the island, part 8: twin human highway flares
This is the eighth in a song-by-song series about why I chose FULL FORCE GALESBURG by The Mountain Goats as the one CD I would take to a desert island. Previous installments are available here.
The tree I've just climbed down is at the top of the hill - I like to call it the mountain, but there is absolutely no reason that it deserves that appellation. It's, maybe, 200 feet tall? I'm shit at estimating distances, magnitudes, lots of things.
Up here at the peak of the island the earth's not sand but soil, and all around are sparse trees, plants, and no true paths but plenty of space for walking randomly. I've hiked up from my hut, and it's a well-travelled walk there and back, but now I'm going to a beach on the south side of the island directly from here, to figure out what that glint in the beach is, and there is no established path so I just start wandering down.
I'm walking, jogging a little, barefoot, boombox, constant companion, slightly banging against my knee now and again, slightly rubbing against the tall grasses. I used to wear shoes but now I can't be fucked and my feet are hardening. I knew a girl at university who went barefoot everywhere and admired her for it. I took a picture of her feet once. I had an idea of taking pictures of people whose bodies are naturally modified via use, calluses from manual labor, those blotches violin players have on their chins, those sorts of things.
I never took those pictures, and there are many more I never took. I am almost but not quite running through the underbrush, and expect that, at the bottom of the hill, slightly buried in the sandy beach there will be a picture. Maybe a picture of a woman, taken by a man. Or of a couple, taken by a third party. Either way, it will be a picture that tells a story, and it will be a story of love. I feel this not with a sense of optimism but with a sense of inevitability. That it is absurd is of no consequ-FUCK!
I have stepped on something sharp.
This was dumb.
I limp over to the nearest tree, find the most bench-like tree root, put down the boom box, and realize it has been spinning on pause this whole time. This is also dumb. My supply of batteries is vast but not limitless. I hit play, and "Twin Human Highway Flares" starts, and as I examine the wound in my foot, I listen to a remarkable song.
It is reasonable to ask why, seven songs into this album, anyone besides a self-flagellating moron would take FULL FORCE GALESBURG to a deserted island. While I do not wish to exclude the possibility that I am a self-flagellating moron, "Twin Human Highway Flares" is so remarkably distinct to everything that comes before it that self-flagellation clearly would play no part.
Gone are the frustrations of the limits of language. Gone is the paralyzing fear of realizing that somebody you love has changed into a complete stranger. Gone is the overwhelming weight of years of thwarted expectations crushing every feeling in your heart.
(I say gone, though obviously the events of this song, should we presume a consistent protagonist - which is, fair to say, an open question that I doubt I will resolve here - must come prior to the events of the preceding seven songs.)
Must have stepped on a sharp stone. There's nothing embedded in my foot. I think.
Here, at the tender heart of FULL FORCE GALESBURG, there is pure love. Is there an ominous presence lurking in the distance? Well, of course there is, it's a Mountain Goats song. But here, it's not about the ominous presence (the "monument to desperation" mentioned in passing) but about the beautiful metaphor of the title and the simple declarations of love. The end of the first chorus - or maybe it's the entirety of the first chorus, or end of the first verse, chorus/verse structure is a bit arbitrary in many of these songs - is the most quotable:
On the day that I become so forgetful
that all of this melts away
I will burn all the calendars that counted the years down to
such a worthless day
- but for me, it's all about the last words of the song, and the little break in John Darnielle's voice:
When we shut the motel room door behind us,
we knew we'd hit the motherlode.
On the day that I forget you,
hope my heart explodes.
The guitar winds its way out. I've tied my shirt around my foot to cover the open gash. Which is too bad, because I liked that shirt and it ain't getting replaced anytime soon. Oh, well. This song has been a salve in the background when I wasn't even really paying attention to it. I expect it has the potential to be my salvation, should I require one.
I hit stop at the end of the song - the boombox skips if I play while I walk, even when I'm not a cripple. I walk, gingerly, down the rest of the hill, and imagine a picture. Before I left, I was reading a book by Geoff Dyer, THE ONGOING MOMENT. It's about photography, and one of the ideas he explores is what you can tell from a photograph of somebody's face. Can you see their future? Diane Arbus, apparently, felt like you would be able to see suicide in the future of somebody's face. And then she killed herself. Which makes you look at pictures of her differently.
