soundtracks for a nonexistent past
nostalgia around my college years doesn’t appear so frequently and with force as it used to. now it’s more an odd matter of ahistoric memory through sound. music that i hadn’t heard until after college gets transposed onto places and scenes from my past, like i’m laying down a soundtrack across time. or maybe more accurately, it’s wishful thinking: it’s music that i associate with aesthetics, places, and people that i wish i had known or been immersed in when i was younger — nostalgia for memories that never existed for me.
i wish i had been at the greek theater in berkeley for this, if only because it would have been so apt:
watching and wishing this, though, i remember events that actually are part of my fabric: lots of events at the greek — common, ozomatli, pep rallies (!), graduation, and hearing/watching this under california stars:
heat for the ears
the heat in socal can be overwhelming in the summer. one september in high school we played a tennis match in 102-degree weather. it’s desert where we live, so there wasn’t so much stickyness so much as warmth everywhere - on the handles of racquets, between my skin and cotton shirt, on the vinyl seats of the school bus that took us to duarte. i slogged through my sets, barely being able to breathe, then afterward went in search of cooler temperatures. the gym was a noise of volleyball, yells, and handclaps, all generating their own kind of unbearable heat, and there was no shade (duarte high school - more trees, please!). i ended up back on the schoolbus with a few other teammates, slouched on hot green vinyl. my head throbbed, maybe from some combination of exhaust from the idling bus, the fiery furnace around me, and the ice cold water i drank. for the rest of the afternoon i sat still, staring out the window at trees and heat waves.
best coast, especially this cover art for one of her 7-inches last year, conjures memories like that.
as varied as LA childhoods can be, i suspect that most kids who grow up there can at least share the experience of sitting in some car on a clogged freeway, like the one downtown in the cover art (LA friends, is that the 110? or the 5?), while the sun beats down, and you’re staring out the window up at a brown-layered sky.
best coast’s music is like the aural descriptor. it’s a hazy slog, and like the heat, so loud in its noise to the point that you don’t complain, you just move through it. the pop vocals could be something i’d actually hear in the car when my parents tune the radio to the oldies station, which seemed to play a beach boys song every hour as if by socal mandate.
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more than any accusation of materialism that could be launched against LA (which i don’t buy completely), what keeps me from settling back in LA is the threat of this malaise — that feeling of not wanting to do anything but sit there and move passively through. clogged heads and clogged freeways.
when side one was side one
a great series up at pfork, in which they ask indie rock-types what music they were into at 5-year intervals of their lives. you get glimpses like this, re: public enemy’s fear of a black planet:
It’s so arresting, especially the first half. I love records where you can’t stop playing side one– and that was back when side one was side one, you know. I didn’t get on to side two for about three months because I was just so blown away by the first side of the cassette.
a nice intersection of past obsessions, material markers of time, a bit of celebrity.
musical imprints, pt ii
after i fiddled around with my cousin’s electric guitar for ten minutes, my nieces showed me what was what. they took to the mics and, with their dad at guitar, performed these for their captivated grand-aunts, tita, and grandmother:
(my nieces, 8 and 9 years old, they are wonderful and amazing. i marvel that they’ll be able to reference high school musical, bob dylan, and johnny cash and june carter in the same conversation.)
for something
(i was there!)
sharing is caring
carrie brownstein’s blog is lovely. if i were a better musician, a better writer, and a more voracious consumer of music, i’d aim for a brownstein-like blog.
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the church-going-related project has stalled. to be continued over the weekend, maybe, the actual writing to start soon, hopefully.
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friends have lately been calling attention to my knack for not paying attention to or just flat out ignoring lyrics. it’s true. i have a horrible memory for those things, except for the most memorable lines. the problem it seems is simply paying attention to speech — listening. [odd, since i’m usually the listener in the conversation.]
so a new vow, for J and pacnw A: i will listen to lyrics. and to everyone else: i will listen [and remember] when you speak, what you speak of. because sharing is caring, apparently, and i should at least care enough in return to receive and retain.
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i want to walk.
travel aural memory real people i don't know people known and loved
by marites
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studies in devotion, time warp style
a way to synthesize clouds of thought that apparently have been incubating for four years, and to partially explain what seems [and only seems] to be my newfound piety. i offer an old journal entry, from aug 2004.
