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"한때는 말이야..."
이런 말은 정말 나이 먹어서, 별 볼일 없게 된 후에, 허풍을 잔뜩 섞은 다음에야 비로소 나오는 말인줄 알았다.

수요일 오후 3시. 바깥 구경은 4시 약속 전까진 하지도 못할 것 같다.
트위터랑 구글 리더로 뉴욕 타임즈와 허핑턴 포스트의 기사가 날아든다.
데이브는 얼마전 수술한 자신의 말이 회복되고 있다며 정말 기뻐하고 있다.
TJ와 전화와 이메일 몇 통을 주고 받은 끝에 오늘 점심 약속을 내일로 옮기고, 내일 약속을 모레로 옮겼다.

한국에 있을 때, 공부를 업으로 삼기 전에, 만나던 친구들의 소식을 블로그를 통해 가끔 본다.
무슨 전시를 하고, 공연을 하고, 런칭 파티에 가고, 함께 술을 마시고, 무언가를 계획하고, 열에 아홉은 지산에 간다.
즉, 나만 빼고 벨앤세바스찬을 다 본다는거지.

내일은 선배의 이사를 도와주러 간다.
정작 내 이사는 돈 주고 사람을 쓸 계획이지만.

언젠가부터 남의 화를 풀어주기만 하는 사람이 된 것 같은 기분
그리고 언젠가부터 그것도 잘 못하고 있는 듯한 기분

선언적으로 말할 수 있다.

"(물질적인 것에 관해 말하자면) 나는 가지고 싶은 것은 다 가지고 있어서 (적어도 지금 이 순간에는) 더 이상 필요한 것이 없다고!"

그렇게 생각하고 테라스 아래를 내려다 보니 한 청년이 스케이트 보드를 타고 거리를 지나간다.
저 '체크 반바지' 갖고 싶어.

아이팟을 만지작거리다가 2007년인가 2006년인가 그 즈음 이리카페에서 녹음한 아마츄어증폭기의 '마네킨' 라이브를 들었다.

나는 당신이 좋아요
당신은 무한히 밝아요

내가 은행을 털어도
당신은 용서해 줄 것 같아요

내 안에 혁명은 없어요
당신과 걷고만 싶네요

내가 무슨 말을 지껄여도
당신은 조용히 웃고 말겠죠

나는 당신이 좋아요
하지만 작업은 아니죠

내가 무슨 짓을 해도
당신의 진심을 알 수 없어요, 난

그리고 노래의 두 번째와 네 번째 소절에 대해 진지하게 고민을 하고 나서,
한숨을 몇 번 내쉬었다.

한받 아저씨는 날 어떻게 기억하려나.

요즘 읽은(는) 책들:
Delli Carpini의 What Americans know about politics and why it matters,
Jamieson과 Cappella의 Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative media establishment,
Bennett과 Entman의 Mediated politics에서의 몇 개 챕터,
Salinger의 The catcher in the rye,
Wilde의 The picture of Dorian Gray.

Kindle DX를 사고나서 독서량이 크게 늘었다.
뭐 이것저것 시작만 하고 끝내지 못한 것들이 더 많지만...
많은 책을 언제나 가지고 다닐 수 있다는 점이, "제한적인" 인터넷 이용이 가능하다는 점이, 그리고 가독성이 좋은 인터페이스를 가지고 있다는 점이 이 기계를 산 내 선택을 가치 있게 만드는 것 같다 (적어도 iPad와 비교해 볼때는 더욱!)

조만간 워드프레스로 옮기게 되면 책별로 (최소한 챕터별로) 간단한 감상을 적는 폴더를 만들어서 읽은 것들을 정리해 봐야지.

Kindle DX와 여름방학을 찬양하고 싶은 요즘.
그리고 스타벅스의 무료 리필 정책도 덤으로.
추가로 Ugly Original에서 주문 제작한 청녹색 토트백도.

I wandered for a few days (actually, nearly a month) looking for a housing, let me say a dwelling, and again, am wandering for several days to dealing with css, sql, xml, and the things of that kind.
I asked for expertise, inquired for the problem, however, they never gave a full solution to anything.
Maybe I am a bit too dumb to make the whole thing in my own and too ambitious to estimate my ability to do something novel.
Why am I say this?
Because I am tired to talk with one of my closest friend.
He keep asking me the question without answer, excessively repeatedly, with all means of mediated communication technology.
So, it feels better to talking to myself.

내가 처음 가진 컴퓨터는 Apple ][+였고 맥도 90년대 중반 아이맥이 처음 나왔을 때부터 해서 파워맥, 파워북, OS 8, 9, 10... 타이거, 레퍼드, 스노우 레퍼드까지 안 써본게 없을 정도로 애플을 좋아했지만...

요즘 한국에 갑자기 불어닥친 애플 열풍과 그 열광자들을 보면 참 바보들이 따로 없다는 생각이 든다.

사회 전반의 fragmentation과 polarization이 기술 수용과 그 문화적 파급에 있어서도 똑같이 재현되고 있는 듯한 느낌.

IBM X32에 깔린 Windows 7을 이용해서 이 글을 작성함.

Tim Walsh의 블로그를 볼 때마다 wordpress로 옮겨가고 싶은 마음이 굴뚝같다.

그래도 기껏 열심히 해왔는데 옮기는게 좀 아까운 것 같아서 일단 참지만...

어디선가 블로그를 통째로 옮겨주는 서비스를 본 것 같기도 하고.

마침내! 이사갈 집을 정했다.

빅토리아 양식의 굉장히 오래된 집의 2층 방 한 칸.
두 블럭만 걸어가면 호수가 있고, 머지 않은 곳에 예술가와 히피들, 젊은 학생들이 잘 가는 카페와 식당이 줄지어 있는 곳이다.
이전에 살던 곳에 비해 학교에서는 두 배 정도 멀지만, 그래봤자 자전거로 10분이면 가는 거리고 버스라인도 여러 개 지나가는 곳이라 살기 편할 것 같다!
룸메이트들은 바라던 것 (=대학원생, nerd, visiting scholar) 과는 조금 차이가 있지만, 뭐 좋은 사람들이 올거라고 낙천적으로 생각하기로 했다.
문제는 너무 오래된 집이라 겨울에도 실내 기온이 화씨 60도를 조금 넘을까 말까 한다는 것과 바닥에 카펫이 깔려 있다는 것인데...
너무 추우면 내년에 또 이사가면 되겠지.

손에 주어진 최대의 걱정거리를 덜어내니 마구 의욕이 샘솟는다.
공부에 집중도 잘 되고 앞으로의 전망도 장밋빛처럼 보일 뿐 아니라 기타도 평소보다 잘 쳐지고 맛있는 것들도 많이 땡기고 오래간만에 요리다운 요리도 해 먹었다.
이럴때 여자친구를 만날 수 있다면 꼭 껴안아주는 건데...
그녀도 오늘부터 방학이라고 한다.
적어도 우리 둘 모두에게 좋은 일이 하나씩 있으니 그걸로 된걸까.
이 카페에 더 있고 싶지만 그만 나가야겠다. 날씨가 참 좋다.

사실 기분이라는 것이 꼭 뇌 속의 호르몬이 뭐가 나오고 안 나오고에 따라서 결정된다고는 하지만 그 이전에 무언가가, 의식적으로건 무의식적으로건, 일어나기 때문에 오르락 내리락 하는 것 같다.
오늘은 기분이 좋다. 냉장고에 넣어 두었던 식스팩 PBR을 꺼내서 홀짝홀짝 마시고 있을 정도로.
1. David Bazan이 여행 중에 우리 동네를 들렀는데 들른 김에 특별한 이벤트-널찍한 아파트를 빌려서 30명 정도 모아놓고 공연-를 한다고 했는데, 그게 오늘이다. 오늘 저녁은 그 곳에서 보냈다.
2. 교수님에게 답장이 와서 내일 보기로 함.
3. David (Wise)에게 답장이 옴.


David Bazan's special living room show

막상 차를 사기로 하고나서 Fiat 500 아니면 오래된 Golf GLS 중에 하나로 결정하기로 하기까지 많은 시간과 정신적 노력이 필요했지만 지금 이사가는 곳의 위치는 차가 전혀 필요하지 않은 위치다. 커다란 슈퍼가 3분 거리. 학교는 자전거로 5분. 다운타운까지 걸어서 20분.
만일 차를 타고 꼭 어딘가로 가야한다면, 나는 꼭 어딘가로 벗어나야 한다는 말이 될 것이다.
그냥 사지 말까? 사지 말고 필요할 때마다 렌트카를 하는 것도 괜찮은 생각인 것 같다.
나중에 Fiat 500 오토 미션이 출시될 때까지 기다리는 것도 좋은 것 같고.
막상 이사를 하려고 보니 내가 가진 것들이 너무 많은 것 같다.

오늘 내가 쓰던 책상을 팔았다.
아니 정확하게 말하자면 그 책상을 내일 팔기로 오늘 약속을 정했다.
다음에는 네모반듯하고 커다란 책상을 같은 것으로 두 개 사고 싶다.
Ikea에서 그것을 판매한다.
Craigslist에서는 Ikea에서 판매하는 책상을 조금 더 저렴하게 (두 개에 80달러) 판매한다.

친구의 부인의 이름은 이유미이다.
그녀의 원래 이름은 박유미인데, 결혼을 하면서 미국식으로 성을 바꾼 것이다.
나는 근래에 알게 된 rumei님의 이름을 떠올리고 재밌다고 생각했다.
내가 일방적으로 절교를 선언한 김유미의 소식을 지난 달 친구에게 듣게 되었다.
Fear Factory의 기타리스트처럼 변해버렸다고 하는 슬픈 소식이었다.

그리 많은 것을 기억하진 못하지만 매일 많은 일들이 일어난다.
그것을 잡아두기 위해서는 실제 경험한 것보다 몇 배는 긴 시간이 필요하다.
요즘 나는 모든 일에 급해서 결국 아무것도 생산하지 못하고 있다.
오늘은 Trembling Blue Stars의 노래를 기타로 쳐 보았다.
그럴 듯하게 부르기 위해서는 어떤 조로 연주해야 할까.

1912년에 지어졌다는 그 집의 이층 방 구석에서 웃통을 벗고 전기기타를 치고 있던 그 대만계 미국인 남학생은 핑크 플로이드를 듣고 있었다. 길게 자란 허연 수염을 달고 있는 집 주인 아저씨는 그걸 듣고서는 얼마전에 수십 년 전에 출판된 핑크 플로이드 기타 악보를 헌책방에서 발견했는데 고민하다가 안 사고 그냥 왔다는 이야기를 꺼냈다. 그 학생은 극도로 흥분해서 자기 할아버지뻘 되는 노인에게 "Shut up! 어떻게 그걸 안 사고 그냥 올 수 있어?" 등등. 얘기는 내가 방 구경을 다 할때가지 계속되었고 방은 그다지 오래 구경할만큼 크진 않았기에 얘기도 그리 길게 이어지지 않았다.
그 집은 대각선 방향을 기준으로 거의 대칭을 이루는 구조를 하고 있었고 조금 큰 방과 조금 작은 방이 번갈아 가면서 정사각형의 한 구석씩을 차지하고 있었다. 나는 그 중 조금 큰 방을 원했고 이왕이면 소음이 적은 도로의 반대쪽, 햇빛을 받을 수 있는 남향을 원했다. 그러나 도로의 반대쪽이자 햇빛이 잘 드는 방은 이미 한 프랑스 유학생이 고민해보겠다며 잡아둔 상태였고, 울 카펫이 깔려 있었다. 반면 그 방의 대각선 건너편에 있는 다른 조금 큰 방은 두 개의 창문이 각각 남서쪽과 북서쪽을 향해 있었고 그 중 한 곳은 대로변을 바라보고 있었다. 동시에 이 방은 새로 깐 마룻바닥과 좋은 재질로 만들었다는 천장을 가지고 있었다.

