What if you created your own personal deck of Tarot cards? I don’t mean simply designing your own version of the traditional Tarot symbols – magician, moon, lovers, etc. I mean what if you created a whole new deck using symbols and images that pertain specifically to you and your own life? What images would you put on those cards?
(And before we go any further let’s just acknowledge that reading what follows doesn’t require anything resembling ‘belief’ in divination via Tarot cards. Though if you’re into that kind of thing, that’s cool, too. This is all about symbolism and only symbolism. Make what you will of each symbol. We can have fun with that kind of thing, right? My own interest in Tarot cards no doubt originated via my collecting habits, which I’ve had as long as I can remember. Baseball cards and Star Wars cards were early and formative manifestations of that habit, and in that sense Nolan Ryan and Han Solo are at least as interesting to me as The Magician or The Fool.)
Think about your life and consider the moments that define it for you, those occasions that figure most prominently in your own idea of yourself, the modes or motions that form the building blocks of your sense of self – the person you have been and the person that you currently are.
Snapshots emerge; you’re sitting behind a desk in school, or you’re in the kitchen learning how to make linguini. Either of those might go on a card, and they’d symbolize education, teaching, exploring new ideas.
Or let’s say maybe you took an archery class in college and in doing so you somehow discovered a heretofore unknown secret self, one that’s charged up by the whole process of archery and everything associated with it. So you spent hours outside practicing the craft. And now, all these years later, even after you’ve long since given it up because other interests or obligations took precedence, you still remember with fondness all that time spent out in the open air pulling the arrow back in the quiver, aiming, letting go, watching it hit or miss, feeling the thrill or letdown. Maybe that memory calls up some part of you that feels like a fundamental aspect of the person you still are. So you come to cherish the reminder.That could go on a card: THE ARCHER. It denotes precision, goals, the act of taking aim.
Maybe in retrospect the endeavor feels like it was “just a phase” but in any event the memory provides some kind of emotional or motivational sustenance. Or growth. That’s the kind of thing we’re after.
Could be it’s something fraught with difficulty, like maybe your relationship with a parent or sibling was strained, so one of the images your subconscious dredges up is of the two of you in a room, arguing. This card is called THE CONFLICT, it depicts each person wearing an exasperated expression, and when you consult your own personal book of Tarot meanings you find that it symbolizes friction, disagreement, the navigation of complex interrelated emotions.
It could be something a little more light-hearted or frivolous; a patch of grass in the yard you claimed as your own personal dreamspace. (THE QUIET PLACE. It means escape, solitude, communing with nature. Not to be confused with A Quiet Place, which is none of the above.)
Could be it’s the act of standing in front of a candy rack scanning the selection on offer, deciding between chocolate and gummy bears. (SWEET CHOICE, it means a surfeit of sensation, intoxication, dental bills.) Could be it’s something even more mundane, a small moment (those can be just as important as the big ones, and often enough they’re way more important) like you and a group of friends simply sitting around the table talking, or some still frame image representing all those hours you spent in your room alone reading comics and listening to records. (I regret nothing.)
These moments are like touchstones, in a way, paradigms that we carry around as signposts of our consciousness, charting our histories, mapping our emotional terrain, informing our idea of who we are. Each image contains whole sets of interrelated feelings, in the same way that each Tarot image contains within it layers of interrelated meanings, foreshadowings, puzzles to be solved, hidden subtexts waiting for us to apply our own knowledge and intuition in an effort to intuition in an effort to untangle the web of our (sub)consciousness and identify more clearly our own complicated place in the world.
Our sense of self can feel like a slippery, illusory thing. It can help us to have a fixed idea of where we’ve been, what our values are, where we feel most at home or most disoriented, what we most desire to be. Where exactly our fears are lying in wait to devour us, and what those fears look like.
Just as a for-instance, my fears look like Linda Blair in demonic make-up and they are projectile-vomiting in my general direction. I really do not wanna put that on a Tarot card, though. Let’s think of some other option.
I can think of a few. A whole lot of ‘em, actually. It’s pretty easy once you start considering it to come up with moments that linger in the psyche like dream polaroids, reminders of key instances, ongoing occasions of growth or joy, obstacles overcome or fears to be faced. The kind of image —or series of images—that crystalize in our mind’s eye some version of the favorite self we’d like to be.
