Who is Kathy?

There was always something I loved about America by Simon and Garfunkel. The music is gorgeous and the lyrics really get to me. It is basically about a bus journey through America with Paul’s former girlfriend Kathy. It’s so full of friendship, love, longing and the search for some place where all these were actually possible, where one could truly be at home. It is about personal language between lovers and friends as well as unbridgeable distance – the sweet pain of being in love and alone, because there are places within ourselves which remain inaccessible however much we share.
I love it when songs become real. It happened to me before with the lyrics of Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen – he describes the same story in his book The Favorite Game, so when I heard the song it really struck me – “yes”, I thought, “this must have really happened.”
I just accidentally found out that also Kathy’s Song is originally by Paul Simon. I had heard some cover version before, but now it makes so much more sense. Kathy just became real for me and the bus journey must have actually happened. Apparently Kathy is also referred to in Homeward Bound. Hence three of the best S&G songs are about the same girl! So what’s the real story here?
This is what the internet comes up with:
Kathleen Mary (Kathy) Chitty and Paul Simon met at the very first coffeehouse Paul played at when he arrived in England in 1964. She was three years younger than him. Kathy apparently rarely spoke and Paul referred to her as his “friendly haiku”.
They broke up in 1965, when The Sound of Silence became a big hit. Some say that Kathy wanted no part of the success and fame that awaited Paul. How painful the breakup was? I don't know, but in May 1991, when Paul was touring England, he received a letter from Kathy, much to his delight. Kathy was married with three children and living in a remote village in the Welsh mountains, working part-time at a technical college. Despite the great interest of the British tabloids, she did not talk to the press…

Hotel Paradis

Manila is large, loud, smelly and hot. There’s just so much life packed and crammed into this place, you feel like its fermenting, constantly brewing futures, fortunes and fate. Its population is young, hence active and constantly communicating, be it in terms of career, pastime or survival. There is so much life here, that it does not let itself be digitally managed as, say, in London, Frankfurt or Paris. Urban management here seems mostly manual – I watched a traffic police officer yesterday who was physically struggling with the waves and waves of cars, jeepneys, tricycles and people breaking into a crossing – despite working traffic lights. I recently spend a lot of time on public transport and I cannot stop looking at people. I try to imagine their lives, or at least something about them. What a snag that I don’t speak tagalog! On the other hand this allows me to listen to conversations and contextualise, like I’m dubbing brief sketches I make up of people.
If you take the MRT from Cubao to Manila, you can change train lines between Recto and D. Jose stations. These two stations are connected by a totally fenced in skyway through an urban slum area. It feels like a zoo, like a catwalk, like a prison and I had a strange feeling of segregation, like one gets by looking through fortified glass barriers at international airports – you can see the flights to Atlanta, Tokio or Sydney, but you cannot take them.
This was when I saw that sign – “Hotel Paradis – Sound proof wall!!”. Obviously one urban slum dweller had picked it up from somewhere and was now making a point to all those hurriedly passing upon business or pleasure through the skyway. Or at least so I'd like to think. Maybe he is just getting paid by the said hotel...

Six Feet Under

Everybody dies and everybody lives
With their struggles and their pleas
Our crystal sorrow summer afternoon
Teaches a child swim attune
The powerful calm of life sways
From in between
And not a rock and a hard place

Musical Life Cookery

When life did not feel right Martha started playing a game she called “musical life cookery”. It was an amazing, imaginative game where she could just about detach from her own life and let lyrics, sounds and all those fictional and non-fictional characters of popular music mingle and meet. That usually made her happy.
Martha liked weird, funny, poignant and occasionally touching connections switching and mixing issues, people, ideas and personalities between songs. Making up a musical movie in her mind allowed her to live other lives for a while until their experiences brought her back home.

One rainy Saturday night, Martha made Frank Zappa and Beth Gibbons accidentally bump into each other in an old funky jazz bar in Louisiana. Frank was just in the middle of a whacky Nixon impression, when Beth nearly ran him over.
"Blimey!", Beth said, not instantly noticing that very strange and weird change that happend as she spilled her drink amidst Frank's attentive audience - Frank and her had mixed personalities: Frank suddenly was Beth, or rather a Beth-like Frank, still retaining some aspects of his but with some of Beth’s personality traits - and vice versa. Frank felt curious. Not only had he never been to Portishead before, but he had also never felt that particular kind of serenity. Strangely inspired he grabbed a guitar and sang

“And the right and the wrong and insane
And the answers they cannot explain
Pulsate from my soul through my brain
in a spanish guitar“ (For a Spanish Guitar by the Byrds)

Beth, in the meantime, had gotten herself a glass of white port with lemon juice and was chatting up the band disrupted by Frank’s singing. When Frank had finished, Beth smiled and cracked a joke about the American guitar she had grabbed. Together with the band she played Egyptian Reggae by Jonathan Richman and even Frank joined in the dancing...

