TRACK 2. “If You Rescue Me (Chanson des Chats)” from The Science of Sleep Soundtrack
“Hello, you’re my very special kitten!”
Meeting Stephanie was like a piano tumbling down several flights of stairs: fast, quirky, musical and dangerous, but a good story. At a mutual friend’s party in Allston, I couldn’t help but notice this girl with long blonde hair beaming at me with her goofily enormous smile as soon as she entered the room and sat on the floor. She was wearing stripes, for which I have a weakness, and had a miniature pan flute around her neck.
Our first conversation was marked by her saying things like "Get out of my head!" and "Where did you come from?" She was using an old Pokémon themed Gameboy carrying-case as a purse. Her favorite was Eevee, mine Alakazam. She had just started reading Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera and I was in the middle of his One Hundred Years of Solitude. Her winter hat as well as my ipod case shared our same favorite teal-like light shade of blue. All surmounted by our mutual obsession with Jeff Mangum's adorable time traveling crush on Anne Frank. I think I may have been wearing a striped sweater that night too.
“If You Rescue Me” or “Song for Cats” is from the film The Science of Sleep. It’s the little diddy Gael Garcia Bernal plays to woo Charlotte Gainsbourg in a dream while he is wearing a bear costume. Later that night, when I told Stephanie it was my favorite movie, she nearly fell off her apartment balcony where she had been sitting. To keep her from freaking out, I had to explain that I was actually psychic, but only one second into the future. To which, she responded that it was like the time machine from the movie that Gael builds for Charlotte which can move only one second into the past or future.
TRACK 3. “Ten Thousand Years” by Greg Mullen from The Hungry Ocean
“It feels good to be understood.”
Once Stephanie and I had determined that I was the boy version of her and vice versa, we inevitably ended up doing a mix CD swap. She actually beat me to the mixtape game, and I had never EVER received a mix first from a girl. The track list was a ransom note she had made out of letters cut from magazines and she deemed the CD “The Dreams of Animals.” The name came from some anonymous quote she also pasted to the CD that read, “It’s really an interesting idea to enter someone else’s dreams. I would love to go into an animal’s dream-like a lion’s or a cat’s.” When the songs from both Stephanie’s and my mixtape get together, they like to tell a pretty complete story of all that happened between us.
TRACK 4. “Spieltier” by Emperor X from The Blythe Archives, Volume II
“I’ll make sure you’re fed.”
Stephanie used to get hunger headaches and I would joke, “Do you not know when to feed yourself?” She really liked to eat honey mustard chicken fingers from this wings joint in Brookline. Whenever I hear that last line, I think of that and of sitting cross-legged with her on her bedroom floor while eating wings out of a styrofoam container.
Emperor X was a band I got into through Zoey. If I didn’t know her, I wouldn’t have met Stephanie. I bonded with Zoey over our mutual love for the fantasy themed folk minstrel and Boston University classmate of hers that masqueraded under the name Spitzer Space Telescope.
Earlier in the year, I finished working on a short film called “The Tree Where Dead People Grow.” I had set up a few screenings around Boston in order to raise money for recouping expenses and to enter it into film festivals. The entire soundtrack for the film was either segments I had composed or local music by friends.
TRACK 5. “Skinny Fists” by Christians & Lions from More Songs for the Dreamsleepers & The Very Awake
“I told her once, ‘there’s a great line in this song I heard, but I can’t tell you unless something really big happens to us.’”
In addition to Greg Mullen’s “Ten Thousand Years,” “Skinny Fists” was another bit of local music on the soundtrack. As a dabbler in music promotion, Zoey graciously offered to host a screening and help plan other concerts featuring bands from the film. She was magic. We raised one hundred percent more funds at Zoey’s apartment than I did at any other event. Stephanie had gone to that screening and later would tell me that she really liked the film. She also dug the music in the picture, partly because she was the live event coordinator for her college’s radio station.
Stephanie had been, however, too shy to talk to me. I wasn't even aware that it was possible for someone to be intimidated by me. It was usually the other way around, especially when an extremely attractive girl was involved. I didn’t even see her there, I was so stressed about trying to fix the projector and oddly shaped sheet that we were pretending was a screen.
