Last weekend, I traveled with my wife and two teacher friends to Las Vegas, Nevada. The reason was simple: Bridget had a conference to attend in the basement of the Flamingo Casino, and us teachers had a three-day weekend and the prospect of a free hotel room.
I hadn't been to Las Vegas since grad school, and I have never really been impressed with it. Who cares about gambling, Cirque du Soleil, cigar smoke, the Osmonds, strippers, Celine Dion, and hookers? My idea of a vacation is a high mountain pass in the Tetons or Wallowas, not the meretricious Turkish delights of idiotic mainstream America. Normally, I'd let Bridget enjoy this conference on her own and wish her well. But I'd heard good things about the rock climbing just west of town, and school was entering its seventh week, and it was a sunny ninety degrees in Nevada, so we went.
Somehow, Las Vegas became even more gaudy and horrible than the last time I was there. This is a city for people that watch big-budget summer blockbusters and cheer on the silvery Oregon Ducks. It's loud, brash, crowded, and abrasive. I took a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson stayed in our hotel) and marveled at how accurate it still was. Huge beams of light climb into the smoggy night sky. Garish clusters of slot machines line the insides of gas stations and supermarkets. Enormous water shows spray the remnant of the Colorado River into the baking desert air. Armies of migrant workers descend on the Strip and hand out pornographic coupon books.
This last detail was the most troubling: Las Vegas represents the physical embodiment of America's collective id. The sex industry is impossible to avoid. Whether it's our hotel assuring us that adult pay-per-view films wouldn't show up on our billing statement or the seven-story tall billboards for gentleman's clubs (these are not subtle), it became difficult to find reprieve from the onslaught. The Treasure Island Casino's nightly pirate show has turned into a burlesque act featuring sexy female "sirens" enslaving male pirates, all out in the open, facing the street. Even the city's slogan (What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas) is an invitation to adultery. I imagine that there was once a time when families with children could happily walk down Las Vegas Boulevard and enjoy the casino displays and architecture. That time has passed.
The worst debauchery, though, was the climbing. I don't mean to write that I had an awful time in Nevada, because I didn't. I spent most of my daylight hours in the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, a beautiful tract of land just 17 miles west of the Strip. Here, gigantic piles of reddish sandstone flank a dramatic fault and seem to explode out of the desert floor. We did quite a bit of hiking here, marveling at the cactus, stone formations, wild burros, and esoteric lizards all along the path. It was hot and we drank quarts of water, but the stark desert beauty was satisfying and rejuvenating. Unfortunately, what should have been a great climbing trip was ruined by the magnetic vortex of Las Vegas.
Rock climbing, as I'm finding out, is a communal sport. It needs a group of people to maintain a natural climbing area, because unless you are so hardcore that you can bag first ascents of rock faces, you need things like "bolts" and "anchors" to, you know, keep you from dying. Red Rock Canyon is monstrous. It has climbs that are well over nine pitches high. (A pitch is a regular rope length. Smith Rock, the behemoth in central Oregon, is rarely more than three pitches.) And yet, Red Rocks has almost no fixed anchors for even the closest climbs to the highway. The trails are primitive--we were lost a good deal of the time in creek beds and underbrush. Because we had crippling time constraints (a conference ending, a plane back to Oregon), we were never able to actually get on a safe rock. The one climb we did was at the end of a three-hour hike through a desert and the anchor was so old and shabby that my buddy did it once and said he wouldn't belay anyone else: it was too dangerous. Essentially, we wandered through a scalding desert carrying rope and gear, only to be turned away at the actual rocks.
If Red Rock Canyon was in Oregon, there would be hundreds of people there every weekend. It would have well-maintained trails and clear lines of bolts to solid anchors. There would be campgrounds and public bathrooms. Essentially, it would be Smith Rock, only much larger. But Las Vegas isn't Portland. People don't go to this part of Nevada to ascend pristine rock. Greater America is too busy gambling or drinking or cheating on their wife or watching Barry Manilow to take notice of this otherwise excellent natural resource. And we're all a little worse for it.
