"I don't live by the river"

Editing at the top to add this curious note. One of the people at this concert dropped into my brother's life briefly, pretty much at the moment I was inspired to write this post. I hadn't gotten around to posting it yet when he told me about the encounter, days later.

Curious thing, life.

Should've worn the Chris Crafts.

But, I mean, it was a concert. It was The Clash. The little Asian cotton Maryjanes were the thing. I wore The Thing. And my nerdy jeans and beige socks, yeah. But then the cool top, it was kind of new wave. Vivid turquoise stripes, cool puffed sleeves.

As cool as *I* got in 1982.


I was fifteen.

My brother asked me to go to a concert with him. It was weird, but with his girlfriend's little sister going, maybe he kind of had to. Or maybe he was just being cool with me. It was about this period in our lives that sort of thing began to happen here and there.

Whether he had to bring me, or wanted to ... Didn't matter. We were excited. I remember us spotting other cars as we got closer to Williamsburg, "Bet they're going." Seeking shared anticipation.

Fortunately, for a change: not seeking boys. This isn't because I was with my brother, though usually he terrified any boys I might find interesting, event he other punks. No, it was because Joe Strummer with a mohawk looked too much like my big brother.

So I enjoyed the whole show without dreary old sex interfering mentally, and actually experienced the concert.


That unique smell - of The Reagan Years ... of the ozone-crackled electricity that was the music itself (mountains of speakers and amps) ... of that much youth packed into a venue. The incredible, the ineffable scent and sensation and sight of youth, in the early 80s. Angry youth, but exultant too.


The crush was intense at the front. I was with the other kid sister, against the barricade; barely more than a child.  Some guy saw me (us?) and got concerned. Or maybe he just wanted my spot. But ... it was after ... Maybe he really was scared for me. He signaled the roadies, they pulled me out of my cherry position. My memory has failed, in 35 years, as to her being pulled up to, but probably so. Dragged up onto the stage, shooed off it, shepherded around - and ended up out of the crush. I was annoyed.

Where my brother and his girlfriend were, who knew - I didn't care, there was nothing to be afraid of. Not even death by general admission. Safe. Wherever the older sibs were, they were never farther than the walls of the venue. Nobody in the crowd was out to hurt us. There was a show to go on.

And so, I wormed my way BACK up to the front, once again causing annoyance, but this time to the guy who had ordered us "saved" from the crowd. Maybe the other kid sister and I did this together. I just remember I was there.

I latched onto the barricade like a tick.

The Clash. Front row. Sea of kids, strange adulation and imperative demand. It was sensational.

At some point, we pulled ourselves back out - noise-fatigue, or the desire to find the others, or maybe they found us. I have some recollection of standing on the seats, scream-singing, bopping.

I had lost one of my flimsy cotton shoes, either in the dragging moment of my salvation, or stomped off during the second round, surrounded by combat boots. Stuck the other shoe in my back pocket - heaven knows why. Maybe I thought I'd find the lost one after the show. Maybe I even did. History and memory have failed in this detail.

Standing on a seat, beer-sopped socks, the muck of spit and sweat and beer and cigarettes. Just a few hours of a life; a meeting of four people. Of thousands.

Then a drive home, on an autumnal night. Ears ringing.


"Rock the Casbah" was the big deal that year, and it was pretty great. But even today, I maintain that "London Calling" is one of the great tracks in recording history. It echoes in a way beyond the mere sonic definition.


The weekend before that concert, The Clash appeared on SNL. Little Opie Cunningham was the host (this was before he disappeared completely *behind* cameras). He drank a beer live on camera, protested his Little Opie Cunningham-ness, and got ribbed by Eddie Murphy.



The ineffable scent of the 80s. The sound of soaring, roaring, echoing, raw music. GOOD music, but raw in a way that's really only synthesized anymore.

I really did see all the good concerts.

Snobbery, Fashion, and Manners of Speaking

The vocal fry thing was only the beginning.

In recent months, verbal linguistics have been a constant obsession. I keep noticing how speedily pronunciations are evolving, and thinking about how they have changed in the past.

Watching films made in the 1930s, I get a sense of the vogue way to speak when my grandmothers were young - what "modern" used to me - and I wonder how their voices differed from one another in their primes, based on the way I remember them before they died. Both Virginian, but from different places, different backgrounds. I can still hear my mom's mother's voice fairly clearly in my head.

