Retailin’ It Like It Is

While pissing away the final moments of an employee lunch break (literally, I’m afraid), a dark epiphany crossed my mind: When my birthday occurs next month, I’ll have spent over half of my life working retail, on and off. It’s less a career choice than it is an old high school flame that I find myself hooking up with every time I come home for Thanksgiving -- so easy, so accessible, yet ultimately, so wrong. But as life throws you curveballs, it’s the one thing you can always come back to.

I came up through the music stores such that my resume now looks like a tombstone: Tower Records, followed by Virgin Superstore, followed by Borders Books, Music, & Cafe. The music industry has now left me stranded among the last gang in town: Barnes & Noble, a solid company though surely not a stupid one; I can almost watch as the inventory ominously disappears like the limbs of Marty McFly’s siblings in that photo during the original Back to the Future. We live our days on borrowed time.

Despite all of these changing companies, positions, and policies, there are some retail truisms that have remained constant such that I feel they are worth relating here. Hopefully they will provide pearls of wisdom upon which future generations can meditate, ponder, and absorb. At any rate, I call this lesson: My Top 3 Really, Really Annoying Things Customers Do That Piss Me Off When I’m Working Retail.

1. The Magical Backroom

Somewhere, in a magical time of castles and kings there was a place where every single stock item that anyone ever wanted was kept. Despite all of the things that we’ve been able to shed from the dark ages -- the black plague, barbers as doctors, a geocentric theory of the universe -- this one has stubbornly remained. Whenever something can’t be found on the floor, the customer’s eyes well up with enough hope to fuel twenty Obama campaigns and ask, “Could you check in the backroom?” In their minds, they are prepared for the retail clerk to smack their forehead and say something along the lines of, “Yes! The backroom! How could have I been so foolish?!” and then proceed to skip off towards that room and arrive back with the item in hand seven to twelve seconds later.

Well, after working at all of the above places, plus a local used CD store, I can safely say that this room does not exist. If there is a backroom at all, it likely has items like employee jackets and backpacks that are not for sale (and too cheap to be worth selling in the first place). The few times there is product, it’s overstock (i.e., the 600 extra copies of every Norah Jones album since Come Away With Me), defects (i.e., the item you want already bought, broken, and returned by someone else), or random freak things (i.e., my old music manager’s stash of “Amy Winehouse Death Watch” CDs -- alas, he was about three years ahead of his time).

That’s about it. The fact is that most retail stores keep everything they have on the sales floor. Otherwise it would be like going to an Eric Clapton show and having him play only songs off his new record. (Which, I’ve actually seen and it ain’t pretty -- I’m lookin’ at you, Pilgrim tour.)

2. Your Child/Grandchild’s Brilliance

Most people shutter when they have to work in the kids department because (a) they hate kids, (b) they hate kids’ products, (c) they hate picking up other peoples’ messes, or (d) they hate picking up other peoples’ messes of hated products that were designed for an age group they hate. As you probably guessed, for most people it’s because of choice (d).

Well, I’d like to offer my own reason for why I shutter when I have to work in a kids’ department: The inability of the child’s parent or grandparent to base their minds in a reality that lines up with the one that everyone else lives in.

It usually happens like this: They say, “I’m looking for a book for my son/grandson.” You say, “Great, how old are they?” And then, almost without fail, they answer with pride: “Well, he’s six, but he reads like a 37-year-old. The teacher says he’s very advanced for his age.” Whenever I hear this, my mind instantly rockets to a fantasy in which I am standing at a huge podium where seated before me is every parent and grandparent in the world. I ask the crowd, “How bright is your children and grandchildren?” And then I fold my arms and watch with sly satisfaction as they all answer without fail and at the same time, “The teacher says he’s very advanced for his age…” before their words trail off in the surprise echo surrounding them that triggers the unimaginable realization that every teacher says this about every kid.

Meanwhile, I do my best to help the customer in front of me as best I can. “Well, if your child is five but reads like an eighth grader, you should just go to the regular adult fiction section, because that’s what most eighth graders read.” Or, I just take them to the Shakespeare section and ask if their kindergartener is more of an Othello or an As You Like It man. They should probably wait and tackle the violent stuff like Titus Andronicus or the brainy stuff like King Lear until they’ve at the very least learned about fractions.

3. Just Because You’re into It, Doesn’t Mean the Rest of the World Is.

Here’s something that happens every day: A customer bounds in and says: “Do you have that book [insert partially correct title here]? It was on [insert generic daytime talk show here]. You must have it. Eeeeeverybody is buying it!”

