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Radio song
Sep. 2nd, 2008 03:38 pmThey're beautiful, aren't they?
Or is it just me?
Okay, maybe it is just me. Me and, probably, the people who work with them and extract amazing information about the universe from them. I don't have such intimate knowledge of radio telescopes and their usefulness, though I do have (thanks, largely, to Carl Sagan) an excited layperson's appreciation for those very things.
Even beyond what they mean, though, right now I'm just impressed at how these radio telescopes look. I do think they are beautiful, in that way that entirely functional things sometimes are. When no attention is paid to aesthetics, sometimes the functionality itself provides something pleasing to the eye.
In just a few seconds in a TV show mostly about something else that I find myself watching only because I love Ian Stewart, who's presenting it (as he's introducing himself at the beginning I am, for the second time in only a couple of hours, impressed at how Scottish people can say "Stewart" (or "Stuart" I suppose) in only one syllable), I was struck by these shots of radio telescopes, enough to catch them and put them here.
It's so easy to anthropomorphize the telescopes. Maybe it's the particular angle of these dishes that makes me believe they could be upturned faces, maybe it's the way the precise uniformity of their alignment reminds me of a military drill team.
I like this picture because they look so curious. While I know about perspective -- some cows are small, and some are far away -- I still say their small size against the big horizon makes them look childlike, in full possession of their sensawunda, and making me wonder what they're all looking at over there.
Or is it just me?
Okay, maybe it is just me. Me and, probably, the people who work with them and extract amazing information about the universe from them. I don't have such intimate knowledge of radio telescopes and their usefulness, though I do have (thanks, largely, to Carl Sagan) an excited layperson's appreciation for those very things.
Even beyond what they mean, though, right now I'm just impressed at how these radio telescopes look. I do think they are beautiful, in that way that entirely functional things sometimes are. When no attention is paid to aesthetics, sometimes the functionality itself provides something pleasing to the eye.
In just a few seconds in a TV show mostly about something else that I find myself watching only because I love Ian Stewart, who's presenting it (as he's introducing himself at the beginning I am, for the second time in only a couple of hours, impressed at how Scottish people can say "Stewart" (or "Stuart" I suppose) in only one syllable), I was struck by these shots of radio telescopes, enough to catch them and put them here.
It's so easy to anthropomorphize the telescopes. Maybe it's the particular angle of these dishes that makes me believe they could be upturned faces, maybe it's the way the precise uniformity of their alignment reminds me of a military drill team.
I like this picture because they look so curious. While I know about perspective -- some cows are small, and some are far away -- I still say their small size against the big horizon makes them look childlike, in full possession of their sensawunda, and making me wonder what they're all looking at over there.
Half my fault and half the atmosphere
Jun. 30th, 2008 11:30 pmWhat brought him his vast following certainly isn't his gift for melody, I read in the Guardian today (even though it was from last week, or from 34 years ago, depending on how you look at it, I just saw it now).
That caught my attention. I too have been baffled by why people like him for as long as I have liked him myself.
His songs, I read, all proceed at much the same pace, with a laconic lilt; and where most people rely on a tune, Cohen seems to aim for hypnosis. I had to stop and grin when I saw hypnosis.
I'm still finding people -- Andrew's family, co-workers -- who haven't seen me in a little while and want to know how my parents' recent visit went. "Did they enjoy it?" I'm always asked. A simple enough question, but since I find myself nearly incapable of answering formal-sounds with other formal sounds and feel the need to give honest answers instead, I keep talking about how I couldn't tell, how they said everything was "nice" or "good." Everything.
As we all know I was uneasy at the prospect of the part of me that likes Leonard Cohen crossing the streams with the part of me that has parents, but he was on his best behavior that night, looking very dapper and sounding enough like a folk singer that my attempt to explain him to my dad as "a bit like Bob Dylan" wasn't as wildly inaccurate as it could've been.*
Oh, and I just remembered that Andrew's dad told me this weekend that he'd thought my parents might actually like the concert because, "his music, it's not religious..." (he clearly thinks my parents are "religious," and of course by British standards they are because they go to church every Sunday, but I don't remember either of them saying a word about religion, so I don't think of them as religious) "...but it's..." He struggled for a word and left it but came back to this theme a bit later and found himself lost for words and this time I took pity and supplied the word he was probably thinking of even though it's one that I hate: "Spiritual?" I said. "Yes, spiritual!" It's not the right word, but I know what he means.
So when somebody asked my parents afterwards what they thought of the show, I was prepared for answers like "Yep, it was good!" and I got those. But then my dad, unbidden, added, "His voice is... hypnotic." I almost had to laugh at that; it's not the sort of word you often hear from people like my parents, whose arsenal of adjectives consists mainly of "pretty good" and "not too bad."
I told this to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rainmerlot in the impromptu gig review I e-mailed her and she replied, "He's right, it is hypnotic!" I smiled.
I can't argue -- what else could I say his music has done in these past few months, after all? Cast a spell on me, change my brain's way of thinking so that good days are better and hard days are a little easier... That's hypnosis. Hearing all those songs that night conjured up vague memories of all the time I've spent listening to them on the bus, lying in bed, walking around town, all sorts of normal things I've shared with that music, and the concert was richer for those happy associations with my quotidian life. That's hypnosis.
And, also like hypnosis, I didn't know it was happening to me at the time. I would've said I didn't think it was possible if you'd asked me but I wasn't asked, I was just suddenly but gently moved to some strange new corner of human awareness.
I can't argue with hypnotic but I'd never thought of describing him that way, yet now here's the same word again already. I know this doesn't sound like a big deal; it's seeming an increasingly obvious word-choice, but little coincidences always make me smile, because they're more than the sum of their parts.
* He didn't even say "Give me crack and anal sex"! He said careless sex instead (something,angel_thane noted when we compared notes of our respective gigs, as taboo now as anal sex would've been when the song was written, and while that's the sort of astute point I'd expect from him, I myself was just thinking I should think it's a shame that you bowdlerized it, sir, but since my parents are here I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart!).
That caught my attention. I too have been baffled by why people like him for as long as I have liked him myself.
His songs, I read, all proceed at much the same pace, with a laconic lilt; and where most people rely on a tune, Cohen seems to aim for hypnosis. I had to stop and grin when I saw hypnosis.
I'm still finding people -- Andrew's family, co-workers -- who haven't seen me in a little while and want to know how my parents' recent visit went. "Did they enjoy it?" I'm always asked. A simple enough question, but since I find myself nearly incapable of answering formal-sounds with other formal sounds and feel the need to give honest answers instead, I keep talking about how I couldn't tell, how they said everything was "nice" or "good." Everything.
As we all know I was uneasy at the prospect of the part of me that likes Leonard Cohen crossing the streams with the part of me that has parents, but he was on his best behavior that night, looking very dapper and sounding enough like a folk singer that my attempt to explain him to my dad as "a bit like Bob Dylan" wasn't as wildly inaccurate as it could've been.*
Oh, and I just remembered that Andrew's dad told me this weekend that he'd thought my parents might actually like the concert because, "his music, it's not religious..." (he clearly thinks my parents are "religious," and of course by British standards they are because they go to church every Sunday, but I don't remember either of them saying a word about religion, so I don't think of them as religious) "...but it's..." He struggled for a word and left it but came back to this theme a bit later and found himself lost for words and this time I took pity and supplied the word he was probably thinking of even though it's one that I hate: "Spiritual?" I said. "Yes, spiritual!" It's not the right word, but I know what he means.
So when somebody asked my parents afterwards what they thought of the show, I was prepared for answers like "Yep, it was good!" and I got those. But then my dad, unbidden, added, "His voice is... hypnotic." I almost had to laugh at that; it's not the sort of word you often hear from people like my parents, whose arsenal of adjectives consists mainly of "pretty good" and "not too bad."
I told this to
rainmerlot in the impromptu gig review I e-mailed her and she replied, "He's right, it is hypnotic!" I smiled. I can't argue -- what else could I say his music has done in these past few months, after all? Cast a spell on me, change my brain's way of thinking so that good days are better and hard days are a little easier... That's hypnosis. Hearing all those songs that night conjured up vague memories of all the time I've spent listening to them on the bus, lying in bed, walking around town, all sorts of normal things I've shared with that music, and the concert was richer for those happy associations with my quotidian life. That's hypnosis.
And, also like hypnosis, I didn't know it was happening to me at the time. I would've said I didn't think it was possible if you'd asked me but I wasn't asked, I was just suddenly but gently moved to some strange new corner of human awareness.
I can't argue with hypnotic but I'd never thought of describing him that way, yet now here's the same word again already. I know this doesn't sound like a big deal; it's seeming an increasingly obvious word-choice, but little coincidences always make me smile, because they're more than the sum of their parts.
* He didn't even say "Give me crack and anal sex"! He said careless sex instead (something,
angel_thane noted when we compared notes of our respective gigs, as taboo now as anal sex would've been when the song was written, and while that's the sort of astute point I'd expect from him, I myself was just thinking I should think it's a shame that you bowdlerized it, sir, but since my parents are here I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart!).I curl up with the book
It'd be a nightly ritual
if I could remember to do anything
every night.
Still I like to get under the blankets
as I have before
and know I will again.
I like to sit with my knees pulled up to my chest
and grab one of the pillows from his side of the bed
all new and fluffy
because I bought them just a couple of days ago
and I think I should be rewarded
for the effort
by getting some use out of them
before he squashes them.
Even as I read I am thinking of how he'll come to bed in a minute
and turn the light off
right away
yanking me out of the book of poems.
The darkness would pull me away from anything, anyone
(my friends' faces, e-mails from my mom),
abruptly,
anything except him.
He is the only one who's still there
when the lights go out.
It'd be a nightly ritual
if I could remember to do anything
every night.
Still I like to get under the blankets
as I have before
and know I will again.
I like to sit with my knees pulled up to my chest
and grab one of the pillows from his side of the bed
all new and fluffy
because I bought them just a couple of days ago
and I think I should be rewarded
for the effort
by getting some use out of them
before he squashes them.
Even as I read I am thinking of how he'll come to bed in a minute
and turn the light off
right away
yanking me out of the book of poems.
The darkness would pull me away from anything, anyone
(my friends' faces, e-mails from my mom),
abruptly,
anything except him.
He is the only one who's still there
when the lights go out.
I am in the middle of* a wonderful book, but I'm finding it as difficult to settle down and read it as I find it to write the review of Glamourpuss that Andrew wants from me, or lessen the chaos in the living room, or clean enough of the kitchen to make myself some food, or throw yet another load of laundry in the washing machine.
Why's it such a chore to sit back and read a book? Even a really good one, which I'm already certain this is. In Why am I finding the internet so compelling, even when I'm caught up on my e-mails and there's no one online who wants to talk to me?
When I was little, I used to imagine being a writer of books. I imagined my handwriting getting good enough to belong alongside the neat serifs in all those typefaces (which may well be one of the reasons my handwriting can be so neurotically neat to this day). I imagined getting the blank book and filling it up neatly, page after page, until I held something like I was reading before I went off into this daydream.
I later found out that no one can write so neatly, and books aren't bound before they're written (this is a lesson I have yet to learn: the many mostly-empty journals strewn about my bedroom — and my life — attest to this). I could write with the same alphabet but it wouldn't look the same, and it wouldn't feel the same.
I swear, one of the reasons I like the internet so much is that I have only to type in the right sequence of letters, http://minnesattva.livejournal.com/ , to find myself on the internet. If I type another string of letters in the same place I might find, well, anything. One of my college professors, or a celebrity I actually like, or someone I've managed to fall in love with, or even some of those books I read, and many I still want to read.
It's all there, along with me. And it's exactly the thing what I was hoping for and finding lacking in those books I daydreamed over as a kid: not finished yet.
* Actually pathetically near the beginning of; I got all the way from page twenty-three to page twenty-six so far today. Out of 777 pages.
Why's it such a chore to sit back and read a book? Even a really good one, which I'm already certain this is. In Why am I finding the internet so compelling, even when I'm caught up on my e-mails and there's no one online who wants to talk to me?
When I was little, I used to imagine being a writer of books. I imagined my handwriting getting good enough to belong alongside the neat serifs in all those typefaces (which may well be one of the reasons my handwriting can be so neurotically neat to this day). I imagined getting the blank book and filling it up neatly, page after page, until I held something like I was reading before I went off into this daydream.
