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Apathy Girl and Other Tales

“Musings of the Overly Naive Cynic”

January 10, 2012 New Selling Lilies

To say I grew up poor would be diminuative. But yes, I grew up poor. The daughter of an uneducated single parent of two. One of my earliest memories is waking up in the trailer we lived in with my hair frozen into a three inch thick sheet of ice that had crept up the wall and spread onto the ceiling. My father would bring home groceries in brown paper bags, groceries that didn’t make sense, as if pulled from a food bin. My Mother had moved on to a new family. I worried about the things all little girls worry about, not having new clothes, new toys, not having heat or lights, not being able to have friends over. And then came the proverbial boot-strap pulling. My Father put himself through school, getting three bachelors degrees and completing his masters course work.

After my dad got a job at the local university my family went from zero to what felt like sixty. We ate out at restaurants, we bought clothes. We moved out of a run-down rental and into a real life house, on the same bus route as the wealthier kids in my school. I began to forget what it felt like to not know where the money was going to come from, or if it was going to come at all. I got a car for my sixteenth birthday, I worried about how old it was. I went to a private university for college, I complained about having to work and go to school. I got to go to Washington, D.C. for a semester, had to wait tables while I was there instead of enjoying the night life. I was upset when I didn’t get to travel to Egypt with my classmates, or New York for Model UN, or England for Regents. I watched people with more money than me continually get more opportunities, and I could see nothing but their dollar signs contributing.

Today I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop in my home town and a man came up to me and held out a lily. “Ma’am, I am selling some flowers because I can’t feed my two kids tonight, anything you could give would be appreciated.” My automatic reaction was “There is no way this guy is going to take this money to feed his kids, this is a scam.” But his eyes looked down, he did not smile, he did not plea, he did not invoke God. His clothes were clean, his hands well calloused. I had tracked him coming through the tables, stopping at each one. He took a dollar, two, change, anything.

I had spent four dollars on the cup of coffee I was drinking. I was watching a movie on a MacBook. Sitting next to me was a brand new smartphone. I saw the coffee as a necessity, the computer as being four years old, and the phone is not an iPhone. When had I become spoiled? When had I become so cynical? I looked at the flower in his hand. A tiger lily, its stem carefully trimmed. My favorite kind of flower. I reached into my purse and pulled two dollars out of the wallet my best friend gave me years ago. I don’t care if the man really has two kids he is trying to feed. Exchanging green money for pink flower all that I can care about is there was a time where that man could have been my Papa, and there are days when I need to be reminded of that. Days when we all need to recall that our comforts are not things that we are entitled to. That every spring doesn’t mean flowers, and certainly having lilies in your life is no guarantee.

 

December 22, 2011 Your Stories Told Here

It was weird, usually the new music that I hear does not come to me in the isles of an Office Depot. But this time it did. I was attempting to ship some items via UPS when a man came up to me and said “Do you like music?” I wanted to blythly answer “Why no, no I don’t.” but there was an earnestness there. The gentleman introduced himself as Nick Venceil, a recently relocated recording artist of the singer/songwriter variety. “What kind of music?” He looked taken aback, what kind of a question is that? “Rock and roll.” It was a statement. It meant that there were musical roots there, a foundation in something that was found to be good, to be pure, from the heart. Listening to Vinceil’s music, this truth is more important than the sound itself.

The sound itself is uncomplicated, hand on a drum, acoustic guitar, harmonizing voices, tamboreen. The stories are classic, human, archetypal. The issue that comes with beautiful simplicity and univeral experiences are just that. Venceil nearly carbons himself, don’t listen to Chardonnay, a shared moment and memory, before or after listening to Amsterdam, where the sound is too familiar and the switch up is between drinking coffee or white wine.

Venceil is a talent destined to a artful following, people who want their music to be a reflection of themselves. However the issue with that is artful music types usually make music of their own, and may not need Nick to show them how to feel.

