longer attracted the girlies. Yet it would be far longer lived; now he started to drive back and forth across the country, living the On the Road life if not achieving immortal success. Bassist would in turn become the next big thing; smaller and scrawnier, suddenly year 4 he was the hot item.
"Did you hear he has a part interest in a place in Tribeca now?”
"I heard Sony might sign up.”
Bassist’s reign, in turn, would last three years, and then suddenly Woodwork would come out of woodwork wouldn’t he, were he what he would be he would work without working wood.
We have to be completely honest now, meet face to face, unblinking, eyes without tears, years sacrificed for the smallest of gains. SEATTLE-TUSK was in fact dozens of letters; mad screeds of love or adoration, and she was perfect because within her she had a zone of nothingness. There was no point in talking to those daughters of gas station owners, those bourgeois economics majors. Economics—from Greek Ekonomia—meant simply household. How could somebody go to Yale and major in household studies, with all the arcing creative possibilities out there, despite six years passage and the bankers going to the same rockstar’s concert now out of a sense of irony.
The karmic debt had piled up, the social obligations, never to be understood by outsiders, had reached a breaking point, and the class, having been better than normal up to Tuesday, swiftly reverted to less than normal by Thursday, and sometimes groups of the students could be seen; other classes had jelled, but 2/1 was now focused on outside possibilities, even as a substructure evolved around BARBIEDOLL; even as social noder made her way through class after class.
Some truth has been captured; but another has been lost. Like overly detailed Dutch miniatures, one hopes for a Claude Lorraine grandeur but gets only details; this was fine, too, though; Rockstar turned down her amplifier; the crowd watched, entranced, as her friends casually packed up the gear; the show was over but still they might hope for me, or even that the shutting down was itself an object of fascination. Daytime gave way to evening; evening to full-on night, and a few actually assembled that Saturday for the week’s close, a group of “nerd-girls” (low status), TUSK independent, Leaf 4 and 5, but no others, only seven therefore, whilst there was a group around some Taiwanese and another group around Boy-3. Music had the power to awaken long dormant memories: the lakeside kiss, the clouds skudding exactly as they would, the childhood experience that symbolized an entire way of life, but it could offer no more liberation than religious ritual, it too was cynically understood to just be what it was.
The crowd surged, then gave way. They were like the crowds that covered Hongdae that Saturday as the groups found their way. Two boys sat by the crowdside and offered commentary on what they were; a pancake griller was friendly, offered directions to anybody who wanted. There were encounters of long-parted friends, new acquaintainces that would be made, social groups that would be studied and analyzed for what they were. Finally however the location (obscure, the map poorly drawn) would be found and there was a group of sixty or seventy as the bands took the stage to begin their sets and be what they would have to be.
It is about lost opportunity that marks this week’s fulfillment. Of course potential exists to ride along that wave of punk and angst, to make that song its own in text, but that would be set-piece-ism, that would be a false elation to deny the “swan song” characterism of what this event was. TUSK, using training-program trained ears, could listen to five conversations at once by remaining perfectly still. Wednesday revealed a group of Koreans trying to figure out his nationality as two Japanese girls discussed Shiseido cosmetics, a British woman talked to him about the Curious Incident of the Dog at Nighttime, the store clerk totaled up prices, and outside the café, a German called out to his friend to hurry up (Mach Schnell!). The simultaneity of this event, however, meant nothing, herein expressed textually; it was just the matter of the coolness of the individually experienced moment, which left little for the outside observer. Similarly for a crowd-sweep of seemingly one hundred eighty people, where no less than twelve people or cliques were dialed in in a matter of minutes. Did it matter that one could just about detect a traditional calligraphy instructor in Alpha, a intrinsic personality flaw in AJ-4, a pushy boyfriend in ICEPRINCESS, or Leaf-4/5 being seduced ever so slightly by a trick of posture and fashion? These things, to the individual observer a neat accomplishment, added up to mere three hundred binary characters, less than a kilobyte of encoded 0s and 1s, minimal information. As with TUSK, so too with Rockstar. For her, a world had changed, for she had finally committed herself to the music, “to following the music,” but what was to her an earth-shattering and life-altering decision was almost invisible to the outside observer. She ripped out her Stratocaster, in a sea of dancing lights; she began her set; the crowd roared.