I later found out that no one can write so neatly, and books aren't bound before they're written (this is a lesson I have yet to learn: the many mostly-empty journals strewn about my bedroom — and my life — attest to this). I could write with the same alphabet but it wouldn't look the same, and it wouldn't feel the same.
I swear, one of the reasons I like the internet so much is that I have only to type in the right sequence of letters, http://minnesattva.livejournal.com/ , to find myself on the internet. If I type another string of letters in the same place I might find, well, anything. One of my college professors, or a celebrity I actually like, or someone I've managed to fall in love with, or even some of those books I read, and many I still want to read.
It's all there, along with me. And it's exactly the thing what I was hoping for and finding lacking in those books I daydreamed over as a kid: not finished yet.
* Actually pathetically near the beginning of; I got all the way from page twenty-three to page twenty-six so far today. Out of 777 pages.
The whole city is your jewelry box
Jan. 30th, 2008 11:28 pmThe ferris wheel went around and around (and then stopped, I think; two revolutions was about all we got for the price of a movie ticket) and we looked over "capsule" (the official appellation was both bizarre and amusing, in an incredibly tedious way) 24 behind me and capsule 22 over Emma's shoulder at Manchester, which was gently rising and falling below us.
Wonders abounded.
Like any modern city, it glittered prettily in the deepening violet dusk. The "capsule" (makes me think of painkillers and Apollo missions) was nearly all transparent and gilded with LED lights; the big wheel itself was part of the nighttime spectacle. Unless I have to go to the bank I'm never in this part of the city centre, certainly not after dark even in the dead of winter when dark is about 3:30, and so I had not noticed this until this night, when it was there beckoning us with its dazzle as we stepped out of Next.
I had noticed the ferris wheel on various other occasions, but never before considered it as a diverting way to spend some time. And after all I was on holiday... nonwithstanding the fact that I hadn't left Manchester. Just as Emma and I have done on our day trips in Edinburgh and Preston and Penrith, we just wandered around and ate a lot and saw the sights.
Other wonders were specific to Manchester. Like the pub Emma kept pointing out, black-and-white Tudor amidst the glassy shine of posh stores and the worst "museum" in the world. Thanks to some IRA bombs, Manchester has had to put a lot of money into urban development in the past decade, helping it avoid the sad demise of other northern Engilsh cities in this age where no one makes anything any more.
And some wonders were specific to our capsule. "The people look like ants!" Emma said. "Well, more like cockroaches..." I smiled. It'd never occurred to me before, but it's silly to say faraway people look like ants. "They might be the size of ants..." she added after a moment's further contemplation. "But really, they just look like small people." I laughed at that, the simile now perfectly accurate and thus perfectly useless, but all the more delightful for it.
She was facing the interior workings of the ferris wheel, while I looked out at dim distant Salford or whatever was in the direction I was pointed at, so it was she who pointed out that you could see the inner workings. I whirled around to admire the cogs and gears, wondering why I hadn't realized this before either: there's really nowhere to hide them in something as gracile as a wheel. It is a joy, an increasingly rare pleasure, to see how things are put together and what makes them work. Steampunk has taught me to fetishize such mechanical things: it's almost a wonder to me now that there's anything that hasn't yet been replaced by CGI or a hermetically-sealed container with no visible buttons or switches.
Wonders abounded.
Like any modern city, it glittered prettily in the deepening violet dusk. The "capsule" (makes me think of painkillers and Apollo missions) was nearly all transparent and gilded with LED lights; the big wheel itself was part of the nighttime spectacle. Unless I have to go to the bank I'm never in this part of the city centre, certainly not after dark even in the dead of winter when dark is about 3:30, and so I had not noticed this until this night, when it was there beckoning us with its dazzle as we stepped out of Next.
I had noticed the ferris wheel on various other occasions, but never before considered it as a diverting way to spend some time. And after all I was on holiday... nonwithstanding the fact that I hadn't left Manchester. Just as Emma and I have done on our day trips in Edinburgh and Preston and Penrith, we just wandered around and ate a lot and saw the sights.
Other wonders were specific to Manchester. Like the pub Emma kept pointing out, black-and-white Tudor amidst the glassy shine of posh stores and the worst "museum" in the world. Thanks to some IRA bombs, Manchester has had to put a lot of money into urban development in the past decade, helping it avoid the sad demise of other northern Engilsh cities in this age where no one makes anything any more.
And some wonders were specific to our capsule. "The people look like ants!" Emma said. "Well, more like cockroaches..." I smiled. It'd never occurred to me before, but it's silly to say faraway people look like ants. "They might be the size of ants..." she added after a moment's further contemplation. "But really, they just look like small people." I laughed at that, the simile now perfectly accurate and thus perfectly useless, but all the more delightful for it.
She was facing the interior workings of the ferris wheel, while I looked out at dim distant Salford or whatever was in the direction I was pointed at, so it was she who pointed out that you could see the inner workings. I whirled around to admire the cogs and gears, wondering why I hadn't realized this before either: there's really nowhere to hide them in something as gracile as a wheel. It is a joy, an increasingly rare pleasure, to see how things are put together and what makes them work. Steampunk has taught me to fetishize such mechanical things: it's almost a wonder to me now that there's anything that hasn't yet been replaced by CGI or a hermetically-sealed container with no visible buttons or switches.
Where am I?
Nov. 10th, 2007 11:26 pmI seem to have lost myself again.
I looked in all the usual places: the equivalents of under the bed, behind the couch, way at the back of the fridge.
Indeed, I did some chores yesterday, my day off. I felt good afterwards, but I did not find myself there. I might expect to; I talk about it all the time, because I'm thinking about it, because I'm feeling guilty and sluggish and disgusted for all I have not done. (And I often accompany it with A Prairie Home Companion or Sounds of the Sixties, both of which are very Me things.) But if anything, I thought the girl who actually did make a big batch of food to put in tupperware containers for the busy days ahead, then moving swiftly on to making a delicious, healthy, unspeakably simple meal for myself to eat right then, after tidying all the papers in the living room and in between hanging up laundry so nothing stayed damp and musty in the washing machine ... I thought that girl must have been someone else, because that's certainly not how I usually act.
I looked for me at work today. Oh, did I ever. I spent hours and hours there, thirteen and a half to be precise. I might well have expected to find myself there too, because people often expect that your job is who you are, as in "I'm a rocket scientist." "I'm a stunt pilot." But I've never felt like my job; the other people with my job are younger than me and going on to respectable careers in nursing or psychology or occupational therapy or something, whereas I'm still just glad I have a job at all.
I looked for myself in my past, my history, my nostalgia (see entries passim!). I might have expected to be there, because I've been thinking a lot about these things again: because we're rolling around to the anniversary of the blackest days of my life and because I also found myself unable to sleep last night since my brain wouldn't stop replaying a meal at a restaurant (what was it called again? what's the secret of that curry? I'll never know) and bits of conversation that are of no use to anyone. But I didn't find myself in the memories that are usually so warm and familiar to me. I can't concentrate on them, can't take refuge in even the nicest ones.
I looked for myself in thoughts of my friends, all too far away: in the nice things they've said about me and the fun things we've done together and the good times I hope to have more of in the future. I looked at my friends list, I read and wrote e-mails, I IMed people. This is probably the closest I've gotten to finding myself, but it still didn't work. Their loveliness proved a pleasant distraction, but I still had to consciously hold myself back from changing the subject to how rubbish I have been feeling latey, an especially confused and inarticulate kind of rubbish. Luckily for them the confusion and inarticulacy saved them, because I didn't (I think) even hint at it really, since I didn't know what to say.
I looked for me at my last, best, and now only, hope: my words. Words are my companions, and have been since before I could remember. I have been able to read so long I don't remember learning how (indeed; I didn't know you needed to learn, and couldn't understand why my brother had such difficulty with it when he started school). I don't remember a time before I wanted to write. I didn't really have friends growing up; I had books. Despite (or perhaps because of) spending so much of my waking life reading, I dream about words as often as anything else, happily skimming my dream-"eyes" over dream-text I usually don't remember when I wake up, though I can recall some of the dream-fonts with startling precision. I don't know what I'm thinking until I can put it in words: I don't mind too much if it's talking to someone or writing it down, though I'm much better in writing than in conversation. So I went to look at my words, and I must say, I wasn't impressed!
(I have this habit of deleting recent entries, not when I've just written them (though occasionally I do that too!) but when I haven't written anything for a little while. I used to think this curiously paradoxical, but now I think I've figured out that this why I do that. And indeed I've done it in the past couple of days.)
It's sad when even the words desert me. Or, when I desert them, I guess, since they're here and I'm the one who seems to have gone missing. Either way, it's hard to be separated from something I find so close and friendly most of the time.
I still don't know where I am, but I do know this happens every so often and I'm not worried ... though I'm running very low on patience. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I hope I get back soon.
I looked in all the usual places: the equivalents of under the bed, behind the couch, way at the back of the fridge.
Indeed, I did some chores yesterday, my day off. I felt good afterwards, but I did not find myself there. I might expect to; I talk about it all the time, because I'm thinking about it, because I'm feeling guilty and sluggish and disgusted for all I have not done. (And I often accompany it with A Prairie Home Companion or Sounds of the Sixties, both of which are very Me things.) But if anything, I thought the girl who actually did make a big batch of food to put in tupperware containers for the busy days ahead, then moving swiftly on to making a delicious, healthy, unspeakably simple meal for myself to eat right then, after tidying all the papers in the living room and in between hanging up laundry so nothing stayed damp and musty in the washing machine ... I thought that girl must have been someone else, because that's certainly not how I usually act.
I looked for me at work today. Oh, did I ever. I spent hours and hours there, thirteen and a half to be precise. I might well have expected to find myself there too, because people often expect that your job is who you are, as in "I'm a rocket scientist." "I'm a stunt pilot." But I've never felt like my job; the other people with my job are younger than me and going on to respectable careers in nursing or psychology or occupational therapy or something, whereas I'm still just glad I have a job at all.
I looked for myself in my past, my history, my nostalgia (see entries passim!). I might have expected to be there, because I've been thinking a lot about these things again: because we're rolling around to the anniversary of the blackest days of my life and because I also found myself unable to sleep last night since my brain wouldn't stop replaying a meal at a restaurant (what was it called again? what's the secret of that curry? I'll never know) and bits of conversation that are of no use to anyone. But I didn't find myself in the memories that are usually so warm and familiar to me. I can't concentrate on them, can't take refuge in even the nicest ones.
I looked for myself in thoughts of my friends, all too far away: in the nice things they've said about me and the fun things we've done together and the good times I hope to have more of in the future. I looked at my friends list, I read and wrote e-mails, I IMed people. This is probably the closest I've gotten to finding myself, but it still didn't work. Their loveliness proved a pleasant distraction, but I still had to consciously hold myself back from changing the subject to how rubbish I have been feeling latey, an especially confused and inarticulate kind of rubbish. Luckily for them the confusion and inarticulacy saved them, because I didn't (I think) even hint at it really, since I didn't know what to say.
I looked for me at my last, best, and now only, hope: my words. Words are my companions, and have been since before I could remember. I have been able to read so long I don't remember learning how (indeed; I didn't know you needed to learn, and couldn't understand why my brother had such difficulty with it when he started school). I don't remember a time before I wanted to write. I didn't really have friends growing up; I had books. Despite (or perhaps because of) spending so much of my waking life reading, I dream about words as often as anything else, happily skimming my dream-"eyes" over dream-text I usually don't remember when I wake up, though I can recall some of the dream-fonts with startling precision. I don't know what I'm thinking until I can put it in words: I don't mind too much if it's talking to someone or writing it down, though I'm much better in writing than in conversation. So I went to look at my words, and I must say, I wasn't impressed!
(I have this habit of deleting recent entries, not when I've just written them (though occasionally I do that too!) but when I haven't written anything for a little while. I used to think this curiously paradoxical, but now I think I've figured out that this why I do that. And indeed I've done it in the past couple of days.)
It's sad when even the words desert me. Or, when I desert them, I guess, since they're here and I'm the one who seems to have gone missing. Either way, it's hard to be separated from something I find so close and friendly most of the time.
I still don't know where I am, but I do know this happens every so often and I'm not worried ... though I'm running very low on patience. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I hope I get back soon.
By the time I was in high school I'd figured out the racket.
