by Carl Hegelman

I don’t remember all that much about my first year at university except that it was the year we converted from pounds, shillings and pence to “decimal currency.” I shared ground-floor rooms, overlooking the Third Quad in college, with a bearded, bear-like chap I called (for reasons which need not detain us) Eighty Two. He was impossibly good: for all practical purposes a saint. His father ran a school for the blind. He had just spent part of his gap year (though the term wasn’t in use back then) in a 12th-century French monastery, l’Abbaye du Bec Helouin, in Normandy. He had thick black eyebrows and soulful, molten brown eyes. He smoked a pipe, and he played the violin in the university orchestra even though he wasn’t reading Music but Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Despite that he was so unbearably good, as well as being insufferably modest about his accomplishments, he was actually a very lively guy and we got along well, at least until the summer, or so-called “Hilary,” term, when we fell out (an incident involving wine, a girl from Scandinavia and a locked door — my fault).

It was at the end of the summer term that I first met the man who so insidiously diverted my life from its natural course. I needed a job for a few weeks so that I could take a trip to Europe, which was the thing to do in those days. I had a place to stay, because an old school friend of mine had digs on the outskirts of town and offered to sublet while he was away. But economics dictated that I should find a roommate to share the rent. And, somehow, that was how Jake turned up in our rooms one day after lunch.

Jake was a colonial, a third-generation Kenyan. I’d vaguely noticed him around college during the year. He was conspicuous for his sheepskin coat, which he’d had made from local sheep by a tailor in Naivasha. He was tanned and buccaneering, with a striking resemblance somehow to both Marlon Brando and Paul Newman. He spoke in a deep, resonant voice with the colonial accent I remembered so affectionately from my own childhood in Africa. I took to him instantly. We found jobs on a construction site out of town and he bought, for 50 pounds (half of which I was supposed to pay him back) an Austin A35 van to take us to and from work. Because we were low on cash, it often ran out of petrol, and so he called the van Sukuma (which is a Swahili verb meaning “push”). Also, the only brake that worked was the parking brake, which made it tricky when we jaunted up to London to see a test match (cricket being one of his passions).

On the face of it, Jake was nothing like 82. He wasn’t Good at all, and Doing Good In The World was a fair way down his list of career priorities if it appeared there at all. Oddly, though, he was a romantic in very much the same way as 82. Only instead of, say, Gandhi or Che Guevara, his heroes were Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, maybe even in a small way Papa Hemingway. Jake’s firm ambition was to be a writer. With his garrulous tongue and dandified style — the tailor-made sheepskin coat was only one fanciful item in a wardrobe which included pink velvet trousers, a black beret, a kanzu for bedtime, sandals made out of old car tires, and a midnight-blue velvet waistcoat with pearl buttons — he had all the trappings and glamour of one destined for greatness in this role. His mother, with the help of a sugar daddy, ran a gallery and cultivated young artists. His father raced in the East African Safari Rally, a grueling 4,000-mile bush race of exactly the type a macho Hemingway character would undertake if he weren’t into bullfighting or killing other large, fierce animals. And his girlfriend, with whom he actually had real sexual relations, was an air hostess (at least until she was killed in a crash at Haile Selassie International Airport, Addis Ababa in 1972, an event which only heightened, by its tragic overtone, his credentials as an aspiring young novelist.)

Even his choice of degree was unusual in that Jake was reading a course, newly established in that year, called Human Sciences. There were all sorts of interesting disciplines under this umbrella, and Jake discoursed enthusiastically and with seeming erudition on Niko Tinbergen, Mary Douglas and especially Claude Levi-Strauss who had invented something radical-sounding called Structuralism. Fellow Kenyan Richard Dawkins, then a nonentity in the wider world but still a rising young star in academia, was one of the lecturers in the Human Sciences faculty, and Jake took tutorials with his extraordinarily good-looking wife. All this was very impressive to a lowly biochemist whose rare moments of study were confined to non-riveting subjects like Glycolysis & the Krebs Cycle.

I don’t remember all that much about my second year at university because I was drunk most of the time, along with my newfound friend.

One evening in The Bear, Jake hatched a scheme.

“Listen, Muguruki,” he told me (the nickname being an ironic usage, meaning “wily old man”), “you’ve got to get away from these fucking etiolated Englishmen. Come on safari, ‘ey? You need the wide-open spaces, mun, or you’ll go fucking nuts. Levi-Strauss says…”

And so in order to take a vacation in East Africa along with a motley crew of other students, I sobered up and took jobs — on the night shift in a commercial bakery for Christmas and Easter, and in the summer watching an automatic lathe turn out steel components in an engineering works.

