In Which We Ignore Most Of The Sorrows

Living For Love Alone

by LUCY MORRIS

At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity in discovering the pleasures of those who live for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also.

– Swann’s Way

I have forgotten many things already, but I do remember this: to be in love in New York felt like an homage to the city itself, a kind of tribute paid to your surroundings. Shoulder rested on someone else’s on the end seats of the R train, hands entwined on the Coney Island boardwalk — these gestures were a kind of offering, the love for where you lived manifested in your love for the person beside you.

I was often in love in New York. The first time it happened it was springtime and the trees were blooming a bubblegum pink and I had a new polka dot dress to wear. I was headed to Russia the following fall, which meant nothing really mattered, nothing beyond the mornings my boyfriend awoke me with croissants and whispers, or the afternoons he read aloud to me in the small park adjacent to Union Square, not the main event but the little refuge beside it. 

Most of what I remember of this period is that I was young: so young that the coffee I drank was more cream than espresso, so young that when the strawberries I bought turned out to be rotten I was too shy to return them myself. I was so young that boyfriends were really boys and I sat with friends debating the terminology of sex like it mattered and staying up all night was an achievement, not a drag. All of these pieces, the late nights and arguments and bodega coffee and moldy berries, were then tinged by the fact of being in love, heightened by it to a terrifying degree: a dawn was not just a dawn, a berry not just a berry.

There were other things, too, in the years that followed that were not limited to their appearances, objects and occurrences with whole lives beyond what they seemed.

A certain lace dress I owned was not just a lace dress — it was a symbol of something I thought could be conveyed by what I wore, because I was too shy to convey it in speech, a trait that I believe to be not uncommon among the young.

“You could crash at my place tonight,” I offered up to a guy with the same glasses as me one night over fries on First Avenue, and it was just one line, but it was also an entire story.

photo by Blake Fitch

There were keyrings and subway lines and paperback volumes from the Strand dollar bins, a gold necklace and Metrocards and Film Forum ticket stubs, and none of it was what it seemed. How could it be? I was then someone who could offer up with no shame, no embarrassment, no doubt: “I’m in love,” exclamation point implicit in its declaration. I can probably pinpoint the moment when I stopped being someone who could say that with enthusiasm, who came to feel the sentiment belonged to a younger, past self, but what would be the point?

One important March, the boss in the all Russian office where I worked gave me a red rose for International Women’s Day. I thanked him, “Spasibo bolshoye,” and carried it in my hands most of the way home. I thought about taking it all the way but ended up throwing it away into a bin at Atlantic Avenue, because the relationship with the bubblegum tree boyfriend I was going home to was disintegrating at a speed that was somehow both unbelievably fast and startlingly slow, and it seemed impolitic to show up with a rose from someone else, even a boss. I want to say that when I threw that rose out I knew it was over, unfixable, but that knowledge is of the kind that can only be applied in hindsight.

When you are twenty-two and shy and not particularly empowered there are not very many transgressive things you can do, but saying goodbye to someone who loves you is one of them. The first time I did that may have marked, in a meek kind of way, the first real adult thing I did — certainly it was more adult than the job, the moving in together, any of that illusory adultness that sounded good when you informed people of it but didn’t require much courage because it was not altogether unexpected.

It is hard to trace lines from theres to heres, hard not to get caught up in detours along the way––the minor romances, geographical diversions — but it is almost certainly true that if I had not thrown out that rose, thrown in the towel, I would not be where I am now. Wherever exactly that may be.

Lying in bed, swollen with Sunday night sadness, I think of when I instructed an old boyfriend to meet me at Tile Bar very late on a Sunday at the end of summer when all other possibilities and excuses had been exhausted. I wore a teal dress of the kind that could pass as casual but which I had in fact purchased expressly for the occasion, gone on that heatwave day to Forever 21 and emerged with the yellow bag, certain convoluted intentions.

I think of intentions a lot lately, and all the years I thought I had none when I very much had ones I was merely afraid to voice, and I think in equal part of the years I thought I had many that were really empty intentions, vague hopes of the kind of person I wanted to be with no course of action behind them.

