A Couple Centuries of Sundays

David T. Humphries

Elevator Music

I was thinking about The Sundays’ first album Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic when I heard “Here’s Where the Story Ends” in an elevator.^[1] Given that my college radio show was called “Elevator Music,” that might have seemed auspicious, a little personal joke, but instead I was reminded of first hearing The Sundays’ version of “Wild Horses”^[2] in a Budweiser commercial and later hearing their modest hit “Summertime”^[3] in a McDonald’s. I was in grad school and had ducked in to buy a $1 coffee, only to feel more deflated, somehow, when the song came on under the fluorescent glare. By the time my elevator ride was over, it seemed that a final assessment had been filed: The Sundays weren’t all that remembered or discussed, but they weren’t entirely forgotten, either, or in need of rediscovery. They had achieved a permanent but limited place of relevance for a handful of recognizable songs, a kind of afterlife of product placement, adding entries to corporate ledgers. They were more than elevator music, but you could hear them in elevators.^[4]

The more I thought about The Sundays, though, the more I wanted to. I remembered they had an early endorsement from legendary British DJ John Peel, so there was that. Besides, I had a host of associations for each of their three albums, released between 1990 and 1997, and the first two had never fallen completely out of my extended rotation. When I had made my most important pandemic purchase, new Sennheiser headphones, I tried them out by first listening to Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Stuck at home, I wanted to enter a different space in my head, and I did.

Sunday Nights

It wasn’t like I first found The Sundays in some small club or underground record store or from an obscure radio show or music insider. True to form as a Gen X-er, TV provides reference points for my early life, with theme songs, canned laughter, and dramatic set pieces forming backdrops for my experiences. When I first heard The Sundays’ “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” it was a different kind of TV: MTV. I remember the VJ (as they were called) on 120 Minutes joking after the video played about a band starting their story with a song about a story ending.^[5] The Sundays’ nostalgia came prepackaged: From the first, they seemed self-aware about beginnings and endings, living and remembering, all at once.

I was home from my first year of college -- where I had mostly given up watching TV -- and at the home of a high school friend, John, in Liberty Township, a suburb of Youngstown, Ohio. The Steel City was a dozen years on from Black Monday, when the steel mills started closing all at once, jobs disappearing by the tens of thousands, and it was buckling under its own series of endings. ‘Alternative music’ was about to become the mainstream for a few years, but out in the pre-internet hinterlands, radio was mostly classic rock, pop music, and the classical music of WYSU from Youngstown State University, which had a jazz show late on Saturday nights that I often listened to.

Staying up late on Sunday nights to watch 120 Minutes made you a certain kind of cool, at least in your own mind. John’s father was a steel company executive brought from back east with the hopeless task of saving the operations. John had a much older, artsy, and shadowy brother who had been among the last group of college students to get lucrative but demanding summer work in the steel mills. He had also been a college DJ at Kent State University, and he passed along to John more obscure recommendations and information about the history of the local music scene. John, in turn, enjoyed knowing more about Pere Ubu and the real origins of Devo and passing along that information to me. In fairness, I might have been a know it all, and so it all balanced out.

John knew more, too, about the mythical story of Stiv Bators, who had just died that year, 1990, under mysterious circumstances, in Paris. Bators, a founding member of Dead Boys and Lords of the New Church, was the most famous person to ever come out of Girard, the nearby working-class suburb where I had lived my entire life, and he had gone to the same Catholic schools as us some twenty years before. The stories were mostly apocrypha about things he did to get suspended, and how, unlike us, he hadn’t cared what anyone thought about him. Now he was dead at 40. Still, if he could light up CBGB’s and land in Paris, maybe it wasn’t so crazy to think that music could be an escape, a way to imagine other worlds.

More immediately, music was a topic of conversation, a bond after high school to keep our friendship going a little longer as we started down our separate paths. John was home from his father’s alma mater in Philadelphia and would soon be leaving Youngstown for good, while I was a first-generation college student with an academic scholarship, heading back to John Carroll University in Cleveland in the fall with only the dimmest idea of the future. In the meantime, we were both working full-time that summer at Calvary Cemetery in Youngstown, making minimum wage, and spending most of our weekends seeing bands at The Penguin Pub and Cedar’s Lounge, wiping the underage stamps off our hands and drinking cheap Rolling Rocks. If some of the guitar on Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic called to mind another favorite, The Smiths’ “Cemetery Gates,” such references were not droll poses for us but reminders that we both needed a paycheck and would be passing through real cemetery gates come Monday morning.^[6]

The video for “Here’s Where the Story Ends” was one of the few that sent a bolt through me and had me off to the record store the next day. From the opening strumming of the guitar, throughout the monochromatic, dreamy video, I was enthralled, already knowing I would remember. Now, in another decade, century, and millennium, my memory is enhanced, like everyone else’s, by YouTube.^[7] I see that Harriet Wheeler doesn’t just sing about wearing cardigans on another song on Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, but was wearing one that first time I saw her. I’m not sure I noticed that then, when seeing a video was a matter of chance, but it was obvious that the band had an art-school aesthetic and I had already fallen for it. It was like the band was living an alternate version of college life, one I could almost imagine.

A Novel Album

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic was one of those albums that came with a ready-made introduction: Given the bands’ names, the shared record label, Rough Trade, and monochromatic cover art, The Smiths connection was obvious. Since The Smiths’ had broken up a few years before, The Sundays seemed at first like a kind of welcome continuation. Once introduced, though, they quickly became their own thing.^[8]

While David Gavurin’s guitar playing shares a certain jangly sound, and the occasional shimmer, with Johnny Marr, it is also more understated, working with the drums especially to open perfect spaces for Wheeler’s voice. Long before lyrics were available with a web search or a click in an app, it was a big deal that Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic included few liner notes and no lyrics. It let you imagine the band’s backstory and piece together the desires, judgements, joys, and regrets that Wheeler sings about -- strong feelings that she would rather explain over tea and candlelight or in a letter. References to miserable English weather, taking lifts, and the correct use of “shan’t” still add an alluring distance for an American listener like me. The music and lyrics create the atmosphere of a defiant dreamer more comfortable in books but trying to make her way in the real world. As the music creates a kind of atmosphere, the lyrics offer just enough identifiable details to make you feel that you are overhearing private conversations that somehow speak to the stories that you are keeping for yourself. Listening again, I hear a series of arguments, cleverly and beautifully rendered -- with friends, parents, lovers, and the world -- and I hear someone young and passionate, sensitive but strong and wise, who knows the most important arguments are the ones we have with ourselves.

