On this Tuesday night, on the back of my weekly call with the Catbirds’ business manager, I’m pondering the overlap between business and dreams. “If you build it they will come” isn’t always a sound marketing strategy, but it’s the only one worth leaning on when you’re laying the foundation. This track by Voxtrot looks at “the queer life” versus “the real life;” the former a foray into fancy and unbridled wandering, and the latter a grounded, legitimized, and accepted facade. The queer life looms behind the real life, like the subconscious, in its immeasurable way, driving the world of the conscious. What we are is what we know and what we can see. But what drives us is what we want to be.
I’m in the process of releasing music into the world. If the Census Bureau came knocking at my door, I would be classified as an ordinary person. But in my queer life, I’m extraordinary. The music that I’ve found is certainly queer, and it too is extraordinary, in ways that are beyond my real life. For sure.
How tied we are to the real life, to the three-dimensional walls that surround us in the waking world. Think of when you’re half asleep, dreaming and darting from scene to scene, and the possibilities that are before you. Think of the real human emotions and spiritual places you go to. Think of the creativity in that hypnogogic state. Imagine if you could start there, and build a bridge into the “real life” world.
I am currently staring into obscurity, with thirty-odd years of lethargy anchoring me to a real life that oppresses me with its dullness and limited scope. I have created this world, acting as a willing accomplice to the law of entropy. There is another world, where programming bugs, expiring domains, flagging inspiration, otherwise-engaged friends, distractions, and pitfalls are all superseded by vision. This vision – it doesn’t ever intersect fully with the real life, but it draws the real life toward it. It drags it further along. It’s a dream, and it’s the only sound basis for making your way in the real life. You can’t wait for it. You have to walk toward it, never reaching it, but moving.
I’ve been sitting on an interview with Baby Teeth from August 6 of this past summer. Eventually I’ll post it here on Subanimal Sounds. Baby Teeth are an earnest but scary group of guys from Chicago, and when you get to know them they’re not so scary. Abraham Levitan is the leader, a cool-mannered, if gawky, outsider with a self-proclaimed history of obsession, if you can believe his lyrics. He started with the great girl groups of the 1960s, and found inspiration in various pockets of showbiz from there on. Abraham always has a half-smile bordering on a full-on guffaw. He means it, and isn’t bothered with the window dressing. Pitchfork reviewed Baby Teeth’s 2009 album, Hustle Beach, and in so doing quickly devolved into label-mongering and contemplating the meaning of the term “guilty pleasure.” What’s guilty about a pleasure? You either like it or you don’t. I do. Abraham sings it. I believe it.
Once or twice a week, I pass through the “Miracle on 34th Street” – the boundless bombast of garish lights that floods the one block between my house and my favorite watering hole, Rocket to Venus. They sell hot sausages there, three for $5. There are Christmas trees made of hubcaps, and one made of old vinyl records. there’s a Natty Boh logo in lights. There are gawkers galore. Tonight we wish you “Season’s Greetings” from Baltimore, USA, with hopes of more substantial tidings to come. To usher in these greetings, we have a stellar track from Baltimore’s finest, Beach House, and one from Baltimore’s most obscure group, the Catbirds.
