His friend Andres was also there. Did I mention that? Well, I admit I didn’t want Andres to be there, even though I loved him (but not in that way). Still, Andres did kind of love me in that way, so there we were, a trio of thwarted desire lying in our separate beds, and that’s when Jon introduced me to Tom Waits.

It might be more accurate to say he presented me with Tom Waits. There was enough buildup for British royalty. Shhh. Stop moving. Listen to this part. Did you hear that line? I wish I could remember the song, but I suspect it was early lounge singer Tom Waits. Funny and broken and three sheets to the wind.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Tom Waits. I was a musical theater fanatic in high school. My friend Catherine and I drove around in her Ford Explorer singing three-part harmonies to En Vogue and the “Grease” soundtrack. But I wanted to know Tom Waits, because I understood that knowing him was a tunnel to Jon, just like Ionesco, and Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong were also tunnels to Jon. I wanted as many tunnels as I could get. So I listened with reverence, and nodded, and hoped that I could discover some element that would explain Jon to me, or help him find me irresistible. But if I’m totally honest, what I thought the first time I heard Tom Waits was: This is awful.

- – - – - -

A 2002 GQ profile describes Waits’ voice as a clown crossed with a cherry bomb. Waits’ music can be lovely or it can be shot through with carnival menace, but it’s his voice that is his most distinctive quality, a love-it-or-hate-it growl that is sometimes comic in its desperation. It got wilder as he grew older, and his voice serves as a kind of carbon dating system: The early ballads are a boozy baritone; the later stuff is feral. My reaction to his voice at the age of 19 was similar to my first sip of Scotch. My face puckered. I wondered how anyone could drink this stuff. But after years of listening to Tom Waits, I have come to crave that kind of brutality. (After years of listening to Tom Waits, I also came to crave Scotch.)

That GQ story is my favorite profile of Waits. It’s written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who went on to pen a blockbuster memoir about eating and praying and loving. But back then, she was a magazine writer fascinated by masculinity. She wrote a few books on the subject, which I’ve heard are good, and her piece on Waits fits into that puzzle, because he is an off-center, darkly poetic masculine hero. Before I ever loved Tom Waits, I loved guys who loved Tom Waits, and they had certain qualities in common. They all smoked cigarettes (often unfiltered). They loved booze (often whiskey). They drank coffee (black). They had flourishes of eccentricity: A fedora worn to the grocery store, a chain wallet, a deceptively casual method of cupping a flame as they lit a cigarette against the wind. They were reckless and tender and sullen and, good god, they were beautiful. The chips were stacked very high against me back then.

In my sophomore year, I fell in with a guy who practically worshiped at the house of Tom Waits. He and his gang of angry young men (which is what we called them) moped around campus with creative facial hair and a disaffected slouch that marked them as different from other kids who came from the suburbs of Houston and Albuquerque. “I’m interested in the commodification of violence,” one of those guys told me, stabbing the air with his smoking hand, and I went home and wrote it down, because it sounded so cool.

I listened to 10,000 Maniacs — classic, awesome nerd-girl band — and around that time Natalie Merchant recorded a cover of Tom Waits’ “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You,” and the first time I heard it, my breath caught in my throat. It was so fragile, so perfect. “Well, I hope that I don’t fall in love with you / ‘Cause falling in love just makes me blue.” That’s exactly how I felt about the guy, who had sidled up to me at a party, and we had fallen into each other’s bodies in that slumping, slightly meaningful way, and the next day I woke up newly tangled about him, experiencing deep revelations about how gorgeous his eyes were, etc., etc., and all I could think was: No no no, not this again.

That song is one of the greatest ever written about the fleeting romance of last call, the way a dim bar and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s can conspire to make you believe you have lived lifetimes without ever rising from your seat. At the time, I did not quite understand this, but I would spend the next two, 10, 15 years of my life figuring it out.

The guy scoffed at the Natalie Merchant cover. How could a woman like her sing about drinking stout, about “these old tomcat feelings you don’t understand”? I swapped Natalie Merchant’s version in my five-CD changer for the soft grumble of the original, and I never looked back. The guy and I didn’t work out. But I had it bad for Tom Waits.

- – - – - -

I scored points with my next boyfriend for name-checking Tom Waits in an early conversation. The right guy would fall to his knees if you told him your favorite song was “Ol’ 55.” The acquisition of such knowledge was the upside to these botched romances. You would go into a relationship one person — an English major with a kink for Tom Wolfe and ’70s soul — and you would exit with a new list of names piled on your coffee table: Frank Sinatra and Joan Didion and the Violent Femmes. Your heart might be dripping from between your fingers, but hot damn, your CD collection was good.