오늘은 계획했던 것들 족족 실패로 끝난 the day of failure.
1. 운전면허 주행시험 신청-자리가 없어 실패하고 instruction permission을 대신 받아 옴
2. University Avenue에 있는 집을 보러 가기로 하고 찾아갔으나 집주인과 통화가 안되어 허탕만 치고 돌아옴. 집에 오니 9번 벨을 누르라고 이메일이 와 있었다. 집에 왔는데 뭐 어쩌라고...
3. 교수님에게 이메일을 보냈으나 아직까지 답장 없음.
4. David 에게 하이킹 계획을 물어봤으나 답장 없음.
5. Denver에서 열리는 학회에 참가하면서 묵을 호텔을 예약했는데 세 명이서 침대 두 개인 방을 쓰게 되었음.
6. 오후에 집을 보기로 해서 4시에 약속을 잡았는데 집주인이 20분 늦게 옴.
7. 휴대전화 약정 통화시간을 30분 넘게 초과해서 추가로 $15를 내게 생겼음. 그리고 약정 시간이 회복되기까지는 아직도 5일이나 남음.

MB의 해박한 축구 상식에 박주영 "외워온 모양"

박주영 선수가 옆자리의 이영표에게 "대통령이 우리에게 얘기하려고 외워 가지고 온 모양"이라고 말하자 그 말을 들은 대통령은 "내가 원래 스포츠를 좋아한다. 축구 경기도 아주 관심깊게 봤다"고 화답했다.

기사원문



--
안 그래도 좋던 박주영이 더 좋아졌다.

오늘 산 연발 고무줄 권총.

캡 뿌듯함.

Au Revoir Simone: Sad Song

http://www.aurevoirsimone.com/

부모님과 샌디에고에 당일치기로 다녀왔다.

너무너무 예쁜 도시.

휴일을 맞은 여름 오후, 바다가 바라보이는 곳 잔디밭 위에 사람들이 만들어 놓은 캠프들을 바라보며 언젠가 우리 가족도 그 중에 하나가 될 수 있으면 좋을 것 같다고 생각했다.

서양식 매너는 없어도 내가 제일 좋아하는 우리 가족들과 함께!

돌아오는 고속도로변에서는 independence day를 맞아 누군가가 터뜨리는 불꽃놀이가 두 시간 내내 우리를 따라 다니면서 이어졌다.

경이로운 하루.

그런데 내일 모레 나 혼자 집으로 돌아간다니...

Mates of State 공연을 보러 Sunset Blvd.에 있는 The Echo에 갔다.

5시 반 부터 시작한 공연은 후디니의 탈출 마술을 재연하는 마술쇼와

면도크림 퍼포먼스, 그리고 코미디언 Nick Thune의 쇼, 그리고 오프닝 밴드 Free Energy의 공연을 거쳐 Mates of State의 메인 공연까지 장장 4시간 동안 9시 반 무렵까지 이어졌다.

LA에서 처음 보는 쇼는 재미 있었고, Mates of State의 공연은 역시 최고였다.

...라고 간단하게 말하는 이유는, 공연 그 자체보다 더 재미있는 일이 공연장에서 일어났기 때문.

키워드: 캘리포니아 걸, 댄스, 뮤지션, 보이프렌드

정말이지 숄더백을 메고 있으면 춤추는데 엄청 불편하다.

1Q84를 읽고 있다.
현재까지 감상은, "재미는 있지만 깊이는 모르겠다" 정도.
동네 헌책방에서 Deborah Tannen의 You just don't understand와 Rosenfeld의 Human interaction in the small group setting을 각각 1달러에 구입했다.

리우의 배꼽 얘기를 하다가 엄마가 내 배꼽을 3년 전인가 버렸다는 이야기를 하는 것을 들었다.
왜?
왜 버렸을까?
내 기억이 맞다면 그건 짐 정리를 하다가 잃어버린 것이고 잃어버린 시기도 3년 전이 아니라 약 10년 전쯤이어야 하는데.
어쩌면 엄마는 엄마만의 소중한 기념품을 잃어버린 안타까움을 그런 식으로 잊기로 한걸지도 모르겠다.
아들이 태어나면서부터 간직한 배꼽을 이십몇년이 지난 후에 갑자기 버릴 이유는 좀처럼 생각해내기 힘드니까.

문득 어릴적 (초등학교 입학하기 전이나 1학년 정도였던 것 같다) 동네 뒷산에서 갑자기 소변이 마려워 엄마에게 말해서 산 중턱 어딘가에 실례를 했던 기억이 떠오른다.
그리고 그 때 엄마가 들고 있던 백의 모양이 생각난다.
천이랑 가죽으로 된 보따리 모양의, 입구에 연결되어 있는 끈을 잡아당겨 열고 닫는 그런 백이었는데 지금 지식으로 생각해보면 전혀 명품 백도 아니고 브랜드 같은 것도 기억나지 않는걸로 보아 예나 지금이나 소탈한 (특히 자신에게 엄격하게 소탈한) 엄마의 취향이 반영되어 있는 물건이었던 듯 싶다.
내 기억에 따르면 엄마는 그 가방을 내 어린 시절 내내 들고 다니셨다.
그 때 내가 많아 봤자 일곱살이나 여덟살, 적게는 대여섯살이었을텐데 엄마는 한창 젊은 나이에 (여자의 로망이라는) 핸드백을 같은 것으로 그렇게 들고 다녔던거다.
요즘 엄마가 쓰던 그런 가방을 들고 다니는 젊은 여자애가 있다면 그녀는 어떤 사람일까 궁금해졌다. 그건 분명히 소위 명품백도 아니고 멋으로 들고 다니는 빈티지백도 아니고 조금 이국적이면서 (아버지가 해외출장에서 사오셨을 법한) 그렇다고 너무 싼 물건도 아닌 그런 것이라는 느낌인데. 도대체 요즘 세상에 그런 가방을 들고 다니는 여자애가 있긴 있을까?
그리고 맞는 기억인지 모르겠지만 언젠가 그 가방이 너무 낡아버려서 대신 쓸 가방을 사오신 엄마의 모습도 생각난다.
예쁜 가방이었지만 이전에 쓰던 것과는 너무 달라서 왠지 거부감이 들었던 것 같다.
그때 그 가방을 아직 엄마는 장농 속에 보관하고 있을까? 내일 아침에 한번 물어봐야지.

싱가폴에서 열린 제 60회 ICA annual conference 발표를 마치고 다시 한국행 비행기에 오른 것은 6월 26일의 늦은 밤이었다. 1시간의 시차를 고려할 때 서울에 도착하면 아침 6시 정도가 되는 일정이었다.

비행기가 출발하기 전 시작한 한국과 우루과이의 월드컵 16강전, 경기 초반 너무나도 쉽게 1점을 실점하는 것을 확인하고 비행기에 올랐다. 이륙하기 전 안내방송에서 한국인 기장이 이청용이 만회골을 넣어 1:1 동점 상황이 되었다고 알려주었다.

그 이후, 도착하기 전까지 예닐곱 시간 동안의 꿈은 대부분 한국전 경기 결과가 어떻게 될지에 대한 것이었던 것 같다. 기장은 더 이상 경기 결과를 업데이트 하지 않았고 그건 예상할 수 있을만큼 불길했다.

서울에 도착하자마자 비행기에 같이 타고 온 동료들이 한국이 2:1로 졌다고 알려주었다. 핸드폰을 켜자 도착한 문자는 아빠가 보낸 것으로 한국전 패배를 은유적으로 표현한 것이었다. 그깟 축구경기 하나일뿐인데 왠지 내 미래에 대한 총체적인 전망을 반영하는 듯 생각되어 유쾌하지 않은 기분.

집으로 가려 공항버스를 기다리는데 어디서 낯익은 얼굴이 보였다. 희연이의 동생 이지연이었다. 그 옆의 작은 실루엣은 이희연. 쇼핑몰 촬영차 보라카이를 다녀왔다며 손에 무언가를 잔뜩 들고 온 그녀. 그렇게 약 1년만의 인사를 건네고 그녀들이 탄 버스 안을 보았다. 이지연 옆에는 한 남자가 타고 있었고, 희연이의 모습은 찾을 수 없었다.

집에 도착해서 짐을 꾸리다가 인터넷에서 효도르의 첫 번째 패배 소식을 전했다. 세상이 무언가 계속 잘못되어가고 있다는 기분. 일단 부산으로 가야겠기에 조금 잠을 청했다. 1시간 정도만 눈을 붙이고 바로 부산으로 가려고 했지만 계속된 여행에 피로가 누적되어서 그런지 약 40번에 달하는 모닝콜 중 어떤 것도 듣지 못하고 잠에 빠져 있다가 깨어난 시간은 오후 2시 경. 오늘이 아니면 여자친구를 다시 볼 수 없기에 부랴부랴 짐을 챙겨 부산행 고속버스에 올랐다. 3시 20분. 버스를 타고 부산으로 향하는 도중에 동생이 아기를 출산했다는 소식을 접했다. 어쩌면 오늘은 그렇게도 비현실적인지. 노포동 터미널에 도착하고, 다시 택시를 잡아 양산 병원 기숙사 앞에서 그녀를 만났다. 보라색 그라데이션 무늬의 티셔츠에 보라색 귀고리를 하고 검은 스트라이프가 있는 흰색 카디건에 타이트한 청바지. 별다를 것 없는 그 모습이 너무나 예뻤지. 언제나처럼.

우리는 진작 수소문해서 알아둔 샤브샤브 식당에 갔다. 그 식당은 원하는만큼 먹을 수 있는 부페 같은 곳이었다. 당연히 우리는 배가 터질 것 같을 때까지 먹었고 행복했다. 우리는 시내를 의미 없이 조금 걸어다니다가 예전에 몇 번 갔던 양산 시내의 커피 숍에서 팥빙수를 시켜 먹었다. 벽 쪽 자리에 나란히 앉아 서로의 손을 잡고 장난치는 순간이 매우 특별한 것처럼 느껴졌다.

시간이 흘러 10시 반 정도가 되었고, 나는 그녀를 기숙사 앞까지 택시로 바래다주고, 포옹과 짧은 입맞춤과 손짓으로 작별 인사를 나누고, 같은 택시를 타고 부산 터미널로 향했다.

휴가철이어서 그런지 버스는 죄다 매진이었고 나는 11시부터 12시 20분까지 기다려야만 했다. 차를 타고 서울에 도착하니 새벽 4시.

아르헨티나와 멕시코 경기를 조금 보다가 5시경에 여자친구를 전화로 깨워주고 조금 잠을 청한 후 부리나케 미국으로 갈 짐을 챙기고 은행일을 보고 치과에 가서 스케일링을 받았다.

2010년의 여름방학. 나는 어떤 표정을 짓고 있었을까. 걱정 하지 말자. 겨우 10시간 떨어져 있을 뿐이니까.

내일 또 싱가폴로 떠난다.

짐 싸는건 둘째치고 머물 호텔 예약조차 안했다.

거기에 발표 준비도 안하고, 싱가폴 다녀온 다음 날 미국 갈 준비도 안하고.

또 막바지에 힘들게 하면 못하진 않겠지.

무얼 위해 살고 있는걸까.

스무 살에 했던 되게 재미 없는 3대3 미팅 같은거나 한 다음에

열 다섯 시간 정도 푹 자고 싶다.

부산에 온지 이틀밖에 되지 않았는데 벌써 일주일은 머문듯한 느낌.

