#though feeble-psyche is also very real

[alectothinker]

tag yourself

[mmmmalo]

the king/father creates/births things while the queen serves only to impregnate (him with the idea for what he will create, like a muse, if you will)? idk i hate women being reduced to their reproductive function but this also seems misogynistic somehow. also does this make roxy's ability to create objects from nothing another "she's trans" joke?

I think the discomfort you’re apprehending is discussed somewhat when Crockertier!Jane tells Jake he will only exist to sire her children? Sexual objectification is probably a more familiar experience for women, but the unease in being subsumed by some sexual function isn’t necessarily gender exclusive… (the existence of domination play attests to that probably)

This subject is probably out of my depth, but I’m going to meander a bit and hopefully say a couple useful things.

First, some clarification: “birth” is the principle of separation and “pregnancy” is the principle of union. Thus birth-as-we-know-it is rendered equivalent to ejaculation, Breathing out, pooping – all of which involve separation from that which was once part of you. Likewise the image of a gestating fetus is equivalent to taut testicles, lungs full of air, a constipated colon – states in which the union is maintained. On this level, it’s apparent that any given body can participate in both halves of the dichotomy.

But as elaborated back in the Roxy-and-Dirk post, Sburb’s queens and kings are aligned with birth and pregnancy, respectively. As per Caliborn’s enchantment, this is treated a hat-switch, a reversal of expectations on who ejaculates and who gestates. “Birth” (which Caliborn likes) is coded as masculine, so that assigning this function to the queen is met as a reversal. While “pregnancy” (for which Caliborn fetishes his disgust) is coded as feminine, so that assigning this function to the king is met as a reversal.

The problem I’m facing is evaluating whether the birth/pregnancy dichotomy (aka separation/union, aka Breath/Blood) contains an intrinsic (ie inescapable?) gendered hierarchy, or if the gendered hierarchy is imported by characters (or us) onto what is actually a gender-neutral distinction. Though there could also be a broader point that binary systems are easily co-opted as mapping to the gender binary…? So that even if a distinction “ought to be” neutral, the matter remains that it has been /rendered/ gendered?

To avoid speaking too much in terms of generalities, I’m going to reorient this discussion around John Egbert via an ask concerning the ARG:

you gotta talk about it man come on

I read the ARG as a conspiracy theory that falls in line with the kids’ paranoid fantasies. In the same way that the very real trolls function as manifestations from the psyches of those around them, the world of Homestuck is, in general, shaped by the psychological profiles of its inhabitants.

I gather this partly from the nods to an irl conspiracy (eg declaring Obama to be a cross-dimensional immigrant), but mainly because the overwhelming paranoia that defines the narrative, the conviction that the world has degenerated and that every known authority is but a feeble puppet of a nebulous overlord. Comedians Laurel and Hardy are slowly corrupted and eventually infused with Evil, resulting in the birth of the Insane Clown Posse, which is to say ICP’s low-class status translates into degenerate art within the confines of the conspiracy. Albert Einstein is renounced as a fake, whose “insights” are mere scraps cast off from a feast of truth available to some unseen master. It’s all insurmountably stupid, but there is a unifying thread:

The idea is that the world is “fallen”, in two of the senses explored via John Egbert’s fear of heights (or rather, his fear of descent). 

1. John is literally afraid of heights, having fallen from the slime pogo. But John’s entry item is an apple because he experiences a pervasive sense that there is a perfect world of ideals from which he has been thrown down – a sort of intersection between the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden and the heavenly Platonic Forms. This manifests partly in an obsession with authenticity, a subject that pervades Act 1 (x)(x). The Obama birth-certificate conspiracy attempts to frame Obama as “inauthentic”, and framing Einstein as a feeble peddler of inherited slivers of truth relies on the idea that there is a Godly figure with access to ALL the truth, a master presiding over the Pleroma. John is susceptible to this kind of thinking; after all, the paranoid idea of Betty Crocker as an Illuminati-tier omnipotent antagonist began as one of John’s funny delusions.

2. The biblical Fall is at times phrased as the corruption of humanity, and that sense carries into Homestuck. The other Heir, Equius, is revolted and titillated by that which he regards as base. His fetishization being lower class and other modes of degradation receives a visual complement in images of a falling ideal: the death-by-fall of man-horse Arthour, and Equius’s own descent through the caves of LOCAS (the circumstances of a lusus’s death and the features of a planet both bear relation to a player’s fantasies). John complicates the picture a little bit: he specifically has a fascination with “bad movies” (low status art), but also he regards the other side of the silver screen as a Pleroma of sorts, which simultaneously elevates the art.

But my goal is to demonstrate that all of this intersects with the original topic: the division of high/low is also projected onto masculine/feminine.

John wishes to undo his traumatic fall from the slime pogo, an event that has come to represent John’s fantasy of his own birth. As hinted at the start, the birth he imagines for himself is ejaculatory: Ghostbusters is “manbro bukkake theatre”, and John fancies himself a ghost busted directly from the loins of his heavenly Father. John seeks to re-merge with his image of God, a goal implicit in John’s attempts to reunite with Dad in a more familiar sense.

But implicit in John’s quest to give up the ghost and ascend to the Father is a rejection of the implicitly feminized earth and flesh, to which the self/soul is umbilically bound. This gendering is often shown via robots: 

Jake jokingly says that Dirk is “more machine than man” – this is a jab at Dirk’s terse demeanor, but placing machines in opposition to manhood potentially feminizes the machines, compromising Dirk’s desiring to be a paragon of dudeliness. The simultaneous masculinization of reason and dehuminizing jabs like Jake’s confuse and frustrate Dirk for a variety of reasons

The ghost of Aradia enters robotic husk to be reborn, imitating the insertion of the spirit into the body. She then finds that Equius has inserted something into her body against her will, and violently removes it and destroys it. “It” was a chip that controlled her feelings, but the intimate violation has tones of assault, and Aradia’s heart is effectively aborted.

There’s more examples, but this is just an aside to push the notion that the Fall (from high to low) entails the entry of spirit into body, which via the analogous entry of sperm into womb would seem to gender hierarchy itself. Masculine/feminine is entrenched as high/low by the metaphysics.

(Here’s a nice post that notes a gendering of the hemocaste system in Zebruh’s Friendsim route)

This leads me into thinking that John’s desire to merge with the image of the Father is connected to his love of pranking people, insofar as it becomes a assertion of domination/power (which is presumed to be the masculine position). The prankster’s gambit, at its purest, is a measure of Who’s On Top.

At the end of the Chaos Dunk scene (in which John symbolically enacts Rose’s rape fantasies), John pranks Rose by dumping a bucket full of gushers on her head. Buckets are receptacles, and thus occupy the balls/womb half of the divide. Evacuating the bucket all over Rose is a repetition of earlier symbolic assault, and the moment is embellished with a prankster’s gambit to emphasize the notion that there is an element of domination to the encounter.

The bucket prank is echoed in a  later conversation between John and Rose, beginning at page 2922. John asks repeatedly whether Rose “knows everything” now, says the beta kids “were in this adventure together” but with Rose’s occult knowledge, she is now “getting away from us”. John is not anxious that Rose is separating in a neutral way – his anxiety stems from the idea that she is rising above them. “Knowing everything” is a property of mastery, and John is confused by Rose being above him. At the end of 2922, John attempts to mock Rose’s words, but she tells him he’s being mean and he apologizes.

Rose herself expresses some anxieties about her position, saying elements of her wizard shtick have made her feel “ridiculous” or “embarrassed”. Her choice of words invokes the manifestation of Eridan, who mocks Rose’s “ludicrous poppycock” – she has an ongoing worry that her phallus (masculinized symbol of power) is fake.

This is why the scene culminates in an play scenario, in which John promises to sweep in like a noble knight and banish Rose’s encroaching grimdarkness, and Rose in turn pretends to swoon. The joke is an ironic acquiescence to the (gendered) hierarchy that is implicitly being challenged by Rose’s rise to power (or rather, that the kids perceive to have challenged). Past this, the conversation goes on to the subject of the Tumor, in a way that I have difficult tying into some sort of conclusion for the gendered aspects of the conversation.

This probably bears some relation to Rose’s insistence that John is the group’s leader…? But again, I’m at a loss. Let’s wrap this up.

