A word for music

[Edited 4-13]

Therefore goes the rock to which I can attest. I just wasn’t up for it, and nothing speaks to that more than our semi-attempt to see the Wrens. Did not see the Wrens. Actually, we did see them, standing around in front of their bus after the show that we missed. I regret it more now than I did at the time; at the time we were all suffering stimulation overload, and the Wrens, more than any other band, would have put me in a weird place. Just a year ago—my twenty second year, post-graduate year, one of the worst years yet—I spent almost every afternoon swinging in a hammock listening to men almost twenty years older than me sing angry and sad songs about disappointment and loss. “I’m nowhere near/where I’d dreamt I’d be/I can’t believe/what life’s done to me.” Shudder. Before Blake, before New York, before the campaign. Too much since then to go back.

So we were way too slack in our effort to see them, but the tardiness yielded one happy surprise; while milling about the venue’s entrance, I ran into one of the office workers from the campaign -- K____, a girl who I had met twice, from Grassroots Campaigns' Recruiting office. She'd come to help out our office during the Republican National Convention, during probably my single best day of canvassing (twelve hundred something dollars, and hardly any high contributions in the bunch) We barely know each other, but like fellow war vets there was something that was hard to miss as we passed by. We exchanged greetings and information, talked for just a minute, and kept walking. I’m taking particular care to collect these contacts – everyone has a different version of the same story, and I want to hear as many as I can.

The other highlight of our weekend was the Merge label’s Friday afternoon barbecue party, the perfect thing to go to on the morning after the M.I.A/LCD Soundsystem extravaganza. We missed the Rosebuds, but got there just in time to see Crooked Fingers, who were great.

The crowd was quite amiable, lounging about in the bright sun, many of them looking pretty ridiculous but nobody really caring. Everyone seems very self-conscious about place at SXSW, proud of place, it’s hard not to notice: they dress sort of like Texans, and their festival is in the Texas capital, filling the place with freaks and songs. All rocking and (some) hip hopping past capacity and into the streets just six blocks from the cursed Capitol that incubated our current nightmare, now into its triumphant second term. if the whole festival wasn’t laced with industry money and insufferable scenesterism you could almost peg it as some kind of defiant protest. Still sometimes you can ignore the insufferables, or at least accept them, and the Friday barbecue was one of those times. See? Skinny, happy people enjoying each other’s company—and goddamn if it isn’t a better Texas all around.

We schmoozed after Crooked Fingers. It being a Merge party, I recognized a bunch of Durhamite faces. Paula Cook, who was a Duke English department secretary for four years, was there with us. I was also surprised to see Robert Kelley, an old Dukie and fellow Recess staffer. Robert said he had come to see the Long Winters, and he would say that again several times. Right around the time the Long Winters came on to play, Terry came in, since the venue was near his ballet class. Terry and Paula and I were all looking forward to see Margaret again, who also worked in the Duke English department before moving to Chicago; the last time any of us had seen her was in Austin.

(When Paula called me the day after the election—to ‘see how I was holding up’—she said that Margaret was talking some crazy talk about Plans.

'Margie and her friends are just going to start driving,’ Paula said softly over the phone. 'Go out there into the red states and, you know, talk to people.’ At the time, it sounded like a good a plan as any. Sure, talk to them. It’s that or ignore ‘em, or civil war; might as well pretend we’re a nation of adults here. At that dark moment, however, “talk to them” seemed to be an utterly unreasonable plan.)

The Long Winters played an acoustic set, and made up for the want of a band with lolling banter. I always thought that their last album, When I Pretend to Fall, was totally overlooked. it was good to see that these guys had healthy humor.

“This next song was on the MoveOn.org compilation, Future Soundtrack of America,” said frontman John Roderick. “But we can’t blame it for what happened.”

“No we certainly can’t,” said the other singer. “This song did the best it could.” The whole crowd laughed. “Sorry if we offended any rednecks out there. As Barsuk [the band’s record label] tells us, rednecks buy records too.” Everywhere I go, there’s rarely ever a Bushie to be worried about offending. Makes it quite easy to laugh at these jokes, even if they are really on us.

