A Blues Song Just For Fighters: James Toback's Tyson
Boxing is our most controversial American sport, always, it seems, on the brink of being abolished. Its detractors speak of it in contempt as a "so-called 'sport,'" and surely their logic is correct: if "sport" means harmless play, boxing is not a sport; it is certainly not a game. But "sport" can signify a paradigm of life, a reduction of its complexities in terms of a single symbolic action--in this case its competitiveness, the cruelty of its Darwinian enterprise--defined and restrained by any number of rules, regulations, and customs: in which case boxing is probably, as the ex-heavyweight champion George Foreman has said, the sport to which all other sports aspire. It is the quintessential image of human struggle, masculine or otherwise, against not only other people but one's own divided self.
-- Joyce Carol OatesSomeday, they're gonna write a blues song just for fighters. It'll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.
-- Sonny Liston
As a child somewhere on the journey towards adolescence in the mid-to-late 1980s, there were certain names that brought with them entire worlds. "Maradona" was one this little Canadian Scot spent a lot of time rolling around his tongue, while balls rolled around football pitches marked out by jumpers and trees, at the feet of players far more capable than he. "Schwarzenegger" and "Stallone" made for air machine guns, bandannas, throwing each other in the mud and learning to love the art of gratuitious bloodshed.
Then there was Tyson. Tyson was what the older kids who worked at the slaughterhouse would name their dogs (and, eventually, their children). Tyson was huddled conversations under the bridge about sixty second knockouts, older cousins with cigarettes in their mouths, replaying the fist swings with a slow and sincere reverence. Tyson was in the playground, our heads smashed against walls by the bulkier and more slowly moving amongst us, games of British Bulldogs suddenly turning to the heavyweight championship for inspiration. Seconds out, they'd shout, and the bricks were only ever those seconds away.
At the time, Joyce Carol Oates was writing very smart and eventually legendary work on Tyson, contextualising him amongst the greats. But the rumble in the jungle, to us, was probably an episode of GI Joe. We were becoming vaguely aware that Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali were the same person but could not tell you the reasons why. Frank Bruno was on the Saturday telly, that lovely Irish McGuigan lad too. But those weren't the word that made the world shake.
That word was Tyson.
I knew nothing of boxing, but I knew what I saw. That vicious, raw, pure distillation of the fight. Kid Dynamite transformed into Iron Mike. The purists hated him. He wasn't the art. The world did not dance on his fists. It was pummelled. He was unbeatable because you can't beat rage like that. You can't beat the streets, and the prisons, and the anger.
You know what happened. Others have written it better. Those who actually know something about boxing. Start with David Remnick and go on from there. There was the rape. The prison sentence. The comeback. Evander Holyfield. The ear bite. Fuck you til you love me, faggot. Don King. The collapse. Dragging boxing down with him.
And always, at the center, that man, that strange, self-victimising madman with the motor mouth. With his mansions abandoned, he is reduced to that hoariest of cliches, the fallen heavyweight champ. The Raging Bull. The Sonny Liston. Long ago a realisation there would be no triumphant Balboa return, horns ablaze. This was it.
James Toback's film about the man could barely be called a documentary. It's a portrait, I suppose, or a monologue. Or something else. It's a fascinating beast of a film, largely because it does that most obvious of things: it points a camera at Mike Tyson and asks him to tell us who he is, and how he got to here.
"I think that he is so incapable of guile and of representing himself with intention one way or another, as opposed to just saying what's on his mind," Toback explains to me as he works the phones for the Australian release of the film.
"There is enough self-incrimination from him that one doesn't need to add to the mix in order for it to feel like a balanced portrait. In the way I edited the film, it was also without any effort to try to make him look good, it was just to try to make him look like what he is."
Earlier this year as I passed through Kentucky, I visited the Louisville museum built in honour of hometown boy Muhammad Ali. When I say museum, I mean shrine/motivational speech in the form of building. As I wandered amidst the children's handprints and soaring string-soundtracked documentaries about the audacity of self-belief or some such, I got to thinking a lot about the stories of the great boxers. The interesting stuff is never in what they achieved, it's in how they failed. It's in where these people who we invested so much hope and belief in, for the most basic and primal of abilities, acted as thugs. As fighters. As failures. That's the story I wanted from the Ali museum. It's the story you always want about the champ. "Find the greatness within"? That's hardly the story we're looking for.
