December Wolves: the Everything Else List

For my other website, every year I do an end of year recap which includes a list of the CDs I enjoyed the most. In 2006 and 2007, it was a huge, sprawling, all-consuming thing that took up a couple weeks of my free time since I had to put everything down that I thought was important in there.

It ended up being 20+ pages on Word. 2008, I stepped back from that, but it was still a pretty long document and involved a week or so of prep and writing. This year, my list was done in sporadic, quixotic bursts, avoiding a numerical list while maintaining a year-end favorite (in this case, P.O.S.' Never Better) that I think is roughly 2,000 words and not nearly as many pages in a word doc. I think it communicates everything essential.

The list itself is little more than a time-capsule and a specific imprint of what I was listening to this year, warts and "terrible choices" and all. The music list hasn't gone up yet and I'm jonesing to get a year-end something out before 2010 hits. An idea struck me walking outside and suddenly another member of the pack is ready for it's close up. Here's a different time capsule for Eleven Names: The Everything Else list.

Since pastepunk is awesome and I already covered the recorded music I listened to, I had other, non-musical experiences that were great, but didn't fit the bill of the first list, the Everything Else list is a list of everything else I enjoyed, or a list of cool experiences, media and so on. It will continue through the 31st.

1. Batman and Robin. Grant Morrison doing Batman is one way I described it to the ARGO kids, but the title of the comic tells you exactly what it's about, even if it requires a little bit of deconstruction. The comic is about legacies of Batman and Robin and the people behind the cowl. The current Batman was previously a Robin. He is training a new Robin, the test-tube baby of Batman, while fighting another former Robin who

has turned into a villain.

All of this is happening while the upcoming plotline is that the new Batman is trying to revive the old Batman. It's about growing up, coming to grips with the new responsibilities with the hope that the actual Batman comes back soon. The new Robin (the test-tube baby) is precocious enough to believe that he ought to be Batman, so the current Batman (former Robin) is trying to hold it all together.

2. Graduating college. I have a nice plaque. Okay, but no seriously, it's an accomplishment that I'm proud of. At the very least, it's provided the spark of creativity for a good third of my posts here.

3. The ARGO column. I wrote a sweet column about growing out of college gracefully. It's one of the things that I go back to and sometimes think I'm a good writer or I'm at least making something universal personal and location specific. The fact that it resonated with people who weren't in the club was something that I worked very hard on and to have the audience recognize that was and is very reassuring.

4. Meeting Jordan. After three or four years of helping Jordan out with it, I managed to hop on a drive to D.C. for the sole and express purpose of meeting up with him. I've never met Adam or Aubin or Brian from punknews, so I've always felt like there was something missing from the last three, four years of our collaborations, so finally meeting him felt awesome and a capstone on an incredible academic ride.

5. End of college radio show. It's an excuse to play all my favorite songs that don't have vulgarities and giving two endings. This two endings part is incredibly important.

The first being the appropriate "things change, it's scary but we move on" song, sung by Vienna Teng, an attractive woman, playing the piano. It's a lullaby for a child being scared by the rain. Note perfect. The actual ending, a little more...ragged.

The first track was John Coulton's Still Alive, a little ARGO hoorah, which I'm sure you know and if you don't know it, learn.

The second was Thunder In the Night Forever by Planes Mistaken For Stars. It is the sonic embodiment of this picture. It is about taking the fight of your expression to the billboards and ideologies that have gouged your eyes and ruined your friends lives with velvet-lined promises of fame, purity and higher callings. The subtitle is We Ride to Fight! and it reflects its performers, a dirty, beautiful song. I think I like women like Planes songs, breathtakingly intelligent, frighteningly powerful and with a pretty edge and this song is one of Planes' defining works.

The third was Bane's Ante Up, a song with an opening drum tattoo made for the purpose of engender stage dives. It is a song about understanding that you have made mistakes and bad things have happened, but you have to get up and put yourself forward in a way that leaves you totally vulnerable and with all your chips in the balance.

Heavy-hearted hymns are my thing, and it's Bane that finds the light at the end of the tunnel without neglecting the fact that it's dark in that tunnel. What's the point of writing about overcoming if the hurdles aren't that high and you aren't stabbed during the marathon?

Transit: Planes Mistaken For Stars

A band whom I'm quite fond of (I own all of their CDs released in America), Planes Mistaken For Stars recently broke up. The label they were previously an artist on folded back into its parent label, and while a couple groups survived, so I hear, most of the other ones are left in limbo. It was probably this and a combination of other factors that led to the group disintegrating.

They are transitioning as well. The singer now has two kids and is starting a new band with the drummer (Gared and Neil, respectively, both the only original members left), and the other guitarrists are starting their own group.

Of course, this doesn't exactly soften the blow. Describing Planes' sound precisely really is a challenge. In the beginning (1997), they started out as an screamo group on Deep Elm Records, an old guard emo label known for groups like the Appleseed Cast, Brandston and Cross My Heart. As you may have heard, this was back when emo did not mean putting on your sister's jeans and raiding her makeup cabinet. Their final full length, Mercy, was one of my favorites of last year owing to it's aglamartion of metal volume, manic tempos and emotional voalitility.

They played with many groups from all ends of the punk and metal spectrum, finishing tours and crossing oceans with Converge, Small Brown Bike, Dillinger Escape Plan, Hot Water Music, Mastodon, Cursive, and most famously, Against Me!. Planes was a group not quickly pigeonholed or quickly grasped. This, is of course, why their headlining shows I saw never had more than 100 pepole there.

Listening to Planes' music ran a gamut of moods for me. I've cried, made out, headbutted mirrors and most other emotions in between while listening to that group, so to say that I'm saddened that I won't ever have a new Planes Mistaken For Stars CD to look forward to wherever my life takes me is an understatement.

In my life there is plenty of transit so on one level, my roads parallel theirs. I suppose I naively hoped that Gared's and Neil's musical trails would stay with Planes Mistaken For Stars for longer, but I know so long as I have an internet connection and their new project has a MySpace page, I can follow where that aircraft touched down...