the island, part 10: u.s. mill

This is the tenth 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.

You wake up gloriously alive, with the firm conviction that the problems that have disturbed you in the past will now disappear. Disappear into the midnight of your consciousness.

That's a found-tape voice that opens "Prana Ferox", the next-to-last song on SWEDEN, and it runs through my mind as I wake up anything but gloriously alive, my liver and gut cursing me in unison, and the firm conviction that the problems disturbing me will soon disappear from my body, but less clarity as to which orifice.

I stumble up from my sandy mattress, quickly decide that being on the floor is very preferable to standing, and I knock the CD player, which I had left on pause. Dumb idea. Runs down the batteries.

Did I really drink a whole bottle of vodka? After my liver having two months of no alcohol whatsoever? Fuck. That was dumb.

"Prana Ferox" is a good song, no, a great song. There are many great songs that The Mountain Goats have written that I do not have with me, other than running through my head. "Oceanographer's Choice", "Pale Green Things", "Source Decay", "Going To Scotland", "Palmcorder Yajna", fuck there's no point in starting because I'll have to stumble out into the sand with urgency before I complete the list.

No matter how long I went on, though, I wouldn't include this song, the song after the song I was habitually playing on repeat last night. Until I came here, I wouldn't have even been able to tell you the name of "U.S. Mill", and in general I'd only dimly remember it, just as when I look at the track listing I can never quite remember how that song goes.

Dim memories somehow seem appropriate now. The birdsong is killing my head. I need water.

Just because you pick an album to take to a desert island doesn't mean you think every song is perfect, and this song - see, it's not bad, it's just like nothing, like sand blowing in the breeze, there and gone, insubstantial. I mean, this is a guy who's used analogies to blood disorders, border wars, and Louisiana graveyards in his songs, who has a functional understanding of Latin, and the best he can fucking come up with for similes in this song are "clear as crystal" and "bright as gold"?

Water. Ah. Must have knocked some button, the song's on repeat play. Think I'll sit here a while, let the sound of the waves wash over me. I wonder if putting my head in the waves would help. The riff plays over and over. Maybe it's supposed to be this insubstantial, like something to cleanse the palate after the sheer awesomeosity of the last two songs, as if three songs back-to-back that were that awesome would cause the universe to collapse.

The light glints through the space between two of the planks, dust mites dancing in the breeze. I try to picture this song, the world of this song that is so frustratingly, deliberately vague.

And then, after hundreds of listens, it finally comes to me, in a flash of hungover inspiration: it's a song about fucking.

Pardon my French, but trust me, it's got to be. Hence the vagueness which is actually discretion, hence being cold in summer (being naked on the stone floor of a shadowy grain silo can do that to you), hence ...

Oh crap.

As I run from the cabin, limbs akimbo but somehow maintaining forward motion, it does slightly occur to me that it is interesting that something you think you know everything about can still surprise you, and that perhaps there is a lesson there, but what the lesson is disappears from my mind quickly as everything else disappears from me, and I wonder if I will ever learn.

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And, of course, the latest installment of videos for people who don't give a shit about The Mountain Goats: the incredibly labor intensive and highly impressive video for "The Gold We're Digging" by Parts And Labor, a band I know nothing about other than this video, but the song is kinda catchy. I just get wiped out thinking about how long it would take to make the video, though.

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.

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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 island, part 7: down here

This is the seventh 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.

There is a large world, and a larger universe, and I am next to nothing in its wake, even in the best of times. But here, on an island, in the middle of nowhere, it is easy to feel like absolutely nothing, utterly insignificant to the rest of the universe.

Back in the real world, I used to sometimes obsess over what I could do that would benefit the world. I would like to think that posting on a blog would help people wake up and realize attacking Iraq was a bad idea. Not so young, even then, but still full of naivete and righteous ire.

Balanced precariously in a tree at the top of a hill, at the center of the island, I stare off into the mid-afternoon sky. The boombox, set at the base of the tree, is playing "Down Here" on repeat.

The scale is so vast, the ocean goes on forever. I could swim and swim and swim. All I would do is guarantee my watery death.

Who knows what goes on in the world, what events I have no control over. Besides all of them. The needs of friends and family. The suffering of strangers. The posturing of governments. The manipulations of multinational corporations. The irritation of government agencies. They all continue, without me. Possibly indifferent to me, possibly not. I have no hard evidence, and only my ego to use as a gauge.