병원 옆 카페를 전전하며 여자친구가 짬이 나길 기다려 얼굴을 본다.

기다리는 동안 학회 발표 준비를 하고자 했지만 일의 진행이 무척 더디다.

아아아 좋은 친구들은 역시 좋다.
이대로 영원하였으면...

JK가 NYC에서 SF까지 자동차로 횡단을 한다며 나에게 좋은 음악을 추천해 달라고 하였다.

음악이 담긴 하드 디스크는 미국에 놓고 와서 오랜만에 집에 있는 씨디들을 뒤졌는데 손에 먼지는 많이 묻었지만 기분이 참 좋았다.
그 과정에서 몇 가지 앨범은 두 개씩 가지고 있다는 것과 가장 최근에 구입한 레코드가 원더걸스의 2DT라는 것을 깨달았다.
JK에게는 두 가지 버전의 앨범을 만들어 주었다.

아래가 그 중 하나.
언제나 느끼는 거지만 선곡하는 것보다 어려운건 곡 순서를 정하는 것 같다.

1. The Bobby McGees: L.O.V.E.
2. Camera Obscura: Let's Get Out of This Country
3. Cornelius: Windy Hill (Originally by The Pastels)
4. Ben Lee: Cigarettes Will Kill You
5. The Softies: Write it Down
6. The Sea Urchins: Pristine Christine
7. Pipas: Tout Va Bien
8. Heavenly: C is the Heavenly Option
9. Vampire Weekend: Walcott
10. Cat Power: Naked If I Want To
11. Frente!: Bizarre Love Triangle
12. Bishop Allen: Click, Click, Click, Click
13. Dyroin: Hunangsdropar
14. The School: I Want You Back
15. Cats on Fire: Higher Grounds
16. Afternoon Naps: The Day We Started
17. Belle and Sebastian: String Bean Jean
18. A Smile and a Ribbon: Book Cover
19. The Smiths: This Charming Man
20. The Brady Bunch: Merry Go Round
21. The Field Mice: If You Need Someone
22. My Little Airport: Edward, Had You Ever Thought That The End Of The World Would Come On 20.9.01?
23. Fishmans: むらさきの空から
24. Young Marble Giants: Salad Days

Click here to download

간밤에 부모님과 영화 '시'를 보았습니다.

밴쿠버 국제 공항에서 또 비행기를 기다리고 있다.

공항에 있는 대부분의 상점의 점원들이 아시아계라는 것이 신기하다.

going to LA (after 5 hours)!

스승의 날에 쓴 편지에 REM의 노래 가사를 인용해서 답장을 써 주신 선생님... 어찌 감동적이지 않을 수 있을까.

some quotes,

"The world is cold and cruel, and it is all we have. There is no god in this machine."

- A chalk writings on the wall of the Memorial Library.

"Stop celebrating in front of me!"

- A girl yelled at a bunch of family on campus who are celebrating a daughter's graduation..

간밤에 냉동떡을 해동하기 위해 이전에 본 냉동떡 해동 매뉴얼을 참고하여 전자렌지를 이용했다.
위쪽에 담겨 있던 떡은 터지고 아랫쪽에 있던 떡은 여전히 차가운 기현상이 발생하였습니다.
수습코자 기름에 떡볶이 소스를 넣어 볶아 먹으려고 하였다. 뜨겁게 달구어진 기름이 약간 녹은 떡에서 배어나온 수분과 반응하여 기름은 사방팔방 튀고 소스는 엉겨 붙고, 떡은 타고...
결과적으로 얻은 것은 타버린 떡볶이와 (하지만 여전히 맛있던!)
약 12시간이 지난 후까지 은은하게 방 안에 맴도는 떡볶이 향...


냉동떡 해동 매뉴얼

계획대로 일이 진행되어 괜히 여유를 부리고 있다.

문득 옛 친구들과 연락을 이어볼까 하는 생각이 들었다가 사라졌다.

이미 옛날이지만 취향이 가장 맞았던 그 때의 친구들은

대부분 그 때 그대로 땅에 발 붙여가며 살고 있는 것 같다.

나만 붕 떠있는 기분. 어딘가로 떠내려가는 것 같다.

그런데 무얼 위해서?

이번에 서울 가면 친구들의 공연을 되도록 많이 봐야지.

Today's fortune cookie says,

We must always have old memories and young hopes.

요즘 부쩍 차를 사고 싶어졌다.

가장 큰 이유는 교외에 있는 목장에 말을 타러 다니고 싶어서...

말을 타려고 차를 사다니.

엉뚱한 느낌.

하지만 말을 사는 것에 더 많은 경제력이 필요한 것도 사실이고

더 직접적으로는 엄마한테 말을 사달라고 할 수는 없는 노릇이다.

그래서 별로 필요도 없는 차를 살까말까 괜히 고민하는 페이퍼의 자체 마감일 전날 밤.

기다림 끝에 새로 산 맥북에어가 도착했다.

그런데 왜 집에서 인터넷이 안되는걸까? 학교에서는 되는데...

무선 랜 보안 설정을 가지고 씨름하다가 결국 포기하고

랩탑 두 개를 번갈아 가면서 페이퍼를 마무리하는 중.

빨리 끝내자!

오늘 아침도 최근 발견한 최상의_컨디션을_위한_루틴*을 엄수하여

* 7시 기상, 8시 샤워, State St.의 스타벅스에서 구입한 아이스 그란데 커피 + 토스트한 플레인 베이글을 들고 State Historical Library의 남쪽에 위치한 책상 맨 끝에 앉았다.

그 순간, 랩탑 어댑터를 집에 놓고 왔다는 것을 발견.

도서관에서 맥북을 빌려서 어댑터만 연결해 쓰고자 했으나 사진이 있는 ID가 두 개 있어야 한다며 거절당함.

남은 배터리 시간은 3시간 남짓.

I gotta do it anyway.

Last night I dreamt about my mom.
She bought a bicycle made by Brompton, which costs ₩1,570,000.
She was riding that bike at the parking lot of Apkujeong Hyundai department store.
The bike was not a minivelo but more like BMX with larger wheels.
It was smooth as Lexus.
When I came down to some video game spot located in the basement, i saw some caucasian girl in green hoodies and black pants. She was sneaking beside of some guy, kicked his head without notice,  and walked away into the crowds.
At that moment, a lout-y traditional music concert was over.
I met a guy with red t-shirt, who came from the city I am in, at the staircase.
He said he'd sleep in his car. I said I had a house and said good bye.
I thought he may think I am gay, so that was the proof to show I am not.
Then I went to somewhere with a guy I am with.

i think i am so uncompetative or noncompetative person, however sometimes, when i think about a few leading figures, i suddenly enter into my own rivalry.

it is sad, the imagine is cruel.

i overslept this morning by re-sleeping after had a can of pepsi.

Seemingly impossible tasks in earlier this week are getting done one by one.

I am proud of that, but feel so sad at the same time.

Dearly wish some rest.

the greatest gentle teenager lose his pace for the reckless planning of the future.
an arrogance metamorphosed to rashness, an expediency turned to drab stagnation, and the dullness were marked as the most fickle emotion.
wrong prospective for the future led him spending priceless time in the least pronounced way.
mind you, these songs had written in the far past, even before you recognize the existence of that school of thoughts.
however, see this great power of self-rearranging cognition.
it evades every possible dissonance, which may cause guilty or self-abhorrence.
sustaining brittle and picky self, dragging into unwarranted participation.

I am shallow and I miss almost everything in the past.

Came upon Al in front of microbiology building.

We were both riding bicycles and about to park.

"Hey, how are you?"

"Good, you came early today?"

"Yeah..."

"It's just a kidding."

"I just get out of house because I was hungry."

"Did you bring anything to eat?"

"Yes, I just grab some waffles on the way, they are in my bag. Are you living around here?"

"Yes, I live by the stadium, about one mile away."

"We have to talk about your research design."

"Oh, yeah, but I am currently working on final papers. So, I will send you after that."

"Sure. Are you staying here during summer?"

"Yes, except for one month."

"Which month?"

"I'll go out of this town on May 15, and travel around LA, Singapore, and Korea. Then back here around late June."
"Are you going to ICA?"
"Yes."

"Cool, same here."

"Alright."

"See you."

"See you."

the school - i want you back

Once upon a time I thought everything would turn out fine, just like lines in books
Now I see Im caught, caught up in a tangled web
All the things you said I bought, like a fool Id shout it loud, I dont care what they say, and now its clear that all of it was make believe

Now and then I think, now and then I think too much about you in my sleep, about you in my sleep

And when the dreams have all come back and settled down
And the stupid nightmares hang around
with the visions of the one youre with now
I know I tried to get you out my broken mind
And to leave the past we have behind
But its no use wishing now for things like that, I want you back

Well I really truly tried in the way youd want me to, and never do you harm
I see it couldnt last cos of what I said to you
And you knew it all along, you couldnt have just said to me I dont care about it, no you couldnt say Hey girl just leave it all behind

Well now and then I think, now and then I think too much about you in my sleep, about you in my sleep

And when the dreams have all come back and settled down
And the stupid nightmares hang around
with the visions of the one youre with now
I know I tried to get you out my broken mind
And to leave the past we have behind
But its no use wishing now for things like that, I want you back

---
listen to their ep 'let it slip' here
for more information, go to http://theschoolband.co.uk/

자유롭게 날아다니는 새 말고
어딘가를 향해 달려가는 타조가 되라는 말을 들었다.
왠지 억울하지만 이성적으로 생각하면 맞는 말이다.
받아들이자.
아스팔트 위를 달리다가 자동차에 치이는 한이 있더라도
일단 어딘가로 달려가야 되는 것 같다.
그러기 위해서는 어딘가 갈 곳이 필요하고
그러다 보면 누군가 나를 볼 것이다.
그리고 이왕이면 초원 위를 달리는 것이 좋겠지.

For the 2008 the Mountain Goats's album "Heretic Pride", John Darnielle wrote descriptions of each song on the album for Jeffrey Lewis to illustrate.

a smile and a ribbon - book cover

a song called 'book cover' performed by 'a smile and a ribbon'

어제 너무 무리했는지 팔이랑 다리가 너무 쑤셔서 온몸에 물파스를 바르고 학교에 왔다.
가끔 바람이 불때마다 물파스와 옷에 뿌린 샤넬 향수 냄새가 섞여 풍기는데, 참 좋다.
아침으로 베이컨과 소세지와 설탕 옷을 입힌 토스트를 사먹었더니 은근 졸리는 것 같다.

A night with Los Campesinos!
A guy behind me said it's feminist hardcore, and I agreed.
A mass of twee boys/girls were dancing really hard!
I let them step on my snickers, and I stepped on them too.
Loved that moment!

마시면 머리가 팽팽 돌아간다는 타우린 + 카페인 덩어리 Red Bull을 마셨다.
날씨만큼 환상적인 컨디션으로... 공부할 폼을 잡고 책상에 앉았는데, 갑자기 예전에 알던 꼬마 여자애에게 안부 편지가 왔다.
내가 가끔 생각난다니, 이상한 기분이 들어 머리가 팽팽 돌았다.
Was I meant something for her? No, not really.

낙동강

대운하 공사 하기 전과 후를 같은 장소에서 찍은 사진이라고 한다

강변의 모든 바위가 머지 않아 콘크리트 고수부지로 바뀌겠지

글자 그대로

미쳤다

Yes, it's tomorrow night!
I'll be there with tight black pants, which always make me hypnotic.

요즘 현아에게 끌린다.
난데없이 청춘불패 애청자가 되어버렸다.
그런데 그걸 보고 있으면 구하라도 귀여운거 같기도 하고.

