The Skyline Network

There is a moment, a point in your time-line, where self-objectivity and the theory of cool split and you’re forced to make a choice about it.  Usually, this has something to do with the Odyssey of the Mind.  The further back in your personal narrative you go, the harder it is to have any real objectivity about yourself and who you are and what you do.  You are the best at something, and if you aren’t it is because you don’t really want to be.  Other boys might capture more flags, but you are more interested in the stealth and counter-insurgency aspect of the game.  Therefore, you are a better/cooler player.  The pickets and the strikers, they may have failed, but you did your job – you are the best.  The rose smell of your own shit goes back, generally, as early as your memories. Yours was the best matchbox car.  Your ability to draw Garfield was tops.  Or even if it wasn’t the best, atleast it was cool.  Because a lack of self-objectivity is tied quite directly to a lack of self-consciousness.  Not that you couldn’t think on your own, but let’s face it – the home made jams and matching shirt that your mom made might not have actually been the jam, but you rocked them, sailboat print and all, until that same loving mother designated them far too threadbare for the family’s reputation.  To you they were cool.  They were the jam.  Then the actual theory of cool takes over, and, unfortunately, right around that same epoch in the dragging days and months of young life (not Young Life), it’s time to decide if you want to be involved in Odyssey of the Mind.

More than anything, more than even the Boy Scouts, which are a natural ourdoorsman out-growth of the myrthy glee of Webelos and all that comes before, OM represents a crucial moment in youth where the largely undeveloped capacity for duality is easy prey for what must be an absolute decision between the fun of building a bridge out of popsicle sticks and the yearning to be cool.  How unfortunate.  If you choose the former, so terrible is your hell – and for atleast a decade – that no amount of consolation from the yearbook advisor that she wishes she would have been smart enough to like boys like you when she was in middle school can make up for the fact that you are going to be beaten up alot in gym class for being stoked about developing and re-enacting an imaginary 13th labor of Hercules. 

The other half takes a different path.  One, ironically, that you may have a even better understanding of due to your geeky desire to talke the course in college titled “The History of Cool – Miles Davis to Jay Z.”  And you find, about this time, that you’re cool afterall – that all that time in the wilderness away from the in-group and the need for a broadly and media-defined indentity has made your an outsider, a person apart – and except when they are feared, it turns out that noting is cooler than the other.  Your geekieness, the insecuriteis you were secure with, they provide a truck-month chassis from which to draw art that is unique and self relient; one that draws harder from the self than the polish.  We bet The Mathletes were really really good at OM.

On #$@% You and Your Cool, which may be Asaurus Records’ last release but seems unlikely to be close to the nightcap for the band itself, Joe Mathlete and company strut their outsider stuff in song after song that appeals to the Comicon pop-life in all of us.  Things get kicked off with “Hornless Unicorn Anthem”, a big rawkus silly bopper full of Elvis Costello-at-his-prime organs, Jolt Cola beats and words about as serious as the BBS your lab partner in Biology II kept asking you to dial into.  From there is runs a shimmering 20-sided die gauntlet, from the world-ending drum cascades of “ASTEROID!” (recorded live on KTRU, no less) to the earnestly apologetic “Clumsy Little Symphonies.”  It’s the duality here that the Mathletes finally confront, all these years since they may have asked themselves how best to built a weight supporting structure out of balsa wood and glue.  Are they clumsy because of the lo-fi recording, or because the words they convey aren’t as polished, as slick, as double-breasted with a perfectly folded handkerchief as they could be?  Are they both?  To us, that unknown, or rather that combination of the two, wrapped in catchy pop that balances cotton candy with Taco Bell is what makes The Mathletes not just enjoyable or enduring… but just flat-out cool.  Recommended. 

The Matletes are playing the Skyline Network and BDM curated OLD FARTS EARLY SHOW tomorrow night (Wednesday) at the Mink.  Doors at seven, no cover, all ages.  Party.