Unapologetically Mundane » i used to be so cool

Damien Jurado and the Greatness of Growing Up

plumpdumpling — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:00:16 +0000

It’s funny, growing up. When I was a wee lass of 18 at college in Columbus, freshly released from my dad’s worries about my venturing into strange neighborhoods in the big city, I’d buy show tickets months in advance. I’d skip classes to be one of the first in line. I’d be happy leaning against the stage for hours waiting for my band to appear. I didn’t mind suffering through three or four terrible local openers, and I didn’t mind waiting around in the rain and the stink of a back alley to talk to the band afterward. If I couldn’t find someone who wanted to do these things with me, I’d go alone. I saw my favourite band more than 50 times between 2000 and 2005, but that number doesn’t even begin to elucidate the sheer amount of shows I saw as a whole.

I know that I’m old because none of that interests me anymore. I don’t want to sit in a car for fourteen hours straight just to see one of my bands open for someone else in places like Georgia and South Carolina. I don’t want to stand around and listen to a band for three hours anymore, let alone the three hours before the show starts when everyone’s pushing to get to the front and I can’t drink anything lest I have to pee and the club’s playing some unknown crap over the speaker system that’s not even in the same genre of the band I’m there to see.

So last night was perfect. I went home after work, watched my “Criminal Minds”, and then took the bus down to the Mercury Lounge in the Lower East Side to see one of my long-time favourites, Damien Jurado.

Kamran met me there at 9:15, and we pushed ourselves against the wall the best we could for the 15 minutes until the doors opened. The bar area is basically just a long hallway, so everyone was touching everyone else, and there was nowhere to escape and nothing to do, and all I could think about was how miserable I would’ve been had I been there alone. The show started soon after, and we were right in front, and we hadn’t been waiting around for three hours, and we were happy.

Damien is just sort of an amazing guy. He sings these incredibly sad songs, and he comes off as so thoughtful, but there are these moments where he’ll say something so bashfully joyful that it kind of makes you wonder if his whole songwriter persona is a put-on. Last night, he told us about sitting next to a girl on a plane who was listening to music; at first, it was David Bowie, but then suddenly something even more familiar came on, and he realized it was his own song. She sat there listening to his entire album and had no idea she was sitting beside him. I just love thinking about how that must have felt.

He was wearing his Seattle uniform of flannel shirt, lumberjack jeans, and moccasins. The woman doing his backing vocals, Melodie Knight from Campfire OK, was wearing black leggings, a black tunic, a black shawl, black strappy wedges, and a black bowler hat. I said, “I think she’s dressed the way she thought New Yorkers would be dressed.” Kamran said, “I think that’s how they dress in Seattle.” I said, “That’s how they dressed in New York in the 80s.” Kamran said, “That’s how they dressed in Seattle in the 90s.” So then it made sense.

I know I won’t be able to explain how good Damien is with dynamics, the way he can have an audience straining to hear him one moment and how he can fill an entire room with just an acoustic guitar the next, and how something as simple as a foot tap can change an entire song, so I’ll just link you to some songs instead.

Here’s my favourite recent song of his:

Here’s my favourite song of his of all time:

And here’s the song that made me cry last night, because it’s so clearly written about me:

I would wonder why a man from Seattle has multiple songs about Ohio, but it just seems so obvious why.

The Strange Places Your Favourite 1998 Rockstar Shows Up

plumpdumpling — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 17:00:31 +0000

Kamran’s DVR has been 97% full for weeks now thanks to all of the “Criminal Minds” I’ve been recording from multiple channels, so I try to knock an episode or two or five out whenever I can. This morning while I was getting ready, I pulled up one with an intriguing synopsis about murders coinciding with a rock star’s tour schedule.

It started out with a band covering Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, one of the best songs ever, and I thought, “Hey, this is actually pretty good.” The lead singer’s Robert-Smith-esque white face and red lips were a bit copycat-ish for my taste, but his performance was so confident and real-rock-star-like that I couldn’t help but want to see more.

I thought, “How great must it be for this local band to get a break like this?” I thought, “This must be the greatest moment of their lives.”

And then I thought, “Wait, is that Gavin Rossdale?”

Now that I watch it again, it’s so obviously his voice. His perfect, perfect voice. So instead of it being some local band trying to catch a break, it’s actually a completely washed-out former rockstar now relegated to a TV crime drama.