I wonder if my flatmates have rented my room out yet. Probably not.

I survey the grounds of the island, for from this point I can see just about everywhere. I have pretty mixed feelings about this, knowing there is little left to discover. But then, the truth is that it is hubris to think that just because you have a survey of everything that you know everything about it.

Perhaps that's the point of "Down Here", a driving song that I've never quite understood, a brief minute and a half that takes us from Venus and Australia to "here", which is presumably somewhere in the heart of the midwest that makes up the setting of the rest of the album. There may be a universe of activity, but what happens around you is more than enough to fill up your life.

The mind wanders. Down here is a recurring phrase in the Goats' discography.

What did I come down here for? You. - "Tallahassee" (TALLAHASSEE) - a song about two lovers at the end of the line, ending themselves in a haze of liquor and bad decisions amidst decay.

Down here where the heat's so fine, I'll drink to your health, you'll drink to mine. - "Fault Lines" (ALL HAIL WEST TEXAS) - another song about two lovers at the end of the line, drowning themselves in a sea of conspicuous over-consumption.

Basically, most of the Mountain Goats songs are about two lovers at the end of the line. Which is reason enough to assume "Down Here" is, as well. That no lover is mentioned is a perplexing elision, however.

I listen again. Hah. There it is, the detail I've missed.

I don't speak the language down here

I've heard the lyric plenty of times, but this time it's with the attention and focus that comes with having only one album to listen to for months on end, and with that comes the recognition that this isn't a throwaway phrase; rather, it's the repeated assertation that drives the album, and here, another sideways use that reinforces the metaphor of knowledge of language as one of dislocation.

Everything churns through my brain, language and feeling trapped and the way the sun glints off the sea, and reflects on to that shiny area in the sand on the farthest beach.

Shiny area in the sand?

There is, perhaps, more to this island than I knew.

It is time to investigate. I extricate myself from the tree, hit the ground with the last words of the songs, air guitar along to the little riff that provides the coda of the song, shut down the boombox, and walk to the far beach, to see what secrets it holds.

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VIDEO #7 for people who can't stand The Mountain Goats: a trailer for the upcoming Silkworm documentary, COULDN'T YOU WAIT?, that looks much better than I expected it to:

the island, part 6: ontario

This is the sixth 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.

Every morning after I first wake up I go to the beach, assuming it's not raining too hard, and I do my morning stretches. They aren't calisthenics, per se, but meridian stretches that are a way to promote the flow of ki in the body. I used to intend to integrate spiritual exercise into my daily life, but would nonetheless find excuses, whether I was working 70 hours a week or taking a month off between jobs.

On an island, alone, you realize, finally, you have no more excuses.

I never talked about my Taoism much, back in the world, for lots of reasons. Spirituality is something very few of my peer group are interested in hearing about or discussing, for one, unless it's to bitch about fringe practitioners of Christianity or to rabidly assert that obviously faith is absurd - unless it's faith in the man-made systems of reason, in which case it's infallible. Another reason is that I'm still learning and not really sure what the hell I'm talking about. (As I discovered during my early online research, some would argue that unless I spoke Mandarin Chinese and lived 2000 years ago I don't deserve to even consider myself Taoist. I like to think of these people as "twats".)

Another reason is that Taoism is so fundamentally different from other religions, in that the Tao is all around us and part of our experience. In the Taoist mindset, interacting with the ultimate God-essence of the universe isn't something that happens when you die and go to heaven, or to help dictate what happens to your soul upon your resurrection, or what have you. It's all around us. Not a transcendental worldview, but an immanent one, I heard it explained to me.

When I first learned about Tao, I tried to find a Taoist service. Boy did I not understand the deal with Taoism. Here, with the sand crunching underneath my legs as I sit down for some of the stretches, this is a Taoist service.

So much of Taoism is about being in the now, and here, stripped from everything, I should be in the now. And I try. But my mind keeps reaching back, and it's not helped by the music I brought with me. But I brought it because of its connection with who I was, and what I really want to hear, I think to myself as I complete the eighth and final meridian stretch, is to listen to "Ontario".

I wipe off the sand, wash my face in the ocean, head back to the cabin. A glass of water, some seaweed chips, a banana, an orange, some smoked fish. This is breakfast. Also, often, lunch and dinner.

It's time for track 6. Repeat play.

Yes, "Ontario" is another song about self-knowledge and its limits. But it's something else entirely to me as well.

