» Posts in Childhood
October 22, 2010
Rarely does a photograph inspire me as much as the jaw-dropper above does. I found it at the Huffington Post, which in turn snatched it from what I assume is Trent Reznor’s Polaroid collection. Actually, I don’t have a clue where it ultimately originated, nor do I want to know. Because the primary source can’t possibly live up to my imagination.
I like to think that the photo was found some years ago in a dented metal lunch box, on the backseat of an ivy-hugged T-Bird, which was parked alongside an abandoned hunting cabin in the north woods of Quebec. I like to think that there was a journal enclosed in that lunch box as well. I like to think that the journal starts out innocently enough, with tales of teenage optimism and lumberjacking aspirations. I like to think that a man named Pierre Beaumont enters the story at a certain point and he has the laugh of a magpie and he carries a jack-in-the-box that he’s always cranking, though the thing never opens, and when the young author asks him if it’s broken, Pierre simply puts a finger to his lips and says “the trees will drink our secrets.” And I like to think that on a night of sleet and whiskey, the author boards a canoe with Pierre and the two go in search “The Norwegian,” a notorious hermit who is said to possess a radio which is perpetually tuned to the sounds of woman washing their feet, but they lose their way when they flip the canoe, then decide to follow an albino fox through a dark hollow, at which point they come upon the fore-mentioned hunting cabin. Then I like to think that the journal changes, and mutates into a series of sketches and scrawls, of riddles and limericks, which appear to make no sense at first, until paired with the photograph above, and then a foggy portrait of an endless evening emerges, of a burlap sack full of masks, of a victrola, of a boy sewing his own eyelids shut and clapping on one and three, of a meal of mutton and Tang, of a game of William Tell, of a moonlit tango which makes the men blush with jealousy, of a hissing teapot, of third-degree burns, of a monkey with a shaved head and lobotomy scar, of a old man who speaks through a hole in his throat and says, “when I was just a boy my father took me to the fish market and we bought the largest fish they had, a five hundred pound marlin, and when we returned home, my father burned my bed and all my linens, then he sliced the marlin lengthwise with a letter opener and he told me that I was to sleep inside of its belly, and so I did, for fifteen years, just me and the marlin and the moonlight, and I was okay with this because I was boy and boys don’t know what life is supposed to give them next, and what life gave me next was a bear, a snarling, drooling, furry beast who stole the marlin and me and took us to a cave and in the cave there was a bucket and in the bucket there were marshmallows, and as the bear ate the marlin, I ate the marsmallows, until my stomach expanded and rounded me out, causing my body to roll down into the caverns and onto dark underground river, in which I floated for a while, both afraid and delighted, until I reached an opening and poured out into the Rainforest Cafe, where they were serving Rumble in the Jungle Turkey Wraps, and I ordered one of those and a nice cold sarsaparilla, and I waited for the judgement, but the judgement didn’t come, no, the judgement never comes, and I learned that the hard way, just as we’re all learning that now, deep in the gut of the world, and it’s times like these that I wish, I pray, my friends, with every bit of bone and bile in my body, that one of you kind souls remembered to bring a camera, cause we really should capture this moment…“
No Comments | Posted by Aaron under Childhood, Death, Mystery, Whaaaa? | Bookmark or Share
June 3, 2010
I have a friend who was a holdout for the cassette tape. Up until seven or eight years ago, he would only buy new music in cassette tape form. Absurd, I know, and as you could guess, I teased him mercilessly about it. When the music industry finally did away with the archaic format, he threw up his hands and joined the rest of the world. He accepted CDs into his life.
His reasons for sticking with the cassette ranged from his suspicion of format fads (CDs might go the way of the laser disc or DAT, he argued) to his thriftiness (why buy new equipment, when his “decks” worked just fine?). My friend came of age in the 80s, so nostalgia may have played a big part too, and honestly, I can’t begrudge him that.