This boyfriend was the guy who truly made me understand Tom Waits. Not because he explained him to me — the way he explained how to line up a shot in pool, or how to blow a smoke ring — but because I was crazy about him, and he broke up with me a month after we moved in together, and in the six months — OK, a year — after he left, Tom Waits became the soundtrack to my sadness. All those weepers about loving someone who left, leaving someone you still love, all the ragwater and bitters and blue ruin.

I listened to female singers, too. They were a pipeline to rage and melancholy — Tori Amos, Liz Phair, Billie Holliday — but I didn’t seek catharsis so much as I sought to understand, to sift through the wreckage and find some lesson here. Why did he leave me? What had I done wrong? And so on the nights when I felt like running my fingers over those scars I listened to Tom Waits, “The Early Years, Volume One.” I listened to the last track, “Old Shoes and Picture Postcards,” on repeat.

So goodbye, so long, the road calls me, dear, and your tears cannot bind me anymore

And farewell to the girl with the sun in her eyes, and I’ll kiss you and then I’ll be gone

When I listen to that song now, I hear the same desperado cliches I know from a hundred country ballads. But back then, the words were a revelation to me, the final piece of a complex algorithm. You guys, you guys, I got it: He had to leave me, it was destined somehow, locked in our DNA that I would be the one standing on the balcony in my bare feet with tears streaking my face and he would be the one driving off into the sunset in his 1995 Honda Civic, flicking a Camel Light out the window. (This never happened, by the way.) Of course, there were other reasons for our rupture: He had quit drinking, and I had not. He was out of college and finding his way in the world, and I was pouring beer on people’s heads at my birthday party. He needed space, and I longed to be smothered.

But at the time, it was unfathomable: He kissed me, and then he was gone, and I spent the next six months — OK, a year — sleeping with him anyway, trying to get back some of the sunshine and safety I’d felt in his presence and feeling let down all the time. I wrote and produced a play inspired by losing him — it wasn’t about him, but then again, it was entirely about him — and every single night before the curtain rose I would comb the audience from backstage trying to find his face, waiting for the sick electric jolt I would experience when I saw him sitting there. And every single night he would not be there, and I would experience a wave of rejection before the show even began.

After the last performance, I got wasted on a Sunday afternoon. What else could I possibly do? I wanted to know. I fucking wrote a play about him, and he did not come. It seems obvious now: Of course he would not come. Of course he did not want to interrupt his busy life as a newly minted chef to sit in a drafty auditorium and watch some bizarre simulacrum of our time together. But I wrote with the idea that the sheer force of my desire could change his mind. I wrote short stories. I wrote letters I never sent. The thing is when we’re wounded everyone’s a bit insane, Tom Waits sang, and I lived it, man. And what I never stopped to appreciate amid all the soggy tissue and melodrama was that he had given me something far more extraordinary than a college relationship. Fifteen years later, the framed poster for that play still hangs in my hallway, one of the proudest moments of my life. That guy — I think I have his photo in an album, somewhere.

- – - – - -

Waits is such a guy’s guy that it takes a certain kind of woman to love him. I grew up in awe of my older brother — his music was the first guy’s music I ever learned — and part of my story has been an urgent wish to have the same shambling adventures as the men in my life. I wanted to jump off balconies and stagger through the streets of some foreign town, shirt stained with blood. I wanted to pour Bushmill’s down my throat and light myself on fire. I knew every word to the song “Pasties and a G String,” a winking, bawdy ode to the low-rent freedom of live nude girls. In the year after college, I went with a male friend to a strip club — one of those junky roadside joints — and I had this idea that I would run my eyes all over those women, I would devour them, but instead I felt strange and wrong inside, and I made him give all his dollar bills to the heavy women and the older women no one paid attention to, and I went home that night and lay alone in bed feeling so blue. (Because I wasn’t one of those women? Because they were?)

It was hard to find my place in those songs, and in the macho novels I was obsessed with (books about war, books about madcap travels, books about drink and damage). What I never realized — what never occurred to me — was that Tom Waits’ greatest collaborator was his wife, Kathleen Brennan. A former movie executive wary of the spotlight, she has co-written much of his work since “Swordfishtrombones” and in his rare interviews, he speaks of her with genuine warmth. “I’d be working in a steakhouse if it wasn’t for her,” he says in the GQ article. “I wouldn’t even be playing in a steakhouse. I’d be cooking in a steakhouse.”

Maybe that’s what I needed: my own Kathleen Brennan. And where do you find them, anyway? Waits attributes Brennan to cracking open his sound, but it was no doubt her stability that enabled such a grueling, decades-long career in the sideshow. Every sinner needs a saint, or something like that. For a guy who used to fall off piano benches, Tom Waits looks pretty healthy in his old age.

In 1999, I saw him when he played at SXSW in the most-coveted showcase of the year. To say it was a spiritual experience feels too small. It was the best live music show I’ve ever seen, and I can’t imagine I will ever see a better one. I sat in the first balcony with a spectacular three-beer high — not drunk enough to be gone, just drunk enough to be right there — and I remember thinking how booze and music and storytelling were like God. Or maybe I should say: If that’s all God was, it was still a lot.

