Member of the Club?

It’s an odd thing, but with all the celebrity deaths this summer, the one that has made me feel genuinely sad is John Hughes’. I am definitely a latecomer to his movies; I think I only saw Sixteen Candles for the first time when I was nineteen, and I admit with some shame that I’ve never seen the entirety of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Yes, that’s something I definitely need to remedy. I am definitely a huge fan of both Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink. The first one especially captures that feeling that sometimes, when you’re a teenager, you feel like the entire world is against you. All you want is just one break, for someone to look at you and tell you that they care about how you’re doing. Kind of like that Belle & Sebastian song that was in Juno, “Expectations”. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stuart Murdoch has had some John Hughes marathons in his time.

But I do have some problems with John Hughes. These are mainly based on the fact that I don’t actually like The Breakfast Club all that much. Sure, the script has some prime moments, and he digs into some of the roots of teenage angst, the desperate need to win, to make the grade. The thing is, I don’t really fit into any of the categories in the film. Sure, I’m a nerd, but there’s a pretty drastic difference between girl nerds and boy nerds. I’m somewhat arty, but my weirdness doesn’t extend into the performance-art, almost Dada-esque strangeness of Allison. And I’m sure as hell not a jock, a princess, or a criminal.

And what the hell is he doing making over Ally Sheedy at the end? What kind of message does that send? Even though she was profoundly strange, it would have been cooler if Andy had actually seen past the bangs and the huge parka to the girl inside them. I kind of hope that Allison kept eating those Pixie Stix and Cap’n Crunch sandwiches even after she had her makeover…

By the way, to read a really superb tribute to John Hughes, check out this blog.

Swimming in the Pond

I have been meaning to write this entry for a while, but I think I just wasn’t sure where to start, because the idea is so blurry and abstract. But yesterday I started reading Letter from America, a book of broadcasts made by Alistair Cooke, who was the BBC’s American correspondent from 1949 until his death in 2004. He was a Salford boy made good (like half of one of my favorite bands), who after spending time at Yale and Harvard, moved to the States and became a citizen in 1941. He spent most of his life interpreting America for a British audience, writing about so many different aspects of politics, society, and culture, beyond just that of the movers and shakers in Washington.

When I read his scripts, I both marvel at the quality of his writing and his deftness and delicacy in capturing a country that had both obvious things in common with Britain, and yet some drastic differences as well. But it also makes me wonder about his identity, and about my own by extension. He’s an Englishman, but an American citizen, writing about his adopted country for his native one. It’s a really unique position to be in, to both invest oneself in a place like that, and yet to also step back and observe it in that way. Maybe, in a way, it helped him maintain his sense of Britishness, to look at America through that particular lens.

I find that when I am here in Britain, I am at my most American. I know that the cadence of my speech is more song-like, and that I have a decent handle on Edinburgh slang. But when I refer to a group of friends as “y’all”, there’s no mistaking where I’m from. When I’m here, I vocally stand up for baseball as a superior sport to cricket (which for all my Britophilia I consider the most boring sport ever created). I defend the merits of jazz to my friends who consider it boring and pretentious. When I quote the Bible I am sometimes met with unblinking incomprehension, and when I talk casually about how I shot rifles at summer camp when I was twelve, the expressions of horror on my friends’ faces are camera-worthy. None of these things are in my thoughts when I’m in the States, but I’m strangely proud of them when I’m in Scotland.

There are definitely things about me that are more British than American. Introverts, intellectuals, and eccentrics are an accepted part of British culture, and I slot pretty comfortably into all of those categories. My sense of humor is drier than a Saharan summer, something that puts me pretty firmly on this side of the Atlantic. I love books, ideas, rock music, and single-malt Scotch. So where do I belong? If you had asked me that question a year ago today, I would have said I had an American passport but a British heart. But I’m just not sure anymore.

For now, I’ll just keep swimming laps in the Atlantic.

(There’s a strange symmetry here, that as I wrote this I listened to Schubert’s “Ave Maria” being sung by Marian Anderson. The most American of voices singing a European song.)

