Sunday, March 16, 2003

Here are a few things to draw a frown or two to your face, if you¡¯re a person with the remotest sense of decency and of what¡¯s right and wrong: incest, rape, pedophilia. And here is a storyline to put quite a few frowns to your face: pedophilic man moves into a boarding house run by a widow and her 12-year-old daughter, widowed woman falls in love with pedophilic but handsome man, he marries her in hopes of somehow increasing his chances of indulging himself with his now legal daughter, she finds out but dramatically dies in a car accident right afterwards, he takes her on a nationwide road trip for a couple of years and satisfies his urges until she runs away to the summer house of a playwright she loves, the playwright kicks her out when she refuses to indulge his urges which involve numerous men and women and a camera¡¦
¡°Lolita¡± is all of these things. ¡°Lolita¡± is a book filled with many lurid, graphic delineations to the point where one could certainly use it as a tool to indulge his or her urges if need be. ¡°Lolita¡± caused me to quit reading it at page 188 and throw it down for a week before picking it up again because frankly, I didn¡¯t see the point in reading page after page of a pedophile praising and lauding the ¡°frail, honey-hued shoulders¡± and ¡°silky supple bare back¡± belonging to the crude and pungent Dolores Haze, also known as Lolita.
So then why, you must ask, am I saying that ¡°Lolita¡± is what a book should be, that ¡°Lolita¡± is what a book should do, and that ¡°Lolita¡± is what a book could do (whilst pointing to the million single-women-in-their-thirties books and the life-has-no-meaning-I-am-so-deep-and-clever books)?
Because the pedophile Humbert Humbert and his sexual escapades with his adopted daughter Lolita is more than enough to make you vomit or at least make you feel queasy, because all throughout the book Humbert Humbert is an ugly monster to be hated and loathed, but the last paragraph of the book, a measly fifteen lines of prose, can make you cry bitter tears and love the abominable H.H.
Because, look, here is a man who spends all his life since his adolescent years trying to hide or indulge his sexual desires, who has no interest in people other than prepubescent females with a certain ¡°look¡± whom he calls nymphets, who will spend his life in jail for rape and murder. But by the time this whole sordid ordeal of reading unwanted pornography is over, you can read the pure love Humbert has for this Lolita, and I mean love like how your parents love you, not how you love your latest crush for his cute lower lip. This pure concentrated block of love he feels is so (pardon the cheesiness) beautiful that it is impossible to believe it comes from him, the ugly horrendous monster, the rapist pedophile murderer. Yet it does. And it¡¯s believable, and it makes you want to love the man for loving so desperately and urgently. If I wanted to be really honest and let you see how incredibly unhip I am, I could tell you that I thought this was what made life worth living, despite all the ugliness in the world, that Humbert was just a mere representative fragment of what the world was like with all his monstrosity and beauty mixed in one confusing shell of a human being. And I just did, so that¡¯s that.

A postscript:
I know they teach this book at Exeter, in one of the senior English courses, and that countless reviews and critiques and papers have been written about it by scholars far more advanced than I. So maybe I¡¯ve got it all wrong and I¡¯ve completely missed the real point but this is as real and true as I feel it to be, much more so than the ¡°real¡± point if it is indeed a different one.
posted by styrene at 5:42 AM

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

I want to make a mix tape.

This won't be any old mix tape full of great pop songs. This will be a mix tape designed for a special someone, and it will be full of great pop songs that remind me of him, that have special stories behind them. I want to make a mix tape, because I've forgotten what it was like to be around him and be absolutely, utterly, tragically in love. I want to remember how his tight-lipped smiles made me want to pull together all the clowns in the world only if it would make him laugh, how much I hated Jim White for not coming to play near my town when he wanted to go see them so desperately, and how willing I was to cry for all of eternity when I saw him hold back a tear, if only it would make him smile again.

I want to hear the songs I weeped to in my room late at night and the ones that energized me so much that I couldn't do anything but explode inside. I want them to remind me exactly what it was that made me willing to forgo my parents and search for a life of music, without comfortable beds and sufficient dinners. I want to hear them the same way I read a story again, to remember.

I'm going to make a mix tape.

