“I crashed down on the crossbar
And the pain was enough to make
A shy, bald Buddhist reflect
And plan a mass murder.”
-“Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before”
-The Smiths

We had come to see Morrissey at what seemed most non-corresponding venue in the world.

Myrtle Beach’s House of Blues is a compound. After passing five miniature golf courses and at least six versions of Wings, that family mart of all things beachy*, you come to a light where there’s a swampy, overgrown ex putt-putt course on your right. You then hang a right off the main road onto an access road and drive through a Siberia of parking lots. Past Dicks, that tourist restaurant chain where waiters are mean to you on purpose, a Florida-pink Hampton Inn and further in still, where you finally park, across another giant expanse of parking lot from the Alabama Theater, which I think is the rough equivalent of House of Blues for FM country music. You park and you walk and you are subsumed.

HOB is a fortress covered in a cosmetic varnish of folksy appeal so insistent it becomes its opposite. It’s advertising itself. Corporate folksy appeal. I’m telling you, The House of Blues sports more Howard Finster than Paradise Gardens in Georgia. It’s made to look like a tin jukejoint, only some of the folksy signs are painted with messages like, “No cameras inside. We will confiscate.” We sat and ate sweet potato fries and quesadillas at a table in the behemoth restaurant, because they told us if we ate there, we’d be let in earlier and get better seats. I had wanted to order the Blues Burger, but I was stopped by the price combined with the idea of Morrissey fans truer than I—which are most Morrissey fans, actually—shooting me “Meat is Murder” glances. It felt like the start of fan one-upsmanship that undergirds some element of the experience of seeing a show, or did to me, because my extent of knowledge of Morrissey and the Smiths runs to about fourteen of their billion-song oeuvre. To say you are a Morrissey fan feels to me like saying that you hated your mother in high school: It feels like a cliché just to say it even if it’s true, and it is true, to some extent, for many people within three decades of my age. In a way, dining at the restaurant was like a return to high school. Everyone stared at one another. Who were these other people, we all wondered, these Morrissey fans who were Morrissey fans enough to buy tickets and drive to this place and sit, now, here, and wait, sipping Cokes and bobbing their heads a little now, to the sounds of BB King and the Staple Singers?

The staff of HOB is legion, and they are not happy. Our waitress worked with the dull knowledge of a night of poor tips ahead. The man we asked the location of the bathroom when we first arrived pointed it out with a dutiful sigh. Workers in black-and-bright-yellow shirts stood around in unhappy clumps in the bar/courtyard between the entrance to the restaurant and the ticket window. My friend tells me there was an attendant in the other bathroom, and that she looked grim. A scowling woman directed us to the Special Restaurant Diners line. Then an older man, less unhappy, took our receipts and gave us special orange wristbands, for being restaurant diners.
Their misery was, of course, oddly fitting.

We got in line with everyone else, diners and non-. We stood for a long time as the line grew, winding around a log-cabinish ramp (here, the painted “No cameras/We will confiscate” sign). Minutes and more minutes passed. We shivered in the not-quite-spring-yet air. Several recorded announcements came on about what was and what wasn’t allowed inside. Two slightly cross men came and metal-detected everyone and endured the lame quasi-racist "We're not gangsters" jokes of the men in line ahead of us. For some reason, they collected people’s spare change too, which also was not allowed inside. At the door, two more workers confiscated drinks people had purchased outside. When we went to order more at the bar, the two bartenders were having a loud argument. The woman-bartender slammed the small fridge. “I don’t even wanna hear about it,” she said to the man-bartender before turning on her heel and facing me. “Yes?” she said.

My friend and I went and stood in the crowd before the stage. We were a mixed group, wristbandwise. It seemed the restaurant perk thing had been a ruse. Two more announcements came on, about emergency exits and proper behavior. There in that big crowd, my sympathies with cattle felt stronger than ever. It had been at least two hours of measured steps of submission. Despite this, it was beginning to feel more like a show. There was a crazy guy shouting things into the crowd. My friend, who loves Morrissey, bounced up and down on the balls of her feet in anticipation.

The man himself, when he came on, was, of course, just a man. His six-something frame was human flesh that scowled and preened across the stage, that flipped the long microphone cord dismissively again and again, strutting around, his band so far behind him and ignored by him completely, the players indistinguishable from one another in their jeans and tucked-in blue seersuckers, their shorn hair, their polite finesse with their instruments. He was just a man, but he shined. He frowned and he lamented; he beat his chest and pointed and leaned down to grasp the entreating hands from the front rows.

This crowd had paid not only to hear the songs they equated with huge parts of their lives; they had paid to be paid attention to in this precise way. To take part in a show in which the man pretended we were his private mirror. He sang his fictional trials to us--You understand, you understand, he was crying, because no one understood but us, of course; not these seersucker guys; no one. He was all strange sex appeal and raw egotistic need and gentlemanly aplomb; “Thank you so much,” he said quietly after each song, bowing at the ravenous applause.

All of this came down to the giant backdrop, a two-story black and white photo of a young, muscled man circa WWII, flexing his muscles and chomping a cigar. After the show, my friend said, “There was something really comforting in that photo. Something so Smiths about it, you know?” Yes, but blown up to the nth degree, revealed when another curtain in front of it fell with a dramatic flourish before the start of Morrissey’s set and flashing in different shades of foreboding with the colored lights of each song, the giant photo completed the feeling that we were truly at a rally of some sort. And I liked it. The parking lot wasteland and the militant lines, the guards, the timetables and wristbands; all of it had led up to this, so in this way, it seemed fitting as one of his blue-shirted minions swung and hit the heavy gong and the man sang the words, “Life is a pigsty/And if you don’t know this, Then what do you know?” before shifting into the final song, no encore, just the Big Lonely vacuum of “How Soon is Now?” with its strobelike guitar echoed in actual strobes, beating like the promise of violence against the giant face of the young son of war, against our small bodies as we swayed in ecstasy.

