In Which You Have To Ask The Price of Orange Juice

The Keyboard Company

by EMMA BARRIE

Los Angeles is large and spread out. It is impossible to see it as one entity. When you’re on the west side, it’s as if the east side doesn’t even exist. There is no big picture.

During high school, after a few of us got cars, we tried to see other parts of L.A. It was like we were lab rats let out of a cage, eager but blind, bumping into walls, stranded in the middle of a giant maze. My best friend Jeff would often make an effort to find new places for us to eat. He would research restaurants on Yelp — a website I had only heard rumors about — and drive me somewhere foreign for dinner. Jeff and I have always been similarly sized (size small, or XS perhaps.) At the time, we were sixteen and we both could have passed for twelve. Now that we’re twenty-three, we could both pass for sixteen.

We would kidnap his parents’ car and if Jeff forgot to make one of his famous mixes, we would have to listen to Celine Dion or Enya, or whatever his father was listening to that week. If Jeff did remember a mix, we’d groove to Dave Matthews and The White Stripes the whole way there (obviously an eclectic taste) — to a place that supposedly had the best chicken sandwich or the best fries or the biggest selection of hot sauces.

But even after our attempts at exploration, I still didn’t know which thing was Burbank and what was Los Feliz and where did the Valley even start and where were people who weren’t us hanging out? As a result of the myriad possibilities, most weekends were spent on my bedroom floor watching Sandy Bullock flicks alone, my car seldom seeing the outside of our garage except when I felt obliged to make cameos at high school house parties where boys named Josh smoked hookahs and pretty girls compulsively yanked at tube tops.

At eighteen, I handed in my driver’s license and my inability to parallel park, and moved to New York. A city full of culture, history, full of places where You’ve Got Mail I mean Manhattan was filmed, full of excitement, yet still accessible. I could walk the length of the city in a day. Streets formed grids, neighborhoods were named in a literal fashion — the Upper West Side was on the upper west side, exactly where it said it was going to be! Go figure.   

To celebrate my 23rd birthday, I decided to go back home for a few days to see my family. I was especially excited to see my grandmother, DeeDee, who I had heard was learning to use the Internet for the first time, something I definitely wanted to get recorded evidence of. My brother and I think everything she does is funny. She’ll offer us snap peas or watermelon in the middle of sentences, pull twenty-dollar bills out of her filing cabinet (M for Money!) and put them in our pockets, and there’s also her obsession with cartoons.  Most of her clothes have Snoopy or Tommy (of the Rugrats gang) sewn on them, somewhere.

DeeDee is the only person I know aside from Chase Bank and National Grid who still sends real mail. She uses a giant, old Xerox machine to make copies of articles from health magazines, then highlights names of vitamins or headlines that read, “Scientists Discover Laughter Truly IS The Best Medicine,” folds them up, and mails them to me. She also sends me pages ripped out of her Nordstrom’s catalogue, with “You’re so much prettier than her!” scrawled next to a model’s face.

So naturally, I thought that with the power of immediate mail and endless articles at her fingertips 24 hours a day, she’d grow to love the web. And my whole family would probably grow to hate it. I could already see my Gmail Inbox full of 100 unread messages. Messages with subject headings such as: Live Love Laugh, I Almost Forgot, Do You Drink Snapple? and 50 Ways to Cure Menstrual Cramps without Medication.

I arrived in L.A. My mother drove me home from the airport, only taking the side streets, as she finds freeways to be overwhelming. We got to the house and I walked through our jungle of backyard to our guesthouse, where DeeDee lives.

“Emzie!”

“Hi DeeDee,” I said and gave her a hug.

“A hug! How did I get so lucky!”

The first thing I noticed as I walked in was DeeDee’s new keyboard.  My mother had purchased a giant yellow keyboard for her, so that she could see the keys. It was appropriately called KEYS-U-SEE, obviously trying to integrate internet abbreviations into old people’s vernacular. Never too late to start, the KEYS-U-SEE manufacturer probably said one day.

I asked my grandmother what she wanted to look up so that I could show her how to use Google.