What will I learn, what will I know when I see this picture? I imagine some kind of quintessential encapsulation of love, something like the sun flaring through the door as it's closing in the motel room door in "Twin Human Highway Flares", and we see our female protagonist through the eyes of our male protagonist, and (I choose to believe, though this information is not supplied) she has blotchy skin and her arms have a little bit more fat on them than is considered normal and her hair is unflatteringly windswept from driving and you can see the lines already starting to form at the corners of her eyes that will be there for the rest of her life and - most crucially, by far - in this moment there is no one more beautiful in the world.
And I imagine this is a picture of somebody that somebody else found to be the most beautiful person in the world, and I wonder if you can see that devotion reflected in the subject's eye, or in the framing, or in some more ineffable manner.
The soil breaks into sand suddenly amidst roots of the trees at the edge of the beach, with an eighteen inch fall attributable to erosion. I gingerly lower myself down instead of engaging in my standard leap, leave the boombox at the foot of the and I look for this picture that will be absolutely useless to me but be my only non-Mountain Goats connection with the world.
I stumble around the beach, holding my walking stick, sometimes scraping the sand. There has been wind, and the sand blows across the beach a bit, and nowhere is there an obvious reflection of anything.
This is stupid. My foot hurts. What was I thinking? Bloody mirage.
I let my dreams die - not even interesting dreams! why not imagine buried treasure? - and sit down. I lie down on the sand, and when I put my head down it's hitting something hard. A rock, probably. I reach for it, try to move it. It's too big to be a rock, or at least too big a rock to move easily.
I turn, and it's glass, and I know what it is even though it's mostly buried. It's full. It's a bottle. I hope against hope, wipe off the sand, and then I take off the bottle top, pour the faintest hint into the bottle cap and drink.
Yes. A bottle of vodka. A big one.
This will be useful for sterilizing the cut in my foot.
Among other things.
I smile, and hobble back to the boom box, and hit play one more time, and watch the shadows crawl over the beach. I take another sip of vodka, and think of twin human highway flares on the Illinois highway, and even though burning like that is such a distant memory that I'm not sure it ever existed, all is right in the world.
--------------------------
VIDEO #8 for people that don't give a shit about The Mountain Goats: I'm not sure if I even like this band - part of me is predisposed to hate everything that they stand for, and I haven't particularly liked any of their other songs that I've heard - but the other part of me is absolutely obsessed with this song. This band is The Pipettes, the song is called "Pull Shapes", and at the moment I think it's the best song I've heard all year. This is from Belgian TV - if you like this, the music video is also worth watching, apparently it's a reference to a scene in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.
Special bonus link: a film trailer I recently edited.
The tree I've just climbed down is at the top of the hill - I like to call it the mountain, but there is absolutely no reason that it deserves that appellation. It's, maybe, 200 feet tall? I'm shit at estimating distances, magnitudes, lots of things.
Up here at the peak of the island the earth's not sand but soil, and all around are sparse trees, plants, and no true paths but plenty of space for walking randomly. I've hiked up from my hut, and it's a well-travelled walk there and back, but now I'm going to a beach on the south side of the island directly from here, to figure out what that glint in the beach is, and there is no established path so I just start wandering down.
I'm walking, jogging a little, barefoot, boombox, constant companion, slightly banging against my knee now and again, slightly rubbing against the tall grasses. I used to wear shoes but now I can't be fucked and my feet are hardening. I knew a girl at university who went barefoot everywhere and admired her for it. I took a picture of her feet once. I had an idea of taking pictures of people whose bodies are naturally modified via use, calluses from manual labor, those blotches violin players have on their chins, those sorts of things.
I never took those pictures, and there are many more I never took. I am almost but not quite running through the underbrush, and expect that, at the bottom of the hill, slightly buried in the sandy beach there will be a picture. Maybe a picture of a woman, taken by a man. Or of a couple, taken by a third party. Either way, it will be a picture that tells a story, and it will be a story of love. I feel this not with a sense of optimism but with a sense of inevitability. That it is absurd is of no consequ-FUCK!
I have stepped on something sharp.
This was dumb.
