1. Cinderella - Aqualung: If you're ever looking to start an awesome mix cd, you could do worse than this song. It has an explosively beautiful opening and it maintains a pretty otherworldly feel throughout. It's got that sort of U2-esque transcendentalism feeling without Bono yelling at you.
2. Stuck On You - Failure: This is, for all intents and purposes, a generic alternative rock song from the mid-nineties. Lately, though, it's gotten under my skin. It might nostalgia or the spacemen on the album's cover. Either way, it's a great time capsule song and deserves to be dredged up. If you listen to it, you'll probably be all like, "Oh yeah... I sort of remember this one."
3. Creeper - Islands: I found this song instantly catchy... like from the first few notes on. That always impresses me. Add in lyrics about being stabbed in the heart, and you can't lose.
4. You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb - Spoon: Spoon's Britt Daniel describes their music solely as "rock and roll," and that's very fitting, especially on the songs from "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga." "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb," is my current favorite track from that record, although I've vacillated between it, "The Underdog," "Rhthm & Soul," and "Don't You Evah."
5. Once A Glimpse - Maximo Park: A nice, strong propulsive song with a singalong chorus that never lets up for a second. It's all anxiety and nervous energy.
6. The Female Of The Species - Space: More 90's alterna-rock, this one from fairly obscure band Space. This one has xylophones, though. It's kind of like Edwyn Collins' "A Girl Like You," although I can't adequately explain why. It's more fun, though. On account of the xylophones.
7. She Got Dressed - Fleet Foxes: I could pretty much put an Fleet Foxes song on here and it'd be ok. This one has struck me lately. This one reminds me of the best possible outcome of a Brian Wilson/Stereolab collaboration.
8. The Good That Won't Come Out - Rilo Kiley: This one's a little bit older, but I sort of rediscovered it recently. It's one of those indie rock songs that starts out mopey and muted and eventually explodes with rage and anxiety. And it's got one of my favorite couplets: "I do this thing where I think I'm real sick, but I won't go to the doctor to find out about it."
9. Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case: Neko Case's songs barely have song structures anymore... it's a pretty big departure from her alternative country stuff with Her Boyfriends. Somewhere along the way, she just shifted into a sultry, almost unnerving film noir songstress. There's a very haunting quality to her music, now, and it sort of sticks to you even after it's done playing.
10. Disintegration - Jimmy Eat World: This song is nearly eight minutes, but it doesn't get tiresome. It's a fairly miserable affair, one of the darkest songs from a unusually optimistic band. It's hard not to picture your worst relationship with this in the background... The slow build to its big crescendo almost catches you off guard the first time 'round.
11. Crown Of Thorns - Mother Love Bone: This is epic pre-grunge... I don't know if Mother Love Bone were ever embraced by the mainstream. I never heard them on the radio, but I graduated to modern rock after Andrew Wood was already dead. I absolutely love this song, though... it's the type of music that led me away from classic rock and forced me to stop dismissing 90's bands as retreads of great 70's artists. Not that they aren't, but when they made music this cool, what's the difference?
12. Plasticities - Andrew Bird: From Bird's "Armchair Apocrypha," "Plasticities" mixes tempos and moods in a lovely, pleasantly jarring way. I have no idea what the lyrics are about, but it seems very important and very stirring. It also makes a great streetlight song... the type of music you want on while driving down a lit, empty city street at, like, 3 am.
13. At The Wake - The Format: I think this song should be in every indie film ever, because it perfectly captures the feeling of suburban isolation, loneliness, powerlessness and restlessness. I might be reading too much into it.
14. Samson - Regina Spektor: This song just breaks my heart. I don't even understand how that works.
15. Move Away & Shine - The Polyphonic Spree: from the "Thumbsucker" soundtrack, this is just a typical freakishly inspirational, hook-laden Polyphonic Spree song. I don't know how they manage to actually capture so much uplift, but it's so bizarrely powerful. It's probably the happiest thing I like.
16. The Perptual Self Or What Would Saul Alinsky Do - Sufjan Stevens: There's not much that really gets me on board with the whole... uh... God thing, but Sufjan Stevens does. His faith is infectious, not obnoxious, and it makes me really want to believe in something that I do really want to believe in even if I can't really (usually) believe in.
