nostalgia

Bigmouth, whip in hand

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All at once the winds of the past start whipping, frothing up a deposit of the beautiful debris of yesteryear. It’s blowing without warning, independent of forecast.

The man, steady, with whip in hand and discussions of ethics on the lips; the memory of yet another Creeley poem (which I had forgotten entirely in my Creeley hysteria a few weeks ago, despite “The Whip” long being a favorite), The Ukrainians and the frenzied sound of their Ukrainian-language Smiths’ covers.

I spent a night turning in bed,
my love was a feather, a flat
sleeping thing. She was
very white
and quiet, and above us on
the roof, there was another woman I
also loved, had
addressed myself to in
a fit she
returned. That
encompasses it. But now I was
lonely, I yelled,
but what is that? Ugh,
she said, beside me, she put
her hand on
my back, for which act
I think to say this
wrongly.
And on the horizon, the PoPos – not slang for the police, but the “Po” countries: Poland and Portugal. And the UK, which I prefer to just call (Y)U(C)K.
Photo (c) 2008 nerissa’s ring used under Creative Commons license. And no, not that kind of whip.

Fade away and radiate

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“Fade away and radiate”

If I had known my mother was right about the transitory, fickle nature of adolescent friendship, I might not have invested so much. In fact, this truth still applies. It’s this slow-motion dissolution of a connection between two people, at different moments striving, trying desperately to remain relevant to one another. Romance/love is exactly the same, where at different times one partner is more in love with the other. And what remains is one of the few conduits to a close but different interpretation of a shared past that comes back – almost taunting, if not haunting – the lost friendship or love, the missed opportunities, forgotten depths and secrets. Where does all that initial – and sometimes even sustained, if temporary – awe go? How does it get buried underneath layers of time, superficial concern and change?

Writing this I feel very much as though I have already written something like this many times. Perhaps because these same feelings and questions churn mercilessly through the brain – and even the heart – too frequently.

Photo (c) Paul Costanich (RIP)

Observations

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Is there anything more dismal than frequent emails from frequent flyer clubs where you will never have any kind of status?

Probably.

Hardened
…Like letting memory wander aimlessly back to revive details such as the wiry, coarse, invisible hair that thickly covered K’s sinewy, hard arms, attached to an explosive, compact, bony, muscular body. Somehow this improbable package provided unfathomable pleasure when hidden away in a dark room somewhere, even if K’s hip bones protruded to penetrate almost painfully deep into the soft flesh of the thick, pillow-like thighs of the other, which made her resolve never to become hard like this herself.

Retail therapy
…Like reflecting on the fact that the most successful department store, at least in the Seattle area, has boomed using boozed-up retail – killing it by bolstering your consumer confidence with some bubbly while brainwashing you to buy more Burberry. (Apparently there is a bar in the Burberry section.)

Reading aloud
…Like spending untold hours reading books I’d never read myself but following through because I promised I would, even if the promise is almost a decade old.

It’s been one of the things I sometimes do – reading books aloud and recording them (these days making MP3 files) – for a big part of my life. Either for my grandmother, who lost her sight late in life and therefore also lost her life’s greatest passion, reading, or for dyslexic friends, who could understand their reading better by hearing it. It’s time consuming, sure, a labor of great love actually, but also a labor of learning for me.

Today I told someone I was reading what amounts to an (amateur!) audiobook, and he exclaimed, “It’s a job! Like a real job. But one that Jeremy Irons does!”

Photo (c) 2013 Vassilis.

The salesman & the sky hook

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“He can’t get anything done. His hands are always groping his heirlooms.”

Who are we when we are not who we are?

“In 1969, Abdul-Jabbar was drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks, where he would perfect his signature sky hook — a balletic feat that involves an explosive one-legged leap before flinging the ball into the hoop with one hand — and win three of his eventual six M.V.P. awards.”

Some people, even someone famous like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, are out of place where they find themselves (not geographically, but in the lives they inhabit). Living, thriving, but always on the edge, a bit out of place and uncomfortable in the confines of what they do and are expected to do. KAJ was a master of basketball but seemed uncomfortable, preferring writing and intellectual pursuits.

