My private hell involves an interminable line to the ladies' room and Kenny Chesney, and the other day I was going to write a whole messy screed on the subject. I was going to talk about Jimmie Rodgers and Garth Brooks and Keith Urban and Conway Twitty and every damn thing. I was going to conclude that the country and western singers of the fifties and sixties lived close to the bone and sang songs about lovin their mamas and their dead babies and the girls they left behind and that these songs represented something viable and authentic about the rural experience during that era. I was going include statistics about mortality and poverty across the south. I was going to talk about Hank Williams dead in the back seat of a big blue Cadillac parked out behind a gas station and about sanitary tales of raising hell and amazing grace sizzling from speakers in an air-conditioned Ford Explorers. It was a neat juxtaposition, the sort of essay that forms itself easily and fully in my mind, so easily that it never quite makes it to paper but just sits around in the back of my mind like a gift from a boy you never liked that well but who always liked you.
There's been a song in my head today, a song I thought perfectly summed up some shady, pastoral corner of my soul. So I found an interview with the band on Pitchfork. The song, it turns out, was meant sarcastically, ironically. A professor I had always mentioned that the word sarcasm means, literally and in it's purest, etymological form "to tear the flesh." I'd carried the song along with me today as I went about my business, something sweeter than myself and something more hopeful. It's sarcastic, isn't it, the interviewer asked. But sincerely meant as well? The question sort of hung there a bit and disappeared in the cloud of vagueries that generally mark interviews. I sat here in front of my borrowed computer and realized that my own sweet little moment was more sarcastic than I realized, that flesh was torn, so to speak.
The thing about me is that I effing hate hippies. One of my favorite musical moments is Kurt Cobain's come on people now/smile on your brothers/everybody get together/try to love one another/right now at the beginnings of Territorial Pissings. It's this bleak, wonderful howl of disappointment at the failure of all that idealism. Smiling on your brother seems this futile ridiculous idea, the playground nonsense of a generation who grew up to be investment bankers and chemical engineers.
Once I got into a fairly stupid argument about postmodernism with a Boomer who clearly had no idea what postmodernism was. It has nothing particular to do with zoos, for the record. I am an enthusiastic postmodernist: I once accused a perfect stranger of being a crypto-oligarch because he discounted wikipedia. That's beside the point, I suppose. Unless the point was don't argue with me unless you'd like to be called a crypto-somethingorother. It's an insult I use all the time with necessary variants. I think it sounds dirty.The simplest definition of postmodernism, the one given by an Intro to Philosophy class in which I was once and woefully involved, is an incredulity to metanarratives. In other words, a simple refusal to believe the big story, the explanations for the stuff of life we can all believe in. Postmodernism is about decentralization, distrust, and decay. Postmodernism is also cheerfully and fatalistically concerned with pop culture. As am I, I suppose.
In 1996, PJ Harvey recorded a splendid cover of an old Peggy Lee song: is that all there is?/if that's all there is, my friends/then let's keep dancing. Or, at the very least, let's keep listening to pop music and buying dvds of all our favorite tv shows from childhood.But pop music is disappointing, isn't it? I've long joked that Britney Spears and I have roughly the same musical talent--practically none--but she has better abs. Or did until she had all those babies and beers. So maybe it's all about promotion: business today consists of controlling crowds. Music is as slick and static as Twinkee wrappers, often the work of engineers and producers more than musicians. Plus, my sister maintains--although not in these precise these terms--that Kenny Chesney's pecs are sho nuff store bought.
Everytime I fight with someone I love, I'm pretty sure all the words we use we've heard on past seasons of the Real World. Or in Reality Bites. Sometimes I wonder what life was like before we had movies and magazines and popular teen dramas and pop music to tell us how to feel and how to say it and what to wear while we do all of it. In college a handful of friends and I designated our Seinfeld identities over lunch and ever after--or was it long before?--we could relate the day-to-day to That Episode Where. At least we weren't the cast of Friends. Cold comfort, perhaps.
Oh there's emo instead of punk and John Mayer instead of Sleepy John and the godawful swill about next to god of course america i love you instead of some bare if sentimental twang about subsistence living. And oh there's my friend with a job in finance who dreams up life as a hobo and my clean-handed friend who dreams of chucking his degrees in favor of farming. And oh there's me with a a coupla chi-chi beers in me singing let the thunder roll and the lightnin flash I'm doing alright for country trash. And oh maybe the Monkees will go down with the Beatles, as shaggy haired lotharios and the handiwork of careful technicians. And oh in the end it's maybe all the same.