And I couldn’t be happier! Now if only Daniel Johns from silverchair and Matthew Caws from Nada Surf would do episodes of “Law & Order” and “Burn Notice”, my high school lead singer crush trifecta would be complete.

Those Happy Golden Years

plumpdumpling — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:00:20 +0000

Remember the days before Kamran actually cared about law school and before he was studying for the bar exam when we used to leave the house on a whim to do things like go to the novelty Dave & Buster’s in Times Square and win a bazillion tickets

on the Wheel of Fortune game

and not spend them on anything at all because our love was all we needed?

No, me neither.

Juuuuust kidding. But Kamran’s staying late at school for the next two weeks to study for this darn test so I don’t distract him with my feminine wiles and my unfortunate sudden interest in television cop dramas, and I feel whiny.

Music and the Early Days of the Internet

plumpdumpling — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:15:45 +0000

This morning, my best friend, Tracey, sent me this:

click to enlarge

Can you imagine all the sob stories we’ll tell our children when it comes to music pre-Internet? Like how for years, I thought the lyrics to The Bellamy Brothers’ “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body” were “if I said you had a beautiful bonnet, would you hold it against me?”, and I wondered why anyone would be offended by a friendly hat-related compliment.

And what about music not pre-Internet but pre-AWESOME-Internet? I remember hearing The Connells’ “’74-’75″ on the radio in high school and thinking it was mind-blowing, but of course Google didn’t exist then, so I couldn’t find the song using the three or four words I knew. I had to actually call the radio station to ask.

And even better, when Tracey and I were in high school, Bush’s album Razorblade Suitcase came out, and we were dying to know the lyrics to “Insect Kin“, so we taped their “Saturday Night Live” performance on her VCR and sat watching and pausing, watching and pausing, writing down the lyrics from the closed captioning. AMAZING.

It’s funny how looking back, that seems so romantic. It seems like music really mattered back then, because bands actually had to have a whole album’s worth of material before they were allowed to record one, and we actually had to buy that music–or record it with our VCRs–to hear the song we liked whenever we wanted to.

I’m not really complaining, because I love being able to call that Justin Bieber song up on MySpace whenever I want to and not feel bad about it because I’m not contributing any money to his freaky fame, but still.

The Only Reason to Ever Listen to Justin Bieber

plumpdumpling — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:00:24 +0000

Most exciting things in my relationship with Kamran happen between 8:30 a.m., when we should be leaving the house for work, and 8:45 a.m., when we actually leave.

Yesterday morning at 8:30, he loaded a Justin Bieber song on his computer. I’ve accidentally caught live performances of this particular song on several occasions just because I watch so much crappy reality TV, but it turns out the album version is actually pretty incredible.

Kamran called it pure bubblegum pop bliss. It’s the song “U Smile”, and in a perfect world, it’ll load automatically when you click on that link.

Next, he showed me the 800%-slowed-down version, which New York magazine likened to Mogwai but I think is straight up Sigur Ros:

Isn’t it beautiful? Parts of it made us look up from our lipstick-applying and flexing-in-the-mirror-for-the-18th-time-that-hour at each other like, “Whaaaaaaaa?”

And then I had to tell Kamran this story, which I’m telling you now so I can remember it when I’m 80 and still be pissed off:

When I was a junior at THE Ohio State University, I took a poetry workshop that was supposed to lead to a career in song- and jinglewriting. I actually liked the professor’s poetry, which is kind of unheard of for me, and although it was clear she didn’t think any of my poems made any sense whatsoever, she always blamed it on herself and encouraged me to keep trying.

One of our assignments was to take a song, pretend like we didn’t know what the lyrics really were, and re-write them based on what we actually hear. So I used Sigur Ros’s “Vaka”, which was sung in Hopelandic, an entirely made-up language:

“How clever!”, I’m sure you’re thinking, and I was thinking it, too.

Only the professor said it didn’t count, because the lyrics not being in English meant I didn’t have to use any imagination to make up new ones. Well, you can guess how personally I took that, seeing as how I thought I’d used all of my imagination in coming up with such a unique song to explore. I never took another poetry class again, never started my indie rock band, and never wrote a single jingle.

