deep south 2013
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dsj creative non-fiction
Mute and Continue
Ways of listening are, like all musical activity, learned behaviors that can be modified.
—Richard Rischar[my iPod] lets an environment randomly create itself out of elements that I've chosen…
—Brian Eno `23rd June 2010
Dear Brian Eno,
I'm writing from a townhouse in Newtown, Sydney, Australia, sitting on a blue suede L shaped couch, late enough at night that I should actually call it morning, head buzzing from Pseudo and wine, watching cable TV on mute, mesmerised by an infomercial for Proactiv that goes on for long enough that I become absorbed by the testimony of a poor scarred girl with rugby player shoulders. Poor girl can never wear tank tops. Poor girl will never find love. Poor girl will die alone. Talking Heads on the stereo. I'm flicking through a deck of rectangular cards, reading each one, but failing to register their meaning.
Lost in useless territory Turn it upside down Use cliches.
The box says 'Oblique Strategies' on the top and 'BRIAN ENO/PETER SCHMIDT' along one side. I used to use the online generator to get my fix; a black and yellow website that could pull up new phrases at the click of a mouse. But for Christmas last year I got my very own deck, the fifth edition from 20021. I've been using them as a decision making tool for a while now. They are subtle enough that their meaning can be adjusted to fit almost any situation, applied to any project and shift towards any direction. I just read one that said: do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable. It's too hard to get off the couch so now I'm writing to you.
Firstly, I hope you are well. I hope you are enjoying the success of your recent collaboration with David Byrne. I am now a huge fan of his work. I had never heard much of his nor Talking Heads' music until I was subjected to repeated references in the books of Bret Easton Ellis and I rushed out to buy the greatest hits CD from the only shop in Newtown that still stocks such things, because it seemed important to have the whole package—cover art, track listing, liner notes. Do you know if David reads Ellis? Is he annoyed or exalted by how often his music pops up as a soundtrack for whatever sick, narcissistic or teen party scene Ellis has imbibed in a chapter?
Did you know that Talking Heads are mentioned seventeen times in Ellis's 1987 novel The Rules of Attraction? My favourite reference is when a heartbroken Sean Bateman creates a list of things he will never do again in his life and puts down playing 'Burning Down the House' on the jukebox as number three. It was the song that was playing at a party the night he and his ex-girlfriend Lauren first hooked up and he decided it would be too painful and evocative for him to listen to ever again. I can relate—I attempted my first blowjob with U2's 'With Or Without You' blaring in the background and even now when I hear that soaring chorus and Bono's, 'Whooooah oh oh ohhhhh,' I have a taste in the back of my throat that most fifteen year olds shouldn't.
Who writes letters anymore?
Mr Eno, I am writing to you because you are one of the most prominent and influential music producers in the world. I am writing because for the past week I have been reading Ellis's books and haunted by an unbearable need for nostalgia. I am writing because I have been spending too many early mornings lying in the near dark on this couch listening to your albums from the late 1970s; the overlapping tracks of heavily processed, long, repeating textures of vocals and instruments that are the perfect background music for picking through the mouldy Moleskine journals that fell out from the top of my wardrobe last week. For digging out the shoeboxes filled with remnants of my first years out of home: photos, tickets and crumbling beer coasters. For stalking old boyfriends on Facebook and creating fake profiles to taunt their new girlfriends. For remembering.
I am writing because I am tense, stressed and often find myself sitting around contemplating my impending death and Music for Airports is not helping. Everyone should have a song like 'Burning Down the House,' a song that reminds them of being in love, on holiday or at home. A song that summons not just a memory, but a feeling. Tears. Shame. Anxiety. Lust. Hunger. Frustration at being unable to remember exactly why the song is so important.
I have gone as far as organising my musical memories into an Excel spreadsheet which details which exact songs I can extract particular memories from. It is a comforting and reassuring database to have at hand; Oasis takes me to England, The Flaming Lips to a Spanish road trip, David Gray to a mid-winter break up. This spreadsheet is causing me to be obsessed with sounds, with music, with memories. It has led me to you.I am writing because I want a soundtrack to my life and what I have gathered on my own seems entirely inadequate.
