music

So right now I’m listening to the excessive 4-disc reissue of Nevermind

Nevermind is very much Of My Generation — I was just barely 20 when it came out — so I’ve kind of been avoiding the whole “20 years ago today” we’re having about this. (This and R.E.M.’s breakup, and now kids born in 1990 are drinking in bars, legally. Also 20 years ago: Linklater’s Slacker and Coupland’s Generation X and the World Wide Web. YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN.)

I don’t remember thinking Nevermind was very exciting or original at the time, but then I was already a Pixies fan.

I’ve kind of formed an amalgam memory about September 1991. I was moving (back) into the dorms as an RA and during move-in week (late August) the speakers pointed into the quad were playing three songs depending on where a particular freshman had just moved to Lincoln, Nebraska from:

• From Omaha (rough side of town): “Down Wit’ OPP"
• From Omaha (nice side of town): “Don’t Cry” GnR)
• From small towns: “I Got Friends in Low Places"

But by October the only noise you heard in the quad was “Load up on guns and bring your friends..."

I think the official line for music types is that Nevermind was kind of a sellout album, what with the Big Vig production and all. But it was the production that made THIS album the one that broke punk forever. I remember playing Hüsker Dü for a metalhead girl in high school and her criticism was something like “it doesn’t even sound like it was recorded properly.” (OK, “Grunge") was one well-produced album away from being a big thing.

Oh well, whatever.

My life is a rather simple zero-sum equation with four variables.

I play with my family.
I work.
I ride or fix my bicycles.
I sleep about seven hours.

That's it. Family, work, bicycles, sleep; repeat. If I do anything else I have to triangulate: what's gonna get shorted? Family, work, bicycles or sleep?

I'm hopelessly out of the pop culture universe. I catch a few minutes of American Idol before the "sleep" dimension. There's no time for "Mad Men" or "30 Rock" or "Dr. Who" or "[insert cool TV show here]." Those things take a serious time commitment which would cut into family, work, bicycles, or sleep. But 20 minutes of American Idol twice a week is just enough to know exactly what's happening on American Idol. For example: the kid with the awesome country voice and good attitude is still in. The girl with the deep pipes and surprising stylistic range is out.

I see about two movies a year. That includes DVDs. A movie is two whole hours away from family, work, bicycles, or sleep.

Music, I can catch a little while I work. Which means lots of instrumental post-rock, lots of bebop, lots of Bach. Anything catchy is death to productvity.

Live music, ha! Are you kidding? They don't even START playing until like 10pm. That means shorting family, sleep AND work the next day.

I started feeling pretty bad for the dog (he was part of this equation until last summer), so I'm stealing an hour from "sleep" every morning to take him for walks. There was a time when he got THREE walks a day. Can you imagine? I can't, any more.

The beautiful thing about "bicycles" is that I can squeeze them in around the other stuff, so they feel like a variable that ADDS time. Instead of a boring old commute I have "fun bike time." Jenny and Orion love Sundays at the Cross Crusade, that's a twofer (family+bicycles) right there. Kids are napping? Time to fix the bikes!

I hit the gym, so to speak, about once a week. That's a calculation against "work" because on those days I leave at 4:30.

My diet is somehow, improbably, nothing but leftovers. Usually pasta. Where do these leftovers come from? At some point there must have been some original source of food. Jenny does the cooking -- funny how Ozzy and Harriet you get in a one-paycheck household -- but it seems like dinner is usually leftovers too. Every time I sit down to eat it feels a little like the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

Gardening, home improvement, spiritual betterment, skiing, yardwork, arts-and-crafts, videogames, homebrewing, gastronomy...my God how do people with kids do these things? (well, with ONE kid, maybe...)

Please don't think I'm complaining here. Well, I am, but not too much. I love how beautifullly focused my life is now.

If a really strange kidnapper ever asked me at gunpoint to name my favorite song, I think I’d say “Once in a Lifetime”

Everyone knows this song as an anthem of midlife crisis. (“This is not my beautiful house.”) A few people pick up on the existential theme. (“Same as it ever was.”) I think they’re missing that this is a song about the irrational absurdity of natural reality, which is utterly indifferent to a human life. (“Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.”) Byrne himself makes this connection explicit in the video, and in his twitchy marionnette dance, evoking images of voudoun possession — the rational mind completely consumed by a primal animism. He also stares in the depth of infinity, and comes away with what Milan Kundera called the unbearable lightness of being. Against the unimaginable span of infinity, the ethereal nonsubstance of our lives provides us with liberation. “Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us.”

For years — from 1980 until today, in fact, when I looked up the actual lyrics on the Internet — I thought that last verse was “Time isn’t holding us, time is ineffluous.” There is no such word as “ineffluous” (I checked), but there should be.