Listen to the music

20 10 2012

I have a lot of cds.

Eight hundred? Nine hundred? Somewhere thereabouts. Not as many as true obsessive, but, y’know, plenty.

I almost never listen to them.

Oh, I used to, oh yeah, all the time. In grad school I had a cheapo mini-system on to which I could load 7 cds and let ‘er ride. Music accompanied my descent into and out of depression (multiple times), and one of my preps for dissertation-writing was picking out the cds which would take me from, say, 8pm-2am.

I was never much for 45s, but when I hit junior high I started hitting Helen Gallagher’s (the requisite black-light/poster/music shop which dotted small-town malls way back when) for albums. I asked for Foreigner for Christmas and my best friend J. and I listened to her brother’s REO Speedwagon live album (DOOT doot doodlo-doot) over and over again. D. and I would sit in her brother’s bedroom and listen to Pink Floyd and AC/DC (Bon Scott era), and in a junior high art class I carved a KISS sculpture out of a bar of soap.

It was pretty much hard and classic rock all through high school (93 QXM? QFM? out of Milwaukee)—a lot Who, AC/DC (Brian Johnson, this time), Led Zep, Yes,Rush,Loverboy—as well as my aforementioned beloved Supertramp, and then, when MTV hit, what was then called alternative music (mainly British post-punk bands).

I bought albums at Helen Gallagher, I bought albums up and down State Street in Madison. I bought albums at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis. And then when I decided to run away from grad school, I decided to sell all of my albums.

I bought cds instead.

I had just a few (20? 30?) when I hied on out to Albuquerque, maybe double or triple that when I slunk back to Minneapolis, where I was a regular at the Electric Fetus as well as a few other dusty shops in the Whittier neighborhood. I bought punk and post-punk and new wave and jazz and soundtracks and classical and electronica, then expanded into funky new-wave Nordic music and dub and neo-soul and soul and 1960s-era American and European singers and a few blues cds. I hauled boxes and boxes and boxes with me to Montreal, then set out to buy even more.

I ended up buying hundreds and hundreds of cds in the shops along Mont Royal and St Denis and Peel—but this was due in no small part to my apartment having been burglarized my first Thanksgiving in the city. Hundreds of those cds were replacements, but hundreds more were music which was recommended to me by music clerks and friends and stuff I’d heard on the McGill and U of Montreal radio stations and read about in the alt weeklies. I picked up Daniel Boulanger and Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sam Roberts and Athena knows how many chill cds.

I listened to it all.

My cd-buying fell off when I moved to Somerville, in part due to my reduced financial circumstances, but I still hit up shops in Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston, adding both replacement and new stuff. I had so damned many cds that they overflowed my (generous) storage; I followed my downstairs-neighbors’ lead and took them all out of their jewel cases and just kept them in their sleeves in boxes.

Which is how I transported them to New York. I bought a few cds here, but the urge to survey the scene fell off and never returned: my desire for music had always been abstain-or-binge, but for the past few years I simply haven’t been interested.

It’s not even that cd shops are scarce: there are still plenty o’ joints in the East and West Villages where I could score tunes if I wanted, and, of course, I could always download stuff.  Nor is it that I hate all new music: I think Lady Gaga has fine set of pipes and I’m charmed by Adele and and Janelle Monae is somethin’ else and I’ll hear bits on WNYC or in stores and think Oh, that’s nice.

But the urgency, the need, to own music is gone. I don’t even bother buying music by acts I already know I like—Emmylou and Beth Orton and GY!BE—much less feel that I have to make any effort to find something new.

C. has said that there really is nothing new out there, and I think she may have a point. Some of the newer stuff I like sounds a lot like the music I listened to in the 1980s, so why not just listen to the old stuff? The one genre in which I have bought stuff is classical and (a very few cds of) opera, and that because it is all new to me.

It’s not bad that my enthusiasm has waned—more money for books!—but it is a loss. I loved music, loved listening to it and thinking about it and searching it out and sharing it and dancing to it and everything everything everything. I’ve lost something I loved.

So, I have a plan. I’m going to listen to every cd I own, in (rough genre-and-alphabetical) order, to re-acquaint myself with the sounds that once so moved me.