Listening to younger women now - and knowing that, though my generation's ears often find it annoying and even unintelligent-sounding, vocal fry and creak are now considered signifiers of education and success - I listen for different types of this evolved valspeak, and try to understand where the annoying affectations of my own youth became the worthy attainments of a new age ... and I wonder how quickly another mode of speaking will take over, what *is* taking over, and how these things will sound to those finding their own, new voices. How quickly fashion will change.

I wonder, too, how much of this occurred - how quickly speech changed - before media developed and burgeoned and kept us constantly aware of how we and others sound. Those thirties movies came at an era when image was literally projected for the first time, and sound became an emblematic part of fashion.

Clearly, language has always changed its sound. If new ways of speaking had not always superseded old ways - in coinage, but just as fundamentally in sound and emphasis - we'd still be speaking in what we now like to call proto Indo-European roots.

It's hard not to think recorded sound and image have not affected the speed with which these changes occur. It seems only yesterday I was complaining about the ubiquity of people emphatically growling HUJAPASSENT to indicate their certainty about something, and now I haven't heard it in months. Already out of vogue? I'm not even sure when I last heard curate; but artisinal has been fairly popular for a couple of years.


Getting out of coinage trends and looking at pronunciation, current fashion sounds to fogeys of (say) my Certain Age ... well, actually infantile. There is a trend for both overstatement and inaccuracy in diction, and some of the inflections and emphases echo those of a child just learning to speak.

A sampling of pronunciations which seem to be crossing regional lines, so do not appear to be related to particular accents:

Overdone ...

           diDINT (didn't)

           JOOLuhree (jewelry)

           feahMAlee (family)
           FOWurd (forward)

           MEEkup (makeup)

Underdone ...

           fill (feel)
           housiz (houses - first S sibilant)         
           uhMAYzeen (amazing)

           BEEdy (it took me some patience to understand this as a pronunciation of "beauty")
           BEDdur (better**)
 

The intensity of emphasis on consonants in middle of a word reminds old folks like me of a liddle kid's care in speaking words still new to their tongues - training the tongue to every part, every syllable of a word. It is adorable in a three year old, the way a toddler's emphatic way of walking is cute, as they learn refined balance.

In an adult - to more elderly adults - all this sounds considerably strange.



Here's where it gets REALLY interesting:

Considering how strange my slurring and curiously unsyncopated manner of speech must sound to those putting (let's face it) so much more effort into their speaking.

At Janet Reid's blog yesterday, we touched in the comments on the concept of dated voice, looking at slang and its changes since the 80s. But the actual mechanics of my tongue and lips, trained in a different generation, are themselves probably a giveaway of my age.

In the same way that, say Rosalind Russell's or Katherine Hepburn's youthful staccato and volume make people think that the acting in old movies was unnaturalistic, perhaps - my own seventies and eighties infused rhythms and inflections are distinct from the modes of speech in the under-thirty-five set right now, and probably sound artificial, if not downright lazy. It may be a more accurate signifier of my age than the old "check a woman's hands and elbows to see how old she really is" thing.

And oddly enough: Rosalind Russell was the absolute mistress of vocal creak ...

**Lest we think I'm talking only about female voices;

some of the most egregious infantile pronunciation currently available... 

August 24, 1983

Apparently, this was the date we saw Bowie.

And this was VERY nearly the view I had; I was to his right, not his left: but this was it.

Image: The Virginia Pilot, 1983

I adore the distortion of this perspecive; it's perfectly Bowie-esque. And a little mantis-like, too. Also good.

Space Coolness

Twelve shot in New Orleans today, at a Mother's Day parade.

But human beings also do this:



Even Bowie must be geeking on this one.

The small lyrical changes are fascinating ... but the images and the personal intimacy are heart-catching and magnificent.  THIS is *art* ... and I can't even aspire to such beauty.  I don't even want to, I'm just grateful we are capable of such immensity.

"David Bowie Is" ...

At last, a post that combines my love of artifacts, the history of costume, my middle-aged chick bragging rights about having seen all the cool concerts, and Ziggy/The Thin White Duke/any spider you ever found on Mars ...

