Curtis Everett Pawley

Raconteur Anthems, Not Ever Renting A Car From Avis, Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, and more.

August 17, 2023

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Curtis Everett Pawley is a New York City-based musician and podcaster. Long before his project The Life was opening for the 1975 at Finsbury Park, Curtis and KJ Rothweiler did a Perfectly Imperfect feature (#59) as “Ion 1” and “Ion 2,” the anonymous pitched-down voices of the influential podcast The Ion Pack. Before I moved to NYC, their podcast was my portal to a scene of eclectic downtown filmmakers, writers, musicians, and actors, many of whom we ended up featuring on this very newsletter. Curtis has released three singles as The Life; the early 00s sunny rock cut “Strong Spirits”, the glossy pop anthem “Grace”, and a sick CFCF electro remix of “Grace.” Lucky for us, Curtis is here to tell what he’s been into, on his birthday of all days.

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🎥

Birth (2004)

More than one person brought this Jonathan Glazer movie up to me within a few days of each other coincidentally so I decided to finally watch it and I’m very glad I did. I love when thrillers are subtle and leave you room to dream.

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🪑🚘

Sitting in a Parked Car

Especially late at night, but it works during the day too. I think because you’re not on the move but you’re also not at a destination or at home. It’s kind of like the ultimate in-between state. There’s something very romantic about it to me, and I like other “in-between” settings for the same reason, like airports and rest stops. I think it’s because your thoughts appear more naked to you when you don’t have something familiar around you to latch on to. And you also aren’t in a position to take any kind of action at the present moment, so it’s easier to confront your thoughts. There’s a book called Non-Places: An Introduction to Super-Modernity by Marc Augé that kinda speaks on this. So I’ll recommend that too.

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Having a “The” in Your Band Name

If your band name doesn’t have a The in it, I don’t even know what to tell you.

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Taking the Stairs

Everyone seems to love elevators. I don’t understand it. I’m terrified of them. Shutting yourself in a tiny box and being at the mercy of electricity, when instead, you could take the stairs. Taking the stairs is healthy. Burn some calories. Arriving at your destination out of breath with adrenaline coursing through your veins is a way more exciting way to start whatever it is you’re doing on that high up floor than waiting in a little box. It can also motivate you to get places earlier. Trust me, try taking the stairs for a week and you’ll feel way better.

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💭♟🌫

Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies

This kind of goes hand in hand with the last one. Brian Eno made Oblique Strategies with Peter Schmidt in the 70s. It’s a deck of cards where each card has a vague phrase or aphorism on it, intended to be used while trying to make a decision creatively. But now it’s online and in an app so I use them any chance I get. Not just in creative situations. Pretty much any decision. I usually draw three.

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Morgan Wallen - One Thing At a Time

The most I’ve loved a pure radio banger in a long time. I can never listen just once. Jack Doyle was recently talking to me about how country music is cool because there’s usually a punchline to the lyrics. This song is a perfect example of that. Instead of writing a classic heartsick lyric like countless other songs, this takes the trope and turns it into something clever, concrete, simple, relatable, all setting you up for a punchline. It’s quite a different approach to writing than something abstract and open to interpretation, and it’s so skillful to me. Kind of blown away by lyrics like this. Nothing against the abstract, we all love that too, but writing stuff like this is hard.

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Randonauting

Randonautica is an app that generates a “quantumly random” point on a map which you go to. You’re supposed to set an intention, however vague you want, while it generates the point and see what you discover with regards to that intention on the way to the point and then at the point itself. Then you can set another point from the first point and keep this process going as long as you want. I guess it was a thing on TikTok for a while but I swear it isn’t corny. I did it by myself out of curiosity and had a really crazy experience that’s too complicated to explain. No one I told seemed phased by it until I forced my friends to do it when we were in London and we had an equally crazy experience. I know it’s annoying that I’m not giving details but trust me, it’s too complicated to explain. But we found something so related to our intention that kinda freaked out. I love the idea of playing with reality, becoming hyper-aware of your environment, and seeing what’s around you in a different light. Even beyond the eerie metaphysical element, it’s a really interesting way to explore your environment.

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Not ever renting a car from Avis Car Rental

Once, I was in LA and rented a car from Avis. While I had the car, I got Covid. This was in 2021 so Covid rules were still quite strict. I had to quarantine and couldn’t return the car. I called them and offered for a friend to return the car for me but they insisted they had to come tow it and decontaminate it. The reason I was in LA was for our first big LA party, which I had been planning for a long time, and it was my first time getting Covid, so it was already a very stressful situation. They insisted that’s all they could do and I didn’t need to worry. Two months later they called me and said they were just getting the car back after 2 months so they had to charge me thousands of dollars. I told them that they had the car towed two months prior and they told me I was lying and that I had kept the car for two months, even though I was no longer even in LA. After two days on the phone arguing with people, I kept getting transferred to other people and all of them insisted I was lying about the whole situation and that I had the car this entire time, which didn’t make any sense. I eventually reported the charge of thousands of dollars as fraud and closed the credit card. I then took out a new credit card, and a little while later, they somehow managed to charge the new card thousands of dollars again. I don’t even understand how that’s possible. It took weeks of arguing on the phone with them and eventually the charge just disappeared, even though everyone I talked to this second time around still implied I was lying up until the bitter end and never backed down. By the time the saga was finally over, it was months after my trip to LA. I was so angry about it I swore to myself right then and there that I would find a way to air out this petty grievance in a public forum, and inspire the masses to take a stand and never rent from Avis. When Tyler asked me to do another Perfectly Imperfect, this was the first thing my mind went to. If you really want to help my cause, every time you see an Avis Car Rental at an airport or whatever go up to the desk and say you will never rent a car from them because of Curtis Everett Pawley.

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Raconteur Anthems

I’ve recently become obsessed with finding songs that fit into this category, which I’ll explain: these are songs that are anthemic singalong songs, but different than an anthemic pop song. These songs are usually dense and layered production-wise, tell a story, and are more lyrical than a standard pop song. The sentiment of these songs are bigger and more sprawling than a typical song’s subject matter. When I brought this up on the pod, KJ came up with the term “raconteur anthems,” and someone else said I was referring to “we anthems” instead of “I songs,” and I think that’s the perfect way to describe it. I think that when this type of song is done perfectly, it probably makes for the best music ever written. “Like A Rolling Stone” is the archetype of this type of song. Other main examples include “Common People” by Pulp, “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem, “Born In The USA” by Bruce Springsteen, “Heroes” by David Bowie, “American Pie” by Don McLean, and this list goes on. A song is probably the most accessible art form there is, and achieving this level of universality in something that short and contained is an amazing feat, and I’ve gotten really obsessed with trying to figure out which songs fit the bill.

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Curtis Everett Pawley

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