When I started considering this idea, scanning my memories for suitable snapshot moments, I was surprised and amused to find that I kept drifting into territory laid out in George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti. Seeing that movie rearranged my brain as a young person. Or rather it helped organize my brain, and helped shape some of my ideas about the world. Maybe not this particular world, but one that could be eerily similar. Some kind of world, in any case; the kind I imagined I wanted to inhabit.
The characters in American Graffiti are all confronting big changes. They’re teenagers, recent high school graduates, thinking about adulthood and how they’re gonna handle it. Each is contemplating decisions that it’s understood will have drastic effects on their future; whether to head off to college, whether to sever romantic ties, whether to give up drag racing altogether. Those questions lurk as subtext even in the scenes during which they are not being directly addressed. Mostly, these scenes involve people riding around in cars listening to the radio.
It’s easy to imagine that when these characters eventually look back on this time in their lives (if they were, you know, real people) they might be less likely to care particularly about the specifics of whatever Big Decisions they were making at the time, and more likely to remember some larger feeling, one colored by the context, the backdrop against which all of the pertinent factors were weighed. Probably, this would boil down to some blurry vision of cars cruising small town streets, the spontaneity and joy of driving around at night, the allure of the lights and sounds, the quiet excitement of making connections, missing connections, feeling a sense of shared drama in their collective lives and in all the songs flowing nonstop out of the radio. This is the stuff that George Lucas most memorably captured in the film.
The stuff of memory. We all know how tricky it can be. Artists have utilized that trickiness since time and art began, but the craft has especially flourished in these last few decades. The creation of a mood or an atmosphere that recalls a supposedly bygone era can hit an audience in a couple different ways: it can either ring particularly poignant emotional bells in those who lived through that era, or it can create a particularly compelling fantasyland idea of that era for those who were not around to experience it. American Graffiti was a giant hit because it did both so effectively.
Notoriety bred imitation, and American Graffiti in the mid 70’s became a front-and-center example of a new wave of nostalgia for 1950’s/early ’60’s culture that spread like wildfire throughout the entertainment media landscape. Suddenly doo-wop music and leather jackets became ubiquitous.
Some people just got sick of the whole thing, the same way we often become annoyed with whatever is popular. Some people decried the whole idea of using nostalgia for effect as a facile and opportunistic move, to the extent that nostalgia itself, in some circles, became a semi-dirty word.
That might be fair enough, anyone watching American Graffiti is likely to have some memory that jibes with what goes on in the film, especially if they grew up in a smaller town in the latter part of the twentieth century. If that’s the case the film is likely to provoke a kind of warm fuzzy glow, maybe a yearning for lost youth or some specific memory from it. Those kind of memories can be idealized versions of a time you only vaguely remember or merely wish you could remember. Subjective, potentially misleading stuff, it’s understood. We remember what we want, in the way that we want, regardless of facts or perspective. So it goes.
But whether a viewer experiences the movie as something to be enjoyed or endured is purely subjective, too. One person’s criticism is another person’s resonance. Per Wikipedia, Pauline Kael said the film in fact had “no resonance except from the jukebox sound and the eerie, nocturnal jukebox look.” She meant that as a criticism but as soon as I read those words my own Inner Eyes started spinning madly; wait, did you say eerie nocturnal jukebox look? I WANT TO SEE THAT MOVIE.
I did see it, at the formative age of eight, too young to have read Kael’s criticism but old enough to have read the Mad magazine parody of the film – my memory of that 1979 edited network television premier is mainly of marveling at the way artist Mort Drucker had so uncannily captured the actors’ likenesses. And in an early example of the trainspottery OCD tendencies that would often go on to plague or enrich my life, I also remember matching the action and dialogue onscreen with my sister’s paperback movie-tie in, which re-printed the script in full. Anytime the actors said something that didn’t quite match up with the book I took careful note, as if the discrepancies were going to add up to some kind of insight that might prove valuable. Nothing’s come of that endeavor so far, but I’ll keep you posted.
Mostly I noticed the way the music so deftly intertwined with the plot and the imagery to create a very particular mood, a kind of teenage nightdream, crackling with possibility. George Lucas designed the film as a nontraditional musical, one in which the music, drawn from the late fifties and early sixties, is practically a character in itself. The songs he chose constitute a free-flowing, fairly unerring collection of early rock, doo-wop, radio pop, soul and surf music. (That latter genre provides an amusing example of the way so many of us lament the inevitable turning of the popular music tide away from the music of our supposedly glorious youth, when in one scene the greaser character angrily dismisses the Beach Boys, declaring “I hate that surf shit!” It’s so easy to transpose that phrase across subsequent generations: “I hate that punk shit!” “I hate that electronic shit!” “I hate that country-pop shit!” It’s also easy to imagine how easily any person who says something like that might eventually look back fondly on their lost youth and realize how much they actually love that surf shit.)
