Lost Lustre by Joshua Karlen

Author:Joshua Karlen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0-9819321-1-8
Publisher: Tatra Press

We’d sit with beers at a wobbly table or stand in the teenage crowd, pressed against a wall, and watch the bands—often they were our classmates—pounding their instruments, raising tidal waves of sounds that came rearing and crashing from the towers of speakers.

And sometimes, I’d suddenly catch a flash of musicianship, some startling, exquisitely subtle vocal harmony or chord-shift, maybe an unexpected feint to a minor key, and then I’d be abruptly swerved into some new place, and a chill would run through me. At those moments, the music, through some alchemy of sound and beer, would transform the club’s squalor, its stark contrast of dark and light, into a Rembrandt-shadowed loveliness, a shimmering vision. A teenage girl with a razor-blade earring and plain features sitting across a table would appear briefly illumined not only with the stage lights but with the touch of God’s perfection itself; my laughing friends became, for those moments, noble, Shakespearean comrades. And sometimes, the music’s rushing sweep would carry me away into a sort of crazy joy, would loft me high on its crescendos, and in giddy, drunken ecstasy I’d want to leap on tables, swing from roof beams, throw beer bottles, cry out with a raised defiant fist to the world, sweep girls off their feet like a buccaneer.

And at other moments, some earsplitting chord progression would summon my adolescent furies from their deep hidden place—the headlong crashing of the drums, the relentless guitars, the screaming young men, their veins throbbing in their necks, limbs stiff and faces contorted with rage, the guitar-feedback squealing from the amplifiers—all unleashed a fury that blinded me in the darkness, that purged my crippling adolescent doubts, bewilderment, and despair at my inability to control my life of school, parents, teachers, or to escape our home on the Lower East Side. My fists would clench at my sides and then I ached to smash walls, scream curses, hurl myself from buildings. In my targetless, searching wrath, I felt a strangely serene ecstasy—as though the fragments of my being were returning together, rejoining, rushing me back to a wholeness lost since childhood.

In those moments of joy and rage and visions, I was, I sensed, being moved by art—a rough, simple art that was being created right before me. Those three-minute songs emerged as quickly as the gesture-sketches drawn by Mr. Bang in class, where each charcoal line came quick and vigorous, yet exquisitely graceful and uncannily perfect as you watched the image emerge and then it was done before you knew it. And like those sketches, the noise from the stage would emerge to form a perfect sketch of a song that ended in reverberating silence before you quite knew what had hit you. And during those songs, my eyes might meet Tim’s and I’d see the angry delight in his look, and we’d share a grin and a nod of approval and turn back to the glare and fury of the stage.

But such transcendent moments were rare. Mostly,

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