The beginning of this end.
Someone tells me Thurston Moore has called iPods the fluorescent lighting of music, and I’m inclined to agree; then again, my agreeing might just be in that sad, petty way of someone who doesn’t own an iPod. Yet.

It’s this “yet” that depresses me, Henshaw, like it’s fate, but more than that—my doom—to listen to all music in this broken-up-by-“tracks” (Whatthafuck happened to songs?) picking-and-choosing Impatient, Important Consumer way. One of the best experiences in zee mundo has to be listening and listening to an album until each song makes sense to you in its context. Especially because everyone makes that context up for himself. It’s beautiful; it’s dying.

The iPod and its MP3-playery ilk (Can you really blame Apple? No matter what, it would have been some brand, right? Some something, in our rearview manifest destiny mirror, at any rate) have steadily decreased the likelihood of being at a party and listening to an album all the way through, having it drunkenly explained to you by the person who loves it, or meeting someone wonderful and talking and talking and later you hear this album again. And having it remind you. I know you. There are records you still can’t listen to. There are records you will always listen to when you want to be reminded. Or whatever, any of the other thousands of things a record can do when it’s a record. Of an event. Of people playing music in a room. As one artist once said. Not me.

I think all this began with the internet, with being able to find music on the internet. Screw whole albums when we can just hear the one song, right?
It’s my fault, too. The other week I ran across the Very First Mix CD a friend made for me that was entirely from ripped internet tracks. This guy worked with me at my first job, this nonprofit in Atlanta. I also had a little crush on him, which may or may not have been reciprocated, but it was all very sweet, somehow, our friendship, which never turned into anything more than our doing goofy seated dances in his Volkswagen as he found new routes all over Atlanta, just driving and driving around, trying to eat at every burrito joint in that town. I was right out of college.

Right before Christmas of 2000, he emailed me and asked me what songs I’d want on a CD if I could have any songs in the world. Any songs—in the world???

Do you remember this, Henshaw? How mind-blowing it was?

I wasted the rest of the day then, wracking my brain and coming up with songs I liked but had forgotten about till then—songs from my childhood and from old high-school mix-tapes and from more recent years. The final CD was my Christmas present, labeled: “Xmas 2K.”

I’m listening to it now and feeling all kinds of nostalgia. So mix-tapes/CDs can do the same thing as regular albums, sure. But that’s because it’s a set list, reminding you of a specific time period. Particular set people you may never see again, or at least never see like you did the first time you heard that song.

So, here it is. Remember: This is from that period when there was still the possibility, it seemed, of Never Hearing a Song again. Of its being lost, forever. The kids, they were less automatically-hip, then. There was none of this Sirius Radio. None of this Pitchforkity madness. With that obvious apologetic preamble, here it is, the list of songs the 22 or 23-year-old me, chose:

Xmas 2K Mix circa Dec. 2000

1. “Tennessee” – Arrested Development
Say what you will, you snob. The beginning of this song totally rules.

2. “Blackbird” – Paul McCartney
Soon after this, my sister had her second child and I made her a mix CD with this song on it For Her Labor, which I now think is pretty funny. The thing stayed in her duffle bag the whole time, turns out. It also turns out Thirtysomething beat me to this idea.

3. “Blue Monday” – New Order
This song seemed so dark and sensitive in that creepyfake Iron Curtain-y Unbearable Lightness of Being-y way. All new wave songs in the early 80s tried to sound just as dark and jaded, but this one wins. Along with that Cure song about “I saw you look like a Japanese baby.” Har. I have a soft spot for such songs.

4. “Carry On” – CSNY
I am a small child. There’s my cool ex-hippie uncle and warmth and all things good. Everything else is foggy, but I still love this song. So. Much.

5. “Clap Hands” – Tom Waits
First boyfriend intro’d me to Tom Waits. I can sing every word to this in my sleep.

6. “Everest” – Ani Difranco
Yes, I was one of Those college girls. But listen: This song stands. This song is so beautiful, it will still make me cry without much prompting if no one’s around.
“And when church let out, the sky was much clearer/And the moon was so beautiful that the ocean held up her mirror.”

7. “Queen of Las Vegas” – The B-52s
When I was 13-ish, I went through a mad, early-new-wavey-B-52s-lovin’ phase. I bought that bio book Party Out of Bounds and cursed God for not planting me in Athens, GA in 1979. At some age other than one.

8. “Hold On” – En Vogue (Those “Never Gonna Get It” folks.)
Lord, so, at the start of this, the ladies do an acapella first verse of “Who’s Lovin’ You,” and it’s just awful. Straight-up flat. But the actual song itself is still pretty good, for a 90s radioland R&B tune. Though I admit, I’ve been skipping over this one on recent listens.

