PrettyFakes

So gorjus and I were reminiscing about our mutual love for Zork in another thread. Truly, if there’s a love that dare not speak its name, then the love of a pimply adolescent for his text-based adventure games is probably it: using the words “Frobozz” and “Grue” in casual conversation in homeroom will get you ostracized at least as quickly as being insufficiently heterosexual. But anyway, one of the great things about those games was the elaborate care Infocom took with the packaging. Each game came with an assortment of goodies and trinkets—maps, books, “magic” rocks, swizzle sticks, Frobozzian currency—meant to draw the player into the world of the game a little more, to stimulate the imagination, to provide a deep and lush context for a game that, visually, was as flat as could be—typically, white text on a gray background. They were also good for bringing to class and placing them conspicuously on one’s desk until someone asked about them so that you could cock an eyebrow and say something ominous about one’s role in fending off the dark forces of the world, though one’s cracking voice and neatly pressed blue jeans sometimes undermined one’s glower.

(I remember that I used to order those games from the Infocom catalog and have them shipped to my house COD. That my parents never once asked a single question about my bi-monthly or so cash transactions with the UPS man should have been a sign to me that I could get away with much, much more with relative impunity. Then again, I thought that by ordering a text-based fantasy adventure game—one with wizards and demons—and bringing it into a house crammed full of books on the dangers of the occult, I was getting away with something. Such were the limits of my adolescent acting-out horizons.)

But I digress. The thing I started to say was, I think that those games is likely where my love of ephemera of all stripes comes from—but especially in music: liner notes, annotated discographies, the whole thing. As I’ve said elsewhere, I sometimes never get around to listening to CDs that people burn for me because that permanent marker scrawl on the front of the disc just doesn’t offer me any context, any story, any way into what’s to come. It’s probably not necessarily a good thing that I want to aborb a whole bunch of essentially superfluous facts about a record before/while I hear it—who played what, where it was recorded, and so on—but what can I say? I hate listening to music in a vacuum. I mean, first of all because there’s no sound in a vacuum, so listening to music would be kind of pointless. But you know what I’m saying. And I don’t just mean the minutiae; I’ll argue (albeit not very passionately and I might let you win just to shut you up) that Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out is only an okay album without that front cover picture: an aggressively mundane middle-class neighborhood at twilight with a lone figure off to the right side, standing in a pool of light that could either be a streetlamp or a landing spaceship; it so perfectly prepares you for an album about the ache and mystery of the everday that you hardly stop to wonder where all the feedback went.

So I was delighted to receive a couple of packages recently that deeply satisfied my love of context (or of this type of context, anyway), my desire to see the whole record package as an aesthetic object. The first: the LP of Mississippi Luau by Charlie McAlister. Here’s a picture:

Lest the flatness of digital photography lead you astray, that’s not a picture of threadbare 1960s dress fabric forming the border of this record—it’s the real thing. (The green background is a chair of ours, which, apparently, was designed with this photo in mind by a prescient and perverse 1950s furniture maker.) And the cover is the perfect complement to the music on the vinyl—craggy, idiosyncratic, lo-fi island-inflected Southern folk covering subjects ranging from Adam and Eve to a monkey who lives on an island and builds robots to kill pirates (that one is called “Island of the Robot Building Monkey,” a title that I thought surely would not be reflective of the actual matter of the song, but o happy day).

I heard about McAlister on John Darnielle’s blog, and hey! what a segue! The other package is Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, by The Mountain Goats. This is a limited special-edition vinyl pressing of Darnielle’s demos for the songs that eventually ended up on The Sunset Tree. As anyone who’s ever spent a joyous half-hour poring over Mountain Goats liner notes before knows, Darnielle is a passionate proponent of the package-as-part-of-the-art school of thought, but here he’s outdone himself. There were 1000 of these records pressed, each one hand-customized and numbered by Darnielle himself with photos, scrawled notes, found objects, and who knows what else. I got lucky #13, and here’s the front of mine, adorned with photos of an ostrich:

And here’s the back.

The left caption reads, “He: ‘The pills make it so hard to breathe sometimes.’”
The right caption reads, “She: ‘Someday all of us will die.’”

And down there at the bottom right, that’s a photograph of John Vanderslice, tMG producer and rockin’ dude in his own right, that was inside the sleeve. It’s annotated thusly by JD:

These are why, when I eventually break down and get a portable MP3 player several years from now ( “for when I’m biking,” I’ll tell myself), I’ll feel like I’m betraying a cherished ideal.

Apologies to Jill McCorkle, from whom I nicked the title of this post.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 21st, 2005 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Professor Fury, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.