My yoga DVD has an excellent workout.* But I hate the music. Like much yoga music, it ranges from bland to treacly to offensively annoying. So I recently took the routine’s instructions from the DVD and combined that audio with my own mix of downtempo instrumental electronic music, leaning heavily on the artists you’d expect, like DJ Shadow and Boards of Canada. (This is where music geekery and yoga assholery converge.)

But at the end of the program, during the “constructive rest” segment, comes “Bad Days,” by Timo Mass, the gorgeous closer to his all-killer-no-filler 2002 dance freakout, Loud. And while it’s ideal music for “letting my body undulate on the waves of my breath while my brain sinks into my heart” (the DVD’s words, not mine), I may have to swap it out with a less potent, emotionally loaded piece.

Because “Bad Days” actually connotes very good days: the sunny spring of 2002 when I didn’t have much of an agenda beyond drinking beer with Neil and playing drums in a party band. There were some bad days back then, too: I wasn’t so much on a career track so much as wildly derailed from it, and I was letting a number of personal relationships deteriorate for various reasons.

But euphoric recall allows me to only remember the sunny afternoons and the bacchanalian nights in Iowa City bars, and seeping in through the cracks between the dance anthems and the sweaty rock songs was this one—bright, patient, searching.

* That is an actual sentence I typed, on a blog with my real, full name on it; a blog that anyone in the world can read.

Posted: February 18th, 2010 under Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 1

Shuffling through an iTunes library containing 105 days of music means that I will occasionally land upon a long-forgotten item so obscure that, were I still storing music on plastic media, would remained consigned to the backs of my closest for years, if not forever.

Such a moment occurred the other day when my player landed on a half-finished track by a band I was in seven years ago. We were called Racecar Radar and we were an Iowa City supergroup, inasmuch as a band comprising members of three local, unsigned, about-to-break-up bands can be.

We had some good songs, though, and we went on to do great things in other contexts, so Racecar Radar remains a brief pit-stop, preserved in the amber of the hazy alcoholic summer of 2002. We did stick together long enough cajole our way into John Svec’s studio for a few days in August to bash out a few demos, only one of which we finished.

One of the unfinished tracks is also one of my favorites. Its working title was “Lighthouses” and Dino wrote it. I won’t post it here because it really is noticeably unfinished and would require a major overhaul, which will never happen. Dino’s scratch vocal is buried in the mix, the lyrics half there; the guitars are out of tune with each other; the whole thing is rough and unmastered.

I forgot this song even existed until my computer thrust it at me the other day, and I was immediately plunged into the usual morass of nostalgia and what-could-have-been, but I also noted that—if you’ll permit me brag for a moment—I am killing the drum performance on this recording. Read more »

Posted: November 19th, 2009 under Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 2

Macha/Bedhead, “Only The Bodies Survive” When a person dies, their body doesn’t survive, really. It’s left behind, buried, or destroyed. This song’s lyrical conceit applies the metaphor not so much to humans, but to their prideful enterprises: Once a relationship is dissolved, its two members are merely discrete bodies rather than the two parties of an emotional contract; a small town’s boom time is over, the homes are abandoned, its residents departed for warmer climes. When only the corporeal shell remains—of a home, a town, a person, a band?—then words aren’t enough to describe that haunted feeling, so Macha’s Javanese vibraphone and Bedhead’s mournful, repetitive guitars come in to finish the job. The piece builds over a drone that sounds like mutated radio static and car engines, which subsides long enough for Josh McKay to breathe a few verses before the song collapses. Then the two doomed bands join forces long enough to restart it and unfurl a dreamy instrumental coda, the guitar and vibraphone locking together to bid goodbye. Bedhead was already dissolved at this point, and Macha’s only future album was still a few years away, so this is as fitting an elegy as the surviving bodies of either band could provide.

Daft Punk, “Digital Love” At the time, I wasn’t in love with Discovery because it wasn’t as visceral or immediate for me as Homework, but it grew on me. And I can trace the evolution now: the duo simply made the repetitive earthshaking beats of the first album a little more radio-friendly, compressed the song structures, and infused them with hilariously infectious pop. They make it sound easy, but boy howdy, is it ever not.

