Exercises For Extra Credit

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Harry Ramble

Time permitting within the test period, the following exercises may be completed and submitted for extra credit (1 point each).

1. Sally has 3 apples, Shawna has an organically grown grapefruit, Molly has a new Powerpuff Girls pencil case, and Madison’s dad is in substance abuse rehab for the 3rd time in two years. If we assume that your former best-friend Riley has not invited you to her 12th-birthday party (at which, just, everyone else is invited) and you drop Drama Club in favor of getting high with your boyfriend Jayden for most of high school junior year, calculate the rate of change (z) in the encroachment of despair, given that (x) is an essentially useless $200,000 degree in art history from UPenn and (y) is a long-standing and undiagnosed eating disorder.

2. Arrange the following elements according to atomic weight, from smallest to greatest:

a) Radium
b) Helium
c) The inadvisability of mixing Adderall, Ecstasy, and 2 glasses of chardonnay
d) Fluorine
e) The chances of that asshole Kevin posting that photo of you to Is Anyone Up?
f) Germanium
g) The fact that Leah is fucking the Iranian TA in exchange for an A in this class

3. It can be argued that a narrative tension arises in Pride And Prejudice between Austen’s impulse, on the one hand, to mock social conventions (as when Elizabeth arrives at Netherfield with muddy skirts), and defend them (as in Elizabeth’s stern censure of Lydia for eloping with Wickham). To what extent does the “happy ending,” earned in large part by the restoration of societal convention, conflict with Austen’s underlying message? Or does it even matter, given that everyone knows the senile old farts in the Academy will vote Best Picture every time for any upper-crusty film about aristocrats with Brit accents? Likewise, is your sympathy for Elizabeth undermined by the fact that Keira Knightley (Oscar nom’d as Elizabeth in 2005) is now flashing her boobs in those super-trashy Chanel perfume ads? And what about Keira’s recent split with long-time beau and major hottie Rupert Friend (Mr. Wickham, no less!)? Finally, in a potential reboot of the Pride And Prejudice franchise, who do you see cast as Elizabeth? Super-hot Emma Stone? Or pop diva Katy Perry? Explain your reasoning.

4. It’s been two years since you dropped out of the University of Albany to “get your head straight” and seven months since your dad suspended your AMEX account. But no one does that “whole cap-and-gown slavery dance anymore.” It’s all social media now and building content with viral potential. One fucking laughing-baby-in-a-high-chair video can generate twenty, thirty grand from click-thrus, never mind the edgy, avant-garde shit you’ve been doing with Stefan, who you met delivering Chinese food. No one reads your blog and no one ever will, but that whole “reading text thing” is a dead end anyway. You’re up in the low four-figures in YouTube views for your film “Transverse Conduit 171A” and you’d be even higher if Google wasn’t a fucking pay-to-play scam. As for Zoey, well, she’ll be back, and the rent won’t be a problem. Briefly discuss possible motivations for getting out of bed this morning.

5. Draw a simple flow chart that correctly describes the relationship among the following factors:

a) Your 12-month contract position at a popular news site that requires strong journalism skills, comprehensive programming knowledge, and personal scheduling flexibility
b) Your checking account balance of $23.70
c) Alternating feelings of listlessness and fear
d) $85,000 in student loan debt
e) The fact that single women outnumber single men in this city by, like, 200,000, so that every schlubby guy with back hair and bad breath is dating a supermodel, while you’re getting shingles from working eleven hours a day and wearing one of the two decent blouses you can afford

Related: Topics For Further Discussion

Dream State

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Harry Ramble

Dreams are a cheap device.

When I encounter one in fiction, I know that the author is going to try to “reveal” something about a character without doing any of the heavy lifting that real plotting and character development and dialogue require. The more “structured” the dream is, the worse it is.

Dreams are, by definition, exposition. They’re telling, not showing. At the very least, they’re a narrative crutch for writers who can’t see their way forward in the plot. When a writer clears the stage of real incident and relationship and cause-and-effect, and starts editorializing about a character’s inner life by using brain-chemical shadow play, I’ll start skipping ahead. Tell me what’s really happening, I’ll say, not some free-associational aside functioning as a story-telling convenience.

I bring this up because I’ve been having some absurdly realistic and involved dreams lately. Structured dreams, if you will. Last night, I dreamed about a young North Korean woman escaping her homeland. She crept out, under cover of darkness, onto a desolate beach and inflated three or four sturdy-looking rubber balls or floats. She put these balls into a net, fashioning a kind of crude craft, and then waded out into the surf with it. And she was at sea for a long time. When she was rescued by a Russian fishing boat, she was covered with sores.

Where was I, during all this? Hold on, I’m getting to that.

My father adopted this North Korean woman; she was a student of some sort and she came to our house to live. My childhood home, that is, of thirty-some years ago. It turned out that the Korean woman was a genius at agriculture. She had devised a series of revolutionary farming methods that greatly increased crop-yield. Within a few days of moving in with us, she installed a lot of irrigation widgets and mirrors and beehives and such in our backyard. Right, mirrors. Anyway, she became very famous. At the end of the dream, a limousine arrived at our house, sent by one of the morning TV news shows–the Today show, maybe–and took the woman away.

I’ve been having dreams like this all week, highly structured dreams complete with everything but title credits and paid-for consumer product placements. What does this particular dream say about me? I’m not sure, because I was hardly in the damned thing. But I know what to blame it on: my decision to stop taking Xanax for a while.

I had a friend years ago, back in the mid ’90s, who I talked to about things. Things that were bothering me or even personal things. Confide might be too strong a word for it, but we talked about things. And around this time, I was having some cataclysmic mental events. Moods that would descend on me and pretty much incapacitate me for hours on end. Many hours. It would be difficult to think clearly or even move about. Feelings of hopelessness and paranoia and being trapped. Devastating episodes. This didn’t happen often. Maybe three or four times in the course of a year. Enough to be noticeable.

I don’t remember what made me bring it up, but when I mentioned this state of affairs in passing to my friend, she didn’t hesitate a moment with her reply. “You have bipolar disorder,” she said. “Pretty severe bipolar disorder.”

I probably rolled my eyes and smirked at this, dismissing it outright, which only caused her to stop in her tracks on the sidewalk. We were on the street in Manhattan, somewhere in midtown.

“You know that, right?” she said. “You have bipolar disorder. I’ve known you for years, and you’re a textbook case. What you’re describing is a panic attack. You should see a doctor. There’s medication you can take that would help you.”

She said all this in a matter-of-fact tone, the way you would say, It sure is great weather we’re having. She was a lot smarter than I was. She knew a lot more about the world than I did. We were both in advertising then, but she’s a lawyer now.

Anyway, I completely ignored her advice. There was no way I had bipolar disorder. There was no way I was suffering from panic attacks. These were things that people in Woody Allen movies suffered from. They were afflictions for people who could afford luxury afflictions. People who could worry about ephemeral things of no consequence to people with real problems.