I knew that MoveOn soundtrack. The Long Winters’ song is “The Commander Thinks Aloud,” and I think it’s about a plane crash. It has the light, high-alt beauty and arc of flight, and when they played it there at the barbecue it was one of the prettiest things I’d ever heard, even moreso when they forgot the lyrics, laughed, and then sang higher, “because the air contains the charge…can you feel it, we’re almost home,” and let out a series of yelping lilting yeah-yaaaays.

On the MoveOn soundtrack, this song (subtitled “Future mix,” which should be a warning) is almost defaced with tinned, too-canny production; in fact, most of the songs on the comp seem more deliberate than they need to be, which is what you should expect from a Dave Eggers-curated mixtape. The song from that comp that I know better by far, though, was by M. Doughty, formerly of Soul Coughing. I liked Soul Coughing a lot in high school; never quite rocked like that before. But this was a pasty, mealy dish, a weak derivative of the Soul Coughing formula. It was called, with intention that was yes all-too-deliberate, “Move On.”

I never want to hear it again.

During the Leave No Voter Behind campaign, they played that track on repeat in our office, I guess in an attempt to score a theme song, perky and bright, to our increasingly harried campaign. It got to the point where my music snobbery was the only thing saving our office from falling into a warped time schism of perpetually-reverberating nasal dam-dam-duh-duh-dam-dams and “move on move on”s and cyclical acoustic riffage, a vicious cycle surely to result in some lite-rock mind-fuck for all within our building.

On the weekend before election day, our entire office was forced to host this “Super Rally," supposedly for every volunteer in our Miami-Dade universe. They played that song on repeat for like three hours while all eighty of us milled uncomfortably through the auditorium which would fit—and we had been promised would be filled with—a thousand people. Doughty’s nasal ghost was even making my mother grimace, and she usually can’t tell whether a song is playing or isn’t, for all she cares about music.

I remember that song being the last straw for the Super Rally, which was a total bust and left everyone involved feeling nothing so much as demoralized and exhausted, so I left to go call through my volunteers and check their progress. I even called Terry and Macy, who had each been using our computer system to make calls to unlikely Florida voters.

“Nobody’s picking up,” Macy said, and I assured her that she must have just had a bad batch of numbers.

“I called 200 numbers,” said Terry when I called him next, “and talked to 3 people. They voted already, they said.” He didn’t sound at all frustrated—not like my volunteers, who were approaching their nerves’ limits—and was perfectly happy to have wasted three hours at least trying.

I was dismayed, though, as the dam-dam-duh-duh-dam-dams still wafted out from the rally’s hall. It was the first moment I realized that our plan really wasn’t going to work. Move on move on.
* * *

Josh and Lauren came by at the end of the Long Winters' set, to my great pleasure. Almost above all else, I was really looking forward to see Josh.

Josh had interviewed me when I first applied for the job in NYC. He’d been a journalist in Portland, but then stopped everything to be the assistant director for Grassroots Campaigns' canvassing office in New York.

We talked one-on-one about politics for ten minutes or so, covering a huge stretch of ground—from Dean to Nader to Kerry, to the Democratic National Convention in Boston and to what I thought it took to be a good leader. I think I said the ability to listen to people, but who knows, I was totally struck by the idea of working here in this office with all these bright handsome young people like him, and I was nervous like hell that they wouldn’t hire me. I might have said anything.

I do remember, at one point, Josh said that “If this doesn’t work, well… I guess I’ll leave the country,” Josh said, which struck me at the time as a pretty unguarded thing to say in an interview. And perhaps not so much in line with what it takes to be a good leader. But then again I’d been known to say the same thing, often, to everyone within earshot.

Now look, we’re both still here.

He’d trained me throughout that first week. we went out canvassing together often, and though I was scared as hell of it for a couple of days, he made it seem like the most awesome thing to do in the world.

I learned a lot from watching him take on the brunt of our office management. It wasn’t just that he, along with one or two others, made the office run – he embodied everything heady and powerful about the job.

“It’s a be-YOOOO-tiful day to beat George Bush!” he’d belt out, so distinctly and with such relish that later, in Miami, Evan and I would say it to each other each morning, even when we didn’t feel that way at all. Especially then.

Josh met his girlfriend Lauren in the office. Now they were living just a few blocks from this barbecue.

