33 rebellions per minute
"I wear newspapers for pants and a T-shirt that says 'Damn, I'm good'"
1998
Eels, ELECTRO-SHOCK BLUES
Well, I wrote in my Go-Kart Mozart review that I wasn't going to quit my community political organizing job "anytime _too_ soon", and the phrase "_too_ soon" can now, in retrospect, be officially diagnosed as a synonym for "within the next 20 days". I'm at home today, catching up on personal tasks, and preparing to look at want ads and contact temp agencies. As recently as last Thursday night I was still looking forward to doing well for ACORN, although the facts that Amy (the slacker co-worker who I now realize reminded me of Sara Gilbert, Darlene from Roseanne) had quit, and that K. in her unfair enthusiasm was doing just as splendidly as I'd assumed, put a damper on things. Then, on Friday morning, my boss announced cheerfully that in addition to the organizing drive -- in which I was to recruit 2 new low-income Mattapan residents a day and coalesce them around some unspecified neigborhood issue which would presumably be chosen by some of the one new member a day I _was_ recruiting if they didn't keep disappearing immediately after giving me their money -- K. and I would now be in charge of hiring and managing people for a voter-turnout drive to last the next three weeks. That left the afternoon for me to be stood up by the single most enthusiastic potential member I'd met to date -- a longtime labor organizer who had said he'd needed only the formality of checking with his active liberal wife before he could meet me at 4:00 to join -- and to recruit my usual one new member and to receive my usual one apology letter at the door of a previous recruit who was suddenly too busy to talk to me. I still wasn't thinking about quitting then, at least not so hard that a weekend wouldn't have cheered me up. Having to work Saturday as always, however, left me only one day of weekend, and that was only enough recovery time for me to formulate a noseload of arguments about why I shouldn't be doing this to myself.
The simplest reason is "because I'm bad at it", and maybe that's enough. It does, however, beg the question of _why_ I'm not good; I'm well-spoken, honest-looking, and good at faking optimism, and I know the recruitment arguments well (and believe them). If something's holding me back, the two obvious nominees are (1) That I despise the notion of requiring my human interactions to have a purpose, to be scorekept, and (2) That I dislike being earnest for a living. It's telling, I thought, that I quickly became unable to read political non-fiction after taking the job; the bio of Karl's daughter Eleanor Marx, for example, was set amid to far too many revolutionary actions that did more immediate harm than immediate good, and I quickly retreated to fantasy novels for my heroes. I was trying, I think, to learn to be city guard Commander Samuel Vimes, from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series: grumpy, sarcastic, obstinate, dogmatic, and very much the man behind both the partial retaking of Ankh-Morpork city streets from gangs and mafias, and the integration of long-hostile races (from humans to elves to trolls to zombies to the silent, unmoving, observant gargoyle Corporal Downspout). The world desperately needs more Vimeses -- Ralph Nader is one, though with the same unfortunate unwillingness to seriously pursue power; Phil Burton was one, before he died and carelessly failed to become an active zombie, and between the two of them the U.S.A. has an extensive national parks system, a set of occasionally-enforced environmental laws to delay our extinction a few perhaps-crucial decades, and a whole lot less dead people in the meantime. I can be grumpy and sarcastic and dogmatic, and if I'd turned out to be obstinate, perhaps I'd've been right for the job. But people aren't apathetic, I've learned; they fight with real passion and ingenuity for the right to ignore their rights as citizens, and I'm inclined to let them win.
The problem, while working this out, is that I've been too busy and unhappy to emulate the fantasy-novel hero role I _might_ have some talent for: Jake Stonebender, bar regular at Spider Robinson's Callahan's Cross-Time Saloon. The philosophy at Callahan's is virtually opposite to the political organizer role: the people there hang out in each other's company telling tall tales and atrocious puns and playing music and dancing. Every once in a while, someone will come to the bar in need of help with some serious emotional problem (heroin addiction, future shock, the job obligation to blow up planet earth), and every Callahan's regular, all of whom once arrived due to their own old hurts, offers instant full attention and support until the problem is solved and the newcomer (or oldcomer) can be integrated into the fun. Take away Spider Robinson's convenient fantasy plot devices, and the Stonebender type -- waiting to be asked for help, not barging in the door and demanding to provide it -- will help far fewer people than the Vimes. But it's still a role I preach: why save lives if life can't be fun? I adore free time, I listen well, I make ridiculous comments and tell logic-bending stories to cheer my friends up, I offer lavish praise, and I still offer enough sensible help that friends praise me for being unnervingly observant. Or at least I was like that when I had time -- so now I'm reseizing that time. Experience with temp agencies tells me it should be easy *crosses fingers* to get a 40-hour job which will, as I now wish, pay my rent each week and leave me alone.