On your last point: Roxy creating items from nothing actually throws a small wrench into things: in another essay on Gnosticism I was reading (Schuyler Brown’s “Begotten, Not Created”), “emanation” suggested that the creation was originally part of something (God, the One, etc), and emanation was thus framed as being in opposition to creation-from-nothing.

This brings me back to the problem of not knowing which portions of Homestuck’s metaphysics are particular to a given character’s psyche, which portions are universal, and which portions are loaded with both personal and universal meaning, or personal meaning that are /rendered/ universal. The motif of Roxy throwing a dead cat out of bucket seems to carry multiple meanings at once… in the sense we’ve noted, it would relate to the terror of stillbirth and miscarriage that follows Mom and Condy around. But reading “birth” as ejaculation, the cat could also be read as a disappointed acknowledgement that she cannot create life on her own…?

[bigmoneygator]

Gonna talk about some things! That have been bothering me! Without need or hope for anyone to reply because I feel like I'm bothering everyone with how much I've been talking about it lately!!!!!!! I love golden age cinema. No, I haven't watched most of the movies in the 'canon', but the stories behind them are what get me. I'm getting real frustrated, though, with the underreporting/erasure of queer people in Hollywood at this time. Not by the studios and the fixers and the morals police of the time, but by contemporary biographers and even just the general public. I'm fully immersed into the 'You Must Remember This' podcast (I even sat through the Manson murder season because of the tidbits I could glean that weren't murder related), and I'm reading a book called 'The Whole Equation' by a gentleman named David Thomson, who is a (rather old) film professor and Hollywood historian in various publications. Karina Longworth, of the former, doesn't seem to shy away from the implications of queer stars, while I have found not one reference to anything like this in Thomson's writings in the latter - to my recollection anyway, which is shoddy at best, so maybe I missed something. So maybe the book is more focused on the entirety of Hollywood and how it came to be, so it glosses over a lot of the seedier, juicier bits about the personal lives of stars - though it does go into some detail about Jean Harlow's death by uremic poisoning (Miss Harlean Carpenter comes back into play later in this rant), but I digress. I'm also losing the point of my ire and, therefore, the entirety of this massive rant. I'm just finding out that it's an agreed upon fact that Cary Grant, born Archie Leach and having spent some time in the Village in New York City before his time in Hollywood, was a gay man who only married and had dalliances with women to keep his contract signed and uphold his end of the morals clause therein. Some perspective: I arbitrarily fell in love with Cary Grant sometime after I had confused him for Gregory Peck during high school, then confused him for Clark Gable for a time, then watched a massive stack of his movies and found my affections with the right man. I've loved Cary Grant for a decade. And I'm just. Now. Finding this information out. I'm pissed. I'm livid. And I'm not pissed to find out that he was gay or that he was suppressed (though it does make my blood boil - just on a whole other level). I'm mad because somehow this information - though widely agreed upon by most biographers - is not even mildly commonplace knowledge. I've BEEN pissed off that people see fit to reduce Montgomery Clift's sexuality down to a simple sentence: He was bisexual, like many other stars of the time. You know what? Fuck that noise. That does not begin to encompass the raging wreck that was Monty Clift. The man felt wrong and ugly inside because he loved women but didn't want to sleep with them, and he put himself through years of conversion therapy and it presumably helped spark the alcoholism and addiction that took his looks and his life. Sure, we remember him as one of Liz Taylor's 'boyfriends', but we don't remember his 14 foot medicine cabinet or the fact that he's only remembered as bisexual because he used to get piss drunk and go home with anybody that would have him, regardless of whether or not he really was bisexual. Which brings me around to my mentioning of David Thomson's book. It's dense and it's wordy and it's filled with a lot of subjective narrative about Hollywood and its history, some raw facts about grosses and contract rates. It's a good read, though, especially for someone who's just at the beginning of their journey through Golden Age cinema (it contains a lot more stuff about the actual dawn of the technicality of movies and film, plus a little more about the magic of moving pictures, and it does so in somewhat manageable chunks of metaphors between the point of the story he's trying to tell and a relevant Hollywood figure). As I mentioned earlier, Thomson goes into some detail about Jean Harlow and her upbringing and death, and mentions her marriage to Paul Bern. He mentions Bern's death. He fails to mention that Bern was quite possibly deeply in the closet. Okay, so maybe the man doesn't believe it. Then, he gets into insulting Marlon Brando quite a bit. That's okay. The man was a bear to work with, an odd duck method actor at his best and a literal destroyer of sets at middling and an actual sexual predator at worst (see: 'Last Tango In Paris'). He goes on to blame, somehow, Brando's attitude on therapy. Weird. Then I recall that in Montgomery Clift's Wikipedia article, his sexuality is compared to that of two other actors: James Dean, and Marlon Brando. I haven't done any research into Brandi's bisexuality or lack thereof, but I'm willing to bet there's some merit there. He mentions Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Kaye Francis - but fails to mention that all of these women were confirmed to be (at the very least) bisexual. He might have mentioned Katherine Hepburn's habit of wearing pants, but I don't think the man even mentioned that her first on screen kiss was WITH ANOTHER WOMAN. The first nail in the 'Whole Equation' coffin for me came in the form of two mentions of Monty in the text: one in which Thomson makes some claims that while working together, John Wayne says that he found Clift 'feeble' but tried like hell to keep up or even outpace him in their filming. Personally, this makes no sense to me, because have you ever seen young John Wayne? He's a dead ringer for Montgomery Clift at his peak. But, okay, Wayne was a hard worker and I can buy him giving the young bucks a hard time. Then, Thomson gives himself the second nail: "[...] Clift would have made [Joe, of 'Sunset Boulevard'] Gillis insidiously charming instead of a desperate scrambler. You would have wanted to save Clift (that was his trick); [William] Holden knows that Gillis is beyond salvation." (p. 250) I'm not going to bother dissecting the part of the paragraph before this quote in which Thomson paints Clift as someone solely turning down a role due to vanity and his own carefully crafted image, because for all I've learned in my time as an amateur historian, this is probably true. Stars were crafted after they were found, and studios did their best to keep stars into the molds they were poured into. I'm gonna talk about the part where Thomson seems to deride Clift for 'tricking' people into saving him. I take this quote as derision as opposed to a compliment to the actor's ability to play a role because of the overall scorn it appears Thomson has for someone who can't seem to live up to the studio's farm factory system, and because he seems to have so much scorn for Clift himself. Could it be that perhaps Clift had this knack for 'tricking' people into thinking they could save him because of his own tortured inner workings and his need for support and validation due to the turmoil he felt because of his sexuality? Maybe I'm just an asshole here because I don't have a degree in psych or film history, but I don't think it would be a stretch to consider that maybe Clift's close friendship with Elizabeth Taylor and his own film roles all contributed to trying to reach out to someone to ease his pain. And maybe - just maybe - Thomson has some kind of problem with this. (DISCLAIMER: I haven't read anything else by this author and I haven't looked into his own personal history and I don't know if he's changed his tune about all of this so I can't be sure.) So, in all of this, somehow and somewhere, what I'm trying to say is: contemporary LGBT people deserve to know their history. There's that post floating around about walking down a hall of history and finding it blank, being told it doesn't exist and that's what it's like for a queer person in this day and age. And I agree. So let's start by acknowledging that Hollywood has been filled with queer people from day one, and go from there. Okay, raging queer nerd out ✌🏻 byeeeee

[ulfwolf]

Music — Musing 24

Looking for   a younger self I find that I   am music— round, black   plastic

They were more than mere possessions. They were a projection of being. They were so much more than a name or a car or an apartment.

In many ways, they were who I was. They were an extension of me.

They were how I, in my own estimation, was seen and judged by others. They were how I impressed friends, the way I established my identity with girls I dated and invited to my apartment to listen to them. It was the way I established myself with the guys. As a cool one. As one to know, as one with the cool, impeccable taste in music. The one with the great albums.

Yet, they were even more than that. They were what came to reflect my emotional depth, my searching psyche, my love for the beautiful. They were what I woke up to in the morning and what I went to sleep with at night. They were my entertainment as well as my guide. They were a path to follow, a garden to grow.

To me, they meant more than food, more than water, ranking up there with air as far as life went. Possibly—and I’m not exaggerating—my record collection meant more to me than life itself.

:

I clearly remember my first record player and album. The album was West Side Story, the original cast sound track with Natalie Wood and whoever else there was (although she didn’t sing her part as I recall). I got the album at the same time I got that first record player, if record player is the right word for such a monstrosity. An eighty-pound reject from someone’s (much happier for the loss of it) living room, ugly, huge and heavy. But it was a record player, with radio, and it played.

