This is the Mystery Dates (Danny Wattenberg singing, me on guitar and singing, Gideon Rosen — who, incidentally, makes an excellent case against epistemic relativism here — on keys, John Fousek on drums, and the long-lost John Travis on bass), from a cassette of a demo that was produced by our Mamaroneck homeboy Peter Denenberg. I think this song is about being romantically involved with someone who is becoming accustomed to breathing more rarefied air than you could ever hope to provide. (I also think it’s the only time I ever sang lead in the Mystery Dates.)
I wrote the verse and chorus after a drunken week on Martha’s Vineyard, besotted with a girl called Laura Resen, which accounts for the semi-pun in the chorus. I remember Gideon at rehearsal fancifying and fussing around with the basic chords I brought in. Later on he and Danny came up with the bridge part — maybe the whole band contributed to the bridge, I don’t remember — but it’s definitely Danny’s words and melody.
Wicker & Palm (Mystery Dates)
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
You got a nice house with wicker and palm
And a chandelier
You got a nice house but I’d change a few things
If I had to live there
Reasons, they’re not so clear now
But they’re happy, happy at home
I’ve got nothing to fear now
‘Cause I’m happy, happy at home
Winter’s coming to this place
Now let’s prepare
Storm doors, storm doors
Can’t predict the weather here
How come there’s no Maypo
For my breakfast, dear?
Casey’s come back from the Cape
But she’s not like I knew her
Not like I knew her
Mike Tyson, who, despite his insane and destructive public image, has always been an extremely honest, thoughtful and eloquent spokesperson for Devastationalism, was the subject of an article in last week’s Sunday Times. The piece concludes with Tyson talking about his sobriety and his ongoing struggle for some of that elusive peace of mind, with a rather stunning example of obiter dictum:
“I just say I’m not getting high today,” he said. “I’m not promising them I’m not getting high tomorrow. I’m trying to figure it out. I’m in an abysmal world trying to figure it out.”
On an eerily similar note (insane and destructive yet honest, thoughtful and eloquent), Philip K. Dick’s last completed novel (published shortly after his death from a stroke in 1982), The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, opens with this paragraph:
“Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it’s to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places, rather than by design.”
“Get me to the nearest Barnes & Noble!” right?? The story is told in the first person by Angel Archer, a narrator of such charm and charisma that Dick claimed in interviews that he literally began hemorrhaging and had to be rushed to the hospital upon completion of the novel, he was so distressed to be separated from her after the book’s long gestation and writing process.
What makes unadulterated sentimentality so repugnant is that sentimentality is really just the potentially creepy fetishization of innocence. But what’s astonishing is to realize that we can still have justice in a world like ours that is devoid of innocence. Because human beings will strive for redemption under virtually any circumstances. Despite how awful things are, and the completely miserable and dangerous conditions under which most people are forced to live, we still (for the most part) persist in being polite and even kind to other people we meet. This implies that in reality justice is more a matter of love and forgiveness than of guilt and innocence. Still, we continue not only fetishizing innocence, but, as our culture becomes ever more misshapen, fetishizing guilt too.
The sometime sociologist Philip Slater has recently resurfaced on the Huffington Post as a sort of humanist contrarian, but he struck real Devastationalist gold back in the 1970s with a series of remarkably prescient books diagnosing the increasing pathological tendencies of postwar society. The most famous of these is The Pursuit of Loneliness, published in 1970. Here he is talking about the prohibitive difficulty of changing paths, and potentially constructive ways of viewing despair, from a later book called Earthwalk (1975):
“I have wasted X years of my life in a painful and useless pursuit; this is sad, but I now have an opportunity to try another approach.”
This is hard for people to [say]. There is a strong temptation either to rationalize our wrong turnings as a necessary part of our development (”it taught me discipline”), or to deny that we participated fully in them (”that was before I became enlightened”). Giving up these two evasions leads initially to despair, but as Alexander Lowen points out, despair is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality–it is a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.
People get trapped in despair when their despair is incomplete–when some thread of illusory hope is still retained. When artificial lights are turned off in a windowed room at night, it takes a little time to realize that the darkness is not total, and the longer we are dazzled by the after-image of that artificial light, the longer it takes to perceive the subtle textures of natural light and shadows–to realize that we can, in fact, see.
And this is the All Girl Band, or me and Tex, at least. (Perhaps the rest of the Girls were already at the bar?) This was the song I sang for the Losers Lounge tribute to Randy Newman and somehow it emigrated into the All Girl Band setlist for awhile. Of course, at the time I had no trouble relating to what was — hidden behind a very convincing facade of drunken self-loathing — the song’s disastrously sentimental heart. Famously known to have been John Belushi’s favorite song.