Lauren’s smile is 50,000 watts of good will, I would imagine it’s on almost 24 hours a day, as it was that afternoon. It was good to see her again. I remember cashing out one day after canvasssing, counting through my just-average take, and Lauren was just beaming all over the place—she’d made like $1400 that day, 1K on a single check. She was bouncing a little bit with every bill she counted out. I remember Josh came over and, though they weren't "official" at the time, her smile at him said it all. Then she picked up the phone—“I’ve got this one call back, but I bet they’ll never go for it”—and pulled out a credit card form that had been signed but didn’t have a number or amount on it. She dialed, and as she talked I finished my numbers, when suddenly she shrieked and almost threw down her phone. Josh looked over; she was still smiling but tears were coming down her face, and she couldn’t talk through the laughter for two minutes. Her hand was shaking above the form as she showed it to Josh—the person she'd called had given her a thousand dollars. Two thousand dollar donations. That smile…on a sunny day no smooth talker in our crew could beat that smile.

When GCI finally sent us out to the swing states, Josh and Lauren went together to Ohio, an office in cleveland. Lauren was one of the first ones to quit. She just knew right away that she didn’t want to deal with it. I’d talked to her over the phone about it once, but here at the barbecue I almost regretted bringing it up and dimming the smile. Right after quitting, Lauren went to go volunteer for the DNC. Many people did the same thing; quit the job, stay with the mission.

Of everyone out there in other offices during the campaign, josh was one of the few I called when things got rough. I wanted to hear all about his experience in Ohio, Florida’s electoral doppleganger, although we rarely got much time to talk. “The lists are bad. Very bad,” was the extent of the analysis he gave me. the last time I had spoken with him was a few days before he quit; at the time, he had mentioned something about trying to “take down” Grassroots Campaigns.

When others quit, I got a little mad at them – I knew things were bad, I thought, but what did they expect? – but when I heard it from him I knew for sure that something was really wrong. He left a few weeks after Lauren, but he was hired within a few days by the Democratic party in Ohio, doing basically the same job as before.

“They paid me two grand, gave me my own laptop, no hassle, a budget, and sent me to work,” he said.

After the election, Josh and Lauren went to New Mexico to ‘decompress,’ They lived in like an adobe hut or something and ate berries and mud or something, I don’t know. Then Berkeley, maybe Portland, Chicago… they’d wandered. The two of them are a favorite topic of the NYC canvassers whenever we have the chance to talk; everyone was rooting for them, like a small town with its Homecoming Queen and star quarterback.

I tried to touch base with Josh afterward. He was elusive, until one day I got a long email. He wrote things that I’d heard said (or said myself) about GCI, but reading them from him somehow felt terrible.

“sunk my heart,” he wrote. Even though he had finished off the campaign doing exactly what he first set out to do, he was now reeling with a bitterness, one wholly separate from the grief of the election loss.

“it is amusing to me that i feel so lost right now. I walked around the j school here at berkeley and it is pretty cool but I didn't feel any strong druthers to go to school there. i felt a hankering, this much is true, but wished i could extend this trip, this feeling of searching. As terrifying as it is, it is so damn enjoyable.…

i read a review in the latest new yorker on the gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and a fire that he was caught in forced him to reinvent the way he played guitar and made him a legend. sometimes our hand that is guided is the one we should lead with.”

* * *

I never did figure out what the big plan was to “take down” Grassroots Campaigns, but I wanted to get a few hours to interview him while I was in Austin. But that didn't happen; that discovery will have to wait. As Josh later wrote me in an email, we were “crazy idealistic bastards to think that we would have hours.” South by Southwest doesn’t afford that kind of time.

* * *

The Capitol building is just a few blocks away from the main strip of South by Southwest; we spent way too much time that weekend on the main boulevard, Congress, with the capitol building brightly lit and looming over us while drunk hipsters filtered out to try desperately to hail cabs. You’d think that if ten thousand people went to a city to spend a good bit of money, the city would toss a couple buses their way. But public transportation in Austin is some boss hog’s version of a practical joke. It’s not a big town, yet if you don’t have a car you’ve got a good half hour to sit and think about getting one while you wait for a bus; even when you get on the bus, there’s no telling where it goes. And they’re not big on maps in Texas; the closest thing to a helpful guide we could find were these grid signs by the stops, filled with nonconsecutive numbers and—for real—sporadically-placed colored armadillos. All I left knowing was that the Red ‘Dillo don’t go wherever you need it to go.

