Owlspotting

As my departure date approaches, I have decided to chronicle my time in the US in pictures.

Below is the first of three installments illustrating the time I spent in America from August 2003 to March 2007. Obviously, each picture corresponds to one particular month, which is also when that picture was snapped.

August 2003: On the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit… My first purchases in America were a latte, a cream cheese bagel and a copy of Rolling Stone.

September 2003: Like most foreign students, I quickly got a job on campus. Mine was supervising something called “Craft night,” a Friday night event where people came to do, well, crafty things with paper, glue and other assorted goodies. No, there was no alcohol. Nor drugs. Well, unless you count sniffing glue…

October 2003: Getting ready to see the Missouri Tigers take the field. They won that day.

December 2003: Meet Cinnamon from Boulder, Colorado. He was a nice dog (just a little smelly).

January 2004: I have no idea what was going on here.

February 2004: Josh and Sara peeking out the window, up in the St. Louis arch.

March 2004: The one and only–Shakespeare’s Pizza in Columbia, Missouri. Eat there!

April 2004: Brody Dalle of The Distillers rocking out the Blue Note in CoMo. That concert remains an unforgettable night for many reasons, one of which involved me catching a drum stick. Not one attached to a chicken, but the one attached to the drummer. The Distillers officially disbanded in early 2007. Brody is still hot.

May 2004: An equally hot moment captured during the photo session that produced the infamous montage: “Girls in carts.” Just minutes after this picture was snapped, we were stopped by local cops who demanded to take over the cart. Roger that, officer. Wheel it away.

June 2004: New Orleans. Bourbon street.

July 2004: Pummeling my Romanian brother for daring to insult the United States. He was taken to the emergency room, and the wounds required multiple stitches, but at least he learned to cheer for America.

August 2004: Visiting Washington, DC with my brother and my dad. The phallus in the background is indeed the Washington Monument.

September 2004: Erin and Brian dance at their wedding in a remote location in the Missouri countryside.

With my departure date less than three weeks away, I have started to count backwards.

Leaving America will probably trigger all types of regrets and bouts of nostalgia, but I’m determined to stay positive at least until I take my window seat on the plane out of Boston (There is a song by The Frames that says: “Too many sad words make for sad sad songs”).

I wanted to find a way–even if unremarkable and inconsequential–to chronicle this parting. This is why the next few posts will be devoted to my 43 months in America (coincidentally 43 is a popular number on the Internets). Come back soon for a photo-chronicle, a list of 43 albums I’ve enjoyed in my time here and 43 things I know I will miss about being here.

Below you’ll find the latest of my quarterly “American months” playlists. Because there will be no 44th American month, this one is called 43 American months. The links will take you to a band’s MySpace page.

1. The Broken West – On the bubble
2. Dear Leader – This is not our war
3. Bloc Party – Hunting for witches
4. MC Lars – Hipster girl
5. Bright Eyes – Four winds
6. I’m From Barcelona – Rec & play
7. Hallelujah The Hills – Hallelujah the hills
8. The Shins – Phantom limb
9. The Frames – Sad songs
10. Dear Leader – Father Baker
11. The Good, The Bad & The Queen – Kingdom of doom
12. Youth Group – Sorry
13. The Broken West – Down in the valley
14. The Arcade Fire – Keep the car running
15. Peter Bjorn and John – Young folks
16. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Emily Jean Stock
17. Lily Allen – Everything’s just wonderful
18. Youth Group – Forever young
19. M. Ward – To go home
20. Apples In Stereo – Can you feel it?
21. The Greencards – When I was in love with you
22. The Snowleopards – Stuck in the middle
23. The Arcade Fire – The well and the lighthouse

My love for The Arcade Fire began with this 2004 article in a small city magazine published by the Missouri J-School, which I was attending at the time.

The article, published November 25 was promoting a show the band was going to play the following week in Columbia, Mo.

The last quote in the article was from front-man and lyricist Win Butler, who was describing the live experience.

It is just so unpredictable. If you come thinking you’ll get one thing, then there will be people with their arms folded. Come with an open mind, and you’ll get an experience.

