tunes recently enjoyed no. 2

"Telephone/telephone/demon/telephone" - Beep!
+
Stravinsky Violin Concerto in D, Aria #2 - Hilary Hahn

I am terrible at making mix tapes. I've never had the knack of being able to figure out what makes one tune flow satisfyingly into another. The "shuffle" option makes me happy. As long as I have a grab bag of songs I like, the order I hear them in is of negligible importance... Except, sometimes, one song falls after another in such a fantastic way completely by accident that it makes me like both more.

"Telephone/telephone/demon/telephone" is a slightly unhinged wallop of noise. Lots of weird sounds enter in weird, but impeccably placed ways. My ears want to lean right into it to try to figure out what's going on and it somehow remains a happy exploration, a pleasant confusion instead of a resentful stumble... And then the Stravinsky piece comes in, alternating piercing stringency with these smooth, fatty folds of sound... And, for some reason, my brain thought this was the most splendid, most felicitous and delightful of combinations. I had to make a playlist just so I could keep hearing the two pieces one right after another.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Benjamin Britten

I've always thought of Britten as being full of odd sounds, and odd distances between sounds, and while I've found most of his stuff that I've heard to be interesting and full of stuff to chew on, I never really liked it in a visceral way. There's a harshness and baldness that unsettled me, a sort of bleak earnestness that made me feel uncomfortable. But this opera is a pleasure. It's beautiful and funny, and it revels in its oddity and the satisfaction of making good noise; there are bits that make me think of someone jumping up and down in a spill of paint just to see the way it splashes. The whole thing is wonderful, but I love the "on the ground, sleep sound" bit (which also happens to be the easiest thing to find on YouTube, thanks to Wes Anderson).

"It Could Happen to You" - Lorin Benedict and Sam Ospovat

This is really strange. But, it's wonderful. Trust me. A combination of intensely bizarre scatting and wild, but delicious drums, the whole Passwords album is addictive. I never thought I would say that about something like this, but it's true.

This track is my favorite. It somehow manages to parade through both pure noise and song, unmooring meaning from speech and throwing explosives at my imagination. I start filling in dialogue, then drop that in favor of images, and drop that in favor of picturing the landscape of the sound. It's like having a really awesome, impressively compressed, completely insane version of "Fantasia" attacking your brain.

Beethoven symphonies nos. 1-9

I've become a Beethoven symphony junkie. They're so grand. Immensely gorgeous. Glorious and spectacular and epic, and honestly so. They're clear-hearted and unconfused, emotionally brash and absolute. Listening to them makes me feel like I need to push the edges of my own canvas out, but they also make me want to believe harder, feel more, go galloping around in neon.

I've been listening to the New York Philharmonic versions of these, directed by Leonard Bernstein, all conveniently streaming on Spotify.

Piano Concerto No. 2, Larghetto - Frederic Chopin

I've been listening to this compulsively over the past few days and every time I do, my eyes well up at about two minutes in, all harshness, all cynicism, all coolness and flippancy collapsing under the onslaught of those sweet falls of notes. I'm not actually sure what it is about it, but this piece jerks the tears right out of me. It conjures wholesome ache and longing, somewhere deep in my gut, and I find myself wishing for things like sunny days and landscapes that roll out in a carpet of green and love. I've been listening to a bunch of recordings, but this video is Arthur Rubinstein with the London Symphony Orchestra.

nightmares

1. (last night)

We are sitting across from each other, playing a board game. The game is homemade. The board is a series of black-and-white shapes that irreducibly depict houses, sidewalks, trees. The names of the pieces are "Nancy" and "Sluggo." We have been playing the game for some time when it turns inside-out.

It's a very Escher-like event.

We find ourselves walking on a black-and-white sidewalk, towards a black-and-white house, in a black-and-white suburb. We are not Nancy. We are not Sluggo. We are foreigners and aliens, softly pliable messes dragging confusion behind us. The smallest disturbance will transform us completely, before we have the chance to protest.