It wasn't just that the teachers assigned homework and scheduled tests in a way that would make anybody believe the universe was malicious. They piled on homework as if they were your only class, but paradoxically the teachers also convinced me they got together to make sure all the tests were in the same week. Everybody knew that.
But evnetually I noticed something more subtle at work here. The English teachers might tell us how poetry infused everything, but in choir I heard that all was music. The science teacher sees how science infuses everything, and while I was picking acrylic paint off the table during my drawing class I heard all about seeing the artistic potential in anything.
As soon as I got around to having teachers with specialties, they all wanted to tell me that their specialty was best! Most important. Most enriching or interesting or even exciting. It was obvious, at least with the good ones, that their subject had enriched, interested and excited them. But it wasn't always clear how it was supposed to transfer to me. My math teacher for Algebra I and pre-calc was obviously thrilled with math, but I still struggled with it enormously (though less in his class than at any other time before or since); there was no love lost between me and the x you're supposed to Solve For. X is for treasure maps and text messages if you ask me.
They were all charged up about something, and I am very suggestible, so I often tagged along on their enthusiasm. I'm still susceptible to other people's worldviews, especially when they're excited about something, which I think is why I keep ending up with people who think they might have Asperger's. But this means — and it was far more a problem in high school because I was around more people and they were more often trying to tell me things — that I change my mind all the time about whch thing is best.
For while all these teachers were trying to tell me a different academic subject was the best, they did have in common the implicit suggestion that there is a One Best Thing. And they've found it. No wonder they're so happy (by which I mean "good at projecting outward contentment"; I know enough about teaching from my mom and my friends now to know how much I'd get laughed at for saying they're one-dimensional paragons of sweetness and light and Knowledge). And I'm happy for them. But I'm annoyed for me! How am I supposed to find out the One Thing if it keeps changing every 50 minutes, with only three minutes between classes, which is not even enough time to get to the toilet or push past the freshman in the hallway by the science classrooms?
College also attempts to narrow you down to One Thing, which by then they are calling a major. Which says all you need to know about their attitudes toward it: it is biggest and most important. I sort of fell into the English department, accidentally taking the introduction to the major my first semester (I mean, I knew I was taking the class! but I didn't know it was the pre-req for the rest of the major). One semester I tried my hardest to do physics, which meant I dropped out of Calculus I halfway through, and another I took two politics classes (American and World) and thought political science might be good. But I always had a big mealy literature-survey class, usually some random elective like the hideous Introduction to Creative Writing as well, for my penance.
But one of the many reasons I couldn't finish is that I couldn't seem to handle One Thing — any Thing — for that long. Certainly not the things available to me there or then. In my last year I suddenly stumbled onto linguistics and fell in love, or at least into a crush I stlil haven't gotten out of. It was too late for me by then but now I want to go back to school and if I do it'll have something to do with languages.
In the meantime I have sighed and resigned myself to something more important but also less tidy and thus often less satisfying: there's not One Thing, at least for me.
Perhaps it's telling that I was pretty keen on the local monotheistic religion during parts of high school and the first little bit of college. Most religious people are certain they've found that One Thing, and they're pretty eager to share it too. I didn't have a big dramatic moment of deciding to distance myself from the charismatic Christians; it just happened. I think I'd been going along with it just because it'd been one I was presented with in high school and I knew how the stories worked. But I couldn't keep up the story forever; it can be a lot of work.
I think part of the reason I'm annoyed by there not being One Thing is that I can't handle being wrong. I don't like going back and reading or thinking about what I was thinking or doing at the time; this is one of the reasons I found it impossible to keep any kind of journal before (or even in addition to) LJ. I cringe and revise my own history, like Egyptian pharoahs who had the faces of their predecessors chiseled off the records: It has always been like this of course, I insist, grinning that wary grin of one who's just nearly tripped but caught myself at the last second so I'm hoping to pass it off as intentional as I look around for anybody who might have seen. Yeah, I meant to do that. But usually nobody's looking anyway.
Still I long for the smoother walk of more certain convictions, even if they are a little crazy. I grew up with a lot of stability, familiarity; these are the things I long for now (probably because I've forgotten how boring they were).
I have gone on being swayed by everybody else's Things, by the way. I've absorbed a little bit of Andrew's (not nearly enough! I'm sure he thinks; far too much! I am sure). I tend to confuse books that are written well with ones I should allow to change my life. This is probably why I want to write books; I'm much better at style than substance myself. It's nice to think that might be worth something. Of course, I don't have anything to write about yet, as I lack a grand plan to mold into the minds of the peons.
I used to think the best books were the ones that made me think Wow, I never knew that! Then it was Wow, I never thought of that! Now I think it's Wow, I always thought that, but never realized it or could express it so well!
And I guess I am writing all of this because I found and still am reading one of those latter kind of books. It's about the last thing I would expect: The Science of Discworld. I would've thought it'd be all about science and Discworld, and it is of course, but it's also about magic and stories. I like stories. (I like magic too, but that's another story altogether.)
Hell, I am a story, especially here on LiveJournal.
Here's an example:
When I happened to mention Discordianism to a friend (a Real Life one, for once, so she couldn't just look it up on Wikipedia) I explained myself into a big silly mess. So when we got back here I asked Andrew if he could do it better and he said something about a way of communicating something something between certain types of creative something-or-others. I'm not doing a very good job of reproducing it now because I forgot it immediately, of course, but it was brilliant.
Later that night I thought of this again and said "I wish I had your brain so I could think meta-things and describe them that well." He proceeded to offer me compliments and praise about myself, which is nice but I wasn't feeling insecure about my own abilities, just covetous of his. "You know, facts and that! I can't do that. I can only do stories." This is even before I read about them in The Science of Discworld, but even so I was pretty happy actually about being able to do stories.
It doesn't mean I am a good storyteller — I may be, but only in carefully controlled environments (of which LJ happens to be the best so far) — it means things make sense to me as stories the way they make sense to Andrew as numbers and logic and facts which he somehow manages to arrange and retrieve with greater ease and accuracy than you'd imagine was possible if you saw the state of his brain's external hard drives (though what he's done with an empty bookshelf tonight is glorious! a masterpiece unequalled in the time I've known him). Anyway, I digress.
Andrew said, "I love you. And thats a fact." Which made me grin, but also made my reply obvious. Being obvious did not make me feel any less clever or proud for having thought it up.
I said, "I love you. And that's a story."
(Thus proving my point really. That is such a story I'm almost surprised it really happened.)
He laughed and hugged me. He didn't think it was obvious, I guess.
I suppose something else will come along — something always does; that's the great and terrible thing about things — but for now, I just wanted to say I am charged up by stories. Not prose or diction or exposition or dénouement; not the craft they're dressed in, just the stories. I see them everywhere I look and I think the universe makes sense because of them, just as my old teachers seemed to think about science or music or math or poetry.
It wasn't just that the teachers assigned homework and scheduled tests in a way that would make anybody believe the universe was malicious. They piled on homework as if they were your only class, but paradoxically the teachers also convinced me they got together to make sure all the tests were in the same week. Everybody knew that.
But evnetually I noticed something more subtle at work here. The English teachers might tell us how poetry infused everything, but in choir I heard that all was music. The science teacher sees how science infuses everything, and while I was picking acrylic paint off the table during my drawing class I heard all about seeing the artistic potential in anything.
As soon as I got around to having teachers with specialties, they all wanted to tell me that their specialty was best! Most important. Most enriching or interesting or even exciting. It was obvious, at least with the good ones, that their subject had enriched, interested and excited them. But it wasn't always clear how it was supposed to transfer to me. My math teacher for Algebra I and pre-calc was obviously thrilled with math, but I still struggled with it enormously (though less in his class than at any other time before or since); there was no love lost between me and the x you're supposed to Solve For. X is for treasure maps and text messages if you ask me.
They were all charged up about something, and I am very suggestible, so I often tagged along on their enthusiasm. I'm still susceptible to other people's worldviews, especially when they're excited about something, which I think is why I keep ending up with people who think they might have Asperger's. But this means — and it was far more a problem in high school because I was around more people and they were more often trying to tell me things — that I change my mind all the time about whch thing is best.
For while all these teachers were trying to tell me a different academic subject was the best, they did have in common the implicit suggestion that there is a One Best Thing. And they've found it. No wonder they're so happy (by which I mean "good at projecting outward contentment"; I know enough about teaching from my mom and my friends now to know how much I'd get laughed at for saying they're one-dimensional paragons of sweetness and light and Knowledge). And I'm happy for them. But I'm annoyed for me! How am I supposed to find out the One Thing if it keeps changing every 50 minutes, with only three minutes between classes, which is not even enough time to get to the toilet or push past the freshman in the hallway by the science classrooms?
College also attempts to narrow you down to One Thing, which by then they are calling a major. Which says all you need to know about their attitudes toward it: it is biggest and most important. I sort of fell into the English department, accidentally taking the introduction to the major my first semester (I mean, I knew I was taking the class! but I didn't know it was the pre-req for the rest of the major). One semester I tried my hardest to do physics, which meant I dropped out of Calculus I halfway through, and another I took two politics classes (American and World) and thought political science might be good. But I always had a big mealy literature-survey class, usually some random elective like the hideous Introduction to Creative Writing as well, for my penance.
But one of the many reasons I couldn't finish is that I couldn't seem to handle One Thing — any Thing — for that long. Certainly not the things available to me there or then. In my last year I suddenly stumbled onto linguistics and fell in love, or at least into a crush I stlil haven't gotten out of. It was too late for me by then but now I want to go back to school and if I do it'll have something to do with languages.
In the meantime I have sighed and resigned myself to something more important but also less tidy and thus often less satisfying: there's not One Thing, at least for me.
Perhaps it's telling that I was pretty keen on the local monotheistic religion during parts of high school and the first little bit of college. Most religious people are certain they've found that One Thing, and they're pretty eager to share it too. I didn't have a big dramatic moment of deciding to distance myself from the charismatic Christians; it just happened. I think I'd been going along with it just because it'd been one I was presented with in high school and I knew how the stories worked. But I couldn't keep up the story forever; it can be a lot of work.
I think part of the reason I'm annoyed by there not being One Thing is that I can't handle being wrong. I don't like going back and reading or thinking about what I was thinking or doing at the time; this is one of the reasons I found it impossible to keep any kind of journal before (or even in addition to) LJ. I cringe and revise my own history, like Egyptian pharoahs who had the faces of their predecessors chiseled off the records: It has always been like this of course, I insist, grinning that wary grin of one who's just nearly tripped but caught myself at the last second so I'm hoping to pass it off as intentional as I look around for anybody who might have seen. Yeah, I meant to do that. But usually nobody's looking anyway.
Still I long for the smoother walk of more certain convictions, even if they are a little crazy. I grew up with a lot of stability, familiarity; these are the things I long for now (probably because I've forgotten how boring they were).
I have gone on being swayed by everybody else's Things, by the way. I've absorbed a little bit of Andrew's (not nearly enough! I'm sure he thinks; far too much! I am sure). I tend to confuse books that are written well with ones I should allow to change my life. This is probably why I want to write books; I'm much better at style than substance myself. It's nice to think that might be worth something. Of course, I don't have anything to write about yet, as I lack a grand plan to mold into the minds of the peons.
I used to think the best books were the ones that made me think Wow, I never knew that! Then it was Wow, I never thought of that! Now I think it's Wow, I always thought that, but never realized it or could express it so well!
And I guess I am writing all of this because I found and still am reading one of those latter kind of books. It's about the last thing I would expect: The Science of Discworld. I would've thought it'd be all about science and Discworld, and it is of course, but it's also about magic and stories. I like stories. (I like magic too, but that's another story altogether.)
Hell, I am a story, especially here on LiveJournal.
Here's an example:
When I happened to mention Discordianism to a friend (a Real Life one, for once, so she couldn't just look it up on Wikipedia) I explained myself into a big silly mess. So when we got back here I asked Andrew if he could do it better and he said something about a way of communicating something something between certain types of creative something-or-others. I'm not doing a very good job of reproducing it now because I forgot it immediately, of course, but it was brilliant.
Later that night I thought of this again and said "I wish I had your brain so I could think meta-things and describe them that well." He proceeded to offer me compliments and praise about myself, which is nice but I wasn't feeling insecure about my own abilities, just covetous of his. "You know, facts and that! I can't do that. I can only do stories." This is even before I read about them in The Science of Discworld, but even so I was pretty happy actually about being able to do stories.
