Half These Songs Are About You

For the last few days I have been ripping CDs into my iTunes library. In the past, I had to be selective about how much of my hard drive I used for music files. And besides that, if I did want to listen to something that I didn't have on the computer, I could just pull out the CD and listen to it.

However, for the last 2 years or so, I've been back living with my parents and most all of my stuff is in a storgage unit about a mile from here. It's something of an inconvenience to go over there just to get a CD I suddenly wanted. But now I have this iMac with its big hard drive, I figured it could stand to hold a few more albums.

I brought my boxes of CDs up to my room and began ripping. At first, I was intent on copying everything I own. I have the space, and I can always back it all up on an external hard drive. As I began going through the CDs though, I began to lose resolve. Maybe I don't have to copy all of them. There are some in here that I'm pretty sure I'll never want to listen to. Some that I'd never even listened to in the first place. And some, that I'm sorta embarrassed that I ever listened to or even acquired in the first place.

I began to imagine someone flipping through my iTunes cover flow and having a giggle, rolling their eyes or just bursting out laughing. I didn't know exactly who this super judgmental person would be. Maybe my brother George? But then he has his own share of guilty pleasures. Most likely I was just thinking about myself. It can be tough living up to my own high standards. Is my record collection cool enough? Is it lacking? Certainly it is. How can it not be? Stuff I listened to growing up was mostly on casette tape, even a few vinyl 45s. Not all of it survived the transition to CD. Some of my earliest CD purchases ended up as trade-ins later on. Some I regretted not having but never bothered replacing.

Then there were all those things that I liked but not quite enough to buy a whole CD. I was, and am still very album oriented. If I liked one song, but wasn't likely to enjoy the rest of the record, I skipped it. Buying music can be expensive, especially if one is not selective. Sometimes I gambled. There have been times when I've read a review and thought to myself, "I should like that," and then bought it with nary a previous listen. Its hard to believe in these days of Genius recommedations and online audio samples that I used to read an article in the NME or Melody Maker, and would toddle off to a tiny record shop tucked into a side street in Darmstadt, Germany where I was stationed and buy a record by a band I'd never heard. But that was how I did it in those days. Results were mixed. There are some bands I found that way which I still listen to today. Blur comes to mind. In 1993, I bought "Modern Life is Rubbish" at Uli's Music Land in Darmstadt and I'm still listening to it some 15 years later. Perhaps not as much as the brilliant "Parklife" that came out the next year, but it was a start.

Some of these failed experiments were abandoned to the used CD shop or given away with other unwanted books and knick knacks before a move. I seem to remember having quite a lot of the back catalog of the Fall. Old Mark E. Smith and I didn't make such a good fit though. They had some cool album titles though. All I remember is a snatch of some angry song about former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, but that's about it. Just not my cup of tea.

I was a late adopter of music downloads. I didn't have my own computer until I graduated from college in 1998. And then, using Napster with a dial up modem, it just didn't seem worth the trouble. If I liked the artist, I would go buy their CD anyway. It was the right thing to do, and you got the lovely packaging and cover art to go with it. And it was a tactile thing, something to hold in your hands. I wasn't about to give that up.

Now I'm on my 4th computer, I've had iTunes on the last two, and I've accepted that some music really can come from thin air, via wi-fi and once paid for of course. But I'm still an album person at heart, 95% of my library is still my own CDs. I continue to buy CDs. I've been given a few free iTunes cards and I actually won a handful in a contest, so I have had some more practice clicking that button to purchase a song instantaneously. When I flip past one of those purchases in my cover flow, I see them along side both albums I own in their entirety, and albums of which I only own one or two songs. It still makes me cringe a tiny bit.

The collection is still woefully uneven. Top loaded with Britpop from between 1992-1994 and the two or three favourite bands whose every release I must buy and listen to ad infinitum. So Morrissey, Muse, Throwing Muses, Semisonic and all their various side and solo projects. And a bunch of other random stuff that Steve Lamacq would approve of. The new favourite band. This week it's Pete and the Pirates.

That can't really be all there is to me? Okay. The Beatles are there. A bit of Bowie, and a bit of Elvis (Costello not Presley). Some Talking Heads and Lou Reed. But not much else that would fall into the category of "classic rock." I played in a garage band for a few years, and was indoctrinated into the world of Credence Clearwater Revival and Eric Clapton and other such cover band staples. "How did I not know this stuff?" my bandmates would always ask me in dismay. Have you not one single album from before 1980?

