The Candyman Cometh.
We, all of us, have people we rely on to be our musical drug dealers. Sure, there are friends we share music back and forth with, but, and this is if you’re lucky, there’s that one person from whom you take an awful lot more than you give. That person who knows just exactly what you like, what you need, baby, and doles it out little by little till you’re begging for more.
Something like that, anyway.
I am not too modest to admit that a lot of friends have told me I’m that person for them, and that’s great and that’s nifty, but you know what? I’ve got an even purer source. At least one. And that’s where I get my personal stash.

My new discovery is not my new discovery, but one that my Musical Drug Dealer heard first, and knew would be right up my alley. I'm not saying you would like it, only demonstrating my MDD's uncanny ability to get inside my brain. Anyway, the band is from Ohio they call themselves Wussy, and they play nifty lo-fi (low-fi? lo-fih? Har) style rawk that makes my little heartstrings vibrate all crazylike.

La Musica-!
I love the music, but I’m pretty damn picky with it. This is something my MDD understands. He knows I like acoustic music, but only when it’s kind of unprocessed and that I prefer the minimalist-sounding stuff. He knows I like the poppish rock, but only when it contains this particular brilliant originality and cutthroat lyrics. Same with hip-hop. I mean, but seriously: Did that just make sense? Probably not, and I probably left a lot out. This is what is great about a musical drug dealer: He(or she) gets you in a way that can’t be articulated. It is greatness in the world when some other person can do that with any part of who you are. Trying to explain my taste to you in words, Henshaw, is like trying to tell you what a poem “means.” This poem means: screw it.

“Oh, you’re a ‘Music Person.’ Do You Like Coldplay?” and other frustrations.
I resent people assuming I’ve heard of certain bands or that because I like music, that I like it in that competitive asshole, Chunklet magazine, record-clerk way (though the above heading may belie that fact.) To take that a step back, I resent people taking a look at me and assuming any thing about my general aesthetic or what kind of person I must be. (An aside: Just because a person has a couple tattoos doesn’t mean she wants to sit around for hours or even minutes and talk about them, not hers or yours. Do-! Not-! Trap such a gal at a party with someone who does this-! Please?)

The fact is that I care for the music I love with a ferocity that embarrasses me; at times there persists a not-very-still, small voice within me that says: Hey! What’s the deal? You’re not supposed to be this way outside your teens, you odd duck, you. That voice is biznullshit and to be ignored, though. It’s just Self-Doubt saying Hello. Mostly, I just feel lucky to have this force available to me that affects me so strongly any time I want it to. And so, conversely, there is just so much music that I hate. I hate more than I love, just because I love what I love so much. I feel completely indifferent to just about every new band that I hear, because there are just too many of them, now, and I'm just not interested anymore, in keeping up. I'm feeling lazy, lately. I'm willing to rely on people who know my specific tastes to recommend things; otherwise, I'll just sit at home and listen to Guided By Voices some more.

Just Another Teenager at the Doc Martin Sock Hop
Because it's changed.
I came of age at a very lucky time. When you expose a music-spazzy, in many other ways spazzy, adolescent girl to 1990s culture, she just might explode. Zines! Wacky dress that's purely inventive! That has nothing to do with fashion (Whee flannel and Doc Martins and Kool Aid dyed red hair)! There was this Brand New third-wave feminism thing; there was this Sassy magazine-thing (forever a sigh deep inside now, an RIP now.) There were these rock shows, and if you went to these shows, you’d meet other creative freaky dorky people like you. For a time, my teenage friends and I completely lost our heads over it all.

Then of course you grow older, and a wave of underground music becomes commercially co-opted and fast-forward to today, when a whole lot of forces—the aforementioned commercialization being one, the widespread availability of all information, music included, being another—and of course the loss of shine that comes with time; all these have worked together to make finding inventive music an activity more akin to flipping through cable channels than excavating for shiny diamonds. You don’t have to work hard to find anything anymore, and with online saturation, some small band from Ohio, maybe, blows up and becomes huge waaay before it probably should, maybe. Before it’s ready to. And there are copycats way too soon and it’s confusing, too, because everyone’s heard that rare Pavement EP and it doesn’t mean that they feel the same way about it as you do.
And nothing’s rare, really.

This is why I keep my passion a bit private. This is why I don’t like to make it competitive. I don’t like every new band that comes along, and the ones I do like, I tend to think of as my secret life soundtrack. I still try to allow myself that privilege, even if it’s a lie. I like to sit down with you and see if you feel the same way, not by talking about this band versus that one, but by hitting play, by whispering, “Listen.”