As I learned back then in little pieces (again, no internet!) and can confirm today, Gavurin and Wheeler formed the band while they were a couple at Bristol University, studying Romance languages and English literature, respectively.^[9] With a title like Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, the album plays like a perfect textbook of 1990s college music.^[10] With allusions to poetry, books, and those cardigans, a good listen still seems like a good read: “Skin & Bones” opens with a speaker who is a bit fragile but stands determined. “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” an instantly recognizable college radio hit, conveys those feelings of urgency and passion, so ingrained in the school year, when summer has the melancholy of knowing you won’t be seeing some familiar faces again when fall comes around. “Can’t Be Sure” and “A Certain Someone” are manifestos of the introvert staking a claim to ideas and desires. I’ve always been susceptible to dry British humor, and there is plenty of that in songs with titles like “Hideous Towns” and “I Kicked a Boy.”^[11]

The album ends with “Joy,” a statement of feeling that works well as the final song and wouldn’t work anywhere else: This is an album, an arrangement of a series of moods, scraps of thoughts and conversations, each song sequenced and adding up to something else.^[12] You can call up the quirky lyrics for “Joy” these days, but they don’t make the song any less enigmatic or bittersweet. It is the closing chapter of a book that takes you through different stories while letting you decide how you feel about your own. Maybe it’s the tension between private desires and public declarations that makes The Sundays’ best songs hold up so well, and maybe that’s why after a few songs started turning up on corporate playlists and commercials, the band disappeared. They didn’t break up; they just vanished. With no social media, it took a while to even notice, and by then there was no speculation, just waiting for new music that never arrived. Yet even if the familiar songs from their three albums have become almost too familiar, the Sundays’ first album, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, is waiting there to be heard on its own terms and reconsidered, like a novel you read back in school and go back to reread every so often, as a witness and guide.

Taken in its entirety, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic becomes more than just the mood of the grey shell fossils on its cover or a witty retort to a world amiss, though it does offer both mood and wit. There is the moment, and there is a consideration of the way moments add up to a life with far grander scales of time beyond that. When you are starting out in college and mowing grass through rows of tombstones, as my friend and I were that summer the album came out, you get a little of that whether you like it or not. It fit perfectly in my routine. I copied my CD onto a cassette for my Walkman to help me get through some of those long afternoons in Calvary Cemetery, pushing my lawnmower, weeding flower beds, and occasionally dropping coffins in the ground and watering grass seeds on fresh graves, doing my little bit to beautify and bury Youngstown in those years when it seemed like there was nothing but dying.

Part of my daydreaming was wanting to fight for my city and to connect with others to figure it all out, but I felt left alone to make my way through college first. That didn’t seem to be such a sure thing. With the soot-stained city rusting away around us, the union halls mostly empty, the mills turning into giant, empty husks, the future seemed especially uncertain, so that small details and minor conflicts, the emotions of the day, loomed particularly momentous and large. Lyrics about loving people -- or not -- for the books they read, trying to decide if you are on the inside or the outside, and winning battles in sitting rooms, seemed playfully knowing and self-aware to me, an alternative life to imagine for a minimum wage worker and bookworm.

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic is a powerful reminder that sometimes the little things really don’t matter, but sometimes they really do. They reverberate. That’s life for those fortunate enough to have the traditional college experience, living on campus as I did on my scholarship money: Picking a schedule, choosing a major (then changing it a few times), deciding what parties to prep for and which to skip, deciding whether to study abroad and whom to room with, and of course, navigating those first serious romances -- everything seems weighty and momentous because it just might be. You explore your desires, side with or more often against your parents, choose your own friends, and immerse yourself in books and relationships that promise -- or is it threaten? -- to change you permanently and make you see yourself differently.

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic captures those feelings about finding your own roadmap, your own ways of living, and making friends and habits for life. You keep “that little souvenir of a terrible year”^[13] for yourself and you consider having “a party in the cellar” with people you already know, people that you at once admire and reject for being “young and selfish, with liberty and money.”^[14] That’s how I felt among my more affluent college classmates -- in the middle and on the edge at once. Behind the dreamy textures of The Sundays’ music and the word play, there is defiance. In each song, the music and Wheeler’s voice and suggestive lyrics work together to build an idea of the self, noticing, remembering, and quietly arguing a way forward. The feeling of wanting to go into the world, but wanting to go back home, the feeling of wanting to luxuriate in the abundant time of youth while making a mark is playfully right there in the middle of the album, in “Hideous Towns”: “Oh oh, my hopeless youth it’s so uncouth / And oh, I’d like to be in history.”^[15]

I wasn’t sure what kind of history I was living through those summers at the cemetery, but the album somehow helped me pay attention to the world and gave me permission to pay attention to myself. I would have to make it through to go on remembering, to understand my own situation before I could recognize what we all shared working through those summers. As Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic builds towards its conclusion, it becomes clear that it is not about gazing at your shoes or your navel, but becoming wonderfully self-aware, acknowledging time, good days and terrible days, good years and terrible years, making unforgettable moments, a kind of proposed nostalgia for future selves who will persist after all. It is about fighting to figure things out, but also making a record of when you could put yourself first, and could take each detail about your life seriously, just in case it was.

IRL: There Was No App for a Lyft

I saw The Sundays twice in concert. The first time was in the fall of my sophomore year of college. My roommate, Dennis, a friend from high school, and I got tickets to see them at The Empire Concert Club, a rickety but wonderfully sized venue in Cleveland where you saw shows upstairs in a large ballroom. It was my first time there, and we bought our tickets in advance. Later, once I got my college radio show, DJs were often comped tickets, and I saw shows at The Empire all the time. It was sad but not entirely surprising when it was shut down as a fire hazard.

If you weren’t around then, it’s a little hard to describe the random adventures that occurred before the internet and smart phones. Dennis and I were dropped off at the show, a good 45-minute drive from campus, by a classmate on his way home on the westside of Cleveland, with no clear prospects on how we would get back to the eastside ourselves afterward. Waiting downstairs for the show to start, I recognized the members of a band from Youngstown, The Februarys, and struck up a conversation with their guitar player who later sent me a cassette single of their song, “Any Wednesday,” which I played on my radio show.^[16] I had first seen them at a concert at Villa Maria High School, an all-girls Catholic high school just across the state border from Youngstown in Pennsylvania. I briefly dated one of the students boarding there, having met her at the YSU English Festival. I won the Candace Gay Memorial Essay Prize at the festival my senior year in high school, which paid $100, and I was riding just high enough on words to talk to attractive strangers. My romantic experiences were not substantial, but it was a new aspect of dating to sign a guest registry while being inspected from head to foot by a nun in a habit. Villa Maria closed not long after that, and those experiences are locked away in the vault of some past century.

