Archives : all posts by Dan

Joanna Newsom - "Good Intentions Paving Company"

It was still too cold to take in the outdoor car cover, the aluminum housing covered in a clear tarp, so the two of them sat in the car, in the cool evening as it rained in March. With March you take your chances. Sometimes you find yourself sweltering in the sunshine in a winter coat and boots, other times a spring coat will feel like you're wearing a plastic bag when the wind kicks up and around a corner. But that night the night was warm, a few degrees above freezing, and it was raining. They sat in the car, with the seats tilted back, and smoked and listened to the rain clapping softly on the tarp. The orange streetlight cast a swath on the road and silhouetted the smoke as it rose to the roof of the car. They had been doing this sort of thing since they were sixteen, the kinetic magic of those first few times being enough to sustain these past ten years. They would talk more openly than with anyone in their lives, listen to the radio and add up the parking tickets and imagine how they could steal that much money to pay them off. They used to make love in these times, in the car, and they used to laugh about who was the boy and who was the girl. Now they cast loaded snickers, breathed smoke up to the ceiling with a smile, knowing everything and knowing nothing.
"Can you roll down the window?"
"I don't know, can I?" while rolling down the window.
They had reached that precarious point where there was a list of necessary answers to any given thing, and they had to play out these little scripts every time one would come up. That tipping point where you can either hold those moments close like warm hot chocolate or dump them out like dishwater. And as with anything balanced ever so delicately, be it the pencil at the edge of a desk, or a book left open with a page in the air, it takes merely a breath, even a sigh, to move it.
"I think I'll get married."
"To me?"
another snicker, "No, silly."
The smoke wound out the window and out from under the tarp, and fought against the rain as it wound right up to outer space.

[Buy]

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This is the first week of the WFMU fund-raising Marathon. As you know, I heartily endorse The Best Show on WFMU, and I entreat you to support them if you listen as well. If you don't know about the show, a good introduction is the Best Show Gems Podcast on iTunes (the show is also podcast in full). A sample podcast is below, of a brilliant half-hour of teasing a 13-year-old.

The Best Show on WFMU - "Mac and Jimmy Crespo"

(photo source)

Born Ruffians - "Sole Brother"

My grandfather is a bit senile and will often call me up and just start singing. Huge long songs that have no discernible consistency, no melody that I can follow, the one thing they are for sure is impenetrable. He barely takes a breath, there's no room to speak on my end at all. So after a few minutes of singing, I will get bored, and either join in, or just talk over it, shout over it, anything to try and break through. He often just sings on oblivious, but one time I was shouting so loud and so boldly that he went quiet, a hush on the line. I paused, listened, nothing. So again I started screaming and he hung up. [Pre-Order]

The Howling Hex - "Apache Energy Plan"

Found, half-buried in dirt, near a tree, a tape with the title "MEGA N JAMS". Unsure if this title means "mega and jams" which could be the names of the people who made it or a misunderstood deeper meaning, or possibly a poorly kerned "Megan Jams" which would probably be Megan's jams. In any case, the tape starts with a voicemail from a nurse saying, "We need to inform you that you are suffering from an unnamed infection and we need you to call to make an appointment". Then "Apache Energy Plan" kicks in, and so starts the greatest tape I ever found. It has a weather report predicting sunny for the next 5 days (tape was recorded on a Thursday) it has what sounds like a dog breathing for about a minute, and an Agent Orange song that starts skipping halfway through. It has Paul Newman singing from Cool Hand Luke, that drum solo from Taxi Driver, and the first three songs from Jesus Christ Superstar. Then it finishes with "Tracks of My Tears", literally the song reaches exactly to the end point of the tape. For something so haphazard sounding, it was really well planned. [Buy]

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Saw Adam & the Amethysts tonight, they played with a fire and class that I heartily enjoyed, despite having had two guitars stolen. And after them, Little Scream. Little Scream is hands-down the best live act I've seen since Tune-Yards almost three years ago. She is working on a recording now, but let's all join hands and anticipate the next great record for this year.

(image via Patricia, Ruffians via Sean, Hex via Tom, thanks all!) (have a great weekend!)

The Pack A.D. - "Cobra Matte"
[Buy old stuff]

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Elsewhere: Joanna Newsom's Have One On Me is released today. It is a triumph. The only reason we're not posting it is that Drag City is vehemently opposed to new-model publicity, which is fine, I still think you should buy her record. It's wholly moving, I was bowled over.

