Now, in a neatly eclectic musical pirouette, we spin from finger-pickin’ blues gospel into the electronic rhythms and screaming harmonics of Animal Collective. Long a fringe act with an alienating-at-first edge to their excellence, it was right around here that Animal Collective hit on the balanced formula that led to mass appeal and mega-success.
Though global notoriety wouldn’t come until the next album, you can already hear the maturation of their sound in Feels and StrawberryJam. Both albums are excellent and important, I really can’t recommend then enough, and this song in particular always felt to me like the polished culmination of something they’d been building towards for a long time.
As much as I love them though, I can’t help but add that Fireworks is a great example of how first-draft writing won’t kill a song — far from it — and what an unfortunate disincentive that can be. While there are a lot of good lines, really, a lot, there are at least an equal amount that are just… bad. Bad like bad poetry bad. Honestly, they could’ve titled the song pretty much anything and it would’ve remained fundamentally unchanged.
And really, that’s not the end of the world. I still love the work, I chose it for the bindle, and I’m sitting here listening and enjoying it all over again as I write about it. But it is wasted opportunity, and it’s not an isolated incident — if anything, it’s the rule. For so many songs, after the last note fades, the lingering, frustrating question remains: if it’s already this good…
“I eventually came to the conclusion you should never say anything in poetry that you would not say in prose. Poetry has the same obligation to make sense as any other statement made by the human mouth. […] As for songwriting, if something has a pretty enough melody or a strong enough sense of arrangement, people will listen to it even if the lyrics make no sense — but that does not make it a well-written song. […] When songs get pretentious, overflowery and obscure, that person is proclaiming he or she is an artist. […] I think it was a good thing that, back in the Renaissance, people like Michelangelo were treated like interior decorators. A well-written song is a craft item. Take care of the craft and the art will take care of itself.”
-Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of Macdougal Street
The Reverend Gary Davis was one hell of an interior decorator.
Almost a year ago today, by some yoga-teacher-training miracle, I gave up nicotine. Since then I’d bummed a smoke now and again when out and about, but my brain had firmly reversed course, closing down the synapses that had fired relentlessly for “pack-a-day-smoker” these past 8 years, and re-opening the cracked and broken avenues of childhood, the decrepit synaptic pathways of “non-smoker.”
It all began with a girl, of course, and a desire to share something with her. In time the girl faded, but cigarettes? Yeah, me and my monkey, we got along famously — if it were just a dirty habit we’d still be together. Make no mistake, I won’t lie to you: I loved smoking.
I had no tattoos and no piercings; as Tom Waits once said, cigarettes were my “artist’s jewelry,” part of my identity, the self-destructive mask of how I saw myself as a poet. More than that though, way, way beyond aesthetics or emulating old heroes, cigarettes became my teddy bear, an escape from crowded rooms, an ever-reliable steam-release valve for any and all anxiety. Finding a quiet place to sit and smoke was my faithful friend through all the times that I was lonely.
And then I was home alone in my rooftop shack in Taipei, having trouble breathing, probably from smoking my way through another chest cold. In time that fear grew into a blossoming panic attack about emphysema and lung cancer and dying in a hospital bed with only my own idiot choices to blame. I don’t know how to describe this kind of anxiety, except that it’s physical, and unbearable, and it demands more than anything an outlet. The way I dealt with that unbearable anxiety, of course, was to go outside and smoke a cigarette. I knew as I was doing it: this was fucked. I was fucked.
So some 3 years later — it took 3 more years — the stars aligned and I found myself truly ready. I moved into vaporizing, wrapping my own coils, twisting my own wicks, then another year tapering the nicotine down, then finally, on the first day of yoga school, I quit the beast altogether. The last exhale was, for this humble addict, something of a miracle.
For the next year I was free. It was cool, I could bum one now and again when I was out, no big deal, no tailspin, nothing. My machinery was re-wired, I went running, sat through the credits of movies, regained my sense of smell, it was good. Then last month, cold turkey off meds and returning to the world, I had a suddenly powerful urge to smoke a cigarette.
With no-one around to bum from, I drove to the store and bought a pack and smoked one. I’d been on a successful kick of don’t make a thing of the occasional square, and it won’t become a thing. But something felt immediately different this time, maybe it was having 19 more of them there in that familiar little box, maybe my stars had fallen out of alignment, I don’t know. Wrestling with myself the whole way home, I eventually threw it out the window as I passed a bar.
The next day, as I was moving into my new place, I bought another pack. It just happened. With a pack in the pocket it was like the last year had never existed, my brain tore the police tape right off the “smoker,” synapses and lo, they had been impeccably maintained: first thing in the morning, again with coffee, after every meal, last thing before bed, every hour on the hour and not even physically addicted yet.
There was more to this than just a re-lapse, (smoking starts as symptom, not cause) but I told myself I would finish this pack and that would be that. The sooner I went back to the mental state of “non-smoker” the easier it would be to believe. The new housemates had no idea that me sitting outside in the morning, shirtless, smoking cigarettes, was me in crisis. They thought that was just me. And I suppose, to some extent, it was. I smoked that pack down in two days flat and that was that.
