Thought Required; Pants Optional.

Category: Biography

  • (Nothing but) Flowers

    Tonight’s song is Talking Heads’ “(Nothing but) Flowers,” from their 1988 album Naked. Give it a listen before you read the rest:

    This song came out during my adolescent protest phase. I remember the rest of Naked seeming rather heavy-handed and cynical. Not that this song isn’t heavy-handed and cynical, but by comparison with the rest of the album it is a ray of pure sunshine. I have always had a soft spot in my calloused heart for pure sunshine.

    In 1988, music was never just about the music. It was about images too. I vaguely recall that at the time there was this TV station called Music Television that showed these little movies that accompanied the songs. I vaguely remember watching it a lot, in my room, by myself, with headphones on, talking to no one and only coming out for food and inarticulate grunting. If you are a teenager reading this, let that stand as proof that being a teenager in the late Eighties was not so different than it is now. Your forbears also spent all of their time in their rooms thinking about boys, or girls, or both, or sex, or boys, or girls. Except we didn’t have cell phones or the Internet and our iPods were these huge things that had big clunky buttons and played these weird plastic cassettes full of brown tape. It was like we were all toddlers and lacked fine motor control. And we had the Music Television, which was like a slow, non-searchable version of YouTube. It kinda sucked. You have it way better now. But we got by OK; we consoled ourselves with big, teased bangs and Urkel. Or so I recall; it’s all a bit hazy.

    So I got introduced to a lot of music through watching television, which now seems utterly bizarre. That is how I encountered this song. The video for “(Nothing but) Flowers,” which is on YouTube but blocked in the USA by the rights holder, was a montage of the band playing the song cut together with various factoids about the rape of the planet by Advanced Capitalism. It was pretty bracing actually; it was perhaps my first introduction to anything like environmental consciousness. In those early days of media conglomerates, a select few musical acts could get a national platform to air issues like this, rather than having their music and messages finely market-segmented, targeted to maximize upward revenue stream dynamics, and safely out of the hands of anyone who might find them remotely uncomfortable.

    Advanced Capitalism certainly won that round. But this song still remains, stuck in my memory forever. It was a mix of sweetness and savage satire that always felt natural to me, but that few others around me seemed to appreciate in 1988. Then, as now, people had difficulty telling when I was joking and when I was being serious. This is that kind of song. And I still love it, because I feel like I can tell which parts are serious.

    One verse in particular sticks out in my memory, partly because it doesn’t really seem to fit the song very well. At least, not in any obvious way. David Byrne gave a pretty cool performance of this song at a TED talk in 2010 and completely left out this verse. It goes:

    Years ago, I was an angry young man

    And I’d pretend that I was a billboard

    Standing tall by the side of the road

    I fell in love with a beautiful highway

    As an angry young man, I always felt a shock of recognition upon hearing this verse. It pronounced some secret doom upon me, fating me to stand still, rooted to the spot out of love, my face a sun-bleached, tattered, overgrown desuetude while my beloved road went ever on. It was always a stark, outlandish image. Certainly no such thing ever really happened. Falling in love with a highway, always there yet always on its way somewhere else?

    Certainly love is never like that. Perish the thought.

     

  • New Series: Of Music and Memory

    I never feel older than I do when I think about my music listening habits. When I was younger I kept up with what was new in music– at least, the kinds of music I enjoyed. Starting at about the age of twenty, however, I found myself settling on a few acts I really enjoyed and not having patience for listening to much else. Now, in my late thirties, I listen to much of the same stuff I listened to in college, with a few other new discoveries mixed in. I “discover” a new act once every three years or so, long after the rest of the world did and got tired of it.

    I am un-hip. Worse, I am formerly hip.

    What I have learned, though, is that my relationship to music is very intimate. Music has never really been, for me, a way to be cool or to identify the clique to which I belong. I listen to a song or a piece of music over and over again until it becomes a part of me. It gets under my skin, in my flesh, and it stays there for years, for forever.

