Since U Been Booooooooooring

I had an interesting conversation with Matt Corley while catching up (since I been gone for so long) about Ted Leo's cover of Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone," which I'm going to have to go ahead and call the best single of the year. What comes close? Amerie? Jamie Lidell? "Wait"? "Heartbeat" again, since now it really counts? "Arena"? OK, the last one came out like two years ago, but I'm giving it another chance. Hey, if you haven't Googled your way to Alan Braxe and Fred Falke yet, check out The Uppercuts or at least download "Arena." Only up for seven days, so get it while supplies last.

Alan Braxe and Fred Falke - "Arena"

Anyway, Ted Leo covered "Since U Been Gone" and it leaked to the internet. This is not shocking. My point to Matt was that this cover is inherently pointless, because as a meticulously crafted pop song, Kelly Clarkson already made any future tampering redundant. My position (which Matt disputed) is that "Since U Been Gone" (Ted Leo Remix) is a flimsy attempt to indie-fy a perfect piece of mainstream pop (booooooring), an act that, sorry Matt, I think comes across as pointlessly ironic. He maintains that Leo is just having fun with the song. I feel like this can only prove that either 1) Ted Leo "gets" fun or 2) it's OK to like Kelly Clarkson, provided you can prove you liked Ted Leo first.

The first statement is true. Ted Leo seems like a fun enough guy. But if this is the song's only value (hey, Ted Leo listens to the radio, and he kind of likes it sometimes!), then my casual assessment (boooooooring) stands. The second statement is debatable, but I still feel like this is a stab at making mainstream pop, a format commonly vilified intellectually (but appreciated in a more immediate sense, leading to condescending qualifiers like "guilty pleasure") among many in Ted Leo's audience, acceptable to an indie rock purist mindset. But indie rock purism as a reaction to mainstream pop is like Wendy's purism as a reaction to McDonalds, a petty distinction. In a completely bullshitless world, Kelly Clarkson would have more "cred" than Ted Leo -- she writes better songs (Leo can't even perform a Kelly Clarkson song convincingly) and has admirably found a way to infiltrate the system, i.e. the supermarket. (NB: I heard "Mr. Brightside" in the supermarket yesterday and my respect for the Killers increased considerably.) Also, my whole family likes Kelly Clarkson. And so does yours. No one really likes Ted Leo, though many people like the idea of Ted Leo.

I don't mean to say that this sort of thing can't be done successfully (check out the previous post's Darnielle-ified "The Sign," which at least provides some humor and context to the cover), just that it can be done better, and should usually be avoided, if not always. Leo's cover plays like a tepid tongue-in-cheek in-joke, and if it's not meant to be even a little ironic then it's...what's that word again? BOOOOOOOOOOORING.

Ted Leo - "Since U Been Gone" (live)

Hey Remember Broom?

So here are some random thoughts because I'm bored and lonely while Emily is in Florida. I would like to have more of a point, but it's either quality or quanitity, and since quality is like a 60/40 shot anyway, what the hell.

1) Ana is poking me with a broom as I type this. Prodding. I asked her this question the other day:

"So what did you think of the new Diplo baile funk album?"

Her reply:

"Eh, his last one was better."

I thought that was funny. Particularly because neither of us have heard either album. I bet she was right, too.

2) To non-converts, the new Hold Steady album is much better if you get "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" stuck in your head. Separation Sunday is in the top twenty after some waffling. (Oh, PS, this is going to be a quasi-MP3 organization now. Here's hoping I don't get arrested!)

The Hold Steady - "Your Little Hoodrat Friend"

3) I'm hoping that Choo Choo La Rouge will play at the Buzzsaw Haircut concert featuring Milton and the Devils Party. A night of power-pop with part two of the intellectual sparring between Dr. Mary Donnelly and Dr. Daniel Robinson.

Choo Choo La Rouge - "Extinct Music"

Milton and the Devils Party - "Ugly American"

4) My first Ithacan article is going to be about ABBA. My premise is that ABBA is the the pop ideal, a perfect business and aesthetic model for considering pop artists. This will, with any luck, introduce the focus of future columns, which will deal with social and corporate institutions that dictate taste in popular music. I might also reference this Ace of Base spiel that John Darnielle has at the beginning of his "The Sign" cover, which I feel is apropos.

