I'm old school.
Which is a cool way
of saying I'm old-fashioned – but fuck it. Old school.
"Cartwheels"
by Patti Smith makes me dance slowly around the room. Makes me feel enchanted
by the changes this world cannot control. Makes me imagine a dog running in my
direction, in beautiful slow-motion, looking as if it's either going to lick my
face or swallow me alive.
Makes me think of my
old school and how once a month I would not go home but get on a bus and travel
to a different part of town. The hostile part, the one you knew nothing about.
With a rough equivalent of three dollars in my pocket. Which was all the money
I had for a month. I paid the man those three dollars for a copy of Beggars Banquet. Or Pet Sounds. Or Face To Face.
Or whatever it was. And then made the long journey home to spend the next few
weeks singing along to "Stray Cat Blues" and going insane each time I
heard the acoustic riff of "Street Fighting Man". I knew there was no
money left in the month and so I had no chance of hearing another album any
time soon. It was a different emotional level. Music was not two seconds away.
You fought for it. And I'm not even being nostalgic.
So it was changing.
The world was a bird, a beast, a butterfly. The question was how to stay
emotional with the art and with the people. Because social network didn't cut
it. All emotions it offered were bogus at best. Really, you could crucify
yourself in social network – I wouldn't care.
Bird, beast,
butterfly – you could be anything. Just take your pick. Or better still, you
could be all of them at once. It's fascinating to follow the backlash that
people like Germaine Greer and Ian McEwan are facing due to their views. Due to
the stubborn need to see boundaries where they no longer exist. Or so it would
seem. Transsexuality, they argue, is dubious at best. They accept some of it,
but they don't accept all of it. Good for them – these people, for all their
advanced ideas and challenging views, see postmodernism as a finite thing. They
see boundaries. It's like they believe that one day Vladimir and Estragon will
wake up to a new dawn. That the boy will give a different message. That Godot
will appear, in flesh and blood. Good for them. You don't accept the world if
you accept all of it. You're just
pissing in the river.
They are not
hysterical and they are not indifferent. It's not that they are afraid of the
changing world. They just try to make sense of it, which is precisely what the
hysterical, indifferent world doesn't want to see happen. It lacks depth and
suffocates all emotion. Because there are no emotions where boundaries don't
exist – there's just one shapeless sea of hysteria and paranoia.
Best you can do is to
try and see them for what they are: the bird, the beast and the butterfly.
'The world is
changing, your heart is growing'. That's a great line. It has a swing to it.
It's also a little improbable – which, when the dust settles, is exactly what
distinguishes great art.
