rather short of the average sort (or, why they don't call it the orangeish-yellows) Aug 30 '05 (Updated Sep 26 '05)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line (Soon I hope to be back with a real review, and after that, more. But this piece is introspection. Flee! After you read the bold-faced song titles, I mean.) When I noticed yesterday the existence of alexdg1’s write-off about sad/ heart-breaking/ tear-jerking songs, it called out to me in ways that have little to do with its intent. I don’t, as it happens, cry or wallow in broken hearts; call me a handsome macho stud if you must, but that’s not how I react to unhappy things. Instead I respond pro-actively, by getting stressed and irritable, growling, doing this weird tense whipsaw head motion, whining about how stupid people are, and then disappearing into the computer room to manage teams of non-existent baseball players in non-existent cities. However, I’ve had occasion to do these things too often this summer. As with last summer, when I returned from a prolonged absence with a please-skip-this-if-you-don’t-care essay about my teaching misadventures, I’d rather package my bad feelings into one avoidable web of digressions rather than letting them seep into actual product reviews. Here, then, are some songs built to speak to frustrations. Ani DiFranco, “Untouchable Face” the Cure, “Pictures of You” Frustrations which, if we stick to mine, will look tiny and irrelevant to many of you. Pop music has made it clear that the #1 cause of immediate misery and self-pity is loneliness, especially that caused by romantic defeat; and even if music didn’t tell me, I’d remember some of what that’s like. But only some, thank goodness, and for now I can still plan to keep it that way. “Untouchable Face” – one of Ani’s gentle, stripped-down guitar songs where she isn’t showing off her speed or agility because her narrator wouldn’t have the energy – is a favorite of mine: fair-minded and generous even in the rage of defeat, and twice as unhappy for it. “I could make you happy, you know, if you weren’t already … Too bad you had to have a better half. She’s not really my type, but I think you two are forever, and I hate to say it but you’re perfect together”. It’s a song where “Fuuck you, for existing in the first place” is the only fair accusation to be lobbed; and, since I was cursed with excellent taste in women long before I was able to do much about it, it’s a song that chanced to arrive in my life on the exact day I was most freshly able to apply it to someone. And I didn’t realize til I started writing this that, while I remember telling that story and meaning it, I’ve forgotten the details: who the hell was I moping about, way back in 1996-ish? Probably no one half as cool as my now-wife Cindy, so seriously, how bad can things be for me? “Bad enough that I can be stuck in a world where the Cure’s ‘Pictures of You’ is being used in a camera commercial!”, I reply fiercely. As comebacks go, it’s a nice try: even if Robert Smith’s broken warbling and the guitar’s minor-key vamping didn’t _sound_ lushly miserable, it’s a song about “breaking apart all my pictures of you”, of “finally [finding] the courage to let it all go”. But even if goddamned stupid insensitivity bugs me more than is sane or normal, that’s no consolation when some of you are a lot better looking and better paid than me, yet single. Jim Croce, “Working at the Car Wash Blues” Which is known to economics profs as “disequilibrium”, and can be a little scary. Cindy makes pretty good money designing computer chips, but she could use _some_ financial help, and my income for most of this summer was zero. She doesn't want that; why would she? This is not because I was not working, exactly. I sent as many cover letters and resumes and inquiries as I could stand; I did as many interviews and sent as many thank-you notes and made as many follow-up calls as I had the chance at. Plus, eventually, I did the sleuthing to discover that, even though I’d qualified for a Highly Qualified teaching license, the official state records showed me with only a Temporary license set to expire. I also looked for summer temp work: all told, I worked some 50-hour weeks, though I also had slow weeks where I could catch up on housework and thumb-twiddling. Until recently, when I got hired to teaching evening/ weekend classes for the Princeton Review (Yay! Happy dance!), this led nowhere. Strangely – or not strangely, given how many of the great British bands, at least, got started while collecting dole money – there’s a dearth of songs about this. “Working at the Car Wash Blues” isn’t a tear-jerker, it’s a high-energy comedy about the pretensions of the narrator (“I told them that I was a genius; they said ‘We got all that we can use’”) – but I have my own pretensions, y'know, and while it’s possible a car wash would hire me, Kinko’s never did. (Musico note: it’s preposterous to mention Jim Croce in a Sad Songs write-off and not mention the lovely “Time in a Bottle”. It’s a love song, and it even seems to be a requited-love song, but more than that it’s a lament, about how requiting can only happen when it fits the schedule. “There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them” – especially if, like Croce, you die in an accident shortly thereafter. But y’know, this summer of unemployment, I had more time than usual to spend with Cindy, yet fewer stories to tell her, and less help to give when her co-workers ask her “So what’s Brian up to?”. Just so you know, Jim, wherever you are: you had a damn good job, and you allocated your time far better than most of us do.) Grandaddy, “Non-phenomenal Lineage” Voivod, “Best Regards” If these songs were part of a mixtape, “Non-phenomenal Lineage” would have come first. It’s a rising action, a song that unfolds slowly but with grandeur: the ringing and ponderous guitar, but even more so the synthesizer patch, a blatantly mechanized choir voicing that puts me in mind of back when one could describe a new church as “amusing, awful, and artificial” and mean “it gives pleasure, inspires awe, and shows great handiwork”. In this context, Jason Lytle’s throaty, hesitant mumble tells us what we need to know even before the words do: “Hello, good morning sir: the results are back. Now it’s time to pack your things and go. Seems you came up rather short of the average sort; now we must inform you’ve no reason left to remain here”. Grandaddy are from California, and maybe people tell you such things there. In North Carolina, technology has advanced to phones and even answering machines, but that doesn’t mean the human resources personnel would stoop to using them, and no matter how many calls I make or how many promises I get that “We’ll let you know by Friday”, it’s been left to me to know when to pack. It gives an extra punch, for me, to Voivod’s “Best Regards”. Set to a thrashing, angular melody, it already resonated with me on a political level, which it intends: the singer has written many times to his (Senator? President?), hopefully signing himself “Denis Belanger” rather than “Snake”. “The sky is falling, the clouds are burning, I’m more than sorry/ You, you write me back blank empty words; you don’t write back. What a disappointment: was I indiscreet? Perhaps I’m impolite; was I out of place?”