Hello and welcome to the first installment of Todd’s Favorite Songs, or something like that. I haven’t quite decided on a real name for this open-ended project yet, but I wanted to get started on it. This one is called “Knock Yourself Out”, and it’s by Jon Brion, from the soundtrack to the movie “I Heart Huckabees”, with a little help from his friends (and two of the movie’s stars) Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg.
I’ve been a fan of Jon’s ever since he was a member of Jellyfish and The Grays, but these days he’s more well-known for his production work with Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann, as well as the movie soundtracks he’s created.
Jon is my personal musical hero, and I learned how to be a producer by studying his work. I learned how to make a song sound intimate, or lush, or sarcastic, or poppy, or melodramatic, or ‘retro’, or minimalistic. I learned how to think about ’space’, and distance, and the three-dimensionality of recording. I also learned about how to manipulate musical space, meaning when to play a certain instrument and when to leave room for something else to happen. I learned how let a song breathe. I learned how to strip it down to its barest elements, if that’s what the song seems to call for. I learned how to really interact with a vocalist. I learned how to decipher whatever the most important thing about a song is, and how to highlight and showcase it.
I learned that there are many types of producers out there, and that my particular style is valid, and unusual, and somewhat sought after. I still have plenty to learn about all of this, but the fact that I’m doing it at all is due in a large part to Jon Brion, and he doesn’t even know it. Who knows; maybe he’ll stumble upon this entry and see my thank-you letter.
Thanks, Jon. You’ve been like a virtual older brother to me. Keep up the amazing work.
Last night I had a fairly short dream involving a plane crash. I was on the plane, which took off out of Seattle. It had some sort of technical difficulty, so it turned back around to head back to the airport, but it never got there. It kept going slower and slower and slower, until we were forced to land on a wide street. Miraculously, we didn’t hit any cars, but we did slam into a mall. (No, JBJ, it was nothing like a mini-mall.)
No one on the plane was hurt, but I don’t know about inside the mall. Immediately after that, the pilot backed the plane up and taxied down the street. I couldn’t believe he was trying to fly the thing after slamming it into a mall, but then I guess he knew best.
Then there was a scene in which I was walking down the street in Seattle the next day, and I saw a pair of little kids (ages two and four) who had been on the plane with me. They were sitting on a bench next to their mother, who was reading the newspaper. There was a story about the plane crash, and it included a picture that had been taken by someone on the plane. The two kids were clearly visible. They saw the picture and said, exactly in unison, ‘Who AM I? I mean who ARE we?”
This morning I had a beautiful and strange dream, which, I suppose is par for the course for me.
* * * * *
I’m driving through the English countryside in a sort of race, but it isn’t really a race so much as an homage to a Victorian writer who packed all of her belongings into a smallish buggy and traveled around England with her cat, Imogen. There are about twenty of us, each following her route across England. Some are taking this as a fun little trip, and others are trying to actually mirror her trip as closely as possible, dressing in Victorian-era clothing. There are even two buggies that are replicas of hers, which are quite impressive to the group, as you can imagine. Two or three people, myself included, bring a cat with them on the trip. I have a small cat the color of cafe au lait, whose name is also Imogen. She rides (mostly sleeps) in her cat bed, which is on the passenger seat of my red Honda, which they allow me to use in England even though it’s left-hand drive. Isn’t that nice of them?
The group is traveling sort of together and sort of separately. We’re not in a caravan, but we meet up at various points along the route to eat and talk, and at those times, the two buggy owners will take the participants for rides. All of the participants are either married couples or single people. There are no tour buses or large groups on this trip. I suspect it has something to do with the writer herself, a solitary but free-spirited person whose writing inspires wanderlust in her readers, as she encourages them to shake up their lives and not to be lulled into the trance of everyday living. She was far ahead of her time, and all of us who are on the trip feel a very close kinship both for her and for each other, despite the fact that none of us had met prior to this.
