Note: These are the first pages of the first book.
Before the Nembath Incident, when Raychel still could walk around in broad daylight, she and Braden used to sneak out of school from time to time and explore the nearby forest. Together they discovered a pond as wide as their school building, a place they thought belonged only to them until they found a can clumsily wedged in the mud, sloppy shoe tread surrounding the spot. Even so, they never saw another person at the pond, so it was theirs. They named it Frog Pond, after the nice-sized green creatures that lived there. They loved to show off the power of their legs; Raychel and Braden had never managed to catch one.
A small mound near the south bank overlooked Frog Pond. It wasn’t much of a mound, but it was just high enough to see the snowy tips of the twin peaks, Pilorite and Silorite, if Raychel stood on the tips of her toes and the sky was clear. The only place she could see all of Frog pond was on top of that mound, all except a small gulf that protruded eastward, ducking out of sight behind the everglades. The mound was Raychel’s favorite place around Frog Pond. Being able to see everything, from the extremities of the water to the tops of the mountains, Raychel felt more confident in herself than she ever could in the classroom, drilled with Geography.
“No, Port Youl is here,” her teacher had said to her earlier, pointing to the map. “Close to the Northern Islands.”
Raychel muttered, “Whatever.” The teacher heard it.
“Port Youl is a beautiful city, Raychel,” he said. “Don’t you want to visit sometime? You’ll have to know where it is first.”
Raychel despised her teacher’s voice. He pronounced her name as if it were missing the Y, a two-syllable word like the Oriathian name. “I don’t ever want to leave Brodaw,” she said with conviction.
“Now you’re just being stubborn. Not even to Nembath, the magnificent Lightning City?” He spread his arms and salesman smile wide.
“Lightning City,” said Raychel flatly. “That sounds safe.”
Note in her hand, she was sent to visit the school counselor, again. She threw the note away and slipped away to the forest. Braden found her on the top of the hill, meditating with her legs crossed. “I told the teacher I had to go to the bathroom,” he said.
Braden’s favorite place around Frog Pond was not the mound but in the everglades, on the bank. He said he liked the mud and the feeling that he couldn’t be seen. Raychel always felt like resisting when he wanted to crouch down in the frigid murk. They would dirty their clothes and return home wet and shivering, their shoes making nauseating squishing noises, to parents who would surely guess where they had been instead of class. He didn’t think about that, it seemed, as much as she did. He felt more in touch with nature when he waded knee-deep along the pond’s swampy bank. There was no resisting Braden, and as much as she preferred the mound she preferred him more.
Braden undid the strings on his dirt and grass stained bag. “I brought something from home,” he said, shuffling his hand around inside. “Dad let me borrow to help catch a frog.” His fingers scraped against the canvass sides until he found what he was looking for and eagerly withdrew it. His fist was wrapped around a small cable, a miniature fan dangling at the end. Opening his fist and bending over, he showed her a small, wooden, banana-shaped object with a rectangular hole carved into the center, inside of which was a tangle of mesh. Raychel leaned over with curiosity, and her scalp nearly brushed against his.
“What is it?” asked Raychel.
“It’s a boat,” said Braden. “The fan moves it forward, and I control it with the remote control. Here, hold this.” Before Raychel could say anything she was holding the boat and the sound of Braden’s hand clawing against the canvas resumed. Raychel lifted a fragment of the mesh with her index finger, cautiously contemplating its shape.
“Is this a net?” she said.
“Yep,” said Braden. “Got it!” He extracted a compact black box that looked like a child’s building block but with a small joystick planted in the middle. “It’s pretty simple,” he said, flipping a switch with an assured click. The fan struggled against Raychel’s steadying hand, and she politely dropped it as if startled by bumping into a person’s shoulder on the street. Braden caught it with his free hand. “Be careful, Raychel!” he exclaimed not giving the impression that he was upset or worried that the machine would break, not for a minute. He pronounced her name like it was supposed to be pronounced.
“What does your dad use it for?” said Raychel. “Catching frogs?”
“Hm,” Braden considered. “I’m not sure, actually. I know there’s a camera on the bottom, so he can take remote pictures in dangerous waters, from a safe distance. I’m not sure what the net’s for, though. I’m not really into that Hero Team thing, you know.”
In the middle of Frog Pond, closest to the east side near the mountains, there was a small island where the frogs liked to spend their time. The only other times Raychel and Braden had tried to capture a frog was when it ventured to the far shore, an irregular occurrence. Braden promised that when the mountain winds died down and the air warmed up again, they would swim together to the island, where they would surely be able to catch a frog. Raychel hated swimming, but she nodded anyway.
Braden and Raychel crouched together in the everglades, watching the island in the middle of Frog Pond, their backs to the mound. Braden held the boat steady in his hand, pinching the motor’s blades to keep it still but ready. Raychel’s butt was getting moist in the mud. She could feel the water spreading through the fabric of her school clothes. She tried not to think about how her parents would react, not because of their reluctance to send them through the wash again but because she would have to admit she skipped class. She felt the dirty water bleeding through her underwear, cold and itchy, and she had to bite her tongue not to squirm. She glanced at Braden. His blue eyes were locked on the island, his eyebrows down in deep concentration, making blubbery lines in his young forehead.
“Isn’t there a better way to catch a frog?” Raychel whispered. “Isn’t using the net kind of cruel?”
“We’re catching it either way,” said Braden just as softly, not changing his expression. There were still no frogs, as if they knew the two kids were up to something.
Eventually Raychel’s clothes reached their peak of saturation, or she had stopped noticing its spread. The water was cold and her feet were numb. She and Braden had spent many days together here on the banks of the pond before, but never before had they waited in one place for so long. Usually they walked the circumference of the pond, taking large steps that lifted their knees to their chests, eyes darting about at the slightest peripheral movement. Now it felt that they were preparing for an ambush. Raychel couldn’t help but feel the fear of the unseen frog that was to be Braden’s first victim. While Raychel’s interest in frog-catching stemmed from a mild excitement about having a pet – there was a jar with holes punched in the lid in her bag – Raychel knew Braden wanted something different. He wanted to beat the frog in a physical and mental competition, to test his own ability to plan ahead and outsmart another living, thinking creature. He was more like his father than he was willing to admit.
