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Thursday: (old/new music) Seven Swans. Sufjan Stevens; 2004
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(style) Walking Well: the 1000 Mile Boot by Wolverine
by Ian Burnette
I bought my first pair of leather boots at Tops for Shoes on Lexington Avenue in Asheville, North Carolina one Saturday morning in early February. I sweat the details of this day because—after nearly eighteen years of dubious velcro cross trainers with shock-activated lights, more shades of canvas Converse than I can count, and a slew of all but destroyed Vans—this purchase was, for me, a right of passage and a taste of the world of heightened responsibility and so-called manliness I presumed I would soon enter. My eighteenth birthday was then eight weeks away.
These shoes, a pair of the Wesley 1000 Mile Wingtip Chukka Boot, made by Wolverine in Rockford, Michigan in some form since 1883, were serious business. I’d never heard of Horweed leather or of a sheepskin lining, nor did I have any idea what welt construction was, but this lexicon led me to believe my new boots came from a place of quality, reliability, and masculinity—buzzwords of a tradition I wanted so badly to inherit. I made a silent pledge to protect these boots with my life. After all, if I could learn to take care of a nice, masculine pair of shoes, wouldn’t it say something about my validity as a man, or at least prove that I was on my way to becoming one?
Leaving the shoe store that day, I made sure not to knick the dark, wooden outsole on any uneven sidewalk tiles or otherwise scuff the winged toe-box on the curb crossing College Street to the parking garage where my car, and safety, were waiting. Of course, the next thing I did that day was go bowling, something I never do, and one of the only activities left where anyone my age takes off their shoes. But I had to, and so I exchanged my holy kicks, with their then impeccable chocolate finish, for a pair of misfit bowling shoes. The attendant, like any normal person would, stuffed my boots into a dirty cubbyhole without giving them a second thought. After all, I was being ridiculous. Shoes are, well, shoes. They belong on the ground. My father, when I told him my dilemma, framed it like this: inevitable nicks, scratches, and abrasions add “character” to leather shoes and are, in fact, improvements upon their original design. With this knowledge, I lightened up a little and soon found myself wearing the boots every day, using them to kick open doors when my hands were full, and even bringing them out in the rain.
This confidence began a misguided few weeks of “character building” which ended tragically with an international flight, a wet, early morning walk in the muddy English countryside and me, in a hurry, leaving my dirty but beloved boots stowed beneath the seat on a train car bound for Wales. My plan to shape myself into the man I wanted to become had been foiled. I had shown I wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of adulthood, not even the most basic of tenets like don’t-lose-your-shoes. And for what? I still missed my connecting train.
That said, this story still has a salvageable ending. For my eighteenth birthday, I was given a pair of the original Wolverine 1000 mile boot in a beautiful, reddish-brown stain which, as it turns out, I like better than the Wingtip Wesley. It’s a more casual style with a higher ankle cuff and it took significantly less time and pain to break in (not a single blister). That said, if you’re in the market for a durable, stylish, and theoretically long-lasting boot, either model would do well. I can’t, however, attest to the kind of person they’ll help you become; that’s between you and your boots. Just, by any means possible, keep them off trains and out of the mud.
The Chukka (top) and the original (bottom).
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(new/old music) Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Spoon; 2007
by Meg Millure
The sound of indie rock group Spoon has never been clean. After all, their name comes from a song by the avant-garde 1970s band Can, consisting of eerie repeating tones, feedback, and something that sounds like a didgeridoo, so you can’t expect them to be too pristine. Though their most recent album, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga”—perhaps a proto-Lady Gaga reference to “Radio Gaga” by Queen, or just another Dadaist allusion—is certainly refined in comparison to their older work, it doesn’t sacrifice the grit that originally gave Spoon traction. Their signature lo-fi sound is completed by errant studio comments and even frontman Daniel singing along with the riff in “Don’t You Ever.” As the chatter fades away, the track cleans itself up and shows signs of the band’s evolution.