Is it the logical end that all the cleanest and brightest bits of ourselves will be little murky, the photocopies of photocopies? Can happiness exist untinged by ironies and a celluloid-born sense of distance? If I ask you whether you were sincere, will you say too many words without enough meaning?
Like the essay I never wrote, this one is stalling. It's stalling because ultimately I don't believe these things. Certainly I believe myself to be a snarky little pessimist in rundown shoes and stupidly oversized sunglasses. I believe that what's on the radio is mostly shit and that I should spend time loftier pursuits than honing indie cred. And I believe that the idealism of our parents' America is ultimately absurd. I believe that Jack Nicholson snarling this ain't reality tv may as well be David Hasselhoff dancing on the Berlin Wall. But none of those things that I believe are the thing I believe.
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now these things abide...
I believe is separation and in discord, in the tearing of skin and the wrenching of bone and in the silly slow progression of days measured in coffee spoons and the dirty socks that somehow appear uninvited in my hamper and the Netflix envelopes that are so effing slow to come and console my sleepless nights. Call me a crypto-platonist, if you like. It sounds dirty, doesn't it. I told you. But the thing I believe, the thing that is most real is that we would not know the broken without the image of the whole, the copy without the idea of the original. The thing that I believe Godthefather and Thelittlelordjesusnocryinghemakes. The thing I believe in is the faith of people with terrible political convictions and with long black socks over their thick white shanks and of brown-robed students of antiquities with poor social skills and of wild-eyed adventurers picking their wives out of beer barrels. The thing I believe in is nails splintering bones and the damps of early mornings and graveyards. The thing I believe in is slick red birth and feeling of grass on my barefeet when I was very young and the way I can never think up words to describe what the sky looks like on a clear night.
And that's what I've got. A collection of records and skinny jeans, a vocabulary of movie quotes and some modernist poets I steal from shamelessly, and a lot of haircare products. I've got enough undergraduate hours of philosohpy and church history--including a real stemwinder of an apologetics class--I could make a reasoned argument for faith. I've got a thousand unsolicted--and, all things being equal--un-read opinions about the state of the arts and politics and the human condition and a semi-surly attitude about most things. Straw.
So in the end, I come back to a question of country music, I suppose, for that is the point where I began.
05 December 2007
I Saw the Light: a story about country music
In Which I Learn a Valuable Lesson about Cell Phone Time vs. Non-Cell Phone Time
Today I set my phone to silent during my class, but at some point I looked over at my bag, where my phone just happened to perch, and I noticed I had a new text. Temptation won the day, and I sneaked my phone from my bag to my lap to see who had said what to me. It was a picture, actually. A picture of a penis. I slammed my phone shut and tossed it back into my bag super quick. I spent the rest of the class wondering if anyone else had seen it and now thought I was a terrible, terrible pervert. And, for that matter, wondering who had sent me such a picture in the middle of the afternoon. Do I have a stalker? After class, I retrieved my phone and discovered that someone had sent me a picture of a newborn baby. Pixels are important, people. But later I'm going to feel weird about talking about how cute that baby is.
Fall 2007
Deep Ellum Blues
Somewhere in the Arizona desert we decided to start a band. Last summer a friend and I drove Route 66, America’s first major highway, from its starting point in Chicago to Los Angeles and the sea. Richie and I had a lot of time to kill between visits to Al Capone’s favorite diner and the World’s Largest Covered Wagon, so we constructed elaborate fantasies. You might call it playing pretend. Richie had just returned from World War II, and I left my spinsterish classics department to go with him to California to drink red wine at the ocean’s edge. We were Okies. The fistfull of change that dragged my dirty jeans lower and lower on my hips each day was maybe enough for some sandwiches tied up in waxed paper. I counted it jealously before dumping it into the cupholder. We were Bonnie and Clyde, opening our slick mouths to laugh at Texas lawmen in gray western towns.
We were thinking about being outlaws, or I was anyway, and we were thinking about music. When we weren’t talking, we played the stereo loud to fill up on sound. Rt. 66 is mostly a network of frontage roads and state highways now that it’s been replaced by slick ropes of interstates. We went hours sometimes without seeing other cars, so we played music for the empty roads and emptier skies.