After that unexpected connection, The Sundays’ concert was simply the most memorable and moving I have ever seen. They opened with “Can’t Be Sure,” which was enthralling, and the spell lasted outside of known time.^[17] It was all general admission tickets, no seats, and having arrived early and rushed in, Dennis and I were just a few rows back from the stage. While everyone was transfixed by Wheeler, I swear that I made eye contact a few times with the guitarist, Gavurin, and that the message that I received was, “Yes, this is really happening.” After the first encore, the band came out again, and Wheeler said something like, “You are all so fucking awesome, but we don’t know any more songs!” Then, they played “Can’t Be Sure,” the opener, a second time to close the show. I hadn’t seen anything so overwhelmingly honest or moving before and haven’t since: It was a statement of the electric connection that you could feel throughout the entire set. The band was right on, and Wheeler seemed like a siren -- a word that I remember seeing in reviews at the time and repeating myself.

Toward the end of the show, I spotted some guys I recognized from John Carroll, and I asked for a ride as the lights came up. We all piled in a wood paneled station wagon, of all things, Dennis and I all the way in the back, like little kids on a road trip or a pair of brothers from The Brady Bunch. On the way back to campus, we stopped at Coventry Pizza, a neighborhood institution then, for “Poli boys,” a concoction of sausage, coleslaw, French fries, and hot sauce served on a long roll -- something you would think only drunk college boys could find appealing. Still, it was better than cafeteria food; it seemed like a sign of belonging. After that night, though, I always stuck with the pizza.

The randomness of that ride added another layer to the perils and promise of those college days and how I came to remember that concert and listen to Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic: The first person I had seen at the show, Terry, I recognized from an intro philosophy class and knew by name, but I had never spoken to him before. I bumped into him again at Blossom Music Center the following summer, at the first Lollapalooza tour, with Jane’s Addiction headlining. Seeing Terry at those two shows started our lifelong friendship. Talking with him all these years later helps me to remember how things were and how they might have been, the lasting importance of small coincidences and decisions.

The driver of that station wagon from The Sundays concert, known then for having a prematurely receding hairline fashioned like Phil Collins, became known a year later for exposing himself in front of a sleeping female student and getting expelled. I was shocked. Another passenger in the back seat I came to know better on the basketball court through late night pick-up games. He was a good passer and always smiling, both rarities, with the unlikely name Smiley. I got news of him, too, the next year, as I was in the middle of logging my third minimum wage summer at Calvary Cemetery.

The news came in an unlikely place. At that time, my dad was just starting to make good money, having long before left the steel mills behind for the Air Force and a series of promotions at the telephone company that moved him from minimum wage to a good union job to management. This meant more vacation options for us, but one of our neighbors had a standing order at a local travel agent to alert us to incredible bargains. That summer, they were trying to fill The Mirage in Las Vegas with a weekend package deal that was practically free. My parents offered to cover everything but incidentals for my brother and me, and our neighbors were taking one of their two sons. I was 20, my brother Ken was 18, and our neighbor, Troy, was 19 and a few years away from coming out of the closet. I’m not sure what I had in mind for three awkward, underage adolescents and their parents in Las Vegas, but a couple days away from the cemetery to sit at a pool seemed like a good idea. Troy, Ken, and I did a good bit of that, gawking and marveling, before we decided to take a walk down the Strip. I was wearing a white John Carroll University t-shirt as we made our way down a long, hot block, when a man came up to me and asked if I went there, which seemed to be either the start of a grift or more back-slapping than I really wanted.

Instead, he asked me if I happened to know Smiley.

Sure, I said, we play basketball together all the time.

Did you know he died a few weeks ago by stepping in front of a train?

He said it just like that.

I don’t remember what I said.

It took me until we got home to find out that it was true.

The second time I saw The Sundays was two and a half years later, at the Agora in Cleveland, when they were touring to support their second album, Blind.^[18] I had comped tickets from the radio station and a car to drive myself. The lighting at the show was better, there were actual seats, and no dank smell of spilled beer or chance meetings. The show was tighter with plenty of songs for the setlist and encore. I was getting ready to graduate, with still only the sketchiest of plans, having landed on my fifth major, English. The concert was not the unforgettable landmark of that first show but a kind of pleasant farewell. As the house lights came up, it was like I was packing The Sundays away with my schoolbooks and CD’s, my letters, journals, and notebooks, ready to move on and remember all at once.

“20th Century Boy”

I was a twentieth-century boy. What I mean by that is I first heard “20^th Century Boy,” by T. Rex, when it was covered by my favorite Youngstown band, Boogie Man Smash, at the most divey of dive bars, The Penguin Pub, on the northside of Youngstown.^[19] It was the late twentieth-century, and I had spent a good bit of my portion of the century listening to Casey Kasem on my portable GE transistor radio, to 45-singles bought for a dollar at K-Mart, to K-Tel compilation LPs bought at National Record Mart on my record player, to bulky 8-track tapes in my Dad’s two-seater convertible Triumph, to cassette tapes and CDs on my boom box, to bands who set up their own drum kits in smoky bars. I was a twentieth-century boy, and while there were always new ways of listening, there were always people, too, attached to the music, the DJs, the VJs, the writers, the record store clerks, the bands, the bartenders, the bouncers, the strangers with strange endings, and, of course, the friends. The technology was a wonder, but the people were the story.

I was a twentieth-century boy, making my entrance near the end. I met Terry at a couple of concerts, and Terry introduced me to his high school friend, Devin, at a Scrawl show. Terry was back for the holidays from his year abroad in Austria, and I drove down to Columbus to see him and ring in the New Year. Devin and I had just turned 21, and we all went to see Scrawl stagger through a boozy but fun set at Stache’s on High Street. It was all novelty. A few years later, when I was in my second year of the English M.A. program at Ohio State University, Devin moved back to Columbus, and we would see many more club shows: Bands from our college days, like Walt Mink and Velocity Girl, many local groups, and most of all, Scrawl. At the end of that year, Devin decided to attend the Cardozo School of Law, and I decided to attend the English Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center, so I knew one person and had a roommate when I arrived in New York.

I was a twentieth-century boy, and I always wanted not only the recordings but to see people live, to connect and remember. I always went to the shows; I always saw the speakers. Time pools differently in a college town like Columbus, and I found time I would never find again -- time to play more basketball, hang out, join reading groups. The best one was led by some ABD students and became known as The Post-Left Hegelians (PLH).^[20] We covered a lot of contemporary theory, some not so Hegelian, with a good bit of Slavoj Žižek on our reading lists. We also discussed unionizing the graduate students, something the ABD students were helping to lead. I started to realize that the Youngstown I remembered from my childhood, a place of workers and unions as well as soot and strikes, could be connected, somehow, to the future I was imagining for myself.

