…all shall be revealed tomorrow, but do know that I’m at work on something exciting!

In the meantime I remain busy and tired.  I look tired, and I know I do because several people have remarked upon it with both grace and innocence, and it’s hard to explain how this is good tired, as opposed to bad tired, but it is.  The last few weeks have been full of writing, reading, working, running, plotting, researching, and socializing, punctuated by a few frantic bouts of cleaning and resting.  If I were to wake tomorrow and discover it already winter, I would hardly be surprised; part of me is still stuck back in springtime, while the rest of me feels as if time has sped up.  The book is coming along well; I no longer know what my deadline is but I’m working towards it every day nonetheless.

We’ve spent the weekend in the countryside, under a rare blue sky.  Yesterday I went for a run along country roads; the early evening silence was stunning, and the smell of wheat and sheep dung and grass was delicious.  Descending back into the village, I had a whiff of warm barbecue smoke, and could hear the hum of pub-goers and children playing before dinner.

So if I’m tired, at least it’s in the name of something good.  I’ve never felt so energetic about my own weariness before.  And the silence on this blog is deliberate, because I’m stretched wonderfully thin.

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Recently, a friend blogged her commentary about this year’s (spectacular) Eurovision Song Contest.  Read the post here; but then read the comments.  She suggested I might be interested in contributing to the discussion on the difference between US and UK/European entertainment tastes.  It turns out I was so interested that my brief comment on her blog has turned into an entire post on my blog.  So think of this as an extended comment, if you will.

I can really only speak about British and American television here, and as someone who doesn’t own a TV and hasn’t for several years now, you may want to take anything I write on the subject with a massive grain of salt.

But I’ve always felt that the best British television tends to fall into one of two categories: the classic (often costume) drama, or the witty/deadpan comedy show.  Neither of which is something we tend to do particularly well in the US; instead, we’ve chosen to perfect the art of the sitcom, the slick crime show, the glamorous reality show (which, yes, tends to take itself just a little too seriously).  We (in the US) are subsequently afraid to laugh at our own product, because we haven’t set it up as something to be laughed at.  We can laugh at the jokes in a sitcom, or the spoiled 16-year-old girls on MTV who cry because Daddy bought them the wrong colour Humvee, but there’s always a flashiness factor that wows even the most skeptical audience (myself included), and suddenly, making fun of these things seems almost more trouble than it’s worth.  It’s like staring at a remarkably shiny diamond, glinting in the sun.  Pretty.  Interesting, even.  But eventually you need to avert your eyes.

The reason, I think, is this: there’s a culture of celebrity in the US–specifically television and film-related celebrity–so powerful, so pervasive, that what we create when we create a TV show is not just a conduit for entertainment.  It’s actually a shrine to this celebrity culture–something like the grand European cathedrals, only in a modern form, an offering not for a god but for an entire race of beautiful, smooth-faced people who spend their lives behind a camera.  The entertainment industry is as much a religion as it is a business; so it’s only natural that we’ve come, over the years, to take it undeservedly seriously.

Obviously, there’s a culture of celebrity in Britain, too–and if ever there was a nation that had perfected the art of tabloid journalism, this is it.  The difference is that there’s also a culture of entertainment which hasn’t been lost somewhere in the CSI footage of dead bodies and unlikely lab experiments.  We’ve forgotten how to be merely amused–now we demand that we’re actually (in the truest sense of the word) awed when we look at a screen.

There are exceptions to this on both sides of the Atlantic, of course.  And it doesn’t exactly explain the cheesiness factor of Eurovision; but Eurovison is, I suspect, a beast so unique that it will defy any categorization, any sociological explanations that we try to attribute to it.  The only thing left to say about the song contest, then, is this: it all has to do with Graham Norton’s commentary catchphrase.  “He’s huge,” Graham said so many times over the course of the evening that I lost count, “in the Balkan states.” Greece’s Ricky-Martin lookalike?  Huge in the Balkan states.  Azerbaijan’s entrant?  Huge, I’ve heard, in the Balkan states.  Meaning that we should all look Balkans-ward to find the secret to that amazing Euro-pop sound.

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Bare legs under a dress. The itch of grass touching skin.  The way it feels to be in a city where you have absolutely no sense of direction or context, except perhaps a ten-year-old memory that is mostly hidden by the cobwebs of the mind and characterized, when it does glint, by the utterly mundane.  What a long, straight road looks like.  That a little bit of height, in a country such as this, gives you more perspective than you think you deserve.  Lots of people in a tiny kitchen.  That the garden, though it may have slept through winter, needs tending again.  The importance of a good book.  A bath, a trashy magazine, wet fingerprints left all over the celebrities’ faces.  How wild and fickle a strong wind can make you.

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I don’t know how to make myself go for a run.  I don’t know how to remember how good it feels, I mean really remember, so that I’ll climb the stairs and shed my Saturday clothes in favour of something that will seep up the sweat.  I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that I have never done it for anybody but myself, or with anybody but myself.  How to tell myself that the darker it gets, the less I’ll want to go out, because the whole point is to see things (isn’t it?), and not to run blind in a straight black line under the mist, the April stars that must be hiding somewhere, the haze of streetlights.

So what if I only do it so I can feel the city air run past my body? So what if I never go far enough, for long enough, hard enough?  At least I do it.  So what if my favorite part is the part after?  (I’ve never told anybody that, it would be cheating, I’ve let myself think, but forget cheating, for awhile.)

The part where I can feel my muscles and my bones and my breath.