It was perhaps on this trip when Jake’s insidious influence was finally cemented. Riding on the roof of the Land Rover across the Serengeti, nights around the campfire surrounded by wild beasts, weed on the beach under the Southern Cross, that sort of thing. The high point was Lamu, an ancient Arabian island port with more seedy enchantment and romance even than Durrell’s Alexandria. Dhows loading mangrove along the corniche in front of the town. Idlers in the market square, shadowed by an old Portuguese fort. Lemonade at Anwar Coldrink’s. Donkeys braying in the alleys of the labyrinth. In the dusky evening, muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the minarets. More weed.

All this glamma was too much. If Jake could be a writer, why not I? To warm up, I began to keep a diary. I read a lot of novels, looking for tips on how to write one. I found Beckett particularly inspiring: apparently, it didn’t matter — in fact it was a boon — if you were boring and incomprehensible. Thomas Pynchon, also: the storyline obscure? So much the better! And, of course, Henry Miller (whole paragraphs of adjectives — a Thesaurus, some vin ordinaire, hey presto) and Lawrence Durrell for the wistful, iambic prose. Some time later I was emboldened to start scribbling. A “novel of ideas,” naturally, since I lacked a real narrative. Finally, I bought an old typewriter, taught myself to type — most people didn’t in those days — and began pecking like a pro. Only the red part of the ribbon had any ink, and I single-spaced to every margin for to save paper, so my manuscript, overwritten with tiny handwritten corrections, was not only unreadable but also almost illegible. When everybody else left university to become accountants, I took a job as a night porter and continued on my great work while the world slept. Jake left me his velvet trousers and record player.

With the benefit of a few decades of hindsight, the folly of this sorry saga is painfully obvious. Unless he’s a veritable prodigy, only a fool will attempt a novel in his twenties. Who so wet behind the ears has anything interesting to say? I suppose Evelyn Waugh (even he burned his first attempt, after Harold Acton observed there was “too much nid nodding over port” — a lesson EW clearly took to heart); but a satire of one’s contemporaries is different, perhaps. And if Nature is telling you to be an accountant, you should pay heed and don the green eyeshade. It takes more than a pair of pink velvet trousers to make a writer.

Unfortunately, the disease has never entirely left me. Even now, I occasionally toil — my fourth effort. Jake was much more sensible. He quit writing after a year and made a bundle taking investment bankers and royalty on luxury safaris. Eventually, he bought a house on Lamu, which has now become a kind of playground for wintering European aristos. He ambles about the town and is treated himself like a local pasha. He’s the only one of my fellow students I keep in touch with. Bad as ever, bless him.

Previously in series: Bad News Brenda and Drunk In China

Carl Hegelman is a nom de guerre.

“Millions of animals live and die every year and many enter the fossil record through serendipitous circumstances, but there really is no reason to enter the fossil record while you are mating. After all, the chances of both partners dying at the same time is highly unlikely and the chances of both partners being preserved afterwards even less likely. The Messel turtles are therefore the only vertebrate fossils known to have died while in the process of mating and this only happened because of the highly unusual circumstances of the lake in which they lived.”
 — Those of us still a little sad about Bibi and Poldi, the 115-year-old tortoise couple who broke up last week in Austria, can take heart in University of Tubingen researcher Walter Joyce’s description of fossils found in the Messel Pit Fossil Site between Darmstadt and Frankfurt, Germany. Apparently, the turtles had fallen into a blissful, sort-of-Tantric trance-like state while they doing sex in a lake and didn’t notice themselves drifting into poisonous water. It’s like a “Lovers’ Leap” thing. Or Romeo and Juliet.

by Eric Spiegelman

In honor of today, the first day of summer — the summer solstice — the day the northern hemisphere gets more daylight than any other day of the year, the astronomical first day of summer (as opposed to the American first day of summer, which is Memorial Day), we celebrate that seasonal genre of music known colloquially as the “Summer Jam.” I asked some Awl contributors to name their favorites, and it turns out that the scope of the Summer Jam is much broader than I anticipated. There are four distinct types of Summer Jam: the Bouncy Summer Jam, for dancing at barbeques; the Languid Summer Jam, for falling asleep in the grass; the Peppy Summer Jam (broken into Soft and Loud), for just kind of whenever; and the Contemplative Summer Jam, for being quiet (and maybe having a cigarette) off to the side someplace on a rooftop or rocky breakwater.

All of these selections, plus a whole bunch picked by Summer Jam connoisseur Justin Purnell, will be featured over the next couple months on Awl Music, and will be available all the time on Awl Music’s Summer Jam microsite, and also on a Spotify playlist. (That Spotify playlist, by the way, is a collaborative one, so add your own!)

