Okay, so I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, and I’m still doing some figuring out and tweaking and all that sort of thing. I don’t particularly like the new page design, for one thing—color good, layout not so much. Expect changes over the next few days as I fiddle with it. One thing I’ve noticed right away, though, is that when you look at the main blog page, links within entries are not clickable—you have to go to the individual entry itself to get the link to show up as anything but text. I’m sure there’s a) some perfectly good reason for this, and/or b) some nice workaround, but till I have a few minutes to figure it out, that’s how it will work. One step forward, two steps back…or “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” or some other applicable adage.
Meta
I don’t generally like Slate, for various reasons, but this article on the “re-proletarianization” of the American worker, is well worth your time:
And just to throw some music content in: a discussion about Sebadoh on Postcard today led me to listen to “Bakesale” (which is, unaccountably, the only Sebadoh record I have on my iPod) straight through twice. God, that’s a great record. Then I switched back over to shuffle, and the first three songs it threw at me were:
“Live Free”—Son Volt
“Pop Art Poem”—The Jam (I still have the original flexidisc of that somewhere, I bet)
“Waltzing’s for Dreamers”—Richard Thompson
I love my iPod. And it loves me.
With apologies to those who have seen this same list from me elsewhere.
Rivka, of the wonderful Respectful of Otters blog, on cognitive
dissonance and Hurricane Katrina, and
Tom Hayden, writing in the Nation, on what Iraqis really think of the
occupation.
Okay, so this has been something of a recurring theme for me lately, but…
Sometimes, there’s no experience quite like hearing a beloved old record for the first time in a really long time. Right now, I’m listening to “Big Plans for Everybody” by Let’s Active, a record I don’t think I’ve heard since approximately 1987 (i.e. a year or so after it came out). It’s not Let’s Active’s best record, but it has some amazing, heartbreaking songs on it, and hearing it again after all this time is sheer bliss.
I can understand people who say things like, “I hardly ever listen to new music anymore, I just listen to the old stuff.” Having just listened to a fine new record by the wonderful Canadian punk band the Constantines, I can’t say I share that attitude completely. But I do understand it—particularly right now, with this Let’s Active record tearing my heart to shreds in the best possible way.
I’ve been going to see bands in clubs on a regular basis since I was 14 years old.* That was 30 years ago, which means that I’ve been going to clubs for just a tiny bit more than 2/3 of my life. So it shouldn’t be surprising that—’ow you say—ze threel, she is gone, to say the least. Standing around in a smoke-filled club (this town still hasn’t instituted a no-smoking ordinance for bars and clubs, though there’s one in the works, I guess) on an uncomfortable floor and waiting and standing and waiting for the band to come on just doesn’t appeal all that much, usually. Add to that my recent decision to give up drinking completely, and a night at a club can seem very long indeed, even when it’s a band I like.
But “usually” is the operative word there, because sometimes I forget how transcendent it can be to go somewhere and see/hear a band live. Yeah, I’m old and jaded, so I almost never seem to be completely distracted from my feet hurting or the stench of cigarettes, and I’m pretty much always ready for the set to be over when it’s over so that I can go home and rest my feet and wash the smell of smoke out of my hair. But sometimes, for an hour or so, I can mostly forget those petty annoyances and lose myself in the music. Still. Even after all these years.
In the past few years, that feeling has hit me most often (not counting Twangfest, where all my usual rules and habits are suspended because I am Happy Twangfest Amy rather than regular Amy) at Grand Champeen shows. It’s hard to explain why sometimes, because Grand Champeen’s local performances—they play nearby Lawrence pretty often, always at one of two clubs owned by the same guy, and they have lots and lots of friends there, and those friends all buy them shots, so their sets in Lawrence tend to be shitfaced and sloppy. But still massively fun nonetheless, because Grand Champeen play with such sheer joy and reckless energy and so embody everything that thrilled me about live music to begin with that it doesn’t matter if they miss a chord or a lyric here or there, or even if their sets degenerate, as they sometimes do, into strings of goofy covers with audience members/friends taking over the mic. Grand Champeen are what live music—live rock music, at least—should be, and they’re still at a point where they’re continuing to get better all the time. (They’re also incredibly good guys, instantly likeable and bright and polite and charming, which shouldn’t matter but sort of does.)