When I was writing a book about Jack Kerouac, obsessed with his work and life, I listened to endless Best of Jazz CDs; the kind you can pick up for $10 from a specials table and no one genuinely obsessed with Parker or Gillespie would dream of ever letting into their collection. Don't judge me Brian. Now I am reading books like The Rules of Attraction and its predecessor Less Than Zero and noticing how every scene is punctuated by a classic 1980s tune.
Sometimes, in my delusional and egotistical way I like to imagine I am one of the characters from Ellis's early novels; the shallow, lost, MTV obsessed young kids who skid around Los Angeles in a blur of music, clothes and movies. The blonde girls and boys who have inane, repetitious conversations about who they've slept with and where they've eaten and which clubs they've been to and the brands of clothes and sunglasses they buy. Who casually do endless lines of cocaine, pop uppers and downers, and stick needles in that soft, untraceable space between toes. It's not hard. I own some expensive things, I have fucked up friends and I am, in many ways, just as unappreciative of my privileged and over-educated upbringing as they are. It is comforting to escape into a fictionalised world, especially one where the main reason for unhappiness is having too much of everything.
I am convinced that I am being followed by 1981's number one hit, 'Tainted Love' by Soft Cell. At the beginning of the week the radio alarm woke me with it. Then someone on the bus had it as a tinny polyphonic ringtone on an ancient brick Nokia. A muzak version of the chorus appeared four times during the 43 minute wait to query an energy bill by phone. This afternoon as I sat stuck in CBD traffic on the way to have a podiatrist shave bits of dead skin off my feet with a tiny electrical sander, the opening line blared for seven seconds before the taxi driver changed stations. Those seven seconds were just enough for me to get in a couple of finger snaps and to remind me that I knew all the words.
'Tainted Love' features a soul rhythm mixed with an electronic backing track, punctuated by a series of heartfelt claps. In my spreadsheet it is under 'Doomed Relationships'; a good choice considering it is a song about the demise of a bad relationship. I have tried to adopt other songs for this theme, I have been through Coldplay, Kate Bush and Duran Duran, but none of them cause the tightening in my chest that 'Tainted Love' does. I am assaulted with a flash of images: sitting to one side at the Year Nine Disco with my leg in a cast watching my classmates bop awkwardly, fixated on a single boy, hoping he would look back at me. Refusing to leave a darkened karaoke joint on my birthday, climbing up onto a table and being left there by an embarrassed boyfriend. Grinding against a stranger in the tempting space that is the disabled bathroom at the Museum of Contemporary Art.2
It's not weird to attach music to love—there are songs for first meetings, songs for breakups, songs for staring into each other's eyes and songs for drinking two bottles of red wine by yourself and sending needy, misspelled text messages to every one-night stand you've ever had, even the ones in Ireland. It makes me feel better, less pathetic, to realise that even the seemingly cold and distant characters in Ellis's novels let music affect their love lives. In The Rules of Attraction Paul hears The Supremes' 'When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes,' looks up, sees Sean and decides to ask him on a date. Lauren lies in the bath listening to a mixed tape, content until a cheesy love song comes on that reminds her of her ex-boyfriend Victor and the song is so bad that she feels like it cheapens the memory of her relationship and she will no longer be able to think of Victor without thinking of that horrible song. I wish we knew what it was, maybe the same thing was playing in the late afternoon of last year's St Patrick's Day as I sat on a bar stool watching my ex-boyfriend stick his tongue down the throat of a girl with a purple ear expander and cargo pants she probably bought in 1998: Bryan Ferry's 'Avalon'.
Why can't I be like Clay? Able to rely on his music-related memories to conjure up something brighter or happier than wherever he is. Forced to sit in a chair for five hours and watch his best friend Julian have sex with a wealthy businessman for money and only thinking about the year before, when he and Julian would smoke cigarettes in the car outside their high school, listening to the new Squeeze album.