Reflecting on all of this, here in chilly Corvallis, I realize that I'll return to southern Nevada. I need to allow more time to explore Red Rock Canyon: it truly was a gorgeous, magical place. But for the same reason that I don't like the screaming glitter of the Oregon Ducks, I'll probably ignore the Las Vegas city limits.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Pieces of Gold
Heaven is a place on earth where you tell me all the things you want to do.
--Lana Del Rey
It's getting dark at 7:30 now. We've been in school for a week and a half: eight days of crumpled papers, hasty emails, early mornings, football crowds, my coffee thermos. The weather's already turning--it rained yesterday. I ride my bike to work and shiver in my jacket, cold air stinging my beard. This angry heave toward autumn means that in a week our town's population will swell by 24,000 as the OSU students come back, a strange "other" community that will flood dark lawns and sidewalks and taverns late, late into the night. We're looking hard now at an Oregon fall and winter. We're getting ready to brave the long months of more darkness than light, months of rain and fog.
If there's a soundtrack to this ominous season, it includes Lana Del Rey's other-wordly song "Video Games". I found this song a few days ago on a music-review site, and it's lingered in the periphery of my mind ever since. Despite the inanity of the title image, "Video Games" is probably the best song I've heard all year--a devastating elegy to something or someone as related by a woman whose voice sounds like a cross between Stevie Nicks and Debbie Reynolds. Watching the video (right now, the only way to hear the song as it hasn't been released on iTunes), there's a bleak early seventies-era vibe that captures this hazy nostalgia. Ms. Del Rey looks and sounds like she stumbled from the pages of Joan Didion's novel Play It As It Lays. The subject of her song, an emotionally distant lover (playing video games, among other things), to the listener, could be anything. To me, the song is a final threnody of a dying summer. We can never return to the past, "Video Games" painfully reminds us. But we are allowed to take one haunting, beautiful look back over our shoulder.
Another artist on this season's playlist would have to be A. A. Bondy. His new album Believers is a familiar return to the sound he does best: late-night, faintly religious, hypnagogic folk rock that carries the listener along a slow, muddy river. The ideal time to listen to A. A. Bondy is at night; he's more comfortable there. When I saw him perform in Seattle last fall, he asked the sound crew to dim the lights so far that he was just a shadow on stage, and we had to strain to see his face. What better musician to narrate the coming dark months?
I'm in that slog now. Teaching returns us quickly to the the haggard grind; there's no transition period. The airy freedom that I knew just two weeks ago is now a collection of bright blue photographs on my computer and the remnant of a deep suntan. It's important to keep the aesthetic beauty in our lives from being choked out by the weeds of obligation and responsibility. I'm thankful for these singers who, along with the writers I'm reading, tend the creative fire. Lana Del Rey, A. A. Bondy, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, and Haruki Murakami all deserve a little nod this cool Sunday evening.
--Lana Del Rey
It's getting dark at 7:30 now. We've been in school for a week and a half: eight days of crumpled papers, hasty emails, early mornings, football crowds, my coffee thermos. The weather's already turning--it rained yesterday. I ride my bike to work and shiver in my jacket, cold air stinging my beard. This angry heave toward autumn means that in a week our town's population will swell by 24,000 as the OSU students come back, a strange "other" community that will flood dark lawns and sidewalks and taverns late, late into the night. We're looking hard now at an Oregon fall and winter. We're getting ready to brave the long months of more darkness than light, months of rain and fog.
If there's a soundtrack to this ominous season, it includes Lana Del Rey's other-wordly song "Video Games". I found this song a few days ago on a music-review site, and it's lingered in the periphery of my mind ever since. Despite the inanity of the title image, "Video Games" is probably the best song I've heard all year--a devastating elegy to something or someone as related by a woman whose voice sounds like a cross between Stevie Nicks and Debbie Reynolds. Watching the video (right now, the only way to hear the song as it hasn't been released on iTunes), there's a bleak early seventies-era vibe that captures this hazy nostalgia. Ms. Del Rey looks and sounds like she stumbled from the pages of Joan Didion's novel Play It As It Lays. The subject of her song, an emotionally distant lover (playing video games, among other things), to the listener, could be anything. To me, the song is a final threnody of a dying summer. We can never return to the past, "Video Games" painfully reminds us. But we are allowed to take one haunting, beautiful look back over our shoulder.
