The Swell Season, Regency Center Ballroom 11/9/07
You ever notice those people that can listen to music, live or recorded, and not move, not budge, not tap their foot or even mouth the lyrics much less sing along? They sit there like mannequins or aliens observing human behavior, emotionally removed from their surroundings. Ooga chacka, ooga ooga ooga chacka could be coming through the radio, and they might as well be watching a digital clock waiting for the numbers to change. Those people drive me mental.
#41, Dave Matthews Band
Living in Chicago and San Francisco
I’ve been at concerts and I’ve watched them just sit there impassively. Not me though. I sing along, tap my hand or my foot, sway my head, or get up and dance. I can’t help it. I dunno if it’s genetic, but I come from a bit of a musical family. Not my immediate family – unless you include my dad’s talent at playing the dashboard of the car, but my mom’s dad was a musician. Her brother – my uncle… and his son – my cousin, are tremendously talented. I played the flute as a kid, but mostly I sang. And the mental suitcase in my head is over-stuffed with nearly four decades of lyrics, jingles, School House Rock spots, television theme songs, musical scores, songs in languages I don’t even speak. I even memorized the prepositions to the Beatles, “Eight Days a Week.” I hear a song once and I’ll remember it. I can name that tune in one note.
The Joker, Steve Miller Band
Cooking my first dinner with roommates in college Summer A, freshman year
Songs, like smells, have the ability to take us back to a place and time. They provide the soundtrack to the happiest and saddest moments of our lives. Back in the days of tapes, we all had the beach music mix, the break-up and wallow mix, the partying mix and who can forget the make-out mix that always but always… included Roxy Music? No matter how bad your memory, we always seem to remember where we were, whose sofa we were sitting on when a song made an impact on our life, punctuating the moment and becoming a musical photograph for our memory banks. Maybe this is why I get so frustrated that there are people who can appear so unmoved by music. Perhaps they’ve had frontal lobe lobotomies?
One Thing Leads To Another, The Fixx
Warm up music for high school gymnastics
Now, I should back up and say I started writing this at 35,000 feet from seat 33a somewhere over dirty clouds and brown, dusty land. I stopped writing to witness scenes here and there from a film that I can only describe as a painfully embarrassing: ‘High School Musical 2’. Then I was writing this from the sofa of my parent’s house on Thanksgiving Day. But I got side-tracked – as in I got sucked into the vortex of cheesy television with my mom. I thought no problem… I will work on it during the flight back. But on the flight back in seat 14F, I was working working… aaaaand chatting with the people next to me aaaaaand I don’t like writing when there’s a strong chance that as stranger sitting an inch away from me can see my thoughts as I type and delete them.
Round Here, Counting Crows
Watching it snow from my windowsill Upper East Side, NYC
So this entry has been written from inside of two flying tin cans, under the sunshine of Miami, and bundled up on the sofa of my very cold at the moment sublet in San Francisco. It’s soundtrack has been wide and varied from sad Irish love songs, to cheesy Hindi tunes, to even cheesier songs of teen angst, to cheery Disney songs, to the beats of Matisyahu the Chassidic reggae singer. Eclectic doesn’t cover it.
At The River, Groove Armada
Sandboarding down dunes in Swakopmund, Namibia
It’s been an interesting month or so in San Francisco. It’s a great city. The friendliness. The intelligence. The diversity. People claim Miami is diverse but it isn’t really. You basically get variations on a theme. But in SF, cab drivers can talk politics and philosophy. People speak all different languages. Everything and nothing is exotic. In two weeks time I had met more people and became friends with more like-minded people than I had met over the course of five years in Miami. Remarkable.
Otto e Mezzo, Irene Grandi
Reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ at my boyfriend’s flat when I lived in Italy
I liken myself to the gorilla in Aardman’s Creature Comforts who says she doesn’t like the cold and damp and finds that in the London Zoo is she often cold and often damp. When I lived in SF years ago it was in a sunny neighborhood. I only saw fog once and that was at a Giants game. But Nob Hill doesn’t have the protection of a valley. The apartment gets indirect light from the alley, the heat comes on in timed doses and the windows have cracks and don’t close – wow it sounds ghetto but it isn’t. My second week here I walked outside to head downhill to work and I could see fog creeping ominously towards me. It was freaky. And this is when I made my big discovery. Fog is simply humidity. Freaking cold humidity. So my hair looks like crap and I am freezing when it happens. Nice. The day after my run in with the fog, I had a cold. Go figure.