I was intrigued. The promise of an experience, combined with Butler’s idea of an ideal band (Marlon Brando on drums, Cap’n Crunch on the congos, Peter Frampton on guitar, early Salt-N-Pepa doing a dance scene with The Fly Girls, and Roy Orbison as the vocalist) sold me on the show.

That’s how I decided go see a band called The Arcade Fire play MoJo’s in Columbia, Missouri on November 30, 2004.

Today (March 6, 2007), the band released their second album, “Neon Bible,” a wonderful and grandiose piece of music. I will not talk about that record (others have done a much better job) but I will use this opportunity for a little reflection.

In November 2004, The Arcade Fire sold out MoJo’s, which fits about 300 people. Today they sell out huge concert halls and stadiums within minutes. The buzz about them had started in 2004, but if you were not paying attention to music festivals such as CMJ, they weren’t anywhere near the radio, MTV or Rolling Stone. They were so small, in fact, that they were interviewed for that story I read in Vox Magazine. Today they grace four pages in the New York Times Magazine or the New Yorker.

I paid $8 to get into that show and I left sweaty and elated. The opening bands had dragged on too long and I was getting tired. But when the Arcade Fire came on to unleash a torrent of energy on a convoluted array of instruments from violins to motorcycle helmets, I was hooked. Instruments were being tossed in the air, band members were drumming on each other’s heads or the ceiling, and the crowd was ecstatic. Today, you hear people referring to an Arcade Fire concert experience as “cathartic.” I know where that’s coming from. (I couldn’t find pictures of that show, but here’s some from another gig on that fall 2004 tour)

I’m still debating whether I should go try to go see them at Glastonbury this summer. I love their music just as much as I did after I gave “Funeral” its first spin. But I know that the intimacy of that night in Missouri is unique–so unique that I don’t want to layer other memories on top of it.

Update (a little later in the day): If you’re curious how the Arcade Fire sounded live back in 2004, check out this recording from their Boston show.

PS: Remembering your musical past is fun–I recently reviewed a book that does just that (yes, it’s about how indie rock saved John Sellers’ life).

Early-bird that I am, I was the first to enter the screening-room of Four Eyed Monsters at Boston’s Coolidge Corner last week. Boiled down to a love-story of the MySpace and YouTube age (when is this phrase going to be considered old?), the film is a stirring portrayal of a relationship, as well as an educated–if cringe-worthy–reminder of our dependence and technology and the social awkwardness and self-consciousness it has layered like frosting on many of us.

But aside from what it says, the way it does it reflects another pesky phenomenon of our world–one that pre-dates MySpace by almost two decades. Four Eyed Monsters is also a film about people who film themselves, a picture-in-a-picture type of entertainment, something we’ve come to refer to as “meta.”

We are gathered here today because of “meta.” Meta has been a topic of conversation at my work for a few months–going back to the night when I casually dropped it in a conversation with a woman I had just met, prompting stupor from her at the word, and from me at the idiotic act I had just performed (Note to self: when in crowded clubs where interaction is achieved by shouting, the number of words used should be sparse. The types of words/phrases should be simple–such as “yeah,” “cool,” “want another beer?” and “want to make out?”)

What happened that night went a little like this. She had said earlier that night that it was fun to watch people dance, a statement I endorsed. A while later, I sat next to her (so I could face the dance floor myself) and, being the communicator that I am, I said: “Yeah, it is fun to watch people dance.” At that point she said something to the effect of: “But it’s even more fun to watch people who watch people dance.”

This is where I thought it wise to bust out my urban intellectual self. I declared, emphatically:

“That’s so meta.”

The conversation pretty much ended there, but it was just the beginning of months of back and forth with colleagues–debates revolving around a couple of questions:

1. What is this ‘meta’ business?

2. Can you really use meta as a stand-alone word?

I don’t know if we ever settled the debate, but a recent lunch-time conversation fueled by some print-outs I brought in, signaled that we had to bury the topic if we ever wanted to talk to each other again. These pieces I had found were an August 2006 article (it’s in a paid archive, but you can read it for free here) from the Chicago Tribune on how “meta” has become a separate word, and a 1988 (!) New Republic essay predicting that it would become one.