Gonna meet them next week!

i wish my heart was cold and solid.
but it is tepid and at risk.

bishop allen - ghosts are good company

아침에 Dominique의 이메일을 받고 매우 기쁨!

오랫만에 조깅을 했습니다.
좋은 기분.
밝은 전망.

구름 한점 없이 화창한 일요일 오전,
늦잠을 잤다.

침대에서 뒹굴다가 이상한 자세로 바닥으로 내려오는 그 순간, "젠장"

점심시간 무렵 찾아간 서브웨이에서 늘 먹는 닭가슴살 샌드위치에 페퍼잭 치즈를 넣고 살짝 구운 다음 양배추, 토마토, 피망, 시금치를 넣고 랜치 드레싱을 뿌린 샌드위치를 주문했다. 그리고 커피도.

샌드위치를 받아들고 커피를 따르려는데 커피통이 비어 있다는 것을 발견. 종업원에게 얘기하니새로 커피를 만들어 주겠다고 했다. 다시 한번 늦잠을 잔 것에 대해 후회.

기다리는건 나쁘지 않았다. 5분 정도 6인용 테이블에 혼자 앉아서 책가방에 싸들고 온 논문들을 꺼내서 읽는데 왠지 머리가 맑고 며칠동안 계속 고민하던 것들이 해결되는 느낌. 실제로 도서관에 와서 글을 쓰다 보니 그건 또 다른 문제였다 싶기도 하다. 뒤늦게 랩탑 어댑터를 집에 놓고 왔다는 것을 깨닫고 다시 집으로 기어들어갈 예정.

a로 시작하는 아이디를 가진 같은 학번 같은 학교 치대에 다니던 여자애의 블로그를 우연히 발견했다.
아니 치대가 아니고 의대던가?
수술실 장면이 찍힌 사진이 올라와 있던데.
시간이 많이 흘렀는데도 취향이며 글쓰는 투며 너무 변하지 않아 신기할 정도.
다른 사람이 보기에 나도 그럴까?
그렇진 않은 것 같다. 오래된 친구들을 만날 때마다 나는 스스로가 퇴화한 것처럼 느껴진다.

그건 그렇고 좋은 전망도 있다.
아침에 Dietram을 만났는데 내 연구에 흥미를 보이더니 Dominique의 리서치 그룹에 추천해주었다.
정작 그의 지도학생은 그가 자신에게는 신경을 써주지 않는다며 투덜댔다.
고민을 조금 하다가 그녀에게 이메일을 보냈는데 다시 읽어보니 건방지게 쓴 것 같아 후회가 된다.

다른 좋은 소식도 있다.
오늘 아침 알 수 없는 경로로 커다란 벌이 내 방에 들어온 것을 발견했다.
그것은 옷장이 있는 방의 전등에 대고 계속해서 박치기를 하고 있었다.
집에 살충제가 없던 관계로 페브리즈를 몇 번 뿌려보았지만 역부족임을 발견하고 집에서 나와버렸는데...
나중에 집에 가보니 그 벌이 혼자서 죽어 화장실 바닥에 떨어져 있는 것을 발견.
휴지를 엄청나게 많이 뜯어서 손에 감촉이 느껴지지 않게 잡아 변기 속에 버리고 물을 내렸다.

기록을 위해 남김.

네 시간 밖에 안 잤는데 아침에 저절로 눈이 떠졌다.

목 뒤가 조금 뻐근한 것을 빼면 놀라울만큼 몸이 가볍다.

오랜만에 여자친구랑 통화도 하고, 경영대 로비에서 엄청 쓴 아이스커피를 마시며 수업을 준비 중.

오늘 하루의 전망이 좋아 보인다.

왠지 많은 것을 이룰 수 있을 것만 같다!

두 책상 너머 17인치 델 노트북을 무릎에 펼쳐놓고 앉아 있는 귀여운 여학생은 한 시간 넘게 페이스북을 하다가 이제는 바탕화면을 보면서 졸고 앉아 있다.
여자친구에게 이메일을 보내도 답장이 없고, 통화는 매번 둘 중 하나가 의식을 잃은 상태일때만 가능했다.
봄바람은 시원하지만 조금 건조하고, 녹은 눈에 실려와 겨우내 바닥에 깔려 있던 먼지들이 보라를 일으키는 바람에 얼굴에 모래로 코팅을 하는 기분이다.

오늘밤은 인도 레스토랑에서 사온 시금치 카레로 폭식의 욕구를 채우고 있다.
뒤늦게 10%나 되는 학생 할인을 받지 않았다는 것이 떠올랐다.
ATM기에 입금하려다 돈이 걸려서 20분이나 통화를 했고,
도서관 앞 자리에는 tic 증상이 있는 여자가 앉아서 신경이 쓰였다.
아침과 저녁에 머리가 맑았던 것 빼고는 무척 운이 안 따라주는 하루였다.
빨리 끝나라 조울증.
딴 데 신경 좀 그만 쓰자.

14시간이라는 시차는 묘하게 그리움을 증폭시킨다.
특히 내가 깨 있고 그녀가 잠들어 있을 시간에...
그건 15시간이라는 시차보다 더 잘 작동하는 것 같다.

The ultimate junk food: KFC Double Down

I REALLY want this!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-morford/the-kfc-double-down-one-s_b_531749.html

Book a ticket
Send e-mail to ICA and prof. Rhee

Revise

Make it perfect
Work on new project

조금 늦게 일어나 Communication Crossroads가 열리는 Nafziger room으로 향했다.
봄비 (3인치의 눈을 동반한)가 내린 후의 햇살은 무섭도록 따가워서 나는 거의 눈을 감은 채로 Vilas 까지 걸어간 것 같다.
도착했을 때 즈음엔 이미 첫 번째 발표자가 발표를 끝낸 후였다 (나중에 관객들의 반응으로 비춰보건대 첫 번째 세션에서 가장 흥미로운 연구였던 것 같음).
내 친구 Chia-Jung이 그 다음 순서로 발표를 하였는데, 노력은 가상하지만 결론에서 조금 맥빠지는 듯한 연구였다. 하지만 내가 건넨 말은 "nice work!"
쉬는 시간에 Albert가 들어와 간식을  고르고 있는 것을 발견하고 앞으로 같이 행할 실험 계획에 대해 조금 이야기를 나누다가, 싱가폴 학회에서 뭐하고 놀 거냐고 그런 얘기로 마무리.
그리고 이어진 David (W)과 Keith와의 토론, Huffington Post의 기자이자 변호사인 Mitchell의 연구에 대한 토론. 이스라엘에서 온 Itay와 Dhavan의 대화.
각각의 연구에 대한 감상은 노트를 참고할 것.
intellectually halcyon days.
happy.

Today's fortune cookie says, "You will do well to expand your horizons."

최근 알게 된 표현 중에 '병맛'이라는 것이 있다.
괜찮은 표현 같다.
뜻에 비해서 어감도 괜찮고 '맛'이라는 글자가 들어가서 그런지 입에도 잘 달라붙는다.
그리고 꽤 유용하다. 예를 들면,
'오늘의 내 상태는 병맛'
이보다 더 적절하게 표현할 수 있을까?
함축적이고 간결하다.

Noam Chomsky의 강연을 들었다.
도어 오픈 훨씬 전부터 Orpheum Theater 앞에는 이미 수백미터의 행렬이...
용케 들어가 이층에 자리를 잡았지만,
그의 웅얼거리는 목소리는 알아듣기 힘들었다.
대학자의 강연을 파편적으로만 이해해서 무척 아쉬운 기분에 폭식.

Jason Collett with Zeus and Bahamas

Broken Social Scene의 멤버인 Jason Collett의 공연을 보았다.

투어의 마지막이라고 장장 3시간이 넘는 시간 동안 수십 곡을 연주했다.

Zeus는 Jason의 백 밴드인 동시에 요즘 캐나다에서 가장 주목 받는 밴드 중 하나.

봄비가 며칠 동안 사정없이 내리고 있다.
내가 우산을 가져오지 않았을 때만 유독 그런거 같다.
어제는 그냥 맞으며 걸어 다녔지만 (레인코트를 입고 있었기 때문에),
오늘은 적시기 싫은 옷과 뉴욕에서 새로 산 퓨마 스웨이드를 신고 왔기 때문에 밖이 내다보이는 도서관에서 비가 그치길 기다리고 있다.
조금 걱정했던 Dietram 수업에서의 토론을 꽤 성공적으로 마치고 나니 기분이 좋다.
한 분야의 대가로부터 무언가를 배우는건 정말정말 소중한 경험인 것 같다.
계속 모호했던 attribute agenda-setting과 framing의 구분이 보다 명확해진 느낌.
하지만 framing에서의 interpretive schema와 active / selective interpretation의 관계는 아직 모호하다.
between / within variable을 헛갈리고 있는 것 같기도 하고.
건물 안에서 오랜만에 캐시디를 만났다. 그녀는 정말 nice human being인 것 같다. 특히 말을 빨리하는 사람 중에서.
생각해보니 하루종일 아몬드 스니커즈 한 개 밖에 먹지 않아서 microbiology 건물에 있는 카페에서 땅콩버터와 딸기젤리가 들어 있는 샌드위치와 커피를 샀다.
지갑을 놓고 온 것은 계산대 앞에 서고 나서야 알았고.
계산대 직원이 커피는 이왕 따랐으니 그냥 마시라고 했다. lucky.

Additional Artwork by 'A Sunny Day in Glasgow'

난 도대체 봄방학동안 무엇을 한 것일까?
학기말까지 남은 일정을 정리하며 막막함을 느낀다.
걱정이다.
결국 어떻게든 하긴 하겠지... 엄청 괴로운 한 달이 되겠지만.
집에 가려는데 비는 쏟아지고, 자전거는 며칠동안 밖에 둘 수 밖에 없을 것 같다.
꼭 해야하는 것만 하고, 최대한 열중하며 지낼 것.
그리고 조금이라도 시간이 있을 때 체계적으로 일을 진행시킬 것.

Twee as Fuck

The Story of Indie Pop

---

by Nitsuh Abebe, posted October 24, 2005

---

Indie pop is not just "indie" that is "pop." Not too many people realize this, or really care either way. But you can be sure indie pop's fans know it. They have their own names for themselves (popkids, popgeeks) and for the music they listen to (p!o!p, twee, anorak, C-86). They have their own canon of legendary bands (Tiger Trap, Talulah Gosh, Rocketship) and legendary labels (Sarah, Bus Stop, Summershine). They have their own pop stars, with who they're mostly on a first-name basis: Stephen and Aggi, Cathy and Amelia, Jen and Rose, Bret and Heather and Calvin. They've had their own zines (Chickfactor), websites (twee.net), mailing lists (the Indie pop List), aesthetics (like being TWEE AS FUCK), festivals (the International Pop Underground), iconography (hand drawings of kittens), fashion accessories (barrettes, cardigans, t-shirts with kittens on them, and t-shirts reading TWEE AS FUCK), and in-jokes (Tullycraft songs and the aforementioned TWEE AS FUCK)-- in short, their own culture. They're some of the only people in the world who remember that Kurt Cobain used to kind of be one of them, and they've been wildly generous about the moments where one of their private enthusiasms-- like, say, Belle and Sebastian-- bubbles up into the wider world of indie music.

As of the mid-1990s, there were a hell of a lot of kids like this in America: Happy pop geeks in love with all things pretty, listening to seven-inch singles released on tiny labels, writing songs about crushes, and taking a good deal of pride in the fact that everyone else found their music disgustingly cute and amateurish and girly. This is the story of how they got there-- a partial history of the indie pop project, and a beginner's guide to what it meant.