It arrived late one afternoon in the early fall. Although the sky was overcast you could tell that the sun had just reached the horizon, and that evening was not far away. My dad pulled up through the pea gravel in our old Volvo PV wagon, and in the back, testing its fetters, fighting to get loose, this feral thing of a record player. My father opened the back of the car and there, eyeing me with obvious scorn, it was. Just like real-life rejects or the little-liked in the world, it held an inflated opinion of itself and it seemed to debate whether I was worthy of its exalted presence. I stared back, slightly, but not overly, intimidated. I am very, very worthy. I know that, and it’s up to you to find that out. It held its horses.

My room, which I shared with my sister, was on the second floor and the fight through narrow doorways and up narrow stairs was completely in keeping with the arrogance of this bulky record player. Finally, though, it was installed under the western window. My monster. Mine. And along with it, West Side Story, also mine. My alum, my record player, my time, my sound, my songs.

It was an almost religious experience to place the needle on that first track and within a few seconds to hear this glorious sound rush out of the single (fairly large) speaker and fill the room, and quite well at that. For all its bulk and ugliness, this monstrosity voiced a fairly pure rendition of the recording; more than acceptable: respectable, I had to admit. I told it as much, but it ignored me, of course.

Still, I felt in some sort of heavenly control; I held the key to fantastic power, I could listen to this music whenever I wanted, I could bathe in this sound at will. It really was a personal treasure that soon grew to take on larger proportions.

Not long thereafter, I got a second album. It was a United Nations release featuring among others Ella Fitzgerald’s “All of Me” which just sent me.

I remember playing these two albums over and over, for the sheer pleasure of listening to and becoming filled with their magic. And I also remember forming the first tenuous bonds with the power of possessing such magic. I owned these two albums, they were mine, and by extension, so was the music they contained.

But they were more than simply mine, these albums, these tracks: they grew part of my being. A portion of me somehow seemed to seep out and into the tracks I liked, making them, as well, me in the process. And playing some of my favorite tracks for some friend or other, I felt as if I gave them a piece of me, and I felt as if, indeed, I was due some of the admiration they would express for the artist.

This feeling was embryonic at the time, but looking back I recognize it even from this distance.

The following fall we moved to another house (a brand new one, which my father had built out on a windy field by a small river), the monstrosity in tow. I must admit I had grown to like it by this time, and possibly it me.

Although it had yet completely to make up its mind about me, it did play, whenever asked to, even if today (so many years later) I would never allow a single one of my albums to be subjected to that five-pound tone arm (well, a pound, say, or half a one). This player belonged to another era altogether. You could select 33 1/3, 45 or 78 rpm, you could stack 10 albums on top of each other, and it never even suspected that stereophonic sound had in fact been invented. All you could get out of the single speaker hiding behind the ornate grille (made from discarded curtain material no doubt) was its very own opinion of that particular piece of music, take it or leave it. But it did play, and with volume.

In this new house, I had my own room. Although the house was fairly large my room was minuscule, a large cupboard with heating and a window. It contained four pieces of furniture: a bed, a desk, a chair and the monster.

Then came Christmas and with it the album to turn my life around—the true forefather of all future record collections, The Beatles’ second album: With The Beatles. On the Odeon label (this did take place in Sweden mind you).

For some time thereafter the universe as a whole consisted of me, the monster, and With The Beatles. And we spent a lot of time together, we three, several times a day tracking the whole album from “It won’t be long” through to “Money”. This was now the album of my life, it was the only thing in my life, soul sustenance that it was. I played it to distraction, and eventually started yearning for more. The problem, however, was that I simply could not afford more albums; in Sweden, they were 5 dollars an album even then—a huge sum fifty years ago, especially if you had no income—and my album collection remained: With the Beatles, West Side Story, and the UN Album.

But, looking back, it seems I could afford singles and they now started, if not exactly to roll, at least to trickle in. First of all, more Beatles, “From Me To You,” and “Twist And Shout.”

Soon followed by The Zombies, “She’s Not There;” The Hollies, “Just One Look” and “Here I Go Again.” “I Believe” by the Bachelors (that’s a great one for you, oh, man, how I loved that song). By now the collection, incipient though it was, began to take on its own life, an emerging presence which I readily adopted as a potentially valuable ally.

As I had sensed from the very beginning: there was survival value in this stuff: I would choose and play a record for someone and that would make a difference in how they then thought of or viewed me. It was a sure way to show and communicate who I was (for the music I knew about, liked, and played said much about me) and a good, surprisingly reliable way to impress. All I had to do was to discover the best sounding and potentially most popular records (which discovery had to be made before the man—or boy or girl—in the street made the same discovery), somehow obtain these finds, share them with others, and behold: it reflected well on me and it grew my “hip” reputation.

I had found my mission.

One such discovery—marginally before it became a huge hit—was “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks. I remember it as if it were yesterday, ushering my soon-to-be girlfriend into the record store to see if they in fact did have it. And, yes, low and behold, they did.

In those days, you could sample records before you bought them (of course, I sampled a lot). Just ask the sales clerk, then pick up a set of earphones, actually, two single earphones, one in each hand, and “sample” away. We sampled “You Really Got Me,” her and I, several times, and for me it was ever after our signature song. And as we listened the record said what I wanted to say. Not by implying or explicitly meaning what the lyrics said, but by meaning and imparting the great impression that the record as a record, as a song, regardless of its lyrics, conveyed to her. Of course, in this case the lyrics did say what I wanted to tell her, as well.

This was me communicating through the record (responsible, as I was, for her now hearing it) this great, great feeling of a wonderful song, and she listen and smiled and laughed and confirmed that the great feeling did indeed come from me, my gift to her.

In that record store that day, I shared my discovery, and by extension I shared myself, with her, and we became, if not lovers (we were, or at least I was, too young), at least steady-ish dates.

Simply but oh, so truly put: I was becoming the music I discovered.

Some of these singles went on the road with me. I would bring my new-found treasures with me to parties—if you could call them that—and I’d be the DJ of the one or two singles I brought (The Beatles’ “From Me To You” comes to mind). Power, here was power. Unimagined, hitherto un-conceived power.

But what pitiful pre-puberty puppy parties they were (yes, I like that sentence). For, yes, we were puppies barely catching the scent of puberty, while completely lost in whatever it was life was actually about, stumbling around and tripping over our own ears in a comedy of tentative emotions and feeble explorations. And I remember, at the pinnacle of my valiant foray into the mystic realm of sexual promise, how I actually sat in one sofa for one hour holding girl’s one hand gazing at one spot on one wall without one single word passing my lips or a single glance at the girl. Sexual abandon, yes, but we were puppies, and puppies grow up eventually, as did this one. But this one was sure to bring his two singles, or was it one, with him back home.

:

The Beatles soon gave way to the full onslaught of the British invasion. The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” was huge. The Nashville Teens, The Swinging Blue Jeans, The Merceybeats, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders (which eventually spawned 10cc), the original Moody Blues, P. J. Proby (anybody ever heard of him? “Hold Me”), Heinz (“Just Like Eddie”), Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, Dave Clarke Five, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clarke (“Downtown”—what a great song), barefoot Sandie Shaw (“Girl Don’t Come”), Lulu with her cover version of “Shout,” the Searchers, of course, “Needles and Pins-a,” the Rolling Stones goes without saying, and more and more Beatles, the list goes on, seemingly endlessly. It was a musical cutting edge and I stayed on it.

It was a glorious wave, and I surfed it.

During the first recess of every Tuesday morning I ran down to the railway station’s newspaper kiosk to pick up the new copy of New Musical Express, or Melody Maker, or sometimes even Fab, the magazine—all imported from England. I read these avidly, picking up new groups, learning about new records being cut or released, immersing myself in this ocean, rushing forward on this wave.

By now I associated myself almost entirely with music and had successfully managed to have others make the same connection.

I was music.

Fittingly, I also came to write a music column for a local paper, reviewing the English Top Twenty in each Monday’s paper, having barely managed to make the list out over Radio Luxembourg the previous midnight—a project and a sensation worthy of its own complete story. Yes, I was my music and I was the reigning guardian of hip (in a town of barely ten thousand souls).

