Kablammo!

Maid Marion: Or forgetful…

It’s been quite a pleasant interlude, but I feel my old self coming on again, for better and for worse. We’ll see how this week-end goes, but in any event there will be no regrets.

In other news, last week’s CO-UT-AZ-UT-AZ-NV-AZ-NV-AZ-NV-AZ-NV-CA roadtrip was ridiculously awesome, and extremely photogenic. Some of my 800+ digifotos will be shown once I get around to it.

It’s kind of funny that, despite my computer dying on Monday and my iRiver H140 (my constant companion for over 3 years) showing signs that it will do the same, and despite the pervasive rain this week, I’m in the best mood I’ve been in for ages.

I just realized the horrible situational irony inherent in sitting in a windowless office, a drone working for the Man, and blasting Rage Against the Machine on my headphones.

1. The Stooges — “Gimme Danger”
   I can’t help thinking how hard this song would be to do well as karaoke. Over the course of the song, Iggy goes from ‘regular’ singing (as regular as he gets, anyway) to a full-bodied howl, to gentle crooning just above a whisper. (Of course, I also can’t help thinking I’d really like to see the karaoke parlor that has this song as a selection.) The beginning is dark, but still almost mellow, since the acoustic guitar is so prominent. You know where it’s going, but it’s not there yet. As soon as the electric kicks in after the first verse, though, it brings with it a tremendous sense of inevitability—you know it’s just a matter of time before all hell breaks loose.
2. The Traveling Wilburys — “Handle With Care”
   It’s hard to imagine a collaboration between George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty (I know I’m forgetting someone…) being any less amazing than this. I assume they each had a hook or a verse or whatever lying around unused, and they decided just to toss ’em all together and see what came out. And thank god they did so. Unfortunately the George parts are a bit flat compared to the rest, but the bridges (both of them, but especially Roy’s) are just sublime.
3. Sublime — “Caress Me Down”
   For years, this song’s lyrics constituted the bulk of my Spanish-language vocabulary. (Nowadays I have some Manu Chao lyrics as well.)
4. Hawksley Workman — “Dirty and True”
   This is the point where Hawksley goes from ‘charming’ to ‘excessive’. The constant changes in the song are less ‘clever’ than ‘jarring’, and the extended spoken passage in radio-announcer-voice just sounds ‘trite’.
5. Beethoven — Piano Sonata No. 15, 2nd Movement ‘Andante’
   I can’t say enough good things about this piece—it (and to a lesser extent, the 2nd movement of his sonata no. 13) is the composition I’d consider selling my soul to be able to play. I love the minor-key opening, and the steady and staccato left-hand part that makes it feel almost like a march. I love the upbeat, major-key interlude, happy and free, with the quiet-quiet-LOUD dynamic reminiscent of Haydn’s ‘Surprise Symphony’, and the floating and lyrical right-hand part that sounds as gay and unburdened as laughter on a summer afternoon. And above all, I love the return to the minor key, and the way the ‘laughter’ motif returns, recast in a decidedly more sinister tone.
6. Teppo & Kõrre — Garmoshka popurii
   Whoever came up with the idea of combining Russian and Latin-American songs into the same medley was a goddamn genius.
7. The Beatles — “I Want to Tell You”
   As with essentially every Beatles song, it’s absolutely unfair how good this is. Of course, it’s hard to tell how much of that is a result of the songwriting itself, and how much is due to having John and Paul on backup vocals and magnificent production values. After all George, despite his many talents, was never the greatest of melodists (cf. “Handle With Care” above). Compare, for example, the next track on Revolver, “Got to Get You Into My Life”. Both songs have similar vibes, similar tempos, but Paul can get away with nothing more than [double-tracked] lead vocals, since the melody is so much stronger. That’s not to say one song is better than the other, just pointing out a difference in songwriting styles. In any case, though, whoever is responsible for the piano part in “I Want to Tell You” deserves a goddamn gold medal.
8. Giant Robot — “Petro’s Bells”
   It’s only a minute long, a throwaway track between ‘actual’ songs, but it almost sounds like it could have been the basis for a Flaming Lips song.
9. The Rolling Stones — “You Can’t Always Get What You Want (live,
   Flashpoint)”
   They sound like they’re playing for a bunch of housewives, and it’s because they are.
10. Dire Straits — “Setting Me Up”
    This song doesn’t seem to do anything all that original—and I’m convinced there’s a crank somewhere on Mark Knopfler that you turn if you want a solo—but Dire Straits are masters of this form.
11. Robert Johnson — “Malted Milk”
    It really is impressive just how different from one another he could make his various songs.
12. CMX — “Kuolemattomuuden ääni”
    Don’t get me wrong, I like their early stuff fine, but CMX got a lot better when they moved away from hardcore, if for no other reason than that A.W. Yrjänä sings a lot better than he growls.

All things considered, yesterday was a very nice day, in many ways.

It just occurred to me that what I miss most about college—or school in general—is resolution: finishing one thing, and beginning another. Pass a course, great; you’re on to the next. Flunk it, it’s not even the end of the world; start over next semester. In moderation, at least, it’s no big deal.

This goddamn interminable sameness at work is, I’m pretty damn sure, what I really don’t like about it. I have coworkers who have been doing their job—my job—longer than I have been alive, and that’s terrifying and horrifying and unfathomable. Those people are obviously a hell of a lot better and faster and more efficient than I am, and they’ve been practicing for a hell of a long time, so more power to them. But if I’m going to spend a lifetime—a goddamn lifetime!—practicing a particular skill, I want it to be because it’s something I enjoy doing so much I want to do it for its own sake, not because getting better will let me go on ratrace-autopilot for 40 hours a week until I retire.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses.