People who came from where I came from had bad moods. We had weak moments that came as a direct result of not sucking it up and toughing it out. If we felt suddenly bereft and terrified, we probably had it coming and would be well served by manning up for a change.

It would be years before I would mention any of this to a doctor. In the ’90s, I didn’t even have a regular doctor. After I got married, I went to my wife’s doctor. I was one of the very few male patients at a doctor’s office that was called, no lie, Women Helping Women. I’ve been taking Xanax on and off for years now.

I might start in with the Xanax again, I don’t know. Some of these dreams, it’s half a day’s work just sleeping through them.

Related: Reflections In Compressed Time

Related: Sleeping With The Angels

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Don’t Miss These Heartwarming Christmas Classics!

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Harry Ramble

The holidays are upon us again and we’re abuzz with Yuletide spirit here at the EZED. When December rolls around, we like nothing better than sliding a turkey/stuffing/mashed potato TV dinner into the microwave, popping open a 40-oz bottle of Miller High Life, and warming up the old VCR for a long night of nostalgic seasonal classics. Let’s see what’s in the Christmas queue!

Black Christmas (1974)

Whoa, hey, don’t go in the attic, little Cindy-Lou Who! The original “The calls are coming from inside the house!” movie, predating When A Stranger Calls by five years, Black Christmas makes the most of the fact that a sorority house is a pretty lonely place to be on Christmas Eve. There are plenty of evocative shots of departing revelers, abandoned campus greens, and long empty hallways here, as the approach of the holiday is marked by a deeper and deeper silence. And the ringing of the phone. The weird, unhinged quality of the obscene phone calls is what most people remember (grunts, animal shrieks, taunts, and the sound of a little girl crying), but Margot Kidder’s performance, as she drinks herself silly, makes inappropriate remarks, and stumbles around while her few remaining sorority sisters meet gruesome ends, is fun, too. Avoid the recent remake.

The Ice Harvest

Based on Scott Phillips’ terrific crime noir novel, this one stars John Cusack as a mob lawyer who just can’t seem to get out of town on Christmas Eve with the $2 million he’s embezzled from his cold-blooded clients. The delight here is in watching Charlie Arglist (Cusack) drive around and around snowbound Wichita, Kansas, fucking over and being fucked over by his shady companions. The Ice Harvest also includes one of Yuletide cinema’s most wince-inducing scenes: the one in which Arglist buys gifts for his estranged kids ($1.49 shrink-wrapped plastic junk from a 24-hour bodega) in the small hours of Christmas Day, as part of an ill-conceived plan to gain access to his ex-wife’s house. Oh, and another one: Christmas Eve at Wichita’s most dismal titty bar.

Silent Night, Bloody Night

No, not Silent Night, Deadly Night, the crappy ’80s slasher movie. We’re talking Silent Night, Bloody Night here, with all the Andy Warhol Factory regulars. I’d be willing to bet that John Carpenter saw this one when it came out in 1974. Same tale of a sociopath come home to wreak havoc, but on a different holiday. This one wanders a bit through a couple of fairly standard slasher murder scenes until it suddenly raises its game halfway through via several flashback scenes. These scenes, depicting a revolt in an insane asylum, have an otherworldly feel worthy of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or a Richard Kern underground reel. Featuring Candy Darling, Ondine, Mary Woronov, and (weirdly) John Carradine, Silent Night, Bloody Night is the Christmas slasher movie that Andy Warhol never made.

Less Than Zero

Christmas is in the air in Less Than Zero, but it’s meant to serve a metaphorical purpose. Newly returned home from school for winter break, freshman Ivy Leaguer Clay reunites with Blair and Julian to make the rounds of holiday parties. But Christmas in California (the fake snow, false cheer, garish plastic trees, trucked-in ice sculptures, ersatz plaster icebergs floating in luxury pools) is meant to signify the disconnect between the characters and their emotions, between their aspirations and their grim realities. Bret Easton Ellis is said to hate this adaptation of his novel, which only makes it better in my eyes.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Let’s face it. Santa Claus is essentially an aloof and unknowable figure, living in mysterious seclusion at the North Pole, employing various arcane mystical powers to maintain us under constant surveillance (to distinguish the nice from the naughty) and traverse the globe in a single night. Oh, and he sneaks into our houses at night. Rare Exports imagines a world in which an American corporation cracks open a mountain in Finland and unleashes the tyrannical, child-devouring fiend Santa Claus. But first you get a plague of elves (emaciated, red-eyed, filthy old men in rags) who go house to house snatching naughty children and dragging them off in burlap bags to Santa’s lair. Ideal for anybody who once found the whole notion of sitting in Santa’s lap to be kind of disquieting.

Eyes Wide Shut

Ho, ho, ho! If your idea of holiday cheer is attending a Christmas Eve orgy with your favorite four-foot-nine-inch-tall, control-freak Scientologist, you’re good to go with Eyes Wide Shut. This movie might have been a creepy masterpiece on the order of A Clockwork Orange, but we’ll never know because Stanley Kubrick died before he could finish it, and then anonymous Warner Bros. hacks made wholesale changes to Kubrick’s rough cut, including digitally altering several scenes.

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians

But only because the Martians are pretty stupid. Angered by the fact that Martian children are obsessed with the Santa Claus they see on their Martian TVs (they get excellent reception with their Martian rabbit-ear TV antennas), the Martians head off to Earth in their spaceship constructed of spray-painted egg cartons and coffee cans on a mission to kidnap Santa. But the Martians’ freeze-rays are no match for Santa’s high-velocity jolliness and soon holiday spirit prevails once more. Especially memorable for the guy in the floppy polar-bear suit and the guy in the cardboard box who’s supposed to be a robot.

The Lion In Winter

Yeah, it’s Christmas. Christmas in 1183 AD, and the throne of England is up for grabs. Plenty of royal court machinations here, none of which I remember too well, as I haven’t seen this movie since it was in regular rotation on HBO, back in the mid-’70s. I was going to put Ron Howard’s ghastly The Grinch Who Stole Christmas in this slot, but that movie, with its sour, leering, unnerving Jim Carrey performance, is much too depressing for this list.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

Okay, I’m reaching here, but this wartime psychological drama does include a climactic scene on Christmas Eve, plus the familiar Yuletide conventions of honorable suicide, wartime imprisonment, suppressed homoerotic fixations, and David Bowie (not singing with Bing Crosby here).

Bad Santa

“I said, ‘Next!” goddamn it! This is not the DMV!”
Yeah. The one and only.

Related: 15 Songs For The End Of Summer

Old People Just Want To Have Fun: The Top 15 Tracks of 2011

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Harry Ramble

Hey, where’d the year go? As previously, the songs here are presented in no particular order and are selected by referring solely to the digit in the “Plays” column in My iTunes library. Thus, if I played it a lot on my iPod in 2011, it’s here. If I didn’t, it’s not. No ringers, no false aspirations to what I “should” have been listening to. All ice cream, no broccoli. Also, as previously, the song title next to the album cover is a YouTube link to the song.