If this is their pitch, chances are good that at least one of these three (if not all) are wrong. People have the crazy notion that just because they read about something on a random page in a newspaper, everyone must’ve heard about it and are clamoring it up. This is almost never true. In fact, sometimes I’m least happy when I can find the book for the customer and they see one of two sad copies that have been sitting in section untouched since they came in on their release day. In that situation, the customer has a wakeup call that causes them to question the world in which they live: “Well, why don’t you have more? And why aren’t they out in front? Isn’t everyone asking for this?”

It’s hard not to tell the customer the truth, especially when the book is something like I Saw Nothing: The Kato Kaelin Story or Lean on Me: A Detailed History of the Household Wall. Actually, I take that back. It’s very, very easy to tell the customer the truth, even though it’ll cost you about twenty more minutes in Purgatory.

* * *

So, if you can just keep these concepts in place, chances are you will be doing better than 95% of the people who walk through the front door of my store. However, that’s not to say that even when these peeves are cured, there won’t be other ones forming down the line like new strains of diseases once the antidote has been found.

But I’d risk it to say that if these peeves are corrected, it will at least bring the conventional wisdom level out of the Middle Ages and into that of the Early Renaissance. There may not be three-point perspective yet, but at least they’re beginning to tilt the halos.

I’m Sorry, But You Must Be Stopped Immediately. (An Open Letter to Nicholas Cage)

Dear Mr. Cage,

I know that you’re a huge Elvis fan, and so am I.

You have probably heard that story (I believe I read it in the 1999 30^th anniversary edition of Elvis’s post-comeback studio recordings, Suspicious Minds: The Memphis 1969 Anthology) where Chips Moman, the producer with whom Elvis would collaborate on the sessions, was trying to get through to Elvis just how out-of-touch he was, having spent the Age of Aquarius shuttling back and forth between Graceland and Hollywood, surrounded only by a crew of hanger-ons and lackeys who did little more than sit around and worship him.

The story goes that for some reason or another, Chips wants Elvis to go outside with him when they were meeting for the first time in California. Elvis tells him, no way, I’m the biggest star in the world and I’m just gonna get mobbed. Chips is able to finally convince Elvis to try it and the two men walk down the street in late-’60s Los Angeles. And Elvis is shocked at the fact that not only is he not mobbed, but that no one seems to even notice him.

The upshot was that Elvis sobered up (at least momentarily) enough to reassess his situation and work with Chips, who was pretty much the only producer of his mature career to challenge him on material and performance. In so doing, Elvis made the finest studio recordings of his life.

I relate this rock and roll version of The Emperor’s New Clothes because I fear that you are in a similar situation that Elvis was in in the late 1960s, and I fear that you may be surrounded by yes men and hanger-ons who don’t know or don’t care about the work you’re doing.

What follows is a manifesto of what one potential fan of yours would like to tell you:

1. You are 47 years old. There is no reason why you should be making action movies that would make Shia Labeouf look immature.

2. Your hot costars are young enough to be your children. Drop-dead blonde 20-somethings don’t fall for 47-year-olds, unless you are rich and can potentially be used to gain recognition, either financial or otherwise…Oh, wait, I see. Still, it doesn’t make it comfortable to watch.

3. People who talk like David Schwimmer don’t make realistic action stars. If you talked like Matt LeBlanc, there’d be no problem here. I think I could even work something out if you talked like Matthew Perry. But Schwimmer? You’d be better off if you talked like Courteney Cox.

4. You have an Oscar. Use it for something other than rubbing your back after a hard day of injuring yourself with stunts that mostly had to be done by a double anyway.

5. Return to your roots (and I don’t mean hairplugs). Accept the fact that as time moves forward, your film returns diminish. You cut your teeth on indie/outsider stuff like Birdy and Raising Arizona before breaking through artistically with Leaving Las Vegas. But then, you had one great action film (The Rock, although the Criterionites are still almost as pissed it’s #108 as they are that Armageddon is #40, but I digress) and one decent action film (Face/Off) before the long, sad slide into one generic blob of loud and crashy dreck.

6. Finally -- and this one’s probably going to hurt -- you should never play Superman EVER. EVER. EVER. You playing Superman would be like the equivalent of Steve Buscemi waking up one day and telling his agent, “Hey, I think I should play Mr. Darcy in a remake of Pride and Prejudice.” Or Sylvester Stallone deciding to direct and star in a remake of Hamlet. Or Bob Dylan convincing his label to record him crooning Bing Crosby-style Christmas standards. (Oops, scratch that last one…But you get the picture.)