Toback has been Tyson's friend for most of the two and a half decades that he has spent in the gaze of an often repulsed but always fascinated public. Toback himself has an interesting place in Hollywood history as a director who has never particularly lived up to the promise of his 1978 debut Fingers, a man full of great ideas for films that never quite come off. Just as I was beginning to study film, a decade or so after those playground head smashes, I came across a copy of his diary in an issue of the British film journal Projections. It documented his idea for a film that was sort of the remnants of an acid trip, something deeper and darker and more brilliant. But it was lost to his own unreliability, and to his procrastination. It's a strange, compelling slice of the creative self that I've always kept somewhere in my head. The film he was trying to make eventually became the much-derided Harvard Man, with Adrian Grenier starring (in place of the young Leonardo DiCaprio Toback was attempting to woo in his diary), and Sarah Michelle Gellar back when she could get roles in films. It was not the film he wrote around in a thousand different ways in those diary pages. Toback, in my Hollywood story, is genius and potential, almost always lost at the point of actual realisation.
With Tyson, he hits upon a perfect intersection of style and subject. To make Mike Tyson "look like what he is" is not simple — first one must figure out what Mike Tyson is. Toback might have a better idea of that than any other filmmaker. That "self-incrimination" he talks about is at the core of the film. Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Tyson tells himself many; he blurs the boundaries of himself in their contradictions and their justifications. Toback seizes this, lays the man over the top of himself in split screen, throwing you directly into the confused, uncertain space of his head.
"Since he is a fractured, multiple personality, I felt that the only way of aesthetically and stylistically finding a good structure for him as a subject of a cinematic portrait would be split-screen and multiple voices," he says. "I'd experimented with both techniques before in Harvard Man and in Black & White, and had grown increasingly intrigued by that method, so I thought if ever it was warranted, it's now."
For Toback, there was never any temptation to introduce the sort of talking heads you might have had in the great boxing films of the past, like say a Norman Mailer equivalent.
"I would probably not have wanted to make that movie," he explains. "That ends up being a kind of journalistic exercise, which would not at all have appealed to me.
"The only vague moment of temptation I had with that, and it wasn't a real one, because it would have blown the whole movie stylistically, was to allow Alan Dershowitz, who was one of the most prominent criminal lawyers and law professors in America, to say what he has said many times, which is that the rape conviction was the single worst miscarriage of justice in his forty years of following and participating in criminal cases. And that any lawyer who thought that it wasn't should go back to law school, only try a different one from the one he went to the first time."
If you are to look at the film as either an attempt to sell a "true" version of Tyson, or as a journalistic enquiry, this is an inherently fatal flaw in Toback's approach. If he were to include Dershowitz, Toback could and should have included a thousand others who have said just the opposite. But that is a different film. It is not this one. I asked him if any ground rules were laid down on other side when it came to the topics of the rape charges, or Evander Holyfield's ear, or any of the other critical junctures in the story.
"None," he says. "I just threw them out as subjects and treated them the way I treated everything else, which was to throw them out as subjects and let him go.
"That to me was the way to do the movie, not to try in any way to get him to say this or that, or cover a subject he hadn't, but to give him the subjects that I considered of fundamental interest, introduce those subjects, and then just let him go."
The end result, as Oates put it, is to turn Tyson into something like an abstract piece of art. We do not know the objective truth of the man, but then nor does he. Tyson himself did not know that this was the film that would result.
"He had no clue," Toback said. "It was actually remarkable, I showed it to him in a screening alone, the two of us were sitting there. He said 'it's like a Greek tragedy, the only problem is that I'm the subject'. One of the things that I knew would make the movie riveting is the elegiac consciousness and tone that he has."
The version of Tyson I walk away from the film with isn't the one I've carried with me over the years, built first on those playgrounds and bridges and later in the writings of the intellectualisers of the sport. This Tyson is a man who has lived a life dominated by insecurity, and by childhood traumas he has never been able to get past. For better or worse, this is what has defined the rest of his life.