At 28, I fell in love with a guy who listened to Tom Waits. Of course I did. I assumed that every man I ever loved for the rest of time would be as besotted with Tom Waits as I was, just like he would be as besotted with booze, and cigarettes I could bum from him, and impulsive late-night trips to nowhere in particular, a night and a hangover we could share.

- – - – - -

The next boyfriend was the ultimate Tom Waits boyfriend. He was a homicide detective in New Orleans. He was handsome and solitary. He told me stories about prostitute sweeps in the French Quarter and what it felt like to touch a brain. Decades of kneeling at the altar of such grimness was no doubt part of why I fell for him in the first place. I love gangster movies where everyone dies in a hail of bullets. My favorite show of all time is “The Wire.” It was one of a hundred reasons our romance felt written in the stars to me, but the funny thing about the ultimate Tom Waits boyfriend is that he had never actually heard of Tom Waits.

He liked the Eagles. “I can’t stop listening to this song ‘Hotel California,’” he said to me once. “Have you heard of it?”

“In the seventh grade, baby,” I said, and ran my hand across his cheek, and he gave one those twisty little grins he offered when he felt slightly self-conscious. He didn’t pay much attention to music, or movies; they were necessary distractions from the soul-suck of the murder police. During the holidays, he kept the radio on the Christmas music station all the time (it drove his partner crazy).

But I knew he would love Tom Waits, just like I knew I would move to New Orleans and we would get married and have adorable babies with twisty little grins. I sent him “Small Change” with a note that said, “I am honored to give you your new favorite album.”

I went even further than that, actually. The first time I visited him in New Orleans, he took me to a bar where the cops hang out. (“Don’t mention you’re a journalist,” he said, which was a joke, but not really.) It was one of those epic nights. The whole bar singing to the Pogues. And when I got back to New York, I sent a gift to the guy who runs the place. Two Tom Waits albums, because the jukebox had a few empty sleeves, and I wrote something like, “These CDs are looking for a home in a smoky dive bar in the French Quarter. Maybe you can help them out.”

I was so pleased with myself, but it didn’t go the way I planned. The guy who runs the bar is a big Irish cop with a mustache — he is exactly the person you see in your head when I say “Irish cop”  – and the next time I saw him at the bar, he said to me, “Yeah, I listened to those CDs you sent. They sucked.”

I laughed, but I was scrambling to cover up my embarrassment. How could I have misjudged this so badly? I clapped my hand on his shoulder. “I feel like I’ve given you a fine Scotch, and you’ve pissed all over it.”

He looked around. “Do you see any fine Scotch around here?” He stuck his cigar back between his teeth. “Van Fucking Halen,” he told me, and walked off.

So there you go. There is a world of difference between the men who love Tom Waits and the men who live the life he writes about. When the detective broke up with me, four months later, it occurred to me I was on the wrong side of the divide.

- – - – - -

In 2006, Tom Waits appeared on “The Daily Show.” Jon Stewart seemed uncharacteristically nervous. “I was struck when I met your wife, your family, how unbeaten by life you are,” Jon Stewart said at the top of the interview. “I used to listen to your music and think, boy, I’d like to lie in the street nearly dead with that guy.”

Waits nods. “It’s an act,” he says.

And I remember feeling weirdly betrayed by that. I mean, I knew it was an act, but maybe I didn’t? Nobody can ravage their body the way he purported to and then stick around for four decades. So of course Waits was sober. Of course he no longer smoked. But it was impossible to imagine him without the neon glint, the clang of empty bottles in the background. Consider: Tom Waits on a treadmill. Consider: Tom Waits juicing. Consider: Tom Waits, happy family man.

It was impossible to imagine my life without such wicked accouterments, too. I put off quitting drinking for as long as I could, but in 2010, I had to stop before my life tipped into parody, the 36-year-old drunk woman all dressed up and falling down. Since then I have been forced to wrestle with so many false delusions, like the one in which every romance comes with a pack of smokes, or the one in which I spend each night sinking into a vodka tonic, cold and fizzy and fantastic.

Sometimes I feel embarrassed that I loved Tom Waits so much. I talk to cool women who defined themselves by the riot girl sound, or Patti Smith, and I think, why wasn’t I like that? Maybe the embarrassment I feel isn’t about Waits at all. It’s about the girl who tried so hard to be someone she wasn’t, the girl who languished in her own self-pity, who posed so many ways for those boys to see. Those boys are all nearing middle age now. They have wives and children and mortgages and, if I had to guess, some nicotine gum lying around somewhere. I’m still friends with most of them. I wonder what they hear when they listen to Tom Waits.

