You Can Never Go Home Again
Technically, Durham, North Carolina stopped being my home sometime last summer, when my mom sold our house and moved down to Louisiana approximately forty seconds before New Orleans' plan to set the bar for expensive blow jobs disastrously high came to fruition; I certainly hadn't been back since Christmas of 2004 and honestly hadn't really been counting on going back. But, at the risk of sounding like a pant-suited Lifetime movie psychotherapist, all of that's strictly intellectual until you actually confront the schism, and apart from buying a heroically random grip of CDs and watching my high-school friends Jared and Rebecca get married (more on both later in the week), that's pretty much all I did from the moment my plane touched down at RDU. And while I'd love to be able to say that I came to some profound conclusion after meditating on the evidence of time's passage while it was jumping up and kicking me right in the face, preferably following some comical dalliance with any one of the legion of girls no longer able to foot the bill for the romantic aloofness they'd stick me with back during high school - god, would I love to be able to say that - the weekend didn't quite work out that way. Oh sure, there was plenty of profundity to be had; unfortunately for me, it was just profundity of an eminantly well-traveled, commonplace variety. I swear to god, my fucking life sometimes.
I do want to make it clear that the split between me and Durham was a two-way street, especially in the context of this particular visit. It is, after all, awfully hard not to notice how far you've come when, thanks to finally taking a leap in pay-grades from "squat" to "squat and a half", you're able to rent a car which far outstrips any whip you've ever been free to push through your hometown's streets before (1), or when you're staying in a hotel room on your own dime for the first time (2), or even doing something as simple as shopping for a suit (3). I'd also like to make it clear that I found myself struck with just as much consistency by all the stuff that hadn't changed - time and tide may wait for no man, but it's good to know that anyone taking US 70 into Durham from RDU still needs to know not to take the first exit pointing towards "Durham" unless they really feel like taking the scenic route through Durham's crackhouse district. In fact, the most striking signifiers of stasis were probably the ones of which I wasn't even all that aware; if I'm going somewhere new, Durham may ask me to extract painstakingly idiot-proof directions on the magnitude of those I gave my mom back when she was first figuring out email (4), but damned if I couldn't staple my eyes shut and drive my car right up through the secret entrance at New Hope Commons, even swerving to miss the speed bumps. Some things never change. Even the radio seemed to be built for nostalgia from the ground up - it should speak volumes about the Triangle's broadcasting culture that the most au courant song I heard all weekend came courtesy of Jared and Rebecca's wedding DJ (5), and if it doesn't, the trifectas of Fleetwood Mac AND the Gin Blossoms AND Diana Ross I encountered simply on my way from the airport to my hotel to the barbecue restaurant oughtta. It's good to know that some things will be stuck in 1996 for at least another decade; I look forward to hearing about Durham's reaction to "Hey Ya" in 2011, assuming America hasn't fallen victim to the Red Peril.
But holy fuck, other stuff sure isn't, primarily the home my mother sold before moving down to Hurricanopolis. My house was, to put it bluntly, at least ten to twenty times as awesome as yours, to the point where I can literally just describe it as "The pink stucco house across the street from the East Campus" and feel relatively secure in the knowledge that anyone who's spent any time in Durham knows exactly the house I'm talking about(6); I literally have multiple stories about walking outside, still wrecked by waking up, to discover someone standing in our front yard sketching our house at the ass-crack of dawn(7), a claim I doubt even rich Croasdaile residents can make. But I don't begrudge my mom for selling it; after my sister and I went away to college, she was simply left with too much house to look after by herself, and it's not like I'd have expected the woman who taught me when to recognize when I've had a good run to have done any differently.
Well - I might have expected her to have exercised a little more caution in who she ended up selling the house to; not to confirm every stereotype remaining about the South or anything, but really - I'd have thought my mom would have had more sense than to sell to a family of pushy Manhattanites who'd just been hired to Duke's faculty (the double kiss-of-death). I'd heard all kinds of murmurs from my back-home friends about the horrors being inflicted on my house - everything from the house being covered in tarps to ridiculous extensions being built out back to the summoning of motherfucking Gozer seemed to be taking place, to the point where I wasn't even sure if I'd recognize the place. In actuality, of course, it wasn't nearly that bad - aside from the hideous portico artlessly wrapped around the porch and the ass-ugly shed/sweatlodge they inexplicably placed on the roof, it pretty much looked the same. But damned if it wasn't enough to make me sit and stop for a minute and just wrangle with the fact that this house, this utterly immobile house, had utterly moved on.