"He gives you a very vivid sense of that in his description of his childhood," Toback agrees. "This sense of a short fat kid being bullied and pushed around. That whole story of the neck of the pigeon being broken by some bully and how he managed to summon up the courage and the strength to knock the guy out, but still was always haunted by his sense of himself as someone who was, at any given moment, going to be pushed around and bullied."
From the streets to juvie, Tyson found it impossible to trust in anybody. It wasn't until he fell into the boxing ring, and eventually under the wing of Cus D'Amato, that he found direction and people to believe in. The version of the D'Amato story told in this film — Tyson's version of it — is disputed by many people who were there at the time. His depictions of D'Amato as the last great hope he had for a righteous life aren't shared by people like former coach Teddy Atlas. But objective truth, here, is not the point. The passing of D'Amato, for Tyson, was the end of innocence.
"Everything from that point on was without any guiding force," Toback explains. "It was with Tyson on his own, or taking the advice and direction of people who were both uninterested in his welfare and, in practical effect, leading him down very destructive paths.
"It would have been possible to be uninterested in him personally and yet not be a destructive influence, but unfortunately he had both the lack of interest, and destructiveness, or at least people playing up his own capacity for self-destruction, which was clearly highly developed."
Toback knew him over those years, and was watching this happen. But Tyson at that time was moving in a different world.
"I knew that when he was with Don King, then Robyn Givens, that he was off in a different place," he says. "It was very hard to communicate with him in any serious way during that period of time."
To me, the kid who still knows nothing about boxing, it seems clear that Tyson was the last great heavyweight champ. If, in sporting terms, he was never a great to be mentioned in the same breath as Ali or Marciano, then at least in legend, in the possession of that myth of being the one true Heavyweight Champion of the World, he sits alongside them in our memories.
"Is there any athlete," Joyce Carol Oates asked in 1992, "however celebrated in his own sport, who would not rather reign as the heavyweight champion of the world?". I'm sure Wladimir Klitschko and his brother Vitali are fascinating characters, and probably excellent boxers (with all of their doctorates and politicking, and the nicknames Dr Steelhammer and Dr Ironfist in their possession), but how many kids these days are replaying their punches under the bridge? How many dogs do we meet called Klitschko? Not twenty years later, it seems Oates' rhetorical question has found itself with a different answer.
"I think there's no doubt whatsoever that boxing's heyday is over," Toback says. "First of all, boxing has always been, in the public consciousness, coterminous with the heavyweight division, and you had these iconographic figures who, if you take them as a group, were probably more prominent than the president of the United States. The great champions going back from John L. Sullivan to Corbett, to Jack Johnson, to Dempsey and then Louis, Marciano, Ali and then Tyson, there is no way that that era, or anything close to it, is going to come back. For a number of reasons."
Such as?
"Well I think one of them is that, like film for instance, which is a dying artform — or let's say one that's being supplanted and complemented by competing artforms that might be offshoots of it — first of all there is Ultimate Fighting.
"But in addition to Ultimate Fighting, there is this dilution of the intensity by these competing other forms. You have too many divisions, too many fighters, the various other sports of physical competitivesness which have become prominent, and even primary. When boxing was in the era of Dempsey, Tunney, Johnson, there was basically no football, no professional basketball, there was really just boxing and baseball. Now there's all the rest of this competition."
What Toback doesn't mention as having contributed to the death are the stories of boxing in the eighties and nineties that turned the public away. The intertwined stories of Mike Tyson, and of Don King, certainly no friends but co-stars in a tragedy played out in whichever casinos would take them (which, by the end, had them fighting in Kansas).
Though the competing sports he mentions may now be more popular than boxing, though they may draw the sponsors away, and the viewers who long ago gave up, there is one thing they will never have. They will never have that heavyweight champion of the world.
"That's true," Toback agrees. "The hope is for people who love boxing is that someone will come along to reignite interest but I don't know who that fighter would be. He certainly doesn't seem to be vaguely on the horizon today."
