R.E.M. were right in the place of youth, that very zone. In the drift of sweet melancholy where there are youth suicides. I think I’m losing my religion. It’s the end of the world as we know it. I hope I die before I grow old, to quote someone else. That place. Not teenagers but young adults fixed in a time when teen years hold on. In the line of James Dean who wished to die and leave a good looking corpse, but crashed at high speed in his Porsche Spider. I knew the concurrent model, my favourite, the 356, which was sold from the early 1950s or late forties right through until the mid 1960s. Someone known as Theodore The Animal owned it in the late 1950s when I was in my very late teens. Despite the name he was a soft, pleasant man, bearish with a black beard. He was an architect. The 356 is often seen at the Porsche garage just up the road in Arundel St. Recently I saw the Spider for the very first time parked around the corner in Derwent St. There was a young fellow in it and he told me it was the model in which James Dean died. All very suggestive.
R.E.M. were around at the same time as Nirvana – late eighties, early nineties – but Michael Stipe did not commit suicide. He retired aged 51. The whole band retired in 2011. Dave Hughes remarked that he thought they had retired ages ago.
I had almost forgotten them too. Then Hughes said, “They’ve probably retired so they can have a revival tour.” I can’t quite imagine Stipe in his fifties (nor Cobain who was seven years older). I remember Stipe as a bald monkey, a fractured puppet whose strings were jerked randomly. He wasn’t the first to dance like that. It was one of the expressions of youth. In the Automatic For The People clip he was carried around, prostrate, through a vast dim throng, like the slain warrior borne home on his shield. But he did not die. He retired in middle age. They played all their clips on Rage on the night of the retirement. Strangely enough it made me think of a bus ride home from Maroubra a couple of years ago, when I looked out on the flat, sparely lit, regular and newish suburb on the plateau above and beyond the old beach suburb, and realised that I had caught the wrong bus. I had ridden my bike through here maybe once. Never had I been here in darkness.
I got off and started walking through the early night in the direction of Anzac Parade. This is where the buses to the city ran. It finally appeared at the end of a long straight street – all streets were straight in this alien region which did not exist when I lived down near the surf – as a stream of headlights and dim buildings. Like a film playing of my childhood, lit as if by gaslight compared to the fluorescent tubes by which I walked.
I was half asleep, weary and yet fascinated by this empty suburbia where few lights burned, but burned cleanly and brightly on the streets or in the newish brick bungalows. It was sterile but mysterious. Who lived here? I was in a dream. There was neat grass and youngish trees of medium height. And silence. Then a car pulled up beside a tree under a streetlight and people got out and went up the drive of a house like all the others. They did not glance at me. Perhaps they didn’t see me walking under the tree, under the light that mingled with its metallic leaves. At these times you are of no age. Alone but not at all lonely. Very glad to have survived teen years and youth. And middle age if it comes to that. My flippers, mask and snorkel were in my bag. I had left the water almost in darkness. The velvet of water at dusk still lay on my skin. I was almost asleep. R.E.M. Rapid Eye Movement.
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