The 30-Day Song Challenge - Day 2

Day Two: Your least favorite song.

I'll admit it: I started on this thing without reading what the 30 different categories were. I'm starting to get the sense that they were written by someone in their formative years.

When I was 19, I had occasion to interview the sing for the Judybats, a band I dearly adored. We were scheduled to speak by phone and I departed from my normal interviewing routine of basically having a conversation, and then clarifying the points which needed it either at the end or sometime before publication. Since I wouldn't have a chance to follow up with more questions later, I decided to prepare some in advance, and was immediately confronted with the idea that there are only a handful of standard questions that people ask when a record is coming out.

As I said, I was 19, so my immediate thought was to come up with questions that would oppose the normal interviewing and marketing conventions. I suspect I just wanted one of my heroes to remember me.

Which is how I ended up asking him what his least favorite song on the new album was.

He was understandably nonplussed, and asked me to repeat the question. I did so, and he hemmed and hawed about various things before finally settling in on a track that had been written during the sessions for the previous album, but was making its debut on this one. He made it clear that the age of the song was the only criteria for naming it as his least favorite. He was simply more excited about newer songs.

I bring this up because it's what I thought of when I read today's category. It's a weirdly antagonistic question to ask someone who is giving up a bit of time to share music with people. I felt bad the instant after I asked the question, as I could see that, rather than coming up with something new, I had simply inverted a normal question in the least interesting way.

And there's a lot of that on this list. For most of the times you get to pick a favorite, you come back the next day and ponder its opposite. The challenge is doing so in such a way that it stays interesting to me. It would also be nice if it were interesting for you, but I'd settle for it not feeling like a chore.

Then there's the promotional nature of this thing to consider. I'm meant to add a youtube video of whatever my choice is. I can think of loads of music I do not enjoy, for whatever reason, but I wouldn't want to add a clip of something I dislike to my blog.

*****

My first thought was something to do with the Black Eyed Peas, even though I think it's mostly about context with them. I saw them perform on Saturday Night Live, and my impression was that they were about as good as a mediocre high school talent show entrant. Which is pretty underwhelming, but if I were watching, say, a high school talent show, I doubt it would register so much as being atrocious. It's merely the heights of success they've managed to reach with their minimal gifts that I find galling. It's not so much about them as is it about the disparity.

So then, I thought I should think in terms of something I find loathsome or unlistenable from an artist I generally admire. That seems more appropriate. I thought of "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)" by the Beatles. It's not hard to find people willing to admit this is their worst song, but it was a b-side, and it has a sense of whimsy and was clearly a lot of fun to record, so I'm giving it a pass.

And so, we come to the high-water mark of bad music by great musicians: Metal Machine Music. The basice story is as follows: Lou Reed still owed an album to his record label, but was angry about something, or didn't want to do it. He was contractually obliged, however, and the result was a full album of, well, this:



Note the appropriate imagery. I'm guessing no one who clicks in is likely to last longer than a full minute. I had a rather nice box set of his music in the early 90s, and it contained about a minute from this work, which seems about right.

Still, it was borne of frustration, and it sure sounds like it, so it does sort of work on some level. As a statement of displeasure with a record label—who must have blinked, swallowed hard and looked around a couple of times before shrugging and releasing the album as is—it seems like a particularly elegant way of saying "fuck you." It's the sonic equivalent of that famous photograph of Johnny Cash angrily flipping off a cameraman.



And for me, it's the high-water mark for unlistenable music from someone I admire greatly.

Or it was, until a couple of years ago, when Mr. Reed decided to stage a "Symphony for Dogs." It's gonna be hard for anyone to dethrone that. It cannot be heard by human ears, and that sort of inverts the idea of "unlistenable" in much the same way I tried to invert "what's your favorite from the new record" all those years ago.

The 30 day song challenge - Day 1

Day One: Your Favorite Song

A couple of friends on Facebook have been doing this (the Facebook page is here), and I figured I'd leap in as well, but do it over here where I can take a bit more time to discuss why a particular song made the cut or whatever. This way, I'll have a way to blog daily with a relatively easy meme.