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at times, when i’m sitting in church during another mindless homily or sermon, i’ll think to myself, ‘what is the point of all this? do people really believe this crap?’
the bigotry and hypocrisy of the church, with all its backwardness, was i thought the unchanging rock that would remind me of home, even when i was home. because i’ve been coming home for four or five years and each time my house feels less familiar. my house and the company in it.
so church. it’s supposed to be the final anchor. a church — any church, or maybe i should say the catholic faith — brings back that loving feeling.
on monday we went to st. phillip’s. or rather i was dragged there.
now i’ve come to expect certain things from my time in church, conditioned probably by hundreds of visits over the years. it’s necessary to maintain a certain level of silence, a distance even. no touching — though my family is steadily breaking that rule. reverence is demanded, even if it’s feigned. these rules, created in my head, seemed to go double for the men (mostly) at the altar. above all, ceremony is supreme. a lot of seeing and doing. the only hearing was of the word or song of god.
sitting in st. phillip’s on monday, i added to my mental notes about church: its immunity to advancement of any kind — morally, intellectually, but especially, i thought at the time, technologically. it felt good to be in a building that didn’t look like a tract home with standard ceiling heights and wall coloring. and this building wasn’t fake, this building and the religion it housed.
it felt really good not having a computer in front of me, or a tv, or a cup of overpriced coffee. church is a vacuum, where life and things can be suspended, but god [or something Big] exists in faith and form.
and then i noticed the tinny and piercing volume of the priest’s voice. they had installed a set of speakers halfway through the church to go with the set perched near the altar. the mic transmitted not only the word of father joe via low-quality sound, but also every clank and swoosh the mic could pick up.
the formerly distant clergy, whom i could only see and barely hear as a child, became uncomfortably familiar down to the bothersome details. the sound of cloth against metal when the priest wiped the rim of the chalice. the rustling of paper as he flipped to a reading in his bible. and even more disturbing, i suddenly knew him intimately as i sat 25 pews away. i heard his heavy breathing during a quiet moment. the whispered words that were between him and god as he blessed the bread and wine were broadcast throughout the cavernous church.
my faint prayer during mass for a swift passing of the hour in church is now a prayer that the priest not say — or i not hear — anything inappropriate. or anything that might shed light on the ceremonies of mass. because i don’t want to know. i want what i know about church to stay the same. or if i must learn something new, i want it to add to my view of the church as massive, unforgiving, ceremonial and stern.
odd spaces, dreamy faces
more adventures in live music consumption this week.
a show in a house:
too close quarters for two drums sets and some loud guitars. mostly interesting sounds to sway and bob to, or perhaps just stand in reverie to, as a cap to a somewhat stressful long weekend. kids in tight pants and stylish coats.
a show in a campus cafeteria:
harsh lighting, low ceilings and speckle-tiled floors. a mix of curious and apathetic undergrads, parents with their adolescent kids, indie poppers, indie pop americana enthusiasts. sitting on the tops of booth seats for a better view, but getting nothing. unfortunately placed columns, which, in combination with the ceilings, gave one the feeling of being gradually squished from all sides. the headliner more satisfying than i expected once i acclimated to the difference in vocals from the recording. an impressive, dream-like combination of drums and piano.
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it was menomona, the cafeteria band with the pretty piano and drum combination, which lent me my second impression of portland (the first delivered via an article i came across that praised portland’s liveability. the accompanying photo was an evening shot of a bridge and what i think i recognize to be the willlamette river. and for the next few years in college i dreamt of moving to a city i thought was a small, condensed town with maybe a bridge or two, housing overlooking a riverfront, and a giant independent bookstore. i imagined a lot of pavement, which, in retrospect, i’m not sure why it would appeal to me.). this second impression i gleaned specifically from menomena’s video for “cough coughing.” when i watched it three or four years ago, it filled in my vision of portland with lush greenery the article had neglected to mention, single-family homes among evergreens, and a sense of frolicsome motion on sunny summer days.
june blues in september
(not quite from june, but close enough in spirit. those boxes are still unpacked.)
by mid-june i was pounding out a paper i’m quite proud of, getting over a shitty quarter of teaching, doubting my place in academia, wanting to recuperate in los angeles, and dreading madison.
what i wish i had was a photo of my kitchen table at 3am: the sudden garish light of my kitchen on a stack of books, notebook, and diet coke. the table is pushed against a window i generally leave uncovered (un-blinded?) and open to the street so that i can hear and see the neighbors and strolling folk three floors below. at 3am i pored over foucault, agamben, and documents about iraq to the soundtrack of andrew bird and sufjan stevens. every 20 minutes my gaze turned to the window, to dim streelights and dark windows across the street.
for a week i read for and wrote this paper, the semi-monotony of work and thought cut only by early morning and late night trips to the gym. i’d drive the same route to the gym, downhill on aloha, further downhill along 23rd. ‘armchairs’ - my theme song on these empty, winding streets through capitol hill and montlake.
andrew bird - ‘armchairs’
I sighed a song that silence brings
it’s the one that everybody knows
oh everybody knows
the song that silence sings
aural memory: evergreens on the 5
in the absence of pennsylvania, or rather in my absence from pennsylvania, oregon’s scenery has smote me. goodbye susquehanna river, hello evergreens.
simon and garfunkel - ‘i am a rock’
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me