That night at the bar we fed the jukebox all our ones and the old boyfriend gave away two cigarettes and late, near close, we went around the corner to the ATM. In my memory we were holding hands, swinging the V of our attached arms back and forth, taking up all of empty Second Avenue. Back at my apartment I offered him the only beer in my fridge, a leftover party Sam Adams, but the beer wasn’t the point; that was never the point.

But goal posts move, meanings change. It was not actually the end of summer, it was early in July, the fifth or sixth maybe, but it was near the end of what would be my summer, in the time I had left in New York. The beer was not the point at the time, but later it was very much the point. I recall then wanting that old boyfriend to miss me when I wasn’t around, but later I would just come to settle for him talking to me.

For a while after that I was afflicted with bad dreams, by the memory of a pale stretch of neck I used to know, by a stinging silence that seemed to spread in the darkness. I was trying to put an end to my preservationist instincts, the desire to record, but the details I refused to write down merely migrated to my dreams: the exact nature of someone’s stubble, the precise route of a walk once taken, the setting and wording of a conversation once had.

photo by Blake Fitch

I note the time I’ve been apart from that pale stretch of neck, all the habits I’ve picked up and broken since then, the people I’ve met and lost, the books I’ve creased open with pleasure and shut with annoyance. I generally have very little understanding of what day it is. Instead, the unit of time by which I measure everything is the duration of people’s absences. Nothing more and nothing less.

When my brother announced his intention to get married I stopped speaking to him for four months, despite the fact that I adore his fiancé and love him in the way that you love siblings, painfully, more than anyone else on earth. But intertwined with the love I feel for my brother, for everyone, is the knowledge that they may not always be there, and that knowledge is so intolerable that I have come to loathe the love attached to it. The berries were as much about loss as about love, the arguments too, the ticket stubs, the Sam Adams, all the rest.

For a while when I was twenty-two and twenty-three — far too young for the fear I felt — I would tell my mother I was scared of dying alone and she would say, “We all die alone.” I did not find this comforting at the time but now I very much do.

Everything I describe comes to me now only in detail, not sentiment. Things I once lived now seem dangerously remote from my reality. I check sometimes to see if that first boyfriend is married. I am not married and I no longer live in New York and the springtime conviction in love has been superseded by rolled-eye allusions to limerence, which is coincidentally a kind of cynicism it turns out men seem to favor, although not necessarily the right kind of men.

I used to believe that the markers of adulthood were checks to the IRS and taking the garbage out, that all the other manifestations of maturity that my friends bemoaned their lack of were basically bullshit. I now think there are no markers at all, just slow evolutions, quiet forfeitures of what you once felt sure.

This spring I lie awake a lot and think about love, in the context of some remarks I’m to give at a wedding, and on certain nights when I can’t sleep love comes to seem an inseparable sentiment from doom and on others it seems so soaring in its expanse that there is nothing to say about it all, and all the Tolstoy and Proust and Pushkin I’ve read on the subject mere attempts as futile as this one.

All I can think to mention at the wedding are the meals eaten at my friends’ table, the nights they took me in and cooked me greens, showed me in their small gestures to each other how to untangle love from loss. One evening I watched them feed their sick dog medicine together and I sat humble before them on the couch, awed by their coordinated movements. Later, I gathered my things and went home, to a bed that is different from the one I sleep in now, to thoughts so separate from the ones I harbor today that I can hardly believe they are of the same mind. When I say that goal posts move and meanings change, probably what I mean is that we all do too, inevitably, without any say in the matter at all. This change is its own kind of loss. It is also its own kind of marvel.

As it happens, I am headed once again to Russia, for the first time in five years. But I have learned by now that you cannot discount meaning just by announcing that you plan to do so. In the end, all of it adds up anyhow.

Lucy Morris is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer and translator living in Iowa City. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the inverse of pleasure.

Photos by Blake Fitch.

photo by Blake Fitch

In Which We Discover The Real Problem

Pictures of Success

by ALICE BOLIN

Let us now sing in praise of Jenny Lewis: she of the auburn bangs, she of the sweet hope vocal, she of the snow-globe collection I read about once, the child stardom, the pretty sad, she the musical descendent of Robert Smith and Linda Ronstadt, which for our purposes will be a good thing.