I hope I’m not totally being totally disrespectful of your career or your talent. Please understand that this comes out of a deep respect for these things. I loved you in Birdy, thought you were charming in Moonstruck, and that The Rock was a lot of fun. Heck, I’ll even take 2,000 Miles from Graceland over your current work.

Which brings us back to the King. What I’m hoping is that, like Elvis getting his hard-to-take-but-much-needed wakeup call from Chips Moman, you too can take this advice and prosper into a late-period career worthy of comeback kids and late bloomers like Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray. Heck, you still have a chance to win a second Oscar before Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise land their first. But time is always of the essence.

And as I already mentioned, you are 47 years old. If you were Elvis, you would’ve been dead five years ago.

Regards,

Eric.

The Slickest Thing I’ve Ever Said (A Daylight Savings True Story)

I hate Halloween. Maybe it’s because I was born on Christmas, maybe it’s because I hate clowns, maybe it’s because I was always nervous around kid-centered social activities, but it was a day I never liked. It probably just boils down to my hatred of people wearing makeup, something that has made me one of the few people I know who is consistently unimpressed by The Wizard of Oz. (I think the movie sucks when it goes into color; I always want to see more of what happens in the black-and-white world.)

At any rate, I often avoided trick-or-treating when I was younger, preferring to stay home, watch television with my parents, and answer the door when trick-or-treaters came by. Sometimes I’d even dress in a “low maintenance” costume (usually a Boston Red Sox player) in case any of my classmates came to the door, so that I could play it off like I had already gone out and was now home. Hence, trick-or-treating was usually avoided; Halloween parties were out the question.

This put me in a strange spot a decade later when a few of my closest college friends were throwing a Daylight Savings party. They originally wanted to throw a Halloween party, but an overlapping group of friends were already planning what was going to be the definitive one of the season. My friend Adam realized that Daylight Savings was happening a few days before Halloween that year and told everyone: “It’s a Daylight Savings party, but you’re encouraged to wear your Halloween costume.” It was a stroke of genius: No toes stepped on, no party spirit lost.

It made me think of my favorite episode of the most underrated television show perhaps ever, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, which had a short run in the ’90s on Nickelodeon. The show always had a surreal bent that separated it from anything else on the channel (let alone the fluff that they played on Disney), which in hindsight feels like a precursor to shows like Community and movies by Wes Anderson.

At any rate, they were the only show I’m aware of to do a Daylight Savings episode. In it, Little Pete decides he hates Daylight Savings and wants to fight against it, so he bicycles across the time zones of the country, racking up the extra hours gained in each. Meanwhile, Big Pete goes on a date with his best friend Ellen, only to have it turn disastrous when he tries to cross the line from friendship to romance. After regretting his actions, Big Pete and Ellen realize that Daylight Savings has given them an extra hour, in which they can redo their failed date and bring their relationship back to friendship.

So, suffice to say that the notion of a Daylight Savings party, even one in which you were encouraged to wear your Halloween costume, intrigued me. I had never been to a Daylight Savings party before.

I put on my college equivalent of a “low maintenance” costume: A tie-and-sweater vest-wearing Alex P. Keaton, complete with parted bangs and a copy of the Wall Street Journal under my arm. I am pleased to report that my costume proved so successful (this being an art party, where everybody usually stays in the costume), someone called me a baby-killer in the kitchen.

As I defended rightwing ideologies to leftwing extremists, I noticed my friend Katy (who hated “slutty” girl costumes and dressed like a cowboy) was getting drunker and drunker. When the party was winding down, a very intoxicated Katy (intoxiKaty?) was ready to make her way home. Even though she lived roughly a half an hour out of my way, I decided I was going to be a gentleman and help her navigate through the mean streets of suburban Pittsburgh, where many a lesser man has fallen prey to the well-lit winding sidewalks and charming front lawns. Through some brave combination of caution, diligence, and determination, I was able to get her home safely in one piece.

The next day, I ran into Katy in a computer lab. She had long since sobered-up and put together what had happened the night before. “Thanks for walking me home,” she said with a bit of embarrassment. “I feel bad – you really didn’t have to walk so far out of your way.”

“It was a Daylight Savings party,” I told her. “I had an extra hour to use, so I used it to walk you home.”