And my hair grew. At first the attempt was to look like an original Beatle—lacking any real personal identity I garbed the most successful one around and wrapped it closely around me, hair and all, but it kept growing, and just when I was about to cut it to re-conform it to the Beatle model, I discovered that the Beatles had let their hair grow longer as well.

There was an odd metamorphosis of this boy from 9th grade to the 10th. 9th saw him exit with straight As, top of the class, albeit a music fanatic. The magnificent entrance to the 10th starred hair to the shoulders, head in the clouds and someone completely immersed in the success of being others, being albums and singles.

The monster (the old, gigantic record player, remember?) was more or less outgrown by now. It played my singles okay, but I don’t think I ever did get another real album for it to ruin. And it was time to move on. With insufficient cash to purchase a real stereo system, but with friends who had both the systems and the albums, the logical choice became a tape recorder. Reel to reel at that time, cassettes had not been invented yet. The brand was Phillips, made in Holland. Mono.

My mother got it for me the fall I turned 16. 7½ inch reels, a fairly large (and heavy—taking a cue from its predecessor) thing, but it recorded well, at least by the standards of the day. I lugged it with me to friends’ houses and managed to record the entire Beatles catalog (at that time not so formidable) along with other semi deities. Other music still came off the radio, like Dave Berry’s “Little Things,” the Ivy League’s “Tossing and Turning,” and Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night.” I kept listening, and recording, and writing for the local paper, and I got myself a shirt with frills down the front buttons, like the Merceybeats, and claimed the center of attention, albeit due to notoriety rather than fame.

Life, at this point, all of life, centered around music. School was heading for the background in a hurry, in fact I flunked my first math test, after having had the highest grade in the class going in. Will the real Mr. Hyde please step forward and take a bow?

Then, in the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty, Donovan arrived in Sweden, and on his heels, if not simultaneously, if not just before, Dylan. Together they struck a deeper chord yet. Both personally—for they did touch me profoundly, although I was as yet not wholly aware of this—and, yes, opportunistically, because it seems the man on the street by now had just about caught up with the British Invasion, and here was new, unchartered as yet, territory where I could be very mysterious, hip and apart from (read, above) the street-man.

Before long I had Dylan’s complete recordings copied onto tape, and that, for several months, was virtually all I listened to, all through the much-too-light for sleep northern Swedish summer nights.

I don’t think I understood too much of what he said; Dylan spoke much too fast and much too much for my high school English, but he still spoke to me, or so I imagined. And, at that time, being as extremely into Dylan as I claimed (or was), was cool beyond cool. I reigned supreme in my little 10,000 population one main street home town on the Baltic—at least from where I saw things. I was into Dylan, and looking back, nothing else really took place at that time, that is what I was doing. The rest of the world was simply part of my involuntary anatomy, rubbing elbows with lungs and kidneys. I didn’t pay it too much attention.

And then, early one summer evening, I heard the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” (one of the best songs I had heard up to that point), followed by more Dylan, and then by more Byrds, and then this kid left his little 10,000 population one main street home town on the Baltic for the much larger Swedish capital, still on Baltic, where I arrived as one of Stockholm’s first long-haired boys, turning heads wherever I went—is it a boy or a girl?—it’s a crying shame, and what is the world coming to trailing me like a taffrail log which in my view was just fine. I wanted to stand out, I wanted to be set apart, I reveled in it, me and my Dylan’ed tape collection—though these early days in Stockholm saw me without my records or tape recorder; I moved around a bit too much to carry them around, so my physical appearance had to take up the slack, which it did.

It and a guitar I had recently acquired and learnt how to play “House of the Rising Sun” and “Catch the Wind” on.

This, by the way, was how I found somewhere else to live after having been thrown out of my mother’s cousin’s apartment for drinking his wine and not cleaning the apartment completely up to his antiseptic standards after the parties I invited the neighborhood to in his and his wife’s absence. He had the nerve to complain to my mother about wine stains on the carpets and floors, and did not want me there anymore. They gave me one week to vacate. The first six days passed in unconcerned Dylanesque bliss, on the seventh day I played “Catch the Wind” for the girl in the army like parka and told her, quite truthfully as it happened, that I had nowhere to live, which is just about as romantic as things could get those days, and the next day I moved into her parents’ attic room in a southern suburb (cold as hell, that winter, but I did have a bed and some blankets).

Then there was Sonny and Cher, and the Righteous Brothers; in fact, I used to play Sonny and Cher’s 45 rpm singles at 33 1/3 rpm and to make them sound exactly like the Righteous Brothers, and I imagine they still do at that speed. And here came the Who and “My Generation,” followed in the early summer by Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” and I moved back into town, accompanied by Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” and Joan Baez.

I held down jobs of some sort, and I guess I spent some time at these places of employment, but what I did was more Dylan, more Byrds, and more Donovan.

I managed to get thrown out of another—sublet—apartment for a wild party, but soon found myself in my own one room apartment on the ground floor in the center of town, with the greatest phone number you’ll ever run across, 444-223 (it made me and my apartment the logical, if not the only choice, for late parties when my friends were roaming the streets, looking for things to do and places to go while stoned beyond remembering anything much—except 444-223); a single bed, and a portable mono record player.

I started my record collection again, from scratch.

My new first record was “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the album.

Picture this: There was me, a bed, the empty, empty room, the high ceiling, the two windows, the Byrds and the light Swedish summer night again. I’m not sure how anything else got done those days.

The rent was $15 a month. I could have scraped by on money my mother used to send me, but I did have a job. I must have, because my portable record player became a stereo (so I must have shown up regularly at work), and my album collection grew. Loving Spoonful, Bee Gees (the original, pre-disco Bee Gees), Cream, more Byrds, Percy Sledge (“When a Man Love a Woman”), Jim Hendrix, and my first taste of the classical, Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” Karl Richter on Deutsche Gramophone along with an album featuring Handel’s Water Music arranged for strings, weird actually, but it reached me.

My little apartment became a regular hangout for music appreciation. Not so much a novelty and expert and an outcast by this time, the world had caught up in those respects, but music had now become food in its own right, I listened to it like you would breathe. I osmosed my albums.

Especially the Doors’ first two albums, and, still my favorite sixties band, Country Joe & the Fish. Over and over again, they spoke to me. Then there was Pink Floyd, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”—recently released in its 40th anniversary edition.

As an aside, me and a friend set out one night to see Pink Floyd live at the Golden Circle Café in Stockholm, but (even though we set out quite early) we just never made it all the way there before the show was over. Talk about side-tracked. What nights!

And there was Sgt. Pepper, and Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” (still, in my mind, the best song ever recorded) and “Regent Walpurgis,” the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Touch (anybody remember them?), the Fugs, and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (anyone remember them?), and Van Morrison’s Blowing your Mind on Bang Records and the first Mothers of Invention Freak Out album.

They all found a loving and very sympathetic home in this one small and very-cold-in-the-winter-with-no-central-heating-inside-and-twenty-below-outside apartment.

And then there was Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant which I learned by heart. Actually, I learned this almost purely by sound, for I only knew the meaning of half the words, if that. Then I would go down to the pub Sturehof and mingle with the Americans on extended visits to a draft dodging friendly Sweden and recite the whole thing for a couple of beers. Yes, the whole 20 minutes of it, I actually could do it, and they would laugh, and laugh, mostly at places where I had no idea about the meaning or the joke, I mean I didn’t know what Thanksgiving was, to start with, and it only got worse from there.

So, they would buy me another beer and plead with me to do it over again, and drunk on draft and all this attention I would gladly oblige and I put the needle on the outside track, got the record up to speed again, and off I went. Until they closed the pub for the night, to return next evening for more.

A bit of classical did leak through the rock and roll universe. One winter night I listened to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and for some reason I was completely enraptured by it. The images evoked by this incredible piece of music in the freezing cold of this winter’s night found their way into a long prose poem, touching me deeply all the way. I felt that Bach wrote for me, and maybe only for me, while my cold and inky fingers scrawled as the images grew. I felt I understood. I went to sleep that night knowing that I had discovered something, albeit uncertain of precisely what.

The months flew by at this point. Country Joe & the Fish was a mainstay, Sgt. Pepper a lot, and more Byrds, “Fifth Dimension,” “Younger than Yesterday” and “The Notorious Byrd Brothers,” still three of my favorite albums of all-time, were with me continually.

I left Stockholm that winter for a town further south, bringing only some of my albums (I kept my Stockholm apartment and the rest of my albums in it). Joining me were Country Joe’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die” and the three Byrds albums. That was it.

