Moistworks05

2009-06-26T17:39:00.007-04:00

DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN
Michael Jackson
1973
Farewell My Summer Love
Motown : 1984
[Out of Print]

Not much to say, because there's so much to say. And if you said everything, would it still be enough? Hard to say.

Does anyone remember the first time they heard Michael Jackson? No one does. He was always there for all of us.

Does everyone remember trying to be Michael Jackson? Everyone under fifty does. Leather jackets with superfluous zippers were donned, often indoors. Moonwalks were practiced. High screams were imitated. Few people bothered with the glove. There was such a thing as going too far. But more people tried to be Michael Jackson than tried to be Bruce Springsteen, or Madonna, or Prince, and with less reason to believe that it could ever be possible. No one was like Michael Jackson, and no one could be, because no one had that life: a star as a child, an even bigger star as an adult, talented beyond compare, denied normalcy at every turn, driven mad by fame and ambition and personal demons, gentle but incapable of self-protection, brilliant, beloved, misused, dead.

The video for "Leave Me Alone," a bonus track from the CD version of Bad, will probably be the defining moment in his career, no matter that it will rarely be shown in the next week's countless retrospectives. In it, Jackson piles into a bullet-shaped craft and goes on a funhouse ride through the various rumors about his life: that he proposed marriage to Elizabeth Taylor,that he bought the elephant man's bones, that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber. Anyone with even a little extension into public life knows how painful it can be to be misunderstood or reviled, and how much worse that pain can be when it alternates with periods of unconditional adulation. So somewhere along the way, for reasons of his own -- and they were reasons only of his own, in the loneliest sense -- he started to try to undo it all. He undid part of his race, undid part of his gender, tried to undo the love that the world felt for him. He fell largely silent as a musician. He stopped performing. Almost no one really believed that he'd honor his commitment to play fifty shows in London beginning next month, or that he'd survive the run if he did.

Three pop icons were born in 1958, within months of each other: Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson. For a few years there, particularly around the time of Purple Rain, Prince and Michael Jackson enjoyed a rivalry. Both were sexually ambiguous, or at least projected that image. Both were racially mixed, or at least projected that image. Both were prodigiously gifted. Both were rich. Both were famous. But even then, if you looked closely, it was clear that the one who was acting crazier was perfectly sane, and the one who was desperately trying to act normal was unravelling inside. In "I Would Die 4 U," Prince sang, "I'm not a woman / I'm not a man / I am something that you'll never understand." Was he talking about Michael Jackson? All three major points were on target. And, now, the fourth: the title.

2009-06-23T11:33:00.005-04:00

SEASONS
Jeff Beck
Jeff
Epic : 2003
[Buy It]

I'm not much for the guitar gods. I've written before, in this space, about my lukewarm feelings for Jimi Hendrix: appreciation, of course, and occasional awe, but not really a deep emotional connection. That goes double for someone like Eric Clapton, or maybe triple, and I got most of my fill of Joe Satriani in my sophomore year of college. It's not as though I prefer my guitarists mediocre, but I tend to want them to plan in the service of the song, like Richard Thompson or Jimmy Page, and when even those guitarists embark upon noodling expeditions, I'm liable to tune them out.

The one exception to this rule is Jeff Beck. The first time I heard him, I'm pretty sure, was on the Yardbirds' "Over Under Sideways Down," played between two slices of indifferent heavy blues on some classic rock station. It's a showcase for Beck's playing, and particularly the ways in which his playing differed from (and trumped) that of Clapton and even Page, but it's also a relic, hard to separate from its time. Also a relic, though of a different time, is "Blow by Blow," the 1975 album in which he mixed together jazz, funk, rock, and soul, and played the hell out of songs like the Beatles' "She's a Woman" and Stevie Wonder's "Cause We've Ended as Lovers." (The Stevie Wonder connection was significant; Wonder originally wrote "Superstition" for Beck but rushed out his own recording first, and Beck supplied the heartbreaking solo on Wonder's "I Believe (When I Fall In Love With You It Will Be Forever).") As the seventies wound down, though, Beck wound down, too. He recorded infrequently in the eighties, though one of those recordings, a cover of "People Get Ready" with his former bandmate Rod Stewart on vocals, showed up frequently on MTV. Today, it sounds dated thanks to Nile Rodgers' production.

So, that was the work of most of two decades, lots of relics, many inspired. They were entered into the historical record, and Beck decided to keep to himself and worked on his collection of vintage cars. Then, in 1989, he released "Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop." This is the album I associate most with my love for Beck; it came out while I was in college, and we played it constantly for about a month, mostly because it's brilliant, unhinged album of rock instrumentals, sometimes with cut-and-paste vocals (in one, Bozzio reads from a guitar-equipment catalog), sometimes with no vocals at all.

Since the late nineties, Beck has recorded more regularly, showing off both his early-rock roots (he recorded Crazy Legs, a tribute album to Gene Vincent's guitarist Cliff Gallup) and his willingness to experiment further with electronica and world music (especially on his trio of recent records, Who Else!, You Had It Coming, and Jeff). His mercurial playing remains at the center of everything he does; "Seasons," from Jeff, is a phenomenally odd showcase of Beck's brilliance, as he careers from hard-rock riffing to speed jazz. I even like the noodling. Today is Beck's sixty-fifth birthday. Don't sing him "Happy Birthday." Try to play it with some death-defying descending pull-offs.

2009-06-04T21:52:00.015-04:00

PEACE, AT LAST
Chas Jankel
Chas Jankel
Angel Air : 1980
[Buy It]

EVERYBODY WANTS TO FEEL LIKE YOU
John Prine
The Missing Years
Oh Boy : 1991
[Buy It]

GOOD TIMES
Sam Cooke
1964
Available on : The Man and His Music
RCA : 1986
[Buy It]

CRUEL STAGE
Graham Parker
12 Haunted Episodes
Razor & Tie : 1995
[Buy It]

Some weeks are filled with peace: peace in the weather, peace in the work, peace in the world. This wasn't one of them. It started with an illness that passed quickly but was severe enough to unsettle.

That was the first domino, and it fell over.

Then there were professional developments that, while essentially positive, were still destabilizing. I don't want to be vague, but I don't want to revisit them either. Suffice it to say that the same mechanisms that brings my work--the books, the essays, the journalism--to a broader audience brings that broader audience back to me, and while I like to know that readers are out there, sometimes I'm disturbed by how out there they are. Then I spent some time with a friend who is going through a hard time that seem to be half-psychological, half-somatic, if not all psycho-somatic. He will get better, I hope. Then I spent some time with another friend who is going through a hard time that seems to be half her own doing and half her undoing. She will get better, I hope. Then another friend got some disappointing news about a project she has been working on for years, and I spent too many hours on the telephone fighting the mortgage department of my bank over a dishonest escrow policy, and I encountered various forms of humorless mid-level bureaucratic stupefaction. Today I was at the end of the rope, and not the bottom end, either--I had climbed to the top with thoughts of leaping. Energy gone, patience gone with it, I then proceeded to have the worst day of the entire week, a dull afternoon growing frustrated with nonresponse from adults who should know better followed by an exhausting evening in which my younger son was impossible in all the ways that five year-olds are impossible. My older son tried to broker a peace, but I wasn't having any, and my wife, who is now in the grips of the illness that unsettled me at the beginning of the week, alternated between not reacting to any of it and overreacting to all of it. This is trivia, mostly, of course. It's the cost of doing business when the business is life. But this week, too, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down, in church of all places, and though I wrote a piece about that, my writing didn't make me feel any better about the cost of doing business when the business is death.

So I ended up here, now, looking for songs that produce peace. It took a while. The Chambers Brothers' "Love, Peace, and Happiness" makes promises, but it is too effortful to deliver fully on its title. Bob and Marcia's "Peace of Mind," a bit of Motown reggae with a little filip of a string arrangement, is closer, but Bob Andy's vocal is pushed too far forward in the mix to allow any listener to settle back comfortably. Cat Stevens' "Peace Train" and the Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Feeling" begin to create the desired effects, but they are cliches, and cliches turn themselves inside out.

I knew the songs were out there. I have Van Morrison on my iPod, and Caetano Veloso and Miles Davis and Mississippi John Hurt. Some people would try to find peace in the space between the songs, but some people are wrong. Still, the search itself was starting to become disruptive to my day, so I just put the thing on shuffle and gave up. Slowly, they started to come to me. First, was Chas Jankel's "Peace, At Last." Jankel, who played keyboards with Ian Dury and the Blockheads and was responsible for much of the songwriting, particularly the work that leaned out of pub-rock into funk and disco, released his first solo album in 1980; it included a few piano instrumentals, including this one.

After songs by the Beastie Boys, the Fall, and Bongwater--a triple shot of chaos--John Prine showed up. Prine has plenty of peace. I was thinking of him while I was searching actively, particularly "All the Best," from The Missing Years, which is a beautiful, simple song. What I got was even better: "Everybody Wants to Feel Like You," from the same record. While the lyric isn't the most generous he's ever written--it's a song to a woman who won't show him affection in the way he wants--the melody and the vocal are simple and magnetic, like a compass, and Prine's lyrics are always at once childlike and wise:

Next time tell me that you want me
Put your little foot inside of my shoe
Next time tell me that you need me
Everybody wants to feel like you

They are also lovingly lickerish, which carries its own kind of peace:

I used to love you so hard in the morning
I'd make you stutter and roll your eyes
I put your mind on a brief vacation
To the land of the lost surprise

After Prine came the MC5, Iggy Pop, XTC, Grandmaster Flash, the Gun Club: not bad but not peaceful, and not welcome. Skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. Then I got Sam Cooke's "Good Times," which I was about to skip. I didn't. I hung in there. And I was rewarded, I think. "Good Times" is among the most misleading of soul songs. It's a song about pleasure, certainly, because it's a song that's built of pleasure: the swaying melody, Cooke's subtly soaring vocal. But the undercurrent of sadness is at least an undertow, and it threatens to take you back out with it. He's singing about a party, and it's ongoing, but he Cooke doesn't know for how long, or what pain will return when it dissipates. This is especially clear in the final stanza:

It might be one o'clock and it might be three
Time don't mean that much to me
I haven't felt this good since I don't know when
And I might not feel this good again

This felt hopeless, almost, so I was relieved when after another stretch of chaos (Stooges, Steinski, Sonny Boy Williamson's "Little Village"), the random hand of music landed on Graham Parker's "Cruel Stage." There are songs about coming out of the dark into the light, but few of them take responsibility to this degree, or do it with such a lovely, spiraling guitar part. It's almost a secular gospel:

Take me for what I'm worth though it may not amount to much
Take me from this abyss and put me back in touch
Though I have strayed from you though I have fallen from grace
I am back on higher ground up from that lonely place

And I have found the going tough
But I will find the strength enough
And I am undoing this cruel stage
That I've been going through

The people who should call won't. The friends who should pass through their difficulties might not. The occlusions may not dissolve, certainly won't dissolve all at once. The frustrations will keep on coming. But so will the songs.

2009-05-27T11:56:00.020-04:00

NEVER TELL YOUR MOTHER SHE'S OUT OF TUNE
Jack Bruce
Songs For a Tailor
Atco : 1969
[Buy It]

YOU SAY YOU TRUST YOUR MOTHER
Swamp Dogg
1972
Available on : Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 2
S.D.E.G. : 2001
[Buy It]

MY MOTHER WAS A FRIEND OF THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Blurt
1980
Available on : The Best of Blurt Vol. 1: The Fish Needs a Bike
Salamander : 2004
[Buy It]

MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO COME
Randy Newman
12 Songs
Reprise : 1970
[Buy It]

MOTHER
John Lennon
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Capitol : 1970
[Buy It]

I DON'T WANNA BE A SOLDIER
John Lennon
Imagine
Capitol : 1971
[Buy It]

WHO PUTS ME IN MY LITTLE BED
Ada Jones
1913
Edison Blue Amberol

YONDER COMES MY MOTHER
Son House
1965
Father of the Delta Blues
Sony : 1992
[Buy It]

In the last week three friends of mine have had what I'll call non-productive moments with their mothers. This isn't the appropriate place for details, so I'll make some up. One friend wanted to go on a camping trip in the wilds of Alaska, and her mother, who once lost a sibling to a vicious Kodiak, overreacted to the plan. "No," she screamed. "You will be torn to pieces by that bear, my darling." Another friend told her mother she was planning on taking crack. "Whatever," her mother said. "Save me some." The woman was then incensed that her mother didn't care more for her. The third friend had given notice at her job, which her mother had never much liked, on account of the fact that her boss was a hardened criminal who bootlegged DVDs and carried a gun in the waistband of his pants. But some important wires crossed in her mother's head, and she became furious with her daughter for once again becoming, at the age of 41, unemployed.

The other day I saw the Albert Brooks movie "Mother," which I have been bothering my wife to rent. She went to every video store within walking distance of our house, and no one has the movie. I despaired for it. Then it turned up on HBO, and we watched about two-thirds of it. I don't usually talk about pop culture other than pop music here, but I urge everyone to see it. It has too much dime-store psychology, and it knows that, but it has a fantastic performance by Debbie Reynolds as the perky, practical, judgmental, loving mother. Brooks is great, because he's always great: when he is forced to eat the permafrost sherbet in his mother's freezer, he screws up his face and says that it "tastes like an orange foot." There are plenty of moments of inspired discomfort -- at one point Brooks taunts his younger brother by pretending that he and his mother are having a sexual relationship -- but the climactic scene, where Brooks, who is playing a successful but blocked sci-fi writer, discovers that his mother also harbored dreams of literary fame, is legitimately moving. Consider this a Moistworks two thumbs up, though both thumbs are mine.

In the last hour I have been working on a technology to beam that movie into my friends' minds. I want them to understand that most of what their mothers do is done from love, and that the poor execution should be forgiven if possible. I would also beam the movie into the mothers' minds and tell them to ease off, that their kids are smart and confident so long as they are permitted to be that way, and that they need not worry so industriously about the worst-case scenarios. Of course everyone already know all of this, but I want to agree. And while I perfected the technology about five minutes ago, now I'm having second thoughts, mainly because the three situations I heard about this week concern mothers and daughters, and the Albert Brooks movie, along with everything I personally know, concerns mothers and sons. I think we can all agree that mother-daughter business is significantly different from mother-son business. It's knottier. It persists. There are mirrors hung next to windows, which can be confusing and exhilarating. I'm not even sure that mother-son solutions can address mother-daughter problems except in the most hapless, generic sense. Oh well.

In the last ten seconds, I put the blueprints for the movie-beaming device into the top drawer of my desk and took out a series of songs about mothers. There's Jack Bruce's "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune," which is interesting advice if you consider it more broadly - Bruce seems to be saying you should just take the lumps from maternal scrutiny/sanction and move on. Unfortunately, all the reasoned thinking takes place in the title; the song, despite some nice guitar by George Harrison, is a collection of disjointed blues-inflected lyrics. There's a similar problem at the heart of Blurt's spiky, excellent, somewhat nonsensical "My Mother Was a Friend Of the Enemy of the People." For actual answers, it's useful to go elsewhere. Swamp Dogg's "You Say You Trust Your Mother" investigates what can happen when children no longer believe that their mothers are acting in their best interest. As usual with Swamp Dogg, the song is far more complex than it first appears; it's not just about biological mothers, but about nations and patriots, the dangers of unconditional trust and the toxic sadness of suspicion. Randy Newman's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," on the other hand, illustrates what can happen when children fail to heed their mothers' advice - what can happen, it seems, is that those children can grow up fast:

The radio is blasting, someone's beating on the door
Our hostess is not lasting, she's out on the floor
I seen so many things here I ain't never seen before
I don't know what it is but I don't wanna see no more
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
Mama said that ain't no way to have fun

So what is the way to have fun? To listen to your mother? To ignore her? To ignore her knowing that what she's saying is half-panic and half-wisdom? In the Albert Brooks movie, he is drawn back to his mother when he starts to believe that he is dysfunctional in life because he has failed to understand what lies at the root of the mother-child dynamic. But he cannot accept anything his mother says at face value: she's always prodding him, always provoking, never saying exactly what she means. If she told him not to go to a party, he'd go, just like the young man in Randy Newman's song - and like that young man, he might spend much of the party thinking of his mother's sound advice, and even missing her a little. One of the most famous mothers in rock and roll belongs to John Lennon, who lost her when he was seventeen; she surfaces explicitly in the Beatles "Julia" and then "Mother," from Lennon's first solo album. She may also be present, though more obliquely, in "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier," the ragged, anguished political broadside that closes side one of "Imagine":

Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Well, I don't wanna be a sailor mama, I don't wanna fly
Well, I don't wanna be a failure mama, I don't wanna cry
Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no

Is Lennon appealing back to the mother he lost for sanity? For safety? Or is "mama" more generic here? Is it a girlfriend? Is it womanhood in general, understood as protection against the ravages of war and male insecurity? Again, these are all mother-son situations, and not particularly helpful for mother-daughter dust-ups. Again, oh well. I did find one explicit mother-daughter song, from Ada Jones, from 1913, though it's sung from the perspective of a child dreaming of adult romance and complexity and coming back, every time, to the reliability of a mother's affection--and then, as punchline, to the harsher reality of a father's responsibility:

I've had the measles and the mumps
The stomach ache and stomach pumps
My ma says she's afraid a cough
Some day will surely take me off
I get five cents each time I take cod liver oil, you see
And when I've got a dollar saved my ma buys more for me
Who puts me in my little bed?
My mama dear
Who hugs me when my prayers are said?
My mama dear
Who buys me every kind of pill
With sugar on to cure my ills?
But who pays all the doctor bills?
My dear old dad

In the ninety-six years since the song was first released, it hasn't gotten any less creepy.

