experiment boomerang

Perusing a feature article at Pitchfork yesterday I came across the name Simon Reynolds, which a) I’d been sporadically trying to remember and b) reminds me of a tale from Iowa City.

I’d been compulsively reading Reynolds’ book Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture in America. One day I was reading it at a coffeehouse. A fiction writer from my grad department saw me and said with nostrils flared, "You’re actually reading that?"

Yes, I was actually reading it and it’s fucking brilliant. The book contains a great passage on the developmental history of electronic music and culture, which you could lay over just about any history or relationship and it would apply, the way a new thing comes to be, escalates, explodes, degenerates from what it was and finally transforms into something else and/or dies, or doesn't. Which is why I want the book back. Here is how it left me:

I had stepped outside my apartment, a converted garage tacked onto the back of a house where four failed frat boys lived—the front of my home was a paint-chipping garage door, for a cigarette. From the side of the house that I couldn’t see I heard a child crying, a painfully sad sound at any time. Within seconds two young guys, one of them pushing a stroller, emerged from around the side of the house. The little girl had to use the bathroom and it was breaking my heart. I toyed with the idea of letting strangers into my home.

The guy pushing the stroller, who turned out to be the girl’s father, was quasi-hippie, with shortish but straggly blond hair, loose unkempt clothing, my age or younger. The other guy was full-on hippie, or something, infinite layers of brown and pilgrim-pattern clothing, long nature-brown hair, au naturale shoes, au naturale scent. As the girl cried more, they glanced in my direction.

"She can use my bathroom," I said to them.

They walked toward the door as I put my cigarette out on my square-foot-sized "patio" and we went inside. My garage-home was set up like this: living room-kitchen downstairs, bedroom-bathroom upstairs. The fact that there is an upstairs and downstairs is deceptive. Each section was the size of a walk-in closet.

I sent the father and girl upstairs to the bathroom. I stayed downstairs with the full-on hippie. Unable to be in both places at once, I became a touch worried about my belongings. What if this was one of those scams? There was the right number of people to pull off the distraction scheme—and with the little girl. Some people are not beyond using children for devious means. I engaged in conversation with…I’ll call him Jesus from here on out.

He asked me about my spiritual orientation, which I tried to describe without betraying anything sacred with a total stranger. He quickly told me he’d achieved enlightenment by reading the Holy Bible. He took his bible out of his bag to use as a visual aid and carried on. The conversation shifted from a philosophical discussion about belief to a zealot monologue aiming to convert me to Jesus-hood.

I began to become confrontational. I am truly tolerant—I like to learn what people think and why, but such blind absolutist pushiness lights a relentless fire in my belly.

About this time, I heard the shaggy father upstairs. At first I thought he was talking to his daughter, and then I recognized the words he spoke. They were from a poem I’d just been working on. I raced upstairs to find him holding the stack of poems I'd left on my bed. "That’s my poem," I said. "I hope you don’t mind," he said, "I like it." What does it matter, I thought. "It’s ok," I told him. "Thanks."

"What’s this?" he asked. The guy was hyperactive--"what's that?", a little twitchy, and a little more interested in my things and my life than I preferred. I wondered what Jesus was doing downstairs. "That’s a book on the development of electronic music," I answered. "I just finished it. It’s good."

He expressed interest in it and then his little girl finished her business. I led them downstairs. Who knew what Jesus was doing with his bible and bag. We stood there talking while the little girl fidgeted. I had a thought.

I tend to become what I believe to be too attached to material things; i.e., I am a packrat. To see if I could, I offered the book to the hippie dad. After all, it had been given to me by someone else. How romantic to pass it on into the world. I doubted he could afford much and probably would appreciate it. He thanked me and they left, Jesus, dad, the girl, and the book.

I never saw Jesus again, but I did see Hippie dad a couple of times around town with his daughter. And once he stopped back by my apartment. He brought with him a few books on poetry and language that he’d gotten from some used-book sale. He'd brought them to give to me. I was touched and flattered and I felt a little ugly for being so suspicious of him. I hope he and his daughter are doing well.

Where I began: Simon Reynolds. I read part of another book of his while standing in a used bookstore in Minneapolis, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, but I had no money to buy it. (I still don't. Checking on Amazon, even a used copy is $49.50). I’d like this one too—he referenced Throwing Muses, alongside the Pixies, as an influential rock band, a reference I don't see often enough. Here is his web site, centered around his most recent book. Here is his blog.