"the alphonse mambo," from the coroner's gambit

q: mike, who are you?

a: i am a guy who works in an office. this is a new thing.

q: do you have a bad heat rash?

a: terrible heat rash.

q: "the alphonse mambo"?

a: when things are sweet and easy, i get obsessed with darnielle's songs about being fucked-up and down and out. when things feel crushing and difficult and transitional, i need the spirit-lifters.

q: is this really spirit-lifting?

a: no.

q: huh.

a: not a question, but that's okay. you know, it's like, i could be playing "the alphonse mambo" in my office, grooving out to the melodica, popping benadryl, or i could just get the hell out with some minor savings, one lonely ked, six yellow socks, and a bundle of nervous excitement. he does that. i couldn't care about the future not one salt lick.

DOUBLE FEATURE: "international small arms traffic blues," from tallahassee / "golden boy," from ghana

today: like picking my teeth with a sword!

i got a call from someone who i didn't think who would call. someone made me think of this song, which is just, you know, a standard folk-blues with lots of overwrought metaphors about how unbearably dangerous and explosive their love is. weird thing was, though, we had a normal conversation. time passes, i guess, but the myth kinda hung in my mind. a photograph of a bomb. is this how these conversations go? i'm not sure. you tell me you're thinking about buying a house, i tell you i exercise more, you tell me you're going to a drawing class tomorrow, we shoehorn in a hushed 'i miss you,' i tell you dad's cat died, you tell me your mom falls down the stairs every day, we careen into something shadowed, something neither of us really want to put our hands on. both of us have learned something, and i can finally return to the line, in my mind, 'the way i feel about you baby can't explain it, you got the best of my love,' because darnielle says it in the past tense. it dawns on me that "ISATB" is a quiet song. one of the quietest. in the future, i will tell my grandkids, "i once knew a girl who wore yellow and had an extra muscle in her leg," and they'll bring me some more mashed carrots. nobody will get dashed against the rocks.

AND THEN, OF COURSE, THERE'S INJUSTICE

OR JUSTICE WAITING TO HAPPEN

OR RISING ABOVE
'
a mountain goats song for every season. i need a banner to fall under. i need a lot of phantom power. "golden boy" is...well, i have a lot of deep theories about how the song is a cynical portrait of consumerism and how we have replaced it with true spiritual enlightenment in our everyday lives, but hell, i'm wearing mesh shorts and drinking tea and writing and staring at birds. fuck all that, seriously, for a minute. "golden boy" is a song we can live under. one man, a monolith. darnielle never plays it live, i don't think, because he doesn't want to blow the whistle for the rapture too early. that's just a hunch though. so we can enjoy it here, on earth, as some sort of sign of strength. a hilarious sign of strength. a hilarious, strong song; a testament that human love has the capacity to RAIN LIKE ROCKS for something as simple as a peanut, that a guy would do more than one take of it just to channel the spirit. screw feelings, i'm going swimming.

"old college try," from tallahassee

preface:

darnielle on darnielle:

"We imagine that our hardest experiences are the ones that help us
grow: that help us get closer to being who we want to be. Whether this
is a good or healthy way of thinking about things is another question,
but I think that people are pretty convinced that in our deepest
wallows is where we locate our core. Also, there's always humor in
extreme situations, more of it in extremely dire situations like
finding yourself alone when you really, really didn't want to be alone
any more."

ok.

so, i finally watched annie hall last night, for the first time, after years of really concentratedly not watching it, for reasons i won't get into. anyway, it made me feel sorta like i expected it to; annie hall isn't a movie about a relationship so much as it is about the burden of nostalgia for one. and holy fuck--or some approximation of holy fuck--does that burden asymptotically approach unsupportable.

i probably coulda put the above quote for pretty much any of these entries. in fact, i could proably just quote that whenever i feel like saying anything about the mountain goats. darnielle has an analytical mind.

but what stuck after annie hall--i had so many feelings out on the lawn in bryant park!--is that sense of nostalgia's poison: more and more, i look back on bad situations from my past, and rather than making them seem rosier, i just learn to praise them for all their trauma. "old college try" is undoubtedly about a relationship gone wrong, and maybe trying to set it right, or at least remembering that sick mixture of a sad past and a tender present. well, the other day, i told karl that i thought a certain girl had been "my dream girl;" he pointed out, helpfully, that "nightmare girl" was more appropriate, and while i couldn't argue, arguing wouldn't've done any good to begin with--if you believe what darnielle says above, they're one and the same.

addendum, five minutes later: this is what i mean by "redemption."