I grew to love Country Joe through that winter and spring, along with her.

Yes, I had found a girlfriend and was incredibly, incredibly in love, a feeling intertwined with writing poetry, reading Baudelaire and listening to Country Joe to form a fantastic world of emotion, sounds and images. I was truly crazy then and very, very happy.

This, alas, lasted only a few months, for although we were actually engaged to marry, she had to take a previously arranged trip to England with a friend of hers, and I was left stranded, and lonelier than I have ever been in my life. I hung around this town for two more months that seemed an eternity, then hit the road hitch hiking further south. Finally got just about as far south as you can get in Sweden without running into Denmark, and settled there for the summer.

Sans records again, I used to listen to classical music in the library, and I was also introduced to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos by a newly divorced city clerk who took me under his wing. I am grateful to him for that, there are still few pieces of music that bring so much pleasure for me, and I always recall that little house by the water where I first heard them.

Had to get a job though, out of money and nowhere to live, and found one as a summer nurse at a resting home. Sedate, but it provided living quarters and food, and a friend who introduced me to the Incredible String Band, a Scottish duo that were aptly named and, in a word, incredible.

I brought Donovan’s “Hurdy-Gurdy Man” and he played the String Band’s “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” on his great stereo system. And here I ran smack into incredible lyrics along with what I deemed fantastic music.

I had taken lyrics to heart before, and learned them and sang them and, quite often meant them, having them reflect my feelings and hopes, but here, these lyrics addressed so much more than being in love, or being lonely, or being lonely in love, et cetera, they reached for and found the spirit in me and struck chords that I didn’t know I could hear. The rest of that summer I lived for and with the Incredible String Band. Fall came, and with it the return of my wayward girlfriend. We were reunited and moved up north. I brought my String Band records, though not much more.

As it happened, we did not marry, and I eventually moved away, into the world, finding Sweden too much of a small town on welfare for my liking, leaving my records behind. Much have happened since.

I eventually settled in Southern California for a quarter of a century, before I moved up to northern Idaho (it’s very Swedish up there) for three years, then back to LA for two, and finally up to the northern California Pacific coast (just a stone’s throw south of the Oregon border), and over these years I have rebuilt my album collections many times over, first on cassettes, then on albums, then on CDs, and now as mp3s.

I have found all my old records and I’ve fallen deeply in love with classical, especially Bach, Handel and, lately, Haydn. But I still listen to Country Joe and the Byrds, and the others. And it is still with my music where I live the most and the fullest.

Music touched me early, stole my heart, and never gave it back.

::

P.S. If you like what you’ve read here and would like to contribute to the creative motion, as it were, you can do so via PayPal: here.

[emperornune]

~XANDER - Through the Smoke of Life~

***Whatever arises as witness to the truth of my current state of mind and Being***

Thursday, March 11, 2010

~Allowing Insanity to be as it is that I may allow Sanity to Arise from within as It Is~

~I am allowing the insanity to be insane that my Sanity may be allowed to Arise as Itself, free from any attempt to control it as I had done with the madness I once totally resisted~

On a personal level I have been spending less and less invested in mind patterns that are resistant to the "Isness" of right Now. I am far more accepting of my life as a whole regardless of the parts of my egoic sense of self that find many aspects of my life situation unacceptable. I have simply chosen to ALLOW my ego to feel and believe whatever it wants about my life situation; I'm just not going to allow myself to seek my identity in these egoic perceptual interpretations of what should and shouldn't be. In this way, though I still make wrong-minded decisions over and over again, I am at peace with myself more than ever before because I have accepted that this is just what is in my current life situation and denying the truth of these deficiencies (as defined by the ego) of personal character and behavior only adds to my pain and lead to an enhancement of my "failure based sense of self".

A couple of weeks ago I wrote: 'Accept all of your unwanted feelings and conditions. Just allow them to be without any conditions as to what your mind believes should occur.

Embrace the Now completely.'

And I have been doing better at this than at any time in my past since I first had an awakening to the Divine Within the core of my Being over 15 years ago. It seems like it's been such a long journey to get where I am with acceptance as I am today but time is an illusion. I was ever denying the Presence of Being right NOW perpetually throughout each and every seemingly separate moment, until I finally had enough of the pain that was arising within my field of awareness and I once again began to awaken. And I am as only spiritually evolved as I am awake right Now, this very moment. There is a quote from A Course in miracles that goes:

"There is no compromise in salvation."

"You are either your Self or you are an illusion." ~acim

And what I allow and accept into my experience of reality right now is all that matters because All of my Eternal Being in the One Being of Infinite Spirit that we all share is All-ways Now; never to be made clear by analyzing the past or reaching for it in some mind-made goal of "realization" that is to occur in the illusory realm of future. If it is not available to me completely and perfectly right Now then it is a product of the mundane phenomenal world and holds no more true value than a ten ton pile of ashes made up of trillions of dollars in paper money. My past is a pile of ashes I carry around imagining it to be what it once was or wishing parts of it were something other than what they were; but never does the pain-body look at and accept the past as it is right Now... a useless pile of ashes that serve only the darken the pain-body's focus so that it sees no further than the ashes it claims it once to be released from. When in fact, if the ashes were to be let to blow away in the gentle wind of the Presence of Being then the pain-body would lose all energy that gives it such sway over my state of mind and behavior at those times it awakens to feed on the soot of pain that reinforces the structure it has built to protect it's ash collection in my emotional centers and the cooperative relationship it has developed with my ego as they both serve the past and future and deny the present moment and it's full embrace without judgment or labeling at all cost.

One of my favorite Lessons from A Course in Miracles is: "Everything is a lesson God would have me learn." And when I do go into any circumstance or approach any situation with a goal pre established in my mind that I WILL learn something helpful from my experience of what is arising in my current field of awareness; then I most assuredly do each and every time I am clear that that is exactly what I want to come of my current string of experiences. When I am sincerely determined (not just passively open) to learning something beneficial to my awakening and the deepening of my experience of the Now, I have always encountered either a new level of awakening or a re visitation of a previous lesson to which I had allow to stall in my experiential relationship to what I had initially come to an awareness about and began to apply that awareness as a practical learning that if not discarded becomes what I teach. And when what I am teaching is teaching me and I accept the teaching and learn from it, then I experience true freedom from the ego-trap of comparison; always seeking validation in the responses of others to reinforce or diminish the Lesson of Now that I am learning. Though we all share at our core the same Essence of Divine Oneness, most of us, most of the time are relating to each other through our egos and our ego's projections upon each other, twice removing our perceptions from the Truth of Who We really Are beneath all the smoke and mirrors that clutter this world that is as mad as a mad hatter from north to south and east to west, young and old, rich and poor, working class to ruling class, almost every human being upon this earth is mentally ill with a soul sickness so profoundly deep and denied that our entire civilization is rotates on the pure exercise of every and any means possible to cover up this fact with false salvations brought forth in all manner of distractions (if you want a good example just turn on network television for a few hours some time during the day or night and the extent of our species sickness will be quite apparent to a mind that looks upon that video-box/noise-machine with a perspective grounded in Presence of Being WHILE observing this altar to dis-ease that is the center of almost every household that can afford at least one at which to worship and receive the unholy revelations of:

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt." ~acim

And all that our society offers up as the great, wonderful "made-its" of the world are nothing more than soul-sick humans just like me and you but with material success and possibly fame to wear as a pretty covering over their ego's mental madness from which those who have "made it" are often more sick than those who have not made it in the eyes of the world and the media machine that establishes these guilt inducing, consumer based manipulations of the human psyche by which they use these rich and famous to further the illusion that there is something of value to be attained in the realm of form. That you will find yourself, become more whole and know peace... That offering is a complete and utter lie, that only a mind under the direction of the egoic sense of self or one possessed by the emotions of the pain body would ever believe as truth. For in the world of the ego and pain-body all is reversed. Truth is falsehood and lies are the truth.

Heaven is the complete and total opposite of everything the ego holds to be true and valuable.

*The following will be some favorite passages of mine from A Course in Miracles that come to my attention as of this writing this morning*

"The ego believes it is completely on its own, which is merely another way of describing how it thinks it originated. This is such a fearful state that it can only turn to other egos and try to unite with them in a feeble attempt at identification, or attack them in an equally feeble show of strength."

