transitmonger

Interview

How do you know Chris Earley?
Team EastBay

How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive?
10-50

Write-Ups by transitmonger

I really liked the previous post about using music as a drug. An MSG soundtrack to heighten the flavors and sensations that we already feel. Music offers this sort of sense that you can wrap melodies together and do a fade-out, and have yourself a clean ‘artistic’ end, and go on refreshed to your next games — sort of like SOTD?

This song, by the Arcade Fire, is a real buzzkill. It’s actually really really scary to me. I LIKE lulling music that can take my mind off the eventual demise of me and mine. Instead, Neighborhood #1 gives me a scary sense of deja vu from dreams that I have known. Confused sweaty panicky dreams, where I can hear myself whimpering, and I know something is wrong but I don’t know what. Fictional lovers are neither nobel or pathetic– merely tunneling away from a room in death’s house. Desperately wailing and atempo, this is a love song bent back to look in on itself.

This isn’t artifice. Reading the footnotes, the main band members lost several close relations during the making of Funeral. Using heartbreaking imagery, Butler and Chassagne don’t sermonize. They let me project for myself… that our last moments are _not_ inevitably painful and alone, and yet I will not accept an easier death.

This is how people end up Scientologists. I advise you all to go take another hit of Sleater-Kinney. And then decide what you want to DO with your lives. It’s a whole new year, you know?

– Darius Roberts

BTW, SOTD was fun! Thanks for playing! I encourage you to add me on last.fm and facebook, so we can be ‘music discovery pals’.

Sorry about the death-focused last post. It’s something I really personally wanted to talk about artfully. (maybe someday I’ll manage it.)

The arcing trajectory of songotheday has been a grand experiment, and Chris deserves much applause and acknowledgment for seeing it through. Make sure to buy him a beer and get him to tell you about his next writing project — He downplays it, but I think it sounds pretty fucking worthy!

In “The Frug” by Rilo Kiley, lead singer Jenny Lewis states factually that she “cannot call you back; cannot fall in love.”

So here’s a different but related question raised by a friend of mine:
Is it common for men to actually, seriously cry in relationships?

I have definitely shed tears. Usually, because it seemed like the ‘right’ thing to do. And I don’t believe this is manipulative; the human body is naturally reflective. We tend to mirror the emotions around us. (Actually, I subscribe to the theory that we generally feel the same way about a person that they do about us. But that’s a different story.)

However, I’ve only once “gushed” => in private, about 24 hours after a breakup.

As to whether or not this is normal, I think we often view this in an overly deterministic way. There is barely anything that fit the definition of “culture” surrounding relationships in the US. Beyond some basic biological component, most of what we in the US call a “relationship” is a mental model derived from 1) our parents and 2) TV– but aren’t we supposed to be learning this stuff from friends, and through social interaction?! As evidence of dysfunctionality, I point out that guys in a small social group can have very diverse expectations for how girls should/will respond. I suspect that other cultures, in which people double-date and have more integrated lives/relationships, normative social pressures would bring small social groups into line.

So, in summary, i think some guys cry, and some guys do not, based on the signals they THINK they receive as children and from their first lovers.

Do you cry? If not WHY not?

– Darius Roberts

Trivia bonus: The Frug features the names of dances that Jenny learned “on set”, while working as a child actress. Or something like that.

We will never really know our mothers. Not even if we say “Thanks!” every year on the dot and take them out for five Margueritas, and ask: “Childhood. How was that?”

Take my mother. She collects guitars– just collects! She hardly plays, except to pluck out a few progression in sheet music– deftly but slowly, and with great concentration. She certainly doesn’t “Jam”.

I myself learned just enough to tune them. (Mom made me take lessons.) I can tune them, sit there, and brush my fingers across the strings. Each of them has a different… emotion. And my hands feel useless. These fine instruments love, and I’m almost a little scared by that kind of passion in an quiet wooden object.

She told me once that HER mother made her take music lessons too–until one unhappy recital, which left the 9-year-old tragically piano-shy.

It was not until I was 25 that I heard the rest of the story. You see: even after the lessons stopped, she never stopped playing! She played piano for 6 more years, in secret! I don’t know how my sister elicited this information–but everything falls into place.

HER mother sold the family piano when my mother was about 15. Sold it without reason or warning. “Oh, you don’t even play that thing!” she told the young adolescent with tears in her eyes. To quell her ‘tantrum’ my grandmother bought her a guitar. Something small that she could keep in her room.

I picture my mother like a Bob Dylan record-cover, sitting on the curb in front of a house, the picture of suburban normalcy, clutching a wooden guitar, struggling to understand who she was in this world, and what she was supposed to do with this… THING.

My mother is more than this image. More quiet. More deep. And she reads instruction manuals all the way through. She cooks and repairs computers and kicks butt at TaeKwonDo.

Thanks Mom.

–Darius Roberts

This is a slow reflective song. Hit play now. Ease into it. … Slowly.

A ghost is haunting me too, and I might as well tell you about it. My recent return to Taekwondo has summoned up memories of my old instructor. An intense life-infused man when we met, I watched him succeed in his ambitions of growing a successful business– and then watched the inevitable disjointed unwinding of his ambitions too, as he focused his energies on hard work and love of his craft– and the world changed around him.

Also, over 15 years, his body fell apart. Following the lyrics of “Philosophia”, this man, this chisled work of art, was not absolute.

And now I’m back in Taekwondo, under the instruction of a younger instructor bearing that familiar intensity and life. Even more: I have become that intense young man that I once knew.

Neither history, nor the repetition of history, worries me (which is probably a mistake.)

Instead, it is pain and guilt in the present that I feel. I should be his legacy, or more– a pillar of support as he ages. Instead I’m 2,000 miles away, knowingly letting him struggle with a shadow of his former Purpose. What could I even say, if I could bring myself to see him again?

While he yet lives, this loving man has become a blameful ghost to me.

—–
I am happily acquainted with this Irish band through Apple’s Tuesday promotion. Their focus on smoothing fitting lyrics over a rhythmic structure reminds me of nothing so much as a mellow Pete Yorn. Other songs by Guggenheim Grotto are available for free download here: http://www.guggenheimgrotto.com/

-Darius Roberts

I don't think the koala deserved such a fate.

Guitar Envy is nothing to be ashamed of. After all, the underlying emotional framework is merely human. Biological, even.Two distinct variants of guitar envy can be easily differentiated by the presenting symptoms. The more common “air-guitar” variant tends to strike mid-late adolescents. High correlations with acne and Beatles fake-books have been found in clinical studies. These cases, while loud and sometimes destructive, rarely lead to long-term damage. Between onset and the discovery of the opposite sex, the average case lasts about 3 years.

When the victim actually possesses a physical guitar, despite an inability to play, the case is likely to be more severe. The archetypical sufferer of Type II Guitar Envy is middle-aged and male, although there is evidence to suggest that similar levels of guitar envy in other demographics go unreported. Indeed, WHO reports general pandemics in California, and conducts covert raids of musical stores across the southwest.

But let’s talk about ME. My own bout of Guitar Envy was precipitated by a folk festival in Guthrie, OK in the late nineties. Due to this very song, I learned no fewer (and no more) than eight songs. I continue to grapple with the affliction, and find it easiest to avoid parties where some random Swedish traveler will play “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and I’ll end up going back to my room and strumming on the guitar for two weeks straight. (That fucker.)

I hope you enjoy this (transportation) gem. It’s finger pick’n good.

PS. I’d love to hear which song prompted you to learn guitar, too. Login and write the title in the comments!

-Darius Roberts

Back to top