December 22, 2011 Death in the Forest: Instalment Three

“Ayelet? Ayelet wake up.”

Her eyes opened slowly. She saw the concrete floor. The brick walls, damp, dripping. A curtain did it’s best to separate her from the rest of the large, open room. Beyond it she could see people huddled around a stove, its feeble flames flickering against the oppressive darkness. She began the focus on things closer to her. The curtain was really a thread bare olive green wool blanket. The walls were covered in a similarly green moss. The floor was cracked and stained. The woman calling her from sleep had a soft face, its sagging lines suggesting it had once been full. The wrinkles around her mouth and eyes suggesting she had once, perhaps still, smiled a great deal.

“Devi?”

“Ayelet, meri jara, you are awake! You must get up, I will bring you something hot to drink.”

“How long was I asleep?” She rubbed her eyes, ran her hands through her hair, trying to grab at memories that were flying away. She had been in the woods, but before that? After that?

“Devi, where is…” She stopped, closing her eyes. Seeing. His eyes. His skin. Everything. Ayelet folded herself in half, putting her head down on her knees. Devi reached out a warm hand to her shoulder, attempting to comfort, but Ayelet moved away. Devi cleared her throat.

“You need to get cleaned up. Malcolm is waiting for you. I’ve kept him back for this long, but…well, you know Malcolm.” She smiled, and rolled her eyes, trying to attempt some sort of co-conspiracy against Malcolm, who had been his best friend, a loyal follower, a great warrior, if not quite a great mind.

Ayelet could not think of Malcolm. She played with the blood stained bracelet on her wrist, gazed as serenely as possible on the mud caked between her toes. She just wanted to sleep. To go back to a time when she hadn’t known what she knew now. When she didn’t know that he was gone. When she didn’t know who, what he was, or anything about the war, the Adumbrations, the Underground.

Ayelet had grown up away from the world, just her and her mother. And her brother, Jakob. She and Jakob would play in the seemingly endless woods and fields surrounding their small cabin. Games of non-sense, enjoying nothing more than the freedom of being together. At times they would fight, once Jakob smeared mud in Ayelet’s long, red hair, she threw mud back at him. They settled their fights together, the same way they played. There had been a time when Ayelet would have ran to her mother, crying, wanted her hair smoothed and tears wiped. Then around the age of ten or eleven, her mother began to go days without looking at her, and then would suddenly grab her by the shoulders, peering at her green eyes as if she was searching for something. It was beyond Ayelet’s grasp. She just wanted to be a child, and to play. Until Jakob was taken.

The day was hot, hotter than most. The heat radiated up from the ground, sticky and sweet, smelling of grass. The air was buzzing, vibrant and full. Jakob and Ayelet were heading down the hill their house sat on, out of the woods, across a wide field to a cool running stream. Jakob had ran ahead of her, he always sprinted to the edge of the woods, bursting from the forest as water from a dam. This day Ayelet had stopped to watch a nest of birds, craning her neck to the point of impossibility. And then something changed. At her young age, she couldn’t put a name to what it was. The air? The energy? The spin of the Earth? She was dizzy. She didn’t know. She only knew that something was different, and that she had to find Jakob. She thrust each skinny little girl leg into the ground, trying to reach them out as far as possible, to eat away at the ground between herself and the treeline. She broke out into dazzling sunlight, gasping, both from running and from this new sensation which was now baring down on her with more force than the sun.

In the field was a…she had no words for it. She had never seen any human besides her mother and Jakob, never knew anything besides the descriptions she had read in the dusty, grainy pages of the books scattered around the house. This creature was not in those volumes. It certainly had the form of a human, but its skin was translucent, its nose flat, and its eyes naught but saucers. Its long, slim, scaley limbs restrained Jakob, who was lying face down in the grass in front of it. One clawed hand traced lines into his young flesh. It stopped when it saw Ayelet. The creature began to move as if it were going to lunge at her, reaching out a hand dripping with her brother’s blood, and then quickly withdrawing it as if burned by flame. The creature made a sound, a screech, a whisper, a scream, nothing, and wrapped its arms once again around Jakob’s body, and was gone, leaving nothing but shimmering summer heat in its wake.

