Nov 19, 2009
Travels Through YouTubia
By: JohnOlson Categories: Essays Feature
{ Time is not a stiff tick }
YouTubia is neither a utopia or geographical location but a portal through time. In essence, a cue, a prompt, a provocation that stirs a memory so vivid and enveloping it constitutes a location, a cleft in the topologies of time. For Proust it was a madeleine soaked in tea; for me, it is a tiny screen of pixels, Red Skelton bouncing up and down in a crowd of screaming girls while a young Mick Jagger sings “Tell Me” with the Rolling Stones in the lobby of the London Palladium September 22nd, 1964. The emotion is palpable. The separation of 45 years melts away. I want to grow my hair long. I want to walk on the wild side and write explosive dangerous poetry like Arthur Rimbaud and Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman and Allen Ginsberg. I want to push boundaries and open the doors of perception, wide. I want to devote my life to art and poetry and go to England and visit the house where Keats wrote “Ode To A Nightingale” and watched coal deliveries and ate nectarines and met Fanny Brawne. The song gives me all those feelings anew, fresh, vigorous, unqualified. Nothing limps. Nothing balks. Everything is limitless. This is not the slow controlled glide of mature, later life, but the reckless energy of youth, before any seeds have been planted, before any ships have sailed, before any struggles and disappointments have denatured and tamed that feeling. The surprise of seeing the very young, incipient Stones exactly as they appeared on TV in 1964 with their peculiar blend of English Romanticism, raffish libertinism, and the electric blues of Chicago’s Southside brought the strength and purity of that original feeling back to me. Did it last? No, of course not. A 61 year-old man cavorting about like a shaggy teenager would quickly swerve into buffoonery. Age has done much to enrich and undermine the Stones after 40 odd years of almost relentless performance. But a lesson was learned.
Time is not that stiff mechanical revolution we see in watches and clocks or dental appointments marked on calendars quietly but hungrily ticking away on a living room wall. Time is a cloud, nebulous, drifting, unstable as space itself. Time travel is wide-open and shiny. A goldfish in dawn light in a Bristol parlor in June or July 1772. Phosphorous glow of buffalo bones on a Rocky Mountain slope viewed and pondered by Samuel Clemens during a stage ride with his brother Orion in 1861. Glint of sunlight on a sword moments before the battle of Shrewsbury amid the lush green hills of Shropshire in July, 1403. There is no reach, no shore, no body of water large enough to prevent the human mind from traveling there. All it takes is something as specific as the dimple on Kirk Douglas’s chin to put me in the backseat of a car in 1957 watching the Vikings dance on the oars of a longship while their tinny laughter crackles through a speaker clipped to the window that has been rolled down far enough to let it in and hang there, a crude metal box with a speaker grill and a volume knob.
Potent as a whiff of paregoric, The Zombies singing “She’s Not There” on Hullabaloo circa 1965 puts me in the small basement room of my parent’s house age 18 eager to get away, go to California, anywhere, but at all costs avoid the war in Vietnam, the numbing banality of the suburbs, the noxious exigencies of employment and financial stability. I remember it vividly, feel it once again: that sweet imperative, that strange urgency I had not yet begun to articulate to keep that new thrilling light in me from being quenched by drudgery and the so-called practicalities of the “real world”.
Denny Laine singing “Go Now” that same year shoots sweet memories into my brain and I feel as coincidental to the emotions of that song as I do to the chair I’m sitting on. “We’ve already said goodbye,” the song begins. The romance is over. But maybe not dead. It still has life. The moment has a piquancy, a complexity of unimaginable nuance. No wonder they called themselves The Moody Blues.
John Byrne singing “Psychotic Reaction” looks exactly as he did when he sat in our English literature class at San Jose City College in the fall of 1966, his song a hit on the radio. It was another friend in a health ed class that heard the phrase “psychotic reaction” and leaned over and whispered to John “hey, that would make a great song title.” Which prompted John to write the song.
I last saw John with his date in front of Original Joe’s in downtown San Jose. He was a very kind person. He lent me some money. I still owe him ten dollars. I can’t pay it back now, however. He passed away last December 15th, 2008.
Keith Relf looks cool and enigmatical in a dark Regency shirt singing “Heart Full of Soul” and I can see why I found him rather intimidating that late summer night in 1966 when I drove a carload of screaming girls behind the limousine of The Yardbirds following their performance at the Civic Auditorium on West San Carlos Street and they parked in the lot of a fast food joint and rolled their windows down and I found myself talking to the one guy who seemed most affable and open to conversation who was none other than Jimmy Page who was filling in for Jeff Beck. I bought him a Coke.
Mr. Page, if you’re out there, you owe me a Coke.
Estelle Bennett looks adorable singing “Be My Baby” in the background of her more famous sister Ronnie Spector, swinging her arms, moving gracefully forward, that powerful music propelling them into TV show after TV show, and what appeared to be endless glitter and glamor, a sweet voluptuous heat compelling as Newton’s First Law of Thermodynamics surrounding and imbuing everything with a libidinous rhythm and delicious, dangerous excitement. I find it remarkable that later in life Estelle became homeless and died, just recently, at her home in New Jersey the same night as the crash of the commuter plane in a suburban neighborhood in Buffalo, New York
There are openings in time everywhere. All it takes is an image, a sound, a small black square suddenly alive with movement: Shakespeare’s Queen Titania scratching Bottom’s donkey ears in a charmed realm of innocent pleasures; Georges Méliès inflating his head until it explodes; Annie Oakley shooting small glass targets in a film made November 1st, 1894 in Edison‘s Black Maria Studio; Maria Falconetti as Jeanne d’Arc in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc looking horrified and full of some inscrutable inner power that makes her eyes glare out of her head with penetrating beauty as she is led forward, her feet bound in chains, to swear on a bible before a scrutinizing and fearful old judge.