My first year at the Grad Center, I found out that Žižek was teaching a course at the New School. On an off day in CUNY, I went to the New School, flashed my Grad Center ID, and walked right into his class. There must have been 20 or so students waiting there, in a regular classroom, with rows of desks and an AV cart, and I simply took a desk and waited, too. Žižek came in bearded and rumpled and proceeded to romp and riff on a series of clips from David Lynch films, exactly as anyone would have expected. No one bothered to notice me. I felt like I was really in New York, while also paying homage to the old reading group that had helped me get there.

That same first year, Devin mentioned that Jacques Derrida would be giving a seminar at Cardozo, if I wanted to tag along. When we arrived, I again flashed my Grad Center ID, only to enter a regular seminar room with a polished wooden table. Devin and I sat down just to the left of the speaker’s chair, and Derrida came in and began deconstructing “hospitality,” the power relations between homes and nations, between hosts and guests, between governments and refugees. Of course, I noticed the swoop of white hair, the accent, the sparkle as he paused, but even if he hadn’t touched on tracings and hauntings, I would have known that hour or so would simmer and go on simmering along with other ideas and associations. Just let me trace: From a music video on MTV one Sunday night, to buying the CD the next day after toiling away at the cemetery, to the first Sundays concert, a random car ride, Lollapalooza, Scrawl, lasting friendships, and Derrida. That’s how I remember, still a twentieth-century boy, always with a soundtrack to connect people and events.

You Can’t Escape Your Centuries

You can’t escape your century. One day, during the pandemic, as I looked ahead to some hours of rote work at my home desk, I put on my new headphones and decided to have a Columbus soundtrack. I started with an obscure album I had ripped long ago from Devin, Photograph Burns by V-3, dark and brooding and perfect in its own way.^[21] From there I streamed bands that I had enjoyed more live than recorded -- Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Gaunt, and New Bomb Turks -- before ending with that old favorite, Scrawl.

You can’t escape your century, being more often alone but always connected. After the last Scrawl song, the continuous-play algorithm kicked in and jolted me into the moment with some music that was new to me, perfectly imperfect indie rock with a female voice that completely grabbed my attention: Jenny Mae. I clicked on the Last.fm page (internet 2.0, cerca 2005), and saw that, sure enough, she had been an important part of the Columbus music scene when I had lived there. I recognized the name of her last band, Vibralux, and saw she was associated with a bunch of other bands that I knew. The entry ended with this: “Jenny Mae passed away on [A]ugust 25, 2017 following ‘complications due to alcoholism,’ according to her former label Anyway Records. She was 49 years old.”^[22]

You can’t escape your centuries. The computer hive-mind jostled some memories from the last century that hadn’t been much jostled since. I felt like I had met a ghost I should have known in life. I couldn’t stop listening to Jenny Mae, and I couldn’t stop remembering the two years I had spent scrounging along High Street in Columbus, including two moments from Larry’s, a legendary bar that the internet said was also gone.^[23]

I was new to graduate school, living alone and veering between the wonders of solitude and the anxiety of feeling very much on my own. After what would later be called a gap year, spent half at my parent’s home making money and half in Prague, I was back in the familiar rhythms of school and meeting my M.A. cohort. Over a few beers at Larry’s, a bespectacled Irish American classmate who tended toward the gothic told me he had something personal to tell me. I said it was all right. He looked me in the eye and said: “I always cry when I read Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’”

I understood. Other than the Little Golden Books my parents had dutifully read to me when I was young enough to be tucked in, I had never seen my parents read a thing. I believed in Literature with the fervor of a convert. My high school in Youngstown wasn’t swanky enough to have AP classes (not a problem, since I had never heard of them), but we did have honors classes. We read To The Lighthouse and Dubliners our senior year, and my honors thesis in college ended up being an exploration of “nothingness” (is it an absence or an agent?) in Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle and Joyce’s “The Dead.”^[24] So, I accepted my new classmate’s confession. As for me, I arrived to graduate school clueless about critical theory. I was hard at work on a reading of Joyce’s “Araby” and too busy catching up to cry. I started with the poor young Dublin boy, the narrator, and how the source of his infatuation, Mangan’s sister, is segmented by the light of the porch and the male gaze. I went on to consider how he is only able to recognize himself and the vanity of his desires when he speaks to the English woman at the bazar and fails in his quest to buy a gift for Mangan’s sister. In other words, I was straining to apply both Foucault and Lacan in my reading in an eager bid to impress the imposing instructor of our Introduction to Graduate Studies course, Marlene Longenecker.

Even as I tried to shake the first onset of imposter syndrome, I was continuing acts of covert autobiography. My first year at John Carroll I had felt profoundly lost, yet I had found, all on my own, two things I loved: Taking the light rail downtown on Saturdays and the Cleveland Arcade. Walking over from campus to the Green Line stop and a mostly empty train, I had snippets of poetry and song lyrics, characters from novels, and whatever torch was serving as the current version of Mangan’s sister bouncing around, uninterrupted, in my mind, as we wound through the elegance of Shaker Heights and then the run-down eastside of that most segregated of US cities. In those days, before Tower City opened, I would walk through the almost vacant, weekend expanses of downtown Cleveland to the Galleria, the modern, mall version of an arcade, with a standard chain record store, to go through the $9.99 CD bargain bin. By the time I walked over to the Cleveland Arcade, so nondescript on the outside, so grand and hushed on the inside, the metal railings lit by the later afternoon natural light flooding in from overhead, it had become indistinguishable for me from the final scene in “Araby.”

Reading was always both discovery and recognition. Of the many critical theory books that I read with PLH, my favorite was Susan Buck-Morss’ The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.^[25] The way Buck-Morss explains Benjamin’s lost project on the arcades seemed like pure genius to me. It was so appealing to think that Benjamin imagined a new way of reading in the arcades of his time, which already seemed like antiquated, halfway spaces between nature and technology, past and present. He proposed that cast-off commodities, little more than junk, could redeem past desires and reveal possibilities for the future that might even be revolutionary. You just had to see in new ways and rip a moment out of history. Rather than ignoring or worshipping technology, Benjamin saw that it could offer new and better ways of connecting people. I doubt I would have been able to follow the nuances of Buck-Morss or Benjamin when I first made those outings to the Cleveland Arcade: I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain how each vender, each shopper, each worker, each open store, and each item on offer, stood out in the near quiet and filtered sunlight, ready to explode into a new world. Reading Buck-Morss’ book later I felt that I had found something -- a new way to describe the charge of those afternoons that had helped carry me along.