It was actually at another party, Zoey's going away to Germany soiree a month or so later, that I jumped to the couch miraculously at the same time as Stephanie. We both immediately started nervously over-talking. Later, while the rest of the gang was outside lighting off firecrackers on the sidewalk, we had our first kiss in the poorly lit lobby of the grungy Allston apartment building.
PART I ::
LULLABIES AT BEDSIDES
The night of the lullabies, Stephanie came over early to help make a gift basket of peanut butter sugar cookies to give to Julian. We shaped a couple of dinosaur ones by hand that strangely looked like genitalia from the wrong angle. We even put some milk into an old timey milkman jar. The cookies went into a wicker basket with an unnecessarily tall handle that I randomly found in my place, along with some money in an envelope for gas and whatnot.
The Minister of Lullabies had specified that pajamas were strongly encouraged. Stephanie pulled out her Where the Wild Things Are T-shirt, just as she bumped into the Max stuffed animal I had hanging from the draw string of my ceiling light. It was a really hot night, so I cut a pair of pajama bottoms into shorts that effectively made me look like a pirate.
While we were waiting for the band to arrive, Stephanie and our pajama wearing friends drew Julian’s cloud people, lyrics and other cartoons all over my white v-neck. That evening we were joined by Zoey and the guy that she had been seeing that summer. There was also a fellow musician, Christine, and her friend, Martine. Including Stephanie and me, we were a merry band of six. The coziness of it made it cooler, like it was more fleeting. Like if the six of us were slowly picked off, it would be gone forever.
TRACK 6. “Two-Headed Boy” by Neutral Milk Hotel from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
"Two-headed boy with pulleys and weights, creating a radio played just for two in the parlor with the moon across her face. And through the music he sweetly displays silver speakers that sparkle all day made for his lover who's floating and choking with her hands across her face."
I hadn't received an e-mail or a phone call or anything from the band that day. They had only told me that they were coming somewhere between eight and eleven that night. So we were just waiting there on my bed in a pile. Christine and I switched off playing our freshly written originals. We also had a sing-a-long to "Two-Headed Boy." I had always thought that the strangely sexualized sweet radio constructing nothings in the lyrics were the most romantic gesture of which I had ever heard.
TRACK 7. “Smells Like Content” by The Books from Lost and Safe
“The quiet becomes suddenly verbose.”
The Books will always be a band I associate with Stephanie, because of her fervent love for them. When we met, The Way Out had just been released and we talked about our likes and disappointments with it. The group is similar to The Music Tapes’ First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad which toys with audio collage and song, sound effects and instrumentals. The voice recording at the end of “Smells Like Content” is a boy saying, “Expectation leads to disappointment. If you don’t expect something big, huge and exciting…” He then trails off, exemplifying what he was trying to say better than words would’ve.
When eleven rolled around, I was starting to feel a bit foolish, luring everyone to my bedroom in their pajamas for a nonexistent concert. However, the buzzer rang and I called down asking who it was. The voice mumbled consonants for a second before saying, "Uh, lullabies?"
TRACK 7. “Thirteen,” Elliott Smith covering Big Star from New Moon
“Won’t you let me walk you home from school?”
“Thirteen” was another song we had a sing-a-long to while waiting for The Music Tapes to arrive. Stephanie and I always joked that our actual ages were anywhere from eight to thirteen. During this show we got to indulge, because the wonders that started filling up my room when the band got there released everyone’s inner child.
The tableau was quite Christmassy, including rows of plastic gingerbread men and women, a giant snowman and a few sheep, all of which had lights in them. Playing alongside Julian and helping to decorate my room was his musician buddy Ian. The chairs they brought in became resting places for the singing saws, bows, banjo, guitar, bell lyre, pump organ and others. Atop an old fashioned trunk was the third animatronic musician, made out of a watering can. When activated, its arms would move to simulate playing the block of wood in front of it that had been carved into a piano. Julian had also brought his brown and white shaggy dog Rudolph, who didn’t play anything, but just watched the performance quite attentively.
My room was already well suited to their aesthetic. I had Christmas lights dangling from behind a tapestry on the ceiling. The wall behind my bed was a chalk board and on it we had drawn a multi colored forest as a backdrop. Like the dork I am, I even put For Clouds and Tornadoes on my record player, to make it look like we had just been listening to it. The bedroom was kind of small, but the guys managed to squeeze in all of their props, gadgets and fusion instruments in a circle around the bed.
