Running is driving yourself birdshit crazy over the perfectly engineered mixtape: #15

Mix #15: Shoggoth Shoulderpads

Part and parcel of this winter’s training marathon is to expand the horizons of my running mixtapes. I’m trying to cut back on my doe-eyed twee intake, to say nothing of my guilty pleasure for marshmallow-y synth pop (M83, I promise to you I will one day return). Even my voyeuristic, increasingly-less-earnest foray into gangsta rap has turned stagnant and moldy; picture Mrs. Haversham clutching a rotted limited pressing of Grip It! On That Other Level to her putrid bosoms and you’ll know how I feel. I used to throw out embarrassing, Usher-inspired “nuh-uh, nuh-uh” hand motions while rounding my final lap of mile repeats while Mos Def ravaged my inner ear. But I just don’t have it in me anymore. Blame the frattiness of the town I teach in. I mean, if the guy in the cut-up tank top who smells like cheap aftershave and who probably has “Rohypnol” tattooed in big gothic letters across his beefcake chest… if that guy knows all the rhymes to “The Humpty Dance,” too, shouldn’t I be reassessing the musical company I keep? And asking gut-punching questions about appropriation and identity?

Yes. The answer is yes.

So what’s next?

Guitars. Guitars are what’s next. Very, very loud guitars. Vulcan-forged, grim metal guitars. Hardcore riffs that sound so angular it’s like they ate Euclid’s corpse for breakfast. Fuzzy, toxic sludge guitars.

Two disclaimers:

1) A guy I used to live in Nevada with was really, really into metal, and all this is probably his fault. I’m more than a little squeamish about running to Maiden, because I’m aware of the stereotypes. Metal, viewed from enough distance, seems the province of hirsute enfants terribles who keep their set of d20 dice on the nightstand and make battleaxes out of aluminum foil regardless of whether or not it’s Halloween. Good luck shaking off that Hot Topic vibe. And some people are prolly all, “Look, metalheads, I inhabit plenty of fantasy worlds, too… but at least I don’t trick myself into thinking that a world of necrotrolls, being electrocuted in blood, or griffin-riding Carmen Electras can somehow ameliorate our actual world of shitty 10-hour workdays at the Dairy Queen, shopping for car insurance online, and calling grandma on her birthday. So let’s not go overboard.” Well, screw you people. Go back to your boring, homogenized, yogurty lives.

2) Metal is totally righteous. It’s hard to believe, I know, but I was once thirteen years old. And I would’ve burned down my church if Billy Corgan had subliminally told me to in a “hidden track” on Gish. Why did I like the Pumpkins and Tool so much as a middle/high schooler? Because their carefully concocted rhetoric of wearied cynicism, baroque guitar solos, fixations on mortality, and freaky bodily-manipulation seemed “grown up” in a way that other music wasn’t. Given: these Salingeresque traits are really just the same old teenager-bait, and I harbor no illusions that many alternative/grunge acts were more interested in making money for their labels than serving as musical reincarnations of Keats and Shelley.  Part of the reason I am now ironically returning to “rock” (ugh) is that the otterpop-colored iCulture of hipsterdom aims to keep us in a state of perpetual adolescence. (For some talking points, see last year’s contentious Adbusters feature, Pitchfork fellating singles this summer that sounded like it belonged in a Gidget film, and the “see you at detox after the afterparty!” photosets on The Cobra Snake.)

Here lie wolf traps within wolf traps, however. Everyone who’s stumbled home from a Guitar Hero bar outing in recent months can attest to the fact that hipsters have recently gravitated towards metal. As Ari Abramowitz notes in “Die Hipster Metal, Die!” these recent converts turn metal into another empty signifier, hovering in an irony-copter above the blighted landscape of “hairmetal” to pick off one target after another with sniper (or should I say “snide-per”) bullets to confirm their self-importance and stratospheric tastes. Abramowitz writes that

Some people (and many hipsters) claim fandom to things in order to stick a flag in virgin soil that has not yet been despoiled by their hipster peers/competitors. For the hipster, the goal is to be hip, to know something that his peers don’t know, to get there first, to get the scoop and gain all of the perceived social prestige that comes with it. Of course, we all play and enjoy this game, to greater or lesser extents, to feel that our hard work to obtain knowledge pays off and somehow makes us special. We all build parts of our identity off the self-expression of others. But to the hipster (the “fanatical dilettante,” as Reynolds puts it), knowledge of music is part of a strategic arms race for more hipness, more coolness. This is problematic because it requires a social context. It cannot exist alone, between oneself and one’s personal relationship to music. That is, for the hipster, one’s tastes only matter to the extent that they are seen and acknowledged by others. The music itself does not matter as much as the privileged positioning within the arms race that it confers. This is what makes all of the extra-musical elements [a given band's politics, image, or ostensible erudition], I mentioned earlier so important: those elements form the currency that enables fellow hipsters to keep score versus each other.

