Domestic Left #25: All the things I'd carefully saved all my life, becoming nothing but junk

Content. There is so much of it.

It is king, according to people in the “communications” trade (like, say, me). It is how influencers influence, how thought-leaders lead.

It is the atomos, the basic stuff, of our online existence, and its creation and propagation is the prime mover of whole sections of the economy. There is content about content, and content about content about content.

Journalism and journaling, food and fad and fashion, art and music and literature, all are now but mellifluous names for categories and subcategories of content, two hard-edged syllables acting as a container for every bit of information or inspiration we receive, whether they come through the narrow delivery chutes of email newsletters or the clean mechanical algorithms of social media.

* * *

Bookstores were quasi-magical places in my teenage years — before the advent of the internet, yes, but perhaps more importantly before the advent of mega-bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders (remember Borders?). They were places not only of commerce, but of discovery.

After you read Siddhartha because that girl you had a crush on in high school recommended it, you couldn’t just look up a list of all of Herman Hesse’s other works on Wikipedia and then order them from Amazon. To find Hesse’s other works, you had to scour used bookstores, perhaps finding Beneath the Wheel (a bit juvenile and over-the-top, even for teenage me) here and The Glass Bead Game (a bit above my intellectual pay grade, even now) there. (Libraries were fine for things you simply wanted to read, but if you wanted a talisman of a literary romance, temporary possession of a hardcover in one of those plastic library permacovers was no substitute for a dog-eared paperback permanently on a shelf next to your bed.)

I never did find, or read, Steppenwolf, which is perhaps for the best. I was already enough of a lonely, alienated middle-aged man as a teenager. No need for extra fuel for that flame.

Shortly after a Borders opened in Kansas City, my parents took us on a family trip to see this new, wondrous-sounding place. But I remember finding it dull and uninspiring — all the great literature of the world* laid out on clean, well-spaced shelves, under bright neon light. Anything you could possibly want was there, it seemed, but there was no joy in finding any of it.

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon as an online book retailer, it was not because Bezos had any particular love for books, but because they were the ideal product for automating the process of buying and selling. Discrete, compact, with a known dimension and weight — from a capitalist point of view, a book is the perfect neutral and interchangeable unit of exchange-value.

*Actually, just the literature of the U.S. and England and those European writers deemed worthy of translation into English. But at the time, that was my literary world, because I didn’t know any better.

* * *

I discovered the Velvet Underground at the Lawrence Public Library. At some point after being granted access to the “adult” wing of the library and starting to listen to rock music on the radio (both around age 11, I think), I discovered that there was a whole section of nonfiction books about popular music. The idea that I could read books (beloved companions since I learned to read) about the bands that I was listening to on the radio (and who were becoming beloved companions for my transition into adolescence) was, to be honest, kind of mind-blowing.

In a library, of course, you discover new books because they are, simply, next to other books on the shelves. You go looking for the sleek new-wave pop-rock of The Cars, you find the gritty urban street observations and abrasive noise of the Velvet Underground.

The book I found was probably Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story, which was published in 1983. In my memory, its cover featured the titillating images of a whip, a high-heeled boot and a mask from the the pulp journalism book that the band took its name from, but to be honest my attention was probably was just as easily grabbed by the cover that actually graced the first edition of Up-Tight: white text on a black background, with high-contrast black-and-white photos of Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison wearing black clothes and black sunglasses, so different from the multicolor brightness of Heartbeat City.

I was able to find a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico in some record store or other. Like everyone else who ever bought that album — according to Brian Eno’s famous epigram — I did eventually start a band. But more importantly, “Heroin,” a lyric with no verses or choruses — just a long, unjudging chronicle — was probably my first exposure to modernist literary writing, and in a form — song lyrics — that felt accessible. The kind of content I could see myself creating.

* * *

Lou Reed’s fifteenth solo album New York came out in 1989. My friend A and I went to see the New York tour in Kansas City, Kansas — we had seats in the front row, but off to the side. Immediately in front of the speakers. It was the loudest experience of my life and I don’t think either of us could hear anything in our high school classes the next day.

New York includes a song that I always put on playlists for friends who are just having children (and a song I listened to a lot when my own children were small), “Beginning of a Great Adventure.” It’s a rumination on the possibility of having children with his wife, Sylvia Morales — something that, I only learned while researching this newsletter, never happened.

In the fall of 1994 I was in a bar/coffee shop in my hometown called The Bourgeois Pig and heard what sounded like Lou Reed singing on a Laurie Anderson song. In fact, it was. The song was “In Our Sleep” from Anderson’s 1994 album Bright Red. Anderson and Reed had begun a romance in 1992 that lasted until his death in 2013. Their first date was not the traditional dinner and a movie, but coffee and looking at microphones. Tools, not content.

* * *

The person I wish I was would, in the modern world, find new music by reading a variety of interesting publications about music (and having friends with interesting musical tastes and talking to them about music). That person would make an effort to keep up with what their favorite artists are doing, and would purchase their music, ideally directly, instead of listening to it on streaming services.

Instead, I mostly just listen to the same handful of playlists on Spotify that I’ve made over the years. It’s comforting to listen to “Hey Jack Kerouac” or “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville” or “Darklands” (#58, #69 and #83 respectively on the “Your Top Songs 2022” list that Spotify just prepared for me) for the millionth time, but those are songs that brought me comfort when I was a teenager in the late 80s.

That said, I cannot deny that I enjoy the convenience of being able to pull up a “This is Laurie Anderson” Spotify playlist when I remember that yeah, I should listen to more Laurie Anderson — and that a Spotify playlist covering her whole career is more potentially interesting than digging out that CD I bought of Bright Red (which I could only listen to in my car) or that one dubbed cassette I have of Big Science (which I have no idea how I would listen to these days).

This is how I came to discover this past week that in 2018* Laurie Anderson collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on an album about Hurricane Sandy. It’s called Landfall, and it is fantastic. Anderson composed the work and performs alongside the string quartet on many of the songs, adding mostly spoken-word vocals, violin, and various electronics.

In one of the last pieces, “Everything Is Floating,” Anderson recounts going down to the basement after the hurricane passed and discovering all of her possessions floating in the black stormwater:

Lots of my old keyboards. Thirty projectors. Props from old performances. A fiberglass plane. A motorcycle. Countless papers, and books. And I looked at them floating there on the shiny dark water. Dissolving. All the things I’d carefully saved all my life – becoming nothing but junk.

And I thought: “How beautiful. How magic. And how... catastrophic.”

*The piece premiered in February of 2013, but a recording wasn’t released until 2018.

At the very end of November, President Biden and the Democratic Congress imposed a contract on 115,000 rail workers which failed to provide them with their most basic demand, the ability to take sick days without getting fired. I had a hand in writing a couple of organizational statements responding to this turn of events:

• “Congress Must Respect Rail Workers’ Rights,” a statement by the UE officers; and

• “Stay Focused on the Class Enemies,” a statement from DSA caucus Socialist Majority’s steering committee (which I am a member of).

I also highly recommend this article by retired UE Political Action Director (and my good friend) Chris Townsend, one of the best explanations I’ve seen of how we have come to the point where workers in one of the most heavily unionized industries in the U.S. find themselves, in the 21st century, in a condition of virtual indentured servitude.