Part One: Great Britain, Anoraks, and the Trouble With "Pure, Perfect Pop"

Let's say it's 1977. You live in London. And with punk going full-steam-- in this new scene that's abandoned sophistication and chops, this scene that insistsanyone can start a band-- you start thinking: Why not me?

Only there's a problem. Punks act certain ways: They're loud and angry, or else they're arty and clever. They yell and make unpleasant noises and put safety pins through their bodies and belongings. And you...well, sorry, but you're actually pretty normal. You have a schoolboy voice and you'd feel stupid spiking your hair or pulling on bondage trousers. The punks sneer at most everything that came before them, but you don't sneer much at all, and you certainly don't see any reason to stop loving the Kinks and Syd Barrett. Truth is, you make a terrible punk-- so what are you going to do?

If you're Dan Treacy, you and your friends rename yourselves after talk-show hosts and start self-releasing your songs as the Television Personalities. Eventually, you release an album called And Don't the Kids Just Love It, which sounds like a trio of 10-year-olds got together in a basement, dropped some microphones on the floor, and played do-it-yourself. They're 10, so even when they sing something hard and serious and real-- "Hear my father shouting at my mother in the room next door"-- it comes out in vulnerable voices and rudimentary guitar figures, and when they play pop it comes out as an unselfconscious la-la-la. If you're Dan Treacy, you do something along those lines, something that in the face of so much sneer seemed completely punk. In the process, you lay some of the groundwork for one of the most misunderstood, written-off, and generally just forgotten threads in the history of the music this website covers.

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In the beginning, "indie" and "indie pop" basically was the same thing. As early as 1978, the sound of punk wasn't nearly so important as the spirit of it; for a lot of British kids, the whole notion of being in a band had changed. You didn't need to know how to play your instrument well, or have a great singing voice. You didn't have to wait for a big record company to discover you and pay for fancy recordings of your songs; you and your friends could record and release them yourselves. Music didn't have to come from pop stars on television-- it could come from the kids across town. These ideas are now eye-rolling clichés, but at the time, they were still fresh-- and as punk and new wave faded off in their own directions, a whole legion of do-it-yourself guitar bands started popping up.

These days, we remember only a handful: Pop crossovers like the Smiths, "post-punk" gems like Josef K and Orange Juice, and anything else that fits the big-picture story of how we got from punk to the present. For those bands, indie was a means to an end-- a way of making and selling records on their own. For a lot of their peers, though, indie was something more: It was their scene, and a revelation, and a liberation-- a trick to play, and a way of rejecting some of the things the world had taken for granted for the past couple decades.

One of those things was the idea that rock music was supposed to be cool-- "cool" meaning sexy, tough, arty, fiery, or fantastical. In indie, a lot of undramatic kids saw an opportunity to make music as themselves, for themselves: regular middle-class white kids in plain clothes, not especially sexy, not exactly musically brilliant, and more often sad than angry. As the 1980s wore on, the music they made began to seem more and more like an outright celebration of those details-- and a little bit of a raspberry blown at the larger musical world, which (sensibly) went right on preferring something more interesting than average white kids playing simple pop songs. The charts had "cool" covered-- these kids, in their basements and bedrooms, were trying to hand-craft a mirror-image of it, a pop world where theywere the stars.

The bands at the root of indie pop were the ones that latched onto those concepts most rabidly. For their musical cues, they looked to the quaintest, least-cool roots of youth-culture music: girl-groups, 1960s guitar jangle, bubblegum chirp, rainy-day balladry. Their lyrics toed the lines between schoolboy earnestness and arch, bratty simplicity. Their guitar playing revolved around elementary chord strumming, and their production ranged from no-frills to downright primitive. Their performances were so amateurish that the word "shambling"-- as in "shambling along"-- became one name for the scene. Their fashion sense was deliberately plain, like children dressed by their mothers: stripy shirts, librarian skirts, and enough anoraks (parkas) to make that word a genre name. Their gender politics weren't just egalitarian: If anything, they celebrated the girly and the sweet, so much so that the word "twee"-- pronounced the way a baby might say "sweet," and meaning cloying, or overly precious-- became the biggest insult leveled at them.

The idea, weirdly enough, was adorable and ideologically radical at the same time. Pop was glamorous. Underground rock, through the punk and post-punk years, had been gritty and serious. This stuff was looking for something else-- something more like the charm of watching children put on plays in their backyard, where anyone can be a star, where construction-paper props turn big gestures into something small and pure, and where the whole endeavor feels like a beautiful, private gift. Such was the case with the Pastels, a Scottish band that defined the hip end of "anorak": Their lazy melodies, lackadaisical strum, and naive attitude transformed the idea of the rock band into something casual, intimate, and free from the pretense of cool. Scotland, far from the London-centric pop universe, embraced that just-some-kids-in-a-basement aesthetic like nowhere else.

And then there were the bands the Pastels inspired, like Talulah Gosh-- two Oxford girls who named themselves after a (made-up) celebrity, recruited brothers and boyfriends as their backing band, and went about pairing girl-group tra-la-la harmonies with shambling punk backgrounds. A few years later came Kurt Cobain's beloved Vaselines, who turned anorak attitude in a snotty, aggressively amateurish direction. There were the Marine Girls, who produced two albums of primitive pop sketches, inspired by the drumless minimalism of Young Marble Giants. And, of course, the Television Personalities, who went on making their scrappy neo-psychedelic pop, sounding sweeter with every record. Even the wider world got its doses of twee sound, from the fluffy pop of Aztec Camera to the stylish bounce of the Railway Children.

The bulk of indie, though, was still all about that 60s-styled guitar jangle. And in 1986, that style got its moment in the sun, with the NME's C-86 cassette compilation. Tracing the musicians who appear on this tape is a pretty good way to see just how important this strain of indie was, for a moment. In and around anorak stalwarts the Pastels and the Assistants, you'll find McCarthy (the terrific Marxist pop group that would morph into Stereolab), the Wedding Present (soon to become the face of straight-up indie popularity), and even Primal Scream (a cute little Scottish band that would soon become, well, Primal Scream). It was Stephen Pastel's label that would help launch the Jesus & Mary Chain, and over the next few years even My Bloody Valentine would dip a few toes in this scene.

And then something happened: indie became cool. Between C-86 chic and a backlash against it, between the massive popularity of the Smiths and the lovable hyperspeed rock of the Wedding Present, British indie became what American indie is today-- the fashionable music-of-choice for a certain sort of mostly-white, mostly-educated, mostly-middle-class young people, the sorts of kids the British call "student types." And if indie was becoming stylish, forward-looking, and ambitious, what would become of its twee side, the side that prized exactly the opposite?

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Enter Sarah Records, the Bristol label and fanzine founded by indie devotees Matt Haynes and Clare Wadd. Sarah clung to the details of indie, releasing 7" vinyl singles-- an inexpensive, personal format-- in hand-assembled packages. More importantly, the music it released devoted itself even more fully to everything the new, stylish indie was coming to abandon. Their first stars, the Field Mice, were willfully starry-eyed and defiantly wimpy; the bands around them embraced all forms of sweetness, earnestness, simplicity, and comfort. The Sarah aesthetic was another "radical" rejection of the whole notion of trying to be cool, trying to be tough, trying to be sexy, and-- maybe most importantly-- trying to be masculine.

"The whole record industry is still relentlessly male," Haynes told the Bliss Aquamarine zine in the early 90s. "Sure, the press will pay lip service to riot grrrl, but you just have to look at how eagerly they fall in love with Primal Scream's new we-are-the-lads, booze-drugs-and-chicks image to realize how superficial it is." Talulah Gosh, he said, "were loathed to an absurd, hysterical extent by people who basically couldn't handle the idea of women being in a band and yet not conforming to stereotypical 'rock-chick' roles or simpering at the mic-stand in various states of undress...So they were labeled cute and twee...People who use 'cute' and 'twee' as insults because they're uncomfortable with us being un-rock'n'roll and non-macho say more about their own insecurities and traditional reactionary attitudes than they do about us."

The best analogy for Sarah's position, interestingly enough, comes from the 60s. If indie was the stylish music-of-choice for those "student types"-- a bit like listening to the Beatles back in the 60s-- then following Sarah was a little like listening to folk music: It was soft, idealistic, intimate, and supposedly made by people Just Like You; its system of fanzines and singles was like some sort of private gift culture. When Bob Dylan went electric in 1965, folk purists complained that their boy was becoming "just another pop group," destroying the intimacy of folk performance. And when, in the early 90s, certain Sarah bands started dabbling in dance and noise, the label's trainspotters came out with the same complaints: That their scene-- simple, pure, and private-- was being ruined.

Matt and Clare were quick to point out that liking cute things didn't mean only liking cute things: "That's like saying Agatha Christie only liked whodunits because that's all she wrote," said Haynes. If that sounds as defensive as his reaction to the "twee" label, well, you've stumbled onto the biggest problem with Sarah: asn't this stuff just reactionary, frightened, backward-looking pap; comfort music for prematurely old geeks who couldn't handle anything actually daring? Didn't their smoothed-out take on 60s pop mostly just cut out the parts that came from black people? Wasn't this stuff basically conservative-- lame white boys with no new ideas, holing up in their own closets and writing songs about how girls didn't like them? And why should anyone be interested in celebrating how pathetic they were?

There's a level on which those accusations is spot-on-- or at least as spot-on as they'd be about preferring the Decemberists to noise bands. For a lot of people, this music only really worked during those awkward teenage years where it genuinely helps to hear some kindred sappy spirits; as they got a little older, they turned their backs on it, digging into more progressive scenes like rave and avant-garde rock. But as part of a balanced musical diet, plenty of Sarah's records feel essential, like a bunch of children, virgins, and librarians have distilled all the sweetest pop of guitar-pop into a sparkling dream. And musically, these bands aren't incredibly different from listening to vintage American country music: They share the same simplified guitar strum, straightforward melodies, laid-back comfort, and stilted sad-song lyrics. Certain Field Mice songs can read like Patsy Cline for English schoolboys.

And the Field Mice are a good example of how it worked. Fans wound up calling this stuff just "pop," flat-out, as if what was on the radio wasn't, and listening to the first singles from this band-- just two guys and a drum machine, guitars strumming casually under melodies that are nothing but breathy hooks-- it makes sense: What part of this can you consider anything but pop? Hence the go-to expression of the Sarah fan-- "pure, perfect pop"-- and the famous, telling complaint: "In a perfect world, this would be on the radio." It's easy to understand. A song like "Emma's House" makes all-pop simplicity seems like the rarest and most beautiful thing in the world; for the four minutes you're taken by its earnest strum and puppyish melody, it seems silly that anyone would try to do anything else. The same could go for the jangling guitar-pop of the Sea Urchins, or the cosmopolitan acoustic comfort of Blueboy, or-- critically-- the chirpy bounce of Heavenly.

Plenty of people will tell you Heavenly were the greatest indie pop act of all time; some people would remove the "indie pop" qualifier. The band was a reincarnation of Talulah Gosh, with almost the same lineup; its style was a reinvigoration of anorak style, twee girl-group harmonies, and peppy pop-group energy. With Heavenly, though, the performances were remarkably tight, with guitarist Peter Momtchiloff playing impossibly twisty pop lines; their melodies and harmonies were precise and catchy, sophisticated and wistful. Most important of all, they matched elegant pop sing-alongs with sharp content, in lyrics that took indie-kid life with a sometimes-cutting seriousness: Their P.U.N.K. Girl EP is so bouncy and full of hooks that it can take a while to notice it's kind of a concept record about date rape. It didn't hurt that the band members were just the type indie pop kids love to make hearthrobs out of: three nice boys in stripy shirts and two cute, smart girls with barrettes in their hair. Heavenly could be the indie pop litmus test: If you don't find it hard to resist a song like "Tool", and if you don't find singer Amelia Fletcher singularly adorable, this stuff probably isn't for you.