Another artist on this season's playlist would have to be A. A. Bondy. His new album Believers is a familiar return to the sound he does best: late-night, faintly religious, hypnagogic folk rock that carries the listener along a slow, muddy river. The ideal time to listen to A. A. Bondy is at night; he's more comfortable there. When I saw him perform in Seattle last fall, he asked the sound crew to dim the lights so far that he was just a shadow on stage, and we had to strain to see his face. What better musician to narrate the coming dark months?
I'm in that slog now. Teaching returns us quickly to the the haggard grind; there's no transition period. The airy freedom that I knew just two weeks ago is now a collection of bright blue photographs on my computer and the remnant of a deep suntan. It's important to keep the aesthetic beauty in our lives from being choked out by the weeds of obligation and responsibility. I'm thankful for these singers who, along with the writers I'm reading, tend the creative fire. Lana Del Rey, A. A. Bondy, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, and Haruki Murakami all deserve a little nod this cool Sunday evening.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Goodbye to All That
I'm sitting in my apartment on a cloudy Tuesday in August, the day before 509j School District employees need to report back to work. It's notable, because I haven't spent most of the last ten weeks in my apartment. Here, on the eve of responsibility, I can look back at the crazy binge of the summer of 2011 and attempt to draw conclusions, to construct a narrative from the hot chaos.
This summer my reflex response, it seemed, to any invitation, was "Sure, why not?" I did what I wanted, when I wanted, the whole time. It created a dizzying few months that can be recorded in interesting ways: for example, I saw seven major league baseball games in four stadiums in three states. I didn't spend a single weekend in Corvallis since school ended. I slept in my tent at least 15 nights and my buddy's car four more. I rock climbed in three different states, ran the world's largest relay race, ascended a mountain, snorkeled in Mexico, and went spelunking in Southern Oregon. I went camping every week in July. I visited great metropolises and desolate wilds. In short, I tackled the American Dream, behind the line of scrimmage, made it fumble the ball, and ran it in for a touchdown. Then I went for two.
I realized a few years ago that I anticipate summer more now than at any point in my life. When I was a child, I didn't have mobility in the summer. In high school and college, I had consuming jobs. As a teacher, however, the obstacles to summer freedom have been removed, leaving ten weeks of blinding, lusty opportunity. This year, I pushed the boundary further, flew that much closer to the sun.
I look back and see a disassociative skein of images: a buffalo snorting dust on my tent in Oklahoma, a rainstorm flood a swimming pool in Mexico, a campfire in Central Oregon, a Jose Reyes triple in Texas, a Ludacris concert in California, a ski area in Utah, a desert river in Colorado. I can't make sense of these pictures. Nor can I explain the feeling, at the edge of my conscience, that I got away with something. People my age should be in quarter-life crises, gunning for a middle-management position at the firm, fondly longing for their college days. They shouldn't be asleep at a rest stop in Idaho, crammed in the passenger seat, wearing the last of their clean clothes and dreaming about semi trucks and wide-open plains. Normal Americans should be at work, buttoned-up, soberly building for the future. I must have missed something.
Then I remember my profession. I wasn't the only teacher to take hold of the idea of summer. Erika went back East. Matt toured the national parks along the Continental Divide. Kevin mountain biked in Canada, then went to Hawaii. Zach, before visiting his girlfriend in Guatemala, spent a month in Mongolia. And on and on and on. The middle part of the calendar opens a wide, beautiful door for us teachers, and we'd be fools not to run on through. God bless you, summer. You're a dear, dear friend.
Tomorrow, we need to report to Crescent Valley High School's auditorium. We'll see a slideshow of the new staff at 509j. We'll hear an address from our new superintendent. The vision for the year will be outlined, along with some whimsical anecdotes for our elementary school staff to enjoy. We'll learn about closing the achievement gap (CTAG) and professional learning communities (PLC's). Outstanding members of our district will receive the coveted "golden apple" award. We'll shake hands, rub elbows, hobnob. We'll collect some handouts. We'll come back.