But really, though, that was pretty much to be expected; one hates to go all Hallmark on one's mp3 blog audience, but that's just the mechanical process of getting older, and consciously ignoring it remains the domain of the Panic! At The Disco fan (8). What I wasn't expecting, however, was Durham's choice for a soundtrack for this moment; I'd venture to say that it ranks among the most perfectly musically-accompanied moments of transition in the entire narrative of my life. That's right - as I turned off of Markham into the gravel alley running by my childhood home and found myself confronting ephemerality more directly than I'd done in the past decade, Sunny 93.9 decided I needed to hear:
Kansas, "Carry On My Wayward Son"
I shit you not. My fucking life. (Click here to buy Kansas' The Best of Kansas from Amazon.com)
FOOTNOTES
1: up until the middle of last month, I drove a 1997 Kia Sportage, so a car made entirely out of pressure-molded kangaroo poop would have been a step up, to say nothing of the 2004 Ford Taurus I ended up driving off the Hertz lot. BIG PIMPIN' SPENDIN' CHEESE etc
2: again, compared to my shitty little LA studio, La Quinta might as well have been the Hamptons.
3: somehow, I suspect that most suits bought in North Carolina J.C. are purchased only after consideration of how well they'd wear in Los Angeles.
4: To be fair, this is at least partially because Durham may be the worst-designed city I've ever driven in apart from Los Angeles and Washington D.C.; I attribute my still-extant shittiness with directions directly attributable to Durham making me throw my hands up and go FUCK IT WITH ALL THIS "DIRECTIONS" BULLSHIT back when I was young and impressionable. "Can't they build a city that works" indeed.
5: "Hollaback Girl", duh
6: Or, failing that, "the pink house you could hit with a thrown rock if you stood on the porch of the Duke Rape House". Or I could just say "this house", but where's the fun in that?
7: of course, I've also walked outside in the same state to find a Duke fratboy barfing his lungs up into our leafpile, but I'M PAINTIN' A PICTURE HERE.
8: One could also easily make the point that owning the house with the most enthralling architecture in Durham, North Carolina is a little like being the highest-ranking Christian Scientist working for GlaxoSmithKline.
-----------------------
Air Traffic, "Never Even Told Me Her Name" - And of course I'm not going to leave the four or five of you who actually made it all the way through that wordswamp empty-handed; there is, as always, plenty going on in the world of Obscure British Indie Rock Of Which Ye Shall Most Certainly Tire Before A CD Is Made Available For Your Purchase, even if it's not the newest ground in the world. Of course, notice the "Ye" in that sentence? That's not me putting on airs (well, not just that) - I'd have put the odds of Air Traffic's in-progress debut album conquering my stereo for weeks at a time at well over a hundred percent even before "Never Even Told Me Her Name" plopped itself right smack down in the middle of my consciousness. I mean, it's like they've addressed literally every single fault I could find with their debut single "Just Abuse Me" simply by refusing to attempt to lend the song any Rock And/Or Roll Legitimacy, and consequently "Never Even Told Me Her Name" is merely a hard-charging piano-driven behemoth which rocks merely as hard as "Suffragette City", which is another way of calling it one of the most gut-bustingly joyous experiences of the year so far. I realize, of course, that I'm setting the bar a little high with comparisons like that, and that "Never Even Told Me Her Name" can't possibly be expected to hold up to scrutiny when held up to the same light as one of David Friggin' Bowie's most archly aware songs (it's very much a HEY I USED TO HAVE A THING FOR THIS GIRL song, arguably even one quite reasonably described as "the best song the Guillemots could ever think to write for the Jimmy Eat World crowd"), but oh well; all I can do is apologize for raising the roof-beams of your expectations high and go back and play the goddamn song again and again and again. I've always had a hard time finding pop-music archetypes more enthralling than the output of a nakedly ambitious pop songwriter who just goes into outright attack mode on a piano - and that was before I found a band like Air Traffic so seemingly willing to address my concerns point-by-point. Pardon the holy fuck out of me if I get a little bit overexcited. (Click here to pre-order the "Never Even Told Me Her Name" EP from HMV)
I do want to make it clear that the split between me and Durham was a two-way street, especially in the context of this particular visit. It is, after all, awfully hard not to notice how far you've come when, thanks to finally taking a leap in pay-grades from "squat" to "squat and a half", you're able to rent a car which far outstrips any whip you've ever been free to push through your hometown's streets before (1), or when you're staying in a hotel room on your own dime for the first time (2), or even doing something as simple as shopping for a suit (3). I'd also like to make it clear that I found myself struck with just as much consistency by all the stuff that hadn't changed - time and tide may wait for no man, but it's good to know that anyone taking US 70 into Durham from RDU still needs to know not to take the first exit pointing towards "Durham" unless they really feel like taking the scenic route through Durham's crackhouse district. In fact, the most striking signifiers of stasis were probably the ones of which I wasn't even all that aware; if I'm going somewhere new, Durham may ask me to extract painstakingly idiot-proof directions on the magnitude of those I gave my mom back when she was first figuring out email (4), but damned if I couldn't staple my eyes shut and drive my car right up through the secret entrance at New Hope Commons, even swerving to miss the speed bumps. Some things never change. Even the radio seemed to be built for nostalgia from the ground up - it should speak volumes about the Triangle's broadcasting culture that the most au courant song I heard all weekend came courtesy of Jared and Rebecca's wedding DJ (5), and if it doesn't, the trifectas of Fleetwood Mac AND the Gin Blossoms AND Diana Ross I encountered simply on my way from the airport to my hotel to the barbecue restaurant oughtta. It's good to know that some things will be stuck in 1996 for at least another decade; I look forward to hearing about Durham's reaction to "Hey Ya" in 2011, assuming America hasn't fallen victim to the Red Peril.
