reason or another.
So, without further ado, the first two, in no particular order:
The Understanding by RöyksoppAs a young'n, I was never much into techno (as we called it) or electronica, or any of it's various subgenres. Not consciously, anyway. At dances, I'd kind of shake along to Sandstorm, sway self-consciously to Castles in the Sky, knowing that on some guilty level that I enjoyed the heavy beats and angelic voices of the faintly accented European variety, electric twinge and all. And so it was with some trepidation that I tried out Moby... and liked it. Matt gave me a sampler that had (among other things) a track entitled (in his uneven handwriting) ASIAN RAVE that ended abruptly at two minutes and one second. At fourteen, I was enthralled.
Some two years later, my aural sights had moved on to other things, a lot of it piecemeal from various friends. I maybe owned ten complete albums, and some 500 unsorted songs drifted around on my parent's PC, playing on a loop through Winamp. Even as fledgling as my growing musical diversity remained, I was still painfully aware of how little I actually had to listen to. So I began borrowing money from my parents, saving quarters, spending hours searching sites that promised 'FREE MP3S' (almost certainly giving my computer a couple dozen viruses in the process), attempting to discover what sort of musical taste I could scrabble together.
Cut forward two years.
Jenny and I started talking when I was 19, fresh out of a chain of uncertain relationships and raring to get into another one. She had amazing taste in music.
One of the first songs she made me listen to was a track off of The Understanding, and I went the next afternoon and bought the album for $22 (it was an import) . It was love at first listen.
Steady beats, catchy lyrics, totally danceable and utterly Norwegian. It defined me for the next year or so, playing out along with the drama around Jenny and I. We eventually parted ways, but I never fell out of love with Royksopp.
Tracks to listen to:
Only This Moment
What Else is There?
Come on Feel the Illinoise by Sufjan StevensSufjan Stevens is one of those people who I love unconditionally, despite not actually knowing them, knowing what they look like, knowing how to pronounce their name. It doesn't matter. I hear his voice, and I can't help but love him. It could be argued that this a great way to love someone, but I would then point out that it's a little bit creepy. It's the same sort of cloth stalking and fan-obsession is cut from, and while it contains a great deal of shallow regard, it leaves no room for the person whose voice it really is.
That said, my really super love for Sufjan began when I heard this album. I'd seen his name plenty of times before that fateful day, bouncing to and fro throughout the blogosphere, but the inpenetrable shine of indie smarm pretty much turned me off to wanting to give it a *go.
But lo!, the library happened to have a copy of Illinois hidden among the software and DVDs, and one moderately warm fall day I took it home with me. It didn't get any attention all that week, nor the week after... it wasn't until I got an e-mail from the good people from DPLD collections that it was a week overdue that I decided I ought to pop it into the 'ol player and give her a spin.
Oh, my ears. I listened to nothing but Sufjan for days, finally burning the album onto my computer after the physical disc began to skip. I listened to him croon about Chicago, Zombies, and Predatory Wasps through the winter (long ago returning the CD itself, along with $3 in charges), letting it alter me in subtle ways. It made me calmer, more poetic, more aware of the beauty of suffering.
Since then, I've collected everything I could find by Sufjan Stevens (including the five-disc holiday collection), and still listen to him an awful lot. But Come On Feel The Illinoise! is something set apart. Srsly.
Tracks to listen to:
Casimir Pulaski Day
Chicago
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!
The next two will come tomorrow, with the two after that on the next day, etc., with Friday featuring the final two albums and some assorted other.
I love you all, two people who read my blog, and wish you a happy Monday evening.
-James
*I have since learned from my mistakes. Thank you.
13 September, 2008
Nature and Me
A short post tonight - I'm deep in a book and not much wanting to come out - just to fill you in on a little bit of childhood I dredged up earlier this afternoon.
Those bins of cut-price movies that get washed up into the corners of grocery stores have always appealed to me, bright stickers with blocky dollar signs and 2 for 1! printed in flaking ink like a siren's call. The films are what you expect to see for the price: forgotten westerns in tinny sepia; foreign films that never garnered an award (or even a nod) at the festival they premiered at; cartoons from the thirties that look as if they've been through the wash a thousand too many times.
