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.
Wes Anderson has a way of invoking emotion through his use of music. His movies can be charitably described as whimsical, or less charitably as overly stylized, or least charitably as unbearably pretentious.
His carefully curated soundtracks bear this out. Even when there are scores as such in his films, he gets more use from pop songs to serve that purpose, to help heighten the mood.
So when Richie’s usual escort from his days on the circuit arrived by way of the Green Line bus (as always, late) and walked toward him while that plucked out guitar line started to play and that melancholy voice sang about the things she wished she’d done and how it should have been different… well, it’s tough not to get the message.
When I’m feeling like I’m usually feeling about myself, listening to Nico sing this song hurts. “Please don’t confront me with my failures; I have not forgotten them.”
And I probably won’t.
I frequently wish I wasn’t able to be brought low so easily. Little things will have a big effect. Something that’s really nothing will grow into something that’s way too much, and I’ll lose all perspective on what’s actually going on.
“These Days” can do that for me. So I only listen to it when I’m already low. I love it, but I don’t want to feel the way it will make me feel if I’m not already. If that makes sense.
I sometimes wonder how much sense I’m actually making.
This one is a little different, a little special. There’s no YouTube video for this song, because it’s never been released. Not never been released as a single, either. I mean that it’s never been released for public consumption, beyond being excerpted briefly on a TV show and maybe existing on a streaming site somewhere or other for a short while.
I first found Schatzi back when people used P2P networks to find music. I was looking for music to make a mixtape featuring the names of my friends. I already had my own song; pretty much everyone I’ve ever met has sung it to me at one point or another.
In the end, the idea came to naught. There simply weren’t enough songs with my friends’ names to make a long enough mix, and then as now, I’d rather scrap a project than complete a compromised version of it.
That’s not good for my self-esteem, I don’t suppose.
I did listen to the songs I found, though. Sir Paul’s “Heather” was lackluster, in the way of a lot of his post-Beatles work. Obviously, the Pixies’ “Tony’s Theme” was great. But the SwAmpee hadn’t yet written “Andey”, and there were slim pickings on most of the other names as well.
There was one standout, though, that caught me immediately, a power pop number called “Song for Stephanie” by a band I’d never heard of.
I didn’t realize yet that my life would be different.
I downloaded as much of the rest of their work as there was to find, and struck out into the wilds of the 2002 internet to find out as much about them as I could. I saw that they had a record coming out in about six weeks, and an EP that was of recent vintage. I tracked down the EP in a record store (remember those?) and got familiar.
On Valentine’s Day, I went to see Jimmy Eat World with my friends. It was immediately after “The Middle” became the biggest song in the world, and the venue was full of people who didn’t quite have the history with these guys that I did. I was annoyed.
The show was still great, though.
After the lights came up, workers at the venue were handing out flyers for upcoming shows. A superhero named Tony came up to me excitedly clutching one for the Promise Ring in a few weeks.
“Cool. You want to go?”
“Look who’s opening.”
An amazing coincidence. We had tickets to see Schatzi play before we got out the door.
We got there early that day, actively ready to see the opening band. It was a weird situation, but hey. Their set was as impressive as their EP had been, which was a good sign. I also shouted out for them to play “Nadine”, one of their older songs. They hadn’t rehearsed it, but they still knew it, and that was great.
Yes, I realize I was That Guy. But I totally looked the part. Still do, in fact.
In the way of small bands in small venues, they came down and hung out with the crowd a little after the show. I met three of the four band members; the drummer was from my hometown and was talking to his parents. Chris and Montez, the two frontmen, were unsurprisingly the more gregarious members of the band. Marc, the bassist, was more subdued. They were all awesome dudes.
On the way out of the show, we saw that each car had a flyer put up under the windshield wiper: another Schatzi show in a few weeks in Norman.
I drove down with a few friends to see. In the meantime, their album, 50 Reasons to Explode, had been released, and I made myself familiar with it. I saw Chris unloading equipment before the show, and asked if they were going to play my favorite song, “Delta”.
