Songs that Defined My Summer

In the past, I've always been of the opinion that lists like this one were simply pretentious attempts both to impress the reader with the writer's impeccable taste in music and also to instill in the writer a certain sense of smuggadocio. But now that I'm a hot-shit college sophomore with a taste for Canadian Club and a painful awareness of whose sleeves are rolled up Italian-style (thanks, GQ), I think I've scored enough undeserved self-satisfaction to make my own list. It's also been the first summer of my life where something very embarrassing (like Coldplay or Death Cab, both music taste death sentences but also guilty pleasures of mine) hasn't marred my seasonal score. I've only bought three new albums this year, one of which was, I admit, Viva la Vida; but the other two, Beck's Modern Guilt and Nine Inch Nails' The Slip (which I guess I didn't technically buy). Everything else on the list was either something less new of which I hadn't previously been aware or something from my own library that hadn't previously caught my ear. I tend to discover new music I already own all the time, I guess as a result of my bad habit of not listening to albums all the way through when I buy them. Anyway, enough about my sensibilities as an audience. Here you go:

Sonic Youth: Incinerate
I know, I know. This is about as accessible a song as you'll find in the Sonic Youth catalog. And I suppose it could be counted against me that the first time I heard it was at a Youth concert when they played with the Flaming Lips. I couldn't get around the observation that all their fans in the general admission crowd seemed so adamant about slam-dancing (even during breaks between songs) to grasp how awesome this track really is. It took a surprise listen on one of my most deliberately ignored radio stations, The Current, to get me into it. It's starting to be just un-cool enough to like Sonic Youth that I can allow myself to listen to them without feeling like a douchebag. Fleet Foxes will have to wait, though.

Beck: Round the Bend
Sea Change, which in general is probably Beck's most hated album of all time will probably be etched in as one of my top five albums of all time. I'd go so far as to say that this eerie, sinisterly melodic engineering masterpiece has had as much of an impact on my love of the American West (or at least my glamorized idea of it) as did my aunt who bought me embroidered boots, spurs and a six-shooter when I was visiting her in Oregon about a decade and a half ago. The album itself has been a mainstay of my collection for a couple of years now, but the song in question has only made me drool for the last few months, coinciding directly with my sudden infatuation with well-loved killer Charles Starkweather. The bleakness of the song matches my vision of the stark landscapes of Nebraska and Wyoming, black and white highways, classic cars, non-filtered cigarettes, blah blah blah.

Vashti Bunyan: Glow Worms
Here's a song I listened to and eventually learned with the intention of playing it for a certain woman in my life. I never did and probably never will, and I fear this strikes a poor precedent for the path of the rest of the relationship.

Nine Inch Nails: Right where it Belongs
I've always liked this song, but I've been listening to it more often than usual these last few months, partially in preparation for the NIN show on August 2nd (which was canceled; THANKS, TRENT). I guess I also listened to it a lot this summer because I know the lyrics to it, and I've been on a big singalong jag recently.

Brahms: Allegro con Giocoso III
I fucking LOVED There Will Be Blood, and for a little while, I actually tried to build the wardrobe of a 1920's petroleum tycoon, but I soon realized that I don't have the financial heft, even in 1920's dollars, required for such an undertaking. I did, however, have the 99 cents required for the third part of Brahms' soul-igniting violin concerto, which is the last piece of music in the film. I invariably find myself listening to this in my car, steering with one hand and vigorously conducting the orchestra on the road in front of me with the other.

Flight of the Conchords: Think About It
Here's one I memorized by placing my computer next to the shower stall and turning the speakers all the way up. I guess what I like about it, atypically brilliant melodies aside, is that it makes fun of everything I worry about in this sick world, but somehow keeps a certain reverence that tells us maybe we should care a little more.

Elton John: Tiny Dancer
Another one I listened to a lot because I knew the lyrics, but also just a really great fucking song. I think it will make a good karaoke challenge some night when I'm trashed.