There is an intersection on the way to my apartment, where you turn right to go home, but if you go straight you’ll come to a 24-hour gas station. The next evening I found myself sitting in the car at this empty country intersection, engine idle, light green, listening very carefully to the sound of the turn signal:
Famous primarily for Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (an admittedly awesome studio offering), The Flaming Lips are really revered in smaller, music-geek circles for what they do live.
The closest thing I’ve heard it compared to is the visual performance art of David Byrne and The Talking Heads, particularly in Jonathan Demme’s concert-movie Stop Making Sense (in which Byrne dons the fat suit). The Talking Heads, though, maintained a comparative distance from their audience — their art was a presentation. With The Flaming Lips it’s inclusive, the show is their gift to the audience, like they’re trying to give everyone a brilliant, exploding, colorful hug.
Here’s an offering off my favorite of their records, a loose (very loose) concept album called The Soft Bulletin. I’ve encountered a number of people lately who don’t know this band. That’s unacceptable. Know this band.
The human brain takes in everything. Everything. If you spin around in a circle just looking and listening, your brain logs every bit of sight and sound; every single detail your eyes glaze over is absorbed with a computer’s meticulous accuracy. We’re super good at processing this information, these sights and scents and sounds and sensations, and deciding on the 1% that is pertinent while pushing all the rest to the back of our brains. It’s what allows us to function. Our brains are cream-of-the-evolutionary-crop super-processors.
We don’t know much about sleep, except that without it we go — literally — insane. The theory I’ve heard that makes the most intuitive sense is that when we dream, the unconscious brain processes all that raw information, the ceaseless, endless litany of sensory stimulation we spend our waking hours accumulating, then like a secretary in an office, it separates and categorizes all that input, filing what it needs in long term memory, clearing the cache of short term, and junking the rest.
We’re the evolutionary products of people who managed to trick themselves into believing this world fits into understandable categories; the children of the ones who got good at parsing this chaos into manageable chunks, pretending there was order and sanity and logic to any of it. Pretending that the reality of our existence is somehow a comprehensible thing. It isn’t.
We’re a pack of talking monkeys who leap-frogged our evolutionary capacity via language and technology to a point where we’re now sitting at our control panels pushing buttons, twisting knobs, pulling levers on things we only half understand. Evolution will catch up, eventually, but right now? If we were shown the hyper-dimensional reality of the universe, merely the actual parameters of the physical space we occupy, our silly heads would pop. There are some things (cough, infinity) that we simply don’t have the capacity to understand.
If some god-creature came down to Earth and said, “Hey monkey, wanna know what’s really going on? What all this really is?”
We would say, “Yeah, of course!” Then just before the fatal hemorrhaging began and we dropped like a wet sponge, our last few sentences would go something like,
“Time isn’t linear? What does that say about free will? How many dimensions are there, anyways? Why are my eyes bleeding? What’s an exponential infinity?”
Our life is vastly more absurd than we allow ourselves to understand, and that’s no accident. The childless aunts and uncles on our ancestral tree who couldn’t ignore the base insanity of existence went crazy. CrrRraAAzY. Crazy. You’re here today because your ancestors caught the gene for classification, for putting things in boxes, for dealing with the 1% of pertinent information that mattered for survival and letting the subconscious sort the rest. Taking in all that stimulus at once is impossible, and if you try to fight the current and struggle upstream to the source? Well, we’re bred for putting our heads in the sand. Trust your evolution. Stick it down there deep.
The universe is infinitely large and infinitely tiny. I’d wager it’s safe to say we’re almost certainly part of something bigger, some ridiculous thing which you and I will never know and lack the capacity to even understand. Any god-creature I conceive of is just a creature that exists in the universe in relation to us the way we exist in relation to ants. An order of magnitude more complicated, with the power of life and death, but still basically middle management.
Oh, those poor ants, who think we speak ant, who think we hear prayers.
No, ultimately, you and me? We’re just a couple of ignorant droplets, soaring through space for the tiniest sliver of time, destined soon to smash on a hot stone. Safe money says a bit of steam, and that’s the end. What larger source dripped us? Who put the stone there? Why are we falling at a constant 9.8m/s^2? Don’t be sad, friend, that we’ll never know — be glad instead that we got to be so beautiful.
So wordpress has a stats page that, to my shame, I check obsessively. At the bottom there is a little field for “search term” that almost always just says “unknown search term.” Every once in a while though, for whatever reason, something else will appear down there. It’s not uncommon for that something to be along the lines of “fucking with handkerchief,” or “girl tied with handkerchief.”
Some non-zero number of people are sitting down with their pants around their ankles, reptile-lust-brain fully in command, searching for very specific bondage porn, and ending up on the bindle. This pleases me very much.