What’s funny is that while writing this, I wanted to look at the Hopelandic lyrics for the song, but on almost every lyrics site, they’re in English, and they look veeeeeeeeeeeeeery similar to what I wrote for my poetry project. Which means that:

1) Lyrics sites are retarded.

2) I really must not be imaginative.

The Best Thing About “Eclipse” (and the Most Annoying)

plumpdumpling — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:00:07 +0000

I was surprised to learn, upon reading them, that though the writing is as awful as I would’ve imagined, the plot of the Twilight series is actually pretty clever. Unlike, say, “Lost”, all of the loose ends eventually tie up, and the things you never thought would matter suddenly do. There are no red herrings nor MacGuffins in them.

Yet they still totally annoy me simply because their author, Stephenie Meyer, has to thank the band Muse in each of them. In all of the novels’ afterwords, right alongside appreciation of her editor and agent, she’ll say things like, “And thanks also to my favourite band, the very aptly named Muse, for providing a saga’s worth of inspiration.” And then I will claw her eyes out.

It’s not even that I don’t like Muse. I actually really liked them in NINETEEN-NINETY-NINE when I was listening to them. But I just can’t handle some kids’-book-writin’, middle-aged Mormon thinking she’s all cool for liking one pop-alt band. It’s like moviestars thinking anyone cares about their political activism. And you know she’s just doing it in some used-to-be-unpopular girl’s attempt to befriend the band she loves.

I went to see Eclipse last night with my friend Ash, though, and aside from a couple of actually-hilarious moments, what I was surprised by most was the soundtrack. It does not suck. In fact, it includes The Bravery, the amazing Ohio band The Black Keys, and my favourite band right now, Band of Horses. And the music is used really well. The first time you see, Jacob, for instance, the camera moves in on his face as a grinding bluesy song starts, and it’s this total moment. How annoying is that?

I can console myself with the fact that I know it wasn’t Stephenie Meyer choosing the music and how it’s used, but I can still continue to hate her for all of her Muse-suck-upping. Mostly because I know I’d do exactly the same thing if I was in her shoes.

Except with a better band.

I’ve Never Even Had Sideswept Hair

plumpdumpling — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:15:45 +0000

Remember when Modest Mouse was so cool? When they were really emo, and no one you would consider “normal” listened to them, and not even your friends knew who they were?

And you had all of their albums and also all of their pins and also all of these homemade pins you bought off eBay, which you dutifully stuck to your messenger bag so everyone would know how emo you were wherever you went?

“Polar Opposites” came on my Pandora station yesterday, and I about died, so I immediately had to go to YouTube and find the best made-by-a-16-year-old music video for the song I could:

The lyrics are “I’m trying, I’m trying to/Drink away the part of the day/That I cannot sleep away,” and I remember being like, “Oh, my god, Modest Mouse, you totally get me.” Even though I had the easiest life and the strongest thing I was drinking back in 1999 in Ohio was Carnation Instant Breakfast.

An Education, and Why I’m Sad to Be a Grownup

plumpdumpling — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:00:53 +0000

Maybe it’s inappropriate to start off the new year with ruminations on pedophilia, but while I was in Ohio for Christmas, my best friend, Tracey, and her friend Kim were in the midst of seeing all of this year’s potentially-Oscar-nominated films, and I tagged along to see An Education with them almost as an afterthought. It’s mostly plotless–a sheltered 17-year-old girl loses more than her virginity to an older man when she’s dazzled by his worldliness–and it’s not for everyone, but it was entirely for me.

It was a great story and all, but for days afterward, it was still consuming my thoughts in a way that I didn’t think it should have. I found myself feeling detached from everything I did, because all I wanted to be doing was watching that film again. I finally decided it was because the girl in the film, Jenny, reminded me so much of myself. Growing up in smalltown Ohio, I wasn’t at all interested in most of the boys I went to school with, because I was way too smart for them, and I don’t mean that to sound narcissistic. Even the ones who could hold a conversation with me didn’t seem to appreciate me in the way I thought my awesomeness merited. I didn’t find things much different in college, so I “dated” first a 35-year-old and then a 41-year-old and just didn’t think anything wrong with it. Brains and humor have always made people more attractive to me than classic good looks alone, and men twice my age seemed so thoughtful and funny. They got why I was so interested in literature, and they listened to the right kinds of music, only they knew bands and read books I’d only heard of. They were so serious about politics, unlike the boys at school who were only Republicans because their parents were. And they both lived somewhere other than Ohio, which was really the most important thing.

