TKM

A musical suite was once composed for me. Only a handful of people are aware of its existence, and I’ve never played it for anyone I know. It strikes me as egotistical to mention it, let alone sit someone down and bid them, “Listen to my symphonic tribute!” Besides, it’s too painfully personal and evocative of the only relationship in my life in which a heart other than my own was broken—casting me firmly in that other, less sympathetic role.

I met Jay McHale in 1987, when I was 20 and working in my first career as a buyer for a retail music store. He was a sales representative for an independent distributor in Minneapolis.

Of the many sales reps I spoke with in those days, Jay was easily the worst at his job, with the actual selling of product taking a backseat to the joy he took in describing it. Where salespeople from other distributors might tag a performer as “Scottish folk rock,” Jay might liken the artist to a cross between Silly Wizard and the Triffids, with a short stack of pancakes on the side and a long weekend ahead—and if you happened to be unfamiliar with any of the bands he made reference to, no matter, he would in turn gleefully relate their capsule history, career highlights, and must-have albums—and because his enthusiasm was 100% infectious and 0% pretentious, one was never made to feel ignorant for having to ask.

Our “sales” calls grew increasingly longer and more frequent, and inevitably we began to swap personal information. It turned out he was 29, older than me by a decade—at a time in life when a 10-year age difference seemed significant. He was born in Racine, Wis., and had a degree in religion from the College of St. Thomas. He told me he had seriously considered the priesthood but never felt genuinely called to service. He was bonkers for the Twins, the Brewers, and baseball in general, immediately adopting my hometown Angels as yet another hard-luck team to root for. He was also a musician and composer who reflexively downplayed his talents.

We swapped phone numbers and took our epic conversations home from work.

You know where this is going, especially if you’ve ever heard me go on wistfully about the Man I Almost Married. Not having come out to myself until the ripe old age of 25, I was still years from that bit of self-awareness. Still, I had only dated a few guys in high school—and only one for a long enough stretch that my lack of physical affection toward him was notable. (And that particular high school boyfriend did note it—the word frigid may have been used.) I certainly had my reasons for not putting out, but like anyone, I longed for connection. Though I wouldn’t articulate it to myself at the time, in retrospect I can see why a long-distance relationship might have been particularly appealing to a lesbian in gestation.

But this isn’t really about me.

I first visited Minneapolis in early 1988. Jay would later write that I had “brought spring to Prospect Park,” and it was true that by the time I left, the bare trees and chill that greeted my arrival had given way to sunshine and new growth, all within the short span of a week and a half. It was a remarkable display to a Southern Californian unaccustomed to such showy seasonal shifts, but Jay was far more a force of nature than I. He took me to about a dozen of his favorite places my very first day there, including multiple record stores and music shops whose staffers seemed uniformly to adore him. I would see several of them later that night when Jay’s then-current band, a power-pop quintet deceptively named Twelve Angry Men, played First Avenue’s 7th Street Entry.

A perfect gentleman, he had arranged for me to stay while in town with his friends Michele and Gail, who lived just down the street from him. And when Jay and I took a side trip to Winnipeg, he asked for two beds at the hotel desk without consulting me. Maybe he was acting on some kind of psychic energy; maybe he was himself reluctant to get physical, whether because of his Catholic faith or his worries that my parents might think ill of a guy 10 years my senior bedding me. (On my departure my mother did make a crack about the possibility that I was flying 2,000 miles to meet up with an ax murderer, but she admirably withheld further judgment.)

While we were both certainly aware of the sexual tension, it never dominated our time together. As he confided in me at one point, a couple of his friends had told him that if after a year of long-distance flirtation we didn’t want to hop into bed together on first sight, something was deeply wrong; he told me he shrugged his shoulders in response and said that what we had was even better—and he meant it.

We sublimated sexual energy mostly through sharing music—and really, if you’re not having sex, aren’t there far worse ways to fill that space? When I heard a new album I loved, what excited me even more than the personal discovery was the idea of playing it for him. We sent packages back and forth, usually with recently discovered favorite CDs accompanied by a long letter and a few items we had come across since last we spoke or wrote that just reminded us of each other. I lived for UPS deliveries. Once I got a package full of fall leaves. And once I received two cassettes containing seven movements collectively called The Suite for TK. (While I had never much liked diminutives of my name, I liked that Jay called me “TK,” incorporating my middle initial, which stands simply for “Kay.”)

