The New Old Song

For most of my life, I have lived under the assumption that I understood what songs meant. I have been very wrong. I understand the words, literally. I know how keys work to play on our moods, and how song structure can impact the effect of a song. But I have not understood much of the music I listen to. The actual underlying emotion that the songwriter captured and the layers of feeling a song can evoke are something I now know I will never completely understand.

The reason for this is very simple. The vast majority of songs you or I will ever hear were written to address a particular emotion that most listeners have never actually experienced. Therefore we have no real way to understand, and also do not realize we do not understand the song. We don’t know what we don’t know. As a counterpoint, movies and television can sidestep this issue by showing us what is going on, and by nature of the medium, there is much more exposition and narrative to fill in the context of a particular scene. Music does the opposite.

Songs are the scene with no intro or epilogue. A good songwriter can bring up excruciating pain with a few syllables, or use a phrase to evoke tremendous joy. But the listener needs a reference point. And as the listener grows in experience, familiar songs suddenly take on new meaning. If the listener does not have that shared experience, the song will sound completely different.

Go listen to “Somebody to Love” by Queen. On the surface it is a song about finding love. It is a short song lyrically, having only 20 or so individual lines. But the beauty of the song is only truly apparent if you have listened to it during at least two very distinct emotional points in your life. First, listen to it when you are happy, or in a relationship. Then listen to the song after you have been dumped. You have had your heart broken, you want that person back, and hate yourself for wanting that, and now you want to get over it. Suddenly it is a much better song, and Freddie’s croon will hammer you heart in a way it never could if you have not experienced that.

“I Will Survive” is a thematic sibling with a slightly more militant take on the same idea. Almost every song by Death Cab For Cutie has to be listened to before the crucial I-need-to-get-over-this stage, or it loses a lot of vicarious heart-tugging power.

The interesting upshot of this is that many songs I have long thought are horrible sound fantastic once I have met the emotional criteria. For some reason country gets better as I age and lose some of my younger self’s swollen ego. I can listen to country songs now and find it very rewarding, whereas I used to think country was the epitome of formulaic songwriting – I identify with the “mundane” topics found in those songs more. This sympathy through shared emotion is a great tool. If you have an open ear, so to speak, you can go back and hear completely different meanings on the radio, in your CD case, or on your computer.

So onward! I know I don't understand most of the songs I listen to, and that makes listening evenm ore exciting!

Quick Update

Over the weekend I was able to find some nicely aged sheet music (Schubert's Impromptu), and get some work done on a second book I have been working at.  I currently have a book planned with music staffs on one page face and blank space for notes on the other.  I need some more paper for printing, but the covers may happen this week.

Motorcycle update:  The Clymer Manual came, but this weekend saw no work.  Paycheck time is needed for some cleaning supplies, then work on the engine can start up!

Let the Faux-Proletariat Raise Their Glasses!

File this in “LA Observations”.  Since moving out here, I have come to learn that my definition of many words and concepts is completely foreign to what the rest of reality, or at least my local LA reality, agrees upon.  The most puzzling to me is the term “dive bar”.

Background:  I am from, and learned to drink, in Wisconsin.  So I have a few general categories of bars:

• College bars, defined by the patrons.


• Sports Bars.


• Upscale bars that have some sort of dress code, and are populated by people usually classified as “adults”, or perhaps the average age is at least 35.


• Themed bars.


• LGBT Bars.


• “Scene” bars that are loud and filled with party people.


• Normal bars.


• Dive bars.

My problem out here is that to me a normal bar is where people go to just hang out with their friends and have a few drinks, without any other agenda such as watching the game.  This is the meta-drinkological equivalent of Cheers or the pub in How I Met Your Mother.  A dive bar is a step below this, to me.  Where you have 3 guys at the bar who were there when you got in, will be there after you leave, and will be there next week.  A place where you think you could get into a fight with a local through no fault of your own.  A place where you know getting completely tanked will probably not be noticed, or will have one of those three guys becoming your best friend for an hour.

So the conundrum becomes this:  As I try to find new places, I tend to go to Yelp! to see what people have said about prospective bars.  Inevitably I started finding the places I like to go, and they are all called dive bars.  Yet they seem to be populated by mostly 20-30 crowds who typify the normal bar crowd to me.  There seems to be a cultural perception in LA that if it’s not a club, it’s a dive bar.

I have been to a few real dives out in LA.  They are not pleasant, and I have the unfortunate honor to have actually been 86’d from one.  Living up to the preconception of the bar, perhaps?  But none of the people who talk about dive bars in LA would even stop at these true dives.

My hypothesis:  Many people in LA are drawn to both the Hollywood scene, but want to try and distance themselves from it at the same time.  Some manifestation of the precarious balance in the unconscious herd’s love/hate relationship with all things pop-culture played out on the internet and in conversation.  We want to show that we are not all those stereotypes that we love to hate, and secretly thrill to indulge in.  So the response is to oversell it both ways.  Make the posh clubs the height of sexualization of every possible facet of life, and make the rather normal bars and pubs into the dives where we can just go and be our ur-selves, reveling in our underclass awesomeness.