"the best ever death metal band in denton," from all hail west texas

preface:

me:
my sense of romanticism is way too deep seated to be challenged with something as flaccid as common sense

or even something as elegant as logic

point is, when we get married, everyone is going to have an honest cry rather than a perfunctory one

Thomas: that made me laugh.

me: it's true and you know it

Thomas: no. it's very true, but what if they're crying because they realize we have committed ourself to a lifetime of messy relationships with the same person because we aren't capable of having it any other way.

me: i hadn't thought about them crying in that way

that's not it

Thomas: i don't think it is either, but the prospect scares me.

me: i mean isn't this why we listen to the mountain goats?


ok.

i remember, it was march 2002, the first day i heard the mountain goats, on thomas's couch; all hail west texas, fresh off the racks. a song comes on about two guys, who are friends, who are definitely existing in harmony to the exclusion of the world around them. the world, of course, knowing no grace, intrudes. the world says they are fucked up. thomas became one of my best friends because we knew how to shut things out in the same way. we taught others, and spent a hellish year in a massive house, and a lot of us still talk about it like it was the worst time of our lives, but we play the long game, so history has turned it into the best. i've never learned more.

last night i played music on a stage for the first time in a couple of years. thomas and i still play together sometimes. jeff and cyrus, in the song, know that bond. there's no name for it. and there's nothing in it but love, blind love; stupid, blind, bank-account draining, futureless, masochistic, glorious love.

"elijah," from the coroner's gambit

on a very busy day, three minutes and seven seconds to have as many goosebumps as i want.

addendum, 6/15:

i can almost barely stomach this song. i have a tendency to want to cry or throw up when i hear it. i don't know whether elijah is metaphorical or not; i don't know about the baby either. this past passover, i actually set out a cup for someone who i've been wanting to come home, next to elijah's. it didn't work. but the prick of anticipation was there; my hair stood up not because i had a reckoning, but because i imagined a reckoning to be possible. and i think a lot of darnielle's songs--i've said it a million times--are about this: not the climax per se (though he has moments of revelation), but about the way a moment can raise like a blister, the way a focused second, no matter to what end, can mean everything.

"young caesar 2000," from zopilote machine

i described this song to a friend once--"it's about caesar, or someone like caesar, and he's just coming to power, but he's having growing pains, and what people don't realize is that he's going to become this incredible force and tear the shit out of the universe. people are always too stupid to realize shit-tearing forces in the universe until it's too late."

he said, "yeah, that's sort of cute, isn't it?" and i said hell no it's not cute, it's amazing and scary and wild. darnielle's doing a breughel and icarus thing; what we aren't noticing right at this very moment is going to reveal itself as the most important detail in the entire world. and, of course, we're gonna pay for our inattention by the bucket.

"maize stalk drinking blood," from full force galesburg

it's actually not that often that anyone has true control in a mountain goats song, and when they do, they usually fumble it like it was fire or a scary penis or a baby or worse. ("young caesar 2000," i'll get to you later.)

down in the mouth and dumb to say anything as weak as "this is an empty country, i am the king, and i should not be allowed to touch anything."

yesterday an important person told me that they got frustrated watching me throw my time away being miserable, which is sort of a long-standing hobby. anyway, i floated to "maize stalk drinking blood," because, well, sometimes having everything settled in its right place is not the same thing as being happy, sometimes balance is a trap, which i guess "wild sage" is about too.

of course i know better and of course knowing better is never the point, of course.

"wild sage," from get lonely

from a pitchfork interview with john darnielle last year:

"Pitchfork: You write about Business 15-501, a road that runs through a pretty odd part of Durham, on "Wild Sage", the opening track of Get Lonely. Is that notion-- being close to home, but maybe lost and not what some people consider safe-- playing into the song?