She is the heroine of a certain story, one in which hard work pays off gradually in immense success.  This is a melancholy kind of story — it maps a drift from coolness and authenticity that perfectly correlates to “growing up.” Lewis formed her band Rilo Kiley with Blake Sennet in the late ‘90s, and they released their first full-length album, Take Offs and Landings, on Barsuk Records in 2001.  They were discovered by Barsuk band Death Cab For Cutie, which is narratively perfect.  Both bands are exemplars of a musical ethic that is now out of date, only a little over ten years later: one which is somehow both lo-fi and mannered, in which sentiment is too plain to be trusted. 

But a lot of people believed it back then, and a surprising amount still do. With RKives, a collection of B-sides and unreleased material that is the band’s first release in seven years, Rilo Kiley adoration that once lay dormant has returned, intensified by nostalgia. In her review of RKives for Pitchfork, Carrie Battan mentions the influence that Lewis and Rilo Kiley had on today’s indie artists like Waxahatchee and Best Coast, and she also explains how Rilo Kiley and proto-social networking platform LiveJournal are synonymous in her mind. There’s something poignant in that association, something that explains some of the emotions that RKives is stirring — the music of Rilo Kiley wakens the inner Livejournal user in all of us.

I first heard Rilo Kiley when I was a freshman in college.  I was only sixteen and was weird and lonely — I picture me then as one of J.D. Salinger’s hyper-sensitive whiz kid fuckups, which, incidentally, is still pretty much the way I think of myself. I related to the voice I heard in Take Offs and Landings, which is full of an adolescent longing to create a new present, to say smart and interesting things, to leave behind this life that is lame and boring and provincial, to be something profound. 

There is plenty of intellectualizing on Take Offs and Landings, most of it embarrassingly earnest.  “I get inspiration from art, science, and agriculture,” Lewis said in an interview at the time, not at all ironically.  “Science vs. Romance,” simultaneously the most cerebral and self-pitying song on the album, whines that “we’re not robots inside a grid.” The song ends with Lewis plaintively cooing, “Zeroes and ones,” and you can’t help but admire their commitment to the metaphor. “Don’t deconstruct and then fill me in,” she sings later on to the pretentious, intransigent other that haunts most of the album.  To paraphrase Cher Horowitz, Intro to Literary Criticism rears its ugly head.

Getting sick of your hometown is what late adolescence is all about, and Take Offs and Landings describes that strandedness, the craving for movement. Unlike their second album, The Execution of All Things, which chronicles a post-apocalyptic journey from the West Coast to the center of the country, Take Offs spins its wheels, languishing at the edges of the Pacific Ocean. There is an obsession, evident in the album’s title, with cars, planes, and infrastructure, but it is in the abstract—travel is only an idea, either to be longed for or resented.  “And the freeways,/They go coast to coast./They’ve taken away all my good friends,” Sennet sings in the hidden track that closes the album.

The lack of mobility in Take Offs and Landings causes more than frustration — there is a dread in these songs that exudes from the landscape. Rilo Kiley’s teenage alienation cannot be separated from the band’s origins in southern California, a place where the American project is pushed to its physical and figurative limit.  As Joan Didion wrote, there is in California “some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”  This translates to Rilo Kiley’s bitching that “traveling blows when you’re out of road.” And this is not only an exhaustion or fear of failure — as much as California is many extremes embodied, there is always the risk of implosion.  “They say California is a recipe for a black hole,” Lewis sings on “Pictures of Success.” Didion: “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” 

The Rilo Kiley story is a uniquely Californian one, as long as we are equating California with the indolent apocalypse. Lewis and Sennet, after all, were child actors, representing to the popular consciousness the most exploitive and traumatizing forces of the entertainment industry. And from these ignominious origins we chart Rilo Kiley’s rise and fall from grace. They traveled from California to Nebraska, where they released their lauded, emo-tinged second album on Saddle Creek records, and then back to California, where they put out two slick and accessible records on a major label. We think of Los Angeles as where people go to sell out, to trade their cult caché for money. That is one way to see it: Rilo Kiley is just another indie band that was a victim of its own success. It became uncool to like Rilo Kiley — if it ever was cool.