Mothers, children, conflicts, bonds: it all comes together and all comes apart in Son House's "Yonder Comes My Mother," which is rich with unanswerable questions of separation, emptiness, fullness, exhilaration, and fear. While most songs about mothers get caught up in domestic particulars or psychodrama, this one sees only the big picture, and this may be because it's mistitled, somewhat: this is Son House's version of the spiritual "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder," which makes a case for accepting even the flawed among us, and for looking past shortcomings to the common thread that binds together all humans, even those who are already bound together. Wait, maybe it is about mothers and children, after all.

2009-05-15T15:23:00.005-04:00

GET UP I FEEL LIKE BEING A SEX MACHINE
James Brown
Sex Machine
Polydor : 1970
[Buy It]

GET UP, GET INTO IT, AND GET INVOLVED
James Brown
1971
Available on : In the Jungle Groove
Polydor : 1986
[Buy It]

GET ON THE GOOD FOOT
James Brown
Get On the Good Foot
Polygram : 1972
[Buy It]

PEOPLE GET UP AND DRIVE THAT FUNKY SOUL
James Brown
Slaughter's Big Rip-Off
Polygram : 1973
[Buy It]

GET UP OFFA THAT THING
James Brown
Get Up Offa That Thing
Polydor : 1976
[Out of Print]

TAKE ME HIGHER AND GROOVE ME
James Brown
Mutha's Nature
Polydor: 1977
[Out of Print]

GET UP OFFA THAT THING (LIVE)
James Brown
Hot on the One
Polygram : 1980
[Buy It]

LET ME GET UP ON IT
Tom Waits
Bone Machine
Island : 1992
[Buy It]

As I have been touring behind my new book, I have been listening to lots of old funk music: Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament, Mandrill, the Bar-Kays, War, more.

I have two things to say about that paragraph, and I will say them in two separate paragraphs.

First, this: touring behind a book is a strange process. When you read a biography of a rock star, fully half of the pages are devoted to on-stage performances. When you read a biography of a writer, readings are rarely mentioned. Writing is a solitary and isolated process, as is reading, and the public component is either overrated, superfluous, or both. Still, you get to meet people. You press flesh. And there is something genuine about that process, something that appears to be beneath analysis but is in fact above it.

Second, this: I am quickly filling up with funk. I have to listen, because the book is about funk music, about a funk musician. It's like a boxer listening to "Mama Said Knock You Out" before stepping in the ring. Did you know that it's built on a Sly and the Family Stone sample? There I go again.

The other day I tried to counterprogram all this funk with the least funky music I could think of: Lefty Frizzell, Diamanda Galas, Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, Bread, Yes, Beyonce. It worked for a little while. Then I spoke to a friend of mine who is feeling down. There were many reasons, but they dissolved into one large reason: she was feeling underappreciated. "Down happens," she said. We talked on the telephone for a little while. I delivered heartfelt advice that may not have been helpful; it consisted mostly of aggressive reminders about her abilities and attributes. When I went back to the music, I found that it had changed back to funk music: specifically, to the fundament of up, James Brown.

Brown's dead, but he's very much alive, especially when you're feeling like your life is a little deadened. In 1969, Brown recorded "Lowdown Popcorn," but that was the last bit of lowdown anything he'd be serving up for a while; by the next year, outfitted with the Collins brothers and well on his way into the heavy funk, he had entered a period of intense vertical ambition and relentless optimism. In 1970, he urged others to get up (on account of the fact that he was feeling like a sex machine) and also, after the machine had been operated to everyone's satisfaction, to get up, get into it, and get involved. In 1972, he focused his advice more specifically on the good foot, and while he spent a brief stretch down and out in New York City in 1973, things soon went back up with "People Get Up and Drive That Funky Soul" later that year, not to mention "Get Up Offa That Thing" in 1976 and "Take Me Higher and Groove Me" in 1977 (where he repeatedly sings "take me on up").

The upness of James Brown is of special interest in the late seventies, because it was a period where all signs pointed to downness. He was not the volcanic force he had been in the early part of the decade. Disco had stolen some of his heat and most of his light. I have a friend who saw him at a tiny club that he said "held fewer people than a taxicab," and it wasn't even full. But he kept on, not because there were great rewards in front of him, but because there was so much momentum behind him. In the process, he produced several fine albums: "Jam/1980's," "Nonstop!" and "The Original Disco Man." One of the finest was the 1980 live record "Hot on the One," in which Brown takes a set of songs, mostly old, and submits them to sweaty, tireless investigation. He finds new things in the material because he is reaching up to it, not stooping down. Perhaps not accidentally, the strongest performance is explicitly about upness: "Get Up Offa That Thing," which is even fiercer and sharper than it was in the studio four years earlier.

"Get Up Offa That Thing" has philosophy on its mind, to some degree, but it also has its mind in its pants -- the lyrics seem to be about getting off your derriere and dancing, but they're really about releasing the pressure on the lower level. In this sense, it returns Brown explicitly to the first time he was up, with "Sex Machine" a decade earlier. Getting up offa that thing, at the lowest (and highest) level, is a form of creating, if not exactly procreating. Libido can be desire for sex, sure, but it is also that more general energy available for defining and advancing the self. Jung knew it and James Brown did, too. He sang about it almost ceaselessly and embodied it as he did: it's hard to be down when you're rising up. There is something genuine about this process, too, something that appears to be beneath analysis but is in fact above it. Getting up certain keeps the dogs at bay: disaffection, destrudo, various other downs. This may be why Tom Waits, near the end of the difficult but rewarding Bone Machine, weighs in with a minute-long instrumental that is both worlds away from and pressed right up against James Brown. The Waits song makes a request that may be more like a demand (Get up, stay on the scene, like a bone machine?), and there's an implication that lingers: when the world isn't giving you what you want, you should remember that you can always turn things around by getting up to something.

2009-05-12T12:33:00.013-04:00

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin I
Atlantic : 1969
[Buy It]

I FOLLOW YOU
Amadou et Mariam
Welcome to Mali
Nonesuch : 2008
[Buy It]

TOO MANY BIRDS
Bill Callahan
Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
Drag City : 2009
[Buy It]

Lately, everyone's talking about Twitter. Or is that twittering about talking? Regardless, the 140-character-limit monologue (mono-blog?) has gotten us all a flutter. It's the future of communication! The future of the written word! The future of the future!

If it's the future, then it has to be distinct from the past, right? By that standard, Twitter earns its stripes. We've probably always had some interest in endlessly self-indulgent pitter-patter, but now we finally have the tools to give constant shout outs to people--of course, they are essentially constant shout outs to ourselves. And who doesn't like a shout out? During my long, often thankless days gazing at the feeble beacon of my laptop screen, I must admit to the simple pleasure of digital attention. Instant messages. Blog comments. Facebook posts. All these notifications have become a meaningfully meaningless part of daily monotony - a sugar rush, sweet and fleeting.

When I first joined Twitter, I had the odd realization that communication had evolved away from the need for an exchange of information. The back and forth of dialogue was, finally, obsolete. Twitter didn't even pretend to be about adding friends, or making connections - instead it encouraged the one-sided wonder of following people. And as I decided who I should follow, I started thinking about what music would follow me. There aren't any songs specifically about Twitter, of course. No band has gone down that questionable path yet - though no doubt we'll eventually hear ditties about twenty-word errors ups and falling in love one status update at a time.

But plenty of songs are still topical. Take the famed Led Zeppelin song "Communication Breakdown," which has a fairly straightforward message:

Hey babe, I got something I think you oughta know
Hey babe, I wanna tell you that I love you so.

Indeed, that could easily fit into the short sentences of our digital age. But even in its simplicity there's a breakdown going on. Someone isn't getting that message, even though he's sending it loud and clear. This makes sense: we may be tech-savvy, but we will always be life-sloppy. As an advertising copywriter, I can compress complicated client briefs into headlines, long-winded arguments into pithy emails, and life into blog posts. But when it comes to getting emotion across in real-time, I go strangely mute. And though I have at least ten different ways of getting in touch, I always remain just out of reach.

I suppose to combat my inherent aloofness, I could take a page from Amadou and Mariam's book. In "I Follow You," the pretense of casual contact is completely discarded in favor of vocalizing unabashed determination.

When you go to school, baby I follow you
When you go to work, baby I follow you
When you go downtown, baby I follow you
I think of you every day, every night
I think of you everytime, everywhere

The word "follow" is a bit uneasy; it suggests a shadowy presence lurking a few steps behind. And yet, somehow this song takes that notion, and injects it with such earnest sentimentality, that there isn't anything disturbing in the urgency of the lyrics. The same is true of Twitter, hopefully: "following" and even "stalking" are common Internet verbs, stripped of their threat because they're kept apart from reality.

Which suits me just fine. I would never really want to admit to my surreptitious interest in those I follow online. I mean, if I were to be more vocal in my longings, what of my pride and reputation? Turns out modern gratification still goes hand in hand with good old-fashioned fear of rejection. After all, what happens if no one responds? If you write something on the Internet, and no one acknowledges it, does it even make a sound? It seems safer not to try. In the end, it's almost a relief to sink back into the anonymity of an online world where no one pays enough attention to know how much attention you're paying. In "Too Many Birds," Bill Callahan nails the wistful comfort of this technological wasteland:

Too many birds in one tree
With no place to land

It's true. We are all too many lonely souls flapping about aimlessly together on one site or another. All just looking for a place to land, a stand to take, or maybe just a place to be noticed and go unnoticed at the same time. I'm not sure if I'll ever really take to Twitter. Its staccato impermanence doesn't do enough for me--even my short attention span longs for something a little longer. Plus, the hope it peddles is mostly false. Twitter might change the way we communicate slightly, but the glorious insecurities of life and love will always be more than 140 characters or less can possibly capture.

Note: This post represents approximately 35 Tweets.

2009-05-07T16:06:00.010-04:00

PLEASE STEP BACK
Swamp Dogg
2009
Available in : Please Step Back
Melville House : 2009
[Buy It]

I have been out of commission for a little while because I have been in commission elsewhere: on the West Coast, specifically, committing the unholy act of Book Touring. I don't know who invented the Book Tour, but it was probably someone with a sense of humor. Or absolutely no sense of humor. I've never quite understood why you would take a private act like reading and try to make it public in some artificial way. When you read biographies of rock stars, fully half of the narrative is concerned with touring. When you read biographies of authors, no one ever mentions readings in bookstores. Do you know why that is? Because readings in bookstores aren't even generally interesting enough to earn mention in books. With that said, it is also a great privilege and pleasure to tour a book around. I went to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Seattle, and to Portland. I met staff at several excellent bookstores, and signed stock, and talked to people who graciously agreed to come out and see me read. I don't have a quarrel with the process in concrete cases, only qualms about it in the abstract.

Oh yeah, the book. It's a new novel of mine called Please Step Back that is about Rock Foxx (born Robert Franklin), a funk-rock star of the late sixties and early seventies. To some degree, he's based on Sly Stone. To some degree, he's highly autobiographical. There are also elements of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles mixed in to the character. I don't have anything particularly wise to say about it, at least in this space, except that if you like writing or music or writing about music, you might like it. There is one interesting wrinkle: about a year before I finished the book, I befriended the cult funk legend Swamp Dogg. Well, befriended is an odd word. We became email correspondents as a result of a review of one of his records I had written for the New Yorker. He contacted me, I expressed disbelief that it was really him, and we went on from there. When I was wrapping up the book, I wrote him and asked him if he'd be interested in taking one of the fake songs I wrote for my fake funk star and turning into a real song by a real funk star: namely, him. To say that he responded enthusiastically is an understatement. We have released the song online and will continue to do so. In a special Moistworks moment, I am pleased to offer Swamp Dogg's "Please Step Back," which is based on original materials by Rock Foxx and the Foxxes. I will be discussing it in greater detail at next week's book launch event.

Oh yeah, the event. Next Tuesday (May 12) at Galapagos in DUMBO, I will be having a party for the book. Sasha Frere-Jones will be talking to me about funk music and literature. DJ Doc Delay will be DJ'ing. People are hereby officially invited to attend. Details are here. Bring friends. Bring enemies. Make more of both at the event. I will try to tell funny stories about the radio interview I did with Swamp Dogg last week.

Oh yeah, the interview. We were in a studio together in Los Angeles. He was great: very generous, very smart, very funny. He had good stories about his country music career, his daughter's time as a disco diva, and about the legendary cover of the early seventies album "Rat On," which is also at the top of the post, next to the cover of my new book. "People say it's one of the worst album covers of all time," he said, "but I kind of like it." I agree. Plus, I think he did a great job with the song.

Oh yeah, the song. My character, Rock Foxx, attains an incredible level of fame. His celebrity exceeds anything you could ever imagine, even if you are reading this and you are Prince. Then he falls on hard times, at least. He has one song he thinks will redeem him: maybe not morally, maybe not financially, but creatively. All his songs have been about highs and lows, both pharmaceutical and cultural and political, but this one is at once his most personal and most elusive statement. He obsesses about it. It is the key to the kingdom he hasn't yet built. That's the song Swamp Dogg recorded. The final verse, which I find very sad for reasons that I will be happy to explain but which may seem stupid to you, are below:

Please step
Please step back
A peach out of reach
Never fails to attract
There goes a bird
Without a word
His song is so abstract
Oh, please step back

See you at Galapagos, I hope.

2009-04-15T10:44:00.019-04:00

HELP ME LIFT YOU UP
Mary Margaret O'Hara
Miss America
Koch : 1988
[Buy It]

THINK ABOUT YOUR TROUBLES
Harry Nilsson
The Point!
RCA : 1971
[Buy It]

HELP ME
Van Morrison
It's Too Late To Stop Now
Warner Bros. : 1974
[Buy It]

HELPING HAND
Fats Domino
1962
Available on: Out of New Orleans
Bear Family : 1993
[Buy It]

HELPING HAND (A THOUSAND MILES AWAY FROM HOME)
Snooks Eaglin
New Orleans Street Singer
Smithsonian Folkways : 1959
[Buy It]

'CAUSE I LOST MY HELPING HAND
Little Miss Cornshucks
1951
Available on: 1947-1951
Classics R&B : 2003
[Buy It]

MISTER, WOULD YOU PLEASE HELP MY PONY?
Ween
Chocolate and Cheese
Elektra : 1994
[Buy It]

The other night I had a dream. It was about the Somali pirates, which means that it probably wasn't about them at all. In the dream I was at home, watching the news. Most of the shots were aerial, footage of the captured boat and the captain with a gun to his head. A few of the shots seemed to be from the vantage of the boat; they showed helicopters with cameras bolted to their doors, zipping by in the afternoon sky. That was how the dream went: shot of boat, shot of sky, shot of boat, shot of sky. It started exciting, because it was a pirate dream -- avast, ye mateys! -- but it got boring fast.

Then after a while I noticed something in the background. It was a friend of mine. She was not on the boat. She was in the water, about fifty yards behind the boat, in a tiny white ring of a life preserver, the kind you see in movies. The air was perfectly clear, and I could see her expression. She looked peaceful. In real life, this friend is going through a series of intense experiences, some personal, some professional, some financial, some emotional. I wouldn't say I'm worried about her, exactly, because she's smart and capable and lands on her feet like a cat, but I have occasional twinges of worry, because I don't like her to be sad. Those occasional twinges displease me because I don't know what they're asking me, or even telling me, to do. Sometimes I give advice. Sometimes I back off and offer a sympathetic ear. Sometimes I tell her that if anyone crosses her during this difficult time I'm going to knock 'em out. But it's not an easy time for her, I don't think, and to be, on top of everything else, stranded in the ocean with only a bright white LifeSaver around her, well, that was just too much. She needed my help. In the dream, I called her and she answered. "Hi," she said.

