Archives for the month of: September, 2005
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All’s more or less well that more or less ends

September 16, 05 //
3

It’s been, I realize, an alarmingly long time since I was actually proud of anything I’d done at work. I haven’t been ashamed of the work I’ve been doing since I started my current job, by any means; I’ve worked hard at everything that’s come my way, and more gratifyingly, I’ve thought hard about all of it—and enjoyed doing so. And believe me, I know full well what a blessing it is to get to feel that way. But I haven’t had all that much opportunity yet to do the best that I think I’m capable of, particularly in my narrow little area of specialization in my still relatively obscure field. A couple of weeks ago, though, I picked up a project that I could really get my teeth into. It occupied my thoughts even when I was nowhere near the office, but not in a bad way: it was a good challenge, and one that I was more than a little nervous about my ability to meet. It’s a project that I was sharing with a more experienced co-worker, but he’s got so much on his plate that he had to limit the amount of time he could put into this one, and he ended up being a project manager more than an IA on it. I like him and respect him, and there was some added pressure because this was our first time collaborating, and I didn’t want him to think I was a complete idiot.

The first full week was spent just understanding the site, the product, and especially, why the navigation wasn’t working as well as it could. Navigation is my thing, after all, and as I declared aloud to no one in particular during a particularly frustrating hour of working with this one, bad navigation makes my teeth hurt. It’s kind of a complex product, at least for me, because my small area of geek knowledge doesn’t encompass this particular type of product, so it really did take a while for me to get my head around it. But gradually, with much effort and occasional insights at odd times (in the shower, among other places), a concept began to come together.

I started sketching it out this week, did a lot of trying out ideas and discarding them, and wasn’t feeling particularly frustrated—even though the project was due today—until I woke up on Tuesday with the flu and a complete inability to think. I thought I would actually have a productive day that day, because I was going to work at home, where I sometimes get more done…but instead, I spent almost the entire day asleep. (I e-mailed the relevant folks at work at 7:45 a.m. to tell them I was going to go back to sleep for a little while and then work at home, and “a little while” turned out to be five hours; I woke up six minutes before the scheduled conference call with the client, which fortunately was exactly enough time for me to force myself into a simulated state of coherence.) Wednesday was pretty productive, good progress was made, and I started the final nav structure that afternoon. Worked on it some more on Thursday morning, then had a small “eureka!” moment, where I hit on a structure that was new, logical, and even sort of streamlined. (Streamlined isn’t my strong suit; I strive for concision in navigation, but I’m naturally prolix, and sometimes it trickles into my work in spite of my best efforts.)

Unfortunately, the network at the satellite office where I work is vaguely glitchy. It isn’t always, but we’ll have whole weeks when there will be random network dropouts for about twenty or thirty seconds, and then before we’ve even really noticed, we’ll get one of those annoying “you have been reconnected to [network name here]. Offline files are available for synchronization.” Thursday was one of those days, but the weird thing is that the first dropout didn’t happen until right after I had dutifully saved my most recent, post-eureka-moment file with an updated name so I would know it was the latest version. Then we had the network glitch, and Visio crashed. When I brought it back up, it recovered…the other file, the earlier one with the earlier name, and didn’t show the newly saved file in the recovery pane at all. So I tried to open the file from its folder, and got a “this is either not a Visio file or it’s been corrupted” message. It was almost 4:00 p.m., and I had lost, I think, about four hours worth of work.

In the greater scheme of things, this was utterly trivial. For one thing, although it was kind of tired right then, my brain was still inside my skull, and the prospect of recreating the work was daunting but not actually unimaginable. For another, with all the bad news that’s been battering the world, and especially the Gulf Coast, recently, it’s just really hard to feel too tragic about losing a stupid Visio file. And a co-worker and friend had received some really horrible news that day. So I was able to keep things pretty well in perspective, I’m happy to say. I made some fussy noises and wrote a comical e-mail about it to a couple of co-workers and whimpered softly to the heroic and very sympathetic tech support guy who did his best to help me/gently inform me that I was SOL. Then I stepped away from the project for a while, did some other little administrative-y things that needed to be done, went home, relaxed a while, and reconstructed the work until about 1:00 a.m. I didn’t get that far, but just getting it back on track made me feel better…even though I was convinced that the reconstructed version wouldn’t be nearly as good as the original.