Of course, the other nice thing about school is winter and summer breaks. Which are nice for their own sake, but also serve to reinforce the episodic nature of the experience—again, unlike the sameness of work.

Seven months ago I came down with pneumonia. It was a miserable ordeal, but I loved it. Why? It gave me a plausible, undeniable excuse to do absolutely nothing for a week. Not a care in the world, other than the sickening feeling of drowning in my own lungs, and wishing the bathroom were closer because walking 20 feet made me winded. On balance, though, I’m almost wistful for it, because it was a nice interlude. And that’s all I really want.

I’ve had this recurring dream, or perhaps more of a recurring setpiece, that’s never exactly the same but always involves some kind of trek through a gargantuan and entirely disorganized library, really more just a building full of books than a library in any meaningful sense. The architecture is always vaguely forbidding with a sense of former glory — the kind of thing that wouldn’t look out of place on some kind of Very Prestigious University campus — with lots of coffered ceilings and magnificent staircases, and walnut paneling everywhere. And, of course, books all over the goddamn place, with not a shelf or a card catalog to be found. Books in every nook and cranny, books filling corridors almost to the ceiling so you have to climb up the pile and crawl across if you want to get through, books of every shape and description. Sometimes the point of being there is to try and find one particular volume, other times it’s just to get out the other side of the building, but in every case it’s more about the journey than the destination — going through, over, around, under, past these enormous stacks of books.

Anyway, last night it showed up again, and I mentioned to somebody in the dream that it reminded me of a recurring dream I get.

I can travel through time, but only in one direction.

1. Towa Tei — “Son of Bambi (Walk Tuff)”
   Kind of a hodgepodge, really: a simple looped ostinato on the bass, a vocalist excitedly shouting reggae-inspired nonsense, and a sitar. So I guess this could sort of be a harbinger for Thievery Corporation’s entire career: combining Jamaica with the mystical East through a filter of samplers and synths.
2. Rush — “2112”
   It takes a certain kind of conceit to make a 20-minute rock song, and it takes an extra-special kind of conceit to concoct a grand science-fiction mythology for your 20-minute rock song, and to include a lengthy segment consisting of a guitar being tuned. I get it: ‘guitars in space’ was a hugely popular theme (or ‘concept’) in the 1970s, but come on.
3. The Shins — “The Celibate Life”
   As with a lot of other Shins songs, the vocals are so thin and so far down in the mix that they serve almost as more of another instrument than as a vocal, and as with a lot of other Shins songs, it works.
4. Rodrigo — Concierto madrigal: Pastoral
   “A literary or artistic work that portrays idealized rural life.” That sounds about right. If you’re ever scoring a film and need to convey “idyllic”, you can’t go wrong with this piece.
5. Cake — “I Will Survive”
   If you’re going to cover a song, you should make it your own; and that goes double for songs that are incredibly well-known. The Cardigans, for example, did a cover of “Iron Man” that was amazing because it was nothing like the original. A cover like that shows that the original composition has legs of its own, and a particular innate beauty above and beyond the original performance. This is one of those covers. Incidentally, it also has one of the best basslines in recorded history.
6. The New Pornographers — “From Blown Speakers”
   This is really an exquisitely crafted song. Among other great things is the way it tiptoes around and teases you, building up the pressure until it turns what would have been a rather ordinary chorus into a magnificent climax.
7. Violent Femmes — “Add It Up”
   This song is so anthemic because it’s so straightforwardly and guilelessly human. That, and it’s a musical Catcher in the Rye—an ode and a paean to the Platonic ideal of adolescence.
8. In Flames — “Another Day in Quicksand”
   A good bridge can completely transform a song and make it vastly better and more interesting. See, for example, the bridge in this song.
9. Blur — “Song 2”
   Apparently the self-parody in this song was too subtle for us in America, since this was Blur’s only hit here and we seemed disappointed that nothing else of their sounded remotely like it. Fuck it. It’s a great song, and if its greatness stems from its tongue-in-cheek nature, so much the better. I can enjoy Spinal Tap’s music unironically, so why not this?
10. Radiohead — “Scatterbrain (acoustic)”
    My immediate reaction upon hearing Hail to the Thief for the first time was jubilation that Radiohead were using guitars again. I can’t play this song, but it’s reassuring to know that I at least play the right instrument for it. (Yeah, John Mayer can play “Kid A” on guitar, but he doesn’t count—he’s the exception that proves the rule.)
11. Wolf Parade — “I’ll Believe in Anything”
    Wolf Parade are like a house of cards with a trainwreck on top. They sound like they could fall apart at any moment, and while the slapdash/lo-fi vibe can get overbearing at times, it’s also the source of their power. If they were stable, they wouldn’t be interesting; if they collapsed, they’d be a perfectly ordinary disaster. As it is, their disaster is still waiting to happen.
12. The Esquires — “Mustalainen”
    The CD of 1960s-era Finnish surf music this is on is one of my prize possessions.

I had just been thinking that the main riff from Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” would make a great loop for somebody to rap over, and now I realized that the Beastie Boys already did that, over twenty years ago, in “Rhymin’ & Stealin'”.

What do you know.