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Posted: October 25th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: none

When Pitchfork released their list of the top 500 songs of the decade earlier this year, I had two reactions: 1) Holy shit, the decade is ending; and 2) Because I like music and have a blog, people are going to care what my top 500 songs of the decade were. I know that only one of these statements is true, but that won’t stop me from proceeding. I won’t do 500. Maybe 200. Probably 100.

This is also, of course, an attempt to rectify some of Pitchfork’s omissions. I know that’s the first thing a person does when considering anyone else’s Best Of list—”Two tracks from Illinoise but nothing from Michigan? Are you INSANE?”—but I’m not trying to correct or argue with Pitchfork. They’re very good at what they do, and our lists overlap in a lot of places.

But I dare say my list is more diverse than theirs. There are advantages to not being Pitchfork: I don’t have to reach any kind of consensus among dozens of editors and staff writers. I don’t have to cater, deliberately or otherwise, to my readership’s taste; it doesn’t matter how closely I hew to a numerical rating I gave a song when it was originally released. I can consider songs that weren’t singles and songs that were never released. Songs by unsigned bands. Songs by bands I was in (sorry).

What’s more, this project will pretty much force me to conduct a comprehensive survey of some people, places, and events I probably haven’t thought about much in a long time, as I try and remember where I was the first, eleventh, or three hundredth time I heard each song. I suppose that’s inevitable when you organize your life along the axes of artists, albums and songs. (For example, I can’t tell you what day I began working at Barnes & Noble [thank god], but I can tell you that I first heard “Singing Softly to Me” by Kings of Convenience on the car radio in the parking lot before going inside for training.)

I’ve tried to limit myself to one song per album, per artist. And they’re more or less in chronological order. Has it really been ten years? I love getting older (kind of).

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Posted: October 6th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: none

I spent my undergraduate years at a small college known for its intimidatingly upmarket music conservatory. When I matriculated, I naively thought I could be a liberal arts major while taking advantage of the Con—as it was known—and dabbling in the percussive arts. What I soon discovered was that the percussion department in my conservatory contained some of the school’s most intense students, and faculty, and I would either have to go hard or go home.

It took me a while to realize that, however, so I spent a few months floundering as a half-assed conservatory student, using the practice rooms to play along with King Crimson albums rather than practice marimba etudes, and watching my grade in music theory trend steadily downward. It didn’t help that I was also extremely busy with French homework, the laziest parsing of Plato’s Republic ever, sleeping through even the loudest alarms, maintaining an awkward amity with an extremely good-hearted roommate with whom I’d decided I had barely anything in common, and tending to a horribly ill-advised crush on a girl who was all kinds of wrong for me. You know, typical college-freshman stuff.

I finally approached my music theory instructor about two months into the first term and said something along the lines of “I can’t do this.” Because I have a surprisingly good ear for detecting pitches, I had tested into the second-hardest level of music theory, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work necessary to keep my head above water. He charitably offered to let me withdraw from the course with a failing grade, and it was an offer I literally couldn’t refuse. Toward the end of the term he called me (this was before professors and students communicated regularly via email) to inform me that he’d carefully recalculated my grade and that my transcript would now show that I’d withdrawn from the course with a D. It was a pretty huge favor, all told.

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Posted: September 1st, 2009 under Music.
Comments: 11

Barring some unpacking and some cleaning, I’m finally and completely moved into my new apartment.

I promised myself I wouldn’t oversentimentalize the process, and I think I’ve done a reasonably good job of that. I threw away, sold, or donated a lot of things I’d been holding onto long past their usefulness even as mementos, and I still think this move sets a new record for the least amount of garbage produced and cheap plastic purchased from Target to replace it.

But old habits die hard, and there’s nothing that turns the gears of sentimentality—or at least retrospect, wrapped in a skein of sentimentality and garnished with shavings of nostalgia marinated in Weltschmertz—better than looking at my newly empty old apartment after giving it the most thorough cleaning I’ve ever given anything (at least, thorough by my lazy bachelor standards; execrable by anyone else’s) and knowing that for three years it was my Home with a capital H. Nothing says transition—or ending—quite like a series of empty rooms.

As a kid, I loved the sitcom Growing Pains. The series finale, after several years of Learning Some Important Lessons and Having a Few Laughs Along the Way, hinged on one of many can’t-fail tropes for ending a series: the Seaver family was moving away, leaving the cozy three-walled house where Alan Thicke’s firm but fair patriarch practiced psychology in his home office and the family gathered on the lawn at the end of the theme song every week. When the Seavers relocated, they literally ceased to exist.