It doesn't mean I am a good storyteller — I may be, but only in carefully controlled environments (of which LJ happens to be the best so far) — it means things make sense to me as stories the way they make sense to Andrew as numbers and logic and facts which he somehow manages to arrange and retrieve with greater ease and accuracy than you'd imagine was possible if you saw the state of his brain's external hard drives (though what he's done with an empty bookshelf tonight is glorious! a masterpiece unequalled in the time I've known him). Anyway, I digress.
Andrew said, "I love you. And thats a fact." Which made me grin, but also made my reply obvious. Being obvious did not make me feel any less clever or proud for having thought it up.
I said, "I love you. And that's a story."
(Thus proving my point really. That is such a story I'm almost surprised it really happened.)
He laughed and hugged me. He didn't think it was obvious, I guess.
I suppose something else will come along — something always does; that's the great and terrible thing about things — but for now, I just wanted to say I am charged up by stories. Not prose or diction or exposition or dénouement; not the craft they're dressed in, just the stories. I see them everywhere I look and I think the universe makes sense because of them, just as my old teachers seemed to think about science or music or math or poetry.
Conjuring Tom Waits up
Nov. 1st, 2006 08:20 pm"I didn't just marry a beautiful woman," Tom Waits says, "I married a record collection."
Me too. Except without the beautiful woman. Andrew brought all the assets to our marriage: DVDs I couldn't have bought stacked precariously against a wall, comics bending and breaking shelves of the secondhand Ikea bookcase, books spilling out of overloaded cardboad boxes, plastic boxes, grocery bags ... wherever they've been since we moved in February and I gave up on organizing them, CDs ostensibly organizied but I found a tiny bit of a broken jewel case in my tights — inside! right down by the toe! — yesterday morning.
His record collection runs the gamut from things I know and love to things I wish I didn't know. Tom Waits is in there, of course, somewhere. When I first got to Manchester, bewildered but happy about it, Andrew never stopped playing records. One of the things I remember hearing then was Stay Awake, versions of Disney songs including Tom Waits doing "Heigh Ho" as the polar opposite of the cheery dwaves' song it originally was in Snow White. Andrew likes to play this for people after asking them to guess what it is; it's completely unrecognizable at the beginning. Actually, it still is even when the words start, even when the chorus starts! In Tom Waits's hands a song eponymizing the phrase of relentless optimism has bcome all sinister and growly. What else would you expect?
"I like to go for that broken-down feel," he says, "the disintegration of it all." (Solvé, I think. Et coagula. I grin.)
Upon first hearing that song, I had the vaguest sense of hearing Tom Waits when I was the sort of age where I'd have watched Disney cartoons, of being simultaneously enthralled and terrified by that voice. I'm not even sure now if that's true or just something I recently decided should have been true (I have this problem a lot; it comes from meeting cool people abruptly and after my formative years have been squandered). If I were going to make something up, after all, that'd be it: it's the obvious reaction to him.
Tom Waits is in that category of things (it also includes, for example, rum, orgasms, and playing the bassoon, lest you wonder) that I thought (and said) that I loved even before I properly knew what they were like. I'm not sure how I got the impression that Tom Waits should be something I enjoy, but I am sure I was right about all those other things as well as him: they're all great. I like it how that works out sometimes.
It's the voice you usually hear talked about. Described by an early reviewer as "that of a drunken hobo arguing with a deli owner over the price of a bowl of soup," this was supposed to condemn him to failure or at least the outer fringes of cult figures, but of course now it's his trademark, his calling card, and now we call a lot more than he wants to answer. I remember a brief period last year when Andrew's mom was excited about the prospect of seeing him in his one UK show. It didn't work out, of course, for her or who knows how many others.
Next only to his voice is his attitude; again we reach for cliches of the music business but we don't need to wax poetical about his gruff exterior, the dues he's paid to earn the right to tell us all to fuck off, when he will explain it much more vividly and maybe even a bit less gruffly: "Gotta keep 'em hungry," he says, and I bet he was smiling when he said it. 'You know what they say: Don't feed the dolphins or they'll poke a hole in your boat next time you go out."
Who says that, anyway?
Or, a better question: Did you see what I just said? Andrew's mom wanted to see Tom Waits! A lot. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this: my mom doesn't really listen to music at all. But Andrew's parents have taught me that Parents Are People Too, and I'm so jealous of the education they, however unwittingly, gave him. I think requests to hear Zappa were among his first words, and I know he'd memorized the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the age of seven or so, years before my mom would allow my brother or I to watch Good Morning Vietnam or Animal House.
There's a Tom Waits song book among the piles of stuff stacked on top of their extremely out-of-tune piano, and I have a nice memory of Andrew's sister playing something from it while her parents sang. She didn't like this, because she'd never heard the song and didn't know how it went, and her parents words of encouragement and singing voices weren't helping as much as they thought they were. The only problem with this memory is that it might have been a Neil Young song.
I mean, I know it did happen with a Neil Young song, that one, you know, oh hell I can never remember what it's called, but I think it might have happened with Tom Waits too. I'd like that, possibly only because I love Tom Waits and I don't like Neil Young. I might just be thinking of the Tom Waits book because Andrew always bangs out a few songs from it on the extremely out-of-tune piano when I'm making him relinquish the computer for a few minutes.
But, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Before Andrew got me to Manchester to play music at me, he had to do it from a distance. And along with the Zappa and Wondermints and Love he showed me a few mp3s from his own band. The one I liked best, I tried to convince myself, was not just the one I liked best because he'd written it and performed most of it. At the time I never would have admitted that I would've listened to it just to hear his voice. I thought I was hearing far too little of it those days. It didn't sound like his voice on the phone, though; he said it sounded like Bernard Manning but that's just the accent (and Andrew's isn't that bad anyway); I called it his Tom Waits voice. He scoffs at this, of course, as he does at almost all compliments. But that's the voice he uses when he's playing Tom Waits songs on the extremely out-of-tune piano.
And, oh yes, there was the time when our Greyhound finally stopped in Minneapolis. Andrew had just noticed (and we were still only a block away from) 9th and Hennepin. He was impressed; I was glad he pointed it out, and not just because I got revel in, for once, getting to be the nonchalant one in this relationship.
Tom Waits may exist mostly in the parts of my head that are in the UK, but he has some presence on the other side of the Atlantic too. It's odd how much he's connected with Andrew, in my head, which doesn't seem fair to either of them, but my brain loves connecting weird things.
The Guardian article I'm nicking these quotes from didn't help; it starts:
It's sort of nice, too, that another thing they have in common is that both will tell you good things about their wives. That, when they'd had enough solvé-ing, a nice lady came along to help with the coagula.
It's such an attractive illusion, thinking you know anything about celebrities. It's easy to feel superior about the one you like because he sings in a gravelly voice rather than answering teen-magazine questionnaires: What's your fave flick? What do you do to chill out?
What do I really know anyway?
Not as much as I might hope, but more than I might think. He says so himself: "I would love to have seen Leadbelly play," he says, and I could say the same thing about Tom Waits (actually, I'd love to have seen Leadbelly play too!), but I know how far down I am on the list of dolphins, "but that's the great thing about records, you put them on and those guys are right there in the room. They're back." So by his own rules, we've been in the same room a few times.
And, it seems, that isn't accidental. "I think about that sometimes," he says. "Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it. Kinda like a time capsule. Or making a voodoo doll. You gotta wrap it with thread, put a rock inside the head, then use two sticks and something from a spider web. You gotta put it all in there to make a song survive."
I'm so glad he puts it all into his songs.
Me too. Except without the beautiful woman. Andrew brought all the assets to our marriage: DVDs I couldn't have bought stacked precariously against a wall, comics bending and breaking shelves of the secondhand Ikea bookcase, books spilling out of overloaded cardboad boxes, plastic boxes, grocery bags ... wherever they've been since we moved in February and I gave up on organizing them, CDs ostensibly organizied but I found a tiny bit of a broken jewel case in my tights — inside! right down by the toe! — yesterday morning.
His record collection runs the gamut from things I know and love to things I wish I didn't know. Tom Waits is in there, of course, somewhere. When I first got to Manchester, bewildered but happy about it, Andrew never stopped playing records. One of the things I remember hearing then was Stay Awake, versions of Disney songs including Tom Waits doing "Heigh Ho" as the polar opposite of the cheery dwaves' song it originally was in Snow White. Andrew likes to play this for people after asking them to guess what it is; it's completely unrecognizable at the beginning. Actually, it still is even when the words start, even when the chorus starts! In Tom Waits's hands a song eponymizing the phrase of relentless optimism has bcome all sinister and growly. What else would you expect?
"I like to go for that broken-down feel," he says, "the disintegration of it all." (Solvé, I think. Et coagula. I grin.)
Upon first hearing that song, I had the vaguest sense of hearing Tom Waits when I was the sort of age where I'd have watched Disney cartoons, of being simultaneously enthralled and terrified by that voice. I'm not even sure now if that's true or just something I recently decided should have been true (I have this problem a lot; it comes from meeting cool people abruptly and after my formative years have been squandered). If I were going to make something up, after all, that'd be it: it's the obvious reaction to him.
Tom Waits is in that category of things (it also includes, for example, rum, orgasms, and playing the bassoon, lest you wonder) that I thought (and said) that I loved even before I properly knew what they were like. I'm not sure how I got the impression that Tom Waits should be something I enjoy, but I am sure I was right about all those other things as well as him: they're all great. I like it how that works out sometimes.
It's the voice you usually hear talked about. Described by an early reviewer as "that of a drunken hobo arguing with a deli owner over the price of a bowl of soup," this was supposed to condemn him to failure or at least the outer fringes of cult figures, but of course now it's his trademark, his calling card, and now we call a lot more than he wants to answer. I remember a brief period last year when Andrew's mom was excited about the prospect of seeing him in his one UK show. It didn't work out, of course, for her or who knows how many others.
Next only to his voice is his attitude; again we reach for cliches of the music business but we don't need to wax poetical about his gruff exterior, the dues he's paid to earn the right to tell us all to fuck off, when he will explain it much more vividly and maybe even a bit less gruffly: "Gotta keep 'em hungry," he says, and I bet he was smiling when he said it. 'You know what they say: Don't feed the dolphins or they'll poke a hole in your boat next time you go out."
Who says that, anyway?
Or, a better question: Did you see what I just said? Andrew's mom wanted to see Tom Waits! A lot. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this: my mom doesn't really listen to music at all. But Andrew's parents have taught me that Parents Are People Too, and I'm so jealous of the education they, however unwittingly, gave him. I think requests to hear Zappa were among his first words, and I know he'd memorized the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the age of seven or so, years before my mom would allow my brother or I to watch Good Morning Vietnam or Animal House.
There's a Tom Waits song book among the piles of stuff stacked on top of their extremely out-of-tune piano, and I have a nice memory of Andrew's sister playing something from it while her parents sang. She didn't like this, because she'd never heard the song and didn't know how it went, and her parents words of encouragement and singing voices weren't helping as much as they thought they were. The only problem with this memory is that it might have been a Neil Young song.
I mean, I know it did happen with a Neil Young song, that one, you know, oh hell I can never remember what it's called, but I think it might have happened with Tom Waits too. I'd like that, possibly only because I love Tom Waits and I don't like Neil Young. I might just be thinking of the Tom Waits book because Andrew always bangs out a few songs from it on the extremely out-of-tune piano when I'm making him relinquish the computer for a few minutes.
But, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Before Andrew got me to Manchester to play music at me, he had to do it from a distance. And along with the Zappa and Wondermints and Love he showed me a few mp3s from his own band. The one I liked best, I tried to convince myself, was not just the one I liked best because he'd written it and performed most of it. At the time I never would have admitted that I would've listened to it just to hear his voice. I thought I was hearing far too little of it those days. It didn't sound like his voice on the phone, though; he said it sounded like Bernard Manning but that's just the accent (and Andrew's isn't that bad anyway); I called it his Tom Waits voice. He scoffs at this, of course, as he does at almost all compliments. But that's the voice he uses when he's playing Tom Waits songs on the extremely out-of-tune piano.
And, oh yes, there was the time when our Greyhound finally stopped in Minneapolis. Andrew had just noticed (and we were still only a block away from) 9th and Hennepin. He was impressed; I was glad he pointed it out, and not just because I got revel in, for once, getting to be the nonchalant one in this relationship.
