The Devastationalist Manifesto

Today we have a guest blogger, the renowned podcastress Miette, who sends us this report from far-off Scandinavia:

At the Bergen Akvariet, make your way past the wiry-eyed motorhead feeding dead rats to crocodiles from the safe viewing distance of two rows of chicken wire fencing. Continue past the petting tank and the iguana. Find the big tropical tank of caiman and assorted ancillary amphibians. In the bottom front corner, in plain sight if you’re looking, you’ll see two turtles, no bigger in size than a matching set of Smørbrød saucers. They appear to be beating the carapacial shit out of each other.

Well, that’s a little hyperbolic. But not by much.

This is what’s going on: one turtle is pawing in the gravel and grime lining the bottom of the tank, digging for food, or treasure, or an escape route, at exactly the pace you’d expect of such a beast. Then the other guy (or maybe it’s a girl, but for the sake of this analogy it’s not too important), who’s obviously working hard on his air of indifference, slowly approaches. When the Feigner makes his way within inches of him, the Digger stops, turns around suddenly (again, suddenly being relative here; to these guys, seconds are measured in continental drift), faces his intruder, stretches out his front legs in front of him, and pedals them as quickly as he can to send a quick-beating little dissuasive wave of water thumping in the face of his trespasser. Maybe this is mildly distracting reptilian semaphore for “back off,” or perhaps it fucks with the offender more seriously, sending some sort of echolocative supersonics back to the central wiring. In any event, it’s enough for the unwanted visitor to about-face, leaving our original turtle back to his excavatory devices.

But only for a minute, because the would-be companion is back before long, and back again and again, in continued failed efforts to help with the burrowing, or to come up with an escape plan, or just to collude on a prank against the caiman. The two are stuck in this tank ad infinitum, after all, and may as well get to know one another. But the digger’s having none of it, and will continue to go on this way long after it’s stopped being funny, or curious, or sad, and long after you stop watching and move on to the next thing [the mysterious Dodraugen (Toilet Monster)].

Maybe they’re angry. We don’t know – maybe they have good reason to be mad. Maybe the approaching turtle once made a pass at one of the frogs up on the log, maybe even the cute little Pool Frog whose pain our sad tunneler is now trying to dig away. Or maybe the interloper’s very presence is stealing the thunder that could be met by a bout of educational front-row digging. It takes a lot to compete in a tank of over two hundred species, after all. Maybe there’s not a problem at all; maybe our miner just wants to be left alone. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Actually, there is, and it’s time to let up. In a tank full of the indifferent and the predatory, on full display for otherworldly tourists, fifty feet from the madman protecting you from crocodiles with fencing used to support garden peas, and it’s clear that they’re all they’ve got. Even if there was some sort of cardinal offence involving the world’s most batty-eyed, full-lipped, tongue-darting Pool Frog, they need to reassess the severity of that crime and find their way around it. There’s no such thing as minding one’s own business in a tank like this. They’re going to need each other.

You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side (Morrissey/Nevin)

Morrissey

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On the back cover of the paperback edition of My Pilgrim’s Progress, George Trow’s second, and ultimately fatal, attempt to trace the line of Western Culture’s post-war descent into inanity, there is a blurb by the literary pundit, Sven Birkerts, that embodies the root of that inanity with uncanny perfection.

It reads:  Trow models the thrilling possibility that one can, from the stronghold of one’s own experience and knowledge, decipher something of the world.

As if there were any other way!

You might be thinking that that sentence could be taken a number of ways, but it’s even worse in context :

“It’s an ambitious venture, especially as Trow proceeds with no authorized historical perspectives or terminologies. He goes forth solo, walking into the jungle with his compass and knife, a bit of an old-school anthropologist. What amazes me — and contributes to the true readerly excitement — is that in many ways he pulls it off. He models the thrilling possibility that one can, from the stronghold of one’s own experience and knowledge, decipher something of the world; that the murk of late modernity can be pierced and rendered at least partially comprehensible.”