A lot of people, a LOT of people, will or would react to that with, “ew.” And yeah, sure, “ew.” But there are only a few variations among human here:
1) you don’t masturbate; 2) you do masturbate, but not to pornography; 3) you masturbate, at least sometimes, to pornography, but you think handkerchief bondage porn is a fetish too far; or 4) some combination of the above, plus you’re embarrassed / guilty about it. The connective tissue across all those options, excepting maybe the aesexual, is shame.
What bothers me about “ew” is our knee-jerk tendency to “otherize,” to point at someone else to prove we, at least, are not that. Our need to create “in” and “out” groups is an evolutionary imperative, and it’s been the cause of some of our most callous collective activities. Being “out,” to a group of humans, means they’ll torture you slowly to save their children. Don’t be “out” come winter, says evolution. I would ask, among consenting adults, what constitutes a fetish too far? Why must your answer be “ew?”
Why must you not be that?
Human sexuality is such a funny thing. Some of it’s rooted in nature, some of it’s nurtured in the darkness of our formative years, but after a certain point, it is what it is. We like what we like. And because sex is so vital to us, because it causes us to act so irrationally, it’s also our catnip, our exposed heel, susceptible to the machinery of institutional control, via the state, religion, madison avenue, dad’s shotgun, whatever.
Our endless capacity to live in thrall to lust is such a truism it’s become trope. It’s no secret, this weakness. Your sexuality, growing up in a self-aware society that thrives on conquering and control, is never quite your own. We’re slaves to our sub-conscious, and to our sexuality most of all, and the key to those chains has always been our shame.
Making art, for me, is about honesty; it’s about harnessing truth to help us feel less alone. This shaming and exclusion, this hurting alone in the dark, that’s my bread and butter. The sad irony of our alienation and shame is that it’s something we share. I’m interested in the stuff we know but don’t talk about, the underwater caves and connected tunnels that exist below everyone’s surface, the impossible lights in the darkness we all see but can’t raise in polite company.
I spit on polite company.
Bring me your reptile-brains with their pants around their ankles, bring me your picked-on teenagers, your girls with daddy issues, bring me your fetishes and your orgasms and send them to the bindle, and let them wank if they wish while I play my guitar and sing a little White Stripes song about children walking to school. The bindle delights in it all.
Fuck the shame of rich old men. Live your own weird life. Come sadness we’re all the same monkey, hurting alone in the dark. Open your window, toss out what you don’t need, let me in with the light. It’s just life, darling. Have a wank and a giggle.
Inspiration for Inside Llewellyn Davis, mentor to Robert Zimmerman, sage of 1960s Lower East Side Manhattan, The Mayor of Macdougal Street himself: Dave Van Ronk.
As with a lot of his arrangements, I thought, hey that sounds easy enough, let’s pull up a tab and give it a go. Nope. Hard as shit.
First, in fairness, came This is Spinal Tap. That was the genre-breaking beginning of the “mockumentary,” the inflection point of this wonderful innovation. But before The Office exploded, and before Netflix web-streaming had brought television online, there was Clark and Michael.
The brainchild of pre-fame Michael Cera and Clark Duke, the show was delivered as a web-series before web-series were a thing, breaking the fourth wall by filming filming, by taking a meta-contextual step beyond the camera long before Jim was lamenting Dwight’s antics with a knowing wink at the screen (or Tim and Gareth, if you prefer — which I do).
Filled with deadpan, serious-sad humor, and flush with rising guest stars, this is a concept that was well, WELL ahead of its time. It almost hurts the brain to consider the thought process of its writing and inception. Michael Cera rode this to Arrested Development and beyond. And Clark? Well, Clark Duke had a harder road.
It’s become a trend these days for young intellectuals to trash J.D. Salinger, and bear with me here, but it grinds me up inside. It’s very easy to disparage a Perfect Day for Bananafish when you’ve read a thousand shitty short-stories that end in suicide, all them — like it or not, know it or not — owing a debt to Salinger. Same goes for Rushmore and The Graduate and The Royal Tenenbaums, they would never have existed without Holden Caulfield and his phonies and his kid sister Phoebe and her floppy hunting hat.
Having been raised on a generation of Salinger-influenced art, it’s now a hip trend to talk down his work, and I understand how it might seem uninspired in the wake of everything it inspired. But that’s lunacy. Salinger was a genius, an innovator, and while he may have been an asshole, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t great.
Even if you prefer his imitators (which I don’t), he should get credit for his creation. I’m not calling Clark and Michael J.D. Salinger — far from it — but innovation means something, something extraordinary, and if it’s your creation? Well, credit is the only currency that matters. For what it’s worth, this is me, giving them theirs.
Also, not for nothing, their show is dark, and sad, and funny, and very sweet.
“Despite the skepticism of their friends and family, Clark and Michael are convinced that they have a TV script that will make them stars.”
Walking along a shortcut through the forest, yoga mat over my shoulder, singing softly to myself. Listening to the leaves crackle underfoot, I looked left and — BAM. Startled the shit out of me. See, what’s really weird is that this is not the first thing to be nailed halfway up that tree. It used to be a urinal.
“A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he shall be going out on a day when he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.”
handkerchief tied to stick 