Oh, and here’s the entire playlist, compiled for your listening pleasure,
now playing @Spotify: http://spoti.fi/rzUNJa

Best Night / The War On Drugs

The genius of The War On Drugs lies in the rural-urban esthetic of taking an earnest, observant, heartland-evocative vocal (provided by bandleader and Bob Dylan fanboy Adam Granduciel) and harnessing it to a precision-machined motorik synthbeat worthy of Trans-Europe Express. It’s been done before, of course, most notably on Grandaddy’s 2000 opus The Sophtware Slump, but here you really get that wide-open-spaces sensation without the luxury-class travel vibe. “Best Night,” the first track on the record, is the ideal soundtrack for watching the countryside clip by through a bus window, even if the bus is just the shuttle from the Rutgers Athletic Center to High Point Solutions Stadium.

Land Disasters / Blanck Mass

Blanck Mass is the solo side project of Benjamin John Power from Fuck Buttons. This song has been a staple of my evening runs along the Jersey Shore, at Sandy Hook and Island Beach, ever since it appeared in June. Everything on the self-titled debut from Blanck Mass is amazing, but “Land Disasters,” which booms into being at 0:01 in full skyward trajectory and then soars ecstatically upward in vast cathedrals of sound from there, may be the greatest song ever recorded for running along the sea as the sun slips below the horizon.

Broken People / Jane’s Addiction

Long after 10,000 bands have hashed and rehashed JA’s original rock-funk-prog template to death, there’s a specificity to the observations on those first two records (three if you count the live disc from ’87) that keeps them fresh-sounding to this day. It’s in the way the Jane of “Jane Says” feels naked without her wig and keeps her dinner in her pocket. It’s in the off-the-cuff, wool-gathering introspection of the long-unfurling “Summertime Rolls” and in the way Perry Farrell bleats, at the end of “Pigs in Zen,” “I’m in the midst of a tra-a-a-a-auma. Leave a message. I’ll call you back!” The songs on The Great Escape Artist are big as heck; they’re anthemic to an almost U2-like extent, but they’re missing those authentic, closely observed details. They’re hard to get a grip on. And then all of a sudden, nine tracks into the record, all the stadium-rock ballast drops out and it’s just Perry, painting an intimate portrait of a lost soul in front of a tap-tap-tap bassline and a gentle Dave Navarro guitar figure. “Broken People” sounds as if the Perry Farrell of 1987 had suddenly teleported twenty-five years into the future, and contributed a guest track to The Great Escape Artist. It’s a gorgeous thing. I met Perry once, about fifteen years ago, but I was just trying to get my money back from him.

The Lazy Song / Bruno Mars

Every year, there’s a perfect pop ditty that shows up to announce that the long, long trudge through winter is over and summer-sweet-summer is at hand. This song, an effortlessly loping faux-reggae ode to “doing nothing at all,” from the ridiculously successful Doo-Wops & Hooligans album, was released as a single in May of this year, and might as well have been issued with a stack of red Solo cups and six beer pong balls. Songs of this sort don’t always make their way to my ears, but the “Official Alternate Version” of the video, with Leonard Nimoy misbehaving, ensured its safe passage into heavy rotation on my iPod.

Down By The Water / The Decemberists

There are a whole bunch of popular, undoubtedly talented bands out there that I know nothing about, simply because I disliked their first album. Thus, Radiohead is a mystery to me because Pablo Honey seemed like a copy of a copy of a copy (in the Pixies to Nirvana to Radiohead sense). The Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Same thing (Wire to Sleater-Kinney to YYY) with their debut EP on Touch & Go. Blur’s Leisure sounded like a pallid knock-off of the The Stone Roses debut to me, with too many impenetrable Britishisms. I know that all these early records are not representative of the respective bands’ later work, but that’s not where I came in, and I never really had sufficient motivation to follow up. So I was surprised when “Down By The Water” wormed its way into my brain. I’m not much for arch and fanciful tales of seafarers and gypsies, I don’t like “concept” albums, and I wouldn’t know World of Warcraft from Dungeons & Dragons, so the Decemberists were largely lost on me since I bought Her Majesty The Decemberists in 2003. This song, though, is downright Springsteenian in its stripped-down, earthy heartland romanticism. I can’t say for sure, but I think that’s Peter Buck up front, contributing the “Fall On Me” guitar bit.

Repatriated / Handsome Furs

Speaking of Springsteen, remember two years ago, when every hot band (The Hold Steady, Arcade Fire, Coldplay) had a crush on the Boss? Well, that’s all over. It’s Gary Numan now. Everybody from Sunset Rubdown to the Antlers is cobbling together some variation on Numan’s icy synths, processed vocals, and dystopian worldview for 2011. Some people just dispense with the homage thing entirely, and have Gary Numan sing on their new single, then put him front and center in their video. “Repatriated” starts out with a repeating, “Cars”-worthy synth bloop, wonders “where did the future go,” and then elevates into full futurist Tubeway Army pathos.

Bad As Me / Tom Waits

After twelve years of closet cleaning (Orphans, Glitter and Doom Live), Robert Wilson collaborations (Alice, Blood Money), and one straight-up album (the abrasive, stentorian Real Gone), I’d pretty much tempered my expectations for Waits. How many musicians release anything truly worthwhile after an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? The list includes, well, nobody. But Bad As Me is a revelation, and as good as anything in Waits’ brilliant discography. The songs here are surprisingly wide-ranging in style and substance, encompassing unhinged blues, torch songs, songs with actual “rock” riffs, and a folk song or two that could have fit on Nighthawks At The Diner. He even adds a heretofore unheard voice to his mad gallery of whispers , groans, and shrieks. On the title cut and “Get Lost,” he lets loose with a joyful, hiccupy warble that’s a dead ringer for the voice of Oogie Boogie in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. What’s not to love?

Dive / Tycho

Tycho (producer and noted graphic artist Scott Hansen) is a downtempo IDMer for people who think Boards of Canada are just too damned prolific. Every year or so, the guy releases a single. I’ve been collecting the songs on this record (“Daydream” in 2007, “Adrift” in 2008, “Coastal Brake” in 2009), single by single, for years now. All, including “Dive,” featured here, are peerless examples of hazy, fuzzy, pastoral electronic psychedelia. Unfortunately, Tycho must have printed about 7 copies of the new 10-track LP, because the thing appeared on Amazon for a single day and then was out of stock. Nothing’s easy with this guy.

Holing Out / Yuck

On first listen, your initial impulse is to say, “Hey, this album is hopelessly derivative!” And then you remember that the Breeders’ Last Splash and Swervedriver’s Mezcal Head came out twenty years ago and the kids who are buying Yuck’s eponymous debut have no idea what you’re talking about. So then you just sit back and enjoy this record for its neo-shoegaze, effects-pedal-driven, fuzz-pop self. Now, if Ride would just get back together …

Novacane / Frank Ocean

Neo-soul singer Frank Ocean is obsessively punching the buttons on the 8-track tape player in his ’80s-vintage BMW M3 Series sedan and feeling that ’70s ennui like only someone born in 1987 can. How serious is Ocean’s Laurel-Canyon-1978 jones? On “American Wedding,” he’s just rapping over the top of “Hotel California” for six minutes. Here, on “Novacane,” he’s unleashing his inner David Crosby, getting stoned and lending a sympathetic ear to a porn star he met at a show. Too mellow for ya? Try “Bitch Suck Dick,” by Ocean’s Odd Future compadre Tyler the Creator. This one’s been in heavy rotation on the iPod since the weather got colder. Odd Future linchpin Tyler the Creator is all about cold. After a litany of outrageous misogynistic slurs, Tyler plumbs the very depths of depravity when he sneers, “Fuck global warning, this the Ice Age bitch.” What would Jackson Browne say?

