BIG YOUTH: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MIKE, HOW YOU FEEL?

ME: I FEEL GOOD, BIG YOUTH. ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE COMING OVER AND WE’RE GOING TO BE DRESSED UP LIKE ZOMBIES AND MY WALL IS COVERED IN FAKE BLOOD AND GORE AND WE’RE GOING TO TALK AND MOAN AND PARTY.

BIG YOUTH: TOULA SALAMANA ZOMILINA WALADALLY, AS I WOUL’ SAY.

ME: BIG YOUTH, YOU ARE AWESOME!

BIG YOUTH: HUAAAAAAEH! TELL YA!

So I’ve been holding my tongue for a hell of a long time on this one but tongue be held no longer, behold:

For several weeks, I would sit and listen to little else than My Chemical Romance’s “Helena” for hours on end, and I could not for the life of me figure out why. I would YSI it to friends and say ANALYZE THIS and they would just respond in the blankest of prose, something like “I feel like I don’t even know you sometimes.” I’d say, “it is the sound of two teenagers who look exactly the same, textbook androgynes of the early post-punk 21st century groping each other by the blue light of the television, fucking each other’s bullet belts right off in suburbs across the country, it is brutally Honest and True and I might Love it, this past I never had.” Usually they were gone by this point, but I still had “Helena.” And alone with her I realized something, right at the end of the bridge: “when both our cars collide.”

One day I snapped, realizing it wasn’t anything short of the feeling behind my beloved Shangri-Las (esp. “Leader of the Pack); the same mountains of grotesque drama, the same cartoonish, uncanny, and morbid fixation on DEATH and ENDING; the same hopelessly myopic and hence thrice as intense passions, those heart-vomiting Teenage Feeling. Now I’m a man of questionable tendencies in psychogeographic/conceptual urban planning; you might not want to walk these bridges with me, but I’m going to build a few. I still love Kim Gordon circa EVOL (in my own riddled misogyny, “Shadow of a Doubt” is still one of the most cripplingly sexy songs ever, I guess I’ve just always liked my blowjob queens to be ghosts anyway). There’s something in the mess of “Helena,” and “Helena” specifically, that cries out to me as a return to some age-old form, the throbbing desires of youth not to die per se, but to feel the charge of death as something important; lest we be reminded that the Smiths are yet to come and still too intellectual, and Wallace Stevens (or at least on “Sunday Morning”) has the feeling, but with fucking tongs (insurance is a tough sell with corn syrup blood on one’s hands). Whew. I needed to get this stuff off my chest before moving into something a little bigger, with thoughts drifting into the world of One Kiss Can Lead to Another, which I recently purchased, and Justin Cober-Lake’s great-duh pre-surgery probe of the girl-group myth, more than a little resonant with Maureen Dowd’s recent plaintive, addled lamentations about the current state of feminism in a perceived culture of gender relations regression. Coincidence? FUCK NO, AS USUAL.

I’ve been thrillingly fickle lately, as anyone who reads this blog might be able to gather, and while I slowly settle, I find I’m emerging into new areas of comfort. After seven or so months of speculation, I have decided that I can prove by science, fire, and feeling that “Hounds of Love” is one of the best songs ever, especially after seeing the video; I have also realized the depths of both head and heart occasionally lurk in dance music, especially the labyrinths of Villalobos and the New Red Earth of Booka Shade’s “Mandarine Girl.”

Still, I was completely shocked to arbitrarily check out Karma by Pharoah Sanders this morning and find that not only is it rather astounding, but I feel actually stripped of anything coherent to say about it other than “go find it and listen as soon as you can, you will hardly be disappointed.” I’ve skirted jazz in a “canonical” way for a long time: in high school, Ayler and Mingus hit together with Trout Mask Replica, three explorations in the blues uprooted and twisted into new, clean things out of a deep hunger. I couldn’t ever find anything to really truly love in heart-squall of Arthur Doyle or the head-squall of Anthony Braxton (except for the unaccompanied stuff); somehow Karma is hitting in between, like some hydra-monster of A) what I was “supposed” to get out of Coltrane B) the ecstacy of collective expressivity and C) the line between the avant-garde (which ought to test you) and the deep roots (which ought to comfort). At the intersection is the ol’ spiritual, the rosier shades of the uncanny. At least, I think so right now, which is enough for me; my friend Kate had a dream of large hands above New York City that we were all afraid of. I feel that dream a little lately, but the flaring honks of Ra on Karma are pulling me through to somewhere better and beyond.

