Meryn Cadell

This is a truly terrible album. Meryn Cadell is a poet/actress/performance artist (three strikes, you’re out) who specializes in clever, feminist, post-modern sound/theater pieces. She reimagines the classic (and surreal) children’s rhyme Baby Bumblebee as a feminist rant against the constant stream of Mr. Wrongs that come into her life. She preaches and instructs as a Dadaist stewardess. She recalls the joy and angst that come with falling in love with some boy’s sweater in the eighth grade. Almost all of her pieces are monologues delivered over innocuous poppy music beds. They are all clever and witty. The first time you hear them. The second time, they’re less so. By about the third or fourth time, you want to break the disc. She’s quite talented and I’m sure she’s a lot of fun to see live, but to actually own her disc is entirely unnecessary. To want to subject yourself to these monologues more than a couple of times is a sign of either advanced psychosis or being a blood relative (or, perhaps, both).

Except for the opening cut, Secret. A beautiful (and short) a cappella piece that blooms into glorious four-part harmony, this song is a mournful tribute to the pleasures and need of retreating to a private place (“there’s no phone, and no way home”). This song never fails to give me chills and I almost always listen to it at least twice in a row so I can sing along. I find the end especially poignant with the four voices singing, “no one knows where I am”, and then the single voice finishing “but me”.

I hate cell phones.

Call me a curmudgeon and a crank, but I can’t abide those little handsets from hell. For one thing, people abuse them relentlessly, holding up grocery lines, weaving blindly across lanes of traffic, shouting half of what should be a personal conversation in the middle of the most public of spaces. Somebody once described cyberspace as where you are when you’re on the phone, and that is precisely correct. When you’re on the phone, you aren’t in your physical space, nor are you in the physical space of the person you are talking to. You are a discarnate being. If I could put a slogan in every household (one of the questions in the horrifically squishy '70s era board game The Ungame which I was subjected to too many times in my encounter-group family “fun” nights), it would be: Be Here Now. Don’t live in the past, don’t live for the future, inhabit the moment, this eternal instant. Be. Here. Now. One of the biggest problems with cell phone abusers is that they are not here now. They aren’t anywhere ever. Their physical body is a relic, stumbling deafly through the landscape, twitching and bumping stupidly about.

But the other big problem with cell phones, and the main reason I don’t have one, is that I don’t want to be in touch all the time. There are times when I don’t want anybody to be able to reach me, when I want to soak in solitude uninterrupted. Cell phones are an ego booster, making the user feel so important that they must never, not for one second, be unreachable. Nobody is so important that they can’t take a shit alone (even Elvis). Me, I relish my solitude, and don’t want the fragile silence shattered by a Black Sabbath ringtone. It’s not that I’m doing anything shameful or secret (most of the time, anyway), I just like to be by myself sometimes, something that seems increasingly difficult to achieve (of course, if I really wanted to be alone, I suppose I wouldn’t have a wife and kids). People seem to be more and more afraid of solitude, and constantly try to build and maintain a personal web of connections – cell phones, email, instant messaging, and so on – to make them feel important and vital and so they never have to look within themselves for comfort or entertainment. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but it sure is good for the phone companies.

This song probably appeals to me as much as it does because I’m an only child (of an only child). As an only child, you learn to make friends with solitude, to take comfort in loneliness, to seek out silence. What others may see as a burden or handicap becomes one of your best sources of strength. Alone, I can silence the cacophonous din of other people’s needs and expectations and listen for the quiet whispering of my own soul. I’m usually too eager trying to be everything to everybody that I often end up being nothing to myself. I need to spend a little intimate one-on-one time to keep myself healthy and balanced. I built a studio once, under the plum tree in the backyard of my first house, a modest mid-century in Culver City. It was a small 10 x 12 space, but it was all mine. I stocked it with my records and books and keyboard and computer. It quickly became my favorite room on earth, because when I was there, I wasn’t anywhere else. I couldn’t hear the doorbell; I couldn’t hear the phone. I was gloriously alone, and it broke my heart to move out of that house and lose that space. Some day, in some future house, I will build another studio, another fortress of solitude, a secret garden where private flowers bloom and no one knows where I am.

But me.