ONCE UPON a        TIME
                                                                                          ezine at l'atelier bonita
                                                     established since december 2002

Nostalgic Discography                                by  Heather M. Borstel 1. "Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning"/'The Internationale": I'm kneeling under the dining room table, reading Little Black Sambo, while the old women are having their coffee and knitting. The radio is tuned to "The Music of Your Life", which is what the ad-chorus sings every fifteen minutes on the dot. Johnny Mathis, the Ames Brothers, Julie London and Sinatra drift through the room, as the old ladies talk shop and grandchildren and eat IMO on ruffled Lays. They are all dressed up and smell like the Walgreen's perfume counter. Rose water is popular. They all cluck about the world today, and how it's so much different from the one they had when they were young. My grandmother could dance on a dime back then, in six-inch heels, too. I don't believe the dime part. One of my grandmother's friends has a huge wall-sized portrait of Frank Sinatra in the entranceway of her house, and only the eyes are blue. She's a big fan, and admits that Frank still sends her to the moon when he starts to croon. I get out from under the table and, running the gauntlet of cheek pinching, make it downstairs to the basement. My grandfather is down there, and he is teaching me to read. We're studying the dialectics of political economy and how it relates to janitorial work. My grandfather is a communist and older than my grandmother. He sings older songs when he sweeps up the corners of the basement and creosotes the floor. "I like coffee, I like tea, I like the Java jive and it likes me." When he was riding the rails, he'd picked up a lot of the music of the colored man, he'd always tell me, and the colored man has a lot of songs to sing. Then he'd start singing a song about the Scottsboro Boys or somebody else who'd had a hard time. According to him, he'd almost integrated the interstate bus lines back in '42, but the stupid redneck bus driver hadn't realized he was an Indian sitting with the white folks, so it was up to Rosa Parks to really do it in 1956. "Thus, the tide of history remained unchanged", he'd say. When my parents were separated, we had to move in with my grandparents, and every morning my grandfather would wake us up for school with a spirited rendition of "Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning" and "The Internationale". For years, I thought Irving Berlin had wrote both songs. 2. "Little Matty Groves": Growing up, we had an old Benjamin hi-fi, which was old by the time we'd inherited it. Whenever it needed a new needle, we'd launch on a massive search to find a store that still stocked them. The life of the needle wasn't helped by the fact that we'd switch back from 16 to 33 to 45 so frequently. When you played a Flintstones' 45 on 33 Wilma sounded just like a swish hairdresser, which was pretty funny. We'd listen to all my mother's records when she wasn't home. One, a pink album with ghostly photos on the front, was full of bloody folk songs and jigs. They were all full of irony, these songs: a poor soldier deserts time and time again, only to keep getting sentenced to more time in the army , Janet pulls her kirtle green up and meets the king of the faeries, Renadyne the fox takes a lady traveler home, that sort of thing. My favorite was the sad tale of stupid little Matty Groves, who forgets to take his sword with him in his haste to get Lady Donald in bed. This poor decision ends up costing both him and the lady their lives, adding to the medieval body count that coursed through the entire album. We used to act out this song with dolls, and when I slapped a Malibu Barbie against the headboard of my bed, she split down the middle in what I figured was an accurate representation of the actual event. We put her back together, but she carried that crack, like a miniature appendectomy scar until she got tossed out, a few years later, with the other dolls. 3. "Electric Avenue": The couple across the street didn't have any kids, so they'd give us the run of their house all summer. We'd run through their halls and up and down their stairs throwing ice at each other, which we'd gotten from the ice machine in the refrigerator. The melting ice left black stains on the hardwood floors, as we slipped and slid into the front door, making the windows rattle. They had a new stereo with blue and red monitor lights that coursed up and down in time with the music, and huge booming speakers that made the walls shake with the bass. You could hear the top twenty hits pouring out into the street and sometimes we didn't bother to even open the doors, if we wanted to hear music when we played soccer outside. It smelled like peach blossoms and fuschias all summer, as tinny synthesizers emulated motorcycle roars and trumpet blasts in every song. Out in the street, we'd all run back into the house when "Electric Avenue" would come on the radio (and it did about every half-hour), just to watch the red and blue lights dance all the way to the top of the scale when Eddie Grant shouted "Boy!" and then drop back down to the bottom with the bass that followed. The Human League would come on next, feeling fascination, and the conversation would turn until the sun went down. Later on that summer, someone got MTV and everyone stopped listening to the radio for a few months. 