Grand Mental Station (2.0)

365-2009-125: Man in the Mirror

RIP Michael Jackson's Star On Hollywood Blvd, originally uploaded by Sërch.

Chaos in Iran. North Korea and Pakistan can't be up to any good while we're all distracted by what's happening in Tehran. Healthcare in America. The ongoing economic crisis.

And yet the whole beleaguered planet had continued humming along. That is, until this Thursday evening, when the entire civilized world seemed to come to a sudden, crashing halt, at the moment it was confirmed that Michael Jackson had passed away at the age of 50.

The immediate effect was such a demand for information about Michael Jackson online that even the largest websites, some, like Twitter, already well accustomed to beefing up their servers after previous service problems, were brought to their knees. ComputerWeekly.com reported,

By late yesterday afternoon in the US, the average response time from news sites was almost nine seconds - more than double the normal response time of less the four seconds, Keynote Systems said.

This indicates that consumer demand for news is now online, with people checking social media sites and online news sites before TV...

Michael Jackson's death wasn't just the passing of one of the biggest celebrities of any kind the world has ever known - it was a watershed moment in the history of the Internet.

Already this week, the Web was abuzz about a post by some engineers at Google about what's wrong with the Internet, and how we need to fix it. The events of Thursday were a demonstration. 

And yet, beyond awe at the sheer size of the bombshell news, it was hard to put a finger on what I felt right away. My initial, gut reaction was similar to when you hear of someone who has died after a long illness -- relief that at least their suffering has ended. Michael Jackson had clearly been overwhelmed by his demons for most of the last 15 years.

I knew it would be difficult to feel anything unconflicted about this passing, since the Michael Jackson most fresh in my memory is the over-surgeried waif holding a helpless baby over a balcony in Germany, and a freak show on the witness stand in court being accused of even worse abuse on other children.

We'll never truly know what happened with Michael Jackson and those children. What I do know is that he was, at the very least, wildly inappropriate with them for a legally grown man, and if he couldn't help himself, there ought to have been someone in the world who could put a stop to it for him.

And yet, maybe not. He was, after all, a rich and popular entertainer in America at the end of the 20th century, and he was, with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, not like you and me. Another layer of meaning to this milestone - the commentaries and reflection it's inspired on what extreme and prolonged fame does to a human being.

But in the end, what we come back to, what we always come back to, is the music, and the dance. "Put it this way," wrote Mark Morford in his "Notes and Errata" column for the San Francisco Chronicle this week. "billions of humans disagree about the nature of God. But everyone knows what the moonwalk is."

Everywhere, there have been tributes, surprising and spontaneous outpourings of grief. A colleague of mine told me today he saw a woman get on his plane on Thursday talking about it on a cell phone with tears streaming down her cheeks, as if Michael were a relative. Everyone from Barack Obama to a highly intoxicated Snoop Dogg have paid their public respects.

This is where the Web comes in. Generations X and Y are gathering on it to mourn, and not just for the passing of an icon and a staple of our childhoods. There are some people in my age bracket confronting their own mortality because of it:

So, remembering all this weird, archaic, pleasant stuff from my childhood, I actually started to tear up. Not for Michael Jackson, of course, but for myself. When the symbols and icons of your youth die, it’s like shutting the door to a room you wish you could go back into. When the people you grew up with – personally or culturally – stop existing, it seems like your childhood gets another step further away. Without those touchstones to spur memories, your early years seem more like something you saw on TV or read in a book or imagined, and less like something you actually lived. An easier, more innocent time is long past, time marches relentlessly on, and life only gets fucking harder and harder.

This is far, far less eloquent than I would like it to be, but it’s hard to put into words. It’s not the loss of Michael Jackson that has me so upset. He was one of the overarching symbols of what was probably the best part of my life. And it’s the loss of that which has me a bit inconsolable this morning.

Yes. This is that big.

All of us, children of the 80's, are breaking out our Michael Jackson records. Or CDs. Or mp3s. Yesterday I came home to find my husband listening to "Human Nature." He commented incredulously on what a great song it really was, and how long it had been since he'd heard it. I've heard similar comments repeated dozens of times since.

Many of us born between 1975 and 1985 have a special relationship with Thriller-- the album, the song, and the video. Many of our parents owned the record. Many of us danced to "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" in our wood-paneled living rooms with our siblings before we went to play with My Little Ponies or watch the Smurfs. Thriller is ingrained in that time, as much a part of the stage set for childhood as the furniture and the wallpaper in the homes where we grew up.

Many of us remember the picture with the tigers on the inside of the vinyl album sleeve. I remember looking at it and asking my mother, once, "Mom, does Michael Jackson have a girlfriend?"

"Hmm. No, I don't think so," was her reply.

The Thriller video is one of my earliest memories, musical or otherwise. When I was three-going-on-four I saw it at the babysitter's house, where the babysitter's older children were watching it. I remember approximately four things from this time period, and the guck dripping out of a zombie's mouth on the television in this babysitter's rec room is one of them.

