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Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony. He is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection.

In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His columns and articles have appeared in Out, Martha Stewart Living, Garden Design, TimeOut/NY and Bookforum. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught fiction writing at the New School University and Wesleyan. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

He blogs at Koreanish.

And he did us a favor and shuffled…

“Heartbeats”
Jose Gonzales
This cover of the Knife’s song reminds of the day I was wandering around Kingston, NY, while visiting my friend Adam Snyder (formerly of Mercury Rev). Kingston is a little abandoned, and made beautiful by it, and now the beauty is drawing people back to it, which is ironic and also perhaps normal, or, it seems normal to me. I think people have this happen to them also. I don’t know if the song is about that, or if it helps you get there. I think it’s maybe both.

“Mazurka in F Minor, Opus 68, No. 4, Chopin”
Piotr Anderszewski
Before I discovered what a mazurka could be under Chopin, the word just sounded always to me like something I would never want to listen to, and so I continued for years in ignorance. This is a little sad. This track is very short, but it’s beautiful, and I found that I put it in my new novel, The Queen of the Night. It’s about under 3 minutes of sweet seduction, and that’s exactly the way it is put to use in the novel, a scene when the main character is a grisette in the palace of the Emperor Napoleon the III, in charge of the Empress’ furs, and one day, she goes where she’s not supposed to, out into the Imperial apartments of their autumn palace, to the library, because she’s bored and angry at being bored. She thinks she’s alone, and then she hears someone begin playing this and she stands still, listening to it.

The pianist is a composer, he’s young, he’s bored too. He’s there because the Empress is in love with him and he’s something of a toy of hers, which is useful to him but offends him. He begins playing hoping the grisette will stand still, long enough for him to really look at her, and what begins is an affair that will last most of their lives, and unravel them as well.

Piotr Anderszewski, it should be said, is among the most remarkable of pianists. He made me love Chopin mazurkas.

“Celebrity Skin”
Hole
I used to listen to this album so much when it came out, mostly to write my first novel, Edinburgh. Then that just went on, for years. After a while, my brother used to call and if he heard it playing, he’d make fun of me: “Are you listening to that new Hole album?” It’s hard to explain, but when I lived in NYC I used music to both sort of evoke a character while I wrote as well as to create a soundwall against the little noises from neighbors.

A lot of that first novel was written listening to Hot 97, which no one who reads it would believe.

“Heaven Hammer (Missing) Air Remix”
Beck

This song for me takes me back when I lived in Koreatown. It was 2004, and I was living in Koreatown with a guy I used to be in love with, living off grant money and supposed to be writing a novel about Paris, but doing it from LA. We lived in a building named for a silent film star whose husband built it so she wouldn’t miss New York so much and the apartment was 4000 square feet. I never had to go outside, but when I did, it was usually at night, in a white vintage Porsche that my friend was letting me use.

When I first got to LA, that year, it seemed to me like this was where you went to after you died in New York. I think that was really about Koreatown for me, though, and Silverlake. I still miss being in Koreatown.

Years later, the whole thing about being in LA instead of Paris would make sense, for the novel. But… not for years.

“Ramones Forever”
Shonen Knife
I saw Shonen Knife play in San Francisco in 1990. They had these cute Mondrian block-print minis and white gogo boots and they came out and created so much awesome noise, it was insane. And then they danced while doing it! All this hair and white gogo boots, I just thought, this is the best thing ever. On their myspace page, they look like they’re still killing it all these years later.

“Bucky Done Gone”
MIA
All of my great nights in New York come back to me with this song. I think back to vanished parties like Sugar Babies, a really great dance party in the East Village of New York back in the 90s. Or dark sweaty dancing in Brooklyn. Larry Tee parties. Some crazy queen doing a grapevine on crack, and not caring that she looks like a freak. I could listen to this girl talk shit forever, or at least that’s what I believe as long as the song plays. I think of her in the Marc Jacobs ad with the suit on, and her amazing blue eyeshadow. I just remember when I first heard this thinking, Thank God someone still knows how to start shit up. The beats on this one make me feel like I could run up the walls.

Last 5 posts by shuffled

• On The Shuffled! Side Of The Ear: Bryan Thao Worra - November 20th, 2008
• Shuffled! Saymoukda "moOks" Vongsay - November 13th, 2008
• Shuffled! Charles Jang - November 6th, 2008
• Shuffled! Emily Lawsin - October 30th, 2008
• Shuffled! Grace Talusan - October 23rd, 2008

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