(*My friend once spotted what we agreed to be in the Top Five of Worst T-shirts Ever, at a Wings store in the Outer Banks. Beside an illustration of a stripper-pole, the shirt read, “I support single mothers.”)

Predictable Me.
So of course, unemployed and with dead car (yes, that, too) and with an uncertain future in Atlanta, a weekend visit to Beachtown to turn in my thesis and hang out with friends becomes one of the best weekends ever. It was Place-under-glass good. It was Awareness-that-this-is-a-golden-memory-in-the-making good, the way only fleeting moments can be. Moments lived under the weight of awareness of their finite nature. That we know we can’t keep.

During a Saturday morning sunny drive to the beach, a friend and I listened to Smog. Smog, as you may or may not know, is the alias of musician Bill Callahan, a man whom I’ve long assumed, from the sound of his seasoned voice and wise old lyrics, to be a creepily handsome but weathered old man, in the tradition of the Devil character from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? I recently found out that he is not; this was disappointing. Rather than a figure of fable, he’s like, a completely normal thirtysomething dude who’s bedded both Joanna Newsom and Chan Marshall. (And yes, I am aware that the word “bedded” makes everything sound worse and makes me sound like a writer from freaking Star magazine.)

The album A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is so beautiful, I feel kind of unworthy to listen to it and claim it for my own, and then I realized that this is precisely why I never listen to it. Even though I’ve had it for several years, my one wish with this album is for it always to feel happened-upon and new. I don’t want to learn all the words. There is so much lurvely music out there in the world, and I fill as many free spaces as possible with it. But something about this album. It’s so good that I harbor this sneaking suspicion that it’s too good for me. That it’s too good for the rest of my records, even. That it will raise the bar and wreck the happy equilibrium I’ve cultivated in my current community of cds.

Basically, there’s a concern concerning balance, Henshaw. There’s a fear of seesaws. Luckily, on this geographical end there is Marshall, who is pretty damn heavy in terms of import, and at least one amazing friend here (you know who you are, Missy-sitting-next-to-me), too, but I’ve gotta shake a leg and I dunno, where to go with this metaphor? Toss some gold ingots down over here. I am looking forward to the day when contentedness is not accompanied by some necessary “Carpe diem” sting. Does this happen? I have created a bad, bad precedent of not staying anywhere long enough to find out.

But darling, there's a gun in the garland.
David Berman is calling it quits with the Silver Jews.

The story ("the son of a demon come to make good the damage") is fascinating and beyond fascinating, whether or not you are a big old devotee of this band. I don't know quite what to say about all this music has meant to me. I mean, this website's been riddled with it for years (see above). The lyrics are often the autopilot, archetypal answers-in-the-brain to any weird, new situation. And although I think DB is saddling himself too much with a sense of overwrought responsibility, I also get it, and it makes my heart soar in sympathy.

Oh, I've written too much. Just read the link, and the link's link.

"When I go downtown
I always wear a corduroy suit
cause it's made of a hundred gutters
that the rain can run right through"

Requiescat in pace.

I said Goddamn,
Henshaw, I ain’t even taken off my apron, yet. But this record’s burnt an unholy hole right through all that pork grease in the heavenlyfried pork chop/cornbread/tater/green bean supper that Esmerelda cooked us tonight, and alacri-fied me right up.

It’s been hours. It’s been days of legs pedaling, to and from campus, or sitting uncomfortable at sweaty, polluted intersections with the heat rising in waves, and weeks of sitting and working silently at the library, and listening to the morning news in concentrated silence, knit-browed, and working silently here at home, or silently at school. "Concentration" and "dread for my country and yours" can pretty much sum up the time since I wrote last. [God. Horrors and nightmares. Story from canvassing last Sattiday: Woman our age calling down from her porch, in a chummy sing-song: “You knooow Obama just got the nomination because of affirmative action!” We kept walking: step-step-step, then I hissed to my partner: “What did that even mean?” “It meant she’s racist.” “Oh.”]

And I’m so glad to have to have all this split wide open, finally, by Jenny Lewis’s new album, of all things. Yes, really. It’s called Acid Tongue. I don’t even know it well enough yet, to describe individual songs to you, just to say: Holy Hell-!, let’s rejoice; she’s put out a barn burner, left that last, tame and tiny rickety Thing that was that last Rilo Kiley album behind to eat her country-bluesy dust, fellas. She’s got Elvis Costello singing with her on one song, and the Watson Twins, too, on some, but the main deal is that the songs are just good. There’s like, some Dusty Springfield, and even, dare I say, some Joni Mitchell up in there. But mostly, you’re just thinking, “Oh, good song.”

Because, sorry to whine, but it’s just been so long since I’ve been caught up that way by anything new.
Everyone’s talkin’ ‘bout, well, say, the Fleet Foxes this and that, and they’re…fine. They’re pretty. No, they don’t remind me of CSN&Y, though yes, they’re clearly a bundle of talent; but there’s only so long I can marvel honestly at your perfect playing-card tower construction. “Wow, so flawless and towering. Such nice right angles.”

Gimme something clumsier. Something greasier. Thank you.