Suddenly Braden leaned forward anxiously, pursing his lips tightly together, and released the boat’s motor to purr noiselessly underwater. Raychel looked out towards the island, following Braden’s eyes. There, on the end of the island, squatted a fat frog, facing the opposite direction, its skin glistening in the sun almost like plastic. It looked like a plastic windup toy until it took a deep breath and Raychel heard it croak. It was the perfect target for Braden: facing away, lethargically motionless in a patch of reviving sun, slowed by obesity. The frog didn’t stand a chance, Raychel knew as the boat inched closer along the surface of the water, the mesh inside poised to launch. Soon the net would wrap around the creature and it would flop around, kicking wildly with its uselessly muscular legs, hurling itself without direction in a blind, desperate panic.
Raychel knew she had to warn the frog. Surreptitiously reaching her hand out, watching Braden’s eyes to make sure he didn’t notice, she felt her fingertips glide invisibly through the barrier of air between her and a pebble on the faraway island’s edge. She felt the tips of her fingers achieve distance, and she knew that if she were to wave she would have seen stony fingers oscillating twenty meters away. But the shape of her fingers had become gray, rounded, and small. She felt the cold, steady will of the stone in the tips of her fingers, and with it the instinctual tingle to freeze in her place and remain stoically still, forever. But the urge was small and easy to resist. She moved her hand to the side, watching the distant pebbly fingertip hover above the pond’s surface with the rest of her hand. She took another quick glance at Braden; he was too concentrated on the frog to notice the floating stone. Raychel released the pebble from her influence, feeling the relief of warm blood pulsing through her digits, and dropping it into the water. It made no sound Raychel could hear, but it was enough for the frog to dive into the pond with alarm.
“Ah!” cried Braden with frustration. “We were so close!”
“Close is good,” said Raychel sarcastically. “Braden, I’m cold. Let’s go back to the mound.”
Braden began to reel the boat back in, his eyes still fixed on the spot where the frog had been, disappointed longing replacing the frenzied concentration of moments before. “Fine,” he said.
On the way back to the mound Raychel couldn’t help but shiver, and Braden wrapped his arm around her shoulder. He wasn’t cold at all. He was so warm.
It was this practice of sneaking away from school that, by a stroke of dumb luck, saved Raychel’s life.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
New Song - Extraordinary Passion Inaction
Ciao, Tutti!
Great news! For the past week I've been working on a new piece of music to share with you all, be it programming drums, writing lyrics, laying guitar tracks, singing, or mixing. Of all the self-recorded pieces, this is by far the best in terms of recording quality, so I urge you all to go listen to "Extraordinary Passion Inaction," the first song you'll see at the First Regrets official MySpace. Hope you enjoy!
-Sam goldsmith
Great news! For the past week I've been working on a new piece of music to share with you all, be it programming drums, writing lyrics, laying guitar tracks, singing, or mixing. Of all the self-recorded pieces, this is by far the best in terms of recording quality, so I urge you all to go listen to "Extraordinary Passion Inaction," the first song you'll see at the First Regrets official MySpace. Hope you enjoy!
-Sam goldsmith
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Short Story - Why Sean Connery Always Gets The Girl
1365 words
I was sitting at a table in the Square Root Café, one hand around a dull white coffee mug, the other writing in my journal with a light blue mechanical pencil, when Charles came in and sat across from me.
“I’ll say, dear boy, you look like you’ve been having a rough spot with the ladies lately, am I right?” he said.
“Um,” I said.
“Don’t deny it!” Charles bellowed. “You’ve just been left by your woman, I can tell. The careless slouch, the half-awake eyes, your sagging cheeks, your slack lips, all give it away. I can recognize a heartbreak from a kilometer away, and you’ve got it bad.”
I believed him. He seemed to have come from an instantaneous kilometer away, and now he dominated my attention as if my – our – table were floating in the middle of the ocean.
“You haven’t been able to put her our of your mind yet, have you?” He smiled from ear to ear. “It must not have happened terribly long ago. You look to have the gait of an experienced lover; tell me, which was it? Third? Fourth?”
I mumbled, “First.”
Charles gave an animated wince, pursing his lips and both of his eyelids. “I’m sorry, old boy. You must feel dreadfully distraught.” He chuckled at the alliteration, giving no thought to his wrong guess earlier.
“Thanks,” I said to my coffee. I was sure he would have reacted this way no matter how I chose to answer, that he reacted this way each time he saw a heartbreak from a kilometer away.
“Don’t mention it! In fact, I’d love to help you however I can.” His smile took a wicked turn up on his face. “I’m sure you’d like to see her hurt right now,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, come off it, you know you do!” He shoved his palm into my shoulder good-naturedly. “You want to make her heart ache the way yours does now, get revenge for how she wronged you, make her cry, have her realize the mistake she made in letting you go at the same time she comes to understand how she will never win you back, make her feel like she’ll never want to love someone else ever again, scar her for life, fill her with a lifetime of regrets, am I right?” Before I could respond, Charles had grabbed the shoulder he had just rammed and gave it a good shake, jostling my whole limp body with it, as he leaned in close. “My services can make all these possibilities into firm realities.”
He handed me a business card while still leaning intrusively forward, his intoxicating wintergreen breath placing me on the verge of dizziness. I hesitantly took the card and even more hesitantly looked down from him and to the nearly blank card. “Professional PhD,” I read aloud. “Making women cry for 15 years.” I looked up again, relieved and terrified to see he hadn’t moved a centimeter. “PhD?”
“Personal happiness doctor, get with the program,” Charles said impatiently. “Here’s what I do: I seduce your cheating ex-lover – she is a cheater, correct? I’m just assuming – lure her into a deep and loving relationship, drive her hopping mad over me, then like that,” he snapped his fingers so suddenly it made me jump, “leave her in the lurch, just like she left you.” He laughed heartily and leaned back again, finally. “And you get your supreme satisfaction for just two payments of $200.”