The lyrics on “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” are somehow both narrative and confusing. They are rich in images, often collaged as in “Rhythm & Soul,” which lists “Tract houses / square couches / short legs and square shoulders. / Pot holders / aching soldiers / your tank rollers / your all overs.” The listener gets the impression that the song has a close understanding of what it’s about, even if he or she does not. This lack of accessibility paired with brief insight is part of the band’s allure.
“The Ghost of You Lingers” perhaps the most relatable track in its lyric simplicity, paradoxically stands out from the album while epitomizing it. The vocals sound either haunting or like someone blowing into the microphone, depending on the amount of listens you give it. Like many of Spoon’s songs, it grows on you (granted, it takes twenty listens to stop being somewhat funny). The repeating piano chords are both reminiscent of the band’s namesake song and the album title. The track is pared down to vocals and piano, another reason why this is the cleanest Spoon album yet. Though it may not be the most thrilling performance piece, “The Ghost of You Lingers” is one of the most interesting songs on the album.
Whether the opening song, “Don’t Make Me a Target,” is about George Bush or an ex-girlfriend is debatable. Either way, it’s catchy and showcases the band on their defensive game. Spoon has carved a niche for themselves in a genre defined by its own lack of popularity, and this song encapsulates their underdog attitude, something also made clear in the track conveniently titled “Underdog.” “Underdog” is one of the band’s most popularly recognizable songs and an appropriate anthem for “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” complete with horns and maracas. Despite these indulgences, “Underdog” doesn’t come across as cheesy. On the contrary, it makes you want to root for Spoon, whether or not you know what they’re talking about and whether or not you’re willing to peg them the dark horse of their underdog league.
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(import) The Red-Tailed Hawk
by Grant McClure
Bird Blog #10 from writinboutbirds.blogspot.com
Scientific Name: Buteo Jamaicensis
Length: 19.7-25.6 inches
Wingspan: 44.9-52.4 inches
Weight: 31.7-51.5 ounces
Markings/Identification: Immense bird slightly smaller than a Bald Eagle. Broad, rounded wings with a shorter tail. Coloring may change dependent on habitat, though most birds share a rich brown top coat over lighter plummage. Abdomen is often marbled or freckled with brown spots. Horizontal barring on the wings compliments trademark reddish-brown tail.
Habitat: Historically a bird of open country seen flying in circles above open fields, or perched along fence posts and telephone poles. Have become more adapted to urban environments in the past half century.
Behavior: Most prolific species of hawk in North America. Incredibly keen sense of eyesight at high altitudes, hence "Watching you like a hawk." Attack prey in slow, controlled dives distinct from similar species of raptors.
Sighting: Seen after a picnic in Falls Park last Sunday hunting squirrels outside campus. At one point, the bird flew directly at my head. Eventually it was chased off by a group of blackbirds.
Fateful Moment:
Each winter a pair of hooded mergansers mate in the tidal lake a block from my house. The lake isn't much—fed by the Ashley River, surrounded by concrete walls, more of a pond than anything. The bottom is silted in with layers of pluff mud, seaweed, oysters. And still, the lake teams with life. I've watched men pull out doormat-sized flounders, fill coolers with forerarm-length mullet. Shrimp, crabs, croakers, ladyfish, toadfish, pinfish, herons, ospreys. And of course, the hawk.
Last year the mergansers gave birth to eight ducklings. The year before that, six. The year before that, four. None of them survive. The hawk picks them off one by one from its perch atop the brick apartment complex parallel to the lake. Every time I pass during these months it seems there's one less bird. It becomes a macaub game: on the way to church last week there were four, walking back from the library there were two, coming home from basketball practice they were all gone.
I can't help but wonder if the mergansers are aware of there naivety—that no matter how many ducklings they produce they'll all die eventually. One by one. I'd like to think that they're aware of their offsprings certain peril. That kind of stubbornness seems, in a strange way, noble if not completely ignorant.