With Jay I could talk about someday starting a record label or founding a music festival or living in a lighthouse, and he would respond as if my dreams were perfectly rational and attainable goals. (In fact, he would later start his own record label, Catacombs, and even help to found a music festival, so attainable is in the mind of the dreamer.) Our visits to each other invariably included side trips wherein we would drive off all half-cocked with no reservations and no clear destination, which led to a number of strange nights in the kinds of motels one ends up in after driving till 2 a.m. before deciding to look for vacancies. We found that span on the clock between a prudent bedtime and single digits to be the most fertile for appreciating a new album—perhaps one to which we had delayed our first listen in anticipation of just such a moment. On one of those night drives together we stumbled on the Northern Lights and it seemed as though Jay had arranged the spectacular display—like the sky, in a fit of modesty, had pulled a diaphanous shower curtain about itself—expressly for the enhancement of our listening party. It’s hard to talk about a guy like that without sounding wistfully idealistic or just sappy, but anyone who met Jay would concur that there was magic in him.

I say “was” because I learned this week of his death, which actually occurred five years ago. It was a heart attack, his second apparently. He was 44.

How did I not know about his death before Thursday last? We lost touch, I offer lamely. Even from the most important people in our lives, we drift. We don’t mean to, and if we knew that the last time we spoke with them was going to be the last time we’d speak with them, we’d certainly handle things differently. I last spoke with him, by phone, circa 2000. It was uncomfortable on both ends, and that’s all I feel at liberty to say.

Since I found out about his death, however tardily, I’ve been doing the kinds of things people do when a person important to them dies: reading through the many letters he sent, mourning his loss—both to me and to the universe—listening to some of the music he introduced me to, and kind of mentally assembling a virtual mix tape of music released since his death that I know he would have loved.

That’s no small feat, as his interests ranged far and wide. A memorial concert that was held in the spring following his death featured an array of Jay’s compositions in genres including pop, folk, jazz, Scandinavian music, and liturgical songs. He was instrumental in forming three local bands that I know of: the art-punk-jazz band 2i, the big band Steak Face, and the aforementioned power-pop force Twelve Angry Men. He played with countless other groups including the “celtodelic” Irish punk-folk band Boiled in Lead and the Violent Femmes, the latter of whom was appearing at First Avenue the weekend after Jay died and had reportedly asked him—via a phone message he never chanced to hear—to join them on stage.

I think the improbable tale behind the founding of Minneapolis’s Nordic Roots Festival provides a neat illustration of Jay’s catalytic properties: The story goes that in 1996 a Swedish folk label looking for U.S. representation sent a box of CDs to a Minneapolis distributor, where it sat around in a warehouse until a curious Jay McHale discovered the dusty, still-sealed box and took it home for a listen. He went characteristically nutty for what was inside and started playing favorites for his friends, among whom was a founder of the Rykodisc label, who in short order would found NorthSide, the only record label dedicated to Nordic folk in the United States. By 1999 NorthSide had attracted enough fan support to launch a festival dedicated to music from Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. Jay would serve until his death as an enthusiastic coordinator of the annual event—which still thrives, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. As he said in a 2001 article about the festival, “Whatever excites me, I put it on tape and pass it around. I love to toot the horn for something that’s underrated. Hedningarna’s [third album], Trä, was my Revolver. Hedningarna was a pivotal musical experience for someone who didn’t think there was anything new. This was what I was looking for.”

This all happened well after our relationship had ended, but as I read about it I thought, Well, of course, if anyone could parlay his enthusiasm for an orphaned box of CDs into a new record label and a festival dedicated to the music therein, that’s Jay.

It turns out I didn’t break his heart after all. I won’t let myself off the hook for hurting him, however unintentionally, but I need only read online remembrances of his life here and here and elsewhere to understand that his heart could never truly be broken. What he thought he saw in me was really just a reflection of his own soul, best summed when he wrote, “I believe you are driven by an inextinguishable love for all the ordinary and extraordinary things that life lets us bump into. To be able to see the sacred in the tiniest of things and to view the really big important stuff with the leavening of humor, optimism, and clear vision.”

Yeah, that’s Jay all right.

