Listening. . . Remembering

I love waking up on a Saturday morning fixing some coffee, and just putting on albums. Album after album, running through my collection of CDs and LPs, sometimes going by artist, feeling like listening to nothing but Prince - a sampling of his records from the self-titled one with "I Wanna Be Your Lover" on it (I really detest his first album "For You") all the way up through "The Rainbow Children" or "Musicology". Other times it is just albums I feel I haven't listened to in a long time. Ben Folds Five's "Whatever and ever, Amen" or Taj Mahal's "Giant Step/Old Folks in De Home". When was the last time I listened to Fishbone's self-titled first record? Or how about Boogie Down Productions' 'Criminal-Minded' or Public Enemy's 'It takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back'? (How can you not love that title?) Those records just pop out to my eyes as I scan the titles, so I load up the 5 disc changer and let it rip - just laying on my sofa with my eyes closed, listening closely - sometimes sitting up and singing along, sometimes standing and dancing and singing along - sometimes my mind wanders and the next thing I know more than half the song that was on has passed - sometimes I back that shit up and listening again from the beginning - sometimes I let slide.

It is such a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning/afternoon. Experiencing the music in the moment of listening and occasionally letting yourself slip away into the nostalgia of some of those albums. I will never be able to listen to This Mortal Coil's 'Filigree & Shadow' without thinking of lying in the dark in my loft bed in my freshman college dorm room with girlfriend at the time, awkwardly fumbling to undo the buttons of her blouse to reveal those forbidden breasts. I remember having my smooth moment foiled by the size of them. You see, I got great practice unsnapping bras when I was growing up.

My mother would come home exhausted from her job and call me into the bedroom and she'd be standing there, back to me, her blouse hiked up in the back, so I could unsnap her bra, too tired to reach back and do it herself. When I was very young I never thought of it as weird, but when I was little older I always did it reluctantly - but one does not refuse my mother lightly - anyway, at around 11 my older brother told me that I should start practicing doing it one handed as the skill might come in handy one day. I became an expert. I could undo those two snaps with a quick flick of three fingers. And after I got good at doing it right-handed, I started doing it left-handed.

But that two-snap bra was the only kind of bra I had any experience with. I just assumed they were all like that, so that first night as a freshman, as I drew off her blouse and reached to the back of the bra, I did my deft flick and undid two snaps. . . But there were three! I even said, all confused, "There are three?" And suddenly shy again, she folded her arms about her breasts and looked down as This Mortal Coil's version of Judy Collins' 'Ohio' came on. It is emblazoned in my memory.

Don't worry we overcame the awkward moment and I got to behold her in all her double-D glory.

I am never going to be able to listen to Big Black's 'Hammer Party' without thinking those blue-dot blotters I took with my roommate later that same school year. Damn, I used to gobble that stuff up like it was nothing. I was used to it, but it was his first time and I was called away to deal with a 'girlfriend situation'. There I was arguing with her about tripping while I was tripping in a study lounge in her dorm. I trying to alleviate the situation and told her it was no big deal (she was a small town girl. She didn't have experience with this kind of thing - Oh, and I am talking about a different girl here) and succeeding, and even getting her to laugh and fool around a little when her roommate comes to knock on the door of the study lounge. My roommate had called their room. He was listening to Big Black and freaking out. I begged off and ran back to my dorm to rescue him from the mental horrors he was inflicting on himself, lying balled up in one corner of the futon mumbling, "I'm a steel worker. I kill what I eat." He was okay. I just needed to come back and remind him to have fun. The funny thing is I have never really liked Big Black before that - but from that moment on I was a fan, and still am. I think none of the music that it spawned of various industrial modes ever surpasses it for pure snide unfocused expression of anger and dissatisfaction with everything. We are talking 1989-90 here folks. I had a lot of that. Come to think of it, I still do.

It is hard to come up with more recent examples. I mean, music was so much a part of my development as a person, especially in my teens and early twenties, when an album could mean so much. I will never be able to listen to Kraftwerk's 'Trans-Europe Express' without thinking about being about 7 years old and sneaking my older brother's records when he wasn't home and trying to mix two copies of them. I really think that track was the perfect introduction to electronic music and those kinds of beats for a kid because it was about a train, and what seven year old boy doesn't love trains? And how many times did I listen to Pink Floyd's 'the Wall' at age 15 lying in my bunk bed feeling sorry for myself and thinking myself an eternal outsider? It is for that reason it is hard for me to listen to that record these days without associating it with that self-obsessed melodrama that would be embarrassing if it wasn't excused by the fact that I was only 15 years old.

But I hope that that is not the end of such experiences and memories regarding albums. And, now that I think of it, I know it won't be - because I just remembered the repeated listening of the Flaming Lips' 'Soft Bulletin' when I was sick with the flu in early 2003, and becoming overwhelmed by the sounds of it, and the yearning in Wayne Coyne's voice that echoes my own (yearning, that is - not my voice). And those repeated listenings of those albums that come to mean so much and have such strong associations also reveal new aspects to the music every so often, some track or trick of production, some other voice or sound deep in the mix that I had never noticed before.

