Teenagers are Funny

The week of Kyle's accident is pretty fuzzy. I remember the call, but not what day it was. I remember the flight, but not the airports. I remember the high school science lab smell of my brother, how it got stronger when I leaned in to kiss him, but I don't remember the doctors or nurses or psychiatrists that shuttled in and out. I remember some of the drive down to LA for the funeral - Big Sur's big cliffs and the violet ocean, the small arc of Cayucos and how it hasn't changed at all since Kyle and I walked out to the end of the endless pier. I remember some of LA - staying in a Santa Monica hotel instead of my mother's house, driving a rental instead of her car, everything both familiar and absolutely strange. I remember the funeral. I remember the coffin. It looked so much more beautiful than I thought it would look. I remember wanting to stay and watch them fill the dirt in on top of my brother, but knowing that I was expected to leave, that these things are usually done without the swollen, judgemental eyes of family around.

I also remember a song. I left New York with a strange collection of things - five sweaters for an LA summer but only three pairs of underwear, a bathing suit but no socks, a whole stack of novels I of course didn't read. I also forgot my iPod, so the only music we had for the car was J's Shuffle, and on it a random sampling of songs from his ridiculously large and obscure music collection, most of which seemed to lack a melody or identifiable lyrics. One song, though, stood out. It was by Bright Eyes (a shocker, I know), I'd never heard it before, but once I did I played it over and over.

You know how songs can become linked to events? How you hear a verse for the first time when you're falling in love, or moving to a new city, or driving around your hometown with a dead brother on your back, and it fuses to the memory of your experience. It makes you cry. Well, that's what this song did for me. It's called Cleanse Song, and I think that for the rest of my life it will be the soundtrack of my brother's week-long journey from train platform to hospital to grave.

I was looking for the Cleanse Song video on YouTube to show you, but apparently there isn't one. Instead, I found this - a teenager being painfully and publicly emotive. Just like me.

Power. To the. Peeeeeple!

Have you heard of YouTuber rx2008? He makes videos out of political footage and surprisingly appropriate songs, and the Bush mashup he did last year is one of the most-viewed political videos on YouTube:



Apparently rx2008 is a fan of Mike Gravel, because he approached Gravel's staffers at a Las Vegas dinner in November and said he wanted to make a video with him. At first they demured - despite his exclusion from the debates, Gravel is running for president and can't be making YouTube spots with just anyone. But then rx2008 said he was the guy behind "Sunday Bloody Sunday," a staffer favorite, and Gravel agreed to be filmed. Here is the "weird, wonderful" result:



Isn't it catchy? Now I just have to figure out how to get it on my ipod.

In other weird, wonderful news, My Brother Is Dead is now a sermon!

J's dad is a Methodist minister in a small Texas town, and he emailed to ask if he could quote a bit of my blog in his Sunday sermon. And, even though the last "sermon" I attended was a Unitarian meditation on peace my mother brought us to in middle school, I have to say it's a pretty cool feeling to know that, last Sunday morning, 103 people is a north Texas church were thinking about Kyle and me. The world is endlessly surprising.

Go here to read the sermon, and here to visit David's blog.

Great Lies

"The great lie in America is that happiness is available to anyone whose means and desires coincide."

GTD from sheli_kaysevin@agenturblum.de:
Put your lassie on fire of pleasement!

Play For Me, I'll Cry For You

So the Bright Eyes show was absolutely amazing. And I'm not just saying that. I had been repeatedly warned that their shows tend to be not that great. Unprofessional, short, and drunken were the adjectives of choice. So I was prepared for them to suck, even at Radio City Music Hall, and I was willing to come back and report to you that my beloved Bright Eyes were a disappointment live.

But before I tell you how wrong I was, can we talk for a second about Radio City? Have you ever been there? It's massive and grand with a ridiculous amount of orange fabric everywhere. I mean, just look at this:


But what blew my mind were the acoustics. They were spectacular. I thought the thing about live music was that the quality is never as good as a studio recording, that you went because the immediacy and energy made up for it. But I was wrong. Apparently, all you need is a really great sound mixer and one of the most famous venues in America to make absolutely gorgeous live music.

And of course it helps if the band is genius. Bright Eyes really had their shit together last night. The lyrics were brilliant, the trumpet player kept making me shiver, and they covered my favorite Tom Petty song in the whole wide world. No one seemed drunk, either.



