All week I've been thinking, "we are stardust." All of us, even if we don't want to be, or wish others weren't. We are, as Joni says, "billion-year-old carbon."
Considering this perspective, time means nothing. A day, a few hours, are meaningless when it comes to galactic evolution and the point in the formations and mergers and deaths that we were spit out of the elements.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation
No one told me about Bruce. It sounds dumb, but I didn’t understand fully how deep he is, how troubled, how truly bardic. See, he was the loquacious songs on the radio, the chronicler of “real” America guy of Born in the USA and “Born to Run,” and, between ‘83 and ‘84, the perpetrator of a long-ass video I had to sit through time and again waiting for “Rio” or “Union of the Snake” to show up on MTV. I’m on limited time, JJ and Alan, and, now that I think about it, what the hell were they doing playing this song from 1973 and video of a 1978 concert? At over 7 minutes, my guess is filling dead air.
Speaking of MTV, this one’s straight from his prime time there, though I experienced it mainly through the radio, having become occupied with things other than sneaking as much MTV as I could in drips and drops and when babysitting.
I finished his autobiography today. Now that I’m not, I can say I was inside the man’s mind for a good portion, if not all, of that book, to the point that reading it at bedtime resulted in insomnia.
Too much to digest, and too much to discuss (yet).
I have a no Carole King rule. I lunge to switch the radio to another station or skip the track, whether in a car, boat, plane, or my own home. But I’m letting myself listen to this one because the internet radio is showing the Tapestry album cover—and this track doesn’t whine and depress like some of the others do. This one is upbeat, but the subject is still a huge bummer.
No, it’s still the cover that draws me. I used to linger over it when I would review all of the albums in the cabinet or that were spinning on the turntable around ages 7, 8, 9 or 10–whenever I could handle the stereo and its components undisturbed. I must have been shown how to put the records on without damaging them, as I’d done to basically all of my Disney records on my own plastic in-its-own-carrying-case turntable. Slide it down the spindle, gently lift the arm, apply some—not a lot!—pressure to grasp the handle on the head shell, and whatever you do, DON’T DROP IT ON THE RECORD.
I remember studying album covers more than those tutorials. And Tapestry’s struck me A woman, alone, and...barefoot? I couldn’t understand it. Women on the other record covers in the cabinet, like Marilyn McCoo on a 5th Dimension record, wore fancy outfits, coordinated with the background or others, and were posed carefully. Here was a woman in her house, sitting in the window with a cat, and who can’t be bothered to put on shoes.
What kind of crystal ball was this record that I wholly do not like?
This one comes from somewhere between convention and instinct. Marking the start of a new time, though if you ask the birds and the trees being smothered by snow outside right now, they don’t care, don’t know, don’t need it. They just need to stay warm and alive, and they have been preparing for this fallow time a while ago, driven by the almighty instinct.
Me, too? I guess I have been applying that guide inside (forgive the PSA and/or morning drive radio speak), preparing for winter’s starkness and solemnity. Somewhere behind it are outrageous colors, ease in the air...and the purple banana?
Reviving this, since this ungovernable and infinite archive we are "on" right now shows me that I skipped last year.
None of this "need it more than ever" stuff--that's marketing lingo by now.
Let George say it:
In his autobiography, Harrison wrote that the song “is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord, and whoever likes it.”*
*quote thanks to this piece, which I will have to dig into (or steal the idea)
If no one can understand why I need to listen to this song over and over and over and over, they are living in the middle of the ocean.
This one kept my head up for a time. Happened across it, NPR probably, it burned through a haze, sun in fog.
Everything is set in motion, and then it's set again, and again. Pain burns away what doesn't matter. God damn, that match hurts when you'e holding it, but, later, it's a charred tip of wood or paper, it's an ash, it's the imprint of fire that gave light to something bigger and that has a purpose.
I was dipping into the internet vacuum, emotions sucked up by others' dusty stories.
Since I don’t really live there any more, when I'm sucked in, it really, um, sucks.
I’d rather live in a dark November of another time, when I was busily preparing for one creative thing or another, planning travel, planning shopping. Going out or making strategies for when I am out. Or immersed in school, people.
Or walking shimmering Loop sidewalks in the early evening with a list in mind. Most of those walks were the function of moving through that list, completing that list, a blur of dashes and things to buy inscribed on a work post-it. Detergent, replacement earrings (again), and the beginnings of gifts, since it's early December or late November.
The walks I remember are when I was--let myself be spontaneously sidetracked. Dip into this hotel lobby, lean way back and take in the Christmas Tree, where ever it was before Millennium Park existed, or --yes! the Puppet Bike!
Whether I took it in or not, there was life all around.
Today, where I walked, I looked at dead trees and dead leaves. Only the water moving, and a deer casually chawing, but always alert.
This doesn't have much to do with this song, other than I remember it was November dark and life was moving a lot when it was out.
It’s hindsight, but the summer of 2001 was so carefree. Oh, I had cares, listlessly pushing around the last pieces of a heart broken in the spring, really filling out the contours of some petty grievances with friends while becoming more friends with the friends who would be my tight friends in the next ten years, the exhilarating feeling of being generally peeved and deliciously, frightenedly, independent.
But from here, oh, here, I see myself and us all and because we had no idea what was coming, all of June-July-August is just aglow. Or whatever art practice descriptors apply: a bas-relief of freedom and fun, a monograph forever preserved, blah and blah.
I don’t know. Most of what I saw was from over the handlebars of the bike: the vanishing point of the L tracks over Lake street heading west, the discovery of dried, spilled chocolate on the street next to Blommer’s Chocolate factory,
The smell of the lake and acrid, cooked chocolate, and sewer gas from manhole covers in the Loop and pissed-in corners, and Coronas.
I bought this tape at Coconuts, which was in the new-ish retail space on Damen, Across from the Pontiac. Then I must have taped the most suitable songs for biking onto a second tape, abutting it with Madonna and...god, what else? Do I still have that tape? I don’t think I do. In my haste to move on and shed items (and after almost two decades of moving all my tapes around, I got rid of these mixes. I must look for it.
And, later, maybe I will think back on a more recent we-didn't-see-it-coming arc of sky, and what I saw under it, drawn-out September-to-February sunsets from Brown line windows, buildings moving past me, and me, always moving.
Oh, how many times did I play this on the Y-Not II jukebox? When I discovered it? I wish I could remember that first time I saw it spin past, and what number it was? The juke at the Y-Not looked like...? Was it the rounded dome or the broad table style box? There were stick-up buttons, the kind that satisfy when pushed because they're going in about half an inch.
What was I even doing there? Because it's what I did, what you did when you were 24, 25 years old and still exploring the contours of freedom since you were a teenager only less than a decade before? A lot of young adults accomplish a lot in those years. I remember aching with the understanding that I wasn't doing that--that accomplishing (something). Not raising hell, either. In the middle, having fun.
If what exists from that time is not a credit to my name but a memory of a feeling stitched across time by music, I'm okay with that. You were doing something all along. Pushing buttons that still satisfy.