Report from House Arrest, (Chained to Computer.)
(Warning: This post contains Snake Island-y content:)

These days, I eat breakfast, consume coffee, writewritewrite, make lunch to Wolf Parade (“Fine Young Cannibals” and “An Animal in Your Care” are the official Themesongs of Lunch in August), then write some more, usually severely reduced-quality content.

I also make lists. Like this.


Nominated for Retirement.
I’ve decided I'd like to nominate the following songs for retirement. They’re not bad songs. I’ve just had my allotment for this lifetime.

“California Dreamin’”
“Satisfaction”
Anything by John Cougar Mellancamp
“I Feel Good”
“Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Moondance”
“What I Like About You”

Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you can’t imagine a life devoid, from here on out, of any chance of “Jack and Diane.” I don’t want to be a dictator about this. If we could just work something out where I don’t ever have to hear these songs again, that’d be good enough.

Against Music Snobbery
(Part 34 of an unintentional, growing series in which Alice rails against one of the great pet-peeves in her pantheon, as part of a larger, futile attempt to fight back the twin fears that 1. she herself is a music snob and 2. real music snobs may look down on her.)

Look, now.
Now; the split second, even, before you get all raised-eyesbrowsy on me. Where did you first hear that band that you’re shocked that I’ve never heard of? That band you’ve been listening to for a whole six weeks, six months, six years now, already? Were you in their basement at the moment they realized brilliance and were you the only one there to recognize it?

Or were you helped along?

Because if you bought their record, it was probably because a friend told you to, or else you heard it playing at someone else’s house and liked it, or you listened to it at a record store, or you read about it online, or you heard about it on All Things Considered (in which case you’ll have a whole busload and half of music snobs laughing at you), or maybe your ex introduced you to a whole new musical world you had no inkling of before you walked into that party and started talking, or else your older sister used to listen to it in her bedroom at night and shut the door on you, and you’d put your ear to the floor, in the dusty yellow shag, there, to hear its vibrations.

If any of the above is true, you have not your own genius, but that of your friends and family and acquaintances to thank. And yes, I’ll say “genius,” because music catching fire inside our brains and bodies feels like nothing but.

And because it’s a better thing to be a bit grateful. It’s a better thing that we all go out in the world and thank whomever it was who first played for us Gang of Four or Shostakovich, Fela Kuti or The Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell or Lady Day. Thank your old friend now. Send him an email and tell him about the excellent Tom Waits show you just came home from, how breathless and happy you feel, and tell him how you realized all at once, that you never would have been there in that wonderful, boney balcony seat, your spine rattling shivers through your skin, if it hadn’t been for him, way back forever ago, in his parents’ kitchen, sticking Rain Dogs in the CD player and playing it so loud his own dogs howled outside. Thank him for making you listen to it again and again till you stopped saying it was weird.

It’s a better thing to thank these people, even if they’re people who don’t expect your thanks, and I’ll say especially in these cases, better to thank them, than to thank yourself. Because if you pat your own back, that's totally a difficult and physically awkward gesture, man. It pulls your shoulder out of joint all weird. And then you'll secretly know you’re lying. And your mind turns you cagey and craven to prove it. And then, eventually, we have on our hands, way too many solitary, striving, and in the end, lonely, assholes.
And that’s not what music’s About, Charlie Brown.

Maybe you heard this music at a show the group played. Maybe you wandered into there by yourself, or your girlfriend’s band opened up and so you had to do the polite thing and watch their set because they watched your girlfriend’s, even though you’re tired and your feet hurt from this awful concrete floor for four goddamned hours. You stay and watch and listen and suddenly, the room gets that electric feeling. No one there knew this would happen, but it’s happening. This music is chastening the crowd. This crowd is moved. Or maybe there is no crowd. Maybe it’s a different night, one in which it really is only, just you and the performer. And somehow, you experience brilliance.

You’re still not so great. You’re lucky. We’re all humbled by the music itself. Thank the sound.


(Thanks to my colleague in Atlanta, as this diatribe was sparked, in part, by our ten-second phone exchange today in which we argued about nerds versus cool people and I was at a complete loss. Now I'm not.)

Hi, Henshaw.
I’m not dead. Just at the start of a very active summer here in Beachtown. Some highlights.

This week, I am busybusybusy, pitching stories to magazines and radio shows and interviewing embalmers and such for The Book. It feels good to be so busy.


Much more fun.
I took a break from all this on Tuesday to drive all the way over the Chapel Hill to see X, one of my favorite bands ever, ever, ever. It was a reunion tour without that irritating reunion tour feel. Really, it was tight and energized and lurvely.

I don’t have any friends here in Beachtown who like X, so I went alone, but that fact actually felt like a perk. The drive was great and it was great too, to revel in my nerdy fandom rather than having to explain anything to anyone or worry about someone else’s good time. Instead, it was me and the rest of the crowd, mostly male, future versions of me: 50-ish dudes in black-rimmed glasses who had come alone, a few with girlfriends/wives, and at least one with a little girl who was probably eight or nine.

It was glorious. The goofy quirk being, of course, Billy Zoom, the band’s platinum blonde legendary guitarist. One of my favorite things about Billy Zoom is that, in reaction to the bullshit GuitarFace that a lot of '70s musicians were known for, he plays--these uniquely difficult and weird guitar parts--without ever looking at his hands, and just standing stock-still, grinning.

He's also known for turning this grin on individuals in the crowd. Staring, especially, at ladies. (And it's not just me.)

I’d somehow forgotten this. Maybe it was because last time I saw X I was clearly there with a boyfriend and this time around, I was clearly there sola.