I’ve heard that Waits doesn’t like those old songs, the songs pre-Brennan, and I wonder if what he feels is the tweak of regret and loss we all feel when we stumble on old pictures of ourselves. Not long ago I found a cache of them — me with a Marlboro Light in one hand and a giant margarita glass tilted dangerously in the other, me with a Dos Equis wearing a see-through undershirt staring at the camera like I’m trying to start a fight — and I laugh at those pictures at the same time I feel grief, and this is one of the qualities in Tom Waits I have long appreciated, the way a good feeling can get wrapped up with a painful one. I feel sad for all that I didn’t know then, but I feel grateful that I forged ahead anyway. I feel sad that it’s gone now, but grateful that I had it. I feel sad that I spent so many hours wanting those guys to love me in a certain way — all that time and energy and agony wishing the world could be something it was not — but I feel grateful that they did love me, all of them, in the way they knew how.

The early ‘90s fetishization of authenticity arose at a time when R&B-flavored dance confections by C&C Music Factory and Paula Abdul topped the charts, and even the über-sincere U2 embraced electronics and irony. Revelations that Milli Vanilli had lip-synced their way to a best new artist Grammy led to album-burning and an S.O.S. for artists who believed there was nothing better than the real thing. Enter Kurt Cobain.

Nirvana’s breakthrough single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was an attempt to emulate the arty rock of the iconoclastic Pixies, but it was received as the raw sound of disaffected youth. Cobain bought into his own mythology: He professed to feel “a duty to warn the kids of false music that’s claiming to be underground,” citing the “corporate” Pearl Jam as a prime example. Authenticity, as Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor point out in their book “Faking It,” is “an absolute, a goal that can never be fully attained,” and Saint Kurt, the idealist, went “to tremendous lengths to ‘keep it real,’ to rebel against commercial expectations, and to expose his problems to the public.” At least Cobain had a sense of humor; after his suicide, however, his devotion to “rawness” became elevated to orthodoxy, adopted as dogma by a host of moaning miserabilists who delivered wave after wave of angst-soaked grunge and grunge-lite.

From Puddle of Mudd to Staind to Creed to Nickelback, the yarling grunge descendants replaced rock’s devil-may-care excitement with blazoned earnestness and sludge. In doing so, they forced a schism between rock and pop, two forms of music that, in terms of style, at least, had been creeping closer together over the course of the ‘80s. It took bands like the White Stripes, the Strokes and the Hives, in the early ‘00s, to bring self-awareness and fun back into rock music. Despite their own assertions of what Barker and Taylor would call “cultural” authenticity (or adherence to a well-defined tradition) in rock ‘n’ roll, they were self-consciously contrived: Theirs was authenticity at one remove, a stylistic decision.

In recent years, stylistic dogmatism has largely receded, and genres have intermingled freely; a rapper like Lil’ Wayne can sing through heavy Auto-Tune (a device beloved in pop and dance music) to produce a rock album (“Rebirth”). But high seriousness has once again started to creep in, as even former enfant terrible Eminem now delivers introspective lyrics with emo choruses, while the latest hip-hop superstar Drake shows us it’s best not to celebrate success without maudlin self-critique.

Cultural reasons for this broadcasting of inner turmoil might include the recession and Facebook-induced oversharing, but it may also be due to the cyclical nature of fashion and popular music, where each new trend reacts against the last; as flannel makes a catwalk comeback, it’s natural that “authenticity” should do so as well. Adele, clearly, is at the vanguard of such supposed bald, unmediated self-expression, and for her critics, this is integral to her appeal: She’s “a real person, with real music” (New York Examiner); a champion of “authenticity and old school talent in a sea of Auto-Tuned belly buttons” (Toronto Star); and “authentic because she is her own creation” (Daily Telegraph).

Her antithesis is widely held to be public whipping-girl Lana Del Rey, who (horrors!) has changed her name, gussied up her image, and dared to be somewhat theatrical; by implication, if she had sung her songs (which sound like anemic, monochrome versions of Adele’s glummest balladry anyway) as Lizzy Grant of Lake Placid, all would have been forgiven. And where one might expect dance-pop stars to challenge Adele’s pervasive earnestness, they’ve instead been joining her: Taio Cruz and Katy Perry, for instance, have delivered straight, po-faced covers of “Someone Like You.” Where authenticity has historically been the province of rock rather than pop, Adele’s crossover appeal extends its reach.

Adele-worship has, however, been greeted with some suspicion in her native England, where she has been seen as the standard-bearer for an artistic “movement” dubbed the New Boring, with her erstwhile tour mate, soul singer Michael Kiwanuka, cited as an acolyte. Undeterred, fellow English singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran has affirmed, “If Adele’s seen as boring, then I’m happy to be boring as well,” and in the wake of Adele’s Grammy sweep, Jessie J, who once sang, “Why is everybody so serious?,” has vowed to pare down her live show in order to prove she’s “real,” as “The English … can sniff a fake very easily.”