No less than the Victoria and Albert Museum has sold, apparently, nearly 50,000 tickets to an exhibition of David Bowie memorabilia, creating what promises to be an exhaustive and multifariously fascinating retrospective of the man, the art, the career - and, yes, the costumes and his various dramatic personae.  Hit the link if for no other reason than the photos The History Girls have posted (by special permission; so not reproduced here) - the Yamamoto bodysuit alone is worth the clicks (two clicks - if you don't view it full size, you aren't viewing it at all!).

Bowie is a valid subject for those interested in history for - pick your reason.  He is the 20th (and 21st, as long as he's been quiet this century) century's answer to the Renaissance man - and his collaborations have  reached farther across the arts and popular culture than anyone in Renaissance times, perhaps, could have, or could even have conceived of.  Not merely by what he has himself done, but by his myriad associations and - let's face it - a dizzying fortune the like of which Michael Jackson never even dreamed - Bowie has accumulated force unlike any other rock star.  Far more than personifying glam rock, he practically invented reinvention - a dynamic so necessary to pop stars today it's almost unthinkable to associate him with the idols who have lived within one image throughout generations-long careers.  There was a time, boys and girls, when even Elvis's single transition from leather jackets to spangled pantsuits could cause cognitive dissonance.  To this day, people still talk about the "fat Elvis" years as something almost alien to the rock and roll guy who gave us his most iconic music - and gleefully cheesy movie musicals.

David Bowie had already lived nine rock and roll lives even by the time *I* saw him in 1984 - and was candid about having damn near lost his, literally, thanks to some of the more florid chemical excesses of his glam years.  The Thin White Duke wasn't ghostly merely in a visual way - he was the husk of a man all but displaying his own corpse.  And that was thirty years ago.

Bowie is the man who caused me my undying adoration for snaggle teeth (I never did forgive him for getting braces - that was actually worse in my mind than marrying someone who wasn't me!).  He was my second big arena show.  He has crooned Wild Is the Wind into my ears since I was a weeping, overdramatic teenager, and my own encroaching age has only deepened my appreciation for the instrument of his voice.

I can hardly even comprehend the level of technical expertise, the sheer madness of his creativity, the scope of his contributions on the stage, and in all the lives of those who are his fans for one reason or other.  Few people have developed the ability to offer quite so damned many reasons, at that.


What's funny is - as hagiographic as all this hyperbole embarrassingly is, and I don't deny it - the fact is, I'm trying NOT to be a gushy little fangirl.  Bowie has DONE all these things - he just IS an immense presence, it's not my gooping about him that makes it so.  If I'm honest, most of my goopier feelings about Bowie are long since dessicated in my own drying-up hide, and I just enjoy (a) the nostalgia memories of my own Bowie experiences bring on, and (b) his catalogue of music, which is literally matchless - without hyperbole.

For those who have the chance, I envy them the opportunity to see this exhibit.

For those who never have - y'all can envy *me* the memory of seeing him live, from the front row.

Pileup

I'm moving slowly but remembering all these hardcore acts I saw back when my brother let me hang around with him and his friends.  Honor Role, YFA, Graven Image, Pledge Allegiance - even just the local legend, Dirt Woman ... who looks so YOUNG to me now.  Terrifying!  Names of the bars - I love the name Going Bananas.  Need to open a place called Going Bananas and be the old lady everyone finds inexplicable.  Don't I?

No?

Yeah, possibly the illness talking.  Must be time to stop flipping my way down memory lane.  It's already run me into pics of The Exploited (gah) and Henry Rollins.  That cannot be good for my poor brain.

Would it be un-punk to cite issu.com and RVA Mini Mag as sources for this lot of pics?
For the record: INKWELL DESIGN LLC
Howzat for punk, man?

I Have Achieved ... Toast

This morning, I woke with some dizziness, and thought (as I am wont to do), "I will try to sleep this off and go in late."

The luck, it has not been quite so good.  Much of this day, I've spent sleeping the sleep of attempted-escape, but with an unfortunate lack of oblivion.  I used to get this sick in college - labyrinthitis isn't unusual for me or for my mom, but today has been the worst attack I've had in memory.  It's a miserable thing - something like the 24-hour death, but at least without any actual biological eruptions.  Only the hideous spinning and lassitude.

