Dear Listener,

My original plan for this blog was to continue the discussion I was having with myself about Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell.  I’m not going to do that.  Instead I’m going to talk about the song that has rented a room in my head for the past week.  To do so, I’ll need to regress a couple months for a little backstory (aka blatant self-promotion).

If you read my first blog, you’d know that I had seen the closing of Be-Bop as an employee.  On the last day of Jackson’s beloved (not beloved enough) lost record store, I was attending the second amazing record swap known as 4TheRecord.  Special for the event, Cody Cox and I put together a cd featuring fourteen songs that we ript from vinyl and called it Issue #2.  The first track that appears on this mix is by The Walkmen (signed to Oxford’s own Fat Possum records, y’all!) called Angela Surf City from their sixth full-length record Lisbon (2010).

More recently I’ve been trying very anxiously to finish The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I don’t know if it’s common with all booksellers, but I’ve had a fair amount of difficulty not leaving work with a new book.  That being the case, I became less and less interested in Mr. Fitzgerald’s work and more interested in the shiny new books. With respect towards the Lost Generation, I ceased reading altogether for a handful of days.  Until I decided it was time once and for all to finish what I had started.  The first problem that I faced was the center of the book: the spoils that the rich in love had left me with were quickly spoiling.  On top of that, I was losing focus on the words and focusing on the aforementioned song by The Walkmen.

That’s when everything started to come together.  The song itself is bouncy and upbeat with a side of surf rock.  But the lyrics are telling a different story about hate and love.  Very much mirroring the story that I am attempting to read about our friends Anthony and Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned.  So I kept listening.  The tone of The Walkmen’s song isn’t necessarily positive, but who really wants pure positivity?  Isn’t a little bitterness and cynicism good for the wit muscles every now and then?  Either way I saw a dramatic improvement in my overall demeanor in five short minutes just by mixing my medias. (hint hint) And more accurately, I was really able to hand myself over to Mr. Fitzgerald once again.

by Simon

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