John Darnielle - "The Sign" (live)

5) Holy crap, a recent search for original They Might Be Giants Dial-a-Songs led me to this site, which has a few free downloads. Most mind-blowing find so far:

They Might Be Giants - "Birdhouse in Your Soul" (demo recording) (Source: Museum of Idiots)

That's all for now. This MP3 blog thing is kinda kool.

Hey Remember Films?

So apparently Ross thinks he's hot stuff for out-listing me (don't forget folks, you can see my taste evolving on a daily basis at the Bedbugs sister site Chaff and a Half. I don't "get" the name either).

But as I told Busdriver's reigning internet superfan (with a notable computer tan), I don't like ranking movies. At least not since Patty Zimmermann and Michel Foucault came and deconstructed my fanboy brain into mush. I don't know what to hate anymore. But I still like a bunch of stuff, which is why I'm prepared to do a half-year film update...right now!

A quick note before I begin (just kidding, it's a longwinded note!): I don't watch a lot of films in the theater. Due to a tricky combination of agoraphobia, supercool hipster ennui, and moneylessness, I stick mostly to a strict regiment of Important Foreign Films and Documentaries from Netflix. But as I feel woefully unqualified to sing the praises of Fitzcarraldo (and then, based on Burden of Dreams, retroactively wring my hands over praising it at all...I mean, I'm not an expert in sound ethnographic filmmaking practices, but that's brutal), I will instead stick to multi- and indie-plex fodder. In alphabetical order to confound listfreaks (including myself).

Batman Begins
A compelling rumination on...what was it again? Oh yeah, FEAR. I forgot that this movie is about FEAR. Ironically enough, I had a massive anxiety attack, either from FEAR or from perilously low blood sugar which as we all know is actually the result of FEAR, and missed the last hour of the film. If it's any compensation to people who would burn me alive for thinking of "skipping out" on this movie (out of FEAR), I spent like five hours crying. *** 1/2 until further notice.

Last Days
Gus Van Sant is an asshole. This will be examined further in a subsequent post.

March of the Penguins
Hey, did you know that penguins "love" each other, and that when a penguin egg breaks the mother penguin is actually "bereft," and that when a seal kills a female penguin it's actually "taking two lives"? Amazingly, this fascinating documentary on penguin mating is narrated not by Rick Santorum, but by Morgan Freeman, whose soothing voice almost, but not quite, detracts from the creepy, pandering, blink-and-you-missed-it-conservative "family values" script. Winged Migration is visually more mesmerizing and keeps the talk at a New Age minimum of misguided anthropomorphizing -- but hey, they had like 7,000 cinematographers and weren't shooting in fucking ANTARCTICA. French people are crazy.

Murderball
Murderball is a thoughtful examination of the many trials -- imposed by both societal taboos regarding the physically challenged and the literal physical impediments of quadripelegia -- that a group of young men must...holy shit, they're playing rugby in commando Mad Max chairs!!! This documentary is pretty amazing, so not too much to add to the chorus. I wish it were longer and more "difficult," but secretly I just want everyone else to like it less. Yo check this ad out!

EDIT: Palindromes

I completely forgot that I saw this at (siiiigh) The Best Theatre Ever. I won't go too into detail about my own feelings, but will make two observations outside the film itself: 1) The audience at the film festival at which this was shown thought the film's most disturbing moments were hilarious. I was taken aback by how openly people "got" whatever "jokes" were apparent in Todd Solondz's characteristically ambiguous black humor screenplay. Frankly, Palindromes isn't very funny, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. 2) In the supplemental essay we picked up, Solondz in an interview claims this movie -- which uses a twelve-year-old girl's abortion of a baby she wants to keep as an entry point for a basic film suture experiment (several actresses and one actor of differing age, ethnicity, and physical appearance play the same girl) -- is "a film about one set of people who kill one way, and one set of people who kill another way." His parallels here are the girl's parents, who force her to have the abortion, and the "Sunshine" family, Christian pro-life zealots who are secretly responsible for mudering doctors who perform abortions. His simplification of the issue (for the record, and feel free to dispute, shooting a man is killing "one way," but pressuring a daughter to abort her child at age twelve is not necessarily "another way"...hence this Supreme Court business) makes me uncomfortable about his relationship with this material. But since the film is not really "about" abortion (the real focus is identity) and since the film certainly doesn't present the argument Solondz makes in his interview, it's possible to engage the film outside of his personal argument, which is the only thing keeping me from Van Santing my analysis the film.