When they tried to start the show, something went wrong. It seemed that the robo-minstrel had gone hoarse. Julian spent some time with grease all over his hands, trying to fix it. While he did, he told us some stories. His family was Russian and as Ian lifted up my LP of For Clouds and Tornadoes, Julian told us that the group of musicians on the cover was an orchestra of his ancestors. He also told us an anecdote about a trick he and his cousins would play on his grandfather when they were little. They would ask him to say a specific phrase and he would respond in a thick Russian accent, "Why do you always ask me to say this? It means nothing." Then finally relenting, "We must catch moose and squirrel!"
Julian couldn't cure the laryngitis of their robot friend, so they were forced to do an impromptu set. When we asked Julian what the show he intended to put on was like, he told us that there's really no way he could explain it. I caught a glimpse of a cassette playing inside the automaton, so I think it would've been like some kind of audio collage, a combination of song and story like their album First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad. Although that was unfortunate to miss, it was just as good to get a personalized performance.
TRACK 9. “Majesty” by The Music Tapes from For Clouds and Tornadoes
“The majesty of life and fear and trust.”
The show began and somewhere in their set they gloriously played the bouncing joyous "Majesty." Julian had his eyes closed and was jumping around in circles as much as he could with the space he had. They also played several lulling saw solos like "Kolyada" from the same record. I wish I could remember the name of the song where Julian played the banjo with a bow, because it was beautiful. They also did plenty of tunes that I had never heard before. Stephanie was cradling my little blue Where the Wild Things Are stuffed monster in her hands giving me that grin of hers that I could always psychically translate as, "I can't believe this is happening right now."
Halfway through the set, Julian stopped to ask us if we wanted to try something special, but that we had to be blindfolded for and could potentially put us in physical danger. I'm pretty sure we all unanimously and simultaneously agreed with, "Of course we do." Normally, if someone you've never met before, wanted to come to your bedroom in the middle of the night, blindfold you and do something that could hurt you, you would be a bit cautious. However, it was unspoken between us all that a mind that helped score In The Aeroplane Over the Sea could do us no harm. It was the kind of absolute trust you have when you're a child, before you know that it’s possible for people to take advantage of you.
We were all blindfolded and I felt like a kid again, trying to make sure mine was loose enough so I could peak from underneath. They told us that we had to make a space between us on the middle of the bed. So we did, without knowing why. They took their places and we heard something that may have been the click of a tape player.
TRACK 10. “A Warning” by The Music Tapes from First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad
"All those who continue to listen from this point onwards are doing so at the risk of their very lives!"
What followed was a slightly altered version of the cautionary vocal recording, “A Warning!" A man spoke of a famous knife throwing magician. He began his act with the sound of knives being scraped against one another and us on the bed as his assistants. "Our sincere hopes that you will conclude this record still in full possession of your life." There was a rush of real air whooshing past our faces and then the booing of a knife against the wall behind us. "This sound recording will conclude leaving you, the listener, in mortal danger!" Luckily, we all survived.
After the mysterious magician vanished and with our blindfolds still on, Julian told us a tale in a soothing hypnotist’s voice that his father used to tell him before he went to sleep, so he wouldn’t need a night light. It personified the dark, telling of how it was very lonely because everyone was afraid of it. When, in actuality there was nothing to be afraid of and the dark was your friend that would always be there for you, to wrap you up all night long so you’d never have to feel alone.
The strange thing about Julian telling this story was that Stephanie and I had some run-ins with her quite real and quite adorable fear of the dark. It was a pretty constant occurrence that one of us would say what the other one was thinking or just about to say. One night after I had read her mind like that again, she got freaked out and ran to hide in her closet. I jokingly shut the doors on her and she nearly had a panic attack. I don’t think Julian’s story cured her, but at least when we went to sleep that night, we didn’t need a night light.
After the show, The Music Tapes packed up their gear and wonders into their sleigh that was a red 80’s style van and were whisked off into the night, to some house party in Allston.
TRACK 11. “Theme from Piñata” by Bright Eyes from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn
“I wish I had a parachute, because I’m falling bad for you.”
