Phthursday Musings: Miscellaneous Debris

I have three or four solid ideas to write about, I’ve even started a couple of them, but I feel like now isn’t quite the week and/or I haven’t quite got the right energy.

And I thought, I wonder if there was something else I started which maybe I could just run with, and then I looked, and realized there were reasons some of these posts had been abandoned.

So I’m going to share some unfinished fragments with you all this week, and then a couple other wacky things. None of this will make any sense together, and I think that’s just about right.

I can visualize my living room as a kid. There are probably odd composite things I’m getting wrong. But the living room and dining room were really one long room with a couple of short walls stuck in the middle to make it seem otherwise. And on the living room side, tucked into the interior corner defined by the short wall, was my dad’s stereo equipment and all of his records.

Intellectually, I know what a lot of those albums were, and I own some today (on CD, though, because I’m new school old school). But I can’t visualize any specific records. Except this one:

(I swear I’ve written about Remain in Light before, but I can’t find the evidence.)

On the second side, there’s a curious song - curious even in a Talking Heads context - because, among other things, David Byrne makes no pretense of singing at all. This song is “Seen and Not Seen”:

It is clearly Byrne making some crazy thing up, but… I believe it. At least as an allegory. But I think I might really believe it.

I see a lot of people in this world who I think have managed to get themselves to look like themselves. As in, there’s some sort of consciousness involved, and not just in terms of applying products, but in terms of willing their faces to conform to some sort of subtle ideal, except it’s not really an ideal so much as it is a self-referential notion. It is them actualizing what they already understand themselves to be. (This, I think, is how to understand the phenomenon of the elderly couples who over time start to look like each other.)

There is this idea that Byrne attaches to his protagonist:

He imagined that this was an ability he shared with most other people.

And I think there’s tremendous insight here. People either understand the things they do - the things they can do - as though they are commonplace and unexceptional, or rare and exceptional. People imagine that they are capable of things which they also imagine others to be capable of, or which they imagine others to be incapable of. Their identities are caught up in the sum of all of this.

In reality, we are all unique amalgams of the exceptional and the unexceptional. And we may be totally wrong about which is which, but, maybe we’re not.

I had been contemplating the idea of personal change, the idea that if you were given an extra year to go do something totally different, what would you do with it? If you’re like me and have hundreds of ideas about how to spend such a year, wouldn’t you just spend the year paralyzed with doubt? And isn’t that kind of what happens with a lot of us as is? We’ve already willed our faces to meet some notional ideal. Would we really shift now? Could we?

I am obsessed with the idea of the important. I am obsessed with a great many things, sure, but I think I can roll a lot of them back to the idea of the important.

I will worry and fret about spending my time unproductively. Productive can be just another word for important, of course, but it is perhaps a sinister synonym, because it implies that importance can be measured in terms of production. This is dangerous thinking. One of the most important things we can do as humans is to fart around, after all.

In evaluating importance, then, it is probably more accurate to think less in terms of productivity and more in terms of accomplishment. Did you build something today? That’s an accomplishment. Did you spend a calm, relaxing day with a nice cup of coffee and a lack of anxiety over needing to attack a chore list? That’s an accomplishment too!

Accomplishment too is inadequate though as a synonym. It’s more of a category of what’s important. Because some things which are important aren’t things we do, or even if they are, they’re more so how we are as opposed to what we do. If I tell my kid that it’s important to always be kind, my point isn’t that he should roam the streets looking for doors to hold open for people, it’s that when he is at a door, if there is someone there for whom it is sensible and kind to hold the door open, then do that.

Roblox is something very important to this kid. It is not important to me. That is okay - importance is relative. Mid-90s post-hardcore is not important to him. French cinema is not important to him. The aurora borealis is not important to him. This is all okay.

Minecraft used to be important to him, until he moved on to Roblox. That means that importance is not just relative but can also be fleeting. This is also okay.