2. (I don't remember)

I look up, and my aunt is looking back at me. Two perfect mushrooms have sprouted from her eyes, their round white stalks centered over her pupils.

3. (five years ago)

It is a windy day, but we are at the beach, stretched out across from each other on opposite sides of a blanket weighed down by bottles of wine. We are playing chess. We are a little bit drunk. We are also somehow flying kites.

I can't decide on which piece to move next. My remaining rook, for some reason, has grown a series of spikes from the flat edges of its parapets. I feel the need to examine these at close range. "It's nothing," I say. "Harmless." He doesn't say anything, which strikes me as rude. I consider that it might be funny to crack a bottle of wine over his head, but it seems that he has turned to sand. I reach across the board and brush a finger across his eyebrow and he collapses into the beach.

4. (approximately twenty years ago)

I am in bed and I have woken up because of the weight on my feet. I stare into the dark, and the more I stare, the more I see--slowly, slowly--the black mass that resolves itself into a head, shoulders, arms, a skinny torso and knees pulled up in an attentive crouch. Death stretches himself out on top of me and I can't breathe.

5. (approximately seventeen years ago)

I am driving a car, except I don't know how to drive, and it is imperative that I cut a hole in an anonymous chest with a piece of glass that can only be obtained at high speed.

6. (within the last five years)

The canopy is made out of white roses that smell like tuberose on steroids. I am standing under it, and all I can hear is the buzzing of bees, a whole colony of them. If I look up, I can see them, their crooked black legs moving through the petals. I am dressed all in white and I am marrying someone who is wearing a mask. I'm wearing a mask too. We hold each other's hands, but we're wearing gloves, so that doesn't give us a clue to our identities either.

7. (now and then, recurring)

I am being chased and the only avenue of escape is to jump off the roof of a building and fly. This is a possibility, but a difficult and exhausting one, and I know the building is too high. The alternative though is to be murdered in my sleep, so I jump. My muscles wear out quite close to the ground, but not close enough.

dear austen keene

Dear Austen Keene (fine young fellow who I interviewed at the comic bookstore last Saturday),

I do believe that I saw you yesterday, waving at me from across the street and smiling the sort of broad, charming smile that only unabashedly clever, book-consuming, rather nice 15-year-olds can manage.

Please know that I'm often terrible at recognizing people's faces, especially when I run across them out of context or am surprised. I once ran into a boy I sat across from in English class for four entire years and couldn't place him, even after he told me his name. I once ran into the brother of a friend, had a conversation with him, and had no idea who he was until several hours after we parted. Funerals, weddings, and large parties are always a trial. I'm either faced with a familiar face that I can't attach to the story of a life, or, more embarrassingly, a face that pounces on me with recognition while I remain blank.

This is why I looked confused, turned away, and assumed you were waving at the only other young person in visual range, despite his obvious fascination with the phone clutched in his hands.

Please know that talking to you reminded me that there is a point to telling stories, beyond the pleasures of telling and consuming. Beyond craftsmanship and art and technique, there you are, the human being on the other end of the street, the one whose soul some lucky story will get to leave its fingerprints all over.

"I'd say that while I don't really have a book that's changed me, reading has sort of made up what I do, how I look at things. It puts ideas in my head. In the comic I'm reading now, the pure of heart are kind of, like, in both sides, so you're not really sure who's good and who's bad. So maybe the bad guys aren't the ones who are really doing the bad things, and things aren't really what they seem. And that really excites me. I could go on for hundreds and hundreds of books." -- Austen Keene

Oh, and if you see me again, just wave until recognition drills through my thick skull.

x. M

on having your mind unexpectedly blown, or, why I'm no longer afraid of Daniel Clowes, or, some thoughts on the educational aspects of romance

There are times when I feel like the top of my skull has been ripped off and the dim, crumbly interiors of my thoughts are being flayed by revelation. By a change of opinion, or a forcible departure from indifference.

