Update! Somehow I missed this extraordinary post by Kicker of Elves about the wonders of songwriting—”The Region Where the Air Is Music.” If you want to know about the origins of one of my favorite songs, “U.V.A.,” it’s must reading. I’ve struggled for a couple years to try and write about why I love KoE’s music. Here’s a boot I drew and named for one of his songs to tide you over until I do.
Also of note: the irrepressible Karen Healey on the new “Minx” line of comics from DC.
FURTHA UPDATE: if you make the best stab at what “Sub-Par in the 90’s” “means”—referencing at least four components in the picture—I’ll send it to you, framed, as an early Xmas prize. Take a shot in the comments!
Yep. Can’t stop smiling.
That totally made my day.
D-lightful, G—I love how you’ve taken something as deceptively mundane and connotation-free as a dryer and charged it with meaning, obscure but compelling.
You are such a romantic!
Prof., if you meet us all in New Orleans this weekend, I’ll sit you down and tell you what it all means, over a serious bottle.
Dammit. That’s a helluva sweetener, just at the moment my dedication was flagging. Oh, and I haven’t even remarked on your clever and surely significant alteration of conjunctions…
For me, this piece is mighty straightforward: the homage to the place where one’s delicates become clean—a renewal, a rebirth—is stunted by the fact that it’s a stackable unit. And I happen to know that this particular stackable was manufactured in Omaha, Nebraska, home of Father Flanagan. And that the Mountain Goats played in Omaha, Nebraska on 3/31/05, and 3 + 3 + 1 + 5 = 12 and 1 + 2 = 3 and that AND and YOU both have three letters and also, those phone numbers are for Mazzio’s, where YOU AND YOUR MEMORY can get three pizzas for one low price.
Or wait: maybe I was thinking of another photo.
In And You stands a young man at a cross-roads, the own county line (in the middle) between paths righteous criminal. “and you,” say you, “are the only one who can make this choice.” it is a choice between becoming a proper citizen with all due respect, represented by the father who reformed wayward and troubled boys, and the dryer on the right side (which is no mean coincidence), and (leftward) walking to a corner store at night, barefoot and alone, destitute with big dreams, but really going nowhere quick. I say quick because the lyric is in the foreground, easier to reach, the path of least resistence, but to get to the laundromat, to get clean, well, that will require much more perseverence and introspection. dig deep, as they say.
I think the key here lies in the dryer’s open door. The theme here is escape, but not just the escape from physical confinement—though that’s important. No, look at the pattern of those thumbprints—they mark where someone has pushed the door open and grappled with the dryer, but they also extend outside the frame of the photo, as though someone (the artist? or, more likely, the artist’s object of desire?) has escaped not only the dryer—a place not only of confinement but of eternal repetition, an endless and monotonous cycle—but in fact has escaped the world of art, of ficton itself, has crawled right out of the realm of representation and into our world.
Thus, the binary choice that the originaltitle of the song offers us—”You or Your Memory”—is transformed in this text into “You and Your Memory.” That is, the artist no longer has to choose between the real “You,” one with all the inevitable flaws and failings of any human, and an ideal, remembered “You,” one that’s fictional, one without blemish, intact and immaculate. With the memory having stepped out of the frame and into the world, the artist now has access to both the real and the imaginary incarnations of his beloved. This theme is underscored by the 4-cent stamp and the phone numbers: the jagged joining of post and phone, of written communication (which has a sort of permanence) and oral (which is only remembered and whose meaning changes subtly with every new transmission). This piece, then, is about the complications of desire and refusal to abandon romantic idealism to the merely fictional, the longing to join real and ideal together.
The theme is things that are hot:
dryers
Father Flanagan
J. Darnielle
fury wins. I knew fury would win.
Fury? Bettybzz is 1,000x closer than the Fury!
Oh, and pizza, if Sally is right about the Mazzio’s thing.
The stamp are your father, the writing is of you lover. And the grand letters?????? Yes!!
No way, this is about dirty sexin’! Clinton, priests, laundry rooms…
Plus! One New Year’s Eve some guy friends of ours painted themselves blue and Willow made out with one of them and ended up with blue fingerprints everywhere. I think you somehow stole that story and incorporated it, too. Genius!
Sequel.
I agree with Prof.