It was the last that most often called to me, especially in my early years when my mother was still susceptible to begging. Over the years, our cheap film collection grew in little trickles, a superman tape there, a collection of jerky fairy tales here, the occasional bunch of Christmas shorts done up in black and white, featuring Santa taking a nip from a flask before he squeezes the chimney around his bulk. But the highlight of our collection, oft watched and always enjoyed, was a blue and white tape with THE Adventures OF Felix THE Cat Runtime 93 min. tattooed onto the side in off-white block letters. We'd found it in the bottom of the bargain bin with no case, just an orange sticker promising us that it was a COOL BUY! ONLY 1.50! slapped onto the naked tape. We took it home because we could not, in good faith, leave what looked to be the only copy of that video in the bin friendless, nude, and alone.
But it wasn't until we watched it the next day, after I came home from school, that I fell in love.
Watch.
It may seem like nothing special, but this is my childhood. This, Star Wars novels, and Alan Parsons on my secondhand Walkman.
Those bins of cut-price movies that get washed up into the corners of grocery stores have always appealed to me, bright stickers with blocky dollar signs and 2 for 1! printed in flaking ink like a siren's call. The films are what you expect to see for the price: forgotten westerns in tinny sepia; foreign films that never garnered an award (or even a nod) at the festival they premiered at; cartoons from the thirties that look as if they've been through the wash a thousand too many times.
It was the last that most often called to me, especially in my early years when my mother was still susceptible to begging. Over the years, our cheap film collection grew in little trickles, a superman tape there, a collection of jerky fairy tales here, the occasional bunch of Christmas shorts done up in black and white, featuring Santa taking a nip from a flask before he squeezes the chimney around his bulk. But the highlight of our collection, oft watched and always enjoyed, was a blue and white tape with THE Adventures OF Felix THE Cat Runtime 93 min. tattooed onto the side in off-white block letters. We'd found it in the bottom of the bargain bin with no case, just an orange sticker promising us that it was a COOL BUY! ONLY 1.50! slapped onto the naked tape. We took it home because we could not, in good faith, leave what looked to be the only copy of that video in the bin friendless, nude, and alone.
But it wasn't until we watched it the next day, after I came home from school, that I fell in love.
Watch.
It may seem like nothing special, but this is my childhood. This, Star Wars novels, and Alan Parsons on my secondhand Walkman.
08 September, 2008
The Blood Club
I woke up this morning with ideas floating around my head like opalescent clouds (were they to be the tangible sort of ideas, anyway. They'd be pink and crudely shaded like cartoons from the 1930's, moving jerkily along to tinny piano, occasionally sprouting snake-like arms and cloven-foot eyes.), begging to be written down.
Unfortunately, I also woke up this morning at about 7:23, too late to take a shower, and just in time to throw some clothes on, mash down my hair, eat a brownie, rush out the door, go halfway down the stairs, run back in, grab my work ID, leap out the window, land on a double-decker buss, steal a sporty little yamaha motorcycle whilst moving, crash through a series of plate glass windows, slide under a semi trailer while machine-gun fire cratered into the asphalt around me, and hurry my way to the low-profile building that lives next to the Keene cinemas. And while only about seven of those things actually happened (I'm still finding blacktop shrapnel in my hair), it was still a trick to make it to work on time.
I am assuming, of course, that TDBanknorth cares about my punctuality. Or rather, that the crack team of capable managers and supervisors that theoretically co inhabit my workplace care. If this were the case, you might assume that maybe they'd check in with me from time to time, maybe shake their heads sagely, expressing deep disappointment in my taking ten extra minutes of lunch last week and clocking in as if I had only taken 30! It might make me feel a little more at home, y'know? Rather than just coming in, finding where I left off, and typing/counting for eight hours. Not that mind particularly, or anything. With the iPod going at lots of decibels of loudness in my ears and a mind that likes to wander, the day goes by like a breeze, sore shoulders and rumors of carpal tunnel the only evidence that I'd just served up an eight hour chunk of my life to the gods of Please May I Have Some Money?
If this were the same sort of scenario I saw playing out in the other cubicles around me, I might be okay with it. But, honestly, it's not. The guy who looks like a young Jeff Goldblum (behind me, to the left) gets the occasional visit from Jersey Lady manager, and the chatty woman who sits just over the wall I face is almost constantly conversing with my department's manager, affectionately known as Mr. P (in my music-induced I-just-counted-4000-sig-cards state, anyway).
I'd just like some human interaction, is all. Maybe I'll make some cookies.