Today, I got all the way back into it, finished reconstructing the nav sketches, and started doing the detail work. It took longer than I’d hoped, but I actually improved it by putting in the extra time. And by 5:00 p.m. almost exactly, I sent it off to my co-worker so he could look it over before sending it off to the client. Then I sat at work for half an hour (he was up at our other office) and waited for him to call me and tell me it was unusable and just how had I managed to get hired for this job, anyway? No such call came, fortunately, but when I checked e-mail at home after dinner, there was his note to the client, praising my work and giving the bulk of the credit to me (unnecessarily, since his contribution was beyond essential). And you know what? I’m not going to take the bulk of the credit, but I think I did pretty damn well. It’s a fairly original approach, it follows sound principles without adhering to them as though they were unbreakable laws, and most important, I think it represents an improvement over the current system. So I’m actually proud of myself.

It’s all proprietary and top secret and so forth, so I can’t even say what the site is, much less post the URL when/if it launches, the way I’d like to, so for all anyone reading this knows, I’m lying and the whole thing sucks. But I don’t think so, for once. I think I did a pretty decent job doing what I love to do, and I really can’t ask for much more than that.

Back to the past

September 15, 05 //
10

…or at least to the Speedies, who were in the New York Times this past Sunday, so maybe now it’s superfluous for me to write about them. Or maybe it means that I have to finish what I started writing about them before the laptop (have I mentioned I hate laptop keyboards? Let me mention it again) ate the entry. (Note to self: hit “save and continue” constantly. After I lost half a day’s work today—good work, the first bit of work at my new job that I was actually proud of, and was even planning to blog about—because Visio decided to crash right after I saved the file and then wouldn’t recover it, my mantra is going to be “Hit save every five seconds” for the rest of my life. But I digress.)

The Times article, like my lost post, focuses on the sudden revival of the song “Let Me Take Your Photograph” via a remixed version that’s being featured in an HP commercial. The article uses Gregory Crewdson, former Speedie and now famous photographer and Yale professor, as its focal point, which seems appropriate to me because in a way, he was my focal point for the band too. Back in my freshman year of college, I moved in with the two frontpeople of a semi-local band, Tina Peel (some of whom later went on to become the much better known Fuzztones); the female half of the couple, Deb O’Nair (real name Carol Krautheim), was a friend of a friend, and the apartment was on a great block in the East Village—this was 1979, and the East Village was barely starting to gentrify, but even then, this was a great block—and my share of the rent was $117/month. So it didn’t seem to matter that after four years of a really longass commute from my family’s apartment on the Upper West Side to my high school in the East Village, I was subjecting myself to almost the exact same commute in reverse, only a few stops longer, from the apartment in the East Village to college up in Morningside Heights, in upper Manhattan. (And adding a ten-minute-on-a-good-day walk to the subway to the mix, since we lived between Avenues A and B and the most logical subway stop to go to was way over on Eighth Street/Astor Place and Broadway. But I digress.) And for a while, till my roommates became totally insufferable, it was a great setup, because I was Miss Punk Rock then anyway, and it didn’t matter that I missed most of my 9 a.m. biology classes that first semester (a small problem since I was a bio major at the time) because I was staying out every night at Club 57 or my beloved Tier 3 or Hurrah or wherever, and even on nights when I stayed in, my roommates had to walk through my bedroom when they came in at 4 a.m. and open the squeaky door to their bedroom because it was a railroad flat. It didn’t matter; I was living exactly the life I’d wanted to lead for years.

Tina Peel’s manager was also one of the partners (owners? managers? I can’t remember anymore) of the great Upper West Side club Hurrah, so we were there all the time even when Tina Peel weren’t playing (that is, when I wasn’t hanging out with my high school friends at Tier 3, a club so brilliant that I can’t even describe it adequately), and partly because of my own connections (I wrote for New York Rocker, and I knew some people who knew some people, that was how it went then) and partly because of my roommates, I got to meet all sorts of bands, both touring ones (hanging out with Madness at Irving Plaza remains one of my fondest memories, though not quite as fond as my memory of hanging out with the Gang of Four on their very first US dates…but that’s really a story for another day) and local ones, including the Speedies.