My older sister had the soundtrack album, which I had already absorbed prior to seeing the film. I think I must’ve been drawn to the deep orange color of the cover, with its neon-tinted illustration of a roller-skating drive-in waitress. (I wanted so badly to go eat at a place where the waitresses wore roller-skates, and was very disappointed to find out it was a trend that had long since died out. How, I wondered, could something so obviously cool die out?) From there it was easy to get hooked by all the hooks — the falsettos, the swinging rhythms, piano fills, sax breaks, and especially all the “ain’t that a shame” and “go, Johnny go!” and “Why do birds sing so gay?”
The 2LP set (or 2CD set, and if you go looking please find one or the other in the used bins, because rights issues prevent the album from being presented on streaming services in all its dream-filled fullness) is a kind of concept album; in its own way it documents the same teenage rites of passage that go on in the movie. There’s lots of strolling and twisting, lots of little darlins and party dolls. There’s teen angels and heartbroken fools trying to break the code embedded in the Book of Love. Several songs are hidden matched pairs; within one side we encounter both The Great Imposter and The Great Pretender, one song has a singer contemplating the journey lovers take from first encounter to the aisle and a few songs later another guy (the same one?) is crying in the chapel. There’s also two songs celebrating a girl’s sixteenth birthday, one of which (“You’re Sixteen”) now sounds much creepier than the other (“Sixteen Candles”), though I guess that’s if you assume the guy singing it is as old as he sounds. (Ringo Starr had a very inappropriate number one hit with a cover of the former, it’s widest exposure happening near-simultaneously with American Graffiti’s cinema and chart run.)
As a kid I became obsessed with those four sides of music, and decades later I still think it’s one of the greatest albums ever made. Bedrock songs by Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly sit alongside great novelty numbers by the Coasters and The Big Bopper, then there’s great dance songs (how does one do the Peppermint Twist? It goes round and round, and up and down, of course, plus one-two-three-KICK one-two-three JUMP) and heartrending ballads sung by artists with dreamy, evocative names like The Crests and The Skyliners and The Diamonds. There’s even a reverse ringer – one of my favorite tracks back in 1978-9 was an early-sixties pastiche by a contemporary-to-1973 band called Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids. They appear in the movie, too, as the band at the school dance. I thought their song “She’s So Fine” was just as old as all the rest of the songs in the movie, and I didn’t realize I’d been faked out til many years later.
(And isn’t it a little crazy how these impressions involve so many eras of time? Flat circle or not, time is for sure a weirdly elastic thing.)
The album as a whole is a coolly kinetic listen; fast and funny, rife with feeling. I listened over and over, and every time the guy the guy ended up breaking his bottle of love potion number nine I found it both hilarious and heartbreaking. I mean, all that guy wants is to find a little love in this cold hard world. Who can’t relate?
My favorite song back then (maybe now, too) was Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” A number one chart hit in 1961, “Runaway” is a sweeping mini-drama of a song, nocturnal and full of longing, more than a little forlorn. For all that, it’s also fairly lively. Del Shannon’s distinctively grainy voice keens and jumps and quivers so that by the time he begins to wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder why his baby ran away the listener feels his angst right in the gut.
The winding melody and way Shannon sings it is the upfront attraction, but the key feature is the minor-key mood, the bleary atmosphere created via the county-fair calliope sound of the piano and the jarringly high-pitched solo, played by keyboardist Max Crook on something that Wikipedia tells me is called a Musitron. It all adds up to a different kind of vivid, and decades later it still hits with rare raw nerve. Heartbreak doesn’t go out of style.
The song is a deceptively simple thing; it lasts barely more than two minutes, but the shadows and sadness within it seem to stretch and make it longer. It feels sort of small and rickety, but in the mind’s eye it expands into a whole emotional landscape. There’s a cinematic flow to it, a sense of characters and movement and place. Maybe a barren place, but one that’s easy enough to dream on. Romantic fools like you and I are of course gonna be suckers for it, as we inevitably are for any drama that takes place in the rain with one character walking and crying, tears and rainfall indistinguishable. I’ve come to associate that part of the song with Jeanne Moreau walking aimlessly in the rain, wondering what’s become of her hapless thief lover in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, released three years prior to “Runaway” but nonetheless a spiritual bedfellow.