December 4, 2011 Death in the Forest: Installment Two

Her heart, maybe it started to pound, she was not quite sure. She was only aware of the fact that she could discern herself in the reflective surface of two sets of dark glasses. Aware of their slow, floating steps as they moved towards her. And the others moving over him. She should run. Their hands were clamping down on his waxen flesh, jerking him up in a surprisingly careless manner. She could not convince herself that she had not seen one of them smile at the markings carved into his back. She barely noticed the hands reaching out for her, deliberate, no rush, performing the task of capturing her methodically. Cool fingers intwined into her hair, bringing at once searing pain and glorious relief. It was almost over. Maybe she would see him again. She had been removed of the ground, held up so that her bare toes just brushed the clean dirt floor of the forest. Ayelet could not focus on the reflection in the Adumbration’s glasses, it was not worth the distraction from the sensation. She closed her eyes.

“Ayelet? You have to run.” His voice, warm, in her mind.

“No, just wait, I’m coming.” She replied, comforting herself, playing the scene out on the back of her eyelids.

“Ayelet. Run.” A command, followed by a very real commotion in the clearing. Her captor dropped her, removing its glasses. Ayelet saw the opaque eyes widen, taking in the birds swarming up from no place, a black cloud to the sky, the pollen of a million flowers filling the air, trees falling at random. Snakes came up from the ground, undulating in front of the Adumbration before striking with purpose. Ayelet got to her feet, but those feet did not run, they rooted as the trees, allowing her to see the Adumbration turn towards her, for her to see the panic in its eyes as it backed away from her.

“Ayelet. You know why you must go. Now RUN!”

There was a nudge from deep inside her, a sudden energy and fear not her own. She ran. They did not follow her.

She ran for miles, out of the woods, away from the green life and death. She ran until she could no longer see him lying on the forest floor. She ran until their opaque eyes could not see her. Until their gray hearts (if they had such a thing) could not care. She ran until the air set a match to her lungs and bit at her legs. Until her feet hit gravel. Until her feet hit pavement. Until her arms were grabbed by friends and she was held close and carried into the darkness. Until there was nothing.

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November 5, 2011 Death in the Forest: Instalment One

The sky was whispering down through the greening foliage. There was a rustling in the grass towards her right. A bird kiltered off of a tree branch. The sun just barely touched his skin, illuminating a pale lavender tint. The shells of beetles, the slow crawl of maggots, the vibrating wings of flies, the hummingbird, all made the ground and the air around where he lay shimmer. She walked towards him, singing softly, placing each foot down carefully. As she approached she made sure her long cotton skirt was lifted off the ever softening ground. She saw his eyes were cloudy, she paused to gaze upwards and see if the sky was the same. Kneeling beside him she picked up his waxen hand, removed the woven bracelet from his wrist. She stayed there for a time, taking in the mud in his shaggy, curly hair. Noting she could not see the chain of his necklace. Seeing the marks carved into his bare back. The filth on his jeans, his bare feet. She sat on the ground, her legs crossed, her skirt spread over her lap like a blanket, soaking up the blood and bile from the ground. She played with the bracelet absentmindedly as her singing became humming. As the sky became the soft lavender of his skin, as the moon rose unseeing like his eyes, as the air became cool as his blood, she sat there, vocalizing a song whose name she did not know, or did not care to think about.

