So This Is What The Volume Knob’s For

by Belle Waring on March 15, 2017

Do you want to look at a wobbly video of someone’s record player, someone who doesn’t know how to position the arm over the groove in between the songs before letting the needle fall to the LP? (Or barring that start the video later.) Yeah, well too bad suckers, because that’s the best video I could find for the best song ever this week month, The Mountain Goats’ “Dance Music.” (The song is more than ten years old; it’s just the best song ever to me this month.) You know, why am I harshing on the person who hooked me up with this video. Thanks random person, I owe you one. Also, new vinyl, woo! Most all of my records sound like someone is frying a pan of bacon on every track.

I find this whole album very relatable which is kind of a bummer in the larger sense because it’s sad. But this is real life that’s happening now, and right now this song makes me so happy I will run when I was exercising by walking before, and run with a smile on my face. No one looks happy when they run. Literally no one.

Joggers uniformly look like they are about to pass their last painful bowel movement before inevitable death by fire ants. Longtime joggers can be picked out easily because they also look shriveled-up, raisin-like, by the exigencies of their alleged fun hobby. I have run before BTDubs, ever, it’s just you hate it almost all the time. If you get to where you don’t hate it you run to where you’re miserable again. That’s how it works. I mean, you get some exulting in the power of your body moments at the beginning of a run when you’re young, but otherwise it’s steady misery. Right now I sprint and then walk. Way better. Except it’s hot as balls 100% humidity outside and the jungle is creepy. Winter in Arizona I’m like, 4 or 5 miles, cool. Singapore: 2.1 miles. Dying.

We joked that seeing a runner smiling might trigger the “if you see a suspicious person or article, notify the authorities” principle and some concerned Singaporean would call to say they had seen such a person. “This ang mo woman with blue hair was running and smiling. Very suspicious one.” “Maybe she is simply catching the bus?” “No, this one is jogging.” Police: “we’re coming now.”

The king of all happy sad songs is Neutral Milk Hotel’s Holland 1945, right?

{ 18 comments }

1

dilbert dogbert 03.15.17 at 1:22 am

SLO! SLO! SLO!! Now a song to connect me back to my college years at Cow Piley SLO! Best time of my life. Met my late wife, Morro Bay girl, there. Lots of great memories. Even my current wife is an SLO girl.

2

david 03.15.17 at 1:25 am

Right!

3

harry b 03.15.17 at 1:35 am

My daughter used to look happy when she ran. Now she runs cross country in college and doesn’t look happy when she runs.

I smile a lot when I run, because I am listening to the News Quiz or I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue or Steel’s in Town or whatever. Mark you, ‘run’ is a stretch. A friend past whose house I used to run referred to it as ‘shuffling’. And that’s 20 years ago when I was faster.

That said, I cheerfully do whatever it is I do when it is minus 10 outside. Even minus 20. Not that that is going to be a problem for long, what with climate change and, even better, climate change denial…

4

max 03.15.17 at 2:16 am

I find this whole album very relatable which is kind of a bummer in the larger sense because it’s sad.

I have no idea if this album is relatable, but when I went looking for it a couple of years ago it didn’t exist on Youtube, but apparently UMG put it up in July of ’15.

Every Dog Has Its Day – lyrics involve rainbows and would’ve involved puppies if you had started writing blog posts when they did this album.

Ten Layers Down – file under: you don’t know what its about but whatever its about sounds pretty significant.

max
[‘MY videos are just as tangential to the topic of jogging as your are!’]

5

CDT 03.15.17 at 3:32 am

Hooray for Let’s Active! The db’s Amplifier deserves some votes for best happy sad song.

6

John Quiggin 03.15.17 at 5:47 am

I always make a point of smiling when I run. OTOH, my smile may be invisible under the sweat that comes from 25 C (77 F) temps and 90% humidity, even at 5am.

7

Belle Waring 03.15.17 at 5:50 am

John: I feel your pain. Jogging up stairs in the jungle is haaard.

