Travel Notes

I.

2014.

I barely have time to check my phone when I’m in New York City. No e-mail. No twitter. No texts. You walk and smell a smell of the halal carts tickling you beneath your nose as if they’re employing a flirtatious hand from an old Disney cartoon. You walk past bikes swallowed by the snow and you realize that bike thieves would have to bring a saw and a shovel with them if they wanted to snatch your bike, and that – as a result – they’d have to really want it. You realize while walking by a Nathan’s that if you squeezed a bottle of altruistic ketchup, it would emerge from someone else’s bottle. You walk and try to avoid pulling a Mr. MaGoo and placing yourself temporarily suspending in the air over the Hudson. You walk and wish it were spring and that everyone was out and about at two in the morning on a Sunday in flower dresses or shorts on block after block. You spot a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park and turn left and right thinking that Bill De Blasio will somehow be right behind you so you can point and say, “There’s one! After him!” and De Blasio will – of course – give chase, shouting, “Hey! Hey, you!” You notice a homeless man strategically sitting atop a grate. You walk by Christie’s and ask the people walking with you if you can get them anything based on your writer’s salary.

You wonder what sort of room could possibly serve as a complimentary counterpoint to these streets and try and reckon with hints of nautical themes and landings with which to emphasize space. You think of sitting on the stoops during those hang-the-head summer heats, but that’s the outside and not the inside, whose stories shouldn’t be seemingly limited to tales of either micro-apartments or apartments bought by rich families for their children attending college in the city limits. You want to hire a real estate agent who wears an eye patch and has a scar across his or her cheek and is more than capable of gutturally growling, “Oh, you want a loft, eh? Aren’t you a pair of long pants?”

You walk through the Met and wonder what would it would be like if Balthus did two paintings – one pre-massage, one post, even though you know anyone who takes Balthus seriously would rightly be offended at such a thought. You check to see if you have enough time to head to DUMBO. You check to see if you’ve applied for a second person singular license, as the fines for being an unlicensed user of the second person singular are rather exorbitant, as you no doubt know. You think about taking someone who works at Per Se to Les Pommes Frites and someone from Les Pommes Frites to Per Se. You double back and look at Man Ray’s painting of “The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Her Shadow” and realize you’re in the Museum of Modern Art, not The Met, and you look at it and think of old-fashioned cable cars with their antenna-like rods attached to wires running all over the city – the colors in the painting are certainly large enough to suggest buildings – and you pivot from that to the opening of Satyajit Ray “Mahanagar” – that is, “The Big City,” which focuses on that specific section of where the subway car meeting the wire hanging above the passenger’s heads exists, and you wonder who else there is out there who can tie a city together like that.

II.

The Elysée refused my request to interview Francois Hollande, but they did it in a way that was both very nice and very French, but they also did so in such a way that made me think that when the time came for them to say, “Yes,” they’d make the stipulation that any articles pursued within the walls of the Elysée had to be done with the assistance of a ‘Journalism Butler’ a la Jeeves, as if there’d be a man there who would raise his fist to his mouth, cough, and say, “Perhaps sir would be so inclined as to change into a dinner jacket before asking a follow-up question,” “Perhaps sir would be so inclined as to file a Freedom of Information request while watching a pack of hounds hunt a fox while seated on a horse,” and so on, because when the Chief of Staff of the President of France says, “Please accept, Sir, the assurance of my highest consideration” when you’ve been living by proxy in a world of Rahm Emanuel, Denis McDonough, and Richard Daley, it’s – well, it’s surprising.

And when I thought of that – when I had this little controlled explosion of a reaction, I thought about Hemingway’s old memoir and how I’d be in the city in May, how I couldn’t stop laughing when someone in college once read a piece announcing that he’d gone to Prague to “have an epiphany” only to realize in a Prague McDonald’s that “you can’t force an epiphany” (I also hear tell from Pan Thomas Wolfe that you can’t go home again), and how I once asked the people at Shakespeare and Company if I could stay the night and they said, “Well, when you show up, ask.”

