Musical musings: Concert crazies and mixtape memories

I’ve realized what a blog might be good for, besides keeping track of how many hours I pressed the “refresh” button on certain websites: random thoughts! Thoughts or ideas too random to bring up in conversation and get the over-emphatic “I’m listening to what you are saying and find it very interesting” nod and smile in which the person humors you while you empty out your random thoughts on his or her tired brain.

RT#1: You know what is amazing to attend in person but terribly embarrassing to watch on TV? A concert. And I’m not talking about the musicians on stage, oh no–it’s the audience.

Here’s the thing: no one ever looks cool when they are enjoying a show. In fact, they look kind of crazy.

Have you ever watched the audience when the camera pans to the crowd during a show? We all love to sing along every time we hear a song we know, and hear every single person around you join in for the sing-a-long too. You feel connected to the band on stage, and the people around you. It could even be described as transcendent.

But nothing makes me cringe more but watching someone with tears in their eyes, rocking from one foot to another, mouthing the words hypnotically to the songs. Concert-goers tend to look like cult members, what with the swaying and the crying and the adulation, with people waving hello at the band, thinking they can get their attention, shouting “I love you!” over and over again. Think Beatlemania–basically adults acting like 14-year old girls. (I really tried to find an image of this online, but couldn’t find anything good enough. I recommend going to YouTube and searching for any filmed concert footage of your favorite band–you’ll see what I mean.)

Listening to and connecting music can be a really personal thing, so to see thousands of strangers sharing in that experience, all letting their guard down in a public place, can be a bit bizarre. Sort of like having lots of people’s diaries flip open and see all their naked fears, ambitions and desires exposed in the span of a five-minute song. Anyway, on to…

RT#2: My iPod died a few weeks ago. So when I took the bus to Boston a few weekends ago, I couldn’t imagine going the eight-hour round trip without music. So I resorted to finding a walkman (my Discman crapped out long ago, but somehow, my walkman lives on) and bring along mix tapes I made 5-10 years ago.

The quickest path to immediate nostalgia and memories of your teens and early twenties is to listen to the songs you loved so much, you had to commit them to tape. I mean, you really had to love these songs to take the time to carefully arrange them in a sonically pleasing way, trying to figure out which order to record the songs so they flow into each other the best, deciding what kind of mood each side of the tape should evoke (serene and contemplative, romantic, rawk out, fun and poppy, etc.)

Okay, so I spent a lot of time on my mix tapes. First, I’d write out a list of my favorite songs of the moment, and then work out an order for when each song would appear on the tape. I had a really old 6-disc CD changer back then, and it was the noisiest machine I ever owned. It didn’t come with a remote control (that’s how ancient it was), so I had to manually input each song I wanted to record by pressing these tiny buttons on this huge boombox. And each time the CD changed from one disc to another, it would make a clank wheeze bam sound like stereo was slowly collapsing in on itself. I was always scared a disc would get accidentally jammed and the whole thing would die on me and eat my CDs (it happened twice actually, and took forever for Circuit City to repair). It was really an arduous experience to make a mix tape on that thing.

So for me, looking at the tapes now, I know that I adored these songs to have committed them to cassette. It’s so funny to look back on the songs now, stuff I haven’t listened to in years. It reminds me of who I was and even what I was thinking about when I listen to them.

Just as an example, here’s the set list from one of my mix tapes I called “Satisfied Mind”. I realize now I made a huge mix tape sin by putting songs by the same artist from the same album back to back, but oh well. I didn’t know better:

SIDE A

Blue (Jayhawks)*Yard of Blonde Girls (Jeff Buckley)*Tom Courteney (Yo La Tengo)*Pablo & Andrea (Yo La Tengo)* Paul is Dead (Yo La Tengo)*Selfless, Cold and Composed (Ben Folds Five)*Steven’s Last Night in Town (Ben Folds Five)*Battle of Who Could Care Case (Ben Folds Five)*Evaporated(Ben Folds Five)*Morning Theft (Jeff Buckley)

Way too much Ben Folds Five on there, dontcha think?

SIDE B

Salisbury Hill (Peter Gabriel)*Will the Circle Be Unbroken (The Staple Singers)*Fake Plastic Trees (Radiohead)*Just (Radiohead)*Street Spirit(Radiohead)*The Long Road(N. Fateh Ali Khan and Eddie Vedder from Dead Man Walking soundtrack)*Satisfied Mind (Jeff Buckley)

Analyze what you will about me from that collection of songs, circa 1999 (I think).

I highly recommend going back to your oldl mix tapes to see what you were listening to, and what kind of person you were back then. It’s a crazy and sort of fun trip down memory lane. And you’ll experience the “why the hell did I like this song” a couple times. And don’t worry, just hide the walkman in your bag, like I do. It’s pretty embarrassing to walk around with, I know, but what can you do…

Community Service (for the week of Oct. 29 – Nov. 2)

To recap: I had 8 hours to make up for wasting time online last week. Let’s see how I did!