I’d parked myself between Exene and John Doe, but Billy Zoom, down at the other end of the stage there at the Cradle, took a turn gazing into the eyes of every chica near the front of the stage, leering/grinning and grinning/leering. And part of me’s all like, you know: we were all standing there staring at him; why shouldn’t he have a turn? But then part of me feels fucking odd when I’m dancing my arse off like a fool and singing along with Exene and she’s got her eyes squeezed shut into her mic a foot in front of me, but Billy Zoom’s closer, leaning over the monitor singing straight back at me with a trace of that trademark mockery of his. I want to be like, Dude, Exene, do something about this. But even punk rock royalty can do nothing about other punk rock royalty.
And all worth it. And all worth it.



Tourist in your (Ghost)town.
Last weekend, Marshall visited so we decided to be tourists.
We went to the beach, something I never do here by myself, and we went on a walking ghost tour. The confusingly pirate-y dressed tour guide started off the tour by warning us that, in addition to ghost stories, there would also be some history. For this, she apologized. It was unavoidable.

This was especially funny because we had decided on the ghost tour mainly because we couldn’t afford any of the town’s fancy historical tours, most of which require eclectic transportation forms, like horse-drawn carriages, houseboats and double-decker busses. Mostly, I guess, because it’s old people who actually go for this sort of entertainment, not kids under 40 like me.
At any rate, learning about the history of Beachtown through half-bullshat stories was our only way.

Some fact-ishes we picked up: 1. A dueling ground here in town left disgruntled ghosts right and left and 2. Our wonder-of-1970s-archetecture library is also haunted by a racist asshole from the 1800s.

One awesome woman in our tour group (not me) kept things lively by frequently shouting things like, “I want to stay one night in that haunted house! I would pay them money!” Another awesome woman (not not me) kept things lively by remarking loudly, “That’s true!” when the pirate-guide announced that, in addition to housing a lively ghost, one particular house on the tour is also the home of a very friendly cat. This house was the house next door to the house where I started out here in Beachtown, see. So I knew.

Marshall said it sounded like maybe I was a plant on the tour. Oh, well. It was a nice cat. No lie.

Today's challenge:
Singing along with that MIA song lodged in your brain without just sounding like an eight-year-old boy's interpretation of a machine gun.
"Dun-dada-dun-dada-dun-da-da-dun..."

Best lyric, though, from Timbaland: "Don't get mad!/In fact, let me hit that."

Snotty remarks about a smart film.
Saw The Counterfeiters tonight. I recommend it. It was one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Really good. Well-done.

My one thing is this: In period movies that take place at any point pre-1960? In scenes at like, parties? You can just see the wardrobe people having damn orgasms over getting to dress their beautiful, uniformly well-fed and leggy bit actors. In this one, it was all early(!) 1930s(!) Berlin(!!) party.(!) And these people; god, they looked good.
And I’m sure people did look good at such underground soirees, but I’m also sure that not everyone looked so uniformly good: so spotless and stunning and nattily dressed. It’s like movies where there are Halloween parties. Everyone’s always gone all out. (Like they had access to, oh, a costume closet somewhere.) There’s no whole cadre of non-dressed up people, and there’s no ten women all dressed up like Goth Sexy Whatever, to varying degrees of success. (Goth sexy carrot! Goth sexy dresser drawer!)

Okay, but the beautiful people party scenes in The Counterfeiters are like, a sixth of the film. They do dazzle. They made me feel all melty and yearn-y over the gorgeous shoes and red lipstick and yawning creamy expanses of silks and skin. And maybe the whole point was contrast, since the other, dead-serious five-sixths of it takes place in, um, concentration camps. So fine, but fine.


The little-by-little.
It’s midnight now, after day #1 of summer vacation. The last summer vacation. A first day of frantically working on el thesis and trying to make myself relax about working on it. Trying to make an honest effort and convince myself with no feedback from anyone else, that this was fine, this (very) little-by-little.
I do love a schedule, Henshaw. It’s why I came back to school in the first place.
So, summer vacation is good practice for what’s peeking out from ‘round that corner over there: That life post-MFA. Shh!

At any rate, it went fine.


A Telephone that Rings, but Who's to Answer?
So it’s late, now. It’s tonight, now. And I go for the most knee-jerk source of comfort to reward all my solitary Grown Up Lady effort. Oh yes: Headphones plus Stephen Stills. Who’s up for a little “Southern Cross”? Oh, me. Just me. And “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” with those Brothers Allman, and, as you know, Abba, “The Eagle.” Terrible, wonderful, awful music of childhood, I shall crawl inside of you; I shall shut my eyes.

It’s funny. Most of these songs remind me of my ex-hippie uncle; all of them remind me of being a small child in some hazily-lit nighttime summer where everything was green and the grownups and older cousins and siblings were all relaxed and happy and I was flitting about playing, probably annoying everybody and spending long moments watching them all, so much younger I was than all of them. The specifics themselves aren’t clear. I’m thinking…croquet game? Maybe cashew nuts in a dish on some low coffeetable that I gorged myself on?

(Though too: CSNY and leads to Billie and Art Tatum and Ella; grandmother music. Don’t think and for a second you hear her singing along in her rusty voice, her pink glasses catching those fluorescent kitchen lights as she turns her head upwards, mouth open.)

Trying, trying, trying to assign specifics here, to re-incarnate.

I can give you no real concrete detail, Henshaw. I’m a poor writer about this. It’s so weird how these details fade to us, and yet the feeling—that capital-H happiness—still hangs there, still hazy and warm like a summer night, like the very words, “long ago summer night,” wrapped inside some sound.