9. “I Wanna Be Adored” – The Stone Roses
In high school, my friend Janice put this on a mix-tape that I wore out. I remember sitting at my desk at the nonprofit and remembering its existence and absolutely freaking out. It’s a great song; you know it as soon as you hear the initial build-up and the metallic guitars that start it out.

10. “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems – Notorious B.I.G.
Undergrad parties, plain and simple. Plastic keg cups of Budweiser you paid four dollars for. Bee-eye-gee, pee-oh-peepee-aye.

11. “Spring” – Kristin Hersh
Her first solo album is flawless, and I love the second one for nostalgia’s sake. The third one is patchy, populated by KH’s once-just-inscrutable lyrics gone silly. But this song stands out. Perfect structure. Pretty Kristin and scary Kristin and still just pretty. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as interpreted by Throwing Muses.

12. “Stepping Out” – Joe Jackson
Okay, so I’m four years old. And I’m in my big sister’s room, and she’s letting me draw in the red pen on her cube notepad in all the pastel colors while she gets ready to go out with her friends. Red, shag carpet, Garfield poster on the wall and this song, alwaysalways, on her record player or radio.
“We are young, but getting old before our time/We’ll leave the TV and the radio behind; don’t you wonder what we’ll find?”

13. “Trism” – B-52s

14. “Wanna Be Starting Something” – Michael Jackson
Mama-say! Mama-saw! Yeah, you know the rest…

15. “When U Were Mine” – Cyndi Lauper (Prince)
Always my favorite song of hers on her first record. Remember how, when she first came out, it was all “Who’s better? Madonna or Cyndi Lauper?? Who? Who?” I voted for Cyndi. I always dressed as a gypsy for Halloween.

16. “Africa” – Toto
Why? Why because, little kid/1980s, “Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a lepress above the Serengeti.” At some point, I debated with my sisters over whether “lepress” referred to a female leper. And I just looked it up, and it’s spelled “leprous,” and it does. Well, "suffering from leprosy." Either way, whole new meaning.

Look.
Sometimes she can see herself behaving in ways she hates. “Unbecoming,” her father would say. “Ugly,” her southern grandma would say. Sometimes she can see that her singing to herself annoys people around her. Sometimes she swears she can feel her own face betraying itself; she’s been told it’s transparent. These are things she's come to accept. Life equals foolishness; hooray.

But there's worse; there's this: Times when it makes sense to forgive and be friends and she can’t do it. (When she was little, she never shoplifted.) There are situations that are not fair and she can’t help but maintain them as such, even knowing this. (She did, however, cheat at Pin the Tail on the Donkey at church once.) There are things she’d like to smooth over, but doing so would equal lying to herself. There are emotions that make no freaking sense but if you don’t listen to them, you’re a mess. Forgive/don't and who am I to. (There was Mexico. She’s not some innocent.) Forgiveness if you’re lying becomes something else. She begins to wonder how human fairness is, anyway. (“That must be a religious church,” says the Unitarian child to her mother once the shining white cross on the building under construction is revealed.) There is the irreparable. There is the too late. There are things she’s never said.

Hiya, Henshaw.
Here in Beachtown it hadn’t rained in weeks and months and we’re still sleeping with our fans and air conditioners turned on us full-blast as we push away covers and cats and significant others. Still sweating. It’s October, for God’s sake.

Then this week, we finally get rain. And that’s good, but now all is tropical rain forest. The humidity caused us to drink beer sluggishly last night as we attempted a jolly show of pumpkin carving out on the veranda. But this was not pumpkin carving weather. Hell, we squirmed and perspired at lighting the candles inside the finished jack-o-lanterns. Before that, we had to flee indoors when a swarm of flying cockroaches descended mid-carve, attracted by the sweet pumpkin meat, I guess, seeking a nest in my hair, for sure.

The weather caused me to go off on a long tangent to my class today about Disney World and about Florida and how odd it is to plant this artificial shopping-mall environment smack dab in the middle of what’s basically a swamp and meanwhile it was becoming increasingly swamplike in the classroom. I was using my cellphone to keep track of time and the screen fogged over. I let them out early.

Tonight there’s a Halloween party at the old mansionhouse and we’re looking forward to running makeup and more sweat. Actually, I am excited about my costume even though much of it consists of thick polyester. My friend is Bad Cop, I am Good. She has fake tattoos and a scary nightstick; I have pamphlets on volcano safety and sugar-free candy to distribute. Also a jaunty hat. Mainly, the jaunty hat. And the volcano safety.
Happy early Halloween from under the sea, folks.

