What's left, What's West.

I promise that sometime soon I will stop writing about songs and start writing about movies, poetry, fiction, culture. But there’s a problem with this theory, the least of which is that the only movie I have seen since coming back to school is Art School Confidential, which sucked. I’ve been compulsively watching Sports Night: The Complete Series, and that is reminding me what I liked and also what I hated about Aaron Sorkin shows. But I haven’t thought of anything articulate to say about that. Expect some haiku soon. Sadly, I don’t have time for much distraction that will take more than five minutes of my time. But escapism, I love the escapism.

I’ve been so tired lately, but unable to sleep. I’ve also been having a little bit of a fiction drought-- trouble writing stories. I’ve decided that this has something to do with not properly and seriously sorting through a lot of what I went through in the past year. So I’m doing that—writing, articulately and with a lot of detail, events in the order which I remember them, in a form that would be really uninteresting for anyone but me to read. I’m hoping that once they’re concretely no longer in my head, I’ll be able to use that space for something a little more original. Songs that evoke the same feeling of trudging on (oddly, they're all about the West):

Liz Phair, “Go West”— “I’m not looking forward to following through/ but it’s better than always running into you,” chants Liz Phair, with the strange echoed loop of her own voice that percolates through the album Whip-smart. The production on the whole album is bizarre, but in this song the vocal doubling works in an indecisive snap. The details in the song are blurry, only Soul Asylum on the radio and the big signs that demarcate lines between states are shared with us. “I’ve got to tear my life apart/ and go west, young man… In some ways it feels like I’ve got something to prove/ but in some ways it’s just something to do,” she sings, and I know exactly what she means. There’s a certain solipsism in such determined coasting. But there are things we have to do for ourselves, because we must.

Everclear, “Santa Monica”—I know that Everclear is not the most hip of bands (neither, for that matter, is Liz Phair. Whatever). This song starts with a great, articulate couplet: “I am still living with your ghost/ Lonely, and dreaming of the west coast”. The guitar riff is rhythmic and steady, a heavy electric lick competing with the screaming lyrics. “I don’t want to be your bad guy, I don’t want to do your sleepwalk dance… I just want to find a place to be alone,” the lyrics rant. Again, with the loneliness—but in the chorus, there is another, a “we”. And in these moments, there’s a concrete balance—we want your ghost to get the hell away from whatever sense of self we're finding, but when it all really does come crashing down, probably somewhere in California, we’d like you (or your memory) to be there too.

Magnetic Fields, “Sunset City”—Another song about moving through the West, as Stephin Merritt plays his country songs with a band that sounds like robots on speed. Or something to that effect. This is an apology from someone who is always, always moving on. The last line of this song is “I won’t miss you , you won’t cry,” though it’s hard to really believe such a thing. Later, there will be tears. On the highway as the roads curve into another state and the speaker understands what’s been left behind—“life is too short to hang around”—that, I can agree with. But the moments of ephemeral selfishness fade out into the road, and getting there is getting over any concept we may have had that we could ever be alone. So we can drive and we can feel whole for once, while understanding that there will always be another place or another person (even if that person is ourselves) to get the fuck over.