For weeks after we moved into Kawama I broke down boxes. Some nights it seemed like I did it for hours. One after the other, peeling off the tape even though I don't think I needed to, just like this for the most part:
You'll notice that the box in the YouTube wasn't the typical Home Depot small/medium/large variety that we used to move. I felt bad throwing out those, though at least they were recycled — someone probably could have used them again. No, the box in the YouTube was different. Those boxes were what Goober used to haul my record collection with him to Seattle.
I can't quite remember why Goober took the records with him to Seattle — except for obvious reasons, that is, which were to listen to them and to get them out of Mom and Dad's house. Anyway, they went to Seattle in 2000, then got moved to New York in 2005 when Goober moved here. Then Goober unloaded them on us, and from 2005 to 2011 they sat squirreled away in any space I could find in the old studio apartment.
When we moved into Kawama, and bought that nifty Expedit shelf unit from IKEA, many friends marveled at where we possibly stored all those albums in the old apartment. It was difficult, but we did it — about half of the boxes fit under the bed and the other half fit in various nooks and crannies in the closet space.
The problem with vinyl albums is that you want to keep them. And where Jen gently or not so gently encouraged me to jettison old shoes, college texts or the George Foreman grill, she never once suggested that we divest ourselves of the ten or so boxes of albums, which just reiterates the problem with vinyl — not only do you want to hold on to vinyl but your loved ones (who don't care one iota about Live Skull's oeuvre) also feel compelled to keep them.
Vinyl is a sickness this way, right alongside baseball cards, stamps, comics and Lionel trains — in other words, stuff that few people actually care about but which most of us know to be "worth keeping."
Which is to say, the baby now has the opportunity to become intimately familiar with all underground music ca. 1987-1991, seeing that the record collection is now in his room.
I was listening to the radio the other day and they were talking about vinyl. The DJ mentioned that his record collection — in the thousands (mine is only in the hundreds) — is in his and his wife's living room. He said that while his wife grudgingly accepted them, his friends encouraged him to keep his albums, especially for his potential children.
Now I can see sharing a lot of things with Animal, but Live Skull's Bringing Home the Bait wouldn't be one of them. Not because it would be inappropriate but because — let's be honest — it's just not that good. I can think of about fifty thousand better things to listen to that were put out between 1985, when Bringing Home the Bait was released, to 2012 or whenever it is in the future when Animal will want to listen to stuff.
Anyway, not to get off on a tangent. And I don't mean to pick on Live Skull (not the first time I've done that); I'm clearly just jealous. Actually, I think Live Skull would have been better if the lyrics weren't so self-consciously "tough" sounding — it's more of that naive No Wave concept of making music as tormented sounding as possible; eventually you need to come to terms with the idea that it's silly to express violence through something as goofy as music.
[Pause to change baby's diapers and come up with something positive to say about Live Skull.]
I have a new appreciation for their live album Don't Get Any On You.
OK, seriously. I liked — and still like! — their song "Fort Belvedere":
[Pause to dig out Cloud One LP to read lyric sheet.] [While searching think of other reasons vinyl is stupid, chief of which being that unless you're OCD you can't ever find anything.] [While searching feel especially stupid that I'm now organizing my Live Skull LPs.]
OK, now here are the lyrics to Fort Belvedere:
Fort Belvedere This is what I saw The ground was all wet And we've run out of cigarettes
Don't touch my friend She doesn't like that Get your hands off her neck She don't speak your language We'll drive in your car Just as long as you take us there Don't drive us too far Like out of the country
Fort Belvedere Clouds move past the chapel Everybody's getting lost Fucking 'round in the bushes This place is too old Lots of broken down statues This place is too cold We don't know where we're going
Fort Belvedere This is what I saw The ground was all wet And we've run out of cigarettes Don't touch my friend She doesn't like that This place is too old And we're tripping our brains out . . .
What I like about the lyrics is that I imagine they are being sung by a precocious teen on a school trip to the Forte di Belvedere in Florence. Anyway, they're marginally better than those in "The Loved One," which go something along the lines of, "You know I'm coming/To wreck your life/To tear your face off/And drive a stake through the heart of your loved one . . ."
