Before and After Fleetwood Mac

As John masterfully blogs Tusk, I am really starting to realize how profoundly it and Fleetwood Mac in general has affected me. At this point, I can see pretty clearly that the discovery, acceptance, obsession, release, and re-evaluation of FM has served as a sort of delineation point between the past and current phase of my life.

It started out pretty innocently. I came into my studio and they were playing Mac. Carl is really into Fleetwood Mac right now, somebody said. And then I got some for myself. Not a lot, a few songs that I voraciously consumed. Then there was that epic trip to Philadelphia in December, an anxious look back in time which was bookended by Fleetwood Mac on the train the whole way down. This was the first time I strongly connected FM to my physical environment and my personal anxieties, and the first but not the last time I wrote about them, in my MS-Word Journal: I think New Jersey is haunting me. I went to Philadelphia on Friday afternoon, and all I am really thinking about is New Jersey: the Meadowlands, frozen, smoking, steaming on a gray Friday afternoon right before dark. On my first Amtrak train, so fancy. New Jersey was so sad and beautiful, and I listened to Fleetwood Mac nonstop—just “Dreams” and “Rhiannon” back to back, over and over again—and watched the frozen ground of the wetlands and all the industrial waste contained within that land dissolve into a more civilized Northern New Jersey landscape.

Upon return to New York, I acquired the full albums of the self-titled album, Rumors and Tusk (and the remastered versions of both), Tango in the Night, Mirage, eventually Buckingham Nicks, even some of Boston Blues. I immersed myself in Fleetwood Mac. All day at work at the magazine, all night at home, on the train, when I walked down the street. I experimented with different ways of listening—an album at a time, an album and its remastered version back to back, single tracks over and over. I researched. My primary concern in life, my most real and serious passion, became Fleetwood Mac.

Lucky for me, I had friends who were loving Fleetwood Mac right then and there, and they definitely enabled this obsession. By Christmas eve, I realized that Fleetwood Mac had indeed become more than just background music, and that I perhaps needed to exorcise it in order to save myself. I decided that this exorcism would take the form of a birthday party that involved only two elements: all of Fleetwood Mac's best work and a lot of drugs. The friends agreed that perhaps this was in order.

I knew this would be a monumental occasion, and everything needed to be just right. I waited several weeks, until all of my closest friends were back from their holiday vacations. There was some talk about procuring the rare making-of-Tusk documentary. This was followed up by phone calls by interested parties and a too-steep $150 price tag. In the meantime, I was growing increasingly distraught. My grasp upon reality was lessening. My thoughts were being replaced with cryptic lyrics, circular song structures, haunting harmonies. The world had grown dark and small and there was only room there for me and Fleetwood Mac. New Year's was a blur: my friend Peter came to visit and I spent all of New Year's Eve day hungover, listening to FM and explaining its brilliance in detail to him. I sat him down by the stereo and made him listen to Tusk with me while I was supposed to be cooking and preparing Jello shots. He said that 'Sara' reminded him of a girl he used to know, and got a little sad.

By the first week of January, I couldn't converse for more than 10 minutes without mentioning Fleetwood Mac. I would slip out of parties to listen to my iPod. Eventually the big day came, and I readied myself: this was the beginning of the end for me and the Mac. This was a dangerous, co-dependent relationship that needed to end. But like anything you love so much that it hurts you, it wasn't easy to let go.

All day, I bought candles and made phone calls to get numbers for drug dealers and actually smoked pot to calm myself down. When enough people arrived we sat together, listening all night— Rumors, Tusk, Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham Nicks, Tusk Remastered, Rumors Remastered... I think maybe Rumors again, "Gypsy" made its way in there at some point. It was perhaps one of the most profound and intense experiences of my life, and it lasted for maybe 9 hours. At 6 or 7am I went to bed with this bittersweet knowledge that it was all over.

After that day everything felt pretty raw and empty. I had thing weird longing that didn't go away for a long time. A week after the party, I permitted myself to listen to two or three songs on a train ride home (Rhiannon, Dreams, Sara) and I had a physical, almost convulsive reaction. By the time I got off the train I felt like a different person. I wasn't ready yet. By the time I went back to my job in February, I was emotionally drained.

