Mix Tape

The thing about a mix tape is that it was generally made with you in mind. Unless you had a playa on your hands, mix tapes were made by one person for one other. The songs selected were intended for, or evocative of, or telling a story of some sort for one person, or maybe a small group. It was a personal form of communication made using constructs of popular culture. Either that or it was an attempt to get laid.

I'm a big fan of the Marvel movies. It would be an understatement to say I was stoked by their recent Phase 3 movie slate announcement. I haven't read any of the "Guardians of the Galaxy," comics or graphic novels, though I have been meaning to, but had heard solid reviews of the movie, so took a chance and snarfed it up. Younger daughter Ava and I have watched it twice, the second time so her older sister could watch it as well.

The mix tape looms large. The soundtrack for Guardians, which I have downloaded and listened to a number of times, is a mix tape made for our hero Peter Quill (played by Chris Pratt) by his mother in the 1980s. "Awesome Mix Vol. 1," was her collecting her favorite songs to share with her son. In addition to being completely iconic, badass 1970s and 80s songs, they are woven perfectly into the movie.



"Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone, anyone? Ava has been singing that song all morning and now counts it as one of her three favorite songs.

When I run with tunes these days, I work out a playlist and then hit shuffle, to let the Universe throw me a sort of running mix tape based on songs I'm vibing on. The Guardians soundtrack is currently tumbling with Digable Planets, Beck and D'Angelo, among others.

But the mix tape philosophy got me thinking about other art forms, books and movies that I dig. A mix tape is not a novel. It is most likely not about plot. It's about every song, every section, chapter, part, being something onto itself, and also not allowing any filler, any lulls. "Pulp Fiction," "True Romance," and "Snatch" are films that feel episodic, where there is scene after scene of simply and utterly cool. Bands like De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and The Beastie Boys put out albums that felt like mix tapes.

There is a level of care and attention given to a mix tape that only certain authors can come close to replicating for a whole book, or work of any sort. I got the mix tape high the first time I read William Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell." I'm cruising through some deep and heady stuff, one "song" ends and here come the "Proverbs of Hell (plucking a few favorites at random):"

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

And Blake just mows you down with rapid fire, fortune cookie bullets. Poets, essayists and short story writers are more likely to conjure mix tape magic it seems, with their ability to work the pause, the silence between the songs; and their prerogative to change direction, change tone, pace without notice--heavy metal to bluegrass to reggae to jazz. One of the literary lions who clearly understood mix tapes was Jorge Luis Borges. You can see it in "Labyrinths," or "Dreamtigers," or almost anything he put out into the world. Maybe for Borges, a mix tape was a labyrinth:

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last pages was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

Maybe that is another aspect of the mix tape--it is almost cyclic or circular; it doesn't matter where you hit play, you are pulled in, wrapped up; you can start and stop at any point or just let it ride.

If that's the case, Borges definitely got it. You can see him taking copies of a new book to his close friends, his lady friends, his peeps. Or maybe he'd be kicked back in a chair, next to a cat, waiting for folks to come to him. I mean, he's Borges. Maybe he would just send a text that said: "New mix tape: Come and Get Your Love. Borges, out."

Invaded by the Marvelous

I could watch Emily Blunt peel potatoes. Last night I got pulled in to "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen." Maybe it's a chick flick. Or maybe it's a fishing movie that also has Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) in it. I'll go with the latter to try to hold on to my man card, loosely.

But something, a line, a thought, struck me. I had been thinking about it earlier in the day, the week, the month, a lifetime.

"She thinks I am genetically programmed to return to dull, pedestrian life," Dr. Alfred Jones (Obi-Wan McGregor) says. The movie is set up with Blunt, McGregor and a sheik trying to do something theoretically possible, likely impossible, possibly making no difference. An act of hubris? Maybe. But an act, of difference, of passion, of eccentricity. An act of faith. An act in the face of dull, pedestrian life.

Rewind a bit. I was thinking of the novels of Charles Williams. His "Greater Trumps" is one of the few academic things I remember from N.C. State. He was tight with Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, and C.S. Lewis. Of Williams' novels, Lewis remarked, "He is writing that sort of book in which we begin by saying, let us suppose that this everyday world were at some point invaded by the marvelous."

Invaded by the marvelous. Boom. There it is. One, a word (marvelous) we should use more often, with or without a Billy Crystal accent. Two, what life lacks unless we look for it. The marvelous.

Rewind a bit further. I am sitting on the back porch Saturday morning, reading Virginia Woolf's "The Waves." The thoughts of one of her characters, Rhoda, go into a sort of ecstatic reverie. It's sustained over two pages, gaining speed with something like, "I see the side of a cup like a mountain... and the brightness on the side of that jug like a crack in darkness with wonder and terror." And then she cranks it up into this:

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

The marvelous. It's what McGregor and Blunt need. It's what Williams dreams up. It is what Rhoda, and maybe Woolf, saw in the everyday. The marvelous can stomp out the dull and pedestrian. Instead of staring sullenly ahead, we might marvel. We might marvel.

Where I want to part ways with Williams and Lewis is the "invaded" part. If we wait to be invaded by the marvelous, we might wind up waiting for Godot. We might spend too much time looking at our watches. We might not seek out the marvelous. We might not look for it, we might miss it standing right in front of us, trying to pull us out of our fu**ing pedestrian ruts.

If you're lucky, maybe you will be invaded by the marvelous. Or maybe you can set out. Instead of marvelous, go active, make it a verb. Marvel.