It’s always a good idea to have a warning before listening to Bright Eyes. At some point, we were talking about the art of mix CDs and the subtle subtext that people can include in them. When it came our mixes, she curiously said she wasn’t sure if there was something in there. Which made it easy for me, because I didn’t have to explain whether or not there was one to mine. By the end of the first night with The Music Tapes, I had forgotten not to expect something big, huge and exciting.
PART II ::
ST. NIKOLI’S WONDER WISHING GAME OF CANDLES
The next night Julian had planned to play a mysterious game called “St. Nikoli’s Wonder Wishing Game of Candles.” All we knew about it was that we had to meet the band at a specific field in Cambridge, which neither of us had ever visited. For Stephanie and me, the adventure began with bike riding. We used to bicycle everywhere so much that I had given her a Pokémon card that I found in my basement to clothespin to her bike spokes.
TRACK 12. “Cave Kids” by Girlfriends from Cave Kids b/w Eat Around the Bad Parts
“We underachieve and live below our means, woahohohohohoh. We can’t get to sleep, because we’ve got oversized dreams, woahohohohohoh. The cave kids of Boston.”
Girlfriends is led by the same Boston wordsmith from Christians & Lions. However, the band is a bubble gum garage trio that had just started up that year. If anybody was, Stephanie and I were the cave kids of Boston. Chasing each other around on our bikes, riding down hills in shopping carts, crashing playgrounds to climb jungle gyms and have jumping contests on swings. Then we’d come home and be insomniacs together, tracing constellations on each other’s arm and shoulder freckles with magic markers.
That night, I cycled up from Jamaica Plain to Allston to meet her and then we both ventured on to Cambridge. All we had was an address that I had gotten off the internet and backpacks with a few candles in them. We found the meeting point and eventually were joined by Julian and Ian, a couple of kids from out of state and about five or six others from The Music Tapes’ Allston performance the night before.
We wandered our way over to the grassy field. There was a marble bust spitting water into a pool at one end of the large space and there was a hobo sleeping off at the edge of the woods. Julian set up a chair for his saw and everyone got out their candles. As we were walking over, hand in hand, Stephanie stopped and said, “I can’t believe this is really happening right now.” I don’t know why, but I always distinctly remember that detail. Right on cue, we saw a little white rabbit at the edge of the field, staring everyone down.
TRACK 13. “Woodcat” by Tunng from Comments of the Inner Chorus
“We all had a lovely time.”
Animals were a constant motif, particularly cats. Stephanie swore that she was going to end up a crazy cat lady with a house full of fleabags. “Woodcat” opens up with a story about a girl who turns into a cat and a boy who wishes to be turned into a hare. Tunng was a band that she had gotten me into that was similar to The Books. They’re an English group that sings mostly pop songs, but with little experiments dispersed throughout.
It was obvious that Julian felt a strong connection to animals, the way he had us all staring and mesmerized by that rabbit for a good five minutes. His dog Rudolph was very sick, had trouble breathing and coughed a lot. Every time, Julian cradled her and rubbed her throat until she was better.
When the rabbit finally ran off and we had all the rules of the game explained to us, we discovered that it was essentially freeze tag with candles. However, there were a few special bonus parts to it. The first part was writing wishes down on little scraps of paper. While Julian was playing the saw, we all stood in a circle and passed the folded wishes around in alternating directions so they were good and shuffled. Then, we were instructed to put them into our shoes.
The next part was the game. The ten or so of us were wandering around the field, trying to capture an antique gas lantern, while keeping our candles lit. All the while, Julian was playing the saw. For some reason our team always lost, with a version of the same thing happening each time. Stephanie and I were on defense and we were very very good at blowing out the attacker’s candles. Our duo was quite formidable, until Stephanie’s flame would go out, usually from her moving too fast. I would try to relight her, but I could never make it in time and would lose my flame as well.
TRACK 14. “Bluish,” an Animal Collective cover by Sondre Lerche from an internet only release
“When you claw me like a cat, I’m beaming.”