Cue outro:

The road’s dark with the stars full on
And they’re above you just the same
Like an answered prayer in the sound-charged air
You will be there as the night will soften
Road ends, and without directions
We will drive it just the same.

—Josiah “Jay” McHale (August 22, 1958–October 16, 2002)

L.A.’s last country music radio station, after 25 years serving that market, switched formats August 17. If I seem a little slow on the uptake on this one, it’s only because I had no idea anything of the sort had transpired until Saturday, when I went for a haircut and was filled in on the news by my gay black West Hollywood hairdresser, who’s despondent over the loss.

“When I went out for coffee the other day I heard strains of Carrie Underwood and started following the SUV she was coming from,” he said, doing a little Frankenstein monster walk to illustrate his blind desperation.

When I asked what format the station had switched to, he spat, “Hip-hop R&B crap,” then he joked that his “people” were after him, that they’d heard about some black guy listening to KZLA and just wouldn’t stand for it.

My hairdresser certainly isn’t the only one in distress. “I almost threw up, I was so upset,” said longtime KZLA listener Ruth Rogers, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I think it’s racist.”

Really, Ms. Rogers? What kind of racism would that be? The 53-year-old Orange County resident continued, “This is becoming a nation of minorities. I’m not going to turn on my radio anymore. Country music promotes patriotism and family values, and they’ve replaced it with something that just promotes money and hate.”

Oh, that kind of racism.

I’m not what I would call a country music fan, though I do like country music. I’m sure you get the distinction. The appellation “country music fan” just has too much baggage, an unpretty, jingoistic, Republican, NASCAR vibe. A Ms. Rogers, not-my-demographic vibe. So while I have a fair amount of classic country and country-influenced singer-songwriters in my music library, I hesitate to tell anyone that I like country music.

In truth, I was raised on the stuff, back when Southern California had any number of stations to choose from. My mom leaned toward KFOX, which played a mix of contemporary and classic country, and our radio was always on. Always—even when everybody was watching TV. It was all I knew for years. Very much like Chinese food in China is just “food,” country music to me was “music,” and as a kid I loved calling the radio station with special requests, first asking Mom what she wanted to hear then ringing them up. I was put on the air a few times, probably because the DJ thought it both disturbing and cute that a kid was asking for songs with titles like “Barrooms to Bedrooms” (among my mother’s souvenirs there’s a cassette tape of me requesting this very song, recorded straight off the radio with my boxy portable cassette player).

Through both subliminal and active processing, I absorbed quite a lot, and I can sing you a startling number of 1970s country songs, a talent on display this weekend as my partner witnessed the full extent of my childhood inculcation into the country music fold.

“You don’t remember ‘Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man’? Conway and Loretta?” I asked, with the proper amount of shock, then tried to jog her memory by singing the hook.

“Hey! Looziana woman, Mississippi man
We get together any time we can
Mississippi River can’t keep us apart
There’s too much love in this Mississippi heart
Too much love in this Looziana heart.”

Blank expression.

We were in her Little Blue Truck™, leaving a local shoppertainment center. Before lunch we had gone to one of my favorite previously owned CD stores to search for the latest Hem album and a decent George Jones & Tammy Wynette hits package. Hem was swiftly located—and bargain-priced because the young people who work at the store have no idea who Hem is—but the only George & Tammy collection they had was a three-CD set, which I passed on. I’m not sure anyone needs that much G & T. After lunch I drifted into Tower Records, located at the aforementioned shoppertainment complex, in search of same. There were no George & Tammy CDs to be had, but I did emerge with hits collections from Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton and Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn. (Country convention demands that the man’s name be cited first.)

My present fixation with country music duets was sparked by the recent Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris album All the Roadrunning. It’s been in my car’s CD deck for months, spinning down only on rare occasions, when even I have to admit that it’s becoming the aural equivalent of wallpaper. I’m a longtime Harris fan, so I was destined to like the collaboration—inasmuch as anything she touches rates somewhere between pleasant and transcendent on my very subjective scale of liking. As an Associated Press reviewer noted, “Emmylou Harris would sound good matched with a singing hinge.” He went on to dismiss the album as lacking chemistry. I couldn’t disagree more.

All the Roadrunning is one of those albums that took a few listens before I embraced it with ferocity, then I was surprised at how much I liked Knopfler’s songs—all originals—and vocals (his fretwork always being unassailable). But the way they came together with alternating sincerity and playfulness is what really won me, and their interplay reminded me of some of the great country duet partnerships.

