What I'm Listening To, 2025.05.26

"What have they done with the fat ones, the bald and the goateed"

I've been in Spokane assisting my mom with a few errands and helping smooth the rough edges off of aging and the American medical system. To sound track our errands one day, I put on a playlist of the The Silver Jews.

"What band is this?" She asked.

I explained in brief the tragedy of David Berman and his collaborators. How I liked Silver Jews, but was a bigger fan of Pavement.I told her how much I appreciated the earnest poetry of Berman’s lyrics and the compositional depth that the band got from simple instrumentation. I elided Berman’s death from the story.

"Huh." She said. And then, a song later, "He can't sing."

"Neither could Bob Dylan." I said.

She laughed. "I guess you're right."

An hour later, two errands done, we glided down the street to her retirement community. "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat" was playing. I pull up to the front door to drop her off before I went to find a place to park so I could haul up her bags.

She opened the door, got out of the car, turned back, and said "he still can't sing."

There's a strange synchronicity with music recommendations that I put more weight on than I should as a good post-Modern. I recently reconnected with a friend from high school. In one of our first conversations in almost two decades he recommended the new Deep Sea Diver album. I jotted it down, but didn't get around to it.

A week later, another student in a writing class I'm taking mentioned that they were obsessed with the new Deep Sea Diver record. I decided to bump it up the list.

I walked into downtown one evening, headed for Riverfront Park for no other reason than it was finally spring and too nice to stay inside. I put on Billboard Heart. It felt like a record out of time. It was the kind of thing I would have obsessed over in the mid-aughts, ironically the last time I lived in Spokane full time. It’s well done, and catchy in places, but now in my 40s I found it aimless and kind of samey.

I’m going to give it a few more listens before I write off Deep Sea Diver as “not for me” (or maybe “for a version of me from two decades ago”), but it I’m surprised it hit so flat for me.

On paper, it should be right up my alley. Chaotic, noisy indie rock, with good guitar lines and interesting composition. It’s even got evocative-yet-cryptic lyrics of a sort that I’m usually a sucker for. For some reason, though I’ve just bounced off it.

Maybe the set and setting was wrong. Maybe it’s not the kind of record that lends itself to warm Spring evenings with nothing to do but wander the park.

My first real night in town, I went to my friends' secret movie club. Twice a month they rent a theater and someone brings a movie, but no one else gets to know what it is until it starts playing.

My friend Paul brought Reefer Madness, which he'd also showed me in college. I remember being absolutely smitten with Neve Campbell (playing a bit part in support of her brother Christian Campbell who is the wayward male lead). The entire cast is electric. Kristen Bell is charming and brilliant in the female lead. I particularly like Alan Cumming playing a pitch-perfect smarmy villain, as well as FDR, a Bacchus figure, and a number of other bit parts.

I'm honestly not much of one for musicals, but I have to admit when they're good. Reefer Madness is better than it should be and the libretto (do you call it that for a filmed musical?) is an absolute treasure. The balance of irony in the script is almost perfect, only tipping into eye-rolling levels of mock sincerity towards the very end. (The message is good, it's just laid on too thick.)

It’s worth two hours of your life if you like goofy musical schlock and great acting in a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s even better with a bunch of friends in a rented theater in a small town if you can arrange it.