You sell yourself every day as something and someone you are not. But how to break free of that persona and its incumbent expectations to become what you really want to be? (Moreover, how do you figure out exactly what you want to be in the face of the cacophony of voices telling you otherwise or praising your current station?)

It’s a strange dichotomy: people project identities, traits, attributes and activities onto you that may be assumptions or based on natural talent you don’t care to fulfill, but at the same time other people are often the only ones who see the beauty, potential, wells of brilliance and ideas, intelligence, depth, warmth and possibility in us – so much more clearly than we can see any of these things in ourselves. How can others see us so clearly and unclearly at the same time?

One woman who saw me very clearly – to the extent that I grew terrified and pushed her away – comes to mind. She pushed me – a lot, which is probably why I never tried to reconcile with her. I pushed her away in a way that I knew would close the door forever. In some ways she knew precisely what I needed and wanted, but went too far, becoming a kind of salesman herself, touting all the possibilities: “It could be like this all the time.”

But no, it couldn’t. I don’t want to be sold a bill of goods and pressured into something – even if it feels good. Sometimes in my own rare zeal and excitement I fear I am doing something similar.

But these days are at least content, if not happy, lying in bed talking about rhubarb or pressure and all manner of other things, reading about the history of Congo, listening to music, all before falling into a restful sleep, dreaming about all those people who perhaps filled roles they never asked for or onto whom I projected the wrong or misinterpreted expectations – like my friend T, whose absence comes to mind more frequently than it should. Today reading about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his “sky hook” made me think of an 8th grade prank our teacher (yes, our teacher!) played on T. He sent her across the entire school during class to ask the gym teacher to give her the sky hook. She had no idea what the sky hook was so was expecting to receive an actual thing. She got all the way to the gym and forgot what she was supposed to ask for. She returned to the classroom to get a reminder and headed all the way back to the gym, where the perplexed PE teacher imitated the classic KAJ move, and when T returned, our teacher expected her to demonstrate the sky hook move in front of the class.

Photo (c) 2012 Ruth Hartnup

Meandering memories with The Stone Roses

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“Sometimes I fantasize
When the streets are cold and lonely
And the cars they burn below me
Don’t these times fill your eyes
When the streets are cold and lonely
And the cars, they burn below me
Are you all alone?
Is anybody home?”

It was 1990, and I was in the full throes of my short-lived but passionate anglophilia. I tried to remake my suburban American life in the shape and form of something entirely different, and what better way to make anything new and beautiful – and most importantly – different – than through music? What different sound could I find that could firmly establish this otherness without the freedom to go be a part of some otherness? These were slow times when overexcited teenage musical discoveries were like hard-fought battles with near-exclusivity the spoils.

Lucky for me, I had been obsessed with reaching out into the wider world through my penfriendships, and exchanged letters with Peter, a bricklayer from Durham, England. I will never be able to express the mania, madness, joy that washed over me when his parcels would arrive, filled with cassettes (!) of exactly this otherness I had desperately sought. The first tapes he sent: The Stone Roses’ first – and in fairness near-only – album (the second could never live up to that debut). It transformed everything. He continued to send me more tapes of everything that characterized the ‘Madchester’ scene and other music from the same period. I felt like I had stumbled into a goldmine into which only I had access (it was a while before America was fully on board, and even if enclaves of people embraced this music, it was not as though it made its mark on my community).

I distinctly remember a day, walking home from a PSAT or SAT practice test (or something like that – a Saturday morning sacrificed to standardized testing, in any case), with “Made of Stone” playing on my Walkman. Is it overstating it to say that everything seemed different to me after that time? In some way, it was. It was – even if other friends adopted the music and we shared it – an assertion of my own tastes and identity outside of that of my friends. The first step toward something different. Sure, that something different did not turn out to be moving to England, which, in my youth, I long believed I wanted to do. But it was a big stepping stone to figuring out tangibly that there was a much bigger world out there with a lot of different kinds of people in it. Some of them were working as bricklayers and writing letters to fawning American girls. Some of them were making music and going to raves in a depressed late-80s Manchester.

