Running Through My CD Collection: Day 12

Today's album: Billboard Top Modern Rock Tracks 1990 (Various) 

Length: 41 minutes

Activity: Treadmill walk

What listening to this album made me think of: Where the fuck was I in 1990, because I only know three songs on this album. 

Oh yeah—I was in Buffalo in 1990, getting over a breakup with my first love back home after several years together, immersing myself in Buffalonian and Canadian music like the Goo Goo Dolls and Barenaked Ladies and moe. (mostly via osmosis because Rob and Chuck of moe. lived two rooms down from me in my dorm and I hung out in their room a lot and didn't give a shit whether they stylized moe. with a period or not, just if they had enough Labatt Blue for everyone, and by "everyone" I mean "me").

What I'm saying is I obviously didn't listen to too much of what was on the radio that year while ensconced in my Buffalo bubble.

Review: I can only adequately and fully speak to three songs on this compilation album:

• "Suicide Blonde," INXS: I can speak to this song, but there's not much to say, because I don't care much for it. Early INXS was best, peaking with Kick, which is one of my favorite albums of all time. I don't know if that's because it came out the year I graduated high school and therefore is entwined with all of that idyllic perfection one attributes to one's senior year of high school after much time has passed and selective middle-aged amnesia has taken hold. It's probably just a really excellent album.

• "Birdhouse in Your Soul," They Might Be Giants: This is before Malcolm in the Middle appropriated "Boss of Me," when TMBG was still quirky and so college, and I was so completely enamored that I blew my first pathetic Apple Bank paychecks to check them out at Irving Plaza and Roseland when I came back to the Island from Buffalo for good. It was fun to hear them again; it's been awhile.

• "Here's Where the Story Ends," The Sundays: I know it, but it makes me feel nothing. I thought of nothing. I was nothing.

How I felt after: Not as nostalgic as I'd hoped I'd feel. 

Random fact I learned about this artist/album: I learned nothing.

Why I'm doing this: See Day 1. 


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Yuletide Fever Dream

 …A Martha Stewart wild mushroom-spinach lasagna that took $120, three hours, and Guinness (the beer, not Alec) to bring to fruition…

…The realization that one does not say Aunt Andie died; one says she moved to West Tampa, or Olga the Superstitious Ukrainian won't stay on as the caretaker in Grandma's house. Not sure how they've explained my grandfather's long absence—I suspect he's in Ibiza…

…A poignant appearance by Scott Norwood in Four Falls of Buffalo to remind me how, and why, it's easy to love Buffalo…

…More proof that the angry owls are out in full force. …

…My body as smartphone, battery bereft of Jenny Juice™ but recharged by hours in repose…

...A disembodiment brought on by the realization that repose is pointless, since FitBit stats show sleep continues to mock me... 

…The salve of the silver screen, via Star Wars, The Hateful Eight, The Revenant…

…via Rilke's two solitudes instantly connecting in a little coup de foudre called Carol, followed by a New Yorker accompaniment on Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt to fill in the blanks…

…via the dark humor of Argentina's incredibly satisfying Wild Tales… 

…via the quiet humor/desperation of the Swedes' A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, complete with one of the most horrifying scenes I've ever witnessed. It involved a bronze bull. …

...A gunned-down 12-year-old, a dream sequence we can't escape, a family's eternal nightmare.

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Herod's HQ (For Tamir)

Welcome to Cleveland, America's Bethlehem,
where gold has turned to 
incense.

Not Camus nor Coventry Carol,
Neither Reni nor a 
Rubens

Can corral these tears from Buckeyes
Crashing onto blood-soaked
pavements.

No sleep for Samaria
Amid moans from Rachel's Ramah
You called it, Jeremiah.

What happened to our wise men?
When did they flee the massacre?
Why did we let them go?

How can we say the Epiphany's on its way
When Matthew's deemed a liar—
Does even Jesus know?

If he does, he surely wept
as truth was swept
down Hell's pitch hole.

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The Medical Examiner of the Future

Set adrift in lacunae,

Drowned in loopholes and clauses,
Anesthesia not needed:
No one flinches or pauses.

He trudges through turmoil,
Through the gore and the gauzes,
Steeped in shrieks of salvation,
Genuflections and crosses.

Bodies bored through with bullets,
He's stopped counting the losses,
Still, he trembles while scrawling
His rote: "natural causes."      

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The Ghost-Child's Chimera

The Ghost-Child's Chimera

I used to think I was someone, but 

I'm no one.
I do not exist.
I never was.

I am not the granddaughter of Yurik, 
not the progeny of some tenacious teen smuggled out of Lviv,

a.k.a. Lwów,
a.k.a. Lvov.

Sent to a Brave New World:

Before his home morphed into a moat in the

tug-of-war
between Schörner's Wehrmacht and the Reds.

Before everything was devoured by the
gut-of-war
in pre-perestroika peristalsis.

Before Plan Zachód headed south, 
and he headed west.

Alas, poor Yurik, I knew you well:

In my specter's reverie, in a phantasmic delusion 
Where you made it to welcoming New York shores,
Where you received salutations instead of renunciations.

Where you felt your cheeks burn in an American kindergarten class,
Where you pretended you weren't an adolescent swapping out Slavic for Greenwich Willage slang,
Where you eventually rose up the ranks to your rightful post.

Where you enlisted in the US Army and entered stage left into the China-India-Burma Theater,
Where you smoked horseshit and dreamt of your old home, but also of your new one.