But why YouTube? Why this technology, this particular medium? Why not go to the source, any current image redolent of things past, keen memories, exquisite sensations still pertinent and internal as my own skeleton surrounded by warm muscle and blood, a batch of taillights on a dark wet night, liquid and alive, the exquisite scent of sage, the jingly jangly sound of a shaken tambourine?
There is no reason strong enough to support an argument for YouTube as a Time Machine. YouTube is a novelty. It will soon be replaced by another novelty. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it will simply grow tedious. What is pertinent is the surprise discovery of things. Seeing and hearing the Beau Brummels for the first time in forty odd years. Seeing James Brown twirl and glide in the shadows of an old Shindig show that aired in the mid-sixties when all that change was just beginning. I did not anticipate seeing these things. I had forgotten what they felt like. Those old emotions were still there. They just needed a trigger to be awakened. It was like finding the keys to a warehouse full of museum treasures. Curiosities and art treasures that have not been available to the public eye in decades.
We are all autobiographers alert to the sounds and smells and tastes of our lives. Sometimes a song will become an obsession because it travels through us as we travel back in time to its source. Those first occasions in which we heard it. Time is laminated. All things are held together in space and time by laws and forces whose actualities elude our senses but are sometimes made manifest in mathematical equations. The smooth cool light of an opal can mesmerize and distill a forgotten memory or feeling as well as anything on YouTube.
YouTubia is neither a region or nectar from the hives of Google but a waver, a warp, a flicker, a caprice akin to an awakening, a perception surprised by the unexpected, by a sudden aberration in the environment. A bright beautiful bug inching its way across a forest floor. Zinnias, bubbles, Flaubert’s parrot. We invent our lives as we go along. Our maps require constant maintenance. Today’s mountain range may be tomorrow’s canyon. The quick movements of a hummingbird in the lassitude of a Tucson afternoon may suddenly metamorphose into a noisy forklift on a loading dock in Albuquerque.
Vincent Van Gogh once fancifully suggested in a letter to his brother Theo that death was a train that took us to the stars. French author Raymond Roussel was notorious for meandering around Europe in a luxury caravan replete with bathroom and study from which he rarely, if ever, emerged. He could not stop writing, could not pull himself away from crafting a prose lustrous with bizarre machinery and fabulous inventions.
Don’t get me wrong. I love travel. Actual, literal travel. The kind in which one’s body travels through space. I love trains, even cars. Before we got our cat, I used to enjoy long road trips, especially the ones involving blue highways and four-calendar cafés. Little towns with a main street still active and varied. What worries me is the slow deterioration of the imagination. The ability to travel long distances within one’s mind. Consciousness is just as rich and mysterious as any South Seas lagoon, just as majestic and jeweled as Taj Mahal. What a shame to see it atrophy, waste away in a population accustomed to more garish, more passively consumed entertainments. A friend once referred to the cell phone as the “death of solitude.” People seem more frantic than usual to distract themselves from their inner latitudes, their internal world. Perhaps this has always been the case and I am just now beginning to notice it. There is inside everyone a knowledge that simply won’t go away. We all know there is that final destination, the bourne from which no traveler returns. Who can blame anyone for wanting to resort to whatever detour is available to avoid thinking about that last debarkation?
Whatever awaits us on the other side, and however we choose to imagine it, the longer we manage to stay alive, the broader and more numerous grow our memories. They become continents. Large entities that crack and shift due to a kind of mental tectonic plate shifting. There are quakes and hurricanes. Himalayan traumas and oceans with soft, alluring, hazy horizons. If death is a train, reverie is a ship. It drifts, meanders, deviates- wanders off course. This is where we do some real traveling. Those more obscure memories are like deeply-rooted plants, subtle fronds of embarrassed light. If we crush their flowers and leaves, potent odors emerge. A Leatherleaf Mahonia awakens a host of ghosts in the blood. Forgotten refinements soaked in the chill of an afternoon. A wrong turn can be splendid with discovery.
My most powerful memories are the ones that catch me off guard, the way hearing Arthur Lee sing “Seven & Seven Is” for the first time in 43 years grabbed me out of 2008 and tossed me back into the year 1966. One minute I’m sitting in front of a computer on a chair and the next instant I’m traveling on a Bay Area freeway headed God knows where, but going totally crazy over this amazing song, “Oop-ip-ip oop-ip-ip, yeah!“
If I try to remember something deliberately, I am never quite sure what has been reliably imprinted on my nerves, and what is invention; what is selective and what is filtered; what is actual and what is synthetic. A forced memory lacks the necessary ingredients of surprise and spontaneity. It is something I have willfully staged in my head with the same craftsmanship and attention to drama that goes into a setting for the opera.
Hence, YouTubia. Which might also be called Sage-A-Stan. Or Bath-Robia. Or Front-Tooth-A-Dor. Any object, sensation, stimulus, or fillip that conjures a rich terrain from the past might be considered a country. A realm. A domain. A wilderness.
There are no walls in the human mind, no monuments or prisons. Only waterfronts. Rivers. Beaches. The smack and lap of water on barnacled pilings. Dizziness, delirium, phantasmagoria. Mists like the ones sometimes seen over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, diaphanous, unearthly subtleties that tease the mind into a voyage of ceaseless speculation.