Also?
How can the CD which accompanies Oxford American’s new southern music issue be so relentlessly perfect?* How and how? The blues! The country! The old and new timey rock ‘n roll! As the cheesy record-review cliché goes, the first tune--“If I Were A Carpenter” by Eldridge Holmes--alone, is worth the price of the whole shebang. But then there’s so much more sheer happiness here. Rundon'twalk. Gah-!

(*Well, except for one or two tracks near the end which are just relentlessly really nice.)

Senseless Attachments, Part 36
In Four Acts


1. Subway tuna-melt sandwiches.
Like I can’t go home and stir together some damn tuna salad and sprinkle some oil and vinegar and banana pickles and oregano over top and call it a freaking sandwich. Here’s the first thing, though. If you lived here and got amnesia but had remembered first to link “Subway” in your mind with “Beachtown,” you’d be saved; there’s one of those ugly little yellow awnings every third block.

And as I drive near one of the eight or twenty Subways boasted by every major thoroughfare, it’s the whole package deal I find myself longing for. It’s the sandwich itself, on that fake wheat bread, with chips and a root beer and that horrible lighting and that horrible booth with no padding. It’s smart in none of these ways: Nutrition, Money, Total Dining Experience.
But it’s my weird little habit and I must keep it.


2. Pringles
We all know that these are fake and reconstituted. That second word? “Reconstituted”? Is how my mother ends any conversation in which the P-word is brought up. “They’re reconstituted, for god’s sake!” with a roll of the eyes, toss of the arm, argument done.

Yeah, I know, Mom; you raised us on the best-ever homemade bread and wouldn’t buy Froot Loops and had us listen to Free to Be, You and Me, but I’m sorry. You couldn’t save us. Yesterday, when I stopped into the gas station for a huge bottle of water after going down to these salt marshes for a story I’m working on, it was ninety degrees. All my own salt was sweated away, a blotchy pattern on my green t-shirt.
Then I saw the can.
It had been maybe years since I’d last had Pringles. Although you wouldn’t buy them, you didn’t count on my best friend in elementary school. I’d get off at her bus stop, and she and I would measure entire afternoons with Doritos and Hohos and Pringles and entire sleeves of Girl Scout Samoas while we dressed and undressed our Barbies and had the little sugar-and-fat-fueled gals run away from home and rescue each other. Till it was time for supper at her house. When we’d order in pizza from Domino’s.

So yesterday, I buy the regular Pringles can, not the small “snack” size that’s one-quarter the height and ten cents cheaper because, you know, I’m a smart shopper. I get in the car and start snacking—no, munching—no; something more grotesque and gluttonous. And then I see I’ve eaten a quarter of the can and so I close the lid.

Fast forward to tonight, when my roommate gets home.

Fearfully, I approach her. “Did you eat some of those Pringles?”
She shakes her head nah.
“Oh, no, Carmelita. You—didn’t? Tell me you ate some! Tell me I didn’t do—this!!” (Alice tears off the plastic lid to reveal…four, maybe five, sad chips curled sideways and alone at the base of the Pringles silo.)
Oh, but I did. I did. I am powerless.


3. Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year
When will I tire of this record? I listened to it on the way to and from the salt marshes. O, “Calistan” and “Ole Mulholland”. “Fazer Eyes” is my favorite love song and “White Noisemaker” just rules and then, like two seconds later, it’s over. Oh, perfect rockitty-pop; I love you. I love you. I love you. I do.


4. My car.
Dear ghostcar may be dying. My mechanic can’t find the problem, but a car whose battery light flashes and then just dies mid-drive is not a well car. So tonight I dropped it elsewhere for a second opinion after not driving it for four days.

Your car becomes the main thing you come to count on without thinking about it if it’s been with you while other, more seemingly-solid things have come and gone.

But it’s old. A few years ago it started burning oil. Then the speedometer and odometer went. Great big tears have rent the upholstery for as long as I’ve had it, and it’s got its share of dents, too.
But it’s a good car. It’s always run well, and I love driving it. Love the way it shifts, its tiny size and vroomy pick-up.

I’m not one to get romantic over cars; I drive a Honda, for god’s sake.

Still, there’s not a major milestone since the end of college for which Ghostcar’s not been there. It was the first car I bought myself. It housed my first major, marathon, heart-wrenching breakup, which spanned a drive from Detroit to Atlanta. (Yeah.) My dog’s muddy, destructive jaunt from puppy- to adulthood. About a dozen moves. Spur-of-the-moment trips to Kentucky. I swear it knows the way to Pittsburgh.