When Bad came out, I was old enough to start listening to things and watching them of my own accord. I had a tape cassette of Bad, and I can still remember jamming out with my old Walkman to "Bad" and "Smooth Criminal".

And of course, no one who was a minor at this time escaped exposure to the Weird Al homage, "Fat." As gross and offensive as parts of the song and video are, I give Weird Al major credit for the lyrical brilliance of "Ham on. Ham on. Whole wheat! Aw right!"

Another one of my favorites, possibly my single favorite Michael Jackson song, is a non-megahit track from Bad, "Dirty Diana". There's just something about it, a sinister atmosphere, a real edge from the King of Pop.

Not to be overlooked, of course, are all of the early hits with the Jackson Five: "ABC", "I Want You Back", "Rockin Robin", and my favorite from these years, "I'll Be There", as well as the early solo hits, "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" and "Rock With You."

But the song that everyone keeps coming back to, the song Snoop Dogg signed off with, the song that inspired brilliance at The Sheila Variations after the news broke, the song I catch myself humming when I haven't been paying attention after 24 hours of Michael immersion, is "Man in the Mirror."

So that's my 365 Song for this day. The day that Michael Jackson died.

In the end, what matters is how you're remembered. And on this day, people remembered the music. 

365-2009-124: Secret

by Meryn Cadell

I'm here where I want to be

Seven thousand miles from infinity

No one knows where I am.

It's quiet here with me

I'm filling in the spaces where the killings used to be

There's no phone

and no way home

It's been a long time coming

It's been a long time

I'm here

where I want to be

Seven thousand miles from infinity

No one knows where I am but me

365-2009-123: Wind of Change

This one might still fall under "Guilty Pleasures", but that post was at least an attempt at humor, and the subject that brought the song to my mind this week was deadly serious, and it didn't feel right to include it in the same post.

***

When I was 10, my classroom music course required bringing in a song for the class to listen to, and then we would identify the instruments in it, and then someone else's song would be played, repeat. Someone brought this song in one day and talked about the Berlin Wall. Someone else said the new Germany was considering this Scorpions tune as the new national anthem for the country. We all listened reverently.

This was around the time I first began to become aware of world events. When I think of that year, and sixth grade - aside from Color Me Badd - I can still remember the images I saw of the Tianenmen Square protests, one of the earliest images I remember from the news. All of us, Generations X and Y, were starting to know enough to ask What's going on? about things like the Berlin Wall.

That year, in another class, I was assigned a report on a country, and I got Romania. I was pissed. There was nothing I liked more than drawing maps in Social Studies class, and I would pore for hours over tiny inlets in the coast of Maine during the unit on US States (and yes, as if I need to lay this out any further, I was a capital-D Dork). Romania was a stupid square. I'd been dying to get Egypt, which I was going through a phase of fascination with, but nooo, I got stupid Romania, and part of the assignment was to make a recipe from that country, and when I checked out a book from the library of traditional Romanian recipes and asked my mom what "suet" was, I was horrified.

I also checked a video out of the library, a documentary about the Romanian government, about which I was also expected to give a report. This documentary was about the most recent years of Romanian government - specifically, the rise and fall of one Nicolae Ceauşescu. The documentary contained footage of the firing squad that executed him and his wife, which I watched in its entirety, numb with shock. The year of their death had just passed -- 1989.

What is it about '9' years? It's not even 2009 in Iran. It's 1388 according to their calendar. Numerology is a bunch of bunk. And yet, the Islamic Revolution, 1979...all of the above in 1989...the student uprising in Iran in 1999, and of course, the Millenium...and now 2009, another year of epic sagas played out on a world stage. My brain grasps at patterns where there probably are none. It's human nature.

On Tuesday, the day for which this song is chosen, I watched the video that had circulated the globe of the death of Neda Soltan, the girl who has now become a symbol of the spiraling situation in Iran.

I am a very different person from the sheltered girl who hid in the bathroom crying after watching the documentary on Romania. This time I watched, and what I felt was not panic but a  deep and aching sadness.

From the recesses of my subconscious came those moments from twenty years ago. Triumphant sledghehammers and backhoes tearing down a graffiti-covered Wall. That lonely, haunting whistle that begins this song, so bound up in all those memories.

There are many differences between what's happening now and anything that happened in 1989. But when I searched for this song on YouTube, I found I was not alone in this association:

365-2009: A Week of Guilty Pleasures

After I "came out" with "I Hope You Dance", perhaps the cheesiest song I'll admit to liking, the rest of the week I found myself drawn to a few other "guilty pleasure" songs in my collection.

It's hard to define what a guilty pleasure is, especially when it's not something inherently bad, like music. Guilt (of poor taste) is in the eye of the beholder. The closest I can get to defining it is the songs that make me picture the eyes of a thousand hipsters rolling as I crank them in my car when I'm alone.

So, for the week of June 15-22:

(#116) Low - Flo Rida

Might as well begin with the most bracing selection. It's a summer song, even if it didn't come out in the summer, a catchy, simple club song, its unmistakable beat blaring out of a thousand cars in a city near you as soon as the weather's nice enough to go cruising. Kind of like "He Wasn't Man Enough for Me" was back in 2000. Its merits as a song are debatable, but it marks a point in time.