Here is an established public intellectual, one of the men our culture has specifically tasked as an arbiter and caretaker of creativity and free expression, and he is openly professing his amazement that someone could actually make sense of the world without the aid of authorized perspectives and terminologies. As if using one’s subjective experience in that way were somehow a form of illicit thrill-seeking. He might as well be wearing a sign that says, “Don’t think for yourself.” Disgraceful.

Pyramid of Night (Mackay)

Andy Mackay

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Sometimes it seems that the human condition can be summed up as standing dazed and bruised at the bottom of various slippery slopes and wondering, “How did we get here?”

One answer might be our mistake in taking it for granted that speed, ease and convenience are always and everywhere inherently desirable qualities, ideals to be considered above all others in shaping our world. When the actual truth is they have blood-sucked the value from virtually every human activity that has ever fallen under their tyrannical sway. They are the insidious de-values, quietly replacing the deeper satisfactions of considered, diligent effort over time, from which human pursuits previously drew meaning.

In practice, this means that we are too quick and too enthusiastic when it comes to adopting simulacra, allowing virtual things to stand in for their actual predecessors with no questions asked. (E.g., a phone call is not an actual conversation, an MP3 is not actual human beings making music.) And the thing we need to be on guard for is that the technologies driving this process always tend towards increased individualism and isolation — away from the real world, real encounters, real relationships — whereas the original things were, by definition, tactile, tangible, social and communal. The scariest part is that over time, as the avatar stands in for the actual thing, people (gradually but inevitably) forget there ever was anything actual. The avatar becomes all we ever know.

Recently, a friend sent me a demo of a chilling new song that he was inspired to write after watching an ad for a dating service on TV. The song did a good job of capturing one unutterably sad and depressing aspect of the process described above, which is the commodification of romance — people shopping for love like they were ordering shoes from Zappos.

And of course there are upsides to it, just as there are upsides to cell phones, iPods, Facebook and all the rest. Speed, ease and convenience in all their glory, beckoning and beguiling. But in the end, what’s on offer is too creepy for words. It really is like a dystopian sci-fi novel, with all of us would-be Winston Smiths contemplating suicide in our grimy little bedsits, while the omnipresent Big Screen offers salvation only through deeper levels of solipsism and alienation.

This passage below is from Michael Kimmelman’s exceptionally illuminating book, The Accidental Masterpiece (2005). (Exceptional in that it is one of sadly few contemporary documents — by a formally educated, mainstream critic no less — that eschews theoretical frameworks and instead demonstrates a deep personal understanding and appreciation of the chaos and messiness that underlie how art is actually created and experienced by human beings in the real world.) I hijack this passage from its original context (Kimmelman is discussing the effect Kodak’s rise at the turn of the last century had on society’s notions of preservation and memory) for my own purposes, so it is only fair to note that Kimmelman goes on to argue for other side later on in the same chapter, making a rather poignant case for the transient beauty of snapshots and even color-by-numbers paintings:

“Before cameras, educated, well-to-do travelers had learned to sketch so that they could draw what they saw on their trips, in the same way that, before phonograph recordings, bourgeois families listened to music by making it themselves at home, playing the piano and singing in the parlor. Cameras made the task of keeping a record of people and things simpler and more widely available, and in the process reduced the care and intensity with which people needed to look at the things they wanted to remember well, because pressing a button required less concentration and effort than composing a precise and comely drawing. During the last century, the history of amateurism in America, whether it entailed snapping photographs or painting pictures or tickling the ivories, like so many other aspects of life, increasingly centered on labor-saving strategies to placate our inherent laziness and to guarantee our satisfaction, a promise, if you think about it, that should be antithetical to the premise of making art, which presumes effort and risk.”

And this is from Mockingbird (1980), by the prototypically itinerant, alcoholic, mid-century, mid-list writer Walter Tevis, a breathlessly melancholy sci-fi ode to the redemptive power of books. It’s sort of like if Philip K. Dick had written Brave New World+Fahrenheit 451. This bit below is an illiterate and suicidal android explaining to his platonic human consort how their world came to be as it is. Though the consort knows very little about the past and has barely any concept of “history,” learning how to read has sparked her innate curiosity. She wants to understand how things fell apart. The android mentions that in the past there were these things called “streetcars,” and she wants to know what happened to them [and remember, this was written in 1980]:

“The automobile companies got rid of them. Bribes were paid to city managers to tear up the streetcar tracks, and advertisements were bought in newspapers to convince the public that it should be done. So more cars could be sold, and more oil would be made into gasoline, to be burned in the cars. So that corporations could grow, and so a few people could become incredibly rich, and have servants, and live in mansions. It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created the suburbs and a hundred other dependencies — sexual and economic and narcotic — upon the automobile. And the automobile prepared the way for the more profound — more inward — dependencies upon television and then robots, and, finally, the ultimate and predictable conclusion to all of it: the perfection of the chemistry of the mind.”