She smiled and gave me a look as though I had just said the slickest thing I would ever say.

Which I just had.

Giving Something Ba[ra]ck.

My wife & I just moved to Washington, D.C. -- the scenic Northeast Quadrant of Brookland, to be exact. So far it’s quite lovely. There’s no shortage of American flags or historical markers (or American flags on historical markers, or even, in the case of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a historical marker for an American flag, but I digress), which is just fine by me.

One bonus of moving to Washington was that we would be closer by all sorts of good people we haven’t been near in a while -- immediate family, high school friends, college friends, post-college quarter-life crisis-era friends, and more.

But there is one person in particular that I am very interested to be living closer to: My good friend who I’ll refer to as Barack O., to keep his identity private.

Did you ever have one of those friends who only ever contact you when they want something? Well, Barack O. is that person in my life. He emails me personally all the time asking me for money. Although I never respond, he still keeps emailing me just the same. Every now and then he throws in an invitation to dinner, but somehow it never seems to work out.

I hope that living near him will cause us to run into each other on the street. If and when we do, boy will he feel awkward! I’ll say, “Hey man, it’s me, your good friend Eric! I know you know who I am since you email me directly almost every day. Funny to run into you now…I was just about to grab a coffee, but I’m short on cash. Can you lend me some money? Any amount, no matter how small, would be greatly appreciated. Getting me coffee will help keep the terrible agenda of tiredness at bay at a time when it is most crucial for my body to remain on the right course. With your help, I know we can do this together. God bless America!”

If that doesn’t get at least a buck fifty out of him, I’m gonna strongly reconsider calling Barrack O. my friend in the first place.

Building iMerica

There is a sense of size and grandeur that has always been central to the American mind – a land filled with an epic sense of vastness in both its physical (“From sea to shining sea”) as well as its mental (“All men are created equal”) identity. Part of the reason why people disagree upon a definitive American novel (my Huckleberry Finn could be your Moby Dick, or vice-versa, or both, or neither) or film (The Birth of a Citizen Gonewiththewindfather, anyone?) is because America is too large to fit into a 500-page book or 2-hour film.

Yet there is an inherently American identity that defies the vastness it thrives upon. I’ve been thinking a lot about this paradox as I’ve been mapping the terrain of my own personal epic adventure, setting up my iPhone. The fact that I’ve had it for well over half a year is irrelevant because what more is America than grand improvisation?

My goal, with equal parts love and obsession, is to strip America down to its bare essence and within the confines of a 14 GB iPhone, such that, the next time I ever get stranded on a desert island (with an outlet), I can keep the essence of America on my phone, and thus, keep it with me at all times. (And, of course, still have room for unrelated non-American things like my Beatles albums and the complete works of Shakespeare.)

I call my grand project iMerica.

What follows is a list of the core documents of my country-within-a-country, the essence of a City upon a Hill in 14 GBs or less.

Documents

The Historical Documents Ap, from StandardWorks. Covering over four centuries of American speeches, articles, court rulings, war papers, poems, and song lyrics, this ap will get you a basic all-in-one American desk reference; included are the founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Articles of Confederation), as well as every presidential inaugural speech (including Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, one of the finest speeches ever given), and all of the other usual suspects (MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and the Emancipation Proclamation, Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech and a complete copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”), as well as such light reading as the Mayflower Compact and the Federalist Papers. All this, and Nixon’s “Checkers” speech too!

Books

I can’t afford a Barnes & Noble Nook (TM) (the “TM” stands for “Too Much”), so I just downloaded the free Nook (TM) ap and some cheap B&N editions of some classic literature and turned my iPhone into a Great American Bookshelf. Minus the sexy Barnes & Noble Nook (TM) cover case, of course.

Nonfiction

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It’s said that if you were lucky enough to own books in the early 19^th Century, you owned two: One was the Bible and the other was this. A pioneering autobiography/self-help/history/memoir that defined the American character almost as soon as it appeared. So charming, fascinating, and inspiring, no one ever seems to notice that it ends years before the American Revolution even begins. (Or perhaps, like the Great Experiment that frames it, it remains unfinished.)

Essays and Poems, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Declaration of Independence of American intellectualism, and one of the finest philosophers the country would ever produce. Ever wonder what people did before they could watch movies with sophisticated story-telling or television shows with ensemble casts and overlapping story archs? Just open to one of Emerson’s essays and try to keep up. In its own way, it’s as thrilling as any Martin Scorsese movie or Law & Order episode you’ve ever seen.

