[Just a rework of an old writing exercise...]
I decided,
before I fell asleep—
I’d be okay with it.
It bites to know he’s gone,
but was he ever even here?
Or
has he only been alive
in our own minds.
Your letter.
Don’t know if I agree.
Thought about what you wrote.
You made it seem so simple.
You made him seem too simple.
Like anybody else.
Like us.
I tried. I couldn’t
fall asleep.
The most consuming headache:
Boll weevils
infesting my brain.
i wanted pumpkin pie tonight
TONIGHT
but we were out of cloves
(or so she said...)
he told me to close my arm with a needle inside and it won’t stab me
but i’m scared to try
the last needle left a bruise
a large one
for weeks and weeks
(so much for professionals...)
this morning felt quite ideal
for parades
but there weren’t any
and there is still a large fly trapped between my window
and the blinds
and i’m not going to let it out
When I was in elementary school, somewhere around third or fourth grade, I started recording my older brother’s CDs onto cassette tapes so that I could play them in my Walkman® and listen to them on the school bus. It wasn’t long before I started my own music collection and realized that instead of recording entire albums onto separate cassettes, I could choose and mix whichever songs I wanted to put together on a tape. I would dedicate hours to compiling songs onto cassettes, holding my finger over the pause and record buttons, focused on the time display of the small LCD screen on my Sony boom box (which I still have, unlike my Walkmans…Walkmen?), and carefully noting each track’s length so as not to run out of tape midway through a song. The whole process was rather messy—the tapes were really more projects based on convenience than music appreciation.
Sometime during middle school, I participated in my very first mix tape swap through a forum at the website of a music magazine I was reading at the time called 7ball. And it was good. It was great! I discovered a slew of music that I’d never heard before and the person whose tape I’d received had taken the time to write descriptive liner notes and everything! This is when I really started to get the mix tape bug...maybe…actually that’s really difficult to determine…I guess this is when I got the bug to make mix tapes for other people. Until then I’d been making them just for myself with themes and rosters that didn’t face the scrutiny of others. None of my friends were listening to music that I liked at the time, so I was encouraged to use the mix tape as a tool to share. Hopefully I could wean one or two of them off of MTV and mainstream radio and get them to come to some shows with me… =)
Then, burning CDs was born. Well that’s when I really started to go to town. The development has transformed the whole process, making it so much simpler, and allowing me to produce CDs that are qual-i-teee. No more rough bumps and cuts where I couldn’t get a button down in time on my boom box, now it’s all smooth transitions and digital recording mastery! I can even make a gapless, seamless disc if I wanted, though that doesn’t necessarily work that well with a mix. Sure the charm of a dinky old cassette tape with handwritten labels has gone, but there’s that entire disc surface to write on and color and I can use Sharpies!!! So now whenever it’s someone’s birthday he’ll likely get a mix from me, if music reminds me of someone I’ll make a mix for him, or if it’s just been a while I’ll compile a mix and give it to Steph. Steph probably has the largest collection of my mix CDs.
So as I’ve tried to explain, mix tapes and I go way back. We are good good friends. And as long as technology exists that supports some form of mix tape creation, I will never ever stop creating them. I didn’t want to go as far as to say that making mix tapes is an art form, but I just did. So I’ll also now add that I am a fan of this form of art. I am pro-mix tape-life.
Here’s a list:
In no particular order and of no particular consequence...
Carnegie Hall
Rainer Maria ending the year/ending the band
prognosticate ≠ pontificate
"Red wine = hope"
Ian Svenonius
macaroni + (Fontina) cheese – bad
“Save the cheerleader. Save the world.” – come on...
newly clipped fingernails making me feel so wonderful and beautiful (beautiful?) right now
BBQ Chicken burrito?
“BORAT is HERE”
Andrew Smith getting married – I am heartbroken, I’ll never be a Danielson (PS: “I have a crush on EVERY boy”)
ALWAYS popcorn on the train
movies featuring music by one band (primarily) ex: Stranger Than Fiction – Brit Daniel (Spoon), Thumbsucker – Polyphonic Spree, Little Miss Sunshine – DeVotchka
“one of the fat campers goes, ‘I’m gonna go marry that hot diabetic over there’”
November 13th is Jasmin’s 22nd birthday
Carmina Burana
Which band(s) do you wish wish wish would get back together and put out some new music?
He’s a strong swimmer.
Austin City Limits fools me with its cityscape backdrop, but Sufjan looks quite charming with wings.