Back then, the NYC teen punk scene had some really silly rivalries, none of which anyone took very seriously, but there they were. I was spending a lot of time with some little girls (I’m not being condescending there; in addition to being four years younger than me, they really were little–the tallest was 5′0″, I think) who didn’t actually go to my high school, or at least didn’t go there for long, but were vaguely affiliated with it—it was kind of a small scene, and everyone knew someone who went to my high school. I knew them through a guy named Allan Hart, who was one of maybe six or seven punks in my high school when I was still there. Anyway, these little girls and their crowd, the fringe of which I sometimes lurked on, were Stimulators fans. The Stimulators were a hardcore punk band, known mostly for their extraordinarily young (and rather talented) drummer, Harley Flanagan, who I think was about 12 at this time. He was what gave them their notoriety, but they were a good band regardless, and always fun to see live. (And in a weird confluence of eras of my musical life, they gave Soul Asylum their original name: the Stims’ slogan was “Loud Fast Rules,” and the Soul Asylum boys had no idea who the Stimulators were, but they saw the slogan on a photo of the back of someone’s jacket and liked it, in kind of a semi-ironic way, enough to call their band that before changing the name to Soul Asylum. But yet again, I digress.)

Anyway, if you liked the Stimulators, you weren’t supposed to like the much poppier and sweeter-sounding and “nicer” Speedies. There are those who were there then who will now deny that those rivalries existed, but trust me, they did; when I started becoming friends with the Speedies as people, I always had to make sure none of my Stims-fan friends saw me. To complicate matters further, the Speedies had a different sort of rivalry with a semi-local (half from NYC, half from the Westchester suburbs of Larchmont and Mamaroneck) band called the Student Teachers. I loved the Stims and got into them because I wanted to be in with that in crowd, but I purely adored the Student Teachers, who were smartypants but melodic, depressive but catchy, and totally irresistible. (Their guitar player, Philip Shelley, went on to go to Columbia at the same time that I did, and we were friends; he and a later-legendary guy named Ned Hayden, who didn’t go to Columbia (he went to Clark) but spent so much time there that he might as well have, wrote some truly amazing songs together.) Gosh I loved the Teachers. And if you were a Teachers fan, you were really supposed to hate the Speedies.

It wasn’t actually that hard to hate the Speedies, because despite having a good ear for melody (mostly courtesy of their bass player, John Carlucci) and some great guitar playing (thanks to Eric Hoffer and Greg—he was Greg then—Crewdson), they were incredibly annoying due to the insufferable mannerisms of their singer, John Marino. I can’t really imagine what it was like to be gay in high school in that era, and I know a lot of John’s campiness was defensive, but that still didn’t make him a good or even tolerable singer. The fact that he sang in a fake British accent half the time didn’t help; Joey Ramone could get away with that, but only Joey. (When I first heard the remix of “Let Me Take Your Photograph” in the HP ad, I thought it was not a remix but a cover, because John Marino redid the vocal, I guess, and he toned the Brit accent and the mannerisms way down.)

So I didn’t have any trouble maintaining allegiance to the Stims and the Teachers…except that John Carlucci was really good friends with my roommates from Tina Peel, Deb and Rudi. He still lived with his parents in Queens back then, so he stayed at our apartment a lot when he didn’t want to make the trek back to Queens, and even when the two bands weren’t sharing a bill, he’d often come over just to hang out. I had a sort of vague, half-hearted crush on him; he was incredibly cute, so I knew he was way out of my league (even back then, when I had a great body and lots of style), but he was so adorable that it seemed almost silly not to have at least a little crush on him. He was also a sweetie, not the brightest guy on the planet, but good-hearted and lots of fun to be around. And through him, and through Tina Peel and the Speedies playing an increasing number of shows together, I got to know the rest of the band (except for John Marino—he never seemed to register my existence, which was fine with me). I honestly don’t remember Alan, the drummer, very well at all, except that he was a nice guy. I remember that Eric was a sweetie, and even then, his academic brilliance was obvious; when I read that he had gone on to work at Apple (and Sun Microsystems, I think) and was one of the developers of QuickTime, I wasn’t even faintly surprised. Eric was quiet and a little shy and tended to huddle quietly in the corner with his girlfriend, whom he’d been with forever, but I still considered him kind of a friend.