Slowly, I've been able to re-introduce some Fleetwood Mac elements into my life again. I can't really listen to, say, "Sara" again like I used to. It's kind of painful. I don't really know how this happened to me. Before FM, I was in a generally optimistic mindset, but I knew winter was coming and it was going to be dark again for a long time. Somehow FM acted as a weird catalyst for a lot of impending badness that had been building up. It's possible that I felt like in the 6 months preceding it, I had changed into a person that I wasn't comfortable being. It's possible that a lot of the things that I had been dreaming about were actually materializing and I couldn't sort out my desires anymore. Post-FM (or, as someone called it, Fleetwood Crack), I am a changed woman. Fleetwood Mac made me see that human beings are flawed in sometimes catastrophic ways that they can't control. There are unpredictable, sometimes dark, sometimes ominous things that motivate them, and there is a certain beauty to that darkness that is rarely captured. These are all good reasons to be afraid, but maybe Fleetwood Mac's music is really about accepting fear and failure and making something good of it, then pressing on.

Some songs relevant to this election cycle

These are from a random old school hip hop compilation. Listen while thinking about the lunch pail Democrats.

"Jesse" - Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel
Everybody get out and vote!

"Yes We Can-Can" - The Treacherous Three

it's not easy being green

Hey boss editors of mine! Welcome to the year 2004! Great and original concept for the next issue--nobody has ever done a green-theme before.

After this issue, the only tolerated references to "green" in my life will be: al green, green monster, money, and weed.

I am going to go home now so that I can turn all the lights on, plug in all my electronics, run the faucets, and blast the air conditioners before I drive my Hummer to a far-away steak house while tossing paper and plastic bags out the window. Ooh, maybe I'll stop at Sam's Club on the way to pick up an economy-sized pack of Poland Spring and little packets of condiments! The world, and everyone on it, can kiss my ass.

I think I am going to marry Andy Rooney

Thanks for the vid tip Renda. (sorry about the ad, I will fix this asap)
Also, speaking of future husbands, my fav. young Southern soccer player and I are now officially 'pals'!

Fuck

7 new sins. I am now too rich for heaven.

1. "Bioethical" violations such as birth control
2. "Morally dubious'' experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

It was everything a slumber party could be

Seriously pro slumber party photos by Astrid Stawiarz. Check them out!

Today's Free Shit: Slumber Party Edition

Party favors have arrived by courier: Pomtinis! Wine Spritzers ! Cliff Bars! Peroni!
Tomorrow's slumber party will be sponsored by of one of our fav. employers (Thanks C.)

HOT MAMAH AMAZONSARAH

go ahead, get viral.

Sharing is Caring

Gentle readers,
I really do believe that it is our obligation as human beings to entertain each other.

Here are some new things I will share with you today:
1. Heartbreak / Dancing Soul playlist. I made this playlist in 2005 and found it recently. I was in the midst of heartbreak, and was trying to create an "Ultimate Heartbreak Mixxx" of the saddest possible songs. This was my side project, just other songs. It is much better, and much more heartbreaking because it wasn't trying to be. Download

2. Andy Rooney podcasts. Ever since I realized that the two poles of my personality were Carrie Bradshaw and Andy Rooney, I've grown much fonder of his crankiness. These 2 minute gems are much more entertaining without the visuals. Listen as Andy dissects the uselessness of kitchen gadgets, self-help books, and baseball.

3. Finally, The Supremes' "I'm Living in Shame" (download) is a really sad song about a daughter who is ashamed of her poor mother, and eventually goes off to college and pretends that her mother had died so that her uptown friends will never see her. It talks about upward class mobility in the most tragic way possible. This song bears some resemblance to Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," a short story that is quite good and that I try to keep in the back of my mind as much as possible. Read it here.

