Some people are morning people. In fact, you often hear people talking about their disposition in relation to this fact. They will say, “I am totally a morning person” or “I am definitely not a morning person.” Unfortunately for the latter, the world is pretty much biased toward the former. For most of us, work starts around eight or nine in the morning. This is also when stores open, this is when breakfast is served at most restaurants, and this is when the early birds will be out looking for worms.
It is said that this daylight-centric schedule comes from our early days as an agricultural society. Back when raising crops and tending to cattle were the primary focus of everyone’s lives, the day time hours had to be used to maximum effect. So it was early to rise and early to bed for everybody other than the vampires and nightcrawlers. I guess we’re all just creatures of habit, because here it is 200+ years after the Industrial Revolution and we’re still getting up with the sun and off to work as soon as it gets light outside.
In the 21st century this no longer makes much sense. Again, the majority of the work force heads off to work in the first hours of daylight, but it’s not to tend the fields or work somewhere outside where daylight is required. Most of us get in cars, trains, and buses and head to office buildings, stores, or classrooms. All of these places have electric light and protection from the elements. So really, the work we do there could just as easily be done at 9pm as it could at 9am. And at this point, many of us are interacting via computer with people in different states, countries, and time zones, which means that there’s not even any real value to having everybody in the same place at the same time.
(Side note: You know what also makes no sense? The fact that UPS, FedEx, and the cable/phone company will only come to your house during regular business hours. They’re just as stuck in this outmoded, 18th century scheduling rut as everybody else, even though it’s wildly impractical for them to operate that way. For example, they will leave several notes on your door saying, “We came by at 11:15am. Sorry we missed you!” No shit. You wanna know why you missed me? Because I’m at work at 11:15am - just like everybody else in the frickin’ world. Why don’t they just start the day a little later so that they can make all the home deliveries/service calls between 5 and 8 pm when everybody is actually home?)
Ultimately what I think it comes down to is light and dark. It’s not so much morning people versus night people, it’s that most people still have some ingrained, primitive fear of the dark and they like to be safe at home before the darkest part of the night falls. However, there are a few of us who relish the dark, be it the dark of a cold, moonless night, or the dark of a warm, windowless bar. Thankfully, some of these people have also started bands so that they can play music for the rest of us.
San Francisco’s Dangermaker is one such band. They play slick, haunting guitar rock that goes perfectly with a shot of whiskey and an absence of light. Don’t bother listening to this band first thing in the morning as you enjoy a bran muffin with your skim latte. This is not a breakfast band. Instead, you should throw on their EP at the tail end of a three-day bender when you’ve jacked up the stereo and you’re just looking to make one last pass at the girl sitting by herself at the end of the bar. I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure Dangermaker are creatures of the night - which works for me because I am definitely not a morning person.
Modern technology has had some strange second-hand effects on society. One could certainly argue that ATMs, automated gas pumps, online shopping, and cable television have made our lives better. If nothing else, these modern conveniences have allowed us to be more efficient with our errands and optimize our leisure time. But what appear to be improvements in the living standards among those of us in the industrialized first world have actually come with some unintended consequences.
I’m thinking specifically of the value of human interaction. Back in the proverbial old days, communities were built upon the exchange of goods and services - and the face time that came with them. Even in large cities, the average person in an average day would have to speak with a gas station attendant, a waiter, a librarian, a milkman, or a neighbor. People knew one another, if not by name than at least by sight.
A sense of recognition is an essential component of the human psyche. In fact, one could argue this is why famous people like movie stars and pop singers are deified in our country; because they are the most recognizable humans of all. For us non-celebrities, a series of daily interactions with our fellow man satisfies this same need, albeit on a much smaller scale. Knowing that other people know you and know of your place in the world validates your existence in some profound, yet intangible way. When you die, these will be the people that carry on your memory - and everyone wants to be remembered.