This summer my reflex response, it seemed, to any invitation, was "Sure, why not?" I did what I wanted, when I wanted, the whole time. It created a dizzying few months that can be recorded in interesting ways: for example, I saw seven major league baseball games in four stadiums in three states. I didn't spend a single weekend in Corvallis since school ended. I slept in my tent at least 15 nights and my buddy's car four more. I rock climbed in three different states, ran the world's largest relay race, ascended a mountain, snorkeled in Mexico, and went spelunking in Southern Oregon. I went camping every week in July. I visited great metropolises and desolate wilds. In short, I tackled the American Dream, behind the line of scrimmage, made it fumble the ball, and ran it in for a touchdown. Then I went for two.
I realized a few years ago that I anticipate summer more now than at any point in my life. When I was a child, I didn't have mobility in the summer. In high school and college, I had consuming jobs. As a teacher, however, the obstacles to summer freedom have been removed, leaving ten weeks of blinding, lusty opportunity. This year, I pushed the boundary further, flew that much closer to the sun.
I look back and see a disassociative skein of images: a buffalo snorting dust on my tent in Oklahoma, a rainstorm flood a swimming pool in Mexico, a campfire in Central Oregon, a Jose Reyes triple in Texas, a Ludacris concert in California, a ski area in Utah, a desert river in Colorado. I can't make sense of these pictures. Nor can I explain the feeling, at the edge of my conscience, that I got away with something. People my age should be in quarter-life crises, gunning for a middle-management position at the firm, fondly longing for their college days. They shouldn't be asleep at a rest stop in Idaho, crammed in the passenger seat, wearing the last of their clean clothes and dreaming about semi trucks and wide-open plains. Normal Americans should be at work, buttoned-up, soberly building for the future. I must have missed something.
Then I remember my profession. I wasn't the only teacher to take hold of the idea of summer. Erika went back East. Matt toured the national parks along the Continental Divide. Kevin mountain biked in Canada, then went to Hawaii. Zach, before visiting his girlfriend in Guatemala, spent a month in Mongolia. And on and on and on. The middle part of the calendar opens a wide, beautiful door for us teachers, and we'd be fools not to run on through. God bless you, summer. You're a dear, dear friend.
Tomorrow, we need to report to Crescent Valley High School's auditorium. We'll see a slideshow of the new staff at 509j. We'll hear an address from our new superintendent. The vision for the year will be outlined, along with some whimsical anecdotes for our elementary school staff to enjoy. We'll learn about closing the achievement gap (CTAG) and professional learning communities (PLC's). Outstanding members of our district will receive the coveted "golden apple" award. We'll shake hands, rub elbows, hobnob. We'll collect some handouts. We'll come back.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
St. Paddy's Day Montage
This time of year is a slog: bad weather, five-day work weeks, no football or baseball, the busyness of a new semester. And then--out of nowhere--college basketball's March Madness emerges. Immediately afterward, Spring Break. We exhale, and the sun returns.
--I'm headed back to Canada in three days. Like migratory geese, my buddies and I must go north when spring comes. Back to the good people of Kelowna, to the snowy peaks of Big White and Silver Star, to warm bowls of poutine. This year, I'm vowing to take long runs on the proud shores of Lake Okanagan. I long to glide along those Canadian waters, to feel the northern wind in my beard. I hunger and thirst for this trip.
--I'm currently swallowing several Prednisone tablets a day. This is another rite of spring. I don't know where the yearly rash comes from, but I'm accustomed to breaking out in some horrible skin infection and having a confused doctor pump me full of over-the-counter steroids. It seems to work. This year, galaxies of tiny red bumps are swirling over my arms and hands, chest and legs. In a few days, they should be gone. If not, I'll take advantage of Canada's universal health care and soldier on.