But what if it is not okay? What if it does not feel okay? What if something has been important for a long time, and then for whatever reason, it isn’t?

Baseball cards used to be important to me, important enough to have put a lot of time and money into them, important enough for thousands of cards to have moved multiple times, sometimes across long distances. At some point it became more important to free up the space than to hold onto the legacy of their importance, though. I sold most of them, and not for very much money.

What I find as I get older is that it’s extremely difficult to accept that something which used to be important is no longer important. I can accept the fleeting nature of things. What I struggle with - a lot - is the idea of waste. If I put hundreds of hours of effort, or thousands of dollars, into something, can I really just throw it away, on the grounds that it’s no longer important?

I imagine that this is the kind of trap that hoarders fall into, where for them importance and usefulness are essentially synonymous. You can’t throw something out if it’s potentially useful, etc.

But I’m not so much getting at things. I’m getting at ideas. I’m not getting at how we spend our money or what we put into our space so much as how we spend our time and what we put into our headspace. I’m also not quite getting at the sorts of things about which people are so often told to “just let it go” because to me that’s guilt or shame that’s in question.

Or is that exactly what I mean, because it’s guilt or shame which prevents throwing something out, which prevents letting something go?

A surprising thought occurred to me while here [in April 2024]. I’m going to preface this thought by at first ruining it: yes, this is Las Vegas, so there are prostitutes wandering about, and there are homeless people wandering about, that’s all true.

And yet: Las Vegas is very clean.

What I mean by this is that The Strip, at least, does not exude any sense of seediness, in the traditional way that one might think of seediness. The streets are free of litter. The casinos are not dark places at a remove from reality but are instead these thoroughly visually crafted spaces. The whole thing actually feels to me like Anaheim, if Disneyland and the parts of the city most immediately surrounding were all just the same thing. Here’s a CVS, here’s New York New York, here’s some Goofy-themed ride, whatever, it’s all just jammed together here, but it’s all clean. Even the weirdo buskers somehow seem clean.

Las Vegas in 1991 wasn’t like this. I don’t mean that it was filthy, but I do mean that it didn’t all feel brand new and shiny. It was bright and it was a sensory overload, but there were older parts, legacy places. Nothing here feels legacy at all. It feels like it was all built or renovated in the last 8 years.

And yet this is Sin City! Maybe it’s not supposed to be grimy, but isn’t it supposed to be a little… rough? Like an old West, desert kind of rough? Shouldn’t it still feel a little bit like Diamonds Are Forever - glamorous, but part of the glamour is in the contrast? An extreme mashup of high brow and low brow?

I think the word I’m looking for is friction. Friction is often equated with conflict, but I’m thinking of the word in a flatter manner.

You wouldn’t want to go to Disneyland and experience friction, right? You want things to be as smooth as possible, and if you set aside the likelihood of waiting in long lines, once you get inside Disneyland, everything is smooth. The rides are smooth, the characters are familiar. Take the whole thing even further, and you can literally call it the Magic Kingdom.

But how do you square a glorious amusement park with a place called Sin City?

This past week [May 2024] I finished the book Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland. It is an accurate title, tracking what passed for a “scene” in Peoria and surrounding environs from the early 80s through the mid 00s.

A couple years ago I read a very similar book, Out of the Basement: From Cheap Trick to DIY Punk in Rockford, Il, 1973-2005. The Rockford book is a little less punk centered, and it seems that much weirder stuff might have gone down in Peoria than in Rockford, but it’s remarkable how similar the content of the two books, and yet with almost no overlapping stories.

I was super intensely focused on indie-rock and everything surrounding right in the middle of the timelines of these books. At WESN we made a point of playing “local” music and would have included anything from within two hours away. I grew up in Rockford and I went to school 45 minutes away from Peoria. I knew almost none of the bands in either book. It was truly bizarre reading all of this and wondering, who? when? THERE? WHAT?