"Hi?" I said. It seemed insufficiently dramatic. "I'm watching on TV and you're in the ocean behind the pirates. Are you okay?"

"Fine," she said. "The water's nice." She seemed unconcerned, like she was certain someone was on the way to rescue her.

"Okay," I said. I started to hang up, but something stopped me. "Wait a second," I said. "How come you're talking to me on the phone now, but in the picture onscreen, you're not on the phone?"

"Don't know," she said. "Maybe it's file footage." She coughed. "Did I just cough onscreen?"

"You're not even holding the phone," I said. "Anyway, I wanted to see how you are."

"Well, I have to go," she said. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." At times, she has sounded under the weather when she has said these kinds of things, or under the gun. This time she sounded calm and confident. "Talk to you later." I hung up the phone and watched her on TV, there in the middle of the ocean. Her expression shifted -- to boredom, to anger, a flicker of fear, then to something I didn't recognize.

She had told me not to worry about her, but I did. I worried even after I hung up. I called the real-life friend and told her about the dream friend. At first, she didn't believe me. "Is that dream some kind of code?" she said.

"Dreams are always some kind of code," I said, as condescendingly as possible.

"You know what I mean," she said. "Did you really dream it, or are you just pretending as a way of telling me that you think I'm making a mistake about something?"

"Are you making a mistake about something?" I said, still condescending.

"Well, I have to go," she said. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." Again, calm and confident. "Talk to you later."

We hung up uneasily. Or rather, I was uneasy. Telling me not to worry once, in a dream, was fine. It might have been some kind of code. But telling me not to worry twice, once in real life, was too much. I could take a hint. I wouldn't worry, which meant I wouldn't help. Instead, I went to listen to music, and specifically to songs about help. I listened to "Help!" and "Help Me, Rhonda" and "With a Little Help From My Friends." As forms of counsel regarding advice and assistance, they seemed pat, like songs you've heard hundreds of times. I dug deeper, through Elton John's "Yell Help" and Hasil Adkins' "Can't Help It Blues," until I reached Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Help Me Lift You Up." Mary Margaret O'Hara is often at the deepest reaches of any question. This song is deceptively simple, which means that it can lose its way among some of the knottier, deceptively complex songs on her "Miss America" album. When you separate it from the rest of the class, though, it excels, not only as a song about friendship and help, but as a song about dreams:

I have a dream
It's very clear
You're all around
But never near

As life preservers go, it's more substantial than my friend's simple white ring but also darker. The chorus, "Help me lift you up," is many things at once, a statement of mutual need, a paradox, a plea. It's selfless but not entirely so. The argument, at least of that one phrase, is that you'll never get lifted without my lift, but that I can't lift you unless you're not just letting me, but helping me. I need to lift you to feel lifted myself, and I need your help. That complex, co-extensive process can unfold over the course of a lifetime--it can nurture two people in parallel or even in intersection--but it has to begin somewhere: with a phone call, say.

And so I was determined not to call my friend. Why should I? I had offered assistance and my offer had been received but not embraced, not once but twice. That was fine. I could take a pair of hints. Still, I went through the morning in a little bit of a haze. The air wasn't perfectly clear. What was my role as a friend, exactly? Should I challenge her? Should I let time pass? Should I joke? Should I call? It wasn't my problem, really: if the emotional circumstances tanked, if the professional circumstances derailed, it wasn't my tank or my train. Maybe the best thing I could do was to let her think about her own troubles. In Harry Nilsson's "Think About Your Troubles," this leads, via a convoluted marine metaphor, to a renewed perspective.

Sit down at the breakfast table
Think about your troubles
Pour yourself a cup of tea
Then think about the bubbles
You can take your teardrops
And drop 'em in a teacup
Take them down to the riverside
And throw them over the side
To be swept up by a current
Then taken to the ocean
To be eaten by some fishes
Who were eaten by some fishes
And swallowed by a whale
Who grew so old
He decomposed
He died and left his body
To the bottom of the ocean

But I had my own marine metaphor, and it left me with my friend floating in a life preserver in the middle of a heartless expanse. Maybe it was unfair to leave her with her own troubles. Maybe this was one of those rare cases where rushing in was advisable. Thinking about it too much was proving unhelpful, so I left the house and went for a walk in my neighborhood. People were talking about the Somali pirates, though no one mentioned seeing my friend on the news. A new store was opening in my neighborhood. There were apples on a table. "Want one?" a woman said. "Help yourself."

The next day, I was done with the apples. There was a core in the garbage and another one in the sink. My friend was still helping herself, or at the very least hadn't asked for my help. I was curious about her situation but not curious enough to do anything about it; I was all around but never near. And so the songs kept coming: Liz Phair's "Help Me Mary," the Lyres' "Help Me Ann," Stevie Wonder's "Heaven Help Us All." I settled, this time, on Van Morrison's "Help Me," which is a live cover of a Sonny Boy Williamson song. There's a tension built into the center of the song: Morrison is asking for help, but he sounds so vital that it's hard to imagine that he needs it. And in fact, he's not asking for help so much as offering an entry-level (if you know what I mean) position that he means to fill one way or another:

You got to help me
I can't do it all by myself
You got to help me, baby
I can't do it all by myself
You know if you don't help me darling
I'll have to find myself somebody else

Other songs are more honest in their abjection, like Fats Domino's "Helping Hand":

I'm a thousand miles away from home, sleeping in the rain
A thousand miles away from home, waiting for a train
Nobody seems to want me or give me a helping hand
I nevermore will roam again if I ever get home again

That's where my friend was in my dream, a thousand miles away from everything. She bobbed on the surface of the water and while she'd answer the phone if you called, she wouldn't call you. The song, which was adapted from Jimmie Rodgers' "Waiting on a Train," was also recorded by Snooks Eaglin, whose version is sadder than Domino's and, paradoxically, less desperate. Eaglin seems aware enough of his confusion and loneliness that there's a good chance he'll grab onto whoever reaches out to help. Little Miss Cornshucks (the stage name of the R&B singer Mildred Cummings) demonstrates this principle even more sharply with "'Cause I Lost My Helping Hand"; she's so deep in the well that it seems certain someone will pull her out.

But certainty's a funny business. Once, long ago, as a kid, I was walking with a friend -- a different friend -- and came upon a dead dog on the side of the road. There was something shocking about the sight, and it wasn't the fact of it. Dogs die. Sometimes they are violent deaths. Sometimes they are peaceful. What was shocking about this dog was that he was neither. He had an expression that I would only recognize much later in life. He was waiting for help that never came. I thought about the dog's expression while I tried to remember my friend's expression in the dream, the final one that came after boredom and anger and fear. She floated on the water and wanted...what? nothing? a chance to make her own mistakes? time to prove that they were not mistakes? a fair shake in the sea of possibilities without interference from, say, me? I was available for help but also happy not to help. The dog's expression was branded on my brain. My friend was out there in the ocean. I had woken up from my dream but that didn't mean it wasn't also true.

2009-03-27T13:31:00.007-04:00

COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]

COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
Billie Holiday
1954
Available on : Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years
Polygram : 1991
[Buy It]

PINKY
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]

DO U LIE?
Prince
Parade
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]

This week, Prince released two new albums.

Today is Sarah Vaughan's birthday.

We will bring these two things together soon.

Sarah Vaughan would have been eighty-five today. She's been dead since 1990, taken after a short but painful battle with lung cancer. According to more than a few published accounts, she expired at home, in bed, while watching a television movie starring her daughter.

Of the three women generally considered to be the triple pillar of American jazz singing, Vaughan is usually my least favorite. Billie Holiday comes in first, almost always, and Ella Fitzgerald comes in second. Vaughan is third: not distantly, but definitively. I realize that this is an idiotic exercise, to take three people with vast and important bodies of work and rank them top to bottom like I am filling out a March Madness bracket. I apologize to them, their families, their spirits.

Sarah Vaughan is always praised for her voice, which I suppose makes sense, though it makes less sense to me when I am listening to her. Her incredible control, her vast range, her box (or is it bag?) of improvisational tricks, they're all indisputably impressive, but for some reason they leave me cold, or have generally done so. If I listen to Billie Holiday's version of "Come Rain or Come Shine" and then hers, one moves me and the other doesn't. For a while, I thought it was because Vaughan was following Holiday's more powerful original, but in fact the reverse is true: Vaughan's was recorded a full five years before Holiday went into the studio for Verve in 1955. Maybe the fact that Vaughan's such a virtuoso works against the song, which purports to be about powerful devotion but sounds like a song about romantic helplessness. Why would someone with ultimate power worry about having none? Holiday, on the other hand, is a more limited vocalist who makes the lyric -- and the song -- work the way it should. When she does away with the idea of contentment, it's heartbreaking:

You're gonna love me like nobody's loved me
Come rain or come shine
Happy together unhappy together
Won't it be fine?

Again, this is just me. I once lived with a woman who put the three women in a different order. For her, Ella Fitzgerald was first, Sarah Vaughan second, and Billie Holiday flat last. "Too mopey," she said with a showily dismissive flip of the hand. It hurt me to see her flip her hand that way, but what could I do? I had no choice but to stand by and watch it happen. To get back at her, I decided to dislike Ella Fitzgerald, and for many years I succeeded: she was too chipper, too cheery, too up. Sarah Vaughan hung in the middle, though. I tried to listen to her, tried often, never had much success. The one exception was instructional: "Pinky," which I loved because it was a wordless vocal, Vaughan's equivalent of "Dark Was the Night." I couldn't identify a lack of conviction in her performance because I wasn't sure what exactly she was trying to communicate.

This woman also hated Prince. Well, I should clarify. She loved Prince in the mid-eighties. Who didn't? Crazy people, maybe, or art directors. She was neither, and when I met her in the late eighties, she was still very much in love with Prince, and we would lay awake at night listening to "Something in the Water Does Not Compute" over and over again. She made me a tape with "Purple Rain" on it, even though I already had "Purple Rain." Who didn't? Crazy people, maybe. She stuck with Prince through "Around the World in a Day," through "Parade," through "Sign O The Times" and "Lovesexy." But then, all at once, she acquired the most dangerous thing a Prince observer can have: perspective. She saw through the ridiculous parts of the "Batman" soundtrack, and most of "Graffiti Bridge," and by then we were heading out the door, perhaps because she had also begun to see through the ridiculous parts of me. Her eyesight improved markedly as we hurtled toward separation. Once, very late in the game, I came home and she was in the bathroom with the door locked. I asked what she was doing. "Thinking how long I can do this," she said. I told her I hoped that was a euphemism for something fun. She didn't even laugh. "If you don't like it," I said, "I'm going to release it to everyone else as a euphemism." This time, there was a laugh, but a tiny one that I knew wouldn't be enough.

This week, Prince released two new records and I thought of this woman, wherever she was (is?). I wondered if she cared about the records, if she planned on paying [insert large amount of money] a year to subscribe to Prince's new Website or in standing in line at Target and buying them for [insert smaller amount of money]. I doubted that she did. I doubt that she does. I have heard the records, repeatedly, and as much as I want to say that I now see through the ridiculous parts of Prince, the fact is that I am as incapable of objective assessment as I was in 1989, when I spent the better part of the summer listening to the "Batman" soundtrack on an auto-reverse cassette player, over and over again. The new albums are not that good, and maybe they're not good at all, but they're Prince, and because of that, I'm somewhat powerless to do anything but love them come rain or come shine.

Does that bring the two things together? Not quite. Time works, when it works correctly, like auto-reverse, always moving forward but reliably returning you to the past. When I heard the new Prince records this week, there was a moment in one song that reminded me of a moment in another song. It's not a direct connection -- not a lyrical or musical one, but an impressionistic one -- and so there's no need to restage it. The song I was reminded of was "Do U Lie?" which was (is?) the second song on the second side of Parade, a moody ballad tucked between the album's two most massive songs, "Mountains" and "Kiss." When the album came out, a billion years ago, I did not know this woman I have been discussing. But when I knew her, the album was not yet old, and we played it the same way we played "Something in the Water Does Not Compute," late at night and often. It was on cassette, and sometimes after "Mountains" I would get up out of bed to fast-forward to "Kiss." She didn't like that, I suppose because she liked "Do U Lie?" After I had been stopped from skipping it a few times, I asked her why she liked it so much. "Sarah Vaughan," she said with a showily dismissive flip of the hand. I understood what she meant, to some degree. She was saying that it was Prince's attempt to mimic Vaughan's vocal mannerisms, especially at the end, when he sounds like he's practicing "Pinky" in the shower. (I release this to everyone for use as a euphemism: practicing "Pinky" in the shower.) But I misunderstood in another regard. I thought she was dismissing Prince for this affectation, or dismissing Sarah Vaughan (who was, after all, second in her bracket). A little while later, a little bit too late, I realized that she was dismissing me.

2009-03-19T18:02:00.014-04:00

GIVE ME BACK THAT FILET O' FISH
McDonald's Advertisement
2009

COMMERCIAL BREAK
Basehead
The Soul of Rock and Roll
Imago : 1993
[Buy It]

COMMERCIAL
The Tokens
Intercourse
Rev-ola : 1971
[Buy It]

THE COMMERCIAL
Wire
Pink Flag
Pink Flag : 1977
[Buy It]

COCA-COLA COMMERCIAL
The Who
The Who Sell Out
MCA : 1967
[Buy It]

TALKIN' FISH BLUES
Bob Dylan
1961

The other week I was out drinking too much with friends and the question of pop music's use in commercials came up. It came up because one friend is an songwriter and the other one works in advertising, as a copywriter, and eventually the two of them came together on what turned out to be common ground. For a while we talked about the rock songs that have, over the years, been sacrificed on the altar of commerce -- "Like a Rock" has hawked pickups, "Rock and Roll" sold Cadillacs, "Picture Book" moved printers, and most recently "Forever Young" uplifted the Pepsi generation. Some of us had a problem with that, but most of us felt somewhat blase about the prospect. Then we turned to jingles, and the advertising copywriter turned to the songwriter: "You must think there's a big difference between the crappy jingles that advertising companies commission and the songs you write, right?"

He smiled. He shifted in his chair. "Well," he said. "I've written jingles." He proceeded to tell us about a few of them: one was for a national restaurant chain; the other was for something more modest, like dentures or car wax. I don't exactly remember. Like I said, we were drinking. The copywriter was either secretly pleased or secretly appalled. She didn't advertise her feelings. On the way home that night, I fuzzily tried to puzzle through it all, to figure out what lines have been drawn (and then erased) between art and commerce and commercial art. I vaguely remembered that I had read something about a recent album that plays fast and loose with those lines and limits. The next morning, slightly more sober, I sharpened my memory.

The album, as it turns out, is Product Placement, the debut from the Atlanta-based Advertisements. Composed of rock renditions of ten famous jingles, the album is the latest attempt to conflate (or confuse) aesthetics and economics. The four band members, all in their late twenties, use pseudonyms taken from the advertising world -- in addition to guitarist, lead vocalist, and chief spokesman Mr. Whipple, there's keyboard player Mikey, drummer Mac Tonight, and bassist The Michelin Man. Friends since they met in a late-nineties Southern-rock outfit named Red Dash, Whipple and Mikey first conceived of the Advertisements a few years ago, from what I can gather. "We were just sitting around watching TV, and he started to sing the GE song. 'GE, we bring good things to living, we bring good things to life,'" explains Whipple. "On a whim, we went down to his basement and recorded it, and it sounded great. So we called up the other guys, who we knew and had worked with, and that was our band." (I did not acquire these quotes personally. I found them in an article about the band, another form of advertisement.)

What does an ultra-gimmicky advertising-reliant rock band sound like? Well, I'll tell you. Founded on a "brisk organic sound" that recalls the "glory days of the Attractions," the band "crackles" (and "snaps, and pops, presumably") with "infectious energy." Promotional language, sure, but not far from the truth, and the lyrics, grating at first, soon become irrelevant, as they are in "Umbrella," or "Sexyback," or any number of infectious classics. From the sunny cheer of "Coke Is It" to the grungy crunch of "The Wiener Song," the band successfully works with market-tested hooks. And while a few attempts miss wide -- "You Can't Drink It Slow If It's Quik" is refashioned on as a swoony doo-wop ballad -- the LP is, for the most part, unconflicted pop.