At some point in your life, you may hear or read some variation of an argument that goes like this: “Don’t blame science or technology. Blame the applications of technology or the people who misuse it.” If someone should happen to make such an argument to you, I encourage you to respond by punching them in the face as hard as you can.

I’m American (Imster/Terhune)

Bootfoot

[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn't always work with Mac/Safari.]

Is it a matter of fact
Or just a matter of faction?
Don’t believe a word I say
When I show you my reaction

I can still hear you saying to her
“Don’t tell” from another room
All you have to do it want it
And someone will give it to you

You tell me how you feel
Tell me how you’re feeling
But I think the way you close your eyes
Is a whole lot more revealing

I remember each word you said
“There’s love behind every move”
Is this how you act behind me
While I take it from you?

Well, I wait for a train
Or I wait for the tide
Or I’m wasting my time
I thought that you were mine

I’m American
And I want mine
I’m American

You go out and get it
Is that the way?
You get what you want
In the land of the big and the brave

But I can still hear you saying to her
“Don’t tell” from the other room
All you have to do it want it
And someone will give it to you

Well, I wait for a train
Or I wait for the tide
Or I’m wasting my time
I thought that you were mine

I’m American
And I want mine
I’m American

Wait for a train
Wait for the tide
Wait for a train
Wait for the tide

Well, I wait for a train
Or I wait for the tide
Or I’m wasting my time
I thought that you were mine

I’m American
And I want mine
I’m American

This is from the Bootfoot MySpace page:

“Eleanor Imster and David Terhune wrote songs together and played them in a band called Bootfoot. Many friends, family, and a future husband, (Marc Fagelson) helped make the Bootfoot sound. Eleanor and David share a unique vocal blend, and their songs weave in and out of pop, folk, country and rock. Their CD “Bootfoot” contains 13 tracks that showcase this successful collaboration. It can be purchased by contacting bootfootmusic@yahoo.com.”

A few months back, the Independent had an article about neurobiologists at University College London who were studying the physical nature of hate. After conducting their experiments, these scientists discovered that the “hate circuit” in the brain was located in the putamen and the insula — the exact same regions activated by feelings of romantic love. No way!

In fact, their scans revealed only one major difference between the two emotional states: “Large parts of the cerebral cortex — associated with judgement and reasoning — become de-activated during love, whereas only a small area is deactivated in hate.” Science, you are killing me!

And once again lighting up my own worn and beleaguered putamen and insula, The Rolling Stones. This is me on acoustic, recorded live on Jeff Cobb’s KALX radio show, back in the Berkeley days. I think this later became the very first song the All Girl Band played at our very first gig.

Mixed Emotions (Jagger/Richards)

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A belated shout-out to a brief sequence in the movie Children of Men that always makes me smile. If you’ve seen the movie, I’m referring to the improbable romantic moment in the fleeing car where Julianne Moore and Clive Owen somehow manage to blow a ping pong ball back and forth between their mouths, through the air between the front and back seats.

While the film is rightfully famous for its stunning set pieces, this little bit of business is one of those inspired inventions where you go, Where the hell did they get that from? (The other characters in the car look on somewhere between aghast and amused at this hilarious left-field display.) It’s a brilliant bit of imaginative problem-solving, a vivid and unexpected means of conveying instantly an infinitude of vital emotional information that the movie doesn’t have time to slow down and show us any other way.