Admittedly, there’s nothing cool about being nostalgic for cassettes. I’ve never been a vinyl guy, but I respect the people who scour the flea market tables and garage sale boxes, examining the grooves of old 78’s and confidently tucking their salvage under their arms. There’s purpose and a little bit of poetry in that. Vinyl has history, beauty, and acoustic integrity. Cassettes have none of the above.
But still, I am nostalgic for cassettes. I didn’t realize it until recently. Another friend, who is prone to bouts of pop philosophy when beer is on hand, can be blamed for my ill-advised wistfulness. He proposed that when the CD stabbed the cassette in the heart, and the CD-R and MP3 twisted the knife, not only did the cassette die. The album died too. I had to agree.
Consider this. The album as a concept was only fully realized during the short age of cassettes. The vinyl and digital ages are highlighted by ease of choice. Not digging a particular Hendrix solo? Just lift the arm and drop the needle on another groove and relax into the familiarity of “Purple Haze.” Not sure which Vampire Weekend song you heard on the latest Gossip Girl. Scan a few tracks until you hear that distinctive keyboard chords. Why bother with an entire album when you can simply spin the hits?
The cassette’s limitations were also its virtues. Fast-forward and rewind were labor-intensive operations, so listeners were forced to actually suffer through an artist’s indulgences. Spinning the hits on cassette just wasn’t a convenient option. By listening to an album front to back, tastes were acquired and grander ambitions bubbled to the surface. One came to appreciate an album as a whole, not as just a collection of songs.
As a teenager, sitting in the dark listening to my sister’s Pink Floyd tapes, I experienced something akin to an Almost Famous moment. I discovered that “Wish You Were Here” only had full resonance when sandwiched between the various parts of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” I gradually fell in love with “Southhampton Dock” while waiting for “The Final Cut” to kick in. This was not the first music that seduced me (that honor goes to the Muppet Movie soundtrack), but it was the first time I was seduced by the organization of music, the noble concept of the album.
That might not have happened with a record or a CD. It certainly wouldn’t have happened with MP3s. I would have logged onto ITunes, made my Pink Floyd greatest hits playlist and called it a day. I would have paired “Money” with “Another Brick in the Wall” and finished it off with “Learning to Fly.” Somewhere in England, Roger Waters would have felt a shiver go down his spine and absolutely no one would have been the better for it.
I still try to listen to albums front to back, no matter what the format. I hardly ever hit shuffle. But I must admit I’ve hit skip more than one time on Yo La Tengo and Guided By Voices. I shouldn’t necessarily be ashamed of that, but as a fan of both bands, I have a responsibility to trust them a little more. Relationships with musicians are like relationships with anybody. You must let eccentricities sink in, be willing to grant forgiveness, and endure patches of annoying feedback.
The same could also be said for mix-tapes. I used to have a box full of old mix-tapes under my bed. Mix-tapes are like time capsules—monuments to tastes, to the evolution of music collections, and to the efforts once expended in the name of puppy-love and friends-forever idealism. I will not step on Nick Hornby’s toes and write a mix-tape manifesto, but I will say that the mix-CD and ITunes playlist pale in comparison to the glorious mix-tape.
For the mix-tape requires genuine effort. From the scouring of shelves of music, to the pause-play-record-pause-play-record dexterity required of dubbing, to the handwritten liner notes, the elements of a mix-tape speak of dedication and romance. There’s no dedication involved in dropping a bunch of files from one computer folder to another, hitting burn, and loading up the ink-jet with jewel-case-sized sheets of paper. There’s absolutely nothing romantic about ITunes. And what’s to say the person you’ve presented with a mix-CD isn’t going to hit skip when that Califone tune doesn’t grab them right away? What’s to say they aren’t going to dump the file of Nina Simone covering “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” into the trash because they’re sick of you trying to sneak a little Bob Dylan past them.
In some ways, cassette tapes are also like letters. Remember letters? They were like emails with souls. Cassette tapes have souls too. And like letters, they’re messy and imperfect and personal. Forgive me some “things were better in my day” indulgence, but the hiss of a 5th-generation dubbed copy of Straight Outta Compton will always mean more to me than the crisp playback of the latest Drake joint. And sitting in a friend’s basement with a tiny screwdriver, trying to flip the reels on a Led Zeppelin cassette around so we could listen to “Stairway to Heaven” backwards feels a hell of a lot more subversive than exchanging torrents. Cassettes are tangible objects with tangible stories and sadly they have been relegated to the trash-heap and forgotten.