The Advertisements' pick of advertisements run the gamut of the American marketplace, from appliances ("GE") to coffee ("Good to the Last Drop [Maxwell House]") to fast food ("Aren't You Hungry for Burger King Now?"). But with so many commercials to choose from, how did they make their final cuts? "We had a terrible time with the final track listing," Whipple says. "For instance, we knew we couldn't do more than one cereal song, and we picked Lucky Charms over Cap'n Crunch because we wanted to do this 'Within You, Without You' bit, Eastern-sounding guitars and a little raga. But we had to shelve some stuff that we loved, like a hellacious instrumental version of 'The Copper-Top Battery' with these crashing keyboards and thundering drums."

Over the years, critics who have charged themselves with protecting music's authenticity side have challenged, sometimes angrily, the appropriation of pop songs for commercial purposes. But this naive inversion -- appropriating commercial songs for pop purposes -- is surprisingly powerful. The Who hinted at this possibility forty years ago with the The Who Sell Out, where they jammed interstitial jingles between real songs. But unlike Ray Charles's "You Got the Right One, Baby" (which was written by Prince, by the way) or Yael Naim's everpresent Apple ads -- the performances on Product Placement are both unsolicited and unpaid, not endorsements of products so much as endorsements of jingles. The Advertisements aren't seeking corporate sponsors, and aren't receiving a corporate dime. "Believe it or not, we recognize these songwriters as artists," explains Whipple. "They're artists working within commercial constraints, but they're still artists. We credit them in the liner notes, people like Tom Dawes, who wrote 'Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz,' and Richard D. Trentlage, who wrote 'The Wiener Song.' These songs are an essential part of Americana, and we want them to get their due. And it's not just old songs. Have you heard that new McDonald's jingle, the one with the singing fish? Amazing."

I have heard that jingle. Have you? If so, you are not likely to forget it. My children have taken it to singing it every morning, and they may even be dreaming about it. I wrote my friend the songwriter. "I only regret that I did not write it," he said. I agree, in a sense: while I don't think it has quality, necessarily, it has qualities, and one of them is that it is memorable to a degree that would shame most pop songs, even those who set out to be purely memorable. Once, years ago, a friend of mine told me that R. Kelly's "Thoia Thoing" was the most annoying, infernally catchy recording she had ever heard. I am not friends with her any longer, but I am sure that wherever she is, she is revising her opinion in favor of the singing fish. The Advertisements take a more philosophical approach. "There's a beauty in the way that music can serve products," Whipple says. "When I was a kid, I loved watching baseball, and in one game there was a ball that was hit deep and the centerfielder had to climb the outfield wall to have a shot at it. Well, Eastern Airlines had rented the wall space, and in the newspaper the next morning there was a picture of this player catching the ball in the middle of the air, suspended in front of these giant wings. I was uplifted. When you see art and consumerism come together all packaged like that, it sticks with you."

Fine, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm not that concerned: the Advertisements have a long career ahead of them if they want it. There are plenty of brilliant jingles out there, some sung by fish, some by other animals. The elements that produce memorable songs (simple lyrics, sticky melodies) are neutral about context; they don't know whether or not they're working for The Man. But what about that fateful day when the well dries up? With the talent they've shown for fleshing out pieces like "Reach Out and Touch Someone" -- the band yells improvised phone dialogue and text-message speak over Michelin's slap bass -- maybe they'll consider recording original material. But maybe not: that might be selling out.

2009-03-18T10:44:00.008-04:00

AIN'T NO LOVE IN THE HEART OF THE CITY
Bobby Blue Bland
Dreamer
BGO : 1974
[Buy It]

I'M THROWING MY ARMS AROUND PARIS
Morrissey
Years of Refusal
Lost Highway : 2009
[Buy It]

HONK IF YOU'RE LONELY
Silver Jews
American Water
Drag City : 1998
[Buy It]

Moving to a new city means being alone. This is an obvious statement, almost too obvious to state. But when you're the one alone in a city, it strikes you as a blinding, almost brilliant epiphany. "Here I am in a place so full of people - yet completely alone!" you think, smug, then scared, in your solitude. Or in this case, my solitude. I moved to New York City this past fall, and was suddenly very much by myself. After ten years in another friend-filled town, it felt strange and new to me.
Thousands of others have had this feeling in thousands of other cities before me. Many of them aren't even new to the city - they're just newly alone. And many of them have penned songs about it. Which makes sense - when artists are faced with change and loneliness, they muse, create, and whine poetic.

When I first arrived, I spent countless hours by myself, Manhattan and music my only friends. Headphones on, I explored, I encountered, observed. And I listened to what the experts (albeit musical ones) had to say. Their advice was varied. Bob Dylan warned that I'd get kicked up and knocked down ("Hard Times in New York Town"). The Replacements explained the woes of drinking solo ("If Only You Were Lonely"). Nick Gilder did some meditative easy rocking ("Hot Child in the City"). Heart did some melodramatic squawking ("Alone"). Soon enough, I noticed a common theme in the soundtrack: lost love. Meaning: your baby left you, which in turn has left you roaming the streets, remembering the happy threesome you took for granted. It was always you, your lover and the city you adored. And now that it's just the two of you- you and the city, that is - you're left to meander and mope endlessly. It's the perfect blend of mental catharsis, physical exercise, and, well, sightseeing. Add music and you've mapped out a potential route to recovery.

In Bobby Blue Bland's "Aint No Love In The Heart Of The City," you can tell he once loved both the city and woman desperately. And now he has, in effect, lost both. Because the blissful romance has disappeared, so has its backdrop. Sure, the city's still there, but without the context of the relationship, it's just a town full of cold shoulders and old memories. Now that she's gone the sun won't shine - at least for him - which sure 'nough is a pity indeed, because he now hates the very place that could actually help him mend his heart. As I know, the city can be a great romantic lead. It's always willing, always up for adventures - and though it pleases a giant population on a daily basis - its sights and sounds often feel like they're made for you alone.

Yes, rather than resent the place, why not embrace it to the point of extremity? Who needs love when you've got architecture? Real love is for sissies, anyway. Leave it to Morrissey to wail this slightly ridiculous sentiment with perfect (or at least perfected) sincerity. "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris" has him personifying a place in the absence of human touch. Give him avenues and buildings and give them fast-- only stone and steel accept his love, and you get the feeling he needs to love pretty bad. I guess I kind of do too. Thankfully, an affair with any city has the happy guarantee of reciprocation. There's an easy intimacy in getting to know its quirks, exploring its nooks and crannies. It gives and you receive expertise on where to go and what to do. What a selfless lover.

Perhaps my favorite approach is a bittersweet medium between the two. The Silver Jews' "Honk If You're Lonely" suggests using a place you love to get over the one you loved, and in doing so, find someone new to love. Or maybe just other lonely hearts to fill the void. David Berman's melancholy deadpan takes loneliness in the city and turns it into a hopeful anthem for losers everywhere. As he cruises the strips of his town, he weaves a tale of taking a second chance on life in the city. He might pine a little, but he'll be damned if he lets anyone get the best of his experience. And so he uses his old haunts to kindle new love. This seems the perfect way to deal with loneliness and explore the city from a different (and potentially refreshing) perspective:

I know it seems sad to be this damn blue
But there's always a chance that you'll meet someone new

Of course, all of this alone-ness is usually only temporary - eventually you meet new people, you meet more new people, and settle comfortably back into the routine of relationships. Which is where (and when) you feel most at home. Because let's face it, we're a needy bunch, us humans: needy for validation, conversation, and the occasional Sunday brunch.

But in those first solitary months, you find yourself alone in the city, and alone in the city you find yourself. After six months, New York and I are getting into the swing of things - slow dancing through evenings that run too late, stumbling groggily into hazy mornings after. I've met a lot of friends. Some keep going through the revolving door. Some stick and stick well. And when they're not around, I'm still content being alone. But I'm lucky - I wasn't heartbroken when I got here. So I guess I get the best of both worlds. And by worlds I mean cities. The sun is shining from the city hall to the county line. Stone and steel accept my love. And around every corner, there is the possibility of meeting someone new.

So by all means, honk if you're lonely.

2009-03-12T16:01:00.018-04:00

DREAM BABY
Roy Orbison
1962
Available on : The Soul of Rock and Roll
Sony Legacy : 2008
[Buy It]

I HAD A DREAM
Howlin' Wolf
1967
Available on : Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
Universal : 1994
[Buy It]

DON'T WAKE ME UP, I AM DREAMING
Arthur C. Clough
1911
Edison Amberol 696

DREAMS, DREAMS
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
1969
Available on : Whatever Makes You Happy
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]

BOB DYLAN'S DREAM
Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Columbia : 1963
[Buy It]

I DREAMED I SAW SAINT AUGUSTINE
Bob Dylan
John Wesley Harding
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]

This week I had a conversation about dreams, and then a dream about that conversation about dreams, and then another dream that came true, and then a conversation about the dream that came true.

The conversation about dreams happened one afternoon this week, and it must have stuck in my head, because that night I repeated it, with variation. In the real conversation, I was sitting across a table from someone who was talking about dreams: not specific dreams, but the entire category, what dreams might mean, what they can't mean. That night's dream was about a conversation, too, but in the dream-conversation I was talking about renting a truck. The person in the dream, who wasn't quite the person I had spoken to in real life, explained to me that the truck I was interested in renting had a compartment behind the driver's seat filled with tools that I wouldn't recognize. That's the phrase that stuck: "filled with tools you wouldn't recognize." Even at the time, while I was sleeping, I assumed that this was a dream about my conversation about dreams.

Before I woke up, I had a second dream. I dreamed I was at a conference somewhere rural--there were mountains and a lake--and a friend of mine was at the same conference. This wasn't a fake friend that my dream invented, but a dream version of a real friend. The whole thing was faintly documentary. I was attending this conference alone, and I called my wife and my kids to say hello; in the dream my phone number was the same as it is in real life. (Again, faintly documentary.) My friend was attending with her mother and her sister, and we were all called to a breakfast meeting. Just after the food was served, my friend left the table. Her mother looked upset but said nothing at the time; a few minutes later she asked me if I would go find my friend. I found her sitting in a meeting room by herself. She had written the word "blue" on the dry-erase board in red marker. "Your mom wants you to come to breakfast," I said. She explained that she couldn't because she needed to write a thank-you note to the owner of the shop that had repaired her boot heel for free. "Look," she said, lifting up her foot to show, "all fixed."

I sneered at her. "Who cares?" I said. "It looks worse than ever." It looked fine, actually. I went back to the table and she showed up a few minutes later, and we had breakfast and talked with her mom and her sister about the conference we were attending. It was a nice dream: no monsters, no missiles.

Today on the phone I mentioned that dream to the real-life friend. "What?" she said. "I just took a boot to have the heel fixed this morning."

"Right," I said.

"I'm serious," she said. "What else did you dream?" I told her the few other things I remembered-- that her phone wouldn't work, that she was wearing a brown skirt--and none of that rang a bell. She hung up, relieved, but evidently it was still bothering her, because she sent me an email a little later: "Tell me if you have any more dreams about what happens to me. I don't trust that you're not dreaming things that might be true. Or, maybe even better, don't tell me anything about them at all."

I understood the problem, partly. Everyone likes dreams but everyone has mixed feelings about the process by which they are shared. Dreams, we tend to believe, are ways of dealing with areas of our lives that we can't politely discuss (fear, libido), and so there is always something a little unclean in the retelling. What did the boot heel represent? Was it something more intimate? Even if a boot heel is just a boot heel, why would I feel connected, even for a second, even asleep, to a female friend's footwear? And why did I have to go and be rude? She was just trying to show me the repair.

Dreams may or may not be psychological skeleton keys. The jury has been out on that for centuries, and then especially for the last century. But they are, at many levels, powerful creative acts, and because of that they have featured regularly in human artwork: paintings, novels, movies. In pop songs, dreams tend to have a more specific function: they provide evidence of life's nasty habit of snatching away objects of desire. Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby," among the most famous dream songs in rock and roll, is about an unattainable woman--"how long must I dream?" he asks, as tortured as he is pleased--and in that it harmonizes with other songs like Howlin' Wolf's "I Had a Dream" or Arthur C. Clough's "Don't Wake Me Up, I Am Dreaming," where love and joy and power are attainable in sleep but cruelly withheld by waking life. There is a countermovement, of course, where dreams aren't a sign of what's been taken, but a reminder to firm your resolve and bring about the dreamed-about thing. This principle is encapsulated in Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech and much of the positive-themed soul that ran parallel to and followed it. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Dream Dream" makes the argument, as Parliament would make in "Fantasy is Reality":

Dreams oh dreams baby
Go up like a puff of smoke
Dreams oh dreams baby
Wake up and your heart is broke
And I've got to do something bad
Because it's getting the best of me
I've got to make these dreams a reality

Bob Dylan has dreamed liberally throughout his career, from "Bob Dylan's Dream" (a melancholy lament for lost innocence) to "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" (a rollicking, stoned bit of surrealism) to "Series of Dreams" (an intentionally fragmented lyric that challenges the very idea of interpretation). In the most beautiful of his dream songs, "I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine," he goes deep into the past, where he meets with the fifth-century philosopher and witnesses the ways that leaders can be destroyed by the crowds that follow them:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive as you or me,
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery,
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold,
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold.

Here, the object of desire, a comfortable relationship between saints and the rest of society, is taken violently, as Augustine is hanged (this did not, of course occur in real life). The dream is fully realized in the technical sense: it ends mid-song, and Dylan's narrator (who is, most likely, Dylan himself) wakes to consider what he has beheld:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried.

Augustine himself, of course, had an abiding interest in dreams. He admitted that they could be deceptive, ways of betraying the world as it is presented to us, though he also thought they could be a form of communication with the divine. Beyond the epistemological dimension, there was an ethical one: if your dream self does something morally wrong, Augustine wondered, are you responsible? (In this he was following the inquiry of several other theologians, including John Cassian, who wondered about assigning culpability for impure thoughts experienced while dreaming.) Augustine decided that a dreamer wasn't responsible for the contents of a dream, but wasn't certain why not. This is obviously one of the issues that Dylan is addressing--if he is there while the mob hangs Augustine, is he implicated? Maybe the dream revealed a secret desire to hang. Maybe an ethical man would have objected, even in his own dream. I'm interested in going back to my conversation about dreaming to discuss this at greater length, but it's trapped in the past and unavailable--or rather, I'm trapped in the present and unavailable to it. Maybe I'll have another dream about a conversation about dreaming, and I can sort it all out. Until then, it's left to me to wonder, and to feel bad for the thing that I said about the boot--again, it looked fine, a nice boot in a nice dream.

2009-03-05T14:16:00.012-05:00

SNOW
Harry Nilsson
Nilsson Sings Newman
Buddha : 1970
[Buy It]

FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
Roger Miller
1960
Available on: King of the Road
Bear Family : 1994
[Buy It]

FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
Ry Cooder
My Name Is Buddy
Nonesuch : 2007
[Buy It]

LOVER IN THE SNOW
Rivers Cuomo
1997
Available on: Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo
Geffen : 1997
[Buy It]

STEAL SOFTLY THROUGH SNOW
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
Trout Mask Replica
Reprise : 1969
[Buy It]

HUMIDITY BUILT THE SNOWMAN
John Prine
Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings
Oh Boy : 1995
[Buy It]

Last week I went to a land of snow, though not the land of ice and snow. I skied, which hasn't happened in years, and skied fairly well, which hasn't happened in about as many years. My only goal was not to fall. I also met some new people and found them all to be very nice, which surprised me. I had forgotten that about people. I should get out more.

While I was in the snow, one of my friends was also on vacation, though she went to a land where it never snows. She was going on her trip, in part, to forget something unpleasant. I won't say whether it was an unpleasant circumstance within her family, or an unpleasant work experience, or an unpleasant relationship. The point is that she was trying to forget, and using distance and difference as tools to do so. She went somewhere with a beach, which made for nice symmetry: her surf, my snow. We figured we'd both be out of the reach of technology, but we forgot that nearly every remote outpost has the dreaded internet, and that the reach of cell phones is now roughly equal with the reach of the human species.

My first day in the land of the snow, it was sunny and warm. People skied in jeans and light jackets. The second morning I woke up to a blizzard. Snow was coming down everywhere. I was determined to get to the mountain early, and so I went tromping out in my ski boots, picked up my skis from the rack outside the hotel, and waited for the shuttle bus to take me to the base of the mountain. When I got there, I got into the lift line and realized that I had forgotten my lift ticket. To say that I was aggravated is an understatement, but I had time, so I went back to the shuttle bus and back to the hotel to pick up my ticket. As I went into the hotel, I noticed that there were no footprints by the entrance. As a record of the morning, this was inaccurate. I had been there, and I assumed other people had been, too. But the snow that was falling had already erased them. I had forgotten my lift ticket, sure, but now the snow was forgetting me entirely. It was like natural amnesia.