Field Notes Three: All the continents, not much about home.
"Not entirely trusting this page to remain attached, I shall write nothing of consequence on it."
Trawling through eight months and six continents worth of notebook. Words written on the top of Austrian mountains; in Quebec hotel rooms where founding members of Godspeed offer clean towels while New York free jazz troupes rehearse outside my door; in Tangier where a cafe owner tells me of his previous life as a tenor saxophonist touring the provinces of Britain, and young hustlers train their kid brothers in the art of the graft. There are directions to the flat in Buenos Aires of two marvellous people in love, no longer together. Take the blue line to Plaza de Miserere. There are shopping lists for beans, cat food, soy milk and Jesse Ball's new book (eventually found in a Shakespeare & Co in Vienna, where I was actually looking for a guidebook for Venice but the only one they had was Venice: A City for Lovers, which did not seem appropriate for my mood). There are notes for a play. That'll happen. Somebody's paying me. It's about war.
There's a note that I want to buy the replica FIFA 1954 World Cup referee's jumper from the shop in Singapore Airport (it wasn't there on the return flight). Directions to barbecue pits in Texas. Notes frantically scribbled at a David Mamet lecture at UT and further lines from Ricky Jay's minor character in The Unit ("you're alive." / "a fault I share with all but the dead").
The words "DMX ('penis be out')", which can only mean in some hotel I'd been watching MTV news (though this story seems to be from much earlier in 2008, earlier than I'd even owned this notebook, perhaps DMX was just on my mind). Then there is a fragment of a conversation from a Canadian uncle, "the strange thing is that he likes the ocean". Followed by notes on fisheries strikes, my grandfather's fingers, and the legacy of Joey Smallwood. In a cafe, somewhere in Canada by the page number, a dreadlocked guy at the next table frantically searching for information about David Icke as the scion of John D Rockefeller Jr.
Thoughts on illness. On hospitals. On love and the ways it breaks. On freezing hands at the edge of the Mall in DC on January 20, "I was there" moments caught mostly in sound bouncing back off the buildings. I will tell my grandchildren, when they ask, about looking up the speech on the internet later, and agreeing that it was quite something.
Notes from the Venice Biennale, futile attempts to try to capture thoughts on so much art in so little time. Ends up just being the names of artists. Maybe I can google Pavel Pepperstein later and re-feel whatever that thing is that strikes you the first time around.
Addresses for gigs. For bars. For friends. For bands. Hotels and train times to get me from one pocket of not-home to another. Other than the odd photograph, the only evidence of what the hell I've been doing.
I thought I'd lost my notebook the other day. I'd left it on the floor of a client's half-height office after writing down a wireless key.
Realised I'd better start writing some stuff down. Now that I'm home.
Omit Needless Awards 2008: Festive Opinion Dump
When I'm not setting overstuffed boats of prose adrift on these pages, I am occasionally reminded that this thing is actually meant to be a blog. As such, it is honour-bound to pay tribute to a few of the ancient traditions of the medium, established by our once and future kings in a neolithic age of model railway clubs tinkering with supercomputers. I refer of course to the year-end "best of" post. So, I'll bite. I'll give you some lists. My weekly distraction of presenting a radio show devoted to the musical arts has already produced a not-stressed-about-enough plain-old top ten albums of the year list, so I won't retread that here. Let's try a few other things out.
The James McNulty Awards for Excellence in Television
- The Wire drawing to a close. Say what you will about the relative strength of the newspaper arc relative to previous seasons, but for a show that promised to be the greatest television show ever made, we were not let down -- it finished as so much more than that. It wasn't about cops. It wasn't in the end even about The City, which I'd thought it was for the first few years. It was about hope, about systems, about order, dignity, dreams and change; it was about humanity, about the sheer brutal fucking hopelessness and futility that comes with trying to live and be part of this world. It was pretty funny too. I shan't spoil for those unfinished, but the final scene between Michael and Dookie may just be the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen. For those entirely Wire virginal, perhaps because too many people have told you how excellent it is and that means you'll never watch it, don't be stupid. Get thee to a downloadery now.
