Annotated Reality.

-written yesterday-

England – I’m back

Scotland – I have returned

Listening to: alva noto - uni rec

Deprived of sleep, bodily motions and any sense of time, I arrive in London. From Heathrow I take the longest ride on the tube to date; 50 minutes till Kings Cross. It’s an eternity in waiting, but paradoxically also a race with time, as I am running late for my connecting train to Edinburgh. An even slower race is taking place within the Piccadilly line between myself and another outcast of the airport. Sitting directly across from one another we take turns to nod off between realms.

When I arrive at Kings Cross it’s too late. My train left half an hour ago. Luckily there is another one within the hour, albeit setting me back a further 60 quid. With no sleep for 23 hours at that point I rush to the newly discovered train for the four and a half hour journey to Edinburgh. At this point – scuttling past York – it’ll be at least another 10 hours before I lay to rest.

This is basically incredible.

⋯

On the tracks now right in between Berwick-upon-Tweed and Edinburgh. A boy just entered the carriage striking up conversation with his sister. I understood very little of it – the Scottish accent as beautiful as ever. So ungraspable and ephemeral. In this moment at least. The fairy tale ambiance that Edinburgh surrounds me with is not bubblegum, happy-go-lucky or daft – it is romantic, aesthetical and kitsch.

Kitsch as described by Milan Kundera; “In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.”

Yours, Sincerely.

New Orleans. No wonder people back in Montréal were passionate about this place. The two places intersect in numerous ways. The obvious being the French influence on both places. New Orleans tries too hard though. The French-ness of the place is assumed and artificial. The more symbolism on display, the more desperate the grasp on a claim to history, which is instantly visible in the amount of fleur-de-lis regurgitated all over the city. The architecture around the water front and French quarter is purposefully different than anywhere else in the states, taking its cues from French and Greek traditions. What stood out to me were the ornate iron balconies of Spanish design, which I haven’t seen since Lima, Peru.

New Orleans is the Montréal in which I could never reside. The heat and politics of the people being a major factor. N’awlins has much in the ways of music though – a lot. I’m just not sure if that’s enough to make a city (for me).

Most of all, New Orleans suffers under the unfairity of being the last city before my departure of this (in the original meaning of the word) awesome continent. The unavoidable yearning for familiarity is nigh. The silly thing about that is that I’m not even going home – Hell, I don’t even have a home. Edinburgh is my next stop – a city for which I am destined to call home at some point. Not just yet though. After Edinburgh comes Barcelona; my final stop before I actually stop (for a while) in Copenhagen.

I wonder when I will realize that I have left Montréal.

Yours, Sincerely.

Clarksdale offered a few more surprises. Meeting T-Model Ford was one such surprise. Serendipitous? I don’t think so. Instead, it is a testament to the luck that has followed Ally and I throughout this entire trip. It just so happened that one of the last remaining blues legends was playing in an old crumbling down juke joint.

We sat in seats out front sharing T-Model’s bottle of whiskey as he told us how B. B. King had claimed his best shows to be the ones he did with T-Model Ford. The 90-something year old bluesman’s hands were plagued and could barely muster a chord on his guitar. His wife and the two other bandmembers (Lightnin’ Malcolm and T-Model’s grandson) desperately tried to make him give up the guitar and just sing. As it happens to the elderly, reluctance to accept a dwindling body birthed stubbornness, which convinced him that his guitar must’ve been at fault. I guess we will all end up weak in mind and body, but T-Model Ford shunned time and age the few times he mustered to just sing. His voice defied his deteriorating body and his younger self shone through.

Somewhere around then I got older still. It doesn’t touch me anymore.

How much longer can we keep doing this? It’s like the same shit just happens over and over, and then in a week it just all resets until it happens again. Every week it’s kind of of the same story in a different way, but it just keeps getting more and more ridiculous.

I don’t know if I’ve changed or you have, but I just feel like I might not have a whole lot of time left, and I want to enjoy it.

I want to enjoy it too, but I just can’t fake it anymore. You just seem kind of shitty to me.

Yours, Sincerely.

Going from Memphis to Clarksdale was like travelling back in time to a lilliput version of what Memphis might have been back when. Memphis was lovely because it proved to be the first city in which we had time to take our time. No running around headless trying to take it all in. Just a steady flow of experiences: Sun Studios; a baseball game; a steady stream of artisanal beers and local food; a ride on what must be one of the slowest trolley cars; and a piece of perfect urban development in the shape of the Mississippi river. Time slowed down and so did we in a response to preceding frantics and the impending gentle tempo of the Deep South.