When I picked up my lift ticket, I also loaded up my iPod with songs about snow, and pretty soon I saw that I wasn't the only one who had considered the connection between snow and memory. Randy Newman's "Snow," which was recorded by Harry Nilsson but left off the original version of Nilsson Sings Newman, describes snow as a medium where memories both live and die.

Snow
Fills the fields we used to know
And the little park where we would go
Sleeps far below
In the snow

Gone
It's all over and you're gone
But the memory lives on although
Our dreams lie buried
In the snow

The bluegrass standard "Footprints in the Snow" complicates the case considerably. The song--a staple of Bill Monroe's act that has been covered by dozens of musicians--tells the story of a man who has been separated from his lover and uses the snow to locate her. More specifically, he tracks her:

Now some folks like the summertime when they can walk about
Strolling through the meadow green it's fun there no doubt
But give me the wintertime when snow falls all around
For I found her when the snow on the ground

Well, I traced her little footprints in the snow
I traced her little footprints in the snow
I can't forget the day my darling lost her way
I found her when the snow was on the ground

This seems like a nice story, right? His darling got lost, he went out to find her, snow helped, the end. But then the song turns, and makes it clear that it really was the end:

Well, I dropped in to see her there was a big round moon
Her mother said she just stepped out but would be returning soon
I found her little footprints and I traced them through the snow
I found her when the snow was on the ground

Now she's up in heaven she's with an angel band
I know I'm going to meet her in that promised land
But every time the snow falls it brings back memories
For I found her when the snow was on the ground

Miller's version is upbeat, almost chipper, and it's easy to overlook the fact that it's a love song about a frozen corpse. Ry Cooder shifts the story so that it's a cat in the snow, not a woman -- "My Name is Buddy," where his version appears, is a concept album about the American labor movement that uses anthropomorphic felines as characters -- but goes back to the older lyric in one important respect. While neither version disputes that the woman/cat in the song lost her way, Miller "can't forget that day" while Cooder (like Monroe before him) wants to "bless that happy day." Snow death is many things, but a blessing? It almost turns the tracking into stalking, and the death into a wished-for moment of revenge. That's even more plausible in Rivers Cuomo's "Lover in the Snow," which forgoes memory entirely for discovery.

I wanna know
What were you doing with my friend?
Out in the eve
Deep in the shady glen I saw you,
Lying with him, down in the snow,
Letting him do all of the things that he wants to

My cell phone worked perfectly on the ski lift, and after the third run, legs burning a bit, I called my friend to compare notes. She was on the beach. "Interesting," she said. "Footprints are a pretty dicey issue here, too. You can run from here to there, and as long as you keep close to the water, pretty soon there's no record of it at all. On the other hand, if you're too many yards up on the sand, it's too dry, and the wind blows away any evidence of you. That middle band, where the sand is damp, is the one where footprints last for days. Are there different names for those different kinds of sand?"

"You're cutting out," I said.

"My phone has worked fine all week," she said.

"Maybe it's mine," I said, and hung up.

She had gone too far into the issue, and I wanted to back off to a simpler, more elegant question: Is snow an instrument of memory or an instrument of forgetting? It was snowing harder, and I looked out at a creek, at the trees, at the other mountains in the distance. I didn't know anything about them except that I was among them. And then I wasn't. Let me be clear about this: it wasn't a mystical experience so much as a mathematical one, a calculation of proportion: when everything is covered by snow, what you forget most is yourself. Newman/Nilsson were right (personal pain is under there somewhere), but also deeply wrong (insisting that it be visible is an act of narcissism). Snow may not be time, exactly, but snowfall is a measure of it, a means of cutting human experience down to size. When I got to the top of the mountain, I went through a number of songs--Marvin Gaye's "Purple Snowflakes," Jonathan Richman's "Abominable Snowman in the Market"--until I found Captain Beefheart's "Steal Softly Through Snow," which is even clearer on the opposition between nature and man's desire to mark it:

Breaks my heart to see the highway cross the hills
Man has lived a million years and still he kills

At the bottom of the run, my phone buzzed. It was my friend, leaving me a message. "I guess we got cut off," she said. "Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I'm doing fine. I'm not remembering as much about the bad thing as I worried I would. Sometimes I do, and it's not pleasant, but I'm not going to beat myself up about it. It'll pass, right?" She was right but I didn't call back to say so. Instead, I went back up the lift with John Prine's "Humidity Built the Snowman," a song about human limits that stubbornly indulges human hope:

The scientific nature of the ordinary man
Is to go on out and do the best you can

I didn't fall.

2009-02-25T13:54:00.009-05:00

PUPPET ON A STRING
Sandie Shaw
1967
Available on: The Very Best of Sandie Shaw
EMI : 1999
[Buy It]

YOUR TIME IS GONNA COME
Sandie Shaw
Reviewing the Situation
Pye : 1969
[Buy It]

This time of year is bad for birthdays, for me. There are too many, and they come in from all directions: family, friends, new friends. Recently I almost forgot a birthday. I remembered just in time, if you count being reminded by the birthday person as "in time." I had mentally set the occasion a day later, and I was prepared, but good intentions mean next to nothing when it comes to forgetting or belating birthdays. Soon I'll have to contend with a bunch more, and I'm sure I'll drop at least one ball. Hazard of juggling.

The birthday I almost forgot was especially problematic, because it belonged to a person with whom I have had ongoing nontrivial interaction. Is that the right way to say it? What I mean by that is that it is a friend who is closer than an acquaintance but has on occasion been as far away as an enemy. What this has meant is frequent attempts to move closer (in times where there has been distance) or assess the reasons for the distance (in times when we are close). Plus, we didn't really let each other off the hook, ever: when there were feuds or fights or dustups, we mocked each other as we went through them, sometimes with songs. Once she thought I was talking too much during our phone calls and sent me a mix that included the New York Dolls' "Chatterbox" and the Monks' "Shut Up." Once I thought she was in a rut, down about everything, so I sent her a book called "Creating Optimism," which an online reviewer called "the worst self-help book I have ever read, and I have read many."

A few years ago, we were going through a strange patch where she decided that I was making her miserable, even though I was doing the exact same things I had done when I made her happy. The problem, she said, had to do with the fact that she was too tied up in the particulars of my life. When I was having trouble at work, or in my marriage, or with my writing, she would ask me tons of questions and offer tons of advice. But she felt like it was emptying out her own life. I absorbed her concerns and, because I was in an unhelpful frame of mind, sent her some songs about people who were too tied up in the particulars of other people's lives. It was harder to email songs then -- big attachments -- and it seemed like a major effort, and that combined with the fact that it was a few weeks away from her birthday made it seem like I was sending the songs as a present. She chose not to read the songs as clever or sadistic commentary on our situation, and they helped to restore our friendship. A lack of scrutiny had turned my cruel act into a kindness. It's knotty, I know. Make it a bow. Presents have bows.

One of the songs I sent was "Puppet On a String," which was recorded by Sandie Shaw in 1967. Thursday is Sandie Shaw's birthday, which I had almost forgotten -- or perhaps never knew -- until I saw it listed somewhere on a site that lists birthdays. Shaw's career started, in pop-music terms, well before "Puppet on a String." In 1964, she rose to fame in Britain with her version of Bachrach and David's "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me." She took the song to number one, where it stayed for nearly a month, and went on to put a dozen more songs in the British top twenty, including "Girl Don't Come," "Long Live Love" and "Nothing Comes Easy." Shaw branched out into fashion (a line of shoes) and television (a variety show called "The Sandie Shaw Supplement"), returning to pop music emphatically in 1967, with "Puppet On a String," which won the Eurovision song contest.

Shaw was born in 1947. She was a teenager for the first wave of her fame. As she got older, as the birthdays mounted, she got sick of pop music. Who wouldn't? She didn't like most of the songs, and hated some of them. She famously derided "Puppet on a String" as "sexist drivel" that "instinctively repelled" her. She was more right than she was wrong, which is why I included it in the set of songs I sent to my friend:

I may win on the roundabout
Then I'll lose on the swings
In or out, there is never a doubt
Just who's pulling the strings
I'm all tied up to you
But where's it leading me to?

In 1969, as Shaw's pop-star stock was fading, she recorded an album called "Reviewing the Situation," which included covers of songs by Bob Dylan ("Lay Lady Lay"), the Beatles ("Love Me Do"), the Rolling Stones ("Sympathy for the Devil"), and Dr. John ("Mama Roux"), along with a selection from the musical "Hair" ("Frank Mills"). Some were good, like "Mama Roux." Others, like "Sympathy For the Devil," verged on oddities. All were deeply felt, which didn't always make for good music, but always made for music that raised the issue of goodness. The album also included a version of a song that had just been recorded by a new British blues-rock group named Led Zeppelin. "Your Time Is Gonna Come" is generally acknowledged to be the first Zeppelin cover, and it's also one of the best. Shaw hangs back and then belts out. She is gentle where she needs to be, mysterious where she needs to be, and menacing where she needs to be. I'm probably understating how good a version this is. The way she handles the first few lines alone is revelatory:

Lyin', cheatin', hurtin, that's all you seem to do
Messin' around with every girl in town
Puttin' me down for thinkin' of someone new
Always the same, playin' your game
Drive me insane, trouble's gonna come to you
One of these days, and it won't be long
You'll look for me, but, baby, I'll be gone

And look at how efficiently she reverses gender, taking John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page's "Messin' around with every guy in town" and turning it on its ear. This is sexist drivel that instinctively attracts me.

I sent it to my friend whose birthday I almost forgot. She didn't answer right away, and I figured she was mad. The next day I got a message from her. It was a speechless message, but not silent: she said nothing but played "Your Time Is Gonna Come" in the background, loud. Then I sent her an email that said "You're welcome" and she sent me one that said "thank you." It was like we were winding time backwards.

But time goes forward for us all. In the seventies, Sandie Shaw became something of an eccentric, technically speaking -- her career lost its center and she focused variously on songwriting, a rock musical, marriage, Buddhism, and writing childrens' books. She returned to more active career management in the mid-eighties, raised her profile with the help of Morrissey, had a solo album on Rough Trade that's still in print, and rerecorded much of her early work. But for me, forever, she'll exist for her cover of "Your Time Is Gonna Come." Today, she's 62. Happy Birthday. And happy birthday to my friend. My birthday is later in the year, and I'm expecting some kind of payback. My time is gonna come.

2009-02-12T10:48:00.013-05:00

THE GRIP OF LOVE
Tom Verlaine
Tom Verlaine
Elektra : 1979
[Buy It]

Why are people so quick to love movies, books, songs, paintings, restaurants, and sports teams but so slow to love other people? Sages have been debating this issue for centuries, and continue to the present day. Bill Sage, a kid I went to high school with, used to talk about the girl he was dating, how she was a hot girl who was smart or maybe a smart girl who was hot. "Maybe she's the overlap," he said. "I love the idea of the overlap." But he never loved her, and she found that out a few years later in college, and promptly slept with someone else. It wasn't me, but I knew the guy, and after she got rid of him, too, we became friends. Now she's living in a western state, where she works for a company that helps other companies manage inventory. I spoke to her not so long ago, and she said that her personal life was frustrating, not exactly loveless but not exactly love-filled. Work, on the other hand, was rewarding. "You wouldn't think it," she said, "but I like the purely logistical issues. For example, in most companies, sending things out of the warehouse is a relatively trivial matter compared to bringing things into the warehouse." She went on to explain that since no system is perfect, especially when so many moving parts are involved, a certain amount of management is management of inevitable errors in counting, logging, and ordering. "You have to be precise about imprecision," she said.

I digress. Or rather, she digresses. Or does she, and do I? Bob Sage, Bill's brother, used to say that it was easy to love people so long as you didn't have to look at them, and we would laugh at him, because he was always making these kinds of jokes, but it's entirely possible that he wasn't joking at all. People are quick to love movies, books, songs, paintings, restaurants, and sports because those things don't love back--or rather, can't love back. There is no expectation of reciprocation and consequently never any disappointment when reciprocation falls short. Each and every time you listen to "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell," say, it produces the same experience for you. If the experience is different, you will quickly understand that the shift has occurred within you rather than within the work. And it's rare that love is withdrawn from a song or a book: you can come to see its flaws, or come to be embarrassed by your earlier ardor, but that might just make you drive your love deeper inside. It won't, for the most part, make you bring your love to a full stop.

Loving people, on the other hand, is a dangerous business, because love isn't just about what you feel. It's an economy in which what you feel must be matched with something of equivalent value, as well as one in which your expectations for ongoing supply can quickly reach self-annihilating levels. Not to mention the fact that you may feel you are not equipped to handle what you are receiving: expectations from another person that are as interdependent and volatile as yours. Love, or whatever you want to call it (pick a less romantic word if you'd prefer, like "relationship" or "commitment") is a frightening prospect. When you accept it, you are assuming risk at a level that often overloads the human organism. Two people acting with single purpose but retaining their separateness? That's an overlap, and nobody likes--let alone loves--the idea of the overlap. Giving love refines the spirit; worrying about getting it clouds and clots that same spirit. Or, to reinvest the digression, sending out of the warehouse is a relatively trivial matter compared to bringing things into the warehouse.

This may be obvious, but it's Valentine's Day, the commemoration of the obvious. The friend in the western state who manages warehouse inventory recently went through a breakup. I think maybe she was trying to hold on until Valentine's Day, but that became untenable for several reasons, some of which I have listed above. The person she was seeing was not a movie or a book or a painting, and so, in trying to love him, she quickly found herself concerned with trying to accept his love, which led to expectations he could not satisfy. These were not unreasonable expectations, not as far as I was concerned -- and, sometimes, not as far as she was concerned. They mostly involved him offering to drive her to work some mornings, or offering to pick her up some afternoons, or leaving little notes in her jacket pockets, or calling in the afternoon and assuming a funny accent to ask if she knew where he might find the "best little wharehouse in the state." Whatever. The specifics aren't important, not to me. The point is that all the things she admired about him statically, all the things that would have worked to his advantage if he was a TV show or a sculpture, dissipated when he couldn't -- or wouldn't -- understand the issues of inventory management. She was able to give him love, for a time, but witnessed repeatedly how pained he was to give in return, and that returned her to a point where giving seemed more like someone else's taking.

After the breakup, she said, she thought often about whether she had give him enough chances. "He made mistakes but so did I," she said. "Why should that be unacceptable?" This was a fair question with a fairly obvious answer. In love, or commitments, or relationships, you don't have to avoid error. In fact, you should embrace error. But you should embrace the proper type of error. This is another way in which static artworks are easier to love than people. As we have said, artworks don't change, really, so they can't disappoint you. But they also can't try to accommodate you and, in doing so, show you that they are utterly insensible about how to find your heart. My friend told me one story that stuck out like a stalactite. After their breakup, the guy came by her office. He took her to lunch. He ate a meal that he would never eat -- a big burger, she said, when he was mostly no-red-meat -- and asked questions he would never ask. "I know he was trying to be a different him so that I would feel differently," she said, "but it only made me feel more the same. The root him and the root me didn't intertwine." It is easy to believe unverifiable things about a song or a book, but harder to do so about a person. We left aside one broader issue, which is the question of why people date people they know are wrong for them -- I have a theory about Controlled Failure which dovetails nicely with the terrors of confronting someone you might actually love, and thus cannot control -- because it was a social call, not a session. We talked about music and politics.

So for this unholy coming holiday, and for my friend, and for the guy, even -- who I never met and probably wouldn't have liked, at least from the description, but who has the right to be happy elsewhere, eventually -- here's Tom Verlaine's "The Grip of Love," which not only contains some of the finest electric rock guitar of the last century (try it, you'll love it), but has a comprehensively elliptical lyric that says most of what I've been trying to say:

You do the moon
You do the snake
Everywhere you go
You make the right mistake
You take a picture
And lay it on my tray
Some kind of window
Just like the Milky Way

The song doesn't end well -- the girl tells him to get lost, and he says, desperately but slyly, "well, don't that buckle my belt?" -- but it starts beautifully, and that's something. Inventory is managed, at least for a little while, and it's managed exactly as he says it is, exactly as my friend said it is: "everywhere you go you make the right mistake." So find that person, get in the grip, do the moon, do the snake. Happy Valentine's Day.