“$200?” I said.
“I have a family to feed, I’ll have you know!” cried Charles, suddenly cross. “Dear boy, you surely didn’t think I would do this for free, just because I pitied your pathetic emotional emptiness! You expect your just dues when you do a job as expertly as I!”
“You mean, seducing…”
He cut me off. “You don’t think I can do it, am I right?” I made to tell him that this accusation wasn’t so, that, for a reason lodged deep inside my brain I was sure he could carry off whatever act of seduction he please, but he was already speaking again. “Well, I can assure you that my track record for seduction is paramount! Let me ask you something: why do you think Sean Connery always gets the girl?”
“Um,” I said. “Because he’s cool?”
“Because of his accent!” Charles broke into a smile, and suddenly I understood something about him I couldn’t place before. The tone of his voice, his distinct pronunciation sounded just like Sean Connery’s as it did in any of the movies in which I’d seen him. Charles even looked like him, I came to notice, like the younger Sean Connery, as if I were seated across from James Bond on the set of Goldfinger.
“I can see what you’re thinking from the expression on your face,” Charles continued happily. “You want to know exactly how I plan to seduce… what’s the damn damsel’s name again?”
“Sherrie.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” proclaimed Charles over me, deaf to what I said. “First, along with your down-payment, you will give me her contact information, work information, and online networking personal web addresses. Anything else you can offer in this regard would be greatly appreciated as well. Using this information I will follow her for 72 hours, studying her every move.”
“You’re going to stalk her?” I was genuinely horrified.
“My dear boy!” Charles cried. “Ladies love to be stalked! It’s a maddening obsession of theirs! They’re captivated by the notion of a man waiting each day on a street she normally walks through, hoping for a glimpse of her by the laundromat, frequenting wherever she volunteers just to keep her face fresh for his lovesick fantasies, waiting to get on the bus until she arrives at the stop just to ride in her presence. Women find it hopelessly romantic.”
“They do?” My eyes darted around, looking for a way out, but all I could see was whiteness, like looking at the sun through eyelids.
“Of course they do!” Charles exclaimed. “How do you think Sean Connery gets the girl?”
“His accent?”
Charles threw his hands helplessly into the air. “Because he’s a spy! Now tell me, what lady do you know of who, when confronted with the notion of making sweet, passionate love to a spy, would refuse?”
Sherrie, I thought, sending me to the cliff’s edge of a memory when I heard, “Cheeseburger, no pickle, no onions!” I closed my notebook and tucked it under my arm as I stood up, pushing the chair away with the backs of my knees, the metal legs grinding against the hard floor. I glanced out the windows as I walked up to the counter, at that street corner in awkward Bed-Stuy, with its under-construction condo shell towering above chipped-paint shacks, blocked from the street by cheap wooden planks swarmed by 8½ by 11 black-and-white fliers printed in Hebrew. I walked past the wobbly café tables I took for granted and their stony chairs with thin cushions that helped us count of blessings. I was the only customer there except for another regular, a short black man sipping his tea as far opposite me as he could be – here it was, Sunday afternoon, and the Square Root Café had only two guests, neither of whom elected to take advantage of the lumpy, sinkhole sofas at the far end, close to the closet bathroom.
At the counter the girl, acting as the, cook, waitress, cashier, dishwasher, and only employee of the day, handed me the burger without a smile. She was the usual here, but I’d seen her a few times whenever the fat, blond, middle-aged woman was out. This young woman had a tattoo of a green snake wrapping up her arm and ducking under her sleeve at the shoulder. She looked like she was pretty young, about my age. I hadn’t looked at her in that way before.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got a question, something I’ve been wondering about. Why does Sean Connery always get the girl?”
“Beats me,” she shrugged, not looking up. She dragged a wet washcloth along the countertop. “Personally I think he’s kinda slimy.”
Fine
- Sam goldsmith
I was sitting at a table in the Square Root Café, one hand around a dull white coffee mug, the other writing in my journal with a light blue mechanical pencil, when Charles came in and sat across from me.
“I’ll say, dear boy, you look like you’ve been having a rough spot with the ladies lately, am I right?” he said.
“Um,” I said.
“Don’t deny it!” Charles bellowed. “You’ve just been left by your woman, I can tell. The careless slouch, the half-awake eyes, your sagging cheeks, your slack lips, all give it away. I can recognize a heartbreak from a kilometer away, and you’ve got it bad.”
I believed him. He seemed to have come from an instantaneous kilometer away, and now he dominated my attention as if my – our – table were floating in the middle of the ocean.
“You haven’t been able to put her our of your mind yet, have you?” He smiled from ear to ear. “It must not have happened terribly long ago. You look to have the gait of an experienced lover; tell me, which was it? Third? Fourth?”
I mumbled, “First.”
Charles gave an animated wince, pursing his lips and both of his eyelids. “I’m sorry, old boy. You must feel dreadfully distraught.” He chuckled at the alliteration, giving no thought to his wrong guess earlier.
“Thanks,” I said to my coffee. I was sure he would have reacted this way no matter how I chose to answer, that he reacted this way each time he saw a heartbreak from a kilometer away.
“Don’t mention it! In fact, I’d love to help you however I can.” His smile took a wicked turn up on his face. “I’m sure you’d like to see her hurt right now,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, come off it, you know you do!” He shoved his palm into my shoulder good-naturedly. “You want to make her heart ache the way yours does now, get revenge for how she wronged you, make her cry, have her realize the mistake she made in letting you go at the same time she comes to understand how she will never win you back, make her feel like she’ll never want to love someone else ever again, scar her for life, fill her with a lifetime of regrets, am I right?” Before I could respond, Charles had grabbed the shoulder he had just rammed and gave it a good shake, jostling my whole limp body with it, as he leaned in close. “My services can make all these possibilities into firm realities.”