Ten years or so ago, I got FULL FORCE GALESBURG in the mail serendipitously, unexpectedly, unsolicited. Some months prior, I had put up John Darnielle and Craig Stewart, the former being Mr. Mountain Goats and the latter being part of Trance Syndicate/Emperor Jones Records, when their tour with Alastair Galbraith came through town. As it happened, despite or because of being around one of my most revered musicians, I spent a good amount of time on the porch talking to Craig.

Several months later, on a Saturday, I go to put in an extra day at my grueling labor building global communities, and on the way to the car, in the mailbox, is a suspiciously CD-shaped envelope.

I open, and I contemplate bailing on work for another hour, but I can't. So I take it to work to listen to.

I had to work, so I wasn't giving it as full of an ear as I'd like. First listens for me are almost always impressions, kind of an idea to prepare myself to really hear the album the second time. The first time you're hearing it against what you expected it to be, the second time you're hearing it for what it is.

Then I got to track 6, and straight out of the gate there's something slightly charged, something that catches me about the guitar riff. And at the end of the verse the guitar suddenly stops and the vocal hits -

there was nothing in it but pain for me

and then the song picks up again, but I'm hooked now, and not having really heard the first verse, I listen to the second verse closely.

I know what can hurt me real bad
and what can't hurt me any more
I know how to rise up with the sun
and I am learning what sleep stood for
I thought I figured out the world in its circular way
and then I saw the sun fall out of the sky the other day
- there was nothing in it but pain for me

And I didn't know what it meant, exactly, but it seemed true, partially because of the words and partially because of the insistent quality of the vocal delivery that made every word sound like truth to me. Today, I think of the closest thing to a spiritual advisor I've had in my life, and his typically blunt advice about how you never figure everything out, and if you think you have, the universe will happily upend this belief of yours.

I have dwelt in the past here. Of course I have. I am a man scanning for traps, hidden dangers. Things that can break me. And these are likely to be the things lurking in my brain, apt to sneak up on me if I am not wary. Survival takes up some time but the island is largely bucolic, intermittent storms aside. I can live here forever, I believe, if I can stay sane.

But I am not done with the past. I still remember sitting in my office in the data center on some high floor of a Houston skyscraper, and the song continued, unrelenting and unexpectedly, into a description of a bucolic paradise of its own:

squirrels climbing trees in bloom
soft yellow light spilling into the room
my favorite records
my favorite books

- and I had no idea how it connected to the rest of the song, but I'm on the hook now, and then it happens -

the people I love

- but see, it's on love that his voice kind of breaks or goes into a different register or something completely vulnerable, and then is immediately followed as he regains his vocal strength with an audacious brilliant line expressing a sentiment I'd never quite heard before but makes perfect sense -

the people I almost love

- and that's the knockout punch, and I am fucking shattered out of nowhere, and perhaps nobody else has ever or will ever feel that way about this song, perhaps somehow I was and am the ideal listener.

And if your question is "shattered then" or "shattered now", the answer is yes. But it's a good shattered.

It's September 23rd. Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be older than Christ was when he died, according to the most commonly believed historical records. No idea how old Lao-Tsu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, was when he died. But I suspect he would be appalled to be venerated.

I imagine a birthday party. A beautiful cabin, dappled with sun. But somewhere with people. My favorite records, my favorite books. The people I love, the people I almost love. Perhaps they are beckoning. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps they have no idea. Perhaps the world thinks I am dead.

But I am alive and I am here, and I turn the music off and throw the food waste in the compost heap down the beach and then I jump in the water for a swim around the island. I have loved being in the water for as long as I can remember, and it's perfect here. Idyllic.

I remember me a decade ago, in a skyscraper in Houston, and the days and weeks before and after that, thinking I was on the verge of figuring out everything if I could just get the right job, the right girlfriend, the right future. Now I know that I will never figure out everything, that if I think I do sudden pain will sneak in as unexpectedly as it does for the narrator of "Ontario". And that maybe the coda of that song is just about being aware of what's around you and recontextualizing it as paradise, and as tiny minnows dart past me in a silvery swarm, light reflecting off of their minute scales, I swim with them, following the current, supposing that this is a fortunate way to spend the last day of my 33rd year of life, at one with the sea, with no idea what is to come next.

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VIDEO #6 for people who don't give a shit about the Mountain Goats: the children's ballet version of Deerhoof's "Milk Man".

the island, part 5: chinese house flowers

This is the fifth 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.