2009-02-04T14:03:00.025-05:00

DON'T FORGET ME
Harry Nilsson
Pussy Cats
Buddha : 1974
[Buy It]

FORGET ALL ABOUT IT
The Nazz
Nazz Nazz
SGC : 1969
[Buy It]

DON'T FORGET WHAT I TOLD YOU
John Simon
John Simon's Album
Water : 1971
[Buy It]

The other day I was cleaning out an early-model desktop computer and I found a folder labeled "Old Old Old." Inside it were pictures of old, old, old people. No, no. That's not true. That would be impolite and uncomfortable. Inside it were a number of text files, all date-stamped April 2000. That wasn't the composition date, as it turned out, but the date of transfer from some other storage device (a floppy disk?) to the internal hard drive of the computer. The files seemed to be from the early nineties. Most were short notes. In many cases, I could retrieve the original context. This one was a note to my roommate regarding a feud about a lamp ("I'm sorry that it broke but I think we both know how that happened"). That one was a note to my brother with what I think was relationship advice ("You might never be sure but if you're sure that you'll never be sure that's something to go on"). One of the files completely perplexed me. It seemed to be a note to a friend in which Terms Of Friendship were being managed and reset.

Yes I'd like to keep it up. I know that you say you don't, or that you can't. You say different things at different times. I don't know why I didn't think to say that same thing sooner. Wishful thinking, maybe? Hey, yesterday I was out at the store and I thought of you. It was because the woman in front of me in the check-out line was hideous and annoying. Ha ha. Just kidding. It was because in one aisle there was a sign that said "Party Supplies" and I remembered how you like using that word: supply. "What if this isn't supplying me with the things I need," you said. You were standing by your refrigerator, so I made a joke: "What, you want one that crushes ice?" You laughed, which was nice of you. Friendly. I am curious if you really felt like laughing. Why would you laugh when you're so convinced that I'm making unreasonable demands? Anyway, I'm sure we'll talk about this more tomorrow and the week after that and probably next year and it won't get any clearer. Unpolished mirrors, like you said.

The next to last sentence was wishful thinking, as far as I know. There are no notes that seem to be sequels to this one. Moreover, I don't remember what the note was about, or who this friend was, or if I sent it, or if I received a reply, or anything else. Maybe it wasn't even a friend. Maybe it was someone I was dating. I figured that it probably wasn't written to a serious girlfriend, because I tended to live with my serious girlfriends and wouldn't have said "your refrigerator." But this was just detective work and I didn't even remember the victim.

I sent the note to a friend who has known me for a long time. She said she recognized my writing, but that she had no idea who I might have been writing to. The note reminded her of something, though: she had recently had a similar experience. She was clearing out a desk drawer and found a legal pad with scribbled notes that she assumed were fragments of a draft for a longer letter. "I think it was to that guy," she said, naming a name that I was supposed to remember but didn't. "It's funny how faint he is now to me. In the notes, I was telling him about how there had been a shift, how one minute I had felt one way and the next I had felt another way. It's like the past never happened."

"That's what you said to him, or that's what you're saying to me now?"

"What?"

"Was that what you were telling him, that it was like the past never happened because you felt one way one second and another way the next second? Or are you saying that to me now because you remember him so faintly?"

"I'm not sure what you're saying," she said. "All I know is that it's very comforting. I love the idea that we have pasts that are unavailable to us. If I had to remember everything about that guy, how would I ever have gotten over the pain?"

"Get over pain?" I said. "Get past it, maybe. If you really forgot everything about him, then what would have stopped you from dating him again?"

"I'd never forget everything," she said.

"Exactly," I said. "But I did. I forgot everything about this letter, this person, this time. I don't know what the inside jokes are about. I don't remember seeing the Party Supplies aisle in the store. Maybe it was a piece of fiction. And, even if it's real, doesn't that mean that the same friend could resurface and the same problem reappear? I could put my hand, or hers, on the hot stove again."

There was then a long pause in which she either considered what I had said with great concentration or ignored me completely and paid attention instead to someone in her office. "I have to go to a fantastically interesting grant meeting," she said.

"Okay," I said. "Later." She went off to her meeting. I went back to the note about supplies and demands, tried again to remember who I had written it to, failed. Part of the problem was in the reciprocity: I didn't like forgetting, but being forgotten was worse. Change was acceptable, even necessary, but the prospect of disappearance triggered an existential shock, and here was solid proof that things did not always persist. In thinking about the note, I found myself thinking about the phone call. Had she forgotten it already? Were a broader set of memories endangered? How could I be sure that the present would not become the future's forgotten past? I wrote that question down and emailed it to my friend: "How can I be sure that the present will not become the future's forgotten past?" Then I went off to a meeting of my own. It was fantastically interesting too. What a coincidence.

Later, as I rode the subway home, I tried to think of songs about forgetting. Or rather, I tried to remember songs about forgetting. I didn't have a pen or paper with me, so I couldn't write them down, and as a result any that I remembered on the subway would have to be re-remembered when I got home.

Most songs about forgetting are really songs about fear of being forgotten, which in turn are really songs about fear of being unloved or unwanted. I remembered Bill Lloyd's "Forget About Us" ("I cannot forget about us"), James Carr's "Forgetting You" ("Don't make me live the rest of my life forgetting you"), Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)" ("Don't you forget about me"). Harry Nilsson's "Don't Forget Me" is a pledge of undying loyalty even in times of dying, with a melody too beautiful for the bleak lyrics:

When we're older
And full of cancer
It doesn't matter now,
Come on, get happy,
'Cause nothing lasts forever

Well, okay, but if nothing lasts forever, then what about forgetting? Eventually that's going to fade, too, and when it does, what replaces it? Utter indifference? Fantasy? Or was it memory? Would there come a time when I would remember exactly who I was writing that note to, and why, and what it meant, and what I meant it to mean? The Nazz's "Forget All About It" is a noisy Who-lite song that makes this suggestion (the chorus, "Forget all about it a while," is either a paradox or a substantial psychological insight), along with another helpful one:

If you haven't got time to rest
Then take the record off now

There was one song whose title I almost exactly recalled, and that I looked up when I got home. It was John Simon's "Don't Forget What I Told You," from his 1971 solo album. The song--which Simon sings poorly but sweetly, like a tone-deaf Richard Manuel--somewhat resembles a love song but opens up much wider to accommodate fairly apocalyptic notions of disconnection and discontent:

This world's a joke they tell me
It'll go up in smoke some day

And then later:

How would you feel if your world wasn't real?

This was the question I had sent in email to my friend, more or less. It was the question that hung over the note I had found. It was the question that I wanted to remember.

There were other songs, too, I think, but they're fuzzy and getting fuzzier by the minute. Unpolished mirrors, like she said.

2009-01-29T15:22:00.006-05:00

QUICKIE
George Clinton
You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish
Capitol : 1983
[Buy It]

PASSIN' THRU
Frederick Knight
1974
Available on : The Complete Stax-Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 3: 1972-1975
Stax : 1994
[Buy It]

LIFE IS...TOO SHORT
Too Short
Life Is...Too Short
Jive : 1988
[Buy It]

RAPIDS
T-Rex
Tanx
Reprise : 1973
[Buy It]

Busy week, at work, at home, busy for reasons that made sense to me at the time, that faintly make sense now, that will cease to make sense soon. But soon's coming too soon: too much to do. And yet, committed. Always committed. (Should be committed?) Will endeavor to provide the maximum Moistworks satisfaction, even if it's just a short visit, a quickie, even if I'm just passing through.

Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in a state that starts with a M. I cannot describe her more specifically than that, for reasons you are about to read. Her husband has become a source of great disappointment to her. As he gets older, he has lost his patience, nearly all of it. They went to a children's party the other week. They came early, because he was hot to get out of the house. They didn't stay very long, because he was hot to leave. On the way out, he found that the family's coats were buried under a heap of coats left by later arrivals. "He blew his top," she said, by which she meant that he stomped his foot once and went to wait outside. "I tried to talk to him about it at dinner but couldn't," she said. "I wanted to agree with him, that the hosts were incredibly stupid to arrange the coats the way they did, but he got up in the middle of the meal. My middle. He was done early. He was quick as always. Plus, he's always tired. He has energy only for moving through things, not for staying with things." She went on to say something about going to bed with him, and how brevity was a problem there, too. Or maybe it was that it wasn't a problem, because she was tired also. I didn't listen to her closely, for reasons you are about to read.

As it turns out, her story had gone on too long for me. I like her, but I sympathize with her husband. Life gets shorter as it gets longer, and it's progressively harder to find reasons to burrow into a pile of coats or to pile on inconsiderate hosts or to consider foreplay, say, in light of the rewarding horizon. Young men can be impatient, but it's from ardor or inexperience. They want to get to the next good thing. Old men are impatient from a whole host of other reasons, not the least of which is getting away from the last bad thing. Much of the time, this isn't morally defensible. Bernardino of Siena, who was old six hundred years before I'll be, wrote about the wickednesses that can get into elderly men: the gloominess, the lickerishness, the willful ignorance, the impatience. Why is impatience last on that list? Why not first? Who can wait?

So, quickly, some older songs about quickness, starting with "Quickie," which is from an album whose title deals directly with impatience -- really, fish, you shouldn't-nuf-bit -- and rushing through the stately secular gospel "Passing Thru" and the plainly philosophical "Life Is...Too Short" (against the lyrics--"Don't be stupid, though / Cause when you waste it, you'll know"--the central sample, from Average White Band's "School Boy Crush," sounds like an explicit irony) before arriving, breathlessly, at "Rapids." It's the first T-Rex song I heard, in the car of an older kid who used to drive me home from school. He drove too fast. He used to yell at older drivers. He couldn't have known that they were every bit as impatient as he was, only more powerfully. The song is still one of my favorites, even though it's from that album that everyone considers a falling-off from The Slider. What's it called, again? Tanx? You're welcome.

2009-01-26T12:37:00.005-05:00

PASSENGERS
Stephen Emmer feat. Lou Reed
Recitement
Challenge : 2007
[Buy It]

THE L TRAIN IS A SWELL TRAIN AND I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOU INDIES COMPLAIN
Out Hud
S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D.
Kranky : 2002
[Buy It]

DOWNTOWN TRAIN
Tom Waits
Rain Dogs
Island : 1985
[Buy It]

Now Ben's gone and gotten me thinking about the train, the most metaphysical of conduits.

A train is a flightless airplane - the ostrich of the transport world.

A train is a car without options.

A train moves in one direction only - forward, into the future (how apt that a bride's trailing veil is called a train - the history she drags behind her as she crosses a threshold over which she'll never return).

A train is a machine made of time, its linked cars dividing it into discrete moments that roll onward, one after another; a train carries you forward without any effort on your part.

A train is a test tube and a womb and a loom, where threads converge via sheer proximity - a train is a tapestry of story.

Trains are repositories of romance, mystery, nostalgia, longing, boredom.

Trains are escape hatches, and cages.

There are books that engross me on trains that seem dull when I'm sitting still.

Trains are somehow excremental - above-ground trains show you the seamy hidden parts of your topograpahy; the blighted depots, the graffiti-scrawled outbuildings, the littered thruways of the world.

Underground trains rumble through bowels, below the congested consumption of cities; the underground train is the most metaphysical of trains - a tunnel within a tunnel.

"Train" also means "teach," and "focus."

Trains are made of tea and rain.

Trains are buses with one-track minds.

Trains might be late but always come.

Trains might be late but always leave.

My first travel by train was the best kind of travel by train - which is to say, European.

On that trip my friend and I rode trains like marathon runners run, which is to say, at great length, with a sort of jolly, self-immolating fortitude.

We took one train from Amsterdam straight to Sicily, which took at least 36 hours, and we didn't spring for any fancy sleeper car either - unlike the Amtrak, which lines up passengers in unidirectional rows, like people watching a movie, this train was broken up into four-seat compartments, with seats facing in pairs, making the experience less spectatorial and more parlor-esque.

If you fully recline two facing seats they form an almost-level surface on which one can rest. But we weren't much interested in sleep.

I will relate the texture of those journeys with a sort of staccato impressionism, because that's how they felt. The phrase "glide" will indicate interstitial moments of pure blank motile Zen. So:

Board and glide, looking at my dim reflection in a night-blackened window, a sense of streaming behind it, glide, hungrily devouring cheap junky snack cake proffered by matronly European lady concerned about these two young American boys in white t-shirts with no clear destination or impetus, despite small child's protestations at the consumption by strangers of his snack, glide, glide, being abruptly awoken by German border patrol in the confused darkness of early morning, having the pot we'd brought from Amsterdam confiscated amid grave threats (the promise of "dogs," the advice to relinquish now before it was "too late") that amounted to nothing, glide, the globe lights floating mistily above Utrecht on another dark morning, glide, glide, glide, smoking cigarettes out of windows labeled "No Smoking," the scrolling scenery itself seeming to tug at them, glide, briefly falling asleep with shoulder bag clutched to chest going through Italy, glide, waking up to an impossible dawn upon rolling Sicilian hills (dotted with distant white villas) to discover wallet gone, glide, finding wallet in washcloset trashcan, 50 Euro gone but debit card intact, glide, glide, glide.

These trains are my creation myth trains, from which all others will forever derive. The same way that Manhattan, the first real city I ever saw in person, will always be my Platonic city, of which all others are shadows.

Whereas my first train rides were pure myth, my subsequent ones have been more prosaic, with flashes of incident.

On a train from North Carolina to New York I sat beside a beautiful drag queen, with two teenage boys from Newark shooting me furtive, desperate glances, until finally she went to bathroom and they informed me to "be careful because she was a dude," apparently having mistaken my train-chatting for chatting-up (unlike airplanes, trains are inherently chatty, because you must have a good reason, an interesting story, for taking a train instead of a plane - except for metro trains, which are even less chatty than airplanes).

I have minded gaps on trains in London and watched gaps on trains in New York; I have indeed seen something but have not in fact said something.

I have longed for trains - for how they go, not where - and I have recorded the sound of the L train from Grand to Bedford, used the recordings to create a piece of music that sounds very much like trains and very much like hell.

Because there's no commuter rail where I live, trains for me are synonymous with long-distance travel or spending time in distant cities.

Trains are away or going away from me, or trains are enclosing me and taking me away; in this way trains can seem very much like life.

Most train songs are not really about trains.

2009-01-23T13:30:00.016-05:00

THE MEMPHIS TRAIN
Rufus Thomas
1968
Available on : Beg, Scream & Shout! The Big Ol' Box of 60's Soul
Rhino : 1997
[Buy It]

TRAIN TO TAMPA
Sam Dees
1968
Available on : The Birmingham Sound: The Soul of Neal Hemphill, Vol. 1
Rabbit Factory : 2006
[Buy It]

SAME TRAIN TWICE
Swamp Dogg
1977
Available on : The Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 5
SDEG : 2007
[Buy It]

PLAY A TRAIN SONG
Todd Snider
2005
Available on : Tales From Moondawg's Tavern

TRAIN SONG
Tom Waits
Big Time
Island : 1990
[Buy It]

Last night I took the train up to Boston for a reading, and then took the last train of the day back to New York. There were equipment delays and subways going one way and commuter-rail connections the other way; all in all, the entire trip took fourteen hours, eleven of which were spent on tracks. The way up was a midday trip, crowded and aggravated. The way back was nearly empty, just me and what seemed like a youth soccer team and a woman reading a dirty book and another woman with a highly shaggy dog in a bag. I tried to sleep, had a little success, tried to read, had a little success.

Between these failures, I had plenty of time to think, and one of the things I thought about was trains: or, more specifically, planes, trains, and automobiles, and how they have furnished fertile subjects for songwriters. In rock and roll, cars win: early rock and roll and rockabilly have too many car songs to count--the original "Brand New Cadillac"? "Dead Man's Curve"? the balance of the Beach Boys/Chuck Berry catalogs?--but if you widen the scope to include blues, soul, country, and jazz, trains may pull into the lead. (This is just a metaphor. I am not endorsing any car/train races. Very dangerous.) There's "Mystery Train," of course, and "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," and "Smokestack Lightning" and the Singing Brakeman and a tradition so rich that I would consider it at greater length if I wasn't so tired from the train. There are many, many things to say about trains in song, but I'm only going to be able to extract one today, and that's how trains embody both desire and helplessness, even when they're not heading into a tunnel. In cars, you drive, which is a self-starting and self-determined act. In trains, you're subject to schedules, to conductors, to people meeting you at the station or not being there to meet you. Songs about trains are necessarily songs about waiting, and that makes all the difference in the world. To that end -- I think it's called a terminal in train talk -- here are Rufus Thomas, Sam Dees, Swamp Dogg, Todd Snider, and Tom Waits. The last two are live versions, and in both cases, songs are preceded by highly shaggy dog stories. The Snider is especially epic, more than fifteen minutes of waiting before he gets to the song -- it just keeps a-rollin'.