BOUNCY SUMMER JAMS

Eric Spiegelman
Naughty By Nature, “Feel Me Flow”: This song has exactly the right amount of bounce to it, and the video is perfectly on the nose for what you expect from a bouncy summer jam. It’s too hot to think, and then an impromptu party breaks out that somehow cools everyone off. Like a beer commercial.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper
Montell Jordan, “Somethin’ 4 Da Honeyz”: This is the ultimate summer jam because me and my 5th-grade girl posse recorded it off our boom box and would play it on a little cassette player while we walked down to the liquor store to shoplift and buy otter pops.

Brent Cox
DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, “Summertime”: Obviously best summer jam of all time.

Sarah Johnson
Rich Boy, “Throw Some D’s”: Could Rich Boy even buy a Cadillac now? Regardless, this is an eternal Summer Jam.

John Ore
I love this Crazy Frog track because it represents everything I love about trashy Euro-pop, which makes for a terrific Summer Jam. Plus, it’s got an animated frog with visible junk in the video. When I first went to London in the Summer of 1988, I bought a 45 on Carnaby Street of “Popcorn” by Hot Butter. So “Popcorn” comes full circle as a Summer Jam for me.

Jolie Kerr
I decided, like, four days ago that “Move This” by Technotronic was totes gonna be my summer jam, because it’s a great song and also it’s apparently 1987 again. (It’s actually always 1987 in my head.)

Doree Shafrir
Terror Squad, “Lean Back.” I didn’t ever know anyone who actually DID the Rockaway when this song came on, but still, it’s a pretty much perfect Summer Jam. Fat Joe and Remy Ma trade verses, and Remy raps one of the simplest, greatest I’m-hot-shit lyrics ever: Listen we don’t pay admission/And bouncers don’t check us/And we walk around the metal detectors.” (Too bad about that “fa**ot ni**as” reference, though.)

Eric Spiegelman
One more. LL Cool J, “Loungin (Who Do Ya Luv).” This song was an important part of my childhood.

LANGUID SUMMER JAMS

Dave Bry
A summertime jam should sound like the season — hazy, slow, wasted, sweaty. The bass notes in Jane’s Addiction’s “Summertime Rolls” bend and stretch themselves out and seem to take longer coming around every time than they should. Like how night doesn’t fall until 9 o’clock on a summer day, and it feels like 11:30 by then because you’ve been doing nothing but watching fireflies for the past three hours already.

Joe MacLeod
“Summer Madness” by Kool and the Gang. For me it always seems like it’s at night and you are outside looking at the sky and all is quiet as you reflect upon your day and how awesome you are for being alive. It got sampled by ERRBODY.

Eric Spiegelman
David Axelrod, “Holy Thursday.” I once met a girl while this was playing. She moved away at the end of the summer.

Matthew Gallaway
I have two summer-jam possibilities, both by Galaxie 500 on THIS IS OUR MUSIC. “Summertime” is about the the languid but sultry romance that often arrives with the stultifying heat. [The other one falls under “Contemplative.” — Ed.]

PEPPY (SOFT) SUMMER JAMS

Nadia Chaudhury
Joanna Newsom, “Good Intentions Paving Company.” My love of this song is well documented, and I still stand by it. You can’t help but bop your head and sway your hips to Joanna’s perfect summer voice, aided by the bouncing piano.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYDSFKLu-TA

John Wenz
Freddy Cannon, “Palisades Park.” For whatever reason, I associate peppy organs with summer… maybe it’s a kind of association in general with The Rivieras’ classic version of “California Sun,” which is also an Ultimate Summer Song of the Early 60s. And also features awesome use of the organ. At any rate, this song is stupid visits to summer amusement parks, or just blaring it out a boombox while day-drinking at an amateur baseball game. Whatever.

Brent Cox
I wasn’t even a New Order fan at the time, but I spent eleven straight days in a car that summer, and by day twelve “Regret” was imprinted in my brain. It’s weird to think of New Order as producing either a Summer Jam or a driving song, but there it is. Also, The Gin Blossoms, “Hey Jealousy” (same reasons as above).

John Ore
Critical criteria for my Summer Jamz: as a guilty pleasure, you must be moderately ashamed of them. Here’s Robbie Williams, “She’s Madonna” and MIKA, “Grace Kelly.”

And last Summer, my wife and I were totally addicted to Foster The People’s “Pumped Up Kicks.”