I was still listening to Jenny Mae as I recalled that first conversation at Larry’s and remembered more music: The Cleveland Arcade had then, on one of its upper levels, a music store that only sold CDs, a first step to the digital world. It invited you in, past a window display, into a small space that was like a library catalog. CD covers were arranged in a filing system to flip through, and if you wanted to buy one, you took the cover to the clerk, who went in the back and brought you the jewel case and CD, slipping the cover back in. I remember some of my purchases, the music forever connected to those afternoons in the arcade. On one trip, I bought my brother Ken the New Order CD EP “Everything’s Gone Green.”^[26] On another, I bought myself Elvis Costello’s Out of Our Idiot, a compilation of oddities and outtakes. Carrying the CD back home on the train, I felt more successful than the narrator of “Araby,” who doesn’t manage to buy anything at all. When I returned to my dorm room and heard the unlikely duo of Elvis Costello and Jimmy Cliff singing about “Seven Day Weekends,” it seemed that much more was possible than I could ever imagine on my own. ^[27] I was still working summers at the cemetery, but I was changing my understanding of what work meant and what it could be.

The second memory of Larry’s, inspired by hearing Jenny Mae, was from my last weeks in Columbus. I couldn’t always bear the weight of my own thoughts, and so I would leave my apartment at whatever time, on my old ten-speed bike or on foot, and roll down the then seedy Short North area of High Street to the Ohio State campus. Sometimes it was to the 24-hour library, but one night, while preparing for my M.A. exam, I put a cheap, paperback copy of that old exam stalwart, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, into my pocket, and walked the mile or more to Larry’s.^[28] I was sitting at the bar, wrapping up my second or third gin and tonic and one last chapter, when the lead singer of the New Bomb Turks came in and sat right next to me. He pulled out his own reading material: USA Today. It was so incongruous that it still makes me smile, picturing us there, side by side, the expected graduate student and the unexpected artist. I still wonder if he was pulling punk lyrics from the Infographics.

When I finished my extended pandemic reverie, I was still listening to Jenny Mae, and somehow nothing in the world mattered more to me than whether I had ever seen her during those days. Had we sat across from each other in a booth during one of my friends’ blue river nights, Ethiopian food at the Blue Nile, followed by cheap beers at the Blue Danube? Had her voice vibrated through my chest in the confined basement acoustics of Bernie’s Bagels or off the drop ceiling at Stache’s? Had I seen her sparkle on stage at Comfest, an annual music festival held near my apartment, on a sunny afternoon at Goodale Park? Had she even passed me, just maybe, to take my seat with her acquaintance from New Bomb Turks, when I packed up Frankenstein and left Larry’s?

I wanted so much to know that I started texting. Devin, now living in southeastern France, didn’t know if we had ever seen her. Though I had somehow missed Jenny Mae’s music during our move to New York in 1996, he knew it and sent me a recent article, “Don’t Wait Up For Me: The Luminous and Troubled Life of Jenny Mae Leffel” by Bela Koe-Krompecher.^[29] Devin noted that he remembered the author as a worker at the legendary Used Kids Records on High Street. Alone inside my headphones, I read Koe-Krompecher’s heartbreaking account, drawn from his book love, death, & photosynthesis,^[30] of Jenny Mae’s final days drinking herself to death on the streets, interspersed with a tale from 1996: She got an audition to win over a major label executive with a show in New York, only to drink too much and sabotage her big chance.

The (Digital) Devil Was In Your Eyes

Over the last three years, as I have worked on this essay on and off, I have circled back time and again to listen to The Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, letting the music shape the writing. I have also continued to listen to Jenny Mae, regularly and compulsively, and her music has refused to leave. It has become a kind of bookend, a second frame for me to understand nostalgia and cross two centuries, from an analog world of scarcity, to a digital world where algorithms promising infinite abundance grab our attention and try to never let it go.^[31]

Somehow, The Sundays pulled off the feat I always imagined when I was mostly a reader -- authoring their own story. They made their mark and disappeared, letting their albums from the 1990s stand on their own: No social media, no reunion tours or festivals -- nothing at all since their aptly titled Static & Silence was released and promoted in 1997 (at least as of this writing). On the first song of that album, “Summertime,” Wheeler sings, “Have I read too much fiction?”^[32] The answer is no, just enough for their imagination and ours. All you can piece together from the meager online sources is that since disappearing from the public eye, Gavurin and Wheeler got married, had children, and still enjoy music. It is as if they picked the ending of their story, foretold from the very beginning, and redeemed the arguments and declarations in their songs. While song placements and the occasional mention continue to offer an aslant introduction to their music, the albums remain as a kind of three-volume novel, a testament to the idea that just maybe you can imagine a life by keeping the right music in your head.

The article I first read by Koe-Krompecher painted a picture of Jenny Mae as an artist at once gregarious and charming, difficult and self-destructive, troubled by her demons even as she used her experiences and talents to create beautiful and moving music on her own terms. Her first album is titled There’s a Bar Around the Corner… Assholes, after all.^[33] This seemingly strange pairing of contemporaries -- The Sundays, founded by a successful art school couple with polish and British wit, and Jenny Mae, the Ohio State drop out and High Street regular, with her sometimes juvenile humor, troubled loves, and just a hint of honky-tonk in her voice -- lets me listen and remember differently. While The Sundays took on time with songs called “My Finest Hour” and “24 Hours,”^[34] and address history as a subject to ponder, letting you imagine persistence and change, Jenny Mae is the consummate rock and roller, ripping out moments and making them mean. The solution is only ever now, full to bursting with emotion.

On Jenny Mae’s second album, Don’t Wait Up for Me, she has a song, “Ho Bitch” (again, it’s right there in the titles!) about self-reproach that begins “What’s wrong with me?” The song stands as an exquisite act of creation and defiance against doubt, mental illness, and self-destruction.^[35] The next song is “Drapes,” my favorite on the album, with a jaunty guitar introduction. It has at its center, like many of The Sundays’ songs, an argument, though this one is more direct, an exuberant feeling of the self shining through something much more foreboding, as Jenny Mae sings lines like: “I asked you to shut the light out / You left it on / The drapes were open wide / The devil was in your eyes.”^[36] When I picked my own way up and down High Street, living on my meager stipend as a teaching assistant, I learned in my reading group, in my Benjamin and Buck-Morss books, that each commodity, each moment, could be the start of a revolution in perception and everything else, but sometimes I didn’t feel that I could even change myself. I needed something more jarring than a book or The Sundays’ albums to pound into my ears and through my veins. Music like Jenny Mae’s drew me into dark clubs and dive bars and lit up enough moments to get me through. It is music forever rooted and rubbed into a certain time and certain place of meaning for me.