I’m not trying to recapture my youth (hah!) or somehow go back in time, but given how much this all once mattered, it’s worth it to see if I can recover or rediscover what was once there.

If not, if it’s gone, then I’ll let it go, I’ll let it all go.

But I don’t think it’s gone. I think I just need to crouch down and put my face close and gently blow those fading chords back to life.


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There is thunder in our hearts

7 06 2012

Saw that printed on a tote bag the other day: there is thunder in our hearts.

My first thought: Cool, in sturm-und-drag kinda way. (And yeah, okay, cool and sturm-und-drag don’t really go together, but you get what I mean, right?)

Second thought: I know that line, I’ve heard it somewhere.

Poem? Speech? Hmm. No. Song lyric.

Thunder. Thunder thunder thunder. Springsteen coulda written this, but no, that ain’t Springsteen.

I kept repeating the lyric, trying to call up the sound. No dice.

Then, this morning, the sound came. There is THUNder in our haahrts.

I know that, I thought, I know I know it. But from where?

Why not just run on a search on the lyric—easy-peezy, you’ll get the answer.

I did not want to run the search. I wanted to remember.

I then thought of asking a co-worker if she could remember, which seems like cheating but it’s not: I wanted SOMEone to remember, someone to have this info in her noggin and be able to pull it out.

But then I didn’t ask, because I wanted to be the someone who remembered.

And then I went back to work and the melody went underground and then, and then, it bubbled up.

Kate Bush! Yes!

Running up that hill! Yes!

There is thunder in our haah-ahrts/. . . /You and meeEEEEeee/ . . . / I’d make a deal with God/And get him to swap our places.

I was going to write a whole bit about how I want to be able to recall things that can be looked up, that maybe exercising this recall is like exercising one’s body (e.g., even if pushing around weights isn’t useful in and of itself, that I push around weights equips me to do other, useful, things); alternatively, that while there may be a good to being able to free one’s mind of trivialities in order to create room for more important matters, the process of amassing and sorting and remembering those trivialities may be—quite unlike pushing around weights—pleasurable in and of themselves; and, finally, that it used to be really super important for me to memorize song lyrics and be able to recite them on command and that while I no longer go out of my way to do so I still sometimes wish I went out of my way to do so and thus when I can remember a song lyric I’m raptured up shoeless to a place when a song could fill my whole heart. With thunder.

But then I decided not to write about all of that, and instead note that I was oddly giddy for having remembered, a giddiness which may have been due to having Kate Bush in my head for the day.

She can be trouble, but she’s my kind of trouble.


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I’m wasted I’m fried I’m a fool I’m a liar

3 04 2012

Yep, pretty much sums it all up.

. . . have I mentioned I’m really looking forward to break next week?

A little Mojave 3 in the meantime:


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All things weird and wonderful, 17

23 02 2012

Sree V. Remella/Nat Geographic Photo of the Day

Needed a bit of break, don’t you think?

 


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We’re on a road to nowhere

9 02 2012

President Obama’s campaign playlist is out; it is, unsurprisingly, unexciting.

I’ve already made known that were I ever to run for office, my campaign theme would be “Life During Wartime”—This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no fooling around—which may go a long way toward explaining why I will never be elected to anything.

More fun than coming up with campaign song-lists, however, is considering anti-campaign songs: all those tunes which would doom any possibility of election.

Some suggestions:

  • Radiohead, “Creep”
  • Beck, “Loser”
  • Beth Orton, “Devil Is My Angel”
  • REM, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”
  • Talking Heads, “Road to Nowhere”
  • Talking Heads, “Psycho Killer”
  • Be Good Tanyas (Townes Van Zandt): “Waiting Around to Die”
  • Mission of Burma, “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver”
  • Velvet Underground, “Heroin”
  • Bjork, “Army of Me”
  • Birthday Party, “Release the Bats”
  • Any song by Serge Gainsbourg
  • Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” (Terrifying. . .)
  • Smiths, “Unhappy Birthday”
  • Wilco, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”
  • Butthole Surfers, “Pepper”
  • Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”
  • Bob Marley, “I Shot the Sheriff”
  • Thee Headcoatees, “Don’t Want to Hold Your Hand”
  • Bruce Cockburn, “If I Had A Rocket Launcher”
  • Loretta Lynn, “The Pill” (Sigh. . . )
  • B-52’s, “Dance This Mess Around”
  • B-52’s, “Hot Pants Explosion” (Just because)
  • Dead Kennedys, “Let’s Lynch the Landlord”
  • Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddamn”
  • Rolling Stones, “Shattered”
  • Semisonic, “Closing Time”
  • X, “See How We Are”
  • X, “Hungry Wolf”
  • XTC, “Dear God”
  • Sam Roberts, “Where Have All the Good People Gone”
  • Christine Fellows, “Roadkill”
  • Violent Femmes, “Kiss Off”

