Being in this place on an almost daily basis, my moods come up and down with the music they play. Today seems to be 90s nostalgia day: we’re sitting through Bleach. Listening to Kurt’s voice, I travel inwardly to the place I inhabited when I first heard these songs. The teenage landscape: how much I wanted to be an artist, how many privileges I claimed for myself because I was already writing songs, and all the stuff that happened on the periphery of my consciousness (though perhaps at the forefront of everyone else’s): parties, driving around Cheltenham with friends, pot, girls. One thing I’ve lost is a sense of expectancy— as of today, I have nothing to look forward to. It’s not just that experience destroys innocence; the road of excess I’ve been joyriding down has created a space around me that cannot be filled. But I catch backwards glimpses sometimes, and music, more than anything else, opens up long-closed channels that allow me to re-receive impressions. Right around the time Kurt died, probably late spring ’94, I was hanging out with Chris and Fran at Fran’s house, high. It was trippy weed and, sitting on Fran’s back porch, I hallucinated that his backyard was an African jungle. I was self-conscious because I had to piss and thought I couldn’t find the bathroom. So, this being the 90s, I just walked into the jungle and pissed there. My last memory of that night is of banging out one of my songs on Fran’s piano, specifically for Chris to hear. I realized in the middle that I have a unique talent— though I often couldn’t find my feet when stoned, I could bash out my songs and get through them. Funny: Chris DeLuca and Ted Gissman didn’t take to each other like I hoped they would. Chris took one look, as of fall ’91, at Ted’s homeboy posturing, and decided to fling some arrows in his direction. Ted became impassive, stone-like. And it went downhill from there. Chris wanted to see some whirling dervish showmanship from Ted, to prove that all that posturing wasn’t hot air, and Ted wanted respect for the loftier position he held at CHS. And other things he was holding. I stood in the middle, attempting to mediate, drained of machismo from long exposure to the CHS theater department and its Harvey Fierstein vibes. Ouch. The contemporary sting kicks in— here I am, at the Grind, 2010, having both gained and lost more than I ever thought I could. All because, bleached or not, when I say “art” I still mean it. Kurt, Fran, Chris and Ted are still with me somewhere.
There’s a man sitting in one of the corner seats who appears to do (outlandish as it seems) cartoons for the New Yorker. In the early aughts, I was quite smitten with the New Yorker, down to being a perpetual subscriber. It took me several years to realize how “culture-lite” it is. It doesn’t aid their lightweight image that the most likely place to find the new New Yorker is in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room. I loved Updike in those days, and I still like bits of the Rabbit books, but the poetry is so putrid I really only pick up the New Yorker for laughs. Why a New Yorker cartoonist would plant himself at the Grind in Philly is beyond me. Maybe he likes the European feel of the place— black coffered ceiling, semi-artsy photographs, hipster sheen. There he is, rubbing one off. Nicer than Bleecker, eh?
One trail I go down on days like this is opening my eyes to visuals, as ends in themselves. Sometimes I get a weird visionary sense just from looking at murals, row houses, cars, sunlight hitting certain kinds of bricks. For instance, the way the sun just now is striking the façade of Frank’s puts my head in a painterly space. I’ve always admired the expansiveness of certain painters’ lives— Picasso, Monet, Renoir. The real painters, it seems to me, have a way of taking it easy while maintaining intensity. There is a terrible narrowness to language in any one writer’s hands; images have a pliability that makes them seem to me, on some level, more blessed. Not that poor old Monet going blind isn’t tragic; but the length of his life, the broad vista of his painterly consciousness, is something that can be picked up, even if Frank’s is hardly a realm of pointillist precision and water lilies. Or maybe there is a hint of desperation in Philly these days, and I’m channeling it.
Yours,
Adam
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