Apple Shampoo (in the style of The Shins)
blink-182 and Pitchfork and Pepperidge Farm and Garden State; or, A New Hope (springs eternal)
Hey. HEY—Listen to Eva LoVullo’s new EP—brill “sadgirl” singer-songwriter, voice is splendor; overall friend of the blog (and enemy of tyranny).
My posting schedule has been chaotic—two other rogue non-Friday emails lately. All newsletters are always ~cross-posted~ on the website itself: here I introduce Yarvinian monarchism; here I explore the idea of genre as ~cultural Overton window~, finding similar, let’s say, conceptual ecology across poetry and politics.
There are also jokes.
(My favorite “reach” or “stretch goal” is the dream of discovering laws of cultural thermodynamics, if only because attempting a unified theory of literal physics—that is, finally bridging quantum mechanics with general relativity—presumably requires algebra.1)
BONUS: Banter from an oldies DJ—103.5, Cincinnati’s Greatest Hits—that struck me as a good fake haiku:
Remember Charlie’s Angels
Fighting crime beautiful women
Their boss never seen
BONUS-BONUS: Admirably upsetting bumper sticker in the Chipotle parking lot—
MOM OF SASSHOLES
—lavender-colored, bedecked with floral glyphs.
The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. — Emerson
Growing up, my friend Jason once told me he didn’t like Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies.
I said, “That means you have an unsophisticated palette.”
I’m at pains to emphasize—we were children. Teens at best.
Thankfully, it was the last time I would ever act that way: my career as self-appointed inquisition—armed with ham-fisted pretension—was over as soon as it began.
Which is to say, I kept doing it, for sure continued in that vein, 100p. What am I, a quitter?
Pepperidge Farm Remembers
The worst and funniest part to me now is that, on top of having taken a psychotic tone with a personal friend, I was exactly wrong on the merits. As my paragon of refined taste, I picked a snack from a factory.
blink-182 was my favorite band in high school. Their CDs were my near-daily companion.
Emerson describes a vision of elation in the arrival of greatness:
If a few grand natures should come to us and weave duties and offices between us and them, it would make our bread ambrosial.
That’s the shit I’m talking about right there. As mundane a task as mowing the lawn was nearly intoxicating with Dude Ranch blasting in my headphones. To this day, the opening riff of “Dammit” makes me feel like a closed circuit.
blink-182 made my bread ambrosial. It was a love I shared with my friends.
Before going away to college—someday I’ll blog about being 17 and silently crying in the theater at the end of LOTR: Return of the King since, if Frodo wanted to reach the shining distant realm of his destination (destiny?), he first had to leave the world he’d always known—oops okay, I blogged about it.
Before going away to college, my horizons broadened slightly: The Shins, Death Cab, Postal Service. I realize the latter two are practically the same band, but I wanted a list of three and Fall Out Boy doesn’t count as “broadening.”2
I don’t remember how I first found the Shins; it was either reading the AV Club, watching Garden State, or obsessively scanning the AIM away messages of friends, acquaintances, and crushes—especially the latter's song-lyric selections, each of which I studied with “the tenderness of a cannibal spicing a baby.”3
“Your first step into a larger world” – Obi-Wan Kenobi
Arriving to campus, it became clear that blink-182 was not going to cut it.
Music-wise, my roommate was into something called The Mars Volta, which was confusing.
My friend from freshman trips was into something called Umphrey’s McGee, which was no less so.
I found my roommate’s blog. It derisively referred to the kind of person who “still listens to the Shins.”
First, “still”? I just got here! The Shins are CALCULUS dude, I’m catching UP to the Shins. What fresh hell awaits beyond them?
If it’s “Mars Volta,” I already decided. I’m not coming.
I tried pretending I wasn’t homesick by reading the Wikipedia page for Cincinnati. (Counterproductive.)
Meanwhile, although I’ve never changed my mind about Mars Volta, some of the other stuff Leon played intrigued me. Like sharks we move forward or die.
Eventually I asked Leon where he found new music.
This is how I found out about Pitchfork.
Like a gull takes to the wind
Before it was a giant music festival, Pitchfork was a handful of dudes reviewing albums on a website. If the magazines can be believed and there really was an “Indie Sleaze” (!!) late-aughts/early-teens fashion revival earlier this year, Pitchfork-approved artists would’ve been a natural soundtrack. Appropriate to the era, that is. Of the past. 2013, for example, which is to say, behind us, time-wise. (One moment while your correspondent catches up to his body. Kk! Np, ty)
Pitchfork was effectively the millennial Rolling Stone.4 Even in writing that sentence I feel a pang of queasy fear at describing Pitchfork in neutral-to-positive terms, lest my Peers overhear me; like Saturday Night Live, Burning Man, the New York Times, and liberal democracy, Pitchfork is an institution whose influence is nowhere more visible than the ubiquity of its detractors.
Freshman dorm, new laptop
But for me, in the fall of 2004, Pitchfork was The Scoop. Eager to find my footing, I gobbled reviews, context, and ~intel~ on the artists I’d heard playing on Leon’s computer: Wolf Parade, Trail of Dead, Okkervil River, The Streets; M83, Phoenix, Arcade Fire, Flaming Lips.
