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Monday, January 26, 2009
PASSENGERS
Stephen Emmer feat. Lou Reed
Recitement
Challenge : 2007
[Buy It]
THE L TRAIN IS A SWELL TRAIN AND I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOU INDIES COMPLAIN
Out Hud
S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D.
Kranky : 2002
[Buy It]
DOWNTOWN TRAIN
Tom Waits
Rain Dogs
Island : 1985
[Buy It]
Now Ben's gone and gotten me thinking about the train, the most metaphysical of conduits.
A train is a flightless airplane - the ostrich of the transport world.
A train is a car without options.
A train moves in one direction only - forward, into the future (how apt that a bride's trailing veil is called a train - the history she drags behind her as she crosses a threshold over which she'll never return).
A train is a machine made of time, its linked cars dividing it into discrete moments that roll onward, one after another; a train carries you forward without any effort on your part.
A train is a test tube and a womb and a loom, where threads converge via sheer proximity - a train is a tapestry of story.
Trains are repositories of romance, mystery, nostalgia, longing, boredom.
Trains are escape hatches, and cages.
There are books that engross me on trains that seem dull when I'm sitting still.
Trains are somehow excremental - above-ground trains show you the seamy hidden parts of your topograpahy; the blighted depots, the graffiti-scrawled outbuildings, the littered thruways of the world.
Underground trains rumble through bowels, below the congested consumption of cities; the underground train is the most metaphysical of trains - a tunnel within a tunnel.
"Train" also means "teach," and "focus."
Trains are made of tea and rain.
Trains are buses with one-track minds.
Trains might be late but always come.
Trains might be late but always leave.
My first travel by train was the best kind of travel by train - which is to say, European.
On that trip my friend and I rode trains like marathon runners run, which is to say, at great length, with a sort of jolly, self-immolating fortitude.
We took one train from Amsterdam straight to Sicily, which took at least 36 hours, and we didn't spring for any fancy sleeper car either - unlike the Amtrak, which lines up passengers in unidirectional rows, like people watching a movie, this train was broken up into four-seat compartments, with seats facing in pairs, making the experience less spectatorial and more parlor-esque.
If you fully recline two facing seats they form an almost-level surface on which one can rest. But we weren't much interested in sleep.
I will relate the texture of those journeys with a sort of staccato impressionism, because that's how they felt. The phrase "glide" will indicate interstitial moments of pure blank motile Zen. So:
Board and glide, looking at my dim reflection in a night-blackened window, a sense of streaming behind it, glide, hungrily devouring cheap junky snack cake proffered by matronly European lady concerned about these two young American boys in white t-shirts with no clear destination or impetus, despite small child's protestations at the consumption by strangers of his snack, glide, glide, being abruptly awoken by German border patrol in the confused darkness of early morning, having the pot we'd brought from Amsterdam confiscated amid grave threats (the promise of "dogs," the advice to relinquish now before it was "too late") that amounted to nothing, glide, the globe lights floating mistily above Utrecht on another dark morning, glide, glide, glide, smoking cigarettes out of windows labeled "No Smoking," the scrolling scenery itself seeming to tug at them, glide, briefly falling asleep with shoulder bag clutched to chest going through Italy, glide, waking up to an impossible dawn upon rolling Sicilian hills (dotted with distant white villas) to discover wallet gone, glide, finding wallet in washcloset trashcan, 50 Euro gone but debit card intact, glide, glide, glide.
These trains are my creation myth trains, from which all others will forever derive. The same way that Manhattan, the first real city I ever saw in person, will always be my Platonic city, of which all others are shadows.
Whereas my first train rides were pure myth, my subsequent ones have been more prosaic, with flashes of incident.
On a train from North Carolina to New York I sat beside a beautiful drag queen, with two teenage boys from Newark shooting me furtive, desperate glances, until finally she went to bathroom and they informed me to "be careful because she was a dude," apparently having mistaken my train-chatting for chatting-up (unlike airplanes, trains are inherently chatty, because you must have a good reason, an interesting story, for taking a train instead of a plane - except for metro trains, which are even less chatty than airplanes).
I have minded gaps on trains in London and watched gaps on trains in New York; I have indeed seen something but have not in fact said something.
I have longed for trains - for how they go, not where - and I have recorded the sound of the L train from Grand to Bedford, used the recordings to create a piece of music that sounds very much like trains and very much like hell.
Because there's no commuter rail where I live, trains for me are synonymous with long-distance travel or spending time in distant cities.
Trains are away or going away from me, or trains are enclosing me and taking me away; in this way trains can seem very much like life.
Most train songs are not really about trains.Labels: brian, trains
posted by Brian
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