The Sea Inside
I guess this counts toward 2004, but I'm counting it as 2005. Along with Murderball and Lifetime's upcoming Wilt: Schiavo's Strength, Schiavo's Shame, this deals with an uncomfortable social topic with dignity and compassion, as opposed to...uh, not.

Sin City
Best comic book movie ever made. This movie is spectacular, and any moral quibbles an ultra-concerned, anti-ironic, PC-but-OK-with-that 'aughts guy like myself might have about the film's content are diffused because it's just a comic book, people, and comic books are awesome.

I have not seen Me and You and Everyone Loves This Movie, Rize, Mad Hot Ballroom...I haven't seen a lot of stuff (besides, we all know I'm going to compile my year-end list from a film syllabus anyway). I did finally check out the "Up" Series, the 2006 edition of which in all likelihood will be better than anything that comes out this year or next. My pick for #1 of 2005 so far: Teratogenesis.

Werner Herzog once said, "I'm quite convinced that cooking is the only alternative to filmmaking. Other than that, perhaps walking on foot." I'll leave you to ponder that.

Paul Anka Probably Doesn't Read Pitchfork

Paul Anka: Rock Swings

The new Paul Anka cover album, Rock Swings, has been met with incredulity, reluctant approval, and outright dismissal (come on, Stylus, that shit is just lazy).

The project isn’t anything remarkably new, which is one reason I won’t spend as much time analyzing (or maybe “analyzing”) it as I’d originally planned -- to be honest, this is more of a follow-up to a statement I made about “enjoying this album unironically” on Dr. D.’s blog. Pat Boone made an infamous stab at contemporary relevance with his metal album, and Johnny Cash has counter-intuitively immortalized many a modern rock classic in his American series. The most direct parallel I can think of to this project in terms of overlapping material is the self-titled Moog Cookbook album from 1996, which I wrote about in more detail here.

However, the key difference between Moog Cookbook and Rock Swings, and a difference that makes enjoyment of the latter a bit difficult, is that Anka isn’t “in” on some kind of an inside pop culture joke -- perhaps Anka himself is the joke, but I’m not willing to snark up my appraisal of Rock Swings just to get a few laughs flaying the easiest pop music target since Michael Jackson. (I’m looking at you, Bjorn.)

In a way, the straight-faced approach is what makes this album provocative. While Anka’s brand of interpretation makes for a few embarrassing missteps (a swing cover of “Tears in Heaven” strikes me as particularly cheap, especially given the song’s well-known back story), it also helps to recontextualize a few ubiquitous 80s and 90s tracks as “standards.” The most memorable example: Aside from actually Googling the lyrics, I’d never really understood the first line in “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a cover choice that would border on sacrilege if it weren’t already such a cliché (I’d save my Nirvana purist rant for the Bad Plus, or maybe Gus Van Sant, who will get his own vitriolic post soon enough).

Anka really does offer a unique, even refreshing take on the song, if only in those opening moments, simply by enunciating -- whether or not the song is actually any good is debatable, but it’s at least thought-provoking. It raises the question: can anything constitute a “standard” given the right amount of popularity or generational significance? If that's the case, I would be interested to see what Anka could do with, say, “Get Low.” The absence of hip-hop on this album (along with on the Cash or Boone or Moog or whoever equivalent) suggests that a rock template is a prerequisite to canonization in a more classicist form.

