Great song. Great video. Dolly is wonderful.
You know, now that I m thinking about it, this doesn t quite qualify for duet status, does it? I think of it as a duet because it s Dolly Parton there..
.she ain t no lousy backup singer.
Eh, fuck it.
Here s another duet, then. Just to satisfy you.
Audio: Share something extremely rare that deserves to be heard.
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Dang, I was trying to find the old Hello Recording Club EPs from and , but apparently they are indeed very rare, and I cannot.
But, if you see one lying in the road somewhere, by all means, listen to it. Especially Brian Dewan s song about a wastepaper basket fire. It makes me want to take up office arson as a personal hobby.
Oh, and there s also Crispin Glover s most excellent song, which is probably called Masturbator. The chorus is something like, I m an auto-manipulator, I play with myself, I m a masturbator although he changes it once to replace masturbator with smooth operator. It s a genius song.
Sadly, I only have this on well-worn cassette.
Another thing I only have on cassette and which is worth listening to--again, you know, if you find a copy lying about in a gutter somewhere--is the tape put out by Poor White Trash, the rappin side project of the Volumen. Anything by the is well worth listening to (go to their website and listen to and those other songs, and you ll see), but most of it isn t all that rare.
I suppose it is in some sense, but you can buy it off the Internet, and I urge you to do so. They re good guys.
Damn I love the Volumen.
They really are the best band in the universe, or at least the outer space part of the universe. I command you to go listen to them RIGHT NOW.
This is not a tale about Japanese (are they Japanese?
Filipino?) snacks. No.
This is about a different Yan-Yan altogether, so if you re looking for the poor man s Pocky, go elsewhere.
No. This is about a boy.
A boy I used to call Yan-Yan. His real name was Christian, and he was Filipino, and I guess (he said) his grandma or someone used to call him Yan-Yan, a reduplication of the last syllable of his given name. I thought it very cute and quickly adopted it.
Why? Because I was head over fucking heels in love with the man, that s why.
He had a similarly cloying nickname for me, too.
But I m not telling.
Anyway, Yan-Yan made me a bunch of CDs--wait, is burned the correct term?--and I unearthed them today, and I listened to one, the one that was my favorite, the one titled Heideggerian Deluxe: Artsy, Faggy British Fish Chips.
It s an unnecessarily long title, I agree. It is filled with songs from Travis and Portishead and Supergrass and Coldplay and some other deep-yet-uplifting artists. It s actually a great CD, and I say that despite the fact that I would probably not buy a CD by any of these artists individually.
Oh, wait, no I do have the Supergrass CD. And I might buy Portishead. Oh, right, and there is an Ian Brown song on there, too, the effin brilliant Dolphins Were Monkeys.
Good stuff, that. But Travis and Coldplay? Not really my thing.
I hadn t thought a lot about Yan-Yan in quite some time, but listening to the CD opened a floodgate of lost love. The feelings were real and prickly and a bit achy in awkward places.
So, what s so very noteworthy about that?
Listening to the CD burned especially for you by an ex-boyfriend does that. Certainly. But, see, I never met Yan-Yan, like, in real life.
I met Yan-Yan in a goddamned Internet chat room, I believe it was an MSN chatroom for Asian-Americans. I m not at all Asian (my slogan was white like rice! ), although I am American.
I was just trolling for Asian guys, particularly Japanese guys. Let s not get into my thing for Asian, and especially Japanese men, right now. Let s focus on Yan-Yan.
Anyway, I used to spend time chatting in there and became a regular. It got to the point where we had a little gang going; most of the others in it were Filipino-American. It was fun chatting, and I never took it seriously as real friendships, although I did occasionally talk on the phone with a couple of them and--egads!
--met a couple of the guys in real life. Hah.
Never met Yan-Yan, though, and it took a long time for us to fall in love.
As he said, he had walls. I didn t, but I also wasn t looking for love, just cheap thrills in the form of rapidfire dialogue and flirting. Yan-Yan hardly ever carried on private chats; he always just stuck to the main room.
Except one day he started a private chat with me. And things got out of hand.
It s not what you re thinking.
We started talking about music. He was impressed with my taste and knowledge. He was impressed with my wit.
He was impressed that I was not trying to get his phone number or promising him eternal love. Like I said, things just got totally out of hand. I fell in love with him.
It was so stupid.
This went on for a while, and at some point we started making plans to meet. We also started talking on the phone.
In the heat of a moment (probably talking about The Pixies, but you never know) we told each other the dreaded, I love you. I meant it, and I believe he did, too, at the time. I did not mean that I wanted to marry him or even necessarily sleep with him; you can t know that over the Internet or phone--at least I can t.
I don t know exactly what I meant, I guess, but I do know I really felt what I said. I know it now, several years later, because of the very real emotions fucking Coldplay evoked in me today.
Huh, well, I ll be a dolphin.
I just tried to find his web page, and it doesn t appear to still be there. Dang. I thought I might take a wee peek, but, no, denied.
Should I be walking the beach? Then I d be holding his hand.
Anyway, approximately one day after telling me he loved me, he got really scared and backed out.
He told me in chat and in email. I kept thinking that if I could just convince him that we could slow it down--way, way down--he wouldn t end it altogether, and some day we could still meet and see how it went. But he was already gone, really.
At the L word, the walls went up, very much up, and there was no more access. I sobbed. I called him when I knew he wouldn t answer his phone, just to hear his voice on voicemail.
I listened to a lot of British Fish Chips. Oh, pathetic, right? I had a heartbreak from some guy I never even met, a face and a font in the ether.