- The part in the first episode of the new Knight Rider series where the hot young leads strip to their underwear inside KITT, even before the opening credits. After KITT has changed both into and back from a GM pick-up truck. And just after they've been hit by a missile, after escaping from a tuxedo party in "Foreign Consulate, USA". To quote sassy nerd chick back at sassy control bunker full of sassy blinking lights: "Things just got interesting!"
- David Simon and Ed Burns get a second nod for what was, in the end, an underappreciated series, Generation Kill. This mini-series managed a tough balancing act, presenting a scathing assessment of the early stages of the Iraq war and its planning, while being fair and loving and fiercely proud of the troops on the ground, be they racist fuckup redneck shits or genuinely good sensitive guys lost in a desert far from moral ground. They are the people that were sent there to die. For long-stretches of episodes, nothing happens except the talking of crap. And then things go crazy. And then more crap is talked. We stay frosty, we wait. I'm naive in the art of warfare, I'll admit, but this felt so much more real, immediate and important than any of the hundreds of preachy message films released on same topic by Hollywood this year.
- Lost not just jumping the Dharma-branded shark but sucking it into a space-time vortex and moving it somewhere where we'll never find it. Season four was glorious and silly and not at all concerned any more for the impatient, or those who don't feel like googling theoretical physicists. As it should never have been.
- 24: "Redemption", in which JACK BAUER saves Africa in two hours with no help from those pesky UN-ocrats who just won't think of the CHILDREN. See particularly JACK BAUER using Crocodile Dundee-style animal-taming hypnosis against a wild-eyed child soldier.
- Jimmy Smits on Dexter. The third season of everybody's favourite good-guy serial killer show got mixed reviews -- I loved it, but mostly because I spent the entire season trying to figure out just what the hell was going on with Smits' completely nutso performance. It can be tough to play against everything Michael C. Hall has brought to the title role, but Smits went punch for punch and scalpel blade for scalpel blade.
The Harry Caul Awards for Excellence in Cinema
- Slumdog Millionaire. All of it, every single one of Anthony Dod Mantle's beautifully shot frames (even the ones on annoying angles). Danny Boyle has been threatening a masterpiece now for several films and it seems that ditching Alex Garland for somebody who actually knows how to write a third act and end a story as well as it starts has finally allowed him to get there. Ridiculously joyous but never trite, Boyle takes the risk of making one of those wretched outsider films about Bombay in which we become obsessed with colour and sense and never feel humanity or reality. But he doesn't do that. He makes the greatest film he has ever made and he makes me love cinema again, even if just for a moment.
- Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. I've never been a fan of Heath's, though not for any reasons of hometown cultural cringe, and certainly not because his team beat mine in high school improv championships a decade ago and I hold a grudge, no sir. His performances -- outside of Ten Things I Hate About You -- have seemed leaden, burdened, at distance from their characters. His gay cowboy was one of the most overrated performances of the decade. His Joker, though? A force of nature. A perfect storm. It was not a great film but you did not notice and you will not remember. You will only remember that last shot, that smile swinging in the wind. You can read something into the seductive story of a role consuming its player, but let's not. Let's celebrate it for what it is, and what it would have been had he lived -- one of the great performances of cinema.
- Werner Herzog's opening thesis statement for Encounters at the End of the World, his suitably wigged journey to meet the Herzogian scientists and forklift drivers who inhabit the research bases of Antarctica. He explains to his funders that the film will not be about pretty pictures of cute penguins, but rather he will be seeking answers to the questions that plague him:
"Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins? And why is it that human beings saddle a horse, and like the Lone Ranger, put on masks in order to disguise their identity and then feel the urge to chase the bad guy? And why is it that certain species of ants keep flocks of wild lice in order to milk them like slaves for droplets of sugar? And why is it that a chimp--clearly a superior creature--does not straddle a goat and ride into the sunset?"
To further illustrate this final question, we are shown a marvellous painting of a chimp straddling a goat, riding into the sunset. - Frank Langella's Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. The film itself is as middlebrow as you'd expect of Ron Howard, and the Frost incompetence narrative is played up no end, but Langella builds his Nixon so perfectly, so meticulously, that those final rounds of the boxing match, the eventual near-confessions, admissions of betrayal and regret, carry just as much weight as they do when you watch them in the original interviews. He holds that famous close-up perfectly.