A Friendly Suggestion.
or two, actually.
Maybe your day's not going so well. Or your week.
You should help it along, by listening to Wussy's song, "Airborne."

I wish they'd come down south. Come on, Wussy! Come to us!

St. Patrick's Day Log
Beachtown, Carolina
In the late afternoon, the public radio station left on in the bedroom turns to Thistle and Shamrock-style new age flavored Celtic-lite. Dangercat leaves the room immediately. Upon arrival home, he is found on the sofa instead of his usual spot on the bed. The fiddling from beneath the bedside table explains all.

Later, Marshall emails these photos from Oakland cemetery in Atlanta. The tornado damage is really bad, much worse than he'd thought, he says. It's hard to look at them.

Album of the Week
Or, Misery’s delicate company
Do I have about six things on my to do list for today that I’d planned on getting around to in the noontime hour? Yes. Am I so overscheduled it’s laughable? You betcha.
Am I going to stop everything this moment, just for a moment, to gush to you about Elliot Smith’s first album and how I cannot stop listening to it this week? Oh, and how.

The self-titled album was the first of his I heard, and it’s still The Record, in my book. All rough-hewn acoustic guitar strumming—fingers slipping down strings as each song moves from chord to heartbreaking, cathartic chord, here. On later albums, I tire of his subject matter: how many fingerpointin’ heroin blame-numbers can one stomach in one sitting, even when the singer’s pointing at himself? Listening becomes like trying to remain friends with a junkie; after a matter of time, it’s up to him or her to figure it out, but you have to separate yourself.

But somehow--if it's not just teetering on the edge of huge, tacky metaphor to say so, which I think it is--this record is like the halcyon days of said-friendship: you know, when it was about something else, too. Somehow here it all coalesces into this ramshackle, controlled mess of passion: Smith’s voice low and straining up to sing these simple melodies contrasted so beautifully with his strumming.

The sun out every day lately, way up high in the cold sky, and we’re having these beautiful bright , clean-smelling evenings and driving from one place to another in town in my car, it’s all I want: the steady build of “Christian Brothers,” or the slow, crumbling convergence of those opening chords of “Clementine.” For some reason, the obvious misery here blows right by me and I’m nested for the moment, instead, inside the sheer beauty of it. The sunset, the high sky with its snakes of cirrus clouds, the green trees and this, this, this. Let’s hear it again. Gah.

Never one to hyperbolize, I thought I’d title this entry

Music. Gods.
I truly believe the world would be a better place if everyone in it owned this record.

The Dirtbombs, hey! And the record’s Ultraglide in Black, and it’s freaking me out. Every album of theirs has a totally different sound, something I’d distrust if this one hadn’t already stolen my soul and sucked the marrow out. At any rate, in Ultraglide, the Detroit outfit takes old R&B songs and does waay more than simply cover them. They take the ideas of these songs and make them into things of their own and, in this charmingly succinct album, do the same to you.

I tell you: Making dinner the other night, I found myself going over to the old boombox and hitting “play” once, twice, three times, the volume rising, my roommates drawn to the kitchen for an impromptu groove-off. Every song totally rules, and this group is obviously having such a silly amount of bad-ass fun, you will get jealous. Jealous, even as your own hips shake. Stand-outs are “Underdog,” “Kung Fu” and “Ode to a Black Man.”
Dancedance revoluuution, indeed.


Oh, and their website’s q&a page is also totally funny. Two sample questions:
“Q: Blah blah blah Detroit scene?
A: If there was a 'Detroit Scene', we'd tell you all about it. However, there's not. It's a nice media delusion, but that's about all it is.”

“Q: Blah blah blah the White Stripes?
A: If you want to know about the White Stripes, ask the White Stripes.”
(This last one, with a link to that little band’s website which, once it opens, remains within the frames of the Dirtbombs’ site. Har.)

The beginning of this end.
Someone tells me Thurston Moore has called iPods the fluorescent lighting of music, and I’m inclined to agree; then again, my agreeing might just be in that sad, petty way of someone who doesn’t own an iPod. Yet.

It’s this “yet” that depresses me, Henshaw, like it’s fate, but more than that—my doom—to listen to all music in this broken-up-by-“tracks” (Whatthafuck happened to songs?) picking-and-choosing Impatient, Important Consumer way. One of the best experiences in zee mundo has to be listening and listening to an album until each song makes sense to you in its context. Especially because everyone makes that context up for himself. It’s beautiful; it’s dying.

The iPod and its MP3-playery ilk (Can you really blame Apple? No matter what, it would have been some brand, right? Some something, in our rearview manifest destiny mirror, at any rate) have steadily decreased the likelihood of being at a party and listening to an album all the way through, having it drunkenly explained to you by the person who loves it, or meeting someone wonderful and talking and talking and later you hear this album again. And having it remind you. I know you. There are records you still can’t listen to. There are records you will always listen to when you want to be reminded. Or whatever, any of the other thousands of things a record can do when it’s a record. Of an event. Of people playing music in a room. As one artist once said. Not me.

I think all this began with the internet, with being able to find music on the internet. Screw whole albums when we can just hear the one song, right?
It’s my fault, too. The other week I ran across the Very First Mix CD a friend made for me that was entirely from ripped internet tracks. This guy worked with me at my first job, this nonprofit in Atlanta. I also had a little crush on him, which may or may not have been reciprocated, but it was all very sweet, somehow, our friendship, which never turned into anything more than our doing goofy seated dances in his Volkswagen as he found new routes all over Atlanta, just driving and driving around, trying to eat at every burrito joint in that town. I was right out of college.

