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I owe much of what I’ve come to know about hanging out to both of my Pittsburgh bands, but especially to The Armadillos. It was with them that I gained, or perhaps gave myself, permission to revel in the kind of shared quest for meaning that is the privileged domain of youth. In the other band, the good band, I was the youngest. Everyone else in it had jobs and homes and kids and responsibilities. But with The Armadillos, it was different. If we had jobs, we hated and were trying to quit them. Our homes, meanwhile, were marked by similar conditions of contingency: they came and went, evaporating at the end of a lease or due to a sudden rise in the rent and, in some cases, proved even temporarily nonexistent.
We weren’t famous, but we were popular, at least in a limited, local sense. That meant we had connections. We hosted bands when they came through town and then asked and received the same favors, in turn. Each summer, we toured south to Asheville, North Carolina—Big Rock Candy Mountain as we called it. There, you could sleep out every night, if it was summer and if you had to, and the handouts really did appear to grow on bushes, just like in the song. In Asheville, an hour’s worth of busking usually got us a full tank of gas, plus a round of burritos and beers on the side. We were friendly with another band that was based there. Its three members lived in a tiny rented house that sat jacked up on stilts and fronting the Swannanoa River. It was one in a line of identical houses, all of them similarly filled with musicians and bandmates. It was a whole neighborhood of splashy, summery, musical mayhem, without a single guy downstairs in sight.
cuuute
On it went. We’d seen no cars approach and had no idea where they came from, these improvisatory ghosts. They sprang up out of the night, armed with a knowledge of our chords and our songs or, at least, enough skill to quickly piece it all together and join right in. I played a Gillian Welch song. The woman with the fiddle asked if I knew any more. I started in on “Red Clay Halo” and she was ready with a complementary fiddle part and also vocal harmonies on the chorus. It was fluid and easy, like a conversation between old friends. It was hanging out—delighting in a shared project, a shared language, with no guys downstairs and no one listening in from the outside, badgering us with requests or demanding a sculpted, polished performance. There was no performance. There was just us, a group of strangers, all gathered together in the dark, listening to each other.
I said before that jamming with those mystery musicians in Asheville was like conversation, like talking. This is because, though we were strangers and hadn’t met before, we already spoke the same language, to the point of being able to comfortably improvise and embellish upon each other’s uses of it. This is Fred Moten’s way of viewing improvisation which, he says, “is located at a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between feeling and reflection, disarmament and preparation, speech and writing.” The “speech” of improvisation is immediate and ad hoc, while the “writing” of improvisation involves laying something down that can be returned to later. It is this combination that leads Moten to call improvisation “speech without foresight.”[7] It lacks foresight because it cannot see what is coming and so is driven to constantly adapt and make use of whatever is there, even as it is still arriving. But there’s an undeniable element of futurity—Moten calls it “prophecy”—that arises from such processes. To improvise is to anticipate and plan without working toward a definite outcome. It’s a form of prophecy without pronouncement, a way of imagining the future without committing to the limitations of what that future has to be.
These questions help to focus attention on the narrator’s brother’s ambitions. Sonny explains that playing jazz is “the only thing” he wants to do[9]—the only thing that excites and compels him enough to keep him away from more destructive forces, namely heroin. His brother is opposed to the idea because it’s an incomprehensible one to him. To commit to playing jazz would be to commit to a whole life of improvisation, not just in musical terms but in the larger terms of employment and futurity. The narrator wants to be able to rest knowing that his younger brother, who already has a criminal record and drug conviction under his belt at age seventeen, is safe. He does not want to suffer through years of watching Sonny improvise his way through the world.
on james baldwin's sonny's blues
This is why reality television is often so unsatisfying. We know it is, so we try to fix the problem of our unsatisfaction by consuming more of it. Shields says that this results from two simultaneous conditions of being: as a culture, we are, he claims, both “desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice.”[5] In being torn between the two, we ask too much of reality television: we ask it to give us what we want, when what we want involves an unholy synthesis of opposites. This conflict ensures that we go away hungry at the end of each episode, only to return the next time with the same old hopes for nourishment.
oooh
quoting David Shields
Such restricted movement between work and home is a problem, Oldenburg claims, because “social well-being and psychological health depend upon community. It is no coincidence that the ‘helping professions’ became a major industry in the United States as suburban planning helped destroy local public life and the community support it once lent.” What Oldenburg is saying is that where communal life and social infrastructure are lacking, individuals find themselves forced to pay for access to support systems. This means that, rather than talking to a family member, we book an appointment with a therapist; rather than asking a neighbor if we can borrow a tool or get help with a physical task, we purchase equipment or someone else’s labor and have them do it; rather than exercising with a friend, we pay a personal trainer to motivate and steer us toward our fitness goals.
At the market, the girl picked out the wine: it was sunset-colored, more orange than red or pink. Émile had never heard of the type and, afterward, he could never manage to conjure up its name again. At her parents’ house, they opened the wine and had it alongside a first course of braised leeks in mustard sauce and it was the most glorious thing Émile had ever tasted, he said. The wine was sharp and dry and acidic, but also laced with honey. It was like the whole day at the beach had been boiled down and put into a bottle and then served cold, still smelling of all its good, warm summer smells.
Years later, back in Pittsburgh, Émile chanced upon the same wine for sale in a shop. He’d been looking for it for years but hadn’t known what to ask for. He recognized it immediately, though, from the label and also the orange color, and he bought a bottle to take home and then picked up some leeks and whole grain mustard to go with it. But, as he would always tell it to me, when he tasted it all those years later, he realized it wasn’t the wine, it had never been the wine. Rather, it had been “the flavor of the whole day,” as he used to put it—that was what he had been tasting back then. It was brewed, that flavor, from a complex assortment of impressions, the beach and the bike ride and the girl and her hair in his mouth and her family’s second-floor apartment with its windows open to the street and the leeks in mustard sauce and then also, finally, the wine. But it had never been just the wine.
What I’m trying to show by way of this conjecture is that, while modern communications technologies tend to make the space of even friendly disagreement feel more narrow and thus also more uncomfortable, hanging out is actually about the opposite. Hanging out, which involves killing time in the presence of others, is about carving out a space that is big enough to accommodate these kinds of relational fluctuations, allowing them to stretch and unfurl as necessary. It’s a way of announcing up front that it doesn’t always have to be good, that we don’t always have to catch a person on a good day in order to care about or honor our connection to them. Hanging out means marking out a space that is big enough to house both the camaraderie that gets built in the moment along with mistakes, attitudinal spikes, and second chances.
And there was something more: Coetzee seemed so dubious about the possibilities of language-as-communication, preferring instead to consider words as a species of music (cf. Disgrace and Foe for articulations of this properly Viconian idea), that Diana wondered whether she should not give up writing. After finding out, two years after meeting Daniel, that he would support her, she had wondered whether she should not simply content herself with the animal sufficiency of their life together, and abandon writing. Really: why write? Speak of the darkest matters, and still you have only produced a decoration for a comfortable room. Adorno said it long ago, when domiciled in LA: even Kafka’s books have become so much furniture.
Diana finds herself thinking again what she has thought before: she should be an activist, not a writer. The thought is never serious. Still, she does not see that it avails anything to write highbrow book chat. Her reviews communicate nothing, convince people of nothing. They are a talented girl’s brittle recital, more or less pleasant on the ear. Sometimes people offer that she writes well; never do they say she has induced them to think.