Already, though, I'm in trouble. Day one asks you to post your favorite song. Do adults still have favorite songs? If it asked me to list seventy songs I particularly enjoy, I'd have no problems whatsoever, but a single song that counts as my favorite?

Yes, by the way, I shall likely be overthinking each of the 30 entries.

The other issue is that you're supposed to link a youtube video of the song in question, but a lot of the music I listen to is relatively obscure by youtube standards, and no such video exists. I suppose in those cases, I'll mention at least two songs, and have a video for whichever ones I can find.

For my favorite song, I decided to go for a Beatles track, as they are my favorite band. My favorite record of theirs is Revolver, and the track that most exemplifies what makes that record so exciting for me is "Tomorrow Never Knows." While much of Revolver straddles the line between the jangly pop music that put them on the map in the first place and the expanding consciousness music that would cement their legacy, "Tomorrow Never Knows" has both feet planted firmly in the future.

As a feat of songwriting and recording, it's kind of audacious. It's one chord droning on and on with backward looping guitars crying out like seagulls and some of Ringo's finest drumming creating a sense of dynamics under Lennon's nasal monotone.

I actually used to call a radio station in sixth grade and request this song. Sometimes, they even played it for me.

The youtube version that I am linking is apparently from the Beatles' Saturday morning cartoon, which I've not really seen since I was ten or eleven. I'm more than a bit surprised that they made a clip for this song.



Cartoon shorthand for backward guitar? Giant horns that terrify bats but seem to arouse dinosaurs. Good to know.

Sudden showers

The last Tuesday in August finds me somewhat reflective, although not more so than normal in terms of visible light. It's 90° again. This has been a hot summer in Chicago, coming on the heels of no spring at all.

Soon the weather will break, the chill will set in, and we can all get back to complaining about how cold it is. In the meantime, I'm mainly tired of sweating so much.

*****

I recently took a nice mini-vacation with a friend, canoeing 40 miles of the Wisconsin River with nothing but our wits, far too much food, miscellaneous gadgets and as much comfort as could be fitted into our watercraft.

Though we slept in a tent on a sandbar, it would be hard to say we were roughing it. This was fine, as neither of us are noted for our hardy ruggedness.



The second day of our intended three was punctuated in the late afternoon by a rumble of thunder. We had recently talked ourselves out of correctly reading our map, so it was easy to carry our wrongness momentum into a belief that it was not actually going to rain. Though cloudy, nothing we could see had the dark look of rainclouds. Even long after it became clear to us both that rain was imminent, my friend shushed me during the thunder in the hopes that he could trace its origins to the nearby highway, some anomaly in the pavement or a vehicle that would put us in the clear.

Still, we searched for a place to put ashore. Thunder, after all, means lightning, and being in a metal boat on water didn't seem like the most wondrous place to be if giant bolts of electricity were milling about.

It had begun to rain by the time we found a spot to put ashore, on a little clearing which seemed to be the origin of all the mud in Wisconsin. We peered bleakly around at the mud and the giant mosquitos and hoped the rain would subside before we would have to make camp. It grew cold, and we found our jackets, put them on. The rainproof fabric was just another interesting sensation on my skin, in addition to the sunburn, sand, sunscreen and bug repellant. I fastened the hood and pulled its drawstring.

Before long, the rain began to subside, and we glared one last time at the muddy sinkhole before shoving the canoe back into the water in search of a better place to camp. We had seemingly no sooner pushed off than my friend spotted the bridge over the river ahead. This meant we had gone far in excess of our intended distance for the day, and now were less than a mile from our extraction point, with something like 21 hours to spare.

This was when the rain truly began.

It was possibly the hardest rain I have ever been outside for, or it felt that way. The tiny drops pelted the surface of the river so that it resembled stucco. Within moments I was blind, the sunscreen and insect spray rushing into my eyes from my forehead. My glasses were no help, as they beaded and obscured as much or more than the chemicals. We began shouting to one another over the roar of water. We would make it to the landing and figure it out from there, we agreed, the sooner the better.