Whatever happened to country music power couples anyway?

Through the 1970s, country radio was lousy with duets, and they weren’t isolated tracks from otherwise solo albums, they were from dedicated duet albums, from superstar singing partners who were often dating or married—making their songs of love and loss that much more resonant.

Remember?

If you don’t, you have something in common with my partner.

“How about George & Tammy’s ‘Two Story House’?” I asked, quoting its bouncy refrain: “ ‘How sad it is we now live in a two-story house.’ ”

“Why is it sad that they live in a two-story house?” she asked flatly.

“Because there’s no love about,” I said, solemnly. “They strove so hard for success, they had no time for each other and they fell out of love.” Then I broke into song again:

“I’ve got my story
And I’ve got mine too
How sad it is
We now live in a two-story house.”

Silence.

“You see,” I said helpfully, “they each have their own story about what went wrong, and they also each have their own story.”

“Yeah, I get the complicated layers of meaning,” she said, with no small amount of sarcasm. “But no, I’ve never heard the song.”

“ ‘Golden Ring’?” I offered, not even pausing this time before singing the final chorus.

“Golden ring (golden ring) with one tiny little stone
Cast aside (cast aside) like the love that’s dead and gone
By itself (by itself) it’s just a cold metallic thing
Only love can make a golden wedding ring.”

I studied her face for a glimmer of recognition and found none.

“Sweetie, I didn’t grow up in your mother’s house,” she said.

For years I had been under the delusion that these songs were ubiquitous, part of our collective American experience, our national fabric. Come to find out, not everyone grew up under the unrelenting influence of country radio. Weird.

Weirder still, I had failed to notice the long, slow death of country radio in my own hometown.

“The Los Angeles radio market is basically 40% Hispanic, 11% Asian, and 8% black, and country fans are about 98% Caucasian,” said Rick Cummings, a top executive at KZLA’s parent company, Emmis Communications Corp., according to the Times. “My job is to attract as large an audience as possible.”

And so it was that immediately following rush hour on the morning now known unironically as “Black Thursday” by KZLA listeners—who call themselves KZLAnation—the morning drive show DJ was reportedly told to segue from the Keith Urban track he was playing to a Black Eyed Peas song, after which he and his fellow staff members were let go.

I know from experience that format changes are as a rule executed unceremoniously. For three golden years, 1994–1997, 101.9 KSCA played an “adult album alternative” format that won my heart. For the first time since high school I felt like a radio station “got” me, that I was part of a recognized demographic who liked singer-songwriters and artists who blended elements of rock and folk and pop and soul and jazz and country into music that sometimes defied categorization and almost always ducked the top 40. Then one day I turned the ignition in my car and Spanish-language programming filled my interior; my little bright spot on the dial was gone forever.

While I understand that my piddling singer-songwriter demographic isn’t an advertising magnet, the death of country radio is more curious. Los Angeles reportedly accounts for 3% of all country music sales nationwide, making it the number 1 sales market in the genre for most major record labels. The very night KZLA crooned its last, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw played their first of three sold-out nights at the Staples Center: capacity 20,000. That’s a lot of cowboy boots for a supposedly urban market. Sure, on any one of those three nights I could likely have rolled a bowling ball from one end of the arena to the other without hitting a Democrat, but still, those folks deserve a radio station too. It placates them.

“What will all the Republicans listen to?” I asked my hairdresser.

“Now, now,” said my demographic-defying friend. “They’re not all like that.”

I couldn’t help but notice that when he talked about KZLA listeners and country music fans, he said “they,” not “we.”

Country music is appealing, I think, in a broader way than it’s marketed. The audience doesn’t have to be 98% Caucasion, nor should anyone who likes country be made to feel like an outsider for being black or gay or Democratic or antiwar—or for not appreciating a goddamn car race.

I don’t miss KZLA, whose play list was dominated by your Tim McGraws, your Brad Paisleys, your Gretchen Wilsons—whoever was hot at any given moment. Even my mom had stopped listening to the radio long before the death of KZLA, her taste having gone completely retro. She’s resorted to a mail-order catalog (with no Web presence—that old-school) called Country Music Memories, where she can purchase Boxcar Willie, Stanley Brothers, and Ferlin Husky CDs with abandon.