I found a cover of “Bluish” by this Norwegian singer-songwriter by chance. For all the eerie ways that Stephanie and I were similar, I think our mixtapes illustrated how we were different. I distinctly remember sitting on her bed, while she was on the floor for some reason, and we were talking about Animal Collective. She was a fan of the inventiveness and newness on their latest, Merriweather Post Pavilion: fun, hokey, dancey, droning, technology driven. Whereas I was a bit wary of the digital trend and really inspired by the more acoustic Sung Tongs: stripped down, soft spoken, silly, and random. The same influences and elements were there, but the style was just slightly different.
One night we were show hopping and wandering around Harvard Square, stopping in for a beer at the diner/bar/venue Charlie’s Kitchen. Afterwards on the street, there was this guy standing there singing and playing guitar with his case open for change. Instantly both of us noticed something familiar in the tune and noticed the familiarity blooming across one another’s faces. With just an acoustic, he was doing a version of the loop heavy, digital bliss of “Bluish” and it was working out pretty well. She took my hand in that moment. I really have no idea if she felt the same kind of coalescence that I did right then. The greater metaphor was only something that was a passing thought in my head and nothing we ever talked about.
While we were standing on the field with our candles blown out, we had to remain frozen in place until the game was won. At that point, everybody froze and Julian plotted out our constellation. He had an old star map that he spread out on the grass and lit a tiny tea light in relatively the same places as the remaining lit candles at the end of the game. Wherever the candles were disbursed would become our constellation and we had to figure out what form it took.
Once we had found a resembling animal or object or whatever, we would all stand in a circle and the victor would spin in the center with the lantern. That person would then walk backwards and whoever they bumped into would have to pull out the wish from their shoe. Someone else from the circle volunteered to read it out loud, so we could all see how it related to the constellation we found. After a couple of games, Julian remarked on the strangeness of the coincidences with the constellations and wishes, deeming that there was something special about our group.
We stared at the first constellation for a while not quite sure how the game worked, mumbling things that we thought it looked like. Julian stared down with a hand on his chin, like a soothsaying wizard. Stephanie said that it looked like a turtle. Julian agreed and his reasoning, without explanation, was because, “he always has his home on his back.” When the selected girl pulled the wish out of her shoe and gave it to another boy to read, he gave a “Woah.” The wish was “I wish I could feel at home wherever I go.”
TRACK 15. “To Build a Home” by The Cinematic Orchestra from Ma Fleur
“This is a place where I feel at home.”
We were laying in bed, just reaching the end of her mix CD, and she said to me, "I've always wished I had a good moment to associate with this song.” She had a thing about that concept of home. Her family life was a bit tragic, but she talked about it with remarkable ease and even made jokes about it. It was exactly something that I would do.
It was also how we first started talking about the film Garden State. There’s a moment, after they jumped into the pool in their underwear, when the main character is trying to define home as a group of people that miss the same imaginary place. I told her that I liked how she wasn’t too hip to like Garden State.
Knowing what I did about her and her family, it was strange when that constellation appeared. The second constellation was just as strange. Julian stared at the map for a good while and finally proclaimed, “There’s no constellation here. This is weird. This has never happened before.” So the wish was opened up, and to oddly match the lack of constellation, all that was written on the paper was a scribble.
TRACK 16. “Tambourine-N-Thyme” by Nana Grizol from Love it! Love it!
“So tell me not to fall in love with you. Frankly, my friend I think that’s the sweetest thing you do.”
Another time, we were lying in bed and just musing late into the night about relationships and our pasts. I was thinking about this line and how it had been used on me before and how it’s the worst kind of reverse psychology that I should probably use on Stephanie. Then, she came out with, “Don’t fall in love with me, kay?” I explained to her how I was literally just thinking of telling her the same thing. At that point it became a battle to see who would fall first, which quickly escalated to a pinky swear. I explained to her that telling someone not to fall in love with you just makes them fall in love with you, which is indisputable. Too bad she beat me to it. I also know now that when someone says that to you, there’s always a reason why.
By the third constellation we had learned our lesson. We had trouble finding one the last time because so many of our candles had gone out and we could only map lit candles. Before the other team won again, we decided to light up everyone’s candles to make a more interesting constellation. It was something that Julian said he had never seen before in the history of the game.