They came just after dawn, the sweeper team, taking up those who were not able to get away fast enough, those who had given up caring how fast they could run. The old, the sick, the weak, were always sent away, but some slipped, and were sieved through the net of the sweeper team. Behind this net were Shadows. A shadow touches, engulfs, darkens and extinguishes everything it passes over. A Shadow lays itself over the people left behind, those smart enough to hide, strong enough to run. The Shadows drape themselves over the landscape, and when they are gone, so are their targets. And so it was in the forest just after the hint of chill had began to burn out of the air, the sweeper team lead through, somewhat loudly, taking sickles to the undergrowth, staining their flashing, sharpened blades with the sticky green blood of the plants. They found no one, and did not look at his body as they passed over it. They did not seem to notice the mix of wild, red curls among the green and purple leaves surrounding a towering tree.

Ayelet noticed everything. From her place behind the jeweled leaves she noticed the Sweepers kicking up the dirt, the dust into the air. She watched them unintentionally disturb the flies around his body. She noticed the hummingbird fly away. They fumbled their way through the forest, past her, with no art, finding no lives to tow in their wake. No sooner than they had gone, than did the air begin to still. Around his body the shimmering stopped, the wings of the flies hovered in the light of his skin, the maggots stopped their feasting. The particles of sunlight that had been washing over her, over him, past his eyes, slowed their descent to the ground on which he laid. It was at the edge of her line of vision that they came. As darkness formed from nothing, from a lack of light, they came. They lay over the landscape, not quite belonging to the ground, not quite to the sky, something about the way they shifted, Ayelet thought, something about the way they moved, not moving, not quite belonging to themselves. This is why they call them the Shadows. Or possibly their soft gray suits, the way their cars made no sound, they appeared seemingly from nowhere. In the underground, they were called Adumbrations, things that obscured.

They stood still, eyes not scanning, but flicking from one thing to the next. To the greening sky. To the dead leaves picked up by the strengthening wind. To the bugs and insects and all things crawling retreating slowly into the ground. To the body before them. And then away. To the patch of green and purple leaves surrounding a towering tree.

They’d seen her.

December 20, 2010 The Black Walnut and the Woodpecker

Outside of my bedroom window there is a Black Walnut tree. The summer before I started high school the Missouri weather shifted (surprisingly), and half the tree succumbed to the wind, but obligingly missed the house. Now the green foliage peeks timidly over the roof line, an awkward but jaunty hat. The tree has scars down its right side, new leaves growing around them, it might be trying to hide. Today there is a woodpecker on the tree, pecking at the scars. Initially, there is no effect. The woodpecker is persistent, continually piercing the scarred bark, trying to reach the softer parts. But after so many years of being broken, of being exposed, of being beaten by the elements, the tree is too much for the woodpecker to handle. He flies away before getting past the difficult parts, unaware if there was something worthwhile underneath.

December 19, 2010 My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: Oddly Enough, It Involves Kanye West, fully clothed.

A general rule: I don’t like rap music. In public, this is what I say. But truly, I appreciate it, and there is even rap, hip-hop, and R&B that I like listening to, but it has to be good. Yes, that is trite, arbitrary, and vague. But so is a lot of rap music. Well not vague, “Do it up slappin’ ass cause the sex gets rough.” The Ying Yang Twins. Poetry, yes? Maybe, a good beat at the very least. So good rap and the like, maybe it has to do what any other kind of music has to do, make your heart beat, make you blood pump faster, make you feel. Kanye West usually makes me feel sad for humanity. After his extremely hypocritical 2004 album, College Dropout, and then his subsiquent public displays, at the VMA’s, on the Today Show, on Twitter, Kanye West became one of my greater celeb annoyances. But, greatfully, he dropped off the radar for a bit, went underground in Hawaii to work on his next project, originally titled “Good Ass Job.” And then it came into my hipster indie rock sphere of vision, in two ways: one, it was reviewed on NPR, and two, a friend informed me that Bon Iver was a collaborator on the project. So, with a great air of disdain and pretention, I decided to listen. Little did I know (do I know? I am still unsettled) the album would provide some insight into a world I had previously dismissed into the world of dirty little secrets, to share a closet with Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Ke$ha (more to follow on that, later.)