Even with its busted front bumper. Even with its lack of a/c--I'll even take that, here, south of the Mason-Dixon. And the old stickers that will not peel off. I hope it sticks around a little longer.

Hands down.
Possibly the best Craigslist ad, ever.


"Pine cones - $19
6" - 9" pine cones; you decorate for the holidays. Six cones, boxed and shipped. Shipping and handling included in price. Allow 5 days for check to clear before shipment."

Bad lyrics good life
I’ve been listening to a lot of music with very bad lyrics lately. Interpol and The Rentals. I love, love, love this music; you just have to plug your ears and go “la la la” when you start thinking about the words (“Would you like to be my missus and in future with child?”) you’re singing.

Things both are and are not as stressful as I’ve made them out to be here. I have a number of ideas for the thesis, and I’m plugging away on quite a few. It’s just that something someone said yesterday in a class, is true: Researching and writing are polar opposite activities. So while I’m all into the research end of things, I see no daily output in the writing, and that… Well, it’s just a big ol’ bummer when everyone around me is coming to workshops with pages and pages and with gleaming faces, “Oh, the writing was just so great, this weekend.” This weekend, for me? Well, the writing About Things Completely Unrelated to the Thesis was pretty good. But even that didn’t amount to much, quantitatively. And the poets. The poets-! With their, “Oh, I wrote two poems this week.” A poem. I am jealous of that unit of measurement. Gah-. Fucking poets with their beautiful, perfect, gifted fucking writing.

This year is weird, altogether. I’m a lot more solitary than I’ve ever been, and I don’t care. It’s that knowledge of people in the next rooms. People who are kindred. I need not talk with them, however, to get along with them. It reminds me of those odd sexual relationships where you don’t have anything to say to the other person. Except I’m not sleeping with my roommates. And we have plenty to say when we come up for air. So I guess that’s a bad analogy. Boy, it’s a good thing I’m a writer. I’m so obviously a writer.

Okay, to bed.

Is it True I can spread my wings?

Meanwhile, in one eastern Carolina town, the obsession with Abba’s “The Eagle” resurges with a fresh energy and passion. The colors of that passion are shimmery, shining purple and gold, the colors featured in a 1977 video for the song my roommate, Carmelita, sent to me. And yes, my god, is it ever dull, but you’ve got to remember: this was pre-MTV, pre-Janet Jackson dancing in the streets shoulder-to-shoulder with all the townsfolk, pre-Twisted Sister guy showing up in your bedroom to lay down the law.
Before all that, there were people lip-synching, joyous, into a camera. And excellent T-shirts.

So of course I emailed it straightaway to Marshall, who shares my embarrassing love of many things Abba, who in fact was the person to correct me on the chorus of “Take a Chance on Me” as we painted his bathroom and I sang along, loud and characteristically unheeding of modesty. “Alice, it’s ‘when the pretty birds have flown”.
Oh. Not “would it really hurt, so call!’” I blame the Swedish. I can enunciate just fine.

Anyway, back to the important thing—our “Eagle” emails.

Alice:
Okay, so, for the best moment, go to 2:52-ish, and check out Non-Bjorn’s facial expression. It’s all “I can’t believe I’m in this freaking video.”

Marshall:
I swear, Frida was about to eat that psychedelic eagle flying around in front of her mouth.

Did you see their outfits? You can’t tell until the end, but one is wearing a shiny, shiny shirt with a huge bunny on it, and the other is wearing a coyote shirt not to dissimilar to yours. Well, maybe a bit more polyester.
Glorious.

Alice:
Yes; their shirts basically rule. And it looks like there’s a video for “The Name of the Game,” too, but I haven't watched it yet. I'm saving it for a special occasion. Then again, it’ll probably be some variant of blonde lady and brunette lady singing and the less-attractive Bjorn and not-Bjorn coming in every now and then, n-B trying not to laugh.

You know, I think Bjorn is to me what Orson Welles was to the girls in Heavenly Creatures. "It." He’s so repugnant to me and always has been.

Marshall:
If you didn't know they were named Agnetha and Anni-Frid, you might well think they were office workers from St. Paul. Shiny, shiny office workers telling magical tales in front of their mesmerizing disco ball.

Also, “Eagle” is not much of a disco song. How do you categorize something like that? Pseudo-mystic Swedish synthesizer pop? Could any other band have produced this song?

My favorite line from the YouTube description:
“Eagle” did not perform that well in the charts.