The Chicago Tribune article is arguably the more historic of the two, tracing the dictionary history of “meta” and then the evolution of the concept from its ancient Greek meaning of “after” to today’s meaning of self-referential whatever. To illustrate the point, author Nathan Bierma says: “I considered writing an article about writing this article, but I thought that would just be too meta.”

When “meta” was first being used, it was taken to mean a level beyond (Metaphysics, for example). But humans can’t resist a word that makes their lives more interesting. As Noam Cohen wrote in the 1988 TNR article, people quickly started attaching it to their own disciplines to spice them up (meta-ethics, meta-criticism etc.) Cohen writes:

These specialties study, respectively, the ethics of adhering to an ethical system, the criticism of self-criticism, and the logic of logical systems. The self-reference industry had been born.

The Oxford English Dictionary realized this was happening and thus this interpretation of “meta” was born:

orig. and chiefly U.S. Freq. in predicative use. Designating or characterized by a consciously sophisticated, self-referential, and often self-parodying style, whereby something (as a situation, person, etc.) reflects or represents the very characteristics it alludes to or depicts.

I soon noticed in my debates with my friends that they didn’t argue that the meaning of the word had evolved–they just didn’t like this evolution. But the fact that words evolve is a given, and whether your are for or against it might not matter much. Being able to study the evolution is much more rewarding.

It was at that point that I realized that disagreeing with the self-referential meaning of the word explains why my friends didn’t think “meta” should never be used alone, something I also disagreed with. To me, “meta” breaking away from the new constructs it found a place in seemed like a logical evolution. This was the meta-meta stage of the word.

What more amused me in this search is that the 1998 article saw the stand-alone use of meta coming a while back (today, it is perfectly common to stumble upon meta by itself in any type of publishing or broadcasting):

According to David Justice, editor for pronunciation and etymology at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “meta” currently is “the fashionable prefix.” He predicts that, like “retro”-whose use solely as a prefix, is so, well, retro-“meta” could become independent from other words, as in, “Wow, this sentence is so meta.” If so, you heard it from me first.

* Post edited to I’m From Barcelona‘s “Rec & Play,” a song about songs.

This is a picture from December. I now have about twice as more buttons pinned to my bag. Including one featuring an owl.

Boston is slushy tonight.

Snow, sleet and rain tore through the city earlier, turning it into the perfect humid wonderland for all couples graciously saving the economy tonight. But I’m not bitter—slush can be quite inspiring.

As I trudged home through puddles up to my ankles, my mind was busy playing the chorus of Dear Leader’s Father Baker:

Don’t you know the lake is frozen
There you are you forgot your coat again
We’re spinning in your car on an icy road in Buffalo

I remember talking to Davy Rothbart of FOUND Magazine once about how the littlest of information in a lost note is enough for you to imagine someone’s life. It’s the same with this song—there is so much intimacy in the second verse. Not only did he or she forget their coat, but they are know for being careless, known for walking straight through slush and shrugging it off. After all, they are the wild child spinning their car on an icy road in Buffalo.

I was yelling these lyrics out last Friday night at their show, foolishly hoping that my coarse voice, which always breaks midway through any chorus, will get me there—coat or no coat. And then, when my feet were planted in this magical land where responsibilities are a fireside joke, I would mumble the opening of the song to remind myself that I had made it:

You stole the car with your parents asleep
Stupid kids do stupid things
Joy riding and aching to be
On our way to heartbreak street

This story is about cars, heartbreak, and—as always—embarrassment.

Before I actually started hanging out with real women, there was Laura. Laura was my first girlfriend, albeit an imaginary one (and no Mirela back in second grade does not count because despite my unrelenting desire, we did little else but hold hands during a school trip to the glass-making factory).

I “met” Laura when I was about 12 or 13 and let me tell you that meeting an imaginary girlfriend is hard. They don’t just pop up at school, or at work, or giggling with friends at the neighborhood dive bar. No, you meet imaginary girlfriends in all sorts of sleazy corners of your own imagination. It was a dark night when I met Laura—as dark as an asshole, as Celine would say—and my dad was driving our family back home from a visit to some relatives in a town about one hour away.

