Wednesday, November 05, 2008
I am proud to report that both John McCain and Barack Obama have conceded the election to me. We fought a hard campaign, but I obviously fought a lot harder and received much more love an many more votes. As I see you all before me tonight, all of you who wrote my name in on your ballots and sent me lots of campaign money that I spent on cream puff pastries from the Zia Diner, pumpkins from McCall's patch, owl pendants, Dale Cooper trading cards, Grant Morrison comic books and Bob Dylan CDs, I feel a great sense of honor and joy. For the next four years, I will be proud to sleep all day while my excellent vice presidential choice, David Duchovny, makes all the decisions. Truly, the owls are not what they seem. My fellow Owls and I will lead this country out of its lack of cultural prominence, and we will once more fight off the ghosts and make the night safe for donuts. The Owl Party, though, is not just about partying. We are also about Batman, those delicious peanut butter cups from Trader Joe's, reviving David Foster Wallace, and producing more and better cats. Tonight, we are all Democrats, we are all Republicans, and we all voted for me for president. I'm pretty sleepy now, so I'll let Mr. Duchovny take over from here.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Back in September, either Scott or Anne heard about a Mountain Goats concert scheduled for Halloween night. John Darnielle and co. were coming through the southwest like a wagon train on amphetamines, parking in Arizona on October 29th and then careening right over New Mexico to Lubbock, Texas for Halloween. Scott wrote a polite message to the mild-mannered, wild-eyed singer, asking him to consider stopping here in order to relieve our high desert misery. He got no reply, which meant we were going to Lubbock.
Life moves slowly here. The last thing I remember is walking down to St. Michael's High School on a warm, drizzly night to see a fireworks display with horrid, beer-sipping, pickup truck-kicking musical accompaniment. Then I think I went to sleep for four months and woke up last Friday to find that someone had placed me in the driver's seat of Hoffman and I was speeding down Highway 40, headed east, a Monster energy drink in my cup holder, shuffling keyboard rock on the stereo. Morrissey was in the passenger seat, and Delirium of the Endless was doing something with scissors in the back. I looked a little closer and saw that it was Scott with a pompadour haircut and an oversized button-down shirt, and Anne with a purple-dyed wig on one side of her head. Then I set my mind to remembering, which is something it does very poorly and only once a season, and realized that I hadn't been asleep, and then I remembered the contents of the first paragraph of this blog.
What is a Lubbock, you might ask? I knew the answer after a few more hours of driving. It turns out that it's a flat bit of earth on the western edge of Texas, where somebody decided to plant a bunch of store fronts from the 1950s, turn on some neon lights, name the streets with letters of the alphabet, and sprout a few Texas hipsters who aspire to someday be from Austin. On Avenue H, which had been subtitled Buddy Holly Avenue, there's an art gallery with a performance space attached, and at 11:30 p.m. on Halloween, John Darnielle jumped out from the garage door that opened onto the stage, glanced at the crowd, saw Scott-as-Morrissey in the front row, and walked over pointing at him and grinning madly. Then he grabbed the microphone, glanced at his bassist, Peter, and started to mouth along to The Four Seasons' "Oh What A Night".
I've only seen the band once before, as described in the first post on this blog, in fact. There was no drummer last time, and Peter only joined him for a few songs. This time nearly everything was with accompaniment, and in the middle they were joined by Kaki King, the opening act. Kaki is an angry-looking, very young guitar virtuoso, able to play different melodies with each hand, one tapping notes on the neck and the other finger-picking, while also thumping a beat with her palm. When she was on with her own band, she seemed to take delight in telling the audience that she'd been up all night drinking, that we weren't fucking rowdy enough, that the people to the right who were briefly moshing were showing us up on the left, that she was contractually obligated to play this next song every night for the rest of her life, "so you can all touch yourselves now, or someone else." The song she then played is apparently her most famous, just her on guitar making a danceable, complex, memorable little rhythm, fingers moving at a hundred miles per hour. It was pleasantly rousing, and the crowd got into it, and she appeared to resent the fact that she'd written something people liked.
So I didn't like her, but John sure seemed to. When she joined him in the middle of his set, he described his embarrassment when she sent him a demo, because he was her fan and he didn't think he was good enough to play with her. "So I wrote lyrics from the perspective of a stalker," he said, and then broke into the song they'd been strumming as he spoke; his lyrics and singing once again showed that he's a master songwriter, while she's (at least at this point) a snivelling poser.
The next song John introduced by saying, "This wasn't on the set list tonight, but someone in the audience told us it should have been." Familiar chords crashed around the room, and then, "Why do you come here? And why-huh-hiii-huh-hiiii-huh-hiiiiii . . . why do you hang around?" While he sang, he made a few airy gestures with his hands, and then he bent toward the audience to grasp people while he sang. Scott had come equipped with a bush-like bunch of flowers to wave, and halfway through the song he threw them on stage. John picked them up and did the Morrissey dance right, then walked over to Scott and took him by the hand, and for half a minute they sang to each other, "You had to sneak into my room, 'just' to read my diary. 'It was just to see, just to see' (All the things you knew I'd written about you...) Oh, so many illustrations, oh, but I'm so very sickened, oh, I am so sickened now." Then John took off his glasses and handed them to Scott, trading him for the pair of black-rimmed Morrissey glasses Scott had on.