I have something to confess, though. I cried. I cried at the last Modest Mouse show, too. I haven't been crying too much these days, but there's something about the intensity of a live performance that just gets me. They're hunched and screaming up there, they're thrashing their instruments, and the way my collarbones vibrate it's like they're telling me they know. It doesn't matter if the song's about war or love or New York, when it gets to the part where the guitars are wild and the singer is pushing the last bit of air from his lungs, my eyes start to burn and I have to look up and remind myself that I'm happy.

I wonder if this will continue, if I'll always cry at live music, if it will always make me think of my brother. I don't mind if it does. It's cathartic. When I left the Bright Eyes show the air was brisk and I was spent and calm. If I felt a little sad, it was the sweet kind.

Birthday Dream

I had a birthday Saturday, which was a lot of fun, though I ended up with food poisoning on Sunday. Severe vomiting was hardly an auspicious beginning to my 26th year...but hey, there's no way 26 can be worse than 25, right?

That night, some of my girlfriends and I went to a bar, and let me tell you (if you already don't know), tipsy women will get into some bizarre conversations when there's no testosterone around. Did you know they have hair-dyeing kits specifically for the pubic region? Me neither.

And the celebration continues. Tonight, J and I are going to a Bright Eyes show at Radio City Music Hall. I haven't seen Bright Eyes live, nor have I been to Radio City, and my excitement grows by the hour.



But really, the reason I'm writing this post is to tell you about the dream I had Friday night. It was a Kyle dream, only my second since he died, and, unlike 99.9% of the dreams I have, I woke up with it absolutely clear and coherent in my mind.

Kyle and I were in my apartment, but my apartment was in some sort of New York City projects skyscraper, and out the window I could see one of those benched courtyards that drug dealers use as commercial spaces. Kyle and I were just hanging out...well, hanging out isn't the right phrase. We were more coexisiting, sharing the same space out of necessity more than choice. Just like families do.

And Kyle was being a brat. Bugging me for this and that, going through my shit, being an overall pain in the ass, just like he was in life. This struck me as funny, even in the dream. I had a sort of half awareness that he was already dead, and in the dream I couldn't help but laugh at the contrast between how reverentially we've all been treating him in death and the reality of his life, in which he was frequently a loud, obnoxious, punk-ass kid. It was reassuring, though. I'd been feeling all this guilt at having spent so much of my time squabbling with him, and the dream was a reminder that hey, just because Kyle's dead doesn't change the fact that he could be a real jerk sometimes. He was a little brother, for chrissakes, and while I certainly could have had more big-sisterly patience, he could've spent a little less time snooping through my stuff.

Anyway, at the end of the dream, Kyle leaned out the window to shout to all the people down in the courtyard, "My sister's doing a reading in ten minutes! And she has huge tits!" The crowd roared, and I looked out to see not the few dozen people that had been milling around out there, but hundreds and hundreds of cheering people in puffy coats, all with their faces turned up to me, all begging for the show to begin.

So I picked up a play (I don't know which one or who wrote it, regrettably), stripped to my waist, stood in the window, and began to monologue. I only got a few words out, though, because then the cops came and began busting heads, and I watched, bare-breasted, as a riot broke out below me.

Weird, huh?

GTD from 760***4827:
Wana get up nails dond wit me 2nite? N den chil at my casa?

Poll Part II

A big thanks to all of you who weighed in on the Do You Realize? debate. Here are the results:

There were 4 resounding No's, ages 41, 46, 49, and 59. Since I have decided that Kyle would also be a no (if only because I am a yes), we'll add a 22 and call it 5.

There were 8 Yes's, ages 20, 22, late 20s, 33, 48, 49, 50s, and 58. And then there's me of course, at the tail end of 25, making it a total of 9.

While my sample is hardly representative, I think it's safe to say that there's a definite age bias working here. With the exception of Kyle, the No's all cleared 40. And with the exception of my roommate (41, m, and only likes psychadelic or dub music made between February and August of 1967), the No's were all women, and related to me. Draw from that what you will.

So how about this guy? He's the new Dylan, as far as I'm concerned. And Kyle didn't like him, either.

I Have Another Question For You

So, as you may have read, I included a Flaming Lips song in my Wyoming is Beautiful post, because when I looked at Cindy's photograph with its big sky and little flowers and reaching, hopeful grain, I could only think of the bells and grandeur and wild happiness of Do You Realize? And I posted it sure that, even if no one else got the connection, they could love the photo and the song, because each were so obviously beautiful and easy on the senses.

