Notes on Camp

Originally written Friday, December 2, 2005

Tonight was sushi-oke night with my department. Sushi, sake, karaoke, the whole works, at this kitschy Japanese restaurant at the edge of town. Fortunately, no one has made us squirm through “Turning Japanese” yet—it’s more Trudy’s sense of humor than a humanities professor’s—but they’re all Generation X-ers, and you just know it’s crossed various minds at various points. I invited Richard along, since he’d best appreciate my karaoke indulgences. I also wanted to discuss extracurriculars with him if we got the chance. He’s volunteering with an all-weekend contra dance this weekend, so he came by after that let out.

I love singing, and I’ve always been a good performer. I spent my last re-gen as a musician (various stringed instruments), music teacher (theory and harmony), and fairly prolific songwriter in the Greenwich Village scene. I only ever put out one album myself, and not a very successful one, but several of my songs have been recorded by better-known artists, to say nothing of a good number of collaborations. The Japanese place we go to is my favorite because some of my songs are on the list, including one from my own record. A sappy little political ditty it was. It got sporadic airplay on the more edgy local FM stations during Vietnam (that is, before FM became the new AM) but otherwise came and went, barely creating a blip on the public’s radar. Still, I was excited to find it on the karaoke list—really, that must be some kind of sign of mainstream success—and I sing it every so often, hoping that someday someone will come up to me and say how much I sound like the original. My ego doesn’t really need stroking, but I certainly don’t mind when it is. That might have been why I brought Richard: I know he’s heard the original before because I’ve played it for him, so that meant someone wasn’t off the hook. Hehe….

So Richard says there is no charm like mine in the museum’s archives. There’s no record of one, either, so if it had been there but was stolen, the evidence of its presence had to have been taken, too. He says there are a few other artifacts from the same time period missing, however, although none seems terribly consequential. Birth, marriage, and death certificates, a couple of diaries, and for some reason a brass bedpan. He could see no connection among any of the missing items except that they all predate the end of the Civil War, although it is true that all we know about the items is what little is written on them in the database. Richard has only been at the museum for a matter of weeks, so it isn’t as if he’d seen them before they disappeared. Likely their absence would have gone unnoticed if he hadn’t had reason to look. Certainly, the investigation created more questions than it answered.

Anyway, the karaoke was fun as always. This time I made sure to sit next to Jeanine. She’s cute, with a short red pixie haircut and trendy glasses. She’s a tad on the skinny side, but it gives her a lanky posture that’s endearingly faux-insecure, with a habit of holding herself in a way that makes you think she’s only telling you half of what she knows. Her research focus is philosophical constructs in late-19th/early-20th century literature. I thought that sounded fairly narrow the first time I heard about it, but to hear her speak about it is something else. She can explain how threads of nihilism in Gilman emerge from colonialist travel narratives by Kipling and others in a way that befuddles me, not because I don’t understand it but because I don’t understand how I hadn’t drawn the connections myself. And I have to say, me being out-thought by anyone in this field is unusual and, I confess, intriguing. On the other hand, she’s hardly a born singer: her taste is wretched—Neil Young is somewhere close to the bottom of my list—and I didn’t know it was possible to sound more uneven, bored, and cranky (simultaneously) on “Harvest Moon” than he does. But again, even her flaws are oddly charming, and I have the utmost admiration for anyone who casts humility to the wind to sing karaoke poorly.