Who I was. Who I am. My tan, my beard. My increasingly frequent external monologues and penchant for public nudity.

Is it public if no one's there to see? I'll certainly wear clothes when I return.

Probably.

My courage, my comfort around innards, my patience. My increasingly detailed attention to vegetation, different kinds of trees. The resilience of different kinds of wood. What different clouds mean, what colors in the sky mean.

The island is changing me, but everything changes everyone to some degree, so that is trivial.

My voice. I sing, often. Everything from Drive Like Jehu to Dean Martin, with half-remembered words and loose attention to the original melody. Everything I can remember. And then new songs, about birds and finding buried cartons of vodka (oh I wish) and the shape of waves and the memory of bodies. I used to say that I needed to find my voice before I could sing, and now, I have. It may be a terrible voice, but nobody is here that can register a complaint. So I sing, and sing again. I finger chords on my little contraption, and I imagine when they are against my melodies they will be unpalatable but in my head they sound brilliant.

Am I going to be the same person when I came back? Of course not. Would I be the same person if I had stayed? Also no. But in that case people might not have noticed.

Five songs in, "Chinese House Flowers" is the third song to draw the line between who a person is and who a person was. Its protagonist has settled into a cabin or house or something, with his partner, and from the sound of things, it's a dim suffocating place, with the hothouse of the radiant energy being just as asphyxiating as the memories of "the way you were".

Out here, the air is fresh, in literal and metaphor. There is no baggage, bar this CD, which is surprisingly quite a lot, though not so much for this song. Apart from general philosophy, my only explicit memory is my friend Dave, talking about how the chord changes represented a step forward for John Darnielle. That's probably true, although I wouldn't have noticed until he pointed it out. That's it for connections to the person I was, except for what I cart around in this formerly overstuffed but increasingly understuffed flesh balloon.

I think of marriage: a commitment not just that you will love the person that you see now, but a future you, who may bear little resemblance to the you now, will also love a future other, who may also bear little resemblance, in distinct ways.

I think of the number of divorces I know, and the pain felt by those who stick through it. Perhaps more have happened while I am away. Perhaps I will come back and nobody will be the same.

But change can rarely be noticed during constant observation. For Darnielle's protagonists, gleams in the eye, offhand words, these sorts of things cause years of gradual change to snap into focus. Or maybe they do believe that the change is immediate and drastic. It's hard to tell. Of course, when that change comes, it's hard to know for yourself.

The song decelerates at the end, like a clock winding down. It's one of the more tightly coiled songs on here. I like to think of it as the illusions fueling a fevered delusion gradually stripping away, until nothing is left. I like to think this is doing something similar for me, stripping away all the garbage in my head. I only hope that, in my case, there is something underneath it.

If I try to find too much in these songs, is it because I have too much time, or is it because I ultimately have faith that there is more to them than I will ever discern, that they are an inexhaustible well? They are my only supply. They have to feed me. Sustain me.

Whoever I am.

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VIDEO #5 for people who don't give a shit about The Mountain Goats: Possibly the best live band I ever saw, the Dog Faced Hermans. (There's a couple other videos if you poke around. Do so.)

the island, part 4: masher

This is the fourth 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.

Why the fuck is there no guitar here.

Well, of course, I'm on a deserted island with limited foodstuffs, a ramshackle cabin that is bearing the brunt of repeated storms with limited resilience, a wall full of batteries, and one CD boombox. There is no reason there should be a guitar here.

There is also no reason there should be one boombox here, but here we are.

I try to remember how my hand made the positions. I was never any good, but maybe I can change that. I remember stories about the two basketball teams, one who practiced shooting free throws and the other who sat on their asses and visualized successfully shooting free throws, and how they wound up doing about the same after some time.

Just maybe, I could come off this island a fucking guitar wizard. Not that that's what I want. What I really want is to understand the music of "Masher", the fourth song of FULL FORCE GALESBURG, which shouldn't be very hard to do, but I would need to hear the notes of the strings resonating, experiment. Wonder why it is that that slight melodic twitch injected in the chord strikes me so. Wonder what magic it is of resonance or neuroscience or whatever that causes me to get swept away, feel wistful by the simplest of tonal variations, something a dozen people I know could figure out in .234 seconds after hearing it, probably dismiss as an insignificant throw away moment. Maybe something most people don't hear. Or don't care if they do.