Through the early 90s, England's indie pop influences bled out in a lot of new directions. Bands like the Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine had spent the late-80s blasting indie's 60s pop aesthetic with noise; once Loveless sparked the shoegazer trend, plenty of indie pop bands followed suit. On labels like Cherry Red, bands like the Charlottes and Blind Mr Jones went as dreamy as they could manage; the singer of Secret Shine played Sarah Records' 1995 farewell party in a handmade t-shirt reading "My Bloody Secret Shine." The Field Mice picked up on shoegaze and dance music both, working their way into a sugary stew of sound. The grace and comfort of "pure, perfect pop" carved out its own spot in mainstream indie, too, thanks to bands like the Sundays. The peak of twee had come and gone, and what had largely faded was the sense of primitivism-- with everyone trying so hard to be dreamy-pretty, production values and good musicianship and sheer ambition had to come back.

The primitive spirit-- the rebellious fuck-you-I'm-twee aesthetic-- was shaping up elsewhere, as the indie concept ran its own course in America.

Part Two: America, Olympia, and Twee-as-Fuck Culture

For most of the 1980s, Americans didn't have so much "indie"-- at least not in the sense that British people used the word. There were jingle-jangle rock bands like R.E.M., but their aims tended to be fairly professional. There were independent labels, and independent bands, but a lot of them were outgrowths of punk (like the bands on SST) or back-to-basics rockers (like the early Replacements)-- music with all those punk signifiers of fire and machismo.

Jonathan Richman aside, one significant exception came from the Pacific Northwest-- something like, geographically speaking, the Scotland of America. In and around Olympia, Wash.-- home of the notoriously free-form Evergreen State College-- a different notion of indie would take shape: Kids recording primitive pop and self-releasing it on cassette.

Imagine the surprise of the west-coast punk scene, then, when it got Beat Happening, the biggest thing ever to happen to indie pop in America. The roots of Beat Happening were ridiculously primitive, and some of their early-80s recordings sound-- quite literally-- like three eight-year-olds with a guitar, some pots and pans, and a boombox, singing songs about holding hands and going swimming. By the time they released the albums they're remembered for-- say, 1988's incredibleJamboree-- they'd grown more sophisticated in sound without losing that feel; if anything, they'd honed it into something even more absurdly affecting.

The band members billed themselves as simply Bret, Heather, and Calvin, and that convention would become standard for the pop scene: First names only, as if these were just the kids who lived over on the next block. The music was reduced to the same number of moving parts: Heather with a primitive drum stomp that can make Meg White look like Keith Moon, Bret repeating four-note guitar riffs over and over, and Calvin Johnson, the first star of American twee, bellowing and yowling in an impossibly deep, booming, near-tuneless voice. When they threw distortion on the guitar and revved up their go-go-styled beats, they sounded like the Cramps or the Fall. When they played pop, they kept that kids-with-a-boombox vibe going strong: four-chord patterns and naive singalongs about apple picking and crushes. Most of what's written about this band is all about that sweet pop and those childish affectations, but that misses the substance at the core: Their music was dark, damaged, full of fright and sex and death and vulnerability-- just like any real childhood.

Set against the masculinity of punk, this stuff sounded like absolute defiance, like a call to arms. The culture of punk, after all, was a lot like culture at large: its sense of cool had to do with toughness and invulnerability and skill, with renouncing innocence and childish naiveté. Beat Happening poked holes in the fierceness of those punks by essentially outdoing them-- their hopscotch stories felt punker than Black Flag tattoos ever could, and their primitive sweetness found the one thing these supposedly daring non-conformist punks wouldn't be caught dead doing. Their sound annoyed the hell out of anyone who didn't love them, but that was a bonus. Henry Rollins could posture and yell and (famously) heckle this band, but Calvin could just lean out over his audiences and throw them candy. It was another snotty dare: "What, are you too cool for candy?"

Even more important was Calvin's role in creating indie labels. In addition to K Records, the label he ran with Candace Pederson, he'd worked on the Sub Pop fanzine, which grew up into the label of the same name. Its first motto was "Decentralize Pop Culture", yet another dream of a world in which pop music felt like tapes traded from friend to friend. Across town, another label christened itself Kill Rock Stars, with the same agenda. One Beat Happening song sealed the metaphor: "Teenage cavemen/ Rocked with skin and bones," the same way these kids would. The music being made wasn't even necessarily the point; the real joy was creating a pop world that was decentralized, local, personal, and handmade, one where a primitive bedroom recording could be enjoyed not just by your friends but by a whole community. When K celebrated itself with a festival, they called it the International Pop Underground-- as if the world's indie pen-pals were gathering for their first meeting.

The accessibility of the thing was critical. These days, K gets written off as a minor label for cutesy pop rejects, which it kind of has become. Look back to those roots, though, and you'll notice half the basis of northwestern indie rock circling nearby. It was the Olympia scene that birthed riot grrrl; it was the International Pop Underground festival that introduced Modest Mouse and Bratmobile. One of Calvin's other bands, the Go Team, briefly included a young guitar player who called himself "Kurdt Kobain"-- a kid who so loved this stuff that he'd tattooed the K Records logo on his arm.

It was the same story around the U.S.: Indie's rock and pop sides coexisting in a scrappy, private underground. In Washington, D.C., the band Unrest moved from hardcore punk roots to making a fetish of early British indie. Nearby, Jenny Toomey founded the landmark Simple Machines label, and published a detailed guide on how you could do the same thing yourself; when the label undertook the ultra-indie project of a year-long "singles club" (one themed seven-inch per month, mailed by subscription), the bands on board ranged from pop travelers (Lois Maffeo, Small Factory) to rockers and punks (Superchunk, Jawbox). In New England, in particular, strummy indie pop and rock were nearly the same thing; the Blake Babies became a mainstay of late-80s college rock, and the Lemonheads, inspired by Australia's indie pop scene, would even take a few twee moves to the mainstream.

The most striking thing about the pop strain was its relationship with gender roles. Proper American punk wasn't always so different from the cock-rock on the radio-- largely a boy's game. The indie pop world was the opposite. Much like English twee, this was a scene open to all sorts of girls, including-- maybe even especially-- the sorts who weren't inclined to shoot for sex appeal or try to rock with the boys. Suddenly these girls could decentralize into a pop culture of their own, trading tapes from one to another, whether or not they had the conventional skills of the rock boys' club. For Calvin's friend Lois Maffeo, that meant starting a band called Courtney Love (there's a story there) and playing acoustic indie-folk. For the four women in Sacramento's phenomenal Tiger Trap, that meant being able to play and release a form of "punk" that was both musically impressive and thoroughly girly, the audio equivalent of a glitter-glued notebook. Between that spirit and the ever-present sound of punk, it's no surprise that the Olympia scene spawned riot grrl.

And then the 90s came, and just like in England, "indie" and "alternative" became popular-- in precisely the hard-rocking, masculine, centralized form that indie pop usually shied away from. The mainstream honed in on the underground's hard-rock side, and, acts like Superchunk and Modest Mouse would go on to become Important Bands; acts like Tiger Trap and Heavenly would, for good reasons and bad, fade into history. And there on the television, ironically, was the K-tattooed Cobain, still wearing his cardigans and covering songs by the Vaselines.

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And then came the important part-- the part where indie pop became a culture. The alternative rock of the 90s, after all, was a return to a lot of the masculine values certain strains of indie were chipping away at. And just as Sarah Records stepped up to hold the torch for indie pop purity, plenty of Americans did something even better: They embraced the stuff with a passion. With the same defiance that fueled Beat Happening, plenty of American kids decided to damn the rest of the world and devote themselves to everything unfashionable about the indie pop aesthetic, everything your average Soundgarden fan would run from: sweetness, girliness, cuteness, brattyness, amateurish performance, and childish innocence. Sarah's Matt Haynes defended his bands against the "twee" label; when charged with the same, Americans sneered back with t-shirts that read TWEE AS FUCK. Alongside the "underground" of alternative, they'd create another decentralized underground-- a system of tiny labels (March and Bus Stop and Slumberland) and seven-inch singles (by bands like Rocketship and Honeybunch, Cub and the Softies), and an international underground of adorable kids trading handmade pop from bedroom to bedroom.

"For years and years we've had a Maximum Rock'n'Roll scene with old-school punk stuff," Tullycraft singer Sean Tollefson told The Digital Collegian. "Maybe it's a reaction to that. It was like how rockin' can we be. It could be 'how cute can we be.' Cuteness can still be punk, but in a different way." Heavenly's Amelia Fletcher saw something more like freedom in there: "It's about not being ashamed of it. I mean, I spent from age 13 to age 17 trying to act like I was 25 and trying to prove to boys that I knew all about sex, when I didn't, and trying to prove I was cool and no one could hurt me, when they could. At 18, I thought 'fuck it, I don't care anymore. I'm just gonna be what I feel like being.'"

That liberation spread in a lot of directions, even when the bands weren't being cute: The pop scene of the 90s spit out everything from comfort music to handmade oddities, everything from rambling nice-guy rock to gorgeous synthpop. Part of the joy was in that feeling of freedom and defiance-- the feeling of throwing off the shackles of "cool" and geeking out on something sweet, the feeling that anyone with a tape recorder could make something wonderful.

This wasn't indie as Serious Progressive Music-- it was indie as a dream-world lifestyle, a world full of incredibly nice kids making incredibly nice music, sending one another mix tapes in the mail, putting on shows at one another's houses. And that mirror image of the music world took shape again: suddenly there was a scene that didn't so much aspire to coolness or toughness or sexiness. Suddenly there was a scene that made stars out of shy boys who probably got swirlied in high school, and idols out of girls who dressed like librarians-- a scene where the pinnacle of style was to be a nice, normal person who made some tiny, lovely thing on your own.

If that just sounds like Lisa Loeb with shitty production values, well, yeah: A lot of indie pop was just terrible, absolutely god-awful and embarrassing. But a lot of it wasn't. It's difficult to offer a run-down of the bits that succeeded, since part of the point of the thing was the smallness of the results-- the way individual people, hand-making pop in their own ways, would wind up with something subtly idiosyncratic, something personal and special. Another part of the point was the scale of the thing, the way one hand-crafted artifact could be more important than a career; there was nothing the scene loved better than making "legends" out of some everyday kids who released one great single. This stuff was one giant scatter-- of crappy things, and of wonderful ones.

The most confrontationally twee band of them all was probably Cub, a trio of Vancouver girls whose style aspired to something like fourth-graders pretending to be Josie and the Pussycats; they gave presents to their audiences, played shows in their pajamas, and wrote deliriously juvenile songs like "My Chinchilla". Back toward Olympia, Tullycraft played the sorts of rickety powerpop and punk that some critics decided to call "cuddlecore," putting put some extra glue to the scene with a ridiculous song called "Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid to Know About", which slagged off the Green Day-loving beau and wondered what had happened to the ex-girlfriend's appreciation for Heavenly. K went right on releasing records, including some terrific ones by the Halo Benders, Calvin's new band with Built to Spill frontman Doug Martsch. And Tiger Trap's Rose Melberg teamed up with Jen Sbragia in a band called the Softies-- just two voices, two electric guitars, and a distilled version of the scene's whole rainy-day sad-and-sweet girly vibe. Whether it was because of the echo of Beat Happening or a reaction against Seattle's much-loved hard rock, this region produced some of the most willfully twee music of the era.