"If you cannot hear the Voice for God, it is because you do not choose to listen. That you do listen to the voice of your ego is demonstrated by your attitudes, your feelings and your behavior. Yet this is what you want. This is what you are fighting to keep, and what you are vigilant to save. Your mind is filled with schemes to save the face of your ego, and you do not seek the face of Christ. The glass in which the ego seeks to see its face is dark indeed. How can it maintain the trick of its existence except with mirrors? But where you look to find yourself is up to you."

"I have said that you cannot change your mind by changing your behavior, but I have also said, and many times, that you can change your mind."

"Watch your mind for the temptations of the ego, and do not be deceived by it. It offers you nothing."

"Without your own allegiance, protection and love, the ego cannot exist."

"Learning and wanting to learn are inseparable. You learn best when you believe what you are trying to learn is of value to you."

"What you perceive in others you are strengthening in yourself."

"You forsake yourself and God if you forsake any of your brothers. You must learn to see them as they are, and understand they belong to God as you do."

"Whatever you accept into your mind has reality for you. It is your acceptance of it that makes it real."

"The ego cannot oppose the laws of God any more than you can, but it can interpret them according to what it wants, just as you can. That is why the question, "What do you want?" must be answered. You are answering it every minute and every second, and each moment of decision is a judgment that is anything but ineffectual. Its effects will follow automatically until the decision is changed."

~ You are truly my Peace within the Presence of Being. Not the you who wears your name but the You Who Is beyond name and form, the One we are both together and as One, Forever Now ~

+ Xander +

Posted by Xander at 12:09 PM

~I have not two realities but one~

 ~I have not two realities but One~

I have noticed that when I allow my ego to drive my entire mind into deep unconsciousness empowered by the accumulated energy of the pain-body that it reaches a point where my ego exhausts itself to passivity.

In this passive state, though egoic mind patterns are still continuous, I simultaneously experience an awakening to a sense of allowing this egoic mess pit to be what it is free of the compulsive attempts at countering the results of my egoic drama with efforts, actions and perspectives born of the ego that it would correct.

A Course in Miracles says that the only way to heal a brother is by seeing the sanity in him. Shadows and darkness when used to address the shadows and darkness we see as either within our outside of ourselves only leads to a perception of shadows and darkness. The Course says something to the effect of failing to see the Light is because we have chosen to see only darkness. The Light is Within whether the external form and conditions of my life are expressing it fully or not. The temporal material world has no effect whatsoever on the Eternal, Indestructible, Incorruptible, Complete, Perfect and Forever Wholeness that is the Truth of Life in and AS the Now.

"You cannot be attacked, attack has no justification, and you are responsible for what you believe." ~acim

"You cannot make the meaningless meaningful." ~acim

"The Holy Spirit does not want you to understand conflict. He wants you to understand that conflict cannot be understood because conflict is meaningless." ~acim

"Wrong decisions have no power, because they are not true." ~acim

"Your brother is as right as you are, and if you think he is wrong you are condemning yourself." ~acim

"To perceive errors in anyone, and to react to them as if they were real, is to make them real to you." ~acim

"Every response you make to everything you perceive is up to you, because your mind determines your perception of it." ~acim

"All attack is Self attack." ~acim

"The ego analyzes; the Holy Spirit accepts." ~acim

It is occurring to me that I allow my egoic sense of self to take such hold of my mind and take my life situation to an extreme of unconsciousness is because it has been the only way I have know how to dramatically put myself in the position where I either accept and allow all that is arising in the Now as I experience it and know Peace or totally fall apart in the self-enclosing insanity of the ego drowning in the density of the pain-body as it totally overwhelms my awareness of the Now as well as my mind. This means even my ego gets outdone in the measure of pain of which is the very essence of the pain-body. The ego, though built on fear, is not made of emotions. It is but a part of my belief about myself. This wrong-minded belief about myself is made up of thoughts and can trigger emotions but is not the center of emotional experience itself. So it seems now to me that my ego believes it is getting more control by providing catalysts for my pain-body to feed and grow, however; what it does not account for is it's total inability to manage the heaviness and mass density of the pain that it is rousing to the forefront of my mental experience.

Once overcome by pain itself, to a point at which not even it can bear it, that Still Small Voice Within me is heard amidst the silence of my ego's retreat. Even while the pain is still coursing through my body and my ego is still compulsively fixated on negative egoic mind-streams, the Light from the center of my Being, of All Being, reaches through the uncertain clouds of self-absorption and I begin to see the world first through the turmoil of my ego's (which is suffering from a total LOSS of control in it's attempt to acquire complete control) perspective and then from the vantage point of Being. I am feeling the pain of my wrong-minded thinking and behaving while simultaneously being free from being a slave to that pain.

I am seeing here a correlation to the Course's teaching on how a miracle is simply a change in one's mind; a shift in perspective from one founded in the ego to The One Vision of Christ which knowing only the Truth to be true, sees nothing else but this AFTER looking through the false and denying it any reality.

"Communication with God is Life." ~acim

I read this as awareness of the Total Presence of Being IS Life Itself for I am not just being aware of this Presence I am this Presence of which I am being aware. Ultimately there is no separate selves apart from Spirit. We are all merely vantage points of Being engaging with Itself through a multiplicity of expressions that I normally see as another person, place or thing. There is no other, for space is as meaningless as time.

"Call not upon the ego for anything; it is only this that you need do." ~acim

"What is not love is always fear, and nothing else." ~acim

~It is always Now~

Posted by Xander at 11:57 AM

"How lost in my ego and pain body am I right now?"

"How lost in my ego and pain body am I right now?"

Always remember there is another way to Be.

Turn Within regardless of how you feel. Your True Identity is transcending the very pain, doubt and discomfort you are feeling this very moment. It stands free of delusion and so do you when you stand within It no matter what arises in the world of form.

Accept all of your unwanted feelings and conditions. Just allow them to be without any conditions as to what your mind believes should occur.

[ulfwolf]

Albums

Albums. They were more than mere possessions. They were a projection of being. So much more than a name or an apartment.

They were who I was. They were an extension of me.

They were how I, in my own estimation, was seen and judged by others. They were how I impressed friends, the way I established my identity with girls I dated and invited to my apartment to listen to them. It was the way I established myself with the guys. As a cool one. As one to know, as one with the great albums.

Yet, they were more than that. They were what came to reflect my emotional depth, my searching psyche, my love for the beautiful. They were what I woke up to in the morning and what I went to sleep with at night. They were my entertainment as well as my guide. They were a path to follow, a garden to grow.

To me, they meant more than food, more than water, ranking up there with air as far as life goes. Possibly—and I’m not exaggerating—my record collection meant more to me than life itself.

:

I clearly remember my first record player and album. The album was West Side Story, the original cast sound track with Natalie Wood and whoever else there was (although she didn’t sing her part as I recall). I got the album at the same time I got that first record player, if record player is the right word for such a monstrosity. An eighty pound reject from someone’s (much happier for the loss of it) living room, ugly, huge and heavy. But, it was a record player, with radio, and it played.

It arrived late one afternoon in the early fall. Although the sky was overcast you could tell that the sun had just reached the horizon, and that evening was not far away. My dad pulled up through the pea gravel in our old Volvo PV wagon, and in the back, testing its fetters, fighting to get loose, this monster of a record player. My father opened the back of the car and there, eyeing me with obvious scorn, it was. Just like real-life rejects or the little-liked in the world, it held an inflated opinion of itself and it seemed to debate whether I was worthy of its exalted presence. I stared back, slightly, but not overly, intimidated. I am very, very worthy. I know that, and it’s up to you to find that out. It held its horses.

My room, which I shared with my sister, was on the second floor and the fight through narrow doorways and up narrow stairs was completely in keeping with the arrogance of the record player. Finally, though, it was installed under the western window. My monster. Mine. And with it West Side Story, also mine. My sound, my songs.

It was an almost religious experience to place the needle on that first track and hear the sound rush out and fill the room. I felt in control, I held the key to fantastic power, I could listen to it whenever I wanted, I could bathe in this music at will. It really was a personal treasure that soon grew to take on larger proportions.

I soon got a second album. It was a United Nations release featuring among others Ella Fitzgerald’s “All of Me” which just sent me. I remember playing these albums over and over, for the sheer pleasure of listening and becoming filled with the magic. But I also remember forming the first tenuous bonds with the power of possessing such magic. I owned these albums, they were mine, and by extension, so was the music they contained.