You grow up and have some sort of understanding that you’re part of a larger world, a world where some things are closer than others, and you form an understanding accordingly. By the time I was a senior in high school I had started to become aware that something was going on, but I didn’t go to a DIY show until the month I graduated, and even that was in freaking Beloit.

It’s all been a wild reminder of how little we really know about what’s going on around us, even when it comes to the things we might think we know all about.

So, there was underground punk rock culture in Rockford, and Peoria, and probably darn near everywhere, even in the mid 80s. Forgive the 10 year olds who didn’t see it, whose shared experiences at school involved no such thing.

For my purposes here I’m going to do what they did in the Peoria book and use “punk” as a broader umbrella term to mean things that it doesn’t really mean. What I’m getting at is the kid who was listening to music you couldn’t buy at the mall, maybe not even at the local cool record store; the kid who had a skateboard before everyone else; the kid who had a certain kind of nonconformist streak at a time when that was considered somehow necessarily dangerous.

There are innumerable reasons why a kid might have embraced a punk ethos, whether that’s how they thought of it or not. I’m going to posit this though: Reagan America in the 1980s was awful in a whole lot of different ways, and implicit or explicit rejection of many of the accompanying trappings is extremely understandable, regardless of how anyone feels about where that rejection may have led someone.

Alright, there you go, four disjoint unrealized posts, which probably all sound like they were written by the same freak.

I have a couple of other abandoned posts as well but they actually got farther and it looks like they sputtered out less because I ran out of ideas than because I got overwhelmed by the stream of conscious I was on. I should really try to rework those.

This week’s Phthursday Flag needs no introduction:

It is of course the majestic flag of Jamaica. As of the time of this writing, this is the only national flag which contains not an iota of red or white or blue. (Libya changed from their solid green flag a while ago.)

The Jamaican flag was purportedly developed by a bipartian committee of Jamaican national legislators and I just want you to imagine for a moment how such a thing could possibly happen in any politics anywhere.

What I really love about the Jamaican flag is how it is so simple and yet so dramatically different. From a basic design perspective - it’s based on the Scottish flag - but the use of green, gold, and black is arresting. I suspect that the relative prominence of Jamaica in world culture is rooted in no small part in the design triumph of a committee.

Consider for a moment then how this alternate proposal might have altered the future of not just a country but indeed of the entire world:

This week’s subject is borrowed from the 1992 Primus EP of the same name, one of those things near the top of the list of CDs I Once Owned But Am Not Really Sure Why. It’s a five-song covers EP which opens with their take on Peter Gabriel’s “Intruder”:

What else would make that list? Almost certainly Ulan Bator’s … All the Quick and the Dead would be there, and I think also Alligator Gun’s Onehundredpercentfreak. Nothing against any of them, I’m just not sure why I ever wanted them in the first place, and/or I barely remember what they even sounded like.

Ulan Bator at least, I’m pretty sure it was the name of the band and the name of the album that somehow roped me in. The one album which I remember buying pretty much entirely based on the name of the band and the name of the album and which turned into something really awesome in my memory was the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments’ Bait and Switch.

Years later I would see Ron House (frontman of TJSA) on a regular basis at Used Kids Records in Columbus and thanks in part to his encouragement I bought Hefner’s Breaking God’s Heart and yeaaaaah I owe ol’ Ron for that.

This is as good a time as any to provide a META-SPIEL teaser that a big, ridiculous new feature is coming this November. I’m kind of dreading what I’ve set myself up for, but luckily my trusty assistant Kuluria is on board to help me with this project, even if she doesn’t remember that I’ve been talking about this for many years. Let’s just say that I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of people absorbing themselves in projects for a while and then wrapping them up, and I’ve got such a large project in the works (at least in my mind), and it’ll involve a lot of music.

And hey, if things go well, maybe next week’s Musings will too, and maybe it won’t be full of miscellaneous debris.