I was at a Grand Champeen show about a month and a half ago, the weekend after my birthday, with several dear friends who had driven up** from St. Louis and parts east for the show, slightly tipsy and feeling a general sense of well-being, rocking out to Grand Champeen, and a phrase popped into my head, all unbidden: “This is my church.” Right at that moment, standing in the (smoke-free, not overcrowded) dive bar where there isn’t really a stage to speak of, it felt like I was exactly where I belonged. It felt like my religion, it felt like everything I believe.
I had a little variation on that feeling this past Saturday night, when I saw Son Volt play an outdoor show in a parking lot (not as bad as it sounds—the lot belongs to the wretched, vile Beaumont Club, which was a “hot new country” bar complete with line dancing and mechanical bull, back when “hot new country” was still a term that people used, but they did a pretty good job with the outdoor setup; it was crowded but not uncomfortably so, the sightlines were decent from almost everywhere, and the sound was remarkably good considering the environment).
Son Volt aren’t really Son Volt anymore, I guess, at least technically; the current touring lineup isn’t even entirely the same as the lineup that played on “Okemah and the Melody of Riot,” the Son Volt record that was released in July. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the “real” Son Volt a little, but really, it was only a little; the original Son Volt weren’t Uncle Tupelo, either, and we all adjusted to that. For me, Jay Farrar and whoever he has playing with him and wants to refer to as Son Volt is just fine.
And they sounded glorious. I’ll admit that the songs from the first three albums thrilled me the most (and the final encore, an expected but still stunning version of “Chickamauga,” thrilled me even more than that), but I was amazed at how wonderfully the new material came alive too. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since I love “Okemah,” which is guaranteed to be my record of the year, but I was, a little. There are a few songs on the record that I enjoy but don’t have extremely strong feelings about, like “Who” and “Atmosphere,” and both of those sounded just gorgeous live. And my favorites, like “Jet Pilot” and especially the Middle-Eastern-inflected “Medication,” were magnificent. I usually say that I have no objectivity at all about Jay, but that’s not exactly true: about half of “Sebastopol” leaves me a little bit cold, and though I like hearing those songs live, I almost never play the record. So, see, there’s a little objectivity. I’d also like to think that if he suddenly started to put out really sucky records, I’d be able to judge them on their (lack of) merits rather than letting him coast by on the strength of his past work. But right now, he’s still among my favorite artists ever and my favorite singers ever, and it had been way too long since I’d seen him, and for the hour+ that they played, I was completely transported. Sometimes, it’s good to be reminded that I can still have experiences like that.
(The next night’s show—two shows in two nights, almost unheard of for me, and not something that I care to repeat anytime soon—was not such a positive or transcendent experience. We saw Dwight Yoakam at the aforementioned, and despised, Beaumont Club, and though it was a fine performance, it wasn’t much more than that; I’ve seen Dwight four or five times now, I guess, and this was the least impressive of the shows I’ve seen. It was far from bad; Dwight’s the consummate professional, which can mean that his performances sometimes feel a little bit phoned in but also means that he sees his responsibility as an entertainer to charm and captivate the crowd, and he did. But the printed ($30!) tickets said the show was at 6:00 p.m., so we raced and rushed to get there by 7:00, only to be greeted by a sign on the door that said “Doors 7:00 p.m., show 8:00 p.m.”…which meant that we sat in the stupid club, Bill pounding overpriced beers and me nursing my $3 bottle of water, for two full hours before Dwight went on. Grrrr. Plus I was distracted by checking the @$# ! Yankees score on my Sidekick every thirty seconds for the first half of the show. Still, I can’t say it was a bad show; it just wasn’t transcendent, and if Son Volt reminded me of how transformative an experience live music can be, Sunday evening reminded me of why the thrill of live music is, in large measure. still gone. Most of the time.)
*I’ve been going places to hear live music for slightly longer—my first concert was Three Dog Night, in 1973 I think, for a friend’s 12th birthday party. A month later, another friend took a group of us to a concert for her birthday party: Deep Purple at Madison Square Garden. If their birthdays had just been reversed, I could at least claim that my first concert ever was Deep Purple, but alas, I’m stuck with Three Dog Night. I’m sure I thought they were great at the time.
**People here always say they’re driving down to St. Louis, and they talk about friends driving up from there. It is true that KC is fractionally north of St. Louis (less than a degree of latitude), but when you drive from one to the other, what you’re really doing is driving across. It’s almost a straight line on I-70 from one end of the state to the other. But nobody says “I’m driving across to St. Louis,” or even “I’m driving over to St. Louis.” Then again, they also say the number of the highway before the word “highway” here—so for example, US Highway 40, which also goes clear across the state (and beyond), is referred to as “40 Highway” (and if you’re a St. Louis native with the local accent, which not all native St. Louisans have, that’s pronounced “Farty Highway”).