“Clark Gable!”

The rest of the night was filled with gasps of marvel and wonder. And stale licorice, loose in a drawer.

The next morning, Jeff and I decided to go to brunch at a place in Venice he had heard about from a co-worker. Jeff and I view things in a similar way and tend to have the same neuroses. We both read e-mails about fifty times before we send them. We both claim to hate bands we’ve never heard or movies we’ve never seen. We both spend twenty minutes looking at a pair of jeans in the mirror before we decide to buy them, and then when we get home we put them back on and realize we look stupid. And I know we have similar issues with L.A., so at brunch I was hoping to bounce some ideas off him for this L.A. article I was trying to write.

We walked in to the Venice restaurant and could immediately tell it was a few notches too nice for us. We had sneakers and cut-off shorts and phony Ray-Bans. They had real, white cloth tablecloths and fancy mimosa glasses. We sat down anyway.

“How much is the orange juice?” Jeff asked the waitress. She looked baffled.

“I’ll have to check,” she said, and backed away slowly. I slumped in my seat, embarrassed.

“If you have to ask, you can’t afford it,” I said. We ordered food that was too expensive. He gave the waitress a literal thumbs up on the $3 orange juice. I itched to get out.

“So do you like living here?” I asked him.

"Living at home is hard. And L.A. is a mess,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Everything here is just so confusing.”

“Literally or metaphorically?”

“Both. Everything about it. The layout of it all, what I’m supposed to do day to day.”

“Do you think you’ll leave?”

“Nah.”

“Can I quote you on this?”

“Yes. I think it also has to be taken into account that I’m outrageously neurotic.”

“OK.”

I got back home and went over to DeeDee’s house. She regaled me with stories of Clark Gable’s life and did you know his mother died when he was ten months old, and did you know he was accidentally listed as a girl on his birth certificate?

“You know you can look up other stuff too,” I said.

“Such as…” she began, and squinted her eyes suspiciously, not understanding what I was getting at.

“Such as anything! Think of it as a giant library, with anything you could possibly want to see or read about.”

“I’m spending this week on Clark Gable. Maybe next week,” she said, stubbornly. “Now teach me how to make the print bigger. My eyes hurt. I can barely read anything!”

I showed her how to enlarge the print. She needed it to be so large that only twenty or so of these giant words were visible at a time. She’d have to constantly drag her cursor across the screen to finish a whole sentence. The borders to Firefox pages were lost. The toolbar was gone. It was disorienting, even for me.

 
That night, my mother invited me to a dinner party a friend of hers was having. I was the youngest person there by about 30 years. It has occurred to me that when a group of adults get together, they almost always form a panel discussion on the topic of Is The Internet Ruining The Way We Live? (See also: Is The Kindle Ruining The Way We Read?) All of these discussions and debates are inevitably a waste of energy and time. But we have them.

“Is Facebook replacing real personal friendships?” a man asked.

“Maybe Twitter is contributing to ADHD,” someone said.

“I have GPS and navigation and all that stuff,” one woman said. “But I miss just being able to get lost!  Remember when we would just get lost?!”

I wanted to tell her I still get lost even with all this technology. That Los Angeles will always be hiding something. It will still be just as scattered. There will still be streets that magically turn into other streets and sections meant to imitate other parts of the world and places named after what they aren’t. There will still be minimal parking so that you have to have to leave your car in another neighborhood, and towering homes that conceal everyone inside so you never know where the party’s at. L.A. is a city full of secrets.

And also, surprise surprise, there are hip parts of L.A. I didn’t find that out until about a year or two ago when someone let me in on it. That L.A. is hip. That hipsters even live there, and call it home, and have tattoos of the contour of California behind their ears and on their biceps. They wear skinny jeans and play shows together and buy “spaces” and turn them into “venues.” I had no idea I didn’t have to go all the way to Brooklyn for this. Thanks for keeping me in the dark for so long, L.A.  Thanks a million.