Martha was happy with the world where Frank Zappa and Beth Gibbons would become friends and people were happy with each other’s similarities and differences. Jacques Brel was sitting next to her on the sofa, gently stroking her hair and kissing her forehead. Martha took a sip of her tea. Outside, the rain was pouring down and her good friend Tanita Tikaram waived at her from under a large black umbrella. Distant music trickeled into her room -

“On a midnight voyage,
One that has no ending;
And it's sending me
The things that I need.
Far away from shore—
Further than I've been before;
But I feel the strength of the new sea.
(Of a midnight voyage for just what you need...)
Dreams come and go,
And I sift through them.
Love starts to grow
From the thoughts that I find within them.” (Midnight Voyage by the Mamas and Papas)

Crossroads

It’s not that love is not around
In her nightgown she stands as Jeanne of Arc
Over the rubble of the city she had build deep inside
Life had torn through metal, glass and wood
Tearing it up like an angry storm chasing lost hair
And at the end
I collect scattered hopes, wishes and dreams
In company of her and the wildlife

Love in the Days of the Blunt Pencil

Wilbur had just finished going through the weekly classified and since the kettle was boiling, he got up to make tea. There were still gaps in his tour for tomorrow and he was hoping to make amends by choosing a route through the middle class suburb of Rosemount to possibly pick up leftovers from the odd removal. He had rented the scrap metal truck about a year ago and although things could have been better he was his own boss and getting by modestly.
When he sat down at the kitchen table he noticed the slim figure quietly standing in the doorway. Wilbur was puzzled, for the person must have stood there for some time without him noticing. Looking at her he remembered seeing her passing by in the park a couple of days ago. Or could she possibly have stood next to him in the second hand bookstore downtown? Yes, he remembered briefly remembering her, like an echo of something significant that had happened long before. And then he had found this book that he might as well send his nice Emily for her birthday.
She smiled and as if she was walking right through him, a soft blanket or veil slowly flowed neck-down around his shoulders, just inside his skin.

~

The party had been going on for several hours and the speakers were spilling a mid-90s trip-hop classic over the midsummer night of North Donside Beach. Wilbur was comfortably tucked into his blanket, his face gleaming in the heat of the fire. The mood significantly lifted by various passing bottles of red wine, old friends and new acquaintances were chatting and laughing.
“What is this about mustard-vinegar dressing that makes me cringe?” Sitting next to him and pulling a face Beth Gibbons would have killed for, Alice was playfully tossing around her spinach salad in a plastic vessel. “It’s the vinegar – there’s just too much of it,” Wilbur answered, while Alice shrugged off sour times – “brrrrrh, you can feed that to the seagulls!” - “Crooooaak, croak, crrroooooak,” Wilbur replied flapping his arms up and down and prompting Alice to wittingly shove a spoonful of spinach right into his mouth – “yikes, very sweet of you, but too sour even for a gull on a beach party,” he laughed. “Just like real life,” said Alice and kissed him, “this food is something special.”

That had been the beginning of an extraordinary summer. With the last exam finished, they went on a long trip hitching and hiking across central Europe. In Switzerland, they had found shelter in a farmhouse after a long hike and torrential rains. The old lady of the house was a brilliant story teller and when the rain finally stopped early morning, they had gotten to know the full extend and drama of love, death and horror in the villages’ local history.
In Leipzig, they had made love on the rooftop of an old disused factory building – their ‘castle’, and they would look down on the tiny match-sized subjects below and invent royal decisions to be taken: “That’s Margaret. Her husband had been a former employee of the postal service, but after the reunification he had lost his job. Margaret is frustrated with him, because his mood is nauseating ever since he has been working with the employment agency – what should we do, my Queen?” “We chop his head off, my King.”
And they had found Alfred – a hungry little stray kitten crying for help in a public park in Amsterdam and after organising water, cat-food and a cardboard-box with breathing holes, they were now smuggling him back into Britain.
“I want a baby, Wilbur…” The National Express was hurrying across the pastoral scene of late summer rural England and inside sat Wilbur, painfully trying to imagine what his baby might actually look like and despite his luck at loss at the overall meaning of it all.

They had been madly in love in summer, but by winter their lives were moving at individual paces. What Alice could not stand was his stubborn self-deception. He was like this or like that, he would say, implying a hurtful “you still don’t know me, maybe I’m not good enough for you”. She knew that wasn’t true. She could see beyond individual character traits and had struggled through both the death of her baby brother Marco and her parents’ subsequent break-up: If there was one thing she knew for certain it was real love when she looked at it. It was not something she could ignore and with Wilbur it had been with her all the time – mustard-vinegar dressing and all.
“When freedom was practised in a closed circle, it faded into a dream,” Wilbur then wrote in fridge poetry. At first she took it as decorative whimsy, but the sentence had struck and stuck: Of course, he was the person he was and she loved him for it, but the hidden cruelty with which he would maim her efforts to devise a common future for the two of them hurt her. It was also rather childish, in her opinion.