So my point is, it's taking a pretty hefty inspiration for me to get on my laptop at all.  I got on this morning to email my management, when it became clear going in late wasn't an option, and left the thing sleeping most of the day.  But a little while ago - I achieved toast.  Eating is helping more than I would have expected (so now I am irked I didn't try it sooner - but, so it goeth).  I also turned on Netflix, and wouldn't you know my luck - we're up to "Space Seed" on the TOS ep count.  Ahhh, Khan, you are perking me up.

However, that is not enough to make me turn to Blogger and attempt to type (which ain't easy, dear readers - I had to correct three typos in the word "Blogger" alone just now).  No, THAT took the interruption to TOS I found when I opened two emails from my brother.  I won't post the vid unless he gives permission - but, thanks to The Wonders of Teh Intarwebs, he came across the most astounding piece of our history.

My brother was the cool sibling, but for whatever reason (and, what's odd is, I don't know that parental pressure actually played into this) he actually included me sometimes in outings with his friends.

This of course is how I SAW ALL THE COOL CONCERTS.  Including perhaps the White Cross show now archived, and which he found online.  Minor Threat.  The Exploited (not even one iota cool - tools to the last minute of their obnoxiousness, those posers).  Ten Thousand Maniacs (yes, with Natalie Merchant - and the source of my first internet meme, actually, though the worthwhileness of digging through that link is dubious).  Even some arena tours - my very first was The Clash's Combat Rock tour, the same week they appeared on SNL with Little Opie Cunningham (who drank a BEER on live TV!  Woo!) - and second was Bowie.

Granted, that second one was only Serious Moonlight - but kids, I saw Bowie live from the front row of a General Admission show, so shut up until you can outdo me.  (And when you do I will not care, because braggin' rights, as fun as they are, mean remarkably little to me.)

Watching the vid of the White Cross show, I could remember so clearly the space of that little dive.  I never drank, and couldn't even smoke successfully, back then.  My brother was sufficient presence to keep me from misbehaving with boys, not that I had any very great urge to misbehave, as many crushes as I liked to have.  I remember the girls, even when I was only sixteen, asking me how I got so pale.

I wasn't one of them - I was a privileged little girl playing with the cool kids, riding on the coattails of my brother.  But they were sweet.  I remember the Andys.  I remember a girl named Honey.  I remember the night we left a show at one or two in the morning, I had something like 73 punks in the backseat, and maybe three bicycles, I was at the wheel ... and my brother meowed at a police dog in the cruiser next to us.  The officer had just come from a homicide and wasn't finding us hilarious.  But I got no ticket, to go with my healthy dose of Official Sternness.



But watching that clip, it was the SHOWS that came back, so strongly.  Mr. X has, over the ten years of our acquaintance, occasionally "warned" me, of his music, as I came to absorb it, that it might be a little hard or heavy for me.  If he watched that clip it might be clearer - knowing I was consuming this life from the age of sixteen - why I go "aww - that's cute" when he does that.

The music and atmosphere may no more be truly extinct than any of the "why when I was a child" memories any old fart uses to disparage The Present compared to one's own Past.  But punk - that Punk, the actual real stuff - has certainly been beaten to near death, emblem of long dead fashion for so long even the emblematic BS is now out of fashion itself.

Look at the people.  There's one guy with a standup mohawk, and I can tell you he almost certainly didn't wear it twice, or went on to become either goth industrial or (more likely) yuppie.  The people who were THERE, the regulars at shows - you can see them.  Guys in jeans with fairly boring short, or cropped, hair.  Ordinary shirts, or none at all.  Just guys.  Sweating.

The whole POINT of punk - real punk - was to reject fashion and affectation.  These guys couldn't afford leather jeans, and would not have worn 'em.  The one common style was army surplus (REAL - not insanely expensive Doc Martens; which came along to make money well after punk itself was dead) combat boots.  Other than that, jeans.  Torn, not torn, probably blue, maybe written on.  White tees, black tees, button ups, whatever.  A shirt that fits.  Maybe one that doesn't stink.

It'll stink by the time the night is over.

The guys got in the mosh pit.  It wasn't a systematic swirl of violence, particularly.  It was intermittent.  The guys could fight, I'm sure, but I really don't remember it.  The only bloodshed I ever recall at a show was when that utter twit of a lead singer for The Exploited SWUNG HIS MIC (of all disco-tastic, foolish show-boy rockstar idiot-hole flourishes, really) and hit his own bass player in the face with it.  I think the guy lost a tooth.  And the singer was a tool about it.  Jerks.