And when I heard that, I imagined standing amongst the shelves the way Boris Karloff stood around on celluloid as Dracula, the light falling across his eyes in the thinnest of strips. I imagined noodling around a bit on the piano they had in the store. I imagined inviting Glen Hansard and Lisa Hannigan back into the store to perform a little bit. I imagined a friend observing me entering the door from the street and spotting me moments later casually flipping through a book as I walked along the rooftops. I imagined spontaneously enlisting everyone in the store in a snowball fight – “Aidez-moi! S’il vous plait! C’est le guerre de neige!” – and people dropping their bags and their Barthelmes and their John Berryman’s and their Ameile Nothomb’s and saying, “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

I have not been to the Place Contrescarpe, the Café des Amateurs, the Place du Pantheon, the Luxembourg Gardens, any of the twenty Arrondisements, The Left Bank, The Right Bank, the Eiffel Tower, the L’Ouvre, have not squinted at the Mona Lisa, have not flaneured where flaneuring was invented, have not accidentally wandered into a lecture hall at the Sorbonne, nor have I realized that I put my shirt on backwards in the morning while standing in the background of a photo shoot for a model whose body elides and dazzles geometry itself, nor – indeed – have I hired a ‘Journalism Butler.’

I have not done any of this.

But I’m coming.

III.

I have yet to see it in the summer, the winter, or the fall, but Paris springs from spring. It is an espresso of spring. From the five-minute cloudbursts to the smell of the Seine to sunny days that you could nearly sculpt, it’s fair to say the city does spring reasonably well. But what else would you expect? What else could you expect? Paris doesn’t exactly have the capacity within itself to crash and burn its way towards a dystopian Las Vegas future, does it? It’s a world city, and with world cities, that doesn’t happen. It’s a world city that lets you do everything including grab a table in a silent street in the middle of a seeming nowhere and not leave for hours. It’s a city with door knobs that look like they belong pierced through the lip of a Hindu god. It is, in fact, a city where you really could play “Si Tu Vois Ma Mere” nearly anywhere. It’s a city where Le Grande Palais swallows the setting sun into its glass rooftops while college-aged kids share a wine picnic on a blanket in the middle of the Passerelle Leopold Senghor because it’s Paris and it’s spring, and everything’s okay and everything’s all right, tu sais, and that means the crunching dog growl of the sands of an empty Luxembourg Gardens in the rain. That means being teased by a couple waiting in line for concert tickets behind you after you’ve just refused an inordinately polite scalper, saying, “What – and you didn’t want to buy them for us?” That means wandering down to the Seine to watch the sun rise and send a video message to R., asking her if she wants to sit ‘here’ and watch the sunrise with you, and then realizing, ‘Wait – the sun’s really taking its time to come up here, isn’t it?’

I spent two weeks in Paris in May. On my first day there – in fact, less than an hour after I arrived – Le Monde rejected an article of mine proposing changing Fenway Park into a factory to fight Global Warming a la Detroit circa WWII if John Henry and co. ever decided to build a new stadium. “And think of the space for variety,” I wrote. “99,000 square feet to create specially modified carbon-sucking trees to send to the tropics where they’d be the most useful (hopefully); the space to manufacture ‘vacuum cleaner barges’ that would suck the pollution out of rivers, as James Dyson has proposed; grain construction rooms to attempt to counter the fact that the grain belt is being displaced north to Canada and the Canadian border; water fabrication rooms to produce water to send to areas suffering droughts — there could be a little bit of everything in a factory like this.” A day or two later, there’s news of two different studies reporting that glaciers in Antarctica are collapsing faster than previously thought and that a certain amount of sea level rise is all but locked in, but I no longer felt like a bee trapped in a glass jar of apocalyptic news and the accompanying apocalyptic moralizing, endlessly pinging about in a looping cycle in which nothing is really accomplished and which everyone felt it was somehow okay to be that bee. I felt like a bearded assemblage of balloons, so instead of reading more, I walked around Paris and took note of the young man dragging a full shopping cart into his apartment, lifting it up and over the lid and disappearing behind ancient oak doors; I overheard a young girl say to her parents in English, “Dinner tonight should be fancy. It should have peaches. And sugar”; I saw fresh-faced pompiers getting salutingly sworn in on the banks of the Seine; and I wondered if the technology existed to reconstitute a glacier, and if it did, what it would look like and how quickly it could all be done.

Your Eiffel Tower
is an ice cube
let loose to float
to the bottom
of the drink,
a helicopter pedal of honey
that chop-chop-chops its way
clear through
the slow breaks of water dynamics
the slow breaks of air dynamics
whatever element this is,

and Jesus Christ, I said to myself, self-consciously smiling and laughing when I realized what I’d written in my notebook as I wandered over the Pont Alexandre a few days later. In fact, I nearly tore the thing out and threw it into the river right then and there. After all, a Fodor’s Guide to Paris isn’t composed of things like Blaise Cendrars’s “Homage to Appollinaire,” is it? No, no. I should be telling you about how one thing that threw me off for a week before my ear finally figured it out is that when you sit down at a cafe, you’ll often be asked, “Dejuneouverre?” – as in, “Lunch or glass?” – as in, “To eat or drink?” So if you want to avoid throwing the conversation off the rails with your waiter at the immediate outset, do please keep this in mind.

