To start, I have to prepare to be savaged by Afistaface, Andey DeLesDernier, because my mixtapes long ago ceased to be rendered on actual cassettes. She is the only person I know who is more of a purist than I am.
Mixtapes are a very important subject to me. I’ve been thinking about them for as long as I can remember, even though I was never quite the savant that some of my friends were when they were younger. In fact, I don’t think I ever made a proper mix until recordable CDs were on the scene; I made a few tapes to play in my car or give as gifts, but I didn’t really use them properly back in their heyday, and it’s definitely a case now where “mixtape” is more the preferred nomenclature than any representation of the physical product.
As I tend to do in my life, I have over time evolved a set of rather draconian rules about what a mixtape is for me. Of course, as with most of my self-imposed rules, they apply only to me; I think someone else using them might even defeat the purpose.
(This gets into a whole other issue of why I give myself strict limitations for work on which I have historically failed entirely to follow through. But I think that might be an entirely different subject.)
When I first started making mixes on CD, roundabout 2000 or so, I generally slopped songs on until I filled up the time, then arranged them in a pleasing order. My crowning achievement of this method was a mix I made for a girlfriend around then; clocking in at 79:59.80, I came as close to perfection as anyone I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, this was all undone by the fact that the version of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” that I’d put on the mix was incomplete by a couple of minutes; when I listened back over the CD and the song cut off in the middle, I learned a valuable lesson.
My insane rules for structuring mixes had their genesis not long after. I picked up Nick Hornby‘s High Fidelity at work one day. I was vaguely interested because I’d heard the movie was good; in fact (shamefully), my copy of the book is the movie tie-in version. In the book, the narrator mentions a few rules that I adopted for myself; a couple years later, when I first started trying to codify my rules, I came back to that passage and realized that he’d not put in nearly as many as I’d remembered. Nevertheless, it was a critical moment for me.
I refined my rules over time, starting with “Never allow two songs by the same artist on a single mix”, still my number one most important rule. I became better at making mixes. I learned the pleasure of a well-sequenced mix from a tape that a friend brought over one night to listen to while playing video games. I picked up the need for context on a tape when I was pulled over for speeding while listening to a particularly high-energy tape after a rough night at work; I stopped listening to fast, angry music if I was already angry.
The next turning point for me came just a few years ago, with the release of Rob Sheffield‘s Love is a Mix Tape. It is, ostensibly, the story of his life with his late wife Renee, but one of their main methods of communication was the mixtape. Every chapter is headed by the track list of a mix that one or the other of them made, or someone made for them. They capture moments in time, documents from people who were in tune with the music of their lives.
I don’t make that kind of tape.
It was instructive to learn from the way they made their creations. At several points, Sheffield writes about the 20 or 30 songs that fit on a 90-minute cassette, which made me think of the early mixes I made on CD. What hit home, however, was a critique of precisely that medium: CDs are 80 minutes, but they’re uninterrupted. Tapes are 45 minutes per side, so each is, as a listening experience, 2 mixes (barring an automatic flip cassette player, of course).
This opened my eyes. Just because there were 80 minutes to fill on a CD didn’t, and doesn’t, mean that every one needs to be filled. I further restricted my own mixes. Initially, I was planning to cap length at an hour, but I changed my mind, instead deciding to put exactly 13 songs on every mix I made from then on. This has been so ever since.
I make many types of mix; if it’s all pop songs, 13 songs might come in at 40 minutes or so. Sometimes I’ll mix it up and make a 20-minute Godspeed You! Black Emperor track one of the 13; those tapes tend to run a little longer. But in addition to the restriction of how many songs there will be comes my ultimate, end-all be-all rule, that the transitions must work. I listen to my tapes slavishly, not least to avoid repeating the mistake I made with “Sweet Child O’ Mine” all those years ago, but mostly to assure that every track flows from one to the other, telling the story I want it to tell.
This is ultimately what mixtapes are to me: using other people’s words and music to tell my stories. And I like it that way.
In addition to writing thousands upon thousands of words that I can hardly imagine anyone cares about, I also dabble in design and have been trying with varying degrees of effort, but always the same degree of success (which is to say, failure), to shoot a movie.