Of course, it must open with a Belle and Sebastian song. All great pop stories from the 90s have their roots in Belle and Sebastian. This story doesn't take place in 1992 or 1997 or even 1999, but it is certainly a product of the 90s, with its computers and digital machines that made life more convenient than it had been in the 70s or the 80s. The story technically starts in 2001, but the Two Thousands are too cyber-age for a person to fall in life-altering first love. People hardly have the time to sit on hills to stare at strangers and fall in love, and even the ones who do have time prefer to sit at their desks to stare at computer screens and set up blind dates via online dating services.

And so, the story is set in the 90s, with Belle and Sebastian as the beginning. But the song is not a love song, as Stuart Murdoch doesn't really write love songs. This presents a question: then why, exactly, did I listen to so much of Belle and Sebastian when I was desperately in love? The answer: because the opening track on Tigermilk wrenched my heart in the same way that he did when I first saw him. Stuart Murdoch wrote songs that were as beautiful as fresh daisies in the garden on a dewdropped morning. They were lovely like a little wooden box a girl named Mary made and painted in gold as a Christmas present for her mother in 1919. They had the same hint of sadness as the daisies and the box, too, because the daisies had bloomed in the midst of rubbles from war, and Mary really wanted to buy her mother a pearl brooch to pin on a shawl but her father had long since been laid off and the family could hardly afford to put buy enough food to eat, let alone pearl brooches. And they're so innocent and naive like Mary, and unsuspecting, too, but they're still beguiling like Edie Sedgwick with her dark beauty and only faint glimmers of hope.

Stuart Murdoch wrote songs that embodied everything I loved. When I first heard The State I Am In, I gave away every CD, tape, and record I owned except Tigermilk. I restarted my music collection, always placing Tigermilk at the very top of the stack because The State I Am In was just that precious. It was precious enough to last me through all of the album and cause violent stirrings of the heart with the slightest of ripples from the rest of the songs.

But the mix tape starts with Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying instead of The State I Am In, because, look, State still tears my heart every time I hear it, but I've come to expect it with its melancholy melody and its straightforward lyrics. Get Me Away has a melody that belongs to a song about eating tomatoes on summer day picnics and lyrics that change tone with each verse, that are paradoxical to the melody which they accompany.

I should explain another way.

If The State I Am In was a person, he would be a person neither happy nor sad, who doesn't look for more because he doesn't know how to look for more or even that there is anything to look for more. If I wanted to get philosophical, State would be the person sitting in the cave staring at shadows of puppets on the walls and thinking they were the real thing. I cry because he has so much more to offer, as every person does, but doesn't know that. I used to cry because I was him in the song, and now I cry because I know and remember what it feels like to be him. There are glimmers of hope, but the light is really very faint.

But Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying would be a person undergoing transformation, who begins as the same person as The State I Am In, with no hopes or belief in himself. Then he finds that there are little things to live for, that perhaps the world isn't quite so haphazard as he though it was. He finds he's competant and able and talented. And so he has found hope.

Maybe I'm looking too far into pop songs. Maybe I'm completely off the mark from what Stuart Murdoch intended the song to be. But, hey, if you're misunderstood, it's your own fault. So I will be sorry if I am indeed looking too far or in the wrong way, but not because I made a mistake, and not to Stuart for misinterpreting his songs. I will be sorry because these songs meant so much to me when I understood them to be what I understand them to be now, and any change in their meaning would detract from them.

So Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying would open the tape, because it has hope, and not just very faint glimmers of it, either. It has bucketfuls.

And also because I met him over this song, when a friend of mine said "oh, he listens to Belle and Sebastian" and I stopped dead in my tracks, in utter wonder that someone in this cluelessly twee a town had heard of a hipster band from Glasgow. I stopped dead in my tracks again a few days later when that friend pointed him out to me, and he looked like a Belle and Sebastian song. He walked and talked like a Belle and Sebastian song, too, but more like Get Me Away than State, with well-placed and understated self-belief. When he said "Oh, I'm learning how to play Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying on the guitar." When I said that I played guitar, too, he offered to email me the tabs, and I fell in love.

So the tape opens with Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying, by Belle and Sebastian.
posted by styrene at 6:13 AM

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Today I wanted to play a Biff Bang Pow! song. I did a search on yahoo, hoping there would be a website with lyrics and chords, making sure to put quotation marks around my words. The results were surprising; there was a web page, exclusively named Biff Bang Pow! and the url was www.biffbangpow.com. I thought maybe finally someone had gotten off his arse and made a website dedicated to the band. (I should have done this, too, yes, but my working knowledge of internet coding reaches as far as boldening and italicizing of the letters before it runs out.)

