Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember wondering why Cinderella's slipper didn't change back at midnight. I still do.

posted by william 10:15 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that in our old apartment we always called "Who is it?" whenever anyone rang. When I was 8 and we moved to 7F, one of the features of the new apartment that I liked immediately was the peephole. My downtown grandmother had one too, but hers was one of those extreme wide-angle ones that I couldn't figure out how to see through accurately at the time. Neither could she. She'd look through when I rang, and then call "Who is it?" My uptown grandmother didn't have a peephole, so she also always called "Who is it?" but we had to do that less and less in 7F, and this combined with the fact that when one of our grandmothers was taking care of my sister and me she would always call when the bell rang made our use of the peephole into another one of the more modern traditions that distinguished our American youthfulness and competence from their old-world ways and traditions.

posted by william 8:19 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember I felt a little more adult, a little more like them, a little more affectlessly competent, when I first discovered how to compress and remove the wooden spindle from its chassis and insert a fresh roll of toilet paper.

posted by william 10:07 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember another word like shirk that I found puzzling as a child: shy. They told me I was shy, which I knew wasn't a good thing to be. But they weren't rebuking me either. They were describing something about me that they knew was making life disconcerting to me, that impaired possibilities for me. So their tone was both regretful and merely descriptive. It was ok that I was shy, but for me not quite ok that it was ok.

posted by william 8:25 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember "Viva the Viva the Viva the chairs! Viva the Viva the Viva the stairs! Viva the Viva the Viva the pears (?)! Viva instead of cloth!" An ad for Viva paper towels, sung to "Viva la companie!" I think that the last ("Viva the pears," if that's what it was) would get a puzzled pause from the singer and a goofy echo from the orchestra

posted by william 12:55 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember Mac Fast Food, probably the only source of American food in the city at the time. French fries were called finger chips, and people ate lambburgers.

I remember my father carrying me down Commercial Street, and vaguely remember him singing nursery rhymes. I don't remember saying what my parents claim was my first sentence, "he put in his thumb," as he carried me. But I remember seeing plums for the first time at a supermarket near Comm. Street, and my father buying a cassette player for my nursery rhyme tapes (because, I was later told, I'd broken his) there.

posted by sravana 8:19 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember New Lincoln, the school that a lot of kids went to who didn't go to Franklin or Trinity after fifth grade. I never saw it, though. But after fifth grade we went from a single poplulation of kids who didn't know that there were different schools you could end up at turned, surprisingly, into IS-44 kids or Art and Design or New Lincoln or Franklin or Trinity kids.

Actually, now that I think of it, Trinity may have been an alternative to P.S. 166 from the start, since I think Tommy went there from first grade on. So it might be that we went from two schools (Hebrew school, my abortive time at L'Ecole Française being outliers) to many different futures, in the summer's transition from one grade to another. After that it was mainly the playground and park that stitched us together as a single population, and that didn't last long.

posted by william 2:30 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember having to use ground chickpeas (I think) to wash my face, and some kind of leaf mix for my hair. They were coarse, did not lather, and were hard to wash off. I envied all the kids who got to use shampoos and soaps.

posted by sravana 6:56 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember not realizing that "curve" and "curb" were different words. I thought that the edge of the sidewalk was the "curve." They still seem conceptually related to me, deep, archaically, down. So I had no trouble with the concept of a "simple closed curve," since a curve did and does seem to me the same thing as an edge.

posted by william 8:29 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the first time I saw a supermarket door that opened automatically, at the Co-op supermarket on 26th street which I was never quite sure I was allowed to shop at when my downtoan grandmother (who lived in the Co-ops there) sent me for milk. It was only the out-door that opened, and it opened when you stepped on a pressure sensitive pad, not when a motion detector sensed you. It didn't work half the time. Sometimes (especially when first Key Foods on 92nd and then the Garden / Daitch-Shopwell on 90th got them) my friends and I would have to stomp on the pressure pads to make the doors open.