Guilty (Randy Newman)
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
Yes, baby, I been drinkin’
And I shouldn’t come by I know
But I found myself in trouble, darlin’
And I had nowhere else to go
Got some whisky from the barman
Got some cocaine from a friend
I just had to keep on movin’
Til I was back in your arms again
I’m guilty, baby I’m guilty
And I’ll be guilty all the rest of my life
How come I never do what I’m supposed to do
How come nothin’ that I try to do ever turns out right?
You know, you know how it is with me baby
You know, you know I just can’t stand myself
And it takes a whole lot of medicine
For me to pretend that I’m somebody else
This is the Lockhorns, in a rather expansive one-off configuration, with me singing and playing acoustic, Bob Ducharme on electric guitar, Marc Fagelson on bass, Eleanor Imster and Carrie Hamilton on vocals & percussion, and John Hamilton on drums. The occasion was a benefit for our friend John Scurti whose acting troupe needed money to go to (I think) the Edinburgh Festival. The benefit was in actuality a vodka-soaked barn-burner held in the company’s theater space.
I don’t remember much about the event, though the evidence clearly shows that I was physically present. (My last crystalline memory of that day is actually puking out the side of a moving car on the West Side Highway in the afternoon as we were corralling equipment.) The nostalgic and summery “Hiawatha” is one of Bob’s songs, and it contains one of my all-time favorite couplets.
Hiawatha (Bob DuCharme)
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee
In the summer of ‘79
Phyllis’s fast food seafood restaurant
I washed dishes with a friend of mine
Hiawatha, do you wanna
Get some beers and drive around?
You call Kate and I’ll call Donna
We’ll watch TV with the sound turned down
By the shining Big-Sea-Water
The tourist come just to eat fried fish
Me and Hiawatha out by the dumpster
Smoke a joint and make a wish
Two in the morning, close up the kitchen
Pies in the walk-in, Hiawatha sweeps then
Me and Hiawatha and the brand new waitress
Take her blood-red Pinto down to Woodmont Beach
The other day I was sitting at my desk, idly Googling “loneliness human condition” — you know, as one does — and two results jumped out at me. The first was from the novel “White Oleander” by Janet Fitch. I’ve never read the book, but if the following passage is any indication, surely here we have located the bitter and bilious underbelly of Oprah bookdom:
“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
God, the first time I read that I laughed so hard it almost made Diet Coke come out my nose. “Murderous with disappointment”! How brilliant is that! That phrase alone makes me want to go out right now and get completely hammered with Janet Fitch. Anyone who could craft such a succinct and pitch-perfect Devastationalist credo is all right in my book. And the crazy thing is, this quote turns up on dozens of blogs and personal web pages where people aggregate their favorite and most inspiring quotes. Apparently some kind of scarily misanthropic nerve has been struck here. I still strongly doubt I could ever bring myself to actually read the book, but the movie is now in my Netflix queue — I’ll happily pay to see Michelle Pfeiffer speak those words.
The second quote, which also turned up in more than one of the Google search results, is by a Seattle-born Theravadan Buddhist monk, Ajahn Sumedho:
“We suffer a lot in our society from loneliness. So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: ‘Let’s talk to each other; let’s do things together so we won’t be lonely.’ And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that’s about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we’re very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.”
To me the interesting thing is that he’s using almost the exact same words as the protagonist of “White Oleander” but his message is meant to be one of comfort and transcendence, in contrast to her message of embitterment and isolation. It just kills me how tiny and subtle the difference is between these two mortally opposed ways of looking at the world. You can read the entire essay here.
Certainly, I’ve held both viewpoints at various times. Life events and certain kinds of inner temperaments can isolate you and leave you feeling stranded or alienated, but our minds still try to find ways to reach out to each other, across great distances of both time and space if necessary, to feel the reassuring thrum of psychic resonance. Not that it’s always easy to achieve. But as far back as I can remember I’ve never felt completely disconnected, and that’s because of music.
Music made me feel less alone, and I know that’s a big part of why I surrendered so completely to it. And I mean it made me feel less alone literally, in the sense of a community to belong to and lyrics that miraculously were generous enough to encompass my misfit concerns. But I also mean it in the abstract spiritual sense of being at home in the universe and feeling connected to humanity.
Speech and gestures and body language and sex are all wonderful, of course, but sometimes they are simply not enough to communicate the things we need to communicate. Sometimes they are not even enough to provide evidence that we are engaging with living conscious spirits similar to our own. Music (and not just music, of course, but all art) provides that evidence when we need it the most, and communicates some of the things words and gestures are helpless to convey.
