Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "Animals have these advantages over man: They have no theologians to instruct them, thier funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills." - Voltaire

Reading: Christopher Moore, Island of the Sequined Love Nun

Listening to: a mix tape (see below)

Decluttering accomplishments: threw out a few more old magazines

3 November 2002 - Rejected Themes

I spent much of the day yesterday working on a mix tape. This has to do with a music exchange that Kymm set up a while back. It's wonderful getting the tapes or CDs each month. Some stuff is too twangy for my tastes, but there are at least a few interesting things on each mix.

So November is my month and I agonized over a good theme. My original thought was to do "Here and There." The "there" side would be assorted world music. The "here" side would be songs about places I've lived, starting with Sondheim's "Another Hundred People," which is the best song about New York ever written. The problem with that is that I grew up on Long Island and that would mean I'd have to include a Billy Joel song. I couldn't do that to nineteen innocent people.

I considered revising that to make the "here" side be general songs about America. The problem with that was that I got hung up on Boston bar bands of my college days and I kept slipping in stuff like "Jackie Onassis" by Human Sexual Response. And that didn't really keep to the theme. Also, I didn't want to use more than one song by a given artist and I thought Uncle Bonsai's "Iowa Apology Song" was a great one to use, but it makes no sense if you don't also have the song it's an apology for.

Then I decided I really wanted to include "Buffy Come Back" by Angel and the Reruns. (If you're not familiar with this, it was a sort of cult hit in the 1980's and includes such lyrics as "Buffy, Buffy, come back to me/ why'd you have to go and o.d./ who'll take care of Mrs. Beasley?") I vaguely thought that combining that with "Jackie Onassis" would make for the start of a dead celebrities tape, but I didn't think I could come up with a whole 90 minutes on that subject.

Aha! "Buffy Come Back" is nothing if not disturbing and I could base something on Ross Altman's "Disturbing the Peace." Actually, I intended to use another one of his songs ("Left Wing Guitar," which is about his father and McCarthyism). And I got fairly far along on making that tape. Somehow, though, it wasn't meant to be and I accidentally taped over half of what I'd recorded.

What was left started with "I Spent My Last $10.00 (on Birth Control and Beer)" by Two Nice Girls and "The I.P.D." by Judy Small. That vaguely suggested reviving an old idea I had for a mix tape that had to do with appetites and would consist entirely of songs about sex and food. The only problem was that I was determined to use "There's Always Next Year" from the original cast recording of The Curse of the Bambino (a musical about the Red Sox). My determination had largely to do with having gotten the bloody song completely stuck in my head for nearly two weeks. That type of obsession is worth passing along to others.

In the end, I came up with "Not an Old Fashioned Love Song." If you don't think a song about the Bosox qualifies as a love song, you don't know me well. I still managed to include two Sondheim songs ("Marry Me a Little" and "Unworthy of Your Love") and some Tuvan throat singing. I think it's an interesting mix and I hope the other people will. But that will have to wait until after I manage to make the rest of the copies (one down, eighteen to go) and design and print a J-card.

What I didn't include, alas. was anything by Ross Altman, anything by Snakefarm, anything from the cast recording of "The Flight of the Lawnchair Man," "Monkey With a Typewriter" by Open House, or "No More Mosquitos" by Four Tet. Maybe next time.

And, oh, yes, I did get "There's Always Next Year" out of my head. But only by replacing it with "L'oranguta" by Pepe and the Bottle Blondes. I dread spontaneously bursting out into song while walking to the metro.