This doesn't happen too often. It's probably fortunate. I imagine that if it did occur with too much frequency, I would have a curdled sense of moral and artistic direction, an inability to say whether I like something or dislike someone, an irritating tendency to say, "ah, well, you know" and not much more.

I love it when it happens though. God! It is the most miraculous sensation. Here I am, not caring about something very much and then, in the next instant (though it's never an instant... it just feels like one, being the shocking event at the end of an invisible avalanche that's been building over weeks or months or years), I care very much. I feel it to the bone. The switch goes from off to on and you can't imagine what the room looked like before, when it was in the dark, because you couldn't actually see it then; and now, even if it goes back into the dark, you will be forever unable to unsee.

It's both addictive and impossible to replicate on demand.

I recently read The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes. I had never read a Clowes book before. Something about the way he draws faces, from certain angles and at certain distances, had repelled me. It was the same breed of feeling that I get from R. Crumb's work, an irrational distrust and fear of the hairy line and bulbous shape that makes absolutely no sense but somehow shoots straight from eyeball to gut. My fear of Clowes wasn't as strong, but it was enough to make me pass over his books, despite their clean lines and immaculate covers, and put them in the category of things I assumed I didn't like. I could talk about Clowes in the shallow white lies that all skilled bookstore girls can wield when asked about books that they personally distrust, but have achieved a certain tipping point of importance (just ask me about Infinite Jest or The Catcher in the Rye or The Corrections or The Night Circus), but I had no intention of reading him and was, faintly, afraid.

But, The Death Ray... Holy smokes. It's a graceful, jaw-loosening display of storytelling pyrotechnics, one chilling and perfectly formed panel after another. I'm pretty much a stranger in the land of comics; before a few months ago I could literally count the number of comics I'd finished on one hand (Sandman, 1602, Mr. Punch, one volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Britten and Brulightly, a very strange and depressing story about a private investigator whose sidekick is a teabag that he keeps in his pocket). But even I can see the brilliance that rolls off The Death Ray's impeccably constructed pages. It's a story that I can't imagine in any other form. There's a wobbly, delicate permeability between interior feeling and exterior spectacle that goads you into misplacing your compassion, then crushes you with unhappy horror. You are inside the story and outside of it within the same page and these flickering shifts in the way you experience the story make you vulnerable to the crazy leaps in time that it makes, so that it can connect one thought to another in the most impressively manipulative (and I say "manipulative" with admiration) way and not be stuck on the road of chronological sense. Painful efficiency.

It's not a pleasant book. For me, it was deeply horrifying. But, it's so well done. I couldn't stop reading it, and now I'm infected with an enthusiasm for comics in general and Daniel Clowes in particular. I keep going to the comic bookstore and picking up things that hit me over the head with newness and freshness and surprise.

(Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes... it's like the author had a fishhook lodged in the current state of my heart back in 1990-something.)

It's like having a raging appetite for a taste that never previously thrilled me.

It's not inexplicable. This often happens to me as a side effect or aftermath of romance. I'm always curious about the enthusiasms of the people I'm close to. Their passions are my guided tours to territories either unappreciated or foreign. It is, for me, one of the most intoxicating aspects of making room for someone among the furnishings of your head. Sometimes the curiosity fades and sometimes it locks in its barbs and takes up permanent residence. I've grown an honest delight in popular science because of this, a passing obsession with biological taxonomy, a thankfully brief addiction to a podcast called "This Week in Virology." I've attempted to appreciate the space opera stripe of science fiction and to understand the fine points of competitive kayaking. I've discovered the delights of banjos and concertinas, of live music shows, jazz, and walking for long distances in cold rain. I've apparently lost my fear of Daniel Clowes.