But they were more than simply mine, these albums, these tracks: they grew part of my being. A portion of me somehow seemed to seep out and into the tracks I liked, making them, as well, me in the process. And playing some of my favorite tracks for some friend or other, I felt as if I gave them a piece of me, and I felt as if, indeed, I was due some of the admiration they would express for the artist.

This feeling was embryonic at the time, but looking back I recognize it even from this distance.

Next fall we moved to another house (a brand new one, built by my father), the monstrosity in tow. I must admit I had grown to like it though. Although it had yet to make up its mind about me, it did play, even if today (so many years later) I would never allow a single one of my albums to be subjected to that five-pound tone arm (well, a pound, say). This player belonged to another era altogether. You could select 33 1/3, 45 or 78 rpm, you could stack 10 albums on top of each other, and it never even suspected that stereophonic sound had in fact been invented. All you could get out of the single speaker hiding behind the ornate grille (made from discarded curtain material no doubt) was its very own opinion of that particular piece of music, take it or leave it. But it did play, and with volume.

In this new house, I had my own room. Although the house was fairly large my room was minuscule, a large cupboard with heating and a window. Four pieces of furniture: a bed, a desk, a chair and the monster. Then came Christmas and with it the album to turn my life around—the true forefather of all future record collections, The Beatles’ “With The Beatles.” On the Odeon label (this did take place in Sweden mind you).

For some time thereafter the entire universe consisted of me, the monster, and “With The Beatles.” And we spent a lot of time together, several times a day tracking the whole album from “It won’t be long” through to “Money”. This was now the album of my life, it was the only thing in my life, soul sustenance that it was. I played it to distraction, and eventually started yearning for more. The problem was, however, I just could not afford more albums; in Sweden, they were 5 dollars an album even then—a huge sum almost 45 years ago, especially if you had no income—and my album collection remained, primarily, “With the Beatles,” “West Side Story,” and the UN Album.

But it seems I could afford singles, and they started, if not exactly to roll, at least to trickle in. More Beatles, “From Me To You,” “Twist And Shout.”

The Zombies, “She’s Not There.” The Hollies, “Just One Look” and “Here I Go Again.” “I Believe” by the Bachelors (that’s a great one for you, how I loved that song). By now the collection, incipient though it was, began to take on its own life, an emerging presence which I readily adopted as a potentially valuable ally.

As I had sensed from the very beginning: there was survival value in this stuff: I would choose and play a record for someone and that would make a difference in how they then thought of or viewed me. It was a sure way to show and communicate who I was (for the music I knew about, liked, and played said much about me) and a way to impress. All I had to do was to discover the best sounding and potentially most popular records (which discovery had to be made before the man—or boy or girl—in the street made the same discovery), somehow obtain these finds, share them with others, and behold: it reflected well on me and it grew my “hip” reputation.

I had found my mission.

One such discovery—marginally before it became a hit—was “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks. I remember it as if it was yesterday, ushering my soon-to-be girlfriend into the record store to see if they in fact did have it. And, low and behold, they did.

In those days, you could sample records before you bought them (I sampled a lot). Just ask the sales clerk, then pick up a set of earphones, actually, two single earphones, one in each hand, and “sample” away. We sampled “You Really Got Me,” her and I, several times, and for me it was ever after our signature song. And as we listened the record said what I wanted to say. Not by implying or explicitly meaning what the lyrics said, but by meaning and imparting the great impression that the record as a record, as a song, regardless of its lyrics, conveyed to her.

And it was me communicating through the record (responsible, as I was, for her now hearing it) this great, great feeling of a wonderful song, and she listen and smiled and laughed and confirmed that the great feeling did indeed come from me, my gift to her.

In that record store that day, I shared my discovery, and by extension I shared myself, with her, and we became, if not lovers (we were, or at least I was, too young), at least steady-ish dates.

I was becoming the music I discovered.

Some singles went on the road with me. I would bring my new-found treasures with me to parties—if you could call them that—and I’d be the DJ of the one or two singles I brought. Power, here was power. Unimagined, hitherto un-conceived power.

But what parties. We were puppies barely catching the scent of puberty, while completely lost in whatever it was life was supposedly about, stumbling about and tripping over our own ears in a comedy of tentative emotions and feeble explorations. And I remember, at the pinnacle of my valiant foray into the mystic realm of sexual promise, how I actually sat in one sofa for one hour holding girl’s one hand gazing at one spot on one wall without one single word passing my lips or a single glance at the girl. Sexual abandon, but we were puppies, and puppies grow up eventually, as did this one. But this one was sure to bring his two singles, or was it one, with him back home.

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The Beatles soon gave way to the full onslaught of the British invasion. The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun” was huge. The Nashville Teens, The Swinging Blue Jeans, The Merceybeats, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders (which eventually spawned 10cc), the Moody Blues, P. J. Proby (anybody ever heard of him?), Heinz (“Just Like Eddie”), Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, Dave Clarke Five, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clarke (“Downtown”—what a great song), barefoot Sandie Shaw (“Girl Don’t Come”), Lulu with her cover version of “Shout,” the Searchers, of course, “Needles and Pins-a,” the Rolling Stones goes without saying, and more and more Beatles, the list goes on, seemingly endlessly. It was a musical cutting edge and I stayed on it.

It was a glorious wave, and I surfed it.

During the first recess of every Tuesday morning I ran down to the railway station’s newspaper kiosk to pick up the new copy of New Musical Express, or Melody Maker, or sometimes even Fab, the magazine—all imported from England. I read these avidly, picking up new groups, learning about new records being cut or released, immersing myself in the movement, rushing forward on this wave.

By now I associated myself almost entirely with music and had successfully managed to have others make the same connection.

I was music.

Fittingly, I also came to write a music column in a local paper, reviewing the English Top Twenty in each Monday’s paper, having barely managed to make the list out over Radio Luxembourg the previous midnight—a project and a sensation worthy of its own complete story. Yes, I was my music and I was the reigning guardian of hip.

And my hair grew. At first the attempt was to look like an original Beatle—lacking any real personal identity I garbed the most successful one around and wrapped it closely around me, hair and all, but it kept growing, and just when I was about to cut it to re-conform it to the Beatle model, I discovered that the Beatles had let their hair grow longer as well.

There was an odd metamorphosis of this boy from 9th grade to the 10th. 9th saw him exit with straight As, top of the class, albeit a music fanatic. The magnificent entrance to the 10th starred hair to the shoulders, head in the clouds and someone completely immersed in the success of being others, being albums and singles.

The monster (the old, gigantic record player, remember?) was more or less outgrown by now. It played my singles okay, but I don’t think I ever did get another real album for it to ruin. And it was time to move on. With insufficient cash to purchase a real stereo system, but with friends who had both the systems and the albums, the logical choice became a tape recorder. Reel to reel at that time, cassettes had not been invented yet. It was a Phillips, made in Holland. Mono.

My mother got it for me when I was around 16. 7½ inch reels, a fairly large thing, but it recorded well, at least by the standards of the day. I lugged it with me to friends’ houses and managed to record the entire Beatles catalog (at that time not so formidable) along with other semi deities. Other music still came off the radio, like Dave Berry’s “Little Things,” the Ivy League’s “Tossing and Turning,” and Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night.” I kept listening, and recording, and writing for the local paper, and I got myself a shirt with frills down the front buttons, like the Merceybeats, and claimed the center of attention, albeit due to notoriety rather than fame.

Life, at this point, all life, centered around music. School was fading fast, in fact I flunked my first math test, after having had the highest grade in the class going in. Will the real Mr. Hyde please step forward and take a bow?

Then, “in the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty,” Donovan arrived in Sweden, and on his heels, if not simultaneously, Dylan. Together they struck a deeper chord yet. Both personally—for they did touch me profoundly, although I was as yet not wholly aware of this—and opportunistically, because it seems the man on the street had just about caught up with the British Invasion by now, and here was new, unchartered as yet, territory where I could be very mysterious, hip and apart from (read, above) the street-man.

Before long I had Dylan’s complete recordings copied on tape, and that, for several months, was virtually all I would listen to, all through the much-too-light for sleep northern Swedish summer nights.