And doesn't the hawk need to survive too? I can't blame this animal for annihilating the offspring. It seems somehow dignified—systematic if not intricately planned. The hawk waits on top of the apartment building for the perfect strike. Aware, always ready to kill, but not always killing. Only when the moment is right. Only when the opportunity presents itself. And the duckling's death seems a reminder of the natural order of things, the food chain, a primal hierarchy to often mislabeled as hostile and in-humane.
When I was sixteen my dad found me sprawled out on my bed. I'd come home early from school and gotten into my parents' liquor cabinet. Admittedly, it wasn't my best idea, but it was brazen, noble even. Anyway, I meant to get drunk, but not that drunk. I tried my best to hide the obvious. When my dad asked me if I wanted to eat dinner at the new burger joint on King Street I told him surrrreeee.
In the car I tapped my right foot violently against the floorboards. My dad asked if everything was ok, if I had anything to say to him. I told him I was tired, that was all. Just a little tired. I stumbled out of the car and found myself on my hands and knees. By now, my father surely knew of my condition. But he was out to make a point. I walked in zig-zags, stumbling over the sidewalk.
I vaguely remember the waiter leading us to our seats. I wonder if he knew I was drunk. How strange that must have looked—a sobered father with his completely inebriated son walking into a burger joint on a Thursday night. Everything was a blur of reds. We sat down. I remember these words: "Grant, I want to tell me something and don't lie to me. Are you drunk?"
The answer, of course, was yes, very drunk. Not that my father didn't already know that. He knew the moment he stepped into my bedroom. But he wanted to make a point. He'd planned the whole thing. He wanted me to admit to my guilt, to put my ignorance on full display. To prove that what I'd done wasn't brave at all, but naive, immature, idiotic. He wanted to remind of the hierarchy I'd been so hellbent on breaking. Aware, always ready to kill, but not always killing—holding out for that fateful moment, moving in slow, controlled.
At the time this treatment seemed cruel, hostile, excessive, but looking back on it I respect his decision more than ever. He's one-hundred times the man I am. A painter. A singer. A pianist. A half-decent fisherman. A damn good architect. The hardest working person I know—and I couldn't be more grateful.
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(poetry) Notes From a Park in Greenville (Last Day)
by Tim Housand
What I had left were
remnants— dull squirrels,
an aging, pinkish dog
reflecting next to me
on a bench. We sat
and watched another
woman on a bench, her November
man trying to kiss
through the wool of her
yellow scarf. She pointed to
her rusted watch,
and I imagined him
explaining time
as motion, or lack of
said motion. Two hands,
lined up on a clock
face— a still life.
“Have you noticed,”
he’d say to her,
“that it’s only when
your back is turned
they appear to move?”
They left,
and I could see
her hand slipping
into his pocket.
What a surprise
for the girl
when she’d feel
the rotted peach
hidden there.
It was, he could’ve
replied, Novembering—
the brown cores
of summer fruits,
wet acorns
on the ground, breath
of the mutt besides me
which was warmer than
anything. I pulled him
onto my lap, and when
the November dusk
settled, we were
all that was left.
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(profile) The American Girl, Age 18
by Ian Burnette
We’re far away from Little River, South Carolina when McKayla Conahan brings up her summer job at The Brentwood, a white victorian off the Grand Strand’s Highway 17 just north of Myrtle Beach. According to The Brentwood’s website—an HTML contraption of bygone days set against a tiled background of wine corks—the house was converted into a restaurant sometime in the ‘80s and changed hands several times before finally metamorphosing into the low country French bistro it is today. But Conahan isn’t interested in The Brentwood’s history, or at least not the kind of history you might find on an informational pamphlet from the maitre’d’s station. Instead, she seems genuinely fascinated with the people she encountered there, including Kim Masson, overlord wife of executive chef Eric Masson. “The restaurant itself was haunted. There were uh, orbs,” Conahan says, one side of her mouth turning up into a wry smile. She pauses, enjoying the tension of this opening line. “[Kim] loved to take photos and catch these orbs on film,” she says. Conahan tells me about one occasion in particular where a camera set up to record any spectral activity after hours captured images of a black shadow gliding down The Brentwood’s main staircase.