--Ron Rash is a tremendous writer. He's from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and his stories reflect the history, landscape, and inhabitants of his home. Rash's novels are dramatic morality plays, echoing Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy. They're effective and pointed. Philip Roth once said that Bernard Malamud was a writer of "severe morality," in that Malamud's characters often paid for their sins. I think Roth meant it as a slight, but I like Malamud's perspective and I see that "morality" amplified in Rash's work. Check out the novels One Foot in Eden or The World Made Straight, or read "The Ascent", his story in this year's Best American Short Stories.
--I'm no Catholic, but for Lent, I stopped eating meat. I love meat, and yet avoiding it for a week now hasn't been as taxing as I imagined. To clarify, I'm not a vegan: I eat dairy products and eggs. However, I don't eat fish. I never understood "vegetarians" that ate fish. How is a fish less of an animal than a pig, cow, or chicken? How does a trout have less humanity than a farm animal? Look into the pleading eyes of gasping salmon, tired from its long journey home, and tell me that they have less of a soul than a steer, you false, fish-eating "vegetarians."
--OSU just opened another enormous climbing wall, in the McAlexander Fieldhouse. There are dozens of new routes, for both rope-climbing and bouldering. It's brand-new and expertly designed, and it evenly distributes the climbers that would normally use the old wall at Dixon. I can get a reasonably priced, semester-long community pass, and enjoy both walls. This last semester, I went three times a week. The wall is another feather in the cap of Oregon State University, and when my friend Kevin first visited the new facility, he immediately wondered what kind of idiot would go to the U of O and slum around on their campus, when they could have the McAlexander Rock Wall. It was a good question, and I had no answer as I hitched on my harness and aimed for the nearest 5.9.
--Waka Flocka Flame is probably the dumbest rapper I've heard since the heyday of J-Kwon and Trick Daddy. His hit "Hard in da Paint" has absolutely no artistic merit or positive message. And yet, tonight at the Cheldelin Middle School track, on my iPod, there was no other song I wanted to pump me up for that last lap than Waka Flocka's brainless, yet strangely empowering, single.
--My college basketball bracket, three games into the tournament, lost a team that I had pegged in the Final Four. We learn to roll with these setbacks, us life-long sports gamblers. Last year, I had early disappointments and then won two brackets. I made about 13o dollars. Just because Louisville can't muster up the gumption to get past Morehead State (Morehead State!), that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy the most magical sporting event of the year.
--Last week a writer came to OSU to discuss point-of-view. It was an good lecture on the subject ("point-of-view is the precondition for story"), but what interested me the most was that it came out that the writer's first novel is loosely based on the life story of Francis Bean Cobain, Kurt's daughter. Today I picked up the book, Lady Lazarus, from the library. I'm excited to read it but a little worried. Don't let me down, Andrew Altschul. Nirvana fans are still looking for that accurate portrayal, and we've been disappointed before.
--I'm endlessly happy that Bridget lives with me again.
--The Beaver baseball team beat the Ducks. This was a long, long time coming. Beaver Nation can look to the future again, can see an orange glow in the west.
--And so on, and so on. I try to run or climb every day. I'm reading three novels that I'm teaching. I need to grade three class sets of essays. I need to pack the car, to file my taxes, to extend my longest weekend run. All around, the Oregon spring weather floods and rages. But on this St. Patrick's Day, those of us that are part Irish take time to sit still and think on ascending trajectory of our busy little lives.
--I'm headed back to Canada in three days. Like migratory geese, my buddies and I must go north when spring comes. Back to the good people of Kelowna, to the snowy peaks of Big White and Silver Star, to warm bowls of poutine. This year, I'm vowing to take long runs on the proud shores of Lake Okanagan. I long to glide along those Canadian waters, to feel the northern wind in my beard. I hunger and thirst for this trip.
--I'm currently swallowing several Prednisone tablets a day. This is another rite of spring. I don't know where the yearly rash comes from, but I'm accustomed to breaking out in some horrible skin infection and having a confused doctor pump me full of over-the-counter steroids. It seems to work. This year, galaxies of tiny red bumps are swirling over my arms and hands, chest and legs. In a few days, they should be gone. If not, I'll take advantage of Canada's universal health care and soldier on.