I like making lists. There’s an old (and not particularly memorable) Go-Go’s song called “Girl of 100 Lists,” and I always related to it (although it applies even more to my friend Vicki, the Queen of Listmaking). I don’t make written lists quite so often as I used to, because in my current job I’m usually focused on a single task at a time, so to-do lists aren’t as important as they once were. I do, however, just as an example, carry around index cards with lists of books that I want to get at the library on them. These are mostly gleaned from the appropriately named Booklist, the American Library Association’s magazine devoted to book reviews. It’s insanely expensive, over $75 for a year’s subscription, but I got so used to having company subscriptions to it when I worked in publishing, and I missed it so much after I left, that as soon as I could afford it, I started subscribing again. It’s one of several little annual presents that I allow myself. Plus the reviews are geared toward librarians, with the goal of helping them determine whether to order a given book for their library, and since I’m a librarian who has never worked in a library—sort of a library wannabe, I guess—it lets me sort of almost pretend that I work in collection development in a large public library.
Not that I would actually want to work in collection development, given my druthers. It would probably be my second choice if I were to work in a library, but my first choice is cataloging. Which ties in to my love of listmaking, I think, as well as to my actual life as an information architect. (And I miss cataloging, much as I love being an IA.) Cataloging doesn’t actually involve making lists, but it, and IA, involve imposing a structure on disordered information, among other things. And I love that. I’m not sure why, because my own life is utterly disordered (I’m one of those people who occasionally buys CDs I already own either because I don’t know I have them or because I can’t find them—and I take books out of the library that I’ve read already, too), and I’ve coped okay with that for 44 years. But one of the things I love about cataloging is that it is extremely rule-governed, and I like rules. I like order. I like structure. It’s why I’m obsessive about obeying traffic laws and stuff like that (although I’ve been known to flout certain laws…but that’s not relevant here), and why it drives me crazy when other people don’t—I can’t stand people who think the rules don’t apply to them.
And rules aren’t that different from lists, I guess. Except that lists are way more fun. So I’m going to try to start a tradition of listmaking here on the blog.
(Geez, it took me a long time to get to the point there—even by my already windy standards.)
Today’s list, which is a preliminary one, is the Songs That Make Me Cry list. There are several subsets of this list that I’ll explore later on, such as the Songs I Can’t Sing All the Way Through Without Choking Up list, and the Songs That Make Me Cry Out of Sheer Joy list, and the Songs That Shouldn’t Make Anybody Cry But Have Such Powerful Associations for Me That They Make Me Cry list (that one may consist of only one song, though: “Let’s Go” by the Cars makes me cry. I can sort of explain why, but won’t right now, because it’s…just an odd story).
But this list is just songs that make me cry. Some songs on thist list are also on one or more of the sublists, and this is definitely just a preliminary list, but I’ve been meaning to start compiling it for a while and was reminded of that fact by the first song on the list—it came on while I was at the gym last week, and I had to skip it, because crying on the elliptical trainer would be weird. And yes, now I am just typing to take up more space before I get to the actual list, because it amuses me. I crack me up. Someone has to, after all.
1. Iris DeMent, “My Life”
2. Iris DeMent, “Our Town”
3. Iris DeMent, “Mama’s Opry”
(Okay, so there’s actually a significant percentage of Iris’s catalog that makes me cry, and I’m thinking a whole Iris post is going to be needed soon…but those are the top 3. I think.)
4. Patty Griffin, “Useless Desires”
5. Townes Van Zandt, “Tecumseh Valley”
(His hokiest song, in a way, and yeah, I have a problem with the resolution of the story, but it still makes me cry)
6. Sandy Denny, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”
7. Sandy Denny, “The Pond and the Stream”
8. Nick Drake, “Northern Sky”
9. Nick Drake, “Hazy Jane I”
(And oddly, I’m not sure any other Nick Drake songs make me cry consistently, even though if there were a soundtrack to my depression, it would be the work of Nick Drake, boy howdy. Some of them give me chills, and some of them move me beyond belief, but those two are the only ones that always get to me. I can’t sing “One of These Things First” without choking up, but that’s another list for another day, as previously noted.)
10. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, “Perfect Blue”
11. Keith Whitley, “I’m No Stranger to the Rain”
(Actually, if that song doesn’t make you cry, I recommend checking yourself for a pulse. There’s a Keith Whitley post in the offing somewhere too, I think.)