Key Foods seemed in advance of the Garden because they had them first. But the Co-op market was shabby, so there the automatic door just seemed somehow already dilapidated even though it as the first one I'd ever seen. I felt a kind of low-level sense of being cheated. I was experiencing what I knew should have been unnecessary disappointment in the promise of the future: automatic doors already seemed unreliable and broken down technology, without ever being shiny and new.

I think Tommy Hoge had already told me about them, which fed into my disappointment, because this was all they turned out to be. Or maybe he told me about better versions of them after I'd already experienced the Co-op version, and that's why I was disappointed with my version of the experience.

posted by william 12:17 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember slamming the car door on my father's fingers once. He had his hand on the molding of the rear right passenger door, as were unloading the car, but I noticed an instant too late. The door slammed shut enough to latch. His pain was obvious and unimaginable, and his face contorted. I thought he'd get angrier than I'd ever seen him, since the sudden gratutious pain was a scarier version of all the things that blew up and made him angry at me, all the sudden disasters that so terrified me. And this was more terrifying than any of those, since I just didn't understand what would happen when fingers and chrome took up space large enough for only one or the other. I was terrified, for him, not for myself, but still his anger would be part of the general atmosphere of terror. But he was fine about it: he jumped around for a while and put ice on his fingers, but amazingly he didn't hold it against me, or the world, at all.

posted by william 5:24 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that I thought magician and musician were the same word. This must be a pre-literate memory. I don't know that I quite discrimintaed between their meanings, but I think I might have. Or I might have begun to do so when I heard that we were going to see my Uncle Jack (Zadikov) who was a musician, since I remember being disappointed about his not being able to do magic tricks (unlike my maternal grandfather, whom I associated with him since he came from my mother's parents' side of the family). This might be the time that I went to see Jack Zadikov conduct a "young people's concert" at what was then the Philharmonic (pre-Avery Fisher).

posted by william 12:46 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember when I first was (made) aware that one should be sensitive to one's audience when speaking or telling a joke (I suppose I'd kind of known this for a while, but not known what I'd known exactly, or moreover what I didn't): I was thirteen, traveling in my grandparents' car with my favorite cousin, Jeanette, and I read aloud what I thought was a really funny line from Wilde: "To lose both [parents] looks like carelessness." Then Jeanette turned around and said, "I've lost both parents. So have your grandparents." I was mortified at how insensitive I'd been, at how I hadn't thought at that moment about the histories of the people I was talking to.

posted by jennylewin 1:33 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that a teacher at school asked the class if we knew what capitalism was. I shot up my arm and he picked me to answer. I didn't really know what it was but I had listened to the album Woodstock and at one point Wavy Gravy says something like "there are sandwiches and stuff to buy if your hungry, for those of you who don't think capitalism is all that bad!"
And based on that quote I instantaneously figured capitalism had something to do with making money. The class was so impressed, though I never revealed how I understood what it was.

posted by caroline 5:44 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that one of the times I rode my bike to school, along with Jon Coles and four or five other people -- including Peter Obstler? --, as we were riding past Grant's Tomb, north on Riverside Drive, one of them turned on the heat to pass someone else -- Jon? -- who'd just gotten ahead of him, and rode with really breakneck speed, awing us all. Except for one of us, maybe the person passed, who rode equably no-handed and just called out, "And I remain unimpressed. [beat] All I am is bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored." (I remember with that Bergsonian precision the number of boreds, remember it as a rhythm and as a beat, not as a figure, just as Bergson says.) The speed of his response matched the speed of the breakneck rider. It was a beautiful morning, fresh and warming, and a wonderful moment, riding to school with all that space around us, the greenery, the church just past, Riverside Drive one-way here as we passed Grant's Tomb counter-clockwise, the river coming up as we swung back uptown on the large trestled span just north of Grants Tomb, and the lovely relaxed quickness of the response, which simply had the effect of making all us by-standers (or by-riders) feel a simple part of a kind of genre scene: a group of cyclists riding to school one beautiful morning. Probably no one else who was there remembers this, and therefore no one else in the world does, so now it's a genre for me alone.