But then my mom left this comment:

"i am not getting this. cindy's beautiful photo i get. but what's with that dreadful video. that wretched song. fake rabbits. bad dancers.an elephant? help me out here. has it to do with the GTD?
oh. maybe hallucinogens."

And I have to say, this shocked the hell out of me. Here I thought the Flaming Lips were doing a modern day Beatles thing, what with their catchy, expansive melodies, Ringo Starr drum rolls, and love-conquers-all lyrics. I thought if any song on my iPod would play well to a Baby Boomer ear, Do You Realize? would be it.

So will you do me a favor? Listen to the song again and tell me what you think. Do you love it? Hate it? Understand it? Have I discovered one of those often discussed but rarely realized Generation Gaps, or is this just a case of my mom and I not seeing eye to eye? Please include your age (or at least your decade) in your response.

Wyoming Is Beautiful

Look at this.
My dad's photographer friend (she's my friend, too, but he found her first) Cindy Bennett took it. It reminds me of the Flaming Lips. Check Cindy out.



GTD from dawna.maguire@sensormatic.com:
(If your in your office, keep the speakers low, lol) I know you will like this. Heck you might even pass it on. LOL

Frank Mulatto UPDATE

Here's the full speech, with both better production and the ending. You may have to sit through a short but brightly-colored, choreographed commercial at the beginning, though.

Fire it UP!

And here's my choice for Obama's new theme song. I know he's under a lot of pressure to black himself up and everything, so his show is very hiphop heavy, but if you listen to the speech you'll see why Modest Mouse is an obvious choice:



Support Barack Obama for president! I've given money and I don't have any, so you should to.

Heavy Things

I went to a Modest Mouse show in Brooklyn last night. Kyle hated Modest Mouse. There's this one single, Float On, that you've probably heard because they can't play it enough on the radio. Once, when I was home for Christmas in '05, Kyle and I were driving through Eagle Rock and it came on. I turned it up. Kyle turned it off. He was heavy into reggae by then and considered the number of white bands on my iPod to be a sign of my lack of musical maturity. I turned the radio back on. Kyle turned it off again. I screamed at him. He called me a whiny bitch. It went on like this until the song ended. After that, every time I sang along to Float On, even back in New York, I thought of Kyle and how ashamed he would be if only he knew what I was listening to.

The venue last night was outside in this massive 7000 person 1930s swimming pool. The sky was wide above and the night was thick and sticky. Towards the end of the set, the drum beat to Float On started and a breeze picked up. The crowd cheered - it had been waiting for this - the melody started, and I thought of Kyle reaching for the radio dial with his spider fingers. "You can't listen to this pop shit, Mir. This is really bad."

There's this line in Float On that I've always loved:
Don't worry
Even if things end up a bit too heavy
We'll all float on all right.

Last night, I looked up into the gray bowl of the sky and saw that it was empty. It didn't hold my brother's body or soul or the promise of seeing him again. He wasn't up there, smiling down and shaking his big ol' head as I danced in a crowd of white people. He wasn't anywhere at all. That realization was like a great weight on my neck. My brother was dead and buried and the only place he was anymore was with me. On me. Like he was suddenly sitting on my shoulders, his legs hanging to the ground, his fingers wrapped around my forehead, and he was never going to let me put him down.

I smiled then. I felt slow, and lonely, and heavy, but I smiled because even dragged down like that, I was okay. Dragged down like that, my mother was going to be okay. My father was going to be okay. Things had ended up entirely too heavy, we had to carry Kyle with us now, but somehow we were still standing. It was a shock - who knew we could hold that much weight? - but it was also encouraging. If we could still stand, we could still walk. And if we could still walk, someday we might be able to float.

Common People

Have you ever heard William Shatner's cover of Common People by Pulp?

Now, before your lip slides up too high in a superior sneer - as mine did when I discovered Shatner covertly slipped onto my ipod - you should know that it is amazing. Really. For whatever reason, Shatner's pompous, insane talk-singing works just exquisitely with this song. The production is amazing and the chorus? It rocks.

So I went to find it on youtube to show you, but I could only find videos made by others. The best of which is below. At first, I was gonna tell you to press play and then minimize the screen, so you could listen to the song without watching some dude mouthing the words. But then I watched the dude? And he's good. I like him. So now I suggest listening first without watching, so you can get the satisfaction of imaging Shatner in Star Trek pajamas telling what's what to some rich bitch, and then watch the dude.