/

I am fragmenting the totality of the experience here – deliberately so – partly because that is the quickest way to get my writing published – and I am not going to be a posthumous writer (not like that, at least) – and partly because the city was so big and so large and filled with so many gaps that I felt like the rest of the figurative map was always just around the corner, that I hadn’t grown my arms in just the right way so as to hug and embrace the totality of it, which meant and means that there is more to come.

/

The Cannes Film Festival started the day after I arrived, and I nearly took the train down to visit, but everything I’d read made it seem to me that the festival was all but shuttered to the public, that the only public event is watching the occasional classic film on the beach, and that seemed off for the Cannes Film Festival, not only because I had a soft spot for the old sight of Truffaut and Goddard temporarily bringing the festival to a halt in defense of both Henri Langlois and the striking student 68’ers, but because an art form with that kind of reach deserves something more than a quick, passing nod to the public that supports it, no?

“The 67th edition of the Cannes Film Festival,” Le Monde told me, “is marked by a strong contingent of films that take war as their subject or for decor.” A few lines later: “Not only, of course, are Mars and Polemas the only gods invited to the red carpet in 2014” – and I had to stop, toss up my hands, and give myself over to pacing outside for a moment, wandering up Invalides where I spotted a waitress so dressed up she was actually wearing what must have been a purely decorative handbag as she lowered some drinks to a table and returned to my street on Avenue de Breteuil, where I saw a dog lift his or her leg to urinate on a vet they had just left, and I imagined a cartoonist for The New Yorker somewhere reacting in the 1931 Frankenstein fashion and shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

Cannes ends with the man who did Once Upon A Time in Anatolia winning for Winter Sleep. He criticizes and bemoans Erdogan’s response to the Soma mining disaster, a disaster which I later learned had its own hashtag that was held up by film stars the way #BringBackOurGirls was held up by film stars, the latter of which I bring up because there is something amazing in seeing a terrorist group invoking Islam getting the message and meaning of “Iqrā” totally wrong – literally, the very first thing in the Qu’ran, and they screw it up – but also because there was a giant cube set up outside the Hotel du Ville that said, “RENDEZ-NOUS NOS FILLES” while the Hotel itself was draped in tourists and two banners congratulating Paris Saint-Germain on winning France’s Ligue 1 with that terrible burden of millions of Euros. Outside Washington DC’s City Hall, there is a small, ground-level LED display that says, “No taxation without representation,” and I realized the two city halls made for an odd juxtaposition as I walked on by and headed towards the Ile de St Louis. (“Here is our one thing!”)

/

There’s an exhibition of fake covers for ‘The Parisianer’ shown at the Hotel du Ville later that night (that is, Paris’s take on The New Yorker) while I’m off watching a tribute to Duke Ellington fill St. Sulpice (and if only the band had done Mingus’s “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”; the rolling mess of arpeggios would’ve fitted the towering spaces perfectly), a night where an American addressed the crowd from song to song in a kind of lean-forward, ‘Repetez?’ broken French, and then – for some reason – suddenly became much more fluent later in the evening, and you had to wonder what happened, like, Did he have a reverse stroke? Did he say to himself, “Oh, right. This is French?” And what would it take to create, run, and edit The Parisianer? Would ‘Talk Of The Town’ become ‘Overheard at the Café?’ Would its fiction selections swerve from mis en scenes of middlebrow lives experiencing middlebrow crises to something else altogether? Would the magazine be bilingual? Or – since you sometimes hear three or four different automated announcements on the Metro – would it be trilingual? Or would it be even more than that?

/

There is a greve a few days later, a strike, and it shuts an odd motley of things down. At a cafe, I take a stab and ask my waiter if it concerns SMIC — that is, the minimum wage.

“C’est toujour concernant d’argent, monsieur,” he replied, and I smiled.

Later, a gypsy punched me in the chest because I wouldn’t give him any money and I gave him a certain look that caused him to back away.

/

Interestingly, L’As du Falafel didn’t wow me as much as I’d been hoping, though a giant hotdog drowning in semi-burnt cheese in a baguette on Montmarte was as good as R. had said it would be (and I really can’t stand hot dogs anymore, but loved this), and there was a bowl of strawberry ice cream on St. Germain that hit like a first cup of coffee in the morning, but for deserts, which I hadn’t been expecting at all.