Right before Christmas of 2000, he emailed me and asked me what songs I’d want on a CD if I could have any songs in the world. Any songs—in the world???

Do you remember this, Henshaw? How mind-blowing it was?

I wasted the rest of the day then, wracking my brain and coming up with songs I liked but had forgotten about till then—songs from my childhood and from old high-school mix-tapes and from more recent years. The final CD was my Christmas present, labeled: “Xmas 2K.”

I’m listening to it now and feeling all kinds of nostalgia. So mix-tapes/CDs can do the same thing as regular albums, sure. But that’s because it’s a set list, reminding you of a specific time period. Particular set people you may never see again, or at least never see like you did the first time you heard that song.

So, here it is. Remember: This is from that period when there was still the possibility, it seemed, of Never Hearing a Song again. Of its being lost, forever. The kids, they were less automatically-hip, then. There was none of this Sirius Radio. None of this Pitchforkity madness. With that obvious apologetic preamble, here it is, the list of songs the 22 or 23-year-old me, chose:

Xmas 2K Mix circa Dec. 2000

1. “Tennessee” – Arrested Development
Say what you will, you snob. The beginning of this song totally rules.

2. “Blackbird” – Paul McCartney
Soon after this, my sister had her second child and I made her a mix CD with this song on it For Her Labor, which I now think is pretty funny. The thing stayed in her duffle bag the whole time, turns out. It also turns out Thirtysomething beat me to this idea.

3. “Blue Monday” – New Order
This song seemed so dark and sensitive in that creepyfake Iron Curtain-y Unbearable Lightness of Being-y way. All new wave songs in the early 80s tried to sound just as dark and jaded, but this one wins. Along with that Cure song about “I saw you look like a Japanese baby.” Har. I have a soft spot for such songs.

4. “Carry On” – CSNY
I am a small child. There’s my cool ex-hippie uncle and warmth and all things good. Everything else is foggy, but I still love this song. So. Much.

5. “Clap Hands” – Tom Waits
First boyfriend intro’d me to Tom Waits. I can sing every word to this in my sleep.

6. “Everest” – Ani Difranco
Yes, I was one of Those college girls. But listen: This song stands. This song is so beautiful, it will still make me cry without much prompting if no one’s around.
“And when church let out, the sky was much clearer/And the moon was so beautiful that the ocean held up her mirror.”

7. “Queen of Las Vegas” – The B-52s
When I was 13-ish, I went through a mad, early-new-wavey-B-52s-lovin’ phase. I bought that bio book Party Out of Bounds and cursed God for not planting me in Athens, GA in 1979. At some age other than one.

8. “Hold On” – En Vogue (Those “Never Gonna Get It” folks.)
Lord, so, at the start of this, the ladies do an acapella first verse of “Who’s Lovin’ You,” and it’s just awful. Straight-up flat. But the actual song itself is still pretty good, for a 90s radioland R&B tune. Though I admit, I’ve been skipping over this one on recent listens.

9. “I Wanna Be Adored” – The Stone Roses
In high school, my friend Janice put this on a mix-tape that I wore out. I remember sitting at my desk at the nonprofit and remembering its existence and absolutely freaking out. It’s a great song; you know it as soon as you hear the initial build-up and the metallic guitars that start it out.

10. “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems – Notorious B.I.G.
Undergrad parties, plain and simple. Plastic keg cups of Budweiser you paid four dollars for. Bee-eye-gee, pee-oh-peepee-aye.

11. “Spring” – Kristin Hersh
Her first solo album is flawless, and I love the second one for nostalgia’s sake. The third one is patchy, populated by KH’s once-just-inscrutable lyrics gone silly. But this song stands out. Perfect structure. Pretty Kristin and scary Kristin and still just pretty. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as interpreted by Throwing Muses.

12. “Stepping Out” – Joe Jackson
Okay, so I’m four years old. And I’m in my big sister’s room, and she’s letting me draw in the red pen on her cube notepad in all the pastel colors while she gets ready to go out with her friends. Red, shag carpet, Garfield poster on the wall and this song, alwaysalways, on her record player or radio.
“We are young, but getting old before our time/We’ll leave the TV and the radio behind; don’t you wonder what we’ll find?”

13. “Trism” – B-52s

14. “Wanna Be Starting Something” – Michael Jackson
Mama-say! Mama-saw! Yeah, you know the rest…

15. “When U Were Mine” – Cyndi Lauper (Prince)
Always my favorite song of hers on her first record. Remember how, when she first came out, it was all “Who’s better? Madonna or Cyndi Lauper?? Who? Who?” I voted for Cyndi. I always dressed as a gypsy for Halloween.

16. “Africa” – Toto
Why? Why because, little kid/1980s, “Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a lepress above the Serengeti.” At some point, I debated with my sisters over whether “lepress” referred to a female leper. And I just looked it up, and it’s spelled “leprous,” and it does. Well, "suffering from leprosy." Either way, whole new meaning.

Also?
How can the CD which accompanies Oxford American’s new southern music issue be so relentlessly perfect?* How and how? The blues! The country! The old and new timey rock ‘n roll! As the cheesy record-review cliché goes, the first tune--“If I Were A Carpenter” by Eldridge Holmes--alone, is worth the price of the whole shebang. But then there’s so much more sheer happiness here. Rundon'twalk. Gah-!

(*Well, except for one or two tracks near the end which are just relentlessly really nice.)

