It's just easier for me to associate people with places. Not easier in the way that Memory Association Triggers work. More so, I find it easier to use the simple tag of a city or a country or a place, to wrap up and concisely state the emotional compartment of my heart and mind, that I may reside a particular individual in, or express the initial first judgment I made of their strength of character, or romanticise the wistful, longing, yet forgotten or lost connection I have or had with and for them, or even just describe the way they appear in their physical presentation to me.
Every bit of turf on this planet, whether grouped together into a defined metropolis or separated from the localities around it as a much hipper neighborhood or unified by a commonwealth parliament or even if it is just minding it's own business as the shaded rise of a rolling, green mountain, scattered with some broken down quartz rocks struggling to fight the pull of downward gravity, has it's own interred and expressed character. Sure, this character is in the eye of the beholder and defined differently by everyone, but I find it easier to just accept my perceptions as they appear to me and then label any and all individuals I meet by the similarites they may project to various 'bits of turf'.
If you are one who has read some of the previous blogs on this here domain, you will have noticed that in the main, I tag - nickname - folk with the city of their birthplace. However, you would have also noticed, that this is not an action of exclusivity, for, on occasion, I will also tag them with places they have only shortly resided in and sometimes, with places they have never even been to. People are, in the main, subconscious expressions of the progressive effect of their foundations and the city or suburb or ghetto or beach or rain-forest or electrical sub-station they grew up in and around, plays and played such a massive presence in that whole equation, that the 'bit of turf' of their genesis, defines so much of them. Whether they like it or not - whether they fight to hide it from you or not. Sometimes, though, people grow and change and whilst their early foundations are still very much prevalent, that which they build and enshrine above and from it, becomes the larger defining element of them. In this particular case, I feel the need, nay - it becomes 'easier', to tag them with a 'bit of of turf' different to that from whence they came.
Wow. What an intro.
And all of this, just so I can disclaim the ordaining of a girl I know, whom, from now on, shall be know as 'The Raven Haired Londoner'. See The RHL, is not from London. In fact, she is not even from where she is from.
Wait -What? What does that last sentence mean?
Sorry, what I meant is, that where she is from - the place she will tell you is home, because her wardrobe resides there - is not where she is originally from. See, she started off all the way over on the West Coast of These United States and is now all the way over here on the East Coast. I first met her on this East Coast and then met her again in a dark, wood stained, beer-hall, full of stuffed birds of game, in Soho - the Soho of London, that is. This is not why I have attached the London moniker, however. To me, she is London, simply because she wants to be. She loves that grimy, spread-out pastiche of browns, tans and yellows and wants to live there, wants to be there, wants to be London and to me, that is the very essence of London.
You would not understand this unless you have lived there, but London wants nothing more than to be London. To be the London of old with it's writers and playwrights and aloof bureaucrats and intellectual posturing and monarchy and ruling and athleticism and its geezer gangsters and it's mods and it's rockers and it's crimes and plagues and recoveries and muted (oh, so muted) revolutions. It also wants to be the London of the future with it's Docklands International Banking Hubs and it's earnestly post-modern erections (and I'm referring to both buildings and people) and it's Tube System that will one day be comfortable and efficient and it's Olympics and it's dogmatically conservative mayor with the most paradoxically left-wing/communist first name possible and it's seething hotbed of racial segregation and hostility and it's bombs and it's enormous football teams and it's winning of cricket matches and it's blue-sky dreaming and thinking. London wants to be London.
But it's not. Instead, it is just london. london with a little 'l'. (and, yes, I know I'm kinda stealing from a Jamiroquai song, but who better?)
As I said above, none of this will fully make sense to you, unless you've properly lived in the former capital of the world, so let me arrest your wandering judgments before they run off with you:
The RHL, is not one who pines after a futile dream of deluded grandeur, just like london. No, nothing to do with that. In fact, in my opinion, if anything, she actually underestimates her true potential and I hope to still be around, when the day soon comes when events and reality simply cause her to realise it. Watch out world, for there is nothing like the power of watching another finally understand and fit into their own powers. Why I associate her with london, is (and I know I'm repeating here, but I want you to fully grasp how 'on the surface' this statement is and not go running off in search of inference) because she wants to be London - with the big 'L'. She wants to believe and be there when and as it happens. She wants, what london wants.
I admire her faith, but it is not one I share.
But I digress, for all of this - all of this up to now - has still been the intro.
So to begin:
The LHR, whom by now you should feel that you know a little and can place a picture in your mind's eye, once told me that I remind her of an angst ridden, high-school girl, for I listen to and enjoy Connor Oberst. You may know Connor better, by the first band he started called Bright Eyes. Since then, he has wandered around, fronting various other conglomerations. They all kinda fit into the same genre of Americana/Country thing and often will include other members of the loose collective of Omaha musicians he has maintained over the years. I guess he just wishes for his Art to express a Nebraskan quality and no one can express a particular 'bit of turf', like those that grew in and from it.
To many of Connor's many fans, it's his lyrics that caputures the heart and mind the most and it's these particular rhymes and lines that The LHR associated with the afore described high-school girls. In his early 'stuff', there's an unquiet and somehow dettached desperation to his words, that are often placed inside the context of a confused displacement from the simple effectations and social expectations of the natural day to day flow of the wider world. One cannot apply the same generalisation to the more recent 'stuff', but it is the first couple of Bright Eyes albums that The LHR was reffereing her sumation to.
I think I know what she meant. I can't quite say that I grasp or understand the mind of a high-school girl (or for that matter, any girl, of any age, of anywhere in the world), but I could imagine that there is an excited uncertainty, when one begins to 'push the boat out' and 'test the boundires' (double cliche! love the double cliche) of their physical and mental prowesses (is that plural of prowess?). At first it's just new and exciting and one just acts without considering or using hindsight to view with any context (just like when a writer gets all excited by parenthesis and litters a paragraph with an excess of them, without pausing to realise an overload). Then, some perspective does arrive and one begins to compare them-self to the others around them. This is confusing and liberating at the same time and leads to an imagined elevated self-pedestal and notions of superiority and detachment from all those around. One needs someone who can vocalise and verbalise these feelings and Bright Eyes' lyrics, I suppose, do and did exactly this for said high-school girls.
Now, this summation above, could be way off. I went to an all male high school and the only true experience I have ever had with high-school girls are the ones I once shared a house with - my sisters. Perhaps their aloof and imaged superiority had more to do with a genetic thing.
Who knows?
Perhaps I will get a letter from The LHR, with a better explanation as to what she meant. For now, though, it doesn't matter, for I have just realised that all of this - all of the above writing -is actually just an introduction.
Yes, yes, I know that I've already said that twice in this piece, but this time I really mean it.
See, I just wanted to talk about a line from a song on Connor's current band's (Monsters of Folk) new album. All the ramble I've just run through was only to serve as a link towards me quoting the line:
"Don't never buy nothing from a man named Truth"
The problem is, this post is probably long enough as it is and I think I'm going to stop now. Pity, cause I had some good material set aside for the discussion of that lyric. I'm going to have to let it go now. It's gone. Gone forever. Gone, gone from New York City
(See, that last sentence is a quoted lyric from another Connor song, but you prob don't know it, so the whole clever drollness of that subtle little reference is lost upon you. No matter, though, for that just speaks to and of the gentic surperioty I prescibed in my sister's names above, but, obviously, also applies to myself as well.)
All I will say, is that you should be careful out there. No matter what 'piece of turf' you find yourself on or expressing or trying to be or trying to forget, avoid a man named Truth. He will try to sell you something, but don't buy it.
"What I know of hope, I learnt from desperation" https://twitter.com/behaimah