That bar was used as the location for a polka bar in the Robert Preston film "Finnegan Begin Again."  I remember watching that movie obsessively, dying every time RP and Mary Tyler Moore danced in that brick-lined punk dive.

It eventually became a coffee bar, at least in the 90s.  It may still be one, or may be a cafe' - it may be a dang Starbucks or a McDonald's by now.  But, then, it was the dark place I was exposed to coolness so potent that, almost thirty years on, I can see this post has gone far beyond my ability to really function.

I'ma finish watching the clip.  Finish watching "Space Seed".  And, someday, maybe I'll come back and tell all you kids about when I was not a middle aged cat (and dog) lady.

But first, another little lie-down, becuase hell if staring at this screen isn't killing me.

Gossy

Kitty is fascinated by New Wave.  After this shot he tried to eat the laptop.  (The screen still is from Visage, "Fade to Grey")

Gnawing good musical fun!

Tum Pluckered Out from excitement

Meanwhile, Pen lies on her sweet, clean blankie under her beloved end table, all cozy and cute - getting revenge on me for her bath today by farting up a storm.

"Well Cut Through the Body"

My post the other day about ancient underwear was flip and meant to be funny, a failure to represent the level of understanding I do have of the history of human costuming.  Today I'll link a piece probably less accessible to a general audience, but to me significantly more fascinating because of its depth.

A silhouette arose during the post-Conquest period, in Europe, favoring length and slenderness.  Breasts were, ideally, very small and firm - "hard as an apple" - as a description, used even many centuries later, extolled.  The ideal sustained for a very long time, in an age when marriage often involved brides who were very young indeed - though of course it waxed and waned even in those centuries of "get them young, get them virginal."

As interesting to me as anything is the science, in fashion, of *exposure*.  Some may recall my posting about the vogue for nipples in 18th century muslin; here, in another lengthy article we have discussion of side lacing - and the nakedness of skin underneath ancient lacings.

***


Just yesterday I was in church and saw a kid with a bright turquoise curly mohawk.  Being a middle aged old thing in church, it may be it looked like I was ogling the weird youngster.

In reality, I was remembering a bet, thirty years ago.  My brother had a mohawk then, and a classmate who also went to our church bet him (was it twenty dollars, Mojourner? I always remember it as being a pretty good sum) he wouldn't show up there looking so crazy.

She bet against our mom, who wasn't letting anyone out of church for shaving any PART of their heads (replayed a few years later, when I only nipped one side off).  And he won the wager, easy.


What I was thinking, in fact, was that it's sort of funny something which wasn't even completely new 30 years ago is still considered shocking.  Aww.  It's sort of cute.

We didn't invent ... any means of covering, uncovering, nor even actually modifying our bodies any time recently.  None of it.
Cut out sides exposing underwear and naked skin are at least 900 years old.  Exposed nipples probably go back more than the 200+ noted in that link above.  Bras aren't 19th century, and string bikinis have enough sensibility of design we may have been echoing the design even half a millennium ago as well.  Cinching in the midriff, manipulating the breasts, men in long hair, women shaving their skulls (for that matter bodily depilation of both sexes, and not just the head) ... we've done many of the same things through history.  We also use similar techniques to do different things, or come up with new ones to do same-old things ...

Mohawks were wild when this middle-aged woman was a little kid.  They're still shocking The Normals, and tight-laced men and women were a subculture countless generations ago.  Funny how some things don't change:

(Pretty sure this model is a certain acquaintance of mine ...)

(G-d Rot the/Thank G-d for) BBC/America

They have wiped countless hours of classic British television - including this - but BBC America was good enough to provide this little piece of daily delight:

David Bowie was the second "real" live concert I ever saw.  It was ... overwhemingly good.  Too good for snot-nosed kid I was.  Good enough, though, that the memory retroactively retrofits me to have deserved to see it, now that I can genuinely appreciate it (and it was, after all, only the Serious Moonlight tour - heh).  Bits of it maybe even THIS good.

I caught his towel.

I still have it.

*Squeeeeeeeeeeee*