taking seasonal syncretic religious symbology a bit too far

Plus, this is from a certified irony-free suburb:

Why bastard? Wherefore bass?

Ah, excess is a beautiful thing - this instrument should feature in a band alongside one of Rick Nielsen's infamous five-neck guitars. I can't quite figure out how it's tuned - but after a while it seems absurd to still be calling it a "bass," since clearly it's going to do more than that. The intonation problems are frightening: it's bad enough when the strings of a twelve-string guitar are out of tune, but micro-detuned low-frequency noises (I'm assuming there's some doubling involved) have got to create a godawful rumble that would really interfere with the rest of the music. But that's okay--I don't like wank fusion anyway (almost guaranteed that's what this guy plays).

Also...Dude? "III-X" is not a surname, and you're not a vacuum cleaner or some other appliance, which is where you'd usually find a name like that.

Degrees of Separation

Curious just how small a world it can be sometimes. Here's a story:

Some years ago, a guy named Jamie from St. Louis sent me a mix tape in exchange for a CD or something. At any rate, as often happens with such mixes, I listened to it a few times but then returned to it only infrequently as other music overwhelmed it. The car I drive to work has a cassette player, though, and I've been rotating through my cassette collection to provide variety. So Jamie's tape comes up the other day, and I remember that its closing track, "Greyhound Bus" by Minneapolis band the Hang Ups, is a lovely little song about travel, distance, separation, and the like. Listening again, I remembered that I'd noticed before that the song refers to "Whitefish Bay," which is the name of a Milwaukee suburb - but I hadn't paid much attention, figuring that it was just as likely some other Whitefish Bay (there are others - most infamously, the one referred to in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"). But this time, I noticed the singer also refers to a "welcome mat on Idlewild," presumably a street name - and there's an Idlewild Avenue in our Whitefish Bay.

So now I'm intrigued, do some digging, and find out that the singer and main songwriter is, in fact, from Milwaukee. And so I think, hmm, I wonder if his family still lives on Idlewild? (I think the collection of consistent details led me to read the song autobiographically, rather than, say, about some character fitted out with random place names.) And in the Milwaukee phone book, I find a family with his surname on Idlewild.

But that world gets smaller: I realize the name listed (presumably the singer's father) is familiar...and after a while, I realize why. He's a coordinator in my department's creative writing program, and his office is about three doors down from mine.

Things Others Should Have Thought Of

Speaking of rapping (yes, I am hanging my head in shame), here are two things I've wondered:

1) The musician known as E (ex-Eels) put out a fun CD last year billed to "MC Honky." Now, that's reasonably funny...but really, if you call yourself "E" and you're being an MC, the obvious name to call yourself is...MC Squared. C'mon, work with me here.

2) Similarly, I was wondering why I'd never heard of a DJ using the name DJ Borscht...cuz, after all, that's beet soup (already my head is so low, you expect me what, to snap it off and hang it from my belt?) - but a quick websearch reveals that a hip-hop columnist for Seattle-based word-thing The Stranger used this byline, at least in one article from 1999. Lost opportunities...

nerdy wrappinghood

I'm sure each of us can name apparently simple tasks which, for some reason, we're unable to perform well, or at all. One thing that inevitably causes my motor skills to fall over and end up tumbled in an embarrassed heap about is the simple act of wrapping a gift. I have no idea why, but I always cut either way too much or way too little wrapping paper, so I either end up wasting the remnant strip or having to cut out a second, smaller piece to cover the gap. And yes, I know that I can use those remnants to make little name labels - or rather, that some people can: for me, the paper gets pouty and refuses to properly fold, or be cut on the square, and so I'm left with what looks like several botched attempts at exceedingly elementary origami. Similar folding problems, only on a more major scale, present themselves when I try to fold over the corners: the paper bunches up at one place or another, or it tears, or the plain-paper underside becomes (impossibly) larger than the colored side of the paper so that it shows no matter which way I try to fold it. And then there's the tape: some people (the same people for whom paper placidly folds itself along lovely little right angles, with no unevenness and without crackling off little bits of color from the wrapping paper) are able to apply tape so it's nearly invisible, subtly sealing the package so the wrapping fits like an Olympic swimmer's Speedo. My technique more resembles Sheriff Andy's in Twin Peaks: in contrast with the paper (which I wanted to fold), the tape (which I want to remain straight until I apply it) folds itself into sticky little helices, or crinkles together to create ugly little folds, or leaps onto the paper before I'm ready for it and tears off bits of the paper's coloring with impressive stickiness. Of course, after such misadventures, the tape generally finds that it's entirely spent that stickiness, and so a second strip of tape must be brought into play, just so the above farcical scenario can repeat itself.