The album has value outside of theoretical musings as well. At times, Anka actually improves upon his source material -- I honestly prefer his version of “It’s My Life” to Jon Bon Jovi’s original, because his take is so much less self-serious than Bon Jovi’s. Also, the reference to Sinatra makes more sense in this context. This particular cover, unlike the Nirvana cover (which is a bit awkward after the novelty of enunciated lyrics wears off about ten seconds in), better illustrates the link between Anka’s “classic” and a more contemporary modern rock radio conception of the word. Here, Bon Jovi’s bravado, tedious in a guitar rock context, really does seem sympathetic with Sinatra’s, and is subsequently more hip. And not in some ironic bachelor-pad sense, either; Frankie is legitimately, effortlessly, mythically cool where Bon Jovi gets upstaged and humiliated by dog puppets.

But then, Bon Jovi could have been upstaged (by Triumph or Paul Anka or Frank) twenty years ago, which leads to another major flaw of the album: timing. If we’ve established that this is not, in fact, an “ironic” album (and what swing album professedly could be?), then it follows that its value either stems from experimental novelty (which I’ve suggested) or, more simply, from its appeal as a money-maker to the widest demographic possible. Though I’d argue for the former, this is unlikely given both Anka’s timeframe (Moog Cookbook wasn’t even particularly timely a decade ago) and also his broad genre criteria for inclusion, which includes everything from “Jump” (classic) to “The Way You Make Me Feel” (redundant) to “Lovecats” (wait, what?). Even if Anka's target audience is in reality unknown-to-nonexistent, the album still lies somewhere between curio and cash-grab, with a significant leaning toward the cash. That's a disappointing middle-ground for a project that has more power as a catalyst for reconsidering the “standard” than as a reliable 4th of July flag-stuffer. Ultimately, Johnny Cash covered this terrain with more personal honesty, while Pat Boone at least did it more brazenly (I’m only referring to the album’s notoriety since I haven’t actually heard it).

The best that can be said of Rock Swings is that some of the songs are good, even when freed of smug projected irony, and most tracks are at least adult-contempo-pleasant. Still, the album is on the whole too stagnant and humorless -- which isn’t to say it’s as stone-faced as Chris Cornell. If it were more consistently interesting, I might expound more on the emerging “classical” (not “classic”) status of rock music in a more general sense, perhaps another sign of the genre's waning relevance. But as it is, Anka’s rock swingin’ is -- well, kind of boring.

(I eagerly await Dave Grohl’s “classical” take on David Banner. Then we can start talking irony.)

Beatle Juice on the Brain

I keep referring everyone to this article by "Metal" Mike Saunders on Radio Disney and the effects of a shifting pop demographic on the wider music culture. The most interesting revelation, and one that seems fairly obvious at first, is that (gasp!) there was music before the Beatles! I know, you're thinking...Elvis. Maybe Chuck Berry. Early rock n' roll. Jazz. Beethoven.

But something fundamental is changing in American music culture, a development that's become more pronounced in the past five or six years, and Saunders discusses it effectively. Pop music as we know it has been shaped by a style of rock popularized by the Beatles since 1964, and this influence is on its way out. Now that the institutional aspects of supposedly preference-oriented listening (and critical evaluation) of pop music have been not only revealed (rockism, rockism, rockism!) but actually oversold to the point of cliche in some facets of the music commmunity, we can see a definitive movement away from rock as the standard, or even center, of a general discourse on pop music.

But enough about rockism. The pertinent point here is that a discussion of popular music in America is dictated institutionally by a style of music that did not exist (as a culturally significant force, anyway) until 1964. Obvious example: Referring to a music critic as a "hip-hop critic" is still awkward and relatively unpopular (though not unheard of), whereas even critics who don't evaluate any rock music are tagged "rock critics." This is changing, but it's true enough to help belabor the point.

It took me a while to come to grips with this idea theoretically -- in fact, it took Good Charlotte to really illuminate my ingrained prejudices. I briefly mentioned this in a Buzzsaw article, but it's worth noting again: Good Charlotte's most recent single "I Just Wanna Live" conforms to a style of pop at odds with a more traditional guitar-bass-drums rock set-up that they've used (poorly) in the past. On its own merits, the song is somewhat monotonous, but comapared to the band's other material it's sunny, upbeat, and it doesn't make me want to kill myself. I wrote the thing off immediately for sounding too "mechanical" and "polished," and realized slowly that this value judgement had no valid musical basis whatsoever -- I hated an idea, not a song. And this is directed toward a band I didn't care for in the first place.