posted by william 8:22 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that my father took me to see Woodstock. I'm pretty sure I wanted to go, but there was some surprise associated with his wanting to see it. And I was further surprised that he liked Richie Havens so much, which I found impressive, both about him and about Richie Havens, since neither of us had known about him before. I think I learned in Woodstock that it was Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young who did the song, which I'd heard and liked. I then bought several of their albums, and had mixed feelings about "Almost cut my hair." I liked pretty much everything else though, since it was so melodic. I remember that Woodstock was their first gig, man, and that they were scared shitless. I was amazed that they would play to four-hundred thousand people on their first gig. And they didn't look scared. (It's only very recently that I realized this was a joke.) I remember that as we were leaving the thater (Hampton Arts) there were people coming in for the next show and handing in their tickets, and I thought about the three hundred thousand people (was it?) who didn't have tickets and crashed the gates, and what a large number that must have been compared to the eight or ten people we passed coming in as we left.

I remember that Tommy really liked a song called "The Ballad of Billy Jo," who's murdered or a suicide, a song I only knew from the words he told me, but which I never heard. I remember how important songs were to us, and what a large social role not knowing certain songs in common played. Tommy's brothers knew that song and maybe a lot of his other friends, and that made them into a group. Hugh and I knew other songs they didn't and that made us into a different group. Even when later Tommy and I were still friends in high school (although he went to Trinity), and Hugh and I more or less lost touch, I still thought of myself in terms derived from the song-commonality (also TV-show commonality) with Hugh as against Tommy, and somehow, though we stayed friends through high school we didn't return to the transparency of thinking about and loving the same things. No doubt I'm reversing cause and effect, but this is the way it felt.

posted by william 8:07 AM
. . . 0 comments

I remember that the book of popular piano music I was practising songs I knew from -- I think I was learning "Those were the days, my friend," which I first heard ice skating in Lake Placid, I think -- had a song I didn't know at all by a group I can't remember called "Itchykoo Park." I did recognize, even then, that it was a rip-off of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." I could never really figure out what it sounded like, but I remember some of the lyrics: "Over bridge of sighs, to rest my eyes, in shades of green....To Itchykoo Park, that's where I've been. [...] But why the fears there? Don't know why. But why the tears there? I'll tell you why. It's all too beautiful, ta TUM, it's all too beautiful, TUM ta...."

posted by william 10:18 PM
. . . 0 comments

I remember the Clandestino Festival in Gotenberg - and speaking there on music and politics with Lez Henry and Aki Nawaz in 2004. Dave Watts and Coltaire K too. After a mad weekend, sunday afternoon found us on the yet more mad wooden roller coaster with the singers from the Mighty Zulu Nation (pictured here with Dave of F^D^M in full flight at the concert the night of our talks - ie, the main event). The MZN (and SKW) pretended to be nervous about the ride, and Sam from State of Bengal and I were being macho and urging we go - tables (not tablas, but stomachs almost) were turned by the end of the noisy rickety 'roler-coaster' of a ride, but our comrades from the south wanted to go again. Not enough time for that as we needed to get back to Clandestino. (Wooden Roller coasters are spectacular - think flat pack ikea but 100s of metres high). The Festival is annual, and its in June, its worth going to, and this year the Micropixie space cadet project is booked. In Gotenberg in summer there's hardly more than two hours of dark at night, the city is fantastic, the festival is radical, political and rare gloriopus thing in the world of music festivalism, not at all governed by 'industry' standards. Open ears and minds. Calandestino!

Aki Nawaz will speak at Goldsmiths College London on friday 3rd March - at 11am in room 137a (Details HERE). be well - XJohn
.

posted by Trinketization 4:09 AM
. . . 0 comments