Room 69 / Hotel 74

Hotel 74 is two guys from France that make droning, lulling, atmospheric downtempo dance music that owes a lot to Air. That’s all I know about them. I don’t even know their names. When I Google them, all I get is a few uploaded songs on MySpace and Bandcamp. They reached out to me on my MySpace page, probably because my “friend” list on MySpace is composed entirely of ambient acts from Brian Eno to Blanck Mass. (What? MySpace. You know, like, My Space. Tom Anderson? Your portal to the World Wide Web? Tila Tequila? Oh, never mind.) Anyway, their only LP is 13 tracks, each named after various locations in a hotel (Room 87, Room 40, Elevator, Pool, Penthouse). “Room 69″ is emblematic of the lot, a dense, swirling lunarscape that would sound good on the soundtrack for a 2011 remake of American Gigolo.

Taurus Chorus / Abbe May

Another person I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about, though she does, at least, have a website, and one of her tunes was used on the HBO show Entourage. I first encountered Abbe May via the terrific art photography blog, cafe selavy. “Taurus Chorus” is a testimonial to the musical fact that any combination of raunchy, distorted guitar and ethereal vocal from a winsome Australian chick has “hit” written all over it, even if I’m the only one who hears the track in question.

Even in Dreams / The Pains of Being Pure At Heart

We all knew this was going to happen, but it still takes some getting used to, this wave of nostalgia for the indie-alternative early ’90s. The touchstones for The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart are more toward the pop end of the spectrum. Think Smashing Pumpkins or Disintegration-era Cure, with emphasis on songs about moody introspection and heartbreak. “Even In Dreams” is the soundtrack, not so much for going out to the club, but rather for staying alone in your darkened apartment all weekend when your roommates have left for winter break and you’re mooning over just breaking up with your girlfriend. It’s enough to make you wish you never grew up.

Where Are You / J Mascis

Speaking of growing up. I’ve heard J Mascis has a young son, born in 2007. So it must be time to break out the sensitive acoustic album. The loudest show I ever saw in twenty-some years of dedicated concert-going was a 1991 NYC Ritz show featuring a lineup of Screaming Trees, My Bloody Valentine, and Dinosaur Jr. The volume, particularly during Dino’s slot, was a dense and physical thing, wave after wave of sound that you had to lean into just to remain upright. Awe-inspiring. J’s recent Dinosaur Jr forays have been every bit as pulverizing and solo-heavy as his vintage ’80s stuff, so I’d give him a pass if he wanted to get soft and introspective here. But J doesn’t need a pass, as these acoustic tunes are surprisingly compelling, each a soft little bed for J’s frog-like croak of a voice. “Where Are You” is probably the rockingest of the bunch, and one of only two songs on the record with a bit of electric guitar.

Screech Owl / Implodes

Well, it’s all got to end somewhere, so let’s end it with “Screech Owl,” a dark, brooding, ambient/post-shoegaze wall of noise from Implodes. Implodes are expert at imparting an over-arching sense of menace and impending doom (check out that album cover!) that recalls conspiracy theorists/post-rockers Godspeed! You Black Emperor. Who, I’m told, have regrouped and are touring again. Look at that. Everything old is new again!

Notable 2011 Reissues:

5 LPs / Disco Inferno

I never heard of Disco Inferno, a British avant-rock band that recorded from 1991 to 1996, until very recently. And I bought a LOT of records in the ’90s. At any rate, “Love Stepping Out” was just about the best thing I heard all year. The rest of this reissue is brilliant, too.

Who’s Landing In My Hangar? / Human Switchboard

Here’s a record I never thought I’d get back. My worn 1981 LP copy of Human Switchboard’s first and only release (issued on the Faulty Products label) went out in my late ’80s purge of vinyl in the first heady days of the CD. Big mistake. They were from somewhere in the Midwest. Wiry post-punk in the vein of Television or the Feelies. Reissued and packaged with some spotty outtakes and CBGB live takes. Okay, now who’s gonna reissue Robin Lane and the Chartbusters?

Science Of The Sea, Jurgen Muller

In the early ’80s, a German oceanic science student recorded a bunch of electronic floaty synth squiggles and effects, loosely arranged into song structures, that he hoped to sell as background music to makers of deep-sea documentaries. He pressed about 100 copies of his tunes to vinyl, nothing ever came of it, and he moved on. Thirty years later, Digitalis Recordings found them, and here they are. Because they were intended for commercial use, the effect is more Raymond Scott than Tangerine Dream, but they’re still an excellent backdrop for an excursion to Island Beach.

Related: 15 Songs For The End Of Summer

A Hill Of Sand

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Harry Ramble

A few weeks ago, I visited an old friend and we watched the Eagles-Giants game together. The Giants played well and came away with a surprising victory on the road in Lincoln Financial Field. I see this guy once a year; he’s the last person I know in the town I lived in from age ten until I went away to college.

After the game, I took the long way back through town to Route 80 East, so that I might drive past the house I grew up in. The house is on a remote street in an area of densely wooded hills above the lake that gives the town its name. The short street, called a “trail,” like all the roads around it, isn’t a thoroughfare to anywhere else. If you’re driving on it, you’re visiting someone or something on the street. I drove slowly up a steep incline, saw the old house at the top, and saw, too, that the people next door were having a garage sale. This gave me an excuse to pull into my family’s former driveway, look up at the house for a moment, then back out and ease the car up to the house next door. I killed the engine and got out.

The garage sale people were a couple in their late twenties or early thirties with two kids, one on a small bicycle and the other an infant propped up in one of those ExerSaucer play centers. The wife was sitting on the steps by the front door. It was early evening, not quite 6pm, but it was September so there was still plenty of light.

“You saw one of our signs,” the woman said. “You’re one of the very few.”

“Signs?” I said. I was walking up the driveway. The husband was trying to maneuver a wooden cabinet onto a dolly.

“This town has very strict rules about signs. You can only have four, and they can’t be larger than one foot by one foot. They actually drive around and check.”

“Oh. I didn’t see any signs.” The older kid pedaled past me and out into the street. There were a couple of tables on the driveway, covered with the usual garage sale odds and ends, plus some appliances, kids’ toys, and flimsy looking pieces of furniture. “I was just,” I gestured vaguely, “driving around.”

“We’ve had maybe a dozen people all day.”

