Category Archives: Other things

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The Odour

The odour coming from the young man sitting along from me on the park bench was unpleasant and penetrating. It was clear he’d been playing football, and his socks were the prime mover in this nasal assault. It jolted a memory into my consciousness: I’ve been in the presence of industrial-scale B.O. before – on a bus in Sydney on a hot afternoon commute. I wouldn’t have believed the stench that day if I hadn’t smelt it with my own nose…

SydneyAn obviously homeless man got on the bus and sat in the front seat. Within seconds people scattered almost as if the man had a bomb strapped to his chest. I was sitting about half way down the bus, and the smell reached me just before the first of the refugees did. I had an automatic reaction – I stopped breathing in and quickly identified the source of danger. My body was taking over – fight or flight. It was curious in its strength and intensity. Remember, I was half way down the bus, so my body didn’t actually, literally take flight as those closer had done. I was familiar with the tone of the smell from passing homeless people in the street, but the force of this was like comparing an atomic bomb with a firecracker. It was extremely unpleasant, but I could manage the smell with a combination of controlled breathing and brute will. So I stayed where I was.

What happened next was interesting: a stand-off. First, the people who were revolted, revolted. They demanded, shouting from the back of the bus, that the bus driver eject the man. The driver, who was much closer to the man than anyone else, agreed and demanded that the man get off the bus. The smeller, however, was having none of it. “I’ve paid my fare” he said loudly, in a
deep voice that didn’t sound used to talking, and sat still.

The bus driver picked out the coins, got up, gave the money to the man, and demanded he vacate the bus. The man huffed and puffed, then got up and got off.

I was conflicted: he had paid, and I did feel sympathy for his situation and his embarrassment. I was also relieved, although it was some time after the bus had moved on, windows open, that I dared take a breath. I remember the stench stayed with me, in my imagination perhaps, for days.

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Music in context

We all wandered around, lost amongst the many, at a loss in grief and in support of the grieving. We had just seen Angus driven off for that last ride, boxed up in the back of the car. The whole scene strange. During the ceremony ‘Degenerate’ by Blink 182 and ‘Why Don’t You’ by Gramophonedzie helped us understand who he was and underscored the tragedy.

It was 35 degrees, stupid hot, but the trees provided a kind of relief. Not the kind we wanted, nothing substantial. The mourners greeted each other, hugs and handshakes. Nothing to say. Lost for words.

‘The Kids Aren’t Alright’, by The Offspring, on loop, still playing, still vital, still connecting us to the formality of what had just played out, became a backdrop, a context. “The kids are grown up but their lives are worn”.

I’d probably heard it before but didn’t remember it. Not my kind of music. But here I liked it. Actually, here I loved it. It worked. Context is important.

I experience that every so often: being surprised by a genre or a song that I previously spurned. Finding enjoyment where I least expected it.

My taste in music changes all the time, but not much. Not so much that I notice it on a daily or even monthly basis. But my favourite bands in 2000 are not my favourites now. The change is glacial though. I loved REM. All of REM. Now, I cherish a couple of their albums, hardly ever play them, and respect their legacy immensely. I hadn’t rushed to hear their new releases for a decade.

It’s easy to stick with what you know. Mostly I get to choose the music I listen to, although teenage daughters increasingly challenge that. Sometimes, in a very controlled manner, I explore new sounds. Usually music that relates to sounds I like. But sometimes context sweeps all of my preconceptions away.

Context shreds our status quo, laughs at our taste-limitations, and overrides our crafted reputations. That country song playing in a café – magic! What was that drum & bass track playing in my friend’s car? These surprises sometimes get through our defences because the context finds us with our deflector shields down. And they’re not always, perhaps not often, pleasant, but when they are it’s glorious. It’s pleasing. It at least makes the next 3 or 4 minutes bearable, but at best it may open a whole new realm of music for us.

The Cinematic Orchestra used in a goofy dog video on You Tube? Thanks spiro1098, I’ve bought every recorded minute and had hours of enjoyment from their music. And I really didn’t expect it.

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Music player device thingy

Currently on my portable music player device thing:

  • The Cinematic Orchestra: Arrival of the Birds [song]
  • The Cinematic Orchestra: Entr’acte [song]
  • The Cinematic Orchestra: To Build a Home [song]
  • Bailter Space: Bailterspace [album]
  • Sufjan Stevens: Come on Feel the Illinoise! [album]
  • Pixies: Monkey Gone to Heaven [song]
  • Judee Sill: Heart Food [album]
  • Judee Sill: Jesus was a Cross Maker [song]
  • Bill Fay: Life is People [album]
  • Lemon Jelly: Lost Horizons [album – four songs]
  • Aimee Mann: Lost in Space [album]
  • Paul Buchanan: Mid Air [album]
  • Minor Majority: Alison [song]
  • Over The Rhine: Changes Come [song]
  • The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come [album]
  • The Mountain Goats: The Sunset Tree [album]
  • The Mountain Goats: Transcendental Youth [album]
  • Rickie Lee Jones: Where I Like it Best [song]
  • The Whitlams: Truth, Beauty and a Picture of You [album – two songs]
  • Brooke Fraser: What to do with Daylight [album – four songs]
  • Bruce Cockburn: You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance [album – three songs]
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White Cedar

White Cedar is one of the best ones. Compassionate and generous, and beautiful. Who ever writes songs about this stuff?

A Mountain Goats interview in Pitchfork includes this:

Pitchfork: “White Cedar” sounds like one of the darkest songs on the album– the lyrics seem to address a sort of finality.

John Darnielle: The song’s about accepting the permanence of one’s condition. The narrator is a guy who’s in and out of hospitals a lot. I’ve worked with people who’ve experienced that, and I always assume there has to come a point where it’s really hard, but then you try to find some way to be OK with it. There’s a lot of sadness in that song.

What I’ve been learning over the course of my life is that diagnoses exist to help get people services they need– but there’s no such thing as mental illness. We’re all mentally ill and we’re all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don’t wind up needing extra help. So I think that “mental illness,” as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people “crazy,” we exclude them from our circle. That’s bogus– you’re in the same boat as they are! Maybe some people are better at pretending they don’t harbor all kinds of issues, but, really, everyone has them. Everybody experiences reality in a way that’s only true for them.

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Entr’acte

Love The Cinematic Orchestra. The wonderful Entr’acte fits my walk to work pretty much to the minute. It is nuanced and varied and I adore the piano and strings at 9:33.

As much as I feel uplifted and energised by fast guitar music, these days I tend to listen a bit more to contemplative music that gives me plenty of room to move emotionally and creatively. But a mix of styles is best – so much music, and sadly, so little time to listen to it all.

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2666

I finished reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño recently and still find myself thinking about it a lot. It told the stories of so many people’s lives so well and I found it very involving. Besides the main characters there were a large number of side stories, all of them engaging.

This quote from the book captures something incredibly well, if you have aspirations of writing well: “Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.”