Anyway, what was I saying? Oh right, breaking down boxes . . .
Every good relationship requires compromise, and when Jen decided that the chandelier light fixtures in the dining room and the living room needed to be painted, and I didn't really feel like painting them, I eventually ended up painting them.
Now you may be wondering, as we wondered, why there was a chandelier light fixture in the living room. I don't know the answer to that. But it was there and needed to be painted.
Like I said, I wasn't terribly interested in taking down light fixtures and painting them. I wasn't too secure with my ability to take them down, paint them and return them to where they belong and work again.
Now the thing I love about electricity — and plumbing, for that matter — is that it's usually pretty simple. You connect something, hopefully correctly, and it turns on. It's like logic on a practical scale. So when the chandelier fixture in the dining room stopped working, it was really disconcerting.
I have to admit that I have no idea what I did to make it stop working, or if I even did anything and it stopped working. Frankly, it would have been better if I unscrewed it from the ceiling, pulled the wires down from the crawl space and cut them in two because at least then I'd know why it stopped working.
I tried everything — changed the light switch, stripped the wires and reattached them, switched the wires around, switched the wires around on the light switch, switched the fixture from the living room into the dining room. Nothing was happening.
Then the madness began. I like Googling my way out of problems, but electricity questions are something that you don't want to Google — the discussion of currents and positivity and negativity is almost too mystical. Basically the only advice I could discern was to call an electrician.
I kept retracing my steps, trying to figure out what I undid. For example, I knew the light fixture in the dining room was connected to the main circuit that travels throughout the house. In our case, we have seven circuits — two for the air conditioner outlets in the two bedrooms, one for the kitchen, one for the boiler, I guess a few others and then this one for basically everything else — the basement, the other stuff in the bedrooms, the staircase light, the hallway lights and then of course the dining room, which is what the chandelier was connected to.
So then I noticed the lights in the basement were weak — where they weren't before. At first I assumed the fluorescent bulbs were going out — and I had no idea how old they were since we just bought the house — but then I got to Googling and learned that dim lights can be the sign of something, too. Something bad about weak current. Something I didn't want to be true.
On a hunch I decided to switch my computer arrangement to the air conditioning outlet in the one bedroom. I was getting ready to switch off that main circuit to work on the lights when, lo and behold, the chandelier started working again.
Like I said, I want to assume it was something I did, so I went back and listed everything I did. Jen had a friend at work who was a contractor, and we were going to run it by him.
One of the first things we did was change the light fixtures in the bedroom and bathroom, which are both on the same circuit as the chandelier — I didn't think this caused the chandelier to stop working, but I forget the time frame.
Another thing I did made more sense because it just looked old and fucked up and looked like it could screw up something. Basically, when I painted in the stairwell, at the top of the stairwell there was this ancient light switch plate behind the door that we never open. I took off the light switch to paint and when I did, the switch was stuck in a half-on-half-off position from years of paint and I played around with it. I assumed it was a non-working switch. It looked like it was a gazillion years old, and every other light switch in the house had been updated except for this one.
But maybe they just forgot about it since it was behind the door in the stairwell and they missed it. Maybe they assumed it didn't work either. (Or perhaps they knew not to touch it; "Don't Touch It!" is the main lesson of everything I've learned about fixing stuff in the house.)
Maybe when I put the light switch plate back on, it jarred the switch. Maybe that shorted out the other switch. Maybe the chandelier fixture stopped working around this point. I wasn't really sure of anything, but I couldn't think of what else it would be. And when you look at what's behind the switch plate, you think this has to be what went wrong.
Eventually I tried turning this old switch off and on and what I assumed was a vestigial switch actually controlled the light in the dining room down at the bottom of the stairs.
So that was that — mystery solved. Except that I'm pretty sure I tried all this stuff before. Jen's contractor friend's advice: "Call an electrician." Which is what basically everyone on Google says, too.
So fast forward a few weeks — we were getting a circuit installed in the basement for a washer/dryer hookup and once everything was going along OK I inquired about it. It was one of those questions that you're not sure you want the answer to, so I prefaced it by making it clear that everything was basically working fine now.