Is it True I can spread my wings?

Meanwhile, in one eastern Carolina town, the obsession with Abba’s “The Eagle” resurges with a fresh energy and passion. The colors of that passion are shimmery, shining purple and gold, the colors featured in a 1977 video for the song my roommate, Carmelita, sent to me. And yes, my god, is it ever dull, but you’ve got to remember: this was pre-MTV, pre-Janet Jackson dancing in the streets shoulder-to-shoulder with all the townsfolk, pre-Twisted Sister guy showing up in your bedroom to lay down the law.
Before all that, there were people lip-synching, joyous, into a camera. And excellent T-shirts.

So of course I emailed it straightaway to Marshall, who shares my embarrassing love of many things Abba, who in fact was the person to correct me on the chorus of “Take a Chance on Me” as we painted his bathroom and I sang along, loud and characteristically unheeding of modesty. “Alice, it’s ‘when the pretty birds have flown”.
Oh. Not “would it really hurt, so call!’” I blame the Swedish. I can enunciate just fine.

Anyway, back to the important thing—our “Eagle” emails.

Alice:
Okay, so, for the best moment, go to 2:52-ish, and check out Non-Bjorn’s facial expression. It’s all “I can’t believe I’m in this freaking video.”

Marshall:
I swear, Frida was about to eat that psychedelic eagle flying around in front of her mouth.

Did you see their outfits? You can’t tell until the end, but one is wearing a shiny, shiny shirt with a huge bunny on it, and the other is wearing a coyote shirt not to dissimilar to yours. Well, maybe a bit more polyester.
Glorious.

Alice:
Yes; their shirts basically rule. And it looks like there’s a video for “The Name of the Game,” too, but I haven't watched it yet. I'm saving it for a special occasion. Then again, it’ll probably be some variant of blonde lady and brunette lady singing and the less-attractive Bjorn and not-Bjorn coming in every now and then, n-B trying not to laugh.

You know, I think Bjorn is to me what Orson Welles was to the girls in Heavenly Creatures. "It." He’s so repugnant to me and always has been.

Marshall:
If you didn't know they were named Agnetha and Anni-Frid, you might well think they were office workers from St. Paul. Shiny, shiny office workers telling magical tales in front of their mesmerizing disco ball.

Also, “Eagle” is not much of a disco song. How do you categorize something like that? Pseudo-mystic Swedish synthesizer pop? Could any other band have produced this song?

My favorite line from the YouTube description:
“Eagle” did not perform that well in the charts.

The Candyman Cometh.
We, all of us, have people we rely on to be our musical drug dealers. Sure, there are friends we share music back and forth with, but, and this is if you’re lucky, there’s that one person from whom you take an awful lot more than you give. That person who knows just exactly what you like, what you need, baby, and doles it out little by little till you’re begging for more.
Something like that, anyway.
I am not too modest to admit that a lot of friends have told me I’m that person for them, and that’s great and that’s nifty, but you know what? I’ve got an even purer source. At least one. And that’s where I get my personal stash.

My new discovery is not my new discovery, but one that my Musical Drug Dealer heard first, and knew would be right up my alley. I'm not saying you would like it, only demonstrating my MDD's uncanny ability to get inside my brain. Anyway, the band is from Ohio they call themselves Wussy, and they play nifty lo-fi (low-fi? lo-fih? Har) style rawk that makes my little heartstrings vibrate all crazylike.

La Musica-!
I love the music, but I’m pretty damn picky with it. This is something my MDD understands. He knows I like acoustic music, but only when it’s kind of unprocessed and that I prefer the minimalist-sounding stuff. He knows I like the poppish rock, but only when it contains this particular brilliant originality and cutthroat lyrics. Same with hip-hop. I mean, but seriously: Did that just make sense? Probably not, and I probably left a lot out. This is what is great about a musical drug dealer: He(or she) gets you in a way that can’t be articulated. It is greatness in the world when some other person can do that with any part of who you are. Trying to explain my taste to you in words, Henshaw, is like trying to tell you what a poem “means.” This poem means: screw it.

“Oh, you’re a ‘Music Person.’ Do You Like Coldplay?” and other frustrations.
I resent people assuming I’ve heard of certain bands or that because I like music, that I like it in that competitive asshole, Chunklet magazine, record-clerk way (though the above heading may belie that fact.) To take that a step back, I resent people taking a look at me and assuming any thing about my general aesthetic or what kind of person I must be. (An aside: Just because a person has a couple tattoos doesn’t mean she wants to sit around for hours or even minutes and talk about them, not hers or yours. Do-! Not-! Trap such a gal at a party with someone who does this-! Please?)

The fact is that I care for the music I love with a ferocity that embarrasses me; at times there persists a not-very-still, small voice within me that says: Hey! What’s the deal? You’re not supposed to be this way outside your teens, you odd duck, you. That voice is biznullshit and to be ignored, though. It’s just Self-Doubt saying Hello. Mostly, I just feel lucky to have this force available to me that affects me so strongly any time I want it to. And so, conversely, there is just so much music that I hate. I hate more than I love, just because I love what I love so much. I feel completely indifferent to just about every new band that I hear, because there are just too many of them, now, and I'm just not interested anymore, in keeping up. I'm feeling lazy, lately. I'm willing to rely on people who know my specific tastes to recommend things; otherwise, I'll just sit at home and listen to Guided By Voices some more.