After talking to Conahan for a few minutes, I notice the care with which she chooses her words. Everything she says is expertly curated, and this meticulousness seems to extend elsewhere. Not only is Conahan a curator of conversation, but of an entire image, something she has no reservations admitting to. “In seventh grade I was like ‘I’m such a Beatles fan,” she says, beginning to list what phases she can remember. She wore a bandana every day for an entire year, garnering her the nickname “Rambo” from one of her middle school peers. For a time, she noticed her uncanny resemblance to Ally Sheedy’s character Allison in the John Hughes film The Breakfast Club. A dark lipstick phase marked her sophomore year of high school. “Now I guess I just strive to be a badass,” Conahan says, pulling out the smile again, this time with teeth. While I can’t attest to her being a badass, she’s the master of a quiet charm that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. In a conversation I had with Kirby Knowlton, Conahan’s roommate, a few days later, I learned how Conahan goes about crafting her badassery at the beginning of each day. “What’s funny to me is that I think she’s done and she’s going to walk out [the door] but then that’s only the beginning. When I finally think she’s ready, she puts on something extra,” Knowlton said, evoking images of a flower crown of faux carnations I’ve seen Conahan pair with a vintage sweater with the word GEEK displayed prominently across the chest.
Today, Conahan is wearing a t-shirt advertising the town of Taos, New Mexico beneath a cutoff denim jacket and a southwestern skirt in muted reds and oranges. It’s one of the first days of spring and we’re sitting beneath an umbrella in the courtyard of the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, the residential arts high school in the new southern boomtown of Greenville, a solid five hours upstate from The Brentwood and the Atlantic Ocean. Conahan has been living here since her junior year of high school studying creative writing. Now she’s four weeks out from graduation and no doubt looking back on the work she’s done during her time here.
Conahan allowed me to read her poem “The Last House of Myrtle,” prior to our third and final meeting, and I found it to be a true testament to her ability to piece together an image from discordant elements in the context of writing, the place where one could argue this kind of curatorial prowess matters most. Conahan’s poetry is, in fact, a kind of mirror-image of her personal identity. A collage, which seems to shift constantly and yet always firmly, definitionally remain McKayla. During our discussion of her poem in a downtown coffee shop early one Sunday morning, Conahan explains her obsession with the ocean and the role it plays in her concept of home. The poem makes mention of a teenager who drowned while surfing in the wake of a tropical storm. “Here we have paddle-outs for boys reclaimed / by tropical storms like beached starfish / tossed back into the ocean’s throat,” the poem begins. “I wanted to celebrate how basically I live on an island separated by the ocean and the inter-coastal waterway, and how we’re just living in a place surrounded on all sides by something so beautiful, that can also kill us,” Conahan says. “That tension. I guess I’ve always felt it.”
Far away from the beach and her home, Conahan is dealing with some not-so-seaborne tension as she looks to the future. Recently, she’s faced more than her fair share of disappointment on the college admissions circuit, having been denied or wait-listed by the majority of schools she applied to, and ultimately enrolling at College of Charleston, a school she had considered only as a backup. “My first choices had been Swarthmore and Brown,” Conahan says. A few weeks ago, she was disappointed, but she’s matter-of-fact talking about it now. Her reasons? After living on the coast most her life, a permanent move inland would be difficult. “I would feel completely disoriented,” she says. During her life on the coast, she came to use the ocean as a natural point of reference. Living in Greenville for the past two years has taken a toll on her maritime equilibrium, though she tells me she’s recently devised a new way to ground herself. When she’s up into the small hours of the morning working on calculus with her classmate Mary McSharry, Conahan listens for the whistle of a cargo engine that rolls through town regularly. As she puts it, at night it’s just “Me, Mary, and that train.”