I don’t know if this is something specific to people who fancy themselves writers, or if it applies generally to all creative folk, but I typically hate the things I make. I gave up a while ago on needing validation from others about the things that I make and do. Despite the fact that other people’s negative criticism is still bound to sting (and, for that matter, the positive criticism to inflate my sense of self-worth) and may affect what I do in the future, the fact is that if I’ve seen something to completion, I did it for me, and that can’t be changed.
(The problem is that in doing things for me, I can’t logically expect to ever be financially successful in any sort of creative endeavor. I’ve come to terms with that, and am willing to work a job that doesn’t bring me any joy if that’s what I must do. But I digress.)
Unfortunately, even in creating for an audience of me, I typically despise the end product. I can pick it apart forever, marking this sentence or that line or whatever down as flawed in my mind. Whether I can correct said flaw or not isn’t important; it is in fact entirely beside the point.
The point being, I guess, that I’m crazy.
I’ve never written anything longer form than a feature length screenplay, and even as we speak I’m working out how to fix the ones I’ve “finished” on their next rewrite. I actually got physically ill rereading the first one I wrote in advance of beginning to rewrite it. (To be fair, I think it might have been the combination of lack of sleep and overcaffeination that caused the nausea moreso than the script, but they’re still linked in my mind.)
I’ve designed a few websites beyond my own. Visiting them now, even the one that I finished most recently, I can’t help but see every amateurish mistake I made and where I’ll have to tweak the code.
George Lucas once said, “Movies are never finished, only abandoned.” In his case, maybe some of the movies should have been abandoned a little sooner, like before they started production, but the spirit of what he said is entirely accurate across all creative projects, at least from my perspective. I’ve never looked at anything I’ve done and thought, “Ah, perfect!” It just does not apply to me, I guess.
I had a conversation with a friend who’s offered to help me with an upcoming project about my tendency to self loathing when it comes to the things I’ve made. She does not appear to have this problem, and I did a bad job of explaining it to her; she took it to mean that I assumed everything I did would fail. To her credit, I did say the words “I’ve never not failed” in the course of the conversation, but what I meant to say and how the words sounded were quite different.
This is a problem I have a lot.
This conversation turned into a argument, and I got pretty substantially taken down. I had to concede in the end, because my argument such as it was had no basis in anything other than my head.
I don’t really know how to cope with this tendency; it’s entirely instinctual, and I can’t remember ever feeling any differently. Nevertheless, it surely can’t be helpful; even if I don’t have a negative attitude about what I’m doing as I’m doing it (and I sometimes do, which is a whole other issue), denigrating it after the fact isn’t going to win me any supporters, either.
There’s probably some deep seated psychological or emotional reason for the way I view my own work. Surely someone out there enjoys their own output, someone who sells themselves relentlessly and wants the spotlight enough to take it when necessary.
I’m not that kind of narcissist.
I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my attributes, that my self judgment is both fair and accurate. But maybe it’s not, at least not about everything. Maybe I am, in fact, underselling myself on the quality of my work. Although I’m unlikely to be convinced of that.
Still, isn’t that better than the alternative? Do the people like someone who’s humble to the point of self-abasement over someone who’s braggadocios to the point of obnoxiousness?
Pop quiz: what’s the difference between a homeless person panhandling for money and a hippie 20-something standing on the corner begging for some cause?
Answer: none.
Both wear dirty clothes, have unwashed hair, and can be too pushy. They’re both begging for money from someone they perceive as better off than they are, and if you tell them no, they’ll occasionally go above and beyond the call of duty to make you angry.
That said, I’d much rather give my money to a homeless person. They annoy me far less.
The “cause” kids can go die in a fire. The rules of (dis)engagement with them are the same as with the homeless, or anyone else for that matter: headphones in your ears, head down, don’t make eye contact, keep out of their path. However, the homeless don’t go out of their way to get your attention. For one, they are likely to be seated, beleaguered, next to a sign that can tell you, based on its level of desperation, how long the person has been homeless. If you don’t hear them, they don’t generally, for example, jump into your path and thrust out their cup.
They are also not asking for a $20 monthly payment. The homeless usually ask for change, which I admit amuses me given the relatively low value of American coin money, but add enough of it together and it still buys a sandwich or a bottle of booze or even a cheap place to spend the night. The cause kids want you to give up your bank information so they can run your “charitable donation” every month. Will I miss that $20 each month in the end? No, probably not. I’m not nearly that desperate. But it’s a lot more of a hardship for me than dropping a couple quarters or a dollar into a sad woman’s cup.