This could go on and on—feel free to drop your own suggestions.

Anyway, it would be awesome if someone were willing to use any of these songs—now that person would be someone I’d want to have a beer with.


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Don’t walk away EILEEN

27 08 2011

Yeah, I was thinkin’ that I had the song title wrong on the last post. Knew it was a Sam Roberts gig, but couldn’t quite get the right name (and was too lazy to get up and check my cds).

As I was falling asleep last night, the right name came to me.

Roberts is a Montrealer, and I first encountered him, duh, when I lived in Montreal. Saw one of his shows at a bar just east of downtown. Very energetic, very smoky.

This is one of my favorite song of his:

This is the other one:

(And check out his official YouTube site; for some reason, I couldn’t post his  vids—where you can really see his sense of humor—from there.)

What can I say: scruffy stoner Canadian boys with a sense of humor do it for me.


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OK computer

8 03 2011

This is what I get for not being paranoid.

Okay, so “paranoid” is a strong word; sufficiently cautious, perhaps.

One of my e-mail servers went down and I’ve been unable to access that account. That’s a bummer, one which has been magnified since I didn’t import every last address into my alternate account.

Laziness, blah blah. Yeah, I know.

See, I was smart enough to set up an alternate account, but not smart enough to duplicate the information across the two services. Until the problem (whatever it is) gets fixed, a whole lotta addresses are out of reach.

I could have set up the second account so that mail from the first is automatically forwarded to it, but I prefer keeping the two sets of mails separate. No, there’s no clear dividing line between the types of mail get shunted into each account, but, still, I like them separate.

So I’m not kicking myself for that—I made a decision, after all, one which makes sense to me even amidst this mini-blackout. (Although I may end up creating yet another account and using that as a drop-box. Christ.)

When I was working on my dissertation I was freaked out at the thought of losing chapters. (I mean, I wrote a lot of nonsense, especially at the start, but I wanted to be the one who got rid of something, not my computer.) I made copies of copies on goddess knows how many computer disks (remember those, anyone?) and kept some of these in my office—in case, you know, my apartment burned down or something.

Given the importance of the dissertation, how much work I put into the various chapters, and the circulating story of someone who lost half of her dissertation, well, I considered the investment in 3.5″ diskettes and the time it took to copy that work on to those disks to have been well worth it.

Nothing happened, happily, but the insurance of those back-ups did assure me. I had precious little peace of mind in those days, so one less thing to worry about did matter to me.

Which reminds me: I’m overdue for a copy of my documents on to my external hard drive.

♪ Better safe than sooorrry. . . .♫


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Thanksgiving for every wrong move

25 11 2010

It’d take about 20 minutes before our dresses would be off.

My cousin A. and I, having been forced to wear something nice (and constricting) for Thanksgiving, would head into the den and whip off our dresses so that we could play—hard. While our mothers might have sighed over the sight of us scampering about in our slips and tights, at least they didn’t have to worry about stains and tears to the good clothes.

All of us kids would head upstairs, carefully closing the door behind us—the better to keep the adults at bay—before tiptoeing through our grandma’s bedroom to reach the closet door.

This was a great closet, mainly because it was less a closet than a long, dark, narrow passageway into the other bedroom. Who had a closet like this? It wasn’t a secret, but it felt like one.

The real treasure, however, was the attic, which we were of course and repeatedly warned against entering. Come on: you tell kids ‘don’t you go messing around in the attic’ enough times and of course that’s exactly what we’re going to do. It was dark and drafty and a little bit dangerous (all those nails poking through the rough wood) and had just the right ratio of stuff to space: a great play space.