/

And I drifted into museums: Van Gogh and Artaud dialogued with each other, Artaud’s poetry framing a string of canvases — including one where a field slicks back its hair underneath an approaching storm — and two borderline retiree-age Japanese women ran from canvas to canvas and counted the number of flowers. Rodin’s bodies complimented Robert Maplethorpe’s bodies. Walking up slowly to Monet’s water lillies, I suddenly and gamefully self-narrated that I was taking a crepuscular pace towards a crepuscular twilight canvas, which muttered, “Firefly, firefly, firefly” in tiny little brush strokes.

A teacher asked a collection of little kids all sitting cross-legged near the lillies, “Qu’est qu’on voit dans l’eau?” and a kid said somewhat disbelievingly, incredulous that the answer could be so easy, ” … L’eau?” and I tried not to laugh.

/

On the flight over, we swam through kelps of luminescence before heading off into the air; I passed an air steward jokingly saying to an air stewardess in French that he was wearing ‘Obsession’ by Calvin Klein and considered whether or not to double check my pulse just to be totally positive it wasn’t 1999 (which is how you check that, right?); I watched the maps mounted on the seat in front of me kept zoom closer and closer to the plane until I half-expect the next slide to read, ‘Hey, It’s Kevin’s House. Hey, Kevin,’ and then I realized: if there’s first class, economy class, and changing rooms that exist for children on the ground — why, if young ones can freaking board first — why is there no ‘Baby Class’ for babies in the air? A sealed off, separate, otherwise entirely pleasant part of the plane where the baby can cry in whatever manner he or she chooses — staccato bursts, long, screeching peels, tragic and crestfallen hiccuping gulps: the works.

I’m not saying that every wailing child signals the impending doom of your chances of getting a nice bit of rest when they start to wail, but surely there’s a bit of room in the 155 feet that composes the length of a Boeing 757 for the chance at a bit of a rest.

/

Before I left, R. and I spoke on the phone, and as I paced up and down the terminal, she told me about a TV program she had stumbled across one night that was all about people who had fallen in love with objects – a ferris wheel, a soundboard in a church (“You don’t have Jesus in your heart of yours, son, but that soundboard”), and even the Eiffel Tower, so much so that the woman who had fallen in love with the Eiffel Tower had actually gotten married to the Eiffel Tower, and that the city government or state government were absolutely furious and insisted on a divorce, which actually happened – and isn’t that so Paris? – and I laughed so happily I nearly broke all the planes.

IV.

If you’ve never been to Milan before and think you’re going to find a beautiful Italian city – even a beautiful ‘modern’ Italian city – it’s important to let you know now: you’re not going to find a beautiful Italian city. There are parts of Milan that are very nice – the Navigli, the park around the Castello Sforzesco, and certainly the neighborhood around the Brera – but if you’re coming to Milan half-expecting to float through the glowing fields of Tuscany, you’re setting yourself up for an existential pratfall. Know that.

But if you know Milan and you like Milan and you’re looking for someplace to eat while you’re there, you can’t go wrong with the Fioraio Bianchi Caffè on Via Montebello. “Fioraio” means “flower-seller,” and it’s a theme that certainly isn’t wasted in the interior, a space plum filled with them, and – if you’re in the city on a rainy day – the notion of surrounding yourself with flowers isn’t an entirely unwelcome one. If you’re having dinner, try the John Dory fillet with champagne and artichoke sauce and crushed potato. If you’re having lunch, give the Baccalà cod fish tart a try.

When you’re done, you’re right near Via Della Moscova. Take your after-meal walk there. Not only is there a small bookshop near a Carrefour and a local market you can poke your head into, not only is there an okay market sometimes set up by the Moscova Metro, but the street is bookended on either side by two different parks – that is, the Giardini Montenelli and the Parco Sempione. Each are worth tossing your backpack to the grass and resting in, though Montenelli struck me as being the better one when I was there in late May.

And take time to take in the granular aspects of the city, too. Wander without purpose. You might – as I did – spot your first Liga Norte politician in the wild, dressed like a New Jersey politician celebrating St. Patrick’s Day year round (green is the color of this far-right, fairly appalling party, and it’s a garish, ugly thing.) You might wander by an acoustic guitarist and a flutist shading themselves beneath a tent from a sun otherwise blazing down on the Duomo, playing what for all the world sounds like a Xenakis-styled children’s television show theme song. You might wander by hyper-modernist buildings being constructed in odd places (a previously empty plaza, a previously empty portion of the Castello Sforzesco) for Expo 2015 and wonder what on earth the city is going to do with them when the Expo is finished, one Italian telling you that the city has no idea, and that people are still somewhat distracted by the fact that seven people associated with the Expo were just arrested, anyway. You might spin your head beneath the glass ceiling conch of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele while successfully avoiding ‘the guys with the bracelets.’ You might wander into a Beppe Grillo rally and then laugh when you realize that he – Roderick Spode-like – is complimenting the quality of a crowd when one person in the crowd could clap and – due to the way in which the area of the Duomo is constructed – it would sound like a thousand people.