Anyway. Pink, shiny ideas (which, on second thought, bear a striking resemblance to pink elephants on parade), left over from a nightful of dreams clamouring around my head like the jealous remnants of memories that they are. I've thought about starting a dream journal for years, or at least a notebook to carry around and capture their more rational kin, the daydream. And now it seems like it might be a good idea again. I've had a rash of vivid dreams in the last few weeks, starring the entire cast of my young life in some form or another. Everyone from my second grade teacher (Mrs. T) to a girl I met a church dance when I was seventeen. I'm not sure why I'm suddenly being treated to my life in review, but I am sure that I ought to be capturing it, writing it down, pulling a David Sedaris and moving to Paris.
Per a recommendation (it counts), I've started reading The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. it's striking, very well written, entirely believable, and capable of inspiring some pretty conflicting emotional reactions (horror;envy). I'm going to continue the recommendation chain, and encourage you all (my legions of readers) to take a look.
I'm also reading Titus Groan (for the second time), first of the Gormenghast novels by Mervyn Peake. It's delightfully dark, full of the kind of macabre language that titillates fans of Edward Gorey and (to a lesser, more juvenile extent), Lemony Snicket. It takes some work to digest, and it's honestly quite depressing despite how hard the author works to get you to feel nothing but vaguely sympathetic loathing for the characters. Its dark, dank, dystopian and delightful narrative sort of drags you along as if you don't have a choice, and that's the way it should be. Plus! it was made into a BBC miniseries a few years back, starring a young Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike, the antihero of the books. It's worth watching, but I recommend reading at least the first Gormenghast novel beforehand.
This made me cry a little with happiness.
23 August, 2008
eastern glow
Street music playing outside, as promised. I made myself a very delicious hamburger for lunch - cooked medium, with whole mustard and cesar dressing, a little leftover grated white cheddar cheese, and spices aplenty; all on a couple of heels of bread.
The foray to the library was a success, although the pregnant woman behind the counter had a huge tuft of unruly hair sticking up in the midst of her pinned-back curly mass. I wanted to lick my hand and mush it down for her, but I refrained. She was nice enough to let me sign up for a library card even though the item of mail I brought to prove my residency didn't have a clear postmark. It was the least I could do.
Books I absconded with!
Huh.
The foray to the library was a success, although the pregnant woman behind the counter had a huge tuft of unruly hair sticking up in the midst of her pinned-back curly mass. I wanted to lick my hand and mush it down for her, but I refrained. She was nice enough to let me sign up for a library card even though the item of mail I brought to prove my residency didn't have a clear postmark. It was the least I could do.
Books I absconded with!
- The Professor's Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert (Translated by Alexis Siegel)
- King Rat by China Miéville
- Quicksilver (part one of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
- Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
- A Mighty Wind
- Nausicaa (Of the Valley of the Wind)
Huh.
Eden
I just finished the last of the cinnamon toast crunch knockoffs that Ali and I had picked up the last time we forayed into WalMart. I don't mean to hold my nose in the air whenever I go to WalMart, but honestly, it does help the smell, and it's a lot less obvious than out and out pinching my nose and breathing through my mouth.
I was ruminating about cost/benefit comparisons out loud, wondering if it was really more cost-efficient to hire cheap labor who don't bother to provide customer service, if the spare concrete exterior and cracked linoleum was really designed to inspire within me a shopping frenzy... and then it struck me. People who shop at WalMart don't care. People who want to discriminate go to Target or Best Buy or Mervyns or the Mall or whatever sane(-ish) alternative they can think of, but for most of your lower to lower-middle class families, that sort of distinction is one they don't bother to afford. It's easier to lower your own scruples (or never have any) than to pay twenty-three cents more for the same imported plastic beer cooler.
So why were we in WalMart in the first place, if we're so discriminating? Well, because Ali is a college student who makes minimum wage working on campus, and I'm an out of work transplant living on savings. That's why. So amid promises that once I start work (Monday morning at 8 sharp) it's nothing but Target, Price Chopper and online shopping for me, I ride my bike down the path, across Emerald street, over the bridge, and into the back lot behind the hulking, rectangular, whitewashed building, getting off and walking as I turn the final corner, sneaking in.
But I do love me some cinnamon toast crunch knockoffs.
