(Note to C. Watching this sequence of YouTube clips might actually make you more, rather than less, hysterical. But it is also derived from something Kathy did once, and Kathy is generally inspiring so I am inspired to try it. She wrote a poem for our little post-college writing group and read it with a MIDI version of the theme song from "Bosom Buddies" looping in the background. The poem ended with Kathy repeating the line "We can dance like spiders" about twenty times, once every four measures. This is a blogpost written to music and video. Multimedia for the multitudes. I'm not sure it works.)
During one of the few times in the last twelve years I have been single or just lonesome I spent a lot of time sleeping on buses with my head knocking on the windowpane and John Fahey playing through my tape player.
I listened to him on the bus that took moved me from Boston to New York on September 9, 2001, and then I listened to him on the subway ride that took me to the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001, where I stood on Floor 110 and looked at the ants carrying their briefcases below and then descended to buy an $.85 plain bagel from the subterranean Au Bon Pain. There was that horrible lonely weekend afterward, when my sublessor fled back to her parents on the Upper West Side, and left to my own devices - no money, no phone, no Internet, no buses, no friends - I could only think to walk around dazedly looking at the missing person posters all over the city with this tinny shit blasting in my ears. In fact, the only time I wasn't listening to John Fahey was the actual morning of September 11, when I walked from Rivington and Pitt to my job in Union Square around 9:20 listening to CBS News on the AM dial, with the two guys who usually did the morning's pep talks saying to each other, "Two planes can't be a coincidence. No way. This wasn't an accident. Someone was behind this." Then the news glut began, and I didn't listen to John Fahey again until the next weekend, when the happiest little girl on the eastern seaboard was borne by flying fairy bus far away from the plasticky smell of pulverized concrete, up Interstate 95 for 205 miles with "Desperate Man Blues" drowning out the motor's sound.
Somebody who loves John Fahey and old movies has combined his loves and put them on YouTube.
Last time I was single, disasters happened wherever I went. There was September 11. Also, on June 1, 2001, I arrived in Kathmandu; that day, nine members of the Nepalese royal family were murdered by the Nepalese crown prince. I know how narcissistic and dramatic this paragraph seems.
John Fahey was the last musician I ever dubbed onto a tape. Do you remember that process? Standing with your finger on the stop button to catch the last song before it gets cut off on the side? I dubbed this tape at dusk and remember that by the time it was through I was standing in the dark in A. Kaufman's room. John Fahey is what I listen to now when I want neutral noise. If I am studying in a room full of people chattering, I put my headphones in and set the volume at 1 and let his jangling steel strings be my background. There was a period in early 2003 when I wasn't sleeping at all - not even fifteen minutes a day - and after three or four days I started feeling crazy and would lay in bed awake from 3 a.m. until 9 a.m. trying to find the right combination of music and sleeping positions that would give me rest. I stuck to John Fahey, Iron and Wine, and Belle and Sebastian, but none of it worked. That spell of insomnia ended when I took a bus to New York - I was living in Cambridge at the time -at the end of the week and slept seven delightful hours on Walton Street in the Bronx with motorcycles gunning all night outside the window. I still woke up earlier than L and to pass the time I wrote a bad lullaby and played Dirty Harry ("Go ahead, punk" said to the mirror, etc.) with Isabell's toy guns until I realized that they were actually dildos. You were supposed to use the barrel of the gun.
Boring. Let us now watch a boy catch catfish, and those captured catfish leaping high against a curtain.
This is not meant to be so treacly and reflective a blogpost. I just have certain archetypes I return to and certain stories I tell again and again. This is actually just supposed to be a bunch of links to music I was listening to seven years ago because I just went on a YouTubing jag. For example, the Rolling Stones. Because the entire royal family had been massacred, the governance of Nepal was in upheaval and tourists were encouraged to route their trekking adventures to New Zealand instead of Nepal. This meant there were no Westerners for the lonely tourist to look at. This meant there were no locals to fawn for the lonely tourist's dollars because they busy were crying, watching people crying on the news, shaving their heads, and preparing obsequies. This also meant there was a noon curfew for a few days, after which one would hear loud cracking sounds in the distance. So I bought a guitar one morning before curfew, and some Rolling Stones tapes, and locked my hotel door and closed the windows and listened to "Love in Vain" over and over again.