I am a filthy liberal, it’s true, and I have the attendant guilt about a lot of things. I’ll cop to my relative lack of charitability being one of those things. I wish I gave more, and I probably could if I crunched my expenses. But you know what else I cop to? The fact that after all my expenses, I have enough to keep myself amused, and not much more, and no amount of pressuring or cajoling is going to change that fact.
Ultimately, if it came down to a push and shove between the homeless and the cause kids, I’ll take the homeless for being generally more respectful and more openly crazy. If I tell them no, they move on. If I tell the cause kids no, they’ll do things like offer to walk me to the bank to check my balance.
You know what happens when you do something like that? You make me angry, and frustrate me, and turn me against you personally and all your peers.
I know what it’s like to have the actions of one affect the perception of all. As a cyclist, I know that pedestrians, drivers, and even other cyclists assume I’m an asshole with a serious disregard for traffic laws, safety, and in the worst case basic human decency. Am I an asshole? (Well… okay, fine.) But do I act with impunity and disdain towards the law and others? No. In fact, I do everything I can to encourage fellow feeling between cyclists and non-cyclists (especially the traffic cops, who could use all the support they can get).
That doesn’t really mean anything, though. Non-cyclists assume that I am their antagonist. Everyone on a bike is the same, for their intents and purposes. That means they occasionally lash out or cause trouble. That also means that I occasionally have to assume the posture of the asshole cyclist to defend myself. Do they recognize the difference? Of course not. So the cycle (no pun intended) repeats ad infinitum and I have to worry for my life every minute I’m on a city street.
That same principle is why I always assume the worst about the cause kids. If it just happened once in a while, okay, maybe they’re short of their quota and extra aggression is required. But over my time here, I’ve been on the receiving end of unwanted, forced attention from them too many times for my taste, so I assume they’re all going to do that, and act accordingly.
Is it possible that I’m wrong? Yes, it is. But I still get caught enough to make my actions justifiable, at least to myself.
The lesson here is that you’re not doing your cause any favors by being an asshole. If I can reasonably compare you unfavorably to panhandlers, I think it can safely be said that you are doin it rong.
I enjoy charity as much as the next guy. I understand the need for clean drinking water/malaria vaccines/money for gay rights. I support your positions. But when I tell you I don’t have the money, you should listen to me. Then, maybe next time, I will have it.
I started when I was around, I think, 13 or so. I never had anyone really teach me, but I’d seen enough shaving on TV to get the general gist of it.
Problem was, then as now, my need was kind of… shaky, at best.
You see, I have what we call The World’s Saddest Beard™. It’s a patchy, multicolored mess; if I ever let it grow out, it would be the most ironic beard of all time, especially the long strip under my chin where no hairs grow.
I blame my mixed heritage for my sad beard situation. I’m multicolored like crazy in the beard area because of my Pan-European roots; how the Irish, English, Scottish, Germans, and Spanish ever ended up all mixed in, I could never tell you. As for the pathetic patchiness, well, I’ve got a lot of Cherokee blood, as you can tell from my skin tone. (Native Americans are pale and freckled, right?) The explanation is simple enough: you’ve never seen a photo of a warrior chief with a headdress and a beard, have you? They just don’t really, you know, do beards. So neither do I.
My brother, who shares my sad beard situation, does not share my sense of self-respect, nor my sense of shame. He has repeated gone long periods of time without shaving, growing a “beard” that almost passed for human on a couple of occasions. However, the first and only time I saw him in person with said beard, I told him that I will punch him in the face if it ever happens again. And I mean it.
So far, so good.
(For the record, he promised to break my nose if I ever dunk him under the water while we’re swimming again. I believe him. So, if I come home from the pool or the beach with a broken nose? I probably earned it.)
So: my beard is really sad. Like, hilariously sad. So I go clean shaven. It would follow, since I’ve been doing it my whole life, that I’d have gotten good.
But as I said: nope.
I frequently rake the blade across my skin, leaving small pockets of blood spreading across my chin. I’ll miss spots, places that I should be able to shave by reflex by now, simply because I forgot to contort my face some way or other when passing the blade over the hair.