He handed me a business card while still leaning intrusively forward, his intoxicating wintergreen breath placing me on the verge of dizziness. I hesitantly took the card and even more hesitantly looked down from him and to the nearly blank card. “Professional PhD,” I read aloud. “Making women cry for 15 years.” I looked up again, relieved and terrified to see he hadn’t moved a centimeter. “PhD?”
“Personal happiness doctor, get with the program,” Charles said impatiently. “Here’s what I do: I seduce your cheating ex-lover – she is a cheater, correct? I’m just assuming – lure her into a deep and loving relationship, drive her hopping mad over me, then like that,” he snapped his fingers so suddenly it made me jump, “leave her in the lurch, just like she left you.” He laughed heartily and leaned back again, finally. “And you get your supreme satisfaction for just two payments of $200.”
“$200?” I said.
“I have a family to feed, I’ll have you know!” cried Charles, suddenly cross. “Dear boy, you surely didn’t think I would do this for free, just because I pitied your pathetic emotional emptiness! You expect your just dues when you do a job as expertly as I!”
“You mean, seducing…”
He cut me off. “You don’t think I can do it, am I right?” I made to tell him that this accusation wasn’t so, that, for a reason lodged deep inside my brain I was sure he could carry off whatever act of seduction he please, but he was already speaking again. “Well, I can assure you that my track record for seduction is paramount! Let me ask you something: why do you think Sean Connery always gets the girl?”
“Um,” I said. “Because he’s cool?”
“Because of his accent!” Charles broke into a smile, and suddenly I understood something about him I couldn’t place before. The tone of his voice, his distinct pronunciation sounded just like Sean Connery’s as it did in any of the movies in which I’d seen him. Charles even looked like him, I came to notice, like the younger Sean Connery, as if I were seated across from James Bond on the set of Goldfinger.
“I can see what you’re thinking from the expression on your face,” Charles continued happily. “You want to know exactly how I plan to seduce… what’s the damn damsel’s name again?”
“Sherrie.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” proclaimed Charles over me, deaf to what I said. “First, along with your down-payment, you will give me her contact information, work information, and online networking personal web addresses. Anything else you can offer in this regard would be greatly appreciated as well. Using this information I will follow her for 72 hours, studying her every move.”
“You’re going to stalk her?” I was genuinely horrified.
“My dear boy!” Charles cried. “Ladies love to be stalked! It’s a maddening obsession of theirs! They’re captivated by the notion of a man waiting each day on a street she normally walks through, hoping for a glimpse of her by the laundromat, frequenting wherever she volunteers just to keep her face fresh for his lovesick fantasies, waiting to get on the bus until she arrives at the stop just to ride in her presence. Women find it hopelessly romantic.”
“They do?” My eyes darted around, looking for a way out, but all I could see was whiteness, like looking at the sun through eyelids.
“Of course they do!” Charles exclaimed. “How do you think Sean Connery gets the girl?”
“His accent?”
Charles threw his hands helplessly into the air. “Because he’s a spy! Now tell me, what lady do you know of who, when confronted with the notion of making sweet, passionate love to a spy, would refuse?”
Sherrie, I thought, sending me to the cliff’s edge of a memory when I heard, “Cheeseburger, no pickle, no onions!” I closed my notebook and tucked it under my arm as I stood up, pushing the chair away with the backs of my knees, the metal legs grinding against the hard floor. I glanced out the windows as I walked up to the counter, at that street corner in awkward Bed-Stuy, with its under-construction condo shell towering above chipped-paint shacks, blocked from the street by cheap wooden planks swarmed by 8½ by 11 black-and-white fliers printed in Hebrew. I walked past the wobbly café tables I took for granted and their stony chairs with thin cushions that helped us count of blessings. I was the only customer there except for another regular, a short black man sipping his tea as far opposite me as he could be – here it was, Sunday afternoon, and the Square Root Café had only two guests, neither of whom elected to take advantage of the lumpy, sinkhole sofas at the far end, close to the closet bathroom.
At the counter the girl, acting as the, cook, waitress, cashier, dishwasher, and only employee of the day, handed me the burger without a smile. She was the usual here, but I’d seen her a few times whenever the fat, blond, middle-aged woman was out. This young woman had a tattoo of a green snake wrapping up her arm and ducking under her sleeve at the shoulder. She looked like she was pretty young, about my age. I hadn’t looked at her in that way before.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got a question, something I’ve been wondering about. Why does Sean Connery always get the girl?”
“Beats me,” she shrugged, not looking up. She dragged a wet washcloth along the countertop. “Personally I think he’s kinda slimy.”
Fine
- Sam goldsmith
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Short Story: The Perfect Album
2856 words
No one is quite sure when the perfect album came into existence. Everyone went to sleep one night, and the next morning there it was. A music historian traced it as far back as he could and discovered very little of use; where it came from or who produced it, there being no language or illustrations on the jacket. There seemed to be no distributor, either; the perfect album simply appeared without announcement in record stores around the world, just as ghastly as it came into our lives. The music buyer at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles had no recollection of purchasing it: “I wish I could take the credit,” he said. After interviewing every employee at Amoeba within six months of the perfect record’s estimated release date, the music historian found that none of the employees could even remember stocking it. And yet there it was, waiting to be bought, and when it was the word spread like a rash. No one knows who bought the first copy. Stores didn’t catalogue the album, and how could they, for an album without genre, artist, producer, or title? It would come to pass, though, that over six billion people would own a copy.
The perfect album held the world hostage for a time – some say for a day, others a week – when businesses shut down as listeners failed to go to work. Streets were empty, cars left in their driveways, phones unused, televisions silent and black. It is said that Paul McCartney cried when he heard it. “I didn’t even realize it,” he would recount to the news later. “Once it was over my face was wet. I didn’t know why at first.” John Cage, upon hearing it, reportedly took an eraser to a stack of his manuscript drafts and began to work feverishly at them. Since he heard it, Kanye West has never been known to use his voice; to this day, whenever he is asked even the simplest of questions he only shakes a heavy head. “It makes you feel like you’ve gone through life again,” Herbie Hancock tried to explain. “But you’re not yourself when you listen. It’s like you’re somewhere else, inside the music but outside the world at the same time. You can feel yourself grow up and grow old when you’re out there. Then, when it’s over, you fall back into yourself and it feels like you’ve never had a body before. Sometimes I have to watch myself move my fingers, just to be sure they’re really there, and that they’re mine.”