This Writing Life

Over the past week, I have come to two very important conclusions.

I do not want to be an academic. At least, not the kind of academic that goes to conferences to give incredibly dry, jargon-loaded papers about topics so utterly esoteric that there are only two other people in the world who are interested in the research, and those two people only give a damn because they need evidence for their own over-specialized diatribes. I heard three really good papers the entire time I was at this conference, and the rest made me very happy I had a thriller in my bag (The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson, which is amazing). I was doing the grown-up, academic version of the comic book inside the textbook. I’m not especially proud of myself for that, but man, I have never been so bored as during some of those talks. If I become an academic, I want to teach and write popular history. But that aphorism “publish or perish” exists for a reason, and publishing means articles. Blah.

I also do not want to do g-work. Now, I’m OK with the idea that the world as it is needs a certain level of bureaucracy to function properly. I’m OK with working under people to a certain extent. But after being at the very bottom of one of the world’s tallest of totem poles (or really, pinned down underneath it) for a few weeks, I’ve learned that I don’t want to be a part of this. My entire education (boarding school at age 14, then a huge public university) has made me both resourceful and very independent. I like, no, love, making things happen and getting significant results. Being a minuscule cog in a gargantuan machine does not do that for me.

So what’s left? This thing that I’m doing right now. I’ve loved writing since I was little, whether it was poetry in high school or music journalism with Fresh Air or travel writing. I also read all the time, and my list of favorite books shifts and expands all the time. The big question is, how do I get someone to pay me for it? I’m not entirely sure what the answer is, but I want to try to find out. I welcome all suggestions!

Londinium

For some reason, whenever I walk around in London, I hear a song by Jamie T called “Calm Down Dearest” in my head. It’s a half-hip hop, half-indie song about a long, drunken night out (as a lot of my favorite songs tend to be). I don’t know why I associate it so strongly with London, even though it takes place in the city (he talks about walking drunk down the Strand). Maybe it’s that the propulsive beats make me think of the flow of traffic, the sheer mass of people on the pavements, catching taxis, waiting for buses, thousands upon thousands of people with their places to go, their people to see, their own stories to live out. But despite the beats and the partying, there’s a sadness and a sweetness in the chorus. In the song it’s the narrator trying to console his lover, but to me I think it’s the hard ache of loving a city like this one, one that has so much ugliness and beauty all bleeding together in the great wash of history. You can’t ever know, truly know, a place this huge. But maybe, gradually, you can chip away. You find the good pub, the favorite park. Or, in my case, you end up on the roof of a parking garage in Peckham on a Friday night, sipping cheap white wine in a ridiculously arty clandestine cafe/art space, watching twilight slip out of the London sky, as all the buildings north of the river spark with minuscule white and red flames. I can’t know this place. But leaning on this balcony and looking at the London skyline, I feel that someday I’ll try.

Bits and Pieces

I did six hours of data entry today at the office. It was data entry for a worthy cause, but I think the only thing that was preventing my brains from dribbling out of my ears was that my headphones were in there to staunch the flow. That and very, very loud music.

Speaking of loud music, Black Lips are absolutely amazing. It’s filthy, psychedelic garage punk. The kind of music that makes you boogie around your kitchen, banging your head and twisting and shaking your hips. Glorious! I’m especially into “Body Combat” and “Take My Heart” right now, and “Buried Alive” is a bona fide classic.

Oh, and the new Arctic Monkeys single, “Crying Lightning” is also dark and seductive and fun. That Alex Turner really loves his 1960s spy movie soundtracks, if this song and most of The Age of the Understatement are any indication.

If you want to read more of my writing, I’ve started to blog for this really awesome study abroad site, GulliverGo. You can find it here: www.gullivergo.com/blog. I just have one entry up there at the moment, but that should change soon enough!

And as a farewell for now, a very cool video that makes me both marvel at the sheer number of cuts involved and also giggle at the weirdness of it. Enjoy.

