Sunday, March 16, 2008

Mike O'Flaherty Remembers Four Times

from a conversation with Seth Sanders March 14 2008, presented at the Chicago memorial at Geoff Guy’s

PLAYLIST
My first interaction with Tim was when Seth suggested I try out for a show at WHPK. Somebody asked me to submit a playlist. Tim must have been rock format chief. You know how insecure I can get, worried that all my shit would seem too old or there was some cool thing they would know about that I didn’t know about, just worried about social rejection or whatever. Tim was the one who ended up calling me back, told me they’d definitely give me a show. He was just really friendly, interested in the stuff on my list and eager to talk about music with me. I got a sense of how warm he was but how inquisitive too: he was interested in this guy he’d never met. It was a very vivid first impression.

FAR EAST ATROCITIES OF THE 20TH CENTURY
That must have been fall 2002. I must have seen a lot of him because by spring 2003 I felt like I knew him fairly well. We had a couple of conversations where we sat down and talked frankly. Both of us were going through rough periods. He was somebody who I felt struggled with things in a way that was similar to the way I did. I’m really apprehensive about how I present myself to people, but there was an unusual lack of that in my relationship to Tim. You could say he was easygoing but that’s not all--there was a kind of ingenuousness, a kind of spontaneousness, there was nothing put-on about him. That might have been related to his fascination with things that were strange or extreme. I remember talking with him about these National Socialist Black Metal bands, and I think he was just fascinated that people could feel that way about things. There was a certain manner he had, he would talk and there was this slight incredulous laughter at the same time.

I would talk to him about some strange thing I was into, and he wouldn’t make small talk. You could tell he wanted to find out what was behind what you were talking about. I would bring up something like Pol Pot’s activities in Cambodia and he wanted to know why they did it. There was this book called “Annihilation Zones,” a pulp account of mass atrocities in 20th century Asia. And what made this book distinctive was that mixed in with what were at least quasi-legitimate historical accounts, suddenly the author would bring in a completely spurious anecdote that would involve something like forced anal sex that would supposedly completely explain the topic under discussion. So he says that in 1938 Hitler and Stalin met for a final set of negotiations over the future of Europe. And that at some point in the discussion Stalin became enraged, threw Hitler down on the floor and had his way with him. And that was the reason Hitler invaded Russia. And I just remember talking about his with Tim and we were both amused and astounded by it and I think it the joke that we both got was that the atrocity of that period of European history was so hard to explain. These two men, Hitler and Stalin, did things so horrible that put them on a scale that the mind can barely process. So bringing in something that was so invented and so grotesque was this not terribly bright person’s way of dealing with something that was actually beyond explanation or comprehension. Trying to deal with it by invoking such a small-scale violation was really funny--there was something touching and tragic and very human about it.

Tim sometimes had a really hard time accepting the hardness and cruelty of the world, and some of this was his way of struggling, engaging, coming to terms with it. He was so fascinated with extreme things while being a very gentle person himself.

SCREAMERS
When he was living in that crazy apartment with those maniac fraternity guys, I remember that they would have these insane parties where lots of stuff would get broken, and they would storm around yelling at each other and yelling at you, and there was this general vibe of chaos and things coming apart at the hinges. And I remember one of these parties where the cops got called and everybody, like 60 people, ran out the front door. in the space of about 2 minutes. including me. And I remember that even though there were so many people there Tim was really excited to see me and he had some records he wanted me to hear, and we ended up going into his room. It was like a railroad apartment with a really long hallway, the classic hyde park apartment with the bedroom off the long hall, and I just remember we were stitting there in his room, every once in a while there’d be a pause and you’d see some lunatic running down the hallway and then there’d be a crashing sound. We were looking through Tim’s record collection and I remember he ended up putting on the Screamers, which I’d never heard. Listening to music with him was very much about you, he wasn’t trying to impress you, so if there was something you wanted to hear he’d put it on. And we were sitting there listening and watching these maniacs running around. This kind of aggressively fey synth-punk of the Screamers, and the preposterously macho antics of his roommates, met at a certain point of joyfully garish and bold aggression.

I remember thinking how weird it was that we were listening to this really esoteric, really smart band while right outside there were these people who were basically cavemen, smashing shit. But I think the thing was that everywhere he went Tim was at home in the midst of this discordant environment. Tim and his giant crates of weird records just fit in with the whole scene, as bizarre and apocalyptic as it was. And I think Tim was someone who really understood, the side of undergound music that he was really into was that thing of making yourself at home in a chaotic environment where a lot of discordant, seemingly incompatible things were happening at the same time and all sorts of shit was flying off because everything was moving so fast. I just remember how gleefully happy Tim was at the whole thing.

THE NIGHT WAS BRACINGLY ACTIVE

This was a later apartment, I think with Erica and Ashley and Elliott and Ryan and Jenni, and everyone else had gone to sleep. There was the usual turbulent stuff going on in our lives, and I remember it was kind of windy out. Not particularly cold or stormy, an early spring or late fall night. and the sense that the night was bracingly active, there was an alertness about things. There weren’t many clouds but the clouds that were in the sky were moving kind of fast. The kind of night where it would still make sense to be talking at two in the morning and still be wide awake.

So we were just talking about the turbulence, comparing notes about the challenges we were facing. And then the conversation slipped, as it often did with us, to music. The topic was the conversation we had with so many of our friends: that we were looking for something that we hadn’t heard that would push beyond what we’d already heard. It was something he shared with that group but his struggles maybe intensified it. That the history of underground music had become this kind of burden that needed to be shaken off, so that you could have music that would really physically and mentally challenge you and we both batted that one around and talked vaguely about what it was that we wanted, stuff that we’d heard that was pushing that direction versus stuff that was going around in circles and getting way too much credit for it. and somehow we ended up talking about metal and I was talking about how I didn’t really understand metal and was trying to find that thing in the musical extremism of punk that appealed to me, that compressed wall of sound. And he asked me if I’d heard Bathory and I’d never had. And he had the Sign of the Black Mark on vinyl, and he put it on. And I remember that it had the kind of grandeur that I’d always gotten off on in metal without understanding it, but there was also this kind of livid guitar sound, that was buzzing and somehow very dark and very alive. And that was what I’d been angling for in my description.

And he understood music so well, and he understood you so well when you were talking about music, so that when he said something it reflected how he knew exactly what you meant. And the kind of engagement and empathy he had, so that he could really get inside the other person and kind of know what they wanted. And I remember sitting there at the table with that weird night going on and being taken, that it opened up a window into a new kind of feeling, a feeling I’d never quite gotten from music. You could almost see the oars going through the black water while you listened to it. And Tim was watching me listen to it and he saw that I’d gotten out of it what you were supposed to get out of it, and that’s the kind of personal connection you can get from two people that understand music and want to communicate about music to each other. There was a kind of satisfaction both in spreading the word and making the other person happy that I really felt from him in that moment.

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