The Strange Boys - "Laugh At Sex, Not Her"
Xiu Xiu - "Dear God, I Hate Myself"
Fiery Furnaces - "Though Let's Be Fair"

My parents handled their divorce in very different ways. Mom moved on quickly. Within a year she was dating. And as anyone can attest to, dating is not always easy after marriage, especially in later life. So Mom was doing great, and it was kinda hard to see her so happy without Dad, but it was even harder to resent her for it, I couldn't hold her true happiness against her. Dad, however, was a different story. He was clinically depressed and suicidal for a long time, and my youngest brother and I took turns taking care of him for a couple of years. Taking the medication out of the house, hiding mementos of Mom, removing sharp objects. This last one was always confusing because, used creatively, a ballpoint pen is a sharp object.

A few years ago, once I reached a level of perspective on things that I felt like I could talk to Dad frankly about it, and on the recommendation of my own therapist, I went to visit him in Rhode Island. I asked him if he ever saw anyone else since the divorce, since to my knowledge there had never been anyone else in his life. "A few people, here and there. But you see, honey, the thing is, I'm not gay."

Those three words, "I'm not gay," changed a lot of things all at once.

My mother was never a man, and was never attracted to women. She was never Dad, she had always been Mom. "So, Mom's my 'other' mother, then," I said, after the tears and the tea and the immense walk across the city. She smiled, "Mom can still be your mother. I'll take the 'other'."

The next night, while we made chili and M*A*S*H* played in the background, I asked her why. Why would you claim that you "always knew" that you were a man? Why would you go through surgery and identify as male for so many years to so many people when you weren't sure? "I have a great capacity to believe I don't have the answer. I knew I loved your mother, and I knew we were meant to be together forever, that's what we had said on our wedding day. So when she decided that she wanted to reassign as female, it seemed only natural that the way we were supposed to stay together was for me to make the same decision. The way when you decide, say, what movie to watch with [your girlfriend]. The best way to make that decision is to feel like the compromise is actually what you want. Well, it was the same way for me. Once I said it, I tried so hard to make it true, but I failed."

Early on, the surgery was found to be, while not irreversible, very "risky" to tamper with. My mother is fixed for the rest of her life in the body of a man, a body she worked so hard to create. While we were driving to the train station, I made the analogy of a man building his own prison. She just looked out the window, suddenly interested in the other cars on the highway. I instantly regretted it, but could only think the other things I wanted to say instead. No, it's like a living tribute, like you built a statue to Mom out of your own body, and you should wear that proudly. You've embraced the scars of your emotional past so fully, they're the first thing anyone can see. I envy you, Mom. You're completely unafraid to let the world know that love can change you permanently, and no one returns to 'who they really are' after anything, no matter how much they try to pretend otherwise. Instead, what I actually said was, "Hmmm," and looked down at the gear shift, the little diagram on top that always looked like a maze to me. An extremely simple maze.

[Pre-Order Strange Boys' Be Brave] [full stream]
[Buy digital version of Xiu Xiu's Dear God, I Hate Myself]
[Buy Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir]

(image by James Graham)

The Mint Chicks - "Crush (Chris Knox cover)"

When I was 11 years old, my parents switched genders. We were living in Rhode Island at the time; me, my two younger brothers, our dog Temper, and my two parents. My "mom" became my Dad and my "dad" became my Mom. It sounds like the premise to a stupid sitcom, but it really happened. Right after they told us that they were both going to undergo sex reassignment, I remember my brother still had ice on his lip from falling off a skateboard in the driveway, and they took us all to Red Lobster for dinner. It was the first time I ever ordered an appetizer.

It was a hard 5 years after that. Hardest for who is difficult to say, so perhaps it's fair to say it was equally hard on everyone, or equally easy for everyone. My youngest brother dealt with it the best, which was that he didn't let it change his behaviour at all. My younger brother in the middle started acting out fiercely and was violent towards a lot of his peers. I smoked and drank but mostly just internalized everything. I'm convinced that none of this retaliation stemmed from any hatred of our parents' decision, we have always been a very close family, but it was the outside world that made things difficult. The questions. The constant, awkwardly phrased, pausing-before-looking-around, questions. But even now I don't blame them. The first question people would ask (well, the first intelligent question) was "how did this happen?" How was it possible that two people, two individuals, could simultaneously come to the same life-altering realization at the same time? I was always told the official story: We always knew. Kind of hard to argue with.