Well, last Saturday I had another revelation at Johnny D's in Somerville, where Emily and I saw the Beatles cover band Beatle Juice perform. Beatle Juice consists of Brad Delp, the former lead singer of the group Boston, and a few other local session band types. They perform Beatles covers exclusively, and their renditions are absolutely faithful. Guitar solos, instrument timbre, vocal phrasing, samples (in the later material)...all spot on. And they perform with unbridled energy and excitement, somehow avoiding the facelessness that this sort of enterprise might suggest.

I danced. Emily danced. Emily and I danced together, sort of. Other people danced, older people. Other people sat and bobbed their heads, much older people. The mean age was about 45, but damned if every single person (from audience member to bartender to sound guy) wasn't at least half-heartedly mouthing along to every lyric -- mumbling at the same verse in "Come Together"; confusing "I get high" and "I get by" and "I'm gonna try" in "With a Little Help From My Friends" because no one remembers the order (except Delp); screaming "Hey-o!" at the start of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (except Delp -- a rare lapse in the band's doppelganger-effective rigor). Fingers were snapped, bodies shuffled, and always with just the slightest hint of respect for the beat.

I don't really remember the experience very clearly, and the only song I could remember afterward was the closer, "I Saw Her Standing There," which we sang on the walk home. What was disturbing (and kind of exhilirating) was how automatic my reaction to the music was. And I'm not even a Beatles fanatic -- that distinction goes to Emily, who chided me for not knowing the lyrics to some of the earlier songs. (Full disclosure: my Beatles collection starts at Rubber Soul. I'm that guy.) This was pop programming, plain and simple. It was a blast, but I have a feeling that I wouldn't have reacted so intuitively or mechanically even at a Kraftwerk show (which reminds me to mention that Minimum-Maximum is pretty much the best live album of all time).

Is it a bad thing that I react to the Beatles in such a slavish fashion that it requires an awkward rhetorical question to reiterate the point? I dunno, maybe. But it does help support the perception of a stifled (or perhaps tunnel-visioned) music discourse that rockism suggests. Perhaps this is ultimately a moot point; maybe the average age of the Beatle Juice crowd is squarely planted in middle-age for a reason. For what it's worth, I didn't feel out of place for one second. As the foundations of modern pop linked historically to Beatlemania begin to be actively questioned in the critical community (and, indirectly, popularly; how many rock singles have topped the Billboard charts recently?), pop music is, as Saunders and others have suggested, moving past rock as status quo altogether.

It's called progress, I guess, and we should probably give in to it -- in 2005, rock is slowly becoming anachronistic, and Beatle Juice is cult music. Still, as fogyish and conservative as it sounds, it's pretty damn comforting to be a member.

Cross Musings

No, the post title doesn't refer to this scathing parody (for the record, I totally out-overwrought David Cross...not even close, Dr. Fünke).

I think that this travel piece (2 of 2 from England) is a little too nasty, and not very representative of my time abroad -- it's more of a series of musings from the sour, if clear-headed, state of mind that consumed me in London. I'm still uncomfortable with this piece, but I thought I'd publish it anyway. If anything, it's an accurate reflection on how I felt at the time.

A more straightforward account of Prague (which, along with Berlin and Paris, was the source of many more positive experiences and began a slow shift toward a happier and healthier general outlook) will follow soon, so as to satisfy my two regular readers, one of whom is me.

TRAVELOGUE

On the plane from Rome to London, I casually overheard a conversation that intrigued me. A young man whose slow Texan drawl I placed somewhere between Goofy and Gomer Pyle was discussing America with an Italian woman, who may or may not have been forced into the conversation against her will. He extolled the virtues of Christian summer camps and teenage monogamy, and of “promise rings,” a venerable symbol of joyless youthful restraint. I wondered what it must be like to live in his America. Extended travel abroad has a disembodying effect, and as I flew back to a temporary home after eleven days in Italy, I found myself floating to the top of the airplane cabin, picking out “Americans” surrounding me from above as though I’d never set foot in the place.