The site turned out to be about a new media company, named Biff Bang Pow. Maybe the founder is a fan, I don't know; the site sure wasn't about Alan McGee's band.

So I peeked on the top of my parents' complex audio system, which is accompanied by two speakers that are both about four feet tall and two feet wide. I love my parents' stereo. They bought it ten years ago, and it's black and angular and very old school. They make me feel a little more like I'm in 1977 England rather than 2002 Elsewhere.

I stack all my tapes and CDs and records on top of my parents' stereo. I managed to pull out my Biff Bang Pow tape without knocking any stacks of music, and I popped it in the first tape deck which still works and lets me eject the tapes after I'm done listening to them.

In all honesty, I don't pay much attention to what words Alan McGee sings when I listen to this tape. I just catch phrases and words that mean the world to me, and anyone who had means enough to write those phrases surely must have written excellent songs. And excellent songs they are. I know next to nothing about Biff Bang Pow. I have no funny stories about the time McGee refused to let his guest use his toilet or the time he and that other guy got drunk and knocked out a whole pub of workers. I don't even know the name of That Other Guy. I don't know if McGee ever refused to let his guest use his toilet, and I don't even know if McGee knew of Lawrence, who did do that.

But Alan McGee writes excellent pop songs and this much, at least, I know. Despite my only knowing a single line of "Wouldn't You", I know in my heart that it's a great pop song. The line, incidentally, goes "We've got so much to do and so much to see! (some words I can't make out) It's great to be alive today! It's great to think we do it the civilized way." Exclamation points, because it's so energetic and I hear them with exclamation points.

That one line brightens my spirits and lights up my life, just as the sincere smile of a loved one can do. Probably more, because the smiles won't last and the mouth smiling them won't be the same, but this line always will (as long as I don't wear out the tape). And great pop songs are made by single lines and fragments, anyway. I call songs great pop songs just for having a great title and not much else.

The first Biff Bang Pow song that clenched my heart between its fists and squeezed out of it every teardrop there was in my eyes was "She Paints". The opening riff in G starts, and McGee sings "country girl, I'll love you forever", and my heart still cries and melts like the first time. I once sat down and worked out the lyrics to the whole song, and it took me two hours to figure out the words through McGee's mumbling. I don't even remember the chorus of the song, except for a line that sings "oh what did i do? I fell for you". I still know it's a great song, and the greatest song to ever grace my ears until I find a new one, and the greatest song again when I tire of another song and put "Love is Forever" on my tape deck again.

I'm really just trying to say that I really like Biff Bang Pow, because they make me more lonely but happier with hope and cotton candy in my heart. The cotton candy melts away pretty soon and I'm forced to look for a new one, but it somehow always resurrects itself, like love, like hope, like everything else that's true and great.
posted by styrene at 5:56 AM

Monday, November 25, 2002

We're off to a launch, and it's a rather shabby one, with no party hats or little fireworks that you can pop indoors. And it's just me, fancying my every whim and writing whatever crosses my mind. But perhaps some of you will like this. At least I hope you do.

The title, Either/Or came from something Kierkegaard wrote a while ago, in the 1800s. Kierkegaard (the Danish Father of Existentialism) wrote about two different kinds of lives, the aesthetic and the ethical. In a nutshell, the aesthetic life is what is sounds like: a life concerned with physical and sensual pleasures, all ephemeral and fleeting. The aesthetic life inevitably (according to K) ends in dread and angst, and disdain for onself. The ethical life can only be attained when one realizes this fact, and involves matters more spiritual and eternal. (Kierkegaard was Christian, yes.)

I used to chase after the aesthetic life, and I did end up falling all over myself, in accordance with the prophecy. So now I am in the search for the ethical, but I still love art. Kierkegaard's definition of aesthetic and my definition differ, sure, and I'd like to lead a life that was both aesthetic and ethical.

The point of all this was, that a solely aesthetic life gets very lonely, and dull after some time, and whether you're chasing after both lives or just one, I hope these words give some sparks and warm-fuzzies in your hearts and minds.
posted by styrene at 4:13 AM