But exactly how “authentic” is Adele anyway? She’s a big fan of the Spice Girls, devotees of Auto-Tune and miming who, she has claimed, “made me who I am.” Her musical style is highly derivative of American soul music, with a smattering of heartbroken country. And the “highly personal” songs on “21″ were written in collaboration with the likes of Ryan Tedder (Backstreet Boys, Sugababes), Fraser T. Smith (Britney Spears, Taio Cruz), Francis White (James Blunt, Take That), and Greg Wells (Mika, Katy Perry).

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of this. Rather, it’s the concept of authenticity itself that’s problematic, especially when it’s linked to “honesty” and “sincerity,” which are easy to assert but impossible to prove, and to a serious mode of “expressing oneself,” which admits of no irony – and therefore no humor. And Adele is capable of both: On “21,” the cheeky stomper “Rumor Has It,” for instance, opens with the lines “She ain’t real,” describing a love rival, but later suggests that the singer ain’t exactly what she seems: “You made my heart melt, yet I’m cold to the core.”

Authenticity is as much a pose as it is a state of being, but we’re conditioned to value it nonetheless. What if Adele, who has recently claimed she’s “never writing a breakup record again,” were to release her next new album under a pseudonym and fill it with peppy, Auto-Tuned dance numbers? Nevermind, we’d find someone like her.

The song I loved the most on that tape was “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” Fourth song, first side. I would perform the song to the wall, then rewind it and perform it again. Play, rewind, repeat. I can still hear the squiggle of the tape in my head as I pressed on the jam-box button just long enough to find the song’s opening once more. This is a lost art in the age of the iPod, but back then, knowing how many seconds to rewind a cassette was a sign you truly understood its rhythms. You had literally learned the music backward and forward.

“This again?” my brother would ask as the tinkling synthesizers kicked in. My brother was a metalhead, who loved the righteous anger of AC/DC and Judas Priest and did not give a rip for the likes of Whitney Houston.

He did not get a choice in the matter. Here is how the song begins:

Remember when we held on the rain, the nights we almost lost it?

Once again, we can take the night into tomorrow

Living on feelings, touching you I feel it all again

It’s a bit mundane, frankly. It’s a fill-in-the-blank tale of a broken relationship. Funny how every love story sounds the same but feels so different when you’re inside it. That’s the poignancy of love stories, I guess. You’re never alone. Then again: You’re never unique.

But this song is all about the chorus. It is a song constructed almost entirely of its irresistible chorus — half a dozen times in less than five minutes — and the chorus launches a mere 45 seconds in. No foreplay, no footsie under the table, no lingering glances and sighs. This song grabs you by the collar and sticks its tongue down your throat.

It’s a really fantastic chorus, by the way. It’s OK to sing along:

Didn’t we almost have it all, when love was all we had worth giving?

The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living.

At 12 years old, I had never been in love. I had never even kissed anyone. And so it’s peculiar that I experienced this song so powerfully. The agony. The crashing emotion. The ka-pow of it all. Why did I feel it so intensely? What was it teaching me? I wonder if all these songs of woe and regret didn’t warp my sense of romance. I wanted to grow up and fall in love, but more to the point: I wanted to grow up and lose that love, because that’s when the real drama began. I understood, even then, the delicious pain of being brokenhearted.

The chorus returns, a little different this time:

Didn’t we almost have it all, the nights we held on till the morning?

You know we’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?

This song climaxes so quickly. Not even a minute into it, and we’re already basking in Whitney’s vibrato, the glorious burst of sustained sound that would become her signature. The woman could push a note like nobody else, squeeze it and feel it up till the listener wanted to cry for mercy. But when you peak this early, it’s hard to know where to go next. The excitement is unsustainable, and for the next three minutes the song will throw out its back trying to one-up itself — a series of elevated key changes, strings atop swell. The song wants you to know the singer is bleeding.

For the moment, though, it pulls back. Whitney’s voice grows subdued. We get more of the back story, which, naturally, is like every back story we’ve ever heard.

The way you used to touch me felt so fine

Kept our hearts together, down the line

A moment in the soul can last forever, comfort and keep us

Help me bring the feeling back again.

I can understand why people hate Whitney Houston. I mean, these lyrics are dreck. It’s cooler to love the big, dirty riffs of Van Halen, the gritty excess of Guns N Roses. But I still find the stadium ballads of the mid-1980s strangely moving. The REO Speedwagon, the Air Supply, the Chicago, the Bryan Adams. The cheesy, lighter-held-aloft songs. They are not clever. They are not sly. They have the temerity to be earnest and unblinking, nothing but a desperate plea to be loved. Like a boyfriend who dims the lights and scatters rose petals in the bathtub. Please, baby, come back to me.