In the middle of the afternoon, we arrive at the main stopping point along the way, a large and grassy park near the ocean, with tall, leafy trees scattered plentifully throughout. The buggies are polished and gleaming, and the people who dressed in period clothing are out in all of their Victorian finery, laughing and talking near the buggies. One man is wearing a monocle and a pocket watch, and another man is wearing an elegant black suit, and his wife is wearing a long, white dress. Another woman shades herself underneath a parasol. There are about ten or twelve people wearing antique clothes, some of whom changed into them only for this part of the trip. I am wearing modern attire, jeans and a button-up shirt, with a gray, European-style suit jacket over the top.
My mom is at the park, volunteering, serving food and refreshments for the participants, but she is unfamiliar with the writer in question. She loves to volunteer for things, and she knew that I would be a part of this event, so she signed up. She walks over to one of the buggies, runs an admiring hand along its side, and makes a somewhat nonsensical comment about how ‘compactly’ people used to live back then, which makes a few of the people around her chuckle. The buggy’s owner is standing next to it, and she asks him to tell her a little bit about this writer. I pick up Imogen the cat, climb into the front seat of the beautifully restored buggy, and place her on the seat beside me. She sits in the sun and purrs, clearly enjoying herself.
* * * * *
This was one of those dreams that was very beautiful to experience, but when I tried to write it down, I found that I had a hard time capturing its mood at first. I laughed just now as I re-read the first sentence; it’s just so strange and funny. Each of the individual words is completely normal, but there’s something about the way they are strung together into that particular sentence that is instantly both surreal and hilarious. A moment like that is why I think it’s so much fun to write out dreams and share them. It pitches you right out of reality in a very satisfying way.
The other day I was parking near J’s place, and there was a red four-wheel-drive Jeep parked in front of a black four-door BMW, with just barely enough space for a Honda in between them. It was tight, but I thought I could do it. As it turned out, I wouldn’t normally have been able to make it, but for the fact that my car is so ridiculously low, and the Jeep is so ridiculously high.
The bumper of my car slid right underneath the Jeep’s bumper, and I glided into the spot without a scratch. I had to capture the moment:
On Sunday afternoon, I participated in Project X, a sort of time capsule event created by a theater group called Hand2Mouth. I found out about it when I went to see a play last weekend, and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.
The event was divided up into multiple stations. There was a main station called ‘ground control’, which was where the lion’s share of the event took place. For brevity’s sake, I will describe it as a place where you listen to other peoples’ stories in headphones, create your own stories, create a timeline of your own life and of events in the broader scope of human history, and choose how you would like to be remembered by future generations. There were ample opportunities to speak, write, draw, or add whatever you felt like adding to the project. There were also opportunities to converse with other random people, and to record those conversations via satellite for posterity.
It was an amazing experience, but it’s also a fairly daunting one. The event asks a lot of its participants, and you have to be prepared to interact in a pretty demanding way. I wasn’t prepared for that, quite frankly. I made it through three of the five stations, in an hour and a half. The two remaining stations were ones that took a bit of time, so I waited numerous times to get in, but each time I found myself turned away because the stations were occupied. At a certain point, I decided to give up. I had been told by my friend to allow about three hours to participate, but since I’d been so busy in the previous few days, I was starting to shut down and become anxious, so I decided to give the last two stations a miss, unfortunately. This exhibit/performance/time capsule/event will also be conducted in Seattle next weekend, at the Bumbershoot festival, and I think that will be a tremendous experience. I have a feeling that if I had done it up there, I’d have been much more likely to participate in all of the events, but since it was here in town, I felt my real life responsibilities creeping back in. What’s more, I felt myself falling instantly in love with one of the women in the group, so I suddenly lost the ability to speak or think in my usual eloquent way.
If you live in the Northwest and are considering seeing the show, I definitely recommend it. Be prepared to be there for quite a while, and know in advance that some of the stations are better equipped than others to handle more than one or two people at a time. Perhaps this will change by the time it has its run in Seattle.
I’m very glad to have been a part of this time capsule, and my metaphorical hat goes off to Hand2Mouth for creating such an amazing event. I hope I’m around in the future to see what becomes of it.