The rest of my trip went by in a blur. I had almost forgotten that my birthday was my reason for returning home. I had dinner with my father’s family. My stepmother bought me a polka dotted thong and I unknowingly opened it up at the table of the nice Italian restaurant. Something chocolate and mushy came with a candle in it. My brother and I watched Sweet Home Alabama and argued about whether it was good or not (spoiler alert: it is not). He got me a $50 gift certificate to Amoeba, a music store only on the west coast. I was leaving the next day. My grandmother shelled peas for me to eat as we played some game with tiles. She put twenties in my palm “for ice cream.” My mother got me to start taking acidophilus. I made a joke about it being a kind of dinosaur. It was all funny at the time.

Before leaving for the airport, I went to say goodbye to DeeDee. To see how she was doing with her new friend, The Internet.

“Phooey,” she said.

“Phooey?” I asked.

“I’m done. Get this thing out of here.” She motioned at the laptop and the KEYS-U-SEE.

“What happened?”

“It’s too much! It’s too confusing!  Everything is all over the place and it’s exhausting. I can’t even think of what I would want to look for, and when I can, I can’t find the thing to search them with! There’s too much information. And nothing is organized, I don’t understand it.”

“You don’t want to give it another go?  It will take some time, but--”

“Phooey,” she said. “I’m throwing in the towel. Now try this juice I made in my new juicer! It’s full of antioxidants!"

At the airport, I realized that my moving to New York wasn’t so different from my grandmother deciding she would just rather watch VHS tapes and organize her filing cabinet than try to figure out the internet. In a sense, I had given up on L.A. Neither of us could handle the overwhelming plethora of possibilities. We both lost our bearings while trying too hard to understand. I’m pretty sure DeeDee is done with the internet for good, but maybe I’ll go back someday and give L.A. another go.   

I texted Jeff.

Me: Do you think L.A. is like the internet?

Jeff: Lol. Internet is easier to navigate I think. No search function in L.A.

Emma Barrie is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York and one half of Paper Cone Stories. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"Lunar Sea" - Camera Obscura (mp3)

"California" - Dr. Dog (mp3)

"Summer Holiday" - Wild Nothing (mp3)

In Which 1969 Lurks Dangerously Close to the Surface

The following appeared in the Dec. 12, 1969 issue of Life magazine.

Campus '69: The Quiet Year - So Far

"The radicals are suffering from a case of the blahs, the liberals are frustrated, and there seems to be no movement in any direction except back toward oneself." No one voice can speak for America's eight million college students, but this comment by a University of Colorado undergraduate comes very close to summing up the mood on campus. A stillness has moved across a scene which as recently as last spring was loud with noisy confrontations.

Yet the stillness is hardly serenity. The hard issues - the draft, Vietnam, drugs - are still deeply felt. Concern is too ingrained for a return to the cool detachment of the 1950s: "My education," complains one Smith girl typically, "is impinging on my learning." And if most students are pulling back to reexamine their commitments and tactics, at a few campuses, the fire is still dangerously close to the surface.

Possibly the change in temper is mostly one of form. The strategy of head-on dissent, however successful, proved to be too painful to sustain. But there will be new strategies. Black separatism has been so widely accepted by students (and administrations) that its attraction as a cause has waned, but there are already new issues - local politics, ecology ("If we don't solve our environmental crisis today," says a Stanford student, "we won't be here to solve anything in 30 years").

For a look at the complex mood of America's campuses, Life asked student writers and photographers at a variety of colleges to interpret the scene for themselves. Their reports are necessarily personal, and arguable, but at the same time they are honest and revealing about their generation.

Some enterprising University of Wisconsin students are getting away from it all by renting tumbledown farmhouses. Even large houses rent for as little as $75 a month.

University of Wisconsin

Unlike Berkeley or Columbia, the Madison campus is a cloud-cuckoo land comfortably distant from noisy, dirty reality. Here life magically transforms itself into allegory. The geography of the place supplies a delicious irony all its own, for the state mental hospital lies directly across the lake from the Student Union.