Mark Oliver Everett, a man called E, may have known zero Stonebender types or several; it's hard to tell. After two singer/songwriter solo albums as E, and one weirdly modern genre-melting rock album with the Eels that contained only two songs ("Novocaine For The Soul", "Beautiful Freak") I cared about, he found his existence severely jarred by the suicide of his sister, the death by cancer of his mother, and the death of several of his friends, perhaps including the very ones who might have helped him cope. He had serious doubts about turning any of this into song material, but what's the point of writing personal songs if you're not going to touch on the only topics that matter to you? ELECTRO-SHOCK BLUES, then, is a harsh and direct record. "Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor", gently sung over sparkling guitar notes, opens from his sister's last moments: "Lying on the bathroom floor/ kitty licks my cheek once more/ and I could try/ but waking up is harder when you want to die/... I think that I am going to a place where I am always high/ My name is Elizabeth/ my life is shit and piss". "Going To Your Funeral, Part I" matches the numbed horror in its music, a thumbing and fuzzy and jaringly weird minor-key bass line dominating the light music-box-driven melody. "Cancer For The Cure"'s spy-movie tropes and volume drop-outs take place next door to an assembly-line for bird-torturing devices, and E's gleeful singing pursues humor on the one topic he has left: "The kids are digging up a brand-new hole/ where to put the deadbeat Mom/ and Grandpa's happy watching video porn/ with the closed-caption on". "My Descent Into Madness", another agile stew of electro, alt-rock, and balladry, brags "the voices tell me I'm the shit".
"3 Speed", down to 2-chord back-porch strumming and warm melancholy organ, is explicitly back to his sister's hollow perspective (though it's not clear if the intervening songs are meant as hers, Mark's, or both): "I look in the mirror and all I see is a beautiful blonde". "Hospital Food"'s peppy noir jazz and faux-soul falsetto is more gallows humor, but "Electro-Shock Blues", a piano note at a time, stuggles with medicine and trying to believe "the doctors [who] tell me I'm OK". "Efil's God" -- a wordplay spelling "Dog's Life" backwards but pronounced near "It feels good" -- rides backwards guitar and a driving beat to express confidence in the decision to die and ask "If you think it matters, take a look at me, and don't close your eyes as I turn into dust". "Last Stop: This Town", the single and to my mind a brilliant and wonderful one, made from pre-school melodic pep and consoling synthesized choir and chunky dancable noise blasts, switches to Mark's perspective: "Can you take me where you're going if you're never coming back?".
The rest of the album is quiet, more like E's solo albums, although still making reserved part-time use of sampler and synthesized orchestrations. The lyrical theme is simpler: looking for hope. "Climbing To The Moon"'s shares his sister's disgust ("Got a sky that looks like heaven/ got an earth that looks like shit/ and it's hard to tell where what I am ends/ and what they're making me begins"), but hey, "the nurse likes my writing". "Ant Farm" goes "Hate a lot of things, but love a few, and you are one them", and this time the sentiment is not about following. By the final song, his credo has become "maybe it's time to live".
It's heartwarming, and that could be why I resisted ELECTRO-SHOCK BLUES at first (that and my not much liking the previous Eels album, anyway). I have heard BLUES described repeatedly as perhaps the most harrowing album ever made, and that's wrong. Okay, sure, the _life_ that E is writing about must've been incredibly harrowing; I don't want to trade, that's for sure. But at the same time, the decision of whether or not to live is the easy one. He had a source of income, he had an acknowledged talent, he had the statistical likelihood that surely not _all_ of his friends would die, and he had an objective standard of success: if he's alive, he's winning so far. He had the ability to transmute his experiences into art, and between his observational keenness and his decision to reclaim his old-fashioned songwriting melancholia as part of his genre stew, he made the best art of his career. I don't have any friends pondering suicide (although a couple have in the past), but I have exactly four friends under the age of 30 who are still working the same job as when knew them in January, versus fourteen who've switched. Nor do all my friends live in the same place as then or have all the same lovers and best friends. No one imposes crises on us, and therefore we have to make up our own standards. If we decide that we're failing them, or that we picked the wrong standard in the first place, we can't even count on the outside world to comprehend, let alone to agree. We've decided that yes, we want to live, but we don't always know if we can find the money to do it without failing the reasons that helped us decide this. It's a larger struggle, and the victories are both larger and better hidden.
But as soon as I stop asking BLUES to be harrowing, this problem goes away. It's tuneful and smart and loving and uplifting, and uplift works precisely _because_ it smooths out the problems. Tomorrow, with my free time, I might think of a dozen new awful puns, but it won't make me Jake Stonebender; fantasy simplifies. If you have to worry all the hard stuff all the time, you'll never know what your ideals are. Care about good people, support them as best you can, and if that means nurture their memory, you nurture their memory. Smile. Go on. The details will bug you on their own time. Wait for them.
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