The Death and Life of the New Jerusalem

Forgive me if this is overly academic and/or incoherent, but these thoughts have stuck in my head like a particularly catchy tune for most of today, and I need to think aloud. This is the result both of having studied an obscene amount of twentieth-century history and of being in the habit of drawing connections between historical events and extrapolating wider themes. I also feel strange writing about this topic from the comfort of my student flat, but here goes. I hope you find it at least somewhat interesting.

This afternoon I was engaged in a universal Sunday activity: eating a very, very late breakfast at this awesome cafe called The Pink Olive, which sounds like it should be in the Castro but is actually quite Scottish, and dissecting and perusing the Sunday paper. As I sipped my Americano (which is what the Brits call house coffee, and always makes me feel slightly self-conscious when I order it), I read about a fire which had happened in a tower block in Camberwell, a neighborhood in southeast London. Six people died, including three very little kids. Allegedly the residents had complained about fire hazards in the block to people higher up, but had been told that because the building had been one of the first public housing projects built in south-east London, it had protected status. The local government denied that they had said this. I suddenly remembered something that my supervisor had told me: apparently, a tower block in Leith (a fairly low-rent part of Edinburgh, famous for being where most of Trainspotting is set) was also about to be given protected status because of its importance to design history.

The title of this post comes from the combination of two different parts of my historical education. Chapters from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1963) were required reading in History 7B this last spring. The book’s author, Jane Jacobs, lamented the breakdown of the sense of community and trust in cities, which she blamed on urban planning theorists who ignored social dynamics in favor of dreams of integrating nature into cities. These took the form of parklands surrounded with, you guessed it, tower blocks. In practice, these open grassy areas were not urban idylls but dangerous places, simply because there’s a lack of foot traffic. Put another way, it’s bloody hard (if not impossible) to supervise your child playing outside if you’re up on on the tenth floor of a high-rise building, or even to trust that there will be other relatively trustworthy adults around who can help if something goes wrong. As a result, people withdraw into the safety of their apartments.

When I read this in Berkeley, it made a lot of sense when put into the context of my experiences in Edinburgh. I have walked home from friends’ flats late at night by myself fairly frequently, and never felt particularly unsafe. This is because the areas I walk through have a large number of pubs, and there’s always a small overflow of people standing around outside, having a smoke or otherwise hanging around. Ordinary people like you or me, who wouldn’t accost anyone deliberately, but who would help someone in a sticky situation. The only time I have ever felt that I was in trouble going home was when I was walking on the edge of the Meadows, a huge park just south of campus. A group of neds (young male degenerates, basically the Scottish urban equivalent of white trash) wandered over to me and asked me for change to make a phone call. There was no one else around.  I made apologetic excuses and tried to extricate myself. Thankfully, just when I thought things were taking a turn for the worse, a police car rolled by and the neds cleared out. It seems counter-intuitive, but a huge open space can be just as dangerous as a dark alleyway. So yes, I do very much agree with Jacobs.

The urban planning theory that Jacobs argued against took hold in Europe as well as in the States, although the locations were reversed. Here, the city centers are generally the wealthier parts of town, and old buildings have been restored, renovated, and generally preserved. I’m lucky enough to live in a nineteenth-century tenement flat in Marchmont, which despite being a student neighborhood (or possibly because of that) is fairly well-off. In contrast, beaten-up-looking tower blocks from the early 1960s dot the outskirts of Paris and London, of Glasgow and Edinburgh. In the UK, these public housing blocks were the result of the comprehensive welfare state, the New Jerusalem, that the British Labour party had planned during World War II, and brought to fruition after their landslide election victory in 1945. The buildings, like the one in Camberwell, tended to be of shoddy construction and questionable safety. At one point, a tower block in London called Ronan Point partially collapsed after a natural gas explosion. In the present, the blocks have the exact problem that Jacobs describes; I was friendly with someone who lived in a tower block in Sighthill, and she said that she always kept the the deadbolt on and didn’t leave her flat at night. I found it very hard to imagine what life would be like, to have that kind of fear.