But holy fuck, other stuff sure isn't, primarily the home my mother sold before moving down to Hurricanopolis. My house was, to put it bluntly, at least ten to twenty times as awesome as yours, to the point where I can literally just describe it as "The pink stucco house across the street from the East Campus" and feel relatively secure in the knowledge that anyone who's spent any time in Durham knows exactly the house I'm talking about(6); I literally have multiple stories about walking outside, still wrecked by waking up, to discover someone standing in our front yard sketching our house at the ass-crack of dawn(7), a claim I doubt even rich Croasdaile residents can make. But I don't begrudge my mom for selling it; after my sister and I went away to college, she was simply left with too much house to look after by herself, and it's not like I'd have expected the woman who taught me when to recognize when I've had a good run to have done any differently.
Well - I might have expected her to have exercised a little more caution in who she ended up selling the house to; not to confirm every stereotype remaining about the South or anything, but really - I'd have thought my mom would have had more sense than to sell to a family of pushy Manhattanites who'd just been hired to Duke's faculty (the double kiss-of-death). I'd heard all kinds of murmurs from my back-home friends about the horrors being inflicted on my house - everything from the house being covered in tarps to ridiculous extensions being built out back to the summoning of motherfucking Gozer seemed to be taking place, to the point where I wasn't even sure if I'd recognize the place. In actuality, of course, it wasn't nearly that bad - aside from the hideous portico artlessly wrapped around the porch and the ass-ugly shed/sweatlodge they inexplicably placed on the roof, it pretty much looked the same. But damned if it wasn't enough to make me sit and stop for a minute and just wrangle with the fact that this house, this utterly immobile house, had utterly moved on.
But really, though, that was pretty much to be expected; one hates to go all Hallmark on one's mp3 blog audience, but that's just the mechanical process of getting older, and consciously ignoring it remains the domain of the Panic! At The Disco fan (8). What I wasn't expecting, however, was Durham's choice for a soundtrack for this moment; I'd venture to say that it ranks among the most perfectly musically-accompanied moments of transition in the entire narrative of my life. That's right - as I turned off of Markham into the gravel alley running by my childhood home and found myself confronting ephemerality more directly than I'd done in the past decade, Sunny 93.9 decided I needed to hear:
Kansas, "Carry On My Wayward Son"
I shit you not. My fucking life. (Click here to buy Kansas' The Best of Kansas from Amazon.com)
FOOTNOTES
1: up until the middle of last month, I drove a 1997 Kia Sportage, so a car made entirely out of pressure-molded kangaroo poop would have been a step up, to say nothing of the 2004 Ford Taurus I ended up driving off the Hertz lot. BIG PIMPIN' SPENDIN' CHEESE etc
2: again, compared to my shitty little LA studio, La Quinta might as well have been the Hamptons.
3: somehow, I suspect that most suits bought in North Carolina J.C. are purchased only after consideration of how well they'd wear in Los Angeles.
4: To be fair, this is at least partially because Durham may be the worst-designed city I've ever driven in apart from Los Angeles and Washington D.C.; I attribute my still-extant shittiness with directions directly attributable to Durham making me throw my hands up and go FUCK IT WITH ALL THIS "DIRECTIONS" BULLSHIT back when I was young and impressionable. "Can't they build a city that works" indeed.
5: "Hollaback Girl", duh
6: Or, failing that, "the pink house you could hit with a thrown rock if you stood on the porch of the Duke Rape House". Or I could just say "this house", but where's the fun in that?
7: of course, I've also walked outside in the same state to find a Duke fratboy barfing his lungs up into our leafpile, but I'M PAINTIN' A PICTURE HERE.