For Berkeley, Calif.'s Slumberland Records, one of the best and most forward-looking imprints of the scene, it was just the opposite. Their amazing 1994 compilation, Why Popstars Can't Dance (answer: "because guilty feet have got no rhythm") brought together a more progressive selection of pop-united styles: early drones from Stereolab, the sharp guitar and overwhelming organ buzz of Rocketship, the shoegazing post-rock of Lorelei, the earnest strum of Honeybunch, homespun sweetness from Glo-Worm, the intensely personal home recordings of Linda Smith, and grotty English buzz from Boyracer. The selection of bands managed to touch on nearly every major strain of the scene; as an introduction to the indie pop world, it's hard to do better than this.

In D.C., the influence of England's shoegazers hit hard. Black Tambourine only ever managed to record 10 songs, all blasts of jangly noise, but it was the seed of much more than that. In addition to recording the ultimate crush song about Stephen Pastel, the group's members splintered off into any number of much-loved acts-- singer Pam Berry to groups like Glo-Worm and the Castaway Stones, and the others to Velocity Girl, a shoegazer band that became an indie pop crossover.

New England would do its share, as well. Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, bands like Blake Babies and the remarkable Honeybunch would strip indie down to an accessible pop jangle that was less cute and more just comfortable, everyday-likeable-- something just laid-back and melodic, like youth-culture's old country music. The Blake Babies' Juliana Hatfield, along with the Lemonheads' Evan Dando, would ride that vibe to something kind of like stardom. Honeybunch drummer Claudia Gonson would go on to join Magnetic Fields, who started off as the best kind of indie pop-- the group's earliest singles, a sort of oddball bedroom synthpop, seemed to come out of nowhere, like the best sort of gift. Their first and greatest success, "100,000 Fireflies", became a staple of indie mix-tape making; it was so surprising, and so surprisingly great, that it just had to be shared.

In the Midwest, Chicago's March Records collected a decent assortment of raggedy pop, and Bus Stop quickly became known as "the American Sarah Records." Minty Fresh traded in more ambitious forms of pop, including plenty of bands imported from Scandinavia's ultra-sugary scene. Co-ed trio Bunnygrunt brought the cuddlecore aesthetic to St. Louis. And, as with Boston's Lemonheads, some strange connection seemed to develop between Chicago and Australia's long-running indie world, with people like the Cannanes' Randall Lee splitting time on opposite sides of the world.

"Cuddlecore," of course, had its problems. In its earliest flush, when fans embraced truly embraced childishness as a style, there were disconcerting streaks of regressiveness in there-- some of the same problems that plagued Sarah Records, only with an extra dash of irony. There were points where cuteness felt like a caricature, and a pose: when girls went around carrying Strawberry Shortcake lunchboxes instead of purses, being twee seemed less like a rejection of cool and more like the creation of a new, worse form of it. Tiger Trap's Rose Melberg went ahead and admitted the escapism of the thing: "It's really comforting to put yourself in a child-like state of mind. The aesthetic is so immediate-- it's big, bright colors, big, simple words, simple melodies. Things like that are easy to understand. I see it as my inability to grow up. I try not to really grow up. I may want to stay ten years old." Another problem came, oddly enough, from the friendly, supportive nature of the scene: the last thing you'd ever hear a popkid say was that she "hated" an indie pop band. This makes for nice atmosphere, but pretty poor quality control.

And here's the part where I admit that I've been misleading you. Thankfully, the twee vibe was never quite as inbred and insular as it seemed. Its core constituency may have embraced TWEE AS FUCK with a passion, but the borders of their scene were relatively permeable. Bands like Velocity Girl and the Magnetic Fields were, in the end, just mainstream indie. Bands like Small Factory switched naturally from sounding pop to sounding like Versus-- a regular old indie rock band still beloved of popkids. Even with the hardest core of twee bands, one imagines that plenty of their records were sold to people with no particular concept of a pop underground-- one imagines plenty of rock fans just heard a Softies record somewhere, liked the sound of it, and slotted it somewhere in their lower racks of their CD collections. And if you asked these musicians whether or not they thought of themselves as part of a "twee" scene, the vast majority of them would surely have said no-- they'd surely have said they were just making the music they wanted to, and they wanted it to be evaluated on exactly the same terms as everything else.

Hence the eventual fate of indie pop, in both the U.S. and the UK: At some point, the scene just started to dissolve out into the indie world in general, creating a natural spectrum between the pop and the rock. By the late 90s, Americans were loving the psychedelic pop sounds of the Elephant 6 collective, and people everywhere were going nuts for Belle and Sebastian-- all polished, accessible music that would be hard to imagine without the story of indie pop lurking somewhere behind it. Mainstay pop labels like March would go on nurturing a true twee scene, including a brief vogue for geeked-out synthpop, and Kindercore would do the same for the Athens, Ga., scene. The twee rebellion would take hold in new places, from Spain to Hong Kong, and the "pure, perfect pop" would keep on coming, from acts like Club 8 and the Montgolfier Brothers. But hardly anyone, these days, thinks of indie pop as a story of its own; new bedroom acts like the Russian Futurists and the Radio Dept. get appreciated-- quite rightly-- on the larger terms of indie. When people hear music that makes sense largely in an indie pop context-- say, Wolfie's Awful Mess Mystery, an insanely good record that hardly anyone likes-- they mostly just think the band is doing something wrong; they mostly just think they're listening to crap.

Strange, then, the way we've forgotten the indie pop story-- especially given the number of people who spent time dipping into it. Poke around American indie fans in their late 20s or early 30s, and you'll find a massive cache of middle-class suburban kids who loved at least some of this stuff, even if it was only for a year or two. And how could they not? If you were a sweet kid, or a bookish kid, or a shy kid, stumbling across bits of this stuff could feel like a revelation-- the sudden appearance of some band that seemed to be coming from the same place you were. By the time you turned 21, you'd probably get over it a little, and mostly move on. But for those years-- and every time you threw your old Tiger Trap records on-- it'd remain a little miracle.

Part Three: Listen to This

A massive, three-page article about indie pop: Why now?

Two reasons. The first is that today's indie audience has managed to embrace plenty of indie pop-styled bands without ever thinking of them in those terms. There's Belle and Sebastian, who in another era probably would have released their albums on Sarah Records, or Postcard, or 53rd and 3rd. There are the Lucksmiths, an Australian band whose fans should really, really listen to some Honeybunch. There are the Ladybug Transistor, with a style that's something like psychedelic twee, and the Clientele, whose dreamy-soft moods have the same personal feel as old-English indie pop. There are the Magnetic Fields, with their popscene roots, and there's the Postal Service-- whose Jimmy Tamborello got his start with the twee-ish synth combo Figurine.

And from there stems the second reason: Today's indie world looks to be shaping up for the same kind of split that makes twee essential. Today's "indie" world is remarkably professional; its notable acts, like the Arcade Fire, are the sort that would once have released their records on major labels. At the same time, we've seen the rise of something analogous to the hardcore bands of the 80s. It's the underground world of post-hardcore noise where things are really happening, and along with that has come an old schism-- between the tough punks and the drama geeks-- with Pitchfork's own Tom Breihan worrying about the Decemberists being "indie bedwetter dweebs" in his Village Voice blog. Chances of some woman recording a series of weird, girly four-track songs in her bedroom and offering them up to the world like a beautiful private gift, the way Liz Phair once did: slim.

In all honesty, its about time the rock kids got their forward-looking tear-it-up moment: the indie world of the past decade has been far too content to strum its way comfortably along, going nowhere. But one side deserves the other, and there's every chance that during the next few years we'll need more of that homespun pop-- not professional bedwetters like the Decemberists, but more of that proud, decentralized underground. If you're young and starry-eyed, here's your chance to get in ahead of the game: Grab a cheap guitar or a cheap keyboard, a four-track or a boombox, and make what you can. Someone, somewhere, will love you for it.

And if you need inspiration, here's something like the format that introduced me to the pop world: the mix tape. Twee mixtapes were personal; they came from faraway points in the International Pop Underground, with handwritten labels and notes enclosed. No time to do that for all of you, but here's the next best thing. Pick one song per artist, and you should fill up a CD nicely.

The Television Personalities: "This Angry Silence" (1981)

It's all the grand, triumphant moves of rock-- from the guitar windmills to the desperation in the lyrics-- as played by kids who don't care whether they're pulling them off or not. It's also one of the clearest routes into the subtle trick at the heart of a lot of indie pop: the way the sound of trying and "failing" can be a success all on its own. They're not rocking in the conventional sense-- they sound way too schoolboy-wimpy for that-- but they're rocking nonetheless, and it sounds all the more grand and human for it.

Look for: And Don't the Kids Just Love It

Beat Happening: "Indian Summer" (1988); "Bewitched" (1988); "Our Secret" (1984)

It's just four notes and some barely there drums, but "Indian Summer" is magnificent, and haunting enough that a surprising number of indie bands have wound up covering it. (Dean Wareham, of Galaxie 500 and Luna, called it "indie's 'Knocking on Heaven's Door'-- everybody's done it.") The imagery is all pastoral beauty-- "breakfast in cemetery, boy tasting wild cherry"-- but there's a sense of impending loss in there that's kind of devastating: When Calvin goes hushed and sings "we will never change," it's like he's trying to make the summer last forever.

"Bewitched", on the other hand, makes the hard vibes explicit. This is one of those Cramps-styled songs, where three-note guitar blares, drums bang, and Calvin bellows as snotty as possible-- "I've got a crush on you, I've got a crush on you." In "Our Secret", one of the band's earliest tracks, you can hear all sides of the band in a fragile drone that captures some deeply affecting sense of childhood's purity. It's also more clever and complicated than it seems; notice how Calvin's voice plays the role of a bass guitar, and makes the chords change?

Look for: Jamboree and Black Candy-- or You Turn Me On, in which this "childish" band grows up into something lush and dreamy.

Talulah Gosh: "Beatnik Boy" (1986); "My Boy Says" (1987) 

Talulah Gosh's short career wound its way from blasts of bouncing girl-group joy (like on "My Boy Says") to bratty punk ("Break Your Face"), but "Beatnik Boy" was their most idiosyncratically twee track-- like pop recovered from some subtly-altered version of the fifties, where minimalist English girl-groups and cutesy rockabilly guitar were the norm. The format of the title-- and that of Heavenly songs like "Lemonhead Boy" and "Cool Guitar Boy"-- would become a staple of American indie pop.

Look for: Backwash, the band's entire collected works.

Honeybunch: "Mine Your Own Business" (1991); "My Contribution to the Greenhouse Effect" (1991) 

This stuff is "pop" indeed-- casual guitar strum, perky organ hums, and elegant, all-hook vocal melodies. The surprising thing is that there's nothing the least bit cute about it-- just a laid-back summer-night comfort. "Mine Your Own Business" may be their best single, and "My Contribution to the Greenhouse Effect" is a cleverly tuned breakup lyric-- all those greenhouse gases are coming from a backyard bonfire of an ex's gifts and letters. If anything in America makes that connection between indie pop and old country music, it's this band-- this time it's Patsy Cline for New England grad students.

Look for: Time Trials, the band's entire collected works.

Magnetic Fields: "100,000 Fireflies" (1995) 

Now that Stephin Merritt-- and Honeybunch drummer Claudia Gonson-- have become court jesters for the NPR set, it's easy to forget how odd and idiosyncratic their early singles were. That's a shame, because this song may still be the band's best-- and the ultimate staple of indie mixtapes. There's beauty in the bouncing rhythm and chiming synths, and there's beauty in the high, choirgirl quaver of Susan Anway's voice, but the freshest bit was (of course) Merritt's lyric. The first lines make you sit up: "I have a mandolin/ I play it all night long/ It makes me want to kill myself." This was everything you wanted from indie pop-- something beautiful and strange, popping up seemingly out of nowhere.

