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Ramblings (January 2005)

01/27/05 -- 9:11 p.m.

I'm working on a Best Songs of 2004 comp for friends and family and have come up with quite a few excellent songs along the way, many of which I'd forgotten about before being blown away by them again. The less than finished list, in no particular order:

Jim White - Static on the Radio (w/Aimee Mann)
TV on the Radio - Don't Love You
Mountain Goats - Palmcorder Yajna
Otis Taylor - Freedom
Elliott Smith - King's Crossing
Drive-by Truckers - Where the Devil Don't Stay
Tift Merritt - Stray Paper
Calexico - Corona (Minutemen cover)
Modest Mouse - This Devil's Workday
The Roots - Web
Kanye West - Jesus Walks
Danger mouse - What More Can I Say
Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #3 (power out)
Tom Waits - Hoist that Rag
Leonard Cohen - The Letters
Todd Snider - The Ballad of the Kingsmen
Wilco - The Late Greats (for the stanza about Romeo alone)

01/27/05 -- 9:01 p.m.

Continuing in the Yeats vein (see what happens when you get an English major reminiscing about poetry and such?). From a letter he wrote about George Eliot:

She is too reasonable. I hate reasonable people. The activity of their brains sucks up all the blood out of their hearts. I was once afraid of turning out reasonable myself. The only buisness [sic] of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

01/24/05 -- 1:29 a.m.

I went to my first wake yesterday, for S., who had died of Pick's disease (a brain condition that resembles Alzheimer's in effect, but which attacks a very specific part of the brain). His final weeks and months had been conducted mainly in secrecy. He'd been in a nursing home and then in Hospice, with only his wife and his long-time girlfriend (looooong story) visiting him. When he died, most of us received the message with a mixture of sadness and relief. He'd been a misanthrope, but an energetic one, and it can be honestly said that our little corner of the world is a little less interesting without him. On the other hand, he hadn't truly been alive for some time now.

The wake was nice and low-key, very appropriate. About thirty of us gathered to sip beer, eat food, reminisce in one way or another about S., and to say goodbye. His girlfriend had constructed a time capsule full of science fiction books, Atlanta Braves memorabilia, S.'s novel, Mountain Dew, Coke in a glass bottle, and sundry other things. We then marched out to a wooded plot where a hole had been dug, and watched as the time capsule was buried under a locally crafted and gorgeous marker of stone and iron. There wouldn't be a real funeral for any of us, so this wake was our way of sending him off. S.'s brain had been donated to science, the rest of his body cremated, his ashes god knows where in the possession of a widow with whom none of us associated.

His eulogy was Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evenings full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

-- William Butler Yeats

Even the hardest of us, even the ones who greeted S. with something akin to suspicious curiosity and exasperation during his life, probably got choked up a bit at that point. It was a surprisingly emotional moment that fit the surroundings to perfection: the sun setting over winter-stripped trees, a couple of horses nuzzling the fence nearby, and an impossibly clear, cold night sky fading in.

01/07/05 -- 1:22 a.m.

Niel Brooks has a couple of new songs posted on his website. He may be rotating the tracks as time goes on, but at the time of this writing, "Dear Suicide" is especially striking and insistent. It make me envision Gillian Welch and David Rawlings leaving the screen door open while they explore their musical dark side, and being startled at the end when Tom Waits pops up out of the floor playing the noise storm from the Beatles' "A Day in the Life." Check it out.

01/07/05 -- 1:00 a.m.

I've never been one for New Year's resolutions. I guess enough of that pointy-headed education of mine took root for me to take exception to artifices like the calendar. I tend to make birthday resolutions, as that strikes me as more of a natural opportunity for a turning point. What's more, I can easily remember 35 as the supposed "year of reversal," in which I was supposed to mold all kinds of bad habits into shapely, well-kilned ashtrays of productivity. Guess how that turned out...

2004? That'll be a blur in about five relative minutes, when I realize two more years have scooted by and I'm peering over the crumbling, rain-softened edges of that cliff known as 40.

At any rate, 2004 stood out for several notable reasons. Got hitched, and am enjoying that thoroughly. Bought my first house, and am enjoying that quite a bit as well. Got to reconnect with family and friends. Drank plenty of Guinness. Saw some good shows. All kinds of good things.

But 2004 was also the year in which, in the end, I decided to plant myself firmly on the side of the artists. In a year of election squabbles, of questionable politics beyond the pale of even this cynical age, it was the some-might-say naive belief that things could be better, that the human spirit could endure and create something out of chaos -- that's what kept me going as the string in the back of 2004 wound its way through its last gibbering, squawky syllables.

I don't believe in the corporate conscience (with rare exceptions, such as the place I work now). I don't believe much in the notion that our political system works towards any end except its own over-satiated survival. As I get older, I find that my youthful idealism doesn't fade away; it's merely tempered with the realism that changes don't come overnight, and that the smallest of changes can have a ripple effect. I'm getting ornery in my old age, and feel the whispers of various causes prodding me towards some unknowable level of actually being involved in the things around me.

But even though I'm currently not creating anything myself (a yearly ritual of resolution that's yet to take hold), I have to side with the artists -- the people who are making a difference merely by creating. Artists aren't necessarily good people, and many probably hold beliefs that would make me cower under the bed at night, but at least they're putting something out there in the world. A few obviously do it for money, and a few of those even make money, but the vast majority are giving in to that itch, that restlessness in the night that makes you lose a few hours of sleep because it's the only way you'll get _any_ sleep, to put this idea down on tape, paper, canvas, or film.

By creating, we grow and discover a little bit more about our place in the world.

An email I received earlier today asked the question: "Is music still dangerous?" I'd argue that all art is still dangerous, even the most seemingly innocuous kinds. Because it kicks your brain into gear beyond lizard-brain pleasures like reality shows. Because it rustles you out of the complacency in which the world at large wants to keep you. Because art can, for a brief second, fulfill all those Star Trek-ian notions of humanity's potential, and make you realize that we're not doomed to the fatalism that seems pre-ordained by the systems in which we surround ourselves.