Huh, it's in 3/4. Or 6/8. I'd say 6/8, but I always get in arguments as to which is which, so it's probably 3/4.

I could whittle a fret board. Now that I've learned to sharpen the knife against the rocks, it's not a huge problem. The frets would just be guides, of course, and the strings wouldn't exist. But I could potentially learn to fret like a motherfucker.

And then come back and play chords that are horrible dissonant clusters, since I couldn't hear them. Or maybe just move between D, C, and G really fast. Those, I know.

It's funny, when your set of tools is small the possibilities can suddenly seem unlimited. I think back to living in Auckland, in my room, with a computer that's simultaneously miraculous and outdated, a guitar, years of watching and listening and reading options, thirteen different sauces in the fridge -

any of which I would kill to have at the moment, by the way -

and feeling at times like nothing made me feel alive. And now a carving project has unlimited potential.

Maybe I will develop a whole new line of art. Maybe I will be the first expatriate Kiwi of Ukrainian-American descent to develop a tropical mode of carving that somehow uncovers a sense of life, in the Christopher Alexander sense, that was heretofore unknown to wood artisans.

Wait. There's two guitars in "Masher". Shit. This is how inattentive of a listener I am to guitar details normally. Good luck figuring this out.

Then again. What else do I have to do?

I find a good piece of driftwood amidst the washed-up rubble from the storm last week, and start carving.

Most of June I spent in jail again
I do not mean jail exactly

I could write songs. More songs - I've written songs, but I've rarely shared them. I'm not sure if this is a regret.

If it is, I certainly have larger ones.

I think I chose a bad piece of wood, big knot in it, not amenable to carving. I toss it in the burn pile and grab another.

Something I love about John Darnielle's lyric writing is that the narrative is alluded to with economy but never fully spelled out. I never succeed at accomplishing this when I write, it's always too literal. I can open my brain, dream, cast about for vague allusive phrases.

Would any be better than "I do not mean jail exactly"? I guess I could reflect that it took something like 6 years and 150 songs to get to the point of writing this album.

I know every inch of the coastline now. I run. I never ran before, but it's worth a try. Every inch of beach. I can start on one side in the morning and watch the sunrise, then climb across and have bananas for lunch in the vegetation atop the hill in the middle, then clamber down and watch sunset on the other side.

So many variations. So few variations.

I do not mean jail exactly.

If I could say anything, what would I say?

I am losing control of the language again

There's a specificity of writing that I love when it's attained, when something is highly specific, almost to the point of being hermetic, but also universal. "Masher" gets it more often than 99% of songs in the world, but doesn't always get it for me in the same way a lot of other Goats songs do. The stuff about the squirrel in the tree and the neck tilting back to make a rainbow (which may be a squirrel or may be a woman, I can't quite tell) is kind of pretty but I don't really get it on a gut level the way I do with some things.

(Like losing control of the language. That, I know.)

But it doesn't matter, exactly, because everytime that guitar moves up just a little bit on the second bar of the main riff, I feel swept away.

Back at home, I was feeling near the end of the line. Houston, Portland, Auckland, I'd sequestered myself increasingly far away, repeatedly uprooting myself, gaining opportunity but losing belonging, forced to regain it by half-measures and then lose it in another move. Sometimes I would think I could retreat along this past, somewhere that I'd been, and somehow simultaneously hold on to the opportunity and retrieve the sense of belonging.

And then I would visit the scenes of my past, and realize that nothing was the same, that my single friends who I went drinking with in Portland had become largely coupled home-owners more concerned with pro-creation than an Old 97's show. And that whatever I have left behind is changing in ways, vanishing.

Most of the things I used to hold on to
Most of the things I used to say to you
Most of the ways I knew around the local roads are disappearing daily

And while it may not be impossibly specific, as I watch the sun fall out of the sky and voyage through the places I knew in my mind, and imagine what might be left on my return, it certainly feels universal.

Night, I lie in bed with my new fretboard in my hand. This is not a euphemism. When I say I spent a lot of time in bed playing on my fretboard, you should not chortle.

D, C, G. Something about the leafy wet substance that gathers in gutters during Portland winters. So close, so far away.

I think of a friend of mine's story, of Ron Wood teaching him to play "Paint It, Black" in a dream. And he got up, and still remembered how to play it. So he picked up his guitar ...

... and it was all wrong.

There's something there, too. There's something in everything, something to say if you know where to look. And you know what you want to say.