I'm not sure why this is: I work well visually in two dimensions, but evidently that third dimension sends my brain's math centers into wild panic attacks, or perhaps the finer motor skills I'm abusing at this very moment in typing this thing are affected by my brain's fit of anxiety over the threat of needing to manipulate objects in three dimensions. I don't know.

Of course, the irony is, most of the presents I wrap are destined to be ripped open by a pack of mad pre-schoolers, my nieces and nephews, whose gift-attacking technique would embarrass ravenously feeding wolves and would cause those wolves to slink away in shame to consult lupine psychiatrists about something called "feeding envy." It would make no difference to them (the kids, not the wolves - although now that I think about it...) if I wrapped their gifts in crumpled newspaper held in place by rubber bands.

boxed cars are pulling out of town?

In a continuing effort to do my bit to solve the most pressing, compelling problems afflicting the world today, I will here establish that it is a grave error to persist in referring to "mixed CDs/tapes" or "boxed sets." The proper terms are "mix CDs" and "box sets," and by the authority vested in me by my own very self, I will explain.

Essentially, the participial forms preferred by persnickety copy editors reek too strongly of verb. What's germane about a mix CD is not that someone sat down and mixed together a random bunch of songs, but that the resulting object is a mix, a created object more integral than the mere sum of its parts: more in the manner of paint, carefully blended in proportions, than of randomly ordered nuts (unless, unbeknownst to me, Buddy Squirrel and Mr. Peanut work cryptic kabala with the cashews). Similarly, a box set isn't distinctive because someone somewhere boxed it (after all, "box" as a verb is sometimes used to mean "pack up" even when no actual box-like objects are involved) but because it looks like a box, big and square and aggressively three-dimensional. Furthermore, "mixed" in relation to music has another, older meaning (to blend the instruments that make up the recording), and so referring to a "mixed CD" could make one think of a finished CD rather than, say, a work in progress that hasn't been mixed yet. Finally, the use of "boxed set" and "mixed CD" is physically risky to the teeth and tongue, since pronouncing those phrases requires way too many collisions between the two body parts. Four out of five dentists prefer "box set" to preserve tooth enamel. And trust me, you don't want to stand too close to Sylvester over there when he's enunciating "boxed set" at you.

(Still and all: perhaps it's incipient elderly flatulence setting in, but the phrase "mix CD" just doesn't flow as trippingly from the tongue as "mix tape"...but who makes those anymore? Yes, I am trolling the Magnetic Tape Fanciers' League of America: nyah nyah-nee nyah-nyah)

!

(stolen from Stereogum...)

creative mishearing

Rog was talking about superpowers the other day, and I recalled that Emmylou Harris song (okay, it was written by Gillian Welch) whose chorus one might possibly imagine goes "I am Endorphin Girl." Hey - I said "possibly."

Now, travel back with me to the glamorous days of the late eighties, when Scott Miller and his band Game Theory started that famous breakfast craze:

"Eggs Chardonnay!"
"Chardonnay?"
"Eggs Chardonnay!"

Gotta go - someone wants me to do some kunging fu on western thought.

in the wardrobe of my soul, in the section labeled "shirts"

My two favorite really bad guitar solos:

1. "Canyons of Your Mind" Bonzo Dog Band (starting at 1:09)
2. "Too Much Paranoias" Devo (at 0:44)

Both intentionally awful, of course. The Devo sounds like a parody of the solo in "Whole Lotta Love."

O ye of little faith!

A few months back, I mentioned that I was, in fact, in Las Vegas on the very weekend Britney Spears supposedly married a hometown friend for, like, twelve hours. Some have questioned my hinting-about at the real reasons for my presence in Las Vegas, and my activities there. Well, here (courtesy of Stereogum) is one of the things Britney said onstage at her first show of the current tour, in San Diego: "Are you from Milwaukee? Do you wanna marry me?"