Staring at the constellation we were overwhelmed by the various shapes that could exist with so many candles. I thought I saw a wizard hat and Julian said it was, “Like Merlin!” There was a circle below the wizard hat that he said was like the Knights of the Round Table during King Arthur’s time, a subject he was thrilled to bring up. So we spun the lantern again and when Julian asked if someone wanted to read it, I felt a wave within me telling me to not even think, but to volunteer. And oddly enough, I got my own wish. It was something like, “I wish that I could make this kind of magical thing to share with the people I love with my own art.” Julian immediately matched the magic to Merlin, the people and sharing with the Round Table and art with Arthur.
TRACK 17. “Dinosaurs” by Christmas Island from Blackout Summer
“Dinosaurs, I’m really bummed out that I missed it. Dinosaurs, I really wish we coexisted.”
A song from Stephanie’s mix, we both agreed with “Dinosaurs” message of wishing to coexist with the extinct reptilian monsters. The time eventually came for Stephanie to go and visit her best friend in California for a week or so. The night before she left she gave me an orange brontosaurus silly band and donned a yellow one herself. She told me not to fall in love with anyone while she was away. Early the next morning, she left and I stayed in her bedroom to catch a little more much needed sleep. When I woke up I made a little drawing of a bronto with a speech bubble saying something stupid like “you’re dinosauriffic!” I left it on her night stand.
The trip was something that we both already knew was coming, even when we were standing in a circle on the grass, after I had just randomly read my own wish. I knew that normally, you shouldn’t tell people your wishes, but immediately afterward I had to let the group know. It was strange because not only were the wishes randomly distributed amongst everyone’s shoes, but someone had to volunteer to read it, making it even less probable that someone would read their own. Julian assured me that the magic of the game made my wish impervious to bad luck.
Then, the first guy admitted that he had read his own wish as well. We tried to get the person who wrote the scribble to come forward, but whoever it was didn’t and thus it remained unexplained. From this we deduced that the scribble must’ve had some kind of Rorschach significance for the person who wrote it. Afterwards everyone else took out the wishes from their shoes and burned them, which Julian informed us was good luck. It was something that his grandparents had always done.
TRACK 18. “Which Will” by Nick Drake from Pink Moon
“Which do you dance for? Which makes you shine? Which will you choose now?”
I gave Stephanie my mix CD just before she left for California. I called it, “remember this feeling that you’re feeling right now” and drew a candle on it. The quote was the last thing that Julian said over and over again in my apartment during his sleep inducing story hypnosis while we were all blindfolded.
On the back of the track listing for the mix, I had drawn a quick three panel comic. It depicted a Pokémon battle for which the trainer used “Stephanie-guin-fox.” It was a Pokémon version of Stephanie I had created that fused her favorite animals/Pokémon, a penguin and a fox. Her main attack was “honey mustard wing attack,” flinging Stephanie’s favorite fried snack to save starving Pokémon. To top it all off, the CD itself was all white, so I colored one half red and fashioned it into a Pokéball.
“Remember this feeling that you’re feeling right now.”
When Stephanie pulled out the wish from her shoe, by chance she had gotten her own. I tried to get her to tell me what it was, using the ruse that “the magic of the game” would protect her wish, but she wouldn’t budge. She lit it on fire and looked at the burnt spot in the ground all while everyone in the circle was talking. Thinking back on it now, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what she had wished. Or, rather, for whom she had wished.
TRACK 19. “Overnight” by Yes, But Slowly from In the Company of Others
“And if it seems like I’m scared, it’s because I have never been this close to something that I’ve wanted so bad.”
“Overnight” is by a lone guitarsman that never had a proper release. He played alongside Christians & Lions at one of their first shows I saw. I had always really liked this song in particular, but had never found anyone to share it with that I thought would appreciate it. Stephanie told me that she loved it so much that she put it on a friend’s mix.
It turned out that the person Stephanie went to visit in California wasn’t just a friend. It was a boy that she had been stuck on for a very long time, named Guy. Every time she thought she was over him and with someone else, he would come back into her life. I have a creeping suspicion that the friend whose mix she put “Overnight” on also wasn’t “just a friend.” However I hope not, because it would be the ultimate mixtape betrayal.
TRACK 20. “Meet Me in Montauk” by Circa Survive from Juturna
“I’ve been wandering around, making up movies in my mind.”
