Ed Ruscha has a great origin story. Even young in Oklahoma, he seemed on the cusp of taking to the open road towards the West. You may have seen that picture of him as boy. He's got that optimistic going places look in a 1950s crew-cut. Apparently, it was a 1950 Ford and Route 66 all the way to L.A., a long ribbon of highway and mountains and road-side attractions stretching out 60 years into the future.
I drove a white Nissan Altima and it was mostly I-40 through New Mexico and Arizona. I simply cannot remember where I stayed, other than a couple of nights at the Grand Canyon. I took my time. I felt what others have felt. All sky. The big empty of the Texas Panhandle over to New Mexico, the distant mountains out of my right hand window, to the North. Probably many combo meals: a cheeseburger, fries, and probably indignation about having to drink a Coke instead of my Texas Dr. Pepper. This is how one would put it where I grew up: "Take Highway 82 over to 287, and you are going to want to ride that, about an hour, to I-40."
I am running these days. I hate running, but with no access to the gym, what can I do? If I took my foot off the fitness gas even for a week, the consequences would be felt swiftly. I once gained 5 pounds during a single Superbowl. And I hate running with my phone. I found my old iPod and I have been running with it flopping silly around my waist, holstered in a ludicrous pouch. I am sure people are laughing, but I cannot get close enough to them to know for sure.
There is no way to update or refresh my iPod. The laptop with all my iTunes has long since been abandoned and lost. The email is tied to an account that no longer exists and cannot be retrieved. Therefore, the iPod is an archive from another time, of another person. Its playlists are sealed and entombed for me to look upon with either a grin or shame. Apparently, I was really into White Zombie. There are all sort of House tracks from my club-kid days, and, like always, a heavy dose of the 1980s country that I grew up with.
Yesterday, I ran 4 miles. Not bad, but the joints are talking to me about it. As I finished my run, I landed on the track Wild International by One Day as Lion. It is definitely not the song that I would choose for this current state of affairs. Actually, it seems like a little angry relic. So, I went to the wheel, twirling my thumb around that loop which was so natural back in the days of the iPod.
Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. This was on repeat on the open road the whole glorious distance to L.A. I bought it on C.D. at a Walmart in Wichita Falls. "Semen stains the mountain tops." Did I actually hear that line as I passed along the fringe of the Rockies? Did I think of the album, its contents, or did it just wash over me?
The album is two parts surrealism and one part modernism. It seems to believe that the unconscious is the path to enlightenment, that it can churn up images and feelings to navigate a person through pain. However, it is rigorous and takes its job seriously, a dense forest of symbols that is more Joyce than Dali. I seem to remember books written on this album, in the spirit of those early internet articles convinced they knew all the eggs inside of America Pie.
I still don't understand In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, even now, on the road in South Pasadena in my shorts, panting. The day has been beat out of me on the pavement. I am looking forward to cocktails, but not yet. What is it about this moment that has kicked the full bucket of my experiences to toss memories off the sides? I feel them like they that are saturating my clothes.
I really did pack all my belonging into two river bags, one green and one yellow. I had finished school in Chicago, and when I got a job in L.A., I flew home to Texas, picked up the Altima, and headed west. The bags were in the backseat, and I remember that I made the decision to travel this way because I could not afford to pay the freight from Chicago for all my stuff. I guess it was romantic to reduce my life to two bags.
I sold or gave everything away. I book-rated a couple of boxes, but other than that, I cut ties. It is shame I gave it all up. When I lived in Chicago, I had made all my furniture in the wood shop at The School of the Art Institute: I loved that bed: finger jointed poplar, the same material that the painters used to make their stretcher bars.
Now that I remember it, I chose river bags because that is how I traveled to Africa, then a bag of books and a bag of clothes. That was the year I read Moby Dick. River bags seem to be my leaving it all behind symbol. I can almost see them sitting on the backseat of the Altima, leaning over and tired like children on a long drive. I now have found one of these bags in my closet. It still has the baggage ticket attached to it from my trip from Chicago. This is the year I will read War and Peace.
Over and over and over. The album must have meant something different to me in Albuquerque than it did in Blythe, where I, like everyone else, breaks down. What must I have thought about it as I pulled into my camping spot in the Grand Canyon? It must have been like Ragnar Kjartansson's A Lot of Sorrow: the words and the performers stay the same, but you cannot possibly be the same from moment to moment.
And I wonder if that Neutral Milk Hotel album has entered my mind as a sort of symbolic dialect that only I can speak, that to hear it spoken again makes me privy to a set of personal, secret knowledge that only I can understand. This knowledge is mine to forget and remember. It probably has very little to do with what the band is actually saying. The words, in a sense, do not matter. It is that intersection of art and biography that can never be transcended.
Ed Ruscha has a drawing from 1975 called, I live over in Valley View. I always liked it for the reason that simply, I am from Valley View, Texas. It has the patois of where I grew up, but 20 miles from Oklahoma, where Ruscha grew up. "I live over in Valley View," is similar to expressions like, "How much you give for that thing," or "Go git it."
I always thought that Ruscha still speaks this language of his early childhood, even to this day, and it is a language I share. It is more than this perhaps. Ruscha's was one of the first exhibitions I ever remember seeing, at the Fort Worth Modern. I wonder if I made my journey to L.A. because of the story I would have encountered there.
The biggest trip of my life: open road, Jeff Magnum, and his crazy crazy album. I am enjoying the memory's visit. I am sad that I will "hate her when she gets up to leave."