Now I can hear the first few seconds of gentle piano and nearly inaudible humming that signals the start of 'Music for Airports.' It is 4:30 a.m. and there is a game of Monopoly happening at my kitchen table. The house is filled with friends and friends of friends, none of them particularly interesting. I am alternating between shaking cold and worrying sweats—specifically my head is hot and my fingers are nearly numb as they press on the keyboard. We have been out in King Street, wandering from club to pub to a future-themed party in a bike lined garage and then waited for 25 minutes to get into an upstairs tapas bar/silent film screening room where they only served gin based cocktails. I lined up next to gangs of boys wearing Wayfarers sunglasses and watched them pull their flattened fringes forward and hitch up their skinny black jeans over their non-existent hips. It could have been LA in 1985. Finally inside, as I hovered in a bathroom stall, doing things you are familiar with, but I will not say directly, I could have been Blair dancing at The New Garage with an English boy from Fred Segal. We eventually came back to my house because I live alone and I always have vodka in the freezer and everyone else lives too far away because this suburb, even with its dirty streets, crack addicts and roaring aeroplanes is shockingly expensive, the narrow terrace houses mostly occupied by middle-aged web developers, lawyers and stay at home dads who are trying to recapture some aspect of their undergrad days, when live music could be seen any night of the week at the nearby university and having 6am beers on a Tuesday at the Sando was still possible.
The TV is still on mute, but now there are music videos playing on MTV. I'm kind of annoyed that I never found out what happened to the Proactiv girl. I want to change the channel, but when I reach for the remote a card falls off the deck and it says Mute and continue so I don't.
Somebody says, 'I feel weird, it's like my hands are numb, but they're not really numb,they can't feel anything. You know?'
Then a blonde girl who I used to see at the bakery but haven't for a while says, 'I only wear organic clothes now.'
A guy wearing aqua and orange happy pants who is a percussionist in a Melbourne based contemporary dance troupe says, 'OMG I love Madonna's upper arm workout.'
The Monopoly game is getting rougher and louder, Music for Airports is making me look towards the window. I expect sunlight to slide through at any moment and then the real airport music will start—a medley of 747s and A380s courtesy of a mid-flight path address. My heart is still thumping from whatever I ingested earlier and my brain is sharp and alive, but the music is making me sleepy. I can only hear the choral whispers of track one when there is a break in the game (usually during a dice roll), but it is there nonetheless, it is adding something to the room. And—oh guess what? Someone has
put a stop to your album and 'Tainted Love' is playing. I am not kidding.
Maybe it is because I am high right now, but with this listening the song seems sinister. I think about how with the increase in AIDS awareness in the late 80's 'Tainted Love' took on a whole new meaning. In Less Than Zero, the heavy bass line of 'Tainted Love' blares into the back office of a nightclub as a pimp refuses to pay Julian and sticks a needle in his arm instead. Of course, I start thinking about my spreadsheet; the depressing label that I have attached to this song and I am thinking that I want to change that, that it deserves something better, that I will do something rash.
Here's what I do next.
I am having a long overdue conversation with an interstate boy about the nature of our friendship. It is intense. We have known each other for many years, hooked up during a trip to his city, done the back and forth weekend casual thing and I'm almost certain, based on a drunken conversation about contraception and careful analysis of his Facebook wall that he's not fucking anyone else. I had to work up the guts for this phone call by downing half a glass of straight gin (there was neither tonic nor ice in my kitchen) and interrupting the Monopoly game for a brief round table of advice and support. I even practised with the guy who was stuck in jail, a vague role-play where he was me and I was the other him.
We have gone through the routines of the phone call, the did I wake you? No… it's nice to hear your voice, the listing of our daily activities, the brief comical flirting and now we are at an awkward impasse; I forget to take a deep breath (you should always, always take a deep breath) and just yell out, 'What do you want from this relationship?' I lay all my cards on the table, I tell him, in an anxious high pitched rush of words how much I like him, how hard it is when I don't see him, how hurt I have been in the past. The Monopoly players cheer. I thumb the Oblique Strategies until they hum. He is quiet. Lauren has a similar conversation with her long lost love Victor on the hallway phone, but he has no idea who she is and after she pours her heart out, he asks, 'Can I buy a vowel?'
This boy says, 'Well, fuck—' and then whatever opinion he has about our future is drowned by the steady roar of the passing 5.20am. Melbourne to Sydney. By the time the plane has completely passed, leaving behind a dull fuzz of descending engines, I am too embarrassed to ask him to repeat himself and can only say, 'Goodnight and good morning,' before hanging up.
