Listen to the music: Can’t stop the music

21 10 2012

C. told me to rip all of my cds before I got rid of them. If I got rid of them.

I don’t know that I would.

I understand the reason—it’s the same reason that I’m filing away the bibliographic info on all of the printed out scholarly articles I’m going to toss: don’t lose what you have—but there’s something. . . satisfying about an irrevocable purge.

I had tapes of my favorite albums, but I didn’t rush to tape everything else before I got rid of my vinyl. (And I got rid of almost all of my tapes when I left for Montreal.) No, my attitude was what’s done is done, and no use hangin’ on just to hang on. No point in fetishizing the past.

I do that, fetishize objects—most obviously, my books. It’s damned near impossible not to imbue objects which deliver meaning with meaning themselves, and as long as the deliveries retain that meaning, I”m not too worried about my affection for the objects. But when the possession itself becomes the point, well, that’s when I need to rethink matters.

There were a few people who tried to talk me out of getting rid of the albums, certain that I was throwing away irreplaceable treasure (i.e., vinyl), but as I told them: I have a shitty stereo system and I hate it when the needle skips, and I see no particular worth in having to turn the album over after 20 or 25 minutes. Besides, I didn’t really listen to this stuff anymore.

That was the real reason to get rid of the albums: These were singers and groups I’d listened to since I started collecting albums, and my tastes had changed. There were a few albums that I replaced with cds—by Rickie Lee Jones, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, B52’s, Violent Femmes— but most of them? Nope. Done. Goodbye.

I don’t regret it.

Of course, if I really wanted to, I could find clips of those bygone songs online, but I’m fine with leaving them all behind. When something ends, it’s good to let it end.

I had a moment, in some cases, a long moment, with those albums, and those moments don’t matter any less just because they’re over. This is something to which I am slowly reconciling myself, that something can happen for the time being, and that being in time may be enough, may have to be enough.

I don’t know whether this particular musical moment is over—that’s the purpose of this listen-through, to find out—but if I’m no longer moved, there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

But I’d like it not to be. I’d like still to be moved.

~~~

Listened to thus far:

  1. *Joe Acker, The Times and Places of Love
  2. Afro Celt Sound System, Volume 2: Release
  3. Air, Moon Safari
  4. Air, 10,000 Hz Legend
  5. Akufen, My Way
  6. Luther Allison, Blue Streak
  7. Altan, The Blue Idol
  8. Tori Amos, Under the Pink
  9. Tori Amos, Strange Little Girls

*Joe was one of the aforementioned downstairs neighbors who decided to shed the jewel cases. He and his wife Tara were great neighbors, early on kindly letting me use their shower when mine went on the fritz. We got to know one another hanging out in the yard with their amazing dog Gracie, and then hanging out in their apartment. They gave me a key to their place so I could take Gracie out during the day or let her out at night if they were getting home late. We lost track of one another some time after they moved out—last I heard, Tara was pregnant with their first kid—but they remain one of my few good memories of Somerville.

And yes, the cd is nice, too. Joe and Tara (who was learning mandolin) were deeply interested in Americana music, and invited me to listen in when they invited friends-with-strings over to play old-timey tunes, but the cd hews closer to the singer/songwriter folk/rock style, which well-display Joe’s meticulous guitar skills and honey-warm voice.


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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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We might as well try: Come to me, come to me, set me free, set me free

18 10 2012

Oh, for the love of all that is greasy and salty!

A federal court strikes down DOMA and Jay Michaelson at The Daily Beast complains that the decision is. . . wait for it. . . too good.

TOO GOOD.

I’m a good American leftist, which means that I’m gloomy and pissy and rarely accused of optimism, but c’mon! This is is win!

Okay, maybe only a temporary win, maybe five members of the Supreme Court will decide that the equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment doesn’t mean equal equal, y’know, equal for anyone who isn’t all regular and equal and everything (remember: gotta see the downside), but as Michaelson himself finally notes, “when it comes to the high court, you really never know.”

Oh really? After arguing that the standards of scrutiny two recent court rulings invoked in their reasons for overturning DOMA won’t be accepted by the Supremes, he finally gets around to noting:

It’s also worth stepping back from the legal details in cases like these. Intermediate scrutiny, narrowly tailored, suspect class … these legalisms are often critical to how the case turns out, but they don’t get to the human heart of the stories. What these cases are really about are widows like Edith Windsor who deserve equal rights. For her, of course, this case is an unqualified victory.

(Am I being churlish if I note that the victory is not “unqualified” if, in fact, the Supreme Court overrules it? I am not, because that is a matter of fact, not speculation. Unlike the rest of Michaelson’s higgledy-piggledy piece.)

I take inordinate pride in my scowl, and the side-eye I give the world is not an act, but even I think we leftists, liberals, and fellow-travellers might do ourselves a favor if we remembered the old cries of We want bread and roses, too! and If I can’t dance I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.

If we can’t find joy even in our wins, why the hell would anyone else want to join us?

Let’s leave the bitterness and fear to those who want to make our world smaller.

Let us be large. Let us embrace the whole, wide, messy world. Let us laugh and gambol around in the sand and leaves and snow. Let us throw our arms out to our fellow human beings and say there is so much more to to all of us, so much more for all of us.

Let us all be something more.


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Dum de dum dum DUM (III)

15 10 2012

Remember when I said guts were stupid?

I stand by that. As I do to notions of “wisdom of the body”.

I should add, however, that I am also stupid when I do not pay attention to the signals my body gives me.

As in it hurts when I lift this and I continue to lift this just. . . because.

So now I walk like a hunchback around the apartment and, in my foray across the street to the pharmacist, as if I had a stack of plates atop me noggin’.

A noggin’ I did not see fit to use properly.

*Sigh*


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All things weird and wonderful, 26

14 10 2012

Oh, this made me giggle. . .

Theron Humphrey

. . . and a little wistful.