Gnash your terrible teeth, squint your weary eyes, feel the thunderquake of love; if you haven’t heard “How Can I Love You If You Won’t Lie Down” by Silver Jews you’re a damn fool and an untrusting compatriot for not seeking it out when I done told you to, but not all is lost: there is a video available on the Drag City website. Cut the jabber, find the feeling, enjoy one of the best songs you’ll hear all year, thank you.

It has been a long time since last post and with good reason; it’s also with good reason that a new post finally comes today. My write brain has been moving away from music lately, partially because of music overload compounded by a fact that I don’t often talk about, i.e. that my day job involves listening to so much music that I feel entitled to a little burnout here and there. Still, I’m not falling away into other interests, just feeling like I was getting too involved in non-life living, like my obsessions have given way to existential diminishing marginal returns.

Why do I post now? As life so often has it, two reasons converged. Last night I skipped regular Halloween festivities to see the ever-wondrous Mountain Goats at the Knitting Factory with an old friend. Having seen him/them several times now, the bar is always high, but I can confidently say that it was the best show I had seen by him yet. What really got me— me sitting all up in that chair, unshaven, tired, and uncertain— was the amount of “real” “experience” John Darnielle seems to have had in a life. For a while I thought of him as a vampire of humanity’s most destructive, fragile impulses, uncannily attuned to the tiniest, most heart-withering tragedies. The Sunset Tree, with the whole “autobiography” tack, really shook that feeling up, that deep seated impression of Darnielle as a guy who used to write songs after simply pulling out a map and staring at the names of countries and towns (I read this somewhere, forgive me for forgetting where). No, last night he donned a priest’s robe; “Dance Music” was prefaced with the words “this is a song about God’s plan for all of us,” to which the crowd laughed and Darnielle in turned silenced by saying “no, really.” He talked about being locked in a room for an entire summer listening to the Birthday Party. At one point he said “This song is about all of my friends in Portland, most of who are probably dead.” He paused. “They liked speed a lot. You say ‘Tina, your teeth don’t look so good and you look too thin.’ And Tina says ‘I’m fine, don’t worry.’ And you say ‘Tina, you are not fine.’”

Now, I won’t do any soulseeking, but I will say that I cry at every Mountain Goats show I’ve ever been to; I could have just come from eating a plate of veal, bench-pressing, and snorting a small mound of cocaine, and I’d still cry, he just wrecks me like that. This was the moment that I said “Yes, fuck yes, I don’t want to spend time on the sidelines; I want to be a wallflower but I want the walls smeared with blood and the room filled with spirits. Relishing in my already hermetic tendencies is killing my youth.” So it was a silly moment, of course, but it stuck.

Today, the ever-inspiring Justin Cober-Lake had a really compelling article up at Stylus. Go there now and read it. Really. It fucked me up a little, which is a testament to its quality and depth of thought and not an expression of fear or confusion.

I should say that I loved this piece; I loved it because I disagreed. Sure, I was reminded of this time that I had a breakdown in a large rare bookstore and ran out, completely shaken to the core. I told a friend that “there are just too many books; what is the world going to do with so many books?” to which he comfortingly said “you just find your corner and you paint it.” Or something to that effect. Justin says you have to hang on to something, to do something. He’s absolutely right, but I think I preemptively felt like I knew what that thing was. Furthermore, while I think there’s a certain sense that one should embrace what they naturally gravitate towards, there is such a thing as not living up to one’s potential. Not that this is what Justin is doing. Hear me clearly: I’m constantly amazed by his work ethic; he writes more than I do and in more places, and I didn’t just become a father. I’m also not saying “yeah music is dumb I’m off to save the world.” I am saying that I’m fed up with the nasty side of all this, the side that makes me unwittingly/willingly well-versed in things I don’t care about, forsaking time I could spend on things I really am interested in. Part of it is my feeling about being comprehensive, i.e. it’s my tendency, thorough = good. Still, I’ve come to some juncture where I feel like I know more about contemporary southern hip-hop than contemporary Japanese dance, and not for lack of interest in the latter, but because of a categorically overwhelming interest in music in general.

Part of the reason I’ve been absent from this blog was as a result of all this stuff: making little shifts in life, how I spend my time, how I hone my energies. Try to read the paper, try to be good about listening to the BBC World Service, because I figure out a shitload more about myself listening to that than the new Dominik Eulberg mix, no matter how good some of it is. Had to get out and get to Long Island and feel the cold of a ghost. Had to crane to hear “The Tennessee Waltz.” Thought about the stories I never finished and finished a couple. Started more. Felt moral, felt ethical. Felt a number of things and came here to say them.

Forgive me, I haven’t been myself lately, but I suspect I will be soon.