I Prefer

I prefer albums to singles

I prefer listening to old favorite albums to searching for new favorites

I prefer Austen to Dickens

I prefer running to cycling

I prefer a knowing smile to a stream of flowery words

I prefer public transport to cars

I prefer walking to driving

I prefer maps to step-by-step written directions

I prefer inside jokes with my wife

I prefer rooting for sports teams with my brother

I prefer in-person conversations to telephone conversations

I prefer not needing to set an alarm clock

I prefer listening to the Beatles when I’m melancholy

I prefer John to Paul

I prefer John-plus-Paul to either John or Paul

I prefer forests to beaches

I prefer real Coca-Cola to non-Coke colas

I prefer blending in

I prefer drumming to singing

I prefer finishing to starting to write a new song

I prefer not unearthing old romantic relationships

I prefer libraries to bookstores

I prefer my candor and friendliness after a couple of beers

I prefer constraints, borders, and outlines

I prefer pushing the limits of constraints, borders, and outlines

I prefer sincere doubt to unexamined faith

I prefer rainy autumn days to sunny summer days

I prefer order to chaos

I prefer chaos sometimes

(h/t Susan, Erin, Elizabeth, and Thea)

The Shackles of Youth

I often daydream about revisiting locations that were the settings of parts of my past. Sometimes, I have a strong desire--almost a hunger or thirst--to walk around a neighborhood in which I used to spend time, or stand in a living room or kitchen in a house or apartment in which I used to live, not interacting with the present residents or inhabitants but merely seeing, drinking in those places.

In other words, sometimes, many times, I daydream about being a ghost.

My own theological architecture doesn't give much space to the contemplation of ghosts, though I don't think it outright denies the overall concept. I don't want to haunt those places--again, I'd prefer my own presence to go unnoticed--but I suppose being a "ghost" is the image that best approximates that desire.

Since I have lived in the city of my birth my whole life, I sometimes actually get to be this sort of (benevolent[?]) ghost. If I choose to drive by the first house in which I remember living (in Frayser), or my maternal grandparents' house (also in Frayser), or the park my mom would take me to after I finished my half day of pre-kindergarten (which happens to be Overton Park), I can do so without much trouble or planning. Of course, some places are forever changed (a shopping center sits on the site of my first apartment, my paternal grandparents' house was razed and replaced by a McMansion), but I can still conjure a mental picture of the places I remember even in the presence of their replacements.

Other settings from other parts of my life, though, have been less accessible. For more than two decades, the biggest hole in my haunting map was the little part of Chelsea in London where I lived for five weeks in the summer of 1995. For years, I would imagine being there, the setting of the Indian Summer of my adolescence (I was 23 going on 16), seeing myself walk down the King's Road and the surrounding neighborhood, not really seeking one specific terminus but simply walking, drinking in my surroundings, reveling in a sense of longing for its own sake.

And then, suddenly, I was able to go there in real life, last fall, when Cindy and I spent a week in London and stayed not a ten-minute walk from the site of my old King's College dormitory. The first thing we did after our first meal the day we landed and checked into our Airbnb was to walk to the King's Road and see the Kings Chelsea Estates, the residential development that had taken over the old campus buildings and also surrounded them with newer, larger condominiums (of course I was already aware of the changes, having virtually walked the streets for years via Google street view).

Seeing them, and then walking eastward along the King's Road for about a mile till we reached the Mona Lisa Cafe (a great place for cheap eats back in '95), felt nothing like being there before. Instead, I had the impression of looking over my own shoulder, or peering into my thoughts and emotions back then without really inhabiting them, seeing them as something to be analyzed rather than felt. It was as if my memories of being there had been a movie projected onto a flat screen, but now that I was there, I could not only see the movie in three dimensions, but experience it in four, pausing certain scenes, walking around the characters and sets. 

There was, no doubt, a brief rush of nostalgia, but also a quick follow-up sense of disenchantment--not dislike or disgust, but a real sense that something that had long held me in its sway no longer did so. The overarching feeling was one of relief. I felt no further need to revisit that particular part of London afterward, and we didn't.

*****

I have spent a lot of time--probably too much time, in fact--listening to and thinking about the remix of REM's Monster album that was done recently by the original album's producer, Scott Litt, and that is included among the bonus material accompanying the 25th anniversary packaging of the album. I was both intrigued and skeptical when I first read about the remix project a few months ago.

I always liked the idea of Monster more than the act of listening to it start to finish, but it was still an album by favorite band at the time, and despite its never becoming my favorite of theirs, I listened to the hell out of it for months and still revisit it sometimes. I hoped that the remix would be revelatory in the way that Giles Martin's recent remixes of Beatles albums (especially the White Album) had been, but secretly feared it might end up being the aural version of George Lucas's tweaking of the original Star Wars movies, which was sometimes benign but other times heavy handed.