Now in Clarksdale after our second of three nights, we have already seen most of what the city has to offer. The first night was spent eating the greasiest BBQ ribs I have ever had – which isn’t saying a lot, as I can’t remember ever having ribs. After dinner we headed over to Morgan Freeman’s blues club, Ground Zero. Run down, messy, friendly and scribbled with the names of performers and guests on every possible surface. This is not a tourist hellhole, but a local hotspot where you can always drop in and check out what’s going on. A Robert Johnson cover, some whiskey and a pool game later, I headed back feeling elated and fulfilled.

The following day, breakfast was had in a all too urbane café with several types of coffee and other fancy eateries. Not like the worn down shacks lining most of the streets of Clarksdale. Ally and I strolled towards the Blues Museum, which was exactly what one can expect of a small-town local run venture. Glass cabinets, an ominous amount of memorabilia and one too many words on little plaques.

A 5 km (3 mile) hike in the searing Mississippi sun along railroads with freight trains and desolate cotton fields brought us to the Shack Up Inn, where wandering souls and bluesmen alike enjoyed good company and better music. An old corn barn (the ceiling still dusted yellow) now housed a cornucopia of signs and memorabilia from the 50s to make a bar and stage for performers on the road. This is what I sought. The thing I hoped to find in Nashville; Memphis; Jackson, TN. Funny how the blues never left Clarksdale, but roamed through the rest of the US, leaving only neon and rock and roll.

Yours, Sincerely.

19/29

After a stretch of oddball cities that were enjoyable in each their own outlandish ways, we have again struck gold. Memphis is everything Nashville was not, although sharing many similarities. Both have a downtown riverfront; are origins of musical history (rock n’ roll in Memphis – country in Nashville); thrive on that history through a strip of neon (Broadway = Nashville – Beale Street = Memphis); and both inhabit around half a million people.

Immediately, the rock n’ roll/blues tradition appeal to me far greater than country music ever could. Added charm comes in the form of architecture – a mix between red bricks and pastel-coloured sandblasted concrete.

The streets are narrow, the city is low, with the least amount of skyscrapers I have encountered in North America thus far. It’s a relief. Horizontalism and attention to detail instead of verticalism and pointless expansion. Earlier on the trip we were told that many of the skyscrapers were built by banks merely as a symbol of power. In actuality, most of the floors in the buildings stood empty and the banks desperately tried to rent out the additional space to whomever they could. Inflated power structures. False hierarchies.

As per tradition, the southern mentality is friendly above anything else. The amount of waves and how’y’all-doin’s followed by wide involved smiles is staggering.

• Where’y’all from?
• I’m from Denmark, he’s from Scotland
• Wauw.. It’s jus’ that.. Y’all dress real different, so I was jus’ wonderin’.
• And you’re from here?
• Yeah, we come here ‘lot! So.. Den-mark and Scotland.

[young girl runs back inside the café of Sun Studios]

Luckily, we’re in town for two more nights. This place is something good in the world.

1. New York City
2. Boston
3. Memphis

So far…

Yours, Sincerely.

Streets plastered with neon have never attracted me. I doubt it attracts many other than tourists passing through. Like moths to a flame. The great colourful tubes signify life and energy with an offer of shortcuts to dancing, bars, music. Ally and I are by definition tourists. We do our best to avoid these snares by scourging various sources for the best eateries, waterholes and leftfield attractions.

When we arrived at Nashville, the neon tubes intersected our interests. The capital of country offered many sights: bluegrass dive bars; antiquated printing press shops; Jack White’s record store Third Man Records; Emmylou Harris at the Ryman Auditorium; and endless freight trains running in succession around the clock. In spite of all this, Nashville was not a place for me. It’s made for cars. Not pedestrians. If the human eye can only take in what is 100m in front of it and 100m to each side, then that would explain many of my reservations. The wide roads, lengthy blocks and abysmal sidewalks made for taxing journeys. Much of the vast area of Nashville looked to be in constant decay or – even worse – re-development. Eyesores littered the city.

In most other places, the entertainment and history would more than make up for those grievances. There was just one more thing though. The people there. They seemed to embody every prejudice and fear I had of white trash and the south. The banter on Broadway was loud and confrontational, while many glances were given at the oddity that were the two aliens in their midst. No logo t-shirt? No dirty jeans? No cowboy hat? We were the obvious eyesore in a city of tourists and passer-throughs from Hickville, USA.

I have dealt with people like this countless times growing up in a small town – these people don’t change much whether they’re from Denmark, the US or anywhere else for that matter. They cannot comprehend and thus they hate. Exquisitely simple. The problem with Nashville is its size. A city of that size determined majorly by these people frightens me.

The desolate sprawl came to be a place of relief.