We paddled hard. Harder, probably, than any previous point on the trip. I was in the rear of the craft, responsible for the steering. I shouted again that I was nearly blind, and that my friend should call out if we needed to alter direction. A pool of water was forming at my feet inside the canoe, and I began to wonder if I would need to stop paddling and start bailing it out. So in my blindness, I kept one eye on the rapidly rising water in the canoe and one on the bridge ahead that signaled safety and potential dryness.

In a strange way, this sudden storm was the most fun part of the trip, truly exhilarating. Though I was worried about our various calamities, I also felt kind of wonderful.

My cell phone was working, and we arranged for a ride back to the place our trip originated. In a flash, our trip was over, and we were left with only the mundanities of slogging back to Illinois. I have to say that even now, nearly two weeks later, I still feel a small amount of the sadness I felt when I realized we were headed home a day early.

My friend and I have made plans to repeat the trip. We have discussed the things we should do differently next time to enhance the experience. We have talked also about camping sans canoe in the fall when the weather turns crisp and a campfire becomes a lifeline. Perhaps most importantly, we seem to have rekindled a friendship that seemed as though it had lain fallow for too long.

*****

Forgive, please, the length and rambliness. I'm rusty.

Monday morning haiku: April 5

Spring barges in like
a petulant pubescent
with a heart of gold

Not a book report

I'm back among the Workers these days, the curious folk who live in the building where I am sometimes called upon to build documents for money. I try not to show up too early, so that they will be up and breakfasted before my arrival.

Many of the people I used to know among them are no longer there. This financial crisis thingie has hit and hit hard. There have been layoffs, and a few times those remaining have been asked to accept a decrease in pay to help ensure the short-term stability of the company. Today was one such day. This makes me fear for my own situation there, which is temporary anyway. It also makes me feel quite sad for the situation in which the Workers find themselves.

I heard on television that unemployment is always a "lagging indicator" in tough economic times, which is meant to indicate that it takes longer to stabilize than the actual crisis. This isn't much comfort.

So I find myself a bit melancholic this Monday evening. Hoping a good night's sleep will take care of some of that. If not, perhaps I will devour a sheet cake.

*****

I've been thinking about the 100 Books/100 Films thing, and am now convinced that I would rather saw off my foot than attempt to write 200 posts like the one I posted Sunday. To say nothing of asking anyone to pop in and slog through such posts. The reasonable thing to do would be to publish a few lumped together every week or so, focusing on highlights and lowlights. I except I'll do a book or film all on its lonesome from time to time, but only in such cases where I genuinely had something to say or a strong response.

Bear with me, I am still figuring things out.

This also means I can blog like a normal person more often, without it getting buried in what would be a new review every two days or so. I find I am looking forward to doing some normal posts.

*****

The lists I am going by, incidentally (the AFI Top 100 Films and the Modern Library Top 100 Books), are not meant to imply that I necessarily endorse their choices for the cream of their respective crops. Any two people would have wildly varying lists, and there are a number on these lists which I might rank higher or lower or omit in favor of another selection.

The main thing is that they are concrete lists, and each have many selections which I have never experienced for one reason or another. The books one, in particular, intrigues me with a nice blend of things I know I enjoyed, things I have always meant to read, and things I had never heard of before. And, yeah, a few I know already are clunkers.

A note about the Top 100 recaps

They need to be shorter. I'll try harder with the next one.

Top 100 Books - #100: The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. 1918, 520 pages.

*****

So last night I finished up The Magnificent Ambersons a little after one, and then spent about 90 minutes wringing out a rather wordy reaction to it, before recalling—with my cursor hovering over the "publish" button—that I am not a book critic.

I think this little project of mine will go a lot more smoothly for both of us, Blogreader, if I confine myself to my own experiences with the book, rather than 100 somewhat disjointed book reports. After all, this project was never intended to be a cosmic make-up exam for all the book reports I failed to complete in school.

*****

Books.

Honestly, that was my main thought when I decided to tackle this list. To color it in a bit, you should imagine me saying that with a sideways grin and a pirate's glint in my eye.