In my dim memory of the finale, Seaver daughter Carol, played by Tracy Gold, was the last one to leave the house. (I’m not sure why she got the last shot, and not Mike, or even better, Boner). She looked around the living room, ground zero for so many comic misunderstandings and Very Special Episode third-act denouments, and bid the place goodbye.

That’s kind of how I felt on Sunday night, which I realize makes me a grade-A sap. But that apartment was my homebase for three years, the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I went to college at 19. It was my first legitimately adult apartment—not a dorm room, not shared with a roommate, not a basement. It’s where I finished my thesis. It’s where I peaked as a filmmaker.

So if all this makes me a sap, then bring on the theme song.

Posted: July 2nd, 2009 under General, Minneapolis.
Comments: 2

Thriller was the first album I actually owned. Beginning at age three, I listened to and became familiar with my parents’ Beatles albums, but I couldn’t claim them as my own.

When I was seven and Thriller was released, I begged my mother for it, and she was all like, “Why don’t you just have Uncle Henry make a tape of it for you?”

“That’s not the point!” I whined. With all due respect to my uncle Henry—definitely one of my hipper, more musically aware uncles— I wanted the official album on tape, the complete package: that shimmery white suit reproduced in a tiny 3×4″ format, and the ugly beige cassette itself, with the song titles and everything stamped on the plastic. That was my holy grail.

So I wore my mother down and eventually got it, and played the hell out of it, and eventually lost it, and a couple years later moved onto the second album I ever owned, Songs From the Big Chair. But that album, the video for “Shout,” and the ensuing 25 years of pop music couldn’t have existed without Thriller, or the man who created it.

As soon as I heard the news yesterday, my brain performed that curious elision that allows adults to reckon with nuance, controversy, and cognitive dissonance: I immediately forgot the past 20 years of Michael Jackson’s narrative—the weirdness and the plastic surgery and the baby-dangling and the allegations of impropriety—and thought only about Thriller and Bad, about being a single-digit age in the 1980s—an era I consider more frequently even as it continues to recede.

The bells at Minneapolis’ City Hall are playing Michael Jackson songs. You can hear them all over downtown. I recorded them playing

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Posted: June 26th, 2009 under Chicago, Music.
Comments: 4

Posted: June 21st, 2009 under General, Images.
Comments: 1

“That challenge haunts all animators. We grow up thinking that our bike is cold when it’s left out in the rain, or that a leaf on a high branch is afraid of heights. ” – Andrew Stanton

“I chose, with not too much deliberation, a nice new desk at which I will accomplish many accomplishments for at least the next three years.” – Me

I’m not an animator, but I still get sentimental about inanimate objects. At the end of this month, in order to be closer to my job(s) and friends, I’m going to move to a new apartment. My last few moves were marked by ill-preparedness and last-minute all-nighters spent haphazardly throwing things into boxes. I’m trying to be a little more organized about it—I consider this my first “adult” move—but I still can’t help but feel overwhelmed by all the shit I have to do before July. Not to mention the emotional strain of vacating a place I’ve inhabited for three years—the longest I’ve lived anywhere since my parents’ house in high school.

So I’m trying to get started early. Today my project was to disassemble the aforementioned behemoth of a desk. It’s served me well in two apartments and through the entirety of my MFA program. I wrote a lot at that desk. But because it’s from IKEA, and because I probably didn’t care for it as well as I should have, it’s basically falling apart, its bolts missing and its famous IKEA particleboard disintegrating. I don’t think it can survive another move and I don’t relish the idea of carrying it up three flights of stairs.

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Posted: June 7th, 2009 under Iowa City, Minneapolis.
Comments: 3

I already alluded to this Onion article about adult kickball. But then, lying in bed last night, I began thinking about my 2004-2005 tenure with the World Adult Kickball Association’s Chicago Deep Dish league.

Those were heady days: three consecutive seasons of truly horrid playing on my part and raucous postgame summits at the bars whose owners probably could not fucking believe they sponsored an adult kickball league.

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Posted: June 4th, 2009 under Chicago.
Comments: 1