Mixtape for Campbell Brown
I am pretty much madly in love with CNN anchor Campbell Brown. She’s feisty and quick on her feet, she seems like she’d be a lot of fun, and have you ever seen the whites of her eyes? It’s easier to notice on HD: they’re soft like clouds, perfectly pearly white with absolutely no red veins at all. It’s as if she’s slept 12 hours a night for the last 20 years. She seems confident but slightly neurotic, the kind of woman whose smile can’t hide her tenseness as she circles errors in your work with bright red pens and then says “here’s what we’re going to do.”
The other day I thought about if it would be possible to make her fall in love with me. Obviously I would have to show her my blog. I’d email her a story about me bullying a Chinese taxi driver and then temper it with a formidable list of funny and/or sentimental tales, all strategically designed to communicate that I’m edgy and dangerous, yet a softie at heart. She’d find me fascinating. We’d write back and forth before finally meeting in person, followed by about a dozen secret dates. Months later on a rainy night I’d ask her to meet me halfway and then beg her to leave her husband for me, and if she hesitated with, “but Dan's a good man, and we have a child together,” I would place a mixtape in her hands and walk away.
Here is that tape:
SIDE A
1. A brief conversation between me and my roommate. The rhythmic beat of him slicing vegetables on the cutting board overpowers CNN, which is playing in the background. You hear him note that he had no idea I was this interested in politics, and then me replying, “I’m not, really... Campbell just makes me so wet.”
2. Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”
3. “Hold Tight” by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tish, taped off the car radio as I drove home from our first interview date. You can hear me placing an order for Chicken McNuggets into a drive-thru intercom at 1:46.
4. The dishwasher running during the middle of the night, doing this thing about halfway through, this huge clank that always sends a jolt through the house, and you think it’s going to break but it never does.
5. Me and her chatting on AIM, complete with furious typing and the back and forth “blings.” On your computer, the files that make these sounds are usually imrcv.wav and imsend.wav.
6. Briefly, the beginning of “Space Oddity” by David Bowie, which was on the cassette before I taped over it to make this new mix.
7. Eight minutes of what I happen to know is snow falling in the winter of 1997. Amateur ears might mistake it for static and someone breathing too close to the microphone.
8. Her interview with Tucker Bounds, where she rips him on Palin’s national security experience. What a babe.
SIDE B
1. Me karaoking to Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Sinatra is the kind of guy whose songs sound easy until you try singing them yourself. Same with R Kelly.
2. Guy on the street playing “The Girl from Ipanema” on the accordion. He manages to work in “thank you” and “God bless” into the lyrics — not once losing beat — every time people drop money into his overturned hat.
3. A song called “Looking Around for the Truth,” recorded off of my third rap LP, Ill Noise, Vol. 2: The Truth (2002). It sounds like I have a cold, but I don’t.
4. Me and her talking about our favorite drinks. This was recorded without her knowledge. I’m telling her I actually don’t really like the older whiskeys because they taste too woody to me, and then she talks about how during her NBC days one of her colleagues gave her a bottle of 40-year Laphroaig single malt scotch at a holiday party. She vowed never to open it until she kissed Tom Brokaw. I can hardly stand to listen to my fake laugh.
5. Me playing a song on mom’s piano called “March of the Astronauts.” It’s the only song I know how to play. I play it disdainfully, with a lot of unnecessary staccato, because of that one day after my piano recital when my father told me he did not pay thousands of dollars for my lessons for me to come home with a stinking 4th place ribbon. The tape recorder was inside the piano and got knocked over by one of the hammers halfway through. Swearing and sobbing, faintly audible at 0:46.
6. Madonna’s “Borderline.”
7. Me and her in my room, lying on the floor, our heads touching and bodies sprawled out in opposite directions. We were like that for about fifteen minutes when she asked me to get out my recorder and tape it. It’s mostly my ceiling fan. At 5:19 you can hear me whisper something, I can’t make out what, and then she laughs and starts to respond when the tape cuts off.