Tom Waits may exist mostly in the parts of my head that are in the UK, but he has some presence on the other side of the Atlantic too. It's odd how much he's connected with Andrew, in my head, which doesn't seem fair to either of them, but my brain loves connecting weird things.
The Guardian article I'm nicking these quotes from didn't help; it starts:
When Tom Waits was a boy, he heard the world differently. Sometimes, it sounded so out-of-kilter, it scared him. The rustle of a piece of paper could make him wince, the sound of his mother tucking him in at night might cause him to curl up as if in pain.And I think of Andrew running out of the room when he sees me reaching for the Brillo pad, wincing at the sound of me walking if my trousers contain sufficent synthetics. I smile, probably because this makes me think I know Tom Waits more than I do.
'It wasn't a cool thing,' he says, shaking his head lest there be any doubt. 'It was a frightening thing. I mean, I thought I was mentally ill, that maybe I was retarded. I'd put my hand on a sheet like this [rubbing his shirt] and it'd sound like sandpaper. Or a plane going by.
It's sort of nice, too, that another thing they have in common is that both will tell you good things about their wives. That, when they'd had enough solvé-ing, a nice lady came along to help with the coagula.
It's such an attractive illusion, thinking you know anything about celebrities. It's easy to feel superior about the one you like because he sings in a gravelly voice rather than answering teen-magazine questionnaires: What's your fave flick? What do you do to chill out?
What do I really know anyway?
Not as much as I might hope, but more than I might think. He says so himself: "I would love to have seen Leadbelly play," he says, and I could say the same thing about Tom Waits (actually, I'd love to have seen Leadbelly play too!), but I know how far down I am on the list of dolphins, "but that's the great thing about records, you put them on and those guys are right there in the room. They're back." So by his own rules, we've been in the same room a few times.
And, it seems, that isn't accidental. "I think about that sometimes," he says. "Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it. Kinda like a time capsule. Or making a voodoo doll. You gotta wrap it with thread, put a rock inside the head, then use two sticks and something from a spider web. You gotta put it all in there to make a song survive."
I'm so glad he puts it all into his songs.
Does anyone else feel they were slighted because their life wasn't like that of the people on TV?
On TV, there were good-looking friends around who were really excited about playing Hungry Hungry Hippos or Trouble with you. I had just a brother who was usually happier calling me names or smashing his Hot Wheels into each other. On TV, people can actually sometimes get the bits out of the Operation guy without setting off the buzzer and going into a rage that ended in the battery being forcibly removed and the little white bits of plastic—the funny bone, the charley horse, the wish bone—being strewn all over the basement.
On TV, you got to eat cereal with the cereal box next to you on the table. I rarely even got to see cereal boxes. My mom kept—and, indeed, still keeps—our cereals in tupperware containers, about the size and shape of a cereal box but with a little flap that opens at the top, out of which no cereal will come after the first little avalanche (it's one of those "Nature abhors a vacuum" things), so you have to poke around with your fingers to get some more out, if the container is very full or if you tip it up too excitedly at first. And the cereal was always Part of a Complete Breakfast at the end, with the juice and toast and all. The closest we got to that, I think, was the time my brother put orange juice on his Cheerios one day when we were out of milk.
On TV, kids found things to do with Cabbage Patch dolls. I had some of those, and I never did. Of course, kids also found things to do with those Barbies whose hair would turn pink when you put cold water on it, or who had rollerblades that shot off sparks when you rolled them along the floor. I had those too. I was only allowed to use Barbie's rollerblades outside, and eventually the hair just stayed pink all the time no matter the dampness or temperature. I was never really a doll person, anyway.
On TV, all the Happy Meal toys were brought together, by half a dozen kids smiling at each other over their french fries, to make the Super Happy Meal Toy. Well, okay, even watching that one I knew better: not only was I aware that you'd all get the same toy because they wanted to make you come back every week if you wanted to Collect Them All, but also I was sure that if by some chance all six of you got a different Transformer, there'd be such a fight over who got to actually assemble the Super Toy that it'd devolve into a bloodbath, or at least a ketchupbath, from which someone's mother would eventually have to extract everyone, returning the toys willy-nilly, not caring at all that your toy had been Optimus Prime and you didn't want to be stuck with Sideswipe.
Most of all, though, on TV, families were practically unrecognizable! It's not just that they were prettier, or had more amusing problems, than anyone I really knew. It wasn't just that people sometimes cheered when someone came through their front door (no one ever comes through our front door at all! ... not even us, come to think of it; we always use the back door). On TV, people talked. They had conversations about those amusing problems of theirs, with their parents, kids, siblings, whatever. Sometimes they even hugged. It seemed really weird. But it also seemed nicer than my family, where no one ever talks or hugs.
I am not a kid now. I don't eat cereal much any more; I don't like fast food; as of the past few yars I am no longer given dolls for Christmas or my birthday. But sometimes, dumb as it is, I still wish I had one of those families that talked about stuff and maybe even hugged occasionally.
On TV, there were good-looking friends around who were really excited about playing Hungry Hungry Hippos or Trouble with you. I had just a brother who was usually happier calling me names or smashing his Hot Wheels into each other. On TV, people can actually sometimes get the bits out of the Operation guy without setting off the buzzer and going into a rage that ended in the battery being forcibly removed and the little white bits of plastic—the funny bone, the charley horse, the wish bone—being strewn all over the basement.
On TV, you got to eat cereal with the cereal box next to you on the table. I rarely even got to see cereal boxes. My mom kept—and, indeed, still keeps—our cereals in tupperware containers, about the size and shape of a cereal box but with a little flap that opens at the top, out of which no cereal will come after the first little avalanche (it's one of those "Nature abhors a vacuum" things), so you have to poke around with your fingers to get some more out, if the container is very full or if you tip it up too excitedly at first. And the cereal was always Part of a Complete Breakfast at the end, with the juice and toast and all. The closest we got to that, I think, was the time my brother put orange juice on his Cheerios one day when we were out of milk.
On TV, kids found things to do with Cabbage Patch dolls. I had some of those, and I never did. Of course, kids also found things to do with those Barbies whose hair would turn pink when you put cold water on it, or who had rollerblades that shot off sparks when you rolled them along the floor. I had those too. I was only allowed to use Barbie's rollerblades outside, and eventually the hair just stayed pink all the time no matter the dampness or temperature. I was never really a doll person, anyway.
On TV, all the Happy Meal toys were brought together, by half a dozen kids smiling at each other over their french fries, to make the Super Happy Meal Toy. Well, okay, even watching that one I knew better: not only was I aware that you'd all get the same toy because they wanted to make you come back every week if you wanted to Collect Them All, but also I was sure that if by some chance all six of you got a different Transformer, there'd be such a fight over who got to actually assemble the Super Toy that it'd devolve into a bloodbath, or at least a ketchupbath, from which someone's mother would eventually have to extract everyone, returning the toys willy-nilly, not caring at all that your toy had been Optimus Prime and you didn't want to be stuck with Sideswipe.
Most of all, though, on TV, families were practically unrecognizable! It's not just that they were prettier, or had more amusing problems, than anyone I really knew. It wasn't just that people sometimes cheered when someone came through their front door (no one ever comes through our front door at all! ... not even us, come to think of it; we always use the back door). On TV, people talked. They had conversations about those amusing problems of theirs, with their parents, kids, siblings, whatever. Sometimes they even hugged. It seemed really weird. But it also seemed nicer than my family, where no one ever talks or hugs.
I am not a kid now. I don't eat cereal much any more; I don't like fast food; as of the past few yars I am no longer given dolls for Christmas or my birthday. But sometimes, dumb as it is, I still wish I had one of those families that talked about stuff and maybe even hugged occasionally.
Safety pins
Sep. 13th, 2005 09:26 pmI don't really like Urbis. Perhaps because it purports to "explore" "urban culture" and not only am I not sure what that means, but I think they're not sure either. Perhaps because, though I know other people seem to like it, I think the building is a huge and ugly blemish upon otherwise-reasonable scenery (though the area does seem overrun with skateboarders these days). Perhaps because its website warns you need Flash, Adobe Reader, and QuickTime to view it.
I think the reason for my dislike is a combination of many such things: the place is all style and no substance. Or if there is any substance it's hidden in the one bit you have to pay to get into, which is enough to make me go "hmph!" and avoid it on principle (or at least in the certain knowledge that the exhibits there are stupid).
Having said all that, I really enjoyed going there on Sunday withsablin1975 and his friend (who may have a LiveJournal but if he does I don't know about it) to see the exhibit about punk and the Sex Pistols.
I could be snobby and point out the absurdity inherent in the mere premise of visiting a fancy building and paying a special fee to see artefacts left by people who were not just uninterested in but philosophically opposed to looking nice or spending money on anything other than sex, drugs, or rock & roll. But mostly I managed to avoid being a crabby intellectual and remained merely an awestruck tourist.
Punk is a strange land to me. It's older than I am; all the interesting stuff seems to have happened before I was alive, after which the superficial style of it--simple chords and never combing one's hair and trying to figure out how to shock people just for the sake of being shocking--were more easily and frequently replicated than ... well, than whatever it is that made punk cool in the first place.
I don't know what that is. I don't know if there's really some underlying secret that the imitators don't get or if the whole point really is that there's no point. I'm a foreigner, and not much of a correspondent, when it comes to Punk.
As when I think about the Beatles or Elvis or Robert Johnson, I have to carefully remind myself that context is important. This was really weird at the time. Even so, that's only intellectual knowledge; I never really feel it, which is why I feel like a foreign visitor, and so I probably don't appreciate it as much as a native would.
I wished Andrew'd been there, as I'm sure he'd have a bunch of knowledge to impart upon me in an only-slightly patronising way.sablin1975 did tell me about a few things: a guy I've never heard of but might like, a club that's still there. I like that sort of thing.
I looked at the gig posters and thought about them being photocopied or mimeographed or whatever the hell they were stuck with before Photoshop and the Internet. I looked at the inexpertly-screenprinted t-shirts and thought about kids with ink-stained hands concentrating on their creations. I looked at this picture and finally felt like I almost got that safety-pin thing.
What I'm used to seeing as an overpriced fashion accessory these days now seemed simply a matter of using whatever's rattling around your house, whatever's in arm's reach, to stitch together your new ideas, fragments of old things coming together in a way that won't wait for glue or scissors and thus is ragged and just barely held together. Safety pins are for improvising. Safety pins are all function and no aesthetic, the opposite of the building in which I came to this epiphany. Safety pins are for temporary things, for holding your jeans together when the button suddenly pops off.
Nah. I probably just made all that stuff up. But I still love the idea. I love the DIY-everything culture that it seems to represent, at least in my head, at least for now.
I still don't claim to have anything figured out. I just wanted to say I had a good time.
I think the reason for my dislike is a combination of many such things: the place is all style and no substance. Or if there is any substance it's hidden in the one bit you have to pay to get into, which is enough to make me go "hmph!" and avoid it on principle (or at least in the certain knowledge that the exhibits there are stupid).
Having said all that, I really enjoyed going there on Sunday with
sablin1975 and his friend (who may have a LiveJournal but if he does I don't know about it) to see the exhibit about punk and the Sex Pistols.I could be snobby and point out the absurdity inherent in the mere premise of visiting a fancy building and paying a special fee to see artefacts left by people who were not just uninterested in but philosophically opposed to looking nice or spending money on anything other than sex, drugs, or rock & roll. But mostly I managed to avoid being a crabby intellectual and remained merely an awestruck tourist.
Punk is a strange land to me. It's older than I am; all the interesting stuff seems to have happened before I was alive, after which the superficial style of it--simple chords and never combing one's hair and trying to figure out how to shock people just for the sake of being shocking--were more easily and frequently replicated than ... well, than whatever it is that made punk cool in the first place.
I don't know what that is. I don't know if there's really some underlying secret that the imitators don't get or if the whole point really is that there's no point. I'm a foreigner, and not much of a correspondent, when it comes to Punk.
As when I think about the Beatles or Elvis or Robert Johnson, I have to carefully remind myself that context is important. This was really weird at the time. Even so, that's only intellectual knowledge; I never really feel it, which is why I feel like a foreign visitor, and so I probably don't appreciate it as much as a native would.