Nights like these happen more often than Conahan would like, but there’s no denying that calculus has been a major undertaking for her this year. When I ask her where she can be found on any given night between midnight and one a.m., she responds, “Sitting in the hallway working on calculus; sitting in the study room working on calculus; sitting in my room procrastinating.” A few days after my first interview with Conahan, I talk to her close friend Wade Nix. “It’s what she focuses on. She has a really good handle on everything except calculus,” he says. “It would be really lame if I failed calculus,” Conahan says casually, though I know she’s more serious about it than she lets on. She’s the kind of girl who marvels at her own ability to succeed in the face of a challenge. If calculus is her one axe-to-grind, there’s no way she’s going down without a fight. Even so, it gives her grief. “The first time I saw her break down, everything was happening at once for her…she just stopped and froze,” Nix says. When I ask him how she deals with the stress of a full course load, our conversations veers in an unexpected direction.
“She loves talking about the universe,” Nix says. “She’s so overwhelmed by everything close that she wants to talk about the all-encompassing.” During my conversation with Conahan in the courtyard, she starts in on yet another of her eloquent anecdotes, this time about the deep space probe Voyager I and how it has already exited our solar system. In the process, the tiny chunk of metal and it’s various accouterments have produced a recording of sound waves produced by vibrating ions in the plasma of interstellar space and successfully sent said recording back to Earth. I find this difficult to wrap my head around, but Conahan manages to explain the concept with ease. “I can only go so much with it,” says Conahan’s roommate Knowlton, who seems a bit perplexed by her roommate’s interests and desires, though I think she summarizes them well.
“McKayla wants to be surprised and taken on an adventure by a boy who plays the harmonica,” Knowlton says. Conahan tells me she’s only been on two dates in her entire life, but nearly every one of her stories seems to involve a boy, from Jack, the boyish-looking but legal bus boy at The Brentwood who Conahan admits to kissing in the blind spots of Eric Masson’s carefully monitored network of security cameras, to Storm, an eighth grade heartthrob who remains a point of fascination for Conahan to this day, to Nix, who admits there are some unresolved feelings between them. When I ask Nix what Conahan thinks about, he scratches his beard in thought before deciding. “Boys, and calculus,” he says. Later, he offered more insight. “She likes guys who frustrate her. And the guys who frustrate her are the guys she can’t quite wrap her head around.” When I asked Nix if he might fit the bill, he responded, “I don’t think I’m nearly confusing enough.”
Despite Conahan’s fascination with boys, none of her flirtations have turned into a serious relationship. But maybe that’s not what she wants. After all, Conahan says her idea of a perfect date is hanging out with someone she cares about, “before it turns into anything,” she says. It seems Conahan is more in love with the mystery of people than with their companionship, that for whatever reason she prefers to keep them at a stargazer’s distance. Her interest in boys suddenly seems akin to her interest in the Voyager I spacecraft, a far off, beautiful thing glinting in the darkness of the vacuum, unspoiled by a complete knowledge of it’s inner-workings.
The second time I meet Conahan, we’re in a different part of the school, a smaller courtyard bounded by the library on one side and the creative writing department on the other. The temperature couldn’t be more perfect. There’s a strong breeze coming in, forecasting thunderstorms later in the day, but neither of us seem to mind. Conahan is wearing a black pleated skirt. The wind plays tricks with her dark brown hair, which is usually perfectly shaped. Mid-neck length. High volume. “I wish I had photosynthesis,” she says out of the blue. I could tell she was thinking about something before she said it. “There’s an old man in India. His body has started to do photosynthesis in some strange way and he has this little sugar ball in the back of his throat,” Conahan says, gesturing to her neck. “He never has to eat.” Her face goes back to some deeper place. I wait patiently. “I might sneeze,” she says. A moment passes. “Nope.” This is how Conahan is. She procures these small, beautiful things in the midst of the utter banality of the world around us. I come to expect this from her so wholly that an oncoming sneeze at first appears to be a spark of inspiration.