On Carole King, and album art in general

When I was growing up, I used to actually play with my dad's records like they were toys. Perhaps the epitome of the fun interactivity of the album jacket was Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, a packaging masterpiece that utilized the double-album format to its fullest aesthetic potential. On both sides of the album, die-cut windows revealed different ‘scenes’ depending upon the positioning of the 4 total sides of the inner sleeves. This led to hours of awestruck record flipping while listening to the strange music inside: What would appear in the windows of this mysterious building when side B faced front and side C faced back, versus when side A faced back? What was really going on inside that jacket, and why did the band decide to make this crazy object?

In the days of records, enjoying music was a multi-faceted experience that involved the physical object – the packaging – as much as the listening part. It visualized the world of the music, or brought another element to that world. It provided us with something to hold, to look at, lyrics to read. Was this person really climbing the stairway to heaven? Or is this what it looks like on the stairway to heaven? Does this drawing have anything to do with the actual song itself? Was it symbolic in some way? Or did the band just like the way it looked?

I formed endless narratives about the worlds inside those covers while listening to the records. This includes any record cover, not just the brilliant or iconic ones: Like a Prayer is suspiciously similar to Sticky Fingers, but as a young lady I thought that the Madonna cover was perhaps what sluttiness looked like. Of course, this is the result of not just cultural conditioning but also the artfulness (in the case of Sticky Fingers) or lack thereof (in Like a Prayer) of its execution. So many album covers showed me things that the music itself didn't, and exposed me to new ideas that I wouldn't have seen any other way.

About a month ago, a music critic named Jody Rosen spoke at KGB Bar about the digitization of music, and the subsequent loss of the object or image that accompanies the music. He started obsessively collecting vintage sheet music – which he couldn’t read – for the images on the covers. He looked at the images to imagine the songs that would accompany them. I love MP3s as much as anyone else, but I definitely feel like a part of the mystery of music, how it existed in several different spheres, died with iTunes. The physicality of music packaging allows us to engage with music through more of our senses. Our own sets of visual, verbal, and musical associations combine into a comprehensive experience that creates an individualized culture of the music. We have more opportunities to connect to the music on a personal level.

My extra-masculine dad revealed his sensitive side to my siblings and me through his love of 70s-era singer-songwriters, especially Carole King. He used to repeatedly and enthusiastically play the 8-track tape of the children’s musical “Really Rosie” for us, and was so excited when the animated special came on tv. He sat us down and made us watch it. This was, of course, because Carole King wrote the music, and through this animated special he could share this love he had with us.

Consequently, I spent a lot of time as a child thinking about Carole King and what made her great enough to soften up my father. Forever burned into my mind was the cover of ‘Tapestry’. She was a woman in the city (King is from Brooklyn but she moved to LA, so this cover was actually shot at her home in Laurel Canyon), sitting on a windowseat looking out a window, maybe waiting for a guy - perhaps 'so far away' - to come home. It seems like a rainy day, and she is a little bit broken but still relatively optimistic, even cheerful. She seemed to me to be the definition of what a woman was, could be, had to be. I identified with this image, and felt that she was perhaps the woman I was destined to become.

At the same time, Carole King’s actual songs sometimes seemed disheartening. In the ‘Tapestry’ photo, she seemed like a model of strength, but in her lyrics dealing with relationships with men, the female always seemed overly weak and malleable. Some standouts include “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).” This lyric from “Where You Lead” always particularly bothered me, as the singer seemed to celebrate the relegation of her own dreams:

I always wanted a real home with flowers on the windowsill
But if you want to live in New York City, honey, you know I will

Regardless of my problems with Carole King, the impact of that photo and ‘Tapestry’ in general on my psyche is pretty undisputed in ways I haven’t been able to fully identify.

And so, Carole King and destiny. This is a photo of the living room of my old apartment in Philadelphia. Finally my life-long dream for a window seat was realized here, perhaps my own version of Laurel Canyon. I spent much time listening to records and smoking cigarettes out that window, looking at trees and beautiful though slightly dilapidated row houses. I would spy on the nightly goings-on and potential streetfights in front of the two Ethopian bars on opposite street corners, see bikes get stolen, try to figure out if it was garbage day. In West Philadelphia, everything was so far away, not just Center City but my regular life in New York too, and my weird fantasy had come true.