As close to a title track as you’re going to get with Kanye, Dark Fantasy launches rough, Niki Minaj’s strange watered-down Trinidadian accent giving you the ground rules for all that you are about to hear, “Zip it, listen!” before she dissolves into her own delicious insanity. She has put you on your edge, are you supposed to listen, should you turn this off and back away slowly?

Oh, wait, here comes the choir, soothing you, asking questions but expecting no answers, “Can we get much higher?” Only Kanye knows if they are wanting to know about his fame, his ego, or his drug use. The soft “ohs” swell and fill your ears until they drop into the thin, uncomplicated beat. West may not need the heavy back beat to tell his story, but as the executive producer on this album it would have been prudent for him to back up his simplistic end line rhymes with a more substantial sound. Don’t get him wrong, though, his message in this song, about growth and beginnings, may carry enough weight to over shadow any short falls musically.

In perfect Rock-Opera style lost to Queen and Boston, Dark Fantasy slides hard like a home run into Gorgeous (ft. KiD CuDi & Raekwon). This song is Kanye’s anthem (Is hip hop, just a euphemism for a new religion), his apology, and his fuck you (tell ‘em hug and kiss my ass, x and o). KiD starts out with a smooth and melodic explanation of addiction, what fame feels like, “Ain’t no question if I want it, I need it. I can feel it slowly drifting away from me.” West then sets in a with a varied discussion of his initial approach to hip hop, as homage to the history of his race, with mention of a slave soul, an Ali fight, even allowing himself to be Malcolm (West/X). But it is Raekwon who brings the honesty, in the style of Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, contrasting the want (Armani suits, fresh fruits, Bally boots and Benzes) with the reality (kites off the jails, buying sweats, running up in Stetson nigga hat game was special). Once again though, West loses the beat, the musical motivation cannot support the weight of his lyrics.

Power finds his power though. With every scratch, every rip back, every drum beat, you cannot help but bob your head, move your body, feel (forgive me) POWER. You know that West has taken control of his music again, of himself, he has taken up his own fight. You want to make fun,

“You short minded niggas, thoughts is Napoleon.” Whereas Gorgeous nodded to the fact that Kanye may have gone off the deep end, (according to friend and producer Noah Callahan-Bever, he had been overworked and overstressed) Power places the responsibility for attitudes and acclimation in the hands of the media, basically telling them they get what they paid and prayed for.

All of the Lights is a full, monumental, piece of music. Once again, the beat does not grab, but it does not have to, Alicia Keys takes care of that, and the amazing assembly of artist boggles the mind past caring. West and Keys are joined by Charlie Wilson, Elly Jackson, Elton John, Fergie, John Legend, KiD CuDi, Rihanna, Ryan Leslie, The-Dream and Tony Williams. The sheer number puts to rest any question of Kanye’s ego, in a 2010 interview, Q-Tip described the process as “music by committee,” saying [H]e’ll go, ‘Check this out, tell me what you think.’ Which speaks volumes about who he is and how he sees and views people. Every person has a voice and an idea, so he’s sincerely looking to hear what you have to say—good, bad, or whatever. (…) and we’re all invited to dissect, strip, or add on to what he’s already started. (…) so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He’s a real wizard at it. What he does is alchemy, really.”

Monster terrified me, taking one of my favorite alternative folk rock bands, Bon Iver, and placing them in another world. Their voices are edgy and distorted, nasal, evoking visions of a young woman walking down a darkened street followed by, lead on by, West’s Monster. Only this is a fame monster, full of arrogance and self-indulgence, of fucking, not making love, Mali(booya) and money. But West is giving you a nod and a wink, caging and displaying the heavyweights of Top Forty hip hop Jay-Z as the overthrown Ring Master (“Love I don’t get enough of it (…)all I see is these niggas I’ve made millionaires, milling about, spilling there feelings in the air”) and Niki Minaj the side show (“now look at what you just saw I think this is what you live for. Ah, I’m a motherfucking monster!”) a smooth Reggaeton melting into a morbid hip hop poetry. Bon Iver closes this show, trying to grant some sort of comfort to the discomforted, slowing the music down, bringing some reality back, and some rhythm and blues to a hip-hop album.