Bob Dylan: Simple Twist of Fate
I've listened to this many times in the past, but it struck a new chord this summer as the aforementioned woman in my life has nested comfortably in the better part of my thoughts. I'd like to think the fact that I've been able to connect this song to my life in a meaningful way means that I'm starting to embrace a more adult (and therefore, more authentic, right?) idea of love, although I realize that Dylan probably wrote it with a wistful sense of nostalgic, youthful romance in the air.

The Seeds: Can’t Seem to Make You Mine
Take all the subtlety and smoothness out of the last song, and you've got a good picture of this song to work with. This one's a bit ornery and twangy and garage-y, but it's great. And yes, the first time I heard it was in the AXE commercial.

David Bowie: Quicksand
I won't pretend I know entirely what this song is about, but I just love it. I didn't discover it until I burned Hunky Dory for my nephew and we (I say we because, although he is one year old, he stayed in the room while it was playing) listened to it all the way through.

Elliott Smith: Christian Brothers
Elliott Smith will probably be the last bastion of my whiny folk music phase.

Frédéric Chopin – Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23
I've never been good at adapting to the very much pragmatic system of naming music used by everybody back in the good old days. These damn kids are so used to their hooks and licks and jingles. So it's understandable if the exact piece of music I'm talking about doesn't come to mind when I reference it, even with a catchy title like Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23. You might remember it better as the woeful piano music that makes up the bulk of the soundtrack for The Pianist.

Beck: Chemtrails
I guess the fact that Beck released his new album about the same time I started to really like the kind of music on it means he's a year or two ahead of me in music taste. Bravo, Beck.

MGMT: Electric Feel
The return of disco music has coincided with my bitchy, dandy popinjay phase. Blame it on a simple twist of fate.

The Knife: Heartbeats (Live)
How I find something to love in a press-hating, shrill duo of Swedes with a penchant for Black Plague-era fashion and oscillating keyboards is something of a mystery. Or maybe not.

The Rolling Stones: Wild Horses
This song is so untouchably perfect to me that I can't say I know quite how to put down my feelings about it. Even the fact that Mick Jagger sort of stole it from Keith Richards and rewrote the lyrics to change its meaning altogether doesn't soil it for me.

Bon Iver: Flume
I only put this one in because it was playing on my iPod the only time I've ever been pulled over, which was some time in June, I think. I got off with a warning, so, you know, it's something of a good luck charm.

Daniel Johnston: Grievances
Again with that gulldarned woman.

Marvin Gaye: The Star-Spangled Banner
My hearing this song was maybe the only good thing to come out of either Nike or the Olympics in a long, long time. Leave it to Marvin Gaye to put some soul into the whitest song of all time, and to produce a few tears in the crowd while doing it. I'm no patriot in the traditional sense, but I just about lit up a dozen bottle rockets with a NASCAR lighter after I heard this the first time.

My apologies if this list was insufferably boring. But, as my former writing teacher (who must be thinking this blog is becoming a little him-centric by now) asked me, "if you don't like your own writing, why would you make other people read it?" I'm doing it because it took a long time to write, so someone had better well fucking appreciate it!

Capmaignforrealbeauty.com, Pt. I

I drove one of these at work today. Well, not this exact one. But the difference to the average blog enthusiast (and frankly, to me) is negligible. I black-and-whited the shit out of the picture to make it more "me", but don't you think there's some kind of shame implied there? A tiny bulldozer is a tiny bulldozer, right? Who am I to desaturate its mustard yellow paint and crop the frame around it for better balance? I mean, fuck. What's this need to turn every image into the album cover for Nebraska? I'd like to think of myself as relatively nonpretentious, but it's hard not to feel like a pompous ass doing the job I do some days.

I work for the street department in my hometown, and it really is everything you'd expect it to be. Sun-soaked afternoons tossing hot, oily sand into a gouge in the road, punctuated intermittently by periods of shovel-leaning boredom. Diesel-fuel stains on worn-out dad jeans. A break room full of forty-something racists with chips on their shoulders. Greasy men driving big trucks and swearing at each other.