    I have led a discontinuous life, a life in fragments. It hardly seems like the life of one person. I read over it like a book and it reads about like this. Music, though, has provided some constant framework. It helps me sort through the spaghetti-factory explosion of my existence.

    Over the next month I am going to write a series of blog posts organized around songs and the stories and ideas I have attached to them. I can’t promise how often or how many of these I shall write. I also can’t promise that they will all be similar to one another. The first one will be embarrassingly personal, but not all of them will be. If you don’t like one, keep reading; perhaps the next one will be better.

    So. Sit back, and if your mental radio can tune in 1970, find the station playing the Velvet Underground and settle in. It is time to remember some things.

  • Testifying in Johnstown

    There used to be a tacit understanding that it was risky to publish the contents of one’s dreams. The thinking was, I guess, that since dreams are such an intimate key to a person’s psyche, it is dangerous to broadcast them to the whole world. Because, uh, my psychic enemies might find an opening into my head and wreak havoc? Something like that, I suppose. In any event, I think this tacit understanding was a creature of psychoanalysis, and no one takes psychoanalysis seriously anymore except cultural studies types. And I think I can take ’em.

    I had a dream a couple of nights ago that was so deliciously bizarre and entertaining, so unconnected to anything important going on in my life, that I had to share it. To anticipate the most obvious question in advance: Yes, I really had this dream. I promise.

    My travels had taken me to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I am not entirely sure why, but that is where I found myself. The centerpiece of town was a large municipal swimming pool. By “large” I mean that it was less a traditional swimming pool than something like an entire high school campus that had been flooded and now existed half-submerged under blue, shimmering, treated swimming pool water. I examined the periphery of the pool for some time but did not get in. Apparently I cannot swim in dreams either.

    The scene changed to a Goodwill store. Ostensibly it was still in Johnstown but there was nothing about it that betrayed the slightest local color. What I do recall was that the place was very large and packed with unusually good merchandise. I recall thinking that I should have to get several items for my son while I was there. It seemed like an opportune place to find things for him. There seemed to be a lot of toddler-size clothes there in good shape.

    As I browsed I came to realize that the store had a larger number of books than was typical for a Goodwill store. And the books were unusually good. I found a book there I had felt the lack of for some years– the second volume of Jaroslav Pelikan’s multivolume history of Christian dogma. I took the book off the shelf, examined it, and began to secret it away in the bag I was carrying so as to shoplift it. It was only fair, I reasoned; after all, I had donated the book to this Goodwill years ago. I was just taking back what was mine.

    As I was in the middle of lifting my own book, though, the manager of the Goodwill, a heavyset man in his fifties, walked up to a table in the middle of the store covered in odds and ends. From the table he picked up a worn Bible in a leather cover and, brandishing it like an evangelist, he began to testify. This conduct was sufficiently unusual that it inspired me to think better of shoplifting the book. I put it back on the shelf as the manager began to proclaim something like the following:

    “Brothers and Sisters, you have been taken in for too long by false standards of beauty! Beauty, brothers and sisters, does not come from the clothes you wear or the makeup you put on your face! True beauty comes from within, and the Lord sees it. See yourself and one another as the Lord sees you, with eyes that see within, and you will live rightly,” &c&c.

    I say “something like” this because I can’t quite remember exactly what he said, both his specific words or the precise point he was trying to make. I only remember two things: by the time he really got going he had turned into the CFO of the company I work for; and I found something about what he was saying deeply objectionable. I felt an odd rising feeling in the pit of my stomach that told me that I was getting ready to state my disagreement with his proclamation and do so at the top of my voice. Which I did.

    I can’t for the life of me remember what I shouted at the manager. But it got his attention. He shot back, “Jesus was not beautiful! Socrates was not beautiful! At least not outwardly! But they had inner beauty!” This got me going even more. The last thing I remember shouting was “SOCRATES WAS NOT BEAUTIFUL! AT ALL! SOCRATES WAS UGLY ALL THE WAY DOWN!!!”

    And then I woke up.