I used to think this was possibly lame, trying on someone else's enthusiasms. But that forceful, pleasurable change in point of view is so rare and so thrilling that I've given up on that opinion. It's an education. Row after row of dominoes falling inside my head.

brief encounters no. 2

1. I thought you were a graphic designer.
2. I love Asian women from America. It's like... the spice without the accent. If you know what I mean.
3. Girl! What you got there? You got something for me? I think you got something for me!
4. Hey-yah, hey-yah, why you walking so fast? I'm trying to enjoy the view!
5. You smell like my favorite drink.
6. Are you looking for a good time? I am such a good time, girl, you don't even know.
7. Do you mind if I sit here? No... no, I mean here. Yeah, right here.
8. Oh, I know. I dated an Asian girl once.
9. Walk those pretty little legs right over here, baby!
10. You don't want to know what I'm thinking about right now.

tunes recently enjoyed

"Lazy Afternoon" - Susannah Young

This is a song from a 1954 musical by Jerome Moross and John LaTouche that apparently takes on both the Iliad and the Odyssey and transplants them to the state of Washington at the turn of the 20th century. The Wikipedia synopsis contains the following amazing bit: "... the small town of Angel's Roost is thrown into confusion when old Menelaus' fancy-free wife, Helen, runs off with a traveling salesman named Paris. He's in town to judge an apple pie bake-off." How badly do I want to see this musical? Very badly.

The song is humid and dreamy, all long, drawn-out lines of sound that periodically tumble over the edge into crumbling trills. This version makes me think of that gorgeous, gorgeous bit at the beginning of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (for which you should watch this video of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Boston Symphony... Bernstein's face just makes me ache it has so much happiness in it) and is so much more satisfying and odd than, say, Barbra Streisand's.

Chopin's Ballade No. 4 in F Minor - Arthur Rubinstein

I love how the first half of this winds you up with a swaying, aching theme that makes measured, gentle transformations that somehow also have yawning gaps hidden between the notes that threaten to either make you fall or cut off the piece and leave you without relief. Tension, just ratcheting up so gorgeously until it feels like your chest will explode from it. And then it lets you fall and you can breathe again for a few minutes before it pushes you into a racing, insane little coda.

Listening to this absolutely flattens me. But, it's so, so good.

"Welcome to Our World" - DRMS

I went to a DRMS show a little while ago. It's one of the few shows I've gone to recently that made me feel like I had to dance. This song in particular has so many weird sounds going on in it--odd plinking, insistent beats, synth-y twanging, hiccuping pauses--all laid out under a rangy voice. It's an addictive and bizarre collage, sort of like staring up at a mobile that has spaceships dangling on one arm and prehistoric tools on the other.

"Bach Suite" - Beginners soundtrack

This just makes me want to cry. It's an arrangement of some Bach melodies for horns. I have no idea who plays it or who arranged it... the track just lists "Johann Sebastian Bach"for the artist... but, it's so earnest and so lonely; the sound seems to come up out of nowhere and bleeds off at the edges, like it's being played in a vast space with no objects or ears to absorb it.

"A House, a Car, and a Wedding Ring" - Mike Preston

This song is weird. And kind of piteous. The lyrics are so heart-on-sleeve desperate that the song is almost embarrassing to listen to. But the guy's voice is smooth, simultaneously really attractive and disconcertingly controlled, with strange endings on certain words that make me imagine them evaporating up and out of his mouth. And the backup vocals are amazingly ridiculous.

"Good Thing" - Naytronix

This one makes me think of a processional, one that goes on and on and becomes progressively stranger as it goes. It's terrifically satisfying to listen to. The beat carries you along under a shifting canopy of bizarre noises that somehow also manage to be exactly the thing you need to hear at that moment. It's like walking through some abstracted animation of a jungle, all flattened out to suggestive shapes and pumped up with neon colors.