I’ve improved my methods over the years, going to using whatever was available to buying my own, better blades and shave gel, to realizing the shave gel was murdering my skin, to realizing that I got better results if I used a sharp blade rather than conserving the spent ones as long as I could in the interest of saving money.
It’s never been pleasant for me. I’ve frequently gone a week or more without shaving, right to the point where I start to look like maybe you should keep your kids away from me. Once, I was at work and made a joke to another coworker about our relative scruffiness.
“Sure, but I haven’t shaved in three days,” he said. “You just didn’t shave this morning.”
It had been over two weeks.
That’s my situation. I have, at this point, graduated to a sharp blade, a layer of baby oil (recommended by a friend of mine who shaves his head every day), and a lather applied with a fake badger brush. It’s without a doubt the most effective shaving method I’ve used, as well as the most work intensive and time consuming. It’s a process for me, and one that I don’t necessarily enjoy.
Still, I want to go further. I’ve explored the Art of Shaving, and would like to learn it. I want to shave with a rich lather from a real brush, soothing pre and post shave oils over a sink full of steaming hot water. I want the closest shave imaginable.
I want to shave with a straight razor.
I would not shock me if those nearest and dearest to me would rather I never took that step. As mentioned above, I frequently draw blood with blades that are ostensibly safe. I can’t imagine anyone wants to clean up the saddest accidental suicide of all time, then have to arrange the funeral and queue up that Queen song.
The worst part? This would be my eulogy: “I don’t know why he was shaving; he could barely grow a beard.”
Today marks the seventh anniversary of my move to New York.
Over those seven years, I’ve become an entirely different person, while also staying very much the same. If I had to ponder it, I would say that I’ve grown and matured much in the way one would have expected me to do.
I’m smarter now, more worldly, more experienced. I’m a little fatter, and much more heavily tattooed. But I’m still fundamentally the same person I was when I moved here.
I had a friend who was born in NYC tell me that you needed to live here a decade before you were really a New Yorker, and I used that as my guiding beacon for a while. I don’t know how accurate it is, and part of that is defining what being a New Yorker is all about.
For example, I came here to go to school, but dropped out. I’ve been paying my own rent from the first day I came; I never lived in a dorm, instead sharing a studio on the Upper East Side with my then-fiance. I don’t have the college experience that a lot of my friends do. Does that make my “New Yorker-ness” more authentic, or less? I didn’t have the relative safety net of not having to pay rent, but they learned and experienced the city in a way that I think is probably more important than my version.
It’s hard to tell sometimes.
According to an unscientific count off the top of my head, about 80% to 90% of the people I know are not “from” NYC, at least not in the sense of having been born and raised here. I’m sure that percentage can’t possibly hold up over the entire population; there just aren’t that many expatriate New Yorkers. Still I’d be willing to bet that the only other American city with as many migrant newcomers is Los Angeles.
When you think about it the way I do, it stands to reason that so many people here would be outsiders. Many of the people I know went to college here. Most of them are young (well, mid 20s or so), urbane, hip, from suburbs or smaller cities, frequently Midwestern. We all have two things in common. One, we thought we could make it here, and we were right. Two, and more importantly, we are all dreamers. New York seems like a good place to go when you want to fulfill your dreams.
So, all of these people, some of them here since they got out of high school. Office workers, artists, teachers, actors, writers, waiters, whatever. We all decided to stay. Even if we are not, by my native friend’s estimation, technically New Yorkers yet, we are certainly part of the fabric of this city. We are part of New York.
(The important part, he says pridefully.)
There is a common perception that New Yorkers are rude. I have never really noticed that as an epidemic problem; there is a certain number among any population that will be predisposed to rudeness, or alternately self-absorbed to a point where they come across as rude. It stands to reason that when you put more people, living more densely, you will encounter the rudeness at a relatively higher rate.
Even with that in mind, though… The born-and-raised New Yorkers I count among my friends are the least rude people I know. They may not exactly be patient with idiocy or ignorance, won’t suffer fools well, but that’s hardly rudeness, just practicality. They are gracious, they are friendly, they have always been willing to help when their friends were at their most down. These aren’t the rude New Yorkers I heard about.
