mixed_tape shower singer I'll make you a mixed tape I'll sit and ponder the perfect order of tracks for hours I'll hesitate over which songs to find a place for and which to leave out I'll copy out the track names in careful coloured pens I'll decorate the label and the case for you I'll spend so much time on it, time I should spend talking to you I'm trusting in this tape to say it all for me I'm hoping it will say it better than I ever could I hope you'll listen and understand 040822 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I did so once, as part of an eleventh grade Media Studies project. Mixed tape class swap. I couldn't think of what music people would like, so I put in what I liked to listen to. Some Charlotte Church, some of the Montreal Klezmer Band from their CD "Go Meshuggah." I remember I misspelled a track "Russian Khers" when it was actually "Russian Shers". I hope it didn't mean anything too obscene. The rest I don't remember. Oh yeah, there was me playing an invention on the dinky little keyboard at the end. You Are the Apple of My iPod or La Revolution Bruyante. Because there was space left, and because I could. Most people made CDs and only five of us made actual tapes. That included Cjay, who liked to steal mints from the depanneur and Habs memorabilia from where she could, when she could. She was well-read and belligerent, and I'd resented her in tenth grade for yelling at me once for not taking a quicker set of stairs to the art class. I also felt self-righteous in comparison to her kleptomania. What's a few punches, hits, and deliberate shatterings of dishes compared to the awesome crime of stealing mints from the dollar store? And liking hockey? In grade eleven I realized I was just hating her for the sake of hating somebody, and since it was really only mild dislike coupled with puzzled interest, I decided to like her instead. She was one of the first people I know to say she was bisexual, which she later recanted since she didn't decide to date X female person after all (rather a flimsy reason to recant something - "I'm not an eater of food because I don't like broccoli," much - but lots of us have been young and confused) and though I didn't like her "that" way, the declaration set a comforting precedent. My love for M-girl with the pretty name having been replaced by the chimeric goal of being "a writer" who is also "good at math," I stored this up for later. Even not-overly-sexuals can claim some sort of spectral allegiance, hm? Anyway, she was one of the people, along with me, blond Sam, quiet Ai, and someone else whom I don't remember, who brought tapes. Quiet Ai didn't like mine, so she traded it with Sam. Sam later told me I had a "weird taste in music" and I said thanks. I got Cjay's. There wasn't any Verdi (I think one of the other things on my tape was the Triumphal March to Aida), though there was "Insomnia," one thing that I recognized. ...Damn. I found the tape, but the paper with its song list is missing. And I'm not going to play it all now, because I should sleep... From memory then: Queen's "Under Pressure," Led Zep's... something about "wanted a woman, never bargained for you"... Marilyn Manson's "Love Song" - I liked his campy morbidity and the fifth intervals, I didn't know they were called power chords yet - Barenaked Ladies "Insomnia" which I'd sung along to with J, and also "Brian Wilson"; Smashing Pumpkins' "Date Rape" - but I couldn't countenance simplistic revenge as a punchline, though I liked the song's energy - something by someone starting with "I don't think I'm ready yet," and this is not a decent list because it has all kinds of renegade punctuation. Oh, and something by MSI with a fun beepy chorus of "Kill yourself, motherfucker, go kill yourself." I couldn't take that seriously so I enjoyed it. The one thing I thought disturbing was The Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." I'd heard a lot of their songs before. Not that one. I guess that, at sixteen, was my general introduction to rock 'n roll. After high school, my tastes steered more towards techno-ish things like Kraftwerk, Amon Tobin, Vangeli, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Supreme Beings of Leisure (I wonder if anyone's put them into the same sentence before?) then into 20th-century classical, Iggy Strav, cool Phillip Glass, various jazz muzikers that I'd heard in childhood but never really paid attention to, and more. ... [Flashback to age fifteen. That'd be tenth grade, when I was new to that school, when Cjay yelled at me for taking the wrong staircase. I'm sitting in the cafeteria. Dark-haired Sara with glasses, "one of the smart ones" because that's how I thought of things then, asked me, "What kinds of music do you like?" I thought about this. I decided not to talk about the music I did like, because she'd think me weird, so I answered that I listened to Mix 96 sometimes. By "listening to" it, I meant that it played at the local swimming pool sometimes. (That was the Montreal pop station, now Virgin Radio. How is radio a virgin? How could radio not be a virgin?) Sara sort of waved her hand and said she wasn't into that kind of mainstream stuff. I left the conversation thinking, "But isn't mainstream a GOOD thing? Isn't that what these people like, things that are popular?"] 140114 ... e_o_i Above story corroborated by computer diary, if you can get past the part about the spiced-up Lord of the Rings film reference. Spring cleaning now; I feel eighteen, as I was then: "October 18, 2006 On Cabbages and Kings, Loud Angry Songs and Otherwise In fact it was not even right to mention rabbit stew at all. Claire was on a diet, and Gollum liked to eat the poor things raw, which grossed the shtick out of Sam McLachlan (otherwise know as Osama bin Laden). Kant defended pure reason, but Aristotle liked to add a bit of sage in the mix. Sappho suggested oregano, but Tiberias couldn’t see any reason for it. The Presbyterian Society of Division Equations insists that “O Fortuna” by Carl Orff is inherently evil. I argued it was a matter of taste. I’ve just been listening to “Love Song” by Marilyn Manson and it’s rather amusing if you don’t take it too seriously. It’s on Josephine’s mix tape, a project from grade eleven media studies. We had to make a mix tape/CD to be randomly given to someone else in the class. It was a fun project, though I had a suspicion my favorite sound wave formations would not mix well with the class. Indeed, Sam, the recipient of my five-song low-tech cassette, told me I had a weird taste in music. In a friendly way, of course. I took a couple of songs from the Charlotte Church CD Enchantment, a bit of la musique classique, la plus belle musique du monde, and some Go Meshuggah by the Montreal Klezmer band. Maybe it was the klezmer. I dunno. But that stuff is just so danceable. By the way, I misspelled the name of a song on my little accompanying pamphlet: Russian Khers instead of Russian Shers. I hope it doesn’t mean anything too obscene." 140416 ... e_o_i ...But why the flying clutterfuck did I refer to my father as "The Presbyterian Society for Division Equations?" Presbyterian, yes, but division equations? Some things are best lost in the sands of time. Anyway, we both think Wagner's overrated. 140416 what's it to you? who go blather from