I don’t think I understood too much of what he said; Dylan spoke much too much and much too fast for my high school English, but he still spoke to me, or so I imagined. And, at that time, being “extremely into” Dylan, was cool beyond cool. I reigned supreme in my little 10,000 population one main street home town on the Baltic, again at least from where I saw things. I was into Dylan, and looking back, nothing else really took place at that time, that is what I was doing. The rest of the world was simply part of my involuntary anatomy, rubbing elbows with lungs and kidneys. I didn’t pay it too much attention.

And then, early one summer evening, I heard the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” (one of the best songs I had heard up to that point), followed by more Dylan, and then by more Byrds, and then this kid left his little 10,000 population one main street home town on the Baltic for the much larger Swedish capital, still on Baltic, where I arrived as one of Stockholm’s first long-haired boys, turning heads wherever I went—is it a boy or a girl?—it’s a crying shame, and what is the world coming to trailing me like a taffrail log which in my view was just fine. I wanted to stand out, I wanted to be set apart, I reveled in it, me and my Dylan collection.

These early days in Stockholm saw me without my records or tape recorder though. I moved around a bit too much to carry them around, so my physical appearance had to take up the slack, which it did.

It and a guitar I had recently acquired and learnt how to play “House of the Rising Sun” and “Catch the Wind” on.

This, by the way, was how I found somewhere to live after having been thrown out of my mother’s cousin’s apartment for drinking his wine and not cleaning the apartment completely up to their antiseptic standards after the parties I invited the neighborhood to in their absence. He and his wife complained to my mother about wine stains on the carpets and floors, and did not want me there anymore. They gave me one week to vacate. The first six days passed in unconcerned Dylanesque bliss, on the seventh day I played “Catch the Wind” for the girl in the army like parka and told her, quite truthfully as it happened, that I had nowhere to live, which is just about as romantic as things could get those days, and the next day I moved into her parents’ attic room in a southern suburb (cold as hell, that winter, but I did had somewhere to live).

Then there was Sonny and Cher, and the Righteous Brothers, and I used to play Sonny and Cher 45 rpm singles at 33 1/3 rpm and they sounded exactly like the Righteous Brothers, and I imagine they still do at that speed. And there was the Who and “My Generation,” and the following summer, Jimi Hendrix with “Hey Joe,” and I moved back into town, accompanied by Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” and Joan Baez.

I held down jobs of some sort, and I guess I spent some time at these places of employment, but what I did was more Dylan, more Byrds, and more Donovan.

I managed to get thrown out of another—sublet—apartment for a wild party, but soon found myself in my own one room apartment on the ground floor in the center of town, with the greatest phone number you’ll ever run across, 444-223 (it made me and my apartment the logical, if not the only choice, for late parties when my friends were roaming the streets, looking for things to do and places to go while stoned beyond remembering anything much—except 444-223); a single bed, and a portable mono record player. My record collection started again, from scratch.

My new first record was “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the album.

Picture this: There was me, the bed, the empty, empty room, the high ceiling, the two windows, the Byrds and the light Swedish summer night again. I’m not sure how anything else got done those days.

The rent was $15 a month. I could have scraped by on money my mother used to send me, but I did have a job. I must have, because my portable record player became a stereo (so I must have shown up regularly at work), and my album collection grew. Loving Spoonful, Bee Gees (the original, pre-disco Bee Gees), Cream, more Byrds, Percy Sledge (“When a Man Love a Woman”), Jim Hendrix, and my first taste of the classical, Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” Karl Richter on Deutsche Gramophone along with an album featuring Handel’s Water Music arranged for strings, weird actually, but it reached me.

My little apartment became a regular hangout for music appreciation. Not so much a novelty and expert and an outcast by this time, the world had caught up in those respects, but music had now become food in its own right, I listened to it like you would breathe. I osmosed my albums.

Especially the Doors’ first two albums, and, still my favorite sixties band, Country Joe & the Fish. Over and over again, they spoke to me. Then there was Pink Floyd, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”—recently released in its 40th anniversary edition.

As an aside, me and a friend set out one night to see Pink Floyd live at the Golden Circle Café in Stockholm, but (even though we set out quite early) we just never made it all the way there before the show was over. Talk about side-tracked. What nights!

And there was Sgt. Pepper, and Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” (still, in my mind, the best song ever recorded) and “Regent Walpurgis,” the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Touch (anybody remember them?), the Fugs, and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (anyone remember them?), and Van Morrison’s Blowing your Mind on Bang Records and the first Mothers of Invention Freak Out album.

They all found a loving and very sympathetic home in this one small and very cold in the winter with no central heating inside and 20 below outside apartment.

And then there was Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant which I learned by heart. Actually, I learned this almost purely by sound, for I only knew the meaning of half the words, if that. Then I would go down to the pub Sturehof and mingle with the Americans on extended visits to a draft dodging friendly Sweden and recite the whole thing for a couple of beers. Yes, the whole 20 minutes of it, I actually could do it, and they would laugh, and laugh, mostly at places where I had no idea about the meaning or the joke, I mean I didn’t know what Thanksgiving was, to start with, and it only got worse from there.

So, they would buy me another beer and plead with me to do it over again, and drunk on draft and all this attention I would gladly oblige and I put the needle on the outside track, got the record up to speed again, and off I went. Until they closed the pub for the night, to return next evening for more.

A bit of classical did leak through the rock and roll universe. One winter night I listened to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and for some reason I was completely enraptured by it. The images evoked by this incredible piece of music in the freezing cold of this winter’s night found their way into a long prose poem, touching me deeply all the way. I felt that Bach wrote for me, and maybe only for me, as my cold and inky fingers scrawled as the images grew. I felt I understood. I went to sleep that night knowing that I had discovered something, albeit uncertain of precisely what.

The months flew by at this point. Country Joe & the Fish was a mainstay, Sgt. Pepper a lot, and more Byrds, “Fifth Dimension,” “Younger than Yesterday” and “The Notorious Byrd Brothers,” still three of my favorite albums of all-time, were with me continually.

I left Stockholm that winter for a town further south, bringing only some of my albums (I kept my Stockholm apartment and the rest of my albums in it). Joining me were Country Joe’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die” and the three Byrds albums. That was it.

I grew to love Country Joe through that winter and spring, along with her.

Yes, I had found a girlfriend and was incredibly, incredibly in love, a feeling intertwined with writing poetry, reading Baudelaire and listening to Country Joe to form a fantastic world of emotion, sounds and images. I was truly crazy then and very, very happy.

It lasted a few months, for although we were actually engaged to marry, she had to take a previously arranged trip to England with a friend of hers, and I was left stranded, and lonelier than I have ever been in my life. I hung around this town for two months that seemed an eternity, then hit the road hitch hiking further south. Finally got just about as far south as you can get in Sweden without running into Denmark, and settled there for the summer.

Sans records again, I used to listen to classical music in the library, and I was also introduced to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos by a newly divorced city clerk who took me under his wing. I am grateful to him for that, there are still few pieces of music that bring so much pleasure for me, and I always recall that little house by the water where I first heard them.

Had to get a job though, out of money and nowhere to live, and found one as a summer nurse at a resting home. Sedate, but it provided living quarters and food, and a friend who introduced me to the Incredible String Band, a Scottish duo that were aptly named and, in a word, incredible.

I brought Donovan’s “Hurdy-Gurdy Man” and he played the String Band’s “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” on his great stereo system. And here I ran smack into incredible lyrics along with what I deemed fantastic music.

I had taken lyrics to heart before, and learned them and sang them and, quite often meant them, having them reflect my feelings and hopes, but here, these lyrics addressed so much more than being in love, or being lonely, or being lonely in love, etc., they reached for and found the spirit in me and struck chords that I didn’t know I could play. The rest of that summer I lived for and with the Incredible String Band. Fall came, and with it the return of my wayward girlfriend. We were reunited and moved up north. I brought my String Band records, and not much more.

As it happened we did not marry, and I eventually moved away, into the world, finding Sweden too much of a small town on welfare for my liking, leaving my records behind. Much have happened since.

I eventually settled in Southern California for a quarter of a century, before I moved up to northern Idaho (it’s very Swedish up there) for three years, then back to LA for two, and finally up to the northern California Pacific coast (just a stone’s throw south of the Oregon border), and I have rebuilt my album collections many times over, first on cassettes, then on albums, then on CDs, and now as mp3s.

I have found all my old records and I’ve fallen deeply in love with classical, especially Bach, Handel and, lately, Haydn. But I still listen to Country Joe and the Byrds, and the others. And it is still with my music where I live the most and the fullest.

Music touched me early, stole my heart, and never gave it back.

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