Excusapology

Ok, so the thing about grad school is that it eats up all of your time even when it's not eating up all of your time.

The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me...

Act I: How to be a bad opening act

1) Play far too many songs.

2) Cover the fact that you don't play your instruments all that well by playing them really fast.

3) Preface every song with, "This one is for anyone who..."

It was a shame. I really wanted to like the Loved Ones. Hell, I was at a Hold Steady concert; I wanted to like everything. I wanted the world to be a wonderful place and match the feeling that I had. But the Loved Ones were obviously a charity case. Tad Kubler and Franz Nicolay (lead guitarist and keyboardist for the Hold Steady, respectively) came out and played with the Loved Ones for their final song and they just made the band look like little boys.

Their first couple of songs showed promise, but for the 45 minutes after that they followed a slow downward trajectory towards "Greenday Rip-off". Every song was "for those of you who have lost a loved one" or "those of you who know someone in jail". I wanted there to be one "for those of you who are tired of hearing the same punk songs over and over again" but it never came.

It's a difficult thing to be an opening act because you have to remove the ego from the equation. No matter how good you think you are, 99% of the audience DID NOT COME TO SEE YOU PLAY. They came to see the guys or girls after you. You have to be mercifully short, while taking up enough time for the main act to bet buzzed backstage. You have to be exciting, but not call too much attention to yourselves. You also have to act like no one knows who you are, because no one does. The best opening act I've ever seen was an opener for Of Montreal. They were a white, two-man, bizarro-rap group called Grand Buffet. They did 7 or 8 songs (for one of which they had an awkward looking guy in a poncho be a guest rapper), 5 minutes of hilarious banter ("You have to microwave your water!") and were gone. Like a refreshing slap in the face before the headlining act.

Thankfully, the beer was moderately priced for a musical venue, so I escaped the set a couple of times and medicated myself with Peroni in anticipation of the Hold Steady...

Words and Meanings

I'm experiencing a bizarre stage of my life in which I have begun to question the meanings and definitions of common words and concepts. What does it mean for something to mean something? What does the word mean mean? And there, I've used the word I'm trying to define in a question asking how to define it. Well, for something to mean something means for something to signify something, right? But what is "signify"? What does it signify for something to signify something? And it is at this point that I usually give up, drink a beer, and watch something nihilistic like Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Then this whole episode ends up being an unsettling metaphor for my entire life. And if a metaphor is an idea that stands for a reality, what does it mean for something to stand for something?!

New York, I love you but you're bringing me down.

Things that I will miss about New York City.

1) The accessible public transit

I got into a bad and lavish habit of taking cabs near the end of my stint in New York, but that didn't detract from my love of the New York subway system. I had approximately nine subway lines running close to my apartment and I was always blown away by the comprehensiveness of the system.

2) The restaurants on 9th avenue

Small, ethnic restaurants (I love that description - ethnic - as if there is a type of food that doesn't have an ethnicity. Water, maybe?) abound between 42nd and 59th on 9th ave. Wondee Siam, Bombay Express, Island Burgers, booyah.

3) Greenpoint

The one place in New York that I would truly love to live in, were I able to ignore the potentially cancer-causing underground oil seepage. Blooper! I have a perverse love of suburbia that Greenpoint fulfills in every way possible. It feels like a neighborhood, it's full of families, and you get a gorgeous view of the Manhattan skyline from the roof of any building.

4) The concert venues

Music Hall of Williamsburg, Bowery Ballroom, Webster Hall, and Irving Plaza all in the same city. Incredible. My fear of spending money kept me away from the majority of concerts in my first year, but I eventually got my head out of my ass and took advantage of the bustling music scene.

5) Drinking beer in movie theaters

This is a weird one, but I developed this habit of going to movies (sometimes alone) and smuggling in Bud Lite tallboys. The monolithic, faceless movie theaters on 42nd St. made this an endless possibility. It added an illicitly fun element to movie-going that I probably won't be able to recreate elsewhere.


Things that I will not miss about New York City.

1) Summer trash smell

Mmmmmm, what is this wafting into my nostrils? Feces. Feces and milk.

2) Surliness

Call me a softy but I don't love the tacit agreement in New York that everyone is allowed to be a huge dick. People on the street, people serving you food, people in the subway: dicks. It infected me after a while as well. At one point recently, I got bumped on the street and turned around ready to glare. It was a mother with a kid in a stroller who apologized profusely. I felt sad about myself.

3) The scene

Everyone's a little obsessed with image in New York. Even hipsters, who aren't supposed to care about anything, name-drop endlessly. The anti-scene is itself a scene. Again, I don't absolve myself of this sin. I got a little caught up in the restaurant-going, the bar-knowing. I spent some time in the West Village. None of us is clean. None of us.

4) Critters

This isn't a characteristic of New York alone. You'll find creepy crawlies anywhere in the world; in fact, they're probably more prevalent in non-urban areas. But the confined spaces in New York make everything a little more unsettling. I saw a house centipede (I dare you to google-image that shit and not get creeped out) in my apartment in the first month of my New York stint and had trouble sleeping for weeks. On my birthday in 2007, my friend Liz bent down to pick up her shoes in my living room and saw three mice caught in the same trap. The night before I left New York, my girlfriend awoke at 4:45 with a sizable cockroach on her face. Enough. Said.