The central meeting area is the Rathskeller, a vibrating, fetid, womblike place. Despite the unseen but verified presence of police informers masquerading in bell-bottoms and faint traces of beard, the Rathskeller is the Aquarian utopia. One learns very quickly how to study in it, how to luxuriate under the blanket of noise and body heat without disturbing the contemplative peace. Though the silverware is made of plastic and the coffee cups are Styrofoam, the atmosphere is congenial.

Still, even in this ideal society, there are hierarchies of a sort. Black students tend to gather in a little corner next to the cash register, and once a student who refused to pay for an undersized piece of pie was threatened with arrest by the manager, who flashed the badge of a university policeman.

Sometimes things are disturbing in more subtle ways. Moral schizophrenia manifests itself when students call policemen "pigs" but take umbrage when a legislator calls welfare mothers "swine." Guilt seems to be a campus disease, as evidence by the fact that fraternities and sororities feel a need to justify their activities by involving themselves in conspicuous charities.

Much of the hypertension on campus stems from the university's use of city riot police to break up a sit-in against Dow Chemical two years ago. Since then, the police and the National Guardsmen have appeared at the slightest provocation. Small wonder that there is a growing exodus by couples and groups to farmhouses in the lovely rural communities around Madison where living is both cheap and peaceful.  JOSEPH McBRIDE

After participating in a Moratorium rally, a girl at the University of Chicago goes off to be by herself.

University of Chicago

Chicago considers itself the last outpost of the life of the mind. The students study a lot, partly because there isn't much else to do. The radicals say the students are apathetic, but they're not; they're just students, in a somewhat otherworldly, alienated way. University of Chicago students tend to be islands in themselves.

One reason the football games this fall - the first since Robert Maynard Hutchens banned the game in 1939 - meant a great deal to us is that they were the first glimmer we have seen of a real community. We felt very comfortable together. We have a lot in common and we came to feel, as a crowd, that there are a great number of other people in the country who have a lot in common with us.

We share a large degree of outrage - outrage at the hypocrisies of an older generation that outlaws marijuana while drinking and smoking itself to the grave; outrage at politicians who try to enforce order by approving laws that plant the seeds of a police state; outrage at an educational structure that makes people blind and mindless functionaries in a system which they don't understand and which, as a result, is out of control; outrage at the race to build instruments of destruction when we already have enough arms to kill every man, flower and bug on earth a hundred times over; outrage at the fact that we have so befouled our environment that even if we aren't blown up we may all be poisoned or suffocated to death; outrage most of all at the war that goes on and on, killing men for a cause that is now an admitted mistake, spending billions of dollars on the other side of the globe while millions of our people are hungry or cold or so desperate that they have taken to rioting in the streets.

But because of the outrage we also share a conviction that people must love each other not only to be happy, but to survive. This is so obvious to us it is a cliche. But it is not obvious to everyone or we would not be in the fix we are in.  ROGER BLACK

A student at San Francisco State mans a sign-up table at the Commons, the scene of bloody action last spring. Sign-up tables are far less busy than they used to be; most students have already signed up.

Oberlin College

Oberlin in 1969 is not the busily activist Oberlin of 1968. The campus is quiet, the library is crowded as never before, and student power, at least for the time being, is dead. "Student politics is unreal," says one student. "Maybe we're just tired of hitting our heads against a wall."

If indeed the old battles are no longer important, the mood at Oberlin may be a precursor to a new student mood across the country - "a privatism," as Assistant Professor of Sociology James Walsh calls it, "a realization that you don't change the attitudes of the working class through demonstrations."

But some people have noticed an uneasiness among this year's freshman class. As sophomore Karen Buck puts it, "They came here with a definite image of Oberlin as an activist place. They didn't find it nor did they find the type of leadership they were expecting. It might not be long before they start bringing up all the 'old' issues again." DAVID ELSNER

Smith freshman Alison Quoyeser puts the emphasis on studying rather than demonstrating. Last year Smith students struck over curriculum change; this year, protest remains in committee.

Smith College

Music is a kind of emotional shorthand and if you would understand what is going on today on the campuses, you could hardly do better than to pay attention to the music now being played there.