So Appalled, am I, that West starts to repeat himself with the seventh track, again harping about his wealth and fame and all the pressures that come with it. However, being back by a distorted string quartet, West displays his background, and once again his ability to collaborate is commendable. Kanye has something to prove though, perhaps repetition is him driving his point home, telling the industry and the fans that they needed him whilst he was gone. Collaborator Pusha-T maintains that throughout the entire album, even twin tracks So Appalled and Gorgeous, there is a “collage of sound.”

Devil in a New Dress is Kanye circa 2005, an old sound on a new album. No worries though, it moves smoothly into Runaway, a rap song that goes the other way, simplistic and beautiful, building instrumental lines like Death Cab for Cutie, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd. Rick Ross and Kanye West find some sort of soul, a contrast to harsh words and anger, a resolve perhaps, that things that seem to satisfy to last forever, and the people that make you want to “runaway fast as you can” still may have their place in your life. The song also seems to be an apology from the playa to the played, letting all the soft beautiful things know that they are there to be enjoyed, and seeing as they are bought and paid for, they have been given the rules of behavior.

When Kanye ran out of his own (at times weak) beats, he turned to Black Sabbath, sampling Iron Man heavily in Hell of a Life. But when pussy, porn, metal and rap converge in this song, oddly enough they tell a song of love and redemption. Initially, Kanye is falling in love with a porn star (whereas T-Pain just fell for a stripper), at the height of romance things get physical (You could hear the loudest screams, comin’ from inside the screen, … she ever fuck a black guy Or do anal, or do a gangbang. It’s kinda crazy that’s all considered the same thing.) Before the song is over, so is the love, they married in the bathroom, but were divorced by the end of the night. As the beat fades, all you hear is Kanye, his breathing suggesting his spent the wedding night alone, watching his brides work.

John Legend brings us back to mainstream romance on Blame Game. This song is refreshingly honest, caught in the middle of a fight that you cannot get out of and, as the title suggests, do not want to take responsibility for. Kanye knows the cycle though, the inability to hate and love someone at the same time without letting some of your insanity to show through (where is Niki Minaj when you need her?). His distortion of voice and use of static and white noise is the perfect setting for a story that plays more fully in ones mind than in real life. Ultimately though, there is the realization that maybe the perfection, that perfect person who wants all the same things that you want, isn’t really the one you will fall truly in love with (And I was satisfied being in love with the lie…I can’t love you this much). Annnd, as he often does, Chris Rock ruined it, one of the most artful and romantic songs on the album comes down to “pussy town” and “my dick thanks you.” High class.

Thank goodness that a sampling from Bon Iver’s Woods redeems that misstep, allowing West to rework a stripped down and simplistic melody into a classic dance mix, letting it build and build to a near boil, and then letting it fall back again, until there is a strange feeling ecstasy, unexpected but welcome. Justin Vernon’s Woods, my Woods, are translated into Kanye’s Chi-town world, and for some reason, it just works, makes you want to move your body and exist in multiple universes.

Who Will Survive in America is easily the shortest, most simple, and best track on the album. Here West is not the indulgent fame monster, he is not the pussy nabber, he is not the nigga comin’ up. He is a speaker, a testifier, reminiscent of (you my strike me down) King, Malcolm X, and blazing the election trail Obama. He acknowledges that there is a world outside the one he has made for himself, holed up in his private studio in Hawaii. West rips through all the history and grandeur that was written by white men for white men, and recognizes the bastardization of a country he was taught to garner inspiration from.

There was more to dislike than like, but at the same time, there is something here. Kanye is scraping at genuine music, knocking on the door of art. After five albums, I would hope he was at least in the neighborhood, maybe in five more albums he can get in the same room. I would hope so, because the potential (shockingly) is there.

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