Roll over John Ruskin, or the Unimportance of being Cool

[gurdonark]

I slept too much today. I still have a bit of work to do tonight. I saw some decent television, and read a fair bit of Ruth Brandon's Surreal Lives. I love surrealist art, but those are not encouraging lives--so much vision, but so many featherheaded, dangerous and disappointing wrong turns. I read a nice post which asphalteden wrote about how fans of "really cool" music become so entrenched in their ways that they essentially create a new "orthodoxy" which kills everything in its wake, including style evolution by beloved artists. I've seen this happen over and over. Music or art or literature becomes This Week's Thing, a way to become "cool" without being named to the Homecoming Court, just another suburban post-teen way to exclude others.
I love small label music, but not as a way to be cooler than anyone. It's interesting to me that the surrealists, Breton in particular, sound like the disaffected inhabitants of my college rather than true pioneers. The ideas are the Art, and the people merely Vessels, and sometimes tupperware at that. Still, to have been a vessel which invented surrealism!

I was getting down this afternoon, what with oversleep, and getting so little done on my work and my nervousness scrapbooks (I did almost finish the first one), my failed mixing experiment Friday (wife cheered me up with a classic quote--"what's the POINT of making bad music if the MIXING has to be GOOD?"), and the general malaise I've felt as I rest up from a stressful and busy week. I hate being depressed. I am not as cool when I am depressed as surrealists were--I'm not really properly pithy at all when I'm down.

Then things looked up. We went to a great hole in the wall, dirt cheap, LA worthy Chinese place, that the folks at my wife's favorite coffee shop, Java and Chai, recommended (I don't drink coffee, so I miss the hot cafe tips). The menu was pretty ordinary Hunan and fast food Cantonese, but these preparation was exquisitely good. Then I got out the mower. This mower, which my brother was kind enough to all but give to me when we first got to Texas (in CA, our neighborhood had a lawn care 'team' who mowed everyone's lawns for less the price of mower maintenance each week--they were so cool, even dead heading roses and the like within the basic price), is on its last gasps. Its handle buckles, the literal rabbit and literal turtle on the throttle no longer connect to the engine, and the pull start does not recoil correctly. I look like a man using a walker as I mow with it. Still, half an hour cutting our lawn put me in an ecstatic mood. I can DO this, I can DO this, and the yard looks mowed.

I do not really buy the John Ruskin/Gandhi notion that we should all be doing simple farming instead of our modern life. I think we need a world with anti-biotics and other technological advances if we are to make our world contented, free and equal. But when I mow the grass, I feel like some haywarden in a poem, who finds his contentment in the sound of the scythe.

Flash: flocks of birds are migrating, heading south. Warning: summer's end approaches! School starts in Allen tomorrow.

Comments

Now I'm found...

[cathla143.livejournal.com]

To-do lists can be the bane of our existence...

One of my favorite songs is "Amazing Grace" (your mood), and I've recently discovered (through people on my friends list) Magnetic Fields.

Re: Now I'm found...

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

my to do list can be my salvation and my damnation,all at the same time.

Isn't amazing grace a wonderful song? When I've been alive 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, I'll still love that song.

I had heard some magnetic fields before, but this weekend, it seemed like one of their songs really resonated with me.

Re: Now I'm found...

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

I've noticed you listing the magnetic fields as your "current music" quite a lot lately. That's neat. I think they may be my favorite band. It's always hard to make that declaration, but I'll never get over listening to "100,000 Fireflies" or the whole of The Charm of the Highway Strip those beautiful first times. Man, just thinking about it now gives me the shivers, and I can smell the cool air that was wafting through my bedroom at that time, as I tried desperately to write a paper on D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, but all I could think about was Easter baskets full of jelly beans and singing along to "When the Open Road Is Closing In." I gushingly introduced myself to Stephin Merritt before one of their shows (very uncharacteristic of me), and he was so disinterested and had the limpest handshake I'd ever felt. Claudia Gonson pulled me aside and said, "He's just like that," so I didn't really mind.

Re: Now I'm found...