We reach textual limits, the limits of words describing music. Beautyrock chord progressions opened up her killer opening, seguing into something beyond post-math or post-shoegazer into true dream-rock or dream-song. An underlying punk profundo opened the ego-observer into an understanding of underlying anger to be constantly sated by streams and streams of beauty-flow overchords. It was battle between lead and secondary guitar for a few minutes, out of which that final understanding of the zeitgeist; of the immediate now awoke, leaving the audience rapturous, carried away, starting to dance, a roar caught in the throat. Hyperactive drum action showed there was more to come; the emotion had been caught and would not be let go.
This was Rockstar’s personal perspective, as the lights danced, and the crowd began to surge: ‘Into the flow of now I go, never letting go, never letting go, now to let go and be. Here I alternately fuzz and then chop down, rip right and three-seven-five bam bam bam. A good night, a good night, and kick in with the bassist, here we go.’
We can’t end like this, of course. The neat piece of a rip roaring concert, one in which TUSK purchased Rockstar a drink, translated for her with the North American talent scout, has its own rhythm and legend, even if it were more than true, over-baked, the contract probably not going anywhere, and the jealous wingman of the show’s producer, a Korean, trying to get them to go even though he wouldn’t. Leaf -4 and -5 for the last time attempted to flirt with TUSK, and TUSK, though normally completely game, had surrendered to aesthetics as well and saw the underlying beauty, one in which desire had been floated away, and the outcome, now decided, was nevertheless a Beautiful and Wild Thing. Rockstar kicked up her guitar. She stared down at the strings as she thrashed out the chords and compared to the three Japanese boys with their band, she was consistent; she didn’t have just one or two good songs and then fade. If BARBIEDOLL had 2-5% of pulling things off in literature, Rockstar would have 10-15% odds in the less demanding field of rock music—where although winners took all, the second rate still got recognition. Maybe this wasn’t it, quite so, but the success curves were different, and even third-rate college bands pulled a lot of groupies. The hilarity would only be if Rockstar herself wanted to be a slut; then the normal gender dynamic would be reversed, even though things like so had been going on for quite some time, and the possibility of true originality would be pooh-poohed.
The artists, in any case, met up. In the soft glow of incandescent lights, the moment had come to move out to the patio that was semi-enclosed, and here, gay American band friends (boys and girls), the talent scout, the producer’s crowd, the musicians would stand around two picnic tables and talk. TUSK had identified the moment right; at the best possible moment he intervened and began the translation work that would inspire looks of awe from three or four. This together with the ability to listen in on multiples of conversations and scan a crowd once or twice to identify no less than twenty interesting point were causes of self-amazement, but as alluded to, he realized in the end he would be completely ineffectual. It merely allowed things like this to be eventually known.
"The Korean music scene today is amazingly popular. But you know, it’s completely controlled by Koreans. Th
ere’s no way an outsider can get in.”
"Well I think that’s fair to say. It’s that Koreans learn Japanese and English but American and Japanese don’t bother learning Korean, so of course the Korean music industry people have a huge advantage. I mean, look here, they can bring two Japanese bands over, and these people have no chance of meeting U.S. contacts because they don’t even speak English.”
[Japanese] “What is she saying, what is she saying?”
[Japanese] “Uh, this person isn’t very high in the music industry.”
[Japanese] “That’s fine, that’s fine. I just want to know what she’s saying.”
[Translation]
"Who is that girl? She’s the band member isn’t she? Tell her I want us to be friends.”
[Japanese] “I want us to be friends.”
[Japanese] “We’re already friends.”
"We’re already friends.”
Slight moment of paranoia elicited, as American girl does not reciprocate Japanese’s girl little dance.
"How old are you?”
[Japanese] “How old are you?”
[Japanese] “Twenty-five”
"Twenty-five.”
"I’m
The Flowers of Keiwha Page 31