A week later, Quincy Jones, Madonna, and Thom Yorke announced that they would cease playing music and that all other musicians, besides the birds, should do the same. 99% of the world’s musicians agreed immediately. Lady Gaga tried to release another album, an ambitious three-disc set with four hours of music videos. It sold one copy, to her mother. To this day it sits unopened on Lady Gaga’s mother’s nightstand, under a stack of old New Yorkers. Keith Jarrett’s post-perfect album CD sold three copies, each to jazz collectors, one of whom unwrapped it an popped it into the CD tray. After three minutes and twenty-two seconds he was seen by neighbors throwing his CD player into the street, Keith Jarrett’s CD still inside. When Justin Bieber came to Fantasy Studios with a reluctant house band, he found the building deserted, the windows shattered, and all the equipment missing.
You couldn’t find an online copy of the perfect album; it only exists – or I should say “existed” – on vinyl. A London DJ tried to transfer it to his computer and gave up after five minutes, filled with remorse. An anonymously uploaded version circulated the internet and produced a moment of excitement for people who missed their iPods, but they quickly learned that the music was different. “Computers don’t understand it,” lamented Steve Jobs in an internationally televised announcement in which he announced that Apple would cease to produce portable mp3 players of any sort. “It’s too beautiful. It hurls us towards our eventual death and allows us to confront our loss of self without fear, and machines will never be able to understand that.”
The Red Cross decided that, in light of all the impoverished people around the globe who could not afford the perfect album, a turntable, or a speaker system, it was their duty to provide the unfortunate with this indispensable piece of art. Massive strike forces were sent out to each continent and disseminated into the countryside, lugging wagons filled to the brink. It was the greatest humanitarian effort ever known in human history. People from well-to-do families around the globe donated money and manpower to the effort. Rural areas without electricity witnessed power grids built to supply them with the energy needed to operate the stereo. Speakers of the native language gave lessons on how to operate the machine, culminating in a playing of the perfect album. These lessons ended in bear hugs, tears of epiphany, and unbearably lengthy goodbyes. It was estimated that less than a year after this project began that every household in the world owned at least one copy of the perfect album as well as the capacity to listen to it.
Soon after this successful effort a popular Japanese recording artist whose name has been lost to history claimed to have been the mastermind behind the perfect album. He was immediately ostracized and has been living in anonymous exile ever since, if in fact he is still alive.
Years and decades passed, and eventually a generation came to maturity who had never known a world without the perfect album, nor a world with albums less perfect. Some old record collections did exist still, mostly in libraries for archival purposes, or in personal collections for sentimental value. One wealthy family in Austria mounted their old records like photographs and lined them along surfaces around the house, including the worthless grand piano, to impress guests. The children in one South African elite family used old jewlcases for an imagination game, or as building blocks. The general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, in order to improve his team’s pitching, used his old records as targets for his struggling young pitchers. The team’s ERA dropped a full point in the following month, and soon teams all over the league were following suit. But no one ever listened to the old records just to listen, for pleasure’s sake. The perfect album was the be-all and end-all for listening, and as the children of the new generation grew up they found themselves in a world with only one piece of music to listen to.
And they began to wonder why. Most importantly, they wondered why the musician behind the perfect album, or anyone else for that matter, hadn’t composed a second. At the heart of the matter was their greed: they wanted more. One perfect album wasn’t enough. They were bored by hearing the same note collection over and over again, as if telling them what to think and how to feel. “If someone could give perfection such beauty,” the valedictorian of Harvard Law was once heard to say, “the same could be done for imperfection.”
The curious youth made their ways to the libraries and listened to the archives for pleasure, not for research. Those precious families who never threw out their CD players or CD collections found their teenage sons and daughters bringing friends over who dressed weirdly and listened to awful sounds, all the music from before the era of the perfect album. And as the parents disgustedly tried to switch off their rebellious offspring’s interest in the imperfect classics and grew deaf to their shouts of protest, they realized with horror that it wasn’t that their precious children had fallen into the wrong crowd but they had instead become the wrong crowd. “We have to nip this at the bud,” the Senator from Arkansas, a fiery seventy-six-year-old man, proclaimed to Congress. “We cannot risk having our youths tainted by the imperfect values of what used to pass for music.” Parents were encouraged to burn their old record collections, take a hammer to their old CD players, and rip the tape out of their old cassettes.
Many did, and the CD as a method for documenting sound was nearly lost forever. However, at this time the world’s youth made a number of technological breakthroughs. A pair of students at MIT, two shy sophomore women aged nineteen each, developed a way to cheaply build small CD players in a way that could easily be mass-produced – the reinvention of the headphone was to be completed by the same young women the following year. Around the same time a graduate student research team at Stanford University created a technology that could retrieve data from a CD and load it into a computer. So, as the previous generation busied themselves with the supposed extermination of all impure music, the young men and women of the world secretly circulated their underground technology and kept the flawed musics alive.
Some took this hungry zeal to the haughty extreme of musical reproduction. A Brazilian college student once voiced his depression that almost all the Antonio Carlos Jobim recordings had been lost forever. After searching for the lost sheet music and historical piano instructions around the world, then finding himself a splintered out-of tune piano, he taught himself over the period of two years how to replicate the lost music with his own two hands. “We’ll never know how beautiful it really sounded,” he said after an unpublicized concert, attended by over two hundred young people. A French Jimi Hendrix fan, in search for what historical archives documented as his most famous song, discovered an ultra-rare tablature transcription of “Purple Haze,” built himself a guitar based on photographs he had seen, and taught himself the piece. “I don’t understand how he could make the guitar sound so dirty,” he marveled to a friend. As a consequence distortion was reinvented, a project that would take years to complete, a project that some would say is still in progress. In Egypt a team of construction workers built a large wooden instrument with strings made of pig intestines, and they learned the Bach Cello Suites by ear from a Yo-Yo Ma recording. Until the reinvention of the bow five and a half years later, the new cello was played by scraping one’s fingernails lightly across the strings, a very rough approximation of the record’s sound. Alongside this musical renaissance, the young women from MIT, now recent graduates, developed high quality recording technology derived from the mediocre equipment normally utilized on a Hollywood movie set. They traveled around the globe in search of underground music preservationists, as they called themselves at the time, and recorded them.
