For those of you who don’t know my method, here’s the explanation from a couple years ago. Remember, just a mix of songs from the year, not a “best of”.

Click photo for tuneage. Track list below (sans notes).

1. Beirut – Santa Fe
2. The Belle Brigade – Belt of Orion
3. Fruit Bats – Tony the Tripper
4. P.G. Six – January
5. Good Luck Mountain – Softly Tonight
6. Brian Eno – Bless This Space
7. Akron/Family – So It Goes
8. Gillian Welch – Scarlet Town
9. Wye Oak – Civilian
10. Ikebe Shakedown – Tujunga
11. YACHT – Dystopia
12. Alela Diane – Heartless Highway
13. Joe Henry – Odetta
14. Thurston Moore – Benediction
15. Low – Something’s Turning Over
16. Mia Doi Todd – All My City
17. Jonathan Wilson – Can We Really Party Today?
18. The Cave Singers – Swim Club
19. Vetiver – Worse for Wear
20. Tinariwen – Imidiwan Ma Tennam

Christmix 2011

Blue Holiday – Aretha Franklin
Pretty Paper – Willie Nelson
I Want My Baby for Christmas – Jimmy Liggins & His Drops of Joy
Holiday Hymn – Orange Juice
Christmas in Jail, Ain’t That a Pain – Leroy Carr
Joy to the World – John Fahey
The Last Month of the Year – Vera Hall Ward
Occom’s Carol – Tim Eriksen
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel – Joan Baez
Ain’t That A-Rocking – Odetta
Listening to Otis Redding During Christmas – Okkervil River

Today I really loved my job. In the morning I taught Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, which takes place in the summer of 1985, when the narrator is 15. (The book’s climax, if it can be called that, is the day that Lisa Lisa—and Cult Jam!—come into the ice cream shop where the narrator works and order waffle cones.) The class was a freshman seminar. The students were born in 1993. They want to know: Did we really rollerskate that much? What did New Coke taste like, and why was it such a big deal? Why were arcade games so fascinating?

1985. Reader, it made me proud that the first record I ever bought with my own money was Purple Rain, and that I saw The Goonies in the movie theater several times that summer.

In the afternoon I taught Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. (The goon in question, if you’re wondering, is Time. The destroyer.) The novel won the Pulitzer last year and, if you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to do so right away. It begins in the punk scene of the 1970s and goes several years into the future. Kind of a Gen-X Remembrance of Things Past. Makes you wonder where we’ll be ten years from now, and what popular music we’ll be digging by then.

In between, at lunchtime, I thought a lot about how this year’s mix was shaping up and how ambivalent I feel about the synthetic eighties production drenching most of the tracks. Were the eighties really that great? Post-punk and new wave, sure. But this year’s music doesn’t ape Joy Division or even The Cars. (That’s so five years ago!) No, we’re talking unabashed Top-40 plundering, Billy Ocean and Belinda Carlisle-type shit. Can’t we just let those sounds rest in peace? And does it sound so unwelcome to my ears because it was bad the first time around, or merely because it was the soundtrack to my most awkward years? (Also: does pop always get more sugary the worse the economy becomes?)

My students love this music fervently, nostalgic for a time that never really was. Then again, The Breakfast Club is their Citizen Kane. (Doesn’t it make you happy for Molly Ringwald, that she grew up just fine and moved to France? And glad for all of us, that we grew up, too?)

Listen here. (p.s. Some of the tracks are from 2010. It’s hard to keep up. “Time is a goon.”)

1. The Fight—Sia
2. Junk Of The Heart (Happy)—The Kooks
3. Fair Game—The Like
4. Little Numbers—Boy
5. Amor Fati—Washed Out
6. Paradisco—Charlotte Gainsbourg
7. When We’re Dancing—Twin Shadow
8. Paradise Engineering—Yacht
9. Hoop of Love—Dominant Legs
10. Bicycle—Unknown Mortal Orchestra
11. Romance—Wild Flag
12. Lazy Bones—Wooden Shjips
13. Last Legs—Army Navy
14. Jesus Fever—Kurt Vile
15. Boxer—Lovers
16. Who Am I to Feel So Free—MEN
17. Sutphin Boulevard—Blood Orange
18. Lose It—Austra
19. Book Of Revelation—The Drums

A loud buzz signals that the metallic hammering is about to begin, a technological blacksmith pounding my molecules against an electronic anvil. The noises vary in pitch and length, long patterns that hold for a while and then change, slamming against the giant red noise-canceling headphones that can’t keep out the aural onslaught. But the sounds make patterns, comforting in their regularity, engaging in their changes.

First, the intro to MIA’s “Paper Planes” seems to be playing, but the chord change never comes and I settle into its sameness for a while. Then I imagine the sounds to be a big long Philip Glass opus, like the score for Koyaanisqatsi; I imagine the landscapes and urban decay and people mobs of those images set to the clinks of the MRI machine. I think of Bang on a Can, Aphex Twin. I remember the movie Altered States.

I imagine that if an entirely spondaic line of poetry could exist, it would sound like this. The machine throbs. I think about those pod-bed “hotels” in Japanese airports. The pulse intensifies. I hear the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” when she imagines the mourners tromping, “treading—treading–” across her soul with “boots of lead.” The tempo shifts. The pitch increases. I am in a private space and my mind is meandering first to concrete comparisons and favorite people, then just abstractions, flashes of color and feelings of sound.