  • The Dead Letter Office

    One of the odd facts about my newly single life that I hadn’t counted on has to do with my mail. When my ex-wife and I separated, I moved into an apartment because I neither wanted to commit to owning a property by myself nor could afford to do so. The last time I moved into a new apartment was in 1996, which tells you how long it has been. There are a lot of things I had forgotten about this kind of life, and even more that would be familiar but for the fact that I have become a rather different person in the fifteen years since the last time I did this.

    I say all this as a preface to what happened to me just now. I returned this evening from a typically wide-ranging and fascinating philosophical conversation with my friend Mike Neal (about which, more soon) to find my mailbox chock-full of mail. This is uncommon. Most days, I have very little mail, and a lot of the mail I do get isn’t even for me but is destined for what I presume are former residents of my apartment. I have to date counted four previous residents based off of the mail I have received. It would be an interesting bunch of people to have in the same room. One has, or has had, serious financial trouble and is getting collection letters; another has, or has had, some sort of connection to Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary; still another is difficult to pin down, receiving catalogues for both Victoria’s Secret and Bass Pro Shops.

    Tonight’s mail, however, contained a letter addressed to someone I hadn’t heard of yet. The address is clearly that of my current apartment. The return address made clear that the letter was sent by an inmate at a prison in South Carolina. The envelope was addressed in careful, neat hand-printed letters with a metered postage stamp. The back bears a stamped notice advising that the Department of Corrections has not reviewed or censored the contents of the envelope and therefore takes no responsibility for its contents. I know nothing about either the sender of the letter or its intended recipient beyond what I have just described.

    I have received mail for prior residents at an address before– the house my ex-wife and I shared received it occasionally up until the time I moved out– but it was never anywhere close to this interesting and varied. Certainly I have never before received a letter that had the potential to be so intensely personal, so fraught with possible significance. Why was the sender writing the letter? Is he getting out of prison soon and needs a friend to stay with? (Will I get a knock on my door from this person in the near future in that case?) Does he need a character witness at a parole hearing? Is it full of hate, bitterness, accusations, resentments? Is it full of regrets for wrongs done? Is it a solicitation to a criminal conspiracy?

    I do not know, and I shall never know, because I do not plan to open the letter. It is not mine to open. However odd it seems to say this, I feel like I would be betraying a pair of men I have never met were I to interpose myself in the middle of their communication uninvited like that. My ingrained optimism, moreover, can’t help but think that the letter is an attempt to repair or maintain an important relationship this prison inmate has with a friend on “the outside. As such, it is a fragile vessel bearing his genuine humanity in the midst of all that would steal or deny it. It would be perverse for me to act as agent of an empty, cruel universe by casually tossing it aside and frustrating its journey to its intended recipient.

    So I don’t know what to do. I possess neither the skills nor the time to track down the person who was supposed to receive the letter, beyond making a routine inquiry at the rental office for my apartment complex if they have a forwarding address for him. If that doesn’t work, and I doubt it will, I feel stuck. The postal service obviously doesn’t know where to forward the letter; otherwise, they would have already forwarded it. I will be happy to listen to any suggestions any of you reading this may care to make in the comments.

    I feel an obligation, though, to do whatever I might reasonably do to get this letter to its addressee. I dislike the notion that the universe has dead letters. I like to think that, ere the end, what we need to convey to people gets conveyed; that we tell those we care about just how much we care about them; that we confess when we have wronged one another and have the courage to ask for the forgiveness we need; that we can live in such a way that we don’t feel like we have left cards lying upon the table. I know that this doesn’t always happen. People leave our lives before we have said all that needs to be said. There are any number of dead people, family and friends, I wish I could greet and embrace right now.

    What keeps me going is the notion that, in a way I can scarcely explain and won’t even attempt to, we are told what we need to be told. What is needed is the mindfulness to pay attention, for given the rather broken and disjointed nature of life this side of the veil, what we need to be told isn’t always told to us via any agency that makes sense to us. Whether they come to us from friends and lovers, family or perfect strangers, the universe at last delivers its dead letters.