No one ever knew they were old-fashioned; everyone always thought they were up-to-the-minute: Rickety Model T cars weren't rickety when they were invented, scratchy radio wasn't scratchy until television, and silent movies weren't a feeble precursor of talkies until there were talkies. Your two-piece telephone that demanded that you hold a cylinder to your ear while you screeched into the wall demanding a particular exchange of a harried, plug-juggling operator was the highest of high-tech. To know it was anything less would have been like acknowledging you were going to die and life was transient and you were already halfway to being a memory or worse. The real and worst tragedy of twentieth-century East Europeans: They had known they were old-fashioned before they could do anything about it.
Arthur PhillipsHe fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.
Arthur PhillipsTags: new-york-city
It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location.
Arthur PhillipsEvery secret is a wrinkle.
Arthur PhillipsIf music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption.
Arthur PhillipsShe had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her "happy" - that wasn't the point - but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds.
Arthur PhillipsOffstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happiness opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day.
Arthur PhillipsThe strangest thing. I came to the end of other people so quickly. Each new person was like a glass of water, and at the beginning I was parched, but then each glass tasted a little worse, the water was grittier, and by the end even the first sip was enough to make me gag, you know?
Arthur PhillipsHe considered her ruthless, in his moments of pain, but also in moments of happiness, experienced mere feet from her but bound right wrist to left ankle by her rules: nothing could evolve, nothing could be consummated, nothing repressed could surface, nothing previously accepted could be ignored. One must not speak of it, in case one could no longer sing of it. Instead, she only kept directing his attention to the wondrously charged air they could tame and make dance between them.
Arthur PhillipsHe had no illusion that this was bittersweet or somehow necessary to make art. It just burned. Anyone who felt this would take their hand off the stove at once, but he was locked in position, inches from the source of his pain, for as far into the future as he could see, because if he was going to be a musician, if he was going to protect the one profound and real thing about himself, the one thing he loved besides her (but which only she made appear at its strongest), then he would be a fool to leave a singer who so obviously was going to go all the way.
Arthur PhillipsPage 1 of 3.
next last »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.