Shall We Play a Game? (Sufjan Stevens-related)

Last Saturday I spent the day with the girls at an amusement park with far, far too many people per square foot contained therein. The water park portion was especially unsettling, particularly one shallow pool which contained way too many people on way too hot a day. At one point I became convinced that I was swimming in a refreshingly cool, Olympic-sized receptacle of urine and I had to immediately get out. All that stuffedness, though, will be forgotten as the days roll on, and what I will remember is how on that day I heard over and over in my mind the piano line from "Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois" and how it made that place enchanted. There was a dusklight ferris wheel ride with my oldest daughter fused with that song that I hope I never forget or allow to fade.

And let me tell you that if I was the President I would immediately sign an Executive Order mandating that certain television shows replace their theme songs. The Order would apply to all of the tentacles of the C.S.I. octopus. It would apply to the Cold Cases and Hard Cases and the Without a Traces and that Law & Order spin-off where writers sit around and try to top each other by coming up with more and more outlandish sex crimes involving children. In short, if the show fetishizes violent acts or violent actors, it's covered. My Executive Order would mandate that when you tune in to one of those shows, you don't get to hear some bouncy, procedural tune. You would not hear The motherfucking Who. You would hear "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." in its entirety.

"John Wayne Gacy, Jr." is the song where Stevens spent some time reading about Gacy's growing up, looked up from all of that and couldn't remember which one was the monster. It wasn't because he forgot how terrible and dehumanizing were the things Gacy did. Not that at all. Rather, his awareness of his own sin made it impossible for him to construct the Other. Why did a seemingly gentle man kill helpless people? Because I am a poor miserable creature, sinful and unclean.

There are lots of exciting things to talk and write about when you're animated by an album like Come on feel the Illinoise. You can talk about the way in which Stevens manages to create an aesthetic that accomodates both irony and meaning. You can talk about the way that he answers the question concerning whether Christian musicians have anything to say to anybody other than the faithful (the "faithful" being defined, with both irony and meaning, as people who buy their music primarily in Family Bookstores). Beyond those big things, you can talk about how Stevens improbably makes American microhistory and macrohistory exciting and funny and endearing.

I can't wait until he gets to Pennsylvania. I'm already imagining what it will look like.

So here's my challenge: take whatever state you, my single-digit readership, reside within and love it like Sufjan will love it. Pick twenty or so locations or people or events or oddities and make a list of what you could envision Stevens's album looking like for your state. Then submit them and we'll list them here-- I'll make separate blog posts for each of them. Entries with links or explanatory text for your people, locations and events will be especially awesome, but who am I kidding? I'll just be happy if this doesn't go completely ignored. (To Dan: your state for purposes of this exercise is Tejas.) (To residents of Michigan and Illinois: just put your heads down on your desks.) Then, in years to come, we'll revisit the posts as the prolific musician releases the albums for the respective states and we'll see whether we got any of the songs right. I figure if this blog goes, it's because Blogger goes, and if Blogger goes, Google goes, and if Google goes, it's all over.

I've already got ten or so locations out of twenty or so for the Keytsone State, but am resisting listing them in full because I don't want to scare off others from this fine state. I'll be grouping my guesses into (1) Near-locks (e.g. the Homestead strike of 1892), (2) Long shots (e.g. Rocky Balboa) and (3) Obvious but Poignant (e.g. Budd Dwyer's televised resignation). I'll post mine on Wednesday, August 24, along with the entries of anybody else who wants to play.