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
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
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
Monday, May 31, 2010
The One Tale From College: Submitted!
Ciao, Tutti!
Despite being on summer vacation officially, I have not been able to get much rest in reality, even though I've certainly been trying. I've been quite busy for an unemployed college grad on his "honeymoon." Just to recap:
1) While the TESOL certificate hasn't come to the house yet, it's only a matter of time. I'm currently looking for seasonal ESL work in New York city as well as a year's worth of employment in Istanbul. No rest!
2) My grades for my last semester came in: straight A's for the first time, pulling my GPA up to 3.9 if you're using only two significant figures. Smoking!
3) Two seconds ago, I submitted my short story "The One Tale From College" to Fence Magazine. Therefore I've removed it from the blog to avoid any possible legal difficulties. Also, a last second decision, I submitted the story under my pseudonym, S. P. Arrow, so don't be thrown by someone with that name having written exactly the same story I wrote.
4) I've got to write about some of the great books I've been reading and great CD's I've been listening to. I've been meaning to for a while, but some things just slip the mind sometimes... Suffice to say that I've been devouring novels and new music as if they don't exist in New York City.
Sorry for the wait. I'll be updating more often in the future. I bow and beg for forgiveness, or something like that.
-Sam goldsmith
Despite being on summer vacation officially, I have not been able to get much rest in reality, even though I've certainly been trying. I've been quite busy for an unemployed college grad on his "honeymoon." Just to recap:
1) While the TESOL certificate hasn't come to the house yet, it's only a matter of time. I'm currently looking for seasonal ESL work in New York city as well as a year's worth of employment in Istanbul. No rest!
2) My grades for my last semester came in: straight A's for the first time, pulling my GPA up to 3.9 if you're using only two significant figures. Smoking!
3) Two seconds ago, I submitted my short story "The One Tale From College" to Fence Magazine. Therefore I've removed it from the blog to avoid any possible legal difficulties. Also, a last second decision, I submitted the story under my pseudonym, S. P. Arrow, so don't be thrown by someone with that name having written exactly the same story I wrote.
4) I've got to write about some of the great books I've been reading and great CD's I've been listening to. I've been meaning to for a while, but some things just slip the mind sometimes... Suffice to say that I've been devouring novels and new music as if they don't exist in New York City.
Sorry for the wait. I'll be updating more often in the future. I bow and beg for forgiveness, or something like that.
-Sam goldsmith
Monday, May 17, 2010
Week 1 of CTESOL Classes
Ciao, Tutti!
I present my flowchart of the turbulent emotions of week 1 of my CTESOL (Certificate for Teaching English as a Second Language) classes:
Friday, May 7 - Cried in bed from loneliness, realizing all my best friends now live away from home, and I care about such things now. Went to the MET, but it didn't make me feel much better.
Saturday, May 8 - Had brunch with Owl Eyes before my flight. It's always exciting to spend time with those energetic friends of mine! Then caught my flight, which was delayed 3 1/2 hours and had to land in Salt Lake City to refuel.
Sunday, May 9 - Arrived home at 1:oo am. Any chance to get over jet-lag before classes started was squelched. Tried to have a relaxing day.
Monday, May 10 - Thrown into the mix. Handed a lesson to plan for "teacher practice" on the next day and another for Thursday. Apparently missed an important introductory week, and the instructor used TESOL jargon I'd never heard before (Lexis? Concept Check? Ss? What?????). Thank goodness there was another latecomer! Our instructor, though, is wonderful and patient, and already I learned a lot, enough to feel I could start my lesson plan without being completely blind. Longest day of classes since high school. How do those guys handle a full day of classes?
Speaking of high school, bumped into my high school English teacher on the way to the subway. We mutually pretended not to recognize each other.
Tuesday, May 11 - It turns out I've always been nervous in front of a class, though not knowing the level of the students beforehand didn't help. They were more advanced than I had anticipated, and I finished a little earlier than expected, even after using all my back-up activities. Overall, though? I was getting the hang of things around there, even though I was still yet to sleep well. Bonus: I finished John Wray's newest novel, Lowboy.
Wednesday, May 12 - J.J. Cale says: "Wednesday's hump day, hump day's Wednesday. The week's half gone." I felt so full after every lesson period that I can't even talk to people. The last time my head felt this heavy was... Cold War/Spy Novel class at NYU last semester. Speaking of NYU, as I was heading home on the train many of my friends were listen to Alec Baldwin at their - their - graduation ceremony. I was indescribably overjoyed I missed that!
Thursday, May 13 - The second class went much better than the first, even though things still didn't go as planned. I guess this means I'm learning something and getting better in general at this. Learned about teaching business English. I have no interest in teaching business English, but we still learned some interesting things about cultural awareness. All in all, our instructor rocks, and we earn our money's worth in the classroom.
Friday, May 14 - We talked about teaching children. Safe to say: parents can be creepy human beings at times. I'm much more afraid of a pair of them than a classroom of their bite-sized monsters. Went to Rasputin's in San Francisco to celebrate, hoping to buy the new LCD Soundsystem (which doesn't seem to come out until this Tuesday, sadly). Got scared by its size and headed home empty-handed.
Will there be a time in my life when I'm not tired out of my mind? Better yet, will I ever get a moment to celebrate my apparent graduation? Perhaps I'll be able to celebrate with a Turkish job interview and be amply prepared to teach English as a second language. Because in real life we don't get to let time stop, do we. Maybe that's why everyone else says the time has gone by so fast, when I feel like it's taken forever, and I'm still not done.
