I remember watching Before Sunrise with someone who kept grabbing me in there. “You’re like dessert,” she whispered in my ear as Jesse tells Celine, “I don't know, I think that if I could just accept the fact that my life is supposed to be difficult. You know, that's what to be expected, then I might not get so pissed-off about it and I'll just be glad when something nice happens,” and I thought, “Hey, this is awesome but stop mashing it.” When Celine says the line, “I like to feel his eyes on me when I look away,” she suggested that we fool around. It made me furious. She had no notion of the gift I was opening up to her, a real window to my soul. Before Sunrise for Christ’s sake: one of the pop-culture cornerstones that make up my id. I could have played her Heart-Shaped Box by Nirvana, loaned her The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, taken her to see The Sketch by Victorio Edades, which, as a little boy at the National Museum, I stood before, transfixed.
Some people fear that they are no more than the sum of their cultural reference points: the books read, films seen, the posters on the walls, and records on rotation. I am happy to admit this. What then remains for a Dracula of pop culture when love is over? What of the books loaned, the records recommended? What gets passed to the next lover, what gets sold for cash at a garage sale? When a relationship ends, I sell none of it, filing it all away for future reference, marveling at how the most dreadful person can turn you on to the most beautiful music or film. These gifts, given in ego—this is me, this is me, have some more of me—are like transferable tattoos. These books and videos, they are stronger than those ephemeral fights, even the ephemeral fucking.
Years after the grabber, I was with a girl younger than me, and I wanted her to see the film with me before we parted. I sat next to her and watched her face as she watched. We did part ways that week, as I sensed we would, and as sad as I was, I was never sorry that I had introduced her to that film. She was special enough and sensitive enough. She understood what I was giving her. When the Dalai Lama dies a new one is born the same day. She became, in my head, the Dalai Celine. It has been a year since it ended with the Dalai Celine. She gave me a lot of music, turning up on my doorstep flushed with excitement, carrying a Tower Records bag. For the first three months after the breakup I kept the CDs she gave me hidden in a cupboard, then moved them like a premature baby first to the nursery and then “home,” the shelves above my desk: More Parts Per Million by The Thermals. Guitar Romantic by Exploding Hearts. Fever to Tell by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
It amazed me, as it always had, that there could be so much out there I had neither heard nor heard of before my lust introduced me to it. It can feel frightening at first—if there are so many records I didn’t know about, perhaps there are whole worlds out there, too—yet, when lust is over, it becomes comforting. Perhaps there are whole worlds out there.
Once upon a time my buddy Steve made the world’s most halfhearted attempt to kill himself over a girl: eight aspirin pills and a long sleep. When he woke up, me and our friend Diego, took him to Le Ching where he ate five platters of hakao. Steve introduced me and Diego to Bruce, the archetype of masculinity. We’d come to his house and we’d lie in the couch and watch Springsteen concert films and he’d sigh, “I love you, Bruce!” then turn to us: “Not in a gay way. I just want to hug him.”
The three of us were going to take a road trip, listening to Springsteen on repeat, but we ended up taking the trips alone. I have no idea what happened, but Darkness On The Edge of Town still makes frustration and sorrow turn, in my mouth, to a smooth beer, swirled, enjoyed, wallowed in. And on the cover of the record, which hangs in my bedroom, Bruce looks, with his dark curly hair and white V-neck T-shirt.
It feels very different when the parting is acrimonious. What I would give—a Shylock’s lump of flesh—to take back having played Darkness on the Edge of Town to that tart who squirmed during Before Sunrise.
When someone you love dies, it is common to take on some of their traits in order to keep them alive. The loss of love is like mourning, instead of tics you keep the records, books, movies.
The girl, who if such things exist, was the love of my life, gave me nothing. No books, no records, although she always promised to. I had no cultural help. All I had was her. I could not understand it when it ended. There was no Franz Ferdinand to help me, no Marillion, no unsung Altman movie. Well, there’s one thing: one night when we were about to watch Before Sunrise she ran out to pick up two tubs of FIC avocado ice cream at the convenience store that I had passed a hundred times but never entered. “You’ve never had a FIC avocado ice cream?” she gasped. When her sister was pregnant she became addicted to the stuff. She did midnight runs for her and now she was doing them for me, who was trying very hard not to fall but still grateful for ice cream in May. She brought it back and we watched Before Sunrise, at the end of which she turned to me and said, “I want to make love to you when you’re 80.” She had put her finger on my fixation with the movie, which is quite simply: “Isn't everything worth doing in life a way to be loved a little more?”
