Plumbing: Keefy
This experiment has been interesting. Just laying it out the way I did had a funny effect: I'm at the point now where I wait until some specific piece of music pops into my head, triggered by some event, then make the deliberate decision about whether or not to listen to it. And when I do it's . . . different. Like I'm hearing it for the first time, in a sense, because I'm actually attending critically to it and nothing else. Recognizing the resonance points in an interested but detached way, discerning what's worth keeping and what should be thrown away, and occasionally getting a surprise out of something I thought I knew well enough already. Weird, but good.
I've decided to spill the process out into public as a vehicle for sorting out a lot of submerged stuff that's been surfacing lately, but if you don't care for that you can just avert your eyes and listen to the embedded media.
My old, lost friend Keefy tirelessly wore down my resistance to Pearl Jam, at least in a few cases. Keef was a tragic figure in the mythology in my life: a manic-depressive alcoholic who seemed determined to single-handedly keep grunge alive a decade after the world had moved on, by sheer force of will (the same force holding his incredibly ripped jeans together, incidentally). He was the first person I ever felt a close connection with online before we met in the flesh during my stints in England.
He always struggled with his own music on just about every level, starting projects only to have them fall apart before getting anywhere. His first touch of success was in assembling a band that was, in his words "a truly excellent fusion of punk-rock and uncompromising incompetence", which lasted less than a year. Last time I'd checked up on him he'd resignedly joined an indie-rock band, playing lead guitar and "enjoying all the creative freedom of a Guantanomo Bay Prisoner". I'll pick one characteristic bit of navel-gazing he wrote about four years ago that tells you a surprising amount about him in one paragraph:
"As I'm become slightly less naive, I've begun to spot the character flaws in the people I worshiped, and the unrealness of heroes on screen. Kurt Cobain probably wasn't against all the corporate interests I thought he was, Che Guevara probably had an extremely macho streak, John Lennon probably didn't treat people quite the way I believed. Yet I find myself an amalgamation of all of the pathetic, media documented and probably made up, characteristics of these people. Inevitably I have taken the worst from all of them and become a sad excuse for a person living off other people's interpretations of people I claim to love when I don't even know them."
In retrospect it's mind-boggling that someone capable of such frankness and clarity could be so stuck spinning his wheels throughout what should have been the best years of his life, but that's depression for you I guess. The irony is that all the effort spent banging his head against a wall musically could have probably been more productively spent honing his prose skills for something other than self-deprecation.
He was simultaneously the best and the worst of the company I kept during that period of my life (about age 15-19), because as fun as he could be it was impossible to change his mind about anything -- not that it never changed, just that the process governing it was beyond anyone else's reach for the most part. He was painfully sensitive in some respects yet incorrigibly insular in others.
His constant oscillations between near-delusional mythologizing and clear-eyed realism prevented him from going anywhere: had he been capable of picking one mode and biting it to the bone he'd have been a lot better off. He'd either have sublimated fiction into reality or burned all the illusions out so that there was nothing but reality left, but constantly being jerked around from one perspective to the other has a way of fucking with your head like few things can. I appreciate this more thoroughly now than I did then.
"I'm Open" is one of the confluence points where Keefy and I overlap. We drifted together because we faced similar contradictions, and drifted apart because I took a different approach to dealing with them. I'm not going to analyze it any further than that; you can draw your own conclusions.
I've decided to spill the process out into public as a vehicle for sorting out a lot of submerged stuff that's been surfacing lately, but if you don't care for that you can just avert your eyes and listen to the embedded media.
Click to viewMy old, lost friend Keefy tirelessly wore down my resistance to Pearl Jam, at least in a few cases. Keef was a tragic figure in the mythology in my life: a manic-depressive alcoholic who seemed determined to single-handedly keep grunge alive a decade after the world had moved on, by sheer force of will (the same force holding his incredibly ripped jeans together, incidentally). He was the first person I ever felt a close connection with online before we met in the flesh during my stints in England.
He always struggled with his own music on just about every level, starting projects only to have them fall apart before getting anywhere. His first touch of success was in assembling a band that was, in his words "a truly excellent fusion of punk-rock and uncompromising incompetence", which lasted less than a year. Last time I'd checked up on him he'd resignedly joined an indie-rock band, playing lead guitar and "enjoying all the creative freedom of a Guantanomo Bay Prisoner". I'll pick one characteristic bit of navel-gazing he wrote about four years ago that tells you a surprising amount about him in one paragraph:
"As I'm become slightly less naive, I've begun to spot the character flaws in the people I worshiped, and the unrealness of heroes on screen. Kurt Cobain probably wasn't against all the corporate interests I thought he was, Che Guevara probably had an extremely macho streak, John Lennon probably didn't treat people quite the way I believed. Yet I find myself an amalgamation of all of the pathetic, media documented and probably made up, characteristics of these people. Inevitably I have taken the worst from all of them and become a sad excuse for a person living off other people's interpretations of people I claim to love when I don't even know them."
In retrospect it's mind-boggling that someone capable of such frankness and clarity could be so stuck spinning his wheels throughout what should have been the best years of his life, but that's depression for you I guess. The irony is that all the effort spent banging his head against a wall musically could have probably been more productively spent honing his prose skills for something other than self-deprecation.
He was simultaneously the best and the worst of the company I kept during that period of my life (about age 15-19), because as fun as he could be it was impossible to change his mind about anything -- not that it never changed, just that the process governing it was beyond anyone else's reach for the most part. He was painfully sensitive in some respects yet incorrigibly insular in others.
His constant oscillations between near-delusional mythologizing and clear-eyed realism prevented him from going anywhere: had he been capable of picking one mode and biting it to the bone he'd have been a lot better off. He'd either have sublimated fiction into reality or burned all the illusions out so that there was nothing but reality left, but constantly being jerked around from one perspective to the other has a way of fucking with your head like few things can. I appreciate this more thoroughly now than I did then.
"I'm Open" is one of the confluence points where Keefy and I overlap. We drifted together because we faced similar contradictions, and drifted apart because I took a different approach to dealing with them. I'm not going to analyze it any further than that; you can draw your own conclusions.