There are a number of songs you should not put on a mix for a significant other unless you’re absolutely sure about them.  One is obvious, taught to us by both High Fidelity and good sense:

But for me, the really salient song is Spoon’s “Anything You Want,” from the album Girls Can Tell:

I was given both songs by a guy who actually did meet me “when [I was] nineteen and still in school.”  It made “Anything You Want” seem like a song we could play at a wedding, that we could smile over twenty years later.  Of course, we were dead wrong.  And the song really, I think, is about a couple that’s broken up, and the guy who says that “I feel so in love and yet feel so alone” is trying to build a case that will compel the girl to come back to him.  He can’t chase after her, whether because of pride, or hopelessness, so he’s conjuring up memories, more to keep himself company than anything else.

But even though the sentiment was mistaken, I’ll forever be grateful for the introduction to Spoon, one of my all-time favorite bands.  I’ve written about the sonic reasons for this before.  They’re one of the few bands where I can listen to entire albums, just put them on and let go.  I’m a twitchy listener like that.  But Spoon’s lyrics also just mean that I’ve turned over various songs like talismans, like worry beads.  High on that list of songs is “The Way We Get By” (in instrumental, the opening music for Stranger Than Fiction, the scene of which is linked to in the Spoon post I linked to above):

Like quite a few of Spoon’s songs, it’s a laconic setup with a very sharp idea at the heart.  As someone who favors major breaks and rapid and deliberate transformations, I’ve always loved the line “Let’s make a new start / And that’s the way to my heart.”  There’s something more precise, and yet less melodramatic about that line than something like “run away with me!”  I don’t know that Spoon believes in the transformative power of love, and I find that refreshing, sometimes, even if I’m working out whether I agree with the band.

Then there’s “Paper Tiger,” which strikes me as an almost Puritan pop song.  It’s sonically minimal even for Spoon:

I love the austerity of the line “I will no longer do the Devil’s wishes” even if it’s explained just one line later (I tend to interpret “The Fall” in “Chicago At Night” as Miltonian rather than as autumn).  The hesitancy of “I’m not dumb, I just want to hold your hand,” as if even that simple, natural gesture needs to be explained.  Unlike in “Anything You Want,” the limits of the promise are clear: “It will not protect you / But I will be there with you when you turn out the light.”  It’s not grandiose.  It’s honest.

There’s an extent to which Gimme Fiction and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga bracketed the dissolution of the relationship that gave me that first song.  I don’t particularly think that’s why I am less enamored of the former album and swept away by the latter, although I do feel like Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga captured a feeling of coming alive again, of grappling with sadness but recognizing that it was past (particularly “The Ghost of You Lingers“), of coming alive and finding myself home that I felt very strongly in 2007.  ”The Underdog,” was, and remains my fight song, the verses I chant in my head when I’m angry or frustrated:

But more and more, I think of “Rhythm and Soul” as my current talisman, the clipped verses, the wonder and the whole wide world:

This band has touched me deeper than almost any other.  I’ll still tell my kids about how much I loved Spoon, but in a very different way than I thought I would.  Tonight, I’ll see them live for the first time.

I laughed a lot reading Michael Jones’ meditation on pop cultural dealbreakers in relationships.  Steely Dan is his:

And the world, in all of its once promising glory, crashes down around you.

How could you have ever ever ever in a million years spent time with this person? All those thousand moments of looking out over the ocean in seeming perfect unanimity of thought, two hearts as one and one heart was secretly singing: “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”

This while claiming “Sympathy for the Devil” was to be your wedding march?

This is serious stuff.

I tend to think that the existence of the iPod has made these kinds of pop culture shocks a lot less of a big deal.  We can all rock out to our own private soundtracks most of the time.  Except for road trips and weddings, accord doesn’t actually matter that much.  As for me, I can definitely say I would draw the line at any Fred Durst-connected project.  But the bar is probably higher than that.  I’ll have to give it some thought.

So much of what I’ve been reading these days has been either academics books for a class I’m taking for work, or Star Wars books (next big post coming soon, y’all!).  Individually, some of those books have been illuminating, or useful, or deep and cheesy fun (Kathy Tyers is better than anyone else writing in the Extended Universe at generating non-embarrassing sexual heat between her characters).  But collectively, they’ve left me ravenous for good prose.  And so it was with that lean and hungry feeling that I tore into Wolf Hall late last week, wrapping it up on the porch this weekend.