Look for: Distant Plastic Trees, or the 6th's Wasps' Nest, which brings together guest vocalists from across the pop underground.

Tiger Trap: "Puzzle Pieces" (1988), "My Broken Heart" (1988) 

Now here's the feminine principle in indie pop: one of the girliest bands ever, and all without ever sounding the least bit meek or unsure. "Puzzle Pieces" stomps along at superfast punk speed, but its true-love lyric and crisp, girlish vocals are all glitter and construction-paper hearts. On a song like "My Broken Heart", the band still blazes, and singer Rose Melberg sings sweet while still sounding absolutely assured, almost deadly.

Look for: Tiger Trap, on K Records-- highly recommended.

Heavenly: "C Is the Heavenly Option" (1992); "Hearts and Crosses" (1993); "Three Star Compartment" (1994) 

"C Is the Heavenly Option" isn't Heavenly's best song, but it's a key indie pop moment. This, after all, is a duet between the genre's biggest heartthrobs-- frontwoman Amelia Fletcher and Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson, one of the group's chief supporters, teaming up to dispense romantic advice. If there's any defining indie pop experience, it's popkid couples driving around in their cars and singing along with the respective parts. More substantial is "Hearts and Crosses", the centerpiece of the band's "kind of a concept record about date rape." For a few minutes, it seems like another sharp-and-bouncy song about crushes. But then comes the bridge, in which the crush rapes the girl in question. Followed by a peppy keyboard solo-- probably the most crushing peppy-keyboard-solo in the history of recorded music. On "Three Star Compartment", the group's interlocking melodies and girl-group bounce have honed themselves to perfection.

Look for: Le Jardin de Heavenly, Decline and Fall of Heavenly, and the P.U.N.K. GirlEP-- this is the core of indie pop right here.

The Field Mice: "Emma's House" (1988) 

Two guys, a drum machine, and probably the best single ever released on Sarah Records. Like Honeybunch or Australia's Go-Betweens, the Field Mice could make all-pop simplicity seem like the only thing worth doing. It's hard to pin down exactly what subtle trick they used to accomplish this, but they managed. Singer Robert Wratten doesn't just have a direct line into the schoolboy heart-- if you don't have one, he just might manage to install it for you.

Look for: Snowball, reissued with accompanying singles.

Rocketship: "You and Your New Boyfriend" (1994); "I Love You Like the Way that I Used to Do" (1996) 

Some indie pop bands were amateurish; Dustin Reske's Rocketship was not. The best of Reske's productions are crisp, clear, and ambitious, bringing sweet pop bounce together with Stereolab-style organ drone and My Bloody Valentine ambience. "You and Your New Boyfriend" has the melodies and lyrics of prime-era indie pop ("you both ride your bikes past my house every day, sun or rain"), but its fizzy organ lines and sparkling production are as spaced-out as indie's progressives. "I Love You like the Way that I Used to Do" is even more ambitious, with quick, ultra-bright guitar chords racing around a world of trebly washes.

Look for: A Certain Smile, a Certain Sadness-- highly recommended; "Hey Hey Girl".

The Softies: "Hello Rain" (1995) 

After Tiger Trap stopped making its rambling girl-punk, singer Rose Melberg moved on to one of the most wonderfully girly duos of the decade: the Softies played exactly the way the name implied. "Hello Rain", the lead track on their first album, is all about mood, full of deep reverb and teary, wistful sighs. It's another good litmus test for the indie pop project: if you don't find this incredibly pretty, the popkids can say, you're either a horrible person or you're trying too hard to be cool.

Look for: It's Love

Glo-Worm: "Tilt-a-Whirl" (1994) 

Brushed drums, acoustic guitar, and deep-reverb vocal harmonies from Pam Berry. This is pretty, homespun pop of the best kind; ultra-pretty recording coexists wonderfully with an intimate, living-room vibe.

Look for: Glimmer, maybe.

Barcelona: "I've got the Password to your Shell Account" (1999) 

This is total geek, obviously: a bratty synth-pop tune with a c:\\-prompt threat for a wandering boyfriend. In the same vein: Figurine's lovely "IMpossible", a dancepop duet in which a long-distance relationship dissolves over instant message, and one of few break-up songs where the break-up in question actually happens, during the bridge.

Look for: March Records' Moshi Moshi: Pop International Style, a two-disc collection spanning the late-nineties' shiny-sounding global twee scene-- including Barcelona and Figurine (USA), Club 8 and Cinnamon and Ray Wonder (Sweden), Spring and Le Mans (Spain), and 800 Cherries (Japan).

Pastels: "Different Drum" (1990); "Yoga" (1994); "Mandarin" (1995) 

The biggest part of the Pastels' endless style came directly from their less-than-perfect voices: both Stephen Pastel and Aggi Wright drawled their way around their notes in a lazy, swooning way that's incredibly charming. (Nothing has ever been more indie pop than having boy and girl singers at the same time.) Their anorak-slacker cover of "Different Drum" is all droopy style, and as they moved along toward a much more sophisticated pop future, they learned to use that quality to beautiful effect-- on tracks like "Mandarin", or their droning gem "Yoga", those swoops and drawls are integral parts of the songs themselves.

Look for: Truck Train Tractor collects those anorak-style singles, but Mobile Safariis the real jewel. By Illumination, the band had gotten beyond "indie" and into an elegant pop dream.

Cub: "Tell Me Now" (Daniel Johnston cover, 1996) 

The Vancouver trio Cub managed to encapsulate everything that bugged people about indie pop-- self-satisfied girliness, willful amateurism, and dippy, juvenile lyrics (see "My Chinchilla"). So who better for them to cover than Daniel Johnston, a mentally troubled singer whose crude, homemade recordings had an equally off-kilter notion of "pop?" Coming from this band, Johnston's lyrics still sound less ridiculous and more just ridiculously honest: "If this really is love / then let's get it on."

Look for: Betti-Cola.

Tullycraft: "Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid to Know About" (1995) 

Not that I've ever understood why some people go crazy for Tullycraft, but you can't talk about indie pop without talking about this song-- a big, name-dropping celebration of the in-crowd. Over some typically joyous indie-rock moves, singer Sean Tollefson lets loose his bratty yelp to pick on his girl's new U2-loving boyfriend and ask what's happened to her indie pop loves: Heavenly, Nothing Painted Blue, Lois, and...Neutral Milk Hotel.

Look for: The Long Secret, a compilation from Harriet Records. (Both the label's name and the compilation's are Harriet-the-Spy-related.)

Wolfie: "Hey It's Finally Yay" (1998) 

Twee, yeah, but then again: These four kids play like they think they're out-rocking AC/DC-- with cheapy instruments in a mid-Illinois garage. They're also just bursting with joy, from the boy/girl vocals (chirpy deadpan versus bratty drawl) to the keyboard leads and tambourine-shaking buildups. Something in the combination of carefree melody, garage-pure setup, and hyper-energetic "rock"-- along with this combo's sharp songwriting skills-- make this stuff a revelation, for whatever tiny portion of listeners "gets" it.

Look for: Awful Mess Mystery, one of-- if you ask me-- the best records of the nineties.

Black Tambourine: "Thow Aggi off the Bridge" (1991) 

Not the band's best moment, by a long shot-- that would be "For Ex-Lovers Only"-- but this is a prime example of an indie pop staple: the crush song. Even better, the crush here is on Stephen McRobbie of the Pastels-- and the simple, happy request, wrapped up in a blast of jangling noise, is to toss bandmate Aggi Wright into the nearest river.

Look for: The Complete Recordings, all ten songs of it.

The Hit Parade: Hitomi (1991) 

I first heard this one on a mixtape from Laura Watling, who'd go on to win the Indie pop List's 2001 "Most Fancied Indie pop Personality" award. For much of their career, the Hit Parade would draw lines between indie pop and dance music-- much the same way Saint Etienne would. With this song, though, the vibe drifted way over toward Sarah Records territory: acoustic guitars winding like Blueboy over synths and drum machine, and a fresh, bedroomy pop vibe that's all sappy smiles.

Look for: The Sound of the Hit Parade

Blueboy: "Boys Don't Matter" (1994) 

Blueboy named themselves after both an Orange Juice song and a gay skin mag, and their music had the same adult-cosmopolitan vibe as Honeybunch. Nylon-stringed guitar, string arrangements, lilting vocals-- this stuff wasn't "cute," just sleepy-beautiful. It also featured some deceptive lyrics: people assumed this was more weepy boy-girl stuff, even when Keith Girdler was singing about homophobia or prostitution.

Look for: If Wishes Were Horses.

Velocity Girl: "Pop Loser" (1993) 

Velocity Girl were the most successful of America's indie pop shoegazers-- and on their second album, they dropped the noise and shot for full-on pop complexity. Listening to this song, from their first album, you might have guessed it would happen: this wasn't just a slice of pop scenery, but a loving, bouncy joke on the scene. The lyrics here could be coming from the ultimate college-radio popgeek, nurturing a bumbling crush: "All day long I guess I've had the same thought/ Wanted to show you all the records I bought/ Waited at the bus stop and I stared in disgust/ But then I realized you don't ride the same bus."

Look for: Copacetic for melodic shoegazer buzz, Simpatico for classically styled near-British pop.

The Vaselines: "Molly's Lips" (1988) 

It's one of the best-known songs on this list, thanks to Nirvana's cover of it. The original, though, is a surprising combination of twee style and, well, something else: the jangling backing and Frances McKee's high, choirgirl vocals are vintage C-86 indie, but Eugene Kelly's deadpan drone under the "chorus" gives it a jolt of danger. The sound is a perfect example of Scotland's shambly style-- and the strange, subtle charm that can make a rickety indie production seem like a better idea than a well-made production.

Look for: The Way of the Vaselines, a terrific compilation of this band's shambling punk.

Small Factory: "If You Hurt Me" (1993)

Just like the original wave of punk, indie pop had a local, just-between-fans vibe that managed to make certain songs feel a lot more wonderful than they had much right to be. Such was the case for this one, from Rhode Island indie underdogs Small Factory. It came as part of Simple Machines' year-long singles club, paired with a Tsunami song for the August edition: a coy little lovesong that unravels into a terrific joke.

Look for: Industrial Evolution, a compilation of singles. Even better, Simple Machines' celebratory Working Holiday compilation-- all the records from that singles club, along with a disc of live performances from the festival that capped the project off.

The Sea Urchins: "Pristine Christine" (1987)

It was the first single ever released on Sarah Records, and the sound is appropriate: This is a perfect example of what that "pure, perfect pop" agenda revolved around. Nothing particularly wimpy here-- just a jangly, infinitely 60s pop song, somewhere between the Byrds and the Monkees, performed in chipper, upbeat style.

Look for: Stardust.

Boyracer: "In Love" (Marine Girls cover, 2002) 

End your tape with this one. Boyracer's ultra-noisy pop buzz was a favorite of the indie pop set, but don't tell frontman Stewart Anderson that: the last time I tried to recommend his work to Belle and Sebastian fans, he wrote to let me know he felt more affinity with old Australian punk. Which is right, and audible. Then again, this 2002 track is a cover of the early English indie primitivists the Marine Girls (including future Everything but the Girl singer Tracy Thorn), revved up into a joyfully bratty blast of guitar buzz. It's appropriate, for a bitter, sarcastic song about an ex: "I hear you're getting along without me/ I hear you're in love."

Look for: We are Made of the Same Wood-- or, for more of the high-energy pop blast on this song, 2002's To Get a Better Hold You've Got to Loosen Yr Grip.

Twee as Fuck