News in Briefish

The move – It’s over. The three of us began our move on the morning of an extremely muggy Saturday, under the direction of Yammers, the neighborhood streetcat. Yammers has successfully charmed Ginger and Carmelita’s block with his street-hustler brand of affection, his prodigious drool and equally generous gifts of dead mice, voles and—most recently—a squirrel the size of Yammers himself, on G and C’s front porch.

Interlude/Ode:
A jolly little song for Yammers (named for his sweet potatah’ color and disposition) by Ginger:

Yammers, oh Yammers.
Our new Gentleman Caller.
He doesn’t leave his Calling Card;
He nails it to your Heart.

Turns out that Ginger and Carm’ are not the only ones who’ve been caring for Yammers. He goes by George across the street, where they feed him wet food and dry, and down the road, he’s known as Sam. We found out about one other life that last day. Turns out that next door, Yammers is Walter. There, he lounges around inside and out, and enjoys free-form jazz music with the elderly bachelor who lives there. Oh, Yammers. You’ll be just fine.
So, Yammers/George/Sam sat in his usual spot on Ginger and Carmelita’s porch, looking on with slit-eyed approval as the three of us lugged their heaviest, most unwieldy furniture down G and C’s steep staircase and onto the Oldest UHaul in Beachtown. I’m serious: When I drove the thing off their lot, I first thought it did not work at all, since there was zero forward motion until I had the acceleration pedal flush with the floor.

The Oldest UHaul also turned out to be rusted-through in spots, so when the subsequent noon downpour came, it also ruined a couple boxes of Ginger and Carmelita’s books and soaked through their mattresses as well. Word to the Wise: This is not covered by U-Haul unless you buy their special “Your UHaul is a piece of Crap and Will Ruin Your Personal Belongings If it Rains” Insurance. S’true.
Around noon, two friends came and kicked much moving ass with us until long after the sun went down. Things went a lot faster and both apartments were translated to Mansion House.

Mansion House has many small, quirky, things wrong with it. It is, however, utterly amazing on the whole. I had a friend over for supper the last week and she walked around slack-jawed for about five minutes at the place’s high ceilings and wood paneling and awesome antique peacock wallpaper in the dining room. I remembered, suddenly, doing the same when last year’s tenants had me over for supper for the first time. And thought of how we take for granted what we’re around every day. And how maybe Lorrie Moore is right in this one short story of hers in which one of her characters posits this notion that we can only love what we don’t understand. In some small ways, at some small moments, maybe. Maybe, Lorrie Moore.
Anyhoo.

Chicaaaago! — is where I am, at present. Visiting my sister, yo. This morning, she asked me what I wanted to see, so I looked up all these “Haunted/Weird/Historic Chicago” activities online, but they all cost more dinero than Lowly Grad Student Me wants to spend. So instead we went to Wicker Park for the Haunted Consumer-Whore Tour of Chicago. Ducked into one shoe store where I flipped over a price tag that read $485, and immediately had that sort of scary nightmare idea about What If I somehow destroyed these shoes completely?-->like, dropped them and then jumped up and down on them repeatedly with the hefty mary janes I wore into the store? That whole fear-of-walking-too- close-to-the-edge-of-the-Scenic-Overlook,-because-what-if-you-just-jumped? thing.
Gives you goosebumps.

Tonight, we take in one stop of the cheap and yummy Salvadoran food tour, so I am psyched about that.

Also, about Chicago: The stranger-type-men here are all stare-y and flirty, (and in the worst cases, cat-call-y.) It’s a little jarring after Beachtown, where the creepiness was more in the vein of “Wait, isn’t that guy dating that 19-year-old, 40?”

Also, about Chicago: At any hour that I sit down on this couch in this apartment, there are children playing in the street down below, with at least one screaming in a repeated car-alarm-like pattern. This includes midnight.

Eyelid twitching – I was lying down reading the very last issue of Punk Planet (huge sob. possibly more about this later), dozing off to said screams and shouts. It was that sort of quasi-sleep that involved a To Do list of things that must be accomplished upon return to Beachtown. It also included a brief worry session over the fact that I often have trouble recalling the perfect descriptive words right when I want them, and does this mean I have some sort of early-stage brain disorder or perhaps a tumor? The poor word-recall is part of the reason that my Real Writing™ takes so long, part of the reason I’m an abysmal arguer who often scripts perfect witty and biting come-backs several hours or days after the argument. So I’m lying there falling in and out of sleep, worrying because I’m trying unsuccessfully to come up with the word “integrity,” and then I really fall asleep. And then I wake up and my left eyelid’s twitching. Still is.