(#117) Supersonic - Sabrina Sang

Not quite as notorious as "Low", but this one's on Jock Jams. It was in a bargain bin! But still. It came from Jock Jams. Which, yes, I got (from a bargain bin!) many, many years ago, but I also have to confess that I ripped a few of the songs from it to iTunes when I retired my CD collection a few years back, including this one. Again, as a song, I recognize its significant deficiencies. But, again, it's catchy.

(#118) All 4 Love - Color Me Badd

About the only CD (or - gasp! - cassette) one can admit to owning that would be more damaging to the street cred than Jock Jams is Mtv Party to Go. Of which I owned Vol. 2, on cassette, in sixth grade. And this was my favorite song on it. Ah, nostalgia.

I would like to note that I never saw the linked video above before now. Which, wow.

(#119) Walk Like an Egyptian - The Bangles

Speaking of nostalgia. I checked the Bangles' album Different Light out from the library and renewed it, repeatedly, in third grade. I danced to it, along with Michael Jackson's Thriller (more on that soon), in my living room many a time.

I knew every word to this song. Still do. Slide your feet up the street bend your back / Shift your arm then you pull it back / Life is hard you know (oh whey oh) / So strike a pose on a Cadillac.

I'll have to remember that next time life is getting me down. Maybe it'll help to find a Cadillac, and strike a pose on it.

(#120) Heaven is a Place on Earth - Belinda Carlisle

Now we're in the Way, WAY Back Machine. Well, okay. Second grade. Back when getting to stay up to watch Solid Gold was a special treat.

(#121) It's Oh So Quiet - Bjork

A guilty pleasure of a later vintage. Karaoke nights in the Burg, and at some point during the night a couple of girls in our group would always get up on stage and belt this one out, to increasingly loud shouts of complaint from everyone else, week after week. After a while, it earned a nickname, the Shut Up Song, because of all the "Shhh, shhhhh"-ing in it, and because that's what everyone else yelled while the karaoke-rs did the "Shhh, shhhhh" part.

It's the only Bjork song I own, because generally, I find Bjork extremely annoying. But when this one comes up on the ol' shuffle, I smile.

(#122) Rain - Madonna

Madonna is not my favorite, but she wrote some very good songs. This was probably not among her best work, and the video is one of her less inspired efforts. But I liked it anyway. And it's apropos for this day of the 365, because it rained for about the 20th day straight in Boston and tensions were nearing a boiling point all around me, and it was kind of hard not to think of songs about rain.

So...what are YOUR guilty pleasures?

365-2009-115: Joy

...written by my husband. The day after my sister's graduation, I flew back to Boston to see a different piece he wrote, called "Lift", premiered by the Charles River Wind Ensemble on a packed program that also included another world premiere, of a piece called "Anniversaries" by George Lam.

Pictures:

It's safe to say it was a pretty big weekend.

365-2009-114: I Hope You Dance

Photo by Larry Sander

I've been putting off writing this post, not only because that's the cost of perfectionism sometimes, but because no matter which way I tried to slice it, I could think of no more appropriate song for last Saturday - my sister's graduation from veterinary school - than this prom / wedding / graduation cliche by Lee Ann Womack.

It's beginning to dawn on me that by the end of this 365 project, any shred of street cred I may have had will be gone. In fact, with the way things are going, I may wind up in street cred debt.

I can hear, nay, FEEL the eyes rolling with this song title. I can feel the clicking away to something more tasteful and worthwhile.

But hear me out.

I didn't choose this song the first time it attached itself to a significant moment. It was released in 2000, and when my sister graduated from high school in 2001, it was a part of her class graduation ceremony - as I'm sure it was part of many.

Specifically, it was played during the ceremony at the high school football field to memorialize a classmate who died before graduation, a classmate who had been a friend of my sister's and who had battled cancer publicly and courageously during his time on Earth. His parents requested this song be played as their son's message to the class. As the first chords sounded over the field, the class began to wave white carnations, swaying in unison in time to the song.

Beside me in the bleachers, my mother bawled. The goosebumps raised themselves on my arms, unbidden, as I watched that field of white carnations swaying. I can still see that exact moment, my mother's red eyes over a balled-up tissue, the flowers, the slightly overcast sky that day.

***
Maybe I never had much street cred to begin with. Two years ago, after all, "I Hope You Dance" was the song I chose to dance to with my dad at my wedding reception.

It's not that I don't understand the eyerolls, the cheesiness of it all. It's just that for our particular experience, growing up as daughters of my father, it's perfect.

I hope you never lose your sense of wonder
You get your fill to eat
But always keep that hunger
May you never take one single breath for granted
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed
I hope you still feel small
When you stand by the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens
Promise me you'll give faith a fighting chance

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
I hope you dance

"Walk in there like you own the place" has always been one of my Dad's favorite lines to us. It's only as an adult, after you have to make your own way in life, when you discover just how many parental marionette-strings held you up and kept you moving forward before -- it's only when you begin that work yourself that you realize what your parents did for you.

