You Don’t Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem’s smooth, spacious exploration of an LA band’s potential moment of glory, is a precise and lovely book. As his latest, Chronic City, is about to hit bookstores, it’s worth revisiting Lethem’s charmingly motley collective: singer Matthew, guitarist Bedwin, drummer Denise, and lynchpin bassist Lucinda, whose personal journey forms the bedrock of the novel, grounding its more raw and experimental tendencies, just as her controlled basslines anchor the band’s chaotic musical explorations.
The band is an elusive concept, to themselves and to the world: their name flickers and changes throughout; they cannot be defined and therefore never fully achieve cultural reality, or perhaps are the only truth in the city of make-believe. Lethem’s finesse in evoking music is rare: the depictions of the band’s rehearsals have the quiet assurance of authenticity; they read like Anthony Kiedis’ descriptions of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ jams in his autobiography Scar Tissue, which, like You Don’t Love Me Yet, feels like a hymn to LA as much as anything (“…sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the city of angels…”). In particular, Kiedis’ recounting of a chaotic Saturday Night Live performance in the early nineties recalls Lethem’s band’s first radio moment, when all their possibilities coalesce, and anything could happen. In the early nineties, musically, anything could have happened: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Chili Peppers, U2’s Achtung Baby and Zooropa albums, their Zoo TV tour, all of it an exhilarating collision and evolution of everything that had gone before. Lethem’s novel is not so wild or chaotic: it’s smooth, gleaming with a quiet glow from within, like listening to an iPod in bed, deep into the night. He shows us LA hipsters in the light of their own helpless gleaming. The city is smooth, measured. They exist in its contemporary spaces, its lofts and clubs, its radio stations, the static and sound waves that contain souls. Their life is music, they breathe chord changes and talk melodies. It’s a world of legendary DJs, doomed art installations, ephemeral connections, and a misplaced kangaroo. It’s also about sex, complaining, being a rock star, the last of the rock gods or the first of the new stars, living in the glass and steel of Los Angeles in what could be the nineties or the future. Lethem nails the desperate intensity of human couplings: the speed of the emotional vertical take-off, the slow spiral back to earth from the sexual cosmos, the pain of re-entry, the brutality of the hard landing. He handles all of this with grace, elegance, streamlined writing, the literary equivalent of gleaming, molded architecture, all reflective surfaces and hidden structures. The words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters change with digital smoothness, the barely perceptible transitions of an iPod moving from one song to the next. It’s a world of smooth lines and clear light. It’s the golden light over the Pacific as the world sinks into a clear dusk. It’s deft. Even the kangaroo has an emotional clarity.
“Too many times I have wanted to turn around and walk away… you can’t provide what I need from you anyway.” The Ahn Trio.
Like dancer Kayla Radomski’s anguished, strenuous yet light-on-her-feet interpretation of the Ahn Trio’s All I Want, Lethem communicates the desperation and pain of wanting someone on their way to being, or already, out of reach. You Don’t Love Me Yet communicates it with beautiful lines, sensual movements, and a deep appreciation and powerful understanding of love, music, souls and humanity.
Tag The Ahn Trio
In Search Of The Miraculous / lighting up the sky
“….a riddle’s just the thing for a dreamer…” Tom Waits.
Not an easy thing, to talk about ‘the miraculous’ without irony. It exists, however you want to define it or refer to it, and we all, in our own way, seek it. And we all have our own version of what it means, which is miraculous in itself, that one concept can survive and in fact be enhanced by having six billion possible meanings, and probably more ways than that of finding it.
We’re human; aren’t we all really looking for the miraculous, one way or another? We might not call it that, but whether we look for it in love, religion, sex, dancing or reality TV, or maybe all of the above, maybe all at the same time, it’s what being human is all about. We need something beyond ourselves, which by the way, just to help you out, is usually found within us. We just need help bringing it to light, if we’ve gone into the darkness to find it, which, being human, we often do, especially as writers, artists, dancers, dreamers and other holy and degenerate chroniclers of the human condition.
“I tell you that I wanna go, but I wanna stay…” The Ahn Trio.
Hubert Selby Jr has words quoted elsewhere in this blog about the risk of not coming back from that darkness. Transforming yourself emotionally in the name of art can be dangerous. You can read that figuratively, emotionally, psychologically, or simply literally. Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader vanished at sea while attempting to complete his enigmatic work, In Search Of The Miraculous. Even back in 1973, it was meant with ironic detachment. It was to be comprised of photographs of a walk through Los Angeles from the freeway to the ocean; photographs from a similar trek in Amsterdam, and details from the Atlantic crossing he undertook, just him in a small boat, the solitary journey during which he disappeared. The Los Angeles photos are evocative in their directness, William Eggleston by way of Weegee. Each one is accompanied by a lyric fragment of a song by the Coasters’ (“I’m searchin’, I’m searchin’ every which way…”) and what could have been mundane and everyday is now something other, something more. It’s simultaneously a deconstruction and a celebration. They coexist, and their coexistence is essential for the miraculous. Like lovers. Transcendence can only occur from opposition.
“All I want is what you got… I know I’m gonna lose myself this way…” The Ahn Trio.
It doesn’t really need saying at this point, but let’s say it anyway: the miraculous is everywhere, and often shows up when you’re not even looking for it. It’s re-watching the first twelve episodes of Californication and realizing all over again how deftly the irreverence sits with the emotional body blows, the brutal human truths. It’s watching a dancer called Kayla Jenee Radomski from a place called Aurora delivering a wrenching performance to the Ahn Trio’s All I Want, lighting up the sky with moves drenched in wanting and loss and desperation that remind you exactly what it feels like to hurt for someone. It’s watching a performance like this and realizing that writers just have to grasp that sometimes words just aren’t even close to being enough to compete with the eloquence of the body. It’s seeing your lover smile for the first time as your lover. It’s seeing your lover smile for the three thousandth time, and still feeling it light you up. It could be a first kiss… or the last kiss… slow-fading memories of how it used to be, or what could have been… or knowing how things could be. Or breathing clean air on a bright shiny morning and for once, not feeling any pain.
“…why’d you have to wait, where were you, where were you?” The Fray.
‘The miraculous’ can be any or many things, and it’s probably not what you expected. It may not be what you were hoping for, and it might come later than you wanted. You might call it and it doesn’t return your messages… but it is there, always. And if it isn’t (and forgive me for this, because I’m writing this on an iPhone), there’s probably an app for that. Once your higher power of choice gets into the app development market, we’ll all be OK.
Until then, you could do worse than follow the lyric that starts this post, and listen to some Tom Waits. Whatever you choose, miracles await.
dreaming between the lines 