17. Who Is It - Bjork: I prefer the Bell Choir mix from the single to the version on Medulla, but either way it's wonderful. There's something very affecting about this song, something ineffably gut wrenching. The bell choir version is especially urgent sounding... like one of the hymns in church I actually look forward to singing.
18. Take Care Of All Of My Children - Tom Waits: Speaking of hymns, this Tom Waits' song plays out like an antique spiritual, complete with warbling trumpet and old vinyl hiss. One of my favorite things about Tom Waits is his ability to make music that sounds like it could have originated at any point in time... there's no indication of its origin. It's like an artifact, something unearthed and discovered. This song is on his "Orphans" collection.
19. Dust Of Ages - Eels: Continuing a hymn-like theme, this little tune from "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations" has a church song simplicity... it reminds me of something that would have been in an early 70's Christian Claymation show... except for the vulgarity.
20. Last Flowers - Radiohead: This is from the bonus disc of "In Rainbows" material. I think it's the best song from both discs, which is a pretty big feat. This song has been floating around since "OK Computer" days, when it was called "Last Flowers Till The Hospital" (I like that version of the title better). It's very pretty, very unsettling and it should have been on the main release.
1.25.2010
Lester & Mister James
Lester, apparently, made his entire living by buying used media in the city and selling it for a slightly higher price in more remote areas, where people had less accessibility to second hand stores. His dingy white van was full of crates of CD's, cassettes, vinyl LP's and VHS tapes. This was at the dawn of DVD technology, so those were pretty rare, but he managed to snag a few every now and then. How he could sustain an entire life on such a meager margin was beyond me, but he seemed to do all right. He had a circuit, basically, that he made around the state, which meant we would we would see him at our used CD store in roughly three week intervals. He was always a welcome sight, not just because his voracious purchases ensured a decent day of profits, but also because a visit from Lester also meant a visit from Mister James.
The exact relationship between Lester and Mister James was never quite clear. They were roughly the same age, older than fifty, probably less than sixty, and the had similar haircuts and beards. They were both graying and a little paunchy, but Lester always seemed far more put together than Mister James. Where Lester always had his longish coif neatly combed, and always seemed to be dressed in relatively neat, clean clothes, Mister James couldn't have been more unkempt. In a strange way, he looked like a wild version of Lester, like Lester had been left to fend for himself a while in the woods and came out looking like Mister James. Mister James' hair was a tangled shock and he always seemed to be wearing the same, stained pink and white striped shirt every time I saw him. He looked, actually, to be a little bit crazy... and I think he legitimately was.
The prevailing theory was that Mister James was Lester's brother, although I found it odd that Lester would refer to his brother as "Mister James." It may have been a nickname from childhood, I suppose, or a more current term of affection, but I never got the feeling that the two of them were related at all. They definitely shared a bond, and Lester was certainly protective of Mister James, but I don't know that their relationship was familial. Mister James, I think, was Lester's friend, and I think there was a time when he wasn't crazy at all.
Now, that craziness wasn't wholly apparent from a brief conversation with the man. At first blush, he may have come across as slightly eccentric. My first encounter with him consisted of him traipsing toward the front counter, happily slamming his hand near the register and saying, loudly, "Shuggie! Shuggie Otis!" I didn't know what this meant, but he seemed genial and excited, so I pressed for more information. He explained, to me, that Shuggie Otis was an unfairly obscure soul-rock touchstone, a genius on par with Jimi Hendrix that had somehow become lost to time. Mister James demanded, there and then, that I promise that at first opportunity, I buy a Shuggie Otis album and give it a good listen. He guaranteed me that I wouldn't be disappointed. This was Mister James at his most benign. Subsequent conversations included grotesquely detailed accounts of his doctoral visits, dissertations on the cruelty of nuns, theories on the creatures living in his lungs and nearly incomprehensible screeds that were surely racist in origin, but so utterly nonsensical that it was hard to be offended. What became clear in a vast majority of his monologues, however, was a very real feeling of persecution, both from sources real and imagined. I am no psychologist, but I think the man may have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
Lester was an ace at calming Mister James down. He had it down to a science. When Mister James would begin to become agitated, often signaled by an increased frequency of vulgarity, Lester would stop his browsing, and quietly sidle up to Mister James, grab the man's arm, and somehow drain the anger, fear or excitement right out of him. It was practically magic. He didn't seem to be doing anything other than exerting a presence. It almost always worked straight away. I couldn't imagine what a boon this was for Mister James... without Lester, I think his delusions and his fears would have easily overtaken him. Nearly anything could set the man off, and once he began a rant, it seemed to spawn a new angry worry with every word. Without whatever medicine Lester practiced, it didn't seem unreasonable to think of Mister James spiraling wildly out of control. Somehow, something Lester offered allowed Mister James at least a semblance of a normal life. I wondered if Mister James even recognized that.