Walden and Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau. A nineteenth-century Into the Wild, this is the writing of a man who escaped his country by the very tenets it was established upon – reinvention and independence – to break life down to its essence and redefine it for himself. Walden was the sprawling epic, while “Civil Disobedience” was the concise essay, two halves of a whole that reiterated one of the chief rallying cries of the Revolution: Don’t Tread on Me.

Fiction

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. An extended meditation on the depths of American obsession, as played out in a high-seas epic, and interspersed with the history of the whaling industry, c. 1850, for no apparent reason. Great God, where is the ship?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. A white boy and a black man go drifting down the Big Muddy on a raft, and the rest is history. (Or, perhaps, culture.)

The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. A history of the Guilded Age disguised as a children’s fantasy book; with all due respect to Ms. Garland & Co., this was the original book that was better than the movie.

Poetry

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. Epic, brilliant, weird, and self-indulgent, Whitman stakes a claim for the American voice – a modern, unpredictable thing that can’t be held down by rhyme schemes, narratives, or anything more than a hip-yet-calculated whim.

The Collected Poems, by Emily Dickinson. Written in seclusion by a woman who spent most of her adult life self-exiled in her bedroom, she produced short, concise poetry that is among the finest ever penned; exploring love, loss, life, and death, her work was as universal as her existence was solitary.

The Essential Tales and Poems, by Edgar Allen Poe. A stunning look at the dark side of American life, which went on to influence everything from southern gothic writing to film noir and gangsta rap – all while inventing the detective novel.

Music

The Complete Hot Fives and Sevens, Louis Armstrong. If jazz music is America’s answer to classical, Louis Armstrong is its Mozart. As the first important soloist, Armstrong and his bandmates worked out not just how jazz should sound, but also how it should feel; the result is a joyful and exuberant music, knocked off in loose, late-night recording sessions that redefined freedom in music and music in freedom.

Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band, Duke Ellington. As the first great jazz composer, Duke Ellington was the ying to Louis Armstrong’s yang – his music was all about form and structure and organization. This incarnation of his band (named after bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster) is generally considered the finest big band ever assembled, and with cuts like “Take the A Train,” it’s easy to hear why.

Lady Day: The Best of Billie Holiday. A two-disc overview of Billie Holiday’s peak years at Columbia, where she literally reinvented how a vocalist could sound (not to mention what a vocalist could feel and be), twisting words and skirting the beat with a gardenia in her hair and a tear in her voice.

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Frank Sinatra. The cream of Frank Sinatra’s legendary collaborations with arranger Nelson Riddle, this is the Chairman of the Board at his mature, mid-’50s peak. Don’t believe the Sinatra hype? Just put on “You Make Me Feel So Young” and try not to swoon.

Legendary Country Singers, Hank Williams. The closest thing we’ve got to a single-disc retrospective of the king of modern country music; it’s hard to narrow it down to an hour when virtually every song he recorded was a classic. Consider this an overview, with nowhere to go but up.

King of the Delta Blues Singers, Robert Johnson. So much has been written about Robert Johnson it has become impossible to separate the myth from the man. Did Johnson really sell his soul to the devil in return for a sudden proficiency in blues music? Maybe not, but it sure as hell sounds like he did…

Elvis at Sun, Elvis Presley. Elvis “invents” rock and roll music on “That’s All Right Mama” and nine other sides, amongst the finest in rock and roll. The remaining nine tracks are the surviving masters (and one alternate take) of his output at Sun; what it lacks in quantity is made up for its brilliance, influence, and vitality – this is music you literally can’t get tired of. Have you heard the news?

Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan. Beginning with the storming “Like a Rolling Stone” and closing with the epic “Desolation Row,” this is Bob Dylan’s finest hour, and he doesn’t miss a beat. He sings of lovers, trains, confusion, and friends in music that blurs the lines between rock and blues, country and folk, past and present, comedy and tragedy, life and death. When he sings of needing a dump truck to unload his head partway through the album, you take his word for it.

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen. On the Road remade into a hipster’s daydream with Elvis’s bravado, Dylan’s imagery, and Phil Spector’s production values, this was music that staked its claim to greatness through the act of mapping it out, music that tried very hard, and somehow still delivered on its own golden promise.

At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash. I once decided that if America had a voice, it would sound like Johnny Cash. This is his finest hour, singing songs of love, home, prison, and death to a crowd that meets his fuel and fury every step of the way.