*

In Italy, it gradually became apparent that even as Italian cities are weighed down to the point of cultural collapse by international tourism, which in parts of Venice seemed at times like a veritable infestation, there is a strong sense of national unity. An inscrutable unifying force pervades the myriad alleyways of Venice, the subways and side streets of Rome, even the slanted ascending expanse of the relatively remote Amalfi coast. It’s in the offhand casualness of Metro strikes, in old women in furs walking slowly side by side, in the tiny scooters that constantly skate along the edges of long traffic lines, in cobblestones that make bus rides slightly nauseating, and in massive, unmarked ancient ruins that sleep heavily in the middle of industrial complexes.

I wonder if the same force exists in America. Politically, national unity within the country has rarely been so fractured and disjointed, and culturally, I think Bill Watterson put it best in a “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon: “The problem with the melting pot is that there’s no money in it.” Outside of the country itself, the only thing that seems to unite Americans is an overwhelming aura of contempt directed toward them, and the seemingly universal paranoid suspicion among American tourists of adhering to the stereotypes of disrespectful clumsiness and callousness.

*

Reading two W.G. Sebald novels on the trip, I was mesmerized by long passages devoted to listing places: street names, mountain ranges, winding rivers and expansive oceans, labyrinthine cities and quaint towns. And I think that even the most depressing account of a near two-week holiday in Italy would be made enchanting by the association of a few plain, specific details. But where Sebald finds the intimacy in the ostensibly common, most American university students are more concerned with dollar bin guidebooks and easily Googled tour guides, cheap lodging in the middle of tourist traps, and the Important Sites. Our itineraries breed such banality that any observations we make are deprived of quieter truths.

I find that the angst and fear and cautious wonderment of travel are there in my notes, but somehow even the most mundane details of widely acknowledged attractions and locations trump personal recollection. I wonder how many people have taken the exact pictures I took, had the exact same conversations on the exact same roads. Yet these shared memories, seemingly second-hand and noticeably worn after countless years of repetition, are what we bring home with us. The monuments, piazzas, crumbling statues and columns, and ostentatious government buildings all swallow the tiny human figures—strangers, friends, girlfriend, you—that huddle together and smile absently in front of them.

*

At some point on the trip I chalked it all up to homesickness, which I’d yet to feel strongly in London because homesickness requires boredom, and boredom in a dingy London flat is far too crippling to allow much room for homesickness. Boredom on a train, however, will get you thinking of home as soon as the words run out in the novel you bought at double price for something to do. But, as is the nature of travel boredom, pleasant details don’t enter into it—the Big Picture asserts itself like a bully, ousting reminiscences of the left side of your childhood bed that you always slept on, or the chair where your father sat and snored a little while you practiced the piano, or the wooden kitchen table where you broke your front tooth.

Instead, you think about things like life accomplishments and financial stability and marriage and death and other concepts foreign to the brain of a university student. And you wish you had music that didn’t make you want to strangle someone, and you wish you had a decent book instead of some convoluted private dick potboiler, and you wish you could think of something that didn’t make you feel utterly insignificant in the scheme of things. Which you aren’t, you reassure yourself—only in Italy.

You think about America a lot when you’re roaming in an unfamiliar city. You occasionally forget that you yourself are from America, and that this is how you’ll be defined by everyone you meet. You start to buy into your own neurotic assumption that everyone despises you on principle, and you try to keep your mouth shut, silently judging all of the tourists around you. Look at that one, ordering a “ham sandwich” as though she’s in a New Jersey diner; or that one, speaking in a slow condescending tone to an Italian tobacconist clerk who not only speaks English fluently, but possesses a passable American accent; or that one, pointing to his menu indignantly and nearly shouting out some bizarre approximation of the word “zabaglione.”

Of course you’re not above any of it—you’re as ignorant of the Italian language as they are, and mangle common phrases accordingly, asking for “quattro big-lee-ett-ee” at the train “stay-zee-on-ay.” Later, you fail to see the irony in mocking Asian tourists in surgical masks as you try to shake your fear of being stabbed arbitrarily wandering the city at night. Are these small hypocrisies all that everyone knows of America? And even as you begin to further understand the implacable aura of contempt, you also grow to resent it.

