Thirst

I have been reading Judith Freeman’s excellent book, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon, 2007). I was struck by her assertion about the cultural significance fast food took on in Los Angeles. She argues that the rise of fast food in L.A. was, in part, due to the idleness and loneliness of the (older) population. In the following passage, she is talking about Clifton’s Sliver Spoon, a once famous cafeteria (now closed) located not far from the Bank of Italy building on South Olive Street where Chandler worked in the offices of the Dabney Oil Syndicate from 1923-1932. She writes:

In cafeterias like Clifton’s, fast food, cheap food, food you selected yourself and put on a tray and pushed along a metal railing, became inextricably wed not to mere nourishment but to the possibility  of escaping a haunting emptiness for a while. The popularity of the cafeteria in L.A. was primarily due to the loneliness of the people. It was a friendlier type of eating place than a normal restaurant. . . . This was the true lure of fast food, and perhaps it helps explain why it has assumed such an important place in American culture. Fast food is about estrangement and existential ennui, about loneliness, and boredom, and absence, and an arresting of traditional patterns of family life and social context. Who cares if the meal is inferior? If it gets you out in the world. (80)

As I read this passage, I couldn’t help but think of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933), also a story of isolation, existential loneliness, and the nothingness or “nada” of contemporary existence. Hemingway, too, associates the café or cafeteria with a person’s need for companionship. Yet he pursues the issue in a different way. In Hemingway’s story, an old man likes to sit late into the night in a café—the clean, well-lighted place—and drink brandy, often leaving the place when he’s very drunk. Why does the old man find comfort in the café? Why does the old man drink to excess? The older waiter at the café seems to understand the old man’s despair (“Our nada who art in nada”). Of course, Hemingway’s story is set in Spain, not Los Angeles, and it draws on Hemingway’s memories of his life after he returned home from the war. Colloquially, to “drink” means to consume alcohol, but “drink” also implies “thirst.” In contrast, “hunger” implies something else. Hunger, or appetite, is to sexual fulfillment what thirst is to spiritual fulfillment; both terms are used as figurations of human longing and desire: “sexual appetite” and “spiritual thirst.” Hunger and appetite, drink and thirst are tropes that function in different ways, suggesting different desires. In The Little Sister (1949), Chandler associates fast food restaurants with restlessness: “They have to get the car out and go somewhere,” he writes. Is loneliness alleviated by being around other people? Restlessness leads to hunger, while thirst leads to solitary reflection. The old man in Hemingway’s story thirsts; he doesn’t hunger.

A Few Songs To Drink To Late At Night in a Sad Café:

John Anderson – Straight Tequila Night

Jimmy Buffett – Margaritaville

Johnny Cash – Sunday Morning Coming Down

Kenny Chesney – Hemingway’s Whiskey

Neil Diamond – Red Red Wine

The Eagles – Tequila Sunrise

Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - Raymond Chandler Evening

Rupert Holmes – Escape (The Piña Colada Song)

Tommy James – Sweet Cherry Wine

George Jones – Tennessee Whiskey

Don McLean – American Pie

Willie Nelson – Drinking Champagne

Jimmie Rodgers – Kisses Sweeter Than Wine

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood – Summer Wine

Steely Dan – Deacon Blues

George Strait – Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind

Tom Waits - Warm Beer Cold Women

Bob Wills – Bubbles in my Beer

You Can’t Always Get What You Need

Imagine a time long ago, before Crawdaddy or Creem or Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, when nobody needed critics, when there were no Beatles scholars or Elvis specialists or authorities on krautrock or punk rock or post-punk or electro-funk, when everything you needed to know was written on the charts that were dutifully listed and updated in Billboard and New Musical Express, when there was no such thing a rock canon or that there was such a thing even conceivable as a rock canon, a long time ago when rock, or rock ‘n’ roll, had no past, when everything existed in the present moment.

What has happened since is that we have developed an historical consciousness. That time seems so distant because there was still breaking news. Now, there are mausoleums such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Record stores serve as museums, where the artifacts of the past are nicely alphabetized and organized into a daunting number of genres, devised by and for musical archaeologists. Events such as Record Store Day (RSD) serve the collective dream in which all recordings from the past, no matter how famous or obscure, are always available. It is perhaps important to remember that events such as RSD are premised on Rule #1 of niche marketing:

• There are approximately 3,000 people who are willing to buy anything

Corollary: There is a market for everything. And yet, our mass collective desire of plenitude is threatened by the possibility of shortages: the stark realization that while we can always get what we want (we scoff at the very notion of “out-of-print”), we can’t always get what we need. Case in point: I recently came across a collection edited by Bruno MacDonald, The Greatest Albums You’ll Never Hear: Unreleased Records by the World’s Greatest Musicians (2012). The jacket blurb says it all: “A Pink Floyd album with no instruments. A Sex Pistols record more incendiary than Never Mind The Bollocks. A sci-fi rock opera by Weezer.” (I take it the  self-parody is intentional.) Other such “You’ll Never Hear” lists can be found by doing a web search. If “Classic” album lists are premised on plenitude and the possibility of collection and acquisition, then “You’ll Never Hear” lists are perversely motivated, denying this possibility.

“You'll Never Hear” lists do tell us something, though perhaps that meaning is unintended:

• Greatness cannot be attributed to music we have never heard
• Distrust any critic presumptive enough to tell you we can