Ranted by Cary Tennis
I was rearranged by the Velvet Underground in 1967
How on earth were they making that sound? And Nico. Nico!
Cary Tennis considers life’s most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.
Struggling to recall who he saw the Velvet Underground with, he resorts to fictive revery. Which, if you ask him, he’ll tell you is the memoirist’s prerogative.
Postmodernism: Deconstructed
The writer locks himself in the audio booth, takes a deep breath, and explains the universe in just over 12 minutes.
This week, having embarked on a quest to understand postmodernism as it relates to our nation’s youth and their baffling indifference toward Carlos Santana, the author reads aloud from a scholarly article by Ryan Moore titled “… And Tomorrow is Just Another Crazy Scam: Postmodernity, Youth, and the Downward Mobility of the Middle Class,” in “Generations of Youth,” and then expostulates with debatable coherence about how the great divide between the boomers and the Xers is nothing more than the great divide between high modernism and postmodernism.
By the time he has finished, the night is over. The windows of the studio are fogged, the ashtray is full of mashed-out American Spirits, and the engineer has nodded out facedown in his beer. Far across San Francisco Bay, the rosy-fingered dawn is creeping over the hills, looking for a Starbucks.
You obviously don’t know who I am!
Creative jealousy almost ate my mojo.
Cary Tennis considers life’s most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.
This week he comes really, really close to making an ass of himself via e-mail, all because of a litle thing called creative and professional jealousy.
How to become an advice columnist
Volunteering to write "Since You Asked ..." was a lot like saying, "May I carry your bags, please? May I light your cigarette?"
Cary Tennis considers life’s most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.
This week he thinks out loud about how he came to write an advice column but first, and quite tangentially, blathers on about Public Radio International’s “This American Life.”
An ex-hippie boomer looks back
Maybe you were having fun in the '60s, but I was dancing out of nihilism and fear.
Cary Tennis considers life’s most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon.
This week he’s been reading the many letters to the “Since You Asked” advice column about what it’s like to be young today, and what the aging boomer generation looks like to those in their 20s. He notices that the ’60s seem to have been portrayed as a carefree, happy time, leading the youth to believe that all that twirling around in meadows and wearing of flowers meant that everybody was just kicking back and having a good time. But he remembers the ’60s as a dark and frightening era on the edge of apocalypse. All that frenetic energy, all that running from coast to coast and hair-growing and face-painting, didn’t seem to arise out of exuberance but instead out of a very energetic and youthful hopelessness.
Maybe he just had a bad attitude. Maybe he got a defective mantra. But maybe, if you look closely at the faces in those old Life magazine photos, you’ll see the nihilism, the confusion, the fear of nuclear winter.
Expect the worst … and be happy!
In an era of diminished expectations, those of us who've never had much hope to begin with are starting to feel lucky.
Cary Tennis considers life’s most pressing questions in audio form most every week on Salon. But it’s been a few weeks now since he stepped into that curtained booth in the San Francisco office, turned down the lights, put on the headphones and communed with his twisted brethren. He just couldn’t think of anything to say. But then a reader wrote in and chided him, saying it had been a month now.
So he went into the curtained booth, turned off the lights and put on the headphones. And lo and behold a childhood memory about a circus show on television came hurtling back to him, and he was stung by an ancient wound that came of facing his limits, or not facing them and having them pointed out to him, or having life itself demonstrate them in its own emphatic, incontrovertible way.
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