Live at the Apollo, James Brown. Rhythm and blues as redemption as the Godfather of Soul begs, borrows, and screams his way through another night on the uptown chitlin’ circuit.

I Never Loved a Man The Way I Loved You, Aretha Franklin. With the title track, the Queen of Soul took the fervor of the church and brought it into the bedroom; with the landmark “Respect,” she then brought it out into the streets.

Film

Citizen Kane.* The greatest film ever made. It’s everything they say it is and more, benchmark in filmmaking and production, and also a fascinating production that has barely aged since it was made. It succeeds where so many other films have failed because it understands that in America, success and failure exist back-to-back to each other, as opposed to on two separate planes.

[* – Citizen Kane will be on sale digitally for the first time on September 16; I am literally counting down the days until this occurs and being careful to leave ample room in my iPhone for when it does.]

King Kong. The greatest movie ever made. All big and spectacle, this paved the way for the great American tradition of the blockbuster – the granddaddy to Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Titanic and Avatar, and better than all of those movies without any of the Technicolor and not a single computer graphic in sight.

Television

The Dick Van Dyke Show, “That’s My Boy?” Until the “Sammy’s Visit” episode of All in the Family comes out digitally – the most perfect half-hour of television comedy if I’ve ever seen it – this will have to do. The finest of all the early family comedies, probably because it was also just as effective as an early workplace comedy, this episode is included here for its trailblazing surprise ending that unwittingly defuses two hundred years of racial strife in one glorious moment of comedy.

The Bible

The KJV Bible Ap, from Tecarta Bible. Okay, so this predates America, but you could’ve fooled me – from the moment America deemed itself a City upon a Hill, it used the Bible as its chief reference and touchstone, the passion play against which its national drama could unfold. Any lip service about separating church and state failed centuries ago to such an extent that we don’t notice how much religion is in our national rhetoric not because it isn’t there, but because we are long since numb to the fact that it is everywhere.

Alright, so that’s roughly four pages of American documents that can provide a basic skeleton for your own little iMerica. From there you can add to it what you wish; like the country it encapsulates, this is an improvisation powered by freedom and reinvention.

I know I for one am gonna be on the continual hunt for when or if iTunes ever releases “Steamboat Willie.”

Sound Treasoning: A Brief History of the Fall & Fall of Recorded Sound

The music industry is dead. Hate to break it to you, but it is.

Actually “dead” is too easy a term to use here, one that sacrifices the forest for the trees. A better word to use would be “in transition.” In fact, I’m convinced that the closest thing the music industry has seen to its current state (or lack thereof) of the last ten to fifteen years was about a century earlier, when sound recording was reeking havoc on the sheet music industry. Think about it – until around the turn of the 20^th Century, the music industry was built around sheet music. If you wanted to listen to music, you made it yourself in your parlor. If you wanted to get some, there was a nineteenth century version of iTunes for your convenience: Song peddlers who came door-to-door, who would sit down at your piano and play “audio clips” of the songs you were interested in. You bought the ones you wanted, forgot the ones you didn’t. Sound familiar? (No pun intended, of course.)

Yessir, that was the good ol’ days of the music industry, back when Tin Pan Alley was a real place and the only digital recording around was the divots on a player-piano cylinder. But then along came the advent of sound recording – first wax cylinders, then coil cylinders, then circular discs (all of which was the BluRay vs. HD of its day…Remember HD? Or better yet BetaMaxx? Or the minidisc?).

I once had a professor who said the most radical invention in human history was the invention of recorded sound because it had absolutely no precedent. Motion pictures had photographs before them, which in turn had daguerreotypes. The telephone had the telegraph, and, um, people shouting really loud before that. Really tiny handheld devices had relatively small computers before them, which in turn had relatively enormous room-sized punch-card computers before them.

The point is that no one was trying to discover recorded sound while sitting under an apple tree or flying a kite during a lightning storm – Thomas Edison just sort of stumbled upon it while pursuing other seemingly important things that I can’t remember the details of now. But there it was. Sound vibrations captured in foil.

(My above-mentioned professor went so far as to claim that when introducing the first sound devices through nineteenth century informercials – that is, traveling around the country like a small medicine show – in which they would show the audience a live band behind one curtain and a cylinder player behind the other, the audience always picked the live band because they had no concept of sound existing any other way; even though the record was scratchy and flat to our ears, for them sound was sound.)