Speaking as a trainee historian of postwar Britain, the tower blocks are definitely important to the whole picture of economic and social history after 1945. I also think historical preservation in general is a good thing. But there is something utterly ludicrous about making a monument out of an urban planning disaster while it’s still needed to serve its original purpose.

British Mode

So, yeah, I’m back.

I’ve been here in Edinburgh for a bit less than three weeks now, and life has settled back into a recognizable rhythm. It’s not the same as it was when I left a year ago, with the natural ebb and tide of shops opening and closing, relationships forming and falling apart, people coming and going. I’ve changed a bit too, and it makes me see this place a little differently. I don’t romanticize it as much as I used to. Which kind of makes sense in a way; my relationship with this place has gone from infatuation to a more comfortable kind of partnership, where I still enjoy finding out new things about it, but at the same time have to acknowledge and deal with its foibles and flaws (generally crap weather, high prices).

Part of this whole adjustment process is what I refer to as going into British mode. Some things are more straightforward: remembering to look right-left-right when crossing the road, thinking in metric instead of imperial (twenty degrees is a nice day, 500 meters is further than it sounds). Other stuff is more subtle: regaining my alcohol tolerance because of a social life centered around pubs, and having a little but permanent buzz from all the tea I drink. My accent reverted a lot more quickly than I was expecting; I was chatting to Doug’s girlfriend Carrie a little more than a week after I’d returned, and she looked at me in a funny way and said “You sound very Scottish.” Although she’s not Scottish herself, I felt both a little pleased and kind of strange at the same time. It’s been pretty easy to slip back into life here, but what does it mean for later on, when I’m deciding where to go after this whole thing is over next year? I try not to think about it, but the thought does linger in the back of my mind.

I don’t think the future lies in working for Big G. Maybe I’ll settle down a bit more as I get more experience, but I like to have more freedom in my work schedule and do not like the idea of being the bottom brick in a gigantic pyramid of bureaucracy. It does have some cool perqs (see the world, meet interesting people, great benefits), but I want…more control over my life, I guess. More say in what I do and where I do it.

Anyway, enough with the deep contemplation. A plus to G-work is that I had the day off yesterday, so I had a very relaxed day, a really cool night (which ended with my being privy to a discussion/argument between the frontmen of the two best bands in Edinburgh about when and with whom to release records), and I’ve still got a nice bit of weekend stretching in front of me. There’s a (fairly) clear sky outside, and the weather’s relatively warm. Life is good on this side of the Atlantic. I do miss California more this time around, the people, the scenery. But it all balances out in the end, somehow.

Oh, and if you have a chance, you should listen to “Ghost of My Old Dog” by Jason Lytle. Kind of Elliott Smith-like, and a very lovely listen for a summer afternoon.

Leaving Songs

Four days. In four days, I will be in a jet somewhere over the Atlantic, returning to Edinburgh. Four days until tea and biscuits, dreich and haars, taking the piss, local bands and  local whisky. Four days until Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, freshair.org.uk, Edinburgh University’s history department. Four days until I’m back in the first place that I could feel loving me back as I loved it.

But it also means four more days in California. Four days of living in the place where I am from, where my family is, where I rediscovered my old life in Berkeley, gaining new appreciation for past good things and adding in new ones: new friends, new hangouts, even new small joys, like sitting on the lawn in front of California Hall in the sun writing essays. Four days of golden hills studded with dusty blue-green oaks, four days of looking ever awestruck out the BART window across the bay to the City. Four days of last meals, last drinks. Four days of long, hard hugs, fierce promises to keep in touch, write, Skype.

Four days from now, I’ll hug my parents goodbye and walk away into the airport, alone. Someday, soon, I want someone to be walking away with me. But until then, I’ll make my way to the departure gate, put in my headphones, and listen to music, especially You and Me by the Walkmen. The album is all about going and being far away from home (wherever or whoever that is), but it’s this particular song that has caught me in the past week or so. The last time I heard it live, I teared up from a combination of awe at its beauty and empathy with its subject. The voice, the guitar, and the words carry everything; the loneliness of the leaving, the excitement of the future, all of the hard and tender love and the loss that naturally goes with it. Just as “Little House of Savages” helped me leave Edinburgh on a long, whisky-heavy night a year ago, I hope “New Country” will help me find my way back.