Or, as Whitney Houston sings it:

Didn’t we almost have it all? When love was all we had worth giving?

The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend. Loving you makes life worth living

I finally did fall in love in my sophomore year. He was sweet like my father, charming like my older brother. I still adore him. We drove around in his Chevy Nova listening to David Bowie and Elvis Costello. I began to understand that Whitney Houston was bad and not to be encouraged. We made fun of “I Will Always Love You,” the No. 1 song that would not go away in 1992, the year we graduated. We wanted to stab that song with knives; we wanted to punish it somehow. We were not the only ones turning on Whitney. That was the year Nirvana hit. Culture was edging away from the light and toward the dark, and there was Whitney in the video for “I Will Always Love You,” singing her heart out in the middle of an empty winter landscape as Kevin Costner walked away.

My boyfriend and I broke up at the end of high school, and I secretly bought the cassingle to “I Will Always Love You.” I listened to it in my bedroom, over and over. Nothing could touch the pure emotion of that song. I listened to “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” too, and it was exactly the comfort I wanted, like pulling an old teddy bear off the shelf and cradling it in your arms as you cried.

Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning?

You know you’ll never love that way again. Didn’t we almost have it all?

“Didn’t We Almost Have It All” is a good breakup song because it grows temperamental. It’s not just a lament. It’s a bit of a tantrum. It’s all so unfair, Whitney is telling us. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. We had it all, and then we did not. How could that possibly happen?

And I like this part, the growl in Whitney’s voice, like she is stomping her foot.

Didn’t we have the best of times, when love was young and new?

Couldn’t we reach inside to find the world of me and you?

We’ll never lose it again. Cause once you know what love is, you’ll never let it end.

After college, I stopped paying attention to Whitney Houston. I guess a lot of people did. There was a reality show, and crack, and debasement that defied easy explanation. It was easy to shove it off on Bobby Brown — the controlling spouse, the bad influence — but she was the one who stayed with him. The reality show made her seem coarse and a little bit mean. When she told Diane Sawyer that “crack is wack,” it was like she was participating in her own satire. This was unanticipated. Crack addicts were not supposed to look like Whitney Houston.

The thing is, I’ve met other crack addicts since then, and they don’t look the part either. That might be the one characteristic they have in common, other than an addiction to smoking crack. I never did drugs; I was a boozehound, a pure-bred lush. But I understand that you have to keep pushing to get the same feeling. You level out, and so you need more. You level out again, and you need more again. Play, rewind, repeat. It’s not just the crack or the booze that destroys people. It’s the always needing more.

I once heard drug addiction described as nostalgia. Chasing the perfection and the abandon of that first time.

Didn’t we almost have it all? The nights we held on to the morning.

You know you’ll never love that way again.

I was reading a book about Marilyn Monroe when I heard that Whitney Houston had died at the age of 48. Monroe’s is the ur-diva downfall, and these tragedies have elements in common: Drugs, a questionable taste in men, the inability to live up to a public persona, success like a rocketship. And they had beauty, of course. Uncommon, breathtaking beauty.

Earlier that afternoon, I had been taking a walk with a friend. I am 37, she is a little older, perhaps 39. We were talking about how hard it is for gorgeous women to age, because they get too accustomed to the oxygen of male desire. One of the good things about never being the best-looking woman in the room is that you never have to stop being the best-looking woman in the room. It is a dangerous game to base your meaning and self-worth on other people’s admiration, because it will inevitably recede, and I don’t think anyone would understand that better than Whitney Houston. It must be agonizing to hold the world’s attention in your palm, and then to feel it slowly drain away.

Didn’t we almost have it all?

After I learned about Whitney Houston’s death, I went searching for this song on YouTube. It is such a corny song, I know, but it made my heart pound nonetheless. I love it completely, without reason, the way you feel about a high school sweetheart, the way you feel about a drug, the way you feel about a song you loved when you were dumb and splendid and 12 years old.

I listen to songs over and over again. I have always been like this. I asked my mother, who is a therapist, why I did this, and she said maybe I was trying to unlock a song’s mystery, to master it in some way.

And I do notice different things every time I hear this song. I notice a quiver in the voice, a breath, a pause. I notice how the song ends by asking the same question twice, different each time. First it is defiant. Then it is sad and vulnerable.

Didn’t we almost have it all?  the song asks. And I don’t know the answer to this question. So I press repeat, and listen to it once more.

Our children will never understand what that Paul Simon song is about. Those theme park “picture spots” may soon be as obsolete as Burma-Shave signs. But photography itself is more robust than ever. There was a time when you got your picture taken on your birthday and standing in front of Mount Rushmore. Now, just try to get through dinner without someone documenting how beautiful those hot wings look tonight. I routinely see parents at the playground with cameras that cost more than the down payment on my home, snapping their children’s idle nose pickings like they’re the next Vanity Fair cover. And then I think of Robert Capa, advancing his film manually on Omaha Beach. I think of how different “a decisive moment” would have been for a photographer who had the expense of film and the hours of effort that go into developing to consider.

