vainglory : all my little words : grousing : identity at $1 a page

"A writer, who was a celebrity in Paris, had entered her shop one day. He was not looking for a hat. He asked if she sold luminous flowers that he had heard about, flowers which shone in the dark. He wanted them, he said, for a woman who shone in the dark..."

"Mathilde did not have them. But as soon as the man left she went to look at herself in the mirror. This was the kind of feeling she wanted to inspire. Could she? Her glow was not of that nature. She was much more like fire than light..."

"The man had come back. But this time he was not asking for anything to buy. He stood looking at her, his long finely carved face smiling, his elegant gestures making a ritual out of lighting a cigarette, and said, 'This time I came back just to see you.'

Mathilde's heart beat so swiftly that she felt as if this were the moment she had expected for years. She almost stood up on her toes to hear the rest of his words. She felt as if she were the luminous woman sitting back in the dark box receiving the unusual flower. But what the polished, gray-haired writer said in his aristocratic voice was, 'As soon as I saw you, I was stiff in my pants.'

The crudity of the words was like an insult. She reddened and struck at him.

This scene was repeated on several occasions. Mathilde found that when she appeared, men were usually speechless, deprived of all inclinations for romantic courtship. Such words as these fell from them each time at the mere sight of her. Her effect was so direct that all they could express was their physical disturbance. Instead of accepting this as a tribute, she resented it."

~ Anais Nin, "Mathilde," Delta of Venus, 1940

acculturation : aural : indie pop/rock : death cab for cutie's plans

[Edited, 01/03/06 09:55 a.m.]

Let me disclaim right at the start that I had never seriously listened to Death Cab for Cutie until, hmm, two weeks ago-ish. I've been digging The Postal Service since late Spring, but it wasn't until I heard "Soul Meets Body" on the radio that I thought, "Huh... methinks I might also enjoy Ben Gibbard's day job..."

DCfC's latest, Plans, procured, I set to listening. And listening and listening. And listening. Etc. In one instance -- three times over, consecutively.

This record is perilous. Baneful. It enfolds one into a hazardly alluring sadness. To my mind, that is the authentication of melancholy as device and as experience both: you percept a beauty. It breaks your heart. You do not particularly enjoy the sensation, but you return to it again and again, sometimes relieved at its termination, albeit racked -and pleasurably so- by a spiritual analog of the full-body hiccup-sobs befitting a post-hysterical child.

Ellipses: the craving remains.

In other words, this album makes me want to shoot myself in the head. But in a good way.

Sure, there are tracks that invite dismissal; sophomoric, seemingly penned for those, both expectedly and figuratively, suffering from Teenage Bedroom Syndrome. "You Will Be Loved" is perhaps the most transparent scapegoat for such a reductive nit-pick.

The opening track, "Marching Bands of Manhattan," "Soul Meets Body," and "Your Heart Is an Empty Room" are stand-outs, but I find it difficult to list any one track as any less than Really Fucking Gorgeous.

Save for "What Sarah Said," i.e. the undeniably most affective and infective song on Plans.

This song causes me to burst into tears in much the same way that Joan Baez dueting with Dar Williams on the latter's "You're Aging Well" once did.

And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to father time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I’ve already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me

Circulating piano, a sustained hold... Love is watching someone die... after which the percussive shimmer, organ bass, and cascading piano each stagger their return and then, zenith-ridden... So who's going to watch you die?, dismantle and fade, fade, withdrawing in reverse order. The track never seems to end so much as to retreat, reinfuse itself into one's personal amygdalic ether.

Death is not an entirely difficult concept to grasp. Earthly ephemera and the surviving may complicate and be complicated by it but, as They are fond of saying, it's right up there with taxes: inevitable, we all sorta 'get' the prospect of that eventuality. Yet, there's also the high rate at which the things that ought to be simplest to comprehend being the very same most taken for granted. Or, more likely, most temporally denied -- especially when it comes to the ones we love.

It's the moments in which we fully realize the immutable... with luck, this occurs in rehearsal, emotionally speaking, but even still we may be shaken to the core; the histrionics, large-scale, intense, but in the end it is, it has to be, c'est la mother-fucking vie.

On the other hand, "What Sarah Said" intrigues and then more deeply troubles me because an alternate reading detects a spitefulness (to be fair, possibly a factor ushered in by the would-be patient threatening his/her own life; a suicide attempt, or perhaps by means of drugs or reckless conduct) in Gibbard's conclusion... that is, if we are to assume that the 'you' is the same for whom he waits: for if his place in the waiting room defines 'love', and yet there is the question as to who will further endure the hospice vigil, then... ouch.

Should that interpretation fly, this song makes a strong showing against Sufjan Stevens' "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." for Most Heartbreaking Metaphor of 2005.

Summarily, with Plans, you are opportuned to resign yourself to the most cardiac-quivering loveliness. Sigh and sour but, hopefully, love in spite of what awaits.

Addendum: I had been focusing my ear so single-mindedly (or, rather, single-ear...edly) on the elemental melancholia of Plans that I neglected to give credit to the insidiously earwormy, non-morose tracks. "Different Names for the Same Thing," along with a few others mentioned above, are full of the kind of balmy, sparkly production that reminds me of the smell of earth after a rain shower. 'Oh,' you might very well be thinking. 'How very...pedestrian of you to say.' Then allow me to particularize -- I speak of the sort of wet dirt essence which occurs only in that narrow frame of time after the April thaw, spring not quite vestigial, the cusp of summer still at a distance. Oddly steamy, yet with a chill sharp to the nostrils. Bright. Pavement-darkening.