8: One could also easily make the point that owning the house with the most enthralling architecture in Durham, North Carolina is a little like being the highest-ranking Christian Scientist working for GlaxoSmithKline.
-----------------------
Air Traffic, "Never Even Told Me Her Name" - And of course I'm not going to leave the four or five of you who actually made it all the way through that wordswamp empty-handed; there is, as always, plenty going on in the world of Obscure British Indie Rock Of Which Ye Shall Most Certainly Tire Before A CD Is Made Available For Your Purchase, even if it's not the newest ground in the world. Of course, notice the "Ye" in that sentence? That's not me putting on airs (well, not just that) - I'd have put the odds of Air Traffic's in-progress debut album conquering my stereo for weeks at a time at well over a hundred percent even before "Never Even Told Me Her Name" plopped itself right smack down in the middle of my consciousness. I mean, it's like they've addressed literally every single fault I could find with their debut single "Just Abuse Me" simply by refusing to attempt to lend the song any Rock And/Or Roll Legitimacy, and consequently "Never Even Told Me Her Name" is merely a hard-charging piano-driven behemoth which rocks merely as hard as "Suffragette City", which is another way of calling it one of the most gut-bustingly joyous experiences of the year so far. I realize, of course, that I'm setting the bar a little high with comparisons like that, and that "Never Even Told Me Her Name" can't possibly be expected to hold up to scrutiny when held up to the same light as one of David Friggin' Bowie's most archly aware songs (it's very much a HEY I USED TO HAVE A THING FOR THIS GIRL song, arguably even one quite reasonably described as "the best song the Guillemots could ever think to write for the Jimmy Eat World crowd"), but oh well; all I can do is apologize for raising the roof-beams of your expectations high and go back and play the goddamn song again and again and again. I've always had a hard time finding pop-music archetypes more enthralling than the output of a nakedly ambitious pop songwriter who just goes into outright attack mode on a piano - and that was before I found a band like Air Traffic so seemingly willing to address my concerns point-by-point. Pardon the holy fuck out of me if I get a little bit overexcited. (Click here to pre-order the "Never Even Told Me Her Name" EP from HMV)
posted by James at 4:09 PM
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Well fuck if I wasn't putting the finishing touches on my profile of Air Traffic, all psyched at the prospect of debuting "Never Even Told Me Her Name" to the blogosphere, only to pop over here for a minute to find that you beat me to it, but I should expect that by now. I went ahead and posted mine (not without some serious links thrown in your direction, mind you), but to make it up to you, a little looksie into your inbox will yield all three of the new Erol Alkan-produced Long Blondes b-sides. Nothing touches "Fulwood", but Erol certainly killed it with the synth-fest that is "Five Ways To End It".
Lot of serendipity today: "carry On Wayward Son" has been showing up a lot on classic rock radio here in my town, too--these things come in waves, I think--and my daughter (who is ten) has been humming it around the house. I was just about to break down and Slsk it. Thanks!
What a lovely house -- that's totes my favourite kind of pre-midcentury cottage action. Wouldn't look out of place in LA either, que no? You're right, it's totally cooler than anywhere I've lived, though my parents' new house -- in which I don't even have a room because they moved when I was in college, but whatevs -- is pretty rad. Similarly stuccoed but more in the Spanish territorial style, and not quite so pink. It kind of looks like a swank Mexican restaurant from the outside, actually. Then again, it is situated approx. 5 miles from the US border with Mexico, but I digress.
Thx for more Air Traffic. I'm totally, ill-advisedly falling hard for this band. Oy vey.
You should write about Durham more often. That was superb and one of the my favorite things you've written.
I too am with 4 G's in one name. Wonderful stuff. Even if you didn't even need the footnotes, the only things worthwhile were the kid in the pile of leaves and the rant about Kia, which mind you, is Korean, and made of Kimchee and grill it yourself meats of indistinguishable origin.
This is one of the better blog posts you have ever written, and also, one of the lesser music posts, save for the clarity that was the bit on Air Traffic as it concerned it's dominance of your stereo.
What you do best is to nail the finest aspects of the listening experience, the sumptuousness of the chours, the need for the staccato delvery in a slow ballad. etc... Why i come back is your piece on it, and I am not giving a back handed compliment here, the less music snob and the Nick Hornby Songbook esque love of music.
While sometimes one has to fill the bill, there are moments when the true skill of a person is diamond in the rough clear. Blogs are one thing, dissertations on life, and the mundanity of those moments between beauty, you know how to get the feeling of music love in those like no other.
Some say music isn't as good as it used to be. Adding Kansas into this challenges both sides of that debate. It is living your own life that makes music all the more special, and when I read you analyze it, it's something special.
Great post, even if I don't like either of the songs.
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