-I prepared a real meal in my kitchen. It was my mushroom curry recipe again, but I had mushrooms I needed to use before they went bad, and plus, it’s really a very tasty meal. I could probably eat it 1-2 a week. 1 hour.

-Ten minutes doing a workout video. ONLY 10? Hey, in my defense, I was it was a 10 minute toning video that focuses on different parts of the body. I chose the abs workout, and it was great. The instructor kept cheering, “you’ll have a six-pack in no time,” and I almost believe her but not really. I Netflixed the DVD like a month ago, and have only done the abs, arms and power stretch each once. I have no excuse: it’s only a 10 minute workout video, so I gotta hold onto it for another few weeks, just to get some good stretching and muscle building out of it. 10 min.

-A long walk through beautiful Central Park yesterday. It was a really nice fall day, sunny without being too warm or too cold, and the leaves on the trees are just starting to change colors. 1 hour.

-So this is sort of a funny story. I was supposed to meet my boyfriend last night. He was going to go home, change out of his suit and into jeans, and come back to my neighborhood to do the late dinner/drinks thing. He calls at 9:30 from the subway to say he’s on his way home. He calls back fifty minutes later. I say, “where are you?” And he says 214th St. I think he’s joking because that’s just the kind of thing he’d joke about. But he wasn’t kidding–he fell asleep and woke up all the way up in the Bronx! (And just so you know he started out from 42nd Street, and was supposed to get off way before 214th.)

He did this once before, the first time he ever rode the subway, so that’s why I thought he was joking. But this time he wasn’t. He had to travel up another two subway stops to the end of the 1 line, and wait in the subway car until it started its long journey back down. So I’m super worried that he’ll fall asleep again, or he’s sitting alone in a subway car and who knows what crazy person will come in–basically being super paranoid–and all the while waiting for him to call me back and let me know he made it home okay, I decide I need to do something with my time so I don’t freak myself out. (Again, in my defense, people occasionally get randomly attacked on subways here for no good reason. There’s probably an article about it once every other week.)

So I write a pitch letter to an online magazine that relates to the writers strike. And it actually turned out really well. The magazine might not choose to go with the idea, but I’m really proud of how how it came out–I think I made a well-written and compelling argument. I don’t write pitch letters very often (that’s another thing I’m definitely trying to do more of) , so out of a stressful time came a pretty good piece of writing. And happily, my boyfriend made it home safe and sound if exhausted after such a long day. I know I need to be better at focusing to get work done, but I never want this kind of focus again! 1.5 hours.

-The above lead me to do more research into full-time freelance writing, which I read up on a lot online. 1 hour.

-I wrote my first letter for The Modern Letter Project. It’s a project designed to bring back the lost art of snail mail correspondence. It’s so much fun getting something in the mail that’s not a bill or yet another credit card application, and I really miss it. I use to stay in touch with a junior high friend who moved back to Japan via snail mail, and she used to write me on the most cute (and strange) Japanese stationary. It was a small thing, but it definitely brightened up my day.

So this is a chance to recapture that experience, except I know nothing about whom I’m writing to except for his or her name and location. Which made for an interesting letter to write, choosing what to share about yourself with a stranger. I hope she enjoys reading it; I put some thought into it. And I look forward to receiving my own letter soon, and each month after that. 1 hour.

Obviously, I didn’t make up all the time wasted, so I’ll have to tack on the extra hours (4.5 ) to next week’s community service. I’ll try to make it up later this week as well as the weekend.

Hopes/predictions for next week: More freelance writing research, more 10 minute toning, and more long walks in Central Park before the leaves go away and there’s only a bunch of tree skeletons to look at.

“My So-Called Life” on DVD

The writer’s strike seems poised to happen on Monday, so I’ve already started watching TV on DVD by Netflixing all the episodes of My So-Called Life. It aired from 1994-95 and only lasted 19 episodes, but I think it was the first show to center on a teenage girl in a truly realistic way. Without it, there’d be no Buffy, Felicity or Joey Potter. MSCL is like the anti-Hannah Montana in just every way imaginable.

The show in a nutshell: Angela Chase, in the throes of an identity crisis, dyes her hair red, lusts after Jordan Catalano (you could never just call him Jordan, part of his mystique was that you always called him Jordan Catalano), befriends bad seeds Rayanne and Ricky after ditching former BFF Sharon, all the while evading the crush of nerdy boy-next-door Brian Krakow.