The young women’s names have also been lost to history, but by their own choice. “Music,” one was heard to have said, “belongs to everyone.”
The older generation was nearsighted, but not dumb, and they began to see the underground trends after a time. Many seemed to give in to the changing times: “People don’t value perfection like they used to,” a sighing, old Australian woman summed up. Many tried to fight back, fight harder against the rising resistance of the young, and it was this attitude that would eventually doom the perfect album. There was a movement to outlaw CDs, originating in Spain and quickly spreading throughout Europe. The first country to make a law to this effect was Afghanistan, whose government decided to punish imperfect listeners with jail time. El Salvador followed suit with a similar law, and police were known to go door to door at unexpected hours and confiscate contraband CDs and the young men and women who were caught listening to them. The most extreme law was in Nigeria, where even possession of CDs or CD equipment could result in ten years of prison, though the reality was often longer. In Europe and North America the norm was to enforce a fine on the listener, and in extreme cases impose mandatory community service. The Chinese government developed an educational video series to show schoolchildren, demonstrating the risks of listening to imperfect music. The video contrasted two students, one who listened exclusively to the perfect album and one who listened exclusively to anything else. The student who listened to the perfect album was kind to his family, worked hard in school, and grew up to own an important multinational company. The student who refused to listen to the perfect album was lazy, snobby at home, and was lonely and unsuccessful in school. She eventually died of this laziness, although the video never made clear how.
The successful student was a boy, the unsuccessful one a girl, a distinction that nearly caused as much outrage among the music preservationists as the attack on music itself. Despite this, the video was translated into fifty-six languages; the average schoolchild saw it 5.2 times before entering high school. The only state in the United States of America not to air it was Florida, which was only because the state of Florida had filmed its own version with the same script, featuring a white boy and a Hispanic girl.
These draconian efforts only enflamed the preservationist movement more, which reacted to this attack with one of their own: a popular call to destroy any copies of the perfect album they could find. Parents returned home to find shards of vinyl on the carpet, accompanied sometimes by an apologetic teen (“I dropped it by accident”), sometimes by an inflammatory note (“Expression cannot be silenced!”). Anger turned to panic as the elder generation realized that the world’s supply of perfect albums had been used up decades ago, when the record stores closed and Amazon removed the music wing of its online shop. Now parents found themselves in the same position as their children were five years ago, huddling in the homes of their lucky friends who still owned a copy of the perfect album. Many marriages were broken by this practice; the intense experience of listening to the perfect album created an overwhelming intimacy between those present and often ended in sexual experiences between co-listeners as if in a dream, compelling them to be unfaithful to their spouses, the mothers and fathers of their children, without thinking of it. “I wasn’t even myself,” one Vancouver woman said to her enraged husband, who himself had had a secret affair days earlier. “I am filled with so much guilt I could die, but at the time I couldn’t do otherwise.” Despite this risk, detachment from the perfect album was far too great a loneliness than anyone could bear. The divorce rate skyrocketed.
As the elderly aged, fragmented, and grew cynical with the passing of these events, the youth movements snuck into power. It happened in Ecuador first, in a coup. After its success there were celebrations in the streets where people threw the perfect album to the ground and danced on its shards. By night’s end not a single perfect album existed in the country. Encouraged by Ecuador’s success, the rest of the world soon fell as if it had been balanced on a marble the whole time. The rest of South America changed power more or less peacefully, with the exception of Venezuela where the military, in a moment of confusion, shot on a crowd of not-so-peaceful protesters, killing nine and wounding forty-six. Music preservationists called it a massacre, and movements around the world grew even more intense. When Russia fell most of the elder generation knew the writing was on the wall. “I believe in democracy with all my heart,” growled the President of the United States of America. “If the people want Satanist imperfection to be the norm, so be it.”
He was not reelected. The power change in the United States and most other non-corrupt democracies came about by popular demand. The young elected other young, likeminded politicians. Most of the change happened overnight, over the course of a single election. The new Congress, an average of 12.6 years younger than previous, did only one thing before overturning the old censorship laws: it ordered the destruction of all remaining copies of the perfect album. Within a year the United States joined sixty-four other countries in reporting that no copies of the perfect album existed within its borders. Now, if any copies of the perfect album remain, only the most secretive know where to find them. They’ve been hidden away stealthily throughout the world, like Holy Grails or wise men atop mountains, meant to be searched for but impossible to find. Despite all modern-day assurances that any trace of the perfect record has been eliminated, you can see the disguised fear behind the youthfully democratic censors of today.
If he is still alive, I’m sure the artist behind the perfect album is dismayed at this blatant display of human nature. And if I could ask him about the perfect album, I’m sure he would insist there was nothing perfect about it.
Fine
-Sam goldsmith
No one is quite sure when the perfect album came into existence. Everyone went to sleep one night, and the next morning there it was. A music historian traced it as far back as he could and discovered very little of use; where it came from or who produced it, there being no language or illustrations on the jacket. There seemed to be no distributor, either; the perfect album simply appeared without announcement in record stores around the world, just as ghastly as it came into our lives. The music buyer at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles had no recollection of purchasing it: “I wish I could take the credit,” he said. After interviewing every employee at Amoeba within six months of the perfect record’s estimated release date, the music historian found that none of the employees could even remember stocking it. And yet there it was, waiting to be bought, and when it was the word spread like a rash. No one knows who bought the first copy. Stores didn’t catalogue the album, and how could they, for an album without genre, artist, producer, or title? It would come to pass, though, that over six billion people would own a copy.