Those who know me will understand why I feel out of place in this job. I am what you might call "little", embodying the marshmallow-fed, outcast, Midwestern nerd-child stereotype we've all come to know and love since the release and runaway success of Juno. I'm like Paulie Bleeker without the track and field records. Also I'm not nice and I don't get laid. Frankly, that was a terrible comparison. What were we talking about again?

Right. Suppose Jack Black decided to put on a shirt and do manual labor for eight hours a day with a dozen or so hard-bodied, sun-leathered Aryans for a summer. Except with more pantomimed masturbation. Yeah, more.

Today, my primary task was shoveling a year's buildup worth of grease, lost bolts and nuts, dirt from truck tires, and a moldy organic buildup on top of it all out of the trench drains in the mechanic shop. The consistency of this muck is somewhere between wet sand and Jello pudding, and it smells something like a mulched, half-rotten pile of forest litter in a wet rubber bag. I have to bend much further down than is naturally all right to be able to scrape the bottom of the foot-deep concrete ditch, and then I get to take this shovelful of ashen gray, petroleum-saturated, black fluid-dripping deliciousness and dump it into the front-end bucket of the tiny bulldozer seen above.

Somewhere toward the end of my toils, by which point I must have scooped half a ton or so of this awful shit, I see something skipping around, ornery and lively, in the gutter. It's a tiny frog, covered in a brown slick. Only his eyes shine yellow through the mechanical filth. I'm reminded of countless Green Peace-funded videos showing oil-drenched pelicans being restrained and gently washed by freckled nature girls. But, barring a sponsorship from Dove Soap, I am forced simply to snatch up my amphibian partner and place him in the tiny oasis of trees near the shop.

END OF PART ONE

Two-Thirty, Time for Dentist, Tooth Hurty

Today I had my third dental appointment in just over a month. I had a crown and two fillings, the first of what I'm sure will be many happy insertions in my oral biography.

First, the OK-looking dental assistant swabs the left side of my mouth out with a numbing gel that's supposed to be strawberry-flavored. The end result is somewhere south of Halls Wild Cherry Cough Drops, but not quite as foul as Nyquil.

I'm left to read an old National Geographic in the office (and if my writing teacher from last semester is reading this, he will surely get the literary reference) as I slowly begin to lose the feeling in my gums. There's an article about commercial products inspired by naturally occurring phenomena like the bristled foot-pads of geckos and the drag-reducing texture of shark skin. And yes, the article belabors the hell out of the whole cocklebur-velcro story.

The OK-looking assistant comes back with My Dentist in tow. Now it's time for novocaine. Supposedly by now, my mouth is supposed to be unable to feel anything, but when the needle pierces the inside of my cheek, I feel it sink deep into my jaw, into fleshy recesses I didn't know existed until they were penetrated by this stainless conquistador. The hypodermic Cortés strikes a nerve, sending a jolt of flicking stingers all the way up through my lips.

Properly anesthetized, it's time to take out my temporary, plastic crown, seated on my rearmost molar, and replace it with a permanent, porcelain one. My Dentist mercilessly thrusts in and yanks out the new crown, stopping at short intervals to file away bits of doll-face replacement tooth until it fits. When she is satisfied, she squirts some kind of godawful fluid that tastes something like salty poop, which will "make the area achy for awhile but will really help me out in the long run". It hurts. The assistant then begins brutally flossing the area "to get rid of excess adhesive", and the nylon filament comes out covered in blood. "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith is playing over the intercom. I am comforted by this, because it means that Stephen Tyler and Company have now been relegated to the dreaded queue of "muzak". In any case, the overhead observation light I've been staring into throughout the exam begins to resemble a bottom view of the firing thrusters of some asteroid-killing space rocket carrying no fewer than five famous actors.