What is it that I want to say?

I don't know. The memories turn and churn, and I lose control of the language, and I drift to sleep, wondering what the hell the title "Masher" means.

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VIDEO #4 for people who don't give a shit about the Mountain Goats: a live performance from Neu!

the island, part 3: west country dream.

This is the third 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.

The storm was on the horizon, and then it was here, and then any sense of paradise was obliterated. My cabin was weatherproofed, I thought, but you never know until the weather gives you what it has to offer. And now I know I was wrong.

If I believed in the gods, I would believe the gods were angry. The little shack is impossibly loud, the puddles on the floor are growing, the roof may blow off any minute.

It could be worse.

Securely on the table in the middle of the cabin, barely audible over the din, my CD boombox plays "West Country Dream", to remind me just how things could be worse.

I remember a ugly and claustrophobic hotel room in northern Michigan with identical ceiling tiles, and the nausea of being suddenly trapped with someone who has said something that changes the molecular composition of the air around you.

This is my story, not the story of "West Country Dream". But the desperate fright of "West Country Dream" helps me remember that being alone in a cabin, struggling to keep water out, has a simplicity and clarity of purpose. There becomes something soothing about the utter lack of emotional warfare in this situation. It is merely me against the implacable universe.

This, I can handle. This is just survival.

The narrative of "West Country Dream" is slight. Two verses of fragmentary details - no choruses - are all you get:

Sure as a surgeon, you slipped your hand into the door jamb
blood coursing through the air tonight, I know who I am
and I know who you are, who you were just an hour ago
static interference on the radio tonight, I know what I know

Quick as lightning, you brought your hand back inside
And you shut the door behind you, It's too hot out there tonight
Breath rising and falling, expansion contraction
Why'd you tell me this? Were you looking for my reaction?

The rest of the effect is the frantic and oft-hand muted guitar and the panic of the vocal delivery. The cumulative effect is blind panic.

Knowing who people are, this recurring theme. I know who you are, who you were just an hour ago. How somebody in the space of an hour can be a stranger to you, somebody who bears no relation to who you once knew despite carting around the same collection of hair, skin, bones, and organs.

And blood. Can't forget the blood. Coursing through the air tonight. A panic that is not what I have to face here, but a panic I must never forget.

Is the storm subsiding? The storm may be subsiding.

But the damage will take longer to clear.

The storm is going away. I am sure of it. I breathe, twice. Expansion, contraction.

And I think about other places I have been in my life, and how simple and soothing the task of clearing fallen branches from the beach will seem by comparison.

Wet feet, damaged home, ruined provisions and all, I am lucky to be here.

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VIDEO #3 for people who don't give a shit about the Mountain Goats: Kenny Rogers, 1972. As somebody who only knows Rogers from THE GAMBLER, SIX-PACK, et al, I had no idea he was capable of a song this heart-breaking.



And for those who don't like either, a few songs live and interview from Superchunk's appearance at McCarren Pool this summer. It makes my heart soar to see Mac and Laura still pogoing.

the island, part 2: snow owl.

When you think of a deserted island, you think of solitude, of being left alone. But the truth is that while I am without human company, Dougtopia is full of other forms of life, with varying levels of annoyance. Most likable, both in terms of being not very disruptive and being reasonably tasty, are the fish. There was a time when I didn't have the stomach to clean and gut a fish. On an island with only bananas, oranges, lettuce, and a large store of rice and flour, such concerns dwindle rapidly.

The birds, on the other hand, are not welcome. They mock me. Their calls harangue me impossibly early in the morning. I thought I would adjust, but wherever I am, the days are long, and the night is not long enough for me to fully rest on the lumpy mattress until I hear their calls. I want to kill them.

And I do, every now and then. A sharp rock and increasingly better aim add up to a lot. They have little usable meat, but it would be a waste not to take advantage of it.

As I set to dismantling the bird, whose name I don't know, I listen to track 2 of FULL FORCE GALESBURG, "Snow Owl". I brought this album as a reminder of domesticity in a place where domesticity would be an alien concept, or so I thought. But here we are, and the narrator of "Snow Owl" is quite simply a lonely guy looking out the window at a bird.

I break off the wings for the fire. They are not yet worth the effort.

I listen over and over, trying to decipher the metaphor if there is any. "In your eyes were all the colors the rainbow forgot" sounds like an extract from a labored love song, but the follow-up, "your wingspan was three feet wide or better", makes it pretty clear his words aren't directed at a human.

