Moving
A short essay on packing up all your stuff, which sucks, and some slide film.
5/28/2020, 11 p.m.-ish:
I learned recently, on an aimless afternoon’s wandering through Discogs, that Silkworm’s essential 2002 LP Italian Platinum had received a vinyl reissue over a year ago without my being alerted. This is not a hugely surprising fact. Silkworm fans, fiercely dedicated as they may be, do not number in legion. Italian Platinum getting a translucent-red pressing to match its (also excellent) predecessor Lifestyle was not getting a Pitchfork headline.
Silkworm have been on my mind as of late for a number of reasons. For one: great band that nobody talks about. For two, my girlfriend wondered aloud last weekend if Christian couples gave up sex for lent; according to both the lyrics of this record’s closing track and a Google result from Focus on the Family, they do, but they shouldn’t. For three, I’m moving, and Italian Platinum‘s most lovely and understated song examines that unpleasant process with a sort of bemused detachment I’d like to have more of right about now.
Moving from someplace you’ve called home for any benchmark-able period of time, as literally anybody will tell you, sucks. Currently I’m in the process of vacating my apartment of the past five years – the only Permanent home I’ve had outside of my parents’ – and uncovering all manner of absolute nonsense I should’ve thrown out long ago. The program to Terry Riley’s 2015 birthday concert at MIT? Got it. Graded papers from my sophomore year of college? Absolutely. Multiple Swans posters I will never display again? I don’t want to talk about it!
But as irritating as the rest of the process is, the thing that feels the weirdest remains boxing up my records. Traditional wisdom dictates that the last thing you pack and the first thing you unpack during any move is the stereo. Or at least it did when most people had stereos. My receiver and the thrift store bookshelf speakers my dad and I repaired with a kit from eBay when I was in high school will absolutely be the last things I pack, but realistically the LPs had to be boxed long before that. Each relocation is a stark reminder that ~14 years of collecting these things will result in a mass of plastic and cardboard that’s as aesthetically pleasing as it is punishingly, hilariously difficult to move around.
I remember the first record I played when I moved into this apartment – a scratched up flea market copy of Master of Reality that maniacally skips its way through “Sweet Leaf.” It was the same first-spin I’d inaugurated my college dorm rooms with, because I love inventing dumb traditions for no reason. I had my turnable set up on a low coffee table and the rest of my stereo on the floor, because Ikea had lost my entire scheduled delivery of furniture and I was thusly about to be sleeping on the floor for a week. It was a comedy-of-errors move-in that suited this agreeably grimy four-bedroom in Lower Allston, which I’d share with a rotating cast of roommates and one tragically horny cat for the next five years.
In packing up my vinyl – which is headed to storage for the summer before my proper move-in to a new place with my partner in September – my internal debate for this apartment’s last spin did not last long. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” might be the ultimate song for that step in one’s life, all optimism and romantic head-rush – how could it be anything other than Pet Sounds?
Naturally, music as it relates to spaces, and vice versa, have been on my mind recently. The hellscape of pandemic fallout has already claimed one iconic Boston venue, and there’s no telling how many others around the country and the world are in danger. No showgoer is immune to the ways in which bars and clubs stay tied to particular music memories, of course, but packing up and moving on from a room that’s been my base of operations for listening to and absorbing and obsessing about records for half a decade has illustrated for me how our personal music spaces mirror the ones where we gather communally. The childhood bedrooms, first college dorms, first apartments and all the radios, Walkmen, iPods, turntables and laptops in between all leave a particular twinge embedded in the music we first hear through them – a nostalgia signature, if you will. As someone who makes a primary hobby out of overthinking music and its intersection with twinges, I have to wonder what pieces of music will keep the dust of this particular room. In Colour, Teens of Denial, Blonde, The Life of Pablo, Rust in Peace, Carrie and Lowell, Bark Your Head Off, Dog and, uh, Views all jump out as potential candidates right now. But truthfully, these things come into focus in the rear view, so get back to me next year on whether Drake turning the 6 upside down (it’s a 9 now) does, in fact, resonate as part of the cultural fabric integral to my former apartment and the process of leaving my early 20s.
(In acknowledgement of how unimportant complaining about moving on the internet is at this moment in time, I’m making a small donating to the Boston Solidarity Supply Distro – which gets food and supplies to folks in need right now – in conjunction with this post and would encourage you to do the same!)