The last night we spent together she walked me from one stall of FIC to another, downing three cups in one hour. In her frozen frenzy she was painting herself as a girl who consumes, who takes what she wants when she wants it, who throws caution to the wind. She is none of these things. But here, in a tiny gesture, she offered a vision of how our relationship could have been.
Movies, books, and records, fixed, pinned like spiders, unchanging and serene, are never going to melt. Thinking of her I take just a few licks of a FIC—it is enough, it is too much—and then throw it in the trash. Jesse loves Celine. There. So I’ll always know where it is.
Some people fear that they are no more than the sum of their cultural reference points: the books read, films seen, the posters on the walls, and records on rotation. I am happy to admit this. What then remains for a Dracula of pop culture when love is over? What of the books loaned, the records recommended? What gets passed to the next lover, what gets sold for cash at a garage sale? When a relationship ends, I sell none of it, filing it all away for future reference, marveling at how the most dreadful person can turn you on to the most beautiful music or film. These gifts, given in ego—this is me, this is me, have some more of me—are like transferable tattoos. These books and videos, they are stronger than those ephemeral fights, even the ephemeral fucking.
Years after the grabber, I was with a girl younger than me, and I wanted her to see the film with me before we parted. I sat next to her and watched her face as she watched. We did part ways that week, as I sensed we would, and as sad as I was, I was never sorry that I had introduced her to that film. She was special enough and sensitive enough. She understood what I was giving her. When the Dalai Lama dies a new one is born the same day. She became, in my head, the Dalai Celine. It has been a year since it ended with the Dalai Celine. She gave me a lot of music, turning up on my doorstep flushed with excitement, carrying a Tower Records bag. For the first three months after the breakup I kept the CDs she gave me hidden in a cupboard, then moved them like a premature baby first to the nursery and then “home,” the shelves above my desk: More Parts Per Million by The Thermals. Guitar Romantic by Exploding Hearts. Fever to Tell by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
It amazed me, as it always had, that there could be so much out there I had neither heard nor heard of before my lust introduced me to it. It can feel frightening at first—if there are so many records I didn’t know about, perhaps there are whole worlds out there, too—yet, when lust is over, it becomes comforting. Perhaps there are whole worlds out there.
Once upon a time my buddy Steve made the world’s most halfhearted attempt to kill himself over a girl: eight aspirin pills and a long sleep. When he woke up, me and our friend Diego, took him to Le Ching where he ate five platters of hakao. Steve introduced me and Diego to Bruce, the archetype of masculinity. We’d come to his house and we’d lie in the couch and watch Springsteen concert films and he’d sigh, “I love you, Bruce!” then turn to us: “Not in a gay way. I just want to hug him.”
The three of us were going to take a road trip, listening to Springsteen on repeat, but we ended up taking the trips alone. I have no idea what happened, but Darkness On The Edge of Town still makes frustration and sorrow turn, in my mouth, to a smooth beer, swirled, enjoyed, wallowed in. And on the cover of the record, which hangs in my bedroom, Bruce looks, with his dark curly hair and white V-neck T-shirt.
It feels very different when the parting is acrimonious. What I would give—a Shylock’s lump of flesh—to take back having played Darkness on the Edge of Town to that tart who squirmed during Before Sunrise.
When someone you love dies, it is common to take on some of their traits in order to keep them alive. The loss of love is like mourning, instead of tics you keep the records, books, movies.
The girl, who if such things exist, was the love of my life, gave me nothing. No books, no records, although she always promised to. I had no cultural help. All I had was her. I could not understand it when it ended. There was no Franz Ferdinand to help me, no Marillion, no unsung Altman movie. Well, there’s one thing: one night when we were about to watch Before Sunrise she ran out to pick up two tubs of FIC avocado ice cream at the convenience store that I had passed a hundred times but never entered. “You’ve never had a FIC avocado ice cream?” she gasped. When her sister was pregnant she became addicted to the stuff. She did midnight runs for her and now she was doing them for me, who was trying very hard not to fall but still grateful for ice cream in May. She brought it back and we watched Before Sunrise, at the end of which she turned to me and said, “I want to make love to you when you’re 80.” She had put her finger on my fixation with the movie, which is quite simply: “Isn't everything worth doing in life a way to be loved a little more?”
The last night we spent together she walked me from one stall of FIC to another, downing three cups in one hour. In her frozen frenzy she was painting herself as a girl who consumes, who takes what she wants when she wants it, who throws caution to the wind. She is none of these things. But here, in a tiny gesture, she offered a vision of how our relationship could have been.
Movies, books, and records, fixed, pinned like spiders, unchanging and serene, are never going to melt. Thinking of her I take just a few licks of a FIC—it is enough, it is too much—and then throw it in the trash. Jesse loves Celine. There. So I’ll always know where it is.