At any rate, this all sent the sheet music people up in arms over what “really” constituted music and who owned it. In truth, however, it was just the thing that made music so awesome – that it was an invisible, instantly fleeting experience – was also making it very hard to make a buck off of. But as what always happens in our country, an industry sprang up relatively quickly around it, which was strong and powerful for over a century.

Until these days. Once again, music’s etherealness is doing in the big dogs and for over a decade now, we have Chuck D on one side arguing for the music’s freedom and Lars Ulrich on the other arguing for artist’s rights, kids are having hard-drives full of pirated music being confiscated by the law, the idea of a “record label” has shifted so much that a once iron-clad reality has become an experimental liquid.

All of which is not necessarily a bad thing. America is nothing if not a country whose very ideals – freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of all that Declaration of Independence stuff that everyone assumes is in the Constitution (it isn’t) – forces it to constantly question, challenge, reinvent, and adapt. Why shouldn’t our music do the same?

Which finds us in a very odd predicament. The history of recorded sound is nothing if not using sound to make a bigger and larger statement – hence, the one-sided disc gave way to the two-sided disk, which in turn gave way to the multi-record album (so named because it was made up of several record sleeves bound together, not all that different in size and feel of an old photo album), which in turn gave way to the LP (about 20 minutes on each side) to the cassette tape (about 45 minutes on each side) to the CD (80 minutes of glorious, digital sound).

The recent trends in the music industry (or lack thereof) appear to be refocusing things on the single, the A-side, the hit. The albums that had stopped being physical albums around the time that the Greatest Generation were first taking advantage of the G.I. Bill were now being used by their grandchildren in the most abstract of terms: “I’m gonna buy this album on iTunes.”

Or more accurately, “I’m gonna find a copy of this album online and download it.”

Given the amount of sound that can be packed into a modern listening device – and if my collection can be considered an accurate representation, I have three and half days of music on my iPhone and over a month and a half of music on my iTunes – coupled with the ease of sharing that accompanies digital technology, we have an entire generation hoarding music, the majority of which they will likely never listen to.

What we have then is a camera obscura of the observation that began this piece. Perhaps things aren’t going back to the single song so much as people now have the capabilities of gathering lots and lots of albums’ worth of material, thus making it a sort of radioactive freak stepchild of the progression from the single to the album to the cassette tape to the CD. For, in downloading song after song by itself, aren’t we just ultimately gathering a library far beyond what could be held in a 200-disc Case Logic book, or perhaps, even a shelf-lined living room?

If this strikes me as natural, it also strikes me as very American. The history of this country was built upon the notion of Manifest Destiny, that is, the idea that the land is bound to be ours, so we might as well grab it now. It is of course a self-fulfilled prophecy built upon the same logic that drove MacBeth (and we all know how that turned out), but it is also an intrinsic reflection of our national character. Namely, I see it, I should have it, I will have it. Isn’t that the story of America in three phrases or less? If so, the whole thing seems closer to the myth of Icarus than anything to flow out of William Faulkner’s pen.

And if rock and roll is a quintessentially American artifact (which I believe it is) on the same level as the cotton gin, Coca-Cola, and Superman, it only goes to show that its postmodern incarnation is still playing out the same battles that we thought were long resolved when we mis-learned the story of Custer’s Last Stand.

Or even better, go find a copy of Larry Verne’s “Please Mr. Custer,” a stupid novelty hit that topped the charts the same year that JFK took office (it also made #9 on the R&B charts, if you can imagine that), and download it illegally. This is precisely what I thought I had done when I went through a novelty song kick last year (pick to click: Johnny Cymbal’s cover of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” theory in the form of “Mr. Bass Man”), only except that it’s not there among the 20,773 songs in my iTunes library.

Apparently a bigger facet of the American identity was in fact driving the day: The freedom of choice.

Either that, or Verne’s song – an intangible, ever-fleeting digital indicator of how far technology (and, I would argue, America) could go before turning back on itself – sucked no matter how it was played.

American Madness, American Beauty: Yvette Vickers, 1928 – ???

When I can’t sleep at night, I often peruse the obituaries. I am fascinated by the lives of these famous, infamous, and anonymous people, who I would have never heard about except in death. As a postmodern romantic who wants to keep the flame of their memory alive, I do what anyone in my situation would do: I post the obit to my Facebook page. It’s gotten to the point where a friend dubbed me “The Grim Reaper of Facebook”; when I do miss an obit that people think are worthy, they post it to my page with a little note.

