Happy Belated Ground-New-Hog's-Year-Day!

Boy! What a finish for 2011. And now, for the last year of the internet *wink*, let's really go out BIG!

(I think the blog has officially come full circle in terms of its clean look and web 1.0 retro-chic.)
(I put the little sub-banner up initially thinking {hoping?} that someone would eventually change it. No one has done this, so I've plucked it pending subtle arbitrary re-branding. Questions, comments or retaliatory/complementary/complimentary acts of symbolic or aesthetic violence are welcome.)
(I recently received comments on a graduate paper asking me to avoid using parenthesis. I think I may be trying to work something out right now)

This has been an unusually verbose parenthetical list. The Project is as follows:

Eric showed up while I was in the throes of a semeiotics paper, which I eventually finished. While in this post-paper+holiday+friday stupor, we decided to have a writing exercise. A mixtape, to be exact. Tyler (or anyone else who reads this and happens to listen to all the music that we used to have in high school), you are highly encouraged to join if time and inclination permit.

The Rules -:

1 - 12 songs - Alternate Selections a-la road trippin'

2 - Songs Permitted Include only THE LIBRARY as it was preceding College EXODUS

3 - No Formal OR Stylistic writing restraints to be enforced

(do what the fuck you want clause)


4 - Explicit Nostalgia

(Adult's [sic] imagination of the child's imagination?)

SIDE ONE

TRACK ONE:





An education on space and time and slide guitar.
I learned there's still such a thing as straight lines
that spit in the eye of cracked asphalt and its turns,
curved roads, and ice salt: cars. That cacophony is tucked

away in the folds of especially melodious silence.
With your hand on the wheel and the wheel fucked
you steer where winter will have you go, and pray.
Not to god, but Luck. The motion is of a hand, knuckles-up,

moving forward, cocksure that nothing can top the power
of sea green bottle-glass trajectory. There's a perverse peace
that comes before crashes, when you've got a few moments
to cover your sockets, when you've finally found the pocket

where nothing you might do could matter. Guess the pattern
the pole will draw when the windows don't quite shatter.
This is desert music, played over frozen tundra. The engine
cuts, abrupt, your power door shorts out and dares you to unlock it.

Sometimes you've got to slide all night just to feel like you're okay.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This song and the album on its back are crocheted into a webby mesh with points affixed to memories as various (or perhaps as related) as untimely death and road-head and bodily triggers that are as likely in a given moment to radiate searing, acid, heat or dump torrents of electrified, frozen mercury through my veins. It's perhaps one of the hardest songs I could try to write about, given this sort of semeiotic perfusion. To be fair - though this is a blatant violation of the foundational tenets of this project - my first recollection when thinking of this album is one that I've somehow short-circuited out of the fraught, manic-depressive, emotional terrain with which this song for years presented me. But let's go back further.

1.

I put my hands on the gray steering wheel of the Ford Escort and aimed the nose away from the rush of purple darkness and twinkling light and into the increasingly searing orange light of dusk. It was September, some day after cross country practice, and Cyndee and I met the tepid, dusty air in a loose interface of cotton sweatpants and long-sleeved t-shirts.

My father had officially disqualified my hulk of a rusty, wood-paneled space/time capsule from making trips outside our county, and Cyndee always made me drive her clattery, matte-silver, chariot when we ventured to Mason City. We'd gone to the mall and there, in the first shop on the right, were the c.d.'s. I found Sea Change on the rack and picked what I guessed would be the least popular of the four covers. I hadn't gotten Midnite Vultures, i was still too rock and roll, but I hadn't forsaken the wizard of Odelay and Stereopathetic Soulmanure and Mellow Gold.

We were fucking in earnest at this point, having figured out the logistical hurdles of curfews and school and parents and space, finding ourselves naked, together, a pair of praying mantises, foam-wrapped pvc bodies, thudding, hands and tendrils knotting and undulating: nervous, anxious, exhilarated, vociferous, new. We stopped on the way back from the mall to buy condoms in the social semi-obscurity of Super Target.

So, like I was saying, I put my hands on the gray steering wheel of Cyndee's car and headed the bow up into a windy solar wash of magentas and oranges. The surrounding cyan to cobalt expanse threw its weight on the horizon: pressurizing, roiling, rattling with electro-ferrousity around the edges of the shadow overpasses and clouds and spindly signage. On my right, she barely seemed to sit in the seat: whirled ass-forward, rustled, tore cellophane, loosed lid, slid plastic platter into waiting slot, whispering with gears, then sloshed halfway out of her bucket seat and into my lap.

I'd always thought Mellow Gold was a funny album title for what Beck offered with that album - more like lyrically jarring, pared-down indie rock - and so being met with the jangle/soar of acoustic over slide paired with smooth, slow vocals and lyrics unusually un-oblique was almost too much to parse. "Shit, he's made a country album. I just paid twenty bucks for some really lonely, affected, experimental country-pop". I had a musical ego to protect from my girlfriend, I kept quiet. Two bars into Paper Tiger, it had me.

