"We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who were."
— Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”
“Funeral - St. Helena, South Carolina,” (1955), by Robert Frank from The Americans (1959), the subject of a 50th anniversay exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art that runs through the end of the year.
Additionally five of his films will screen thoughout October, including Cocksucker Blues, the unreleased Rolling Stones documentary.
Harry Houdini
“His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin.
His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings.
He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn’t stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.”
- E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (via Ta-Nehisi Coates)
On Sound Opinions: Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot discuss the Big Star box set that comes out next week.
"The Beatles’ run in the 1960s is good fodder for thought experiments. For example, Abbey Road came out in late September 1969. Though Let It Be was then still unreleased, the Beatles wouldn’t record another album together. But they were still young men: George was 26 years old, Paul was 27, John was 28, and Ringo was 29. The Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, had come out almost exactly six and a half years earlier. So if Abbey Road had been released today, Please Please Me would date to March 2003. So think about that for a sec: Twelve studio albums and a couple of dozen singles, with a sound that went from earnest interpreters of Everly Brothers and Motown hits to mind-bending sonic explorers and with so many detours along the way— all of it happened in that brief stretch of time. That’s a weight to carry."
Ville Marie Expressway, Study for section C next to Place d’Armes, September 1968; City of Montréal
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
“What do any of us really know about love?” Mel said. “It seems to me we’re just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too. You know the kind of love I’m talking about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as love of the other person’s being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other person. But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did. So I suppose I am like Terri in that regard. Terri and Ed.”
He thought about it and he went on.
“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me. Then there’s Ed. Okay, we’re back to Ed. He loves Terri so much he tries to kill her and he winds up killing himself.” Mel stopped talking and swallowed from his glass. “You guys have been together eighteen months and you love each other. It shows all over you. You glow with it. But you both loved other people before that too, even. Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us - excuse me for saying this -but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.
- Raymond Carver “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (via meredith hight)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“Premonitions - The Fantasy”
Trimble grew up in Worcester, Massachussetts and his early twenties released two albums, 1980’s Iron Curtain Innocence and 1982’s Harvest of Dreams. Both records were filled with weird low-fi psychedelic folk and pop and were out very much of the step with the times.
He never had a record deal and never played outside of Worcester County. This was in part because his backing band consisted mainly of 12 and 13 year olds, and clubs concerned about their liquor licenses were not apt to book him. While he saw nothing strange about a 23 year old playing with a backing band of pre-adolescents their parents tended to disagree, and eventually pulled the plug on the whole operation, after which his recording activities ceased.
The two records had a very limited pressing, but slowly over time found fans among music writers and musicians like Thurston Moore. In 2007 Secretly Canadian re-released both albums, “Premontions - The Fantasy” is the opening track on Harvest of Dreams.
In 1960, John Steinbeck decided to set off across America, to revisit the country he’d spent his life writing about, in a speciality made camper that he nicknamed “Rocinante” after the horse in Don Quixote.
With his dog Charley he traveled from Maine to the Pacific Northwest, down into his native Salinas Valley in California, across to Texas, up through the Deep South, and then back to New York. This trip across the country in the twilight of his life resulted in his most personal piece of writing, Travels with Charley: In Search of America.
You can see “Rocinante” at the National Steinbeck Museum in Salinas.
On Introversion
From ‘Caring for Your Introvert’, an essay by Jonathan Rauch in the March 2003 issue of the Atlantic:
“Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.”
Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating.”