It’s a marvelous, ingeniously constructed and deeply felt work and I highly recommend it.  But I don’t want to talk about that, or about my Elizabeth I fixation, or about the fight over Thomas Cromwell’s reputation (I would be extremely curious to see someone do a book like The Daughter of Time on all of this).  Instead, I want to talk about the prose, something that’s going to necessitate a diversion.

I read Angels in America at an extraordinarily influential time in my life, about which I have long intended to write a post, but for now let me say it left me with a strong preference for sentences that are…baroque, ornate, those aren’t quite the write words, but sprawling, urgent, stuffed because there is so much feeling and so many ideas behind them.  Joan Didon’s clipped sentences with sprawling construction sometimes pulled me back into the possibility of constraint.  But my brain has moved to the rhythm of Tony Kushner’s prose for many, many years now.  I have none of his brilliance, but often feel a great deal of urgency and impatience.

But God, Hilary Mantel’s prose.  My God, people.  ”He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury….He works all hours, first up and last to bed.  He makes money and he spends it.  he will take a bet on anything.”  It’s almost a platonic version of a list, one that should be taught alongside The Things They Carried, a marvelous guide to manhood.  ”It’s not the hand of God kills our children.  It’s disease and hunger and war, rat bites and bad air and the miasma from the plague pits; it’s bad harvests like the harvest this year and last year; it’s careless nurses.”  Brutal, plain and effective.  ”Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes.  At an earlier stage in life this would have surprised him; he had thought that under their clothes people wore their skin.”  Counterintuitive ideas, simple prose.  It’s an unforgettable idea that rattles around in the brain, changes the way one’s random gaze lands.  ”From this marriage–Fifth Henry and the Glass Princess–sprung another Henry who ruled an England dark as winter, cold, barren, calamitous.”  Perhaps it’s just my susceptibility to myths, but it’s a fairytale in a single sentence.  ”He never saw the future again, not clearly as he had that year.”  An burst of magic, and of fate, into the everyday occurrences where we can notice them.

And that’s just a few of the passages, working through the list, that caught my eye.  It makes me want to dream in concise and perfect phrases, to value every one of them and not just the chains made by linking them together.

In a way, Wolf Hall is a good companion volume to Possession.  One is more about Melusina than another, the former about the state, the latter about private persons, but both dedicated wholly to matters of the heart.  And to England.  I wrote at one point when I was about halfway through that Wolf Hall was like reading fireworks.  It’s like that, but it’s a vast, intelligent construction, too: like Ellen Ash’s journal in Possession, Wolf Hall is a delicious exercise in bafflement, in misdirection.  I’ll have to read it again, and soon, to fully absorb Mantel’s accomplishment.  And hope that she finishes her sequel soon, and with as great skill.

The New York Times has a feature up where they’re letting readers ask questions of a location scout who works in New York.  The answers aren’t up yet, but the questions are delightful.  For example:

I work on Water Street and John, across from what still is, but will no longer identify itself as the AIG building. Frequently assembled there are the various trucks you see at movie shoots, yet I can’t imagine what fascination this area would hold for anyone; and it only becomes more of a corporate wasteland as you proceed down Water, toward the Battery. What are they doing here?

Then there’s local pride:

Hi Nick, don’t underestimate the cool spots in Hudson County, located right across the river in NJ. Don’t forget that On the Waterfront (an amazing movie) was filled in Hoboken!

And moral:

In these tough ecnonomic times, it would be nice if the cast/crews were given per diem to patronize local eating establishments–has this ever been considered? I saw a film crew on my area set up a catering tent in front of a deli that has been there 15 years. Disrespectful I think.

Envious:

Why are NYC apartments in movies so much larger than any apartment anyone I’ve ever met actually live in? Is it because the average NYC walk up is too tiny to fit a crew, lights, etc., or is it just that people in the rest of the world would not relate to a character who lived in a studio with a loft bed and no closet?

And ultimately fed up:

Can you please influence some of your clients to stop shooting in Greenpoint, Brooklyn? We’re sick of it. Thank you.

In my frequent tirades about the dullness of movies based in Los Angeles and New York, about the hunger those of us in other parts of this world to see the places that are beloved and familiar to us on film, I think I forget that it’s possible to overlook vast swaths of those great metropolises.  It’s been interesting to me to see the praise lavished on movies like (500) Day of Summer and Greenberg simply for being set in those comparatively quiet and lovely parts of Los Angeles like Silver Lake, Los Feliz and Echo Park.  There’s so much to cities.  It’s a pity films often seem determined to see so little.