A boy who looks Spanish, but has a French accent puts on Fleetwood Mac and asks me to dance. He wears a huge smile, he is already wriggling his hips, he is stretching his arms out towards me and beckoning me with one finger. But I put my head down and fight back tears. I am angry that the jet with its untrained, unrestrained catapult of sound invaded my world and altered it irreversibly. How will I ever know his answer? What if my only chance at honest to God, once in a lifetime true love was ruined by a stupid aeroplane?
There are daily sounds that trigger nothing for me: the sound of an air-conditioner, a DVD player on standby, a dishwasher finishing its cycle. No memories, no images, no thudding heartbeat and welling tears. I have to concentrate on these sounds to even notice them. These sounds do not punctuate anything, they don't let themselves be noticed. It is only when they jump into a situation that I care about them.
A few years ago, I lived in an inner city flat above a restaurant that specialised in Slovakian grilled meats; it was two depressing, brown carpeted rooms with a kitchenette and windows looking out on to a main road. I took the place in the midst of a back to uni housing shortage and was charmed by the location; it seemed like the kind of place a cast member from Rent would live. At first, it was a nightmare. From 5 until 10.30pm, Tuesday to Sunday the whole place hummed with the vibration of the restaurant's exhaust fan. There was a foot-wide vent snaking its way up one wall at the foot of my bed emitting a powerful and deep growl that could only be covered by running water or listening to the Top Gun soundtrack. The noise was loud, able to dominate any conversation and ruin all hopes of sleep. However, over time, I grew used to it and began to kind of look forward to it, subconsciously anticipating an evening's entertainment when it began its roar. When visitors clutched their ears and complained, I looked at them blankly. It had ceased to exist for me anymore. The vent meant nothing to me.
Fuck the plane.
I am thinking that if it had just been 'Tainted Love' or even one of your albums playing, there would have been no interruption. I wouldn't have been listening intently to the song, I would have been granted the whole conversation. The aeroplane was a classic noise, it interfered with my natural state instead of enhancing it. I have put it in my spreadsheet under 'Something Fucked Up', not such a creative definition, I know. But
Brian, getting back to my request, for my soundtrack could you alter the aeroplane noise so that it slips into a tune? Can you adjust and rearrange it so that it is no longer something that challenged my authority and robbed me of power, but something that could be beautiful and atmospheric?
I thought you would be interested to know that one of the Monopoly players is not engaging in the game at all, he is silent through each move and refuses to negotiate property sales. He chews gum incessantly and has one of the most popular accessories of 2009 in his ears; white headphones. It has been said that portable listening devices are the ultimate way to control ambience and when this young man walked into my house he looked around, sat down, said, 'I'm not sure you have what I need,' and popped his headphones in.
I think of all the different people on the street listening to different music and travelling to different imaginary places. Even in this room, we are all occupying a different landscape, each person reacting to the rhythms and stories of the music differently. Fleetwood Mac makes me think of a road trip up the coast and their Greatest Hits album being stuck in the CD player of the rental car with a broken radio. Fleetwood Mac made Clay think of driving through the desert with the wind in his hair. The Spanish/French guy stops dancing and says, 'Fleetwood Mac makes me think of vomit. What does this mean, 'You can go your own way'?'
There is a plethora of music-related devices in this room. A computer on the table, the iPod entertaining that single gum-chewer, the CD now pumping out 'Don't Stop' and the TV flashing the startling images of an up-and-coming rock band: rain falling on their heads, angled close-ups, a shell being passed around a jungle full of nymphs. I am drawn to the television screen. I don't know the song playing at all, but these young boys with their high hair and confident swaggers are pulling me in with each pelvic pop and endearing look. They are as asexual as a Velvet Goldmine extra, they have as much eyeliner as you wore in the Roxy Music heyday, and they are proof that our musical cycle has coughed up the 1970s; bandanas, tight pants, a tambourine spewing glitter. They are attractive, yes, but very, very young, much younger than anyone in this room. A blonde girl sits next to me on the couch (I shield this letter from her gaze as her coarse hemp dress brushes against my thigh) and she looks at them too and says, 'They are cute, but I bet they smell awful. Like teenage boys.'