12. Soul Asylum, “Ain’t That Tough”
13. Soul Asylum, “Closer to the Stars”
(Most Soul Asylum songs make me cry since Karl died, actually…but those two always got to me, long before Karl got sick. Soul Asylum were touring when Husker Du’s manager, David Savoy, killed himself, and they played a version of “Ain’t That Tough” on stage that night (in Boston, I think) that was as blistering and furious as anything I’ve ever heard—I wasn’t there, I was in Minneapolis in a state of shock over David’s suicide, but I heard a recording of it later. And never forgot it.)
14. John Prine, “Hello In There”
15. Lucinda Williams, “Sweet Old World”
16. Richard Thompson, “Small Town Romance”
17. Richard Thompson, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (which really belongs on a list of its own: the first time I ever heard it was right before “Rumor and Sigh” came out, at an RT show at the Guthrie Theater in Mpls. in 1991, and before I’d even heard all the lyrics, the sheer beauty of the guitar-picking made me cry)
18. Dale Ann Bradley, “East Kentucky Morning”
19. Rosanne Cash, “The Real Me”
20. Elliot Smith, “Miss Misery”
(Totally because of the movie, which also makes me cry. It’s a flawed movie, but it still gets to me, and has continued to do so each of the 75 times or so that I’ve seen it.)
21. Peter Gabriel, “In Your Eyes”
(Speaking of “because of the movie”…)
22. The V-Roys, “Goodnight Loser”
(I do just fine until Scott gets to the “Ain’t she the sweetest thing?” part, and then I’m lost)
23. The Replacements, “I Will Dare”
(“Answering Machine” used to be the one song by any artist that absolutely without fail made me cry, but somewhere along the line, all the heart-grabbing Mats songs—”Within Your Reach,” “Unsatisfied,” even “Hold My Life,” which comes closest to still getting to me— became so familiar to me that they no longer choked me up. “I Will Dare” makes me cry in a happy/sad way because it is, quite literally, the song that changed my life, more than any other single song ever.)
24. 10,000 Maniacs, “Back of the Moon” (mock if you will, but that’s the best song on by far their best album. It’s also #1 on the list of songs I can’t sing without choking up—it’s among my favorite songs in the world to sing, and I’ve sung it literally hundreds of times, and I still choke up every damn time.)
25. Joni Mitchell, “Urge for Going”
(See notes on 10,000 Maniacs song, but multiply the number of times I’ve sung it by at least 10. And it’s a good one to end tonight’s list on, because the weather is finally supposed to turn sharply colder overnight—the mere phrase “turning sharply colder” in a weather forecast can make me happy, especially this time of year—and I’ll probably be singing it in the car tomorrow. And choking up, right around the part about “See the geese in chevron flight.”)
Comments noting songs that make you cry are especially welcome.
I’ve always been fond of the phrase “Geography is destiny.” I’m not sure who said it originally, or indeed, if anyone said it originally or if it’s just one of those phrases that took hold in the popular lexicon of clichés. But I like it. I don’t know exactly how it applies to me, but geography has certainly been intricately tied to my destiny for most of my allegedly adult life. And lately, as I’ve been in touch with people from my past (raise your hand if you’re tired of hearing me talk about that…yeah, that’s what I figured), most of whom seem to have wound up on the East or the West Coast, it’s really been on my mind. It’s not that I’m wondering how I wound up here (and this time I mean “here” in the geographic rather than the emotional or metaphorical sense), because I can follow the path quite clearly. It’s that I’m wondering what I’m still doing here, and how much longer being here will be my destiny. If that makes sense. Which I’m not sure it does.
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to end up here, “here” being specifically a dilapidated ranch house in a dull suburban-style area of a dreary midsized Midwestern city in the heart of Red State Land, but also more generically, “here” in the middle of the country, far from my family, the ocean, overcrowding, more ethnic diversity than you can shake a stick at, noise, four real and relatively moderate seasons, large Jewish populations, good or even acceptable pizza and Chinese food, and other things that feel like home to me. I’m not sure that I was supposed to end up in a high-ceilinged prewar apartment w/riv vu on the Upper West Side, where I grew up, either; nothing I’ve ever pursued as a serious interest would have provided the kind of income that would have landed me in a place like that. But I wonder if there was some sort of happy medium (with a slight eastward bias) that I missed somewhere along the line.