Or you might find something else altogether.

V.

I bring word from Paris. I bring books from Paris. I bring bookstores from Paris — not literally, of course, though the theatrics of trying to get that through Customs would be something of a joy (“And this is the remainder bin, Officer, where …” “Just let me go on my lunch break. Please. I beg you”), but I’m swerving off track already — I do that — because all I wanted to say was that after the death of Rizzoli’s in New York City and the death of Borders and George Packer’s profile of Amazon and the dearth of book-related television here in the United States (despite the fact that more new books are published in the US every year than any other country in the world, some 250,000-plus every year), I think it’s worth taking a moment to talk about Lang’s Law.

Lang’s Law fixes prices for books in France, and it’s all the more interesting now in an age in which Amazon does what it does, the latest of which would be erasing certain books from its site until it receives more money from certain publishers to boost its own bottom line. (This has also earned a terrific fusillade of comedic ire from Stephen Colbert, as some of you will no doubt know.) And it’s also interesting because in an age in which there still seems to be a consensus concerning disruptive technology being the economic future of all countries, everywhere, Lang’s Law still feels like the exceedingly right and properly situating thing to do.

But to explore that point a little bit further, during the two weeks I spent in Paris in May, I visited Le Pont Traversé on Rue de Vaugirard, a beautiful bookstore that looked like it had once been an old bank run by a man with owl glasses who had spent more time collecting old books than banking, and who ended up raising a Decca Mittford-like daughter full of adventure who was now reaching retirement herself. After picking up a book for R., I asked the owner — because the store was just her and her alone; she was still switching on the lights when I walked in — whether Lang’s Law helped her store at all. Al Jazeera America’s short article on the issue had yet to be published.

“Yes, Monsieur. Absolutely,” she said. “It helps enable stores like this to exist. It might seem like something out of an old, Soviet-era Russia to you as an American, but …”

I laughed. “And I also noticed while I was walking around the city that there are very specific bookstores here, too, bookstores dedicated to the Congo, automobiles, the sea, revolutions, the Holocaust …”

“Yes, yes. That’s true. How is it in the United States?”

“Well — for one — we have Amazon.”

“Ahhh, oui.”

I don’t necessarily think Shakespeare and Company needs the help of Lang’s Law, though. It’s a perpetual stream of foot traffic, so much so that it’s hard to believe Sylvia Whitman actually caught a couple having sex in the bookshop there, as she said in one interview somewhere, because even if a couple had the bit between their teeth, you literally can’t stand anywhere in the store for more than a few minutes before someone pokes their head around the corner.

I didn’t ask her about that, or anything at all, really. I helped her move a few chairs to the side after listening to John Berger (most famous for Ways of Seeing) read to an assembled, eclectic crowd (one of which included an old, gay Spanish doctor who bafflingly and confusingly told me about how he had a drink with a famous British painter and how — as a seeming result, he seemed to imply — he died a week later), which you can hear — courtesy of the bookstore — above. He read from a piece called “Fellow Prisoners,” which talks about how —

Between industrial capitalism, dependent on manufacture and factories, and financial capitalism, dependent on free-market speculation and front office traders, the incarceration area has changed. Speculative financial transactions add up to, each day, $1,300 billion, fifty times more than the sum of the commercial exchanges. The prison is now as large as the planet and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners.

— which uplifted us all, and he spent a moment reading from Angelus Silesius, partly to talk about the way to bridge the difference between a humanizing medical language and a dehumanizing medical language, and partly because — like someone sitting on a stool at the end of the pub — he was just simply amazed by lines like, “The truly empty is like a fine vase containing nectar; it holds it knows not what,” and he couldn’t help but want to share his delight (“I love him,” an employee silently mouthed to Sylvia), and there was wine waiting outside for us when we were all done, and it looked a bit and felt a bit and was a bit like Upright Citizens Brigade in Paris.

And can we take a moment to talk about the foot traffic? Retailers would kill for the kind of foot traffic Paris gets on a nice day. All the different stores of Gibert Jeune that line the areas near the Quai D’Orsay were just as packed as Shakespeare and Company during the time I was there. Even if Lang’s Law wasn’t there fighting for bookstores to stay bookstores, the sheer interest of French-speaking and English-speaking readers in Paris in reading would still translate into an incredible fight against the Amazons of the world. It was unbelievably heartening.