Given that hipsters are often described as “curators of consumerism”–self-conscious and ultimately bourgeois lovers of the disposable, deconstructable, and originless–I like Abramowitz’s claim that metal (generally) promotes dedication, sincerity, community, and primacy of experience. So here’s my rule for metal mixtapes while running: I will attempt to sever the umbilical cord on the parasitic literary critic and cultural bean counter in my head. I will enjoy first and rediscover my primordial love of the riff and chug.  What better music to run to?

1 / Iron Maiden – Aces High
2 / The Sword – Freya (Austin’s own)
3 / Mastodon – Iron Tusk
4 / Cult of Luna – Adrift
5 / Pelican – March to the Sea (Pt. 1) (This album should come with a “listen responsibly” label. I remember one time I was listening to this while running on the treadmill at Lombardi and had to resist the urge to SET IT AS FAST AS IT COULD GO UNTIL THE TREADMILL CAUGHT AFIRE)
6 / Led Zeppelin – No Quarter
7 / These Arms Are Snakes – Horse Girl
8 / Fugazi – Shut the Door
9 / Sleater-Kinney – Good Things
10 / Sebadoh – Rebound (Come back, early 90s indie rock ethos! We hardly knew ye!)
11 / Drive Like Jehu – Caress
12 / Detachment Kit – Sitting Still, Talking About Jets (Totally underrated band, and one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen)
13 / Shellac – Steady As She Goes

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Days remaining until the Austin Marathon: 107

Miles completed since I (really) began training for said Austin Marathon: 19

Running is Volksgeist

Chris Carter
Executive Producer
The X-Files
20th Century Fox
10201 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035

Monday, April 6, 2009

Dear Mr. Carter,

About this time last year, I worked my way through the first three seasons of The X-Files. Despite the show’s increasingly dated special effects and early-90s wardrobes (Scully’s grey pantsuits! Flannel! Chunky shoes! Cable-knit sweaters!), I have to tell you: few television shows still have the creepy staying power that the X-Files does. Even the show’s occasional forehead-slapping foray into political incorrectness is sort of charming in retrospect. See, for example, the Season One’s episode “Shapes” (Also known as the “Native Americans are werewolves! Who knew?! Awrrrooo!!” episode).

For the record, I think that “Darkness Falls” is, by far, the best episode. Oregon loggers getting cocooned and sucked dry by mutant, bioluminescent swarms of prehistoric green bugs who’ve been released because the loggers clearcut a bunch of old growth? That’s so cool. SO COOL. I can’t even believe how cool that is.

Mr. Carter, do you believe in ghosts? I’m curious if the X-Files episodes you produced were in any way informed by actual paranormal experiences.

I tot. believe in ghosts.

There’s a place in rural Douglas County, Colorado near where I grew up. It is called (rather unimaginatively) the “Ghost Bridge.” There are two legends associated with the bridge, which is way out in the plains and spans a ditch formed by a seasonal creek. The first legend, at least the way I heard it from my friend Staci my junior year of high school, is that a bunch of “Indians were buried out there” and that “their spirits get really pissed off when white drive over their graves in their cars.” The second legend is that a schoolbus went flying over the guardrail back in the early 1970s after hitting a patch of black ice on a particularly cold morning. 30-some high schoolers and the driver were killed. Whose (again, according to Staci) “spirits get really pissed off when anybody drives over the bridge.”

The two legends are held in a weird dialectic whenever anybody goes out to the ghost bridge. You’re supposed to hear *both* the menacing, mossy thump of Indian war drums AND see ghostly children with black eyes screaming soundlessly at you from the far side of the bridge. Which is then supposed to drip blood from its I-beams.

Blood. Blood. Bloooood.

I’ve only been out to the ghost bridge twice, and both times nothing happened except that it was really cold, foggy, creepy, and a couple of cows started humping. One time, Staci claimed to have seen a “ghost school bus” on the road with no driver, but Staci also listened to a *lot* of Whitesnake, which tarnishes her reputation as a witness somewhat in my view.

I myself am a devout believer in ghosts after the most intensely frightening night of my life spent in a haunted bed-and-breakfast in Eureka Springs, Colorado in 2005. The B&B was an old, Victorian-style house owned by a man named Hugh. He’d moved to Eureka, a small mountain town near Colorado Springs, with his partner in 2000. They’d split up within six months. His partner bailed on Hugh because he couldn’t stand the house. It gave him “bad vibes,” pipes would constantly break, rooms would be freezing cold even with the heat on, and he couldn’t be in a room without feeling like the walls were “looking back at him.” Anyway, my parents and I were the only guests for the night and Hugh and I talked for a long time down in the kitchen, drinking, after my folks had gone to bed. Around 11:30, I made to go back upstairs and Hugh asked me to remind him which room he’d put me in. “The Peacock Room,” I said. “Oh,” Hugh said, “That one’s not so bad. With the ghosts.”