Ah, the Taj Mahal record just ended. . . I love that I've forgotten what comes on next. . . Oh! 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot'. I love it.

Do You Realize?

Crossing Manhattan Bridge this morning on the D-train, listening to the Flaming Lips on my mp3 player, listening to the echoing words "the sun eclipsed behind the clouds", I admired the awkward off-balance perch of brown-haired nerdy girl with her hair in a bun and her black glasses close to her eyes, looking like an emaciated turtle in her blackish-green ribbed high-necked sweater, as she leaned against the door crammed into place by me and the rest of the commuting crowd. I admired the high clouds, puffy and distant, as if spying on the weather on the far-away land of the Bronx. I watched the cars skate up and down the FDR and was filled with one of the strongest feelings of being monkey-man-me that I have felt in a long time. Thinking that everyone of those driving apes has his own banana tree to worry about, or maybe some don't have one and that is their worry, but here is one thing that is true: Most of them have forgotten, maybe never known, that it is all just bananas.

Just friggin' bananas.

The Flaming Lips ask "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" And for a second I do, and then consider all the ape-people that have come and gone and are now forgotten. How many generations does it take for the average person to be completely forgotten? I mean, it must vary from person to person and how close they were with their families, how close and/or large their circle of friends was - but still it cannot be very long. I would think three would be a lot for most people. But how many spinster aunts and bachelor uncles, crotchety old grandfathers and weird loner guys that lived in the basement apartment that everyone called "Slosky", even though it said "Rodgers" on his mailbox are never thought of again by any living person, unless it might be wondering who they are when their photo is come across in an old shoebox when your own parents die. There you are at age 6 making a funny face for the posed pictures beside the Christmas tree in 1977 with your brother and sister and this strange person. . . There is no one left to ask.

I once heard mi abuela bemoaning the fact that her large collection of family photos will likely be thrown away when she dies because no one else cares, and even if they did no one knows who all those people are anymore; no one but her. But I want those photos. It is strange how I have little desire to meet most of my extended family, but I don't want to lose the tenuous connections themselves - the relations. . . I want to go through all those albums with mi abuela and tape little index cards beneath each photo listing who is in the photo and their relation to each other and to my immediate family.

But it is really hard to sit down and do something with your grandma that is for when she dies - even if the fact that she will die eventually and probably (even hopefully) sooner than the rest of the family is undeniable. She has lore, but sometimes it is difficult to harvest. She gets tired, and even I find the process of the telling of stories and the answering of my questions emotionally draining. So much of it comes down to how fucked up people can be to each other, and how people coped when fucked up shit happened. Murder, rape, child abuse, spouse abuse, rumor, innuendo, infidelity, poverty, alcoholism - those are the stories my grandma has to tell. And yet, there is still something beautiful about them - like the spiraled sparkles in a shattered window glass.

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My mind wandered back to when I first started listening to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I remember liking the first three or four songs, but thinking the rest of the album kind of all blended together. It took a while before I discovered the gems of that second half of the record - realizing the texture and layered depth of sound they had - the obvious almost cheesy almost cliche almost simple lyrics - that somehow cuts through all those things to just be earnest and raw.

And it struck me that that time it took to discover that second half was the unintended consequence of unintended consequences.

I am an album listener. Rarely am I in the mood for a single song - and I never use the random feature on a playlist on iTunes or whatever - I like hearing a record from beginning to end - and when I hear a song taken out of the context of its album I automatically begin to hear the next song on the album as the song ends - as if it were to start up - I anticipate it.

Because of this, most often when I do not have time to hear an entire album in a short time, the next time, I listen to it from the beginning again - with CDs and records this is no problem - but I grew up in the era of the tape - of rewind and fast-forward and flipping. Because of the pain in the ass of that - back in the days, it was more likely to hear a single side of an album at a time and when you came back to it - listen to the other side. Album sides had themes and feels of their own - think about how overrated side one of Led Zeppelin IV is compared to side two . . . This flip requirement had the unintended consequence of making me listen to songs on a second side more often - or even prefer a second side - so the unintended consequence of the tape cassette machine - the laziness or impatience of not wanting to wait for a tape to rewind led to one thing - and then the loss of that with the advent of CDs led to another.

It seems to me that so much of life is like that - handling an inconvenience in one way which leads to something potentially positive - but when the inconvenience is eliminated that is lost and you miss the coping mechanism. Heh, in some cases that leads to addiction.

We stumbled out of the D train on Broadway-Lafayette and I climbed the steep steps two at a time as I always do weaving in and out of lines of one step-at-a-timers and I could not help but laugh out loud momentarily filled with joy for this personal moment of awareness of the finite nature of my life, my memory, my ability to take in information of all kinds of a day to day basis. The thought and the moment felt better than any moment I could wait for or even imagine.

Somehow, the almost unbearable, almost crushing, almost soul-numbing, often enraging aspects were cut right through by being.