Clive Owen and Julianne Moore play Theo and Julian, estranged lovers who in-spite-of-or-is-it-really-because-of (that really ought to be one word) their estrangement still trust each other. Plot-wise, Julianne Moore’s character only exists to hand off the MacGuffin and then (spoiler alert) die tragically in an ambush, so she and Clive Owen have only two or three short scenes together. Given the structural parameters of the movie, there’s no time to develop their relationship properly, and their back story is officially given to us later on in the time-honored way, through expository dialogue. (Michael Caine, playing an old friend, tells Theo and Julian’s story to another character.)

But because of the ping pong ball sequence, we are given a fleeting glimpse of magic between them. What they have lost is shown rather than told. The rest of the movie gains enormous weight from this small marvel of ingenuity. Not only do Theo and Julian still trust each other, but, as it turns out, these two irredeemably dour people can still make each other laugh as well.

Till The Next Goodbye (Jagger/Richards)

All-Girl Band

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This is from A General Theory of Love (2000) by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon (M.D.s all). They are talking about how memory stores and shapes love, guiding our romantic choices in mystifying ways:

A scientific theory of memory is therefore a map of the soul. Every such diagram must attempt to delineate the mind’s Dark Continent: why do people possess emotional knowledge that leaves no conscious trace?

A lover tests the combination of himself plus serial others like a child juxtaposing jigsaw pieces until a pair snaps home. Love’s puzzle work is done in the dark: prospective partners hunt blindly; they cannot describe the person they seek. Most do not even realize, as they grope for the geographical outline of a potential piece, that their own heart is a similar marvel of specificity.

So, what makes your little heart go pitter-pat? Me, I’ve always been a voice man.

Which brings us to the forever incomparable Chrissie Hynde, standing steadfast and unblinking in the midst of this blazing conflagration from the Pretenders’ shamefully underrated second album. This particular song, incidentally, also makes a good answer to the question (should it ever come up), “Was James Honeyman-Scott really that good?” (The sheet music might even read: “Duet for girl and electric guitar.”)

The English Roses (Chrissie Hynde)

The Pretenders

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Just before it rains
And the wind whips ’round the balcony
And the sky closes
On the English roses

And she’ll be pacing
‘Round and ’round and ’round and ’round her room
But these storms always find her
To remind her

To the endless sky
Of pink over grey
She looks for an answer
But it’s too late

Maybe it’s true
Some things were just never meant to be
Maybe not

This is a story
Of fruit cut from the vine
Forgotten, left to rot
Long before its time

This is a story
About the girl who lived next door
Looking for someone to hold

A wish made on a star
Brought her here tonight
In the courtyard she waits
A thousand broken dates

But she holds the hymnal
Where so carefully pressed
Is the English rose
She laid to rest

It’s only a story
Flowers in full bloom
Bouquets in every room

This is a story
Of fruit cut from the vine
Looking for someone to hold

I finished only one book while on the road this summer, Harriet The Spy, but Harriet proved to be a most enlightening traveling companion — the perfect book at the perfect time. And, as it turns out, arguably the best book I have ever read about writing and living and what it really means to grow up.

11-year-old Harriet is a spy and a writer. Her meticulously honest observations fill notebooks. But Harriet’s cozy and well-ordered world falls to pieces when first, her nanny moves out, and then, her very private notebook is discovered by her classmates. These events effectively mark the beginning of the end of Harriet’s childhood.

As things spin wildly out of control, Harriet falls to pieces — she has to start learning quickly how to reconcile the demands of her muse with the demands of everyday life. This is a letter Harriet receives near the end of the book from her former nanny, Ole Golly — the kind of wisdom we should all be so lucky to have someone impart to us at any age:

Dear Harriet,

Now in case you ever run into the following problem, I want to tell you about it. Naturally, you put down the truth in your notebooks. What would be the point if you didn’t? And naturally those notebooks should not be read by anyone else, but if they are, then, Harriet, you are going to have to do two things, and you don’t like either one of them:

Another thing. If you’re missing me I want you to know that I’m not missing you. Gone is gone. I never miss anything or anyone because it all becomes a lovely memory. I guard my memories and love them, but I don’t get in them and lie down. You can even make stories from yours, but remember, they don’t come back. Just think how awful it would be if they did. You don’t need me now. You’re eleven years old which is old enough to get busy at growing up to be the person you want to be.