That’s the thing: their ubiquity cannot completely explain it.  Even during their Take Offs era when they flew under the radar, it seemed like the backlash was imminent. Before the album was even released, their music was featured on Dawson’s Creek, injuring their indie cred before they even developed a following. Do I need to mention that Pitchfork really, really hated Take Offs and Landings? They found it shallow and insipid, essentially too boring to criticize — their harshest attack was “Jenny Lewis’ vocals really drive me crazy.”  “I hate Rilo Kiley because she’s good looking and her music sucks,” my friend Molly recently said in an e-mail, stubbornly refusing to learn that Rilo Kiley is a band and not a person.  She is on to something, though—their prettiness is the real problem.  They are guilty of that unforgivable indie sin, being easy to like.

This is part of why I feel so tenderly toward Take Offs and Landings — if it were cool, I doubt I would have ever identified with it.  I was a precocious child, and it is a precocious album, mixing grunge, country, beachy fifties rock, and electronic beep-boops.  “Don’t Deconstruct” is a waltz that recalls the Beatles’ “For No One,” right down to the French horn solo.  In school, I often felt like I was behind because I was ahead — it was hard not to hold on to the feeling that I was special, a wunderkind, which in some ways hindered my learning to be a normal grownup.  In the same way, Take Offs and Landings’ naïve intelligence makes it all the more dorky and vulnerable. 

I remember reading an interview with Rilo Kiley in Jane around the time that their fourth album, Under the Blacklight was released.  In it, they said that “Science vs. Romance” was among the songs that they would never play live again because it just didn’t feel “relevant” anymore.  The band outgrew the earnestness of Take Offs, but somehow I never did.  The lonely sixteen-year old is still a huge part of me, which is a venerable cliché for a reason. This is why the release of RKives is such a welcome palliative for all the faux grownups of my generation. Who doesn’t want reassurance? As Sennet sings in the Take Offs and Landings’ final track, “We’ve been waiting all year/For someone to just say/Everyone fucks up, it’s going to be okay.” 

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She last wrote in these pages about Taylor Swift and living alone. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Well, You Left" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)

"Emotional" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)

 

In Which It Is A Sunny Day For A Lonely Soul

Sky's Not Listening

by LARA MILLS

Three years ago Indonesia erupted in scandal when police arrested the country’s biggest rock star, the hunky singer Ariel of the band Peterpan. Someone in Ariel’s camp stole his computer, and that guy’s cousin leaked several short sex tapes featuring Ariel and his equally famous model girlfriends, Luna Maya and Cut Tari, to the internet, unluckily after the Indonesian government started promoting its new anti-pornography laws. Ariel was sentenced to over three years in prison for distributing pornography, and the social media-obsessed Indonesians lost no time rebranding their favorite son: Peterporn.

I arrived in Indonesia while Ariel was still in jail and, probably like you, had no idea who he was or what his band sounded like or how a celebrity sex tape could be such a big deal as to warrant arrest. I started picking up on his story because people love to gossip here, if not conspire, but there’s no TMZ so people read pieces on the internet or on twitter, or recount what their cousin's wife's little brother who's a security guard in the hotel where Ariel's agent lives says, and it all gets put together in different ways depending on where you are.

I love gossiping about Ariel. I first heard his story over dinner two years ago with a 5’1”, 40-something unusually chatty Javanese woman wearing a jilbab. Since I had yet to understand the nuances of practiced Islam in Indonesia, her head covering made her next words a little surprising: "Celebrity sex ring!" She explained that Ariel took the fall for Luna to protect her, but that actually the two of them were part of this group of Indonesian superstar celebrities who were all having sex with each other, and in the end Ariel suffered for them all. What a stud.

