While we wait for various professors to respond to my questions about Jungle Cows, here’s a little hold music:
In addition to an inexplicable hiatus from writing, I also took an even more inexplicable vacation from music. I’ve gone through, almost literally, a year and a half of silence. Back in high school, standing on the accelerator of my ’83 Honda, with my Weird Al Yankovic curls blowing in the wind, I drove around town with a large plastic shopping bag bursting with cassette tapes in the passenger seat. Rush, The Cult, Primus, Metallica, The Talking Heads, Suicidal Tendencies, Queensryche (among dozens of unmentionables. Ahem, Ratt, cough). Then I became an amateur audiophile in college. They’ve labeled my generation the “X generation.” More accurately, we were/are undoubtedly the “mix tape” generation. After college I went through a more civilized classical music phase, during which I had the good fortune to schmooze with dozens of incredibly talented and paranoid orchestra musicians. For those few years, I was able to stand in my father’s living room, stroke my beard, and rub musical elbows with my classical music-loving father. Then I went to live in Spain and took a completely unexpected foray into electronic music, long after Raves had become popular and then more or less died out in the US. I went that route because at that time (2002), in the Barcelona night scene, that’s all there was. You either liked it, or you didn’t dance with girls. I became a big fan, of course. Then I came back to the US and moved to New York at the exact moment that something unbelievable happened. The iPod was born…
If I was an amateur audiophile before that, something exploded between my ears, and my life truly began to rotate around music. My daily goal was to get my hands on anything I hadn’t heard before. Punk, Jazz, Classic Rock, Metal, Opera, I didn’t care. Anything. Everything. Hundreds of dollars later, I had nearly filled a 40 gig iPod. They say you can push ‘play’ on a 40 gig iPod, walk away from it, and provided it’s plugged into the wall, it won’t stop for a month without repeating a song. I was ready.
I took my iPod on a six month voyage outside of the US. I was going to learn who I really was, or something ambiguous like that, but in addition I was going to learn how various cultures party (yep) and listen to a lot of music. I was going to give a thoughtful listen to each and every one of ten thousand songs. It was going to be great. Until the iPod died, of course. I still remember standing there in this cinder-block apartment I was staying in, staring at the little machine. This was in Mexico, in July. How can I describe July in Mexico? They say the fallout from a nuclear war would be cold. Nuclear winter, they call it. Well, if it was hot, then I imagine it would feel like July in Mexico. Put it this way: it was so hot I would erupt into spontaneous laughter. I was laughing at how hot it was. My iPod, however, just heaved for a second, and then died. I see an image of a tiny librarian running to retrieve the album I wanted to listen to in a building that looks like the Library of Congress, in post-apocalyptic heat. It was too much. I don’t really blame the iPod at all.
I listened to whatever I could for the rest of the trip. And then I returned to the US again, found myself at the end of another loop, made the fateful decision to study the world and how it works and unintentionally shelved music and writing.
Well, here we are again. I’m hanging out with Writing again. And I’m playing a Spoon album as I write this. And after a year and a half of silence, I can’t tell you how amazing it sounds. You want to really appreciate how great something is? Go for a year and a half without it. Except don’t really do that (just pretend you did).