Me, I prefer your Donna Fargos, your Loretta Lynns, your Bobbie Gentrys, and to Tammy Wynette I guess I’d have to say, Tammy why not? So I do miss country radio, at least in theory. I miss the radio of my youth, when it was just “music.”

By the way, if anyone knows a gay country music lover in SoCal who’s available, my hairdresser is tall, fit, and handsome. He does a mean two-step, and he’s a Democrat.

“My” Starbucks is busy, especially now that tourist season is in full swing. Most mornings, a line extends out the door and onto the patio at the Hollywood and Highland complex. So it was that I was standing in such a line a bit before 9 this morning, alternately being charmed by the singsong cadence of “my” Starbucks’ newest employee, a Brit who surely took diction and etiquette lessons from Miss Julie Andrews herself, and wondering who the heck thought it necessary in 2006 to cover “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” which was merrily jangling through the speakers at me:

“You’d better look before you leap still waters run deep
And there won’t always be someone there to pull you out
And you know what I’m talking about
So smile for a while and let’s be jolly; love shouldn’t be so melancholy
Come along and share the good times while we can”

The guilty party is Martina McBride, and she lays it down without a trace of the irony with which you or I would surely smother the song were we to get drunk in a karaoke bar.

You know how it works when lines extend through doors—most notably at concerts, during intermission, when 5,000 women have 15 minutes and five bathroom stalls in which to pee—there are the people inside the establishment and the people outside the establishment, and then there’s the doorstop: the poor schmuck stuck holding the door open so that the people outside can see what’s going on inside. If the door isn’t held open, one or more people behind you are liable to get all antsy and think you’re just idly standing in front of a closed door, or that maybe you don’t know how to open it. (I’m reminded to be grateful that humans don’t come standard with horns—the loud kind, not the ramming kind, though those would be dangerous as well—because they’d be honking them all the livelong day.)

Just as the guy in front of me at Starbucks was due to assume doorstop duty, he pulled up a chair and sat down just to the right of the entrance, out of the line of the door and in the shade. “Man, this wait is crazy,” he said, then, looking at me, added, “I’ll catch up with you.”

Catching the door as the former doorstop squirted inside, I thought, He can’t possibly mean that I’m supposed to hold his place in line for him, that he’s going to sit there until I make it to the counter and then, like a dear old buddy pal of mine, slip inside to give my beautiful Mary Poppins his order. I decided that he didn’t expect that, that the scenario was so impossibly rude anyone with common decency would be embarrassed to attempt it.

For the record, I believe in extending common courtesy to others. I’ll hold the door for anyone, young or old, man or woman. I’ll hold it longer for a senior or a physically challenged person. And I don’t mind being thanked or acknowledged for doing so, because I think if I’ve taken the time to notice and accommodate someone, they can find the time to nod, smile, or even say thanks. I sometimes wonder if young, able-bodied men who blow through doors I’m holding open without so much as a wink in my direction suppose they’re doing feminism a favor? That would be the more charitable explanation.

Indeed, as I approached the counter, Mr. Sitonhisass popped through the door and slid into line in front of me without a glance or a word in my direction.

Had he asked me to hold his place in line, I would have. But three human traits I find particularly galling are arrogance, selfishness, and presumptuousness, and he managed to nail all three in one gesture. I so often find myself speechless in the presence of louts like him, but then I hang on to the psychic angst they generate far longer than I should.

Tell me, am I taking the decline of Western civilization too personally?

I’m trying to think of ways to let go of the negative energy I unwittingly glean as I move about society. Maybe I could take a cue from soccer and carry around yellow and red flashcards to signal violations of generally accepted manners. Just stoically hold the appropriate card in the offender’s face for a couple of seconds, then move on. They may have no idea what had just happened, but I could walk on in peace, leaving the toxicity behind to be reabsorbed by its source.

For Christmas I gave my partner the new 30-GB video iPod she’d been romancing at the Apple store, and as a result I inherited her first-generation 10-GB iPod. I had played around with her old iPod before, once, on an airplane, while she was asleep and I was wide-awake and completely disinterested in watching Monster-in-Law. I had to admit that it was nice having a virtual record collection in the palm of my hand and, having thus far resisted the iPod juggernaut, I wondered whether I might like one after all.

