Sunday Mixtape #3

First of all, happy spring Sunday and possible solar eclipse viewing! I had the pleasure last night of attending a concert featuring Josephine Foster, one of the great true musical weirdos of our time, and I want to say: check out her touring schedule, and if she is coming anywhere near you, go out and see her perform by any means necessary. I waited twenty years to get my chance, and goodness I wish I hadn’t had to do that. It doesn’t get much better than feeling like you’re in a haunted reel-to-reel tape recording listened to underwater while an effortlessly world-class singer validates your faith in art. I guarantee your experience will be similar.

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Here is the track list for this week’s mixtape, this one finished in late 2009:

26 Confessions of a Middle Class American Heart, Vol. 3

Side A:

1. The Vaselines, Son of a Gun (3:47)

2. Beat Happening, Bewitched (3:06)

3. The Unicorns, Tuff Ghost (2:57)

4. Pavement, Unfair (2:33)

5. The Pastels, Nothing to Be Done (3:55)

6. Super Furry Animals, Something 4 the Weekend (2:53)

7. Boyracer, In Love (2:13)

8. The Manhattan Love Suicides, Things You’ve Never Done (2:57)

9. Heavenly, C Is the Heavenly Option (3:22)

10. Sparklehorse, Ghost of His Smile (3:13)

11. Grandaddy, Summer Here Kids (3:36)

12. Supergrass, Evening of the Day (5:19)

13. The Delgados, All You Need Is Hate (2:53)

14. Beulah, If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart (3:16)

Side B

1. The Field Mice, Emma’s House (3:39)

2. The Sugarcubes, Birthday (4:02)

3. Big Black, The Model (2:35)

4. Mission of Burma, 2wice (3:36)

5. 18th Dye, Only Burn (2:57)

6. Sonic Youth, Catholic Block (3:27)

7. Menomena, Wet and Rusting (3:33)

8. Thee More Shallows, Monkey vs. Shark (4:47)

9. Yo La Tengo, Cherry Chapstick (6:12)

10. The Wedding Present, Dare (3:45)

11. Asobi Seksu, Goodbye (3:44)

12. Galaxie 500, Strange (3:18)

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I labored over this mixtape like no other mixtape I had made before. In the interim between the previous installment and this one, I had finished graduate school (feeling: less hopeful than finishing undergraduate), begun teaching at a university, and begun raising my oldest child. I had less time for mixtapes and they seemed more serious, as everything did.

When I did find time to work on selecting and organizing songs for this third installment in what I felt would be a definitive trilogy capturing my experience of taste, I found myself sorting towards music that I would call canonical — indie rock that influenced the indie rock I had started out loving and shared on the previous two volumes, indie rock that had set the tone for much of the alternative rock I grew up listening to on 107.7 The End in Seattle.

It is, for that reason, a noisy mix. The loudest, scuzziest mix of music identifiable as “song” that I believe I’ve ever made. One song after another, it’s a blast of fuzz or a high-energy vocal, with no time to rest and absorb. It’s not friendly in that way. But it’s not unkind in how it makes the noise seep from one place to the next and everything else around the mixtape get quieter.

I remember finishing it after nearly a year of work and thinking it was perfect and that I couldn’t make it any better sequenced than I had: I had done the best that I could. I remember that Jay agreed when he received it. And according to David Antin, that’s art:

someone asked me once a simple question an absurdly

simple question and I gave an absurdly simple answer whats an

artist he asked and i said somebody who does the best he can by now

ive said this so many times ive begun to believe it because when you

think about it there are very few people in this world that do the best

they can

you know if general motors makes a lemon of a car its

your problem but if an artist makes a lousy artwork its his problem

or her problem so it turns out that artists are the last people in

this world who have to do the best they can because their life is at

stake you say you know a plumber who does the best he can i say

hes an artist you know lots of artists who dont do the best they can

its very simple theyre not artists anyhow that’s how i answer

the question

(David Antin, Talking at Blerancourt, from “I Never Knew What Time It Was”)

I find great comfort in this definition of what an artist is — it’s comforting in a strange way to know my life is at stake (what I value of it in any case) depending on whether or not I’m doing the best that I can.