2009-01-20T10:34:00.012-05:00

SWEARIN' TO GOD
Frankie Valli
Close-Up
Private Stock : 1975
[Buy It]

Too much historical import for me to take it all in, certainly in any kind of glib journalessayistic way, and because of that, I will resist the temptation to put This Label on That Thing or That Wrapper around This Event. Plus, highly orchestrated events that involve millions of people are, to me, troubling things. Still, I sent some spies. There seems to be a surplus of joy and optimism, along with a surplus of merchandise. A friend of mine who is there checked in with this report: "Today, an outpouring of hope; last night, an outpouring of martinis."

Years ago there was another country called the seventies. I remember the inauguration of Jimmy Carter, which we talked about in school. We all had to draw pictures of the new president, and that was easy: big teeth and yellow crayon for the hair. Around that time, Frankie Valli put out the disco single "Swearin' To God," and while it's a love song about how spiritual power feeds the heart, or maybe feeds off of it, it serves equally well as a summary of the stirring oddness of the swearing-in ceremony for our nation's highest office, that (un)holy collision of power, conviction, inspiration, and the personal touch that characterizes the best politicians:

Swearin' to god
There's no one else on earth I'd rather be
Swearin' to god
You made me see, so I believed in you
Oh, you've been fillin' my cup
Til' I'm runnin' over with joy
From you heaven sent love
Just touch me again
I'm king of all men and reigning from above

2009-01-15T10:55:00.033-05:00

MY LOVE FOR YOU HAS TURNED TO HATE
Hank Williams
1949
Available on: Original Singles Collection
Mercury Nashville : 1992
[Buy It]

I'VE GOT REASONS TO HATE YOU
Lefty Frizzell
1951
Available on: Life's Like Poetry
Bear Family : 1992
[Buy It]

HATE STREET DIALOGUE
Rodriguez
Cold Fact
Light In the Attic : 1970
[Buy It]

I HATE U
Prince
The Gold Experience
Warner Bros. : 1995
[Buy It]

HATE IS THE NEW LOVE
Mekons
OOOH! (Out Of Our Heads)
Quarter Stick : 1992
[Buy It]

I HATE YOU
Monks
Black Monk Time
Polydor : 1966
[Buy It]

TURN IT INTO HATE
Graham Parker
Acid Bubblegum
Razor & Tie : 1996
[Buy It]

This week I published a short article in the magazine where I work. It was a humor piece about the Holocaust. Well, really, it was a humor piece about the Herman Rosenblat case, and the way that our culture encourages the artificial sweetening of memoirs about even the more horrific events so that those memoirs can better appeal to publishers, programmers, movie studios, television executives, and the public. It wasn't a major achievement, but it was a piece with a point. I should know. I sharpened it.

I thought it would make a little trouble, and it did. People don't like jokes about the Holocaust, even jokes that use it to make a broader case. In the wake of the piece, I have been getting a pretty steady stream of hate mail. The people who have decided to send me hate mail have derided not only the piece, but my entire body of work, not to mention my character and (in one case) my parents' character. That guy was the worst. I won't say his name. Let's say his name was Bill, which it wasn't. Bill wrote many negative things about me. Some I will repeat, some I will not. I will paraphrase and conflate, possibly also inventing: I'm trying the Herman Rosenblat thing. Among the things Bill said was the following: "You should be ashamed of yourself and your parents should be ashamed of you and if they aren't then they are just as self-hating as you." He went on: "race traitor," "talentless," "awful," and one misspelled profanity. (To be fair, it was probably mistyped: does anyone think it's spelled "fcuk"?)

I thought for a little while about Bill, who I won't identify, but whose remarks I will briefly dignify with a response. Dislike of the piece is fine, Bill. I prefer praise, Bill--who doesn't?--but I don't believe in a world where my preferences should always be satisfied. People are under no obligation to like my work, Bill. For me to believe otherwise would be idiotic, Bill. Sometimes, something I write will rub people the wrong way, Bill. Don't you think so, you freakin' moronic eunuch? See: it can happen. Other times, it's just that different readers occupy different territory. Let's say, Bill, that you love Claire Messud. I pick her only as a random example of an author I admire and like, but haven't yet found a way to love. Not her fault. Not mine. Could just as easily have been Etgar Keret or Barbara Pym. It is possible, even likely, Bill, that love for Messud/Keret/Pym is incompatible with love for me. Your heart and mind have staked out territory, and I am beyond the pale. That's fine. That's good. You can't love everyone, as they say, or your love is not love at all. You need hate so that love is real, as they say. They also say that a world without dislike is a world drowning in diet cream soda, and that it's better to have some bourbon and scotch too, so that people get intoxicated by what they consume rather than pleasantly, fleetingly carbonated. So in some ways, Bill, we're on the same page. I'm sympatico with your unsympatico. That's what I would have written back to Bill if I had written back.

I didn't, though. Why? Because I was mad. In the matter of Bill, I felt like stomping his head until I got wine. I put on heavy boots and looked up his address on the Internet. I even had a line I was going to say before I put the boot on his neck: "If you shift things into a hateful register, you might get rung up on that register." It wasn't exactly Dirty Harry -- it wasn't even Gran Torino -- but the boots were all laced up. A friend of mine asked me why I was so mad, when I professed not to care about criticism. I didn't know, and I said I didn't know. "I mean it," she said. "Why are you bothered so much by a reaction that's clearly ignorant? How thin is your skin?" Again, I said I didn't know. My friend was making me mad. It turned out the questions were rhetorical, which didn't make me any less mad. My friend is a writer, and she told me that she has an odd reaction to hateful readers. "Sure, they make themselves look bad, but they also make me look bad," she said. "So, mixed feelings, like watching an ex-boyfriend drive off a cliff in my Jaguar."

Why is it okay for Bill to hate me but not okay for me to hate him? What's the difference between a response that demonstrates measured disdain for me and my writing and one that lashes out? And why is ad hominem hatred any less virtuous than a more global misanthropy? It's the last of these questions that should come first. What's ironic about the whole experience is that the humor piece in question, the one that Bill thought was trivializing the Holocaust, was written from a place of deep and abiding hatred. All the people who expressed outrage that I was burlesquing the Holocaust were, whether they know it or not, simply re-expressing the outrage I felt when I first heard about the Herman Rosenblat affair. You should have seen my face. I mean it. You should have, because then you could have explained my expression to me: it was a look of sadness and distaste and frustration and despair, not only at the poor old man who felt compelled to fictionalize the horrors of his youth, but at the swarm of houseflies that came so quickly to the carrion. My sense of the whole incident just burned at me. I felt more than just hot under the choler. I was, well, Holocaustic. In the end, the outrage got filtered through at least three layers of trickery and irony, through masks, through fictional devices, because it needed to be at a temperature where I could safely handle it. (Incidentally, this is why I'm not as mad at Rosenblat as I am at the people who ringed around him opportunistically: maybe his introduction of fictional elements was somehow psychologically necessary. Who am I to say?) So that's the thing, Bill. I don't mind hate. I depend upon it, as do many people I depend upon--Stanley Elkin, Axl Rose, Ice Cube. But I like it to be deployed correctly, Bill, by which I mean non-idiotically.

Eventually, I took off my heavy boots. I never got the wine from Bill's head. I wrote a sentence about punching him in the face. An ear flew off. Call it cowardice or call it satire. In his honor, I'd like to offer a few songs about hate that use the term (and the weapon) correctly: a pair of bitter country tearjerkers, a hippie relic, the Mekons' "Lone Pilgrim" update, Prince's "Thin Line Between Love and Hate" update, a classic from the eternally mad Monks, and an undervalued anthem from Graham Parker. The Parker is my favorite of the bunch, I think. It's a song about how war and celebrity culture and the deadening of the human spirit has only one proper response, and that's to load up a whole quiver with arrows and then, quivering with rage, let them fly:

Send your little boys and girls to go and play in a giant sandbox
Put your movie stars on the cover of People for going in for a detox
Let your happy-face news readers share a little joke
At the end of the night's transmission
Let's see the world through the eyes of some clown
Gonna make all of your decisions

Well if you can sleep at night go ahead that's great
It's all been manufactured like the junk that's on your plate

Come on
Turn it into hate
Turn it into hate

Parker doesn't attack anyone individually. Rather, he attacks everyone, implicates whoever contributes to the blindness and complacency that lets the world go on cracked and crooked: that allows a memoirist to be lionized and then turned into a sacrificial lamb, that allows a justice department to be used as a blunt political instrument, that allows an economy to be rubbled by short-sightedness. Though the song was released in 1996, it feels even more contemporary, in the sense that it feels like a hurried, heated pushback delivered in response to a proximate threat. New technologies have harmed music in many ways, but jeremiads aren't one of the victims; digital delivery permits hatred and rage to range more freely, with often bracing results. In fact, Parker himself has recently taken to YouTube with a series of topical songs performed under the pseudonym Tex Skerball, and other rock stars like Neil Young are beginning to see how the death of record stores and radio and the rise of alternate distribution channels can help rather than hurt their cause. Elsewhere on the album, on "Sharpening Axes," Parker delivers a lyric that is nearly a manifesto:

I don't appeal to the masses, and they don't appeal to me.

Dyspeptic but fair-minded, angry but controlled, misanthropic because of his love for humanity, kicking against the pricks without ever breaking down: that's the kind of hate I understand and, consequently, the kind of hate I love.

2009-01-08T13:31:00.033-05:00

EASTBOUND AND DOWN
Jerry Reed
1977
Available on : The Essential Jerry Reed
RCA : 1995
[Buy It]

BUSY DOIN' NOTHIN'
The Beach Boys
Friends
Capitol : 1968
[Buy It]

TOO BUSY
Louis Armstrong
1928
Available on : The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings
Sony : 2000
[Buy It]

WORK SONG
Dan Reeder
Dan Reeder
Oh Boy : 2004
[Buy It]

I had a busy week back from vacation. Lots to do and not very much time, and so the days felt pinched, kind of like they did for the Bandit:

We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there

He wasn't kidding. In only twenty-eight hours, the Bandit and his Trans Am had to block for Snowman as they ran 400 cases of Coors from Texas to Georgia. They had to make the Southern Classic or else they'd never get their eighty thou from Big Enos:

Keep your foot hard on the pedal, son, never mind them brakes
Let it all hang out cause we've got a run to make
The boys are thirsty in Atlanta, and there's beer in Texarkana
We'll bring it back no matter what it takes

My situation is nearly the same as the Bandit's, with some instructive differences. Instead of ducking and dodging Buford T. Justice and picking up runaway brides on the roadside, I sit in an office, generally either writing or editing, sometimes meeting to talk about writing or editing. In any given day, there are many things to do, but the size of those things is subjective. They have no set physical dimensions and consequently few set chronological dimensions. At my discretion, within reason, the time spent on those things can contract and so, in a sense, the time-container can be felt to have expanded. This was not dreamt of in the Bandit's philosophy.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine and...well, that should tell you something about how busy I was. I was pressed for time. I was strapped. I was running in circles. Still, I had time for her in the sense that I had the desire to talk to her, and consequently the will to contract the tasks at hand. You can always count on my making time for friends, because friends are what make time count. I think that was stitched on a sampler I saw once. (One of the other ones was "Peace in your heart can be seen on your face and in your soul." I never quite got that.)

As coincidence would have it, the conversation we had was about how another friend of hers is always too busy to talk. The two women have been friends for years. Their friendship with one another predates my friendship with either. Despite that, whenever the first friend calls the second friend during the day, the second friend says that she is too busy, and rushes the first friend off the phone. The first friend has complained bitterly to me about the state of affairs. "How can she be too busy? That's crap."

As I have said, to disagree would smack of hypocrisy. The other day, when she called, her purpose was twofold: to reiterate her central complaint about the second friend and then to dispense an epiphany. I think it was a fresh one and that she dialed me as it was crowning. "I don't think it's that she's too busy at all," she said. "If she's really as busy as she says, she would just let the phone go through to voice mail."

"Good point," I said.

"I think she's trying to put me in my place."

"How so?"

"Well, we have a different relationship socially. Whenever we're at a bar, she monopolizes the conversation. She tells me about her bad boyfriends, about how this one was mean and that one drank too much and the other one kept meaning not to drink so much."

"Monopolize, you say?" I said.

"Absolutely. One hundred percent. No, more. One thousand percent. It's not fair. I mean sometimes I have a bad day, like today. My boss is opening a second store and she's been in a terrible mood and she almost took my head off when I asked her where the deodorizer for the bathroom is. I'd like to be able to talk about that. But when this friend and I go out, it's all about her. I like hearing about it, but sometimes I look at my watch and I see that she has chewed up two hours. I don't know where the time goes, and I don't mean that like someone in love."

"Have you said anything to her?"

"Of course not. What could I say? It would hurt her feelings, and she's my friend. So why doesn't she feel the same way?" I started to answer, but then I remembered the terms. She went on. "You know, the reason I feel so bad about it is that once I had a boyfriend who was exactly the same as her." This, delivered like an epiphany, was not one. It had been rehearsed. In fact, I had heard it before. "He was my first serious boyfriend when I came to New York. He was a lawyer in a big firm and I was just getting started in the office of an art supply store. There were no cell phones then, or far fewer, but I had a phone at my desk, and lots of downtime. I used to call him during the day. He rarely answered, and when he did, he was like a different person. It was like someone was pointing a gun at his head on his end of the phone. It made me feel smaller than a flea, like a worthless little speck. But did I break up with him?"

It was my line. "Not soon enough."

"You said it," she said. "Not soon enough." Our conversation went on from there into other topics: her brother's nagging cough, the strange appeal of commercial wallpaper, a book she read, another she meant to read. My phone keeps track of the length of the call, and this one was more than fifteen minutes. I won't say how much more. Eventually she said she had to go. Someone was standing near her desk and she needed to look busy.

I put on my headphones and forgot all about the phone. I had editing to do. While I worked, I listened to music: it's like being busy in two different ways at once, and since I was listening to music about being busy, it was like being busy in three different ways. I went through Elvis Costello's "Busy Bodies," which is, predictably, about a different kind of getting busy, and the Lyres' "Busy Body," which I think is also about sex, or possibly about rock-and-roll. For more than a little while, I stuck close to the Beach Boys' "Busy Doin' Nothin'," which is a little Brian Wilson vignette about the way that the daily grind can interfere with important things, like communication with friends. I will quote a large swath of it, because that's quicker than picking out a few resonant lines:

I get a lot of thoughts in the morning
I write 'em all down
If it wasn't for that
I'd forget 'em in a while

And lately I've been thinking 'bout a good friend
I'd like to see more of, yeah yeah yeah
I think I'll make a call

I wrote a number down
But I lost it
So I searched through my pocket book
I couldn't find it
So I sat and concentrated on the number
And slowly it came to me
So I dialed it

And I let it ring a few times
There was no answer
So I let it ring a little more
Still no answer

So I hung up the telephone
Got some paper and sharpened up a pencil
And wrote a letter to my friend

There is a desperate Zen flavor to this, as there is to many Beach Boys songs of the period, but there's also practical advice. Don't spend all your time on the phone. If you don't get an answer right away, write a letter.

I called my friend to tell her, but she didn't answer. I called back a few minutes later: still nothing. Once, a few months ago, after weeks of her calling me all the time to tell me about her troubles, she dropped off the map. I experienced an even mix of relief and lack. But this was just a phone that wasn't being answered. I returned to the headphones, and soon enough came across Louis Armstrong's "Too Busy," from 1928, which is a fairly straightforward tale of busted love, distinct only as a result of the spirited and altogether strange lead vocal by Lillie Delk Christian. (Armstrong shows up scatting at the end.) The lyrics are short and sharp, like a pocketknife, and they are occupied (maybe even preoccupied) with what happens when one person can't find time for another person. When you're blown off, what's the blowback? Again, to save time (I could explain the reasons but that would defeat the purpose--you can find them up above, by the Beach Boys' song), I'll quote generously:

Why do you keep avoiding me
I confess it's annoying me
Honestly it's so aggravating

Play that twice, the way Christian moves from the rhyming verse of the first two lines to the almost witheringly conversational "Honestly, it's so aggravating." Play it three times, in fact, then move on.

Won't you tell me just what to do
When I ask for a kiss or two
You say no not now dear
Somehow dear
You're always too busy for my loving
Too busy for my petting
That is all that I've been getting from you

What's more and I'm not lying
I noticed you've been trying
Hard to shake me
And it's making me blue
I can't understand your actions
But I'll get my satisfaction
Don't you worry just you wait and see dear
Wait til you want me honey
Then it won't be so funny
When I say that I'm too busy for you

The Armstrong was the flip side to the Beach Boys, not literally--though that would have made a great split single--but temperamentally. Should you let the day run its course and value precious time when you find it, or should you feel acutely the sting of other people's alleged unavailability, sharpen your resentment to a point, and then plunge it into their hearts? I see that my friend has called a few times. I should call her back and see where she falls on the question, but it'll have to wait until later. I tell you, I've got enough to do.