Nevertheless, the old iPod has been sadly neglected since it came into my possession. (Actually, I’ve never really taken “possession” of it since I feel that I shouldn’t profit from a gift I gave to my partner, so really she has two iPods, one of which she keeps trying to tell me is mine.) My pop-in-law gave me a $50 iTunes gift card to kick-start my digital library, but I haven’t yet visited the site. My partner thinks that I have trouble adapting to change, or that I simply resist the unfamiliar. But that’s not entirely true. I transitioned from LPs to CDs quite nicely.

I spent the better part of my youth, which by my calculation penetrated far into my 20s, hanging out in record stores. For nine of those years I actually worked in them, my first full-time gig being at the now-defunct Record Trading Center. As the name implied, RTC dealt in new and used records, though soon after I began working there we stocked our first CD: a Japanese import of the Beatles Abbey Road album. (Just in case anyone’s wondering, it’s OK to call a CD, or even a collection of music files meant to represent an artistic whole, an album. The term comes from the days when 78-rpm discs, which generally had just one song on each side, were sold in binders (or albums) that contained five or six discs comprising a cohesive collection. When 33-rpm LPs were introduced they retained the name, signifying not so much a format as a collection of music.)

While the compact disc took off in Asia, U.S. record companies were slower to embrace the new format. CDs were treated more as an audiophile novelty than a viable replacement to the LP. Most of the initial offerings were classical recordings, with only proven rock acts receiving CD treatment, and in those cases the disc releases lagged behind their LP counterparts by a number of weeks. Even then quantities were strictly allocated since manufacturing plants were scarce and their production was limited. As the price of CD players came down from thousands of dollars to hundreds, more and more customers clamored for the relatively small catalog of music available, with demand outstripping supply for the first year or so.

After I graduated high school I took a job as a buyer at an upstart store with a crazy business model: They would sell only CDs. I worked there for the next seven years, a witness to the CD revolution.

Now, just 20 years later, my friend J has gleefully announced to me, “We’ve decided to liquidate our CDs!” He and his wife have made three piles: music already transferred, music to be transferred, and music they no longer care about. When all their music is converted J figures they’ll have only a handful of CDs worth keeping—those with sentimental meaning—otherwise they’re going the way of so many dusty boxes of records before them.

I know I’m a dinosaur for liking the tangibility of CDs and LPs. (I still have a turntable, as well as a small collection of records that have never been released on CD.) I like to hold them and read their liner notes. I like madly searching through bins of used CDs at stores, hunting treasure, just as I used to dive into boxes of records at music swap meets.

I didn’t much mourn the passing of the LP. It had served us well for decades, but it also degraded with every revolution, filling its music with unintended pops and hiss that now sound as quaint to us as the key strikes of an old manual typewriter. I wasn’t even terribly concerned, as many record collectors were, with the loss of A and B sides as discrete sequences, with the B side of an album often kicking off with a song meant to set the tone for the second half. I figured that not having to split the album in two (with imposed time limits per side) would be more freeing to the artist, and back-catalog albums would still retain their original flow when released on CD.

My partner thinks I’m a snob for insisting that most serious artists intend that their albums be heard as carefully arranged sequences of music, the whole of which adds up to an artistic statement. It’s this prejudice that causes me to announce, more frequently than my partner would like, that greatest-hits albums are for pussies. Sure, it’s an overstatement—and I have a number of best-of and greatest-hits albums myself—but I do prefer the listening experience, and sometimes even the challenge, of music in its original context. I think it puts us closer to the artist’s soul. And I know that iTunes offers complete-album downloads, but I can’t help feeling that the album as a concept is in trouble.

Also in danger: album art.

As much as I love music, I also adore its ephemera. I used to decorate my room, and later my apartment, with promotional posters, album covers, and 45 sleeves I found meaningful, interesting, or flat-out strange. There were times when my living space resembled one of the rare record haunts I’d seek out in far-flung places, where the clerk/owner seemed disinterested in actually selling anything, regarding his collection more as a museum than a store. I still have hundreds of promotional posters from my music retailing days, brought home because I couldn’t bear to throw them out. I still can’t.

I know there are Web sites dedicated to downloadable album art for display on the iPod, but the iPod users I know don’t seem particularly interested in covers or liner notes. That said, I offer the following visual reminders of why album art is essential to our culture:

Save the album cover!