The thing is, modern technology has removed many, if not all, of these interactions from our lives. We pump our own gas simply by sliding a card into a machine. We get our money from a slot in the wall. We drive to work alone in our cars, stopping on the way home at the drive-thru to order food from a talking box. If we’re lucky enough to have a family, it is very likely that we will find them at home plugged into their own entertainment devices - iPods, computers, TVs, video games - with communication limited to a few words and some fleeting eye contact.
Taking a bleak view of the future, it’s possible to envision this country populated by lonely, disenfranchised individuals. Sleep walking through life, we would essentially be alone together. With this absent sense of community or recognition would inevitably come a decreased sense of accountability. This, in turn, would lead people to withdraw from human interaction and curl up inside their own minds - minds that have been pickled by television, first person shooter games, and internet pornography. The nightly news already features enough psycho killers and deranged perverts to tell us that the human mind is too volatile to be left to alone with these influences. Nothing good can come of it.
Instead, you should use technology for the good of humanity. The internet allows you access to places and people you might never have otherwise seen or met. You can share recipes with a stranger in Minnesota. You can send pictures of your cat to an old lady in North Dakota. You can watch videos of snow falling on New York City. You can even use your computer to check out the music scene in Bellingham, WA.
Let’s say you opt for this last one. A basic internet search will probably turn up a few big names like Death Cab for Cutie and the Posies. Of course, faithful readers of this blog (hi dad!) will know that we’re not interested in big names. Those people already get plenty of recognition. Instead, we try to dig a little deeper and, as a result, we often strike music gold.
Citizens of the world, please meet The Love Lights. These crazy kids have taken shimmering 1960s soul music and given it the indie rock treatment. You can still hear the treble-heavy Memphis rhythm guitar and thankfully there is also a horn section. But underneath it all is a band from the Pacific Northwest that has clearly spent some time in a musty basement, writing lyrics and listening to Pixies records.
So there, we’ve gone ahead and shared the love. But don’t keep it to yourself. Step out on your front porch, maybe introduce yourself to your neighbor or somebody passing by. Tell them about this cool band from Washington you just read about on the internet. It might just end up making the world a better place.
Today was unofficial crazy day in San Francisco. Actually, almost any day in San Francisco might be considered crazy if you don’t live here and see all the weirdos on a daily basis. But even for somebody accustomed to all the fruitcakes, I’m telling you today was nuts (pun intended). In the two blocks between the train station and our office I saw the following:
- A woman staggering down the sidewalk chanting, “Snakes! Snakes are falling from the sky!”
- A man stopping traffic in the middle of street and then dry humping the bumper of one of the cars that tried to drive around him.
- And a another man just doing the generic crazy - i.e. running down the street, slobbering and wild-eyed, going, “Blah bloo wah bla arrrgh!”
Many of you who live in other cities might wonder why we let our crazy homeless people roam the streets instead of giving them shelter, medical attention, and lessons in personal hygiene. The short answer is that we are a bunch bleeding-heart liberal cupcakes whose good intentions cloud our ability to make rational decisions. Each time a new mayor gets up at city hall and lays out a plan to handle the crazy, drug addled homeless population of San Francisco, an outcry goes up among those vocal groups of people prone to outcries. They insist that the mayor has no right to infringe upon anybody’s personal freedom. Being crazy and homeless is not a crime, they contend. If crazy homeless people want help, they will seek it out. If they don’t want help, they will let you know by exposing an open sore, eating from the garbage can, and asking you for a dollar.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy in all of this is that being crazy doesn’t necessarily mean being a menace to society. In fact, crazy often equals brilliance in musicians and artists. Take, for example, Jared Falcon. From 1986 to 1988, Jared Falcon attended Petaluma Junior High in Northern California. He played baritone sax in the orchestra and did not do particularly well in school. However, he was a songwriting prodigy. Falcon wrote almost a song a day and recorded each and every one onto a Fisher Price tape recorder. This practice started in January 1987 and ended, 336 songs later, in February 1988, when Jared was institutionalized.