“Yeah, I think so. Montez wrote that, I’ll be sure to tell him you asked about it.”
Ouch. That was embarrassing. And then my friend called me a brown noser. I had to agree with that assessment.
Again, they put on a great show, and again, I talked with them a bit afterward. Again, I found out they were playing soon.
There were three more shows over the next several months. They opened for Ultimate Fakebook on their farewell tour. I saw the last show, saw the Schatzi guys get duct tape mummified and have flour dumped on the drum set. (Incidentally, Ultimate Fakebook have since reunited and are releasing a new record in the near future.)
A few weeks later, Schatzi played at one of those venues that changes its name, but not its function, every few months. I remember Montez loved the place because they were the only bar in the world (as far as he knew) that had one of his old bands on the jukebox.
My favorite, though, was the time I saw them alone. I drove down over an hour to see them, got a flat on the way, made the rest of the drive on the donut spare. When I got to the venue, the show had started. Chris recognized me when I walked in and nodded to me, touching his lip to the mic and getting a shock. Apparently there was a short somewhere in the line, because it happened a few more times until he finally had the bright idea to pull a sock over the mic and provide some insulation.
As always, they were great, and this was the most intimate setting in which I’d seen them, in the sense that the few dozen people in the space were right up against the “stage”, such as it was. A small space, a close space.
Afterward, I bought a couple of compilations that Schatzi appeared on from Marc. We got to talking, spent an hour or so shooting the shit until the band decided to go to Waffle House. They invited the fans who’d stuck around to come with them, but I couldn’t stay any later, given the state of my flat tire.
Not long after, they went further afield on their tour and I wasn’t able to see them again. I kept up with their exploits via their tour diaries, which I found out were written by Marc, and which weren’t your average tour diaries.
He didn’t really write about the places they played, or the people, or the other bands, or the travel, or being stuck in the van. All of these things were mentioned, obviously, but that’s not what the writing was about. It was about how it felt to be in this band on the road, working together.
It was something else.
Not long after, Marc started writing a personal LiveJournal. I read it for a while, kind of in awe of this guy. I knew him, a little. I knew he was a kickass bassist, I knew he had sweet dreadlocks, I knew he seemed shy but was a smart guy and a great conversationalist once you got him out of his shell a little bit.
I hadn’t heretofore realized that he was a genius.
I wrote him an email, just telling him what I thought, how impressed I was by him and what his band meant to me. He responded, and we became friends after a fashion. He told me they were going into the studio in Lincoln, Nebraska to work with Mike Mogis, he of Saddle Creek Records production fame, as well as, you know, being in Bright Eyes and Monsters of Folk. It sounded like Schatzi were ready to take the next step, and I was fucking pumped.
The recording sessions were harrowing. Lincoln in the winter is not exactly heaven on earth; it could charitably be considered a wintry wasteland, I suspect. But I’m biased against Nebraska, so maybe don’t take my word for it.
Marc continued to write, about the recording process, about himself, about the band, about the everything. About life. I was in my early 20s, a kid, and I am not ashamed to say that I was learning about life, the inner workings of being an artist, from this guy. A guy I knew, a guy that I’d spoken to, a guy I’d call a friend.
It was a weird experience.
Marc watched a lot of Travel Channel while they were holed up in Lincoln. He became smitten with Samantha Brown, the host of Passport to Great Weekends. He decided to name a song after her.
The band finally finished the record and struck out on tour again. They prepared for a new release. They were at the top of their game.
Then, not.
Disney bought their record label, and with it the rights to their unreleased album. It remains unreleased; the Machine Breaks Down, as foretold by the song of that title on said unreleased record.
Meanwhile, on that tour, Montez discovered he was going to be a father. He left the group to prepare, leaving them as a power trio in an awkward situation.