There is a hill right outside this town and I decided it made perfect sense that Laura, who was also 12 or 13, would be standing out there at night (what?!), hitching a ride back to her hometown, which of course was the same as mine.

Of course my dad picked her up and we sat in the backseat happy to have found each other. I have no idea what this Laura looked like, but I can guarantee you that she was the hottest imaginary 12 or 13 year-old living in Transylvania in the early 1990s. She must have told me pretty stories in that hour’s drive because here I am remembering our trip, more than a decade later.

Yes, we saw each other for a while after that, too. We had to fit it around our school schedule, so most of our encounters happened at night. In my bed. She was usually a pillow draped in a banana-green pillow case and we often made out furiously for about 2 minutes or so. I told her what a good kisser she was and she naturally said that it was me that made her a good kisser. I told her she was twice as awesome as ice cream, and she bit my nose and told me I was twice as smart as her entire family combined.

I vaguely remember that we did not consummate our torrid affair, probably because we thought of each other as being too pure for carnal endeavors. That, or I had come to my senses and decided that it’s one thing to kiss your pillow, and a whole other to hump it in the name of love.

We eventually broke up and I promise you that we have not seen each other since. There were three other imaginary girlfriends before I turned 16, but those were invented to impress others. Laura had been just for me.

When I eventually met a flesh and blood Laura years later (it was snowing, but it was not at night on top of a hill with my dad driving), it’s possible a great deal of my affection for her was prompted by her name alone.

It’s one particular moment in this period of my life that I remembered tonight as I was deftly trying to avoid a puddle only to step into another one (I am famously clumsy). I was talking on the phone at the same time and the friend at the other end was chiding me for not acknowledging the “coffee cup” Facebook gift she sent me as a joke earlier in the day. But I did acknowledge it, I protested.

I even sent a reply, I told her.

I didn’t get it, she said.

Maybe I sent it to somebody else then, I replied.

And that’s when it all came back.

I occasionally send really long e-mails that say nothing but are heavy on words (like this post for example). Well, in a Freudian slip back in 2002 I typed in the wrong e-mail address for the flesh and blood Laura, sending the message to a Hotmail account, instead of a Yahoo one.

I don’t have that e-mail anymore, but what I do have is a reply from this other Laura that received my message. I was living in Romania at the time so my e-mail was written in Romanian (it also probably included lyrics from Marilyn Manson). But the reply, written in all CAPS, was in English. This Laura had the same last name as the intended recipient so it probably means that she left Romania when she was young. Thus, even though she seemed to have deciphered the message, she wasn’t proficient enough to reply in Romanian.

Here is that e-mail in its entirety–I have converted it lower case to spare you the shouting:

I recieved your letter, and can read most of it and understand it. Yet, can you please send me another letter telling me exactly who you are? Please….i’m very sure who you are but let me know. And let me know what you/we should do about this important situation. This summer i will have some time off school, i want to do some traveling.

Can you please write back so we can arrange something?

This has been one of the most touching letters i’ve ever read…it was beautiful and makes my soul cry.

I’m sorry…

I don’t know what else to say, except for, we have a lot of talking to do. And if possible could you possibly write back in english. It would be easier for me to understand.

Laura 🙂

I never made anyone’s soul cry before or after. I also never replied to the mysterious Laura as I felt I had done enough damage with my „touching letter.” I don’t know if her travels were fruitful, nor do I know whether she found a solution to „this important situation.”

Still, I decided to dedicate this post to her. I hope that (whoever and wherever she is), she is happy today. I like to imagine her having a happy Valentine’s Day next to a guy who hums lyrics from Bon Savants’ „Between the moon and the ocean” into her ear.

Uh-oh, Uh-oh
You kiss like a Russian
Uh-oh, Uh-oh
We sank so low between the moon and the ocean
Uh-oh, Uh-oh

You know your favorite ex-indie label band (yes, of course I’m talking about the Decemberists) has made it big when, within the span of a couple of days, you hear a hit from their major label debut played in a bookstore (Barnes & Noble) and then a national coffee shop chain (Au Bon Pain).

The hit? The star-crossed lovers tale of “O, Valencia” of course. (look for the video here)

Can I please take credit for blasting this song way back in October? Thank you.