Later in our conversation, I bring up her father, Cormac, who has been away for long periods at a time ever since she can remember. He works on oil rigs in the remote corners of the world, operating ROVs, robotic submarines that inspect wells for leaks. Now he installs them, but at least for now this still necessitates him spending months at a time away from home. Right now he’s in South Korea. “He’s going to be home for graduation because he definitely doesn’t want to miss that,” Conahan says.
Conahan’s family maintains a strong sense of their Irish heritage, and along with that an interest in symbols. Her father has a number of tattoos. “My dad’s got a Celtic-weave arm band…And there’s a wolf howling at the moon across his chest,” Conahan says. The wolf is a symbol of her family. She hopes to get a tattoo of Canis Major, a constellation that depicts a dog and integrates Sirius, the dog star. She also wants a tattoo of the maritime signaling flags the sixteen year old protagonist of the Studio Ghibli film From Up on Poppy Hill raises each day to beckon the return of her own father, a sailor lost at sea. Conahan recounts how her mother used to lead she and her brother in a song with a somewhat similar purpose. Here, in the courtyard, she sings a bit of it for me, completely impromptu. “Bring back my daddy to me,” she sings. When she finishes, her face is completely solemn.
This summer, now a mere three weeks away, Conahan will return to Myrtle Beach. She’ll be in her element again. The edge of the world will be at arms length, or at least at the other end of a five minute drive. Maybe she’ll get the tattoos she told me about or maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll meet a boy. Maybe things will be different this time or maybe they’ll be just the same. Maybe she’ll bus tables at The Brentwood again. In any case, I have no doubt she will continue to be in control of her own life, and to let no choice go unmade or unconsidered. And I have no doubt she’ll keep a close eye on the universe and let us know should Voyager I leave the Kuiper Belt and charge head-first into the Milky Way.
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(upcoming)
Saturday:
(profile) The American Girl, Age 18
Sunday:
(poetry) New Work by Tim Housand
Monday:
(import) A Fresh Entry from Grant McClure’s Bird Blog
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(head-matter) Michel de Montaigne and Getting Outside of Myself
a PechaKucha by Sam Breazeale
PechaKucha is a Japanese presentation style in which twenty images are shown for twenty seconds each as the presenter speaks. The aim of the PechaKucha is to facilitate the concise, fast-paced communication of ideas.
This is the transcript of Brezeale's PechaKucha. Due to the nature of the presentation format, some sections have been reconfigured to appear in print.
[1]
In the summer of 1570, Michel Eyquim de Montaigne was having a midlife crisis. He had recently been rejected for a promotion and had shortly afterward witnessed the death of his brother in a freak tennis accident. But instead of buying himself a sports car, or getting a younger wife, Montaigne decided to retire from his career as a French nobleman, move into a single tower of his estate, and spend the rest of his life thinking.
[2]
Eventually, he started writing. Montaigne is remembered today as the inventor of the essay, which is the French word for attempt. Montaigne's essays are his attempt to savor the life he had left, and they contain his thoughts on everything from thumbs, to cannibals, to kidney stones.
[3]
Montaigne tried to see the world as an alien visitor might see it, and it’s this kind of perspective on life on Earth that makes his work so important. I think Montaigne saw that when we wake up from our routines, everything is incredible, and reading his essays has taught me to be better at thinking this way, too.
[4]
It’s incredible that water sometimes falls from the sky, or that plants take energy from a star that’s millions of miles away, and then use it to grow, or that I can call a number on my phone and somebody will drive to where I live to bring me a pizza. When I was ten, my parents told me I was going to have a brother, and I told them I thought I was going to throw up.
[5]
But I like him now, and I see how optimistic he is about things, and I want to preserve that for him. He’s seven now, and he looks like I did, and hanging out with him is kind of like hanging out with the first version of myself I can remember, and it makes me want to live up to that more innocent version of myself who could be astonished at the littlest things, and this is the lens through which I end up reading Montaigne.