We met waiting on the train. You asked me for a cigarette, which I had because in this story I smoke. He turned down the music.
I was on the lam.
No, I told him, we’re musicians this time. We’d both finished shows. I’m in a girl band, the drummer. We play the music sisters would play who lived their whole lives alone in a creaky old farmhouse. A Rose for Emily, the musical.
He told me what music his band would play, but I’ve forgotten. Probably something that sounded like McClusky.
He was on the lam, he insisted. He asked me to come with him there at that train station because, even though we’d just met, he knew we’d get along. I said yes because in this story I said yes to things and believed in love at first sight.
In the Arizona desert, we sat in seats dampened with sweat and planned the band we’d start when we began our lives over again in Los Angeles.
Wait, why are you on the lam?
I, uh, cut down those damn trees inside Trees.
As well you should've.
Trees, one of Deep Ellum’s oldest rock clubs recently closed. Deep Ellum is Dallas’ oldest entertainment district and home to a motley assortment of clubs, bars, and restaurants. Trees has a pretty good history for a rock club. A lot of your favorite bands from the ‘90s played there, probably before they were your favorite bands. Right after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" broke, a Nirvana show famously erupted in chaos. Kurt Cobain got his ass kicked. Mudhoney, the Toadies, and Radiohead all played Trees, albeit with less attendant drama.
But now no one plays there. The doors are locked. Someone's taped up a couple of signs, and already the corners are crinkly with this damn humidity. Richie didn't chop down the trees, those big columns that--as far as I could tell--were once growing in a forest somewhere before they were brought in to support the roof, block the stage from certain angles, and give the club its name. Richie didn't kill Trees.
Or at least he didn't kill Trees any more than I did or any of Dallas' other rock fans who could be going to Deep Ellum but mostly choose to go to another part of town. Club Dada, another of the old guard, closed last month. Deep Ellum, some people fear, is not only long past its glory days of the 1980s and 90s but is fading out all together. Robert Wilonsky, a music columnist for the Dallas Observer, claims that at the very least that great rock shows will be replaced by 18 and up dance clubs, growing crime rates, and what he elegantly designates butt rock. We mustn't let that happen. Sure, there are plenty of great music venues in the city, and if Deep Ellum no longer exisited as a place to see bands, we'd still have plenty of options. But something precious would be lost.
In the 1920s Deep Ellum was the sweaty navel of the country blues universe. Blind Lemon Jefferson and Sonny Boy Williams played on street corners for the clang of nickles in their tin cups. Inside juke joints black folk and white looked on slack jawed as musicians beat their guitars like they beat their wives. The streets were slick with horseshit and mud and, on Saturday nights, blood. Seems like somebody got stabbed down there 'most every weekend. Women slipped into "pharmacies" for whiskey and cocaine while their men shot craps in the alleys.
In 1938, bluesman Robert Johnson recorded a long walk away from what used to be Trees. The building's still there. It's boarded up and crusted over with grafiti and notices from the city. Its doorways stink of piss and vomit. Dallas, one of Johnson's girlfriends recalled in a documentary, was what killed him. In Texas the kid from the Delta traveled among his people as a star ran headlong into segregation. Men had opened their flasks and wallets to him; women their thighs. In Dallas, they locked the front doors of buildings and sent him in the back way. People said he learned the guitar in exchange for his soul.
I don't know what the next several decades were like in Deep Ellum. There were warehouses, I know. Under the glossy facades of clubs and restaurants, there are signs of colorless urban past, a time when America was consumed with throwing up unlovely buildings to house and display their post-war wealth. There were drunks and junkies in the doorways when the artists and musicians came back in the eighties. But bands played on Fridays, and galleries filled up rooms where machines once clanged with bright light and strange sculpture. One developer talked about making Commerce and Elm into Bourbon Street.
Many people I know are afraid to go to Deep Ellum now. There is a good chance you'll run into panhandlers. Once a wizened man sang me some Motown song about a beautiful girl in a voice I couldn't believe, so I gave him a dollar even though the signs everywhere say not to. Another time a man blocked my way on the sidewalk and demanded money more than asked when I was walking with a friend. I was a little frightened then, but we stepped into the street and continued around him without incident. About half the stories I know about car break-ins take place in Deep Ellum. And a couple of bloody headlines have daubed the area's reputation. A couple of kids started shooting at each other outside a dance club. Two girls' father was beaten almost to death at an Old 97s concert. Cops glare at you even if you're sober and walking neatly down the sidewalk. Why on earth would anyone go to such a place?