No more nonsense.
Ole Golly Waldenstein

The song below was recorded at Stuart’s, in San Francisco. At the time I was hanging out a lot with a girl known as The Travel Agent. She only listened to old standards, mostly on this musty AM radio station whose call letters I forget. We would listen as we drove around, and I would always turn it up for the Jo Stafford version of “You Belong To Me.” (The Travel Agent’s favorite was “Swinging on a Star.” When the song goes, “Or would you rather be a fish?” she would always unfailingly answer back, “Um, how long do I have to decide?”)

You Belong To Me (Pee Wee King/Redd Stewart/Chilton Price)

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“Peculiar Way” is from a batch of songs recorded back in the 90s at Kris Woolsey’s apartment in the West Village. In those pre-Garageband days, if someone got their hands on a decent four-track machine you simply had to take advantage. I forget who left the device at Kris’s house, or why, but its very presence in his living room demanded from us a long day of single-malt recording. I think we worked on 3 or 4 songs, new stuff of his and mine that we wanted to whip into shape.

The skeleton of this song came from a bunch of scratch cassettes I made in Florida, at my grandmother’s house, during one of many New-York-nervous-breakdown sabbaticals. I wanted it to foretell of a life-changing encounter, but in reality my life wasn’t changing that way and the song never got finished.

The nominal chorus came later, separately, and was a more characteristic expression of drunken resentment. I thought this provided a nice, truer-to-life counterpoint to the imagined epiphany. So, at Kris’s, with the help of a few tumblers of Laphroaig, I simply stitched the pieces together. And not completely successfully, I might needlessly add. (The All-Girl Band only played this song once, at a Coney Island gig where some poor kid got shot on the Boardwalk and we had to make our getaway dash in a loaner Humvee.)

But the song made more sense to me balanced out like that, despite the slapdash needlework. Occasionally you meet a person whose brief appearance in your life is both decisive and abrupt — someone who simply bowls you over, as instantaneous and elemental as a tidal wave. When the wave recedes (often carrying away many things you thought irreplaceably dear), the effect can leave you feeling disoriented and traumatized, or reawakened and revitalized. And more to the point, sometimes all of the above.

Peculiar Way

[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn't always work with Mac/Safari.]

What is peculiar ’bout the way
You came to me
Is I had nothing more to say
And suddenly

Knocked my eyes wide open
Like a castle by the sea
You knocked my eyes way out of focus

And then a most peculiar thought
Occurred to me
Going against all I’d been taught
And suddenly

Knocked my eyes wide open
Like a castle by the sea
You knocked my eyes way out of focus

You thought I was too drunk to remember
All the little lies that I was told
But the simple fact is I remember
Every single one
Every single one

People have been asking me when I’m going to post something about Halifax, but I’m not sure what more I can say other than I felt very much at home there, something I rarely feel in The Rotten Apple anymore.

Halifax is a spectacular city (er, I mean “regional municipality”) — historic, cosmopolitan, grimy, gorgeous, soulful and maybe even a little dangerous. Everything New York used to be but mostly isn’t anymore. The downtown is teeming with delicious food, used bookstores, music venues, public gardens, old Victorians, old stone and red brick buildings, a couple of colleges, and some very intriguing people. And it stays open late. All this surrounded by the Atlantic and a huge, ancient, and very active port. (Yeah, I know it’s not perfect — the global corporate revolution has certainly made its incursions even there, and a fair amount of tourist crap abounds, especially down around the “seaport” area.)

And I know we’ve talked before here about “geographical cures” and the very true and unavoidable fact that “wherever you go, there you are.” But a human being is just a coalescence of energy, in a constant state of flux and exchange with the energy of his or her environment. So it makes sense to me that certain kinds of environments would provide more spiritual resonance to some people than others, and that there are other kinds of environments which impose energy exchanges that are spiritually harmful to all.

The song below I wrote specifically for Amanda — her voice, her sensibility — and this version appears on her new album, Union Square. (We ended up finishing the song together, and she wrote about half the verse lyrics.) A song of romantic searching, yes, but there’s a problem: once you’ve reached a certain point of of Devastationalist stasis, is the disturbance worth the effort to go on looking? Put another way, if home is where the heart is, then where do you belong when you’ve got no heart left?