As the algorithm brought me to Jenny Mae and her music continued to stream into my head from the cloud, I remembered a foreshadowing of this century: The year after I met Devin at a Scrawl concert, I was driving south to meet another new friend, for another New Year’s Eve. I had met Chris, a commuter student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, while studying abroad in London. The plan was for us to meet up and continue to New Orleans, where his brother was a grad student at Tulane. I was driving alone with a stack of CDs, including The Sundays second album, Blind, which opens with “I Feel,” a song full of pauses and the repeated phrase “I’m losing the words.” That’s sort of how the album goes: It is introspective, a working through of darker thoughts and the struggle for language, and it requires the right mood.^[37]

I was mostly in that mood when six or so hours after leaving Youngstown, I stopped at a rest area. I was in a complicated and important relationship, and I made a call using the technology of the day: a calling card at a pay phone. By the time the bill arrived -- on paper, in an envelope, of course -- the parties were over, a new year had started, and the relationship had taken its next dramatic turn -- not the last, but closer towards the end. What baffled me was that the conversation, which seemed to be a record of the heart or the stuff of poetry, had become something else: data. There was the name of the town in Kentucky where the rest stop was located, the number of minutes we had spoken, multiplied by the going rate, with some added fees, all ending in a sum. As if I didn’t know already, I had to pay.

Nothing stays strange forever. Re-reading Buck-Morss on Benjamin, I’m reminded that every moment of wonder, every new technology, is both a revelation and a rehearsal. When I got that phone card bill, I already knew that life could be data from my first real paycheck. There is nothing cliché about time being money when you earn wages, especially if those wages are the legal minimum, which was $3.25 an hour when I started at Calvary Cemetery. I translated life into a nickel or so a minute, measured out in rows of tombstones whose dashes marked years and lives. The fact that the money was to help with college reminded me that I was trading the present for some future that had yet to be imagined. Music like The Sundays let me do just that. It helped me get through work and see through those days, to pay those bills that only seemed to come due only when I couldn’t sleep and wondered where I belonged.

Nothing stays strange forever. That phone bill was a rehearsal for how data would become a way of keeping a self-curated record -- smart playlists in iTunes to guide me through my 12,000 MP3s, a Last.fm account to chart my favorites, a FitBit to make walking productive somehow, and now our platform-generated years in review. Nothing stays strange forever, not even the feeling of finding Jenny Mae, filling a massive and unknown blackhole in my music experience from Columbus, through an algorithm, decades later. Now, it’s nothing but ordinary to see algorithm-generated playlists that tell me to Chill, Get up!, to dive into mixes and ‘stations’ made just for me, including one called “Jenny Mae and Similar Artists.” For someone who settled into college by making friends at the radio station and stole many happy hours flipping through racks at record stores and with friends at club shows, it’s a strange mixture of endless choice and endlessly being alone.

Nothing stays strange forever, and so I begin my ruminations on the nostalgia of the 1990s with music discovered on MTV at a friend’s house and end with music discovered from a streaming service, writing through the losses of the pandemic, the emergence of another supposed wonder, generative AI, with the now disappeared Sundays and now deceased Jenny Mae keeping me constant company.

Here’s Where the Story Ends: Reclaiming “Junk” from the Ruins

From my days at Ohio State, there was a Franz Kafka quotation that I remembered as, “I don’t believe in salvation, but I will be ready for it every moment.” The internet corrects me, or offers another translation: “Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”^[38] In my mind, salvation means revelation, the idea that you can tune your apprehension just right and suddenly uncover connections to past stories and past desires, finding yourself present in a way so different the world might change.

While The Sundays’ albums are best listened to in their entirety, I have found myself making my own Best of (Essential?) Jenny Mae. My favorite song is from her first album: “Junk.”^[39] The song starts with the static of analog recording, swirls in with what sounds like declarations of love and regret, the vocals coming into focus as she sings: “I can’t say things that I spit out / Words tumbled out like junk / Drawn on the floor.” Listening to the song many times, I find myself transported back to Larry’s, and I see myself reflected once more in the bleary eyes of my new classmate. I have come to think of the strands of feeling in the song, the relationship between the singer and listener, as encompassing all the main characters in Joyce’s “The Dead”: Michael Furey, who spoke his love but died for it; Gretta Conroy, who survived and judiciously remembers; and Gabriel Conroy, who realizes that he has spent a lifetime yammering on -- a terrifying thought for an aspiring English professor.

When Jenny Mae sings, “You’ll always be the subject for me,” that’s where the song turns. Even before I read Bela Koe-Krompecher’s love, death, & photosynthesis, I could feel that Jenny Mae paid for that line. Reading his book, I understood that hurt more, and I felt the hurt, too, in Koe-Krompecher’s descriptions of his very complicated relationship with her, his own struggles with alcoholism, and the ways he charted a life in Ohio across generations of uncertainty, centering everything in the Columbus music scene, running his own label, Anyway Records, to this day. I had only been an interloper, but we must have darkened the same doors on some of the same nights. Reading his book felt like a kind of shadow history of parts of my life then, transitioning between different understandings of what work could mean and the shape of my life. Importantly, he describes how Jenny Mae had sometimes taken lyrics from his own notebooks, including those for “Junk.” As he describes it, the longing in the song is a longing for her and from her. That makes perfect sense, helping me understand how the song is both a gift from Jenny Mae and a tribute to her memory.^[40]

When Jenny Mae sings “It’s not how it used to be,” it’s a reminder that nostalgia, simply wanting to go back, is a fool’s game. When she sings, “Na na na na nah na, nah na nah” against a crackling guitar, the timber of her voice makes it pure poetry. That’s the peak of the song, a human voice that lives on against the ruins of static and beyond the technology that records it and serves it up when the right data inputs are triggered. It’s that moment that you wait for, to be ripped out of history, a sound so sweet that it stretches and pops across two centuries. It’s the adrenaline that used to come after a week of trudging through the cemetery, to leave behind the sweat and dust and blankness, to go out for a show with the best people I knew to help pull me through, to get lost in the mosh pit at the Penguin Pub with the amps blasting music into my chest.^[41] I’m back in the present in a new way, the past fulfilled.

Re-reading Buck-Morss on Benjamin, a line I underlined last century jumps off the page: “The ruin, created intentionally in Baudelaire’s allegorical poetry, is the form in which the wish images of the past century appear, as rubble, in the present.”^[42] Coming from Youngstown, a city that lost over half of its population during my time there, I felt that I was something of an expert on rust, rubble, and ruins. I was born too late for a certain kind of nostalgia of the steel mills. I rode waves of apprehension and exhilaration through all of that, through my education, with music and books as my companions and guides. I couldn’t see a “wish image” then but I could hear what that might mean. Listening to The Sundays as I trudged through the cemetery, I felt a kind of story building that would only be for some future self.