I cut off the bird's head and split it down the center, and I hear his description of the snow owl's cry -

with your voice practicing notes from time's own beginning
you took apart the alphabet letter by letter

- and hear it as one of the infinite number meditations on this album about the limitations of language. I wonder, as I rip small pieces of meat from a bone, what I will have to say to people when I come back, what set of words would really give any sense of this experience.

When I come back.

If I come back.

I listen to the plucked, not strummed, guitar. In the early days of The Mountain Goats, plucking was a sign of reach exceeding grasp; "The Window Song", for instance, is chock-full of flubs. But here, the picking is, while certainly not virtuosic, then confident in a quiet way. Tranquil, calm. And a bit sad, as the narrator shares with the only being he can share with, his loneliness -

the dice were loaded against us ever seeing each other
but one of us had nowhere else to go

- causing him to reach out to the snow owl, a calm port in a storm.

And as I seal the bird's guts in the fish bait jar and skewer the meat for cooking, I look out to sea, and I see the dark clouds over the sea, I remember, I know, and I feel slightly sick -

- what comes next is not calm.

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VIDEO #2 for people who don't give a shit about The Mountain Goats: Roots Manuva's video for "Witness The Fitness", which has a lengthy setup before revealing itself as one of the funniest music videos ever.

the island, part 1: new britain

(Note: this is part 1 on a series about why I chose FULL FORCE GALESBURG as the one disc I would take to a desert island. See this post for an introduction.)

I awake on the beach, the cool waves licking at my feet: the tide is coming in.

Where am I? I have no idea. I must change this. The first thing, as always, is the name. If we can name something, we can delude ourselves into thinking we know what it is. For now, the name is Dougtopia. It may change.

A desert island and a deserted island, but a once-inhabited island, so the comforts are not entirely up to me inventing things from scratch. The cabin will need work, but the stove is good, the mattress is more comfortable than I hoped, and the view is unimpeachable. Also, there are enough D batteries to last a long time, and a CD boombox, and so I throw in the only CD that will keep me company, FULL FORCE GALESBURG by The Mountain Goats. The familiar aggressive acoustic guitar volley hits me, the only opening to a track I hear until I am rescued.

If I am rescued. I should repair the cabin, take advantage of the good weather, find fresh water to supplement the few bottles in the cabin. Instead, I sit on the beach, staring into the sun, like the protagonists of this song.

The name of the first track is "New Britain". As it happens, there are New Britains in Pennsylvania, Papau New Guinea, and Connecticut, none of which, I expect, are meant to be the subject of the song. (Neither the album by Whitehouse nor the far-right British political party, for that matter.)

I assume, rightly or wrongly, that New Britain is an old name for America, before a war was fought, battle lines drawn, a new relationship was borne out of years of blood and hatred, and certainly the Revolutionary War reference is explicit in the lyrics:

All the way across the ocean, they're gathering their strength again
lining up across the country's length again

But in the world of the Mountain Goats, at least in this era, the struggles of the world ultimately boil down to the struggle between man and woman. (The universe of the Goats has always been an incredibly hetero-normative one.) And this struggle, one more basic, one based around the inability to communicate and failures of language -

you've had it up to hear with my west country talk
you can hardly understand a word I say ...

I try to tell you secrets til my face turns blue
I am not getting through to you

- is no less challenging.

A common movie trope - and I assume it comes from life - is for soldiers or others in precarious situations to have a picture that sustains them through the rough times, usually of a loved one. Inevitably, the return home, where they come back to the vision that has sustained them through all of this, is a letdown, a catastrophe, and nothing as they imagined. The woman has found another man, or the dream job has fallen through, or what have you.

I could've taken an album of a dream, one that gave me a fantasy to sustain me. But that would be catastrophic. I didn't want to take a dream of a possible world with me. When the narrator of "New Britain" has had his world collapse -

I hold you in my arms but you're hardly even with me
This morning I know who you are

- it's not something to hope for. But it's something I know, the horrible feeling of holding somebody who is a million miles away, and it's not a pleasant memory but it will keep me human, both now and when I return, for the end of this experience, be it an ordeal or paradise, will not lead to a happily-ever-after but to a sloppy and complicated world interacting with humans, with challenges less visceral but far more difficult than any I will face here.