The show is so high school circa Clinton administration (right down to Angela’s mom’s Hillary haircut). I remember watching the show when it first aired, and then a lot more when MTV would air reruns after the show was canceled. It definitely feels like time travel; in the same way people who grew up in the 80s relate to the pitch-perfect pop culture references in “Freaks and Geeks,” this show takes you right back to the moment when flannel ruled the ensembles of both boys and girls, and people listened to grunge and still made mix tapes. It seems to capture a time took place so long ago, and it really is only ten years old.

If you ever wanted to remember how angsty and self-important you were in high school, this show reminds you quite nicely.

I went to high school in the mid-90s, and while watching the first episode of the show on DVD, I recalled that I lived my very own “My So-Called Life” moment. There’s an episode towards the end of the series when Angela wakes up and realizes she finally no longer has a crush on Jordan Catalano. I even remember the line from her voice-over: “I am so over Jordan Catalano.” She celebrates by dancing and jumping on her bed to the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun.”

So me: I had the hugest crush on a guy in high school who was in my Latin class. He was sweet, smart and very cute, and one year older than me. He was also president of the Latin club. See, it might not sound like he could have been smart or cute on that basis alone, but he was the anamoly of hotness in four years of Latin.

I had a very Angela-esque crush on him. Because Angela focused on the little things like “one time I think I touched his sleeve during a pop quiz,” and Angela could live on that moment for days. Same for me. Me and him– let’s call him Rocky–did some mild flirting once in awhile, and were “class” friends in the sense we talked during class but not outside it. But I knew I was completely out of league.

He graduated, and somehow I got his email address, and got up the nerve to email him at college, and he emailed like three sentences back (“great to hear from you, college is great, how’s latin?”) and I lived on that for days. I was able to sustain a giant crush on him for an entire school year even though he wasn’t even there. That takes tremendous brain power, really, to spend that much thinking about a person I didn’t even see anymore.

I would dream that he would come back and visit our class (some people came back to visit old H.S. teachers) and see me, and then fireworks would fly and daisies would cry and he’s finally like me just as much as I liked him.

One morning in the spring, I woke up with this thought: “I am so over Rocky Balboa.” And then like magic, “Blister in the Sun” came on the radio. It was kismet! I danced around my room a bit–I might have even jumped on my bed. I felt like Angela Chase, like I conquered something that had been dragging me down for so long. I went to school feel fresh and free.

I’m in Advanced Latin later that day, and the door opens. In walks Rocky, looking like a grumpy king forced to come back see how his peons were operating. He sat down in the easy chair at the front corner of the classroom, and looked a little heavier that his high school days. To say I was in shock really undermines just how outright flabbergasted I was. Because I just had had my moment! The song came on, and I danced, and I was actually over him! And now he was back, if just to visit, during his spring break. Cruel fate, why me?

I think I went over to him and said something which I can’t remember (although what ever I had said mortified me, because I reran it in my head and carried it around like a heartache for days, wishing I had said something more fun or witty) and he gave me a hug. And that was the last time I saw him.

I don’t recall how much longer my crush lasted beyond that. I think Rocky’s actual return deflated the image I had built and lovingly nurtured over time. But the strangeness of my Angela Chase moment colliding with his reappearance has always made me laugh–at myself, and at how weird life can be.

Like I said above, more than any other show, “My So-Called Life” viciously and deliciously awakens you back to what it was like to be a teenage girl: a grinding kind of insecurity and hopefulness, and the occasional bit of delirious perfection that could come from touching someone’s sleeve during a pop quiz.

How I wasted my time this week (Oct. 29th – Nov. 2nd)

To recap: I made a pledge last week not to press the “refresh” button on websites that sapped my productivity and energy, in order to make more time to get actual work done, and maybe even cook something or take a long walk before it gets too freezing outside.

The outcome: I’m so proud to say that I actually followed through with the above. It felt like once I actually wrote down how this was becoming a major issue for me, I was able to give it up pretty easily. And even better, I found I didn’t miss it. The temptation to pause work and jump to a site and immerse myself in news was less, well, tempting. As a result, I got so much work done this week for my job. Unfortunately, I didn’t make time for a long walk/cooking/yoga, but those are all goals to accomplish for next week.

Also, I view the upcoming writers strike as a good news/bad news thing for my pop culture diet.

Good news: No TV show airing due to strike = no TV articles, interviews, recap and commentary to consume

Bad news: Good TV shows replaced by reality trash and “To Catch a Predator” reruns

It’ll be interesting to see how long this strike drags on for, and what kind of bite it will take out of television. But I’m definitely on the writers’ side. For a cogent analysis of why the writers are striking–and are right to do it–I highly recommend reading award-winning sitcom writer Ken Levine’s blog post about the issue. I could sacrifice my “Lost” or “30 Rock” fix if it means that creative types are getting the money they deserve. Go WGA!

Hours wasted: 8. Not too bad. I spent all of yesterday hanging out with my boyfriend since he’d been away for a week-long business trip, but today is for community service. I’ll report back on what I did with my time later in the week.