Today, returning from Manchester, where I spent a few days with my brother seeing The Stone Roses reunion, seeing the iconic Haçienda transformed into apartments and generally taking it all in, I am starkly reminded of how I felt, how it was, to feel such intense feelings about music, about the sense of place (the sense of wanting to be in a different place). It’s been 26 years since I walked through the streets of the town where I grew up, overcome by and elated at this new sound – these new possibilities.

Today I am wandering the streets of Oslo, bound by sun and a few clouds, wondering in some way how I got here. In life, that is. Scandinavia was nowhere on my radar back in 1990, and yet this is where I feel happiest and at home. And listening to the Roses as I walked around the sun-dappled Oslo train station and opera house, I create new and very different memories around these same songs that carried me through suburban American streets and experiences. The songs are the same but are no longer the ones that made me feel lonely but understood – and held the promise of different ‘othernesses’ – and now hold this bittersweet nostalgia in every note and word.

Of course with nostalgia there is also the past – whatever happened to the northern boy bricklayer Peter, who introduced me to all of this and spoke in an accent I could not begin to understand? My best friend from that period, too, where has she gone? I thought of her so much as I wandered Manchester and saw this concert we would have killed to see when we were 15. I know neither she nor I are the people we were then, but the heartstrings were pulled. Hard.

 

Penmanship and Italian tastes

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Growing up – and still – I had a lot of pen pals. It seemed that penmanship was a national trait in many countries. Every French person formed their letters and numbers in the same way. Every German, every Russian, every Italian, too. Unique handwriting for each person, but you could always tell from the envelope and the way the letters looked what country the letter came from.

I wondered the other day, as I watched the surprisingly good (for the most part) Italian TV drama 1992, about the soundtrack. It fit its time perfectly – but I wondered how many Italians at that time were really listening to most of the stuff included? Screaming Trees (the one song on the Singles soundtrack) – yes. Smashing Pumpkins – probably. But Teenage Fanclub and Primal Scream… eh, I have my doubts. There were not THAT many people listening to those bands anywhere, let alone in Italy (a place I perhaps unfairly judge in matters of pop culture). Or did I see this through my own faraway prism, imagining that because Fanclub and Scream were indie/off-the-beaten-path where I came from, they also were for everyone else?

I don’t let Italy fool me and do have many good Italian friends who also have great taste (in music, too), but images of Berlusconi, the ridiculous bimbo-filled TV game/variety shows and crap like Eros Ramazzotti (or other things I cannot identify) always spring to mind. Maybe some of these trusted Italian friends can set my biases straight. Were people really getting that down to the sounds of early 90s Glasgow bands? (I grant you – the show only included the two best-known songs from these bands – but it still surprised me.)

 

Striking midnight: Just your ghost passing through

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I have been forcing myself to get into bed by midnight every night. I might not fall asleep immediately, but I am there, mostly tucked in and ready for the cuddle that isn’t coming. Haha.

Tonight I am listening – for the first time in ages – Tori Amos‘s Boys for Pele. I had a bunch of Shiseido stuff sitting on my kitchen table for some reason, and I can’t hear or see the word “Shiseido” without thinking of the lyrics from “Muhammad My Friend“:

“And on that fateful day, when she was crucified, she wore Shiseido red, and we drank tea by her side…“

This is, incidentally, the only reason I am listening to this album, even if there are other bits of it that resonate with me still. Tori Amos is a very 1999-2000 thing for me. A transitional cache of music that carried me through the end of a relationship (that seemed unequivocally adult at the time, but reflecting, I see I was little more than a child in many ways – as he’d said, “You are two years old – maximum!”) and saw my decisionmaking take twists and turns that seemed illogical at the time but have slowly led me to where I am now.