I hit play again, as the sun sets, and the guitar starts up one more time, and I wonder if it is the narrator who is New Britain, or the woman he fruitlessly holds close to him. The woman, I decide, who has made her declaration of independence. The man will be left behind. Alone. Call him old Britain, unable to adjust to a new changing world, plunging forward in redcoats in straight lines while being fired upon in unexpected ways.

I could listen to this song forever. I may have to.

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VIDEO #1 for people who don't give a shit about The Mountain Goats: recently, the amazing director Michelangelo Antonioni died. I re-watched BLOW-UP (truthfully, not his best film, but I'd still be ecstatic if I made a film this good), and when I heard "Middle of Nowhere" by Hot Hot Heat a few days later, it reminded me of the video, which owes a huge debt to BLOW-UP but still manages to be its own, very cool thing. Even if the singer's hair bugs me.

the island, part 0: out here where our dreams take form

This post was supposed to be a lot of other things. I have a lot of half-baked or over-cooked things to write about, but I find as I approach them I get either blocked or rambling, "losing control of the language", to quote from an album I will be discussing in great detail in the next sixteen weeks. And I wonder what I'm doing writing here, what I have to say, what is waiting to give birth, as Carlos put it in wonderful prose that I understand but can't explain.

And then this week in the mail a long-delayed Amazon package arrived, including a number of discs championed by folks here (Etran Finatawa and Jesu in particular), two DVD box sets (Teshigahara and Jodorowsky), and two books, one Joan Didion and the last that's relevant to this post, a book called MAROONED. It's a compilation of essays by various writers about the disc that they would take to a desert island with them, a follow-up to an older book I haven't read called STRANDED.

And so, I've decided to write about my desert island disc. Specifically, I'm going to write each week about a track on it. This will take sixteen weeks, assuming that I don't have pressing things to write about. (Considering I'm seeing The Editors, Bloc Party, and Bob Dylan with The Frames opening, I might have other things to write next week.)

The desert island disc that immediately came to mind is FULL FORCE GALESBURG, by The Mountain Goats. Why? Not just because John Darnielle wrote an essay in MAROONED (which I haven't read yet). And not at all because it's my favorite album - a few that I esteem more would include BLUE TRAIN, DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME, IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA, THE EARTH IS NOT A COLD DEAD PLACE, and Joel R.L. Phelps' BLACKBIRD, possibly the most overlooked album in the history of recorded music. I'm not even sure it's the best Mountain Goats album - ALL HAIL WEST TEXAS, TALLAHASSEE, and THE SUNSET TREE are all strong contenders in that race.

So, why, then? I suppose because when I think of being alone on a desert island, and what I know of my own character being alone, I would want a record that would remind me what it's like to be in civilization, on that day when I am hopefully rescued. A record that keeps me as sane and as human as possible, no matter how long my beard gets or how accustomed to wandering around naked I become.

And FULL FORCE GALESBURG is a meditation on domesticity, belonging, the geography of the United States, the subterranean emotional landscape of relationships, and the births and deaths of hopes and dreams. And while no record contains everything, I feel like it contains enough, as much as one can hope for to stay connected to the world while fully isolated. And I've listened to it hundreds of times, but I still miss details, and while at some point it may give up all its mysteries, I imagine that it has as much to offer as any album I already know I love.

A fuller explanation will come over the next sixteen weeks.

P.S. I'm agonizing over the question of whether to include the corresponding track from FULL FORCE GALESBURG each week on the Podcast or not. On the one hand, it'd be nice for people to hear what I'm talking about; on the other hand, sixteen weeks of Mountain Goats may kill everybody who doesn't share my affinity. (Although it can't be worse than fucking Steely Dan, a band of which John Darnielle is a big fan of, as it happens.) Vote in the comments.

As an appendix each week, for those of you who could give two shits about The Mountain Goats, I'll include a video of one of my favorite bands, a band whose music would be going through my head on the frequent times on this island where I have no music playing, can't stand to hear that music anymore, and think back to the various earth-shattering live music events I've been privileged to see. I meant to write a meditation on what live music meant and why it was important, but it devolved into a YouTube link fest, so I'll just leave it as what it should be: an excuse to see performers that, for some reason or another, astonished me.

This week: A collection of Boredoms live performance from the mid-90's, before they became a Krautrock band. One of my favorite memories of live music is standing in the front row when they played Emo's, getting repeatedly whacked in the face by Eye's microphone, and just basking in the blow. I can still picture Kyle and HK's faces after the show, fully gobsmacked.