“There are so many books here,” a man with a leather jacket and a fisherman’s mustache told me from atop a ladder as I was trying to decide whether or not to get something by Mitterand or a collection of Camus’s newspaper articles, “it’s difficult to decide which to choose. Thankfully, I drank a lot of soup, grew very, very tall, and am able to look at everything.”

“Unfortunately,” I said in French, “French isn’t my first language. I didn’t quite catch that.”

He repeated it again in French at the same speed.

I laughed. “And look at you!” I said, gesturing.

Leaving the bookstore, the security guard cordially badgered everyone entering.

“Welcome, beautiful mademoiselle! Welcome to my chateaux of learning and knowledge!”

“A very beautiful castle,” I said to the laughing cashier.

“Oui,” she replied.

VI.

“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw… “Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.” -- Alasdair Gray, Lanark

I’m off to Glasgow in two weeks. Edinburgh, too. There are only so many questions one can ask one’s self before one goes on a trip, like: how many Gaelic words will I misspell and mispronounce while over there? Most of them? All of them? Infinity-plus-one of them? (And what is the infinity plus-one of language, anyway?) Will I be taken down to the docks, handed a a pile of hammers, a pile of nails, and a pile of steel planks and be told to build everyone a ship, wee bastard that I am?

Or will I run into Kei Miller in the streets, and will this honorary Glaswegian recite this?

And so who are the mermaids of Glasgow? How do they swim? Who are the mermaids of Glasgow? Does Alasdair Gray know? And, you know, I’d tell you — I really would — but that would spoil the fun.

VII.

The sounds I collected in Glasgow included the murmurings of a student cafe at the University of Glasgow, an organ player in the Kelvingrove word-of-god-ing away above scatterings of people in metal chairs looking up to the balcony where he was playing and to the extra TV’s displaying his playing perched in the corners as well, a circle folk session at Ben Nevis (and so many musicians were coming in, including — as my companion told me at one point — one of the best fiddle players in Scotland — that I joked that an organ player would come through the doors of the bar next, dragging the behemoth behind them with tendrils reaching all the way back to the church it’d been hoisted from), the chatter of the river-bound tea-mastery that is Tchai Ovna, the wind of a town in the West Highlands called Oban, and in the basement of a packed Glasgow bar standing on a bench, a French-Cuban duo singing this —

And on the way up to the Highlands, the train took a curve as Tuneyards took a vocal curve in Esso/Rocking Chair. A passenger was reading a book with a chapter called, “The Ecology of Sin.” Spread out safari branches of seagulls hovered over a full paddock of sheep. A rainbow dipped into a West Highland loch. The ticket-collector gave a passenger a kiss because a friend of the passenger-in-question had informed the collector that it was the passenger’s birthday.

On the way back to Glasgow, four friends starting the weekend on the train tried to play a game of musical chairs. No one moved. “So is this a game of musical statutes, then?” one inquired, incredulous (and a woman stood up to dance, too, and danced, and was told that dogs don’t dance like that; “they do if you pick them up,” she replied), and before my traveling companion and I made our way back — before we heard of the outrageous indignity of The Parrot Sanctuary on Kerrera Island being closed — we sat with chips with curry on the seaside docks.

VIII.

Hazy yellow over Fife sun. Cherry eating over Leith us. Over the hill, a spitting contest with nothing contested, the only question being whether or not cherry trees would sprout through the sand of the shore, an arboreal blinking on the coastline akin to a lighthouse, as a lighthouse, is.

IX.

Bright doorbell-speed (but canyon-sized) arpeggio chimes. The drums, guitar, bass and vocals – each doing a separate thing, but – together. A sweaty elevator glow of closeness. The joy of being the few dancing to music that demanded dancing. NBah. Nse. Seagull-sized wings stretching through Guinea and Maritania and unfurling themselves along the coast. Nbah. Nse. Dour, motionless sentries presiding over their pints in the reflections of scattered mirrors like an old ghost cousin of John Laurie in The 39 Steps. Nbah. Nse. Sweat. Air.

X.

In February, I left Edinburgh for Austin and decided to stop by Waterloo Records while I was there. On first blush, Austin seems to be a city that makes you say, ‘Who needs crickets when there are teenage skateboarders overlapping one another? When there’s 1920's New Orleans-styled houses mixing in the fig tree evening shade of 1930's California?’ It seems to be the city where you can become the actual 1950's-styled father taking an old fashioned Oldsmobile or Buick for a cross-country drive with the kids draping their arms over the seats. It’s where golf carts get taken for loop-de-loops atop parking garages and someone knows that -- in their wardrobe -- you know you have something you can classify as a ‘haunted yellow parking lot’ t-shirt. It's a city where someone reminds you that the motto of the city is 'Keep Austin Weird,' and so when youaskthem what the weirdest thing they've seen in the city so far was, you get an 'Oh, um.' It’s a city where great-tailed grackles sound like they’re trying to build a collective house all together.