- The twenty minute shot at the center of Steve McQueen's Hunger. McQueen pulls off a remarkable feat, making a film that is otherwise near-silent, drained of dialogue and driven along only by incessant physical pain; by indignity and grunts and moans (often too artily shot for their own good, it must be said, though I allow McQueen some first-time-director let off points for this). And then, just as we're gasping for air, he opens the tanks and floods us, letting it all pour out in a riveting single shot two-hander between a prisoner and his priest which journeys tenderly and unsparingly through the Troubles and all of their contradictions and pain, from tiny human betrayals and folly through to the broadest and purest of battles led astray through idealism. And then, just as suddenly, we're treated to a minutes-long shot of a prison floor being swept of urine, it being pushed back under the cell doors, and we hear barely a word again for the remainder of the film.
The Timothy Treadwell Award for Cinematic Folly
- Australia, for showing just how much of a clusterfuck the Australian film industry has become. Here's my review, I don't have the energy to repeat it. To cheer you up and reassure you that things could always be worse, Baz Luhrmann promises that his next film will be The Great Gatsby.
The Townes van Zandt award for delayed discoveries of tortured, tragic genius
- I came to the late "seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer" Arthur Russell last year thanks to a strange little EP of covers of his songs by folks such as Jens Lekman and Taken By Trees. His story was entirely unfamiliar, and the allmusic bio seemed a little improbably hyperbolic. And yet, as it is told in Matt Wolf's great doco Wild Combination, and through a series of excellent reissues mostly on the Audika label, I've fallen rather hard for this strange man who died too young, whose story and musical evolution, from sparse country to the 70s New York avant-garde scene with Cage and Glass through the Modern Lovers to disco and the birth of house music, are saying something bigger that I'm yet to entirely comprehend. Plus, those Dinosaur L tracks? You can not argue with those.
The Colossal Squid Award for Most Terrifying Thing in the World
- It was a terrifying year in the world, possible apocalypse creeping in from many directions both man-made and not. I was going to go for a top five here, but Radiolab's year-end list brought with it one more than freakish enough to wipe out all of mine. So, for your terror, I give you zombie caterpillars controlled by parasitic wasps. Try to stop thinking about them. Go on, try. They're in your dreams now.
The Fuck You Tree of Smoke for Being So Excellent and Long Award for Books I've Actually Finished this Year
This can't really be a top list, because I haven't finished enough books to make it so. Instead, books I've finished (which implies I quite liked them) separated for your convenience into fiction and non:
- Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke
- Jesse Ball - Samedi the Deafness
- Ahmadou Kourouma - Allah is not Obliged
- Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn
- Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude
- Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh - Off the Books: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
- Edward Tufte - Beautiful Evidence
- Philip Gourevitch - A Cold Case
- William Langewiesche - The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
- Charles Glass - The Northern Front: A Wartime Diary
- Henry Mayhew - London Labour and the London Poor
Books in progress that I'm going to list anyway:
- Alex Ross - The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
- Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris - Standard Operating Procedure
The Hiro Protagonist Award for Most Overrated Book of the Year
- Joseph O'Neill - Netherland. The Great Gatsby is reached for as fair comparison by the sleeve critics. Yeah, maybe the Baz Luhrmann version. Perhaps it was unfair to read the two Lethem books before it but this reads like New York as imagined by a leaden-prosed tourist who's been there for a week, two days of which were spent staring at the odd characters milling about in the lobby of the Chelsea, the rest spent attempting to shed excess similes from baggage. I can't understand why the American critics embraced it so -- perhaps the exotic allure of cricket?
The Patrick's Being Indulgent Now Award For Albums He Didn't Put In His Top Ten
These are albums I didn't list in my radio top ten because I didn't play them much, either because I missed them when they first came out (Grouper) or because the kids don't like driving around to 20 minutes of loops and drone (The Fun Years). Or because I forgot. Or because they came out after I made my list. Or because they didn't actually come out this year but I didn't hear them until this year. Or because I want to list them here. Okay?
- Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
- Matthew Herbert Big Band - There's Me and There's You
- Kieren Hebden and Steve Reid - NYC
- Hauschka - Ferndorf
- Jacaszek - Treny
- Fennesz - The Black Sea
- The Fun Years - Baby It's Cold Inside
- Deer Tick - War Elephant
- Wildbirds & Peacedrums - Heartcore
- School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms
- Jeffrey Lewis - 12 Crass Songs
- Billy Harper - Black Saint
So there you go. No more lists until next year, I promise. Well done to all of you, except for you Baz Luhrmann... we need to have a little talk.
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.
-- Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales
My mother has wrapped her shrubbery carefully in hessian sacks. Snow coats everything. This is home, here at the end of the earth. This is where I slow down. The power is out, I'm writing on my remaining battery with assistance only of the light of a log fire. How very rustic. A sliver of iceberg melts into my single malt, Scottish coastal fire mixing with Canadian coastal ice. I romanticise a little, of course -- the plasma TV was on not half an hour ago, I'm still playing games on my iPhone. But let's just pretend for a moment we're rugged and slightly insane Irish fisherfolk, stubbornly refusing to be defeated by something so paltry as Atlantic Canadian winter. "Is this all you've got?" we'd shout to the wind, scooping up our abundant nets of winter cod with a defiant glee. We'd build our houses on the sides of cliffs, sail into twelve foot waves on our rickety wooden boats, throw down the nets we'd woven by hand with our whalebone needles. We'd laugh at it all. We'd be the masters of the ocean. The whales would be elsewhere, ever the more sensible species, somewhere down in Bermuda awaiting return on the warm currents of spring with a calm and sanity we ourselves would never possess.
Or we could be the masters of the strip mall, the jumbo-sized tin of processed sausage or frozen juice, the great Canadian diet of sugar and preservative. We'd spend our liminal summers watching wrestling on stolen cable, lines run down from the poles by uncles with usefully tall ladders. Salt fish in buckets, salt beef in buckets, salt in buckets. Cod tongues in oil on the stove. Always the smell of drying animal flesh, picked over by flies, stretched out in the sun. Tobacco, rolled into cigarettes by the hundreds, in the hands of everyone, always. Collections of Molson Canadian bottles from the back sheds of drunken neighbours, exchanged for deposit, exchanged for sugar and rented Nintendo. And then later, exchanged for Canadian Club, cigarettes snuck under bridges from older cousins, retreats deep into the woods far from the roving eyes of adult supervision. The rules that governed you at home would not apply here in your other space, with these other people. Your blood people. These ones wouldn't see the awkward little nerd with the bottle-base glasses and shaky hands so much as just a boy from somewhere strange, full of different ideas and different experience. A wholly exotic little Scottish other. Your time here would be something else. Eventually, we would have to go home. But not yet, not yet.
Now I watch the ocean do its thing, dare the water to tell me something I don't know; to speak something new with those waves that I haven't learned in all these years of coming here. Daring the Atlantic to tell you anything is almost always folly, but occasionally she'll give something up if you phrase your question just right. Get it wrong, she'll let you know soon enough.