I looked around and saw a recliner, a dining table, and an entertainment center of the sort designed to hold a big picture-tube TV. I looked out onto the lawn and saw that a realtor’s sign was spiked into it. “You’re moving?” I said.

“Trying to. For nine months. All we get are rude bargain hunters.”

I went over to her husband and helped him lift the cabinet onto the dolly. “Bad housing market,” I offered. Their house was a small one, laid out on one floor, with, I remembered, one bath. Too small for a family of four, these days.

“Bad town,” the wife countered. “Worried about all the wrong things. Like garage sale signs.”

The husband started wheeling the cabinet away and I looked at the house next door. It was up a short, weedy incline, the long wall of its built-in garage facing us. There was a door off the side of the garage, but the little porch that it had opened onto was long gone. In its place was a row of four overflowing trash cans. A twenty-foot section of rain gutter was lying in the weeds below the cans. I had seen already that there was a ragged stretch of shingles and bare wood across the front of the house where the gutter had been.

My parents built that house in 1972, when there was only one other year-round house (and two summer cottages) on the street. The lot was situated in the midst of a slope that descended precipitously from the roadfront to the property line at the rear. There are plenty of ways to build a house into a slope so that it makes architectural sense, but the builders my parents contracted weren’t sophisticated in that way. They solved the problem by trucking in tons of sand and construction waste and plopping a two-story rectangle of a house on top of the pile of sand like a cherry on whipped cream. The fact that the town had no sewage system for wastewater disposal posed another conundrum which the builders addressed by suspending a septic tank a few feet behind the house in the hill of sand.

“That’s not even the worst of them,” the woman said, following my gaze. “The one across the street was abandoned almost a year ago. Owners just packed up and left.”

Our former house was sided with firehouse-red asbestos shingles, the use of which had been banned in new construction sometime in the mid-70s. This house still had them, though a great many were cracked and broken. There were no curtains or shades in any of the windows I could see. The driveway was unpaved and a car sat in front of the house under the picture window where a front lawn had once been.

A little further up and across the street was a house in better condition, though it was unmistakably vacant. A section of gutter was down here, too, collapsed across the driveway. The lawn had gone over to tall weeds. The Mannings, who had had lived there many years ago, had always seemed like nobility to my unworldly eyes. Mr. Manning was a burly, barrel-shaped man, covered with body hair. He was, I think, a salesman of some sort. The Mannings had a patio boat on the lake, a large, slow-moving craft on pontoons, essentially a sea-faring backyard deck adorned with folding chairs and life preservers. Over the years, the Mannings’ son’s things—a bedroom desk, a bicycle, a colossal Zenith black-and-white TV—would be handed down to me and my brother. I knew that the Mannings were sophisticated and worldly because Mr. Manning kept a stack of Playboy magazines in a magazine rack in the living room, glossy publications filled with pictures of naked ladies right out there in the open and no one was self-conscious or weird about it. They were just another thing, like the liquor bottles and glassware arranged on a sideboard and the framed pictures on the wall.

“That one there, at least people still live in it. They drink a lot of Rolling Rock, I can tell you that. I’m constantly clearing away the empties that roll down the hill.”

The woman was speaking again about our old house. The people who’d bought the house from my parents in the late ’80s had purchased a home in desperate need of major repairs, none of which were apparently ever made. On the opposite side of the house there had been another little wooden porch and a long flight of wooden steps. It had rotted away when my parents still lived there and never been replaced. Twenty-five years is a long time to leave a second-story door hanging in space on the side of your house.

The woman’s husband had returned from moving the cabinet into the garage. “You see anything you want, you can have it for half off,” he said. Some of the items around me bore strips of masking tape inked with prices. I made a show of flipping through some vintage CDs in a box. Smashing Pumpkins, Aerosmith, Spin Doctors. A dollar a piece.

“You want to buy a house?” his wife said. She seemed in the mood to talk. Twelve garage sale customers over the course of an entire day will do that, I guess. “We bought this house six years ago at the top of the market. Now we can’t get rid of it. No one can sell anything. There’s another foreclosed house at the other end of the street and plenty more in town.”

I looked up the street. The Cullens’ old house, perhaps. They’d had a family history of health issues, I remembered. How long it had been since the last of the neighbors we’d known up here had moved away from this area? Twenty years? It’s odd how I can recall the last names of our neighbors of decades ago, but I couldn’t tell you the last names of any of my current neighbors, most of whom I’ve lived among for twelve years now.

From where I was standing I could see only the side of the house next door and the corner of the property around the garage. I wondered what the back yard looked like. I wondered if my father’s work bench and shelves were still at the back of the garage. I couldn’t imagine, given the fact that nothing else had been changed or repaired in decades, that they wouldn’t still be there. I used to assemble the sunday papers, the Newark Star-Ledger, in that garage in the hours before dawn. In my teens, I would often stay up all night on a Saturday, watching as the network TV stations went off the air one by one until only CBS-TV’s Late Late Shows remained, creaky B&W stock comedies from the ’40s and ’50s like Where’s Charley? or the Thin Man mysteries.

Why was I staying up all night? I can’t remember. Though I do recall listening for the Star-Ledger distributor’s truck, which would deposit bundles of Sunday edition sections at the foot of our driveway at about 5am. I would assemble these sections (there was a pattern, the classifieds into the living section into the comics/magazine section into the news section), and then head off with the bulky papers (as many as I could carry, jammed into a cloth shoulder bag) out onto the rural streets as the sky shifted from black to purple to pink on the horizon.

“Looks like there might be a few code violations up there,” I said.

“You’d think so,” the woman said. She stood up and gathered her sleeping baby out of the ExerSaucer. “But nothing gets done. This town is run by thieves. Everyone’s trying to get out.”

Building code inspections must have been pretty lax forty years ago, too. Shortly after we moved in to our new house, it became apparent to my father that the sand dune our house was perched on was going wash away down the hill. The contractors who’d built the house had filed for bankruptcy as they were finishing the job, so my father was painting and nailing up sheetrock when he wasn’t driving fifty miles back and forth to his day job. So he sent me and my brother off into the woods around the house to gather big rocks, as many as we could find, and set them into the hill of sand in rows. My brother and I had lived all of our short lives in a tiny apartment in densely populated Bergen County, so our new surroundings were a revelation to us. We felt like explorers, like pioneers, building a homestead in the wilderness. All day we carted rocks up the hill, sweating in the July sun and listening to music from a small radio tuned to WABC Musicradio 77 on the AM dial. “Alone Again (Naturally),” by Gilbert O’Sullivan. “Candy Man,” by Sammy Davis, Jr. “Song Sung Blue,” by Neil Diamond. In the late afternoons in those first weeks, we would hear the sound of a bugle or horn being played somewhere off in the distance. I imagined myself on the frontier, where life was brutal and short.

It took a while, but eventually a lot of that sand would erode away. My mother tried to plant things on that hill, but sand is sand, and not much would grow there. In the ’80s, after I’d moved away, a few bad storms carved that hill up to the point where the septic system was exposed, and it stayed that way for a while. Talk about your code violations.