The rain becomes a reflecting pool, and I’ve always sort of wanted to ask the characters in American Graffiti how they felt about it at the time, in those moments depicted in the movie, whether they felt like it reflected back at them anything they were going through. (Um, again, you know, if they were real people. They are fictional. Right?)
Who knows, but if you asked the characters years later, decades later, how they felt about it, then surely the song would conjure a difficult-to-define sense of longing. That underlying emotion is what a listener keys in on, even if they don’t realize it’s happening. That process can happen most easily if you’re moving. As part of a blur in traffic. You’re caught up in the movement and the feeling until you’re feeling it so strongly you have a sense of being both present in the moment and disappearing altogether. As if you’re a character in a movie. (Are we? Nah, we’re real people.)
“Runaway” plays early on in American Graffiti, as the characters are settling into small-town cruising mode, depicted as a series of flashing headlights and spinning tires and kids leaning out of the windows of moving cars, shouting at each other. Cruising as a rite of passage continued for several decades (has it ended? Seems like maybe it has.) but it was in its infancy when the movie takes place, in 1962.
For context, a movie that takes place in 1962 that gets released in 1973 is equivalent to a movie being released today (as I’m writing this, anyway) that takes place in roughly 2014. That movie, if it emulated the radio hit format of American Graffiti, would have a soundtrack containing Katy Perry and Pharrell Williams and OneRepublic. Laugh if you want, but if that movie was made and released today it would likely ring very loud bells in the psyches and souls of a pretty significant number of people, maybe even you or me. We all have our meaningful phases and stages.
The American Graffiti soundtrack album provided an example to me at a young age of the idea that a set of songs can be more than a backdrop or a nice diversion. A set of songs can be a marker of a specific period of a person’s life. A scrapbook, sure, but better yet it could be a territory. A terrain of consciousness that we share with others, friends or family, or keep within ourselves like a secret map, an electric outline of one specific season in our lives.
I’ve carried that idea around with me pretty much my whole life, and one of the first times I remember being conscious of it came with my own cruising-around-with-friends experiences, which took place in 1986-7, when I was 15-16. Unlike the kids in American Grafitti, who only had the radio and were therefore forced to hew pretty close to the music of their own era in their listening habits, my friends and I had a few decades worth of music at our disposal. And we had that genius invention of the eighties; the mix tape. We listened to cheap cassettes that we made in our own homes, usually from vinyl. Lots of Talking Heads and The Who and Ramones and R.E.M. and Patti Smith and Beatles and Violent Femmes. It can be fun to think about what a double album soundtrack from this period might include, and I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time compiling that kind of thing in my imagination (and, truthfully, in reality —hello, era of the mix CD.)
A set of songs can sum up the emotional tone of one of life’s seasons. For me and my little friends it would’ve been So. Central Rain and Psycho Killer and Blister in the Sun and Squeeze’s Up the Junction. Look, we’ve got our own soundtrack album!
Those days of driving around aimlessly listening to music, the act of doing so, now feels illustrative of some greater guiding spirit at work in my little world. That memory qualifies as a Tarot card representation of one facet of my own particular peculiar soul: a moving car, me and a friend in front, music streaming from the speakers and moving us along as surely as the wheels or the gas, invading the spirit in indelible ways so that the sense of youth at work and play miwith the sounds and the sense of discovery and weird soul to form some kind of locked-in-place yet still-elastic paradigm. It’s that feeling of only having been there once, yet still somehow always being there.
Is any of this making any sense? Here, try this:
This is what the characters in American Graffiti are up to, and as surely as “Runaway” must’ve continued to carry resonance for those characters in their imaginary world, it’s also the feeling that any number of R.E.M. or Violent Femmes songs (played on a beat-up Memorex tape) will always conjure in my own allegedly real one; a sense of adventure and comradeship, with an underlying subtext of unanswered questions, a future and an outside world that we're not too keen on getting back to anytime soon. Because we want to hear whatever song comes next.
Sometimes now when I’m out and about in traffic I’ll look around at passing cars and see people who must be experiencing some version of the same stuff. Worrying about whatever crisis large or small is going on in their lives, using whatever song they’re listening to as a way to navigate their feelings.
Sometimes I’ll even spot us – me and my high school pals – still out there driving around aimlessly. You know, out looking for KICKS. It’s 1986, and we’re not wearing seatbelts. Guys, please be careful.