When you share the same musical upbringing with someone, you immediately have a strong connection. In high school, both Stephanie and I had been fans of Circa Survive as well as bands like Brand New and Bright Eyes. This song is largely inspired by Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind, which was director and writer Michel Gondry’s film before The Science of Sleep. It’s about literally erasing a past lover from your memory.
Ironically, this film and Garden State happened to be the anthems for Stephanie’s relationship with Guy. Apparently he borrowed the line from the trite airport ending of Garden State, telling her that he was putting an ‘ellipsis’ on their relationship. Whenever she started to like someone, he would toy with her to pull her away from them. When she went to California to go see him, without either of us knowing it, she was putting a period on her and me.
So, we sat there in the grass, she was staring at the embers of her wish while everyone else was still dumbstruck from how the game of candles had turned out. One of the girls showed us a tattoo she had on her back of the Neutral Milk Hotel airplane record player. It was the pen and ink sketch from the insert for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Julian told us he was planning another unique tour that would be like a carnival complete even with rides. He also explained how he was trying to make a story he had written, called Second Imaginary Symphony for Cloudmaking, into a movie. It’s about a boy named Nigh that discovers a cloud-making factory. Due to the creative obstinacy of the studio thinking that the story wouldn’t sell, the project was sadly dead at that time. Since we were talking about movies and I happened to have a copy of my short film because I was making DVDs earlier that day, I asked Julian if he wanted one. He promised to watch it once he wasn’t living in a van.
TRACK 21. “Two-Headed Boy, Part II” by Neutral Milk Hotel from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
“Two-Headed Boy, she is all you could need. She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires and retire to sheets safe and clean.”
I had always thought the tomato and radio wires line from “Two-Headed Boy, Part II” was a tragic and brilliant way to call back the motif of the radio from the first part. It’s a mellow song, but the brilliance of that album and The Music Tapes is that indecisive emotion wavering between somber and sweet, depressing and hopeful. That was just the kind of acceptance that In the Aeroplane over the Sea leaves you with. The last line is, “Don’t hate her when she gets up to leave.”
Stephanie and I left that night on our bicycles. As we rode by the crowd around Julian’s van I shouted “Hullo good souls!” which was how Julian began every one of his e-mails. We’d go home together that night, but soon Stephanie would get on a plane. I know that before she even got off of it, the ashes of that feeling that she had been feeling before were slowly leaving her memory, flying from the aeroplane over Boston.
We hung out a few times when she got back. We went to the amazing bizarro-music fest put on by The Whitehaus Family Record, called Weirdstock. Afterwards, I went through a few weeks of nagging doubt and agonizing worrisome indigestion when I knew that I was being ignored and avoided. Eventually, I got the truth out of her about the way she felt about Guy, the way she had always felt, and that was really all I ever got to know. I should’ve had that dramatic “rocks against her window” confrontation scene, but it seemed useless. In a matter of weeks I was going to Spain to live and teach English for a year. I still don’t know how she had a better story than this with Guy. I asked her to tell it to me once, but she never did.
Of all the things I could’ve done differently, now it just seems like it would’ve been nice to tell her my sappy, pathetic confession that we had a good story. It really was like a movie, and for as long as I can remember I’ve wanted me life to be like a movie. And even if there was no happy ending and afterward it sucked, and it sucked for a while, I hope Stephanie is happy. I’m pretty sure her wish came true.
TRACK 22. “After Hours” by The Velvet Underground from The Velvet Underground
“If you close the door, the night could last forever.”
“After Hours” inspired the previous track from The Science of Sleep. Those two songs were how I bookended her mix and it always seemed like a few good notes to leave things on. The Music Tapes came storming through our lives for two nights, and it was a crazy way to get to know someone. You can’t be sad when the show ends and the band packs up and drives away, because no matter how unbelievable and fun it was, some things just have to come to an end. If it never happens to you again, if those crazy bedroom lullabies never wind their way back to your door, at least you experienced it once. At least you have the memory of that secret once in a lifetime thing that only those involved will never know. At least you have that story. So even if she forgot the tale, at least it’ll exist here. And that’s where I’ll keep it so it won’t bother me.
Deerhunter :: Hacylon Daze 
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