One such time was earlier this month, when a friend from Texas posted a link to my page with the message: “Did you hear about this?”

I had not. The link was to an obit in the “L.A. Times” with the picture of a ’50s blonde with a headline that was as gruesome as the girl was beautiful: “Mummified body of former Playboy playmate Yvette Vickers found in her Benedict Canyon home.”

This was the rare obit that didn’t announce that a person had died, but rather that a dead person had been found.

Vickers was already living as a recluse when a neighbor began to get concerned when she hadn’t seen or heard from Vickers in quite some time. When the neighbor noticed yellowed untouched mail in the mailbox and spider webs on the front door, she decided to investigate further. Climbing through a window, she made her way through an endless tangle of junk – boxes of clothes, newspapers, and letters that were strewn everywhere and made walking through the rooms nearly impossible. Eventually, the neighbor reached a room upstairs, where she found the body of Yvette Vickers so far gone that her body had mummified beyond the point of recognition.

The police estimated that Vickers had been there for upwards to a year.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on August 26, 1928, as Yvette Vedder, she changed her name, moved to California, and tried to become a Hollywood star. She could be ruthless – after appearing in a nationally-televised White Rain shampoo commercial in 1955, she divorced her first husband because she felt he was holding her back, even though he had just bought her the 1920s Benedict Canyon home in which her body was later found.

And though she spent her final days as a recluse, she spent her prime years bubbling under in 1950s Hollywood. She became one of the first Playboy playmates, a B-movie star who had appeared in the likes of “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” (as a mistress, not the 50-foot woman), and a would-be Hollywood socialite who had dated Cary Grant. After a string of television and small movie roles, it seems that her career got permanently off-track when a major role opposite Paul Newman in the 1963 film “Hud,” was left almost entirely on the cutting room floor. She spent the next decade doing sporadic television work until a B-movie buff discovered her in the ’90s and helped her go into the cult movie circuit, where she went to conventions autographing old pin-up pictures of herself.

But then, it seemed, something snapped. Maybe it was the shame and frustration of being reduced to the convention equivalent of a freak; maybe it was the alcohol she seemed to be drinking more and more; maybe it was genetics (her parents had also become very reclusive in their old age). Whatever it was, it did her in good, and for the rest of her life, she was rarely seen and hardly ever left the house. Apparently she became paranoid, spending her final days scrawling notes about people she believed were stalking her in the margins of the books in which she kept her recipes.

Yet, all of the initial articles I saw left out the thing for which Yvette Vickers can be most recognized for today: She is the laughing blonde who frustrates William Holden by tying up the telephone line in the party scene of “Sunset Boulevard.” Although uncredited, it was her first appearance in a film and, perhaps, something of a break.

Of course, she is only in the film for a few seconds because the rest of the film is focused on an entirely different lady, the delusional and aging silent screen star Norma Desmond, who is played by the aging silent screen star Gloria Swanson. The film creates a bizarre world of fourth wall Hollywood self-reference – when Desmond is watching old films of herself, they are real old films of Swanson; when she has her old friends over for bridge, they turn out to be an uncredited trio of real silent film stars, including, if you look sharply, an aging Buster Keaton.

In portraying Desmond’s histrionics in equally comic and tragic turns, “Sunset Boulevard” is the definitive romantic portrait of American madness. Here is a grand old star locked away in her old 1920s-era Hollywood mansion, a tireless performer living out her days in a performance that nobody sees.

I have often thought that “Sunset Boulevard” portrays the quintessential version of American madness: Someone cut off from the real America, who then creates their own country in their mind.

The real-life version of this can best be found in “Little” Eddie Bouvier’s bizarre “performance” in the legendary “Grey Gardens,” which documents Bouvier and her mother (Jackie O.’s first cousin and aunt, respectively) madly living in the filth and squalor of a dilapidated Hamptons beach home. But shades of this can also be found, I believe, in Brian Wilson’s lost “Smile” album, Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and James Otis’s final years. As Perry Miller famously theorized about the Puritans, perhaps the quintessential American identity is one who goes on an errand into the wilderness, fails to rivet the world on his their own, and is forced to retreat into themselves.

Yvette Vickers is thus the most striking example of this I have come across yet – there she is, at the center of “Sunset Boulevard,” a stark portrait of American madness and failure that her brief appearance contrasts, a girl-next-door blonde beauty, bubbly and laughing into the telephone, oblivious to the rest of the film, oblivious to the fact that she would spend her final years all but living this film out.