But it was Greg who was really my pal. Greg had a girlfriend too in those days, and I don’t think we were ever interested in each other romantically even on a theoretical basis; at any rate, there was a sort of tacit agreement between us that we were friends and nothing more. But we were sure good friends; he was one of those people you sometimes meet and instantly feel like you’ve known forever. All those memories are kind of hazy now, but I remember that as soon as I walked into the backstage area of whatever club they were all playing, he and I would gravitate toward each other and just talk and talk and talk. “Soulmate” would be way, way too strong a word, because we didn’t spend that much time together and it wasn’t that intense, but he was someone who I just clicked with, in that magical way that doesn’t happen all that often.

None of it lasted all that long. Roommate Rudi (real name: Glenn Dalpis) was truly hideous to live with—he was 26 then, the same age as my oldest brother, and he had the maturity level of a particularly immature 12-year-old—and ultimately, I fell out with them and moved back home for a while. After that, I didn’t go to Speedies gigs much, and eventually I stopped going at all. I’d still see John Carlucci (who was always friendly to me) from time to time at shows, but somehow I rarely ran into the other guys. I moved farther uptown, closer to school, made friends there and started paying more attention to Britpunk than to the local scene, and so Eric and Greg, my favorite Speedies, just sort of slipped out of my world and eventually out of my memory; it wasn’t until a number of years later, when I started to see Greg (who was by then Gregory) written up in the Village Voice or even The New Yorker, that my fond memories came back to me. I was overjoyed for him that he’d become a success, and I went to see some of his exhibits and was very impressed, but not surprised; he wasn’t quite the conspicuous genius that Eric was, but he was smart as hell himself, and gifted, and I was always glad to see him do so well. I’d be truly surprised if he remembered me at all anymore, but I remember him, with great fondness and good feeling.

But now they’re back, those Speedies, on my TV screen on a regular basis (they played the hell out of the HP ad during the US Open). Not that long ago, I finally managed to find an MP3 of a really wretched quality live recording of my favorite Student Teachers song, “Christmas Weather” (I had the single, bought it when it came out, but it’s long since disappeared, on a site that Teachers’ lead singer and frontguy David Scharff set up, and that was a thrill too. A better musical thrill, I might add—the Teachers are still a better band. Old rivalries die hard, I guess. And those old memories, vaguer and vaguer all the time now, are all good ones, so even though every single one of the Speedies seems to have done just fine (better than fine, really) in their post-punk-teen life, I hope they’re making some big money off that ad. In my heart, if not necessarily in my ears, they deserve every penny.

On not hating your friends, Internet friendships, and other stupid things I have said

September 14, 05 //
0

That post the other day garnered a little more attention than expected and, I’m afraid, caused some pain to people I truly didn’t intend to cause pain to, so I think some clarification is in order.

One, it was a passing feeling that didn’t pass as quickly as I hoped it would but did, in fact, pass. Turns out I was coming down with a flu on top of all the other bodily damage I did over the weekend, and that can’t have helped. Also turns out that though my depression is being held at bay/controlled more effectively now than at any time in recent memory, it hasn’t actually gone away completely, something I need to keep in mind. I obviously felt strongly enough about what I knew, intellectually, to be a passing feeling that I felt I had to post about it, so I didn’t retract the post. But I do think it’s important to note that it reflected a (longer than anticipated, but still brief) moment in time, not a permanent state of mind.

Two, and perhaps more important, it was very explicitly not my intent to denigrate the very notion of Internet friendships, and if the post came across that way, I’m more sorry than I can say, because most of the important friendships I’ve formed over the last decade have been through the Internet, and I would never for a minute suggest that they are somehow less valid than friendships formed in more conventional ways. (I hesitate to even use the word conventional, because nowadays, the Internet is just as conventional a means of finding friends and lovers as anything else, really.) Sitting in that room on Saturday night, with some of the best friends, Internet or otherwise, that anyone could ask for, I knew that they were people who loved me and cared about me and “got” me; I just couldn’t feel it, not right at that moment. If I’d just gone to bed early and decompressed for a while, I don’t think the feeling would have even occurred to me. But there it was, and the fact that it was happening in a group of people who matter so much to me was what made it especially baffling, and troubling.