In this city at this shop, I ended up purchasing the latest from the Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band and an old album by Ali Farka Toure featuring Idan Rachel. (One nice thing about this shop that I hadn’t had time to enjoy since HMV left Harvard Square: the abundance of headphones to listen to music before making a go at a purchase.) Later highlights include “Music And Friends” and Toure extending his music tendrils to mix themselves with eventual early morning muesli.

Having worked a miserable bookstore job while listening to shoppers croon about how much they love bookstores, I am cautious about providing any sort of fuel to a needless romantic disconnect (though I still believe in the romance of bookstores and love them dearly.)

I went to Avalanche Records in Edinburgh a few days after I’d returned from Austin. Heading uptown to the shop from where I was was one of the rare times I saw myself on the bus monitor screen that hung in the middle of the front window. I took the bus up and sat on the upper deck. Drizzle had begun. An old woman waited for the bus on the opposite side of the road. A boxer dog sniffed at some groceries a few doors down from that, got a tug of ‘No,’ and then tried to nip at the owner as a result. A young man in sweats ran in front of the bus. Someone slowly attacked a flower’s bloom of fish and chips with a fork. I checked back in with the screen: I was still there, being filmed in profile, modified knit hat still on my head. How are you? All right? You still living? A young African boy had gotten on the bus and been spotted by someone who knew him. His father, on the phone, followed. They spoke for a few moments and their conversation dropped below intelligibility, until I heard one of them say, Freedom, eh? Everywhere. And he spread his hands wide.

I got to Avalanche with 15 minutes left on the ‘open’ clock and said hello to the man running the floor, who looked like an older, shaved version of Tom Berninger, Matt Berninger’s younger brother. I flipped through a few vinyl records: Rags + Feathers, read one title. Fred Allen in 1948 read another. The latest Leonard Cohen played over the system. I hesitated for a moment between a compilation LP of French artists the band No Whiskey for Callahan had brought in, a LP by NWfC themselves (a later listen of their bandcamp suggested that they were terrific), or an album that attracted my attention for two reasons: the cover (Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger in bed reading something together) and the group name: Murderburgers. My sympathies were further piqued by the fact when the Berninger clone told me that they were a punk band and that punk wasn’t a particularly big thing in the city.

I ended up going with a ‘shot in the dark’ random purchase of Get Color by the band Health. And as someone else and myself made ratatouille later on in the evening, I put the album on, and I was genuinely surprised it wasn’t terrible: it was mostly instrumental techno-rock colored by the sense that I was listening to someone who had just seen The Matrix for the first time. It was something in the ballpark of the Beastie Boys indulging in science fiction. I chopped away at some parsnips. I peeled some potato skins. The music continued.

XI.

“You should have seen the look on the man’s face at Barnes and Noble when I brought him a copy of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic,” my mother told me as my parents and I sat around the kitchen table with the LP and Dr. Dre’s upward-turned face sitting between the three of us. I imagined the fifth face at the bookstore, something bearded and vaguely resembling the musician Nathaniel Rateliff, confused at encountering a level of situational discrepancy creeping towards inexorable Mrs. Doubtfire territory. I imagine the transaction proceeding without incident.

That is something I noticed years ago while reading fiction, resolved to do something about, and still feel like I haven’t resolved in a particularly big, satisfying, catharsis-for-everybody sort of way: whenever I sat down to write a piece of fiction myself, I always veered away from the face, often out of sheer boredom at having to find a way to ‘do’ the face in a way that interested me for an extended period of time -- ‘hard,’ ‘angular,’ ‘cutting,’ ‘soft,’ and other adjectives could only take me so far, could only signal with a ping of submarine radar shorthand the way the thing can shift and glow like something warming up on a breakfast pan.

At Dyno Records in Newburyport, Massachusetts, there were so many faces: Curtis Mayfield, with sunglasses, stared down. Marvin Gaye stared beatifically up into the area just next to the lights that bore his name. R.L. Burnside cradled a dog. Matt Berninger and Brent Knopf looked like the moon had found a flash camera and discovered them shuffling about the woods. Bob Marley smoked a thousand-yard-stare joint. Sleater-Kinney hailed a cab. Savages stood aside each other in Bergmanesqe black and white. Sister Rosetta Thorpe smiled in Warholesque checkboards of color. Sam Cooke’s mind was somewhere else as he stood on a rock in the middle of a lake.