Show Me a Place (Shelley/Thorpe)

Amanda Thorpe

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Never wanted anything
And everything was fine
As long as there were cigarettes
And another glass of wine
Nothing in the world out there
Could ever bother anything of mine
I found a place so high
I’m never coming

Down into the wishing well
Is where I cast my eye
I saw my own black silhouette
Reflect against the sky
I stood and watched the pennies fall
Leaned against the cold stone wall
I made a wish so wild

Won’t you show me a place
Like the one in my mind
Where the days are sweet and long
In the green, green grass
With my hand in yours
Where the noise turns into song

Expectations crystalize
They’re scattered all around
I see them lying everywhere
Like my pennies on the ground
But I can’t hide from you
The light keeps shining through
I found a place so high
I’m never coming

Down into to the depths behind
The walls I built inside
The things I never wanted
The things I never tried
Everything was in its place
Everything was once so safe
I hold the glass so tight

Won’t you show me a place
Like the one in my mind
Where the days are sweet and long
In the green, green grass
With my hand in yours
Where the noise turns into song

Sometimes, the the best things you can do while you’re on the road are things you would ordinarily do at home anyway. In our nation’s capital over 4th of July weekend, we delayed a side-trip to Annapolis because we could not tear ourselves away from this year’s epic Wimbledon men’s final (which lasted over five hours including rain delays). We had no choice but to just sit there all day on the couch, glued to the wide-screen TV.

McEnroe was beside himself in the booth, and it was clear that this was one for the ages. Afterwards, when he went down to the locker area to interview the players, McEnroe was completely lit up by what we had all just witnessed — the ferocious and transcendent quality of the tennis on display, even up to the bitter end. He was gushing like a little kid.

Eventually he asked Federer, who was ever-gracious in defeat (one gets the impression that Federer and the equally gracious Nadal actually like and respect each other) if there was any consolation in knowing that he had just participated in what was arguably the greatest final in Wimbledon history. Federer smiled a kind of sick, sad smile and I don’t even remember what he answered. But in any case it was clear that the real answer was “no,” that there was no consolation at all in fighting that hard only to come up a whisker short.

And I thought of the many equivalent sporting events I’ve seen over the years, and I’ve always had the exact same feeling as Johnny Mac — that when you play in one of those it should offset the disappointment of losing. It should be more than enough just to have engaged in such a thrillingly high level of competition. That’s certainly how I would feel if it were me. (I am perhaps a bit too comfortable in seeing things from the loser’s perspective.) But of course to the Federers of this world, it’s not nearly enough. Champions play to win; it’s part of what makes them champions. Yet another stunningly obvious life-lesson I had never quite figured out before.

To help me sort it all out later, I was thankful for the company of Harriet The Spy:

I WILL NEVER FORGET THAT FACE AS LONG AS I LIVE. DOES EVERYBODY LOOK THAT WAY WHEN THEY HAVE LOST SOMETHING? I DON’T MEAN LIKE LOSING A FLASHLIGHT. I MEAN DO PEOPLE LOOK LIKE THAT WHEN THEY HAVE LOST?

And to top it all off, an aptly themed romantic melodrama from the Nightmares playbook.

Perfume

The Nightmares

[Click to play, right-click to download MP3. Doesn't always work with Mac/Safari.]

Hear the glasses clinking in the air
When I reach for one, well it’s not there
I light the room with candles one by one
I’ll burn a lot more things before I’m done

I was stranded, a dirty roadside
Stuck out my thumb and caught a ride
Ended up in an old saloon
The ceiling fans whirled me across the room

They sang, all that’s left of you is just a little perfume
All that’s left of you is just a little perfume

Well, I heard you were asking Danny how I was
That’s very kind, thank you very much
I do the crossword puzzle in the New York Times
But I can still remember different times

I was frightened, a dirty roadside
Hit my knees and there I cried
Later on I was in your room
The bottles on the dresser played forgotten tunes

They played, all that’s left of you is just a little perfume
All that’s left of you is just a little perfume

All that’s left of you
All that’s left of you dear darlin’ is the smell of your perfume