the musical fruit: movement #7.
song: "bowl of oranges," bright eyes
fruit: mineola orange



i used to really like bright eyes. like a lot. during the first few years after i first moved to nyc back in 2001, i must have gone to at least a half dozen bright eyes shows. i even drove over an hour to cat's cradle in carrboro, nc to see bright eyes whilst on a business trip. i've always been super intrigued by artists who, while still in their teens, have accomplished more artistically than i have in my entire lifetime & conor oberst, the mastermind behind bright eyes, definitely fit that description. by the time he was 21, he'd already put out three albums & an EP under the name bright eyes, two of which (letting off the happiness & fevers & mirrors) i had in heavy rotation for a good two years after discovering him. they were organic sounding albums clearly written by a teenager but filled with oberst's quivering voice spouting forth detailed stories of angst & heartbreak & self-reflection.

then in 2002, when i was at the height of my obsession, the fourth full length, lifted or the story is in the soil, keep your ear to the ground came out & became the first bright eyes album to get serious national attention, with late night tv appearances & whatnot...their "breakthrough" album if you will. it features some of my favorite all time lyrics, lines like "abc, nbc, cbs, bullshit. they give us fact or fiction? i guess an even split" that tiptoe between profound & pretentious. still today, i can put the album on, get sucked in & not realize it until i find myself coming out the other end seventy-three minutes later. about a third of the way in, there's "bowl of oranges," a piano-tinged song that acts as a short, slightly happy buffer between the beginning of the album & the epic "don't know when but a day is gonna come." it delves in familiar territory for a bright eyes song, telling a vague story about being alone through lyrics like "and we'll keep working on the problem we know we'll never solve of love's uneven remainders, our lives are fractions of a whole." totally deep, man.

in honor of the song, i'm having myself a lil bit of citrus today with a mineola orange i picked up at the produce market a couple blocks from my apartment. it's a tiny place (with tiny aisles) that's run by an old korean couple. the dude seems to be perpetually sitting outside arranging the produce. the lady loves me & every time i go in, as she's ringing up my haul, she makes sure to comment on how little i'm paying for the amount of produce i'm getting. she's all "red pepper, green pepper, yellow pepper, snow peas, onions, portobello, shitake...you're eating good tonight, huh?" then i tell her that i have marinated tofu at home to go with all of it & i totally blow her mind. she points out my total on the register & we smile at each other. it's our semiweekly bonding moment. yay neighborhood businesses.

as for the mineola, it's a cross between a grapefruit & a tangerine, similar to a tangelo. according to the wikipedia, the mineola was released in 1931 by the USDA horticultural research station. my fruit was created in a lab! go frankenfruit! as is characteristic of the mineola, it didn't have any seeds in it, but it did have a couple unidentifiable, random lil nubbins hiding out inside of it. as the picture above shows, it also has that characteristic nipple on the top of it. as far as nipples go, it's one of the least exciting nipples i've come across in recent times. on the upside, it's definitely juicier than your typical orange. when i was cutting it up into slices, i ended up with juice flowing off of the cutting board like blood from a freshly shivved prisoner out in the yard. don't worry. i didn't lose any of that juice. since there was nobody around, i lapped & slurped that juice up like some sort of vitamin-c loving dog. mmm...saved citrus cutting board juice.