5) The weather

New York spends ninety percent of the year in meteorological extremes. The temperature is either less than forty degrees or more than eighty. Spring and fall tend to last about two weeks tops. At any given time I am either wearing three sweaters or sweating my balls off.


So.

Goodbye, New York. You were good to me. It took me a while to get used to your ways, but I acclimatized and it was...exciting. I've never spent less time being bored, and for that I will always thank you. And chances are I'll be back in two years, so see you soon.

Two suggestions for when Dartmouth eventually gets around to choosing a mascot.

1) The Dartmouth Depressed Beached Whale

He would be airlifted and placed at the 50 yard line during halftimes of important Dartmouth football games, where he would utter his catchphrase: "Don't push me back in. Life's not even worth it."

2) The Dartmouth Townie

A rangy young man wearing a mexican poncho who would skulk around the vicinity of various Dartmouth sports arenas. To each approaching fan he would hold up a hacky sack and mumble his slogan in a smoky voice: "Wanna hack?".

Two old poems

These have been rattling around my notebooks for a couple of years.

Ricochet Song

He couldn't sing so great.
The notes crackled up in his throat
And ricocheted out at odd angles,
Producing sounds
That seemed too eager to escape his body.

His cords could never find the right note,
Wavering back and forth,
Circling,
Pouncing and barely missing it.

The concentration needed to reign in his quavering voice
Would push his eyebrows together,
As if the muscles in his face
Could wrestle the sound onto the right tune.

When singing along with songs on the radio
His ears focus on the sounds
Made by the real singer,
And suddenly,
They could be his own.

When averaged with the notes of someone who can do it right
His errant vocalizations
Almost sound like the real thing.

But turn the speakers off
And you are left
With a busted bugle,

A guitar
That has been stepped on
And mangled.


Puppy Love

There he is at her door again,
Bloody and awkwardly nude.
He is a stupid piece of shit.

He knows precisely what will happen:
First, the door will open,
Spilling saturated amber light onto his face.

Then he will be invited inside,
Stomped on with soccer cleats,
And shoved back out the door.

Knobby knees over elbows,
He will tumble to the street
For everyone to see.

It was endearing the first time;
He is young and resilient
And not used to falling.

But after so many attempts
It is difficult to feel sorry for a dumb animal,
Incapable of self-preservation.

He stands slowly,
Ignoring the unsightly scrapes
Running up and down his sides

(The human body is not skilled
At regeneration.
Instead, scarring -

Lumpy misshapen tissue
Hastily covering cuts -
Is what it does best.)

And there he goes,
Left steadily in front of right,
Until he stands squarely in front of her door.

Can it still be called courage
If it is fueled by stupidity?

Heartbreak is not attractive,
As it is in films.
There is no beautiful and melancholy music,

No slow motion,
Only scorn
And embarrassment.

But there goes his arm,
Shoulder muscles tensing
To bring the entire limb

Into a raised position,
Closed fist poised
To reassert his presence

To someone who will
Calmly open his chest and slash
At something vulnerable inside of him.

And yet, inside the house,
It is so warm.
And he does not know any better.

The M83 Concert

I think friends tend to view me as a controlled human being, in the same way they view a corporation with a relentlessly conscientious PR department: nothing gets out to the public unless it's been heavily vetted. The one thing in life though that sends me irredeemably out of control is music. Liquoring me up will get you somewhere, but if you REALLY want to see me let loose, turn on "Boy From School" by Hot Chip, or "Digital Love" by Daft Punk and crank that shit. You will learn things you never wanted to learn, see things you never wanted to see, and experience dance moves that would never, in any civilized society, be considered dance moves. And, while my general style in life includes a heavy dose of skepticism, with a sprinkling of irony, I like my music loud and genuine. And so, when I saw tickets for the ridiculously over-the-top, grandiose, electro-space-rock group M83 on sale, I grabbed four and told some friends that they were busy on June 3rd, whether they wanted to be or not.

The best way that I can describe the music of M83 is to say that each song sounds more or less like what the soundtrack to your life would be if you were constantly having sex during spaceship battles. Every time an M83 song comes up on my ipod shuffle, I envision myself in elaborate science fiction action-romance-dramas saving the world, falling in love, curing loneliness, etc. Numerous times (whether on the C train in the mornings heading to my job as a high school math teacher, or wandering 9th avenue at night) I have broken futuristic laws forbidding human to human contact (because of potential virus infection!) so that I can caress a lover's face or hold a child's hand. Then I go shoot up some bitches with my laser guns. That is the kind of music that M83 makes. The fucking band is named after a type of spiral galaxy in the Hydra constellation for god's sake! But I elaborately digress...