In the case of my parents, my father in particular, it's only in retrospect, with hard-won adult perspective, that I've come to fully appreciate that everything my sister and I took for granted in life came from our parents, always behind us. The image I have now of the way they, along with our grandparents, pushed us through childhood is, oddly, of curling, the furious dozen brushes on the ice for every centimeter movement of the stone.

As an adult, I'm particularly grateful that we had the parents we did as girls. The concept that females were better or worse at certain activities, were more inclined to have certain interests, let alone were supposed to be certain ways or interested in certain things, was not a native idea for us. We were never discouraged from anything--sports, science, leadership -- on the basis of our gender, or anything else.

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance
Never settle for the path of least resistance
Living might mean taking chances
But they're worth taking
Lovin' might be a mistake
But it's worth making
Don't let some hell bent heart
Leave you bitter
When you come close to selling out
Reconsider
Give the heavens above
More than just a passing glance

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
(Time is a real and constant motion always)
I hope you dance
(Rolling us along)
I hope you dance
(Tell me who)
I hope you dance
(Wants to look back on their youth and wonder)
(Where those years have gone)

It's only in retrospect, by comparison, that you realize these things. I didn't cry at my sister's graduation eight years ago, which a year and a half before my own graduation from UMass. But when my father and I danced to this song at my wedding six years after that, as those lyrics echoed and resonated, to say I cried would be an understatement; I put my head down on his shoulder and sobbed.

***

It's difficult to put into words just how proud I am - we all are - that my sister is now officially called "doctor". That her lifelong gravitation - "interest" would be too weak a word - toward animals has borne itself out into this career, these honors and prestige. It's difficult to put into words the feeling that rushed over me as "Pomp and Circumstance" began playing at her Oath and Hooding Ceremony - the College of Veterinary Medicine's special graduation the night before the mass ceremony in the stadium.

I remember thinking, as the graduates began to stream in from the back of the hall toward the stage and the crowd cheered, how many times I've stood in a crowd just like this one and cheered and chanted for a baseball team or a rock band - people I don't even know. How odd and wonderful to stand in an audience as a fan not of a celebrity of some kind but of my family. That's when I realized I had a lump in my throat the size of my fist.

I didn't cry this time, but my mother did, again, after the ceremony as she and my father embraced. I watched them and that fist closed around my throat again. That cheesy song popped into my head again, unbidden.

I hope you still feel small
When you stand by the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens
Promise me you'll give faith a fighting chance

And there were the goosebumps again, right on cue.

Photo by Larry Sander

***

Some of my photos (click thumbnail for photo page):

Full set here.

365-2009: You better work!

MOW_April1993_RuPaul, originally uploaded by firechick.

Songs for days #105 (June 4) through #114 (June 12)...

June 4 (#105) Now I'm Nothing - Nine Inch Nails

Really not as emo as it sounds. The lyric "Wave, wave, wave...wave goodbye" is from this ancient B-side from the early days of NIN, and I believe is where the "Wave goodbye" title of the tour comes from. So it was in my head the day after the concert.

June 5 (#106) So What'cha Want - Beastie Boys

Pro tip: Don't blow yourself out at a rock concert in the middle of a week. Especially if all you can manage to take off is the next morning, and have to spend the better part of the ensuing 48 hours working. Yes, this song was in my head specifically for the lyric: "said I think I'm losing my mind this time..."

June 6 (#107) Fu-Gee-La - The Fugees

June 7 (#108) De La Soul - Oooh Feat. Foxy Brown, Nas, Az, Kool G Rap

June 8 (#109) American Idiot - Green Day

All day on this Monday, I had the specific line, "Now everybody do the propaganda" from this song in my head. I think this may have been one of the days I'd decided all that is inherent in human nature and postmodern culture is UNACCEPTABLE and the REASON FOR ALL MY UNHAPPINESS. I get like that sometimes (you may have noticed). Usually on Mondays.

June 9 (#110) We Break the Dawn - Michele Williams

And thus began the week from hell. Up at the ass crack of dawn every day of the week, including and especially June 9, when I had to be in the Financial District at SEVEN FUCKING THIRTY A.M. The silver lining to this was that I got to spend the night at the Big Gay Disco in Brookline, where Andy introduced me to the TRAGIC FABULOUSNESS that is RuPaul's Drag Race.

The show is incredibly campy and silly and full of reality-show drag queen drama, but there are also moments of it that are truly touching, so touching that they put a song I otherwise never would've even heard (much less remembered if I had) into my head for the whole next day:

(Song starts at 2:00)

June 10 (#111) Cover Girl (Put the Bass in Your Walk) - RuPaul

The new single RuPaul was pimping throughout the show. This earworm appears in every episode. It's been difficult to get rid of. In fact, I have it in my head right now. Now walk.