[6]
Montaigne was fascinated by the things we usually take for granted, and he didn’t want to miss out on any of them. For example, he would have his servants wake him up in the middle of the night so that he could write down whatever glimpse he could get of what it was like having been asleep before it left him.
[7]
Montaigne also marveled at how most people spend their time trying to ignore the feeling of being alive, because the feeling of being alive is full of stress and confusion and physical pain, but I think I owe it to myself to at least try to revere this feeling, because I can’t explain music, or earthquakes, or my heart and lungs, or why it feels good to drink coffee, but I know I’m lucky for it all.
[8]
One of my favorite essays by Montaigne is called That We Taste Nothing Pure. It’s about how pain and pleasure are completely wrapped up together, and how we never really feel one without the other. My dad runs marathons, and he tells me about the awful pain of the last couple miles, and how they seem to take forever, and yet he absolutely loves it. Montaigne talks about how whenever we feel intense pain or intense pleasure, they each seem to be accompanied by the other, which makes sense. I can’t imagine how something could be as emotionally satisfying as running a marathon if it wasn’t so physically difficult.
[9]
In Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, he talks about his time in a German concentration camp, and he says that even in an environment where creativity and enjoyment were taken away from him, he was able to find meaning in having control of his attitude towards his situation, and able to use his suffering as an opportunity to achieve something inwardly.
[10]
I think Montaigne realized that the feelings of being alive can’t be separated into good ones that we want to cultivate and bad ones that we want to eliminate, but that on some level, it’s a privilege to be able to feel everything that we’re able to feel, and that it's not useful or productive to try and compartmentalize those feelings.
[11]
Last summer I went camping with my roommate. On the first night we made dinner on this big, bald part of a mountain, and all we had were vegetables, and we were sore, but it was one of the best meals I’d ever had, and it made me wonder why anyone would spend money on fancy food when just walking all day made potatoes taste so good.
[12]
The next day, we were hiking down a mountain for hours, and at first the trail was sort of damp, and a little further down it turned into a creek, which later joined with some other creeks to make a river, and I got to witness it, and I just feel like things like that are so much more than I deserve.
[13]
In Zion National Park in Utah, there’s a place where water drips out from the rock its been percolating through for over a thousand years. Whether or not a millennium is really a long time in the scheme of things, I think it’s an honor that I can be there when the water sees light for the first time in so many years.
[14]
There are moments in Montaigne’s essays where his cat is the star. Montaigne believed that all animals share the same world, including humans, though each has their own way of perceiving it. He wrote that he and his cat entertained each other with “reciprocal monkey tricks," and that he couldn’t understand his cat any more than his cat could understand him, but that animals seem to be much better at cooperating and living successfully than we humans who think we’re closer to gods than to animals.
[15]
He said that nature made us so presumptuous to console us for being so needy and pathetic, but I think if we accept that we don’t know anything and that we’re dependent on so many processes outside of our control, it’s easier to be appreciate of our existence and what opportunities we have.
[16]
I discovered Montaigne's essays at the Brevard Music Center in Brevard, North Carolina two summers ago, and I think he may be the reason I've been so successful in my training as a pianist since. People there were talking about the sublimity of Mozart sonatas and stuff like that, and I didn't really get it.
[17]
But I started reading the essays, and found this French guy so completely astonished at his own existence, and I understood exactly what he was talking about, and I thought, if my own ears or my own anger could be so amazing, how amazing was it that I could use an instrument to make vibrations that cause people to feel things?
[18]
It’s good to be objective sometimes, but I think it’s a privilege to be able to feel the emotions we’re able to feel, and one of the reason I like music so much is that it lets me indulge in emotions like despair and relief and triumph, endless combinations of feelings, without the consequences of the situations from which those feelings usually arise. I think the reason people have always been so enamored with music is that it gives you that feeling of being alive, and it lets you notice it, like putting paint on something invisible in order to see it.
