Vampire Weekend have a new album coming out in April and have released a couple singles from it, “Gen X Cops” and “Capricorn”, as well as videos to go along with them. The videos both use imagery of New York City in what looks to me like the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s compelling stuff. Since Vampire Weekend’s lead singer and songwriter Ezra Koenig was born in April 1984, it means the album will be released right around his 40th birthday. The imagery of NYC, then, seems to evoke a world Koenig never knew, a world that still has a powerful, even nostalgic hold, but which is in some fundamental ways unknowable, gone.
I’m especially taken with “Capricorn”, in particular these lines:
Too old for dying young
Too young to live alone
Sifting through centuries
For moments of your own
The first two lines are standard middle-aged angst, trite to the point of parody, but the second two extend the angst into the dustbin of history in ways resonant to our current moment. There are lots of ways to think about those lines — we could, for instance, see them as expressing a symptom of what so irked James Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, who was celebrated and villified for criticizing the presence of presentism in historians’ work. (I particularly liked Timothy Burke’s response, focusing on the institutional and structural forces Sweet ignored.)
I didn’t think of presentism with those lines, though, partly because of the more clichéd lines before it. Koenig’s a smart songwriter and rarely gives in to cliché or triteness without reason, and for me that’s the power of these four lines together.
I’m a number of years older than Koenig, much closer to 50 than 40, and I can say that one of the unsettling things about middle-age is how settled it feels, how lived in, how much like an old pair of pants bought at a thrift store. Which isn’t necessarily bad. A lot of my earlier years felt like they were dressed in nothing but a hairshirt, and I’ll take well-loved thrift store outfits over that any day.
What do we do with the dustbin of history? Sift through it for some interesting remnants, some few bits of discarded food still edible, perhaps? Or do we just end up with ash and rot?
On Valentine’s Day, I watched Todd Haynes’s great 1998 film Velvet Goldminefor the first time in a couple years, though I used to watch it more or less annually. I’d forgotten how much of a memory play it is. I’m a sucker for that structure, since two early artistic influences for me were The Glass Menagerie, which first taught me the phrase memory play, and Citizen Kane, which Velvet Goldmine overtly pays homage to.
Every ghost story is about history and memory, and memory plays are inevitably about haunting. The cinema itself is a ghost medium: images from the past conveyed in light. I’m slightly younger than Christian Bale, Toni Collette, and Ewan McGregor, slightly older than Jonathan Rhys Myers (the stars of Velvet Goldmine) and now, over 25 years after its release, the film preserves those actors’ youthful performances while I hold memories of watching them as, with each viewing, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, I grew older and older. I remember the first time I saw it at an arthouse cinema in West Newton, Massachusetts during its first release, then remember renting it on VHS, then buying and watching the DVD, then the Blu Ray.
One of the famous lines from The Glass Menagerie states: “In memory everything seems to happen to music.” It could be a line from Velvet Goldmine, focused as it is on the ways music shapes both lives and memories. The film is a kind of speculative fantasy of a David Bowie-type character, drawing acknowledged inspiration from many moments of Bowie’s life in the ’70s, but through the lens of recollection, surrealism, camp, and homage. It’s as much Flaming Creatures as Ziggy Stardust.
When Velvet Goldmine first came out, I was a Bowie fan, but didn’t know much about his life or about the music scene he first came to fame in. I didn’t yet know anything about Iggy Pop or The Stooges, Brian Eno, Roxy Music, etc. I did know something of Placebo, who perform T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy” in the film, but I don’t know how I knew them at that point. I got intrigued by lead singer Brian Molko because of his performance in the film, and then was transfixed a couple years later by the video for “Taste in Men” to such an extent that the kind of goth-elf figure Molko portrays in that video haunts a lot of my short stories (it may not be obvious, but maybe a third of my protagonists either are or fantasize about being/loving something like that figure.)
When I first watched it, I didn’t love Velvet Goldmine, though I did love Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who has never been more beautiful than he was in that film. When I was young, Christian Bale’s character bothered me. He seemed so passive, so mopey, so lost that I had trouble feeling anything but contempt for him. Over the years, I’ve found myself more and more compassionate toward him. In some ways, I was misled by the expectations created by regular biopics where the focus is on the famous person. Velvet Goldmine is more concerned with ordinary people’s relationships to the famous people who, for whatever reason, they most strongly connect to. When I first saw it, I thought I wanted more of the film to be about famous people; I thought that’s where the most powerful story would live, because that was what I was conditioned to. Of course, I was entirely wrong. Haynes was smarter than me. He knew that Christian Bale’s character was the key to real meaning and emotional force.
Like Ezra Koenig using imagery of New York in the years shortly before his birth, the actors in Velvet Goldmine were recreating a world they had no real memory of themselves. (Haynes was born in 1961, so his experience of the ’70s was different from that of most of the actors.) But Velvet Goldmine was never intended as a faithful reproduction of the ’70s. At various times, Haynes addressed complaints that the film made the ’70s look too good, or that it wasn’t “realistic” about one point or another, saying that they always knew they weren’t making a documentary. They weren’t aiming for social realism. Their goal was queer reimagining. (After all, the film proposes that Oscar Wilde was brought to Earth by a UFO!) It’s not attempting strict historical verisimilitude. There are also hints that the 1984 setting is not the 1984 of our reality, but rather one like that of Diamond Dogs.
This is a different way of sifting through the centuries, a different way of addressing the idea of history and present: to accept the inescapable trap of our present viewpoint and propose the past as a memory play and speculative fiction. After all, every memory play is also a dream play, and history itself is little more than a dream made from scraps of experience, relics of lost lives, and ruins from which we extrapolate wishes and fears.
I think of this now with New York. I went back to the city a couple times last year, my first visits since the pandemic, and was struck again, as I always am these days, at how far away the New York I think of as “mine” is from the current one. Everybody who ever gets to know New York has this experience, because the city is constantly changing. My New York is the city of the mid-1990s, a place nearly as different from the city of today as it is from the New York of the 1890s. Like Ezra Koenig, I have no memory of New York in the 1970s, since I didn’t get there until that New York was long gone, but I understand the nostalgia for a place that existed before your birth, even if I know that what I feel pseudo-nostalgia for is not the romantic bohemia I imagine it to be. New York in the ’70s and early ’80s was the city of David Wojnarowicz and Basquiat, of avant-garde theatre and experimental film, of wild writers living in cheap apartments and somehow making art while making do. My late friend Rick Bowes always cautioned me away from attaching too much yearning to 1970s New York, a dirty and dangerous place, a city bankrupt in multiple ways. I shouldn’t really feel nostalgia for the New York of the ’90s either, because I don’t have to work too hard to remember how beaten down I got there, how disillusioned and dispirited. Still, there was magic. Memory tends to hold onto magic and let a lot of other things go. A month or so ago, I talked with an elderly friend about memory loss, which he has experienced quite a bit of over recent years. He said he’s blessed to remember the good things, mostly, while the bad are fading away. I’m sure it’s not that way for everyone with memory loss, but he says he’s grateful for it, grateful to enter the twilight years gently, knowing that there was plenty to rue in the past, but the razor edges of its memory have dulled away.
I know the New Yorks I dream of aren’t real, because I lived in one of them for a few years, but still, like the 1970s of Velvet Goldmine, I can’t help dreaming of them. I wonder if there’s any good in that, if such dreams bring some sort of truth or at least comfort to the waking world and all its lacerating surfaces. I don’t know, but I do know that when, decades hence, my memory slips away, I hope it is the dreams I remember longest rather than the realities.
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images: via Wikipedia, Esquire, and DVD Beaver