So what about the transplants? All these Midwesterners, from the flyover country, known and occasionally mocked for their unfailing politeness, are they the rude people? No, not even. We may have picked up an edge of cynicism from living in the city. We may (I may) (I DO) fucking hate when a group of people walk slowly down the sidewalk, taking up all available space. But we’re still going to smile at people occasionally, even if it garners unwanted attention. We’re still holding doors open. We still wait our turn when getting on and off the subway. We’re not rude.
So who is it, then?
The tourists.
A representative anecdote: your average beautiful New York City office girl, heading from the subway to her job near Herald Square, says “Excuse me” to a person stopped on the sidewalk, staring up at the Empire State Building, and steps around him. Oblivious, he steps back, bumps into her.
“Excuse me, bitch!” he spits.
“I said ‘excuse me.’ You bumped into me.”
“Whatever, bitch.”
The office girl affixes him with an icy stare, the one that beautiful women are granted when they are first left to fend for themselves in this city.
“You’re not from here, are you?”
Taken aback, the exposed tourist steps aside.
Will he likely tell that story as one of a rude New Yorker? Absolutely. He will perpetuate the stereotype to his friends, and it will become canonized. The cycle continues. Yet it’s hard to see how he was not the perpetrator of the rudeness.
And so it goes. Most tourists, the ones talking about how rude New Yorkers are, spend their time in the gaudiest, least “New York” areas of the city. In these places, they are largely surrounded by others like them; the actual New Yorkers with whom they interact are generally going to be extremely harried service people at this restaurant or that store.
The people on the street, the ones being rude, making them think New Yorkers are rude?
Tourists.
I may not have been here for a decade, but I’m New Yorker enough to scoff at that.
If I make it three more years I won’t even have to qualify it.
So, I successfully completed all 30 Days of Music. In a row, and on time. It was kind of weird.
What did I learn? I learned that the music that has stuck with me has a tendency to not be very diverse. If someone were to judge my probable music collection based on the songs mentioned on my list, they probably would not guess that I have much non-rock music, which I do, and they’d assume that I skew towards guitar bands from the ’90s and the first decade of the 21st century, which I also do.
The apparent lack of diversity? That’s a problem, one that apparently most people run into as they grow older. Their tastes tend to sort of solidify and they stop searching out the new.
When I was a teenager, and into my early 20s, I was very active in seeking out new music. As I’ve grown older, I’ve gotten a lot worse about it, even as the effort involved has decreased to almost nothing thanks to the internet.
That said, the real decline in my effort had a direct cause, as far as I can tell. Shortly after I moved to New York, I started tutoring a couple of teenagers, a sister and brother. Mostly, we’d sit and whichever one I was with would talk to me about her friends, her school, her life, and I’d do my best to teach her whatever it was she needed to learn. I mostly failed.
I got the job because I commented on the Strokes button hanging on the older sister’s bag. She decided I was cool enough to be seen with in public, and she hired me for $20 per hour. Before long I stopped having to look for music at all, because she’d make me mixes with whatever she was into that week and I’d weed out the good stuff from the crap.
When I started tutoring her brother as well, he did her one better. He’d give me CDs full of a few hundred mp3s, bands’ entire discographies for me to try and absorb.
Of course, it’s kind of fucking impossible to learn new music that way. I didn’t even try to listen to most of what he gave me, honestly. It was easy to ignore it, although I’m the first to admit that I missed out on some good stuff by not listening. For example, he’s the one that first put me on to the National, an excellent band that I only just this past week listened to for the first time, this despite owning their previous record since 2007.
I can only imagine there’s plenty of other good stuff that they showed me that I never gave the time of day, and that’s just the barest edge of all the good stuff that I either haven’t heard or haven’t paid enough attention. I stopped putting in the effort because I stopped having to, and then when I needed to start again, I couldn’t get it together to do so.
Ultimately, I think that’s the sad takeaway from my 30 Days of Music: I’ve stagnated in my consumption of the new, the different, and the exciting, at least as far as music is concerned.
This song made me cry over someone else once, someone who was lying right beside me when it happened.
That was over within a year. But it was still years before I could listen to the song without hurting.
Now I can. Sometimes, I feel bad about it.
What happens when you love a song more than you respect the memory of what it stood for? It was ours, but I had to make it not ours after a while. There had been other “us”s by then, and presumably other songs, but that one had always stayed where it belonged.