After they finished the tour, they returned to Austin. Schatzi was on the cusp, and circumstance had derailed them. I kept in contact with Marc, and not long after, he sent me a burned copy of their unreleased record.
It is, tragically, as good as I’d hoped it would be.
I still talk to Marc to this day. In fact, I asked him to upload the song so I could use it for this post.
And Marc Fort is one of my heroes. A true example of a gentleman and scholar, one of the coolest dudes I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and someone I wouldn’t mind being more like. A writer whom I respect. A musician whose work and tastes I love; his most recent release is as part of the dreampop band Norushi Minx; you should go buy now. Hell, buy two.
Schatzi are one of a few bands who have literally changed my life. I’ll champion them, always. I hope that they return someday, able to do for someone new what they were able to do for me.
Even if they don’t, though, they’ll always represent for me one of the best things about music, the way that you can accidentally discover someone with no previous presence in your life and they can be the greatest band in the world. Most people who love music have a similar experience, I’d bet; maybe Bowie on the turntable when you were a kid, R.E.M. at a bar before anyone knew their name, some bar band whose name no one else would ever remember.
If you love music, there’s music that helped shape you. There are others that I’ve mentioned in other of these posts, and others that will be mentioned. But more than any other, Schatzi the band and Marc Fort the person are that music for me.
This idea is difficult for me, possibly the most difficult post of this entire project.
I am frequently a deeply insecure person. I can know objectively that something I do is worthwhile, but in my heart of hearts I’ll never believe it.
One advantage of this, I suppose, is that I’m often quite good at accepting criticism. After all, if I believe in my heart that there’s nothing redeeming about a piece of work, then a few hypothetical red marks on the page can’t possibly be as bad as what I’m imagining.
However, it has the opposite effect with concern to value judgments. If someone tells me they don’t like something, or even that they prefer something else I’ve done that I consider not as good, I tend to take it extremely personally.
I used to describe myself as highly self-confident, but with no self-esteem whatsoever. It is a vast oversimplification of how the situation really is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate. There’s definitely a bit of truth to be pieced together from it if you can parse what exactly I mean by it. Which shouldn’t be hard, since I told you as much in the second paragraph.
All of this is paralyzing for a writer. Of course, I don’t know any writers who aren’t at least a little neurotic; it follows, in its way, that a person who had the tendency and desire to create other eyes through which to see the world, or to describe what is seen in the world in another way, would be a person with a tendency towards any of a number of certain neuroses. (Hell, for all I know, most of them share my paralyzing fears and specific doubts.)
This is what it ultimately comes down to, I suppose: the way I accept value judgments makes me loathe to show my work to other people. That would be fine, if I were writing for an audience of one, but I’m not. I write for myself, but not just; the things I write are, I guess, typically supposed to be read. So you can see how not wanting to show my work to others might be a negative for my creative process. I wish I could get past it, could accept that some people just aren’t going to like Thing X and move on, that I could let their opinions bounce off of me.
Wait a minute… that sounded curiously like THE POINT: for all the many and varied other ways the song can be read and applied to me, how it describes me is the most simple explanation possible, and only barely a metaphor.
My most direct inspiration usually comes from experiencing things–movies, music, books, etc–that I consider great. When I watch/listed/read/whatever these things, I Get Excited and Make Things!
We Are Words + Pictures
I also get inspired by my friends and co-conspirators. I jump-started a project after the seed was planted by Matthew Sheret‘s Phonogram Vs. The Fans zine; even though that project is two months behind schedule, I received contributions to it from Matt, Julia Scheele, Katie West, Steele Tyler Filipek, Andey DeLesDernier, and a host of others. My friends make amazing things, and if I don’t make amazing things to, then I’m not living up to their standards.
xkcd: Angular Momentum
Finally, I get inspired by love. Loving makes me want to do big, brave, bold, crazy, beautiful, stupid, exciting, romantic, artistic, cathartic, brilliant, funny, extraordinary things. Sometimes all at the same time.