What a miserable state. It’s not just that it has contempt for the rest of the country; it has contempt for its own citizens, especially the brown ones but everybody when it all comes down to it. I know Bush’s accent is phony and all, but damned if that Yankee boy’s true home really is here.

Out Hud, a band that I definitely would not have missed had they played, have a song on their new album called “Dear Mr. Bush, There Are Over 100 Words for Shit and Only 1 For Music.” This came to mind a lot during the festival. Another one of those cheap jokes, not at all satisfying, but not petty either. Not petty. You can take our government, but you can never take our…senses of humor. That’s a raw deal, but it’s a done one too and you gotta figure out some way to make yrself better off for it.

When Terry told me he got a job proofreading at the Texas legislature, it was beyond hilarious – here’s this bright spot of innocence (in their view, of course, he’s the exact opposite, a sinful homo threat), fundamentally disinterested in politics—supportive of progress but not inclined to invest in any other than his own. When he’d started, it had been kind of funny to him; government was just this thing where somewhat intelligent, not-very-attractive people did complicated jobs that probably should be easier. I remember how, senior year during Bush’s State of the Union address that effectively declared war, Terry sat and watched in silence, not heckling the screen like the rest of us; he was listening to Bush, ready to be convinced. Doubtful, but still innocently credulous.

Since he’s had this job, I get all kinds of great fish-out-of-water stories. My favorite is how the proofreaders all call out aloud the votes of each session – he’d nicknamed the guy who called out the votes ‘the Count,’ and the Count would read off the votes like the muppet on sesame street in mirthful Transylvanian oratory: “Wahn! Too!…” Now he says he’s going to go speak at the public hearings on the gay marriage amendment, but only because it's down the hall from him and he thinks it will be funny; then he'll go back and proofread the transcripts and the eventual amendment itself. I don’t always understand how terry works – he doesn’t even like music – but I’ve come to like the idea of him there, poring diligently over reams of putrid Texas governance.

When Josh told me he’d got a job at the Texas legislature as well, it was almost enough of an instance of synchronicity to send me to a psychic to get my aura checked. He started off copy-editing (only a slightly more politically active job that proofreading) but now he has been brought up to be a legislative director or some shit like that, obviously a darling of his Representative boss and a favorite of her chief of staff. Working crazy hours, though maybe not quite so crazy as we worked on the campaign. I’m very thankful that Josh moved quickly out of his initial copyediting job, though I imagine he’d move quickly through any place where he worked.

however, it also poses an issue for me: he’s still here.

We’re both still here, right, but not only has he not fled the country—he’s taken a breath, recollected himself, and turned right back to fight. The fight’s a lot less glamorous these days (“It’s a beee-YOOO-tiful day to…lobby for legislation to improve the public transit access to minority communities!”) but this time he’s right there in the belly of the beast (well one of the minor but uglier beasts). Rather than accept a final defeat, he’s in for the long haul. It’s not something I could do. I’m so glad he’s there.

* * *

Postscript: 4/25
I called Terry tonight. "Do you know what's happening here today?" he asked me.

He sounded alarmed. Riots? i thought. Terrorists? What business would they have in Texas?

It was the bill. The state legislature. had passed the bill banning marriage -- and any kind of social compact thereof. There was even a provision that held that foster parents who were discovered to be gay would have their children removed from them.

“It’s just so terrible,” said Terry, even though he’s know this day would come since he started the job.

Today he’d gotten a close look at the laws – he’d probably even crossed the damn t’s and dotted a few i’s, which has got to be something that he is very very good at, seeing how neat his room is.

"I expected the part that said marriage is a contract between one man and one woman, but I was surprised to see them just strip these people, you know? These parts of their lives that they had worked so hard to build and keep. Their families… As far as the newspapers will say, the senators aren’t going to go for the foster parents provision, but I’ll believe it when I see it – cause I’ll see it.” He laughed mirthlessly.

“I want to get a job that’s not in government, so I don’t have to read all this. It makes me sad, and I’m usually a pretty happy guy. I just want it to stop. I want Texas to stop."