I rest my case.

kinks

My friend Miles recently sent me a homebrewed comp of Kinks tracks, in the process reminding me that even on their lamest records, they still generally had at least one good song. Of course, it's hardly news to state that Ray Davies is among the finest rock lyricists - but in listening to the compilation, it struck me that one of his sharpest skills is a precision-balanced sense of ambiguity. This is most obvious in what I still contend is the single best line of any rock song ever, the punchline of "Lola": "I know what I am, and I'm glad I'm a man - and so is Lola." In this case one really has to thank the Powers-That-Be that the English language is ambiguous regarding grammatical gender - since otherwise, Davies wouldn't have been able to finesse the complement of "so is Lola" with such exquisite equipoise.

A subtler example is "Waterloo Sunset." Setting aside lyrics, it's simply one of the most beautiful recordings ever made, and the instrumental backing establishes the song's bittersweet mood even before you look at the lyrics. A virtue of lyrical ambiguity is its generosity: the listener must, perforce, participate in making meaning, since the specifics of that meaning are left open. Much of this song's pathos is carried by what it doesn't say: the narrator, in fact, claims that "as long as he [can] gaze on Waterloo sunset," he's in "paradise." He labors to assure you that everything's fine, that he has any number of reasons for staying home: he's just lazy, it's chilly in the evening, the city's busyness makes him feel dizzy, and my, isn't that a beautiful sunset? At first you might think "Terry and Julie" are friends of his, whose meetings at Waterloo Station he just happens to be able to see from his window. Yet he says that he doesn't need friends - and so, we're left to deduce that, in fact, he may not know "Terry and Julie" at all: he probably doesn't even know whether those are their real names. To me, the narrator's situation seems unutterably sad: he simply can't bring himself even to leave his house, and the way Davies sings the word "paradise" evokes a desolate irony, even more so than that house named "Shangri-La" Davies sings about elsewhere.

But it's "Art Lover" that's Davies' most audacious exercise in delicately balanced portraiture. At first, most listeners probably assumed the song was Davies' attempt at punk-influenced, "shocking" subject matter: "ooh look, Enid - he's writing about a child molester!" But in fact Davies is quite careful to lead you only so far down the path of that conclusion: far short, in fact, of any such unambiguous characterization. Yes, the narrator likes to look at little girls; yes, he hides his glances behind sunglasses; yes, he follows the girls around (at a discreet distance?) - but he also tells you that he's aware of the impression he makes, and takes pains to deny that it's the case: he's not a "flasher in a raincoat" or a "dirty old man"; he has no intention of snatching girls from their mothers. Davies could be playing coy about his narrator - he might expect us to disbelieve his assertions - but Davies' songs often address interior musings, rather than action, and so a familiarity with Davies' work might lead us to assume that this man is exactly who he says he is: a rather sad soul, similar to the narrator of "Waterloo Sunset," if perhaps less depressive and more willing to engage in risky behavior (and knowing it: the character is not, as I said, oblivious to the way he's perceived). He tells us directly that he knows it would be wrong to actually act on his attraction and try to take home one of these girls; he even knows why he's attracted, and what the girl's beauty means to him: "She's just a substitute / For what's been taken from me."

At first, that line struck me as problematic, nearly cliched. It's saved, once again, by Davies' careful sense of ambiguity: the narrator doesn't tell us what, specifically, has been taken from him - and his use of the word "substitute" moves us away from a simplistic reading that the man's own daughter is lost to him (although it doesn't rule out that possibility).

And here's where Davies, I think, makes the sort of moralistic move typical of many of his songs - but he does so, subtly, by forcing us to analyze our own judgment. Obviously, a man who would act on lecherous impulses toward young girls (but wait - who said anything about lechery? Not our narrator...) is a moral monster - but if a man has such feelings, is aware of them, and knows better than to act on them - and even knows why he has those feelings - doesn't the pathos of his situation deserve our pity, rather than our scorn? And isn't there something rather pathetic about our rush to judgment, our own imagining that the narrator's actual motivations are sexually twisted, our own assumption that he will act and lacks the self-restraint we presume ourselves to possess when our own desires can't legitimately be indulged in? Isn't reading this song as being about a "pervert" more a judgment on our own predilections than on those of the narrator?

Davies' subtle use of ambiguity is one element of the incisiveness of his portraiture, the sense we get of knowing these characters from the inside. In a sense, we do - because Davies paints us at the same time he paints his characters and situations.