OK, so my partner tagged me to complete this survey, and while I’m not in the habit of doing everything she asks of me, this seems an easy enough way to please her. Maybe if I do this, she’ll agree to have Thai food this weekend. (She won’t. She dislikes Thai food, so she’ll probably bargain me down to Chinese food, which is what I’m actually gunning for. But had I started with Chinese food, she would have tried to bargain me down to Panda Express, which is far less appealing. For Thai food, I have to wait till she’s out of town, at which time I generally get too inert to leave the house and make myself oatmeal instead. So I seldom actually achieve Thai food. Do you see how difficult it is being me?)

Four jobs I’ve had:
a) Waiter (That’s lead waiter to you, buddy!)
b) Purchasing manager at an independent record store
c) Copywriter
d) Copy editor

Four movies I could watch over and over

This is like asking me to choose four favorites from among my unborn children, or just four kinds of salad dressing (if pressed: blue cheese, bleu cheese, fromage bleu, queso azul). It’s very stressful, because, as regular reader(s) of this blog already know, I have trouble choosing a loaf of bread at the g store. Besides which, there’s a temptation to get all highfalutin and artsy to try and convince people that I’m complicated, and not just in a mental-health kind of way. Fine, whatever, here goes:

a) Sunset Boulevard
b) Quadrophenia
c) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
d) The Philadelphia Story

Four places I’ve lived

Here’s where my colorful and varied past shines!

a) Long Beach, Calif. (my birthplace)
b) Garden Grove, Calif. (the OC!)
c) West Hollywood, Calif.
d) Van Nuys, Calif.

Four television shows I love

“Oh, I don’t own a television,” she says disdainfully.

Ha! People who say they don’t own televisions are precisely the people who will house-sit for you and soak up your 180 satellite channels like a crack addict on a post-rehab binge. Here are my ever-changing current faves:

a) Project Runway
b) House
c) Intervention
d) Rebuilt: The Human Body Shop (If you haven’t seen this new Discovery Health channel show about the staff and clientele of a high-tech prosthetics lab, check it out. It is at once fascinating and inspiring.)

Four places I’ve vacationed:
a) Yellowstone National Park
b) The Grand Strand, South Carolina (a.k.a. Republican Jesus, S.C.; annual gig with the in-laws)
c) Cornwall
d) Belgium (headquarters of my family’s 1992 Great Bowling Alleys of Europe tour)

Four favorite dishes:
a) Coffee (That’s not a dish?)
b) Spicy string beans
c) Dark chocolate (That’s a dish, right?)
d) A bowl of stuff from Chipotle

Four sites I visit daily:
a) Salon
b) Dooce.com
c) Whatever (on fire)—my partner’s blog
d) The forums at DBSA (Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance)

Four places I’d rather be:
a) At home
b) On my bike
c) Walking barefoot anywhere an ocean licks the shore
d) On a massage table

Four books I love

Again, this is a mean and stress-inducing question:

a) Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America by Carolyn See (my creative-writing mentor’s memoir)
b) High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
c) Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
d) Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

Four albums I can’t live without

OK, this one was initially “four video games I play,” but I don’t play any, and I was surprised there wasn’t a music question, so I’m having my way with this silly survey:

a) The Walking—Jane Siberrry
b) Quadrophenia—The Who
c) Traffic From Paradise—Rickie Lee Jones
d) Eveningland—Hem

Four bloggers I’m tagging:

Hmm, I don’t really know any bloggers except the one who tagged me, and those she’s already tagged, but wouldn’t it be funny if I tagged her back? Then we could just toss the potato back and forth, and each time we were tagged we’d have to answer the survey differently. Then we could be really self-indulgent, as if blogging isn’t already incredibly self-indulgent, and get all of our favorite movies and books and CDs out of our system, because it’s oh, so important that everyone understands how very diverse and complicated we are. For instance, I didn’t list any jazz CDs, so you don’t know how very much I like jazz and am therefore somehow cooler than people who do not like jazz. And that’s a shame, really, your not knowing that about me.

I do know one would-be blogger I can tag, hoping to spur her to action in her blog-in-potentia, which will be amazing when it evolves from its current zygote state. Grrrly Librarian, you are so tagged!