What I like best about the above video is that nobody seems to care about this band. The man in the pompadour filling the screen for the first thirty seconds, the youth at the barricades, the woman rising from the grass and wiping her hands on the seat of her pants (there are two actually, if you watch the entire video - Where's Waldo?) - they all don't give a damn.
I bought up all the Rolling Stones tapes at one of the music stores in Thamel and then bought fistfuls of AA batteries (they only held charge for about two hours but they were $.10 for four) and took my tape player with me on my long bus rides around Western Nepal. At the end of my seven weeks there, I was spending on average 10 hours per day on a buses. I would wake up at three, ride a bus for seven hours, get out and ask hotel proprietors whether their prices and hours had changed from the year before, eat dhal bhat, and then get back on a bus that would take me to wherever I was staying that night. At first I hated the bus rides because the hilly roads I traveled on were melted by monsoon rains and another Let's Go researcher had died in a bus crash in Peru and I was frightened, and also American standards for incidental touching are much more conservative than South Asian standards so I felt inhuman for the first few weeks, when old ladies would brace themselves on my knees to stand up and market men would place their sacks of live chickens on my feet and everyone just stared at me, grinning. By the end of my time there I loved those rides. There was one ticket taker around my age, whose cartilage on his left ear was all twisted up and made him look like an elf. His job was to fold up the filthy single rupee notes the passengers gave him and put them into his chest pocket. There was no door on this bus. When the bus was rolling along, the ticket taker held onto the frame where the door would have been and leaned backwards out of the well, out of the bus, and into the curves in the road, like he was windsurfing. And he would catch me looking and then grin, and by this point I had learned to grin back. The soundtrack to this was "Angie," or Tim Buckley, or Hoyt Axton.
Look what I found! "Protection," also another late 90s-era favorite on the playlists of the morose. What a lovely video - or maybe I'm just a sucker for things that appear to be shot in single takes (see, e.g., Janet Jackson's "Rock With U," linked to below, or Russian Ark)?
On a 6 train uptown, Stephanie brought out her CD walkman (even in 2005 this was quaint) and popped in a blank CDR and beckoned me to put on her headphones. "This was my favorite song," she declared. I heard the opening drumbeat of "Protection" and then took the headphones off and said, "This was also my favorite song!" It was more evidence that we were meant to be together forever. Tracy Thorn's voice makes both of us feel contemplative and passionate, and Massive Attack's spare rhythm makes both of us feel like things are about to fall apart. Then she forwarded a couple tracks to the Pussycat Dolls' "Doncha" and explained how this song was the reason she wrote "Doncha Wish Your TA Was An Employee?" on the poster she carried in small circles on the graduate student picket line in front of Bobst. I felt a swell of affection, pride, and lust for the way she effortlessly combined what was cool and what was political.
Why not Russian Ark itself? Oh, the YouTube choices are disappointingly thin, but you get a glimpse of the thrilling mazurka sequence in this one.
And for the hell of it, why not Rear Window, too, which I also learned to love during a single spell. The "Protection" video reminds me of it. The trailer below captures what I like best about it. The horror/suspense is incidental; the point is the movie's affection for the weird, manic, repetitive, lonesome things people do at their rear windows when they think no one is watching, and the weirdness and mania and lonesomeness even of the person who watches. (And then of the person who watches all of them, on a screen! The meta is boggling.) I liked Disturbia but it was a completely different movie, much more about Shia LeBoeuf's twitchy teen persona and creepiness than love.
I've lost track of what I was trying to say. Oh yes, the first song is called "I'm Gonna Do All I Can For My Lord." It is a resolution for dark times. Lettuce prey:
We can dance like spiders
We can dance like spiders
We can dance like spiders
We can dance like spiders
We can dance like spiders
We can dance like spiders
We can dance like spiders
We can dance like spiders
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