Maybe it’s too easy to say I’m over it now…but I’m over it now. It was a feeling that was real, and disconcerting, but it’s gone, and that’s all I’ll say about it. The subject of friendship in general, that’s something I hope/plan to continue talking about, because it’s kind of the great puzzle of my life in many ways (along with more mundane puzzles, like “how do they get those ships into bottles, anyway?”). But I’m afraid I’ve inadvertently made it sound like I don’t value the friends I’ve made through various music lists and through Twangfest in particular, and nothing, really, could be farther from the truth. (Just as a single example, I literally don’t know how I would have gotten through the last, say, seven or so years without my friend Marie, who has been as true and loyal a friend as anyone could ever ask for. And then there’s my husband, who I technically met in person before we started corresponding by e-mail, but who still started out as part of my Internet world, and I wouldn’t trade him for anything in the world—”real” or “virtual”— either. Okay, that’s two examples.)

So, enough about that for now. Onward to some musical stuff: I just recently bought a record by the traditional Aran Isles singer Lasairfhiona Ni Chonaola, and yeah, I admit that I bought it partly because I wanted to own a record by someone with a name as complex and beautiful as that (and learn to pronounce it, which I have), but it’s also one of the more wonderful records I’ve heard in the recent past. I can’t honestly say that my listening habits are tending back toward Celtic and mainstream country lately, because I’m actually listening to just as much indie-ish rock as I have for the last year or two, maybe slightly more. But somehow I’ve found a way to bring the country and Celtic stuff back into my frame of reference, and after volunteering at the local Irish fest a couple of weeks ago, I’ve really been in the mood for the Celtic stuff. So I’ve been on a teeny bit of a buying binge there, and so far I haven’t been disappointed: in addition to Lasairfhiona’s record, I picked up two by Cathie Ryan (one of many former singers for Cherish the Ladies) that I’m loving. Next up, I think I’m going to buy something by the Old Blind Dogs, whom I half-heard at the Irish Fest and was favorably impressed with. And after that? Irish lessons, for real this time.

Hate Your Friends

September 12, 05 //
5

…is the title of the first Lemonheads record,* and any direct relevance it has to this post is a little tricky for me to write about because if anyone still reads this blog—and I have my serious doubts about that—they are my friends, or at least people I know.

But I’m having serious issues with friendship, and specifically with some of my longest-standing friendships, right now. “Longest-standing,” in this case, includes people I’ve known for about eight or nine years, I guess, which for me is practically the equivalent of a lifelong friendship for many people; I’m always amazed by and envious of people who are still friends with folks they’ve known since high school or grade school or whatever, because I’m sure not.

In fact, I’m worse at maintaining friendships for any length of time than anyone I’ve ever met. One of my best friends from high school stays in sporadic touch despite my failure to reciprocate in any sort of timely fashion, and the same goes for some of my friends from my just-post-college days in Austin, TX, but that’s about it. I don’t think I’ve talked to any of my college friends since 1990, the year my first husband and I got married. I have a stalwart friend and former co-worker from my Minneapolis years who refuses to let me drop out of his life entirely, and I’m grateful beyond words for that, especially since the rest of my Mpls. friends** finally gave up on me a year or so ago.

With a couple of notable and still painful exceptions,*** my friendships usually end because of distance or a sort of natural growing apart (at least, I think that kind of thing is natural; I am so bad at friendship and human contact in general that I honestly don’t know), not because of fights or one of us suddenly deciding we hate the other or really any active hostility. And maybe that’s an entirely typical experience, especially for someone who’s changed major aspects of life as frequently as I have; like I said, I don’t really understand the way friendship works for other people, so I don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s just that I take it harder than I should when friendships change or dissolve. But of all my many personality failings—and there are a lot of them—I’ve always considered my inability to sustain/manage/”do” friendships the biggest and most damaging of them.

Sometimes I think it’s because I’m such a loner, but then again, sometimes I wonder if it’s the other way around, if I’m a loner because I avoid human contact because I’m so awful at it. I know that when I’m in social situations for more than an evening, I need to hide for days, sometimes weeks, afterwards. I don’t know if that’s something I should be actively concerned about and trying to change, or if it’s okay that I just need time to myself after time with other people; it’s just another of those things about human contact that I don’t seem to get.