The sad thing I realized after watching An Education is that the main reason I wanted to date older men no longer applies. Somewhere between 18 and now, I figured out that the guys I thought were so wise back then had really just accumulated the sort of life experience you do when you’ve had a job, had a wife, had some birthdays. They knew bands I’d only heard of because they’d been my age when those bands were making music, just like I know more bands than someone half my age does. My best friends now are just as literate, just as politically-conscious, and just as funny as any of those guys were. In fact, my current boyfriend, who’s only a couple of years older than I am, is smarter and funnier than probably anyone I know. It wasn’t that boys my age were necessarily not good enough for me but just that I hadn’t met the right one. Not that I regret any of it.

My even sadder realization is that I probably already ended my tenure as pedophile bait without even realizing it, and despite being wise enough now to recognize that older isn’t always better, I’m still going to miss the attention. Sure, I can date 80-year-old men for their money in my late 20s, but no one’s going to question that guy’s morals or mental health. If I’m not attractive simply for my ability to get someone arrested for touching me, what do I have to live for? What’s the point of being seen with an old codger if it doesn’t garner him disapproving glares and me worried glances? What’s the point if I’m not being taken advantage of?

Geocities is Dead! Long Live WordPress!

plumpdumpling — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:46:10 +0000

Sunday night around 7 p.m., Kamran just happened to be napping, and I just happened to be wasting time with my Google Reader when I happened upon this article from “Huffington Post” about Geocities shutting down on October 26th, the very next day.

Horrified, I went to the Geocities website and read the entire FAQ where they said something to the effect of if you don’t right-click on each of your individual pages and save them to your hard drive, your information will be lost FOREVER. Not for a second did I think about how annoying that was going to be or how a much better use of my time would be creating a new website, because my Geocities homepage was my LIFE from 1998 to 2002, and the Internet would be a sad, sad place without pages such as

the one in which I rate facewashes by how gross they taste,

the very first “blog” entry I ever wrote online in 1998,

and the one in which I have potential suitors fill out an application to marry me.

So I went through each of my maybe 100 pages, right-clicked, saved, and breathed a sigh of relief knowing that someday, I’d be able to go back and read the online diary that used to get me in so much trouble in high school whenever someone found out I’d called her a skank in it. Only when I got about 30 pages in, I started getting an error on every page telling me that it couldn’t load. I started flipping out again, searching the Geocities website for an apology about their overloaded servers and the promise that they’d keep the sites up for an extra day so everyone could have time to save their PRECIOUS MEMORIES. What I found was that Geocities had an hourly download rate, and that I’d surpassed it and had to wait to access more of my pages. I was prepared to sit in front of my computer until midnight on the dot, still downloading as the clock ticked from 59 seconds back to 0.

Hours later, I finally finished grabbing everything I could, including the pages that weren’t linked from anywhere and that maybe two people in the entire world had seen accidentally via a Dogpile or Metacrawler search back in the day. I started thinking that maybe it was a good thing the site was disappearing. Maybe I didn’t want the world knowing how I referred to myself as The Katie™ not infrequently or how I had an entire series of connected pages chronicling how perverted Mister Rogers is. Now that everything was safe within my hard drive, it didn’t matter that no one would ever fill out my Application for Husbandry again.

But then I woke up on October 26th, and the site was still there. I kept checking, and it kept being there. I almost got pissed off. That’s my private writing! Who does Geocities think they are, keeping that stuff around?! Ten minutes ago, in the midst of writing this, I checked again, and sure enough, there it was. I typed my address into the historical record of Geocities, and it was there, too.

But two minutes ago, I checked again, and now it seems to be officially dead. The historical record is showing the first page and then “Not in Archive” error messages when I try to click on anything from there.

I’m relieved. I’m saddened.

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Shoes Like Papier-Mâché

plumpdumpling — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:45:58 +0000

I bought my first pair of Converse Chuck Taylor low-tops my sophomore year of college and wore them for the next six years. They were probably two sizes too big for me, because I was somehow under the impression through high school and college that my feet were much, much bigger than they actually are. Had they been the correct size, the rubber reinforcement strip around the front of the shoe would have kept the canvas top from peeling away from the sole, but things being as they were, I developed holes on both sides of each shoe within weeks where they curved every time I bent down.