There was an old Victrola in the attic, and while I don’t remember if this was Thanksgiving or not, one year my brother and A.’s brother somehow got that thing cranked up and going; we all fled as sound came out of it, giddy and afraid we broke it.

No, we did not dare tell the adults.

Another favorite was to grab a blanket and ride it down the (carpeted) stairs. The door ended right at the last step—no space or landing—so every time you bumped down the steps you’d slam into the door. This would the lead the adults to ask What are you kids doing up there?

Nothing!

You’re not sliding down the stairs, are you?

No!

At some point my dad and uncles would grab a couple of glass jugs and head over to the nearest bar for beer, although it seemed to take them quite awhile to go just the few blocks and back. But they’d always return, in good cheer and carrying the soon-to-be-emptied jugs.

Finally, it would be time to eat: Adults at the fancy cherrywood table lengthened just for this day, the kids either at a card table set up near there or in the den. The den was best: We had our own bowls of food, and could take as much or as little as we wanted, but, really, we could laugh and mess around and not have to worry about ‘behaving’ or ‘keeping it down’.

We’d all crash out for a bit in my grandma’s small front room, my aunts and uncles smoking and us kids waiting until the cherrywood table was made small again and the adults gave permission for us to take over the (much larger) dining room. The blanket came back into play, usually in some manner of us rolling ourselves in it and trying to chase one another around. If one of the adults was sufficiently, ah, loosened up, he or she would join us, and perhaps we could get them to slide down the stairs, too—only this time, with the door open.

T.v. would be watched—there was usually some holiday movie on—and pie eaten. Other cousins who had eaten elsewhere might stop by, either for pie or beer, and we’d hang out until the traditional holiday walk.

Honestly, I don’t remember if this is something we did for Thanksgiving or Christmas or both (I think at least Thanksgiving), but we’d all bundle up and head out into the south Sheboygan neighborhood, a knotted string along shovelled walks. When we’d hit the highway the adults would call us close, then we’d climb the stairs to the bridge over the lanes. We got a nice shot of the lights of the neighborhood, and we’d wave at the oncoming cars.

And then we’d spit.

No, we weren’t (well, we weren’t supposed to be) aiming at cars. It was just our thing: We’d spit off the bridge.

So happy Thanksgiving, everyone. And may you get the chance where you are to spit off a bridge.


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Fool’s overture

19 07 2010

Oh my god, is that who I think it is?

That stutter of chords, fanning out across the guitar strings, repeated, then a side-step into another flutter of chords. And now, that high reed of a voice. . . no.

A cover.

Strangely, I was disappointed. I didn’t particularly want to hear the song, but if Planet Fitness radio is going to play it, then play the real goddamned thing.

Faux Supertramp is unacceptable.

Not that I can listen to the real Supertramp, but at least with Roger and the boys, I know what I’m getting.

(I have no idea about the images, but this is the only actual Supertramp version I could find in my, uh, 3 minutes of searching YouTube.)

I sometimes listen to vids after I post them—I watched the Lena Horne interview a couple of times—but I won’t listen to this.

Takes me back. . . to where I don’t particularly care to go.

My older sister brought home Even in the Quietest Moments some time before I was in junior high, and by eighth grade I almost certainly listened to that album more than she did. ‘Give a Little Bit’ opened up side 1, and side 2 ended with the long mashup that is ‘Fool’s Overture’.

I loved it, beginning to end, unreservedly and unashamedly. When Breakfast in America and the double-live Paris came out I scooped those up, then went back and sussed out Crisis? What Crisis?, Crime of the Century, Indelibly Stamped, and their eponymous debut. (The latter two didn’t get much time on my turntable, and Stamped, which featured a naked woman’s tattooed torso embarrassed my teenaged self.) I stayed with them through Famous Last Words—Roger Hodgson’s last gig with the band, but didn’t let up until I was in college, and knew that Brother Where You Bound was the last Supertramp album I would ever buy.

Six years of intense devotion; it wasn’t a bad run.

