jibe

jibe v. to be compatible with or similar to

There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway, a song that they sing when they take to the sea, a song that they sing of their home in the sky, maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep, but singing works just fine for me.

-James Taylor, Sweet Baby James

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve heard this word a number of times in my life and not exactly known what it meant…well not enough to explain it with words. I sort of knew, but I think I thought it was “jive” and didn’t realize it was a B instead of a V. It always reminded me of dancing or catching some musical vibe. In a way, jibe is a combination of jive and vibe and I consider it a pretty musical word.

I listen to music a lot. With my depressive personality, it’s pretty much a form of self-medication. I love wine and I love music, and I love them together, but I would give up wine before music. I don’t think I could ever do without music…ever. I think I’d rather die. There are a few things in life that serve as fuel for my melancholy soul - music, exercise and books are three of them and in order to “jibe” with me, you need to agree with at least one of them. If it’s music, you’d be considered a close friend.When I was a teenager, I didn’t have an abundance of friends. My parents didn’t have to time to drive me back and forth to school, so I walked a lot. It wasn’t a short walk either. My first “Walkman” was not a Sony, but a Radio Shack Realistic brand that was about the size and weight of a VHS tape. It had a cassette player and AM/FM receiver and it came with a pair of cheap foam covered, tinny sounding headphones that didn’t fold up and broke in a week. The kind with the metal adjustment sliders that caught your hair in them and hurt like a bitch. Nonetheless, I’d tape my favorite songs off of Z100  or HOT97 and keep that cassette in it or I would sometimes buy a single cassette from time to time to change things up. Sometimes I’d listen to the radio, but for the most part it was pretty homogenous and there wasn’t a lot to listen to. Whatever it was I was listening to created the soundtrack in my head as I walked. When I first started this practice, I listened to a lot of Belinda Carlisle and the GoGos. Later, I was really into hip hop and rap. Whatever the genre,  I would walk a daydream set to my soundtrack the entire way home. It relaxed and balanced me for all that I had to face. I still walk this way to and from work every day. Those foam headphones have been replaced by purple Beats and it’s my Iphone playing a curated playlist or shuffle instead of that old brick of a Realistic. I’m a seasoned practitioner now, but my tunes still get me through whatever the day holds.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OULlWNCqDQMy memories are also cataloged according to music and some days when I feel like the world is just being a bitch, I can pull them out like shelved records and play one to feel better. Just the other day someone was describing how Billy Joel no longer sings “Uptown Girl” because he divorced Christy Brinkley. I really didn’t want to hear this conversation so I just took that single down from the shelf in my brain. In my mind I was transported to my living room, to around 7 years old, listening to that song and getting ready for school, dancing around in my plaid uniform and knee socks. I remember having seen the video on television with Christy Brinkley in a sleeveless black dress dancing cheesily around with Billy Joel.  I wanted to be the uptown girl. Sometimes I still do.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCuMWrfXG4EThen there’s the Barbara Streisand, Barry Gibb “What Kind of Fool” memory of what I believe was my brother’s christening party at my Grandmother’s house in Bergenfield. It was in the basement - which was awesomely disco. It must have been around 1981.  I remember hearing this duet while watching the purple, plastic, beaded curtain sway amongst cocktail carrying relatives wearing fabulously large polyester collars. I can still see the red velvet wallpapered walls and burgundy sombreros that my aunt used as decoration. (She loved Acapulco.) I was playing with one of those plastic slot machine toys that squirted water in your face when you hit the jackpot and remember faintly of someone trying to explain to me what the party was all about. I apparently had a brother…or whatever that meant. Years later I heard this song in my head while we packed up that old basement and I carried away crates of old records that are now a personal prized possession. I feel authentically 70’s when I reminisce on this one.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wbi9q-tV8QBut my most treasured, catalogued song is by James Taylor, whom my husband hates. It doesn’t bother me that he hates him and doesn’t enjoy this particular song, though. This song belongs to my father and I and I’m not interested in sharing it with anyone, so it’s fine that we don’t particularly jibe on this tune. When I listen to it, I feel like he’s with me the way he used to be, driving along in our beat up old Isuzu Trooper singing along on the way to who knows where. The sound and the sentiment embody who my dad was and listening to it feels more like a hug than a collection of harmonically pleasant notes.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2EZUw2mvjs