June 11 (#112) Delirium Trigger - Coheed and Cambria

June 12 (#113) Metal - perf. Nine Inch Nails

A cover of a Gary Numan song. The rote, mechanical beat and the lyrics (We're in the building where they make us grow /And I'm frightened by the liquid engineers) are perfect for a day spent doing two of the most pedantic, assembly-line-like activities possible: going to the courthouse for a car insurance hearing and then the airport (I need my treatment it's tomorrow they send me / Singing I am an American / Do you?)

Wave, wave, wave...wave goodbye

It was over too quickly. The days since have gone too quickly. The whole experience has left me feeling generally, strangely tongue-tied.

Trent has not been definitive enough for the likes of us NIN obsessives when it comes to his future plans. Many of the commenters I saw reacting to his announcement on the NIN.com forums in February that it's "time to make NIN disappear for a while" naturally intend to cling to the last three words of that phrase.

Still, most were gracious, and several pointed out that since his rebirth in 2004 after With Teeth, Trent has essentially been touring and producing music nonstop. That's not to mention that over the last 20 years, he's given us a breathtaking and voluminous discography, complete with an exhaustive gamut of experimental remixes and B sides as well as a whole separate body of artistic video work, whether studio music videos or live documentaries. Who the hell are we not to cut him some slack?

But I can't sit here and say I don't also identify with some others, who just the same could not hold back their protests on that forum thread. My initial, gut reaction when "Head Like a Hole" began in Mansfield Wednesday night was to turn to K and holler over the amps, "NO! NO NO NO NO!" It couldn't be over. It just couldn't be.

It wasn't - not quite. When the band reappeared to play an encore of "Hurt", the feeling made me week in the knees. But soon enough, the lights came up and the crew started setting up for Jane's.

My friends left to make pit stops, buy t-shirts, grab bottled water. I just sat there dumbly in my seat. I should have been getting pumped to see a band I never thought I'd take in live, but I couldn't help sitting there for a few minutes, just feeling sad.

***

Even as he's waving goodbye, even as we whine, Trent has still been trying on this tour to feed our relentless demands for intimacy. He's sold VIP pre-show meet-and-greets to raise money for charity, despite having to fend off outraged winners of free access passes on Twitter who got bumped for those who gave $1000 or more to his cause. He's played tracks on this tour that rarely find their way into NIN's live set lists, based in part on fan requests.

Even though it was in front of an arena of 10,000, this farewell performance was more open and intimate than anything I've seen from this band before. In front of a stripped-down set, the band played a much less polished, more improvisational show this time than the theatrical Lights in the Sky.

Andy pointed out after the show that the Nine Inch Nails of the 90's would have -- well, I won't repeat what unmentionable act he said they would have done to this incarnation of themselves, but I'm sure you can use your imagination. And it's true. But that's a natural hazard with an artist who endures and produces for so many years. How much growth will necessarily take place since this voice found us in the wilderness of adolescence, now a generation and a world ago. How foreign they will ultimately seem to each other.

The self that discovered Nine Inch Nails and I would probably have words, today, too. The miracle is the way the music has remained.

***

Probably the high point of my night was when the band launched into "The Becoming." Chris and I clutched each other. Trent banged on the piano the whole way through, reprising some of the riffs he put into the song during the "Still" sessions.

"Annie, hold a little tighter," I sang along, glancing at Andy, remembering the way that line touched off a silly but adorable attempt among a group of us in high school to script a musical based on The Downward Spiral, complete with an actual, literal character named Annie.

A few rows ahead of us was a tall, skinny guy in a backwards Celtics cap who kept up a pogo-ing, fist-pumping, head-banging dance throughout the whole concert. I watched him leap a full three feet in the air ahead of me as the band launched into the outro section of this song, the part that inspired a wave of provocative t-shirt slogans at Hot Topic back in the day: "It won't give up, it wants me dead, goddamn this noise inside my head."

Thousands of people screamed it. Celtics-cap kid took a nutty. That was the last thing I saw before everything, including the band onstage, disappeared into a blur of my own head-banging, fist-pumping, nutty dance.

Throughout the show, I reminded myself this was the last one, through "The Becoming" and "Burn" and an absolutely unreal remix of "Somewhat Damaged", "Gave Up" and "March of the Pigs", all the way through to "Head Like a Hole." Even my fat ass pogo-ed, on 15-year-old steel-toed boots without anything that could be called a sole left on them. Two days afterwards, my entire spine still hurt.

It was my ninth such experience with this band, the ninth physical, heart-pounding rush, well into the better part of a decade of blurry, sweaty and thoroughly enjoyable ass-kickings. And that's because the guy behind all this puts in this pile-driving, relentless effort every single night, month after month, year after year.

I don't expect him to still be doing it when he's 50, and I know that I have nothing to complain about.

***

I figure, and probably Trent figured, too, that if you showed up to this tour, after five solid years of arena shows, after 20 years since the band's early beginnings, you are more than likely among a rabid core of die-hards. A rabid core of die-hards he's been growing friendlier with as Nine Inch Nails has developed. Even at this late date, he was still opening up to this audience during this show, still trying to fill its endless appetite for communication.