The rise of digital and the slow death of film have radically altered how we approach photography, but they haven’t made us value it less. They’ve just put it in more hands. Neither the simplicity of digital nor the cleverness of Photoshop can make a person a good photographer – though they can make it easier for someone to appear to be one. Just take 100 shots, crank up the vignetting on the best one, and voila! That sunset is atmospheric as hell, man. Of course, on the flip side, all the expensive gear in the world won’t make a great picture. It can just make a really, clear one.

But no matter who goes Chapter 11, our love of the magic an image can evoke doesn’t change. Neither does the way we associate pictures with the grandeur of awe and the intimacy of love. And it’s a strange kind of synchronicity that the brand so synonymous with the history of photography should be floundering just as we find ourselves playfully lapping up tools that recreate its vintage glory. The Hipstamatic app became an explosive success on the promise that “digital photography never looked so analog,” with retro pics that mimic the effects of old toy cameras and grainy, black-and-white film. Instagram became Apple’s 2011 app of the year for its similarly clever effects.

The ersatz old-school photo apps appeal because they can make just about anything look arty and cool. They’re also huge because they lend themselves to sharing across social platforms. But they also represent a new incarnation of  things that are rapidly becoming extinct — the smell of developer, the sound of film winding. They’re a new mutation of our abiding affection for things that are dinged up and cracked and scratched around the edges. Things that are a little imperfect and fuzzy. Like our memories themselves. Like our Kodak moments.

“Midnight in Paris,” “The Tree of Life,” “Super 8,” “The Artist,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “Hugo” and “The War Horse” were all, to some extent, about nostalgia — about wrapping oneself in the texture of some glorious past, be it an earlier period in a character’s own life or an earlier era in filmmaking. Some of the highest-profile TV — successful and unsuccessful — had nostalgia on the brain, wallowing in luxurious sets, costumes, hairstyles, music and slang from the early- and mid-20th century — even as they repeatedly told and showed us that things weren’t so great Back Then, whenever Back Then was. The short list includes the glossy but unsuccessful network series “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am,” HBO’s “Mildred Pierce” and “Boardwalk Empire,” ReelzChannel’s “The Kennedys,” PBS’ “Downton Abbey” and “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Hours.” That “Midnight in Paris” quote sums then all up rather nicely. Superficially they’re all so different that it seems crazy to group them together — they vary in setting from the very early 20th century to the early ’60s, and their tones are all over the map: dramatic, melodramatic, droll, shticky, tragic, horrific, you name it.

But there’s something basic and significant connecting all of them, and I think the connection is more aesthetic than historical. It is, as Paul said, about the need to escape the present, and not so much about the particular of the past that’s being escaped into. It’s about tactility — a fear that the virtual world is displacing the real one, and a corresponding conviction that a cinematic or televised re-creation of the past — however stylized or “unreal” — can feel somehow more real than whatever we’re living through now.

To borrow a literary analogy, the texts of these productions were often overwhelmed by the illustrations; even as the plotlines showed us how cruel life could be, and how ignorant and venal the characters were, the viewer’s eye still feasted on those dresses! Those hats! Those cars! Those hissing vinyl records spinning on those elegant Victrolas! And of course the white beams of light slicing through cigarette-befogged darkness in movie theaters and casting black-and-white images up on big screens, images shots on honest-to-God film.

Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” and Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” both worshiped, even fetishized silent cinema, or more accurately, the idea of silent cinema, and the era that spawned it: a time of steam engines and big black automobiles and stony-faced men in hats and long coats. Like the boozy, smoky, wood-and-wool-and-brass tableaux of “Mildred Pierce” and “Boardwalk Empire” and ABC’s intriguing if ultimately unsuccessful “Pan Am,” these films were not so much about the historical particulars of a time or place as the re-created, fantasized texture of it. Anything prior to the 1990s could still be considered a remnant of the Industrial or Machine Age, an epoch in which things were physical and present — when they were indisputably and obviously there, and not some incredible digital simulation; when some person, or some machine run by people, made things, and when even popular culture was something you could touch, or that you at least knew you could touch: a book, a film, a record. Until as recently as 10 years ago, even television was shot on tape, and could (in a pinch) be cut on tape, with a razor blade and tape — just like film, or a construction paper collage.

That’s all gone now, or going away soon: This was the year that major camera manufacturers announced that they would no longer make new motion picture film cameras. This same year we learned that the days of film itself were numbered. Some sources claim it will be extinct by 2015. Major distributors just don’t see the point of producing it any longer, now that everything is being shot, edited and shown digitally. Major studios announced that they would begin phasing out rentals of actual film prints, because it was too expensive and bothersome to store, maintain and ship them — and besides, now that everything has been converted to ones and zeroes, what’s the point?