Turns out it works even though I used to say no one ever wrote anything good when they were happy.
Inspiration is a funny thing. It has a way of striking when you don’t expect, and occasionally when you can’t use it. But getting it when you can’t use it is much better than never getting it at all.
To find out what inspires Richie Design, tomorrow’s Blog It Forward participant in my line, go here. Yes, I am shamed; the person following me posted their blog before I did.
A few days ago, I had an exchange with my friend Anne on Twitter. She linked to a set of game-themed cupcakes. For this, I told her “A NERD IS YOU.” Her response was that she is a geek, and that it is a subtle hierarchy.
That got me thinking. Because really, if not a miserable little pile of secrets, then what, in fact, is a nerd?
I use the word in a couple of different ways. Of course, I use it to deride my friends or myself any time we do something that lives up to the classic stereotype of a “nerd”; I’d hardly be a self-consciously ironic self-hating semi-hipster if I didn’t, after all. But I also use it in a more global sense.
For several years now, I’ve been arguing that everyone of my generation is a nerd. The reason is technology: we have so much information available for our consumption that we have to actively decide what to take in. (I personally am partial to video games, some comics, design, and typography.) Like needing to grow up, this simply wasn’t an issue to our forebears. As recently as my parents’ generation, the simplest way to get information about the world was through newspapers, television, and magazines. While some amount of specificity towards what was consumed was possible then, the fact that they had either physically manipulate the paper or passively accept what was shown to them on the television ensured a fairly large degree of informational omnivorousness.
Compare that to now, when we all choose what we want to read/watch/play. For example, I’m entirely dialed out of “popular” music, to the point where I have literally never heard most hit songs. I choose music based on recommendations from friends or that I run across in the normal course of my life. It’s a limited but fulfilling world of music for me.
It’s like that across every section of the spectrum. Want to follow a specific sport to the exclusion of all others? Well, you’ve got countlessavenues to do that. The evening news sports segment and the morning paper are no longer all you get. Want to drill down and focus strictly on Korean cinema? Go to town! Want to learn only about nose-to-tail cooking? Have I got a story for you!
The problem with this, of course, is that it creates a little echo chamber. It’s very easy to build yourself a world where your tastes and opinions are the right ones. If you only read blogs about things you like and listen to your friends who share your opinions and never hear any opposition or dissent, why would you think you’re wrong? But then you get that on a macro level, where America’s relative wealth has made it easier for people to relocate, and their choice for new location is near others who are like-minded, which soon leads to entire communities built with people who agree socially and politically, which leads to being entirely unable to understand what the other side could possibly be thinking, which leads to batshit insane partisan politics, which ultimately leads to 79-word compound sentences. We don’t have to integrate ideas in our neighborhoods, so we can’t see the big picture. (By the way, I’m not innocent of this in any way.)
So, that being my argument, I did some checking on Anne’s “subtle hierarchy”. Unsurprisingly, there is a great deal of material on the internet attempting to define “nerd” and “geek”, and… it turns out Anne was right. I frequently use the word “nerd”, which apparently applies specifically to intellectual pursuits. By all evidence, what I mean is in fact “geek”. It’s not an error I intend to correct; as far as linguistic concerns go, this isn’t anywhere near the worst of my issues, and people still generally understand me. But hey, don’t let that spare me the pain of admitting that I was wrong about something.
I turned 27 a couple of weeks ago, my early late 20s. I have an office job, I live with my domestic partner. I am, by any estimation, an adult. But I’m no “grownup”.
No one goes through their 20s without changing. If they do, I’d consider that a pretty significant problem. That much is fairly obvious; I mean, if nothing else, I’m much more heavily tattooed than I was at 20. Nevertheless, I still consume much the same media, have the same relative sense of responsibility, and many (if not all) of the same interests I did back then, when I would have laughed right in your face if you’d dared suggest that I was even “adult-esque”.