I go to Deep Ellum because, in a city mostly dedicated to tearing down its history and putting up shiny new condos, it still wears a gypsy jumble of old architecture and new. We go to Deep Ellum to acknowledge that music is more than the shitty screamo and hardcore your hear there most weekends and even more than this week's indie darling. The corner of Elm where blues legends played is the sacred ground I can walk in my beer-damp Chucks after a Gossip show. We go to Deep Ellum because rock music at its best is no about thosands of people, upholstered seats, eight dollar beers, and a laser light spectacle. Rock music is musicians crowded up on a stage, squinting through smoke-blue air as people press close to the stage giddy on beer, yes, but on this strange closeness and music they feel in their bellies.
This weekend, go to Deep Ellum. Bring a friend. Bring twelve friends if you're worried about safety. Lock your doors, and don't leave shit laying out in your car. But go. Eat at Deep Sushi. Or, better yet, grab dinner at Angry Dog. They have some of the best burgers and hotdogs in town and, best of all, a great vegetarian sandwich. Go to the Curtain Club and the seven other clubs you can get into for one $8 cover on "Deep Fridays." You'll see some butt rock and, probably, some college freshmen who love Dave Matthews more than anyone should. But maybe you'll run into something great, something everyone'll be talking about in three years. It might be the beginnings of a story to tell your grandchildren.
Or spend fifteen bucks at the Gypsy Tearoom to see a national act. Three drinks in, you might notice the picture of Blind Lemon tacked up on the curtain is begining to smile benevolently right at you. Somehow the smells of smoke and beer and sweat are strongest here, and when you leave they'll stay in your hair and on your clothes like the ghosts of a thousand shows.
Two step with a drunk middle-aged cowboy at Adairs while twentysomethings pound out the country music your grandparents listened to. And drink some Shiner bock out of little plastic cups until, secretly and sheepishly, you start to love Texas. Close your night at the Velvet Hookah sitting on pillows with goth kids and hipsters and dance club kids and cowboys and those dozen friends you brought to save you from mugging. Drink one of the dozen or so chichi martinis they serve, and try not to leer at the belly dancer. On your way out, proposition your designated driver and hold tight to your purse.
When you wake up the nexxt morning and your ears and mouth feel packed with cotton, know that you've done your part to keep Dallas from losing what's best about itself in a crush of silicone and skyscrapers. If you don't live in our around Dallas, don't think you're off the hook. Find where local music is being made. Find where the buildings are older than you are. Find a bar or a restaurant that exists only in the town where you live and not in the movie Office Space. And go there. If in ten years, we're all saying there's a Starbucks where something cool used to be or a crack house, it will be our own faults. I'll have to turn Richie and his axe lose loose you then, and you will deserve it.
Spring 2005
I like you but...: a story about how my clothes are holding back my social life
During iffy weather--that is, weather I'm not sure will make me feel chilly--I like to wear a scarf. It's surprising how keeping a warm neck warms your whole self. If the scarf fails to keep me adequately warm, it still conceals certain, ahem, evidence of chilliness. Scarves are much easier to carry around too. Lugging a coat when you walk as much as I do can be burdensome. All of this is to say, yesterday I was wore a scarf with a long sleeved tee shirt and jeans. I saw my boyfriend's four year old nephew. Or maybe he's five I don't know. Anyway Nephew and I were having a conversation about Toy Story when he paused and stared at me for several seconds.
What's up, Nephew?
I like you...
Hey, Nephew, I like you too.
But you're wearing a scarf. It's not winter outside.
Fall 2006
First Post: Sixth Blog
I have a small blogging, ahem, problem. I do it, which you might consider problem enough. But mostly the problem lays (or is it lies? this is the one grammatical concept that will always elude me) in the number of blogs I have. I have one about my attempts to run marathons. I have one that shows some fiction writing in progress. I have one all about my great pop cultural loves. I have one in which I communicate daily events and personal musings to a mostly closed circle of readers. Also there's that secret one out there somewhere for the carefully disguised divulging of subjects too controversial to put on the internet with my name signed to them. Is that only five? I also have a problem with counting. No, this is the sixth. That's right.
This blog, number six, is a depository of all of that. The greatest hits, if you will, of my writing life. The essays I'd like to hang in the hallway of my house, if I had either. So. Welcome to it.