The Peacock Room was named because of its wallpaper, emerald green and purple. It was also decorated with bird-ish stuff, including a giant, hanging birdcage in the window and (how scrotum-tighteningly creepy is this) a taxidermied eagle on the dresser. I managed to pass out right away, but then awoke around 2:30 in the morning to a creaking. The birdcage swayed back and forth in the room for the next three hours. I’d left the window closed and there was nothing coming from the air conditioning vent. Except (and this is the thing that still gets me) the sound of somebody breathing. Right next to the bed. There were also footsteps coming from the hall at weird, shuffling intervals. I was too petrified to even get out of bed and reach for my phone for at least an hour, at which point I called my then-girflriend and mightily compromised my masculinity over the phone. I was way too scared to get out of the bed. Instead, I waited until dawn broke, when the birdcage abruptly stopped swinging and the panting ghost was banished back to its day-lair, or whatever. I’m never staying in a bed & breakfast (sorry, “B&B”) again. Ever. Not even if Kevin Sorbo was the owner and baked oatmeal scones wearing in a frilly gingham apron every morning, delivering them hot and fresh to guests’ rooms. Not then, not never.

That’s all for now.

Best wishes,
C. Turner

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Days streaked: 15

Total Miles: 57.1

colonna sonora di oggi : Common and Jay-Z.

Running is driving yourself birdshit crazy over the perfectly engineered mixtape: #11

mix #11: fleeter than a oiled gazelle

(60% shoegaze fuzz, 20% bratty electrotrash, 10% ironic sludge metal, 10% dodos)

1 / wolf parade – we built another world
2 / french kicks – abandon (one miracle-bearing day, i might pick up a tin can out of the curb down on Virginia Street, put it to my ear to find something as infectious, wonderful, and analog reverb-drenched as this pouring out of the other end)
3 / the pains of being pure at heart – contender (pfork is working itself into a froth over this album)
4 / cut copy – out there on the ice
5 / goblin cock – stumped (if for no other reason than i can one day tell my grandchildren that i used to “run around reno a lot, listening to goblin cock.” and liz can testify to just how monumental 1:16 is in the video. actually, you should probably watch the whole video, as there’s a good bit where a couple of robots get totally wailed on by some snarl-lipped softball players and druids near the end.)
6 / the dodos – fools (why the fleet foxes continue to be critical darlings, but the dodos remain largely overlooked is beyond me. apparently naminal bands are only fair game if you don’t take your moniker from one that’s extinct. so much for the constellation of prog-metal possibilities surrounding “Coelacanth.”
7 / holy fuck – milkshake (aside: anything drawn by chad vangaalen freaks. me. out.)
8 / islands – where there’s a will there’s a whalebone
9 / jesus & mary chain – april skies (my aunt mary, who now lives in michigan attempting to manage one near-eschatological domestic disaster after another caused by one of her four kids, once gave my mom a jesus & mary chain poster to save for when “i got older and cooler.” i was probably ten at the time. my mom promptly threw it out, because the poster included the word “jesus” in a decidedly secular context (distressed black leather and Wayfarers, man). i still hold this against her. even though i’m probably still not cool enough to have that poster above my dresser.)
10 / new order – regret
11 / beep beep – the fluorescent lights

Running is not being able to properly update a blog because you’ve been reading about workingclass poetics all day

Mexicans Begin Jogging

At the factory I worked
In the fleck of rubber, under the press
Of an oven yellow with flame,
Until the border patrol opened
Their vans and my boss waved for us to run.
“Over the fence, Soto,” he shouted,
And I shouted that I was American.
“No time for lies,” he said, and pressed
A dollar in my palm, hurrying me
Through the back door.

Since I was on his time, I ran
And became the wag to a short tail of Mexicans–
Ran past the amazed crowds that lined
The street and blurred like photographs, in rain.
I ran from that industrial road to the soft
Houses where people paled at the turn of an autumn sky.
What could I do but yell vivas
To baseball, milkshakes, and those sociologists
Who would clock me
As I jog into the next century
On the power of a great, silly grin.

-Gary Soto, from A New Geography of Poets. Eds. Edward Field, Gerald Locklin, and Charles Stetler. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1992.

Today, while trail running through chilly canyon updrafts and looking for Basque arborglyphs on Peavine Mountain, I witnessed a red-tail, on the wing and flying faster than greased electricity, sink its talons into some grey sparrow-ish bird.
This made sense at the time, as I was listening to Iron Maiden.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: decidedly autumnal: cold and gorgeous with a sharp wind and even sharper sunlight. I ended up as rosy-cheeked as a gin-blossomed hobbit.

Workout/whether or not my innards gave way : eight slow, rolling miles with everything downstairs feeling relatively tranquil.

Total Mileage to Date: 601

Days remaining to Denver: 6