Yours, Sincerely

Zooming out of Atlanta is a sunny ride on top of a few grey and rainy days. The rain was relief. Ally loves the sun and heat. I thrive in cooler climates, where the possibility of wearing shorts and t-shirts is out of the question. At this moment of writing, endless fields of urban sprawl is passing by the bus. I just watched Urbanized, a documentary by Gary Hustwit who did the recommendable Helvetica and slightly less so Objectified. It’s incredible to watch while seeing many of the issues raised right outside the window.

The expansive, clogged up –but beautifully minimalist – high way systems twirl and veer off into the cookie cutter communities. All molded and pre-fabricated with no history apart from how Sally said that thing about Fran’s roses, which was overheard by Peggy. What a bitch..

Atlanta had some of the same problems of suburbia. It’s comprised of little communities, connected by car-traffic with quiet all-too-green plots of grass. As a pedestrian, I felt that I was placed in the Sim Cities I built in my early teens. I would place residential 1x1 blocks to compensate for my 1x1 commercial blocks, and when I had some spare resources I would scatter some 1x1 blocks of recreational areas and parks just to make things appear slightly habitable. Aesthetic only on appearance. It was functionalism at its most dire extreme.

Atlanta seemed to be a plastic city. It just didn’t seem real. Where were the inhabitants? Why weren’t anybody using the – admittedly too sculpted – parks? Block by block urban planning offers little cohesion. Maybe the huge high ways running through the city center was an attempt to achieve such consistency.

Yours, Sincerely.

The second leg on our tri-city tour of North Carolina (bookended by Raleigh and Charlotte) was Winston-Salem. Yet another one-night stop in somewhere completely unknown to me. The main focus of our stay there came to be the people. There’s little I hate more than Danes who’ve been to the US (or anywhere else for that matter) only to return home with stories about how we – the Danes – need to learn from the openness and hospitality of the True Blue.

There is no way of making any changes to social conduct by postulating a hate of the current.

It’s nationalism reversed. A thought that the grass is greener on the other side, but without the insight of there being an other side. It is the thought that mannerisms are seperable from history and cultural context. It’s even worse than (reversed) nationalism - it’s regionalism. Who is so preposterous as to claim they know a country - let alone their own - to an extent where they can make judgements on its people as a whole?

However, it is undeniable that the people I encountered in Winston-Salem were incredible specimens of the human race. First of all, our hostess of the night was a soccer mom fighting to create a workers union for airline staff, driving us everywhere at our slightest behest. She told us everything about the city, the neighbourhood and her own life and made us a breakfast fit for kings. At the brewery/restaurant where we had our dinner and sample of the local brews, we got talking to the table next to us – three young brew-aholics all settled in Winston-Salem, but originally from Florida, Atlanta and Arizona. They made friendly banter and supplied us with other must-try beers on the menu.

I walked home with a smile and slight intoxication plastered across my face.

To top it all off, there was a girl in the euro-styled café/bakery/winebar where we had our lunch. The shuffling, glance-stealing kind. After a bit she could not hold back and told us how she loved our clother and appearance. We thanked her and received information on our following stops. While we packed our things and left for our bus to Charlotte I frantically held on to the conversation learning that she was from Atlanta, studied Art History and loved good coffee.  No emails, blogs, phone numbers or addresses were exchanged. Damned to be forever in my memory. Unresolved.

Charlotte? Carolyn? Charlie? Caroline?

People are pretty damn awesome.

Yours, Sincerely.

On the Greyhound to Raleigh, North Carolina I thought that maybe now we’d get to see some hillbilly culture and shotguns. Or at least something suburban as what we had just left.

Surprise.

Raleigh turned out to be the richest and safest little city I have seen thus far. Strolling down the city centre there was no one in sight for ages. Like a ghost town, but not the ones from Clint Eastwoods westerns. Rather a city left alone to be pretty, because all its residents were wealthy enough to buy a cute little cottage in the spacious ‘burbs out of sight. Raise the kids, tend to the garden, drive to work, grow old.

Nothing like the day before, but again inherently American.

I could never reside here, but I am glad that I saw it.

mac·guf·fin

Noun:
An object that serves to trigger events in a plot of a story, but that is otherwise insignificant

A gourmet BBQ down by the railroad made for impeccable conversation about trains and cinema, sounds of horns and crickets, and narrative methods employed by Hitchcock.

Tonights Macguffin in the narrative of our visit could be any object in the city of Raleigh, from the city itself - pointless in the scheme of our trip - to the railroad or light installations. Most of the things that I tend to enjoy and, which trigger events in life seem pretty insignificant.

We left for Winston-Salem early the next day.

Yours, Sincerely.