The perfect album held the world hostage for a time – some say for a day, others a week – when businesses shut down as listeners failed to go to work. Streets were empty, cars left in their driveways, phones unused, televisions silent and black. It is said that Paul McCartney cried when he heard it. “I didn’t even realize it,” he would recount to the news later. “Once it was over my face was wet. I didn’t know why at first.” John Cage, upon hearing it, reportedly took an eraser to a stack of his manuscript drafts and began to work feverishly at them. Since he heard it, Kanye West has never been known to use his voice; to this day, whenever he is asked even the simplest of questions he only shakes a heavy head. “It makes you feel like you’ve gone through life again,” Herbie Hancock tried to explain. “But you’re not yourself when you listen. It’s like you’re somewhere else, inside the music but outside the world at the same time. You can feel yourself grow up and grow old when you’re out there. Then, when it’s over, you fall back into yourself and it feels like you’ve never had a body before. Sometimes I have to watch myself move my fingers, just to be sure they’re really there, and that they’re mine.”
A week later, Quincy Jones, Madonna, and Thom Yorke announced that they would cease playing music and that all other musicians, besides the birds, should do the same. 99% of the world’s musicians agreed immediately. Lady Gaga tried to release another album, an ambitious three-disc set with four hours of music videos. It sold one copy, to her mother. To this day it sits unopened on Lady Gaga’s mother’s nightstand, under a stack of old New Yorkers. Keith Jarrett’s post-perfect album CD sold three copies, each to jazz collectors, one of whom unwrapped it an popped it into the CD tray. After three minutes and twenty-two seconds he was seen by neighbors throwing his CD player into the street, Keith Jarrett’s CD still inside. When Justin Bieber came to Fantasy Studios with a reluctant house band, he found the building deserted, the windows shattered, and all the equipment missing.
You couldn’t find an online copy of the perfect album; it only exists – or I should say “existed” – on vinyl. A London DJ tried to transfer it to his computer and gave up after five minutes, filled with remorse. An anonymously uploaded version circulated the internet and produced a moment of excitement for people who missed their iPods, but they quickly learned that the music was different. “Computers don’t understand it,” lamented Steve Jobs in an internationally televised announcement in which he announced that Apple would cease to produce portable mp3 players of any sort. “It’s too beautiful. It hurls us towards our eventual death and allows us to confront our loss of self without fear, and machines will never be able to understand that.”
The Red Cross decided that, in light of all the impoverished people around the globe who could not afford the perfect album, a turntable, or a speaker system, it was their duty to provide the unfortunate with this indispensable piece of art. Massive strike forces were sent out to each continent and disseminated into the countryside, lugging wagons filled to the brink. It was the greatest humanitarian effort ever known in human history. People from well-to-do families around the globe donated money and manpower to the effort. Rural areas without electricity witnessed power grids built to supply them with the energy needed to operate the stereo. Speakers of the native language gave lessons on how to operate the machine, culminating in a playing of the perfect album. These lessons ended in bear hugs, tears of epiphany, and unbearably lengthy goodbyes. It was estimated that less than a year after this project began that every household in the world owned at least one copy of the perfect album as well as the capacity to listen to it.
Soon after this successful effort a popular Japanese recording artist whose name has been lost to history claimed to have been the mastermind behind the perfect album. He was immediately ostracized and has been living in anonymous exile ever since, if in fact he is still alive.
Years and decades passed, and eventually a generation came to maturity who had never known a world without the perfect album, nor a world with albums less perfect. Some old record collections did exist still, mostly in libraries for archival purposes, or in personal collections for sentimental value. One wealthy family in Austria mounted their old records like photographs and lined them along surfaces around the house, including the worthless grand piano, to impress guests. The children in one South African elite family used old jewlcases for an imagination game, or as building blocks. The general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, in order to improve his team’s pitching, used his old records as targets for his struggling young pitchers. The team’s ERA dropped a full point in the following month, and soon teams all over the league were following suit. But no one ever listened to the old records just to listen, for pleasure’s sake. The perfect album was the be-all and end-all for listening, and as the children of the new generation grew up they found themselves in a world with only one piece of music to listen to.
And they began to wonder why. Most importantly, they wondered why the musician behind the perfect album, or anyone else for that matter, hadn’t composed a second. At the heart of the matter was their greed: they wanted more. One perfect album wasn’t enough. They were bored by hearing the same note collection over and over again, as if telling them what to think and how to feel. “If someone could give perfection such beauty,” the valedictorian of Harvard Law was once heard to say, “the same could be done for imperfection.”
The curious youth made their ways to the libraries and listened to the archives for pleasure, not for research. Those precious families who never threw out their CD players or CD collections found their teenage sons and daughters bringing friends over who dressed weirdly and listened to awful sounds, all the music from before the era of the perfect album. And as the parents disgustedly tried to switch off their rebellious offspring’s interest in the imperfect classics and grew deaf to their shouts of protest, they realized with horror that it wasn’t that their precious children had fallen into the wrong crowd but they had instead become the wrong crowd. “We have to nip this at the bud,” the Senator from Arkansas, a fiery seventy-six-year-old man, proclaimed to Congress. “We cannot risk having our youths tainted by the imperfect values of what used to pass for music.” Parents were encouraged to burn their old record collections, take a hammer to their old CD players, and rip the tape out of their old cassettes.
Many did, and the CD as a method for documenting sound was nearly lost forever. However, at this time the world’s youth made a number of technological breakthroughs. A pair of students at MIT, two shy sophomore women aged nineteen each, developed a way to cheaply build small CD players in a way that could easily be mass-produced – the reinvention of the headphone was to be completed by the same young women the following year. Around the same time a graduate student research team at Stanford University created a technology that could retrieve data from a CD and load it into a computer. So, as the previous generation busied themselves with the supposed extermination of all impure music, the young men and women of the world secretly circulated their underground technology and kept the flawed musics alive.