"Can you hear me?" he asked, almost casually, as if to a well-known friend, as he moved to a different microphone, began playing the first chords that would turn into "La Mer". We hollered back in the affirmative. And then he started talking:

Some things, you appreciate by jumping around and head-banging and screaming. Others, you appreciate by holding perfectly, perfectly still, which is how I spent the first few minutes of this song.

I have still never written him that fabled letter after all these years. I have sent a few @ replies his way on Twitter, but have yet to see one in return. But seeing what he said about the fans he did meet before this show, seeing the way he talked to this audience, I realized, it really doesn't matter.

What I've tried with varying degrees of success all these years to explain about how I feel with this band is not that I feel like *I* understand this person I've never met. It's the other way around - I feel understood by this music, and in some ways, the mind behind it. And, more and more often, the kindred spirits I recognize around me at these concerts.

The speech before "La Mer", I realized, was a gesture toward that, a gesture of recognition. He gets it. He knows what we're here for. These days, that's all I really want.

***

And so the feeling should be closure. Even a sense of final graduation, maybe, from adolescence. Maybe now is a time to set aside even more of the habits I inherited from a younger self -a time to retire those steel-toed boots once and for all, and seek out a new self, with new things.

Yet a few days after the farewell show, I find I still don't want to let go. I hatch hare-brained schemes to get tickets to another date before this tour is over. And yes, I cling to those words, "for a while."

I allow myself to imagine that what Trent really means is that his next tour will be more stripped down, maybe even a Tori-Amos-like series of acoustic performances at small venues. I allow myself to imagine string quartets and piano solos and more songs like "Non-Entity", or maybe an extension of the Ghosts aesthetic. What I find myself unable to imagine is Trent Reznor still walking this Earth and not making music.

As Jane's took the stage, my eye was suddenly caught by another fan I hadn't noticed before, also a few rows ahead of me. She looked a little shorter and a little older than me, and much more petite. She had long, straight, undyed brown hair. It looked like she was wearing something summery, but not exactly edgy - she looked, frankly, like a soccer mom who'd taken a wrong turn into this concert.

But as Jane's began, she threw herself into each and every song, totally lost in her own world with the music. How many years had it been? I instantly recognized what she was feeling, just through her body language, the way she seemed to know each and every word.

In that moment, with NIN off the stage, I was enjoying myself, but detached, as if thrown back through some looking-glass. I wasn't the girl making a nutjob of herself anymore. And the feeling of Zen I'd achieved after "La Mer" was suddenly gone - right there in front of me was the demonstration of how not-the-same things are going to be. How some things only really happen to you once in a lifetime.

At the end of the day, I am trying not to be a selfish fan, but find the best I can do so far is a compromise: I can accept an end to the Nine Inch Nails concept. But not to becoming the girl who looked like she'd just been starving without a glimpse of something irreplaceable for years. Not an end to that sense of connection.

This week in 365 Songs

May 26 (#96) Sun King, The Beatles - First day back after an extra-long weekend. This song, an alternate track at the end of Abbey Road, is a good soundtrack for the kind of disjointed, disrupted feeling I had that day, especially with that rambling, nonsensical Italian section. Quando para mucho mi amore de felice corazón Mundo paparazzi mi amore chicka ferdy parasol Presto obrigado tanta mucho cake and eat it carousel...

May 27 (#97) Fast Car, Tracy Chapman - Picking up a little in energy, but still a little out of it.

May 28 (#98) Let's Dance to Joy Division, The Wombats - Then all of a sudden, it was Thursday, and it was time to socialize.

May 29 (#99) Working My Way Back to You, The Four Seasons - Mucho el queso selection by my internal jukebox as the weekend appraoched once again. Why couldn't it have picked "Working for the Weekend"? Also, who knew there was this much 60's music in my head?

May 30 (#100) Pictures at an Exhibition, "The Great Gate at Kiev", Mussorgsky - As Steve rolled in from running an errand, I thought I heard this playing on the radio in his van. Turns out it wasn't, but the first two notes of what I heard put this great orchestral finale in my head, along with an image of my college orchestra conductor onstage, dripping with sweat, conducting it with a series of increasingly emphatic downbeats. Remembering it was one of the first pieces I played with the University Orchestra - I can still see myself poring over it in the dining commons, nearly in tears as I looked at the impenetrable walls of 16th notes, the bunches of sharps and flats in every key signature...let's just say it's a challenging piece to play.

May 31 (#101) As Good as I Once Was, Toby Keith - This is almost without a doubt the first, last and only time I will mention Toby Keith on this blog. Definitely not my cup of tea, but this is my Dad's favorite song, and Sunday was his birthday (see picture above), so...

June 1 (#102) You Could be Mine, Guns N' Roses - Random

June 2 (#103) Uptight (Everything's Alright), Stevie Wonder - Tuesday was a pretty long, hectic one.

June 3 (#104) Zero Sum, Nine Inch Nails - Tonight's the night! I'm heading with Chris, K, and Andy to see the NINJA tour in Mansfield. I requested that the band play this song a few months back, because a) it's one of my favorites, b) they've never played it live and c) when I first heard it, I immediately pictured it being played, to a thundering, lighter-waving choral sing-along from the audience, at Great Woods during the summer. Tonight the show's at Great Woods. It's the summer. Fingers crossed.