I wore them every single day. (Unless, of course, I was wearing something that went with my neon pink or teal blue Sauconys, but that was rare, as you can imagine.) When the sole lost all of its minimal padding after a couple of years, I bought padded inserts. When I found a giant hole in the back of the right one in a couple more years, I ignored it. When the balls of my feet actually wore holes in the rubber sole of each shoe, I replaced the padded inserts with waterproof gel inserts that kept the rain out (for the most part). The shoes got wet so many times that the canvas actually got hard, like papier-mâché.

My parents came to visit NYC two years ago and asked what they could buy me for my birthday while they were here. It hurt, but I decided to have them purchase my very first replacement pair of Chucks. Reminding myself that my feet are actually quite normally-sized, I went down a couple of sizes and enjoyed the freedom of not worrying about wet socks for the first times in years.

A few days later, I had developed blisters on the sides of my feet where the old Chucks hadn’t rubbed but the new Chucks did. I assumed my feet would get used to the smaller size eventually, but two years later, I was still having to rotate them out of my wardrobe every couple of days and actually wear dress shoes or something to give my feet a day off from the pinching.

The other day, though, I finally told myself, “THESE ARE $40 SHOES. Surely you can afford to buy new ones that don’t hurt.” And I did, one size between the originals and their next-of-kin. I’m wearing them now and working on dirtying them up so I’m not THAT GIRL with the new Chucks, and it’s a delight. And you know what? Moving on didn’t bother me one bit. Apparently I don’t get attached to things that hurt me.

Except men and ice cream.

What’s so hipster about being literate?

plumpdumpling — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:22:40 +0000

Look at this fucking hipster is basically photos of all my neighbors in Brooklyn wearing their stupid 80s clothes and not brushing their stupid unwashed hair. As much as I love being a voyeur of it, I’m usually glad that I’ll never be featured on it, because that involves looking like this:

So rough and tumble!

and I look more like this:

So sweet and innocent!

But yesterday, the site posted this, which is basically the tattoo I’d get if I ever got a tattoo. Except that mine would include way cooler books, of course.

Yeah, I took honors English, and I want the world to know. My senior year, my honors English teacher told the whole class that I’d be the only one of us to score a perfect 5 on the AP exam. Boo-yah!

And then I got a 4 just like everyone else. But still!

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Nostalgia About the Early Days of the Internet

plumpdumpling — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:07:13 +0000

Remember how much more important the Internet seemed in its youth? How we didn’t rely on it for everything and didn’t entirely take it for granted?

I don’t remember how I knew what it was exactly, but I do remember the first time I ever used it. My best friend Tracey and I were going to a Men’s Glee Club concert at THE Ohio State University one day in our early years of high school, and we stopped by her older brother’s campus apartment beforehand to waste time and use his computer, which included what must have been the slowest modem ever made.

As I remember, it turned out that we’d left our tickets to the concert in her parents’ car, so we spent the entire afternoon looking up song lyrics and pictures of our favourite bands of the time: silverchair, Megadeth, Bush, and Nirvana. Recently, we had spent an entire Friday night at her house watching, pausing, watching, and pausing Bush’s performance of “Insect Kin” on “Saturday Night Live” that my mom had taped for us so we could figure out all of the lyrics. Which took hours. So yeah, the Internet and all of its tricks seemed AMAZING to us at the time.

I bring this up because my co-worker Nik was hovering over my desk this morning, swinging the laces on the hood of his hoodie back and forth over my monitor like windshield wipers, and somehow, it reminded me of the eSheep I had back in high school.

This little Sheepy would hang out above the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, walking, running, sleeping, and occasionally getting bug-eyed and dying. You could pick him up with your pointer and drop him, causing him to bounce, but that’s literally all he did. AND I THOUGHT IT WAS AWESOME.

Still do, to be honest. And thankfully, there’s a 4-minute+ video on YouTube to help me relive its glory.

So tell me: what did you love about Web 1.0?

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Completely Normal Rednecks

plumpdumpling — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:45:56 +0000

People in New York always find it so weird that I talk about how into my own sister I’d be if I was a lesbian, but according to this note that my Best Friend 4-Eva + 4-Lyfe, Tracey, saved from our early days of high school, incest is something I’ve never been embarrassed to talk about:

I’m from Ohio, though, which makes this totally okay.

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