I never made a decision to take it back for myself, to use it for my own selfish gains, to listen to it again without feeling all the hard things that it had made me feel.
That doesn’t change the fact that sometimes I listen to it and feel like I stole something from someone, that I took something that doesn’t belong to me.
I don’t think that I will ever feel completely free of guilt.
When I started hanging around musicians all the time, one would have thought that my intense interest in music as well as whatever potential I’d shown in that direction would have manifested in me, you know, learning a fucking instrument. But I didn’t.
I feinted in that direction a few times, most notably writing some lyrics for a project that I wanted to start with my roommate. No one ever really saw them, and I’ve not pulled them out in about seven years because I fear that they are the epitome of terrible. I was 20, after all, and I can’t think of much good that happened when I was 20.
So, I sat around, a band aide more than anything else. I’d help cart equipment around, give whoever might need it the occasional ride to practice, go to shows, do the whole thing except play an instrument.
I’ll never not wonder what might have happened if I’d pushed it then. We all know by now that I am a shameless, if not talented, singer. Add in some actual working musical ability and maybe I’d have a whole different art that I was pursuing, or at least some other way to express myself, like Marc Fort.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Rock Band. The way I play games is not the way a lot of people play games. I am a serious completist when it comes to such things, wanting to reach every goal set for me and whatever else I only set for myself. This sometimes results in a marathon gaming session marked by a masturbatory intensity so complete that I alienate those around me to the point of anger.
So, yeah, that’s me and video games.
Those tendencies made me, in the end, very good at RB drums. I learned how to play (sort of) more than a few of the more popular songs of all time.
That’s including “Everlong”, one of the greatest songs ever, and one of the toughest to drum. But, sadly, I can only get through it on hard. Those sixteenths give me a hell of a time.
I could probably learn to play real drums, having learned some of the basics through this game. But I probably won’t.
Just another example of wasted potential for me in a lifetime full of them.
I admit right up front that I stole this particular usage for this song. It wasn’t my idea, but my best friend’s, and all due credit goes to her.
Still, it suits me, and I’ve been joking about it (SO not joking) for as long as I’ve been considering my own mortality enough to recognize that I will, in fact, someday have a funeral.
I have curious ideas about death, mostly stemming from my complete lack of religious belief and my feeling that one of the better uses for a newly dead human is donation to science.
I’m not especially reverent, such as it is, to the ceremony of a funeral. I do understand the need for closure; I am personally largely unable to process death if I don’t go to the funeral.
However, I don’t see a reason for it to be a spectacle. The big room, the casket set up under the glowing lights, the pretty verses read from the book… I get the appeal, if you are that way inclined, but I’m simply not.
For that reason, I’d like my funeral to be a fucking party. I know it would be a tragic event for those closest to me; death is not something the living tend to handle well, in my experience. Still, I am fairly certain an open bar would go a long way in assuaging that grief. Plus it would be a good legacy to leave.
But what’s a party without a good DJ? It wouldn’t take much, I don’t think, to find one with a suitably morbid sensibility to play the party, and I would think, nay, hope, that any DJ worth his salt would play “Another Bites the Dust” in that situation. It would seem to me to go without saying.
I would prefer a celebration of life, such as it is, to be my legacy. I can’t think of a better way to set the mood than with this song.
When Plans came out, I didn’t know what to expect, and wasn’t ready for what I got. I’d been put on to Death Cab for Cutie when a friend of mine put “We Looked Like Giants” on a mixtape for me. I’d ignored them until then, knowing their name, but not their music, laughing when my friend said he was going to start a parody emo band and call it Death Cab Confessional.
It turned around with that song. I bought Transatlanticism and got to know it like family. I wrote to it and about it. I loved it (save for the two terrible songs).
I heard the lead single from Plans a few weeks before it came out, and dutifully bought the album. I wanted more of what I’d grown to love, but it never has grabbed me in quite the same way.
But beyond that: there’s something to the fatalism of “I Will Follow You Into the Dark”. I like the foreverness of it, the sense of always. It suits my romantic notion of love, my sense of being a dreamer and thinking in the long term.
It was suggested that it play at my wedding, and I wasn’t sure, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I like it.
There’s never been anything wrong with a little fatalism in your romance.