I almost certainly still listened to them in college, but I don’t really remember that. And when I sold or gave away my albums prior to my 1993 desert sojourn, I knew that I would never own Supertramp in cd form.

I’m no longer embarrassed by women’s breasts (which, given my ownership of a pair, is probably a good thing), and even all these years later, when I don’t want to listen to one  Supertramp song and two is out of the question, I can’t quite be embarrassed by my former ardor, either.

I was just about to write something snarky about the band, but, honestly, I can’t. You can, if you like—there is much eye-rolling to be done when it comes to Supertramp—but given how much I loved them, how they carried me out of my childhood and angsted right along with me in my teenaged years, it seems like bad faith for me to slag on them now.

I don’t love them now, but I did, once, and even if—or, perhaps, because—I no longer love any band (or any thing) the way I loved Supertramp, it seems a kind of betrayal both to my young self and to that love to repudiate them.

They weren’t the only band I listened to, of course, and when MTV hit SmallTown in the early 80s, a whole genre of music which the album-oriented rock of the Milwaukee stations never played suddenly chipped its way into my consciousness: the Police, the B-52’s (back when they still had the apostrophe), the Eurythmics, the Call, the Fall, the Clash, the Jam and on and on. I didn’t like them all, but to have the world open beyond Kansas or Boston—well, MTV in the early days performed a public service to us SmallTown kids who didn’t live close enough to catch the college radio stations.

By the summer after my sophomore year I was slam-dancing to the Violent Femmes at the Peaches stage at Summerfest, and when the LP played their 3 song ‘alternative’ rotation of the B-52’s (Rock Lobster), the Femmes (Gone Daddy Gone) and Surf Punks (Shark Attack), I was out whipping my skinny little body around that almost-empty dance floor.

A slightly-older co-worker at the local health club introduced me to Pat Metheny, and my theatre buddies to Manhattan Transfer, Frank Sinatra, and anything else that wasn’t, well, album-oriented rock played out of the Milwaukee stations.

So while I took Supertramp with me to college, I was already heading away from the songs which cocooned me and toward those that smacked me in the face, upside the head, and out into the headwinds.

I haven’t missed them in the fifteen or twenty years since I stopped listening, and I don’t think I ever will.

But they were a part of me, and they’re at the heart of one of the best things anyone has ever done for me:

Supertramp’s final tour with Roger Hodgson stopped at Alpine Valley, a mass-seating concert venue somewhere west of Milwaukee. I couldn’t afford one of the few hundred reserved spots, but I damned sure made sure that we got as close in as general seating allowed.

(General seating: the stage at Alpine Valley was situated near the bottom of a hill; the reserved seats were covered, and rising behind them, a vast slope of green. You’d get to Alpine Valley early in the day, set out your blanket and cooler in line if wanted to be first-ish in, or just in the gravel parking lot if you wanted to, I don’t know, hang out near your car. At some point they’d announce they would shortly open the gates, at which point you grabbed your shit and scrambled up into the crowd—which would, inevitably, start mooing—and pressed and pressed until they opened the spigot and you popped through the turnstiles and ran as fast as you dared down the hill to claim a spot.)

We did pretty good getting far down the hill at the Supertramp show, but as I was as short then as I am now, when the crowd stood up for the first song, I couldn’t see a damned thing.

That’s when the best-thing happened: JK, who didn’t come with us and wasn’t a part of my regular crowd, came over to me. Get on my shoulders, she said.

What?

I know you love Supertramp. Get on my shoulders.

JK was not a big girl, but she was strong, and she hoisted me up and bounced with me through that whole opening song.

What a magnificent thing to offer someone who’s not, really, even your friend.

I don’t remember what the opener was, and I haven’t seen JK since high school graduation, but as long as I can remember her I will.

So, you see, to turn my back on Supertramp is to turn my back on that passion and is to turn my back on this great, good deed that JK did for me.

She deserves better. And, what the hell, so do I.


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Walls are encircling the land

30 03 2010

Oh, heaven: Terence McKnight on WQXR is broadcasting Dawn Upshaw singing Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre.

This is not background music. This is not background anything.

The following videos were apparently shot in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Didn’t really watch them—the music is all.

This music is all.

Tancas serradas a muru



Nani

Wa Habibi


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