8

ZM 03.15.17 at 10:10 am

Sorry to ruin your jogging music …

9

ZM 03.15.17 at 10:12 am

Also the Chinese spies at my uni know about this, they politely indicated such to me in 2014, so I’m pretty sure the Singapore spies would know about it too.

10

Sonny Jim 03.15.17 at 10:59 am

I listened to “The Sunset Tree” obsessively for the couple of years after it came out. “This Year,” with its rousing mantra, “I will make it through this year if it kills me,” did, indeed, help me make it through at least one of those years. When they toured NZ, and played those songs live, God, it was thrilling and cathartic to be part of that audience.

They’ve got a new LP about to drop: Goths, which is rumoured to be a concept album about the goth community. The lead single, Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds, is great: a clever, wistful song about getting older and ending up where you first began in the guise of a fable about The Sisters of Mercy vocalist quietly taking a train up to Leeds and picking up the keys to his new flat from the letting agent.

11

Belle Waring 03.15.17 at 12:51 pm

I’m excited about the new album!

12

T 03.15.17 at 1:52 pm

Ah. The always cheery Mountain Goats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRP6egIEABk

I probablyy screwed up the embed below but the link is above…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRP6egIEABk&w=640&h=360%5D

13

Doug K 03.15.17 at 4:20 pm

used to be a runner but now it’s more like a wog (walk/jog hybrid). When young the exultation was steady, for long runs it would subside into a sort of quiet joy, not a smiling mood but certainly not miserable. Now there is no exultation but the quiet joy is sometimes still achievable, on a good day with the planets aligned and a following wind..

Don’t call them joggers though, it’s a sort of malediction..
http://www.runnersworld.com/fun/the-curse-of-the-jogger
http://www.runnersworld.com/fun/introducing-joggers-world

14

Kalkaino 03.15.17 at 4:24 pm

WTF….? Completely untrue on every level, this is some sour-ass bullshit generality: “Joggers uniformly look like they are about to pass their last painful bowel movement before inevitable death by fire ants. Longtime joggers can be picked out easily because they also look shriveled-up, raisin-like, by the exigencies of their alleged fun hobby.”

They’re not all smiley, in many cases, because they’re just in resting-face mode, alone with their thoughts or meditations. They are often serenely happy, even if they’re not smiling. A smile is more usually a social gesture, a signal to someone on your radar; there’s not much call for it during a solitary run.

Perhaps Belle would be better off with an Elliptical machine, in the air conditioning. Nothing wrong with that.

15

Belle Waring 03.16.17 at 1:41 am

I actually have to go past the elliptical machines in our air-conditioned gym on my way to run up stairs in an actual jungle. Weird.

16

sidd 03.16.17 at 4:01 am

I do like walking. I have been accused of grinning vacuously while doing so, and not always because I was stoned. The right pair of shoes makes a big difference, and the right clothes.

Walking in the country is very nice, but even a big city can be nice once you get in the rhythm of it. My mental flow in the two instances is quite different. I seem to think on several levels in a city, but more focussed in the country.

I would be out walking now but it is well below freezing outside with a wind kicking, and I have a fire going. Splitting wood doesn’t really count as walking tho.

sidd

17

Val 03.16.17 at 4:09 am

I used to look ecstatic (or at least feel it) when I sprinted the last 100 metres of my run. That was before my doctor said ‘you really should stop running on that bad knee’. I still miss it. I used to be a sprinter when I was young, and running flat out for that last 100 metres was just the best.

Probably looked terribly sad for the 3 ks before that though.

18

Yan 03.16.17 at 7:08 pm

“The king of all happy sad songs is Neutral Milk Hotel’s Holland 1945, right?”

Damn right. Many years ago (was it 2012?), Mangum did a solo tour, singing NMH songs alone with just his giant hermit’s beard and an acoustic guitar. Somehow it made “Holland, 1945” simultaneously much, much more sad and much, much more happy. And then much more sad again.

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