You meet a lovely American couple at a Chinese restaurant (why did you go to so many Chinese restaurants in Italy?) and help them to decipher their bill—the tip is included, you say, and they thank you, and you have a brief discussion about the many ways one can be ripped off in a Roman restaurant. And at that moment, you’d love to get on the plane with them headed for Chicago or New York, or wherever it was they were from. Because in America, you aren’t charged for service twice, and when you tip a waiter it goes to the waiter, and you can get a decent steak at a decent price, and how on Earth are you going to go another two months without free refills or tap water?

*

I visit Emily, whom I haven’t seen in weeks, and we stumble through Rome again from Paolo e Iginia’s Bed and Breakfast. We retread the sites in a blur: Trevi Fountain, which owes me a euro; the Imperial Forum next to the Colosseum, which Emily has been studying for a test; back down Via Cavour and the SEXY SHOP 2 (there is no SEXY SHOP 1) and Cavour 313, the enoteca where we purchased the cheapest dessert wine and felt as sophisticated as a student budget will allow; back up Via Veneto to eat our worst meal, and south to Trastevere to eat our best; across the one-block expanse of the Jewish ghetto where we avoid fried artichoke because Emily is sure she can’t stand the stuff; along the Tiber where a forced kiss is more awkward than romantic, and we imagine others have done it before, perhaps moments prior, with far greater panache; and back to the bed and breakfast, where Paolo winks at Emily (again) and we laugh and drink limoncello and look at our pictures and immediately fall asleep on opposite sides of the bed. And that’s the last I’ll see her for a month.

*

The next day you’re in Venice, and the water smells like sulfur and the scenery’s resemblance to its corresponding postcards is striking. There’s an element of filth to every picturesque view—in the water, on the sidewalks—that undermines the sort of spotless grandeur the postcards suggest. You bumped into a few classmates on the previous train, and wonder if you’ll see them again, sitting in the same car as you in the same seats as you. Is it that small a world, or are we all just the same sort of suckers, all traveling on paths calculated specially for us? Despite your planning, you haven’t really found Venice yet because you’re looking in all the wrong places, wearing down the most tourist-accessible side roads and sites while neglecting those private crevices that exist even in a city as small as Venice. While you “weigh down” the city, others live in it, very much apart from you, and they will know the beauty of this place. You’ll know a postcard, and honestly it’s all you’ll need—Rialto and San Marco have been molded into their current state for you specifically, and try as you might to condemn the artificiality of the shops, the sites, the goddamn McDonalds, it’s all perversely comforting.

You think back to that day in Amalfi, when the local high school let out as you cluelessly stumbled through the tiny city, and you remember how uncomfortable you were in a sea of children, most not much younger than yourself, all strolling confidently down those streets. You might have flicked up your collar and felt the slight heat of embarrassment in your cheeks; you might have averted your eyes and shut your mouth. But regardless of your attempts to conceal your identity and your shame, this was the one time you couldn’t fool yourself, couldn’t rationalize that perhaps the contempt of locals was baseless and ingrained—you, you don’t belong here and don’t need to be told. You are an American, an invader, a tourist. You wanted home then, too.

*

You feel like you’ve neglected to do so much during your stay. In fact, you feel like you’ve missed everything, wherever it was. But there will be time for that later, maybe, when you’ve figured out where your home really is, when you’ve set your priorities, when you’ve matured. Or maybe not: Better to go through it all blindly—mindlessly and breathlessly. Already your experiences are congealing into a dense, bittersweet blur. You’ll keep sporadic, fleeting bursts of nostalgia, perhaps, or the detached comfort of digital pictures on a website, or the few anecdotes you’ve edited and sugar-coated for laughs, though in truth there was once a distinct sadness to those stories…

Have you really been so stupid to have squandered these experiences? Are they even yours? Are you grateful for being allowed the opportunity at all? Or are you resentful of the institutions that dictated how and when you might have explored these places? Will you remember it all tomorrow? How little of it all remains, even now as you scramble to record it cogently.

But soon enough you’ll be in America and you won’t concern yourself with these matters. You’ll wonder why “home” was such a captivating idea from abroad—it’s so plain, so safe. And until you leave it again, you’ll forget how much you really cherish the place.