And okay, I’m not saying I hate my current crop of friends. (I wouldn’t say that even if I felt it, because it would be bad manners to say the least.) But this weekend, in the company of several of the ones I’m ostensibly closest to, I had what I sometimes think of as a “Bye Bye Blackbird” moment, because of the lyric “No one here can love or understand me…”: I was talking and laughing and drinking and apparently having fun with all of them throughout the weekend, but by Saturday night, it had gradually started to feel like pretty much none of them understood or even knew or cared about me. (Yes, I know how self-pitying that sounds, and is, and I hate sounding that way; one reason I sometimes think I really do need to become a hermit is that I don’t like myself when I’m self-pitying—does anyone?—and I think it’s a good idea for me to avoid people and things and situations that make me not like myself.)

The feeling subsided some, especially after a totally painless and non-fraught short social encounter with someone not in that crowd later in the weekend, but it didn’t pass entirely, and it hasn’t yet. I don’t think any one thing or person triggered it, and I can’t put my finger on why or when I started feeling that way, but I did, and it wasn’t fun, boy howdy. It didn’t make me not like the people involved, but it threw me, badly. Driving home from St. Louis, I spent most of the 225 miles in tears, because I was suddenly starting to think about tossing my whole life out the window yet again and moving somewhere else and not knowing any of the people I know now.

I’m not going to do that, and even when I was feeling like doing it I knew I wasn’t going to do it or even seriously entertain the idea of doing it, because despite my apparent inability to learn from my previous mistakes, evidently one thing I have successfully learned after doing it one too many times is that just throwing out my current life and moving to a different city is something I can’t do anymore; the fact that I was able to do it successfully twice was just a very lucky fluke, because the plain fact is that is just doesn’t work.

Maybe it was just that I was tired; certainly, a few days of sleep deprivation plus a bunch of Red Bull couldn’t have helped me feel calm and serene. Maybe it’s that I’m a little depressed again. The euphoria created by changing jobs has definitely worn off; I still really love my job and the people I work with are great, but the inevitable realization that making one extremely positive change in life doesn’t make the whole rest of my life all better has hit. Maybe it’s all hormones, who knows. Maybe it’s just that drinking more than a drink or so really doesn’t work for me anymore (actually, it’s definitely that in some small measure; one thing I figured out decisively this weekend is that I really don’t enjoy being drunk or being around people who are drunk). I don’t know, and I’m not going to make any rash pronouncements about anything for a while, till I’ve had some time to process what exactly is bugging me about my friendships at the moment. Except this one pronouncement, which really isn’t all that rash: I definitely need to have some friends whom I didn’t meet through the Internet. I’m not sure how I’m going to go about doing that; as terrible as I am at keeping friendships, I may be even worse at making them in the first place. But it’s something I need to figure out how to do.

————-
*That was when the Lemonheads were a really young little punk rock band and Evan Dando was the drummer rather than the frontman. I like both the pre- and the post-Dando-as-superstar versions of the band, in different ways.

**A particularly fine set of friends, which makes it especially sad that they gave up on me, but geez, it’s not like I can blame them. And not that I go around ranking the groups of friends from various phases of my life or anything, except that I do, and they were among my favorites.

***I think last year was the year I finally completely got over one of those exceptions, a best-friendship (the best friendship I’ll ever have, I think, which isn’t a reflection on later close friendships but just a result of my belief that you don’t form the same sorts of joined-at-the-hip friendships when you’re not a teenager that you do when you are) that ended, badly, in 1982. Marina. Maybe I’ll write about her at some point. I really am over it, but on the other hand, I can’t say I wouldn’t love to talk to her again someday.

Nostalgia, or what?