~~~

h/t Cute Overload; Theron Humphrey


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We might as well try: Dum de dum dum DUM (I)

8 10 2012

Guts are stupid.

Whenever someone says go with your gut or what is your gut telling you, I roll my eyes, or go half-lidded and twist my mouth, or mutter, guts are stupid.

Of course, most of those who advise recourse to our alimentary anatomy speak figuratively, not literally. They’re not really saying Listen to your colon or Ponder your digestive system or Meditate on your viscera; that would be silly.

But it is just as silly to advise people to forgo their reasoning abilities in favor of the so-called wisdom of the body.

Our bodies are not wise.

Yes, they have needs, and we need to pay attention to those needs, but in paying attention the wisdom is located in the attentiveness itself, not the thing to which our attention is drawn. Our bodies send us signals that we may then interpret as pain or pleasure or need, but, again, any wisdom is in the interpretation, not the signal itself.

So, too, may we have physical reactions to people or situations. I’ve been around folks who’ve creeped me out and have chosen to go this way rather that just because, but is this due to my spidey sense, or, again, to attentiveness to the signals I’m getting from those folks or the environment?

I’m quite willing to allow for a role for the subconscious, that is, that there are processes not under my conscious control which detect the presence of murmurings below the surface, but the subconscious is just that, sub-conscious.

It ain’t guts.

I might be particularly biased against gut-checks because my gut is so often wrong—or should I say, when I did listen to my gut I usually made the wrong decision. I am a very reactive person, very VERY reactive, so much so that if I have a strong reaction to something or someone, I make sure NOT to respond to that reaction. No, what I need to do is wait, think, then think some more before making any decisions or judgements. If I let my gut dictate my response, I would often be yelling NO or throwing things out the window or running in the opposite direction.

Am I confusing initial reactions to gut-knowledge? Perhaps, although those who state that our guts can speak are likely confusing guts with experience or habit or the skill gained through practice: when one is used to dealing with routine situations, it is possible to be sensitized to detours from the routine.

But what about those moments of indecision, when consulting one’s entrails is recommended as a suitable method of adjudication likely to lead to reliable results? Well, you probably a) are already leaning toward one side, such that tipping over feels right (or reeling back feels wrong), or b) you honestly don’t know and are simply relieved to have chosen at all.