In my defense, I must say that I knew it all. Stairway to Heaven? Check. Innagoddadavida? Check. American Pie? Check. I've been hearing that stuff my whole life, it's on the radio a zillion times a day all over the world. It's on loops at retail establishments such as the Pier 1 Imports I once worked at. Of course I know that stuff. I just don't own it, and therefore don't actively listen to it.

And apparently, I don't hang out at bars enough. A particular group of friends I've gotten to know fairly recently have this regular bar they gather at every Friday night. About 20 of them, and they've all known each other for years. And they queue up the mp3 jukebox with all kinds of old stuff that everyone has heard, and they break into sing-a-longs and they all... know... every... word. Motown and all that other sort of stuff people play at parties. You know the stuff. It is communal music.

I've wandered far off my point by now. Back to the ripping and some statistics. In the last two days, I've added 1941 new songs (or items). That's 5.5 days of listening, 7.16 GB of memory space. That increased my current library by a whopping 70% to a total size of 4949 songs (or items), 13.5 days of listening and 17.49 GB of memory space, and that's all just with stuff I already own! After the chore of correcting the alphabetizing - I like my solo artists arranged by last name (as in Amos, Tori rather than sticking Tori Amos under T) - and finding all the missing cover art, I was done.

And to think, it wouldn't even fill up a 20 GB iPod! How big must the libraries of others be? Well, even so, they could never possibly listen to it all. Just like having a library full of books doesn't guarantee you could ever make it through every single one. You take a sampling. You choose your playlists of favourites and leave the rest just in case it's needed one day. And each of us has our own special mix. No two people could ever agree on what it should include.

So my collection reflects some of what I like. It gives a sense of who I am, but only I can fill in the gaps.

"Sing your life
Any fool can think of words that rhyme
Many others do
Why don't you ?
Do you want to ?
Oh...
Sing your life
Walk right up to the microphone
And name
All the things you love
All the things that you loathe...

Others sang your life
But now is a chance to shine
And have the pleasure of
Saying what you mean
Have the pleasure of
Meaning what you sing
Oh, make no mistake my friend
All of this will end
So sing it now (sing your life)...

Dont leave it all unsaid
Somewhere in the wasteland of your head, oh
Head, oh, head, oh, head, oh
And make no mistake, my friend
Your pointless life will end
But before you go
Can you look at the truth ?
You have a lovely singing voice
A lovely singing voice
And all of those
Who sing on-key
They stole the notion
From you and me
So, sing your life (sing your life)
Sing your life (sing your life)
Oh, sing your oh..."

Oh well, I quoted Morrissey. Sometimes it's just impossible not to.

How to end this now? Let's try this:
My dad just got a new cell phone, and he's decided that he wants a different ringtone for every member of the family so he knows right away who's calling. He chose easily for mom and George, but what about me? "What's your favourite song?" he asked, sensibly. And I had no answer. How could there just be one? It changes all the time. And should I choose something so obscure that not only would he not recognize it, but he wouldn't be able to associate it with me? Or should I choose an oldie but goodie. I'm still working on an answer for him. I guess I'll start flipping through my library. And then again, maybe it's a song that I haven't heard yet.

Brak's School Daze: Yearbook

I guess it always happens at around this time. In June of 2009 it will be 20 years since I graduated from high school. Talk of reunions is floating around. Most of us are scattered far and wide. But now there's this thing called Facebook.

It's only in the last few months that they have been finding me. It's not that it never occurred to me to look for them. I'd only reluctantly joined up because of my friends Skip and Jazzie who live in England. And then because Benrik instructed us to. So I've been using it mainly to keep in touch with those who were far away in miles, not in time.

Then Joe Furno found me, followed by Melissa Workman and Hina Sherwani. Gerry Cooney, Rubin Santiago. Friends from high school that I hadn't seen or heard from in 19 years. And soon the network expanded, some people I knew through them, and then through others. And then even further back. People I knew since grade school. Felicia Cono, Sintera Graham and Diane Maheu. Each day it seemed there was a new piece of nostalgia appearing on my monitor.