I limp over to the nearest tree, find the most bench-like tree root, put down the boom box, and realize it has been spinning on pause this whole time. This is also dumb. My supply of batteries is vast but not limitless. I hit play, and "Twin Human Highway Flares" starts, and as I examine the wound in my foot, I listen to a remarkable song.
It is reasonable to ask why, seven songs into this album, anyone besides a self-flagellating moron would take FULL FORCE GALESBURG to a deserted island. While I do not wish to exclude the possibility that I am a self-flagellating moron, "Twin Human Highway Flares" is so remarkably distinct to everything that comes before it that self-flagellation clearly would play no part.
Gone are the frustrations of the limits of language. Gone is the paralyzing fear of realizing that somebody you love has changed into a complete stranger. Gone is the overwhelming weight of years of thwarted expectations crushing every feeling in your heart.
(I say gone, though obviously the events of this song, should we presume a consistent protagonist - which is, fair to say, an open question that I doubt I will resolve here - must come prior to the events of the preceding seven songs.)
Must have stepped on a sharp stone. There's nothing embedded in my foot. I think.
Here, at the tender heart of FULL FORCE GALESBURG, there is pure love. Is there an ominous presence lurking in the distance? Well, of course there is, it's a Mountain Goats song. But here, it's not about the ominous presence (the "monument to desperation" mentioned in passing) but about the beautiful metaphor of the title and the simple declarations of love. The end of the first chorus - or maybe it's the entirety of the first chorus, or end of the first verse, chorus/verse structure is a bit arbitrary in many of these songs - is the most quotable:
On the day that I become so forgetful
that all of this melts away
I will burn all the calendars that counted the years down to
such a worthless day
- but for me, it's all about the last words of the song, and the little break in John Darnielle's voice:
When we shut the motel room door behind us,
we knew we'd hit the motherlode.
On the day that I forget you,
hope my heart explodes.
The guitar winds its way out. I've tied my shirt around my foot to cover the open gash. Which is too bad, because I liked that shirt and it ain't getting replaced anytime soon. Oh, well. This song has been a salve in the background when I wasn't even really paying attention to it. I expect it has the potential to be my salvation, should I require one.
I hit stop at the end of the song - the boombox skips if I play while I walk, even when I'm not a cripple. I walk, gingerly, down the rest of the hill, and imagine a picture. Before I left, I was reading a book by Geoff Dyer, THE ONGOING MOMENT. It's about photography, and one of the ideas he explores is what you can tell from a photograph of somebody's face. Can you see their future? Diane Arbus, apparently, felt like you would be able to see suicide in the future of somebody's face. And then she killed herself. Which makes you look at pictures of her differently.
What will I learn, what will I know when I see this picture? I imagine some kind of quintessential encapsulation of love, something like the sun flaring through the door as it's closing in the motel room door in "Twin Human Highway Flares", and we see our female protagonist through the eyes of our male protagonist, and (I choose to believe, though this information is not supplied) she has blotchy skin and her arms have a little bit more fat on them than is considered normal and her hair is unflatteringly windswept from driving and you can see the lines already starting to form at the corners of her eyes that will be there for the rest of her life and - most crucially, by far - in this moment there is no one more beautiful in the world.
And I imagine this is a picture of somebody that somebody else found to be the most beautiful person in the world, and I wonder if you can see that devotion reflected in the subject's eye, or in the framing, or in some more ineffable manner.
The soil breaks into sand suddenly amidst roots of the trees at the edge of the beach, with an eighteen inch fall attributable to erosion. I gingerly lower myself down instead of engaging in my standard leap, leave the boombox at the foot of the and I look for this picture that will be absolutely useless to me but be my only non-Mountain Goats connection with the world.
I stumble around the beach, holding my walking stick, sometimes scraping the sand. There has been wind, and the sand blows across the beach a bit, and nowhere is there an obvious reflection of anything.
This is stupid. My foot hurts. What was I thinking? Bloody mirage.
I let my dreams die - not even interesting dreams! why not imagine buried treasure? - and sit down. I lie down on the sand, and when I put my head down it's hitting something hard. A rock, probably. I reach for it, try to move it. It's too big to be a rock, or at least too big a rock to move easily.
I turn, and it's glass, and I know what it is even though it's mostly buried. It's full. It's a bottle. I hope against hope, wipe off the sand, and then I take off the bottle top, pour the faintest hint into the bottle cap and drink.
