john jacob niles

Yesterday was another rainy day. When I was a teen and it used to rain in Los Angeles, I would take out LPs of latter-day folk music - Joni Mitchell's first album, Ian and Sylvia records, early Leonard Cohen - and watch the rain on the streets and listen to the occasional passing car through the glass of the bay window in our living room. I would sit on the window seat my father had made, with the stereo fitted under the seat behind a door. It was a secret vice in my already schizo musical existence - classical music on the one hand and punk and new wave on the other.

I only brought three CDs with me to Germany this year, all purchased in last-minute desperation at Amoeba Records in L.A. I hadn't purchased a new CD in ages, not because I had started downloading music (I'm still not hip to that), but probably because I already have enough music that keeps me entertained and that I like to listen to again and again (long ago my chief criteria for purchasing a CD - as opposed to a cassette - in the first place). But I wasn't bringing any of it abroad, and suddenly, I feared I would need something. I re-bought an album by Quasi that an old bandmate of mine never returned about four years ago and I got an album by Nancy King ("Live at the Standard"), whose rendition of "A Small Hotel" the jazz station KLON was playing on repeat during my stay in the city last summer. I normally don't go in for jazz vocals, especially scat, but King's take on that song is inspired and wouldn't let me go. (Since then, my sister sent me Brian Eno's "Another Green World" which rounded out this mini-collection perfectly.)

But the third album I bought was "An Evening with John Jacob Niles." Niles wrote a lot of folk songs or adapted traditional ballads he collected in the 1920s and '30s, and if anyone still learns folk songs, chances are, the version you know bears his thumbprint. I love his voice and his theatrics. I picked up this CD again yesterday, having not really listened to it all that much during my year here after all, and I lay down on the couch in the steely light of the rainstorm and listened without doing anything else "in the meantime." I remembered how they used to teach us folk songs and the autoharp in primary school, and I wondered if that was still something they did for schoolchildren. Somehow, I doubt it, and suddenly I realized that my childhood too was losing its contemporaneity and becoming one of those infinite objects that dissolve and leave no trace.

It's probably no accident that laying on the couch "idly" reminded me of the thing I miss most about psychoanalysis: laying down and being alert at the same time. After this reverie, I went to visit F. for an early dinner, and she lent me a book that I am currently inhaling, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. I never heard of it or its author before, but it belongs to the same world as John Jacob Niles. I thought it significant that a Swiss woman who had spent most of her childhood in the States had been motivated to give it to me. She was prompted in response to my using the idiom, "I don't want to change horses midstream." While T. thought it was a product of my invention, a flash of recognition of something once banal but now precious flashed across her face. Something about hearing this phrase delighted F. to no end, and off she went in search of the book. I noticed, as I started it, how tricked I have been into believing that American culture is what it has been said to become - when what passes as "American" today (ruthless imperialism, political corruption and expediency, and unchecked consumerism without any of the libidinal charge - that is, the ideology of the American Right) is actually something else that, while undoubtedly honed to a science by many Americans, masks or banishes what makes their culture specific and enchanting.