I must have been out of my fucking mind to think I was going to write a series of posts about a mix CD-R I made at the end of 2002 before the end of this year. Here it is a month later and I still have just the one. At this rate I’ll finish in 2014.
Regardless, here is track no. 2: Metro Area’s “Miura”.
I underrated this record for Pitchfork that year and I still enjoy it. I have a strong memory of listening to it in preparation for the review. I was living in Richmond but came to New York for a long weekend because Julie was attending a choreography workshop. At one point she met a person in Brooklyn regarding some dance-related thing and I had several hours to kill. So I walked around and listened to Metro Area on my Discman. It was November and was quite cold but I was very happy to be walking around Brooklyn and looking at the brownstones and listening to this music. I stopped into a coffee shop to warm up and read for a while. I was reading Charles Cross’ biography of Kurt Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven, which had come out the year before, and I was thinking about how for some people just being alive is so painful that death can seem like a relief. Then I walked again and I thought about New York and its history with dance music and how Metro Area were now part of it. I thought of this new project the DFA, which they had relationship with, and how a new era in NYC dance music was coming, and I thought about how beautifully recorded this record was, how they got the drums to sound just as good as the drums in real big budget disco songs that probably cost a lot of money to make.
It’s funny to think now but I was actually walking around Fort Greene, where I’ve lived for the past year, and I can remember Fulton Street. I remember all this, and the date (Google says November 2002) because the evening of the day we spent in Fort Greene we went and saw the butoh dance company Sankai Juku do a piece at BAM. For the opening of the piece, the stage was covered in sand and everyone was laying down and there was a device on the ceiling over the stage (which is way up there) and it was dripping single drops of water, slowly, into a pool on stage. You could see them fall all that way and it was so quiet you could hear them hit (maybe it was amplified but there was no other sound for a moment other than this drop). The piece was incredible and Julie and I both cried.
As I was walking around and listening to Metro Area earlier that day I started to get uncomfortably cold and I walked to buy a hat and it was a New York Yankees stocking cap. I bought it at Target, right near BAM. And I had that stocking cap for about eight years and everywhere I wore it in Richmond and later Chicago people gave me shit about it. Outside of New York, people really hate the Yankees.
Here I am wearing the stocking cap two months later, in early 2003 in Banff, Canada, on a ski lift, during my honeymoon.
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