The husband had rejoined us and was starting to close up some of the boxes on the tables. I’m sure I didn’t have the look of someone who was going to buy anything. “I think we’re gonna call it a day,” he said.

“Sure, okay,” I said, retreating down the short driveway. I looked up at their little house; the wife was heading inside. I’d watched all of these houses go up in the ’70s. It was a hopeful time, a whole neighborhood springing up around us, middle-class families in their first houses, everywhere the rumble of bulldozers, then the roar of cement mixers as foundations went in, the shriek of table saws and the rap-rap-rap of hammers. My brother and I had played in every one of these houses as they were being constructed. We watched as guys in hardhats and toolbelts installed pipes and wires and sheetrock, then we returned in off hours to tightrope-walk the roof beams and carry away cast-off building materials for our own childhood projects. Somewhere in this particular house, I knew, was a small white Matchbox ambulance with a flip-open rear door, wedged between beams in the crawlspace.

“Good luck with everything,” I said, but the woman was gone and the man had walked back into the garage with a box. I got in my car and I drove away.

Related: I Speak For The Trees

Topics For Further Discussion

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Harry Ramble

Left-Handed Hummingbird God of War

Largely forgotten amidst the grandiose narrative of the destruction and plunder of the Aztec Empire by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez in the early 16th century are the stories of those invading Spaniards who, upon first encountering the religion of the Aztec people, grew enamored of the indigenous peoples’ pantheon of gods and goddesses, and enthusiastically converted to the Aztecs’ religion. Today, savvy tourists can still seek out the Mexican storefront churches and street-corner shrines where the ancient rites of the polytheistic Aztec religion are observed, albeit infrequently, according to the Aztec calendar. It is said that Huitzilopochtli, the Left-Handed Hummingbird God of War and Sacrifice, lives modestly and plainly in a small apartment in Mazatlan, where he is sometimes visited by his old friend Quetzalcoatl, The Feathered Serpent. The once revered deities are said to enjoy watching American baseball on pirated Direct TV, bowls of nuts and sweaty cans of Tecate on a TV tray between them.

Night Out

If not for the fact that I sleep poorly most nights, I would have remained blissfully unaware of these facts. On certain clear nights in the early spring, the shadows beneath the elms on my estate rotate on fixed axes across the lawn until they bear no congruent relation to any sources of light (the moon, a single halogen streetlamp) in the vicinity. When the moon reaches its apex, a single cab, its roof light extinguished, rolls slowly up to the curb and the shadows depart, en masse, for a night out on the town. Much later, in a still hour before dawn, the same cab returns and the shadows resume their stations at the bases of the trees, correctly aligned.

Once Removed

“My God,” she said, “look at your ass.” We were sitting in chairs by the courtyard pool of the Best Western, the late-morning June sun blazing down upon us. “It’s jiggling all over the place. It’s obscene.” We were looking at the viewscreen of the digital camcorder we had used a few hours before to make a video of the two of us fucking. This wasn’t the kind of motel where people used the pool or even left their rooms very much. Every once in a while, a curtain would twitch in one of the windows along the balconies above us. “That may be the least erotic thing I’ve ever seen.” We were there to meet her sister, who was supposed to be bringing forty OxyContin tablets with her, but she was already almost two hours late. Much too late. “Next time, I get on top. You can just lay there, keep your flabby ass out of sight.” I wasn’t listening anymore, however, because two cops had appeared at the service entrance behind the pool. They were talking to the morning front-desk manager and looking over at us. I turned off the video and lifted the camera so that the cops floated up into the viewscreen. They looked less threatening, less portentous, this way, once removed.

At The Third Annual National
Conference of Literary Sock Puppets

“… I don’t want to give it away, but this is an absolute show-stopper of a novel with insights into the human condition that defy any attempts to put it down. I spent six hours inhaling every word. My GOD. You know how you slow down when a great read starts to come to an end. I did that. Uh huh. Love story, thriller, paranormal and yet relevant to our times, and it all seemed so effortless, as though I were watching a film. This masterful novel breaks your heart amd yet lifts you. All told, it reminds me of a blend of Jodi Picoult, Stephen King and Elizabeth Berg. Funny, amazing, strange and beautiful, and now I see VANITY FAIR has named it as a hot read for Jan 2011. I’ll say. I’m recommending this one to everyone I know who asks, “What should I read next?” LORD HAVE MERCY this author is on fire and please, don’t let anyone put her out, because I need to know what is next, like I need her next book RIGHT. NOW. The mystery kept on and on and yet never felt strained or obtuse. More, more, more, more. I … is my time up? Why, yes, I am a real person. Are you? Well, I don’t see why …”

Celestial Washcloth

I have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, and it’s damned exasperating, is what it is. It’s been a few hundred billion years since God has wandered upstairs to this remote scattering of galaxies, and the place is a mess. You turn your back for a few eons and everything goes to hell. You get this weird particulate matter swarming and seething all over these worlds that were perfectly clean just yesterday, cosmically speaking. So there’s nothing else to do but wet a celestial washcloth and get to work.

Aquaman In Decline

The footing is tricky, here on the sea bottom, beneath the tall sea windows, shedding their half-sea light. Everywhere are the tomes, the shelves and shelves of tomes, the secret stories of the vanished tribes, the lives and times, the secret essence, of the lost people of Atlantis, wiped from history, as if they’d never existed, forgotten forever here on the sea bottom. Once, their civilization waxed mighty, basking in the surface light of a benevolent sun, but the world shifted its massive shoulders, a colossal indifferent shrug, and their time passed away and they were lost, irrevocably, to the pages of history, and only one, Aquaman, fins and flits among the ruins, his heart heavy, his dreams a yellowing screen cluttered with the shifting shapes of ghosts, silent, extinct.

The Revolution This Time

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Harry Ramble

Maybe nothing will be accomplished at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and marches. Maybe the whole thing will dissolve into riots and chaos and looting. Maybe the cops will finally arrest enough people to cripple the event’s momentum. Maybe nothing will change at all and corporations will keep banking their profits and shipping jobs overseas, while the big banks privatize obscene profits and socialize all the losses attendant upon their gaming of the system.

But at least someone is standing up and saying something.

Until last weekend, if you read anything about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations now going on in Zuccotti Park (re-named Liberty Square by the protestors) you read that it was a silly, unfocused bacchanal staged by a few hundred disaffected hippies. That’s what Citibank and President Obama and the GOP and the New York Times want you to think. Never mind the usual cranks like Glenn Beck and Rick Perry and Tea Party “revolutionaries” whose idea of revolution begins and ends with being personally exempted from paying taxes (like their free-market heroes at General Electric). It’s Lockheed Martin and CNN and Aetna who want you to think that the problem with America is selfish Americans who aspire to some kind of affordable living wage and access to universal healthcare that might prevent them from being financially destroyed by their next illness.

So for a week what you saw in the media was, “Ha, ha, look at the dirty hippies and weirdos,” and “Why don’t you get a job?”