This was also the year that we started to hear very serious rumblings about the end of media as a physical object that one could hold in one’s hand: not just the vinyl records and 35mm film prints that old timers like yours truly love to blather on about, but the supposedly more cold and forbidding late 20th century versions, such as videotapes and CDs and DVDs. Those are on their way out, too, if reports — and the maneuverings of industry giants such as Netflix — are to be believed. It’ll all be virtual soon, an endless stream of data held on gigantic servers in undisclosed locations and “licensed” to us for private use on our computers and mobile devices and perhaps soon in the chips that will be installed on the brain stem of every American newborn, along with the port that allows them to jack into the Matrix.

“All men fear death,” says Ernest Hemingway in “Midnight in Paris.” “It’s a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same.” The film’s tone is rather jokey as he says this, but from the intensity in his eyes you can tell he’s not kidding — and if you read the words in plain black-and-white, divested of lush celluloid images and piquant music, it sure does feel like a line from a manifesto, or a lament.

Allen ultimately deflates the very nostalgia that his movie indulges; the film’s comic climax takes Gil and his girlfriend Adriana, a ’20s Frenchwoman, back to Paris during the Belle Epoque era, the period that she worships as brazenly as Gil worships the Paris of her own time. “I’m from the ’20s, and I’m telling you the golden age is la Belle Epoque,” she insists. But really: “Midnight in Paris” is not a hit because of the director’s clear-headed attitude about the blind worship of earlier, supposedly more interesting times. It’s a hit because of the clothes, the music, the cultural references and the comic star power of the Paris writers and artists we’ve read about in school. It’s a hit because it’s a warm bath in another era, and a blessed escape from this one.

J.J. Abrams’ Steven Spielberg pastiche “Super 8″ was not merely a paean to the filmmaker’s adolescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s — an era that spawned such early Spielberg classics as “Jaws” and “Close Encounters” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.” — but a valentine to the last great age of analog media, the Carter-Reagan-Bush I era, when records were on vinyl and films were shot on film, and both could be looked at, lifted, touched. Abrams went so crazy re-creating Spielbergian, late’70s lens flares that there were times when the actors’ faces were partly obscured by horizontal bands of blue light. A telling moment at a drugstore showed the teenage hero waiting to get his Super 8mm film back; in the days — days!! — leading up to that glorious moment, he looked as anxious as a young father in some mid-20th century sitcom, pacing around in a hospital waiting room and smoking cigarette after cigarette until the doctor arrived with the good news. And while Abrams’ “Super 8″ was playing in multiplexes this past summer, Spielberg himself was finishing his epic “War Horse,” which is set during World War I but strains to evoke the shots, camera moves, music, pacing and tone of a 1940s Hollywood prestige picture. (During a recent New York preview screening, Spielberg said he was hugely influenced by 1940s John Ford films, particularly “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “How Green Was My Valley.”)

“You’ll never be a great writer if you fear dying,” Hemingway tells Gil in “Midnight in Paris.” “Do you?”

“Yeah, I do,” Gil replies. “I would say it’s my greatest fear.”

A more ruminative, searching, open-ended take could be found in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” a Proustian reverie by way of suburban Texas in the 1950s and ’60s. To watch this movie is to be completely immersed in the mind of another person: ostensibly the narrator, Jack (Sean Penn), but really Malick himself, a generous filmmaker who seems to be remembering his own past because he can’t remember anyone else’s. It’s a tough movie in some ways, filled with confusion, pain, regret and messy Oedipal resentments and desires. But ultimately the look and sound of the film eclipses all of that. What predominates is an overwhelming, at times helpless-seeming urge to escape this horrible, sterile modern prison of virtual being-and-nothingness, and go back to a more casually physical time, a time when you could stay outside all day and all night without your parents worrying about your being raped or doped up or kidnapped by sex slavers or organ thieves or converted to Shariah Law or whatever bugaboo is obsessing modern parents at this very moment; a time when you could fall down and scab your knees, tear-ass through woods and vacant lots, roll around in grass, even strap a poor frog to a rocket and then feel horrible about it later, then come home and clean the dirt out from under your fingernails and sit down to supper with Mom and Dad, who maybe didn’t know quite what to do with you, and perhaps even resented you at times, but loved you unconditionally.

Well, maybe not your parents, but somebody’s.

“The Tree of Life” ends on a beach that might represent the afterlife or that might simply be a metaphorical or figurative space — a place where all Jack’s most beloved fellow beings can gather in one place and just be loved, admired, embraced. It’s a place where the virtual becomes real and the dead return to us, if only for a moment. A place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

“That’s what the present is,” Gil says in “Paris,” responding to the quote that opens this article. “It’s a little unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.”