365-2009-95: Navy Hymn

It had been easier this time. Of course, that's a very loaded relative term - to say it had been easier to bury my grandfather than my grandmother speaks more to the trauma of her death than anything particularly easy about his.

One of the things that made it easier were the sailors, and the brilliant, brand-new American flag draped over the casket at the burial ceremony. I knew my grandfather would've wept with pride watching the man in a dress officer's uniform press the folded flag between his white-gloved hands, and pass it reverently to my father, my grandfather's only son.

After the burial service, I approached the man in the dress uniform. For a fleeting moment, his otherwise stoic face betrayed surprise as I walked up to him. Maybe families don't normally say anything. But I had to.

I took one of those gloved hands in mine, looked straight into the man's cornflower-blue eyes above a sandy moustache, and told him how proud my grandfather would have been that he had come. He thanked me back, and his grip grew a tiny bit tighter before we parted ways.

As our family limo departed the cemetery, he drew himself into a fine, sharp salute. He held it until we had driven out of sight, at the top of the hill by the family plot.

Something about it. Something about the pride in that salute, the pride I felt today, Memorial Day, looking at the veterans' marker recording my grandfather's rank and tours of duty. I didn't lose him in a war, but I lost him just the same, and the Navy was a part of that memory, wrapped up in it. Just as the war was a part of my grandfather, and service to his country a foundation of his identity.

The same goes for my family as a whole. Before Steve and I laid flowers for my grandparents this afternoon, we went on a trek aided by GPS and my dad's knowledge of Goffstown landmarks to find the headstone in a Manchester-area cemetery for my great-uncle, who was killed in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal during World War II.

He was buried at sea, and the stone marks the actual graves of Earle's parents, my great-grandparents. Earle's side of the stone is by far the more ornate. IN MEMORY OF OUR SON. The pain and the pride leap out at me from the epitaph, wrapped up in each other, inextricable.

My grandfather, my great-grandparents, my great-uncle...these are the faces that come to mind on Memorial Day, and whenever I hear the Navy hymn. The Navy and pride in my ancestors, inextricable from one another.

***

Previous posts:

Earle's Story
Why I Remember
More Memorial Day Photos

365-2009-94: This Old Heart of Mine

Random.

A Day Off, a Picnic and a Hike

Last Friday, I didn't touch a computer. At all. For me, this is a very big deal.

And Thus Began a Weeklong Earworm Affliction

And Thus Began a Weeklong Earworm Affliction, originally uploaded by ConfessionalPoet.

...almost as bad as the time I saw a supergroup of 70's and 80's has-beens, including the lead singer of Toto, perform in Las Vegas and wound up with "Rosanna" stuck in my head for two months. This concert by 90's has-beens the Gin Blossoms at another corporate gig last Sunday (Day #87) had me contending with "Hey Jealousy" and "Found Out About You" for the rest of the week. They're my picks for Sunday, obviously, and, more oddly, Thursday (Day #88). That's when "Found Out About You" made its delayed appearance.

I will say this for the Gin Blossoms: they were much, much better, musically speaking, than the last has-been band I saw play a corporate gig, the Goo Goo Dolls. I'll cop to owning Dizzy up the Girl when I was 17 and liking their song "Slide". But when I saw them play here in the 21st century...with this palpable attitude that this corporate gig was beneath them, and so sloppily that it seemed like they hadn't bothered to sober up, so that even their derivative, repetitive songs were almost unrecognizable, they weren't just bad. They were offensive. The Gin Blossoms refrained from insulting everyone's intelligence, at least. They were graciously enthusiastic in their performance. I appreciated that. And even though every song of theirs sounds alike, too, they at least had the decency to play them coherently. For that, I also give them props.

Apparently, my subconscious decided to pay its own tribute to the performance, by replaying the lines "You can see I'm in no shape for driving / and anyway I got no plaaace to goooo," from "Hey Jealousy" and "You know its all I think about / I write your name drive past your house / Your boyfriends over I watch your light go out..." from "Found Out About You" approximately 50 million times apiece this week.

In between, my own interior Apple Genius™ came up with the following songs to set off the Gin Blossoms selections -

Monday (Day #89) - Teenage Wasteland, The Who
Tuesday (#90) - Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me, the George Michael version. Which really was just the cherry on the weirdness sundae that was Tuesday. (And no, I don't know why Tuesday is always such a bad / weird day. In this case almost no circumstances of this Tuesday were like the last one. Yet it was still the longest, weirdest day of my week.)
Wednesday (#91) - It's a Shame About Ray, the Lemonheads
Friday (#92) - The Logical Song, Supertramp (These two songs go together, the same way "Caught Stealing" and "Blister in the Sun" go together. They also remind me of the creators of the 365 Songs project, who were highly influential parts of some of my formative popular musical experiences.)
Saturday (#93) - Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin Which, sadly, always makes me think of a United Airlines commercial.