[19]
Reading Montaigne has a way of redefining things like this, and in the centuries since he essays were first published, there’s been a tradition of people reading them and being struck by how the time and the distance between Montaigne and themselves seems to disappear, and I definitely feel that, because his thoughts are so human and so honest that he’s not afraid to be vulgar or to contradict himself if it means accurately describing his experience.
[20]
In the essay “Of Cripples, he said, “ I have never seen a greater miracle or monster than myself,” and the monstrosities and the miracles he sees in himself are the things that all people have in common. Montaigne realized the value of experiencing life on earth, and through that realization has allowed countless other people to see their own humanity in his.
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(new/old music) Merriweather Post Pavillion. Animal Collective; 2009
by Ian Burnette
Animal Collective’s 2009 release Merriweather Post Pavillion, titled for the Columbia, Maryland amphitheater of the same name, is (as its title suggests), a true performance. Working in tandem, solo artists Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), David Portner (Avey Tare), and Brian Weitz (Geologist)—minus regular guitarist Josh Dibb (Deakin)—maintain the verve and complexity of electronic psychedelia without boring us with repetitious or arduous themes and without sacrificing the emotional closeness of live concert. Through the canny execution of this balancing act, and with the help of co-producer Ben Allen (hip-hop/soul fusionist of Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere), Animal Collective break the mold of contemporary synthpop and—perhaps more apparently—transcend the musicological genome from which their preceding album Strawberry Jam arose.
After work on Strawberry Jam wrapped up in 2007, guitarist Dibb left the group, quite explicitly, due to “personal reasons.” Hence, Merriweather’s evolution was majorly decided by the band’s guitarless-ness, which led them to use samplers as lead instruments in a batch of new songs which took shape during recording sessions at Sweet Tea Studio in Oxford, Mississippi in early 2008. “It feels like you’re making music in a living room,” said Portner of the secluded, deep-south studio, a sure change of scenery from the group’s Baltimore hub. Still, the sense of home Portner describes comes across in Merriweather from the very first encircling, aquatic pulsations of the album’s opening track.
“In the Flowers” is a fitting introduction to Merriweather as it introduces us to the distinct intentions of the album as well as its emotional range, opening in level-headed adagio before exploding: “If I could just leave my body for the night / then we could be dancing / no more missing you while I’m gone,” Portner belts, submerged beneath a sonic apocalypse of gyrating synth organs and raucous drums. To our disappointment, this gem at the center of the song never returns. But this is how it should be. The last thing Animal Collective want to be are gluttonous showoffs. More than they want to impress us, they want to transfix us, to reel us into their electronic maze and make us believe that what we need above all else is their music. They want our faith, and so they will have it. Beyond its core, “In the Flowers” devolves into its former self, a vaulted room full of shimmering keyboard and heady vocals. “The ecstasy turns to rising light / through our windowpane,” Portner sings, though as one episode of ecstasy dissipates, he leaves us sure that another will follow.
“My Girls,” the second track on Merriweather and arguably the most popular single on the album, enters with the same air of wanting as in “In the Flowers.” Above a swell of whistling wind and a glittering loop of synth, Lennox sings, “There isn’t much that I feel I need / a solid soul and the blood I bleed.” A laundry list of desires seems to emerge—to leave one’s body for a night, to keep “a solid soul.” In “Summertime Clothes,” Portner sings, “my bones have to move and my skin’s gotta breathe.” If desire is the impetus for Merriweather, it seems spontaneity is the solution. “It doesn’t really matter, I’ll go where you feel / hunt for the breeze, get a midnight meal,” Portner continues. Narrative like this and the blooms of synthetic carnival that arise in every song on Merriweather are grand musical leaps towards this ultimate conclusion. All said, if having complex, musical fun is Animal Collective’s idea of a path to nirvana, more power to them, and more power to Merriweather Post Pavillion as well.
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