getting high on my own supply - 14. end of the world
"imitation of life" (REM, october 2007)
i have an extremely good memory and always have had all my life (the fact that i have also had a practice of obsessively excessively documenting my life for the last decade or so certainly helps more recent years). my extremely good memory is a thing which is often a point of contention between deborah and i (wherein she believes my memory to be more fallible or limited than it is because how could i possibly so confidently remember such small and meaningless details and i get mad bc it feels like she's invalidating my truth).
given my generally extremely good memory, i always am the first to recognize when it turns out to be wrong, both because, despite my extremely good memory, i would never be foolish enough to say it is infallible, and also because usually the divergences are interesting to me (i usually think things about myself are interesting and this is why you are reading these posts). the strength of my memory is also context dependent. while i'm great at remembering facts and things that happened in the real world, for example, my narrative memory is weak: i basically always forget most of a book or movie or TV show almost immediately after finishing it, which is sometimes annoying if i actually need to remember it but mostly a blessing since it means that i can revisit my favorite things over and over again and feel their eternal sunshine (i have a friend who reads a lot but never rereads and i just can't imagine this life).
in the palace of my memories, i have always been so sure that i recorded this cover of "imitation of life" by REM some time in the summer or fall of 2008, when i was living in korea and deeply alone, no friends and no love, my new adult life mostly monastic (but devoted to my writing rather than god). when i think of this recording, i remember very vividly sitting on the floor of my tiny high-rise studio apartment one night and feeling very sad and when around 2:30 during the minimalist build-up of the last chorus i sing "no one can see me cry" and my voice cracks, i remember it was because i was actually really crying there in the apartment, what barthes would call a punctum.
however, the historical record (old blog post) shows that this "imitation of life" was actually recorded and released in october 2007. i was still not quite an adult, living with my mom and our dog in a mostly empty house in florida that was refusing to sell and after my japanese teaching job had fallen through because the company was having serious financial problems, i had passed another interview for a similar job in korea and was waiting for a visa (i knew nothing about korea that i had not learned in childhood tae kwon do lessons (i.e. nothing) but it was more money, lower cost of living, and i had no other ideas for earning a living). my recording studio at that time was a dell laptop my parents had generously bought me to take abroad and which i used lying on my stomach on the floor of my last high school bedroom to record this. there would have been reason enough for me to actually cry then too, so maybe i did, but i don't trust the memory now.
the reverb here is too big and cheap and the drums aren't mixed loud enough and the stereo image could be wider and the vocals less overdriven but i like some of the jangly chug of the guitars and the live-ish dynamics. i don't really know the REM oeuvre very well, because to the me of this era most of their music seemed too wordy and/or sad, neither of which were my favorite musical characteristics (sadness being a thing i've never needed music to reinforce, but to escape, and lyrics being another void in my memory), so the main memory i have of their music is no doubt's cover of "it's the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine)" on the live MTV show at the dawning of the new millenium, when people were not sure whether the world was about to end but still wanted to dance together.