My cassette-dedicated friend has an IPod now. As do I. The IPod’s size and shape are vaguely reminiscent of a cassette. Only they hold more music—a whole lot of music. I am certainly thankful for that. Yet IPods will eventually be replaced too and IPod nostalgia will be deemed quaint and silly. There’s nothing quaint and silly about championing the experience of music, though. Format is tied into that experience. So let me mourn the death of the cassette tape, because it provided me, and many others, with genuine experiences. It shaped the way I listen. It exposed me to more music. It made me a curious and tolerant fan. Its sound wasn’t so great, maybe, but its sound will be missed.
2 Comments | Posted by Aaron under Childhood, Music | Bookmark or Share
May 4, 2010
I write this post with some hesitation. First off, the question in the title is not my own. It’s a search term that someone used to click-through to this blog. But my hesitation doesn’t arise from a fear that the quesioner might be reading the blog now, because I didn’t provide the type of information he or she seeks. They saw that I deal in pure ridiculousness and vowed never to return. The reason I hesitate is because it makes me sad. Every time I think about it. Writing about it is worse. It causes me to imagine two scenarios:
1. A boy has just started dating his first girlfriend. He adores her. He stays up late, writing poetry about her. He even imagines marrying her some day. But he’s not quite ready for that. Kissing comes first. He meets her somewhere quiet – a park, maybe a trail behind the school that leads to a creek. They hold hands. They sit on a rock and try to kiss. Their teeth crash together. They give it another go. It’s soft and sweet and not what either of them imagined. But it’s nice. They haven’t told anyone about their relationship yet. They like to imagine that their love is star-crossed, that their parents wouldn’t approve of something so intense and true. It’s all very Alex Chilton. The next day, the boy goes to school. He’s beaming. He’s not one to kiss and tell but he tries to steer conversations to his new girlfriend. He expects his pals to say things like, “she’s the greatest girl that ever lived,” or “she’s what rainbows are made of.” Instead they say, “That girl? She’s ugly. Even uglier than Penny Dobson.” It would be an understatement to say this deflates the boy’s sails. He wonders if he has to end it now before anyone finds out. But he’s not going to jump the gun. He’ll do his research first. He consults Google. He starts by searching “Are Any Girls Uglier Than Penny Dobson?” Not very helpful. So he goes general. “Are Some Girls Uglier Than Others?” The Indubitable Dweeb provides little help in this department, but other sites lead him down a rabbit hole to disillusionment and heartbreak.
2. A girl comes back from a family vacation to Florida. The women on the beaches were like nothing she’d ever seen in real life. Perfectly molded into their bikinis. Tan and TV-worthy. She’s grown past reading Judy Blume and now thumbs through her older sister’s copies of Cosmo. She doesn’t understand all of it, but that’s the appeal. In the cafeteria, she watches from behind her bagged lunch as the eighth grade girls come and go. She gauges their levels of development, imagines them in bikinis. Back at home, in the mirror, she takes a ruler and measures her nose, her ears, etc. She logs the measurements and wonders if there’s some computer program you can enter such things into. Does the data reveal incontrovertible facts? Still, she has a strong sense of what she really wants to know. It’s simple. It’s obvious. She feels almost stupid for writing it, because it’s something a kid would write. But in the back of her mind she thinks that maybe there’s a scientific study that proves conventional wisdom wrong, that exposes middle school cliques for what they are. She goes to Google. She does her search. She finds The Indubitable Dweeb. As she sighs and checks the other search results, her Mom calls her down to dinner. It’s her favorite – tacos. She decides to skip the sour cream this time around.
Yes, those scenarios make me sad. Yet now that I have thought about it more, they also give me hope. Of all the things you could ask the great and mighty Google, that question is one of the most innocent I have ever encountered. And should someone else end up here after searching the same thing, I can now answer that question definitively:
Yes. But, trust me, you’ve never met those girls.