. Yeah, I know; I didn’t expect miracles (well, maybe a little), but I used to write to the proper authorities in hopes that my arguments would at least be read. Now I use Epinions instead, and they are: thanks, guys, even if you don’t run the world. Which you don’t, alas. But then, I also wrote my first sample S.A.T. essay (as part of the Princeton Review application process) unaware that each 25-minute essay will be looked at for about one minute. Mine was much funnier than it needed to be, and bad, because it was not written to the correct intro/ example/ example/ example/ conclusion structure that the question didn’t, um, actually ask for. I also remember my general interview that Guilford County Schools required as recently as last summer (it doesn’t now), where each candidate would be asked the same questions for the camcorder, and I answered the questions by thinking about them, asking for more information, and saying the most truthful thing I could think of. Jack, my Princeton Review trainer (who teaches science at Ragsdale, and almost certainly teaches wonderfully), was told in advance by a friend-of-a-friend that schools are looking for specific answers, and he was told what those answers were. He recited them on cue. The day after _his_ general interview, and his blank empty words, he got calls from eight different schools. Weakerthans, “Pamphleteer” Obviously, I should know better by now than to handicap myself with sincerity, but I’m bad enough at saying what I mean. The extra effort of fakery leaves me lost, and it’s no wonder I’m attracted to songs with slow, hesitant, stumbling rhythms, where the singer and band dance around each other, not quite in sync. I’ve quoted “How I don’t know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you/ How you don’t know where you should look, so you look at my hands” before; with any luck, this scene sounds inane to you. I’ve lived it. They Might Be Giants, “Wearing a Raincoat” I hope, I truly hope, that the only people masochistic enough to read this are people who’ve read a lot of my other pieces. I’m weary, I’m in an accentuate-the-negative mood, I’m trying to put all that weariness in one place and lock it away, and in the process I’m selling myself short. My teaching interviews don’t lead to jobs – my new discovery that I’m _still_ showing with an (expired) Temporary License can’t be helping – but 70% of the time I can tell the interviewers enjoy talking to me. I can be creative, I can be goofy, I can respond semi-coherently to other people, I can even get my head out of my tuchus long enough to think about people whose issues aren’t mine. Cindy considers me “charming” and even, most of the time, a “bouncy, happy” sort. This has recently led to me having a good number of local, real-life friends. Friends are lovely: “You’ll need your friends for later on”, as John Linnell sings to us here, chirpy and wise. Yet, to the degree that people listen to miserable music for re-assurance that they’re not alone, no song has comforted me more lately than “Wearing a Raincoat”. It skips along on assertions like “Wearing a raincoat is flying around in a yellow rubber airplane made out of raincoat” and “Needing a friend to talk you down is food that comes from a pipe”. But Linnell bluffs and distracts the way I like to bluff and distract, when I have wrong thoughts, and by the time his kazoo-like vocorder has kicked in to disguise his voice, he’s reached a disturbing patch of sense: ”Being awake is swimming around in a lake of the undead And the undead are like a bunch of friends that demand constant attention. Demanding constant attention Will only lead to attention, And once they have that attention They’ll use it to ask for attention, And once they have that attention They’ll use it to ask for attention”. I don’t mean you Epinion readers (indeed, I give hugs and thanks to Liz, Mike, other Mike, Drew, Caroline, Anna-Maria, Jer, T.J., Eric, Ali, Jason, other Brian, Jay, and Duane, for your e-mailed or instant-messaged entertainment and support). After all, it is a rare thing to make friends who don’t say hi until _after_ they know my off-putting obsessions with weird music, politics, history, forced Buffy analogies, and bad puns, and it is freeing. My real life friends have shown bravery of their own, I admit – choosing to speak to a fellow who’d wear a bright yellow shirt to dance at a goth club – but they were taken in by mere charm. And once they have my charm, they use it to ask for more charm. Like Mother Nature crushing fossils to make oil, I have only so much charm to give away before the whole system crashes, and if I was ignoring my In-Box lists of new reviews and new comments until today, it was in horror of draining the supply yet further. Grandaddy, "AM 180" But more than any of that, I've just been feeling a little embarrassed to show my ... hm, "face around here" doesn't finish this sentence right, but you know what I mean, yes? "AM 180" is a faster, catchier Grandaddy song with its own shiny fake synth patches, but the sentiments follow "Non-phenomenal Lineage" smoothly. "Don't change your name, leave it the same, for fear I may lose you again. I know you won't, it's just that I'm unorganized and want to find you when" (a brief pause for disbelief) "something good happens". So what the hell: I have a teaching job now, part-time but at a good hourly rate. And I miss y'all. I don't know if I'll have as much _time_ to be here as I used to have; but if so, perhaps, I can drain the last of that charm supply with vigor, and buy more at Harris Teeter when payday hits.

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