To walk down a hall at Smith College, for example, is to find the plaintive notes of Segovia's guitar suggesting a peaceful gentleness; or the words of Hair ringing out an innocent defiance of social convention. "Come on, baby, light my fire" is a challenge - sexual, emotional - that is both very ancient and very immediate.

Laura Nyro cries, "Save the people, save the country," and for some student this meant: Go to Washington on Nov. 15; be there, in peace, to do what you can for your country.

Classical music has not been abandoned. "Bach fulfills a need for order, precision, clarity of tone," says one student. "I impose control on myself by listening to controlled music."

While music of today's music is personal, much also expresses an attitude that is distinctly social in its application. Music, in a way, is holding us together today. RHODA MICCOCI

University of California

One local columnist claims that "the freaks rule the campus." A spokesman for the Young American for Freedom, a right-wing organization, says the silent majority runs the campus But the only apparent ruler is the Frisbee. On any day, sometimes even rainy ones, both Sproul and Lower Sproul plazas abound with Frisbee aficionados. Frisbees are so ubiquitous that they have been banned on campus by police as "dangerous and lethal weapons."

That's the kind of place Berkeley is right now. The campus is calm. But the scars of last year's violence are still apparent and much of the calm, though partially the result of apathy and studies, is also the result of a kind of fear stemming from last year. Students are afraid of another cycle of gassing by helicopter, afraid of clubbing, afraid of arrests and another 22 days of National Guard occupation.

Some students are becoming involved with the community surrounding the campus. They have formed several tenant unions to combat rising rents, poor living conditions and inadequate apartment management. A rent strike is in the offing. As one optimistic student, surveying the oddly quiet campus, remarked, "The revolution is coming to an end and it's time to rebuild."

A black man and a white girl walk arm in arm through Sproul Plaza, but no one looks up. People are too involved listening to bluegrass bands and folk singers on the steps of buildings that surround the fountain. Frisbee, anyone? KATHY WHITE

University of Texas

The average student here is still the well-scrubbed adolescent he is expected to be, and the University of Texas still offers as dominant images football, beer and Saturday night fraternity dances. Few innovative radical leaders are to be found here because they have long since migrated to centers of social change like New York and California. For this reason, student-initiated conflict on a really large scale is not likely to come to U.T.

One flare-up occurred recently when architecture students found that plans to enlarge the stadium included the unnecessary removed of many fine old trees and that the campus' only waterway was to become a concrete drainage ditch. Faculty and students immediately came up with alternative plans and went through proper channels with them. Too late, they were told; the contract had already been signed. They went to court to seek an injunction, but at 8 o'clock on Oct. 22 the bulldozers arrived to remove the trees. The court was to convene at 10 o'clock, so opponents of the project tried to stop the bulldozers. Twenty-seven of them were arrested. The injunction arrived an hour after the trees had been cut down.

As on many other large campuses, the mood here is anxious. But barring any major administrative blunders, the biggest concern of the students is likely to remain whether or not the Longhorns can hold their number one national ranking in football. D. KIRK HAMILTON

At Ole Miss girl-watching is second only to football. The best view is from the Student Union steps.

University of Mississippi

Football, good looks, and social life - those are the things Ole Miss students say are most important. And in exactly that order.

"The whole school revolves around football," observes one senior without exaggeration. The second prime concern, good looks, means early rising for most coeds. "I hate hearing my alarm sound at 6:15," sighs one. "But it takes that long to get ready for my 8 o'clock class." The third thing on everyone's mind, social life, is reflected in the strong system of sororities and fraternities. "If you're not in one," someone said the other day, "you miss half of what's going on on campus."

But these are not the only things Ole Miss thinks about. There are also, from time to time, political concerns. Only last year a large demonstration erupted after the defeat of a referendum to legalize beer. PATSY BRUMFELD

San Francisco State

We've been learning a lot more lately. Before the violence last winter, we had not been familiar with tactics frequently used by those who want to prevent change in the social order. We have learned that powerful arguments need not be expressed in words, that arguments can take whatever form is necessary for repression. The form of the argument at State was hundreds of police impatiently twisting their clubs in gloved hands, stomping their feet, waiting to be released on miniskirted girls and defenseless young men who were supporting the minority students' demands for a School of Ethnic Studies.