So they underwent the surgeries and the hormone therapies and they essentially turned their lives upside-down, or rather, rightside-up. They independently lost the majority of their friends, kept a few close ones, and together they gained a lot of new trans or gender-neutral or "identity sensitive" (my Mom's term) friends. At first it brought them so much closer together. It was as if, in the changing of their respective genders, they somehow met in the middle before crossing to the other side, and their identities became indelibly enmeshed. It was like a physical manifestation of them having shared the most intimate elements of their lives. I heard my Dad say one time to a minister who was visiting the house, "It was like she gave me her masculinity, and I gave her my femininity." At that moment they looked strange, though, I remember they were holding really fancy cocktails, with big pieces of fruit and mini umbrellas sticking out.

Things weren't as perfect as all that, however, they divorced when I was 16. It was 1999, and they had told us on Boxing Day. Needless to say it was a very strange Y2K New Year's for me. I remember hoping that the world would actually end in some giant computer glitch. Like pulling out the wrong plug by accident and your computer just goes dead, I wanted that to happen, for the world to just count down 5-4-3-2-1 to its own--bzzt!--flickering abortion. But it didn't. Banks still functioned, planes still flew, things kept working. And my parents kept getting divorced.

[This story, from an anonymous contributor, will continue on Friday]

[Please buy Stroke, the fund-raising album created especially to support Chris Knox through his recovery. With artists like Bill Callahan, The Mountain Goats, Will Oldham, and Jeff Mangum.]

(illustration by Marmotte)

Group Bombino - "Tenere"

In the quiet dust of the backyard, a girl, 11, comes crying up to her brother, 8.

"I'm running away. You can come if you want." She storms off, her sandals kicking up dust and her hair coming out of its ponytail. He rises quickly and follows her.
"What? You're doing what?"
"I'm running away."
"Where?"
"I don't care. I'll take East Road until it leads somewhere. Anywhere is better than here."
"The roads are covered in mines."
"I can see them, where they rise. I am not heavy enough to set them off."
"It's three days walk to anywhere. Where will you sleep?"
"On the road. To the side."
"You'll be killed by bandits. They will touch you and kill you."
"I'll shoot them. I have my Kauser."
"That's not how bandits are. You can shoot one, sure, but there are always more, they make sure of that."
"Well, then you should come with me."
"But I am not the one who wants to run away!"
"Well, I'll go by myself then."
"Please stay."
"Never. You are too young, you don't understand."
"Dasin is playing guitar tonight. At least stay tonight for that. You can run away tomorrow."
"No. I told you, I hate it."
"We will sit under the stars and look up at the stars and tell their stories. Remember Half-Little and Big-Little? How they tricked Gargantua into thinking they were a fortress, draped in a silver cloak? Remember how I buried you in sand and it was your cloak? Stay for the guitar."
They had reached the edge of town, a trail of dust behind them and the gates to East Road ahead. She stopped and dropped her backpack, pink and dusty, and then fell to the ground herself, sat up and started to cry.

[buy the world's best music]

The Irrepressibles - "Nuclear Skies"

"Now, without any reasons, without any context, tell me how you feel."

Unable to answer this nonsensical question, I snicker and twirl a pen. This guy is really something. He thinks he's some kind of magician or something, he might as well be wearing a tuxedo. He speaks with that kind of flourish, he sounds like he's unveiling a statue every time he talks. May I present...Anastasia! or some bullshit.

"I don't know. Scared."

"Good, excellent. Hold on to that."

Fuck him. Fuck his golf shirt and his khakis and his salad breath and his bike helmet and his too-many keys. Fuck his beautiful wife. Or maybe he's gay. Oh well, fuck 'em both.

"It's only 'cause I'm up against this case and I can't afford a better lawyer than y--"

He was holding up his finger to his lips. Goddamn magician lips.

I let out a big sigh, fell back in my chair, and put my feet up on his stupid coffee table. He talked for an hour about what he was going to do to defend my case, all the evidence he was going to present and all the people he was going to question. Instead, I kept hearing he was planning dance numbers and pyrotechnics to get me off.

[Valentine's album launch]

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Grace Lee and the Stylers - "Each and Every Flower"

"Okay, good, the Stylers are on. Now, you listen to me. You go out there and you do it just how we rehearsed today. I don't want any slip-ups from you. You're the only one who can do this. He deserves it, don't forget what he did to us, to all of us. He's scum, Jin. You shake his hand and let him press the starting button in your palm. And then with every drum hit you'll administer poisonous dust into the air. You remembered to take your breathing pills? Good. Now focus, Jin, don't falter. If you break the pace or you falter in your spirit, the jig will be up and we'll all go down for the count. Listen to me, Jin, I love you. I love you and need you to be strong. For me, Jin. For Tai-Tai. Okay, they're finishing, get ready." [Buy from Sublime Frequencies]