Pete Yorn is not my boyfriend

My ears are getting old, my hearing a little, well, what?, but I still go to rock concerts. And at most of the shows I attend, a good chunk of the crowd is in my demographic, wearing earplugs and supporting whatever band is trafficking the latest brand of reunion nostalgia. It's a racket, but I fully participate. Sometimes I even buy the T-shirt.

I am, however, a little old and a lot married for crushes on the bands. Isn't that the domain of teenyboppers, of Tiger Beat and Bop? (Do they still make those magazines? Somebody ask the computer. Or I could just, you know, run to the newsstand for a sec...) Still, I love so many bands and singers. Tears of joy at the Pixies reunion in '05, same at my first Feist show in '08.

I may not plaster the walls with posters these days, but that's simply a design decision, not a statement about lack of feeling. Music can still transport me back to the age and mood when I first heard it, a sometimes awkward space to inhabit. Or the best place in the world to inhabit. You know how it is.

I've always wondered why music can have such an emotional hold. In the height of the nostalgia tours, Daniel J. Levitin's book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession was released at an opportune time. I wound up listening to his book on CD in the car, which was great for the musical examples (less so for technical descriptions, at least for this visual learner. Narrator/actor Edward Hermann, recently of Gilmore Girls, rocked the house nonetheless.) The science folk speculate that the part of the brain that makes memory is closely tied to the part of the brain that understands music. Music discovered in adolescence makes such an impact because the brain and self are in a period of insane change, another reason adolescent experiences stand out so strongly in memory.

Which may be why, in the most time-crunched part of my week, I decided to see Pete Yorn in concert Monday after teaching my night class. He graduated from Syracuse University one year ahead of me, and I didn't discover his music until I was in my mid-20s, living and working in Syracuse several years after college. My friend and co-worker Glenn passed on Pete's first album, Musicforthemorningafter, knowing we shared similar taste in music. I was, and remain, hooked. Pete's now promoting his fourth album, and while he's too young to be on a nostalgia tour, something in his music makes me feel nostalgic: it reminds me of being in college, it reminds me of Syracuse, it reminds me of people I miss.

Because of the brain's weird emo-circuitry, I have to remind myself that it's my own memories I'm associating with and projecting onto the artist. Pete Yorn and I don't know each other, though he was very kind when I met him briefly a couple years ago at an in-store show & signing. That sweltering summer day, he covered The Ramones song "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" in a packed record shop. The crowd swooned. (Why pretend? I did, too.) In between songs, he recognized a young woman in the crowd. "You don't live anywhere near here," he laughed, and she stammered some reason for her appearance at yet another show.

Monday was my third Pete Yorn concert, though I've yet to travel far to see him play. But why wouldn't that young woman, or anybody, really, drive out of her way? Certainly it's for the artist and the quality of the music, maybe even the Almost Famous dream. But I think the power of memory moves us, too. We're driving closer to ourselves.

Westside story

It does not involve snapping, or a dance-off, or the inimitable Natalie Wood. No, this is the Westside of Indianapolis, arguably the most diverse side of town, thanks in part to an influx of immigrants over the last decade.

The area's changed dramatically, which I wrote about for this week's NUVO. If you're in Indy this weekend (and really, who isn't?), the Lafayette Square Area Coalition will celebrate that diversity with a 2nd annual International Parade, Saturday at 10 a.m.

Good morning

Humanity everywhere

You know when you're shopping for a car/suit/house/pet, and suddenly you can't stop noticing cars/suits/houses/pets? They're everywhere, all around you, and they always have been. You've just been oblivious because you've had no cause to notice them before.

So it is this fall, sitting in on a Humanities lecture and leading discussion sections. All the texts, all the people, all the art and the music we've studied -- they've been around far longer than I have. They've likely been referenced a million times over. And though I never took a course like this in college, surely I must've picked up a fact or two in my own time as a student. What I love about teaching: always learning, always discovering. And because the Humanities work is fresh in my mind, connections surface for me anew. Observe. A thing long-dead can be kept alive in a story, whether it's in stone, paper, or song.

A syllabus-in-the-world sampling from the last few weeks alone:

At a reading by poet and translator Khaled Mattawa, in one poem he calls to Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose "Meditations" should be required reading for Human Behavior 101.

My horoscope (Aquarius, natch) defines the Greek term daemon, from which 'demon' is derived. The original meant more of a guiding spirit, a conscience or internal force, not an evil entity.

At a They Might Be Giants concert, references abound in the song "The Mesopotamians," a TMBG-created band featuring Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal and Gilgamesh.

Finally saw the oft-recommended (and excellent) In Bruges with Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes, and what painting do the assassins happen upon in their city tour? "The Last Judgment" by Hieronymus Bosch, showing the same just retribution as Dante's Inferno.

The title story of Wells Tower's 2009 short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is Viking lore told in modern vernacular, making human the prototypical warriors of much older literature. In its last page, this story takes just a couple lines to draw sharp insight into why humans do the senseless things they do. Go read it, you'll see.

Charles Baxter's 2008 novel The Soul Thief uses the word "ravening" three-plus times, a word from the Old French, and before that, Latin, which I've seen repeatedly in our texts this semester: v. To seek or seize as prey or plunder. A word that's evolved over thousands of years, a word, like the paintings and epic stories and songs, that we continue to have use for.

Oh crystal ball, save us all, tell me life is beautiful

"You will live daringly. When afraid, you'll summon the courage to push past your fear. A powerful person admires your guts."
-Holiday Mathis, Horoscopes