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt.1, The Flaming Lips
Catching a beach ball at their concert on my birthday in SF 2003
A few weeks ago, I was flipping through a paper that I was about to recycle when I saw a concert advert for the Swell Season. I asked my friend Joanne if she wanted to go and I went online looking for tickets. The show was supposedly sold out. I was all ready to buy the tickets when I realized I left my credit card at home, and I went on a crazed search to get the digits without schlepping home to retrieve the card. Even after you answer the security questions Citi won’t give you your card number. No matter what. It’s for my protection… glad I didn’t need to pay for a kidney transplant. It was reassuring to know someone can’t call in and answer obscure security questions I created but annoying as well when I am the person that needs the card number. I wound up getting it with the help of my parents who found an old bill I left at their house.
Leave, Glen Hansard
Riding on NY Transit to Jersey to visit my brother and family
So the Swell Season. The band is fronted by Glen Hansard and Marketva Irglova, the stars of the film ‘Once’ by John Carney. Glen was incredible. Funny, self-deprecating, cute Irish accent: “ Tank you. Tanks very much.” Marketa Irglova, his partner, has a lovely voice but no stage presence or passion to speak of. She gets up to sing her song and then sits down. She doesn’t interact with the crowd or connect on any level. She’s young but Glen makes up for her shyness.
I went to see the show in part for a sense of closure. I had seen the film on my birthday with my buddy Rob while I was in NY this summer. (May 28. I’m an XS, and I love red for anyone interested.) We had no idea what the movie was about and had I known, I wouldn’t have seen it. Dead Sea salt into open wounds. I had just broken up with someone, packed up my things, moved out and left him and here I was a week later in NY, on my birthday, watching a film about an Irish busker singing songs of deep iceberg shifting heartache. I mean slit your wrist heartbreak. The songs were so poignant I bought the soundtrack right after seeing the film and the next day had gone back and bought another copy. A week after my birthday was my ex’s and I mailed him the second copy as a gift because he really liked depressing music. To this day I don’t know if he ever received it. Read into that what you will. You certainly won’t be the first.
Dream On, Aerosmith
Thanksgiving ‘04 with my entire family – the credits from Olympic hockey movie ‘Miracle’
When I read that the band would be performing live it seemed ba’shert for me to go see the show. The music haunted my summer, and it seemed opportune to really make sure I had rid myself of ghosts. The concert was ghost free. And when it comes out on DVD put it in your rental queue.
Bonito, Jarabe de Palo
Walking down California Street and across Sansome to work 2007
Just before flying back home I had gone with Joanne and some of her friends to see “Don,” a cheesy Bollywood musical. Good stuff. Then, the night before I flew home for turkey I had a High School Musical reunion of my own. I met up with my friend Eliza who was spending Thanksgiving in San Francisco. When I was a junior and she was a sophomore we were in ‘Damn Yankees’ together. We both auditioned for the performing arts school, got in and we hadn’t seen each other since I graduated. Reunited through the magic of Facebook.
Eliza at 15 in Damn Yankees
While we were having dinner on Market Street catching up on life I had told her about the film idea I had years ago that I was writing as a novel and she just sat there shaking her head no. She said it wasn’t a novel, it was a screenplay and she could see the scenes in her head. And of course, I agreed since the idea started as a film, I had a soundtrack picked out and had been struggling with the novel concept, on a roll one day and losing patience the next.
My Happiness, Powderfinger
Skydiving and Canyoning in Wanaka, New Zealand
The next day I was flying home and I groaned when the captain announced the in-flight entertainment: ‘High School Musical 2.” It would have been nice if it brought back pleasant childhood memories. But this was cringeably bad and because my iPod had died and my laptop was losing juice and I had nothing left to read I felt like I was experiencing nothing short of psychological water-boarding. This has to be on the top five Netflix rentals for the torturers at Gitmo. The music and choreography were dreadful. The singing sounded unnatural and electronically enhanced. It was just awful Mickey Mouse Club, schmaltz marketed to 11-year olds who don’t know any better. And to make matters worse, after it ended they showed that short-lived, ‘Viva Laughlin’. Oh Hugh honey, what were ya’ thinkin? Absolute shite.
Ii. Largo, Vivaldi
Canals of Venice, kayaking in Widbey Island, Washington- from the film ‘A Little Romance’
My visit home was great. Good food, good times. I got to catch up with friends and enjoy the sunshine. I saw “No Country for Old Men” which I didn’t like and “Enchanted” which was adorable. I searched my apartment and found the binder that had the original scenes blocked and all my notes for my screenplay. And back to writing I go. So far no characters break out in song. But like the weather in San Francisco, that could change.
What else? Here are some photos of my sublet. If you turn around you see closets and a door. Through the door is the kitchen.