Drain half bottle of scotch with friend returning from Mumbai gunfire. Leave Australia in midst of night. Arrive Frankfurt, sleeper train, Leipzig, leg of pig, bratwurst, beer, so much beer, autobahns, angry friends, high speed, blurring vision, snow-filled country roads and villages that should exist only in absurd postcards and quaint Disney musicals. Perfect children skip across the street with sleds. I try not to kill them with my car slipping down the ice. Pump brakes. Köln. Dinner with my father. Wolf Parade in basement club. Guns and Roses covers. No sleep. Autobahn again, blurring worse. I travel in the slipstream of trucks, hoping nobody will notice me in my American rental beast, surely the last Dodge on European roads. We could not find Chinese Democracy on sale in petrol stations so instead we listen to bad German radio and occasionally tinny laptop speakers until the battery gives in. I am accused of quoting from Adbusters. This makes me sad. Middle of the night. Obstinate GPS. In 900 metres, keep left. Recalculating. 86'ing, sadly. Frankfurt. Blink. No sleep. Buenos Aires. Excellent friends at airport, a smile that will keep me going for hours, a missed smile these past several months. A child juggles at traffic lights, a more impressive request for pesos than the old-fashioned window wash. Shower. Steak. My friend's band is playing, Diego says. They're on early. 2am. Okay sure. Heineken in Palermo bars, still unsure when the last solid sleep was. The band are not great; apparently the singer used to model for his paintings. Hostel rooms, quietly stumbling onto top bunk, the Chilean below felling forests all night long. 4 hours sleep. No coffee in this place. Stumble into San Telmo, gather up some pesos, become convinced the cash machine has only offered to loan me the money and is asking when I will pay it back. Wish I had learned a little more Spanish. No gracias! Walking, much walking, drinking mate in parks and then too much beer again in grungy cafes not so very different to ones from home, find a Melbourne friend's short story on display in the lobby of the national library, a science-fiction building apparently landed like brutalist spaceship in garden surrounds, wander drunkenly through shopping malls and forget about eating, pass out in a blur somewhere before midnight, skipping plans for dinner. The Chilean's at it again. I wake up and pick flecks of mate from my teeth.
The backpacking life is not for me, never particularly was -- surrounded by Australians and Germans asking where you've been, where you're going next. Skipping along the top of the world, a smooth rock on a flat pond, never sinking down with any satisfaction. I'm going where my friends are, where my family is, recharging, reshaping and shifting perspective. Thinking about not going to Brazil, where there will be a week more of this backpackerly bullshit, but after these 10 days with excellent friends in Argentina, fleeing back to Canadian family perhaps earlier than intended. My carbon footprint is monstrous, perhaps to be unearthed by palaeontologists exploring far-flung parts of Patagonia, postulated to be a travelling beast the likes of which the planet has not seen for millennia, and should not see for millennia more. Finding myself thinking about people I had not planned to be thinking about, cursing myself for that, for being unable to leave with the blank slate intended. Plates shifting beneath feet, as they always are, but a strong feeling that, upon return, configurations of friendships and life will be very different -- the past no longer a foreign country, but the past as Gondwanaland. The pieces the same, but you wouldn't recognise it without expert training. 2008 was snuck away from before it was fully done with -- actually, no, not snuck away from at all. I thumbed my nose and ran, hopped on a jet and brought myself here. 2009 will not begin until I return. This is the dead space of travel, a gap year for the soul.
More notes to follow. Vaya con dios.
A dark stage. Silence. You've been here before. You've heard the promises.
Your narrator shuffles once more onto the stage, a little older, a little more broken, just as tall but somewhat surprisingly a little skinnier. A single spotlight picks him out against the fading curtains. There are more scars on his body than last time you saw him, but those aren't the reason he's been away. He's wearing jeans that are not ripped, for he is now more mature, although he is still wearing a Daniel Johnston t-shirt, so he might just as well be fifteen. The glasses are more expensive and oddly angled.
PATRICK
Umm... hi. (Taps Microphone). Yeah, so anyway. Thanks for coming.
Frankly I'm quite surprised to see anybody here at all. We kinda closed things up without telling you about it. Sort of like when that little restaurant, the only decent one in your neighbourhood, puts up the signs saying they've closed for a few weeks for renovations. Something in you knows what that really means, right? Those signs always make you sad. Me? I'm still mourning the loss of walking-distance cajun.
I'm not going to go into the boring detail of the reasons why I haven't been writing for the last year. Those who need to know do know. Those who don't most certainly don't need to. It is not a year I would choose to repeat, let's just leave it at that and I'll tell you some time over a beer or ten.
But I think I've managed to piece my brain back together. I've been stripping back my various online presences, redefining descriptions of self to something much simpler and much more achievable. At the point where my day-job business is more successful and has higher profile than probably ever before, I've taken down its website and replaced it with a one-pager. Likewise with my professional site, which cribs the same design and pretty much just points to other things I'm doing.
Cutting down on noise. Cutting down on distraction.
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