--Ron Rash is a tremendous writer. He's from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and his stories reflect the history, landscape, and inhabitants of his home. Rash's novels are dramatic morality plays, echoing Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy. They're effective and pointed. Philip Roth once said that Bernard Malamud was a writer of "severe morality," in that Malamud's characters often paid for their sins. I think Roth meant it as a slight, but I like Malamud's perspective and I see that "morality" amplified in Rash's work. Check out the novels One Foot in Eden or The World Made Straight, or read "The Ascent", his story in this year's Best American Short Stories.
--I'm no Catholic, but for Lent, I stopped eating meat. I love meat, and yet avoiding it for a week now hasn't been as taxing as I imagined. To clarify, I'm not a vegan: I eat dairy products and eggs. However, I don't eat fish. I never understood "vegetarians" that ate fish. How is a fish less of an animal than a pig, cow, or chicken? How does a trout have less humanity than a farm animal? Look into the pleading eyes of gasping salmon, tired from its long journey home, and tell me that they have less of a soul than a steer, you false, fish-eating "vegetarians."
--OSU just opened another enormous climbing wall, in the McAlexander Fieldhouse. There are dozens of new routes, for both rope-climbing and bouldering. It's brand-new and expertly designed, and it evenly distributes the climbers that would normally use the old wall at Dixon. I can get a reasonably priced, semester-long community pass, and enjoy both walls. This last semester, I went three times a week. The wall is another feather in the cap of Oregon State University, and when my friend Kevin first visited the new facility, he immediately wondered what kind of idiot would go to the U of O and slum around on their campus, when they could have the McAlexander Rock Wall. It was a good question, and I had no answer as I hitched on my harness and aimed for the nearest 5.9.
--Waka Flocka Flame is probably the dumbest rapper I've heard since the heyday of J-Kwon and Trick Daddy. His hit "Hard in da Paint" has absolutely no artistic merit or positive message. And yet, tonight at the Cheldelin Middle School track, on my iPod, there was no other song I wanted to pump me up for that last lap than Waka Flocka's brainless, yet strangely empowering, single.
--My college basketball bracket, three games into the tournament, lost a team that I had pegged in the Final Four. We learn to roll with these setbacks, us life-long sports gamblers. Last year, I had early disappointments and then won two brackets. I made about 13o dollars. Just because Louisville can't muster up the gumption to get past Morehead State (Morehead State!), that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy the most magical sporting event of the year.
--Last week a writer came to OSU to discuss point-of-view. It was an good lecture on the subject ("point-of-view is the precondition for story"), but what interested me the most was that it came out that the writer's first novel is loosely based on the life story of Francis Bean Cobain, Kurt's daughter. Today I picked up the book, Lady Lazarus, from the library. I'm excited to read it but a little worried. Don't let me down, Andrew Altschul. Nirvana fans are still looking for that accurate portrayal, and we've been disappointed before.
--I'm endlessly happy that Bridget lives with me again.
--The Beaver baseball team beat the Ducks. This was a long, long time coming. Beaver Nation can look to the future again, can see an orange glow in the west.
--And so on, and so on. I try to run or climb every day. I'm reading three novels that I'm teaching. I need to grade three class sets of essays. I need to pack the car, to file my taxes, to extend my longest weekend run. All around, the Oregon spring weather floods and rages. But on this St. Patrick's Day, those of us that are part Irish take time to sit still and think on ascending trajectory of our busy little lives.
Monday, February 21, 2011
This Empty Northern Hemisphere
Most artists I've been listening to lately are wildly inconsistent. Lil Wayne, for example, uses auto-tune too much. About half of his songs are so inappropriate it makes me uncomfortable. Even though he's the best rapper alive, I have to fiddle with the skip-forward button too much when I play a Weezy album on my way to work. Likewise, Mumford and Sons is too fond of the soaring-crescendo chorus. The Avett Brothers and the Red Hot Chili Peppers should stick to slower, quiet songs: their party jams are obnoxious. James Brown can be repetitive. Kenny Rogers is funny, but a little bit goes a long way with the Gambler. I don't know of a Dylan album that I can listen to all the way through--there's always a few grating experimental tracks that set me on edge.