-Sam goldsmith
I present my flowchart of the turbulent emotions of week 1 of my CTESOL (Certificate for Teaching English as a Second Language) classes:
Friday, May 7 - Cried in bed from loneliness, realizing all my best friends now live away from home, and I care about such things now. Went to the MET, but it didn't make me feel much better.
Saturday, May 8 - Had brunch with Owl Eyes before my flight. It's always exciting to spend time with those energetic friends of mine! Then caught my flight, which was delayed 3 1/2 hours and had to land in Salt Lake City to refuel.
Sunday, May 9 - Arrived home at 1:oo am. Any chance to get over jet-lag before classes started was squelched. Tried to have a relaxing day.
Monday, May 10 - Thrown into the mix. Handed a lesson to plan for "teacher practice" on the next day and another for Thursday. Apparently missed an important introductory week, and the instructor used TESOL jargon I'd never heard before (Lexis? Concept Check? Ss? What?????). Thank goodness there was another latecomer! Our instructor, though, is wonderful and patient, and already I learned a lot, enough to feel I could start my lesson plan without being completely blind. Longest day of classes since high school. How do those guys handle a full day of classes?
Speaking of high school, bumped into my high school English teacher on the way to the subway. We mutually pretended not to recognize each other.
Tuesday, May 11 - It turns out I've always been nervous in front of a class, though not knowing the level of the students beforehand didn't help. They were more advanced than I had anticipated, and I finished a little earlier than expected, even after using all my back-up activities. Overall, though? I was getting the hang of things around there, even though I was still yet to sleep well. Bonus: I finished John Wray's newest novel, Lowboy.
Wednesday, May 12 - J.J. Cale says: "Wednesday's hump day, hump day's Wednesday. The week's half gone." I felt so full after every lesson period that I can't even talk to people. The last time my head felt this heavy was... Cold War/Spy Novel class at NYU last semester. Speaking of NYU, as I was heading home on the train many of my friends were listen to Alec Baldwin at their - their - graduation ceremony. I was indescribably overjoyed I missed that!
Thursday, May 13 - The second class went much better than the first, even though things still didn't go as planned. I guess this means I'm learning something and getting better in general at this. Learned about teaching business English. I have no interest in teaching business English, but we still learned some interesting things about cultural awareness. All in all, our instructor rocks, and we earn our money's worth in the classroom.
Friday, May 14 - We talked about teaching children. Safe to say: parents can be creepy human beings at times. I'm much more afraid of a pair of them than a classroom of their bite-sized monsters. Went to Rasputin's in San Francisco to celebrate, hoping to buy the new LCD Soundsystem (which doesn't seem to come out until this Tuesday, sadly). Got scared by its size and headed home empty-handed.
Will there be a time in my life when I'm not tired out of my mind? Better yet, will I ever get a moment to celebrate my apparent graduation? Perhaps I'll be able to celebrate with a Turkish job interview and be amply prepared to teach English as a second language. Because in real life we don't get to let time stop, do we. Maybe that's why everyone else says the time has gone by so fast, when I feel like it's taken forever, and I'm still not done.
-Sam goldsmith
Friday, May 7, 2010
Farewell to New York
Ciao, Tutti!
And arrivaderci, New York City.
As of 4:55 tomorrow afternoon, I will be on my way out of this cubist sculptor's paradise, finished with college as of yesterday having never truly diving into college life. And it makes perfect sense that I will be going out on a mood swing; New York is a giant mood swing in itself. Example: this morning I helped an older man open the gate to his jewelery shop and we shared a good laugh before I was to walk on, the green light on my side, and get my ears blown out by a taxi driver making a sharp right and speeding off at 40 miles per hour. Mood swings. New York can't decide between angry and jovial, overwhelming and accepting, antisocial and agoraphobic, and the city jerks like an awkward drunk between these poles.
And here I am, leaving in a mood swing of my own. I can't deny my hating it, as I always have, even though it's been years since I've last left a love life on the left coast. I've never liked cities, I've never liked concrete, and I've never liked large groups of people. But, despite all the obvious reasons for my refusal to like New York, I am drawn to it, falling under its spell. Because it's main attraction is people. The impressive buildings are only tall for a few days - the experienced New Yorker looks up only in surprise for the rare instance he sees the sun. The museums are so numerous that Miró begins to look like Michelangelo who begins to look like an ancient Egyptian temple. There are so many concerts that they are all mediocre with the pressure of cranking out 250 each night, and music veers away from innovation and towards survival, as all New Yorkers must learn to do. But once you get to know some of the individuals who somehow found their ways here - from the suburbs of Chicago, a mansion in the middle of nowhere upstate, a tiny town 45 minutes from Flint, Michigan, or from a Jewish Nashville outlier - and all have crazy or normal lives to lead them here, I can't help but become attached.
So it's not New York that I've grown fond of, just the strange collection of friends I've made like unpolished colored marbles. And yet, how can I separate these things? The friends are in New York; they live here as I have. They exist in this suffocating atmosphere and we are united by our survival instinct, our tenacity in keeping from being swallowed by it. Our comradery is not formed based off our unified weathering of a magnificent storm but in our communal strength in avoiding the storm altogether, the beautiful fact that we were all driven to suspend the storm from reality within each other's company. And this is what makes some of the people of New York so wonderful once you get to know them. They suspend the awful and smelly habitat of the city and replace it with a warm cooperative of their own. New York ceases to exist, but that which takes its place could not come to pass without the city laying the groundwork first. If only it weren't so! And yet it cannot be any other way, I and I try to have no regrets.
So I will leave this city and the people in it. I will miss the people in it and forever loathe the city, but I'll have to put up with it whenever I want my old close friendships back.
- Sam goldsmith
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