I am so drawn to songs about god, frequently a Christian god, like Sufjan Stevens’ “the Transfiguration” or the Innocence Mission’s “Small Planes”. Sometimes wonder how or why I feel so connected to these songs, since I am not Christian myself. I think I am more drawn to the underlying motivation behind faith, the striving, the desperate clinging to love or something better, sublime. Always reaching, changing, becoming. Gives me hope and it makes me feel less alone. Although so much of music about spiritual quests is so profoundly alone. Amazing how love and sacred feel the same to me. A real love poem, a real love song, is a spiritual song, a spiritual poem. M Ward's "Here comes the sun again" is just a love song for the sun but the feeling behind it makes it feel sacred.

Love might be like this.

On The Station Agent:

Shannon told me about this film years ago, she just kept mentioning it in passing. It was a bit strange, she never does this. Anyway, I'm glad she did. Who knows why she thought I'd like it. It features a random obsession on old trains ... which I don't have. Maybe she thought i'd like the whole outsider theme, it's about a dwarf and being isolated by society and finally becoming isolationist, living out in the woods in an abandoned train station. Anyway, I sympathized with Finbar, you know, I feel like a freak sometimes, I look different and I'm sensitive to that. Growing up that way can be painful, and sometimes you wonder what it is that connects you to others, if we aren't really all the same.

I have this theory that your heart has this repository of emotions, you're born with a huge range of emotions that you are able to feel, and you can dig them out as needed. Like jellybeans in a jar, you can pull out the purple one if that's your mood. So like, if someone is feeling a particular way, we hear it in their voice, we can feel it coming from their body, and if we're open to it, we recognize that same feeling in ourselves, in the jellybean jar. Like an old memory. So no matter how old you are, you can recognize, say a woman's grief when she loses her child. Which is what happens in the movie. And I cried. Which is silly, but I wondered at it, because I have nothing in my present experience to explain why I felt anything for it.

The (lost) art of the mix tape

I’ve been wanting to make a mix tape, but I’m starting to think the form is disappearing and maybe I’m dating myself in the attempt, or maybe having some mini midlife crisis. Am I twenty-nine or twenty-one? Can I be both? Does it matter? Fuck it, I’m making it.

Everyone has a jukebox in their computer. (My computer is this combination home stereo, newspaper, mailbox, notepad.) You give a name to someone, like “Karen Dalton”, or “Sufjan Stevens”, like it’s a juicy secret, a gift, and they’re off digging into the infinite library the internet affords. Or maybe you’ll just rip a cd onto a friend’s computer while they’ve slipped off to the bathroom. So no one needs a mixtape anymore. No one wants to spend the time, unless there’s love involved. I imagine that auditory seduction still takes place. Does it still happen at 29? I hope it does. If a man can’t dance, he should make a mixtape.

I miss the pastime. I miss sticking my finger into the little cassette sprocket and winding it by hand, until the clear space, the white noise, is passed. There was a rhythm to making a tape, a slow, pensive rhythm. I’d play a track, think about it, play another, and rewind, just to hear the two songs next to each other, if they’re good together. Then I’d open up a bottle of wine to enhance the mood, and listen to the bird perched on my shoulder, telling me what song might be just right, next. What would build, surprise, thrill. What would please the particular person. I think about it. Then I think about it too much. I get nine songs in a line, and play it in the car, play it while I’m making spaghetti. I make notes. I change the whole thing. It’s like a scientific experiment/ artistic process. I suppose you could make a case that they’re somewhat the same thing, a combination of emotion, subjectivity, objective evaluation, and technique.

They’re delicate things, mix tapes. Somehow three songs together can depress or bore, or elate you. How do you make that happen? And is it okay if it doesn’t? How do you get from the first to the second song? Somehow the rest of the tape hangs on that balance. It tells you how far you’re willing to leap. Can you get from the Flaming Lips to Cesaria Evora and make it work? And a certain amount of momentum to the thing would be nice. Some kind of emotional arc. The songs should flow into each other, but excite you at the same time.

Anyway, I’m in the midst of one. Not for anyone in particular, no hidden messages, it’s just for me. Music I’ve been listening to since my big breakup in February. Not all sad, definitely not. It’s a way of looking at how I’ve changed, perhaps. Or a way of putting all the sadness in a box. A nice box. A fun box. I’ll let you know how it goes.