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I'd been aware of Magnetic Fields for some time, of course, as they seem already to have developed a bit of controversy (are they good? are they predictable? is usually the spin I read), and they have nice tunes. But I've not picked up any of the CDs, and I suppose now I will have to do so. I used to listen to a lot of what I think of as spare, clean pop, although the bands that played it the last time I did were more like the dB's, Green on Red, Guadalcanal Diary and the True Believers. In fact, I heard a radio spot where the TB's Alejandro Escobedo, now solo, turned 50 lately,and I felt a little old.

I like simple sincere music because it just is what it is, and not too "cool". I love that story about introducing yourself to Stephen Merritt, which reminds me of the time I did not have the nerve to knock on the door at Cocteau Records and see if Bill Nelson was playing any club dates at the lowest ebb of his career circa 1980.

I've never owned any Magnetic Fields. I've never read the Rainbow. But I have always been intimidated by celebrities, usually against my better judgment.

Re: Now I'm found...

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

One reason I love the Magnetic Fields is, of course, for their pop sensibility. But I love the songs lyric-wise because, evidently, they aren't really sincere at all! Stephin Merritt just makes them up so they sound good. And for some reason that really appeals to me. I read in an interview somewhere that Merritt's mother thinks they're all about her! And really that's the beauty of all really good songs--when one thinks they were written for her (or him). D. and I think Merritt could have another career writing musicals (which I loathe, but anyway...). I like a lot of the songs that have female vocals. The first few releases featured a female vocalist. But I always insist Charm of the Highway Strip is my favorite. Many disagree that it's the best of the lot, but I love it. And recommend it whole-heartedly as a purchase! (To answer your poll a bit late.)

Re: Now I'm found...

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendation. Now I'll have to think on this "sincerity" thing, because almost all my favorite lyricists are sardonic. The Magnetic Fields thing, which in my limited, read an article or two, heard a song or two, understanding, seems to be about parodies of love songs and the like. I'll have to think on this notion of a great lyric being a song everyone thinks is written for him or her. I'm always fond, I know, of a grim lyric counter-pointed against a happy melody. But while I like to "relate" to lyrics, I rarely think they are about me. I suspect that far more artists than Merritt make up lyrics because they sound good. I think that all prog lyricists did that, though they did write about elves a lot.

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking a lot about "simple farming" lately. We got in a "how-to-do-it" book recently at work on just that subject, and I was leafing through it longingly. I really would like to have some sheep and some rabbits. Maybe even chickens and a cow. So they could help me make the most fabulous sweaters and most delicious cakes known to man. All of which I could sell from my front porch as I drink my morning coffee and get to work on that novel.

I can be so unrealistic at times, it shocks even me!

There's a Bright Golden Haze on the Meadow....

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Being a town boy from a very country region, I have a lot of second hand knowledge of these things, but no real first hand experience. Sheep and cows, as well as horses, are very difficult for novices. Goats, by contrast, are very easy to keep, aside from essentially eating every shread of grass in sight. Goat milk and goat fur appeals to some.
Chickens are not that hard, but unappetizing, because to make enough money to make it worth while one has to factory farm, which is very unappealing.
A few chickens, though, can lay eggs nicely, and not offend your sensibilities. Rabbits are easy, although after Roger and Me, harder for me to focus on except as pets.

Now gardening, that's a different, and much easier thing! Mustard greens, spinach, squash...virtually all good southern food is easy to grow. Only corn can frustrate, because it is so darn eager to get 5/6th of the way done, and so slow to get all the way done.

It's funny to think on! But imagine this instead--a position in a university library of a semi-rural region. Close enough to the urban areas for culture and jobs for both of you and the like, close enough to the country so's you can buy a cheap home, farm fresh eggs, inexpensive wool, and breathe that fresh country air. Lots of places in the south and midwest offer that; a few in the barely inland Pac. Northwest. Who knows? Maybe your pipedream has more pipe and less dream than you imagine.

But I'm still going to smile at the thought of your future posts about chickens that won't lay eggs, and how cow milking must have meaning.