***

The task we've set ourselves, this grand spelunk in stale caverns to grease gears and hinges of erstwhile mechanisms, is fraught with the ticklish funk of insistent, resilient, polymerous cobwebbery. Look one way, tug a thread, loose a torrent of shadowy god-knows-what. The space fills, and not just with the old, but with the new piled atop, slid into its cracks, scribbled in next to crossed-out passages and redacted sections of sensitive recollection. The terms themselves have changed. I can't make Eric forget how to pronounce "row", and I can't remember the precise moment at which my writing started to include words like liminal (2004, this is a bad example) or conflate (2003, shit!).

But pretend for a second that I'm writing this all at once, and that I'm not really writing it at all, but we're just talking. This is what I'm trying to do. Of course it's difficult with you not actually talking there, filling up your sides and letting me riff off of them, but I imagine you anyway, what you'd say, and I imagine the place my mind would go. I imagine until I practically shake with the kernel of my next utterance, the thing that I'd hold-to even if your next statement threw me off track and gave me another. I'd wind it back in and knot it to the rope and then spit words at you until you feel it. As I feel the tugs pull in all directions, some pop loose, and though it might seem like what you get is a mere filament to knit onto your own ongoing text-ile, you've seen sections of my afghan before, maybe we've even managed to share some patterns over the years. Maybe we do know, if we can hold that certainty gently enough.

2.

Spat Spot Spit Spot Sput! Rain on the windshield. Tunes in my ears catch and swallow me back into long corridors of tears and flowers and marker fumes. Sad sagging bodies slump heavy on old, orange, squeaking, metal sheet. My head is drenched and I push back into soft blue embrace and sigh a mist that hangs in the shadowy wet light of the street. Two fresh bodies ground in simple transit. One dead girl, one smashed friend, infinity of feeling and sensation and contemplation.

Age of Gold - Titans and heroes and legends before the degeneration of man into forms of lesser metals. Eventually swapped for an upside-down world built on humble stone, and now something even more ephemeral: a confused, nostalgic metaphor of loss or expectation, of eras bygone and foretold.

She was dead, she was younger than me. Guhhhhhhhh, how incomparably shitty. She was dead and my stomach seemed to be on fire, and my forehead and my shoulders. I pulled off the headphones and blew into my hands, turned the key back a notch and checked the time, which read something like 3:46, but which made sense to me @ the time. Flipped the key forward three notches, tugged on the lights and dropped the handle to bring an orange box around a bright green D. I rolled down the hard black iridescence.

Had she fucked anybody? Gotten drunk? Fulfilled the trite cinematic fantasies of the coming decade? Let alone the strange scenes of adulthood that still only danced, shadowy on the horizon. She was cooler than me at least, I thought. I took some comfort there.

I got to Eric's and things blur in my recollection. The day was fucked: a bad, sick, reminder of three years prior with different actors and slight rewrites. Of course we ran from his parents: their emotional trip was far from ours. Think about it. What does it mean to confront these things afresh, at most having read a few scribbles on the responses of characters, historical, fictitious, to the full-on weight of phenomena that a human can receive in the fallout from mindless tragedy.

I fended off their soft but probing questions for a minute, weaving around between the back door and the bottom of the staircase, eventually going wild-eyed/sarcastic/bombastic to compensate for the soft mournfulness in their tone and their faces watching me.

Eric slid down the stairs and we vanished with a thwack into the rain.

We brought it up then, a compelling multivalent topic of social, existential and emotional wilderness. It was all rain.

We got soaked and came back and decamped in his basement and, I remember this, I tried to show Eric how intertwined the day's events and this new album had become in my mind. Maybe it wasn't exactly, explicitly this. The thing is, it was true. The conversation we had was something about the album and the way I was hearing it.

I led with "vaseline".

"Huh? Like the STP track?"

"No, like being suspended in a universe of it. Like radical closeness and stillness and connection."

"Huh! … I'll have to listen for it..." he said. But that just seemed impossible. I tried again.

"Okay, it's like flying, but not. Like floating, but not. It's a weird suspension with no real momentum or inertia, no jerks or jars or bounces, no acceleration or deceleration. It's a fundamentally smooth, elevated glide through a wide-open landscape."
I think I tickled something that time. Eric cocked his head back, looked up and rolled his shoulders. After that we started talking about dreams and fantasies and concepts of flying, and we let go of it.

The next summer I was lucky enough to befriend and start fucking the dead girl's best friend - not the one who she'd died on in that fetid sardine can, the one who hadn't been in the car - and when we finally got around to discussing that time, I told her much fresher versions of these accounts of emotion and grief and music. I hope it wasn't an excessive thing to do. It's warped this vinyl for me forever.