So we became students of reality. After two years of student effort, politicians and administrators demanded that changed in the curriculum be effected only through due process. Although the strike has passed, we do not consider the events surrounding it to be just history. Between classes we sit on the lawn in the sun and on the benches in front of the campus, knowing that insights, like life, will continue to grow. And not least among those insights is the fact that the fear of change far exceeds the fear felt by those who want change. We learned who was afraid of whom. DAVID NOARD

"Girl From the North Country" - Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash (mp3)

"Big River" -  Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash (mp3)

"That's All Right Mama" - Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash (mp3)

By God, this is America, and I'm a human being. I'm not a piece of property. I'm not a consignment of goods.

- Curt Flood

In Which Martin Amis References Almost Everything

A Young Brit

by JEFF GOLDBERG

Much anticipated and widely reviewed, The Pregnant Widow satisfied my desire for a weighty Martin Amis novel even if it did not entirely satisfy my desire for consistency. 

Keith, a young Brit summering in an Italian castle with several beautiful women, might be the least despicable of Amis's protagonists unless he is the most. Does one feel sorry for him, ashamed by him, or embarrassed for him? As for whether this one summer could truly impact the rest of his life in such a way: I am neutral on the point. In a novel, the central event is always the most important in the characters' lives because the characters don't have lives outside of the novel depicting that particular event.

The sheer amount of literary references struck me more than anything else. Here are the books read by the protagonist over the course of one summer:

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (p 32)
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (p 39)
Pamela by Samuel Richardson (p 43)
Shamela by Henry Fielding (p 43)

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (p 80)
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (p 81) [Closed after 15 pages]
Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (p 108)
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (p 125)

Emma by Jane Austen (p 125)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (p 135)
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (p 158)
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (p 197)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (p 199)
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (p 202)
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (p 217)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (p 253)
Pansies: Poems by D. H. Lawrence (p 278)

That's actually not as many books as I remember. I'm not including books read by other characters, and I'm not including some invented non-fiction books (such as Religions of the World) read by the author. I may have missed a few.

amis' room Books alluded to by the protagonist but not necessarily read that summer:

Dracula by Bram Stoker (p 161)
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (p 224)
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence (p 224)
The Odyssey by Homer (p 253)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (p 253)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (p 268)
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (p 268)

I'm not including books alluded to by other characters. I definitely have missed a few.

Most of all, I thought this novel did a better job of quoting relevant poetry than any other novel I've read. Unfortunately such quotes stopped after around page 100 and didn't pick up again until the end.

Sexual intercourse began
In 1963
(Which was rather late for me —
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

— Philip Larkin, "Annus Mirabilis"

Mind and Body run on
Different timetables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face, with all our courage,
What is now to be.

— W. H. Auden, "The Geography of the House"

photo by tom craig

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

— William Shakespeare, Ariel's song from The Tempest

Action is transitory--a step, a blow.
The motion of a muscle--this way or that--
'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark.
And shared the nature of infinity.

- William Wordsworth, "The White Doe of Rylstone"

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I, the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah, my deare,
I cannot look on thee.

— George Herbert, "Love"

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew...

— John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

...where they work, and age, and put off men
By being unattractive, or too shy,
Or having morals...

— Philip Larkin, "Letter to a Friend about Girls"

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

— William Blake, "The Sick Rose"

There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . . but long it could not be. Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.

— William Shakespeare, Gertrude's speech from Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 7

What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

— Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "The House of Life"

I think the above speaks for itself.

Jeff Goldberg is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. You can find his blog here.

"Feels So Real" - Rusko ft. Ben Westbeech (mp3)

"You're On My Mind Baby" - Rusko (mp3)

"Kumon Kumon" - Rusko (mp3)