Where, when you anchored back in the Hudson's maw, you danced the Hopak and closed down McSorley's before stumbling down 7th into morning Mass at St. George's.

Where you fell in love and kept on living, though not in Lvov,
a.k.a. Lwów,
a.k.a. Lviv.

Where you became a woodworker and worked as you would.

Where you shepherded five children to the Unisphere of the World's Fair, on the other side of the world from where you were born.

Where you smoked not horseshit, but tobacco, in the bent billiards and Dublins that your smart-ass American-born kids occasionally crammed with weed.

Where you still sipped wodka and wisited your parents in the Willage,

Where you paid your taxes,

Where you gave your grandkids Dorothy Hamill haircuts in your cellar woodshop and caravanned some of them to Kerhonkson to learn what it was like to be from 
Lviv.

Where you died on an island far from your origin story, proud to be an American, eating forbidden kielbasa to the very end.

But there were no salutations, only renunciations.
You became a bolus—the Euro-intestines got their fill. 
Another St. Louis sent back to the motherland, or whoever would take them.

Those were all just my dreams—a ghost-child's chimera.

I used to think that I was someone, but
I'm no one.
I do not exist.
I never was.

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A Twinkle in Time

On July 14, 2001, the Eiffel Tower shuttered its millennium illuminations, a show of visual magnificence that triggered 20,000 bulbs each evening in a dazzling display. From sundown until an hour or two after midnight, depending on the season, residents and visitors would lift their gaze to one of the world's most iconic landmarks, swathed in a twinkling hourly homage to the City of Light. The filaments would heat up and wink; enraptured eyes would refuse to blink for 10 minutes of ocular splendor.

This tribute to the turn of the century wasn't designed to last forever. The tower's electrical system was decrepit and unequipped to handle a long-term energy overload, and so city officials turned off the twinkles barely 18 months after they had begun. The date for the shutdown was purposeful and symbolic: July 14, Bastille Day.

But it turns out you can't keep a good twinkle down, and the flicker-fest was resurrected in June 2003. It's since been tamped down: In efforts to go green, Paris replaced incandescent bulbs on more than 100 of its monuments with energy-efficient metal iodide ones, and it cut down each hourly tower light-show to five minutes instead of 10.

I was in Paris that July week in 2001, two months before the New York I'd fly back to was plunged into darkness by horrors never foreseen. I left Paris on July 13, the day before La Fete Nationale, so my last memory of the Eiffel Tower was the imprint of the night before, one of erratically flashing radiance witnessed while noshing on a sublime Nutella crepe wheedled out of a charmingly grouchy food-truck vendor. 

The next day, as urban event-planners gussied up the Champs-Elysées, I left Paris behind and boarded a train to Amsterdam, a city awash in its own waves of light: the gallery fixtures illuminating the Van Gogh Museum's wares, the symbolism of light and reflection holding calm court in the Prinsengracht's Anne Frank House, even the neon glow emanating after dusk from behind the Rossebuurt's eagerly ogled panes.

That trip seems so long ago, but 9/11 does not, because light and darkness often don't fall on the same continuum in our memory bank. And while much has changed since in what I can claim I've learned about the world, there are only three things I can say for sure at this particular moment: that I love my children unconditionally; that the fog of war of this latest devastation will take some time to dissipate (so prepare for a flood of false information, finger-pointing, and the inevitable references to concealed carry, college campuses, and even Rob Lowe); and that the lights of Paris will continue to shine through that fog.

The tower is shut down until further notice and will remain dark tonight in mourning for the victims of yesterday's attacks. The pervading feeling is one reminiscent of the days immediately after 9/11, when we stared out at the destruction, coated in suffocating layers of ash, in the streets of lower Manhattan. We were unable to fathom not only how we could recover from our psychic wounds, from losing so many loved ones, but also how we could ever clean up our city left in shambles. But we did, and the Freedom Tower was one of the world's red, white, and blue wayposts this week as we scanned the horizon for some hope and humanity. 

The Eiffel Tower will sparkle in due time, taking its rightful place next to the Freedom Tower, the Sydney Opera House, Rio's Christ the Redeemer, and even the brilliance of this week's Diwali. They'll continue to shed light on evil that may shape-shift and adopt new acronyms, but always burrow in blackness—be it in Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, Ukraine, Kenya, Syria, or any of the other places around the globe that don't see the flash of the media's camera when the militants come to town. These are the beacons we'll need to illuminate the dark days that still lie before us.

Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.

Running Through My CD Collection: Day 11

Today's album: Back in Black (AC/DC) 

Length: 42 minutes

Activity: Treadmill run/incline walk

What listening to this album made me think of: Being in a seedy Buffalo bar (probably Sutter's), because when I'm trying to peel the soles of my shoes off a sticky linoleum floor while drinking an Alabama slammer is the only time I really enjoy listening to AC/DC.

Review: I don't really like AC/DC. As previously stated. Much like I don't really like the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, or Bruce Springsteen. Don't try to convince me with arguments. The heart wants what the heart wants, and it's not AC/DC. "Shook Me All Night Long" is a great song, though.

How I felt after: My feet and ankles hurt.

Random fact I learned about this artist/album: Mutt Lange's real name is Robert John. I know this because Robert John "Mutt" Lange is splashed right across the front of the CD.

Why I'm doing this: See Day 1. 


Tweets and treats at @jenngidman.