Just Another Teenager at the Doc Martin Sock Hop
Because it's changed.
I came of age at a very lucky time. When you expose a music-spazzy, in many other ways spazzy, adolescent girl to 1990s culture, she just might explode. Zines! Wacky dress that's purely inventive! That has nothing to do with fashion (Whee flannel and Doc Martins and Kool Aid dyed red hair)! There was this Brand New third-wave feminism thing; there was this Sassy magazine-thing (forever a sigh deep inside now, an RIP now.) There were these rock shows, and if you went to these shows, you’d meet other creative freaky dorky people like you. For a time, my teenage friends and I completely lost our heads over it all.

Then of course you grow older, and a wave of underground music becomes commercially co-opted and fast-forward to today, when a whole lot of forces—the aforementioned commercialization being one, the widespread availability of all information, music included, being another—and of course the loss of shine that comes with time; all these have worked together to make finding inventive music an activity more akin to flipping through cable channels than excavating for shiny diamonds. You don’t have to work hard to find anything anymore, and with online saturation, some small band from Ohio, maybe, blows up and becomes huge waaay before it probably should. Before it’s ready to. And there are copycats way too soon and it’s confusing, too, because everyone’s heard that rare Pavement EP and it doesn’t mean that they feel the same way about it as you do.
And nothing’s rare, really.

This is why I keep my passion a bit private. This is why I don’t like to make it competitive. I don’t like every new band that comes along, and the ones I do like, I tend to think of as my secret life soundtrack. I still try to allow myself that privilege, even if it’s a lie. I like to sit down with you and see if you feel the same way, not by talking about this band versus that one, but by hitting play, by whispering, “Listen.”

Hey Summer, Where ya Been?
A= This is moving week. Yes, it’s adieu to ye olde artsy garret in favor of a portion of giant old mansion built in the nineteen-teens, with my two pals, Ginger and Carmelita. It’s not that I don’t need, love and crave solitude, Henshaw; it’s that too much of it in an enforced way magnifies my weird little proclivities to the max. Soon, the decoupage is everywhere and things are organized in a ROY G BIV sorting system made up in a fit of 2 a.m. inspiration. You understand. Merely having people in the next room, or the next wing, as this gigantor apartment will allow, is comforting. It tells me there’s order, and there’s dinner taking place at a normal hour in the next room, which I am welcome to join, or to decline, politely.

The folks moving out left things in the mansion house—which I may just call the place here—with a wink and nod to a great Jenny Lewis tune—anyway, they left it kind of a mess. This means that Carmelita and Ginger and I have spent the past two weeks dumping things and scrubbing things and shouting, “Oh god, that’s disgusting!” a lot, upon revealing items such as particularly gigantic dead cockroaches, rat droppings and dog turds in kitchen cabinets.
No one ever said the road to the life of beauty was a smooth one.

So, we’ve been cleaning. Meanwhile, I’ve been in the early stages of trying to put together a syllabus for my classes this fall, and-! working on two stories I want to have ready for workshop when classes start up again. This, between: putting in many a mind-numbing, but necessary hour at ye olde call center of doom and writing articles for various local publications. That and I can’t seem to shake this weirdo summer cold which tells me that all I really want to do is sleep all the time.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to Carmelita and Ginger, the notion of creating some Uruk-hai from the pits of the steamy swamps west of Beach Town to help us move things from our two apartments to the new one, come Saturday. Seems their only close male friend is outta town for the weekend, which brings our collective grand total of close male friends here in town to zero.
Not that we need the menfolk. The three of us have enough moves under our belts to be able to move our big unwieldy wooden furniture in our damn sleep at this point, anyway, I suspect. We’ll be fine. Freaking exhausted, but fine.
Gotta go, now. See ya.

(Meanwhile: Listening nonstop to these songs on the National’s newest record that Marshall keeps feeding me, one by one. Argh.)

Oh, and the new John Doe single, "The Golden State"? The cathartic number he duets on with Kathleen Edwards? That one? Is something I can't stop listening to. You should check it out.

(I'm trying to buy the CD, but every music store in Beachtown is sold out for now. So I have just the one song, and I'm seriously considering just burning it onto a CD so that I can drive around the places I need to go today and just listen to it over and over. I am a wasteful American. Not that I'm actually gonna do it. Ha. Haha..err.)

Things Seen Along the Way
This weekend I drove down to Charleston, South Cacalacka to work on a story. The great thing about the drive is that you’re actually on a road, rather than an interstate, and that actual road winds through actual towns. You know you’re really traveling, rather than just relying on duplicate green signs to tell you.
Anyway. A couple things.

1. The whole sign-with-cartoon-pig-outside-the-barbecue-place has been made fun of, pretty much to death. You know, “Come partake of me! I am deeelicious!” But I saw one on Route 17 that I think brings the whole thing to a new level. The cartoon pig not only was parked before a heaping plateful of bbq, but underneath were the words, “Gut-Bustin’ Portions!” And Sir Pig’s expression as he looked up toward the viewer, clutching a fork, was that of bug-eyed horror, something akin to looking like he was about to:

a-vomit
or
b-bust a literal gut.

That is, die an excruciating death like that gluttony guy in the movie Seven, or like a duck whose insides are intended for pate, and good god this is a horrible line of thought, so I’ll stop there…

2. Around dusk yesterday, I drove by a golf course that looked like it hadn’t been mowed for a number of months. Right there, at the side of the road, and for some reason, really inviting, somehow. It made me want to pull over and have a picnic and then roll down one of its manmade hills, now soft with weeds and flowers, human negligence having robbed it of some of it manicured bite.

Also: Favorite song lyric from favorite song at present: "I had this friend, his name was Marc with a C./His sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV."
Because you needed to know that.