At number five in his Zurau aphorisms, Franz Kafka puts offers this though:

From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

For all I know, Kafka could have been talking about one’s whole life and that melancholy moment when you realize that the path in front of you is likely to encounter little to no future crossroads, no distractions, no temptations. But since that doesn’t sit with me, I prefer to think Kafka was referring to particular moments–when one struggles with a decision, looking for that sharp corner he must turn.

Well, after months of tormenting myself (here and here for example) and those around me, I believe I have reached this point, and it happens to be a British Airways ticket from Boston to Bucharest.

For a while beginning in May, Owlspotting will be based in Romania–at least a new point will have to be reached.

PS: Ideas for cool projects to do in Romania? Drop me a line.

(Disclaimer: The whole point of the story below is to promote this article I just did on the prevalence of personal stories in a series of media projects, ranging from blogs to magazines to stage shows.)

My life changed in the summer of 1996.

This was the summer when the first copyright law was introduced in Romania—quickly leading to the disappearance of counterfeit Polish and Russian cassette tapes from stores around town. Up to that point I diligently bought almost every release of Euro-dance greats from Sweden to Holland to Germany. I was proud of my hundreds of tapes and even prouder of the “Best of” mix cassettes I turned them into. Back then I strongly believed that my music collection–which I later learned contained little quality material (except for maybe MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice)–was the key to my social survival. I also day-dreamed about how this collection would ultimately ease my plunge into romantic adventures with girls who smelled like vanilla.

The disappearance of knock-off labels like Poker Music (oh, yes!) and Vivo forced me to resort to desperate measures, such as recording music from the radio. It might have also prompted me to tell Cristina I loved her.

That summer I finished my freshman year of high school–nine months of torture that almost led to me being kicked out of school for skipping classes (that’s another story altogether). That same summer Cristina finished her senior year and, barred an act of Balkanic bravery on my part, I would never see her again.

Now, let’s get the obvious out of the way. I didn’t know Cristina and she certainly did not know me. We were never introduced, we never spoke to each other, and the closest I got to her was walking back into the school building after breaks between classes. I don’t remember what she wore or what she smelled like—although whatever it was, it must have been divine. What I do remember is that she was tall, had long black hair and was just cross-eyed enough to break your heart. And, unless my memory went cuckoo (Speak, Memory!), I remember hearing her voice: coarse, stern, yet playful—as if she chain smoked for comic relief.

I decided quickly she would be my unattainable freshman year crush. I watched her daily from a distance and scribbled her name on my arm during boring classes, feeling that the lame body art made her more palpable. My dad would wake me up in the morning to go to school, and I’d still have the scribbles on my forearm from the day before. He would ask who Cristina was, and would laugh as I tried to pull my sleeves over my clumsy love samizdat.

By the time school ended that year, I had found out her last name and where she lived. Although I couldn’t work up the courage to talk to her, I did tell friends about her. One classmate (who later dropped out of school caught in an early experimental phase) told me he knew her—not knew her knew her, but he did know where she lived because he lived in the building next door. Her address and her last name (which today I don’t remember if it was Popa or Pop or Iosif) meant there was a chance.

So one day, a couple of weeks into the summer vacation, I was at my grandparents recording tracks from the radio, when I decided to write her a letter. I probably told her what a magnificent creature she was, how I couldn’t stop thinking about her, how I understood the problems that age difference might cause between us, and how I’d give anything to go out with her. I must have been darn pleased of my composition because I decided to deliver it myself rather than entrust the postman with it. How? Simple: I would walk over to her apartment building at 5 AM the next day and drop the letter on her doorstep on the fourth floor.

This is where things take a turn for the humiliating—but bear with me a little. Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, says a good story is made out of chunks of action and reflection. Well, the action is me writing this letter and deciding to deliver it to a girl who doesn’t know me at the crack of dawn. Reflecting back on it today, I see that by deciding to cut the intermediary, I was showing more courage than I had throughout the school year. I also realize what an idiotic plan that was, and I believed I probably loved the idea of writing the letter more than the idea of getting results out of it.

Let me explain.