I was never one of the rabid fans, didn’t jump on board right away during the heyday that followed Tori’s first two albums. It was later, looking for CDs (you know, when CDs were a thing) in a Borders (you know, when Borders was a thing) bookstore (erm, yeah, uh, you know when bookstores were a thing!) in Kahului, Hawaii, to serve as the soundtrack of our driving around Maui for a week. I found only Tori CDs and decided, despite having lukewarm feelings about her music, these would have to do. They struck a nerve for me, forever tied to that summer of intertwined endings and beginnings. The Maui sun, the tying up loose ends on the master’s thesis, the summer-long departure for a dreadful European bus trip (it was even worse than that sounds, despite all the things I saw and experiences I had). The culmination of it all in Iceland – the first time in my life that I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be. Driving from Akureyri back to Reykjavik with Anna in the middle of the night at the end of Verslunarmannahelgi weekend through the thickest fog I have ever seen – trying not to hit an errant sheep and stay awake while blasting Tori’s Under the Pink.

Tori Amos was the soundtrack of these transitions – but by 2005 I did not care any longer, and The Beekeeper is the last album I am conscious of seeking out. By then, it was all just treading old ground, and if you know me, you know I don’t like doing that.

The Art of Iced Tea

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Growing up my mother always made giant jugs of iced tea in summer. It seemed commonplace at the time, nothing remarkable. She’d break out these large plastic jugs in late spring, and we’d never run out until summer did.

Since leaving home, I tried to make iced tea maybe only once. It was difficult because I never had a refrigerator big enough to hold a very large pitcher (and it never seemed worthwhile to make iced tea at all unless I could make a whole lot of it at once).

Suddenly the last few months, I have wanted iced tea badly. Especially when I go to restaurants – and there is no option for pure, plain, unsweetened iced tea anywhere. In the US, of course, it’s pretty much everywhere. What a simple, good but ridiculously cheap thing to drink.

I finally did it – I made two pitchers and they turned out even better than I hoped. I had a glass with lemon, and I am again truly happy with the small things.

Shifting perceptions: “Show some class”

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My feeling that Norway is living eternally in the second half of the 1980s is not going to change, even if all the rest of my perceptions shift constantly. Evidence to prove this: every time I get in my car and drive somewhere, Norwegian radio is playing Michael Jackson. Never the same song, but it’s Michael all the time. And when it’s not Michael, it’s Richard Marx, it’s Bryan Adams, it’s Berlin, it’s Billy Ocean or some other thing I don’t want to hear – in the 80s or now.

As a corollary to this everlasting musical 80s timewarp, I have become known as the harbinger of death because I seem to trip over news of celebrity deaths accidentally (am watching or listening to news almost constantly) or just know about past celeb deaths.

I was in the car the other day, and got immediate proof positive of this 1980s assertion: Jermaine Stewart‘s one-hit wonder, “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off”, blasted from the radio. I listened to the lyrics as if for the first time and could not really figure our why a song like this would exist. And who the bloody hell would drink cherry wine?

My firewall and I spent the whole evening singing it and reveling in the cheesy nostalgia.

But then, being me, I just had to know: what became of Jermaine Stewart? One hit and then gone… well, DEAD is what he is. Apparently he died in 1997 of AIDS-related liver cancer. What? Maybe because he was not really that famous, his death came and went without much fanfare. Or I was just not paying attention.

Whether or not Stewart knew his infection status in 1986 when the song was a hit, knowing this information, I hear the song filtered through that mid-80s terror of AIDS. It is more a safe-sex anthem than anything else (like many songs of the era) but it had never once occurred to me that that song fit such a bill. But listening to it armed with this information, it’s like a completely different song.

But there are new filters and lenses for everything, really. I was listening to Jim Croce the other day, remembering listening to him and looking at an album cover (a close-up of his distinctive face) when I was 4 years old. My mom explained that Croce had died a few years earlier in a plane crash. He was 30. I recall even today what I was thinking when she gave me this background information, “So what? He was old. He did everything he needed to do.” The level of a 4-year-old kid’s reasoning: 30 seemed like a good, full life. Looking at it now, of course, I am taken aback reflecting on his youth, the promising career cut short, the 2-year-old son he left behind.

I admit it. I am feeling nostalgic, contemplative about the shifting filters and perceptions that come with age and time. I am feeling mortal.