Not skipping a beat, My Dentist begins digging holes in two of my other teeth, noting that her wild drillstrokes are shredding the fuck out of my gums, so those'll probably be sore for awhile, too. Switching randomly between the two teeth with that fucking drill, I feel as though My Dentist is having a really bad game of "Operation". It's not water on the knee, butterflies in the stomach, or a charley horse, goddammit. Every time that diamond-tipped bit sinks into my teef, it's like someone's running a live wire down into my jaw and shocking the shit out of it. Now my mouth is like an unevenly moist, bloody salty poopy cesspool.

My Dentist begins filling in the strip mines she's made of my bicuspid and first molar, telling me that the filler "smells bad, sorry".

"Well, at least it tastes great," I think. The filling filler smells like burnt garlic-rubber. My Dentist is no liar. Then a little more drilling and picking to smooth things out.

Then, suddenly, we're finished. My mouth is still wide open, and My Dentist begins tilting my chair up. The OK-looking assistant asks if I'd like a mouth-rinse, and although I'm thoroughly enjoying having an unwashed, sweaty orgy in my mouth, I nod my head obligingly. Then I'm expected to get up and leave the office. I feel like I'm missing something. I'm stumbling around in the lobby and then out to the parking lot, but nothing happens. I feel oddly used after this relatively short but excruciating appointment, but not necessarily upset. It's as if I've been taken advantage of by someone I sort of like anyway, you know? I don't know what, if anything, I could have expected. It's not like I have a fuck-on-the-third-date rule.

Where's the Poop?

It's been a long time, but I don't know where else to turn. While this was meant primarily to be a video blog, I refuse to further update my old blog, which, while occupying a very cached-away place of love in my soul has proven too embarrassing and misunderstandishable for further use.

I only write now because I have realized that to write is a commitment tantamount to that which one must give a child or a lover, and although I don't actually know what I'm talking about, it must be that this is true because someone else's blog says so. I expect that what I have to say will rarely be of any consequence or relevance to anyone but myself, but perhaps time and a yet-unexposed group of similarly world-weary, pretentious young bastards will prove me wrong.

Now then; today I'd like to talk about Mickey Dee's, and more specifically about the meat of the matter. WacArnold's has launched a campaign, emblazoned on the sandwich boxes grabbed at by our corpulent children, bragging that their burgers are made with 100% Pure Beef. Rather than taking a more reassuring "This is what isn't in our food" route with a title like "FDA Allowable 2% Animal Feces," the Golden Arches has called into question the content of all of the Quarter Pounders, Double Quarter Pounder with Cheeses, and Big 'n Tasties made and served before these ads were printed. Am I supposed to assume that my suspicions have always been correct; that the hamburgers of my childhood were not only assembled and served with beef and a smile, but also with a dash of medical waste?

Maybe I'm being unrealistic. Maybe it's just that, before this campaign, McDreamy's put the meat from other animals into their sandwiches. That wouldn't be so bad, would it? Christ knows we've all had hotdogs that probably had a few bits of pigeon or saltwater iguana in them, and the worst that ever came of that was violent, effervescent diarrhea, right?

I know, I know. I'm being very hard on America's most popular eatery. I apologize. After all, they're just saying what they are. Certainly that must be better than the wily pitches of snakeoil salesmen Billy Mays and Ron Popeil. But something about McDuck's' sudden decision to advertise the contents of their meat smacks of the same kind of false sincerity observable in the "About Me" sections of countless MySpace rapists and in the smile of Ronald Reagan. Haven't Ray Kroc and company had something like fifty years to make their burgers with 100% Pure Beef, or at least to say so? Why now? Is it because of that ambiguously motivated but brilliantly cast Richard Linklater film? I want answers, McDonald's Chairman Andrew J. McKenna, Sr.

God DAMN You Are One Suave FUCKER

This is my first ever video blog post. Enjoy.


Sincerely,
Jeffrey Beaumont