I love books, of course. I've been reading since before I can remember, and I have some pretty old memories. I have spent most of my life voraciously devouring anything readable in my path. But a curious thing happened a couple of years ago when I made the conscious decision to write: I all but stopped reading at the same time. I just sort of fell out of the habit. At first, I suspect it was because I was struggling to find my voice, and didn't want a bunch of other voices clouding me as I did so, but even when I stopped writing, I only read actual books occasionally. This made me a bit sad.

The list is not only my way back into my blog, but also a rekindling of a lifelong passion.

*****

The Magnificent Ambersons, it turns out, is only barely in print. Unable to locate a copy that was less than $15, and being quite cash-poor at the moment, I was pretty delighted to find a scanned copy for free over at Google Books. I was a bit daunted as well, as I've never attempted to read a book on my laptop before. At 520 pages, Ambersons promised a lot of quality time with glasses and screen.

It was not, frankly, an experience I would like to repeat. I like the feel of a book, and the fact that I can move it around, move myself around while reading it. I like that I cannot check my email on it, or read what various people are making for dinner on Facebook. I'm certainly no Luddite, but a good old analog book makes a world of sense to me.

I'm not sure how long it took me to plow through The Magnificent Ambersons. It was 520 pages, sure, but some rather generous typesetting leads me to conclude it would be less than half that under normal, contemporary publishing rules. I took quite a few breaks to do other things, and each new pair of pages took a few seconds to fully resolve, and I still managed to get through in far less than 12 hours. My guess is about four or five hours of concentrated reading.

I had no preconceptions heading in. Like a handful of others on the Top 100 list, it was one I had no real awareness of before I sat down to read it. I had some foggy recollections of a film version floating around in my head, but nothing to do with plot or characters or even when it had originally been published. (The film version, it turns out, was an Orson Welles Joint [as I believe he called his works] from 1942 which would have also been on my Top 100 Films list had I opted for the list from 1998 rather than the one from 2007.)

I hoped, of course, that our Ambersons were going to be a troupe of trapeze performers or magicians or something (perhaps with a mischevious pet monkey?), but instead found rather quickly that they are the richest family in a town which is already, in the opening lines, threatening to become a city.

Tarkington wastes no time establishing that the Ambersons are...uh...magnificent. He cleverly uses that word or a variation no fewer than four times in his opening paragraph, even while he is qualifying the term and explaining that such things are relative. Then he ditches his charges and goes on about fashion styles and buildings and popular songs for a while.

The opening, largely Amberson-less chapter contains some lovely, wryly humorous odes to the town. It also contains the first of several passages which are not especially kind to anyone with a different skin tone or national origin. I won't dwell on this, as the book came out in 1918, and it's hardly fair to judge such passages by the standards of today. They were a bit distracting when they did crop up, but largely because they pop up out of nowhere from time to time and have virtually nothing to do with the main plot.

There is a dark mirror of the opening passage much later in the book, where we once again leave the Ambersons for a bit and see what happens to the town over the passage of some time. These sections, although powerful, pulled me right out of the book. Suddenly, the narrator has all sorts of opinions about everything, which is a sharp contrast to the main body of the book. And since his opinions coincide with our protagonist, who is also clearly our antagonist, it felt like a bit much.

I'm sure there's something interesting that I haven't quite caught in the fact that almost none of the major characters in the book still carry the name "Amberson." George and his mother are Ambersons by blood, but their last name is Minafer. I kind of took this, in addition to all the opening magnificence-qualifying, as a sign that the inevitable downhill run of our poor Ambersons begins long before that mansion has a chance to decay.

Also, as a side note: If you are writing a book with exactly six main characters—three men and three women—try not to name two of the men George. It's just creating problems for yourself. Especially in a book with "Ambersons" right there in the title, when your main George is a Minafer and the secondary George is named George Amberson. I dunno. Just seems like an odd choice.