I did meet a couple of the other guys--oh, 3, actually--from the chat room in real life. I wasn t in love with them, though they were interesting and fun guys (and at least one of them was dead hawwwttt), and I dated one of them for a few months (yes, in person). When those ended, as they inevitably did, I was barely even fazed.
But, Yan-Yan just hangs there like a ghost sometimes. I have wondered if I would have gotten over him, too, like SNAP!, had I actually met him.
Probably. Or I would have married him. You know--one of the two.
Inspired by Merlin s fabulous and s recent decision to take up the 5 on Friday meme from, uh, that meme site whose name is now totally escaping me. Fuck you, I am not going to Google it for you.
Today is Friday, isn t it?
1. Heartbroke (Ricky Skaggs; Rodney Crowell; written by Guy Clark)
3. Life is a Highway (any version)
4.
Why Why Why (Billy Currington)
5. Oh! Darling (the Beatles, of course)
There are others, but we find these ones particularly interesting.
Some of his favorite songs almost seem like kids songs even though they aren t, e.g., Hey, Good Lookin and Octopus s Garden.
I mean, sure. But I think it s going to be a long, long while before he can really relate, even superficially, to lyrics such as: Pride is a bitch and a bore when you re lonely.
Ah, but god bless Guy Clark.
. They also gave the news in Navajo, though, and I loved listening to it. No, I couldn t understand a word of it, and what I have studied of Navajo has been enough to convince me that it is the hardest language in the world for a non-native to learn.
I suppose it depends on who the non-native is. Anyway, they also often played traditional Navajo music which was also interesting. Even if I didn t understand, it was just interesting, and it was refreshing to be reminded sometimes that America is still not quite as homogenous as it can seem on the surface.
is still going strong, as is the Navajo language, and I have to think that having a radio station that broadcasts partially in the Navajo language is a large measure of what s saving it. The loss of a language is a terrible thing, and I applaud the Navajo for keeping theirs going. I wish I could learn Navajo, but I am simply no match for it.
If you re ever within range of KTNN--and the range seems to include much of the Four Corners states--I not only recommend it, I can also recommend the fry bread (oooooh, Navajo tacos--the best) and Canyon de Chelley, one of my favorite places on earth.
Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound --Hank Jr.
Making this list just reminds me of how many songs I am neglecting.
How can I listen to it all? I clearly need to rededicate my life to listening to music.
And for some reason I have also been wanting to listen to my old Consolidated cassettes, but I don t have them anymore.
interesting, and I have a few things to say about it. I have given this a lot of thought, about the relationship between music and behavior in my own life and that of the people I know.
I remember back in my day, a lot of music was getting blamed for a lot of stuff.
Judas Priest made some kid kill himself or something. There was a big fuss about the Dead Kennedys, too, what with their use of HR Giger artwork. I didn t pay all that much attention, because frankly the idea that Judas Priest made a kid kill himself or whatever seemed insane, but that was just my gut reaction.
And then here were all these experts on Donahue saying that they had some evidence of a link and suchforth. I did know, though, that Jello Biafra had the coolest name EVER.
I do think that there is probably a strong correlation between, just as an example, girls who listen to very sexually explicit music and girls who are likely to have sex in high school.
But correlation is not a cause. Correlation just means the two things exist together. One might cause the other; the other might cause the one; both could just exist coincidentally; or both could be being caused by a third (or set of) forces(s).
In the case of music and behavior, I think it is likely the last option there. I don t have evidence. What I have are anecdotes backing up a gut instinct.
I could be wrong.
Basically my musical listening habits are similar in some respects to those of most people I know; to wit, they have mellowed a lot with age. I grew up listening to country and Motown.
I did get some exposure to things like The Cure and The Smiths from my cousins, and as soon as my mom told me I was not allowed to have any Motley Crue albums, I promptly got them all. The thing is, I didn t like Motley Crue, and I never listened to them. The Smiths were way too mopey for me.
I liked some of The Cure, but they also got pretty mopey. I really, really dug The Talking Heads and the Violent Femmes, though, because they were intelligently cynical without being mopey about it. I like upbeat cynicism.
I was not a mopey child/pre-teen/teenager. Moody, certainly, but not especially mopey, so mopey music did not appeal to me and still does not. Upbeat cynicism appealed very much to me, though, and I also continued listening to country and Motown because, well, because that is some good music.
Then I went through a severely angry stage when I was about 18-20. Very angry. Not mopey, though.
Aggressively angry. Along with the Nirvana and Soundgarden that everyone listened to anyway, I got into some pretty aggressively angry music, like Helmet. But I did recognize that my mood came first, and I was listening to music that supported and bolstered that mood.
Now I can t listen to Helmet anymore or anything that aggressive and angry. As I grow up even further and have a kid and all that, I find myself being attracted to music I would not have liked back then for the very simple reason that it supports and reaffirms feelings that I have every day now. I am still not crazy about songs that get overly sentimental and sappy, but I do find myself enjoying more songs about family and raising kids (and why are almost all songs about childrearing country songs?
). I still listen to Talking Heads and the Femmes and my very beloved trifecta of depressives: Morphine, Nick Drake, and American Music Club. But depression is still something I battle, whereas anger is not.
In other words, my shift in musical taste is again reflecting shifts in my own life, not making them. Certainly there was no song that made me want to conceive a child and become a mother. I listen to music about being a mom now, though, because I am one.
I don t know what listening to some of the music I listen to says about me and my mood at all. Sonic Youth? Foreign Legion?
Los Amigos Invisibles? Miles Davis? Danny Barnes?
Zony Mash? Put those together with the country and the Motown, and I m pretty sure I have a mood disorder.
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