win and tonic

A large portion of the music I listened to in 2008 was spawned from the Helvetica soundtrack.

Sam Prekop (Helvetica track listenable here) is one of the artists on that compilation, and just recently I learned of a band he is in called Sea & Cake. This track in particular I want listen to on headphones on repeat while lying on my back in a room with those carpeted-concrete floors that were never really that comfortable, industrial but presentable and dirty but intimate and authentic and practical and hell on your backbone and shoulderblades when you’re trying to get a quick nap in the band room before the busses arrive for the next competition in whatever city this week’s marching band competition was in.

I met the members of El Ten Eleven in a dive bar adjacent to one of my favourite concert venues in Ohio - they were very kind, and encouraging and humble when after their show I told them that they were equal parts inspiring and soul crushing in their display of talent and joy in music making.¹ There were only 30 or so skinny white boys in the crowd that night, and my drinking buddy (also the owner of this delicious spawn) and I were right up at the front of the tiny little stage. In between each song it was dead quiet, everyone present evidently such fans of the two performers on stage that their excitement after applause was displayed through stunned, rapturous attention to the stage to see and hear how these sounds were made from just these two people (answer: double neck Gibson and a loop pedal.²). In an attempt to break the strange tension created by the shoe gazing white boys shiftily standing before delightfully bouncy math rock I had muttered “Reaganomics!” at the trailing end of a round of applause. The band heard me and laughed, commenting on it, saying “That’s great! Who said that, that’s awesome” and I just grinned some, but didn’t raise my hand or anything because, man, skinny white boys be judgmental like skinny white boys be and I didn’t want anyone to think that I was trying to be the “outrageous” guy at a concert, even though muttering such a thing, trite and tiny as it was, was clearly the action of someone trying to be “outrageous” in a public setting in this particular instance, at least in comparison with everyone else there, so I never really identified myself and just shifted a little where I stood, grinning until the corners of my mouth were shaking because in tandem with the liquor I was genuinely happy to be here, in front of these musicians I admired so, and now having made them laugh, even anonymously, filled me with more joy than it should have, probably, and I had been grinning all night already, so much and so long that my entire face hurt but in that cathartic way that makes you think, This pain is a direct result of being happy, This is a good pain to be thankful for, Remember this pain in your cheeks and your temples and your teeth, Remember and associate it with all the other times that your face hurt from prolonged genuine grinning, and while standing there in front of them I secretly hoped that my utterance would become a story that they tell other bands they go on tour with, or a story they tell on stage while tuning a guitar in between songs in some far off city.

There were a couple of drone-y electronic songs on the aforementioned soundtrack, one of which was Motohiro Nakashima’s “Meow” that I had 4-starred, which means “Download More” in my iTunes library³. The album that track belonged to was fairly nice, and I was searching for more places to get some of this guy’s (girl’s?) stuff, and upon further googling, I found someone had upped an album of his/hers that I hadn’t been able to find on Amazon or iTunes).

And it’s basically The Loveliest.

Which I suppose is the opposite of the rudest.

I sent the download to a friend of mine and told him such, complete with reference followed by the accompanying link for reference to which I was speaking (which was in turn a reference to yet something else), and then commented to him how difficult for me it is to imagine a world in which obscure references died in obscurity, rather than propagate through exposing the source of it after mere seconds of inquiry, and the original intent of this post was to say just how great it is to be able to have access to and share information with anyone, instantly, forever, and how the unit of measure, the modicum of encapsulation of all bytes, memes, whatever of information can be from a second-hand account, at worst.

Which, in turn, reminded me of this:

[The Tuyuca language] requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

— Difficult Languages, The Economist — which is sadly now-paywalled which I guess kinda detracts from my “information is freely available everywhere these days” bit, but there ya go.

“Nono, I bet someday we’ll be opening for you!” That’s what he said to me! I mean, good gracious, just how lovely those two were, I can’t say enough. Also they had a very lovely merch girl who gave me a discounted shirt because I had spent all my cash on bourbon. ↩
“Sheer badassery” would also have been an acceptable answer. ↩
I have several smart playlists populated by rated songs, with the 5 starred tracks being sorted into “Completely Great”, and the remaining ratings into “Download More”, “Revisit!”, “Fix Metadata”, and “Yuck”, respectively). ↩