Wide Eyed Fool
Bettie Serveert
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
There were — are — some things I definitely plan(ned) to post up here to mark the one-year anniversary of this blog (born November 19, 2006). But, alas, as they are all still in “progress,” this will have to do for the moment. And actually, I think it does quite nicely. A declaration of love undying from a Devastationalist Ur-text, Max Beerbohm’s side-splitting, heart-broke and beautiful little book, Zuleika Dobson:
“My heart is no tablet of mere wax, from which an instant’s heat can dissolve whatever imprint it may bear, leaving it blank and soft for another impress, and another and another. My heart is a bright hard gem, proof against any die. Came Cupid, with one of his arrow-points for graver, and what he cut on the gem’s surface can never be effaced. There, deeply and forever, your image is intagliated. No years, nor fire, nor cataclysm of total Nature, can efface from that great gem your image.”
And an anniversary song, too, why not? The All Girl Band live, drunkenly defying traditional gender roles! Take that, America!
I Want That Man (Tom Bailey/Alannah Currie)
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
I saw Caitlin Corless play live in a cramped little club and was astounded at how complete and self-contained her talent was. It was not the biggest, most wide-ranging and all-encompassing talent, but it was a talent fully served and fully realized. She knew what she wanted to express and had developed the necessary aesthetic and technical competency to express it. Heart, mind, fingers and voice all seamlessly serving a simple, clear vision.
After her set, I stopped by her table to pay my compliments and see if she had any CDs. I was nervous, intimidated by the audacity of both her youth and ability. At close hand she had that extraordinary shyness and self-possession — almost stuck-uppedness — that I have observed in other extremely talented singer/songwriters. This, of course, only increased my high regard, but between us there was not much psychic ground left for conversation. I stammered something like, “You’re really good at this…” And she replied, “I hope so; I’ve been doing it since I was 10.” (I don’t remember the exact, ridiculously young age she gave.)
Luckily for me, she was sitting with a more tipsy and talkative friend who introduced herself as Caitlin’s “publicist,” and explained that, No, Caitlin had no CDs out, no real recordings at all in fact besides her Garageband bedroom demos. I asked if there was website where I might hear some songs, at least? Caitlin’s publicist shook her head, Sadly, no website, but she was kind enough to scribble the address for Caitlin’s MySpace page on a napkin and send me on my way.
The part that really gets me is that here’s a person who’s been working on her songwriting with evident dedication and diligence for at least a decade, who obviously takes her art very seriously, and yet, for all her investment of time and energy, is almost un-Google-able and has never been inside a proper recording studio. In other words, it seems to me like she makes songs in order to live and get through her days but that she’d almost rather keep it to herself. (Not to overstate the case here — I’m guessing she wouldn’t mind a little more recognition, but clearly, that’s not the main reason why she’s been doing it.) The idea that people commit astonishing art in private that we may never know about is very endearing to me, while also a bit mind-boggling.
Yellow Dress (Caitlin Corless)
Caitlin Corless
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
Where have I been? (”Got any what?”) Uh, where have you been? Or: Where haven’t I been, more likely. Actually, it’s a rather suspiciously odd coincidence that my involuntary blogging sabbatical just happened to coincide with my return to New York City and its gnatty clouds of debilitating psychic energy. (Even walking down the street is exponentially more difficult here than elsewhere, with the weight of so many people crammed so close together, emitting so much negative mental energy — it’s like being slapped around sometimes just to buy a quart of milk.)
Of course, if I tell people I’m getting the hell out of Dodge because of the bad vibes, they look at me with pity, like I’m crazy. But it’s true. And that’s not only the main reason, that’s the umbrella which covers virtually all the myriad other reasons. Human beings were not meant to live this way.
Allen St. John’s recent book, Clapton’s Guitar, tells the story of a backwoods Virginia musician called Wayne Henderson, one of the tiny and tight-knit community of master guitar builders in the world today. The best of Henderson’s painstakingly handcrafted instruments compare favorably to pre-war Martins, the most coveted guitars in the world, and the book explores the reasons why this might be so, talking a lot about the qualities of different types of wood and the techniques luthiers use to cut, whittle, sand, glue, brace, treat and finish that wood to bring a guitar into being.
It’s an interesting book if you have even the slightest bit of guitar geek in you, but it’s almost all smoke screen. The real truth of the matter doesn’t come out until near the very end of the book, in a scene that takes place over lunch in a shopping-center Italian restaurant in West Concord, MA. St. John is talking to a guy called T.J. Thompson, a gifted and reknowned guitar restoration expert. They are discussing the “Big Question”: “what is it that separates a magical guitar from a merely great one?” What are the reasons that one guitar can channel magic, while its erstwhile twin only sounds pale in comparison? There’s some hemming and hawing (”I could probably list 600 reasons…” says T.J., alluding to the aforementioned processes of cutting, whittling, bracing, etc.), before T.J. finally blurts out the most important thing; really, the only important thing:
“The state of mind of the person building the guitar.”