Some took this hungry zeal to the haughty extreme of musical reproduction. A Brazilian college student once voiced his depression that almost all the Antonio Carlos Jobim recordings had been lost forever. After searching for the lost sheet music and historical piano instructions around the world, then finding himself a splintered out-of tune piano, he taught himself over the period of two years how to replicate the lost music with his own two hands. “We’ll never know how beautiful it really sounded,” he said after an unpublicized concert, attended by over two hundred young people. A French Jimi Hendrix fan, in search for what historical archives documented as his most famous song, discovered an ultra-rare tablature transcription of “Purple Haze,” built himself a guitar based on photographs he had seen, and taught himself the piece. “I don’t understand how he could make the guitar sound so dirty,” he marveled to a friend. As a consequence distortion was reinvented, a project that would take years to complete, a project that some would say is still in progress. In Egypt a team of construction workers built a large wooden instrument with strings made of pig intestines, and they learned the Bach Cello Suites by ear from a Yo-Yo Ma recording. Until the reinvention of the bow five and a half years later, the new cello was played by scraping one’s fingernails lightly across the strings, a very rough approximation of the record’s sound. Alongside this musical renaissance, the young women from MIT, now recent graduates, developed high quality recording technology derived from the mediocre equipment normally utilized on a Hollywood movie set. They traveled around the globe in search of underground music preservationists, as they called themselves at the time, and recorded them.
The young women’s names have also been lost to history, but by their own choice. “Music,” one was heard to have said, “belongs to everyone.”
The older generation was nearsighted, but not dumb, and they began to see the underground trends after a time. Many seemed to give in to the changing times: “People don’t value perfection like they used to,” a sighing, old Australian woman summed up. Many tried to fight back, fight harder against the rising resistance of the young, and it was this attitude that would eventually doom the perfect album. There was a movement to outlaw CDs, originating in Spain and quickly spreading throughout Europe. The first country to make a law to this effect was Afghanistan, whose government decided to punish imperfect listeners with jail time. El Salvador followed suit with a similar law, and police were known to go door to door at unexpected hours and confiscate contraband CDs and the young men and women who were caught listening to them. The most extreme law was in Nigeria, where even possession of CDs or CD equipment could result in ten years of prison, though the reality was often longer. In Europe and North America the norm was to enforce a fine on the listener, and in extreme cases impose mandatory community service. The Chinese government developed an educational video series to show schoolchildren, demonstrating the risks of listening to imperfect music. The video contrasted two students, one who listened exclusively to the perfect album and one who listened exclusively to anything else. The student who listened to the perfect album was kind to his family, worked hard in school, and grew up to own an important multinational company. The student who refused to listen to the perfect album was lazy, snobby at home, and was lonely and unsuccessful in school. She eventually died of this laziness, although the video never made clear how.
The successful student was a boy, the unsuccessful one a girl, a distinction that nearly caused as much outrage among the music preservationists as the attack on music itself. Despite this, the video was translated into fifty-six languages; the average schoolchild saw it 5.2 times before entering high school. The only state in the United States of America not to air it was Florida, which was only because the state of Florida had filmed its own version with the same script, featuring a white boy and a Hispanic girl.
These draconian efforts only enflamed the preservationist movement more, which reacted to this attack with one of their own: a popular call to destroy any copies of the perfect album they could find. Parents returned home to find shards of vinyl on the carpet, accompanied sometimes by an apologetic teen (“I dropped it by accident”), sometimes by an inflammatory note (“Expression cannot be silenced!”). Anger turned to panic as the elder generation realized that the world’s supply of perfect albums had been used up decades ago, when the record stores closed and Amazon removed the music wing of its online shop. Now parents found themselves in the same position as their children were five years ago, huddling in the homes of their lucky friends who still owned a copy of the perfect album. Many marriages were broken by this practice; the intense experience of listening to the perfect album created an overwhelming intimacy between those present and often ended in sexual experiences between co-listeners as if in a dream, compelling them to be unfaithful to their spouses, the mothers and fathers of their children, without thinking of it. “I wasn’t even myself,” one Vancouver woman said to her enraged husband, who himself had had a secret affair days earlier. “I am filled with so much guilt I could die, but at the time I couldn’t do otherwise.” Despite this risk, detachment from the perfect album was far too great a loneliness than anyone could bear. The divorce rate skyrocketed.
As the elderly aged, fragmented, and grew cynical with the passing of these events, the youth movements snuck into power. It happened in Ecuador first, in a coup. After its success there were celebrations in the streets where people threw the perfect album to the ground and danced on its shards. By night’s end not a single perfect album existed in the country. Encouraged by Ecuador’s success, the rest of the world soon fell as if it had been balanced on a marble the whole time. The rest of South America changed power more or less peacefully, with the exception of Venezuela where the military, in a moment of confusion, shot on a crowd of not-so-peaceful protesters, killing nine and wounding forty-six. Music preservationists called it a massacre, and movements around the world grew even more intense. When Russia fell most of the elder generation knew the writing was on the wall. “I believe in democracy with all my heart,” growled the President of the United States of America. “If the people want Satanist imperfection to be the norm, so be it.”
He was not reelected. The power change in the United States and most other non-corrupt democracies came about by popular demand. The young elected other young, likeminded politicians. Most of the change happened overnight, over the course of a single election. The new Congress, an average of 12.6 years younger than previous, did only one thing before overturning the old censorship laws: it ordered the destruction of all remaining copies of the perfect album. Within a year the United States joined sixty-four other countries in reporting that no copies of the perfect album existed within its borders. Now, if any copies of the perfect album remain, only the most secretive know where to find them. They’ve been hidden away stealthily throughout the world, like Holy Grails or wise men atop mountains, meant to be searched for but impossible to find. Despite all modern-day assurances that any trace of the perfect record has been eliminated, you can see the disguised fear behind the youthfully democratic censors of today.
If he is still alive, I’m sure the artist behind the perfect album is dismayed at this blatant display of human nature. And if I could ask him about the perfect album, I’m sure he would insist there was nothing perfect about it.
Fine
-Sam goldsmith
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
