Introducing a new writer: Mark Jaeschke

my name is mark and i’m not the kid of guy who is known for having a fantastic memory. i’m not dumb by any means, i just sometimes have trouble remembering little things on occasion. be it those silly one month anniversary celebrations with a girlfriend (i mean, celebrating those are dumb anyway…right?), math equations...during my first year in middle school, i had grades that were on a constant descent throughout the entire year. starting off with a b the first quarter, i dropped to a b- the second, and a c+ to a c- for the third and fourth quarters, respectively. and even after my dismal performance throughout the year, the math department decided it would be a spectacular idea to throw me into the honors program. you can imagine how well that went. hell, i even have trouble remembering birthdays. i recently was at a hospital for some blood work and when asked by a worker for the date of my father’s birth, i furiously racked my brain for about thirty seconds trying to remember the date, but it was to no avail…some son i am. needless to say, i could continue to list off examples of when hippocampus has failed me, but i would end up writing a novel.

and yet for all of the important dates, facts, and ideas that i should have memorized, there are an abundance of life happenings that i shouldn’t remember which have somehow all impressively lodged themselves inside the walls of my brain. a prime example of this enigma includes when a young mark placed a toy camel outside by a tree in my backyard, only to wake up the next morning and find that my little plastic dromedary had ran off. the poor thing was probably picked up by a bird, ripped to shreds, put into a birds nest and then shat upon by baby birds. what a miserable existence. another, more fitting, of my memories was a when a young, and apparently quite narcissistic, me was watching videos my parents had taped of my baby years (don’t laugh, i’m sure most of you have those videos too) where i saw myself to elvis presley in my basement. there were also many youthful memories of mine revolve around listening to oldies 104.3 in my mother’s soccer mom van. sadly, oldies 104.3 is no longer in existence and has since been reformatted into jack fm where they ‘play what they want’, meaning they play the same four or five def leppard or ccr songs on a constant loop. the bastards. growing up with groups like the beatles, the who and yes constantly being played throughout my house as a kid added a strange quirk to my already hyperactive personality. that also reads as ‘i was a weird little motherfucker when i was growing up’.

it is needless to say that not many kids growing up in suburbia circa 1994-1999 were big into classics like baba o’riley or strawberry fields forever. no; instead most of my peers were sporting their limp bizkit hoodies, baggy pants and spiky hair (feat. blonde highlights) or were wearing sweats with terms such as ‘juicy’ on the rear while singing the latest spice girls single. oddly enough, since starting at columbia, i think i’ve heard the song 2 become 1 at least five times or so. strange. so, completely unable to relate to my classmates, i would wander the halls of patton elementary in shirts i had gotten with my family while on vacation (my favorite being a tee-shirt of a shark about to feast upon a school of innocent fish, perpetually stuck in a moment of terror, as they are about to be made into the shark’s next meal, which my parents had purchased for me while we were vacationing in florida), old navy jeans and ratty sneakers, looking for some other outsider to talk about why revolver is far superior to sgt. pepper’s lonely hearts club band (it still is) or debate whether or not the who’s keith moon could beat zep’s bonzo in a drum off (i’d have my money behind keith, for the record). luckily enough, i found a few people who i could talk shop with. though i was far from being ‘cool’ in elementary school, my small group of friends enjoyed each others company. by the time i arrived in middle school, the number of peers i could talk to about the oldies grew exponentially. while i was there, i learned about egypt (the only thing i still remember from that class is that making paper mâché mummy coffins is the best possible way spend class time), how to practice safe sex in health class and most importantly about bands like weezer and the mighty smashing pumpkins. outside of school, i ventured into the world of blogging, via xanga.com, and attended many very very very bad emocore shows at local venues. i was in my prime during these adolescent years.

in high school, i flirted with heavy metal acts ranging from the bay area thrash group, testament, to hollywood’s finest sleazeballs, guns n’ roses, and all the while, still listening to my favorite alt/classic rock groups. however, this greatly confused many of my metalhead cronies, who would give me strange looks when i’d sport a nirvana shirt to their shows. in fact, many would be quickly grow engraged and scream at me for supporting the man who single-handedly killed off hair/thrash/prog metal in one fell swoop with a song called smells like teen spirit. needless to say, by my senior year, i had begun to lose interest in the genre; my neck has suffered permanent and irreversible damage from going to many a metal show and i lost interest as to whether or not axl rose’s magnum opus, chinese democracy, would ever see the light of day (it finally was released to a less than stellar fanfare and mediocre sales. that being said, the album is really pretty good.) and started to dive further into what most people define as ‘indie rock’. having already been familiar with a few of the saddle creek bands, as well as the decemberists (whom i initially despised), i spent lots of time listening to new bands who i was less than familiar with. this trend continued into my freshman year at depaul when i began to start writing reviews for shows i’d attend or albums i’d listen to. i eventually became a regular writer in the depaulia magazine and met many wonderful people while writing said articles.

so now, a year and a few, four to be exact, months after i sent in the first album review of many in to my editor at the depaulia, i sit in my room pounding the keys of my computer, a task that seems almost foreign now, to complete a biography of sorts which is to go along with my ‘best of 2009’ list. and although writing again seemed strange at first, there’s something about writing something that isn’t a twenty-one page paper on the decline of the music industry for my art and business of recording technology class that is very refreshing. not only is it refreshing, but it’s also odd to see that old habits (read: writing too way too much) seem to diehard. i had intended on originally writing a mere paragraph or two long synopsis as to who i am and why i am re-entering the blogosphere. but that would have been too easy! so i end up spewing out what seems more like the beginning of a tedious / boring memoir that probably only three people (two of them would be my parents) on planet earth would be interested in reading than the two paragraphs i had intended to write.

oh well.

anyway, despite my self proclaimed mediocre memory, i plan to keep writing music related blurbs on a semi-regular basis and hopefully branch into movie / art / whatever writings as well. now, whether or not i can think of anything interesting enough to say that isn’t show / album related is a totally different story, but there will hopefully be at least something to read every so often. so, in attempts to refrain from any more rambling, i will end with a lyric:

brosandi / hendumst í hringi / höldumst í hendur / allur heimurinn óskýr / nema þú stendur.

uhhh…yeah. right.

-mark.