A passing stewardess informed her friend on the phone that she’d just come from a flight where they’d had “8 service animals, 3 emotional support animals, and two deaf animals -- it wasLITERALLYa zoo." And, a few hours later, I’m in a hotel across the street from a theater advertising a show of female impersonators. A few were taking cigarette breaks. An empty rooftop and light rain with lone instances of light blurred the eventual picture with ease.

It’s damp, but of course it’s damp. It’s green, but of course it’s green. It’s Portland. It’s Oregon. A cyclist, with gentle friendliness, held up their hand to another cyclist coming to the beginning of a four way intersection unable to spot an oncoming car themselves. “Just Trying 2 Survive,” reads a cardboard sign held aloft by two individuals outside Voodoo Doughnuts.

Sleep. Light. Work. A walk. Tender Loving Empire, the sign declared. A record label and a shop. On the inside, I discovered that the band Y La Bamba had found a man from the 19th century who had the head of a cat for a third eye. I saw a giant pair of lips, the nameBug Hunt, and at first I thought ‘a band,’ but the later reality of research revealed: a label. A label within a label. The band itself was New Move, and I nodded, took note, and then all but ran into a band playing through an open door of a bar in the rain.

XII.

2016

It was an evening of American Summer Vinyl after an afternoon at Bull Moose in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The flutter of white placards stood out into the aisle, baseball cards conquering the bicycle wheel. The label “Halloween Collections” stood alongside “Grammy’s.” Geometric shapes filled the spaces between the antlers on an album for the band Pyramids. I thought back to the rally I’d just come from. Someone droned on at the counter about Nintendo DS. I made my way to the shelves.

Sebastian Cabot’s spoken-word rendition of Bob Dylan was met with incredulity. The multicolored Felix clock cats that adorned the cover of Tacocat’s “Lost Time” was met with delight. John Angaiak’s radical missive to the world was filed away for future reference.

And, in a broader sense, amongst all this, I was ‘home.’ And though I could have gone to Liverpool Street Station to go visit the old airbase my grandfather flew missions from and tried to find a local music shop (Google suggested there was none) to compare and contrast the music of today with the Vera Wang-esque, sail-away music of then soaring overMurrow’s radio reports and the musical he put on with other prisoners in a POW camp as a bit of a PR stunt the Germans wanted to pull, I didn’t. The notion was shelved.

Clyde “Kingfish” Smith, a street vendor, improvised a song on vinyl as the air conditioning buzzed its basso profundo in the background and the blinds stood drawn. Ahoo-lawd made a sharp turn around the corner of a chord. A banjo on side B seemed to enter a stormy, metallic tunnel. Beyond the blinds, I imagined the heat acting out its idea of a wasteland.

The highway wind elevated car conversation to a shout. The sun blazed down. And, here, I read the liner notes on the back of the vinyl in my hand,Lost Train Blues. “Strange things are happening in this land,” Buster Ezell would later sing.YouTube, mentioned the notes. “Sloppy, sublime, democratizing glory.”Wind,roared the windows. And, later, I would open up my backpack and read a Navajo poem from a freshly purchased copy ofIn The Trail Of The Wind, which said --

It was the wind that gave them life. It is the wind that comes out of our mouths now that gives us life … In the skin at the tips of our fingers we see the trail of the wind; it shows us where the wind blew when our ancestors were created.

So, with the wind, we passed through the Zakim Bridge with “Chimes of Freedom flashing.” Back again: Peggy-O. Early morning Beethoven’s 8th over early highway light. I started to imagine True Detective Season 95 when I look out over the chest-high green cattails by the Hackensack River. New Jersey gave way to Delaware gave way to Maryland. With C-SPAN radio on, Virginia itself and subsequent Virginian sunsets arrived.

Love and Mercy, one tie-dye Brian Wilson LP declared inSteady Soundsin Richmond in ‘Why are you even outside?’ heat. “Get back here,” a voice shouted on the way there to who knows whom, “and tell me what you’re wearing!”

Inside was a collection of vinyl with lightly colored used clothing arcing alongside the bins. Should I get King Tubby vs. Channel? And what gave the album its ‘versus,’ anyway, if Tubby was doing dub and Channel One was a studio for reggae musicians?

The Music From Marlboro Country surprised, as did the continuous photos of cowboys lightning a cigarette in one posture or another on the cover. I looked at the back and wonder if this is the kind of song lingering on the track.

4 Freshman and 5 Trumpets, read the title of another vinyl. “Where does the fifth one go?” F. joked.

The heat crackled on. It’s a wonder Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and others simply didn’t just melt all that time ago.

XIII.

2086.

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