Sarah Marshall
As tribute to my habit of listening to country music in summer and summer alone, I nominate David Frizzell’s “Gonna Hire A Wino,” which might just epitomize everything great about cheesy old country. My roommates are dancing to it right now.

Anne Helen Petersen
Traveling Wilburys, “End Of The Line”: This song was on The Boat Tape growing up, sandwiched in between Bonnie Raitt and Billy Idol. The Boat Tape was the soundtrack to Doritos-fingers and fluorescent pink and purple life jackets and trying to kneeboard on the Snake River, getting my parents cans of Coors Light and fighting my brother for the last can of Grape Shasta, begging to keep my swimsuit on for 24-hours-straight. Clearly, “Boat Tape” is 1980s-speak for “Summer Jam.”

PEPPY (LOUD) SUMMER JAMS

Brent Cox
Blur, “Song 2” (on the grounds of sheer ubiquity).

Brian Pritchett
The Undertones, “Here Comes The Summer.” This, I guess, is what summer sounded like in Northern Ireland in 1979. It is surprisingly cheery!

Japandroids are two very young and nice Canadian fellows. They sound like a version of the Foo Fighters that doesn’t suck. The song, “Nights of Wine and Roses,” is about smoking and drinking and being young and nice.

Sarah Johnson
FIDLAR, “Wake Bake Skate”: It’s loud, stupid, and fun as hell.

Nadia Chaudhury
St. Vincent, “Cruel”: It’s fast, yet slow; synthy, yet soft; distorted, yet smooth; awfully disturbing, yet playful. That’s what summer is all about.

CONTEMPLATIVE SUMMER JAMS

Abe Sauer
The one that springs immediately to mind is “Fake Empire” by The National. It’s moody but the early line “Put a little something in our lemonade, and take it with us” (as well as the song as a whole) reminds me so much of summer nights in Brooklyn, walking from the park in the afternoon to rooftop party to rooftop party. It’s, to me, “THE” New York summer song; it’s moody, contemplative, a little wearing-dark-colors-in-summer and buzzed and bleary but the ultimate NY city song.

Matthew Gallaway
“Fourth of July” by Galaxie 500 perfectly encapsulates the malaise of summer in the city, when everyone is going out and doing supposedly fun things, and, despite your best intentions, you end up staying in bed with the curtains shut.

Ann Finkbeiner
This is hopeless but I can’t help myself. Glenn Gould in the 1981 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. You could sit and watch the grass grow and the wind move the trees, and think this music explained it all.

Rick Paulas
The Arcade Fire, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”: Someone — an acquaintance on Facebook, I don’t remember who — said this song neatly summarized the last four decades of pop music. My own musical knowledge isn’t expansive enough to bullet-point the references, or even enthusiastically confirm that he’s right even making that statement. But it feels just about right.

Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles.

Ryan Sutton’s one-star review. (“Sound Level: Around 80 decibels, often piercing. Date Place: If strollers turn you on.”)

“Out of every $100 American consumers spend, about $1 goes to alcohol. That hasn’t changed much over the past 30 years. But where we spend our money on alcohol has changed quite a bit. We spend a bigger chunk of our booze money in bars and restaurants. We spend less money buying alcohol at the store to drink at home.”
 — But it turns out that alcohol in stores is cheaper than it used to be, while alcohol at bars is more expensive. So those of us who mostly spend our money on alcohol at stores, which we then bring home and sip steadily on the couch, crying alone or singing softly to ourselves as the night winds down, silently promising that we’re going to wrap it up and go to bed while knowing full well that we’re going to pour another one and hate ourselves for needing it and not being able to do anything about it even though we know what the consequences will be tomorrow, should congratulate ourselves on our brilliant budgeting behavior. Good for us!

Photo by thaumatrope, via Shutterstock

“There is no question that the chip mounts a full-frontal flavor assault on the palate, with the spices as shock troops. The taco shell is demure by comparison, but it may well be that the restrained application of the spices, rather than a reformulation of the recipe, accounts for the difference.”

“Young people who heavily use cell phones and computers also complain more about sleep disturbances, stress and other mental health problems, according to researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. ‘Public health advice should therefore include information on the healthy use of this technology,’ says researcher Sara Thomée from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg.”

“And all this post-racism is killing me/I heard some hipsters saying ‘nigga’ real liberally/I know, some your best friends is niggas/Nigga, please…”
 — Detroit rapper Denmark Vessey’s new song is about Gwyneth Paltrow. (No, it’s mostly about smoking cigarettes. But Gwyneth Paltrow should definitely listen to it. It’s really good.)

Have enough years passed since the show’s conclusion that we can now consider “The Hills” to be “retro”? Apparently, they have. Time to die!