Over time I started name-dropping Ariel in Indonesian social settings because everyone tells his story differently. A parking attendant in Yogyakarta told me while I was waiting for a ride that Ariel had been prostituting himself for money after his band’s finances were shaken by two members quitting. A Jakartan I met climbing Krakatoa added that Ariel had gotten a fan pregnant and, since she was of Arabian descent, was forced to marry her and now needed money to support a family (they have already divorced). I finally met someone who knew Ariel from their high school baseball league in Bandung (there are 240 million people in Indonesia yet this was inevitable), and he told me that Ariel’s laptop had broken and his computer repairman stole the tapes, and it was the repairman’s cousin who leaked them to the internet.

Then one night in Jakarta, as beer became wine and wine became whiskey, a Wednesday-night, Peterpan-soundtracked Glenlivet session prompted a high-class Indonesian business executive to tell me the most sensationalistic version yet: a gathering of obscenely rich Jakartan housewives used sleeping with Ariel as a prize for their monthly collective (“arisan”). The winning woman’s husband was infuriated after finding out and threatened Ariel, plus every girl he had slept with, that he would release all of Ariel’s sex tapes unless each girl paid him $25,000. He released the Luna Maya tape first to prove his sincerity, and Cut Tari didn’t pay because she didn’t care; her husband is gay and everyone knows she sleeps around. Not even whiskey could convince me that any of this was true, but my business executive friend told me something else I hadn’t heard: everything and everyone in Indonesia can be bought for a price.

What is true is that two original band members quit Peterpan in 2010 and took the band’s name with them, so even before the sex scandal, Peterpan wasn't allowed to be Peterpan anymore. In retrospect that's a godsend because the nickname “Peterporn” is here to stay. Now the band is called NOAH, and they haven’t said why, apparently they just like the name.

Ariel was released from prison in July 2012 and Peterpan immediately released a new album as NOAH. Its first single, Separuh Aku ("Half of me"… is you), is playing in every single one of Java's thousands of convenience stores at every minute of every day. It plays in department stores, in the background of Indo soaps on TV, on the sound system hanging off the back of a guy's motorbike transporting chickens from the village. I have been in the forested mountains of East Java and come across scratched up guitar-playing Indonesian kids strumming along to Separuh Aku. Ariel's jail sentence did not diminish his appeal, if anything he's now the survivor of a government people feel uneasy about anyway, and even cooler because he used to be fucking Luna Maya.

I saw NOAH in concert in Yogyakarta in February and it was transcendent. Superficially Ariel's not that cute compared to cute Indonesian guys, he actually looks a little lopsided, but he knows how to work a crowd better than anyone I have ever seen. He has a voice and temper that will melt any girl into a puddle of puppy love. I guess that's only if you can understand what he's saying, which now I can, so I'm screwed. Sadly he was so tired at the concert that he ended up lying on the ground with his microphone, begging the jubilant crowd to start feeling tired so everybody could just go home.

You’re not tired yet…? Why are you not tired?? – Ariel

Ariel is always brooding about the meaning of life and heaven and the fact that we can ask questions to the stars but they’re never gonna answer back. Learning Peterpan songs has given me a valuable Indonesian vocabulary for expressing love, angst and excruciating existential torment. Most recently I have relied on this vocabulary in imagined conversations with my Javanese ex-boyfriend following our sudden and unresolved breakup a year ago. I never saw my ex-boyfriend while I was home in Yogyakarta last time because he's a national soccer star with no sense of his own schedule. He tried to fit me in for lunch between his Friday prayers and afternoon practice the day before his big game against Aceh. It started raining and I declined, but luckily I could turn to Ariel for the exact words I needed: Biar hujan menghapus jejakmu, "let this rain erase your trace!"

Why did I ever date an Indonesian national soccer star in the first place? I should ask Ariel. Does Ariel have anything to say about navigating the confusing doublespeak of Indonesian text messages? No, because luckily his lyrics are much more straightforward: I hope the rain comes and gets rid of you! Agreed, Ariel. The rainy season here lasts from October till March, so I sure hope my next one’s a Christmas breakup or else I’m gonna be out of luck.

Lara Mills is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Jakarta. You can find her website here. This is her first appearance in these pages.

"A Sunny Day For A Lonely Soul" - Peterpan (mp3)

"Menghapus Jejakmu" - Peterpan (mp3)

"Cobalah Mengerti" - Peterpan (mp3)