Nova Ahead 20
When I got out of college, I put on a new suit and brought my resume to several newspapers in the area, thinking that with my degree, I could start a career in journalism. I loved Hunter Thompson and wanted nothing more than to turn any mundane assignment into a creative exploration of some facet of the human experience, all couched in flowery language, incongruent and overshot analogies, like ESPN anchors jousting. As you are probably aware, I got zero newspaperman jobs from this effort, and fell into working at the Toadstool, which ended up being pretty amazing; though now I have found myself intermittently writing for the paper to which I once applied. When I decided to write a weekly essay at the start of the pandemic, I didn’t realize that I was giving myself a regular assignment where I would be telling stories about my life and trying to shoehorn in musings about music; or is it the other way around?
Lately I feel like I’m just journaling at the world. I’m sitting outside on this porch, which I’m told is a micro-climate (I don’t know what that means either), and there are bats moving in unpredictable slants and dives, each on some anarchic journey in a herky-jerky four dimensions. I remember reading that bats know where they’re going so you don’t have to be afraid of them messing with you, and they certainly don’t want to get slapped and screamed at by some hysterical human. I love “I remember reading”, you can really use it for anything without needing to specifically cite a source; this kind of journalistic laziness is surely one of the reasons why I am not gainfully employed by any news organization. But hey, if congress doesn’t have to stick to the facts, why should anyone else? Seriously though, I don’t actually feel that way, and obviously this kind of tit for tat has been instrumental in the fundamental erosion of trust that has been occuring ever since Reaganomics started spraying haphazardly all over the country. Trickle-down isn’t real, but if rich Republicans insist on its validity loud enough, for long enough, the poor people who buy what they’re selling will start insisting on it too; it’s one big dog barking and then all of the other dogs start barking too, which further reinforces the big dog, and it’s a grand, destructive ouroboros of reactionary hysteria. How did I get here? Ah yes, bats; hysterical humans.
My grandfather has been reincarnated as a cardinal, and he’s always showing up wherever I go. He has a nest outside of my grandmother’s window, but we don’t talk about the more mellowly shaded female who must be involved behind the scenes. He once told me that he lost the top layer of his tongue when he was dared to lick the train tracks in the depression winter of 1930s Lowell. Or maybe he just told me that to make me feel better when I stuck my tongue to a pole at the bus stop in late ‘80s Rindge; though in his story I feel like a train was coming when he did it, explaining why he had to rip his tongue free. Or did I make that up? Either way, I can always go with “I remember reading” and just move on, though there were some corroborative witnesses to my episode. My grandfather was hanging out with a kid named Post, who was so named because he had only one arm, therefore was as “useful as a post”; I’m not sure they understood ableism back then. Some of his gang was in the Kerouac book Dr. Sax, throwing rocks and riding slabs of ice down the Merrimack river, smoking cigarettes and also simultaneously somehow working on the railroad. Eventually they’d all be in a variety of places: on submarines, benders, or ladders carrying bundles of shingles. Within a decade some would be dead in Europe or floating in the Pacific among the flotsam and detritus of anonymous explosions, or married with kids, between cardgames and black coffee, oblivious to the complete insanity awaiting them. Though I like to think at some point while he was collecting cans in the street, or putting snakes to sleep, my grandfather imagined that he would indeed teach his grandson to drive by literally reclining the passenger seat, closing his eyes, and saying, “go ahead and drive.” Or that when his daughter had a bat in her basement, he would go down and spray-paint it orange so that at least she could see it next time she went down to laundry. And now he’s a cardinal and I wonder if he too can move like a bat, understanding that the trail behind him leaves an impossibly sophisticated web, outlining and connecting all of our futures and pasts. And at the end of this fever-dream stream of consciousness, I can see that it makes total sense that I’m writing this essay that will be published in a newspaper that I wasn’t good enough to work for.
I do want to tell you about the Nova livestream this week too; Alex Burnet will be returning to Keene with Laundry Day, a brilliant amalgam of ‘90s indie rock and timeless American tenderness. This has been Eric Gagne, a standard issue human being high on nothing but pure nostalgia and family folklore.
Eric Gagne is the Programming Director at Nova Arts, and has spent the last thirteen years booking The Thing in the Spring. He also played many shows over the past decades with Death to Tyrants, Sisters and Brothers, and Redwing Blackbird, and is actively recording and performing with his band Footings.