But then old people whose savings were wiped out showed up, and the people who work fifty and sixty hours a week and still don’t make enough money to lift themselves above the poverty line (in a city where 20% of the population exists below the poverty line) showed up. And then the broken Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans showed up and and the people with PhDs and $75,000 student loans that have ballooned into $200,000 debts due to bank fees and penalties showed up. Oh, and the Marines showed up—to protect the protestors. On Wednesday, the unions are showing up.

And what can the corporations and the banks really say? It’s been three years since the global financial institutions drove the economy off a cliff, and not one act of legislation has been passed to rein them in. No one went to jail except Bernie Madoff, who had the temerity to steal from rich people. Months after the self-inflicted calamity, it was business as usual on Wall Street, with the biggest firms handing out eight- and nine-figure bonuses to executives who apparently must be retained at any cost.

What can Barrack Obama say? All of his biggest donors are Wall Street bankers; all of his “financial advisors” and “job czars” are the same Goldman Sachs and General Electric CEOs who created the crisis. On the GOP side, it’s all about breaking unions and cutting spending. Even if Congressional Republicans would let a true banking reform bill reach Obama’s desk, he’d never sign it.

Meanwhile, the big banks borrow money at 0% interest from the US government (the Federal Funds Rate has been at zero, since December 2008), then lend it to cash-strapped Americans at interest rates of 14.99%. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, signed into law by George Bush in 2005 as a means to make declaring bankruptcy more difficult for ordinary Americans, remains in effect even as the banks themselves have demonstrated their willingness to shake down those same Americans for hundreds of billions the moment the big banks’ bottom lines are threatened by their own malfeasance. Banks, in collusion with colleges, have presided over a system in which college fees and tuition have risen 439% since 1982, while student loan borrowers remain the only class of borrowers who have no recourse to bankruptcy protection. Americans have grown used to the fact that their 401(k)s grow in small increments during good times and plummet precipitously during bad times.

So now somebody is saying something. And Big Business and the bankers are silent, fully expecting, like dozens of Hosni Mubaraks, to wait out the tempest with the help of the media and the police and the politicians of both parties. But the people in the street, the “99 percent,” burdened with unrepayable debt and with little hope for the future, have nothing left to lose. If the revolution this time fails, it lays the groundwork for the success of the next one.

Critics (mostly on the right) admonish the protestors for being unrealistic. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” they say. But these people are past all that now. The younger protestors are part of a Lost Generation that graduated from college to find a barren employment landscape. They’ll never catch up to the lifestyles their parents and grandparents enjoyed. The older people are disenfranchised in their 40s and 50s; many will never again work in any real career or professional capacity at all. They have nothing for retirement. The hand stopped feeding these people a long time ago.

Here’s a photo blog over at WeAreThe99Percent of desperate, protestors and those similarly effected, who have written out their doleful stories for the world to see. Look at all the dirty hippies, too lazy to get jobs:

We Are The 99 Percent

Related: The Vampire Squid Speaks

Oak & Acorn 3: The Whirlwind

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Harry Ramble

Sometimes I think nothing will ever be enough.

The endless minute-by-minute supervision, the careful management of his every waking moment.

The therapists, the IEP classroom aides, the specialized summer camp, the 24-hour-a-day awarding of “points” for every quiet, decent hour; the deletion of “points” for his scarifying outbursts. The detailed accounts of meltdowns written by grammar school attendants who are clearly wearying of him.

He was conceived in the midst of an enormous storm, three days filled with bad omens.

We had a daughter by then, a beautiful, empathetic, sweet child, almost three years old, but my wife and I were already stumbling badly as 2000 turned to 2001 into 2002. In 2000, I walked away from a dead-end publishing job (Prentice Hall, it had 9 months to live) for something else that had even less of a future. I was out of work for six months, bringing in freelance money for book jackets and such, during the Christmas Where No One Spoke.

But the storm, I was talking about the storm. The rain fell and it fell and it fell. We were trapped in a house in the Cat’s Ridge section of Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks. The floodwaters rose over the streets and crept around the borders of our rental house. My father-in-law and I moved our cars to the last, highest hump of grassy knoll and watched as the tide rose up to the tires of our cars. It was a relief to be outside, buffeted by 60-mile-an-hour winds and driving rain; the heavy weather inside our rental house was much worse.

I was working again by September of 2002, at a job I still hold today, and so maybe it was some sense of euphoria that moved us to do what we did. We both wanted it, we both very specifically had the same goal.

After the storm passed, Tropical Storm Gustav, I packed and packed and packed. I refused to stay in the same room for more than a moment. I had driven over some sort of PVC piping in the yard and broken it. It was a relief and a release to go to the hardware store in town and buy new pipe, and replace the broken plastic. We fled that island like refugees from a catastrophe.

Most days are fine here, now. Other days are not. He has taken to hitting his sister. His sister copes by being overtly solicitous of us all. She is the facilitator of some kind of “normal life” for us all. Some times I look at my son and he looks at me and I can see him calculating. Sizing me up. He has a talent for the cutting remark. A bad day announces itself when my daughter runs out to the car when I come home and strikes up a desperately cheerful line of conversation. Today, my son announced, as he has before, that “he’s going to kill us all.” Today, I took all of his Xbox games back to the GameStop and gave them away. Tomorrow will be bad. It’s going to be really bad.

I am not innocent in all of this. Autism, they say, is latent in preceding generations. I look at him and I see all of my own failings. This series, Oak and Acorn, is not haphazardly named.

My son was conceived in a whirlwind. Sometimes I can’t see the future.

Related: Oak and Acorn 2

Related: Oak and Acorn

15 Songs for the End of Summer

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Harry Ramble

So I was out at the beach locker in the pavilion at Spring Lake the other day, pulling out chairs and sand toys and body boards in preparation for our trip to Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks. It was a gray rainy Monday; the boardwalk was silent and the building was unoccupied but for the elderly woman who checks badges at the entrance.

I carted out the first load of stuff to the car and then returned for more. As I was climbing the steps out of the bowels of the pavilion with the second load, the woman looked up from her book.

“Moving out?” she said.

I was about to say, “Oh, no, we’ll be back.” But then I paused and counted the days and realized that, at best, we wouldn’t be back until the few days before Labor Day. The lockers close on the day after Labor Day. They’re tearing this old pavilion down in the fall, this outmoded edifice of ancient yellow brick, warped wood, and flaking paint by the Jersey Shore, and building a new one.

“Well,” I said, instead, “We might bring a chair or two back.” And then I humped the last of the beach stuff out to the car.

That’s the way summer is. One day you’re sitting on the beach in a swimsuit and sweatshirt, marveling as your children frolic in Memorial Day surf that’s still too cold for you to even dip a toe in. And then comes another day when you sense something, the quality of the light or a damp clammy breeze off the dunes at your back, and you think “Oh, right, autumn.” No matter how vigilant you are (and I’m more obsessed with the passing of time than most people), the end always sneaks up on you.

At any rate, here’s fifteen songs for the end of summer. Because you need these kinds of songs, when the days grow shorter and the shadows lengthen. Text-linked You Tube audio in each entry.