Oh, what a night indeed, dear dwindling number of readers. It ended at the Lubbock Denny's where a Johnny sophomore who had told Anne that we could crash on his floor (and then revoked the offer the night before) held court before a group of local admirers. He waxed on lovingly to his high school friends, embellishing the difficulty of the St. John's program, oh, how very hard and impossible it is! Anne even remembers him calling Johnnies the Navy SEALS of the intellectual realm. There were about twenty people at the table, one of them a Freshman who had come along for the show but had been snubbed by a guy she was hoping to hang out with, and now she wanted to go home. Luckily, so did we, so we offered her the extra seat in our car, then turned around and left the arid plains of Lubbock for the juniper spotted wonderland of New Mexico at night.
Life moves slowly here. The last thing I remember is walking down to St. Michael's High School on a warm, drizzly night to see a fireworks display with horrid, beer-sipping, pickup truck-kicking musical accompaniment. Then I think I went to sleep for four months and woke up last Friday to find that someone had placed me in the driver's seat of Hoffman and I was speeding down Highway 40, headed east, a Monster energy drink in my cup holder, shuffling keyboard rock on the stereo. Morrissey was in the passenger seat, and Delirium of the Endless was doing something with scissors in the back. I looked a little closer and saw that it was Scott with a pompadour haircut and an oversized button-down shirt, and Anne with a purple-dyed wig on one side of her head. Then I set my mind to remembering, which is something it does very poorly and only once a season, and realized that I hadn't been asleep, and then I remembered the contents of the first paragraph of this blog.
What is a Lubbock, you might ask? I knew the answer after a few more hours of driving. It turns out that it's a flat bit of earth on the western edge of Texas, where somebody decided to plant a bunch of store fronts from the 1950s, turn on some neon lights, name the streets with letters of the alphabet, and sprout a few Texas hipsters who aspire to someday be from Austin. On Avenue H, which had been subtitled Buddy Holly Avenue, there's an art gallery with a performance space attached, and at 11:30 p.m. on Halloween, John Darnielle jumped out from the garage door that opened onto the stage, glanced at the crowd, saw Scott-as-Morrissey in the front row, and walked over pointing at him and grinning madly. Then he grabbed the microphone, glanced at his bassist, Peter, and started to mouth along to The Four Seasons' "Oh What A Night".
I've only seen the band once before, as described in the first post on this blog, in fact. There was no drummer last time, and Peter only joined him for a few songs. This time nearly everything was with accompaniment, and in the middle they were joined by Kaki King, the opening act. Kaki is an angry-looking, very young guitar virtuoso, able to play different melodies with each hand, one tapping notes on the neck and the other finger-picking, while also thumping a beat with her palm. When she was on with her own band, she seemed to take delight in telling the audience that she'd been up all night drinking, that we weren't fucking rowdy enough, that the people to the right who were briefly moshing were showing us up on the left, that she was contractually obligated to play this next song every night for the rest of her life, "so you can all touch yourselves now, or someone else." The song she then played is apparently her most famous, just her on guitar making a danceable, complex, memorable little rhythm, fingers moving at a hundred miles per hour. It was pleasantly rousing, and the crowd got into it, and she appeared to resent the fact that she'd written something people liked.
So I didn't like her, but John sure seemed to. When she joined him in the middle of his set, he described his embarrassment when she sent him a demo, because he was her fan and he didn't think he was good enough to play with her. "So I wrote lyrics from the perspective of a stalker," he said, and then broke into the song they'd been strumming as he spoke; his lyrics and singing once again showed that he's a master songwriter, while she's (at least at this point) a snivelling poser.
The next song John introduced by saying, "This wasn't on the set list tonight, but someone in the audience told us it should have been." Familiar chords crashed around the room, and then, "Why do you come here? And why-huh-hiii-huh-hiiii-huh-hiiiiii . . . why do you hang around?" While he sang, he made a few airy gestures with his hands, and then he bent toward the audience to grasp people while he sang. Scott had come equipped with a bush-like bunch of flowers to wave, and halfway through the song he threw them on stage. John picked them up and did the Morrissey dance right, then walked over to Scott and took him by the hand, and for half a minute they sang to each other, "You had to sneak into my room, 'just' to read my diary. 'It was just to see, just to see' (All the things you knew I'd written about you...) Oh, so many illustrations, oh, but I'm so very sickened, oh, I am so sickened now." Then John took off his glasses and handed them to Scott, trading him for the pair of black-rimmed Morrissey glasses Scott had on.
Oh, what a night indeed, dear dwindling number of readers. It ended at the Lubbock Denny's where a Johnny sophomore who had told Anne that we could crash on his floor (and then revoked the offer the night before) held court before a group of local admirers. He waxed on lovingly to his high school friends, embellishing the difficulty of the St. John's program, oh, how very hard and impossible it is! Anne even remembers him calling Johnnies the Navy SEALS of the intellectual realm. There were about twenty people at the table, one of them a Freshman who had come along for the show but had been snubbed by a guy she was hoping to hang out with, and now she wanted to go home. Luckily, so did we, so we offered her the extra seat in our car, then turned around and left the arid plains of Lubbock for the juniper spotted wonderland of New Mexico at night.