During lunch at a trendy and probably faux-environmentally-conscious restaurant (albeit with a pretty tasty salad), I grabbed the A&E section of the Times, thinking that I would only have a few minutes to browse the articles until my food arrived and my attention turned to more pressing matters. As it turns out, the person that was taking the to-go orders was also the waitress, and had to try to manage her time among the five or six tables eating food as well as the flood of people that were demanding locally sourced lunches to take back to the office. So I ended up reading the whole section. If you, like I had even earlier today, thought of Pittsburgh as a burgeoning scene for the arts...the Times A&E section was actually TWO sections, totaling 58 pages. I'd say we still have some work to do.
One of the articles was centered on the 33 1/3 series of books, where famous authors/columnists/critics write a little novella about an influential album. This particular column was about Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville", which is a pretty okay LP...not something I would want to read about for a hundred pages, but probably influential (and I did not know it was written by Phair as a track-by-track "response" to the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street") as an example of a female musician that broke through the monotony and stereotype of what it meant to be a female musician in the 90s (i.e. Madonna, or those that wanted to be Madonna).
There was one part of the article that really jumped out at me (and I'm glad I found it online):
There's plenty to mourn about this lost utopian world, when you had to see a band live, instead of Googling its YouTube clips, and when buying a record was an act of almost blind faith -- you couldn't stream the thing first.
Holy shit. Holy. Shit. That's exactly what happened back then (21 years ago, in case you weren't already feeling ancient).
In 1993 I got Pearl Jam's "Vs." for Christmas. I had no idea what was on it (except for "Daughter", which was already in pretty heavy rotation on the radio...the radio), and I'm sure there was some small part of my 13-year-old-self that hoped and prayed that it was going to be good, or at least listenable, because I probably would not get another CD for months. CDs were relatively new to me/slightly less relatively new to the rest of the world...and if Pearl Jam sucked I'd be back to listening to Bryan Adams some more. My entire auditory-enjoyment persona would have been altered forever if I hated "Vs.". Spoiler: I didn't hate it.
In 1997 I was in a band (no further questions) and we decided to cover Blur's "Song 2", because it would be fast, and loud, and loud always masks mistakes. This caused two problems for me: first was that I believe, at the time, I had heard Song 2 exactly once...actually I had seen the music video, and was paying more attention to the band slamming into walls repeatedly. I had some general idea of how the song was supposed to go ("just...kind of 'woo hoo' it and then sing some stuff, right?"), but not nearly enough information to make it a even semi-respectable cover. The second problem was the lyrics, as Damon Albarn tends to sing without ever closing his mouth, which is an action almost imperative for enunciation.
The "internet", back then, was certainly budding (although AOL was more or less the queen bee of information and socializing), but still not the kind of place you go to for niche information like song lyrics, or songs, in general. The lyrics we found relatively easily (through WebCrawler, RIP)...I think the best we could manage for the actual song was a 20 second clip on some site. Thankfully the song is only two minutes long, and that little soundbite was derivative of the entire thing, more or less. I do say "we" because I did not own my own computer, and all of this was conducted in the basement of my friend's house, probably hepped up on Sunny Delight and an onslaught of food from Pizza Outlet.
I can't imagine, today, struggling to find either of these morsels. Hell, just a minute ago I thought I haven't heard The Cult's "She Sells Sanctuary" in forever, and now I'm listening to it. Twice, actually. I like the echo-y guitar at the beginning, I guess.
All of this weird dot-connecting, however, kind of explains my relationship with you.
Like most people in my age bracket I have, so far, straddled the internet age. I am old enough (but not too old) to retain vivid, sharp memories of a significant chunk of my childhood where the internet was unfathomable. In retrospect it was very, very much a work-in-progress in the 80s/90s, and categorically a government/higher education tool, and scarcely resembled the thing I'm using to transmit this little message to anyone on the planet that cares to read it.
I'm trying not to paint myself into a corner of badmouthing the internet, because I love the concept of having information, no matter how insignificant, largely available to me on demand. I'm glad I'm alive in the middle of this weird deluge of enlightenment. You want to know something? Well, here it is, along with a trillion other things, just in case.
But, at the same time, I am just as grateful that the first 15 or so years of my life was spent without this massive and seemingly omniscient beast. I like having a childhood where memories were almost never solo endeavors. Where my friends were my friends because they were within walking distance, and sometimes I'd go down to Matt's house and we'd listen to his brother's Monkees records on this shitty little player, and shoot pool, and his mom always made us hot dogs and mac and cheese for lunch. If it was nice out we'd run around his back yard with fake rifles and pretend we were leading armies into battle, and then take refuge in his kudzu-covered ditch in his front yard, to wait for the imaginary heat to blow over (apparently we had assumed that a lot of pretend people would be mad at us for killing so many soldiers). Or I would go over to Dave's (RIP) house and traipse around the forest that was essentially his backyard, skipping stones across the creek or working up the nerve to jump our bikes off of a makeshift cliff and across a stream to the other side. Or I would hang out with my next door neighbor who would make me listen to Bon Jovi as payback for coercing her into playing football with a few other kids.
Those are days cultivated by our parents shoving us out the door and saying "go play".
You know what else I haven't heard in forever? "Big News I", by Clutch. Poof!
A staggering amount of my time is spent "online", in the sense that I am actively doing something that requires a connection. I could pretend that work is an acceptable explanation, but it's 11:00 at night on a Friday and take a wild guess what I'm doing?
Again, I'm not admonishing the internet, but I am self-flagellating my perpetual use of it nowadays. It's not as if forests suddenly disappeared, or I'm not in possession of one little girl that is begging for entertainment 90% of the time (with the other 10% reserved for ice cream negotiations). Earlier today I rented The Lego Movie, a film both my daughter and I have seen (and enjoyed immensely). It's a pretty long film for an animated feature, but my parents, her and I all crammed into the playroom and watched it in its entirety, with no interruption. And when it finished I realized that those 100 minutes were, by far, the longest amount of time I was not a login screen away from the internet all day. A distant second was the 45 minutes or so it took to get home via the subway, where my phone doesn't really have service for most of the journey.
Didn't Guns N' Roses cover "Live and Let Die"? Oh, there it is. Guess I'm digging metal tonight.
Last night I drove to a friend's house and cooked her dinner. She lives a good 30 miles away, closer to my hometown than my home. I think the total drive time was about 90 minutes, thanks to the trifecta of terrible traffic conditions caused by a steady rain, rush hour, and the end of a Pirates' game. Her house sits near the edge of town, on a large hill, and the road I had to take to get to her driveway was noted as a two-way street, but I've no idea how two cars could ever fit on there adjacently.
I left there at 10:30...about four hours after my arrival...and the whole time we just talked. About whatever popped into our heads. Jobs, relationships, how she didn't really notice the sound of crickets until I pointed them out, the ease of cleaning up my (admittedly messy) cooking because I managed to use just one spoon to prepare three different dishes. As I was leaving she mentioned how she owes me a trip up to Dormont, seeing as I've made two excursions to the-middle-of-nowhere to spend some time with her, and I guess we need to keep our odometers even.
But she doesn't, really. In the selfish sense, I would drive 90 minutes every damn day if it made me feel connected to another person by something less tangible than an ethernet cable and a keyboard. It breathes some nostalgia into my life, which is kind of a sad revelation, because I shouldn't have to reminisce about a time in my past when I had to call someone on the phone or show up at their house to talk to them, earnestly, about life.
I suppose, above all, I wonder if those moments would be nearly as important to me had I been born just a few years later.
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