Nick Drake: Saturday Sun

Saturday Sun

The elegiac piano, the retreating sun, remembrances of people in their season and time, Sunday weeping for a day gone by. It’s all there.

Simon & Garfunkel: April Come She Will

April Come She Will

The whole damned arc of the season, framed in terms of an intimate relationship, in just a few choice phrases, over the space of a minute-fifty. Man, that’s economy.

Wild Nothing: Summer Holiday

Summer Holiday

What? Too melancholy for ya? Slap this slice of up-tempo guitar chime and yearning vocals from wistful fuzz-poppers Wild Nothing onto the turntable. Here, from last year’s Gemini, it’s all about memories of summer holiday at your lover’s parents’ house and sneaking out of your separate rooms in the middle of the night for some quality time. In short, it’s what being eighteen is all about.

Shelley Fabares: Lost Summer Love

Lost Summer Love

Fabares had a #1 single in February of 1962 with “Johnny Angel.” Later that same year, she released a second LP on the Colpix label, The Things We Did Last Summer, that includes a number of “summer’s past” laments (the title track, “See You In September,” a cover of the Brian Hyland summer weeper “Sealed With A Kiss”), none of which appeals to me much. Two years later, transplanted to the Vee-Jay label, she released a non-charting single, “I Know You’ll Be There,” that features “Lost Summer Love” on the flip. I originally encountered it on a Varese Sarabande compilation. “Summer is over/ And we have parted/ Nothing is left of, oh/ The dreams we started.” An almost martial drum beat, ethereal vocals, nifty horn break. What else do you want?

Frank Sinatra: The September Of My Years

September Of My Years

The great grandaddy of them all in the Autumnal Reminiscences Canon. Sinatra was turning 50 in December of 1965, the season when this LP appeared. Virtually anything here (the title song, “Last Night When We Were Young,” “It Was a Very Good Year,” “When The Wind Was Green”) could fit in this slot on your playlist. This song, with its opening stanza, “One day you turn around and it’s summer/ Next day you turn around and it’s fall/ And all the winters and springs of a lifetime/ Whatever happened to them all?” will do just fine.

The Cure: The Last Day of Summer

The Last Day Of Summer

Robert Smith in high melancholy mode. Lyrics self-explanatory.

Terry Jacks: Seasons In The Sun

Seasons In The Sun

Yeah, what’s your point? Damn right, it’s hard to die “when all the birds are singing in the sky.” I cry everytime I hear this song. Technically, “spring is in the air,” but not for Rod McKuen, the wordsmith here.

A Summer Wasting: Belle & Sebastian

A Summer Wasting

Not everyone’s regretting lost opportunities and good times slipped away. Twee-poppers Belle & Sebastian know the values of loafing, and they’re perfectly okay with “Seven weeks of river walkways/ Seven weeks of reading papers/ Seven weeks of feeling guilty/ Seven weeks of staying up all night.” “I Know Where The Summer Goes,” from one of the early B&S EPs, would also fit nicely here.

Fourth Of July: Dave Alvin

Fourth Of July

Dave Alvin replaced Billy Zoom in X just in time to participate in sessions for the lackluster See How We Are LP in 1986. Dave brought “Fourth Of July” with him, however, and it was easily the best song on the record. Even better was the version he cut for Romeo’s Escape, the solo album he released in the same year. And don’t be deceived by the date, this one’s definitely about the end of everything.

Bruce Springsteen: 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) (Live)

Spanish Johnny’s slipping out the window, Kitty left with Big Pretty, the circus is pulling out of town, and the boardwalk life for Bruce is through. Everybody’s leaving in Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent, and the E- Street Shuffle. Time to roll down the security gates on the Asbury Park arcades, and drag the lifeguard chairs under the boardwalk. Season’s over.

The Doors: Summer’s Almost Gone

Summer’s Almost Gone

Dig that tinkly chamber pop electric piano from Ray Manzarek on the intro. Wistful, eh? Then Robby Krieger starts twisting guitar notes into yearning shapes, and we’re good to go.

Tom Waits: Town With No Cheer

Town With No Cheer

Here’s one to send your Labor Day Party guests scrambling for the exits. March 21st is the last gasp of summer in Southern Australia, in some dusty nowhere station between Melbourne and Adelaide.

Bob Dylan: Summer Days

Summer Days

“Summer days and summer nights are gone,” but Bob Dylan “know[s] a place where there’s still somethin’ going on.” His Bobness has been engaged in his Never Ending Tour for more than twenty years now (appearing at every minor league ballpark, state fair, bowling alley, and laundromat across America) and he’s got no quit in him. He’s “standing on the table,” he’s “spending every dime,” he’s “got [his} hammer ringin'," he's "got eight carburetors ... and [he's] usin’ ‘em all.” Probably scare Belle & Sebastian half to death.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: Green Cotton Sweater

Green Cotton Sweater

They say you can find anything on the Internet, and here’s your proof. The 15th and last track on the Town Topic EP, buried behind a list of B-sides, instrumental versions, and unlikely ringtones, “Green Cotton Sweater” is an archetypal tale of a summer’s romance ended.

Dusty Springfield: Summer Is Over

Summer Is Over

And, finally, Dusty. I’m writing this on the breezy porch of an Ocracoke Island house in late August. There’s a flock of ducks waddling across the street to drink from the air conditioner run-off beside the back stairs, the wife and kids have walked off to get some ice cream at the harbor store; it’s time to fire up the grill for dinner; and the living is good.

The Vampire Squid Speaks

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Harry Ramble

So it turns out that there are two kinds of vampire squids.

There’s the vampire squid that “is wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” and there’s the vampire squid that does the same thing while also taunting you with outright lies and insults.

Henry J. Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs and former US Secretary of the Treasury, is the second kind of vampire squid. His Eminence stepped down from the clouds briefly to speak with the the NY Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin about the real cause of our now double-dipping Great Recession. His take?

“Many of the Western democracies — including the U.S. — have a problem that voters want benefits they don’t want to pay for,” Mr. Paulson said.

Thanks for the heads-up, Henry!

See, it’s not about the fact that visionaries like Henry pay 15% federal tax on their income (capital gains, you know) while the rest of us pay 25% and 28% payroll tax on ours.

It’s not the fact that middle-class taxpaying Americans doggedly pay into Social Security and Medicare programs all of their working lives, while bankers immediately demand taxpayer bailouts the instant their clumsy, ham-handed attempts to game the system result in possible quarterly losses and forfeiture of their year-end bonuses.

It’s not the fact that financial institutions like Goldman Sachs are raping everyone from Greece to Jefferson County, Alabama to student loan borrowers that are caught up in an endless cycle of new fees, penalties, and an ironclad no-bankruptcy policy that are driving young people to contemplate suicide.

It’s not the fact that we live in the midst of a lose-lose regulatory environment in which the titans of the financial industry privatize all profits and socialize all losses.

It’s that we, the American taxpayers, are greedy.

Related: Detours To Nowhere

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