With that look I am lost to a memory. Fourteen years old, my older brother drives Mum's car into the city. It is a school night, we don't have mobile phones, he has only been legally driving for a week and when he parks the car in the multistory car park he scrapes one side against a Toyota Rav 4. I am, as usual, on crutches. I am wearing denim shorts, a blue and white checked shirt, one converse sneaker, butterfly clips in my hair. In the foyer, I buy an oversized T-shirt and one for my best friend who didn't get a ticket. For this performance, as he has for every other one on their world tour, the lead singer is wearing shiny silver pants and a black long-sleeved shirt with the word 'Zero' printed on it in silver letters. His head is a shiny, hair-free dome. Thanks to my leg, we have front row seats that oversee a dark mosh pit and the smell of teenage boy rises up through the air before the support band has finished their set. It fills my nostrils, pungent, sour and smoky all at once and one of them in the throes of a mosh flings of his shirt and throws it back towards us where it lands spectacularly on my face.
Later:
Brian, it is mid-morning and I just got back to an empty house. The blonde girl wanted food, not just anything, she needed a spicy chicken burger from a local 24 hour fast food chain that specialises in selling buns soggy with cheese and aioli that go perfectly with weed and red wine hangovers. Someone had a car, a rare thing in this city and they claimed they were okay to drive and we didn't question them. We all piled in, I don't know how many of us, but it was crowded and hot. We drove down King Street and it was completely empty of cars because it wasn't even really light yet. The shops selling vintage clothing, records and second-hand feminist literature were all closed. One lone coffee shop was having baskets of sourdough delivered. The few homeless people that occupy this area were bunkered down on the benches outside the train station. We passed a couple of solo walkers on their way home from parties and city bars: a girl struggling after spending 12 hours in four inch heels and a guy practically running towards the kebab shop with a cask of wine in one hand.
There was a guy pressed against me, the brother of the driver maybe? I think his name was Ted and he was passed out with his heavy head on my chest and he drooled all over my cleavage. My iPod was hooked up to the stereo and it was playing The Strokes and Ted, even though he was asleep, was still tapping one foot along with the beat. I felt so free Brian! I yelled the chorus. We were those young kids that you see driving passed, crammed into a car, pumping the air with their fists, yelling random things at traffic lights. The overwhelming, living for the night feeling. Smelling the air. Summer binge drinking. Being fingered in dim lighting against a brick wall. The sense that I was as old as I was ever going to be. Riding around with a lover, eating ice-cream and sitting by the pool. If I had the upbeat tunes of the B52's on my iPod, I would have played them. You must have felt like this at some point Brian? Squatting in a field looking for aliens with your sister?
While everyone else was looking for food I wandered off into the mall across the street and roamed the hallways of slippery lino and barred up shops until I am drawn in by the fluorescents of a 24 hour Kmart. I stood in the empty, early morning space, in awe of the bulk stationery products and generic cola. Running my fingers along every bright package in the confectionary aisle. Walking through racks of high-waisted cotton underwear and nearly stopping to try on Spanx. Until I ended up in the electronics department, a sad cluttered area of disposable cameras, novelty USB sticks and cordless phones all backed by a bank of out-of-date television screens.
Being in Kmart on a Sunday morning when most other people are sleeping or tending to children or practicing yoga or creating masterpiece breakfasts was distressing. I flicked through the CD racks, looking for a Best of '80s album that would capture the mood of Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, but their covers were too flashy for what I think are dark and harrowing books, with sparks of turquoise and pink. I spotted an eerily composed Sting giving sexy death stares at the camera. I remembered that Sean also found a Sting album, but thought he was too good looking to buy the album. I remembered that Blair asks her movie producer father if he'll put Sting in a movie and he says yes, even though he calls him 'String' and cannot name a single song of his.
The televisions were on all on mute, which was comforting and familiar. I stood transfixed before them, a bank of screens displaying a montage of my life in 1996, the video for grunge band The Smashing Pumpkin's hit, '1979.'
It's a day in the life of the average middle-America teenager. It begins with a group of young people rolling around a park in an old truck tyre and ends with them trashing an all-night convenience store and racing away in a selection of second-hand cars. In between they drive around some empty streets, give their town the finger, attend a raging party, make out with each other, and break into a neighbour's backyard and fill the pool with plastic furniture. It's how I (stuck in the suburbs, without the confidence to drive, kiss strangers or vandalise property), desperately wanted my teenage years to be. It's how I finally felt in that car on the way to grab a chicken burger, maybe a decade too late.