Yes. A bottle of vodka. A big one.
This will be useful for sterilizing the cut in my foot.
Among other things.
I smile, and hobble back to the boom box, and hit play one more time, and watch the shadows crawl over the beach. I take another sip of vodka, and think of twin human highway flares on the Illinois highway, and even though burning like that is such a distant memory that I'm not sure it ever existed, all is right in the world.
--------------------------
VIDEO #8 for people that don't give a shit about The Mountain Goats: I'm not sure if I even like this band - part of me is predisposed to hate everything that they stand for, and I haven't particularly liked any of their other songs that I've heard - but the other part of me is absolutely obsessed with this song. This band is The Pipettes, the song is called "Pull Shapes", and at the moment I think it's the best song I've heard all year. This is from Belgian TV - if you like this, the music video is also worth watching, apparently it's a reference to a scene in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.
Special bonus link: a film trailer I recently edited.
Labels: the island, videos for people who don't give a shit about the Mountain Goats.
11 Comments:
Doug,
Isn't this the second "cute girl band" you've posted on here?
Ha ha. You done used "ain't."
Do you have something against cute girl bands, Ramon?
None at all as long as they bring the rock.
I suppose Smoosh is also a "cute girl band", in much the same way that Jesus Lizard and Jimmy Eat World are "guitar-driven boy bands". I can't think of any others, but it's early here.
I have the sick feeling in my stomach that some point is being made that I won't get for ten more posts.
well just to clarify I meant Cute-Girl Band and not Cute Girl-Band.
But Jesus lizard, while a boy band, were hardly cute. I have no Idea who Jimmy eat World is so I can say if they are a cuteboy band but Ultrahummus definitely would have been one.
You miss my point. I didn't say Jesus Lizard was cute - my point was that the phrase was (seemingly) used to dismiss two radically dissimilar bands with a pert nickname that encapsulates the smallest fraction of what they're actually about.
(Probably not dissimilar to how I dismiss deep house and drum and bass as all being "crappy electronica".)
I still have no idea what you're on about, and am wondering with the cute-boy band reference if this is going to turn into a protracted and indirect inquisition about my sexuality for the second week in a row. I could only be so lucky.
Yes, this is my way to out you on your Furbee festish. Admit it Doug we all know about it!
All I'm saying is that both bands have cute girls singing pop songs and I'd guess are marketed as such to pre-teens. Pop is tricky to pull off well and in both cases I just don't see anything special that I couldn't see on a kids network like say Nickelodeon.
I'm not knocking women in bands. I'm all for talented and creative femmes in music - love them!! In h-town alone, I can name easily a dozen women whose talent and creativity make the boys look like talentless hacks so don't get me wrong.
Oh great, Ramon, here we go with another manist. What? Men can't rock too? Geez... I can't think of any names right now, but I'm pretty sure at least one or two men have played guitar in the last twenty-five years.
And, scene...
Geez, I can't win can I. In the aggregate man, I'm talkign in the aggregate. In the aggregate guys on guitar are like well...like guys with guitars. There are a hell of a lot of them and many peddle in the tired rock-and-roll tropes that result in bad tatoos and the word party being used as a verb.
Not to say that there aren't and haven't been great male guitarists in the scene in bands like...the Jonx, Mike Gunn, Golden Axe, Sugar Shack, Dry Nod, Sharks and Sailors, etc etc etc...all I'm saying is that there is a hell of a bigger pool of suck for guys.
Women (in the aggregate) I think tend to work outside of those annoying rock and roll tropes but again maybe becasue the pool is smaller the suck is proportianally less.
I have no idea who's marketed to who, but Smoosh is on indie label Barsuk and tours often with Bloc Party, and The Pipettes are a British pop group started by a Spector-like dude to capitalize on the success that he had playing girl groups at his DJ nights.
Neither sounds like the under-12 set to me.
As for whether they're anything special, eye of the beholder, but I love the details of the arrangement of "Pull Shapes" - the extra 2 bars thrown in during the beginning build, the sweeping violin at the last repetition of the chorus, and most everything in between. If I wasn't committed to this 16-part series, I'd have written a part-by-part analysis of it this week.
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