I still constantly talk about what I’m going to do when I grow up. I harbor the same basic ambitions about my creative endeavors. I still have the same lack of understanding as to what exactly my place in all this is. And I don’t think I’ll ever know.
By contrast, my parents and all the parents before them had some sort of role that they were molded into. They became “Grownups” and “Parents” and “Workers” and “Role Models” and all that. Of course, they were often flawed in the extreme; that they didn’t live up to the ideals of those roles can hardly be held against them. They are still people, after all. Nevertheless, they were trying to fit into the compartment that thousands of years of human social evolution told them they should fit.
I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to fit anywhere. And for the first time ever, that’s okay. Hell, it might even be expected. Of course, some of my generation will elect to fill the standardized roles. Some people are simply best suited to be one or more of those quotation-marked categories. But… it’s okay not to be.
Which leads me to this: I think that I am a part of the first generation that never has to grow up. Those among us who have taken more “grown up” steps don’t act any differently than they did before. Initially, I thought this was a matter of society accepting perpetual adolescence from us. However, I mentioned this theory to a friend and was rebutted. Paraphrasing:
We’re not adolescents. This is pure fact. The things we enjoy don’t determine our maturity level; we’re smart and independent and make our own decisions.
I had to concede this point. Our society isn’t so innocent as to accept perpetual adolescence. We still have certain responsibilities to meet. Within the limits of my responsibility, I do what I want. I’m not forced by social mores or circumstance to deny myself. None of us are. And that is what’s never really happened before. In fact, the answer feels a lot more sinister: our society is more accepting of our selfishness than any generation before. We’re allowed to live for us.
That’s a terrifying thought. We’re allowed to live only for ourselves if we so choose. We never have to grow up… and we don’t know what that means.
I turned 27 a couple of weeks ago, my early late 20s. I have an office job, I live with my domestic partner. I am, by any estimation, an adult. But I’m no “grownup”.
No one goes through their 20s without changing. If they do, I’d consider that a pretty significant problem. That much is fairly obvious; I mean, if nothing else, I’m much more heavily tattooed than I was at 20. Nevertheless, I still consume much the same media, have the same relative sense of responsibility, and many (if not all) of the same interests I did back then, when I would have laughed right in your face if you’d dared suggest that I was even “adult-esque”.
I still constantly talk about what I’m going to do when I grow up. I harbor the same basic ambitions about my creative endeavors. I still have the same lack of understanding as to what exactly my place in all this is. And I don’t think I’ll ever know.
By contrast, my parents and all the parents before them had some sort of role that they were molded into. They became “Grownups” and “Parents” and “Workers” and “Role Models” and all that. Of course, they were often flawed in the extreme; that they didn’t live up to the ideals of those roles can hardly be held against them. They are still people, after all. Nevertheless, they were trying to fit into the compartment into which thousands of years of human social evolution told them they should fit.
I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to fit anywhere. And for the first time ever, that’s okay. Hell, it might even be expected. Of course, some of my generation will elect to fill the standardized roles. Some people are simply best suited to be one or more of those quotation-marked categories. But… it’s okay not to be.
Which leads me to this: I think that I am a part of the first generation that never has to grow up. Those among us who have taken more “grown up” steps don’t act any differently than they did before. Initially, I thought this was a matter of society accepting perpetual adolescence from us. However, I mentioned this theory to a friend and was rebutted. Paraphrasing:
We’re not adolescents. This is pure fact. The things we enjoy don’t determine our maturity level; we’re smart and independent and make our own decisions.
I had to concede this point. Our society isn’t so innocent as to accept perpetual adolescence. We still have certain responsibilities to meet. Within the limits of my responsibility, I do what I want. I’m not forced by social mores or circumstance to deny myself. None of us are. And that is what’s never really happened before. In fact, the answer feels a lot more sinister: our society is more accepting of our selfishness than any generation before. We’re allowed to live for us.
That’s a terrifying thought. We’re allowed to live only for ourselves if we so choose. We never have to grow up, and we don’t know what that means.