The Pumpkins were not my favourite band when I was in high school, but they were played heavily on the national youth radio station I favoured and during the September school holidays in 1995 I trekked into the city to pre-order the album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness from the most alternative music store in Perth (a two story warehouse that sold T-shirts emblazoned with marijuana leaves and had a whole wall devoted to framed Kurt Cobain posters.) I sat in my bedroom and listened to those two discs over and over, trying to unravel the messages in the rock ballads 'Today' and 'Tonight, Tonight'. Somewhere in between was '1979'—a grunge anthem, a fusion of psychedelic dream pop and heavy metal. In 1995, the average teenager was born in 1979. My brother was and most of my friends were. It was a smart move by the Smashing Pumpkins to name this song for their demographic. A song that is essentially about the transition from youth into adulthood and although from a different decade, is not that different to one of Ellis's novels. It occupied the majority of mixed tapes I sent to interstate friends in high school. '1979' is in the spreadsheet under 'I Want to Be Back in High School'.
Earlier this year I paid $82 to see one original band member perform in a group with the same name and play the same songs. It was disappointing. I sat with my friend Robyn, off to one side of the stage, in a theatre that seemed too small for a band that once attempted to create The Wall for Generation X. It was a non-smoking venue and Robyn had to lean down low towards the concrete floor to light up one of the six joints that she'd pre-rolled and stuffed down her cowboy boot. Dozens of heavy set men in orange vests patrolled the perimeter of the dance floor. The audience was mostly pudgy thirty year olds who had dug out their 'Zero' T-shirts and Dr Martens for a final lap of grunge honour. Corgan wore a long black skirt and a black cloak. He looked very tall compared to everyone else on stage. He looked like he didn't want to be there. He made self-conscious comments about his absent former band mates.
When the band began the opening bars to '1979' he flung off his cloak and he was wearing a black T-shirt underneath with the words 'Disappear Here' printed on it. I stood up in surprise, transfixed and impressed by Corgan's brazen literary reference, feeling for the first time that evening that the band was worth its ticket price, finally beginning to enjoy myself. Then the joint was plucked from my hand by a triumphant security guard and Robyn and I were escorted from the building.
I stood in the post-dawn wasteland that was Kmart and watched those carefree and happy young people on the screen and thought of that concert and thought of being fourteen and thought of our drive here and I whispered, 'Disappear here,' and cried. When I got home I fashioned my own Oblique Strategy using a Uno card and a Dymo label maker and it said Disappear here.
It's now nearing the middle of the day. I have been awake for a very long time. I'm sitting inside looking through a glass door at the overgrown garden and the planes keep soaring overhead. I wish I had a swimming pool like Clay and I could sit and stare into its shiny blue surface, but I don't so I just watch the bellies of the jumbos go passed through the open double-glazed sliding doors. Watch the passionfruit vine that covers the clothesline shake in sympathy. Watch the leaves, cigarette butts and melted candle stubs scatter across the courtyard with each take off.
My iPod died on the way home, its screen darkened and it could not be awoken no matter how many times I tapped the ergonomic buttons. It is all the more disturbing because when you press the play button it is stuck on the last song I was listening to before it collapsed and I am now doomed by this failure in technology to listen to 'Hotel
California' for the rest of my life; The Eagles' docile harmonies a pathetic soundtrack for my daily activities. I opened a window because I needed to hear some kind of noise and
I couldn't cope with the hassle of using such ancient technology as a CD player or the unpredictability of the radio or the distraction of a music video.
All I feel comfortable with is the steady roar of a plane. The take off and landings which bothered me so much earlier have gone back to their comforting rhythm. No videos, no '80s synthesizers, no teenage anthems. I want to be inside that plane, have its roar envelope me; that white noise rumbling that signals circulating air and reliable engines.
Fall asleep to high altitude humming, land in air conditioned buzzing and fall back asleep in the cocooned muffled splendour of a Sheraton or a Hilton. I pluck a card from the deck and it says Go outside. Shut the door. So I do.
Christelle Davis completed her novel Mute and Continue (from which this story is adapted) in 2012 as a part of her PhD degree at Sydney University. She is currently Assistant Professor of English Literature at Gyeongsang National University in South Korea.
