[Songs My Son Should Know] Tamba Trio | Mas Que Nada

Sometimes life comes at you slow, sometimes life is very easy.  Its an open-net sitter, and all that was required of your efforts was to be in the right place at the right time.

In fact, life is not as hard as we allude to in text form or around attentive audiences.  Perceived strife is empathy, and I get why we are normalized to do it.  Tension builds an audience and it captivates people.  Some people cannot even have a simple conversation without some sort of labored monologue.  This is how cable news networks overwhelmingly succeed and the Hallmark Channel is buried somewhere deep in the lower 300s of your dial.  Also, this is why women have -- and keep -- crazy friends.  Its both entertaining and therapeutic for everybody.

But life slows down if you allow it.  It will let you pause and have a lengthy look around the place.   Life is very spectacular most of the time, it really is.  It is when you begin living for moments -- and recognizing when you are actually in one, that things start to really get good.

Living in a moment is the primary canon to life; becoming fully cognizant as if in a wonderful dream, infallible for the next minute-and-a-half before alert consciousness takes you over.  It is what separates us from lesser intelligent species, recognizing that fleeting moments don't return, programming ourselves to capture them internally. 

We remember seemingly inconsequential moments because somehow they've impacted us so profoundly, but like a janitorial keyring, you have to remember what emotion they unlock -- pride, love, comfort, exhilaration.  I still remember what it was like to be proud of myself for a shitty Honorable Mention in kindergarten.  Its very possible that the motivation to succeed could have stemmed from that.  I remember what it was like to kiss my wife for the first time -- not why or how or where, anyone would remember that -- but what it was physically and emotionally like; awkward and sweet.  Life slowed down for me when I met her.  It got better.  These kinds of moments have to be internalized because they will stay with you and guide you forever.

Something your mother and I are really, really trying to be perceptive of is how much we enjoying each of those moments with you.  Yes, we will remember the first teeth, the first steps, the millionth laugh -- but we also remember your first look of recognition, the first time you looked upon mom and me as if you had wished on everything for us.  How happy it made us that you approved of who we were, and that it meant everything to you to be a part of our small family. You were all we wished for too.  We remember.

For our first anniversary, your mother and I set out on kind-of a big fucking adventure knowing that the chances of being as whimsical and free of the real-deal responsibilities in the near future were dwindling.  Mom had the hilarious idea to try to invent you on this trip, and together we were dead set on naming you after the relevant city: Rio.  Relax,  it could have been Casablanca had only Morocco been more inviting to its female guests.

If you do the maths, well, obviously, that didn't happen.  You granted us a couple more months of leisure and latitude that we parlayed to a bunch of really fun, really drunk nights of scenester dancing.  I thank you for this because this is surely something that would have never been a part of our history -- your mothers and mine -- because, though short-lived, it was fucking wild and fucking spontaneous, and just generally a nice time to spend as a happy couple.  A moment.

But back to Brazil: One of my favorite memories -- one of those nearly imperceptible life-moments that I've been going on about here -- was after our visit to the top of Corcovado to see Cristo Redentor.    Shopping around the district of Ipanema, we deviated into a very quiet and quaint record store, more similarly resembling a musical library than a place of commerce.  There was a kind, older gentleman keeping inventory of the place, which would have been better suited in an educational setting or research institution someplace away from the bustle of Rio.  The gentleman, without other customers to tend to (not that it would have mattered)  led your mother and I on a very precise and historical audio tour of Brazil's most famous musical export: Bossa Nova, playing one record after the next with the grace of a professor and the enthusiasm of a student.

This was a moment.  I could remember myself thinking that: remember everything, as if willing myself to internally ledger the smells of the vinyl, the very low din of ambient noises coming from the megalopolis of 13 million people, painted and accompanied onto the pantomimed bodies of women in sarongs walking towards the beach and men in yellow Brazil jerseys walking to the pub.  There was something so pure and genuine about listening to first-print records from this man's impressive, but concise collection.  This was an art class taught by the distinguished scholar, surreal in perspective, as we were his only audience, surreal in proximity because we were literally in the center of Brazil's cultural mass of humanity.