Maybe we’re on our way to work. Work can be a thorny subject when you’re a teenager; it’s so dangerously close to adulthood, and it takes away so much time that could otherwise be spent hanging out with your friends doing basically nothing. The Silhouettes’ doo-wop lament “Get a Job” taunts the kids in American Graffitti just as annoyingly as it would me and my friends, in some spiritual way, years later. We got our recorded version of that sentiment via The Smiths: “I was looking for a job and then I found a job / and Heaven knows I’m miserable now.”
Through some stroke of luck, skill, or nepotism (my grandmother knew the owner) a couple of friends and I managed to realize a modest dream when we got hired as on-air disc jockeys at one of the (only two, though I guess we were lucky to have that many) commercial radio stations in our little town. That particular ambition had been inspired at least in part by American Graffiti. The kids in the movie are united not only by the music itself but by the DJ who brings it to them, portrayed in the film by the legendary real-life on-air personality Wolfman Jack. His asides, exhortations, and silly jokes, delivered in the burry growl that gave him his name, are used as a linking device between songs and scenes. The kids regard him as a mystery figure, speculating about his real identity, his location, how and why he does what he does. Kids of all different social groups rally around him in an almost religious way. On air via telephone between songs one young girl gushes “Oh boy, I love you, Wolfman!”
The sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, a moderate TV hit around the same time as the first network airing of American Graffiti, had already instilled in me a romanticized view of the DJ life. I particularly liked the “cool” on-air personalities on that show; Howard Hesseman’s burnout rocker Dr. Johnny Fever, perpetually dressed in jeans and faded t-shirt, sunken eyes always hidden behind dark glasses, and Tim Reid’s Venus Flytrap, who conducts his evening-hour smooth R&B show with the lights down low and candles lit, windchimes at the ready for ambient sound effects. But the allure of being a disc jockey really crystallized for me via one scene late in American Graffiti, when Curt (played by Richard Dreyfuss), confused about his future and desperately pining for a mystery girl he’d glimpsed earlier in the film, seeks out the Wolfman at his outskirts-of-town station base.
There in the desolate station he finds a lone DJ sitting in a tiny ill-lit room, surrounded by tape cartridges and records. The scene resembles the cover of Donald Fagan’s 1982 album The Nightfly, which features a similarly nocturnal scene of a DJ sitting at a microphone in a room full of shadow and smoke. Somehow that struck me as a very desirable place to be. Not only might being there provide a good way to escape the rigors and confusions of our big bad world, but it might actually be something more: I imagined being in that little booth as a kind of parallel world, an existence just slightly outside or beyond this one, a small universe all its own.
The DJ character in the film tells Curt he is not actually the Wolfman, he’s only filling in. But later, as Curt is leaving, he spots the DJ speaking on air in the same raspy voice that clearly belongs to the same person that the characters in the film have been looking to as a kind of spiritual guide. That he doesn’t want Curt to know his true identity is paradoxically a humanizing trait, crucial for a character who basically spends his time sitting alone in the dark perpetuating his own mystery cult. He tells Curt “The Wolfman is everywhere,” then he offers him a popsicle. (The freezer’s broken, all the popsicles are melting.) Then he plays the next song.
Technically it doesn’t feature at this spot in the movie, but one song that might have fit well within these scenes of nocturnal mystery is “I Only Have Eyes For You” by The Flamingos. It’s a lovely, haunting tune, swaying, gentle, sung by a person who can’t see the moon and the stars because he’s so blinded by love, his devotion so great it renders him senseless. I believe to the core of my potentially misshapen soul that this song, in addition to being a perfect choice for this moment in the film, and the perfect song to play in a dark radio station near the midnight hour, is also among the very tiny few thousand finest works of aural art mankind has yet produced. If that sounds like hyperbole, maybe it is, but I am hardly alone in this conviction.
“I Only Have Eyes For You” is a moonlight ballad, charged up with a sense of stillness, drunk on sky and nighttime and unfathomable ardor. There’s a languid, hypnotic quality to the sound, along with a little bit of a warm smile; the slow-strummed chords of the guitar underline the vocals as if to say “Hey, man, keep going, ride this feeling as long as you possibly can.” For the listener, it might last for some kind of forever.