1 Comment | Posted by Aaron under Childhood, Internet, Mystery | Bookmark or Share
March 23, 2010
I have a scar on my forehead, starting just below my current hairline. I “cracked open my skull,” as the neighborhood kids liked to say, at the height of my curly-haired moppetness. It was the result of a head-to-head collision during an intense garden hose fight. Six stitches later, I was fixed, but I was forever marked.
This was the early 80s. Forehead stitches, as well as dermatological pastiness, were Frankenstein’s stock in trade, and I was the proud possessor of both. I can’t count the number of times I was chased through elementary school halls by pitchfork wielding bullies. Well, maybe not pitchfork-wielding, but they certainly had some sharp barbs to poke me with. My hair wasn’t helping things either. You could swab a deck with the stuff. Since the barber crisis of the 70s had come and gone, afros weren’t cutting it anymore in my town. If you didn’t look like Ted McGinley, William Zabka or Michael Schoeffling, you might as well have been Curtis Armstrong. I only wish I was born a generation or two later. “Why?” you ask. Well let’s look at the evidence.
Forehead Scars
The boy who lived, and has the scar to prove it. That’s right. Harry Potter. Can you think of anything that would get you more hand-holding at a modern-day roller skating party? You can’t, because a Harry Potter scar bestows upon its owner a Fonzie level of chick-magnetism. It implies that you are a hero, but the soul of a bad-boy is always at the front of your mind. It’s the type of internal conflict that will keep the valentine box full and the pleas to see your patronus pouring in.
Ghost Skin
Thanks to Robert Pattison, visible cheek veins haven’t been this en vogue since they were casting for The Munsters. Vampire fanaticism is nothing new, but 13-year-old girls never hung posters of Bela Lugosi or Max Schreck on their walls. And it’s certainly not the Interview with a Vampire Brad Pitt that got them swooning more than 15 years back. All the libidinous metaphors aside, what distinguishes the current craze is its insidious, ubiquitous infiltration of bubble-gum culture. Most notably: Justin Bieber. He may not be some 100-year-old man who runs his incisors across your daughter’s neck, but he’s as pale-skinned as they come and his lyrics give away his agenda. His song Eenie Meenie features the chorus, “Eenie meenie miney mo. Catch a bad chick by her toe. If she holla (if, if, if she holla) let her go.” It’s nice to see Mr. Bieber takes no for an answer, but what happens if she don’t “holla?” He’s Canadian, you know? I don’t doubt that deep in the woods of Manitoba, Bieber’s got a log cabin full of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and ninja gear. And I don’t doubt that he stands on the roof of that cabin, all shirtless and pigment-free, and he screams his mantra into the endless Canadian night: “By the blood and souls of all shorties, I will never, ever die!“
Hair Nests
Dr. Spock must have added an afterword to one of his tomes imploring us to raise a bunch of Albert Hammond Juniors. Because kids these days look like rejects from Phoenix (the band, not the city…or the mythological beast). Go to any grade school and you’ll find the evidence that parents of all socio-economic stripes are against the clear cutting of hair. When I was a kid, the school nurse would make regular visits to our homerooms to perform lice examinations. We’d put our heads on our desks and she’d tickle our scalps with rubber-gloved fingers. Then, 45 minutes after she left, the classroom phone would ring and the teacher would call out names of children who were to report to the gymnasium. Never was there a less subtle outing of the lousy. In my day, the shamed would hang their heads as they shuffled to the door. Now, I bet they walk a proud gauntlet of high-fives and sprint to the gym hoping to learn that their tangled locks are harboring ticks.
Which all means…had I been born 20 years later than I was, my scar, my skin and my hair would have made me, quite simply, legendary. Or maybe I would have ended up a tan, unblemished boy with a nicely parted quaff and nary an invitation to slow dance. In any case, a man must ponder these things from time to time.
1 Comment | Posted by Aaron under Books, Celebrity, Childhood, Music | Bookmark or Share
