Tag Archives: Modest Mouse

Finding an Antidote for Poisoned Music

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The shitty (tragic?) parts of my life have tended to poison things that I love, including favorite music. Low, a band I once saw in concert every year, has been off my playlist ever since Mimi Parker, a member of the duo, died suddenly of cancer. It’s been three years now. As much as I miss the music, I can’t listen. Not yet.

Alan and Mimi play Low music in Fargo (2010)

A similar grief hit when my friend Gord Downie, the lead singer of The Tragically Hip, died although I was more prepared for his death, given his prognosis. It wasn’t grief as much as mourning, as Joan Didion differentiated in The Year of Magical Thinking. I attended one of his final concerts, and then he died. As much as I miss him, his music provides comfort.

Gord singing and contorting at Fort Henry in the ’90s

The poisoning is more intense when it comes on a personal level. I very much enjoyed Modest Mouse until a student I associated the music with committed suicide. And then, as they sing on Polar Opposites, I’m trying to drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.

I’ve had a couple of relationships turn terribly sour and drag the joy of the music with them. The death of an ex made The Red Hot Chili Peppers feel dark and awful, while Sufjan Stevens, once a great passion, was dragged into a quagmire of triggering memories. I’m working on getting his music back into my head.

Sufjan plays Christmas Unicorn at The Bowery Ballroom

In the end, this self-cleaning of music, loving it once and then not, allowing it to creep back in, knowing it again, almost feels like wisdom, or at least the closest I will ever get to a thing like that.

Phil plays one of his last shows at The Capital Theatre

We’re only Carbon Neutral

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The Marquis de Sade writes in his controversial novel Justine that we, as a species, tend to exaggerate our relevance:The power of destruction is not in the gift of Man. He may, at the most, change the form of things but he does not have the power to annihilate.We're only Carbon NeutralOh, what does it matter to Nature’s eternal creation that the mass of flesh which today makes up a biped creature should be tomorrow reproduced as a thousand different insects? We're only Carbon NeutralI say this: all men, all animals, all plants that grow, feed and are destroyed, reproducing themselves by the same means, never truly die but merely undergo variation and modification.

Modest Mouse offers a similar sentiment in their 2004 song Parting of the Sensory. We're only Carbon NeutralI’d start at the dawn/Until the sun and fully stopped/Never walking away from/Just a way to pull apart/Dehydrate back into minerals/A lifelong walk to the same exact spot/Carbon’s anniversary/The parting of the sensory.

In other words, we’re just not that big a deal.