I wondered, too, what Lester got out of the deal, and how he had come to care for his slightly mad friend. Lester probably found the company comforting. He spent most of his life on the road, after all, and he probably got quite lonely. I think the pair lived out of that van most of the time... Lester never spoke of a home, although that doesn't preclude the existence of one, I suppose. Still, I knew their Wisconsin sales circuit pretty well, and I can't imagine Lester's income afforded them too many hotel stays along their trip. Under such cramped conditions, a companion might not seem ideal, but three weeks of isolation is an awful lot. Every road trip is better with a partner.
And Mister James, when not rambling incoherently, was a pretty interesting man. He was a virtual encyclopedia of psychedelic rock. He had elaborate explanations for the meanings behind the songs of Cream, the 13th Floor Elevators, ? And The Mysterians and Pink Floyd. He knew the biographies of hundreds of musicians, and how they interconnected to one another. He could expound eloquently on music theory, and who had innovated what and when. I learned a lot from him... I don't know how much of it was true.
Lester and Mister James stopped coming around in the winter... I'm sure that the cold was not conducive to their lifestyle. I don't know what they did from November until April, and I never found out. Our store shut down in February, and I never got to see either of them again.
The exact relationship between Lester and Mister James was never quite clear. They were roughly the same age, older than fifty, probably less than sixty, and the had similar haircuts and beards. They were both graying and a little paunchy, but Lester always seemed far more put together than Mister James. Where Lester always had his longish coif neatly combed, and always seemed to be dressed in relatively neat, clean clothes, Mister James couldn't have been more unkempt. In a strange way, he looked like a wild version of Lester, like Lester had been left to fend for himself a while in the woods and came out looking like Mister James. Mister James' hair was a tangled shock and he always seemed to be wearing the same, stained pink and white striped shirt every time I saw him. He looked, actually, to be a little bit crazy... and I think he legitimately was.
The prevailing theory was that Mister James was Lester's brother, although I found it odd that Lester would refer to his brother as "Mister James." It may have been a nickname from childhood, I suppose, or a more current term of affection, but I never got the feeling that the two of them were related at all. They definitely shared a bond, and Lester was certainly protective of Mister James, but I don't know that their relationship was familial. Mister James, I think, was Lester's friend, and I think there was a time when he wasn't crazy at all.
Now, that craziness wasn't wholly apparent from a brief conversation with the man. At first blush, he may have come across as slightly eccentric. My first encounter with him consisted of him traipsing toward the front counter, happily slamming his hand near the register and saying, loudly, "Shuggie! Shuggie Otis!" I didn't know what this meant, but he seemed genial and excited, so I pressed for more information. He explained, to me, that Shuggie Otis was an unfairly obscure soul-rock touchstone, a genius on par with Jimi Hendrix that had somehow become lost to time. Mister James demanded, there and then, that I promise that at first opportunity, I buy a Shuggie Otis album and give it a good listen. He guaranteed me that I wouldn't be disappointed. This was Mister James at his most benign. Subsequent conversations included grotesquely detailed accounts of his doctoral visits, dissertations on the cruelty of nuns, theories on the creatures living in his lungs and nearly incomprehensible screeds that were surely racist in origin, but so utterly nonsensical that it was hard to be offended. What became clear in a vast majority of his monologues, however, was a very real feeling of persecution, both from sources real and imagined. I am no psychologist, but I think the man may have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
Lester was an ace at calming Mister James down. He had it down to a science. When Mister James would begin to become agitated, often signaled by an increased frequency of vulgarity, Lester would stop his browsing, and quietly sidle up to Mister James, grab the man's arm, and somehow drain the anger, fear or excitement right out of him. It was practically magic. He didn't seem to be doing anything other than exerting a presence. It almost always worked straight away. I couldn't imagine what a boon this was for Mister James... without Lester, I think his delusions and his fears would have easily overtaken him. Nearly anything could set the man off, and once he began a rant, it seemed to spawn a new angry worry with every word. Without whatever medicine Lester practiced, it didn't seem unreasonable to think of Mister James spiraling wildly out of control. Somehow, something Lester offered allowed Mister James at least a semblance of a normal life. I wondered if Mister James even recognized that.
