Spitball Army

…that are crossing my radar these days:

1)  “Anyone Else But You,” a song by The Moldy Peaches
I was intrigued to see the new film Juno at the top of Roger Ebert’s year-end list, so I went and viewed the trailer online.  Besides the cleverness of the dialogue and the simplicity of the setting, what struck me was the song playing in the background, which turned out to be this song.  Strictly by coincidence, the day after I saw the trailer, I received a promotional copy of the soundtrack CD in the mail, but just got around to listening to it today – now, I can’t get this little tune out of my head.  It is charming, quirky, sung not entirely in tune, and contains the phrase “shook a little turd out of the bottom of your pants.”  How many songs can claim that?  (None that I am aware of.)  This video features the song over cleverly-edited footage from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

2)  Books about music and the brain
This morning I had the pleasure of guesting on a radio show with two friends who toil in professions of the mind: one is a psychiatrist, the other a Jungian analyst.  They had asked me to join them on their monthly Doc Talk program to discuss music as it relates to emotion, health, state of mind…it was actually a pretty open-ended discussion, which was a well-suited approach for their call-in show, and we had a good time.  But an interesting thing that came up in our conversation before the show was that all three of us had recently purchased the same two books: Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, and This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin.  This crazy coincidence knocked me sideways, until I realized later that it was our interests in these very topics that had brought us together in the first place.  I have not been particularly diligent in tackling either of these books yet, opting instead to occasionally pick one of them up (usually it is This Is Your Brain…) and reading two to three pages for an idea.  I found this passage recently (from page 219):

Identification memory – the ability that most of us have to identify pieces of music that we’ve heard before – is similar to memory for faces, photos, even tastes and smells, and there is individual variability, with some people simply being better than others; it is also domain specific, with some people…being especially good at music, while others excel in other sensory domains.  Being able to rapidly retrieve a familiar piece of music from memory is one skill, but being able to then quickly and effortlessly attach a label to it, such as the song title, artist, and year of recording…involves a separate cortical network, which we now believe involves the planum temporale (a structure associated with absolute pitch) and regions of the prefrontal cortex that are known to be required for attaching verbal labels to sensory impressions.  Why some people are better at this than others is still unknown, but it may result from an innate or hard-wired predisposition in the way their brains are formed, and this in turn may have a partial genetic basis.

In other words, I can blame my music geekiness on my genetic heritage.  Maybe.  Though I can’t play a musical instrument other than the stereo, and don’t have perfect pitch, I am pretty good at the song title and artist naming game (not much better than approximate on the year of recording, however).  I have a customer who could tell you the b-side of a 45 rpm single from the ’60s, what the record label was, who wrote the single (which he could probably identify after three notes), five other songs by both the writer and the artist, and probably the writer’s preferred grocery store.  He cannot play an instrument or carry a tune to save his life, however.  I find this all extremely interesting.

3)  Root Beer
The little gourmet market behind my shop must carry fifteen different kinds of root beer, and I may have tried half of them in the year and few months since they have been open.  They have all been terrific, especially the one that comes in a porcelain-corked brown glass bottle (like a Grolsch beer bottle).  I haven’t been in the aforementioned Tria Market much recently, but maybe Monday I will try a new root beer from them to toast out 2007, which I will be glad in many ways to be done with.  Honorable mention for a soda this year goes to the fountain Mr. Pibb with a squeezed lemon wedge from Zoe’s Kitchen – I had that today, and it was mighty fine.  And I’ve become more of a water guy than a soda guy in the last few years, but I can still tell a good one when it’s in front of me.

4) Quiet
I can’t get enough of this.  If it could be bought, I’d possibly spend a lot of my money on it.

5)  A very special gift
To commemorate the closing of my business (or perhaps to simply commemorate the business), my friend Ben – an innovative graphic and photographic artist – obviously spent a great deal of his valuable time creating a present for me to which my attempts at description won’t do justice.  It is a thing of wonder.  I have worked with Ben on several projects – favorites being my store’s annual CD samplers – and he has become telepathically tuned in to my concepts practically before I even tell them to him.  He creates work for my company as if he were an extension of the company, and that kind of relationship is rare today.  If I can scan this special creation of Ben’s, or get a jpeg of it from him, I will talk about it in more detail.  Suffice it to say that it has immediately become one of my favorite things.  Ever.  Period.  And it has to do with The Beatles (one of my many soft spots).