At which point you might as well have flipped a coin.


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Teacher tells you stop your play and get on with your work

4 10 2012

Oy, is teaching takin’ it out of me this semester. In a good way.

Last semester I taught 2 courses on Tues-Thurs and 1 course Mon-Wed. Which meant I was commuting from Brooklyn to the Bronx 4 days a week. Which sucked.

This semester I’m only commuting twice a week, which is nice for my back and my general attitude, and which also means I have time to work the unfortunately-necessary-second-job at a place I’ve worked on-and-off for years (in the Financial District, although not of the Financial District).

So, y’know, two days a week at school, two days (Mon & Fri) at the office, three days a week at home: easy-peazy, right? Ha.

The office job is pretty low-stress, but by 6pm on Thursday, I am DONE teaching. My voice is hoarse, the tip of my tongue for some reason numb, my hair is askew (okay, my hair is often askew), and I am covered in chalk dust. I’m not sure how or why I get chalk dust everywhere, but I do.

Have I mentioned I’m really enjoying this semester?

My American govt students are bit quiet, but they are generally attentive and ask good questions, and they do have their moments. Things get livelier in my bioethics course, with students popping up with comments and questions and what-ifs and, most importantly, they’re right there when it comes to the implications of biotechnologies.

And then my contemporary political issues class. Man. This is full of high-schoolers from a number of schools in the Bronx who trek on to campus to take college courses. I had a bit of bummer experience with a similar group of students spring semester—they would not fucking participate—but this group, whoo, this group requires me to shout and wave my arms and signal like Bruce Willis near the end of Die Hard 2 trying to bring the plane in a for a safe landing. (Or am I misremembering that, too?)

Anyway, it’s not really a good thing that the class is so unruly, but in a course like this, where they really do have to participate, I’d rather have them too into it than not at all. This is the first time I’m teaching this course, so I’d expect that next semester I’ll have a better handle on how things should go, but in the meantime, I’m enjoying how willing they are to mix it up.

I just need some more damned coffee. And throat lozenges.


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All things weird and wonderful, 25

2 10 2012

A De Brazza monkey—what a magnificent creature!

And s/he lives on this planet with us—our neighbor. If one considers the earth a big ol’ neighborhood. Which some days I do.

Shakespeare comes to mind. . . .

h/t: Cute Overload


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La la how life goes on

1 10 2012

Funny how the disappearance of someone you hadn’t seen in 20 years, might not have seen in 20 more, can nonetheless knock you sideways.

I don’t know if I would have seen Chris again, but I took for granted that I could: the possibility was always there that I’d run into her back in a Wisconsin bar, buy John and her a beer, and catch up on the lifetime or two since we’d seen each other last.

Now I know that will never happen.

Chris is not the first person around my age who’s died—an old boyfriend died in a car crash half a lifetime ago, another guy who I partied with in high school was killed in a snowmobile accident—but she’s the first one who I know who died for health reasons. Her death in an accident would have been shocking and sad, but that she died because her body gave out is. . . well, I was going to say incomprehensible, but, really, stunning precisely because it is so comprehensible: this is, in the end, what will likely happen to me and everyone I know.

Are you more prepared in your sixties for this? In your seventies and eighties? Not that you get used to it, the disappearance of people, but is it less shocking? Is it worse for being less shocking?

Chris’s death has meant a peg has been kicked out and away from my own sense of self; I left a bit off-kilter, for she has carried a piece of me away with her.

And that’s how it is, I guess. I mourn the loss of her, mourn the loss of the possibility of her, and mourn the loss of myself, in her.

I can scarcely imagine what her family and close friends are going through, to lose someone so central to them, so central to who they are; they have lost Chris and thus are themselves lost.

So in their grief, through their grief, they’ll try to find their way back, without her.


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O bla de, o bla da

29 09 2012

And so my eldest niece (mid-twenties) said yes when J., her smart and funny boyfriend of 3 1/2 years, asked her to marry him. I am so very happy for her.

A funeral this week, a wedding next year.

Life goes on.


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