Corduroy Appreciation Club…vip vip vip
I have no use for a box full of Styrofoam peanuts
Now...feel free to share a list of your own.
Halloween is a hit or miss holiday. Some people love it. Others hate it. I hop the fence from year to year. This year, I think, was a hit.
I have never had a full-time job during Halloween until this year. In the past, I spent October 31 staying up with friends, subjecting ourselves to horror movies that none of us liked nor could we get enough of. One particular year, I spent Halloween at a train stop waiting in the freezing cold for a lone trolley to cart me back to Philadelphia at 3 in the morning. I was dressed as a gypsy-living-out-of-the-bottom-of-my-closet with very little creativity and even less insulation.
This year, like I said, was different. I spent Halloween in an office where I'm normally slotted away in my little cubicle, but for one day at the end of October, I'm allowed to dress however I want and work as little as possible without feeling guilty. Apparently, as I quickly found out, Halloween in my office is quite a big to-do:
First, the costumes. Each team in the office is required to dress up according to a theme. Because this was a contest, hushed discussions took place in corner cubicles, entire teams went to 'lunch' at the Halloween store down the street and conference room windows were papered over as secret costume construction took place inside. Oh, the intrigue. My team, of course, took the easy way out with the theme: "What Not To Do In The Office" or, in our words, "An excuse to wear t-shirts on Tuesday." My sweatpants came in real handy.
Second, the pumpkin pie eating contest. Gross. I just gagged just thinking about it.
Third, the mummy-wrapping contest. The senior-most member of each team was nominated to be our mummy and at the sound of a whistle, teams were to wrap him or her with toilet paper from head to toe. Not as easy as it sounds, I guarantee you. It took us a while to figure out whether it was more efficient for the mummy to spin around or for us to run in circles maypole-style while trailing toilet paper. We finished second, to which my manager quipped, "Second place is the first loser." Yay team.
Fourth, guess the weight of the pumpkin. 5, 10, 20 pounds? I have no idea. I don't lift weights often enough to have a reference for this type of thing. Oh wait. I don't lift weights. Ever. I saw one woman cradling the pumpkin and judging whether it was lighter or heavier than her 10-month-old child. The girl who won was off by one ounce. (And by the way, the accompanying picture is not of people in my office, but they look like people who would work in an office and they are indeed trying to guess the weight of the pumpkin.)
Add to all this some trick-or-treating throughout the cubes, decorating in the aisles, prolonged lunches, ooo-ing and ahh-ing over children who came to visit, general laziness and, of course, sweatpants and you can guess how much work I did. Zero. And to think I got paid for it. In candy.
When I hear Hamilton Leithauser sing with his gruff voice and drawn out style, I imagine a drunken, moody, arrogant jerk who won’t give up the mic. And I love it. In the slightly unsettling words of Project Runway contestant, Vincent Libretti: “It just turns me on.”
For The Walkmen’s newest release, a track by track remake of the 1974 “Pussy Cats” collaboration between Harry Nilsson and John Lennon, Leithauser seems to lose the chip on his shoulder and welcomes a number of friends to join him. As a final hurrah before the band’s Marcata recording studio in Harlem shut down, The Walkmen enlisted buddies including the likes of the infamous Ian Svenonius to record one last album, throwing a party to celebrate its end.
As any article or review about the album reiterates, there is a special parallel between The Walkmen’s recording and the original in that both are very much projects created in the celebratory and productive environment of friends. The DVD included with The Walkmen’s CD also highlights this subject. And listening to the record, you can certainly feel the fun and hanging out vibe, especially on the track, “Loop de Loop,” which I’ve been playing so loud and often that my mother keeps complaining that she has the song stuck in her head. Clips from the party where they recorded the choral segment of the song appears on the aforementioned DVD, starring various New York City hipsters (was that Sarah Silverman?).
Some standouts for me are the opener, “Many Rivers to Cross,” a passionate ditty originally written and performed by reggae artist Jimmy Cliff, Nilsson’s original “All My Life,” a version of “Save the Last Dance” that is full with strings and features genius/psycho Ian Svenonius brilliantly, and of course, the song that has been playing incessantly, “Loop de Loop.”
This album is unlike any previous Walkmen album, which makes it an exciting and essential piece to their collection. I won’t pretend that I grew up listening to Nilsson and Lennon’s album, which was definitely before my generation, so I make no comparison, but this remake certainly calls for a listen to its inspiration.
If I’ve peaked your interest at all, you may listen to the entire album streaming HERE.