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A few days ago, on recommendation of my father, whose music advice I trust blindly and without fail, I listened to these guys, and I’m playing “Black Tables” over and over again on my computer this morning (morning in terms of proximity to sleep only, I hasten to add–I’m officially on vacation, and it’s actually past noon now).  It occurs to me as I sit here that nearly every artist or band that I have had a lasting and meaningful auditory relationship with  was introduced to me by one or both of my parents.

A huge part of my writing (and, indeed, thought) process involves moments like this: a repetitive soundtrack, a window, a seasonal spark of inspiration.  Music sets my mood; or my mood sets the music.  I can never decide which.  I have an uneasy relationship with music; tender on the one hand, fraught with pitfalls on the other.  Like most things, it’s a relationship which didn’t become complicated until my teenage years.  My memories of music prior to my 14th birthday are simple and, to a certain extent, poignant (in a distinctly generational sense–I doubt anyone who isn’t my age could consider Michael Jackson “poignant”): listening over and over again to the Free Willy soundtrack in the living room of our Laguna Beach mobile home (yes, really, like the TV show, and yes, really, a mobile home) as a 5-year-old.  Bouncing up and down in my seat as we rumbled through the deserts and mountains of Utah in the Volkswagon bus, Mozart (played by the orchestra at St. Martin in the Fields, a poetic name that I liked even then) blaring.  Developing a fierce love for the Counting Crows a few years later, trying to play “Sullivan Street” on my keyboard, writing the lyrics as I heard them (for some months I believed that the song “Rain King” was actually “Rain Gauge,” which didn’t strike me as at all odd).  Playing a Hootie and the Blowfish tape in my dad’s silver toyota 4×4 as we drove in search of planks of wood, toilet seats, faucet fittings, cabinets, bathtubs (my parents were building a house now).  My mom’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” mix tape, which featured at least four versions of said song and which she listened to sometimes on the way to school, lending a morose east-coast sound to our blazing-sunshine west-coast commute.

But in high school it all became something different.  I met people who would judge you based solely on what was in your portable CD player (these were the days literally just before the iPod, when we still carted around heavy nylon cases full of well-loved discs).  I met a boy, who I desperately wanted to impress by my savvy (who once asked me, in dark and derogatory tones, “exactly what CDs do you own?”).  After our adolescent adoration dissipated and we decided, for no good reason at all, that we would never be able to speak civilly with each other again (less than a year later we were comfortably friends), I fell into a strange and uncharacteristic punk phase, dyed my hair maroon, wore Doc Martens with fishnet stockings and a plastic studded belt.  A close friend and I went to Warped Tour, which visited the seaside park in Ventura in summertime, ate french fries and joked nervously that maybe we would get closer to the mosh pit next time.  In our black converse and messy eye makeup we saw Green Day at the Santa Barbara bowl and bounced up and down on each other’s feet, shrieking out the words, convinced that we were cooler by miles than anyone else we knew.  Late one school night her father drove us to town so we could see a band called No Use for a Name play at a now-defunct venue called “The Living Room”; I remember being dissapointed that they didn’t play my favorite song at the time, “Why Doesn’t Anybody Like Me?”, but I bought a sweatshirt that was six sizes too big for me anyway, and duly wore it to school the next day, with my obligatory headphones and walkman.

In the secrecy of my own room, however, I was listening to things that I foolishly felt I could never share with my classmates.  I sought solace in Belle and Sebastian’s album “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” which my mom had purchased on a whim after hearing them on KCRW; on the gravel pathways between classrooms I was humming “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying,” and before track practice I heard Stuart Murdoch’s dulcet tones reminding me stars of track and field you are beautiful people.  I borrowed all of my parents’ Van Morrison albums, learned through my mom to appreciate Leonard Cohen and through my dad that the pop-punk that I so loved would be nothing without The Clash (I still remember going to the Anti-Mall in Orange County with him, stopping at the music shop to buy “The Best of the Clash” so that he could educate me).

By my third year of high school, I had an iPod (first generation, a birthday gift from my dad, technology still so new at the time that I was literally nervous the first time I brought it out in public at school lest my colleagues deem me hopelessly geeky–ah, the glorious irony) and an infinately more refined taste in artists and songs.  I was still plauged by the people who, now, would judge you based on your playlists, but now I wore a Belle & Sebastian t-shirt every other day and at least my hair (after a brief period of being black) was back to its normal dark brown colour. I would grow increasingly confident about my own ability to make musical choices ever after, apart from a period in college during which a boyfriend continually told me that the artists I liked were invariably “whiny” and during which, therefore, I decided that in addition to my usual litany of favorite artists, I also liked 50 cent, Dispatch, and, confusingly, Ashlee Simpson (that was not a proud moment in my personal history).

I know they say that smell is one of the most evocative senses, but I also have a memory that’s littered with song.  Standing high above a lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains, watching the cold black surface as someone sang Coldplay’s “Spies” in eerie tones; a summer spent playing the same Death Cab for Cutie album over and over again as I wrote hundreds of pages of incomprehensible notes about a monthlong tour of four Greek isles; playing Rilo Kiley’s “The Execution of All Things” as I drove away from a hotel on my first morning as a high school graduate.  If I play Paolo Nutini’s “New Shoes” I can still see the Man’s bookshop, now shut and empty, where I spent hours circling him, listening to the books and smelling coffee and stealing kisses in between customers.

(I like to close my eyes sometimes and feel bits of my own life come to the surface in response to a few notes.)

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