The technician interrupts on the loudspeaker every few minutes to let me know when another round of noises will begin, and I find that when the noises stop, I start to wish he wouldn’t say anything. I am sure he does so because most people find it comforting to hear the human voice, but I like the buzzes and beeps and the total retreat.

In between rounds, the technician reels me up to the surface and I find I don’t really want to go. He makes fun of me for looking away when he hooks the IV into my arm, and I object to this because I am really not freaking out; it’s just that no one actually likes to watch that jab, right? Or looks forward to it? It makes me want to dive back inside to escape his jollity.

Instead, since it’s not up to me when I glide back in, I ask the technician what makes the noises, and he says the sound is there to move the microelectrons in my bloodstream, to upset them so they register an image. A few minutes later, face down in the tube, I feel the cold contrast dye seeping sluggishly into my vein and settle in for the next song. And I can feel the electromagnets pulling on the fluids in my body like a lunar banshee of a moon-tide. My ear piercing vibrates under the headphones as the force of science tugs at it. But the itch stops soon and all that’s left is the hail of pure powerful sound.

I emerge from the tube with deep red grooves on my cheeks from lying face down on the face cradle. I absently mention that the music was good and he says oh boy, I’m worried now, she’s hallucinating, so I stop talking about it. Groggy and quiet after my time in the tube, I want to keep my thoughts to myself. I duck my head as I walk through the loud waiting room in hopes that my hair will hide the marks on my face, into the different sounds of a different atmosphere. I sort of miss the music.

1.) This song “A Real Hero” by College (feat. Electric Youth) is from the movie Drive. I could not stop playing this song every day, ten times a day, for a week straight. Especially after experiencing the movie. Go ahead, see the movie and see if you do not play this song obsessively. And if you go, which I strongly recommend, know this: it has some serious violence. I felt a bit traumatized when the movie ended. But also, I felt like I had just watched something amazing. One of my favorite movies of the year. Anyone else feel the same?

Click here to view the embedded video.

2.) Berlin. While visiting that city a couple weeks ago we were struck by a few things. First, it’s a really really fun place to visit right now (ok, for a few years now, but we’re late to the party). It’s cheap. It’s energized. There is a DIY artistic entrepreneurial-ness everywhere. Except for the food–which is terrible (Such a weird defect in a world-class city. But, communism, I imagine, was not a nurturing patron of inventive cuisines. Also, as a guide book pointed out, Germany’s short-lived stint as a World Empire meant that its colonies never got a gastro-foot-hold in Berlin, unlike say, Britain’s Indian cuisine, France’s Moroccan, Dutch’ Indonesian, etc.) Another thing, a lot of people walk their dogs off-leash. And people don’t seem to care. And people walk their dogs right onto the subway. It’s a very permissive city. You can buy beer, wine, liquor at just about any corner store. And throughout the night. And you can carry it on the street. Or onto the subway. Berlin’s treatment of alcohol is fascinating. I’ve never seen people on a subway car at 10:30 in the morning enjoying a large green bottle of beer. People who look like they’re on their way to work. Perhaps other countries in the world are just as permissive, I’ve just never seen it displayed like this before. The other thing about Berlin is how it makes you confront some heavy heavy shit. You don’t get that gut-kick visiting Barcelona or Beijing. The War, the holocaust, the Wall. There are some really moving memorials and museums completed in the last few years, in particular, the holocaust memorial and the Jewish History Museum (by Daniel Libeskind). I won’t describe them here, but by themselves they would make the trip to Berlin worth the trouble.

3.) Amsterdam. Has anyone else been there recently? Is it just me, or is it just a little bit boring? For all the ground-breaking permissiveness of this city (red-lights, coffee houses, legalized outdoor sex in their public park, etc.), it felt really sleepy. Central Amsterdam–outside of the red-light district–is a gorgeous and dreamy world of canals, bridges, and 17th Century houses and is clearly inhabited by very wealthy people. It’s like visiting those tiny brownstone streets in the West Village, except with much greater acreage and more beauty, and everyone rides bikes instead of cabs, but it still feels unwelcoming, like you don’t belong there. And for a city known for its nightlife, it closes down really early. We had a hard time finding a place for dinner after ten. And it was hard to get find a decent place to have a drink after eleven. It felt at times like a movie-set that gets abandoned by night–except for that occasional bike whisking by. Maybe Summer is a lot different than October. And with a pack of friends in the know, it’s probably a lot more fun. Did we miss something? Is there a good reason to visit again soon?

4.) Occupy Wall Street. A couple days ago I came across this link to Adbusters that proposed OWS finally take up a unifying cause: The Robin Hood Tax. Why hadn’t I heard of this until now? The Robin Hood Tax video (feat. Bill Nighy) below is from February. Of 2010. I should really check my facebook more often. Regardless, the video’s pretty clever. Could this idea really work? Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have signed on. And a lot of smart economists too. Could this be the unifying rallying cry that OWS could finally manifest? Maybe. Is this the time? Adbusters proposes October 29th. The Robin Hood Global March. Torches and pitchforks. And our TGW masks. If this is for real, my fellow travelers, let’s make ourselves heard! Anyone in?

Click here to view the embedded video.