Saturday was not Mike’s actual birthday, but that was the day he wanted to celebrate it, so what’re you gonna do? You have to follow the birthday boy’s wishes. He started by having a little soiree over at his place, with about ten other people. (Incidentally, the hit of the party was Allanah’s homemade guacamole, and her chocolate ‘Irish’ cake.) From there, he, Allanah, Orion and I went to Tony Starlight’s to see the band 3 Leg Torso.
BassistMichael is a friend of mine, who actually played in Steph’s band for a short time last year. It was great to see him again, and especially to see him play in his natural habitat. He’s really an amazing musician.
It was a totally great evening, and after driving everybody home, I think I got home around 2:30 in the morning. But the weekend wasn’t over yet. . .not by a long shot.
Last week was super busy, so now I finally have a spare moment to sit, and process, and also to get you up to speed.
Wednesday night was the first play-reading group we’ve had since Tossed In tossed in the towel on leading the group. A handful of us have been persistent about keeping the group going, and after about two months, we finally managed to make it happen. We read the script for the movie My Dinner With Andre.
It was an amazing evening. A few of us were die-hard fans of the movie, and knew our favorite parts almost by heart, and a few of us had never seen or heard of the movie, so it made for a particularly interesting discussion. I really should say ‘discussions’, because we stopped many times along the way to switch to different readers, and to discuss the section that we’d just finished reading.
A couple of us had our favorite sections that we really wanted to read. I read Andre’s section about the Little Prince and about how New York is the new model for concentration camps, and Matt read Wally’s introduction, his argument near the end, and his ending monologue. We all discussed different ideas for staging this work as a play, and the various ways we could bring the various scenes to life, while still retaining the feel of a dinner. It was an amazing evening, and a passionate discussion all the way around.
Afterwards, Matt, Lindsay and I went to Squeez for a drink. I really should say ‘another drink’, because we’d already had plenty at the reading. We shared some quesadillas and continued the discussion about the play and about various other things.
Matt was too shy to want his picture taken that night. I tried to surreptitiously snap a picture of him and Lindsay while they were at the bar ordering, but the picture didn’t come out. Not that these did especially well, but the other ones are even worse, I promise you. I love the colors inside Squeez. It’s just a really cool, comfortable place to meet with your friends.
Oh, and for the record, I’m lucky enough to have found a very special copy of the script for MDWA. . .it was autographed in 1982, by both Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, AND it’s inscribed to someone here in Portland. A bunch of years ago, I went looking for the script, and finally found it at HugestBookseller. I decided to wait, however, and felt that another one would turn up, despite the fact that I had already been fruitlessly searching for it for years. No matter, I had a hunch.
The next day I went to Powell’s (even though I’d checked there countless times before) and sure enough, I was rewarded with this:
Talk about synchronicity. . .which fits in perfectly with the themes of the script, too. The autograph picture I left at higher resolution, so you can read what they wrote. I love it.
I first saw the movie when I lived in Yakima, at the age of twenty-four, and was mesmerized by it. I instantly went and tried to find out as much as I could about both of the guys, and all of the references they made to actors, directors, books, plays. . .everything. Jerzy Grotowski, The Master and Maragarita, The Little Prince, I couldn’t wait to understand what they were talking about. For the record, not a single one of my friends shared my enthusiasm for this movie. I raved about it, and even made a few people watch it, but they got bored and gave up after a few minutes. (I think this has something to do with the adage, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’)
Anyway, it’s one of my all-time favorites, and it also introduced me to the Little Prince, which to this day I re-read every year or two, and I’ve probably had to buy ten or twelve copies of it over the years, because I’ve loaned so many out and never gotten them back. That’s okay, in this instance, because the story is so beautiful that I want everyone to read it, and I hope that they get as much out of it as I have.
And I have my friends Wally and Andre to thank for it.
This hilarious two-minute video eliminates almost all of the dialogue from The Big Lebowski except for the various incarnations of the F-word. You’ve been warned.