Wilbur was at odds with himself. Not only was his job with a local accountancy firm meaningless and boring, but he was also struggling not to loose it. Yet, the more stress his boss would unload onto him, the less he would get done. With each apology the strings on the inside of his soul would tie into a tighter knot, impossible to untie. What was needed was a sword, to break the spell just like Alexander had done with the Gordian Knot. Wilbur wanted to quit and look for something else, but when he got home, his mind was oblivious. On top of it all, his father kept calling – “we’re going to Venice on invitation of your sister Francine and her husband Barry. You know he is a solicitor in Hampstead, don’t you? He is such a man of means and connections. Anyway, when will you get a proper job, Wilbur?” What a prison cell his life was! How could Alice honestly expect him to simply break out of this mess without any collateral damage?

One night he had a dream. Alice and he were walking up Gallowgate through stormy weather. Gusts of wind tore through their conversation, distorting phrases out of context and into absurdity. Both of them felt misunderstood and hurt by the other, yet they were trying to drive their respective point home: “You are ---- invincible ---- shit” – “When you --- falter --- each time your father calls.” They were bitterly angry with each other when Wilbur spotted what looked like a Rubik’s Cube just next to the sidewalk. It looked muddy and had obviously been thrown away by some bored kid. Yet, it looked precious, as if it could provide answers to all his questions. “Wait, I need to pick up that thing,” he shouted, but Alice startled at the monstrosity the wind had turned this phrase into and with tears in her eyes darted off into the wind. Wilbur picked up the Cube and tried to follow, but the wind got stronger and stronger, until he could hardly move forward. Having lost sight of Alice, his only hope was the cube: He instantly realised that each of its sides provided the answer to one of his personal struggles. “My life is such a mess,” he thought, “I won’t make sense of any of the other sides, but at least one of them is an image of Alice.” He knew that if he would solve at least that one side, she would come back and maybe they would be able to sort out the rest together. Frantically, he started to turn the bricks, but with each turn less and less bricks actually reminded him of Alice. Then he realised that he didn’t even know what she looked like – and woke up.

A month later, Alice moved down south. She called him from Westmoreland Service Station: “You know, Wilbur, I cannot forget you stopped loving me. Love is a precious living thing and a terrible thing to loose. It is like a plant that needs watering and sunlight, so it can grow. I have taken Alfred with me. Take care of yourself, please do. I really hope that you take care of yourself…” Soon after, Wilbur quit his job.

~

The figure was now sitting across from him. She looked neither young nor old. Her face had friendly and rather androgynous features. She wore a pastel-coloured dress gently flowing around her body and although she looked at him in a kind - yet nonchalant – way, her body generally seemed fragile enough to get bruised by everyday items such as wooden chairs, kitchen sinks or even a blunt pencil.
Wilbur searched around for dangerous objects. Indeed, this was not a place to receive a guest – he fetched a pillow and blanket and put out Turkish delight. His guest, in the meantime, smiled. Who was she? Just when he was about to ask, she spoke:
“I am Love and I’m moving in.”
Wilbur blushed. “There might not be enough room for you and I’m not sure if you can bear with me...”
“Don’t you worry about that – I’m here to stay. As long as you can remember…”
The veil gently settled over a vast expanse of land deep inside Wilbur - where he had expected crevasses and cliffs - and he smiled for the first time that day.

Treasure is everywhere

Record shops are full of treasure. Here is a great pasttime for a rainy afternoon: Find a friend with a sense of humor, go to a second hand record shop and spend ten minutes looking for the worst album cover you can find. You and your friend will most likely end up laughing your heads off. There was a time in the 60s, 70s and 80s when quirky layouters would come up with a vast range of breathtaking adsurdities...
Take a look at Slim Goodbody - can you imagine what his music may sound like? What may the "FREE full-color activity poster" look like and what on earth would it make you do? Discoveries like this can make your day, you can bottle them up for another rainy day, a shitty everyday moment of murkiness lightened up by their vivid memory.

The music video of "I Wanna Love You Tender" by Armi & Danny is another one of those peaches. Not only is the dancing choreography ridiculously awkward and the lyrics totally naft, but I think it is the grammar that adds a pinch of grandeur ("How can I be sure you're not pretender?") to a great artwork. I want Slim Goodbody and Armi & Danny to team up! I want a music industry that cherishes quirky detail and serendipidous crappiness! I want a museum for artists like Slim Goodbody and Armi & Danny!