2009-01-05T14:47:00.006-05:00

LIFE IS LONG
Brian Eno & David Byrne
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Todo Mundo : 2008
[Buy It]

October before last, I spent a few weeks camping my way through California. At the end of this week, I'm preparing to do it again. Funny how life repeats like that - funny odd, not funny ha-ha. For me, to be aware of this repetition is to experience a complex, even contradictory, mixture of feelings - it's a comfort, and a curse. The idea of reliving a positive experience is at odds with the idea of reliving an experience, period, while un-lived experiences accumulate at an astonishing clip. How much human misery is predicated upon trying to capture some old feeling, or to regain some lapsed state of grace - trying to live in memory rather than the moment? Like, all of it? And why do we cling to outmoded lifestyles, even as we speak so knowingly of the law of diminishing returns?

Of course, this trip to California will not be a reenactment of my last trip to California. I'm a different person now than I was then, even at the minor distance of a year - hell, I'm a different person today than I was yesterday. The urge to recreate the wonder and sweetness of that trip, moment by moment, is something that can be kept at bay if I stay aware of it. This is important, because I want to know how California looks and feels to me right now, not try to remember how it looked and felt a year ago. (There's a photograph of me in the corner of my partner's bathroom mirror: I'm standing on a cliff, with my back to the camera, looking out over the sea. My arms are stretched over my head, my left hand clasping my right wrist, in a posture of relaxation and relief. That's the feeling I remember from California, and it's the one I'll be tempted to try and recapture, if I let the past infect the moment. It seems as if the only surefire way to access that feeling again is to avoid striving to do so, since there is no relief in trying to split off from the present-ness of one's being - this is to be a shimmering, vague creature, caught in memory's shifting currents and not laid into the groove of the day.)

A new year comes with a sense of renewal, as if somehow the slate has been wiped clean, but it can also draw the annularity of events into excruciating focus. Around this time of year, instead of enjoying my morning coffee ritual, a sense of futility can overtake me - how many mornings have I made coffee in just this way? On how many more will I do so? And this minor, irritating awareness of routine can swell up to envelop everything in my life. In this humor my progress through time and space begins to feel less like a forest path, which has a destination, and more like a high-school track, a closed loop where the same scenery rolls by again and again. I make my bold resolutions - STOP WATCHING A DOUBLE SHOT AT LOVE WITH THE IKKI TWINS - yet continue to fold my life into tight creases of convention. Rituals that usually comfort me come to seem constricting, pointless, inevitable.

This new-year's discomfort with ritual, I experience on a couple levels. One, the futility of relatively static rituals - how many more times will I have to brush my teeth in my life, and finally, will it be the sheer tedium that kills me? To brush my teeth in this state of mind is to take an unduly mechanistic view of the human experience. To be reminded of the body's increasingly time-intensive demands for simple maintenance, as life goes on, so the act of living becomes an algorithm whose only function is to sustain itself. I am not currently as depressed as this post makes me out to be - in fact, I'm quite happy right now, and excited about my trip. The life-fatigue I'm describing is not currently upon me - if it were, I wouldn't be able to describe it as calmly as I am right now.

My current happiness is enhanced by the fact that I am coming off a solid two-week stint of depression, though, and that depression had a lot to do with what I'm talking about today. It had to do with the second level of discomfort-with-ritual I alluded to above - the sadness of rituals which are preserved despite being untenable. The holiday time has been a difficult time for me, in recent years, and this is wholly a function of the past. Some of my warmest, happiest family memories are linked to my childhood holidays, which make the current state of my family's holidays seem sadder by comparison. My dad's father - a charming rake we called "Pop," a mischievous presence among a family gently inclined toward sanctimony - died a couple years ago, and my dad's mother, almost sightless now (whose library fueled my early adoration of books), lives alone. All three of my dad's brothers have now gotten divorces or separations, dividing my cousins among various households. My mom's mother, with whom I was very close as a child, is senile now, and the joy I used to feel in her presence has bent into a heartbreaking discomfort that I can't help but beat myself up over, even though it's understandably hard on anyone to see someone they love in such a state, trapped in vapors of the past, telling the same stories and asking the same questions over and over again. There's nothing exceptional about any of this, and as family crosses go, it's not too heavy to bear. But the fact remains that the 24 hours or so I spend among my extended family around Christmas leaves me feeling incredibly drained, painfully nostalgic, wary of the future toward which this all inevitably slides, and mired in my personal history. The passage is natural, the discomfort comes from locking oars against it, which some members of my family, especially my mother, are wont to do. I would feel a great pressure lifted from me if we could devise family rituals that suited who we are right now, instead of trying to squeeze our dynamic and habits into a shoe that wore out a long time ago. But not everyone is with me on this, so I find myself in the uncomfortable position of trying to be a man in a context where I'm expected, in some ways, to remain forever a child. My mother still gave my brother and I each a stocking full of candy until she finally gave it up just a couple years ago. My grandmother, through no fault of her own, asks me what Santa Claus is bringing me, and I think, "I'm almost thirty." Again, she can't help it - the past is where she lives now. But when she asks me, I feel the jolt of an outsized and poignant metaphor.

2009-01-02T13:02:00.027-05:00

STRANGER IN MY OWN HOME TOWN
Elvis Presley
From Elvis In Memphis
BMG : 1969
[Buy It]

GOIN' BACK HOME
John Fogerty
Eye of the Zombie
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]

One of the things about this time of year is that it involves lots of time in houses. For me, this year, that meant lots of time spent in one house, as a long-term guest, for a period that spanned from just before Christmas to just before New Year's. I was there long enough to bring about a slight shift. One of the last days, I was out driving with my kids and my older son got tired. "I want to go home," he said. There was a moment of uncertainty. "Home home or home here?" I said. It was a question that meant nothing because it meant too many things.

The house where I was staying was my wife's parents' house. It is in suburban Miami. It is the house where she grew up, and I'm sure she has a different relationship to it than I do. Whenever we visit, she takes a walk through the place to see what's changed since the last time, how it is growing incrementally more distant from her. We stay in the room that was her room when she was a child, and while I'm told that it looks nothing like it used to, the resemblance is strong enough to trigger a cascade of memories. My seven-year-old son likes to hear about how the house used to look, and once or twice he asked my wife what would happen if he walked into the bedroom and saw the ten-year-old version of her there. She had no good answer. These Twilight Zone-style displacements are reliably exciting for seven-year-old boys, but somewhat less so for the adults who have to accept the fact that they are impossible.

The house where my wife grew up is a few miles from the house where I grew up. More than once during my time in Miami, I drove by my old house and parked on the street so I could look at it. Once, I had my kids in the car, and I pointed at the window that used to be my bedroom. The plants just outside the window are different. There aren't asparagus ferns that lizards can run across. The shutters are different so I'm sure the lighting inside is different, not to mention the furniture, the wallpaper, the smell. The people who own it now have a boat in the driveway, which we never did. It's hard to look at it and think it's the same place. I drove home and my younger son, who is four, leapt out of the car excitedly and went to tell my wife that he had seen my house. I didn't punish him for the lie. Later, I asked my wife whether she thought it was stranger to drive by your old house and be put off by a new paint job or to sleep in your old house surrounded by deceptive familiarity. "This bed squeaks," she said, either answering or avoiding.

The house where I grew up is near the houses of lots of other people who grew up with me. I think that's what "where" means. One day, I was going out bike-riding, and I thought I'd probably be going by the childhood house of a friend, so I wrote her to mention it. She said that as far as she knew, the house had been totally renovated, but had since been redone a second time into something that more closely resembled her childhood home. She told me a story about a fire that had once broken out in the yard of the house next door. I started to tell her about the things I was thinking about the insides and outsides of houses, but then I stopped. I was on vacation. She was, too. Why bother her with lots of theories? Instead, I took a picture of her house. It was a picture of the outside of her house but I am sure that for her it is a picture of the inside, too. One person's photograph is another person's X-ray.

The house where my friend grew up is near another house, entirely nondescript, where I once found myself, a few years ago, paying a visit to a friend of a friend who had moved to Miami. While I was in the house, I needed to use the bathroom, and while I was in the bathroom, it suddenly occurred to me that it was the same house where I had spent a few summer afternoons more than a decade before, during college, with a girl from high school. A strange-shaped window in the bathroom tipped me off. I had run into the girl at a movie theatre. We had gone on a date, just one, at a restaurant where the waiter was unfathomably incompetent, and then we had returned to her house and taken up a series of compromising positions on the couch. (I had wanted to go to the bedroom--the couch was the compromise.) Eventually she relented and we went to the bed, where there was a poster of Iggy Pop. "This is a fun house," I had said, as a joke, and she had laughed and buried her face deeper into the side of my neck. In the house years later, I dared to open the door to that bedroom and look inside. It was an office now, with a big wooden desk and a computer and no poster. This past week, I didn't go by that house. Why bother? Houses are hosts rendered unrecognizable by parasites, and that's no fun to hang around.

If I hadn't been on vacation, I am sure that I would have been able to put together a trenchant examination of location and memory as articulated through songs about domestic spaces. In songs, home is a highly elastic term that stretches from the spiritual end of the spectrum (Blind Willie Davis's "I Believe I'll Go Back Home") to the carnal (Alex Chilton's "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It"). Home is proof of presence except when it's a felt absence--sometimes it's where you are, and sometimes it's where you aren't. Figuring all the psychological, metaphorical, and erotic complexities is like counting the rooms in an infinite house. But in Miami, I couldn't even get started. I felt out of place, not to mention out of songs: I was having trouble with my iPod and had to use my wife's, which had almost no music on it. It didn't have Joe Hicks' "Goin' Home" or the 13th Floor Elevators "Slip Inside This House" or Lefty Frizzell's "I Was Coming Home to You" or Grin's "Hi Hello Home" or X's "In This House That I Call Home" or Sarah Vaughn's "Baby, Won't You Please Come Home" or the Shangri-Las' "I Can Never Go Home Anymore" or, most damningly, Sam Cooke's "Bring It On Home To Me." It didn't have them, and so I didn't have them. They were at home without me, and so I wasn't at home without them.

As a result, I didn't write the piece I should have written and I didn't even think about it in any productive, anchored manner. I just rode up and down the streets of suburban Miami, listening to the few songs about home I had managed to locate on my wife's iPod--one was a Elvis Presley soul shouter about home towns rather than homes, the other a beautifully evocative and evasive John Fogerty instrumental about returning home rather than being unable to return home--and looking at the houses of people I no longer knew. Then I flew back to New York alone; my family was following a few days later. I got back to my house late at night and tried to come in like a stranger, but the week or so that had passed hadn't introduced enough unfamiliarity. I sat on the couch, trying to remember what about the place I had remembered when I had sat there before, trying to anticipate what I would remember later. One of the things about this time of year is that it involves lots of houses in time.

2008-12-16T12:21:00.010-05:00

BTWN YOU + ME
Windy & Carl
Songs for the Broken Hearted
Kranky : 2008
[Buy It]

THE THING WITH FEATHERS
James Lavino
The Woodpecker OST
Brookhaven/TuneCore : 2008
[Buy It]

TRACK3A (2WAYNICE)
Keith Fullerton Whitman
Playthroughs
Kranky : 2002
[Buy It]

Today appears to lack characteristics. Gray, blank sky. Leafless trees - it's winter. Houses washed clean by last night's rain. I can't see them anyway - windows fogged with condensation from heater, behind closed Venetian blinds. (It's cold - cold enough to numb, but not to bite.) No cars on the street, just wetness and a dull shine. The power went over night and my clock flashes 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. My books look like, just, objects. Every story the same: The tower is visible but inaccessible. The flaming horses run into the waves. The hero returns from the mountaintop only to sink into iniquity. Amado Vazquez will fall in orchids and bloom again in Malibu. My instruments struck deaf and dumb. I tried to send a Facebook message and the "Send" key didn't respond, as if my cursor were just a decoration. I'm monochromatic in black shirt and black pants. My neighbors sold their house and it's emptier than empty. My paintings look like accidents. I can see the white wall behind them. I don't have any lights on and the room is washed in dim white light. The heater's hum is voracious and empty. The phone book in the drawer is a cemetery, except portable and helpfully indexed. The world is around me but not within me. My mind a coastline vanishing into a bank of fog. No opinions, only aphorisms. This state is eternal and it will pass. I will shift again and click back into the pattern. Or so the pattern has showed me in the past. But for now I walk the road without characteristics. That road is short and never ends. My mind is voracious and empty. Things pass through it and leave no trace. I pass through things and leave no trace. My messages are not being delivered. No mail today either. If I touch the window will I leave a fingerprint? I thought and thought about what to write and found only a void. Write the void.

Sometimes I wonder where I go. Always up or down. My mind radiant with good or filled with dark birds whom I love, and do not know. I know it's me that's moving because the world is still there - but remote, as if at a distance of years. Or abstract like math - infinite half-spans between wall and wall, always one more to close. Impossible to cross the room. If you're reading this post, either we're both dreaming or we're both awake. Today I am not sure that's true. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that I might be blogging from someone's dream. If the world is still here and I am not in it but not beyond it, where am I? Quite literally lost in thought. As if under glass today. Noticing odd details that amount to nothing. The dust remover I use to clean my computer contains an agent called "Bittergent," to deter me from inhaling it. A small mound of rubber bands on my desk reminds me of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty." One of my walls is covered with what appear to be footprints. The grain of my desk alternates light and dark and resembles a plowed field viewed from high above. The letters "P L E" are vanishingly carved into the railing of my porch. My keyboard's cord is tangled around it in a way that depresses a couple keys - a partial D minor - a silent dirge latent in the air. Each of these details containing a thought, a post, a poem, a story, a novel, an encyclopedia. But, lacking characteristics, I can't interpret these messages. They notice me and move on. Each an aleph. But not today. I hear the drone of an absent chord. I should inhale dangerous chemicals. Calamity would be good for me. But I'm too quiet for calamity right now. I feel so disconnected from my actions that I wonder if I carved "P L E" into the porch myself. No evidence today that my actions connect - to each other, to the world, to my memory. I wonder if I was going to write "PLEASE." I wonder what I was asking for, and from whom. I could write poems if I would let myself. Idleness is the leading cause of poetry in white males. But the world seems coiled like a serpent, slumbering. Best not to prod it.

Today I crave music of pristine blankness. Music without characteristics. Windy & Carl are a married couple who've been making ambient and shoegaze music together for a long time. They recorded Songs for the Broken Hearted during a period of unspecified sadness. But I'm not interested in sadness today. It's the disconnection that, weirdly, I connect to. Carl made the music in one room, and it sounds like the world slipping free from its moorings, the dark field beyond it gusting in. Windy recorded the vocals in another room, mining her journals for grist. Like a small figure with a lantern, searching for Carl through an impenetrable murk. You can leave a room but the wall remains. Today I feel as if I could move to the perimeter of the world and find a barrier of sheetrock at each end - can't get out of the wall. And there's James Lavino's soundtrack for The Woodpecker, in which he hollows out every genre he can think of, rendering each as a profoundly formal exercise. Music with sense but no meaning. Then things get really endgamey with Keith Fullerton Whitman, into whose music everything else funnels down. It's the hum at the root of consciousness. My mood condensed into barely audible form, not so much filling the blankness in the air as giving it contour, color, shape.

And suddenly through this shape an opening resolves. The day's soupy mass fragments into vectors of possibility. Because boredom is always a failure of imagination, and the blankness of this music, giving form to my own, stirs my imagination in a way that seemed impossible moments ago. What if I were to turn on the radio, and sit amid a gray tide of music and voices. What if a few notes of jazz pierced my sternum, opening a dark blossom inside my chest. And what if I opened the blinds, and saw dark blossoms blowing slowly over the horizon. Now we are getting somewhere. Time returns - the faucet drips the minutes, the heater hums the hours. The dark blossoms becoming entangled in the piano wire woven through the trees. My mind stirring. A red phone in a dish of milk rings. I find a brightly wrapped package inside my piano. When I shake it, I can hear the skitter of little talons inside. My cheeks puff out and I draw a long black stocking out of my mouth. A voice wells up from the radio, proclaiming, Get your heart down out that tree, Reverend, and sing! The world returns if you can part enough veils. Important to remember that a void is not a thing but the absence of things. And this world contains no shortage of things, we can touch them and move them. This is a reminder. Writing happens against all odds. It just did. I am thinking again. I can move. I am opening the blinds.