I wished Andrew'd been there, as I'm sure he'd have a bunch of knowledge to impart upon me in an only-slightly patronising way.
sablin1975 did tell me about a few things: a guy I've never heard of but might like, a club that's still there. I like that sort of thing.I looked at the gig posters and thought about them being photocopied or mimeographed or whatever the hell they were stuck with before Photoshop and the Internet. I looked at the inexpertly-screenprinted t-shirts and thought about kids with ink-stained hands concentrating on their creations. I looked at this picture and finally felt like I almost got that safety-pin thing.What I'm used to seeing as an overpriced fashion accessory these days now seemed simply a matter of using whatever's rattling around your house, whatever's in arm's reach, to stitch together your new ideas, fragments of old things coming together in a way that won't wait for glue or scissors and thus is ragged and just barely held together. Safety pins are for improvising. Safety pins are all function and no aesthetic, the opposite of the building in which I came to this epiphany. Safety pins are for temporary things, for holding your jeans together when the button suddenly pops off.
Nah. I probably just made all that stuff up. But I still love the idea. I love the DIY-everything culture that it seems to represent, at least in my head, at least for now.
I still don't claim to have anything figured out. I just wanted to say I had a good time.
They've got cars big as bars
Aug. 16th, 2005 02:11 pmToday I did something I've been meaning to do since early Friday evening.
I found the "Fairytale of New York" mp3 and played it. On repeat.
I think Andrew thinks I'm playing when I say I don't want to sing something.
Likethe_forecast telling me I can do Super Smash Bros. Melee, and then watching me not even manage to choose which character I'm going to be.
Or likecomradexavier telling me Risk is easy and everyone can figure it out, and then me crashing and burning almost immediately because I have no talent or skill at strategy.
My boyfriends should listen to me more.
I'm sure Andrew did listen. I know he heard me say "But I don't know the words!" ... but he also probably saw some glint in my eye or something, because I love "Fariytale of New York," andverlaine even said once that it's his favorite karaoke track, and how can you argue with an endorsement like that?
Well, you could try I don't know the words. But I wouldn't recommend it; that one didn't work for me. In many other respects Andrew knows there's a difference between a good song and a good karaoke song--he often says himself that he doesn't want anything to do with melodies, because he can't sing them--but if it's about me, he's never impressed by professed incompetence.
Maybe that's because my reason is unique: the whole point of karaoke is that it tells you the words. But it tells you them in a way that can be pretty unhelpful if you're half blind!
The first part of the song is easy: a couple long slow verses, all sung by Male Voice. Ha ha. I stand around and watch.demiurgician thinks there's something wrong with me. I wait. But then it gets fast! And I think Oh shit! That's when Kirsty MacColl starts singing...! And I still have no idea what the words are! I probably could read them off the screen--I can always read them--but not soon enough to do me any good!
"I told you!" I shouted repeatedly at Andrew afterwards, but it didn't help.
He tried to tell me all the words, "Theyvegotcarsbigasbarstheyvegotriversofgold," but since he did it just like that, with no spaces between the words, I had no idea what he was talking about. So that didn't help either.
But I don't want to give up on the song just because that sucked, I told myself. I shall do my homework.
So that's why I played it four or five times now (mostly while I took a shower, which is good because everyone can sing in the shower). I'm better at the lyrics now, but I feel a little weird. Approaching the song as homework made me forget what a fucking good song it is. I'd make you all listen to it, if I could.
And a little weird because Andrew and I sang it together, too. It was fun to get to call him names--especially "You scum bag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot," which just rolls off the tongue; try it!
And after that comes the line that the whole audience screams at Shane MacGowan in the live version we have somewhere. "I coulda been someone," he sings, all rough and charming and Irish, and then Kirsty MacColl or everyone in the world or me comes back with "Well so could anyone!" ... a harsh truth, even when set to lively folk chord changes.
Then Female Voice sings, "You took my dreams from me, when I first found you." Any time when I haven't just listened to this song a bunch, I'd probably just blow this off, but now I have to remind myself this is not real. No one took my dreams from me. Songs I sing at karaoke are not my life. I just never had any dreams in the first place...
Male Voice's reply is "I kept them with me, babe. I put them with my own. Can't make it all alone. I built my dreams around you." And then, though I still hear the rough voice of a man known for many songs and few teeth, I see someone else.
And I'm sure I would have thought of him even if we'd never sung it at karaoke, if I'd ever actually bothered to think about it.
I found the "Fairytale of New York" mp3 and played it. On repeat.
I think Andrew thinks I'm playing when I say I don't want to sing something.
Like
the_forecast telling me I can do Super Smash Bros. Melee, and then watching me not even manage to choose which character I'm going to be.Or like
comradexavier telling me Risk is easy and everyone can figure it out, and then me crashing and burning almost immediately because I have no talent or skill at strategy.My boyfriends should listen to me more.
I'm sure Andrew did listen. I know he heard me say "But I don't know the words!" ... but he also probably saw some glint in my eye or something, because I love "Fariytale of New York," and
verlaine even said once that it's his favorite karaoke track, and how can you argue with an endorsement like that?Well, you could try I don't know the words. But I wouldn't recommend it; that one didn't work for me. In many other respects Andrew knows there's a difference between a good song and a good karaoke song--he often says himself that he doesn't want anything to do with melodies, because he can't sing them--but if it's about me, he's never impressed by professed incompetence.
Maybe that's because my reason is unique: the whole point of karaoke is that it tells you the words. But it tells you them in a way that can be pretty unhelpful if you're half blind!
The first part of the song is easy: a couple long slow verses, all sung by Male Voice. Ha ha. I stand around and watch.
demiurgician thinks there's something wrong with me. I wait. But then it gets fast! And I think Oh shit! That's when Kirsty MacColl starts singing...! And I still have no idea what the words are! I probably could read them off the screen--I can always read them--but not soon enough to do me any good!"I told you!" I shouted repeatedly at Andrew afterwards, but it didn't help.
He tried to tell me all the words, "Theyvegotcarsbigasbarstheyvegotriversofgold," but since he did it just like that, with no spaces between the words, I had no idea what he was talking about. So that didn't help either.
But I don't want to give up on the song just because that sucked, I told myself. I shall do my homework.
So that's why I played it four or five times now (mostly while I took a shower, which is good because everyone can sing in the shower). I'm better at the lyrics now, but I feel a little weird. Approaching the song as homework made me forget what a fucking good song it is. I'd make you all listen to it, if I could.
And a little weird because Andrew and I sang it together, too. It was fun to get to call him names--especially "You scum bag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot," which just rolls off the tongue; try it!
And after that comes the line that the whole audience screams at Shane MacGowan in the live version we have somewhere. "I coulda been someone," he sings, all rough and charming and Irish, and then Kirsty MacColl or everyone in the world or me comes back with "Well so could anyone!" ... a harsh truth, even when set to lively folk chord changes.
Then Female Voice sings, "You took my dreams from me, when I first found you." Any time when I haven't just listened to this song a bunch, I'd probably just blow this off, but now I have to remind myself this is not real. No one took my dreams from me. Songs I sing at karaoke are not my life. I just never had any dreams in the first place...
Male Voice's reply is "I kept them with me, babe. I put them with my own. Can't make it all alone. I built my dreams around you." And then, though I still hear the rough voice of a man known for many songs and few teeth, I see someone else.
And I'm sure I would have thought of him even if we'd never sung it at karaoke, if I'd ever actually bothered to think about it.
Some day we'll find it...
Aug. 10th, 2005 08:46 pmThe buzzing sounded scary.
I couldn't see the little needle-gun thing, though. I don't know if that made it better or worse. Y'know, that fear-of-the-unknown. And the anticipation of fear which, like anticipation of something good, can end up being more intense than whatever it is when it finally shows up. It made me cringe a little, anyway, even though that's apparently bad if you're getting tattooed because it makes it hurt more.
I was mostly excited. I'd already learned new things, mostly about how the sketch is transferred onto skin. "Stand up straight, girl!" Laurence, the tattoo artist, said as he was doing that. He was very nice and I liked him a lot.
But then the scary buzzing started. A bit like the drill at the dentist's...
I suppose I should say that I did not get a tattoo.
demiurgician did! I got to watch. (I also took that picture, just after it was done.) And, as you can see, she's not new to the process. This was her fourth tattoo (but three of them look like one big one: the triangles were first; this is the second set of vines and flowers to be added, as you can probably tell--the colors of the new bit will match the old once everything's healed), and she handled the process very well. She was very excited--before, during, and after--about her new tattoo.
It never occurred to me that watching a friend get tattooed might make a nice outing. But Elizabeth went withbelladonnalin to watch her get the last installment of her tattoos, and afterward was all the more excited to get her own. I was a bit afraid that if I went along to watch I'd meet the same fate!
But luckily I am (a) poor (b) a big wuss who doesn't like pain and (c) unable to think of anything I'd really want to wear on my skin for the rest of my life. So I've managed to avoid signing up for my own tattoos, so far.
Yet these two make them seem appealing. I sort of envy them having a Thing (or many Things) that they like enough to want to wear them all the time. And they both have interesting and thoughtful reasons behind their tattoos, stories to tell about their tattoos.
Elizabeth and I hung out in Starbucks for a while afterwards (she showed it off, clingfilm and all, to the people working there) and had many interesting conversations about how we got here and where we're going. I asked about her tattoos, having not heard much of the stories behind them yet, and heard about the themes of growth and change that seem to run through them all. I really like that she has emblems of change inked permanently on her body. But I guess change is the one constant; it shows up whether you like it or not.
And while sometimes it might be nice to forget the things that ended badly or just don't seem like much a part of you any more, as tempting as it may be to revise your own history to fit your current outlook, it's ultimately better to realize that your life, like Elizabeth's tattoos, is a work in progress. There are landmarks of where you've been, and there's still the potential of more to come.
I couldn't see the little needle-gun thing, though. I don't know if that made it better or worse. Y'know, that fear-of-the-unknown. And the anticipation of fear which, like anticipation of something good, can end up being more intense than whatever it is when it finally shows up. It made me cringe a little, anyway, even though that's apparently bad if you're getting tattooed because it makes it hurt more.
I was mostly excited. I'd already learned new things, mostly about how the sketch is transferred onto skin. "Stand up straight, girl!" Laurence, the tattoo artist, said as he was doing that. He was very nice and I liked him a lot.
But then the scary buzzing started. A bit like the drill at the dentist's...
I suppose I should say that I did not get a tattoo.
demiurgician did! I got to watch. (I also took that picture, just after it was done.) And, as you can see, she's not new to the process. This was her fourth tattoo (but three of them look like one big one: the triangles were first; this is the second set of vines and flowers to be added, as you can probably tell--the colors of the new bit will match the old once everything's healed), and she handled the process very well. She was very excited--before, during, and after--about her new tattoo.It never occurred to me that watching a friend get tattooed might make a nice outing. But Elizabeth went with
belladonnalin to watch her get the last installment of her tattoos, and afterward was all the more excited to get her own. I was a bit afraid that if I went along to watch I'd meet the same fate! But luckily I am (a) poor (b) a big wuss who doesn't like pain and (c) unable to think of anything I'd really want to wear on my skin for the rest of my life. So I've managed to avoid signing up for my own tattoos, so far.
Yet these two make them seem appealing. I sort of envy them having a Thing (or many Things) that they like enough to want to wear them all the time. And they both have interesting and thoughtful reasons behind their tattoos, stories to tell about their tattoos.
Elizabeth and I hung out in Starbucks for a while afterwards (she showed it off, clingfilm and all, to the people working there) and had many interesting conversations about how we got here and where we're going. I asked about her tattoos, having not heard much of the stories behind them yet, and heard about the themes of growth and change that seem to run through them all. I really like that she has emblems of change inked permanently on her body. But I guess change is the one constant; it shows up whether you like it or not.
And while sometimes it might be nice to forget the things that ended badly or just don't seem like much a part of you any more, as tempting as it may be to revise your own history to fit your current outlook, it's ultimately better to realize that your life, like Elizabeth's tattoos, is a work in progress. There are landmarks of where you've been, and there's still the potential of more to come.
Home is one of those tricky words for me.
Home is something that I grew up thinking was a farm in southern Minnesota, with these fields around it and these trees in it and these dogs and this road going to this house here, which is peach and contained my family and my bedroom and all my things. My parents have lived there slightly longer than I've been alive, so it was the only "home" I'd known until I left for college.
