"Santa Rita High": The Past is Another Planet

I was reminded of a line of thought I arrived at as a newly-minted bachelor living in Manhattan almost 25 years ago: "The past is another planet."

I think the formulation was something like, "If another person is a foreign country, then the past is another planet." I had recently seen a nighttime production of Charles Mee's play Another Person is a Foreign Country. My ex-wife -- we were newly divorced -- got us tickets in exchange for working the performance as ushers. The play was performed in the ruins of an abandoned nursing home, south of Morningside Park and west of Central Park at a time -- it must have been 1991 -- when there was a crack and AIDs epidemic in New York City.

My ex-wife was beautiful, I was young and the play was ahead of its time. It featured black people, dwarfs, a transvestite, a deaf person, and women both young and old -- lots of women.

I enjoyed myself. At the end of the show, Chuck Mee, who contracted polio as a teenager, walked out herky-jerky with the help of his cane. He was dressed plainly. He had on a pair of running shoes, slacks and I think a Members Only jacket. The ovation he received was large and sincere. I was impressed by what a decent guy he was; he just exuded realness -- a true model for someone like me who aspired to be a thinker. (A few years later I read Meeting at Potsdam (1975) and was not disappointed.)

I mention all this as preface to a moment I experienced walking downtown yesterday morning to catch the train to work. Supersuckers' "Santa Rita High" shuffled on my iPod. The song comes from their 1999 album, The Evil Powers of Rock 'n' Roll. And I experienced at that moment, as if I had mainlined it into my arm, what the whole Grunge, Seattle Sound mass hallucination felt like. Depending on how you measure it, that hallucination lasted a full ten years (from the recession of 1990-91 to 9/11). And the substance of that fevered dream was that somehow it was possible to live a hard-partying life of rock 'n' rebellion within the confines of the bloodsucking neoliberal capitalist order. What could have caused such a delusion? I think that it was a combination of the evaporation of the go-go '80s during Bush I followed by the gradual buildup to a low-wage full-employment economy under Clinton. A lot of people who had reached adulthood during the "Morning in America" (set to a synthesizer score) decided to try a bastardized, Lollapolooza, Burning Man version of the Age of Aquarius. We were suffering from the misapprehension that the system afforded enough wiggle room to accommodate such a lifestyle.