Rivalry

(This was planned as an e-mail to my friend Mac, but it rapidly became too long and literary and I moved it here instead. The “you” is still him, but I think it applies to anyone who has a sibling.)

We look similar; same blond-brown hair, same almond-shaped gray-green-blue eyes. We both have deep voices and a dry, sarcastic sense of humor. Beyond that? Not much in common. I love him, but I don’t understand him at all. This fact has caused a lot of friction between us in the past. I remember you describing the last time we met how you had followed after your brother in so many ways, and wanted to do something for yourself. I have the opposite problem; because my brother does something, it makes me want to do the opposite. This is especially true when it comes to listening to music. I am slow to get into individual bands in the first place, and if my brother loves them, I am even more reluctant to listen to them. For some reason, because he’s my older brother, it lowers my opinion of the music. Utterly stupid and irrational, but that’s how it is. Usually, when my brother gives me a recommendation, I’ll push it to the back of my mind, and then, maybe, eventually, start listening to the band months, or sometimes years later.

And so, today. I was at home in Cupertino, in the middle of a holding pattern before I leave for Scotland in less than two weeks. My brother is currently backpacking in Europe, and my mode of transportation is his car, a Ron-Paul-bumper-stickered grey sedan full of empty cardboard boxes, random papers, and other bits of trash. It’s not completely abysmal, but not ideal either. But the car came with something else; my brother left his binder full of CDs on the passenger seat. Before I start out on the day’s journey, I peruse his collection of Pitchfork-approved albums. Kanye West, M83, Hercules & Love Affair, TV on the Radio. I settle on Boxer by the National. The National are my brother’s favorite band, bar none. He had started singing their praises all the way back in early 2006, but I had initially shrugged it off and continued listening to my angular indie post-punk. After Boxer came out, I came to like a few songs, but the  whole album was something I knew vaguely but which I’d never listened to straight through. I slipped the CD in the player, and the opening piano chords of “Fake Empire” filled the hot car as I pulled out.

The big moment only came a while later, as I ran the last of my errands. I pulled into the grocery store parking lot, and the CD clicked over to track 10. A fall of acoustic guitar pluckings flowed from the stereo, joined by the singer’s crooning baritone and a river of piano notes. It was…sad. Nostalgic. Tired. It drew me in, wrapping me in luminous chords and soft words. I parked the car, but couldn’t bring myself to get out just yet. I sat there in my brother’s car in the middle of the parking lot, my hands still on the wheel, closed my tear-stung eyes,  and listened. And as the last notes evaporated in the warm air, I said aloud, even though he couldn’t hear me, “I get it, Will. I get it now.”

Obsessing About Music: New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down by LCD Soundsystem

God, I am such a sucker for three-quarter time. Whether it’s Waltz #2 by Elliott Smith or Slow Parade by Broken Records, for some reason my mind just grabs onto it and won’t let it go. Maybe because there’s something so old-school romantic about the tempo (and of course, it’s from the nineteenth century, so it’s capital-R Romantic as well); I always imagine dancing with someone when I listen to it, even though I could probably only do an impression of a paraletic elephant dancing the waltz (yes, I am THAT clumsy). And even though James Murphy doesn’t exactly sound like a crooner, the words, the piano, and his voice have all this longing and bitterness twisted into each other. One unfortunate thing I’ve learned from living abroad is that leaving a place can be just as complicated and sad as leaving a person, and I think he gets the mixed emotions exactly right. I think I understand it even better now in a way, as Berkeley has become home so much more. And now I have all of these amazing people around me here, it’s spring, and I’ll be walking out again soon, going back to my other life, where I have a radio show, another group of friends, and a different vocabulary. I know I am extraordinarily lucky to have the opportunities I do, but I have another price to pay.

But coming out of the depression, the band breakdown towards the end is awesome. And seventeen-and-a-half down, twelve-and-a-half to go.