Today I'm going to run to the library to (finally) get myself a card, get a few books that I've been meaning to read, walk for a little while, listen to some Daft Punk and Billy Joel, eat some meat, listen to the street music, (silently) heckle people as they pass below my window (on the way here we flew low for about fifteen minutes, low enough that people were discernible as small oblong things spaced unevenly among the more concrete things around them like cars and telephone poles and houses. I heckled them, too), watch the sunset.
The library closes at 1. I've got to hurry.
But first, a video.
The Irrepressibles - In This Shirt
I was ruminating about cost/benefit comparisons out loud, wondering if it was really more cost-efficient to hire cheap labor who don't bother to provide customer service, if the spare concrete exterior and cracked linoleum was really designed to inspire within me a shopping frenzy... and then it struck me. People who shop at WalMart don't care. People who want to discriminate go to Target or Best Buy or Mervyns or the Mall or whatever sane(-ish) alternative they can think of, but for most of your lower to lower-middle class families, that sort of distinction is one they don't bother to afford. It's easier to lower your own scruples (or never have any) than to pay twenty-three cents more for the same imported plastic beer cooler.
So why were we in WalMart in the first place, if we're so discriminating? Well, because Ali is a college student who makes minimum wage working on campus, and I'm an out of work transplant living on savings. That's why. So amid promises that once I start work (Monday morning at 8 sharp) it's nothing but Target, Price Chopper and online shopping for me, I ride my bike down the path, across Emerald street, over the bridge, and into the back lot behind the hulking, rectangular, whitewashed building, getting off and walking as I turn the final corner, sneaking in.
But I do love me some cinnamon toast crunch knockoffs.
Today I'm going to run to the library to (finally) get myself a card, get a few books that I've been meaning to read, walk for a little while, listen to some Daft Punk and Billy Joel, eat some meat, listen to the street music, (silently) heckle people as they pass below my window (on the way here we flew low for about fifteen minutes, low enough that people were discernible as small oblong things spaced unevenly among the more concrete things around them like cars and telephone poles and houses. I heckled them, too), watch the sunset.
The library closes at 1. I've got to hurry.
But first, a video.
The Irrepressibles - In This Shirt
19 August, 2008
Fall Awake
On Sunday Ali bought me a large (over a pound) slab of amazingly marbled steak because I was feeling pretty crappy and homesick. Or rather, she bought me the steak because she's awesome, and it helped alleviate some of the homesickness I'd been feeling that day.
It was very delicious.
I pan-seared it in black pepper, garlic, mix'd-up-salt, and whatever other seasonings came to hand, then broiled it for about six minutes. It came out perfectly. Like, perfectly medium, pink and hot in the middle, tender as all getout. I just salivated all over the keyboard.
And then we watched Firefly (we're on the last disc) for an hour, talked about nonsense, danced idiotically.
The windows in the apartment are huge affairs, some fifteen feet high, curving gracefully towards the whitewashed pressed-tin ceilings (almost 100 years old) in two well-proportioned arcs. The original room, before they turned the building into apartments, was a little more than twice as big as the current width of my apartment, and it must have been pretty awesome. As it is, there's a drywall divider bisecting it, and the apartment that takes up the other half of the room is a mirror image of mine, if slightly larger. They have the same two huge windows, the same ancient wooden floors, the same pressed-tin (pressed in) sky. Sometimes, when I stick my head out of the window, I try to angle my neck around to see into their half of our ballroom (or, as I like to imagine it, a ballet studio), see what they've done to the place.
But there are trees out there, a tall old specimen of the New Hampshire variety swaying in the breeze, dripping rain off of leaves like my hand. I hear that certain New Yorkers would kill to have my view come fall, and that my illusion that New Hampshire is a quiet and placid place will be smashed into a billion bitty bits when they invade my town (technically city). In my queer way, I can't wait.
I have a beard. For those who haven't seen me in a while, this may be hard to imagine. I'll make you pictures.
In the meantimes, have a video.
Jason Webley - Eleven Saints
It was very delicious.
I pan-seared it in black pepper, garlic, mix'd-up-salt, and whatever other seasonings came to hand, then broiled it for about six minutes. It came out perfectly. Like, perfectly medium, pink and hot in the middle, tender as all getout. I just salivated all over the keyboard.
And then we watched Firefly (we're on the last disc) for an hour, talked about nonsense, danced idiotically.