I was adding other friends too as I went along. Those from all the different parts of my life. College, grad school, the language school I taught at in Belgium. The internet communities where Skip and Jazzie and Katrien and Jules and Mandy and I all crossed paths. And Lucy and Shady, the Benrik folk. Then some of the friends I've gotten to know here in Vegas and don't get to see much for various reasons. Sometimes thirty miles can be as great a distance as 3000.

Along with these names come pictures of course. It is called facebook afterall. So I see them, familiar faces from the present, recent past and long ago. Not just their faces, but mine too. The yearbook picture from my 6th grade class turned up recently. My 11 year old face obediently looks at the hand signal of the school photographer, not knowing that many years later, this picture will end up on the internet. Back then the internet was just a seedling growing from its roots as ARPANET into the first Internet Protocol wide area network and was not yet known to the public much less to school children.

Those of us who were in the same region or still near enough to easily travel and meet up began having impromtu mini reunions. I was too far away being out here in the West. But many of the remaining east coast residents ventured into Manhattan and got nostalgic together in person. And the feelings came back, not that they had ever gone away completely, just like in school, I wondered how do I fit in? Am I a part of all this? Does anyone remember me aside from the fact that I appear on the same page in the yearbook?

Wall posts exclaim "I remember you...we used to chat in the library...your kids are adorable...wow you still look exactly the same..."

I think of how I've moved around so much. I left New York for good in 1995, after the Army, and before college. I've lived in many states, even a couple of different countries now and somehow I've landed here in Las Vegas. (If you'd told me this back in high school I would not have believed you.)

Along the way, I've had many friendships that lasted different lengths of time. A couple of years here, a few months there. I kept moving on and starting over each time. But then here are these people I grew up with. We went through the formative years together. In 19 years, I've met many others whom I've spent bits of my life with. Maybe the same 2 or three years that I had with Hina, but is it the same? At that age, we were doing it all for the first time. Three years is nothing now, but then, it was a huge chunk of our lives. It was forever. And forever ago.

So I look back at that 11 year old me and say "I think I remember you." And I wonder what she would think if she saw me. Would she be proud? disappointed? or would she fall over laughing never imagining that she would ever get so old? The yearbook pages may be faded and yellow while the computer monitor in front of me is crisp, clear and bright. It makes little difference. The faces still peer from the page. Can we ever really know what they see?

This Will Be My Year

It's just that there's so much. That's why I don't write anymore. Because my head is filled with song lyrics and TV dialogue and snippets I read in a book or on Facebook or someone else's blog. There are ideas flying around everywhere and none of them are mine. I was watching Torchwood this afternoon thinking "someone thought of this story. When did they have time to think of it? How have they been focused and disciplined enough to sit and write it all down, and then actually get something done with it." All this stuff that is in my head now, it's all been created by someone who got off their couch.

It used to be a special thing being a writer. But now everyone is a writer and even the most pointless bloggers have more of a point than I do because they are saying something, banal though it may be. And I'm just stuck. Because there is so much. And I don't know how to separate it anymore from my own thoughts.

For a while I thought it was because my well had run dry of adventures. I'm not traveling that much these days. No army or school (and right now not even a job) for me to talk about. But in the summer of 2007 I was in London for a week, and somehow I wasted it. I tried to write thoughts in a little notebook along the way, but I couldn't manage it and I tried to go back and remember so I could write about it after the fact. But I couldn't manage that either. It had gone. Lost in the noise of all the other thoughts.

So here I am trying to make a start again. With the new year comes the inevitable resolution though I never make a resolution out loud any more. I don't bother letting anyone know otherwise they could just wait and observe my failure. Sure a lot of other people fail too. It's cliche. Just another thing to be embarrassed about and to give up on and perhaps to start over the next year.

Dissapointed. I want to quote Morrissey here but I won't because it'll just become a habit. Or a crutch. But hang on, isn't that what we all do, we take others' ideas, let them influence us and then add on our own little bit? We acknowledge our influences and then continue on adding.

Okay so it's not just me. We all have these ideas swirling around us in the air all the time. We absorb some of them and we keep going. It just requires some filtering. So that's what I really want to attempt here. To filter through some of this stuff that's everywhere and try to weed bits out until I can actually hear my own voice.