ILL MUSICAL MADELEINES: The Kinks, "Lola" (c. 2002)

By THOM HAWKINS

Driving north from Oberlin, Kansas, toward Valentine, Nebraska. I left home just a week before. Rolling dusty green hills broken by quick crevasses filled with saplings and dry streambeds. A few days earlier, at a gas station near Hermann, Missouri, I bought a few tapes to play in the car--Grandpa Jones, Johnny Bond, and The Kinks. Since then, a stop at the pirate house in Lawrence--no one was in so I unbuckled the typewriter, pulled up a cinderblock, and nothing came out. T. was asleep inside, I found out later. I stayed in F.'s mother's room--she was away in Alaska. In the hallway was a box of communal pornography--I contributed marginalia to some of the more interesting articles. We drank beer and talked all night under flashing neon lights. I woke up early, and wandered down to the living room where a train hopper with horns tattooed on his forehead was watching The Rock. I asked his name and in a dark brown voice he said "fuck." I continued west across Kansas, refueled in Junction City, had lunch in wide-boulevarded Russell, and went to the movies in Colby, twenty-five miles short of the Colorado border. It was windy, then, and I turned north toward Atwood and Ludell. The one motel in town was closed for the night, so I parked in the lot and crawled in the back to sleep. Up with the sun again, I passed through Ludell and Oberlin and once again aimed north, heading across western Nebraska toward the Black Hills. When Lo-Lo-Lo-Lo-Lola ends, I rewind the tape to the beginning of the song and let it go again and again.

ILL MUSICAL MADELEINES: Radiohead, "Planet Telex" (c. 1998)

By THOM HAWKINS

The apartment on Gelding Drive. S. makes hot dogs in the microwave. I try to make dinner using a black bean burger. The patty is bland, so I add barbecue sauce. This is too tangy, so I add Frosted Alphabits from S.'s collection of forty boxes of cereal. I reason he can't miss it if I only take a little from each box. I sit down at the black lacquered table and turn on the CD player. Eating takes me five minutes only, but I always start at the beginning of The Bends.

Sitting at his computer in the dining room, S. mocks the opening guitar to "Planet Telex." I counter his behavior by staging a life-size cardboard cut-out of Barbra Streisand next to his computer. Neither of us drinks normal milk. I drink soy and he drinks acidophilus with bifidobacterium.

I also keep a hammer in the refrigerator because there's enough room and I have no other place to put a hammer where I will not lose it. There's a strip mall across the street where my sister works at a health food store next to an Italian cafe. I sit down for ten minutes ... if no one speaks to me, I walk out ... if someone takes my order, I ask for a pound of angel hair with tomato cream sauce. When we leave the apartment in S.'s car, he tunes the radio to a station that plays disco ... we're out of range of the tower, but S. reconstructs the song through the fuzz. All I hear is static.

ILL MUSICAL MADELEINES: Ray Lynch, "Celestial Soda Pop" (c. 1993)

By THOM HAWKINS

It's Christmas Day, 1993. I'm in bed with the 24-hour flu, vomiting bile into a metal E.T. trashcan. Of the presents I got, the only one I can think to enjoy is a CD by Ray Lynch--Deep Breakfast, which I listen to in its entirety. I learn in the following days that is a mistake--as soon as the first song, "Celestial Soda Pop," begins to play, my stomach turns. My mother sits next to the bed, looking for something to say to make me feel better. She picks up a one-page 'zine from the bookshelf next to me and begins to read an article about what an asshole Santa Claus is. I agree, sometimes. But the article contains some language that reminds me of the time I insisted that the "Parental Advisory" label on Blood Sugar Sex Magik was an overreaction, and she opened the CD booklet to the lyrics for "Sir Psycho Sexy" and read aloud: "There's a devil in my dick and some demons in my semen."

The next year, I am also sick on Christmas, and my right lymph node swells up to the point where I look like I no longer have a chin on that side of my face.

ILL LSD SNOWCONE: Neon Indian, "Laughing Gas"

By RAYMOND CUMMINGS

Sometime during the past week or so, as July gave way to August, summer finally decided to make an appearance in central Pennsylvania; suddenly, the air possessed a muggy heft, sweat came easier, and the constant hum of our basement dehumidifier became part of the overall domestic ambience. Lazy dips in the cheapie inflatable - and largely neglected - backyard pool became imperative; yard work, less so. And then -as if on cue - the promo for Neon Indian's Psychic Chasm materialized in my mailbox, Tex-Mex hued paper sleeve and all.

So what've we got here? A post-Ducktails, post-Ariel Pink laptop stew that burbles and warps like overbearing summer sunshine (ozone alerts, we hardly knew ye) is supposed to. The aluminum definition of what Glenn Danzig meant by "dirty black summer." Interstate traffic jams that seem to have no beginning or ending, and weeks later, all you can recall is the sensation of roasting alive in a smoldering cage of plastic, steel, and upholstery.