The next record played, and he lit a smile:

At this point in time, as I'm listening to him precisely place the correct "ba-bum" percussion beats with his articulators, it is quite difficult to resist a squeeze of your mother's hand in silent urge to cede our former lives, take up a small residence near the beach, and set forth on an alternate autobiographical path.  It was in that moment, where the bustle of soot and industry and millions futbol fans bypassing the storefront, that time slowed to its most deliberate crawl.  I'm telling you son, find these moments and capture them.

Instead of selling our worldly possessions and camping on the beach forever, we regained our sensibilities and went to a Bossa Nova niteclub instead.  Gruff with knowledge and perspective, we proceeded to drink rum-and-cokes and "ba-buh" to the beats until we could no longer distinguish between Portuguese and a stapler.  We smiled at people when they looked at us.

Life is just a collection of these moments, and the way you process them, sequence, and recollect them makes your own library of nostalgia.  That is what I live for, this is how I slow life down because it will move too fast if you let it.

[Songs My Son Should Know] Band of Horses | Marry Song

The third date with a one you've been fancying is probably around the time when you start attaching together pieces of the puzzle that ask your subconscious, 'so, where is this going'?  

But with Melissa, I had already gained that insight.  This gig was going on  a week-long, college-style, fun-bender to San Francisco; away the sultry heat of Arizona with a family-sized back of jerky, a 6 hour playlist that would have to be played twice, a winery map, and one trusty Japanese SUV.  That was it.  That was the third date.  Two unfamiliar people mapping out a future together, immediate and distant, 12 hours or 60 years?

That was the July of 2007.

Two summers later we were off to the other coast, New York City, exchanging nuptials like graduates of La Société de la Fortune, alma mater to the colleges of  Preparation & Opportunity, an imagined Wes Anderson plotline with an ensemble cast of friends and family, thoughtful dialogue, strange happenstance, and most importantly, a poignant soundtrack. 

With every great film score comes the definitive musical crux of the story's plot -- Mark Renton's flop house Perfect Day, Max Fisher's Ohh La La moment, or The Dude's Man in Me.  There is so much derivative meaning in music, and we found it crucial to heighten the emotion of the room set to the climax of our courtship biography.

Not only should the song be hopeful, but also triumphant, peddling towards life's dénouement with the aplomb of an old French man with dinner groceries.  The delivery should not be pantomimed or false or have veiled social critique.  It should not have opposition to the context in which it is be used; Marriage should be its only category.  It should not be clumsy or used; its message aesthetic and pretty.

Though obvious in name, Marry Song is inconspicuous in public ovation.  The meter wavers with both pace and patience, an important characteristic for dancing through a marriage through its seeding and its harvest.  Its message is spartan in its approach, stripped and honest, like a telegram.  It presents love as a humble dowry, weary minds long pursuing peace. 

This was the Express to San Fransico five years ago.  She is gone now, but may she live forever.

[Songs My Son Should Know] Neutral Milk Hotel | In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Three years ago from right now, as Melissa and I were lifting our seat backs to their full and upright positions, each two-or-three bloody marys deep into the flight that would ship us to our rainy wedding weekend in New York as a two-pieced parcel, later to be fit together as one; this song was triggered by the music gods on my earphones as a Call to Post:

It was entirely befitting as a cross-section of what my life had been up to that point as an individual -- but also an example of the antonym of singularity, which, in the case of this story, would be the bond of marriage.

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all around the sun

Here I was sitting in this airlifted carriage beside the woman who had brought me such a very long way in life to this particular moment in the sky; circling all around the sun, trimming the sea, writing pages to a better story.

What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly
From the aeroplane over the sea

And our chance meeting years prior caused the realignment of integers so that this life is measured by alternate calculations: a flash on the screen, or a blink of an eye is an eternity or more with this beautiful face I have found in this place.

  

But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Love to be
In the arms of all I'm keeping here with me

And because of this awareness of the indefinite, we bathe in the beauty of devotion and love without the anxiety of loss; in his arms she will always be.

