Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Girls‘ “Morning Light” 7-inch. Download their music for free because the record is sold out. Read Schnipper’s thoughts on it after the jump.
After two dull years at Oberlin, Dean Bein decided to quit school. He’d visited Vassar and loved it, but found himself at Oberlin because he “was abandoned by my student guide and happened upon the radio station and heard a band playing. Everyone was odd and awkward, so I decided that Oberlin fit ascetic criteria I had established for living a ‘hard-working, academic life,’” Bein says. So he went there, moved from San Francisco to the middle of Ohio to go to college. “My first two years at Oberlin were really terrible. I didn’t really study and fully immersed myself in putting on shows, doing radio and going into Cleveland to see more hardcore bands. I had this weird idea that everything in ‘the city’ (San Francisco or even Cleveland) was really real and that Oberlin was just a weak, out of touch version of it,” he says. “After two years I realized I was wasting my time and decided to go learn a trade. I went home to San Francisco, worked for a month putting up flyers and then took Amtrak across the country to Philadelphia where my best friend had gotten me an apprentice carpentry job.”
Bein’s mother was sure he had lost his mind. He was somewhat sure of that as well, but “had this messed up family drama and just wanted to withdraw from the world I knew and enter a new one forever,” which is a very distinctly youthful pang, though few people actually do it. In Philadelphia, he lived in cold, shitty loft learning carpentry for five months, staying with his girlfriend for heat. He wasn’t much good at the work, but as a goofy, loquacious Russian Jew got along well with his coworkers. “It seemed really awesome,” he says. “I remember it as a really happy time. I didn’t feel the anxiety or depression I had arrived with.”
Bein became close with Mitchell, “a red haired Jewish Grateful Dead plasterer from northeast Philadelphia.” Mitchell didn’t have any sons and took Bein under his wing, and proposed to Bein that he join him as a business partner, to which Bein said he would seriously consider. Later the same day, he talked to another stonemason (whose name he has since forgotten) he worked with often, who despite being rather gruff was always friendly with Bein. “He was a pretty serious alcoholic and would come in smelling like vodka, yell at his contractors and then sleep in his truck during lunch,” he says. “He started talking to me, saying that someone told him I went to college. I said, ‘Yes, but it wasn’t for me.’ ‘So you got kicked out?’ ‘No, I just wanted to learn something else.’ When he found out that I was doing the work I was doing by choice he got really confused. He said, ‘You want to do this your whole life? Don’t be stupid, go back to college. If you’re quitting college by choice to do this you must really be an idiot. We’re all miserable!’” A few days later Bein reenrolled at Oberlin and ultimately finished as a serious student with good grades.
Bein told me this story after a discussion on Cleveland hardcore worked as an accidental segue. He lives in New York now and puts out Girls’ records. We were both in San Francisco over New Year’s, where we almost hung out (and where Girls played on New Year’s Eve) but we didn’t hang out (and I didn’t see Girls). After coming back from the weird young people mecca of San Francisco, I was bummed. Two weeks ago I wrote in my column about my trip, my conflicted feelings about the city. San Francisco is a pit if you want it to be. But it can be a bright pit of rainbow joy and weed and tallboys. It can be a pit where you live in a pretty nice group house with an organic chef for a roommate and four hundred dollar rent really close to whatever you need to be close to with pretty murals on the side of the Laundromat and Golden Gate Park a healthy walk away. New York, God bless it place of my birth, I live in a hovel for a bunch of money and I work really hard. San Francisco, it seems chill if you want it to be chill. I kind of want to be chill. But not in a San Francisco way.
Sandy, who spent the summer in New York City and interned at FADER is friends with Girls. Awhile ago she went with them down to LA for a photoshoot and took her own photos. It looked fun, except maybe for where the guy has the gun to his head. Is that a real gun? Is that how things work in California? Then I noticed the silver hair. Dude is old! Wow. What has he been doing in San Francisco? I bet a lot of intense shit but also some zoning. His own mental construction work. Someone is singing “I don’t want to die” on “Hellhole Ratrace.” If it’s not that guy, it might as well be.
After a good four years of college I decided to apply to graduate school and get a fiction writing MFA. I wrote a story that won a prize. Then I didn’t get in. Man, that was a gigantic bummer. I spent the six months after college in an unshowered funk. Then, in the depths back at my parents house, I made a zine and got a sales job. Fuck it. I moved to New York and hit on my waitress and got her number and got some nice clothes. I still live in the same apartment. It took a long time until I finally spent the time with Girls but I did this weekend. Sorry about that. This is great. “I’m sick and tired of the way that I feel I’m always dreaming but it’s never for real,” someone says in “Hellhole Ratrace.” I dreamed about going to Mexico last week. I went up to an observatory and if you looked one way you saw a beautiful waterfall. If you look the other way you saw a baby blue glacier. There was a huge forest behind it, pine trees. I left the lookout but before I could make it all the way down the stairs the tour guide called me back up and told me she was getting divorced.
“Oh I wish I had a boyfriend I wish I had a loving man in my life I wish I had a father maybe then I would have turned out right” someone says in “Lust for Life” and then “Oh I wish I had a suntan I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine.” There is a maraca, two minutes of the same thing, downstroke guitar and lunch bucket drums. Pizza vs dad? Same thing. Everyone has to get their lessons somewhere. It’s better than never learning.
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