As titled, "Laughing Gas" suggests delirium, dementia, surreality. As experienced, it delivers those questionable goods: dosed giggles looped and cajoled, a synth hook nicked from a half-dozen 80s pop-radio staples and hiccup-ed into vertigo-disco infinity, an almost seasick rhythmic bounce, vintage boom-bap beats. Freed from the Reagan-era associations it evokes, "Gas" runs the risk of seeming inconsequential, disposable, trifling; yoked to them, it conjures the flush of near-dehydration following a day-camp marathon, four-square throw downs, "Cruel Summer" blaring from a Cyndi Lauper-wannabe counselor's ever-present boom box.

Click here for the Lefse Records site, where non-"Laughing Gas" Neon Indian songs are available for free download.

ILL MUSICAL MADELEINES: New Order, "Subculture" (c. 1998-1999)

By RAYMOND CUMMINGS

My undergrad senior year was an emotional horror-show on more levels than I can accurately articulate now, a decade-plus after the fact. I went for long, brooding walks, at all hours, because I rarely slept. Really, where to begin with that year? The scabbies plague? The crushing, immobilizing lethargy? The relentless loneliness? The all-encompassing certainty that I was destined to flunk Logic (a math requirement, Philosophy-major must, and graduation get-out-of-college-free card, all wrapped in one)? The very-real fear that four years of liberal arts education, most of it wasted on campus publications no-one read, would not lead to gainful, satisfying employment? I wanted out of academia, in the worst possible way - didn't seriously pursue graduate programs, didn't even begin to cram for GREs - but was terrified of what awaited me beyond that tantalizing tassel-flip. I went for long, brooding walks, at all hours, because I rarely slept. I'd been entrusted, that year, with editorship of The Collegian, an almost-monthly features magazine; very few had any interest in writing for the thing, let alone reading it, and its six 1998-1999 issues were essentially glorified versions of the irreverent, sardonic zines I was still cranking out at the time that nobody read, either. (I still have nightmares in which I'm back in that particular editor's chair, somehow armed with everything about life and journalism that I've learned since, fully cognizant that I'm dreaming and yet bursting with ideas that will make my Collegian do-over totally fucking rad and unfadeable, award-winning, triumphant. Then I wake up, and I'm all, "that was too real.") My Philosophy thesis - some bullshit about Michel Foucault and how the power of cigarette makers is made manifest by the effects of smoking on the bodies of smokers - crashed and burned, so I settled for a minor in that discipline, sweated out long English essays, listened to The Slim Shady LP waaaay too much, took a lot of dangerous walks alone, procrastinated ruthlessly, climbed trees, skipped a record number of classes, wrote quixotic newspaper columns, re-read Ellis' Glamorama over and over, skipped Dining Hall meals because underclassmen's general la-de-da cheeriness drove me even deeper into the depression that, unchecked, threatened to consume me whole. I went for long, brooding walks, at all hours, because I rarely slept. I was in a non-zone. All of my close friends had graduated already; they could relate to what I was wrestling with, but consoling telephone conversations can only accomplish so much. Those friends who remained had more pressing concerns. I went for long, brooding walks, at all hours, because I rarely slept. I went for long, brooding walks, at all hours, because I rarely slept. I went for long, brooding walks, at all hours, because I rarely slept. Paul Cox put "Subculture" - the non-gospel choir version - on a mixtape that he sent to me as part of a mixtape exchange project, meaning that I was supposed to listen for a month prior to sending the tape to somebody else. But I didn't do that. I held onto the tape, which also included Talking Heads and Sugarsharp songs, for months, and quite literally let the tape rock until the tape popped. The details of that period, beyond what I've laid out above, are hazy. Thank God for that. And Paul? My bad.

ILL MUSICAL MADELEINES*: L7, "Andreas" (c. 2004)

By THOM HAWKINS

It's July in Charleston, South Carolina. J. is at work and I am hungry. He is a chef, but keeps no food in his apartment. I take a shower and walk to the ABC store to buy a pint of Heaven Hill vodka for $2.69. When I return to the apartment, I take another shower to cool off and then mix the vodka with some stale pink lemonade mix I find in the cupboard. A. calls and invites me to visit. I drive drunk for the first and only time in my life. When I get to her apartment, she is listening to L7's 1994 Hungry for Stink album, which I had bought when it was released, but had long since sold. We decide to walk down Broad Street to Gaulart & Maliclet's Fast & French. We take chalk with us and write on the jersey barriers blocking off a construction area. I write "E=mγc2--don't break the laws of physics." At Fast & French, we sit in the kitchen window and eat for free. I have lemon leek soup, which I enjoy, but am never able to find anywhere again. Memories of Charleston are hazy after that ... more showers ... stepping on palmetto bugs on the way to the Piggly Wiggly ... a curator with dirty shirtcuffs at the Karpeles Manuscript Library ... drunk at a Japanese restaurant, I draw 11011213211011 on a napkin and show it to the girl next to me--she turns away and starts a conversation with someone else before I can tell her about the special powers of the number nine, describe why the inside of the letter O can make a paranoiac anxious, show her how to knife-fight, or any of the other things I do when drunk ... sober at 3am at another bar ... driving a fully-loaded Cadillac Escalade alone through Charleston to get back to J.'s apartment, sleeping, then driving back to pick him up from R.'s house ... my mother drags her toes on the sidewalk, trips, and falls.


*"And suddenly the memory revealed itself. ... The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost palpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." -Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past