The next day, I sneak out of my grandparents’ apartment building at 5 AM and make the 20-minute trip to hers. I am clutching the letter and my knees are shaking as I climb the stairs—not because of the letter, but because I am terrified a neighbor will open the door and see a pale-faced brat probably looking to steal something or piss in the plants that Romanians grow in the beige hallways to make them Soviet-blocks look less like prisons.

I drop the letter on her doorstep and make a run for it. I am relieved, happy and full of hope. I had spilled my heart and also gave precise instructions about replying. She would have to write back and drop the letter in the same place she found mine—I would be there the next morning at 5 AM to look for it. In her letter, she was encouraged to accept a date, and I promised to return with details.

I realize today how stupid that was. My gesture, though well-intentioned was as romantic as an invitation to tour a slaughterhouse at sundown. What kind of mad stalker leaves letters on your doorstep at 5 AM and then promises a drooling return the next morning? If I was her dad, I would have made sure to be out there the next day, holding a baseball bat, a big-ass umbrella or whatever other pain-inducing object I had stored in my closet.

But I was young and naïve, and books had instructed me that women love this kind of mystery. Well, I WAS MYSTERY—a full 130 pounds of honey-drizzled mystery!

I made the trip to her house again the next day and climbed the stairs just as terrified. I didn’t dare walk all the way up to the fourth floor, so I peeked from the stairs. There was no letter on the doorstep.

I ran out, more puzzled than dejected. My letter was no longer there, which was a good sign. But what if her parents got the letter and burned it in a Satanic ritual? What if she was out of town and didn’t read it yet? What if a neighbor stole it? What if her alarm clock didn’t ring and she didn’t wake up in time to deliver her heartfelt reply?

The reason I was willing to lie to myself is because I never gave her any alternatives. There was no e-mail back then. No cell phones. Plus, I don’t believe I gave her my address, or my home phone. Maybe not even my last name. In my desire to appear a knight in mysterious armor, I only gave her one option to get on my awesome horse. And she missed it.

Maybe unconsciously I was just looking for a way to break-up with her. She had tortured me enough over the year by making me conscious of my fear of talking to her, and I was looking for a way to break the evil spell of the “what ifs” (As in: what if I had talked to her at school?). My letter presented her with a simple choice. She would either be wowed and agree to have tons of cross-eyed babies with me, or she would not and we’d break-up, never regretting the time we didn’t spend together—a concept I like to call “ex-future girlfriend.”

I got over Cristina a week later, when I met R. on the train to summer camp. She had long dark hair, smelled divinely and was about to enter her senior year. Eager not to repeat past mistakes, I stared at her sucking on a lollipop, gathered all the courage to be found in the feeble mind of a 15-year-old, and launched into the darkness with a shaky voice.

“Do you like to suck?”

Oh, boy, couldn’t I have just written a letter?

Mix tapes are very consuming enterprises even for someone who makes plenty of playlists on a regular basis. I finally got around to putting together a bunch of songs to stand as my 40 American months mix, and I have to admit I’m pleased with this one (read about past ones here).

I went through the trouble of bolding a few tracks that benefited from heavy IPod rotation.

1. Of Montreal – Heimdalsgate like a Promethean curse
2. Copeland – Control freak
3. Me First & the Gimme Gimmes – Much too young to feel this old
4. The Shins – Turn on me
5. Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s – Skeleton key
6. Bon Savants – Between the moon and the ocean
7. Umbrellas – Angel or demon
8. Shiny Toy Guns – Rainy Monday
9. Damien Rice – Rootless tree
10. My Chemical Romance – This is how I disappear
11. Dear Leader – Radar
12. The Long Blondes – Once and never again
13. The Decemberists – The crane wife 3
14. Voxtrot – Fast asleep
15. Arcade Fire – Intervention
16. Beirut – Scenic world
17. Pony Up! – Dance for me
18. Peter Bjorn and John – Objects of my affection
19. Modest Mouse – Dashboard
20. Cold War Kids – Hospital beds
21. The Strays – You are the evolution
22. Deerhoof – + 81
23. The Dresden Dolls – Delilah
24. Devastations – I don’t want to lose you tonight