Background voices chant “shoo-bop, shoo-bop” and the sound echoes across the track like some ethereal chemtrail, adding a little levity to the dreamy mood. The dreamlike quality is apt; guitarist Terry Johnson claimed the arrangement, background vocals and all, came to him when he fell asleep with his guitar on his chest while trying to figure out how to record the song. When he woke up “It was like God put my fingers just where they were supposed to be.”*
Divine intervention or not, life sometimes (maybe not often enough) has a way of putting us exactly in that place we’re supposed to be. At my radio job we carried a syndicated oldies show that ran deep into the night every weekend. Often I’d be working that shift and sometimes “I Only Have Eyes For You” or “Runaway” would pop up and I’d get that sense of having been in this place before and of knowing I’d be there again. That might sound like a mystical idea, it felt like one for sure, but it’s also just realistic - I worked that shift every Saturday.
Sometimes at the station during those late night shifts, especially if one of those moody old songs came up, I’d get up and wander through the hallways, watching shadows, counting cobwebs. I’d think about how ten years earlier I had wanted to find myself in a space just like this one. I’d wonder if I might be visited by some sort of character like Curt. I didn’t have any advice or popsicles to offer. Now that I’m thinking about it I guess I’m glad that never happened, it would have freaked me out.
In any event, working those shifts felt like a realization of something, less a dream that I’d aspired to than a dreamstate I’d wanted to conjure into reality. Alone in a booth, music playing. Lost in a series of small dreams but also hearing the whirring type of the news coming over the teleprinter. Isolated and connected. That connection was a key part of the equation – the feeling of being away from the world but also an active part of it. At least inasmuch as it was my responsibility to make sure the sounds kept going out to the public without interruption and that the news and the station ID’s ran at the required times.
Then there was all of that music and the sense of flow and reversed time it inspired. So many of the songs that we thought of as oldies then were less than two decades old at the time they were being aired on those syndicated shows. This is, again, at the time of this writing, the equivalent of considering something like Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” a golden oldie. Jarring dissonances in the perception of time are just a given in life. No point in obsessing, I guess, but Holy Crap, “Crazy” is still a new song, isn’t it?
Dissonances in art and/or time can be jarring and/or stirring, and I think part of the reason “I Only Have Eyes For You” works so well and endures so strongly is not only the beguiling mood it evokes but also because, whether it’s actually there in the song or not, the listener can’t help but come away with a tiny chill. The song carries in it a forever feeling, outside of time. Simultaneously, as the song is playing the listener also understands, implicitly, that the act of listening is only an ephemeral state. There’s a cool and unnerving friction at work there. To quote 1974 Cat Stevens (and why not, timeslips are already abounding here) we want it to last forever but we know it never will. Is that really true, though?
We’re told that nothing lasts, and we’re supposed to believe it, to always keep it in mind, right?
That’s why symbolism like that contained in the Tarot can be so powerful, because it hints otherwise. That’s why those weird little moments in time and the images that represent those times – or the feelings inspired by them – tend to resonate so strongly. They feel like forever. The sun, the moon, the lovers, the tower. The archer, the DJ, the kid in the candy store.
They’re fleeting things, in a way, for sure – the tower’s already collapsing and the sun’s gonna go full-on red giant eventually. Then there’s all those big ideas; Strength and Temperance and, ultimately, boo, Death. Judgement. You know, the everyday things. Those uncomfortable ideas that we just have to live with somehow, so we make symbols out of them.
It’s that part, the living with it, that we sometimes end up taking for granted. All the small ways we deal with the big things. Aren’t those moments worthy of being made into symbols, too? They help, right? The driving around, the car radio songs, the sense of movement, of going somewhere (or nowhere) on one hand. And the sense of staying put on the other, the radio DJ’s sense of isolation and connection, of being heard and not seen.
Both of those symbols represent a need to get away from the world at large and both also represent a hidden, haunted need to connect, to share in the moment. Those are evergreen human traits. The same kind of traits we transform into songs, and then we put those songs into collections that constitute one multi-faceted single emotion. No wonder we make mix tapes and playlists. Also no wonder we gathered all those paradigmatic images and put them in a deck of cards. And also no wonder that deck’s allure has lasted centuries; it’s a mirror. Maybe it’s cracked and dull, maybe it’s shiny and clear but we obviously find comfort in the reflections.
Those paradigms represent less a moment in time or reversed time than forever time. Human nature, as long as it lasts. (It’s been going on for a while, right?) The friendships and the cars and the records and the moonlight and all those other things that come and go and linger. Riding and listening, hanging out, being alone.
In a place like that the bearings go a little loose. Time begins there and it also stops there. And then it keeps on going.
*https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-flamingos-only-have-eyes-you