My sister (from whom I get the majority of my musical tastes) and I went to dinner at Sea Thai before the concert. The food was fine, but we sat at a bamboo table near a pond with a Buddha in it, so the whole experience had a tinge of the absurd/awesome to it. My sister got a whiskey soda and I panicked and got one too, then spent the rest of the meal worrying about whether whiskey soda is a drink that only girls get. We headed over to the music hall at 9 to catch the opening act, The Berg Sans Nipple (no clue about the name). They were all right, but a little too heavy on the drums and a little too light on the melody...or tune at all, really. The "lead singer" would say thanks after every song in a manner that made me feel like he was mildly perturbed by the fact that an audience was watching him.

The Berg Sans Nipple's set was mercifully short and the normally interminable set-up time for the main act was minimized due to the fact that M83 had very few instruments. There were two keyboards, a drum set, a guitar, and a transparent box that looked like either a plinko machine or a radioactive hamster cage. Hamster. Hampster. Hamster. Hamster.

Anthony Gonzalez, the only permanent member of M83, entered nonchalantly and set himself up by the keyboard with the hamster cage on top of it. He twisted a couple dials, conjuring up some ambient electronic effects as his band mates entered and positioned themselves by their instruments. Segueing out of the ambient effects, they launched into "Run Into Flowers", one of the best songs from the band's incredible repertoire. I'd already begun to lose it. And by the time they launched into their second song, "Graveyard Girl", the single off their new album, I was dancing like someone was paying me lucratively to do so. My dancing tends to consist of a continuous random combination of the following five moves:

1) Jump
2) Stomp
3) Clap
4) Nod head
5) Thump self on chest

And all of these moves are consistently accompanied by the ubiquitous sixth move: "scream [often misremembered (more often off key)] song lyric". Unfortunately though, I injured my knee over Memorial Day weekend playing incredibly poor quality/ridiculously fun beach football and the jumping quickly became a non-option. So, my dancing included an inordinate amount of stomping (with my good leg) and resembled an upset Scottish child, physically protesting something. All baroque comparisons aside, I'm sure it was pretty impotent looking. But I didn't care.

There was a guy to the right of us with an unfortunate gladiator-style bowl cut, who was obviously under the influence of one or more substances. His dancing consisted of an unending barrage of two moves:

1) Close eyes
2) Freak out rapturously

Any time he did something especially silly, my sister would laugh and point him out to me. I looked at him and felt an uneasy kinship. I would so much rather be him (minus the drugs and haircut) than almost anyone else from the crowd. The majority of the concert attendees stood through the concert with arms folded, hipster frowns marring their gaunt faces. I had no doubt they were enjoying the music, but for some reason they felt it inappropriate to express their enjoyment physically. I wanted to be this guy to my right. No shame, no cares, just an uncontrollable physical expression of ecstasy from something that gave him genuine and deep pleasure. I loved the music and I wanted to spin and scream and shake people until they broke out of their skeptical trances. But just enough decorum remained in me to limit my expressiveness to the usual moderately contained "dancing".

This isn't to say that I spent the entire concert having depressing philosophical conversations with myself about the nature of self-expression and self-consciousness. I let loose in my own modest way and it was wonderful.

Anthony Gonzalez, himself, was a glorious caricature of what you'd expect him to be. He swayed and slithered around the stage, obviously sexually attracted to himself and his music. Numerous times it appeared as if he were giving it to his keyboard in more than just a musical way. My sister thought it was silly and hilarious but I thought it was perfectly fitting. If he had been any less grandiose and over the top than his music, I would have been disappointed. The world is woefully short on self-important artists of mythical proportions that are genuinely good at what they do.

The drummer's internal monologue was definitely a repeated utterance of, "I may be suffering from male-pattern baldness and wearing a polo shirt but I will rock your fucking genitals off," and the back up vocalist/keyboardist resembled a hot mad scientist with her frizzy hair, glasses and wild demeanor. Mikey made a good point that the guitarist looked more or less like our friend Caz: small, shaggy, and wearing a Polska t-shirt.

M83 struck a perfect balance by playing all of the incredible songs from their new album, as well as a surprising amount of old hits. After they demolished us with my favorite song from Saturdays = Youth, "We Own the Sky", my sister turned to me and, without any adornment, said, "That was really good". And it was. It was so fucking good.

Once it was over, we stumbled out into the street and headed towards the L train. The concert had been incredible. The only thing I had missed was a closer personal connection to other people who loved the music. I appreciate that my friends and I have diverse and rarely overlapping musical tastes but sometimes I just want someone to love something as much as I do. I love that good music makes idiots out of people and I wish there were more people around me who get as idiotic as I do over the things I love.

On the train ride back, I sat across from some white boy hip-hop posers. At one point, a girl wearing a relatively revealing plaid skirt entered the train and sat down next to me. The posers were unabashed in talking about the girl and her clothes. They looked right at her and spoke to each other about how she looked. She was wearing ipod headphones and so was I, but I could tell what they were doing, so I hit pause and listened. I couldn't tell if she could hear them or not but she certainly didn't make eye contact with them. I got really sad at that point about men and life.