But I still want all those “dive bar” patrons to come with me to few little places in the Valley.  It would be an entertaining night.

Pavlov Must Have Been a Drag at Parties

Birthdays, break ups, the smell of fresh snow.  Time, distance, rarity.  I have always been amazed at how almost every thing we encounter can trigger gutwrenching responses in us.  I am also amazed at how these emotional responses can change when we least expect them to.  Finally, I am awed at the things we do to feel the ghosts of past emotions and find new ones.

A personal example:  I had a girlfriend who lived in a studio apartment with two cats.  She was not the greatest at cleaning out the litter box.  If you have ever had a cat, or known someone who has, that combination leads to a very strong smell, and possibly taste, that hits you in the face when you walk in a door.  At the start of the relationship, I complained about this state of affairs regularly, even cleaning the litter box once in a while to push back the odor.  As time went on, I began to smell that odor and realize I was home.  This was not because I fell in love with the cats, or the scents they left behind, but because as the relationship grew, walking in the door and smelling the cat piss and kitty litter that told me I was about to see the woman I loved.

Now if I smell that same odor, it comes with a wall of feelings: lost love, distaste for ammonia and cat fluids, lazy afternoons watching old television shows, regret, and a touch of happiness from what I learned about myself and life from my time in that apartment and with that woman.  A stew of nostalgia.  And now, in some strange way, I enjoy that smell while being revolted in the same breath.  I'll breathe it in a little bit if chance across it.  I am sure most of you can relate to this.  Once in a while you buy that shitty beer because it reminds you of an awesome summer of parties.  A Blue Jeep reminds you of that asshole boyfriend you couldn't quit, but you check the plates anyway, and you are just a bit disappointed when it isn't him

We even go out of our way sometimes to seek out these triggers if they make us feel good.   Pushing a workout past your saftey zone to feel the accomplishment for a few more hours.  Staying up that extra hour to keep the conversation going.  I've heard this described as nostalgia for the present moment, and it fills us with a wistful happiness that fades even as we feel it.  We do the opposite to avoid the painful feelings and memories as well.  Avoiding your ex's street to pass the pain of seeing her porch where you spent so many nights together watching the drunks and drinking until you both joined them.  Not drinking grape soda because of the time you got sick at camp.  But what interests me most is the when we seek out that which causes us pain.

Most of the people I know seem drawn to pulling back the scab of old wounds and even rubbing salt into the nerves.  This may be indicative of the people I know more than anything else, but I still find it morbidly fascinating.  Why do it?  What memory is worth that pain?  I am left to think that underneath the pain and sorrow we willingly go back to, the joy that bred the hurt is too tempting to avoid.  And that fills me with hope.  We endure the bad, because the good must be underneath it somewhere.   That happiness is something we will keep trying to find.  Something that we will hold on to and push through the world to find again.  God be damned if we aren't going to try and dig down through the shit until we unearth that one grain of diamond!

Engines Are Not Light..

I spent Saturday tearing Oliver apart after taking a boat load of pictures before starting. With a little help from the roommate, almost every part of the engine/transmission has been removed and is now ready to be taken apart, cleaned, and inspected.

Unfortunately I broke one of the two throttle flaps connected to the choke. But, better to find out they are in bad condition now than when it is up and running on the 405!

So, here is Oliver before the teardown:


And here he is closer to the end:
And the money shot - we got the engine out, so of course I had to hold it high and pretend to smile while trying not to drop it!
I estimate the engine weighs at least 90 pounds, and after holding it up for about 30 seconds, I need to hit the gym a bit more.

Now I am waiting on the shop manual to come so I can begin taking apart the engine and seeing how much work this project is really going to take!

Random Thoughts of the Last Week

A few things lodged in my head over the last few days:

• I am surrounded by oil:  The fork I use in the cafeteria, the keys I am typing this post on, massive amounts of plastics that sits all around me.  If I think about it too much, I feel surrounded by the melted, extruded, squeezed, and pressed bodies of thousands of dead animals that were dug out of the ground.  None of us find this creepy.  Now imagine a car or building or computer made of less decomposed and processed bones and bodies.


• I went for hike and climbed 800 feet in elevation.  Once I got to the top, I realized half of the hill I was hiking on was a landfill.  In order to escape the city, I went to a hill, but the hill only exists because it is the accumulated trash of the city.  In a few million years, will the hill become the building blocks of some new society's utensils and television analogs?


• I am enraged over the pointless squabblings on the news about all of the problems we are having.  As a nation, as a culture, as individuals.  I talk to friends about these things over and over.  Yet I haven't actually written a letter or gone to protest, or done anything.  How many people like me are out there?  How do we reconcile supreme apathy with intense emotion?  Is this some sort of inherent human trait, or is this a slow, societal decline of involvement?

Good luck to us all, I suppose.