More on all of this later, but for now here’s a question: If believing T.J.’s statement makes sense to you (as it surely does to me), why not extrapolate from this and work out all the logical implications? Clearly, if you conscientiously did that, your whole life would have to change. And I wonder why our culture can so easily accept isolated glimpses of this aspect of reality, but would seek to ridicule anyone who went ahead and drew the obvious conclusions.
This is the Girls playing “Millionaire,” recorded live at Dick Zigun’s Coney Island Sideshows By The Seashore. It’s like one of those psychological aptitude tests where they try to determine if you know the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes, for years at a time, you lose your perspective — it’s impossible to tell. But if you just took one step in any direction, suddenly it would seem so obvious.
Millionaire
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
There’s a millionaire underneath the table
I know it’s not right, you know it’s not right
But there’s a millionaire underneath the table
There’s a millionaire underneath the table
Do you think I don’t know it’s not right?
I don’t know anything at all
Regarding the previous post: Of course, nowadays I would not be (quite) so inanely pleased with myself to be wearing such a pathetically crippling defect as a badge of honor. There’s nothing wrong with memories, but being an obsessive-compulsive emotional packrat is ultimately self-defeating. (Over time, you end up having a giant rear-view mirror where your windshield should be.) And one way of looking at recovery from Devastationalism is as an advanced course in baggage disposal. But still…everyone has a list.
The List
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
After the service, we were standing around
Down by the harbor, watching the boats
I saw the husband smoking all alone
And the English girls in their winter coats
I don’t pretend things will be the same again
But I believe in something worth holding on to
People were quiet, as we stood at the gate
Ice in the water, snow on the ground
I never realized what we had to lose
Some kids from the theater passed a bottle around
I don’t pretend things will be the same again
But I believe in something worth holding on to
I don’t pretend things will be the same again
And so we grieve for someone we will never see again
You wanna see a list?
The things that I have loved
The things that I believed in
The things worth holding on to
After the service, we were standing around
Down by the harbor, watching the boats…
Addendum
Kristian writes: “Things will never be the same again–from every moment forward. From this moment to the next. Nothing will ever be the same. Even without some benchmark loss. And yet somehow we’re genetically attuned to the notion, or cling to the feeling, or have a soul addiction to needing something to be the same. Some comfort zone, some notion of stability, a kitchen view or a hand you held or a loving glance or a favorite carpet or the flavor of some recipe that you’ve lost. I guess it’s about the darn journey after all. Fuck all those new age babblers that have been trying to get me to hear that darn message all these years, dagnabit!”
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Alice McDermott that appeared in the online literary quarterly, failbetter.com. It’s from last year, around the time her novel, “After This,” was published:
It’s been said that, to some extent, every novelist writes the same book over and over. Many reviewers have noted how much your novels share: middle-class Irish Catholic characters, and that Long Island setting… Do you ever worry that you are indeed writing the same book again and again?
No. I think the question doesn’t apply to fiction… More southerners, Miss Welty? More Russian émigrés, Mr. Nabokov? Have you considered using your imagination, Mr. Garcia Marquez, and maybe setting your next novel in Finland? We’ve forgotten how to read literature (or even what literature is for) if we confuse the meaning of a piece with its subject…
I like that she finds the question so fucking stupid that she can’t even be bothered to tone down her sarcasm. So, which is more important: The lines of the story, or the story between the lines? Of course, this question applies to much more than just how a person reads literature or listens to songs. Where a person falls on this continuum provides a gigantic clue about how they construct their view of the world.
This mostly instrumental, semi-novelty song, “Martian,” was inspired by a smart-ass retort I delivered to a rude and creepy customer (along with his cappuccino) at the Berkeley cafe where I used to work in the early 90s. I guess that’s the “subject.” But the “meaning” of the song comes from something Beth McGroarty once said about me (in my presence) at around the same time.
We were sitting at an initial-carved table in the back of a grad-student bar and as usual I was carrying on about some or other romantic catastrophe. One young man in our party spoke up, making a genuine attempt to be kind. “Don’t worry,” he said, “You’ll get over it.” Kindness being like chalkboard nails to me in those days, I repaid him with a look of almost complete disgust. Thankfully, Beth immediately leapt in to defend my honor. “Philip,” she explained curtly, “has never gotten over anything in his life.”
Recorded by Stuart in San Francisco, with Beth’s brother Mark on the bass. Stuart also played percussion, banging a tambourine and repeatedly slamming a gunmetal file cabinet drawer.
Martian
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
How do you know how I’d look at a martian?
How do you know what I’m going to say?
I raise a glass for the dearly departed
The things in my head won’t go away
Martian Spoken-Word Intro Live on KALX
[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn’t always work with Mac/Safari.]