I wondered, too, what Lester got out of the deal, and how he had come to care for his slightly mad friend. Lester probably found the company comforting. He spent most of his life on the road, after all, and he probably got quite lonely. I think the pair lived out of that van most of the time... Lester never spoke of a home, although that doesn't preclude the existence of one, I suppose. Still, I knew their Wisconsin sales circuit pretty well, and I can't imagine Lester's income afforded them too many hotel stays along their trip. Under such cramped conditions, a companion might not seem ideal, but three weeks of isolation is an awful lot. Every road trip is better with a partner.
And Mister James, when not rambling incoherently, was a pretty interesting man. He was a virtual encyclopedia of psychedelic rock. He had elaborate explanations for the meanings behind the songs of Cream, the 13th Floor Elevators, ? And The Mysterians and Pink Floyd. He knew the biographies of hundreds of musicians, and how they interconnected to one another. He could expound eloquently on music theory, and who had innovated what and when. I learned a lot from him... I don't know how much of it was true.
Lester and Mister James stopped coming around in the winter... I'm sure that the cold was not conducive to their lifestyle. I don't know what they did from November until April, and I never found out. Our store shut down in February, and I never got to see either of them again.
1.23.2010
Remedy
Minutes tick by and Benjamin sits in the dark, listening to the motion on the clock and checking his wrist, every so often, for a pulse. This fear of dying, it's irrational, he knows it, but it's all he's dreamt of, all he's imagined, now (against his will) for so long. It's gutted him. Once that realization of mortality (an honest realization, not the sideways and muted understanding that most people give it, but the very visceral and powerful fact that his life is ebbing away, tick by tick, tock by tock) set in, it wriggled its way into his consciousness, laid parasite eggs and took over. And now he's literally listening to life end. In any moment of concentration, any moment where he is not distracted by hunger or lust or something interesting on the television, he imagines scenario after scenario after scenario and he wonders how his imagination will dovetail with his actual demise. He fears his fear most of all. Second to that, he fears that he will die before he accomplishes anything. Sometimes, that fear is mutated into a palpitation-worthy worry that he will die JUST as he accomplishes something, thusly being robbed of its reward. However, at three in the morning, with work mere hours away and no sleep in sight, it is unlikely that Benjamin will need to worry about the latter case.
His life, he sometimes realizes, is a monument of incompletion. He has three quarters of a necessary ambition, and it serves him well, up to a point. Beyond that, boredom sets in. Or, rather, what Benjamin calls boredom sets in. What it is, really, is worse. There is another horrible realization, similar to the gut wrenching knowledge of his own mortality, that plagues Benjamin. Unlike many successful people, Benjamin is all too aware of his own mediocrity. And so, as a project winds down, as a genuine accomplishment nears, Benjamin takes stock of his work and he dismisses it as too banal, too mundane, too pedestrian, too dull to be meaningful. Completion, he decides, is only a waste of his precious, dwindling time. And he surrenders progress for depression, vowing not to try again. His projects, like hunger, lust and good television, are a very viable distraction from worrying about death. The abandonment of his work, then, opens the door to these long, interminable nights of irrational terror. The whole of it is compounded, then, by the lack of accomplishment, the surrender which pushed him down in the first place, and an increasing amount of crazy brought on by the resulting insomnia. He finds himself in the middle of a vortex of self-created lunacy, and he struggles to free himself of its hold. He spends waning minutes of his life (waning, in the fact that he is on a slow march to the grave... there is no valid reason to believe his ending is coming soon, although he can cite, with chilling detail, how very thin the line between life and death is, and he will expound in unpleasant volume about how no one is guaranteed an average lifespan) fretting over his seeming inability to do anything of value, and as he wastes those waning minutes, he only has reason to chastise himself more.