4. "I Do Believe You Are Blushing": You'd get one of those fan-boy mixtapes, and that song was always on it. Oh, some tried something different, a little Muddy Waters never hurt, maybe some Fugazi, but at that time and place, that was the song. Cheap sentimentality ruled those things, but you would fall for them just like everyone else. But it was a good song, and though you could never go back to the time you'd first heard it, it was still a good song. The great sadness of music is that you cannot ever go back to the time you first heard a song on the radio, or at a party, and the part where all the instruments dropped out hit you like a new dawn or a first love, but you could always try. Nostalgia was a strange, unownable thing, because it was not yours, but was owned by everybody of the same age and experience, and all you could do was try to make it partially yours. You'd take all the armies of Gog and Magog and Gheg and Tosk and try to build them into something new, while you leaned back. Sometimes the music was so loud the walls seemed to shake and you'd sweat out all the whiskey you'd drank so fast you couldn't even get drunk. Later on you'd walk home and you didn't feel any different, but somehow you moved differently and to a new beat. You wondered if people could tell your new status by looking at you, because maybe you were glowing. You'd realize just how stupid that was the next day in class, when you were still studying the later Roman Empire's St. Germanus in Britain and trying not to make eye contact. In the afternoon, sitting on the cool grass of the quad, you might make big plans for the weekend but know you'd probably be doing the exact same thing you did last weekend, and the weekend before. And wasn't it all so stupid and pointless how they haven't the decency to even talk to you later on. But then you'd hear that song again and remember how St. Germanus shouted "Allelujah" at the head of his troops and held back the Saxons and the night. Notes: 1. Irving Berlin wrote over one million songs in his lifetime and "The Internationale" was not one of them. I don't think anyone ever sings it anymore, but it is a catchy tune, second only in propaganda value to the old Soviet Anthem. I dare you to hear it and not want to go and defend Stalingrad from the Nazis. 2. "Little Matty Groves" can be heard on the Fairport Convention album, "Liege and Lief" or wherever fine folk music is heard. Ralph Stanley does a pretty good version on his latest CD. 3. Eddie Grant's "Electric Avenue" shows up on VH1 from time to time, and sound very dated. "Keep Feeling Fascination" by the Human League sounds even more dated. Don't even get me started on Duran Duran. 4. "I Do Believe You Are Blushing" is on Unrest's "Imperial Frrr" album which you should go out and buy right now. Seriously, do it. Although "Summer Babe" by Pavement always worked better in my case, it is still an excellent song. St. Germanus converted the Saxons to Christianity, and you know its been going downhill ever since. But he is still a pretty cool guy never the less. ©2003 Heather M. Borstel _____________ Heather M. Borstel was born in San Francisco, California, at the dawn of the 1970s. She lives in the shadow of Twin Peaks, went to Catholic school and San Francisco State University, and is of average height, build and appearance. She enjoys contract bridge, falconry, Gandhian nonviolence and whipping up a nice pot of Vegetable Medley. Her favorite song is "Superstar" by the Carpenters, which she sings without shame at karaoke bars, and her favorite book is Anna Karenina. Heather was once said to have a wit which rivals that of Bennett Serf by her third grade teacher, but she has yet to find any evidence that Bennett Serf was witty. She has never had the stigmata, curses like a stevedore, and makes a mean White Russian. Heather would like the phrase "I told you I was sick!" chiseled on her tombstone.

                                                   ONCE UPON      a TIME
                                                                                          ezine at l'atelier bonita
                                                     established since december 2002