Unfortunately, the first released track from the remix--"What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"--was more Lucas than Martin. The sound was bright and clean, but I noticed changes right away: The "machine gun" tremolo guitar riff--one of the catchiest and most memorable individual parts in the original recording--had simply been removed, as had been the final two lines of the chorus (including the concluding "Don't fuck with me"). "Kenneth" was my favorite song, and it seemed to have been changed for the worse; what was going to happen to the other songs?

But one quirk about the original version of Monster is that ""Kenneth" was something of an outlier. Although it, too, featured loud, layered guitars that more or less buried the vocals, it had a brightness and expansiveness that contrasted with the claustrophobic sound of many of the other tracks. Those other tracks somehow sounded both layered and flat, closer to an aural painting done impasto than to a sonic sculpture.

And it wasn't till I listened to the second track, "Crush With Eyeliner," that I began to get a feel for what the remix was accomplishing. Listening at full volume to a new mix of a song I'd heard literally hundred of times, I could actually hear the different layers individually and could feel their interplay. The flat screen projection became a solid object through which I could walk. The experience held for the rest of the album as well; and the sludgier and flatter the track was in the original release, the more shocking the revelation of hearing the sonically expansive remix. "I Don't Sleep, I Dream" and "I Took Your Name," two of my least favorite recordings on the original, are easily two of my favorites in their new versions. The enhancements, far from sanitizing the record, make it that much sexier, that much more glam, the lyrics (though now decipherable) that much slipperier, the narrator that much harder to pin down.

And listening to the remix gave the opposite emotional effect that walking around Chelsea did. Instead of providing distance and closure, it immediately dropped me into the mental and emotional space of my 1994 self--a mixed brew of insecurity and bravado, cockiness and crushing doubt, the feeling that I could be anything I wanted as long as I did not think beyond the present moment. I got that feeling on my first listen last Friday, and I got it again when I listened the next few days in a row. Listening to the remix isn't doing a haunting--it's being haunted.

Which is why consciously stopped listening to it a couple of days ago. I am not my 1994 self (22 going on 15), nor do I miss him very much. I can't live in that headspace any more than I can function walking around drunk (both things I know from experience, fortunately or unfortunately). Maybe I'll revisit the remix someday if I can do so in a less immersive way, but I'm letting it go for now.  

***

Coda: For fun, here is my quick take on which Monster songs I like better in the original release and which I like better in the remix:

Prefer Original
What's the Frequency, Kenneth?
King of Comedy
Star 69
Strange Currencies
Let Me In

Prefer Remix
Crush With Eyeliner
I Don't Sleep, I Dream
Tongue
Bang and Blame
I Took Your Name
Circus Envy
You

The Aviator

The men's book club at my parish recently read and discussed The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin. Spoiler alert: I loved the book. Second spoiler alert: I'll try not to spoil the actual plot of the book here.

The conversation was particularly stimulating and energetic, with everyone who had read the book making interesting points and asking thought-provoking questions. J____ asked me one such question: "What was it about the book's plot that affected you so strongly?"

My answer was somewhat rambling. I noted that the book was as much a punch to the gut and a bruise to the heart as it was a workout for the mind (while definitely stimulating, I would not say the writing itself was difficult to follow). When asked what especially moved me, I struggled to respond but was able to articulate one thing that hit home: the slow physical and mental disintegration that seemed to be leading to a slow disconnection from someone with whom one had an intimate connection. The slowness of the loss seemed as tragic as the loss itself.

After the meeting, though, I knew that my answer was not so much inaccurate as incomplete. Yes, the impending loss moved me deeply, as did an earlier, similar loss of connection with another character. But, more than that, I think the book held up a startlingly clear mirror to my inner self, and I saw much that was familiar in the book's observations. And much of what I saw was hard to look at. The following all seemed to be reflected back at me:

• My own mortality and the mortality of people I love - imagining if I were the protagonist and Cindy were the wife, or that she were the love interest from earlier in the novel.
• My own sin - What dark deeds and thoughts lurk below the level of my consciousness? Are there things I've done that I'm afraid to admit--to confess--even to myself, let alone to God before a priest?
• My fear of dementia/losing my memory/being physically alive but decresingly able to communicate and connect with people around me, especially my wife.
• My unwillingness (out of laziness? out of fear? out of indifference?) to do the long, taxing work of repentance. Vodolazkin's protagonists tend to do something awful when they're young but then spend the rest of their lives in active, humble (even humiliating) penance. Am I even sorry for my own wrongs?

On a completely different level (perhaps), my reading of this novel in light of having read Crime and Punishment, with which it shares some thematic and geographic elements--makes me want to visit St. Petersburg in the same way that I so long wanted to visit London. I don't want to do a big touristy tour--I want to feel and smell the streets, parks, bridges, churches, cemeteries. Its a longing that may pass. But I feel it, deep down.

Brace

I limp to conversations

And brace myself

Waiting for the bottoms of boots

to crush me

into the playground blacktop

Waiting for the voices of amateur comics

to shout me

as a punchline

to a joke yet unwritten

Waiting to be unheard

or heard, and ignored

I see you
Brace yourself

And I remember

For a moment

How heard

How loud

How crushing

My words can be

Your silence calling Bullshit

on mine