Nov 19, 2009 0
Travels Through YouTubia
{ 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.
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