The windows in the apartment are huge affairs, some fifteen feet high, curving gracefully towards the whitewashed pressed-tin ceilings (almost 100 years old) in two well-proportioned arcs. The original room, before they turned the building into apartments, was a little more than twice as big as the current width of my apartment, and it must have been pretty awesome. As it is, there's a drywall divider bisecting it, and the apartment that takes up the other half of the room is a mirror image of mine, if slightly larger. They have the same two huge windows, the same ancient wooden floors, the same pressed-tin (pressed in) sky. Sometimes, when I stick my head out of the window, I try to angle my neck around to see into their half of our ballroom (or, as I like to imagine it, a ballet studio), see what they've done to the place.
But there are trees out there, a tall old specimen of the New Hampshire variety swaying in the breeze, dripping rain off of leaves like my hand. I hear that certain New Yorkers would kill to have my view come fall, and that my illusion that New Hampshire is a quiet and placid place will be smashed into a billion bitty bits when they invade my town (technically city). In my queer way, I can't wait.
I have a beard. For those who haven't seen me in a while, this may be hard to imagine. I'll make you pictures.
In the meantimes, have a video.
Jason Webley - Eleven Saints
18 August, 2008
turns me on.
I got a call earlier this afternoon from a good man at TD Banknorth, informing me that the position I was applying for (some sort of data entry nonsense. I'm not picky at this point) was no longer going to be considered a position with benefits. Was I still interested?
"Um, yes." I said.
The fact that I'm still struggling to keep money in my pockets when I've been here for three months is a little disheartening, but (in continuation of my last entry) I'm still alive, still paying rent, and Swanzey's resident Kirby-salesmen still owe me $300. Nevertheless the fact that I'll know by Thursday at the very latest as to whether or not a typing job is mine (minus the paid vacation, health insurance, etc.) is something of a load off my chest. Even if I don't get it. At this point I've given up on worrying.
And now, a video.
Natalie Portman's Shaved Head - Sophisticated Side Ponytail on Vimeo.
"Um, yes." I said.
The fact that I'm still struggling to keep money in my pockets when I've been here for three months is a little disheartening, but (in continuation of my last entry) I'm still alive, still paying rent, and Swanzey's resident Kirby-salesmen still owe me $300. Nevertheless the fact that I'll know by Thursday at the very latest as to whether or not a typing job is mine (minus the paid vacation, health insurance, etc.) is something of a load off my chest. Even if I don't get it. At this point I've given up on worrying.
And now, a video.
Natalie Portman's Shaved Head - Sophisticated Side Ponytail on Vimeo.
14 August, 2008
Life
Life is always a good place to start. Whatever you happen to be doing, wherever you happen to be, the most basic fundamental truth about your state of being is that you are alive. Or, you know. Dead. Either way, you've only got two choices, and that's tonnes better than the infinitely more complex and diversified cloud of other choices that group vaguely at either end of the whole life/death spectrum.
So... hey. I'm alive. Ever since the catholics gave up on the whole purgatory thing, I've found myself wondering on the possibility that it might just actually exist after all, and for a while there my alive/not alive status was kind of in question. Not to say that New Hampshire isn't a nice place - the humidity is great for my skin, and oh my goodness the trees! - but the last couple of months have been nothing if not eventful, and sometimes, when it comes to events, that's bad.
Not to say that badness is the song that I'm singing, because it's not. I'm happy out here. Not slowed down enough to be content, and not nearly as financially stable as I'd like to be. You see, there's this story about Kirby Vacuums and borrowed cars and getting lost in Woodstock, Vermont...
But maybe later.
Today I'm letting it known that I'm alive, whoever you are.
----------------
Now playing: Ben Folds - Jesusland
via FoxyTunes
So... hey. I'm alive. Ever since the catholics gave up on the whole purgatory thing, I've found myself wondering on the possibility that it might just actually exist after all, and for a while there my alive/not alive status was kind of in question. Not to say that New Hampshire isn't a nice place - the humidity is great for my skin, and oh my goodness the trees! - but the last couple of months have been nothing if not eventful, and sometimes, when it comes to events, that's bad.
Not to say that badness is the song that I'm singing, because it's not. I'm happy out here. Not slowed down enough to be content, and not nearly as financially stable as I'd like to be. You see, there's this story about Kirby Vacuums and borrowed cars and getting lost in Woodstock, Vermont...
But maybe later.
Today I'm letting it known that I'm alive, whoever you are.
----------------
Now playing: Ben Folds - Jesusland
via FoxyTunes
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