Reading Pitchfork yielded even more fruitful procrastination than the New York Times, the Wikipedia page for Cincinnati, and my article for the student paper that was published online days ago which I’d already re-read several times.
Feeling this
Garden State’s all-important meet-cute between Natalie Portman and Zach Braff hinges on a Shins song. Portman’s character even namechecks the then-obscure group before putting her headphones on Zach Braff’s head. As YouTube commenters note, the invitation to discovery is extended to the audience.
Natalie Portman: “This song will change your life.” Then, as if through the headphones: the celestial twang of “New Slang.”
When I looked up the Shins on Pitchfork, I learned that Pitchfork liked The Shins fine, but seemed never to mention them without sarcastic reference to the spotlight they’d enjoyed in the movie. My new authority made no secret of its disapproval.
I was crestfallen. I loved Garden State. And I loved that the movie featured the band. It was as if the Pepperidge Farmer himself was telling me I wasn’t cool enough for his crop.
I steeled myself.
I searched “blink-182” on Pitchfork.
Nothing. They didn’t even dignify them with disapproval. Not having reviewed Dude Ranch, an album which seemed ancient even then, I could understand—but ignoring Enema of the State? Take Off Your Pants and Jacket??5
I thought of the summer before. blink said, “I guess this is growing up.” Rides home from practice, Beechmont and Eight Mile, we could go and we wanted to stay. That summer means more now, which is funny because it meant everything then.
It all happened, was as finished as summer gets, years before the naming of the concept of the manic pixie dream girl; Garden State helped invent it and condemn it by its innocence of the future. Meanwhile, I was a manic pixie virgin.. virgin. Excited and scared, which would not change.
These were moments, years, solid with reality, faces, nameable events, kisses, heroic acts—but like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression, not too reassuring: as though meaning could be cast aside someday, when it had been outgrown.
Regarding Garden State, Pitchfork wanted us to know how much they didn’t care. Oprah types say we teach people how to love us. The fig leaf of disdain almost works. The paradigmatic joke about 21st-century hipsters is that you’ve never heard of their favorite band; what’s needed is you wanting to know.
15 years later, the concept of selling out no longer existed; ancient indeed seem the days of Pitchfork grilling Lana Del Rey for seeming manufactured. Now it’s arguably worse if a celebrity doesn’t post sponsored ads for products; not hustling exposes you as a nepo baby.
Nostalgia pretends things were better; memory reminds us they were different and the same. As with any great devotion, blink’s haters made our love stronger in the long run.
Meaning isn’t cast aside, only added to. “Beechmont and Eight Mile” means more now, yes, as in fondness of distance—but more than that I mean it has more meanings, is refracted through new futures. We try on other places and other lives, leaving some and keeping all of them.
“Always coming back to the mooring of starting out,” Ashbery said. “For this is action, this not being sure.”
Falling in love with someone new, it’s like you’ve never loved before. To return is to “know the place for the first time.”
Tom from blink-182 came out as an alien conspiracist and we cringed. Other people, like the Navy, began to agree with him. Taking Tom back in our arms, we cringed instead at cringe itself.
The powderpuff terrorist diet
Sophomore fall I attend a sorority formal, where I am arrested in a klepto-alcoholic blackout. Never one for proportion, I’d been drinking Boone’s Farm for hours—pastel “wine” from gas stations—and I hadn’t eaten.
The next day I remembered: The closest thing I’d had to dinner was Pepperidge Farm Milanos. I Googled what happens if you’re convicted of a felony.
When I last visited New York, I caught up with the guy whose date gave me the Milanos that night in New Hampshire. Without her, it would have been even worse. He and I didn’t mention cookies in Brooklyn. I think his toddler was eating some.
Happiness makes you cry / “Mask off,” as the poet said
When I hear whining that something “isn’t that deep,” I want to scream, Have you noticed primates became self-aware and invented soccer? The Flaming Lips say we’re floating in space. They say a good deal more. Have I read too much poetry? I haven’t read enough.
When Garden State came out I argued bitterly with a friend about its title. He noted that the movie was overly concerned with neither gardens nor the Garden State. I said the apparent superficiality of the title was “doing something” with the irony of New Jersey’s nickname—with the state’s less-than-Edenic-ness.
“And you see, both of us were right.”
Today I’ve been not-drinking longer than I drank, which is impossible and true. With cookies I’m hit and miss.
Adam and Eve walked east from Paradise, wrote Milton, “and the world was all before them.”6
I wanted a sophisticated palette and I still do. The better to eat the library with.
SEE YOU ON FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS. I MEAN IT.
Don’t tell me string theory is the bridge—not as long as we’re staring at that goose egg regarding experimental verification. You won’t pull the wool over this creative writing major’s eyes...
I realized in writing this that I’d forgotten several important high school discoveries which somewhat complicate the NARRATIVE: the Strokes, Daft Punk, Wilco, Bright Eyes, maybe even Neutral Milk Hotel? MODEST MOUSE oh god duh & brand new & TBS ofc
This is, approximately, Walter Benjamin. (Struggling to find the original.)
Maybe it still is! I’m on semi-permanent vacation from keeping up with things.
Incorrigible, my boys are.
Marilynne Robinson: “They were together, after their fashion, and the world was all before them, such as it was.”
Real recognize real