He is at a loss. He wonders, then, if he would be better served by lowering his expectations of life, by embracing his mediocrity and enjoying the bland pleasures that seem to sustain most people. He has a hard time swallowing it. He wants to offer up something, to create something of substance, to be known, to be admired, to be respected. He does not want to just give in to a daily grind of punching a clock and being told what to do by an army of superiors all working to keep some indifferent and colossal cash machine running, oiled with his blood and sweat. But, given his lacking skill, given his inability to rise above the middling, he wonders if he really has any choice at all. Maybe he's only making himself ill by peppering everything with expectation and a desire to elevate. Maybe he's killing himself with delusion, losing time that he could appreciate the simple things of life. Without the constant want, perhaps he could settle into a pleasant rut and develop a comfort that would mitigate his menial and unimportant place in the world. That thought is both seductive and the most absolutely depressing thing he's ever considered. And so he continues on, stuck in a stasis of his own creation, unable to live up to his own expectations. His ambition is outsized. His capability is puny in comparison. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to remedy the situation.
As time slips by and daylight creeps up, he thinks there might not be a remedy at all.
His life, he sometimes realizes, is a monument of incompletion. He has three quarters of a necessary ambition, and it serves him well, up to a point. Beyond that, boredom sets in. Or, rather, what Benjamin calls boredom sets in. What it is, really, is worse. There is another horrible realization, similar to the gut wrenching knowledge of his own mortality, that plagues Benjamin. Unlike many successful people, Benjamin is all too aware of his own mediocrity. And so, as a project winds down, as a genuine accomplishment nears, Benjamin takes stock of his work and he dismisses it as too banal, too mundane, too pedestrian, too dull to be meaningful. Completion, he decides, is only a waste of his precious, dwindling time. And he surrenders progress for depression, vowing not to try again. His projects, like hunger, lust and good television, are a very viable distraction from worrying about death. The abandonment of his work, then, opens the door to these long, interminable nights of irrational terror. The whole of it is compounded, then, by the lack of accomplishment, the surrender which pushed him down in the first place, and an increasing amount of crazy brought on by the resulting insomnia. He finds himself in the middle of a vortex of self-created lunacy, and he struggles to free himself of its hold. He spends waning minutes of his life (waning, in the fact that he is on a slow march to the grave... there is no valid reason to believe his ending is coming soon, although he can cite, with chilling detail, how very thin the line between life and death is, and he will expound in unpleasant volume about how no one is guaranteed an average lifespan) fretting over his seeming inability to do anything of value, and as he wastes those waning minutes, he only has reason to chastise himself more.
He is at a loss. He wonders, then, if he would be better served by lowering his expectations of life, by embracing his mediocrity and enjoying the bland pleasures that seem to sustain most people. He has a hard time swallowing it. He wants to offer up something, to create something of substance, to be known, to be admired, to be respected. He does not want to just give in to a daily grind of punching a clock and being told what to do by an army of superiors all working to keep some indifferent and colossal cash machine running, oiled with his blood and sweat. But, given his lacking skill, given his inability to rise above the middling, he wonders if he really has any choice at all. Maybe he's only making himself ill by peppering everything with expectation and a desire to elevate. Maybe he's killing himself with delusion, losing time that he could appreciate the simple things of life. Without the constant want, perhaps he could settle into a pleasant rut and develop a comfort that would mitigate his menial and unimportant place in the world. That thought is both seductive and the most absolutely depressing thing he's ever considered. And so he continues on, stuck in a stasis of his own creation, unable to live up to his own expectations. His ambition is outsized. His capability is puny in comparison. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to remedy the situation.
As time slips by and daylight creeps up, he thinks there might not be a remedy at all.
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