I think most talented musicians are hit-and-miss. It's why "greatest hits" albums are popular and b-sides are aptly named. This doesn't bother me. Bob Dylan is still a genius; Lil Wayne is still the greatest in the game.
That said, it was with a childlike mirth that I discovered Gregory Alan Isakov. Wikipedia tells me that Mr. Isakov was born in South Africa, grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives in Boulder, Colorado. Somewhere along the way, he discovered indie-folk music and learned to play it better than anyone. Happily, all of his songs (on his latest two albums, at least) are fantastic. He is the best artist I've heard in a long time, and he never, ever, lets up.
Pandora.com (God bless it) tuned me in to this brilliant new voice on the "Bon Iver" station. I liked the song I was listening to, and the artist had a funny name. I'm glad I was forced to write it down: I otherwise would have forgotten a name less unique than "Gregory Alan Isakov." The track I heard, "The Stable Song," sounded like a modern re-imagining of a hymn, as a church will sometimes do. The song sounded ancient and modern, holy and reprobate, haunting and comforting. Isakov has a lilting, airy voice that hovers over his simple chords and creates, slowly, a mood that captures the most honest things in life.
In online video interviews, Isakov comes across as self-depreciating and vaguely uncomfortable. When asked about his muse, Isakov shrugged and said "driving." As elusive as that is, it makes total sense to me. I've never seen this guy live, but I can tell that he's been on a lot of desolate Western highways in his time.
I have also been on lonely roads in Nevada, Montana, Colorado, Idaho . . . Perhaps this explains why I haven't skipped a track on any of Isakov's perfect albums this whole month.
I think most talented musicians are hit-and-miss. It's why "greatest hits" albums are popular and b-sides are aptly named. This doesn't bother me. Bob Dylan is still a genius; Lil Wayne is still the greatest in the game.
That said, it was with a childlike mirth that I discovered Gregory Alan Isakov. Wikipedia tells me that Mr. Isakov was born in South Africa, grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives in Boulder, Colorado. Somewhere along the way, he discovered indie-folk music and learned to play it better than anyone. Happily, all of his songs (on his latest two albums, at least) are fantastic. He is the best artist I've heard in a long time, and he never, ever, lets up.
Pandora.com (God bless it) tuned me in to this brilliant new voice on the "Bon Iver" station. I liked the song I was listening to, and the artist had a funny name. I'm glad I was forced to write it down: I otherwise would have forgotten a name less unique than "Gregory Alan Isakov." The track I heard, "The Stable Song," sounded like a modern re-imagining of a hymn, as a church will sometimes do. The song sounded ancient and modern, holy and reprobate, haunting and comforting. Isakov has a lilting, airy voice that hovers over his simple chords and creates, slowly, a mood that captures the most honest things in life.
In online video interviews, Isakov comes across as self-depreciating and vaguely uncomfortable. When asked about his muse, Isakov shrugged and said "driving." As elusive as that is, it makes total sense to me. I've never seen this guy live, but I can tell that he's been on a lot of desolate Western highways in his time.
I have also been on lonely roads in Nevada, Montana, Colorado, Idaho . . . Perhaps this explains why I haven't skipped a track on any of Isakov's perfect albums this whole month.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
A Poem
Summer Camp
Sunny afternoons:
the nap time was Nirvana
Unplugged playing—
a sound in harmony with those
insects, leaves in the breeze,
low drone of passenger jets,
the curtains at the window.
We were in junior high.
I felt Siddhartha’s peace
then. My counselor
and his CD, that stereo,
the birds outside
illustrated in bright colors,
singing along the new path.
Sunny afternoons:
the nap time was Nirvana
Unplugged playing—
a sound in harmony with those
insects, leaves in the breeze,
low drone of passenger jets,
the curtains at the window.
We were in junior high.
I felt Siddhartha’s peace
then. My counselor
and his CD, that stereo,
the birds outside
illustrated in bright colors,
singing along the new path.
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