September 9, 05 //
0

I’m not sure if I’m experiencing a bout of unexpected nostalgia or if I’ve simply entered a time warp in which it is suddenly the late 1970s. This morning, I was browsing my regularly delivered bit of permission-based spam from BBCAmerica, and I noted that they were advertising the DVD of the first season of Butterflies. So I bought it. (Being an inveterate spender of money online, I also noted that DeepDiscountDVD.com had it for about $10 less, so I bought it there, of course. BBCAmerica does pretty good spam e-mails, but their shopping site is limited and kind of ludicrously overpriced.) This comes on the heels of my acquiring the CD reissue of David Johansen’s first solo album (which I finally found at a not-too-ridiculous price, after searching for more than a year), not to mention my previously sort-of-mentioned involuntary and frequent plunges into my past courtesy of the Speedies’ song that’s being used in an HP commercial. I’m starting to wonder if this is all one of those Freaky Friday things where I’ve woken up and turned back into a teenager (in spirit, that is; alas, not in body. If I could wake up and fit into my old 26″ waist Trash and Vaudeville black stovepipe jeans, I’d be happy to accept any accompanying weirdness).

Of course, in some sense, I’ve never totally stopped being a teenager. Not having kids makes it easier to feel that way, and remaining a music fanatic at an age when most people, even those who were huge music fans in their younger years, have long since settled into either indifference or just vague interest in music, also makes it easier to maintain that teen feeling. But these recent things refer back to a very specific part of my teeny years—let’s call it 1979, since that would be about the midpoint of the stuf f in question—and they’re aspects of that time that it never occurred to me to be nostalgic for.

I’m not making sense yet, am I? Okay, let me enumerate just a little:

1. Butterflies was a British TV series that started airing on PBS not long after it first aired in the UK, which was 1978. I actually don’t quite remember what year it was when I started watching it, but I know I was still living at home, so it was pre-1981. (And then I watched it again, the whole series, years and years later when PBS re-ran it, but that would skew my whole point here, so let’s ignore it.)

It was a quirky series, the type of series that a lot of guys I know would have hated then, as teenagers, and would hate now, as ostensible grownups, though it wasn’t exactly a girly series. It was about a family, and especially the parent couple, and a little bit about adultery, and suburban life, I guess—none of which were things that had any relevance to me personally when I first watched it. (Well, okay, I had a family, but my two much older brothers were nothing at all like the late-teen sons on the show.) It starred Geoffrey Palmer, who any USian who’s ever watched a second of British TV would recognize (among many, many other things, he starred in the brilliant series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin), and Wendy Craig, who most USians probably wouldn’t recognize, which is their loss because she’s such a lovely actress. It was both very funny and absolutely heart-tearing. Ria, the Wendy Craig character, is a generally happy but vaguely restless and dissatisfied suburban wife and mother, and one day, she meets a charming and extremely wealthy man in the park who becomes utterly smitten with her. The show centers around the family’s daily life, with some very funny running jokes and some sensitively handled plots involving the teenage sons, but the temptation of an affair with Leonard, the rich guy, quietly underlies the whole air of the show. It takes over Ria’s inner life, even though her strong moral code (and her essential conventionality, I guess, though the moral stuff is more obvious, and admirable) means she never gives into the temptation of having an affair. (She comes very close at one point and gets cold feet, in one of the more moving episodes.)

The acting was superb, from Geoffrey Palmer’s likeable if slightly irascible overworked dentist husband to Bruce Montague’s ineffably sad and lonely Leonard, and the young men who played the sons were great too. But that doesn’t quite explain why the series affected me the way it did, and I’m not sure I can explain it even now. I will say, though, that even thinking about certain scenes from it (even now, at least 15 years since the last time I saw an episode of it) can make me cry, and on the other hand, remembering some of the running jokes (there were always issues with moving the family’s three or four cars around their small driveway, and the neighbors in their quiet suburban street were always shaking fists at them or staring at them in bewilderment) can still crack me up. Back when I used to write songs, I even wrote one around a line from the show: Leonard is once again trying to persuade Ria to have a tryst with him, and he comments, quite sardonically, that “everyone is doing it these days.” Ria’s response is adamant and startling and memorable: “I am not a product of ‘these days,’” she says. That affected me profoundly, don’t ask me why. (It still does, in fact; I’m having to fight back tears and will have to plead allergies if anyone walks by.)