JD: Yes."

first of all 15-501 might run through an odd part of durham, but it's a business road--in chapel hill, there's a wal-mart on it. pretty sure the trailer diner is there too, but thankfully, my memory isn't all that clear.

i'm this close to getting on the phone with eliot spitzer this morning: "eliot, throw me amongst your confused, lost, and mentally ill. i want to see if they don't know something we don't." i periodically just have to leave new york, and i sleep for 11 hours and wake up confused. i hate listening to john squeal through the opening lines, because the needling tenor gift wasn't well suited to falsetto, but he strains it anyway, and it makes him sound a little more out of place. which, this morning, i basically understand. katie once told me that there are actually more suicides in spring and summer because people realize it wasn't just winter getting them down. don't get me wrong, i'm sticking around, but i think the metaphor is desperately illustrative: sometimes, the worst thing is feeling unsafe when you know everything is ostensibly okay.

"pigs that ran straightaway into the water, triumph of," from we shall all be healed

it's this morning, as a busted and sniffling man celebrating dead civil war soldiers, that i realize "pigs" is something like a positive force "jaipur." or an inverse variation. there may be some CHUMPS who are going to try to keep you DOWN, but that's irrelevant because you were born with concrete teeth, and even though they're dragging you off to jail and you're imagining shit falling out of the sky just to save you from your uncool fate, you could basically not give half a fuck, bouncing along to this hard, hard, hard folk-rock with a heart beating out your hometown's name and all its family trees and impossible lingo and tough streets like morse code, telling your brain something like "it's all just fine."

addendum, 5/28 (sober):

of course, it is not "all just fine" but sometimes your brain is dumb enough to buy it.

"quito," from we shall all be healed

"quito" is a song about how you are fucked up and pledge to do good. (anyone who has been fucked up and has pledged to do good will understand--this is darnielle's idiosyncratic universality.) we shall all be healed is--it's in the title!--both a promise and a hope. and like vows, like marriage, like AA, it's prone to be absolutely full of its own overblown shit. to imagine a chorus of children dancing around you as you stagger from the tomb is, it strikes me, at once the most romantic, redemptive, and self-indulgent fantasy you could have--the kind of thing that only actually occurs to you while completely drunk. sober people don't dream of a god who rains like hail, who stops everything to reckon. of course, after that, the narrator talks about raising the dead--and the swirling mess of wet organs and violin actually does it, the raising, all way off in the corner. our frail cages!

addendum 5/16/07:

in what will probably be the absolute crowning irony of this entire project, i wrote this entry last night, quietly hammered and deeply in the mood to be JUSTIFIED by the big-U universe. darnielle almost always works me the hardest when i'm having "sensitive days," which i've realized, is just about all the time, which is part of the reason why his appeal is very difficult to explain to people.

it's like, the adult in me loves the rich poetic flourishes and christian imagery of "quito,"

but the kid in me just wants to puke up my heart as regularly as possible and gesture at redemption in the way that only irresponsible people can!

"hast thou considered the tetrapod," from the sunset tree

jason was a well-intentioned investment banker, but for some reason he had a tic where he just couldn't stop hitting my mother. being the oldest, i got my fair share of the tortured hand; i always felt worse for him than i did for me, because i, like john, could say "i am young and i am good," while i doubt he had anything to look forward to except dying.

it's an adolescent song, really, probably the most adolescent song darnielle's ever written: there's a big bad dude, i have headphones, i will evolve, yeah! making light of it would be dickish and irresponsible (and why would i? living in an abusive household sucks), but there's something to be said for the fact that darnielle's trope is EVOLUTION rather than war-like struggle. when i was 13 i was an avid huffer, grade-f student, and utter basketcase--what does it mean to be a martyr with no redeeming qualities? something like an embryo, i guess.

"home again garden grove," from we shall all be healed

it occurs to me, in a conversation with lex about my potential move to new orleans, while "home again garden grove" is playing, that there are good reasons to find john darnielle's songs a centering force: sometimes, everyone around you is an absolute fuck-up, but at least it's a contained universe (college, for me); the solipsism and narrow worldview in his songs--even if that world is always on the verge of collapse--is a source of comfort. so shouting "shoving our heads, right into the guts of the stove, home again garden grove" is a way of acknowledging that crucial narrowing, even if it means relishing in the way things fall apart, even if it means accepting that you're tying yourself to something sinking--as long as you can see all the way around the hull, there's peace.

addendum, 5/10: i had a friend who drank too much—to prove that this isn’t the start of a thinly veiled therapy/aa plea, i confess that we all drank too much that year. but this one friend in particular got into a bad habit of falling down the stairs in our house. that the thud of elbow on wood on head on wood on legs on ribs, all the way to the floor, became a source of comfort during a difficult year is the paradoxical grind at work in “home again garden grove.”