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.