In several separate phases of my life in very different circumstances each time, I have picked up and moved to a completely new place: not counting the moves from NYC to DC and back again that occurred when I was little and had no control over my destiny, geographic or otherwise, there have been five of these major, disruptive, discombobulating moves. Of those, only one was an unmitigated disaster (my move to Chicago during the breakup of my first marriage, an ill-considered decision that resulted in a ragingly horrible experience—that year, and the profound effect it had on me, was originally going to be the main focus of this blog when I first thought about starting a blog, and maybe I’ll get to all that eventually, because there are lingering effects that I try to ignore but kind of can’t). The rest have been successful to varying degrees; I won’t go into details about all of them just now, but all have had their ups and downs.
But in purely geographic (and aesthetic) terms, the one that brought me here to Heartlandsville has been the least successful, and I’m wondering how much longer I can put up with this particular bit of geographic destiny. Love brought me here, and a pretty great job is currently keeping me here, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t occasionally worry that I’m going to be stuck here forever. I doubt that that will be the case, but then again, the idea of uprooting again is so overwhelming that my mind recoils from it when I try to think it through logically. It’s been almost five years since I got here, so I’ve reached the point at which the thought of putting my whole life in boxes and clearing out the detritus that I’ve accumulated and so on is something I can just about begin to contemplate, though even just contemplating it makes me tired.
I’m not, incidentally, equating geography with happiness. I’ve figured out that I can be unhappy wherever I am. 
And more seriously, I’ve learned that whatever you leave behind in a given place, you don’t leave much of yourself behind; it travels with you. So I’m not looking for a geographic solution to all my problems. (It’s true that living in a house I liked better in a neighborhood that I liked better would make this town more tolerable for me and would temporarily improve my overall outlook—I think— but it still wouldn’t make me feel like this is where I belong.)
Thing is, I’m not sure where I belong. I’m pretty sure it’s back home in NYC, or more precisely in Brooklyn or Queens or Jersey or wherever I could afford, but sometimes I wonder if it’s the idea of living in New York that appeals to me more than actually living there would. On the one hand, I was ecstatically happy the first six months or so after my first husband and I moved to the city; I loved the alive-ness of it, and I was so happy to be able to walk everywhere (and to see a million new things on every walk—other cities I’ve lived in, like Minneapolis, are good walking cities, but you see the same things over and over, which isn’t true in NYC), and having so many options for places to go and things to do made me less of a homebody than I’m usually inclined to be. On the other hand, I got tired of lugging groceries (from the surprisingly cruddy grocery stores in Park Slope—you really can’t beat Mpls.-St. Paul for grocery stores) up three steep flights of stairs; I got tired of the crowds and the expense and the way it seemed to be impossible to set foot outside the apartment without spending $20 on…something, who knows what. I missed things like cross-country skiing and being able to hop in the car and go to Target when I wanted to and having good restaurants that didn’t actually bankrupt you. I missed Minneapolis’s famous quality of life, which unfortunately now costs a hell of a lot more than it did when I lived there. Somehow, though, I now seem to have traded both the quality of life stuff and the excitement stuff: this town has neither. The very best thing I can think of to say about it is that it’s dirt cheap to live here. Oh, and the people are friendly…but since half of them are also far-right fundamentalist types, I’m not sure friendliness itself is much of a consolation.
So where does that leave me? I’m not necessarily prepared to go someplace entirely new again, unless there were a really great job opportunity or it were someplace close to but not in New York; I’m getting kind of old for that, and there aren’t that many cities left that I’m willing to try (other than St. Louis, a city so familiar to me that living there would barely be like moving to a totally new place; hell, I know way more people in St. Louis than I do here). So there’s a very short shortlist. If you count the four years I spent in the DC suburbs as a child, I’ve now lived outside of New York longer than I’ve lived there, and I always swore that that would never happen. But New York isn’t the city that I grew up in by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not sure I’m prepared to make all the tradeoffs that would be necessary in order to live there. Again, I think the idea of not living there bothers me more than actually not living there, although the pull of being closer to family is very strong. I don’t know. Sometimes when I look into the magic 8-ball, it says “Signs point to Minneapolis,” which is the town that, other than NYC, feels most like home to me because I lived there for 12 years, 12 years that saw a lot of life changes and helped turn me from a lost and hapless twentysomething into a slightly less lost and hapless alleged grownup. But there are problems with going back there, too, not the least of which is a husband who hates winter.
So if geography is destiny, what’s mine? I wish I really did have that magic 8-ball to tell me where I’m going to be next. I hope to God the answer isn’t “right where you are now, sucker.”