"These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)" - Thelonious Monk

Wobbly, fuzzed around the edges, pounding and trilling... it's like a drunken high wire act. I like how much space there seems to be between the shambling, repetitive lower notes and the skittering higher ones. It's like having someone mumble and sing at you at the same time, which sounds horrible, but is somehow charming. I keep waiting for it to fall over the edge into pain, but it doesn't. Mostly it doesn't.

Grandma Megs

On Saturday, I spoke at my grandma's funeral. It was hard, very, very hard, to stand up at the front of the beautiful, tiny church, and try to say something that made sense and meant something other than being sad. There is a somewhat irrational fear of not doing justice to someone loved, though there's no justice to be done when you're speaking to a crowd of people who knew, intimately, the person you are trying so hard to talk about. There is nothing I can say to either burnish or blot an entire lifetime of generosity and mischief and goodness.

I've always disliked eulogies whose skeletons are a bare recitation of facts. I do not love someone, mourn them, miss them because they were born on such and such day, worked at such and such job, lived in such and such place from such and such date to such and such date. I love them because of the innumerable moments in their company that are now over and impossible to retrieve.

This is what I said:

Grandma Megs

Helen Hamamura is Tiny. She is Mom. She is Grandma Megs. She is so vivid in so many moments and days and years of my life that I can almost fool myself into believing that if we turned our heads fast enough, we would see her walking towards us, steadily and sturdily, her head bent over, just a little, and on her face, a small, persistent smile.

She would sit down, cross her hands in her lap, lean back in her chair… and she would know every single one of us. She would remember everyone's name. She would know, precisely, how everyone is related to everyone else. She could tell us a thousand stories, most of which we have probably forgotten. Saying "do you remember?" to Grandma Megs was like lighting the fuse on a memory and watching it bloom out, as fresh and pungent and colorful as if she could grab your hand and take you both traveling through time.

*

These are some of Grandma Megs's stories:

There was the time the telephone girls sent the firetruck out and the one fireman, the chubby one who was taking a break, came running past and she shouted the address as he went by. There were the times when the neighbor brought home sea turtles and she rode the empty shells around the yard. There was the time when Uncle Glen--just a waru bozu boy then--ran up a mountain, waved a flag for her, and ran back down again. There was the time when her mother was a little girl and she slept in a horse trough, waiting for her father to come home. "I love you so much," he said, "that if I put you in my eye, no tears would come out."

*

Grandma Megs loved hard and often and stubbornly. Her love was magnificently ordinary, offered up in meals cooked, cakes baked, pineapples stripped of their armored skins and turned into yellow cubes for breakfast. She made slippers and blankets. She cut out recipes from newspapers and mailed them across oceans. She did not care for the radio. She collected odd remedies for cramps of the legs. A bar of soap under the covers. A piece of string tied around a toe. An onion on the table. She taught her grandchildren to catch lizards with their hands, but she was the only one fast enough to catch a fly. She smuggled scraps of interesting plants in her pockets and stuck them in pots and somehow made single wilted leaves turn into wild things worthy of a jungle.

Grandma Megs made breakfast for Grandpa Megs every morning. Eggs, rice, and tea. I can't quite describe how enormous a portion of my understanding of how love should be has been defined by the act of eggs, rice, and tea every morning. 

*

The more we love, the tenderer and more vulnerable we become. So, I suppose, in the end, one of the goals of our allotment of days, one of the targets at which we must aim the arrows of our lives, is to have inside ourselves a bottomless lake of potential tears.

The lake inside Grandma Megs must have been so wide and so deep that you could throw an entire world in and it would fall forever. Her lake would be pleasant, but not flashy. It would be bright, all the way down to the bottom, and filled with stories in which everyone remembers everyone else's name, in which nobody is ever forgotten, in which things remain sharp and unfaded and well-loved forever.

These are the things, or at least the two most important things, that I learned from Grandma Megs: 

Love is an ordinary thing that is worth everything in the world.

And, if you remember the stories that make up your life, they exist for your own reckoning of forever and you never really have to say goodbye.