Jenny Mae offers a different kind of nostalgia, one that takes each moment as its own poem. While I suspect that Derrida would chide me for wanting to know if I had ever been in Jenny Mae’s presence, if I had only paid closer attention to the absence that he describes as “always-already” there, I also know that I remember differently from that hour I sat with him at the same table. I choose to not try to match the dates too closely, thinking that is at least possible that he, or I, or both of us, passed past Jenny Mae on the street in 1996 when she was in in New York to enjoy but blow her big audition.

Of all the critical essays I read in grad school, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was assigned most often and made the deepest impression.^[43] Benjamin knew that the book was the first commodity, that the novel separated the story from the storyteller. He knew that those writers of the nineteenth century, who had grown up with the new arcades, had often been paid by the word to publish in periodicals -- a rehearsal for all the later data of our own time. He knew, too, the significance when records, the radio, and the telephone brought disembodied voices into the home, creating new kinds of presence and absence. Today, digital technology and digital reproduction seem to be as much the story of this century as the human ‘content’; the economy flows with the currency of attention. New media not only translates our desires, movements, words, and creations into data, but works to shape and make them.

Yet we still have a lot to learn from Benjamin. We have to learn to live with new kinds of presence and absence. Just as Benjamin found traces of the human storyteller, the breaths and gestures, in published stories, and old desires and dreams in the cast-off junk of the arcades, so too are the remnants of the analog world not only worth saving, but capable of offering salvation by transforming perceptions about the reality of now. Whatever the technology, music is not simply a mute object, a commodity recycled or waiting to be reanimated and redeemed. You don’t have to believe; you just have to be ready to meet the music halfway in your imagination. The music offers its own stories, its own beginnings and endings, its own histories, and the means for us to imagine and make them our own.

The title of the song is “Junk,” but when Jenny Mae sings, “You’ll always be the subject for me,” she turns junk into just that beautiful kind of redemptive ruin. It’s not always-already too late; it’s always now. The now ripped from history is its own kind of salvation. It illuminates and transfigures the long trail of destruction and loss into something new. You just have to be ready, alive enough to listen, to hear the other voices that helped you rehearse for just this moment.

Bibliography

1. 120 Minutes. TV Series, MTV, 17 seasons, 1987-2003.
2. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. [1939]
4. Breihan, Tom. “The Alternative Number Ones: The Sundays’ ‘Here’s Where The Story Ends,’” Stereogum, January 31, 2024. https://www.stereogum.com/2248843/the-alternative-number-ones-the-sundays-heres-where-the-story-ends/columns/the-alternative-number-ones/.\
5. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
6. The Februarys. Tohelenback.
7. Harvilla, Rob. “‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: The Cranberries, ‘Zombie.’” The Ringer, August 17, 2022. https://www.theringer.com/2022/8/17/23309016/zombie-cranberries-podcast
8. James, Henry.The Beast in the Jungle and Other Stories. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1993. [originally published in 1903].
9. “Jenny Mae Age, Biography.” Last.fm. Accessed May 9, 2023. https://www.last.fm/music/Jenny+Mae/+wiki
10. Jenny Mae. Don’t Wait Up for Me. Anyway Records, 1998.
12. Jenny Mae. There’s a Bar Around the Corner… Assholes. Anyway Records, 1996.
14. Jenny Mae. What’s Wrong With Me? Don Giovanni Records / Anyway Records, 2021.
15. Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. [originally published in 1914].
16. Koe-Krompecher, Bela. “Don’t Wait Up For Me: The Luminous and Troubled Life of Jenny Mae Leffel,” Columbus Monthly. October 20, 2021. https://www.columbusmonthly.com/story/lifestyle/features/2021/10/20/jenny-mae-leffel-bela-koe-krompecher-love-death-photosynthesis-book-columbus-underground-music/8441195002/
17. Koe-Krompecher, Bela. love, death, & photosynthesis. Kingston, NJ: Don Giovanni Records, 2021.
18. “Larry’s: ‘Center of the Universe’ Closing.” The Columbus Dispatch. December 27, 2008. https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2008/12/27/larry-s-center-universe-closing/23498389007/
19. Moffat, Iain. “Anniversary | 30 Years On: Remembering The Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.” The Quietus. February 10, 2010. https://thequietus.com/articles/03709-25-years-on-remembering-the-sundays-reading-writing-and-arithmetic
20. Phutatorius, “The Februarys, ‘Any Wednesday.’” Take Take the Noise in My Head. March 20, 2023. https://phutatorius.substack.com/p/the-februarys-any-wednesday
21. “A Quote by Franz Kafka.” Goodreads. Accessed May 16, 2023. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/505430-even-if-no-salvation-should-come-i-want-to-be
22. Scarlet Picnic. “Larry, Penguin Pub, Youngstown, Ohio, 9.20.91.” YouTube Video, 5:18. August 15, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW1V5Y5p_r4
23. Shelley, Mary Frankenstein. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1994. [originally published in 1818]
24. The Sundays. Blind. Parlophone/Geffen, 1992.
25. The Sundays, “Here’s Where the Story Ends.” November 21, 2009. YouTube Video, 3:49. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHsip5xOenQ
26. The Sundays. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. Rough Trade, 1990.
27. The Sundays. Static and Silence. Parlophone/Geffen, 1997.
28. “The Sundays: Whatever Happaned To The Band Behind “This Is Where The Story Ends” & Harriet Wheeler?,” 2021. YouTube Video, 8:25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-ZmvVr0sM0
29. “The Sundays.” Wikipedia. April 21, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sundays&oldid=1151103266#cite_note-Tortorici1999-3
30. T. Rex. “20th Century Boy,” YouTube video, 3:56. Decebmer 12, 2010 [song originally released in 1973]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpMa6JADDJM
31. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harvest Book, 1981. [originally published in 1925]

Notes

1. The Sundays, “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” Track 2 on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade, 1990.

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2. The Sundays, “Wild Horses,” Track 12 on Blind, Parlophone/Geffen, 1992.

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3. The Sundays, “Summertime,” Track 1 on Static and Silence, Parlophone/Geffen, 1997.