-----

Later that day, waiting amongst the immeasurable mass of humanity inside of New York's City Hall for our license application, it was very clear that there is no cross section to this life.  The multitude of living organisms that have bisected my life and influenced it in every way possible had led me to exactly there, on that day, with this person.  It was, quite simply, staggering.  There was no single moment, but an explosion of moments.  Every bit of organic machinery working overtime to ensure your fate. I was not enraptured by marriage only three years ago -- just as Enzo was not born only seven months ago, he was created centuries prior, when the gods of music made it so.

[Songs My Son Should Know] Kings of Leon | Arizona

When it comes to the Kings of Leon, there are so many odious demonstrations by the band, that they could teach a volume of lessons before they begin strumming one, single, solitary note. 

1) Don't believe your hype
2) Don't overextend your boundaries
3) Don't insult your admirers
4) Don't become a rocketdouche Sooner fan.

And while The Kings are a case study in buffoonery, they also come with certain caveats, because we, as humans, tend to egregiously apologize for our athletes and artists as reimbursement for making us feel so fucking thrilled all the time.

When this album was released, it was a massively transitional time for your mother and I -- the kind of transition that makes you nearly collapse from dread had the circumstances surrounding it happened any differently.

In the complicated pre-summer of 2007, there was a very slight sliver of opportunity where it was going to be possible for your mother and I to meet, hit it off, and eventually decide that a relationship was worth the tokens for admission.  Any sooner than that small window, and the complications of other circumstances fold the relationship before it even begins -- and any time after those three days, we ride out our final days of the school year having never met, mommy moves on to New York by autumn, and your daddy continues to grind it out, never knowing the fugitive of an alternate universe that is this life.

This song reminds me so much of those three compelling days; probably on an iPod playlist I built to drift along with my in Phoenix -- because that is what people do in Phoenix, they drift.  It probably never extended past its initial song: Arizona.

The laze of the melody speaks intricately about the melancholy of isolated, desert living.  I always called Phoenix The City of Dreamers, because so many people there had other ideas about where they would end up -- in some far-off exotic locale -- and just how they were gonna do it.  Rarely did someone forget to remind you of their ambitions.  Dreamers.  In the face of easy, comfortable living, nobody appeared to be exactly satisfied with their open-ended drift.  Living in Arizona was like renting temporary space in a broken heart.  Don Draper said it better then I can, "Tell them that it didn't work out because it didn't. Tell them the next thing will be better because it always is."

And I don't think he was very inaccurate with that statement, for here we are now.  And this is how we did it.

[Songs My Son Should Know] Aerosmith | Sweet Emotion

Aerosmith actually used to kind-of rule the school before they were making dedicated theme songs for commercially appealing event films and casting Alicia Silverstone in every 1990s version of my wildest dreams.

In perhaps the greatest opening film montage ever conceived, it's Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion that binds the whole two minute mini-episode together like saliva to Zig Zags -- and so much so, that this entire rock opera has become correspondent with the awesomest day of school: The Last One.

That, my friends, was yesterday -- which makes today the awesomest day of the entire year: The First Day of Summer Break.

 

This suggestion doesn't end at the endorsement of Sweet Emotion.  Instead this promotes the entire film and its accompanying score as an essential experience for the Class of 2029.  While the natural elation and triumph of educational finality is celebrated fairly uniformly from ages four to twenty-four, its the peek into historical context that provides for mimicry and personal inventory on how to properly beast the final day of classes -- a beer bust, a vintage Pontiac GTO, staying out til sunrise.  Despite the prospect of these events being displaced 52 years by the time of Enzo's senior summer, it will still be relevant.

Its pretty much the way we've all experienced it -- but then again, we've all hit a layup before and no one is mistaking us for Wilt Chamberlain.  This generation were the engineers of lewd-cool; a rebirth from the 1920s after the four, long decades of composed-cool.  Better still, these were the artists of Austin-cool, which paced the rhythm of ideology for the way this city operates today, even after a millennial turn -- hipsters and the creative class and old hippies and students.  Government plodders, professors, struggling musicians, and dragworms.  Cool kids, scene kids, fit kids, and just too-many kids.

At last, a way to amplify the foundation of post-modern Austin into a solitary tune.  Austin is infinitely the Last Day of School.  To the maxx.



* ... and sure, you will always have record of your Aunt Annie's theatrical debut.  There was just no way to bypass this familial fact. :)