Perhaps that was part of the reason Morris felt so strange at first. Even once the summer-camp mentality--the carefully-packed bags, the recicent children glaring at their worried parents until they left, the strange bed to sleep in, the avalanche of activities to keep our minds off all this, the new people that were both fellow inductees and the best distraction from the induction process--wore off and the drudgery of classes and homework set in, even though I was thriving there and had great friends and fun things to do, it still felt a little weird to me for almost half the year.
I was very conscious of my environment in a way I'd never been at "home," which was a place and a circumstance that had, for as long as I could remember, always been there in the background. Almost never interesting or noteworthy or anything other than scenery for the events of my life, but always there.
That feeling went away eventually. It started feeling more unnatural to be "home," with my parents and the TV but little else: no friends, no homework, no concerts or speech meets or late-night conversations or anything. That, I guess, was how I knew that college had become "home."
But I was still prone to calling my parents' house "home," too. The two different things existed with only the one word to cover them. It didn't make sense, but it was the best I could do, and anyway it didn't really matter what I called things, so I didn't think about it.
Then I came to England.
I could hardly think of a thing more alienating than to make my first plane trip, by myself, to another country that didn't seem to want me there, to see someone I don't really know as well as I might like, and stay at his house. So obviously this place seemed weird at first. (A lot of it still does!) And once again, I started off thinking that "home" was a very different place from where I now found myself.
Though now "home" was a bit more vague. Now it encompassed not just my parents' house and not just the small town where I'd been in college. Now when people asked me where I was from, I never got more specific than "Minnesota" ... and Minnesota, I felt, was my home now. All of it. The Twin Cities were mine, farm girl though I may be. "Up North," with the trees and lakes and stuff, that was mine. The prairies and fields were obviously mine. The accent was mine. Garrison Keillor was mine. Bob Dylan was mine. All mine. All me.
And all so far away.
And then I went back there, which was even weirder, because now I felt like I didn't fit anywhere. I was restless and lonely at my parents' house. I visited my friends but felt like a burden to them, or at least a confusion. Everyone was still nice to me, but I didn't feel right there. My bedroom looked different--there was even a new bed there!--and I wasn't even interested in going back to Morris. My friends were mostly out of school or at least doing new things (like starting school again ... or having a baby!). I floundered.
Then I came back here, determined to make sense of the place this time. I've been barraging Andrew with questions all the time and he's been volunteering information, as well, on everything from Kylie Minogue to Margaret Thatcher ... and I think that's helped, actually. I'm a little surprised that increasing information makes the place feel nicer, but when I think about it, the lack of knowledge is a big factor in making me feel so out-of-place. Unfamiliarity makes everything seem cold and prickly.
Still, knowledge is not all. No matter how much I know about the local geography or history or culture or entertainment, I still call other places, faraway places, "home." I think it bugs Andrew a little bit. "This is your home," he tells me. "You live here." I know what he means, and I don't want to make him feel bad, but my attempts to explain that I can't just jump into a new place have not met with much success.
There are things that I more obviously expected would help make this seem like "home" (and what exactly is "this" anyway? the UK? England? Manchester? this flat? I'm not sure), like getting our own place so that we weren't living in Andrew's cousin's house, a definite bachelor pad with two bachelors in it, but instead some place where I can arrange everything the way I want it and take care of it myself.
But it never hurts to reinforce the point with a Visual Aid! Messing around on this computer a couple of days ago, I found myself, just for a moment, looking at the
Home is something that I grew up thinking was a farm in southern Minnesota, with these fields around it and these trees in it and these dogs and this road going to this house here, which is peach and contained my family and my bedroom and all my things. My parents have lived there slightly longer than I've been alive, so it was the only "home" I'd known until I left for college.
Perhaps that was part of the reason Morris felt so strange at first. Even once the summer-camp mentality--the carefully-packed bags, the recicent children glaring at their worried parents until they left, the strange bed to sleep in, the avalanche of activities to keep our minds off all this, the new people that were both fellow inductees and the best distraction from the induction process--wore off and the drudgery of classes and homework set in, even though I was thriving there and had great friends and fun things to do, it still felt a little weird to me for almost half the year.
I was very conscious of my environment in a way I'd never been at "home," which was a place and a circumstance that had, for as long as I could remember, always been there in the background. Almost never interesting or noteworthy or anything other than scenery for the events of my life, but always there.
That feeling went away eventually. It started feeling more unnatural to be "home," with my parents and the TV but little else: no friends, no homework, no concerts or speech meets or late-night conversations or anything. That, I guess, was how I knew that college had become "home."
But I was still prone to calling my parents' house "home," too. The two different things existed with only the one word to cover them. It didn't make sense, but it was the best I could do, and anyway it didn't really matter what I called things, so I didn't think about it.
Then I came to England.
I could hardly think of a thing more alienating than to make my first plane trip, by myself, to another country that didn't seem to want me there, to see someone I don't really know as well as I might like, and stay at his house. So obviously this place seemed weird at first. (A lot of it still does!) And once again, I started off thinking that "home" was a very different place from where I now found myself.
Though now "home" was a bit more vague. Now it encompassed not just my parents' house and not just the small town where I'd been in college. Now when people asked me where I was from, I never got more specific than "Minnesota" ... and Minnesota, I felt, was my home now. All of it. The Twin Cities were mine, farm girl though I may be. "Up North," with the trees and lakes and stuff, that was mine. The prairies and fields were obviously mine. The accent was mine. Garrison Keillor was mine. Bob Dylan was mine. All mine. All me.
And all so far away.
And then I went back there, which was even weirder, because now I felt like I didn't fit anywhere. I was restless and lonely at my parents' house. I visited my friends but felt like a burden to them, or at least a confusion. Everyone was still nice to me, but I didn't feel right there. My bedroom looked different--there was even a new bed there!--and I wasn't even interested in going back to Morris. My friends were mostly out of school or at least doing new things (like starting school again ... or having a baby!). I floundered.
Then I came back here, determined to make sense of the place this time. I've been barraging Andrew with questions all the time and he's been volunteering information, as well, on everything from Kylie Minogue to Margaret Thatcher ... and I think that's helped, actually. I'm a little surprised that increasing information makes the place feel nicer, but when I think about it, the lack of knowledge is a big factor in making me feel so out-of-place. Unfamiliarity makes everything seem cold and prickly.
Still, knowledge is not all. No matter how much I know about the local geography or history or culture or entertainment, I still call other places, faraway places, "home." I think it bugs Andrew a little bit. "This is your home," he tells me. "You live here." I know what he means, and I don't want to make him feel bad, but my attempts to explain that I can't just jump into a new place have not met with much success.
There are things that I more obviously expected would help make this seem like "home" (and what exactly is "this" anyway? the UK? England? Manchester? this flat? I'm not sure), like getting our own place so that we weren't living in Andrew's cousin's house, a definite bachelor pad with two bachelors in it, but instead some place where I can arrange everything the way I want it and take care of it myself.
But it never hurts to reinforce the point with a Visual Aid! Messing around on this computer a couple of days ago, I found myself, just for a moment, looking at the
/home folder. /home is sort of to Linux what My Documents is to Windows. Your stuff goes in the "home directory" of whatever your username is; mine's /home/holly. That's the one I look at most; if I go up a level, to look at just /home, I see this:/home, with two things in it, holly and andrew, made me grin. It almost makes sense now.I don't remember my parents telling me stories or reading me stories when I was little. Not that I blame them, you understand; I taught myself to read when I was three and ever since then I've taken care of finding for myself as many stories as possible.
And it's not as if my childhood was completely devoid of the usual fairy tales and assorted fantasies: as a relatively early part of the generation raised on not just televisions but VCRs, I had at my fingertips cartoons, sing-a-longs, and most of the Disney videos of the day, in those big soft white plastic cases.
I know I had similar children's stories in books as well, of course, but I barely remember those. The first thing I really remember about books is something that happened to me in kindergarten: my class had just returned from our weekly trip to the library and my teacher noticed that while most kids had Bernstein Bears books or other picture books, I had a book on astronomy. She said something like, "Oh, you don't really want that one, do you?" I frowned in confusion. Now I imagine she was either trying to save me the frustration of a book so far above my age's reading level, or she was just being mean (my kindergarten teacher was mean! she's being mean to my mom, who works with her, now). But at the time I had no idea what she was talking about. Of course I wanted that book! It looked great.
In elementary school I read the handful of books the school library had on the subject, over and over. I read them on the hour-long bus ride home, I stayed up late with them (of course, I did these things with all my books ... come to think of it, I'm really no different now, am I?). I happily lost myself in notions of exotic oceans and skies, in phrases like "mean distance from the Sun", which I thought sounded great even before I knew what they meant. And of course there were all those mysteries, so many things unknown not just to elementary school students, but to everyone. The number of moons on Saturn's page of statistics had a question mark after it! Even after I turned off the lights, my mind would whirl in the stunning weirdness and crazy mysteries, astronomical units away.
I would move on to other fascinations as I got older. A future in science aws not meant for one so terrible at math, I've come to believe; my laziness and general confusion are surely the hallmarks of an arts or humanitites student. But I still read books about astronomy; I watch the shows about it when they're on TV, sure they must be better than anything else that's on, even if I don't hear anything I didn't already know.
Anyway, it's nearly impossible for any such collection of facts not to contain something I hadn't known or didn't remember or had never thought about in quite that way before. And even when I'm just hearing again that Uranus rotates on its side or that Galileo thought Saturn had ears, it kind of makes me smile, it makes me feel good. These somehow ended up being the stories of my childhood.
And it's not as if my childhood was completely devoid of the usual fairy tales and assorted fantasies: as a relatively early part of the generation raised on not just televisions but VCRs, I had at my fingertips cartoons, sing-a-longs, and most of the Disney videos of the day, in those big soft white plastic cases.
I know I had similar children's stories in books as well, of course, but I barely remember those. The first thing I really remember about books is something that happened to me in kindergarten: my class had just returned from our weekly trip to the library and my teacher noticed that while most kids had Bernstein Bears books or other picture books, I had a book on astronomy. She said something like, "Oh, you don't really want that one, do you?" I frowned in confusion. Now I imagine she was either trying to save me the frustration of a book so far above my age's reading level, or she was just being mean (my kindergarten teacher was mean! she's being mean to my mom, who works with her, now). But at the time I had no idea what she was talking about. Of course I wanted that book! It looked great.
In elementary school I read the handful of books the school library had on the subject, over and over. I read them on the hour-long bus ride home, I stayed up late with them (of course, I did these things with all my books ... come to think of it, I'm really no different now, am I?). I happily lost myself in notions of exotic oceans and skies, in phrases like "mean distance from the Sun", which I thought sounded great even before I knew what they meant. And of course there were all those mysteries, so many things unknown not just to elementary school students, but to everyone. The number of moons on Saturn's page of statistics had a question mark after it! Even after I turned off the lights, my mind would whirl in the stunning weirdness and crazy mysteries, astronomical units away.
I would move on to other fascinations as I got older. A future in science aws not meant for one so terrible at math, I've come to believe; my laziness and general confusion are surely the hallmarks of an arts or humanitites student. But I still read books about astronomy; I watch the shows about it when they're on TV, sure they must be better than anything else that's on, even if I don't hear anything I didn't already know.
Anyway, it's nearly impossible for any such collection of facts not to contain something I hadn't known or didn't remember or had never thought about in quite that way before. And even when I'm just hearing again that Uranus rotates on its side or that Galileo thought Saturn had ears, it kind of makes me smile, it makes me feel good. These somehow ended up being the stories of my childhood.
More stuff about Smile
Sep. 27th, 2004 11:31 pmI really like "Vegetables".
I like vegetables too, but here I am saying that I like the song called "Vegetables".
It was the first bit of Smile that made an impression on me. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the first bit whose lyrics I could discern. That made it more memorable, or at leat more obviously "about something" than, say, "Cabinessence" (which I also noticed at first, but whose words I still don't know, really). I don't really think lyrics are the essential element to understanding a song. (In fact, it's often easy not to be too bothered by the lyrics of Brian Wilson's songs, because he's often not that great at writing them (there are obvious exceptions to this, but melodies are his strong point), and often he's working with another lyricist anyway.) But they must be part of it, or they wouldn't be there in the first place, right?