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4. As if on cue, as a final draft of this essay was being prepared, a notable new piece was published on Stereogum by Tom Breihan. Breihan situates the song in the moment of its release, provides helpful background information about the band and song, and ruminates on the current state of music journalism. The comments section also provides a welcome opportunity to share reflections on the song. Tom Breihan, “The Alternative Number Ones: The Sundays’ ‘Here’s Where The Story Ends,’” Stereogum. January 31, 2024. https://www.stereogum.com/2248843/the-alternative-number-ones-the-sundays-heres-where-the-story-ends/columns/the-alternative-number-ones/.\

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5. 120 Minutes, TV Series, MTV, 17 seasons, 1987-2003.

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6. The Smiths, “Cemetery Gates,” Track 5 on The Queens Is Dead, Rough Trade, 1986.

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7. The Sundays, “Here’s Where the Story Ends.” YouTube video, 4:03. November 21, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHsip5xOenQ

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8. Rob Harvila makes the same observation in his podcast episode about The Cranberries. Rob Harvilla, “60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: The Cranberries, ‘Zombie.’” Podcast. The Ringer. August 17, 2022. https://www.theringer.com/2022/8/17/23309016/zombie-cranberries-podcast.

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9. It is telling that when I began this piece, the best online sources I could find were the Wikipedia page for the band, full of dead links, and a YouTube video that misspells “Happened” as “Happaned.” The Sundays.” In Wikipedia, April 21, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sundays&oldid=1151103266#cite_note-Tortorici1999-3; “The Sundays: Whatever Happaned To The Band Behind “This Is Where The Story Ends” & Harriet Wheeler?,” 2021. YouTube video, 8:25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-ZmvVr0sM0

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10. Iain Moffat makes a similar claim: “What's also especially striking -- and, given the title, wholly appropriate -- is just how strong a reflection of student-age life this is, which, on reflection, is a rarer gift than might initially be assumed (consider, if you will, how much easier it is to rattle off lists of artists whose oeuvres correlate with adolescent experiences or properly grown-up concerns). Iain Moffat, “Anniversary | 30 Years On: Remembering The Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.” The Quietus. Accessed June 16, 2023. https://thequietus.com/articles/03709-25-years-on-remembering-the-sundays-reading-writing-and-arithmetic.

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11. The Sundays, “Skin & Bones,” Track 1; “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” Track 2; “Can’t Be Sure,” Track 3; “Hideous Towns,” Track 5; “I Kicked a Boy,” Track 8, on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade, 1990.

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12. The Sundays, “Joy,” Track 10, on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade, 1990.

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13. The Sundays, “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” Track 2 on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade, 1990.

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14. The Sundays, “I Won,” Track 4 on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade, 1990.

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15. The Sundays, “Hideous Towns,” Track 5 on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade, 1990.

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16. The Februarys, “Any Wednesday,” tohelenback, See Phutatorius, “The Februarys, ‘Any Wednesday.’” Take Take the Noise in My Head. March 20, 2023. https://phutatorius.substack.com/p/the-februarys-any-wednesday.

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17. The Sundays, “Can’t Be Sure,” Track 3 on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade, 1990.

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18. The Sundays, Blind. Parlophone/Geffen, 1992.

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19. T. Rex. “20th Century Boy,” YouTube video, 3:56. Decebmer 12, 2010 [song originally released in 1973]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpMa6JADDJM.

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20. The PLH included Paul Eisenstein, Todd McGowan, Eleni Mavromatidou, Ken Petri, and Nathan Moore.

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21. V-2, Photograph Burns, Onion Records, 1996.

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22. “Jenny Mae Age, Biography,” Last.fm. Accessed May 9, 2023. https://www.last.fm/music/Jenny+Mae/+wiki.

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23. “Larry’s: ‘Center of the Universe’ Closing.” The Columbus Dispatch. December 27, 2008. https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2008/12/27/larry-s-center-universe-closing/23498389007/.

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24. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harvest Book, 1981) [originally published in 1925]; James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) [originally published in 1914]; Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle and Other Stories (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1993) [originally published in 1903].

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25. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

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26. New Order, “Everything’s Gone Green,” Factory Records, 1990. [originally released in 1981]

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27. .] Jimmy Cliff, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, “Seven Day Weekend,” Track 1 on Out of Our Idiot, Demon Records, 1987.

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28. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1994) [originally published in 1818].

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29. Bela Koe-Krompecher, “Don’t Wait Up For Me: The Luminous and Troubled Life of Jenny Mae Leffel,” Columbus Monthly. October 20, 2021. https://www.columbusmonthly.com/story/lifestyle/features/2021/10/20/jenny-mae-leffel-bela-koe-krompecher-love-death-photosynthesis-book-columbus-underground-music/8441195002/.

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30. Bela Koe-Krompecher, love, death, & photosynthesis (Kingston, NJ: Don Giovanni Records, 2021).

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31. Thanks could be given in many places, but especially here, to Justin Rogers-Cooper, for helping me improve the writing of this essay and sharpen my thinking about the broader context behind the experiences I describe.

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32. The Sundays, “Summertime,” Track 1 on Static and Silence, Parlophone/Geffen, 1997.

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33. Jenny Mae, There’s a Bar Around the Corner… Asshole, Anyway Records, 1996.

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34. The Sundays, “My Finest Hour,” Track 9 on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, Rough Trade, 1990; The Sundays, “24 Hours,” Track 9 on Blind, Parlophone/Geffen, 1992.

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35. Jenny Mae, “Ho Bitch,” Track 4, on Don’t Wait Up for Me, Anyway Records, 1998. ↑

36. Jenny Mae, “Drapes,” Track 5, on Don’t Wait Up for Me, Anyway Records, 1998.

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37. The Sundays, “I Feel,” Track 1 on Blind, Parlophone/Geffen, 1992.

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38. “A Quote by Franz Kafka.” Accessed May 16, 2023. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/505430-even-if-no-salvation-should-come-i-want-to-be.

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39. Jenny Mae, “Junk,” Track 12 on There’s a Bar Around the Corner, Assholes, Anyway Records, 1996. Another, earlier version appears as Track 9 on the recent compilation of alternative versions and rarities, What’s Wrong with Me?,Don Giovanni Records / Anyway Records, 2021.

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40. Koe-Krompecher writes in love, death,& photosynthesis, “One of the first songs they [Jenny Mae’s band, Vibralux] recorded, “Junk,” was fragments of a poem I had written for her, wherein I tried to explain my smallness next to her colossal nature.” Koe-Kropecher’s also includes his version of the lyrics (104-105).

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41. Another band I enjoyed regularly, Scarlet Picnic has posted a few videos from those days. Scarlet Picnic, “Larry, Penguin Pub, Youngstown, Ohio, 9.20.91, 2010.” YouTube video, 5:18, August 15, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW1V5Y5p_r4.

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42. Buck-Morss, 212.

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43. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968. [1939]), pp. 217-252

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