The tapes lay in a dusty pile in his mother’s attic for years until they were discovered by Shannon Ferguson, an old classmate of Falcon’s. Ferguson was helping Jared’s mother clean house when he found the tapes, and he knew right away that he had stumbled onto a gold mine. He returned to New York and started a band with a singular vision: Take the tapes born of Jared Falcon’s confused teenage brain and turn them into the songbook of a Brooklyn indie rock band.
And thus the band Falcon was born. Playing only reworked versions of the original songs found on those early Fisher Price recordings, Falcon has built up a repertoire of about 20 songs and has just released an EP. The songs feature soaring guitars and wander from dreamy psyche rock to rhythmic pop in a way that sort of illustrates the open freedom of a broken mind - it goes where it wants to. With these songs, Falcon shows that crazy people can sometimes lead us to beautiful places. Now if only we could lead the crazy people off the streets of San Francisco and into an institution, who knows what kind of hidden genius we might find.
Conventional radio is in a weird place these days. With the exception of some college stations at the low end of the dial and maybe NPR, almost everything you can pick up on your car stereo is a commercial station owned by Clear Channel, Infinity, etc. Those guys have openly admitted that they’re in the business of selling advertising, not bringing new and exciting music to the people. It’s no surprise then, that they play only the most obvious Top 40 drivel. Everybody’s busy talking on their phone, or listening to their iPod, or not giving a shit, so what difference does it make anyway?
What is comic about the whole thing is that these stations are still entirely under the control of the FCC. This means that despite the fact that a lot of these stations play music that brazenly glorifies sex and violence - and despite the fact that this has been largely accepted by the public - the radio stations still have to go through the basically pointless step of bleeping out “bad” words. C’mon now. Everybody knows that “chick” rhymes with “dick,” “itch” rhymes with “bitch,” and “fuck” rhymes with half the English language.
The other day I was at a stop light and heard a so-called urban station blasting from the car next to me. The lyrics were something like, “Got that itch, driving in my truck/looking for a *bleep* for me to *bleep*.” Well done FCC. Like any 10 year old can’t figure that one out on their own.
What’s even more comic is that a lot of the smooth jazz/R&B stations cover this same territory - albeit with songs that are easily twice as lewd. At the laundromat where I wash my clothes, the radio is stuck on a station that seems to cater exclusively to the grown n’ sexy crowd. There’s no profanity in any of the songs they play, but there certainly is plenty of licking, caressing, stroking, grinding and making of sweet love all night long. I’m no prude, but I feel like some of these songs should only be played when two people are between the sheets (not folding them).
Which reminds me of another thing. I once played in a band with a singer who sounded a lot like Bill Withers. Some times at the end of band practice, when everybody was good and drunk, we would play fake slow jams with lyrics pulled from the pages of Penthouse Forum. You should try it some time. It’s super funny to juxtapose the underlying idea of an R&B slow jam with pornographic language that describes the same thing.
R&B slow jams (slow jamz?) get old pretty quick though, so it’s nice to see an indie rock band stepping up to the plate and broadening the options for those of us who want to say dirty things without being too dirty. The Ums from Tallahassee, Florida have a clever new track that does a nice job of laying open the male psyche. Of course, the fact that guys spend a lot of time thinking about sex is no secret and, honestly, not that interesting. So The Ums have couched that idea in a jazzy little pop song, reminiscent of Ween’s “Freedom of ‘76,” but with better lyrics, better production, and some weird guitar parts. It’s catchy as hell and makes me want to *bleep* and *bleep* every girl I see.
Way back in 2007 we wrote an article on a plucky little New York band called Rich Girls. We even posted an MP3 of their soon-to-be classic pop hit “You & What’s His Name.” Well, now the band has gone and completed their album and they’re giving the whole damn thing away for zero dollars. Bam! That’s how things are done in 2008!
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