365 Songs Catch-Up

May 6 (#76) About a Girl - Nirvana
To be completely honest, I don't really even remember what song was in my head on this day. It may have still been "The Way You Move" - that particular earworm likes to visit me for days at a time when it rears its ugly head. But a Facebook quiz told me on this date that I am a 90's grunge rocker. Immediate association? Nirvana. Next association? Unplugged in New York, still one of my favorite albums of all time.

May 7 (#77) Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk - Rufus Wainwright
In honor of my ongoing inability to break bad habits.

May 8 (#78) Tessie - The Dropkick Murphys
Went to see the Sox with the fam. Sox won. They play this song after "Dirty Water."

May 9 (#79) Straight Up Now Tell Me - Paula Abdul perf. Andy Hicks
Went into Cambridge at midnight to see Andy play at a bar. We are definitely shadows of our former selves - I used to be an all but literal vampire, but I had to drink two cups of coffee just to stay up that late. Andy M confessed he'd had to do a 5-hour Energy. Yay! We're old! And now, a song from our long-ago youth.

May 10 (#80) Mary - Tori Amos
Kind of a Mothers' Day-ish song. Tori also makes me think of Heather. She was on my mind again on Mothers' Day for obvious reasons.

May 11 (#81) Get Off of my Cloud - The Rolling Stones
Cranky, cranky Monday.

May 12 (#82) Gave Up - Nine Inch Nails
Terrible Tuesday. (P.S. Still love the above-linked video for this song. Can you spot Marilyn Manson? Do you know why the house shown in exterior at the beginning and end of the vid was famous?)

May 13 (#83) D'yer Mak'er - Led Zeppelin
Mellowed out a little.

May 14 (#84) Live and Let Die - Guns N Roses
You may have seen my obnoxious tweet about this, but for some reason the iMac startup chord in the podcast studio at work always sounds like the opening of this song to me. So I spent Thursday (podcast recording day) with it in my head.

May 15 (#85) Two of Us - the Beatles
A long week, finally over. This popped up as I was headed home to spend a quiet Friday night in with my husband.

May 16 (#86) "Nox Aurumque" - Eric Whitacre
Steve played this for me last night. It's a new piece by choral music composer Eric Whitacre. I didn't know that there are apparently some new-music hipsters who think Whitacre is too tonal until I read Steve's post about this premiere on Facebook. Whatever. I've never heard a more inventive, loving approach to the human voice as I hear in Eric Whitacre. And the textures he can create - VERY DIFFICULT to sing - are just astonishing.

365-2009-75: The Way You Move

Andre Benjamin and his clothing line?, originally uploaded by SwanDiamondRose.

Another random one. I wish there were more eclectic, funky, retro bands like Outkast in the world.

365-2009-74: Anticipate

Ani DiFranco, originally uploaded by Erik R. Bishoff.

Another one that just happened to be in my head today. Specifically, the Living in Clip version.

you are subtle as a window pane
standing in my view
but i will wait for it to rain
so that i can see you
you call me up at night
when there's no light passing through
and you think that i don't understand
but i do

we don't say everything that we could
so that we can say later
oh, you misunderstood
i hold my cards up
close to my chest
i say what i have to
and i hold back the rest

'cause someone you don't know
is someone you don't know
get a firm grip, girl
before you let go
for every hand extended
another lies in wait
keep your eye on that one
anticipate

dress down get out there
pick a fight with the police
we will get it all on film
for the new release
seems like everyone's an actor
or they're an actor's best friend
i wonder what was wrong to begin with
that they should all have to pretend
we lost sight of everything
when we have to keep checking our backs
i think we should all just smile
come clean
and relax

if there's anything i've learned
all these years on my own
it's how to find my own way there
and how to find my own way back home

I often wish all my favorite bands had Ani's talent with lyrics.

Couples at the Museum

Sorry to be tooting my own horn, here, but I just love this shot. Well, maybe more like, I love the moment it captured.

Full photoset here.

365-2009-73: Gotta Get Away

The Offspring - Noodles & Dexter, originally uploaded by dareii86.

Another case of the Sundays.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGjkViiDbko

365-2009-72: Inkanyezi nezazi

South African male choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo was first made famous by Paul Simon to the western world on his album Graceland. They have a powerful, warm, unique sound and have enriched my musical life immeasurably. This one's my favorite track of theirs. I don't understand the words, but I know them by heart.

This is also a mutual favorite for me and Steve, and also was on our wedding-favor CD. On Saturday, the day for which this song is chosen, he and I had a nice, warm, vibrant day of touring the galleries at the MFA and then sunshine and fresh air and time spent with friends in Boston, all of which is well accompanied by the joyful music of LBM.

365-2009-71: Back to Black

Amy Winehouse, originally uploaded by finleycornelius.

Just a good song, by a great artist despite her well-publicized demons. Her voice is truly one of a kind, and this song is one of the best-constructed pieces of popular music written in my lifetime.

The picture above is a scan of the Rolling Stone article I read which first introduced me to Amy Winehouse, and made me curious enough to check out her music. It's a very well-written piece, as most RS interviews are.