So anyway: Main George is sort of a prick in his callow youth and there are many in the town, we are told repeatedly, who would like nothing more than to see him receive his comeuppance. I have to count Tarkington among those rooting against George to some degree, as the plot which unfolds involves him growing up and making some pretty horrible decisions over the course of a couple of impetuous days. He imagines himself as Hamlet in one of the darker passages late in the book, attempting to project some nobility on his actions, which will end up costing most of our characters—including himself—any chance they had for happiness.

*****

Yeah. Spoiler alert, I guess. The book is nearly a century old, though, so I don't feel cripplingly bad about it.

*****

I had some problems with the characterizations. Many of them are a bit two-dimensional, acting within their prescribed attributes and possessing no others. But this is a town, or a world, or a time when all of the characters have met the only person they will ever love romantically before they turn 20, and nothing that ever happens in their lives can alter these original loves. Which implies pretty strongly that none of them are capable of any change in other areas either, except by force, which happens to Main George late in the book. That most of the dialogue is of the "I shall now proclaim to you the things that I currently think and feel" variety doesn't help. I want to peg a lot of this on the time in which the book was written, but given that Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain all came before Tarkington, and never seemed to have much trouble creating characters that have the power to feel real and move me, I can't blame all of it on the times.

At its heart, The Magnificent Ambersons is about a boy who learns far too late how to be a man. Indeed, once he has burned down the lives of more than a few of our main characters, he is still stubbornly committed to his belief that he has acted rightly. It is only years later, once the family fortunes are revealed to be so much quicksilver in a nest of cracks (to borrow a phrase from the book), that he engages himself to take care of his aunt and assume responsibility for something beyond his own whims.

Or possibly, the book is about the gradual decay of a statue of Neptune. Or it could be about how unbelievably dirty cities are, and how they tinge and destroy the beauty of formerly great Midwestern towns, erasing the names of those who built it in the first place and replacing them with foreigners and strangers. Mr Tarkington makes it plain that much of the "progress" that came about near the turn of the century—when automobiles began to replace horses with their dirty, dirty dirtiness and their noisy noises—is just another knife plunged into the wholesome and decent world that certainly existed up until then. Except, of course, that—aside from the narrator, who clearly believes this to be the case—the only one who seems to be on that side of the argument is our petulant man-child hero-villain.

*****

So, yeah: a bit of a mixed bag. It was a brisk enough read. There was quite a bit roiling underneath the main narrative which seemed contradictory to me, but, for what it was, I found I enjoyed the ride. Overall, I'd probably give it a solid C.

The "reading on a laptop" aspect was a bit distracting. I also had no idea how many pages were left, which proved a bit of a drag in the last hundred pages, when the end of every chapter felt for all the world like the book was over, and then I'd click to be sure, and...nope. Yeah, I could have scrolled down to see how many pages there were, but I was so sure I was close to the end that I didn't bother.

I feel like I probably missed a lot of stuff in this one, which may have been partially due to my own eagerness to get started on the project without a clear understanding of what it is, exactly, I am doing. The idea of getting a book read and posted served as both a motivator and a distraction in this instance.

There was a lot of very good stuff in this book, and I suspect my writing mostly about the aspects I didn't buy into or enjoy stems from feeling like I didn't really get this one. The mere fact that it's provoking a lot of thought is a decent sign that the book was a success, and I do not begrudge it its Pulitzer or anything.

*****

I expect I will get better at this as I progress, but please feel free to leave suggestions in the comments if there was something you would have liked me to touch on, or something you would have preferred I didn't bother with. Not promising I will take all suggestions, of course, but I'll certainly read them and ponder them.

*****

Tarkington was from Indianapolis, which is almost certainly the town he's describing in this book. My only exposure to Tarkington before this was references from Kurt Vonnegut, also from Indianapolis, who seemed to truly admire Tarkington. Between this fact and my own shaky grasp of the book I just read, I think it is quite likely that I might revisit this book later in the project.

*****

Next up is #99, J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, which was apparently banned in the U.S. when first published in 1955. From what I can glean from the back cover, it seems to be a "wildly funny" bawdy romp through postwar Ireland, which sounds about as different from The Magnificent Ambersons as I might hope. There seems to be a dearth of humorous novels on the list in general, so I'll be trying to embrace the levity when I can.