But one of the things I like so much about "Vegetables"—a thing I've always liked about it, I think, though I haven't always noticed it consciously—is that the lyrics sound so much like him. Things like "If you brought a big brown bag of them home / I'd jump up and down and hope you'd toss me a carrot" and "I tried to kick the ball but my tenny flew right off / I'm red as a beet 'cause I'm so embarrassed" and "I threw away my candy bar and I ate the wrapper / and when they told me what I did I burst into laughter".
One time, after hearing that last line, Andrew commented, "That sounds like something Brian Wilson would actually do." I laughed and agreed. That's what I like about it ... but that's not all.
A good artist makes you think He expresses what's in his soul. It's touching. A great one will make you think He expresses what's in my soul. It's moving. Brian Wilson makes you think He's writing about himself ... and he is me! That's sublime. *
I know it may be dumb of me to say such lofty things about a lyric involving candy bars. I've never thrown away a candy bar and ate the wrapper, so how can I say this has anything to do with me? I can't explain the appeal, even though it's obvious to me. I wouldn't be surprised if this made sense to roughly no one who reads it, but that's all right.
Andrew didn't like Smile much before it was finished. This is apparently somewhat unusual among Beach Boys fans, but it makes sense to me. Much of it used to be just changes between two chords, and the tone can best be described by the words "plinky-plink."
He was a bigger fan of Smiley Smile, the album mostly made of what was salvaged from Smile and released instead. It's very quiet, and very odd. I think I would've found it more fun if I hadn't heard it after I heard Smile, which sort of wrecked it for me, because I hear all kinds of things that belong in those songs now, but which no one expected then. I still like Smiley Smile, but I can't help that Smile is more interesting.
The one exception is "Wind Chimes". The Smile version is nice enough, but lacks the beautiful, haunting simplicity of the Smiley Smile one, which is done so gently: the vocals are whispered, the instrumention (an organ, I think; I've only heard the song once or twice myself) is sparse and quiet. I realise that, once again, the song I'm describing here doesn't sound that exceptional. In fact, it sounds more like no song at all. I know it can be explained better than I'm doing it, but you'll just have to trust me: it's good.
The song starts "Hangin' down from my window, those are my wind chimes". Then a line I don't remember. Then "Though it's hard I try not to look at my wind chimes".
I just love that line. Like the song itself, it's very simple yet very interesting. I'm not really sure why I like it so much, except that it made sense to me immediately when I first heard it. But then I wondered why it should do that, and I'm not really sure. Simultaneously seeming obvious and inexplicable is definitely at least part of the reason I like it so much. This is what I mean by sublime. (I think it is, anyway.)
Why try not to look at the wind chimes? Why is it hard not to?
I started out to say two small things here, and got carried away.
I'm not a Smile geek, by any means. I know I wrote a lot about it a few days ago, and am doing so again now, but that's still nothing compared to the possible geekery. I've written a lot here about just two lines of lyric, really; think how much there would be to say about a 45-minute suite of this music. And that's not even mentioning that some people have been waiting 37 years to hear it. Whereas it's just a phase I'm going through. I'll shut up about it now.
Probably.
* I stole this paragraph from at least one thing I've read—I can't remember what; it seems such a generic sentiment—except for the part about Brian Wilson, which I lifted from
stealthmunchkin.Time, love, and baseball
May. 9th, 2004 12:07 amI've always liked baseball, and (as with most things I like) never really understood how other people dislike it.
I often hear that it's "boring" and "slow," and I understand that, really. But whenever I find myself watching a Vikings or Timberwolves game (I feel invested in the teams from the same state as I am), I remember how annoying I find football and basketball because, for all their much-touted action, the action still takes up less of the time than referees blowing whistles, penalties, strategic time-outs to pscyhe out the other team, time-outs that actually might be useful to one's own team... Things just drag--especially near the end of the game--and it annoys me to no end. Especially near the end of the game.
And yes, I realize that baseball looks old-fashioned and slow-moving, but that's okay because it is and that's one of the things I like about it. People write cheesy, romanticised thing about it, probably more often than they do about football or basketball. I know; I did a speech on love of baseball a couple of years ago, for which I collected bits of drama, prose, and poetry about the subject. And I remember one bit, the end of a poem, went, "Baseball is precious, baseball is timeless, baseball is forever." (The whole speech wasn't that cheesy, naturally, but since love and baseball can both be cheesy I thought it was important to have some of that.)
I don't know if baseball is actually timeless, but I do know that baseball has no clock. It does have time, though. Like an avant-garde jazz piece, baseball's sense of time is not immediately evident but, like a good avant-garde jazz piece, it is there. Ever played catch with someone? If you're good enough not to drop the ball more often than you catch it (read: better than me), maybe you notice a rhythm to it. Baseball is a many such simple things, repeated much and often. It may move slowly, but it moves steadily. (More or less.) And still has time for commercial breaks.
In baseball, events don't collide, they flow into one another. This isn't even a matter of politeness, I think, so much as aesthetics. Or maybe it's just me who thinks it's beautiful that at any moment, the most amazing thing could happen. Some tihngs you build up to, true, like pitching a no-hitter or hitting for the cycle, but the more mundane things can show up at any time, at any point of the game. The most important part of the game is not delineated by the shot-clock or the two-minute warning or the blue line or the red zone. It could be anything, so you don't notice at the time, but when everything's over you realize that the double play in the third inning won the game, or that the manager really should've taken his starting pitcher out sooner. I know this is still duller than dirt to some people, but I'm glad I'm not one of those.
I often hear that it's "boring" and "slow," and I understand that, really. But whenever I find myself watching a Vikings or Timberwolves game (I feel invested in the teams from the same state as I am), I remember how annoying I find football and basketball because, for all their much-touted action, the action still takes up less of the time than referees blowing whistles, penalties, strategic time-outs to pscyhe out the other team, time-outs that actually might be useful to one's own team... Things just drag--especially near the end of the game--and it annoys me to no end. Especially near the end of the game.
And yes, I realize that baseball looks old-fashioned and slow-moving, but that's okay because it is and that's one of the things I like about it. People write cheesy, romanticised thing about it, probably more often than they do about football or basketball. I know; I did a speech on love of baseball a couple of years ago, for which I collected bits of drama, prose, and poetry about the subject. And I remember one bit, the end of a poem, went, "Baseball is precious, baseball is timeless, baseball is forever." (The whole speech wasn't that cheesy, naturally, but since love and baseball can both be cheesy I thought it was important to have some of that.)
I don't know if baseball is actually timeless, but I do know that baseball has no clock. It does have time, though. Like an avant-garde jazz piece, baseball's sense of time is not immediately evident but, like a good avant-garde jazz piece, it is there. Ever played catch with someone? If you're good enough not to drop the ball more often than you catch it (read: better than me), maybe you notice a rhythm to it. Baseball is a many such simple things, repeated much and often. It may move slowly, but it moves steadily. (More or less.) And still has time for commercial breaks.
In baseball, events don't collide, they flow into one another. This isn't even a matter of politeness, I think, so much as aesthetics. Or maybe it's just me who thinks it's beautiful that at any moment, the most amazing thing could happen. Some tihngs you build up to, true, like pitching a no-hitter or hitting for the cycle, but the more mundane things can show up at any time, at any point of the game. The most important part of the game is not delineated by the shot-clock or the two-minute warning or the blue line or the red zone. It could be anything, so you don't notice at the time, but when everything's over you realize that the double play in the third inning won the game, or that the manager really should've taken his starting pitcher out sooner. I know this is still duller than dirt to some people, but I'm glad I'm not one of those.
Most of the time I don't mind. Really. I forget that I'm missing out at all, since I've never known anything else. In fact, when I was very young, I was totally blind--I was born that way, since my optic nerve, among other things, didn't form properly--but that, for reasons still unknown, ceased to be true when I was about two. I don't remember it myself, but my parents have told me the story of my dad coming home from work, turning on a light in our house, and me looking up at it. My mom once called it a miracle.
So I think I'm doing pretty well, all things considered. I see well enough that people sometimes don't notice until or unless I tell them (though one of the problems with my eyes is a noticable one--a weakness of my eye muscles makes my eyes jump back and forth all the time...though I've been told this has gotten better in recent years; I can't tell myself, the things I'm looking at don't appear to be jumping around, so I guess my brain has figured out how to compensate).
( But. )
I remember being in our backyard with my dad one night when I was quite young. He showed me constellations. See that bright star there? That's the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. I asked him what a dipper was, and I remember that he said it was a little basket for water, because I imagined a basket in the sky, made of points of light.
But I didn't have glasses yet and without them I can see only the brightest stars; the sky is mostly black to me, and thogh I can see a few light dots, it's often not even enough to catch my attention. And I love stars. But stars always bring out longing in people, we want to reach out to them. I want that too, but I'd be happy just to really see them.
So I think I'm doing pretty well, all things considered. I see well enough that people sometimes don't notice until or unless I tell them (though one of the problems with my eyes is a noticable one--a weakness of my eye muscles makes my eyes jump back and forth all the time...though I've been told this has gotten better in recent years; I can't tell myself, the things I'm looking at don't appear to be jumping around, so I guess my brain has figured out how to compensate).
( But. )
I remember being in our backyard with my dad one night when I was quite young. He showed me constellations. See that bright star there? That's the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. I asked him what a dipper was, and I remember that he said it was a little basket for water, because I imagined a basket in the sky, made of points of light.
But I didn't have glasses yet and without them I can see only the brightest stars; the sky is mostly black to me, and thogh I can see a few light dots, it's often not even enough to catch my attention. And I love stars. But stars always bring out longing in people, we want to reach out to them. I want that too, but I'd be happy just to really see them.
Jenn and I went to St. Cloud on Monday. It's an hour-and-a-hal drive each way, and except for the random mix CD we played at first, we listened to The Joshua Tree for the whole three hours.
After some debate over whether or not it was playing at all, our straining ears heard the beginning guitar lick to "Where the Streets Have No Name." Jenn and I had been talking about how much we love this album--we like some of the same things, and sometimes talk about the most random stuff until we've worked ourselves up into a frenzy of excitement over something like Chipotle (which was one of the reasons we were going to St. Cloud in the first place) or The Joshua Tree (which Jenn was inspired to borrow from a friend of hers who loves U2).
So by the time the song started having words, I'd been thinking about these things enough that I was too enthralled to sing along with this song I knew and loved so well. I just wanted to listen. I couldn't help mouthing the words, though. "I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside."
Soon we were singing along anyway. One of us would randomly stop talking to sing a random line we know or like and would then return to our conversation as if nothing unusual had happened ... because nothing unusual had happened.
I noticed that the overcast sky was bringing dusk down upon us even though it was only 4:30. It wasn't raining but it looked as if it might. We left our boring stretch of highway for I-94, and our zippy car became super-zippy.
We talked about music and sex. We weren't just horny, though; there weren't any hormones involved (well, in my case anyway, but I wouldn't presume to speak for Jenn). This music isn't about sex, it just makes us want to have sex with the people who made it. The Joshua Tree gives us goosebumps sometimes.
I need that CD. I used to have it on tape (so it couldn't have been any later than junior high, back when I still bought and played tapes), and it has long since disappeared. I miss it now!
After some debate over whether or not it was playing at all, our straining ears heard the beginning guitar lick to "Where the Streets Have No Name." Jenn and I had been talking about how much we love this album--we like some of the same things, and sometimes talk about the most random stuff until we've worked ourselves up into a frenzy of excitement over something like Chipotle (which was one of the reasons we were going to St. Cloud in the first place) or The Joshua Tree (which Jenn was inspired to borrow from a friend of hers who loves U2).
So by the time the song started having words, I'd been thinking about these things enough that I was too enthralled to sing along with this song I knew and loved so well. I just wanted to listen. I couldn't help mouthing the words, though. "I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside."
Soon we were singing along anyway. One of us would randomly stop talking to sing a random line we know or like and would then return to our conversation as if nothing unusual had happened ... because nothing unusual had happened.
I noticed that the overcast sky was bringing dusk down upon us even though it was only 4:30. It wasn't raining but it looked as if it might. We left our boring stretch of highway for I-94, and our zippy car became super-zippy.
We talked about music and sex. We weren't just horny, though; there weren't any hormones involved (well, in my case anyway, but I wouldn't presume to speak for Jenn). This music isn't about sex, it just makes us want to have sex with the people who made it. The Joshua Tree gives us goosebumps sometimes.
I need that CD. I used to have it on tape (so it couldn't have been any later than junior high, back when I still bought and played tapes), and it has long since disappeared. I miss it now!