2. So that was Butterflies, and I have to say I can’t wait for it to show up in the mail (which, knowing DeepDiscountDVD, should be sometime in late October…but hey, they ship for free, so who am I to complain?). (Season 2 isn’t out on DVD yet, but I’m going to preorder it.) The Speedies thing I’m going to have to get back to later, because it will be long and ruminative, providing my @#%& laptop keyboard doesn’t eat it again. So that leaves the first David Johansen record, which I haven’t listened to yet because I’m just a tiny bit afraid that it won’t sound as wonderful to me as it did in 1978. But I’m pretty sure it will. It’s one of those inescapably time-and-place records for me, and I suspect that when I hear it, I’ll be sitting in the armchair in the living room of the apartment I grew up in, gazing out at the beautiful mess of Broadway, maybe sipping an alcohol-and-Tab concoction that I put together after everyone went to bed, feeling the spring breeze coming in through the window. Maybe my first boyfriend, Richard—he who should forever be known as “that shithead”—will be sitting next to me, and my parents will be out of town and we’ll be staying up all night listening to records on my dad’s stereo. It’s one of those records.

One of my claims to…er, something (not fame) is that I saw the New York Dolls when I was a tiny child. Okay, I was 12, just about to turn 13. I put on makeup and glitter and platform shoes and got myself into Max’s Kansas City (“Are you 18?” the door guy asked. “Yes, I’m 18,” I replied in a world-weary tone. “Yeah, you’re 18,” he said, rolling his eyes. But he let me in anyway.) It wasn’t the first show I ever went to, but it was my first nightclub show, and it was a giant thrill. And growing up in NYC at the time, I was lucky enough to be hip enough to read Creem often enough to know and love the New York Dolls. By the time their various former members started playing in new formations, I was a seasoned CBGB and Max’s denizen, and I saw Johnny Thunders more times than I could count, but David Jo sort of disappeared for a while. And then he put out that first solo record. This is a few years before the Buster Poindexter thing, and eons before the Buster Poindexter thing went from being entertaining to being kind of a bad joke. No one knew quite what to expect from that first record (although he played some shows before it came out, and some of the songs were already becoming familiar, like “Funky But Chic”), and I don’t think anyone expected it to be so damn good. It rocked like crazy, baby, but it was also a breakup record (two breakups, really–the Dolls, plus David’s breakup with his longtime girlfriend Cyrinda Foxe), so it had heartbreak and passion and David’s big, surprising voice tearing you right up.

I sometimes think of it as the record that I lost my virginity to, though that’s factually incorrect; there was no music playing when I was actually losing my virginity, but the last record we listened to that night before the sex part was not the David Johansen record but Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks. But we spent a lot of time listening to music that night (and drinking Canadian Club, and feeling the June breeze coming in off Broadway, and so on), and the David Johansen record was one of our selections. That’s not the only reason it has such meaning for me—it was practically liturgy for me and all of my friends in those last two years of high school—but you have to admit it’s a pretty compelling contribution to my feelings about the record.

Nostalgia isn’t something I’m enormously prone to. Yeah, I love to tell stories about my Twin\Tone days and my following-the-Replacements-around-the-country days, partly because they’re sort of the only things that make me interesting (at least to some people), and partly because I want to tell them while I can still remember them (I’m quite serious about that), and partly just because they’re good stories and happy memories. But after spending a lot of my 20s and even early 30s wishing that it were any other time in my life, I gave up nostalgia somewhere along the line. So many things in my life have gotten steadily better as I’ve aged that nostalgia just doesn’t make that much sense. And maybe that’s why I’m taken aback by this sudden, random resurgence of weird bits of my past. I mean, here I am in 2005, and I really wasn’t particularly expecting to find myself in 1979. And it’s not a bad thing, but it sure as hell is weird.

ohfercripessakes

September 7, 05 //
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I was about two-thirds of the way into a very, very long post about the Speedies, old pals of mine whose single “Let Me Take Your Photograph” is now being featured prominently (after a remix) in a commercial for HP that’s been getting a lot of airtime. And in typical fashion, I accidentally leaned too hard on some damn button or touchpoint or something on my friggin’ laptop keyboard, and the whole damn thing disappeared. I’d like to reconstruct it, and I will…but not now. For one thing, there’s a pretty gosh darn exciting tennis match taking place right now (Blake leads Agassi two sets to one, holy cow), and for another, I need to think about sleep soon.

Damn laptops, I hate the stupid things, at least the IBM variety. I will get back to this, though, because hearing that unexpected sound from my past every few minutes during this last week of US Open coverage is weirding me out in all kinds of ways.

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