THEN I SAID

Simon here. Just got back in. Been out cycling you see. For such a jet-setter I sure travel like the common folk. Nights are colder than just a few weeks ago. Dark streets a little darker. The few light-posts just that bit further apart it seems. It’s only me out there. I use the breadth of the street, doing large, slow, lazy turns. The crank makes a noise like a broken collarbone when I need to pedal. I have a small rusty chain for a lock. It’s a women’s bike a friend said. Down Montana, a left onto 6th, past the school and the basket court, a right onto California. I roll down the slight hill, one foot resting heavy on one pedal, the other bent, just touching the other; most of the weight on the handles.

In a year that saw Thenisaid growing increasingly weary of popular culture, there were still some records that got played on the newly purchased iPods. Yes, this device itself marking a change in attitude and initially increasing the sense of dread we were feeling. Will we be downloading music now? Like teenagers? And yes, we would, as it turned out. The editor finding himself marooned in the third world for much of the year, there was no way around it. We therefore had to face the uploading of a ridiculous number of records before his departing, and the whole staff was happy to see him leave.

He told us before he left that pop music had cut his feelings short, that it wasn’t allowing him to register emotions beyond a certain number of clichés, and that this was part of the reason he had to go, that life was more than pop and rock and reading reviews and going to gigs. And what could we say? We had no idea what he was on about. He just left and said goodbye.

So while he was away we openly continued our former lifestyles, drinking our beer and discussing what he would term infantile lyrics, arrested artistic development, and worse.

We kept compiling a list of albums we liked, very discerningly we thought; blissfully unaware of what was brewing below the equator. This is what we had down before his loud and, frankly, strange return:

Deerhoof – The Runners Four (we know, 2005, but still…)
Calexico – Garden Ruin
Evangelicals – So Gone
The Tyde – Three’s Co
Ali Farka Touré – Savanne
Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Graham Coxon – Love Travels at Illegal Speeds
Serena-Maneesh – Serena-Maneesh

And that was about it we thought, it wasn’t such a god year for music after all, or maybe we were getting bored and disinterested as well?

And then he came home, and all other weirdness aside, suggested we add these albums to the list:

Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam
The Lemonheads – The Lemonheads
Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Stadium Arcadium

All by former, now faded lights, and we thought he must have caught Dengue fever at least. But he insisted, saying that being away had taught him a thing or two about being cool, and who were we to argue?

I spent last weekend in a villa in the Hollywood Hills, by the pool, sipping vodka tonics and squeezing grapefruitjuice from a grapefruit that I took from a tree (when reaching for the grapefruit I knocked my head against an avocado, yes, hanging from an avocado tree) Apparently we went out and had dinner at a diner on Franklin, but I can’t remember the eating part, only the numerous vodka tonics and throwing a napkin at the owner (a feisty lady) Waking up I felt a heaviness I hadn’t felt before, a sort of hole in me, that pinned me to the soft bed, under the comfortable sheets (Egyptian cotton, if I’m not mistaken) and made me sort of worried that I was well. I didn’t have a headache, just felt heavy, heavy and strangely dizzy, probably drunk still. I threw myself into the cold pool, the heating was off for some reason, and heard a strong ticking from the pool cleaner that continually kissed the bottom tiles. Tick tick tick tick. There was no stopping that automatic pool cleaner from kissing those tiles. So I got up and lay down on a nicely upholstered sunbed, very dizzy, clearly very drunk still.

And now sitting in my wonderful and bright and simply smashing pad in Santa Monica I’m halfway down a quart of Bushmills and smiling as the election results are ticking in, announced on the radio, seen on the TV, whooped out on the WWW. I’m ecstatic, semi-stupefied, sunburned (it was hot today, 85, at least) and I read good stuff on the beach, some ironic Stendahl and the hysterical Proust (that guy must have been one hell of a bore, so connected and in-tune with his past, his memories. What about today M. Proust?)

So, If I could have voted I would have voted today, and voted well. I’m a hell of a voter once given the voting right and opportunity. Anyway, as the saying is these days, I do promise some more special privy Hollywood reporting as soon as I can get my ass over there and start sampling those bottomless vodka tonics. Must we all pray I don’t fall asleep again.

Yours truly devoted,
Simon Robertson