kitsch

kitsch n. art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing wayI thought of this word a few weeks ago while dusting my collection of vintage salt and pepper shakers. I suppose if you walked around my home you would call some of the decor kitschy. But I started my collection of strange and "ironic" things a long time ago before the hipsters stole my style and turned it into an insult. Now when I think about the word "kitsch" I don't think about my cheeky, cute salt and pepper shakers or my vintage 60's self help books. I think about hipsters. I have a love / hate relationship with these smelly, overindulged beings. I am definitely not a hipster. I shower regularly and I tend not to take myself too seriously. However, I listen to hipster approved music, enjoy ironic art and tchochkes, and once lived in Brooklyn. It seems my life is irrevocably intertwined with them.It all started back in Rhode Island, maybe around 2002 or so. I had my first apartment in the attic of a building on Medway Street in the Wayland Square neighborhood of Providence. I graduated with an English degree from Providence College and wanted to live on my own, but really had no money. I fancied that I would become a journalist since I had interned at the Providence Phoenix and Providence Monthly Magazine, but quickly found out that writing for a paper meant a salary of about $500 (before taxes) and no health insurance. I also had a series of bad interview experiences, one in particular where I didn't get the job because my hand shake wasn't firm enough. So I commuted to Boston, trained and became a mutual fund accountant - the most bland and boring job I could have ever conceived for myself - but it paid the bills. Because money was tight and my apartment was pretty small, I began decorating with cheap things I found at tag sales and thrift stores. My boyfriend (future husband) and I couldn't afford to eat out at expensive restaurants, so we frequented a dive bar on the corner of my street called Mavericks and a little breakfast spot - Ruffuls. We would always pray that the Starbucks a block away from where I lived would screw up and give us the free drink coupon so we could get the vente frappuccino -  which counted as an entire meal. This is as close as I got to a hipster lifestyle - but I wasn't cool and I always showered. And I respected other people. Back then this was just called "poor."In a few years we moved to a lovely home in Oak Hill, Pawtucket. I ended up working in Product Development for a watchband company called Speidel and found my career path. We kept our ironic sense of decor and our love for indie music. In 2004, I came home with a record player I found at Home Goods in Seekonk, Ma. My husband thought I was crazy until we went to the Salvation Army and spent a few dollars on some old records and I convinced him that it was a wonderful thing to hear the crackling and static. We also inherited a huge and wonderful collection from my aunt which makes up the basis of our growing collection. These days my husband brings home more records than I do, traveling to places on business and seeking out strange (and kitschy) vinyls. Our neighbors back in Pawtucket were also a little strange and crazy. One always smoked a pipe and let his yard grow like a jungle. The other had vines growing through her roof and played the piano all day. You could always hear various concertos wafting out of her window. We adopted a dog, the infamous Stella, from Petfinder.com. She was a rescue born in a Kentucky shelter who we picked up in the parking lot of a hotel in Connecticut. She was supposed to be 40 pounds full grown, but was 40 pounds at 5 months old when we picked her up. She, our red leather sofa, our record player and records, and my collections of various kitschy junk lived a happy life - until we made the leap to NYC. We still showered and respected people, but we were ready for a change.Our first apartment was in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn right near Fort Hamilton Parkway. We rented it from a landlord named Forest who we found through a tank top, lip gloss, flip flop wearing lesbian who drove the biggest Mercedes I have ever seen on the hottest August day ever. It was a duplex with a yard and no sub floor. When we moved in our dog Stella used to pee because she hated the city and it would drip through the slats in the wood flooring to the downstairs. For weeks we would come home to find what seems like aerosol sprayed urine on the downstairs floor. I thought we had rats or animals, until I spilled some red wine one evening and my husband saw it dripping from the ceiling while downstairs. Nevertheless, all of our kitsch fit perfectly into our first apartment - as if made for it. We enjoyed all that Brooklyn had to offer...loved Williamsburg and it's strange hipster people that dressed funny and wore face paint - until the hipsters moved in upstairs. Until then, hipsters were just people that liked the same things as us - just showered a lot less and didn't have serious jobs. Suddenly, there were random cats strolling around the duplex...and beer cans in our vegetable garden. The door would slam at 5 am...repeatedly...and we were never sure exactly how many people actually lived there. One day, we went upstairs to knock to have a reasonable conversation about what was going on - and found the door open with no one home. I will confess, we walked in...just for a peak. It smelled. There were full plates of food on the floor amidst piles of clothes. A cat carrier, little to no furniture. It looks like a bad version of a homeless shelter or drug den. And apparently these people went to Cooper Union...? We took our showering, respectable selves and all of our kitsch to Carroll Gardens, where the hipsters couldn't afford to live and the Park Slope mommies hadn't fully discovered yet.We now live in Maplewood, NJ and it's hard some days to live in such a distilled environment. I confess that there are days where I miss the crazy hipsters and their artwork and kitschy ways. We have a child now and Stella will be turning 10 soon. We now have a whole house to house our collections of music and kitschy decor. We have a hipster in the family now...my brother in law is an artist in Bed Sty - so if we ever feel like we are losing our edge, we have him over to do a spot check. I guess you could say we are kitschy suburbanites - "kitschanites." But it isn't about being ironic or cool for us. It's not a lifestyle. It's just a vein that runs through a lot of the stuff we like. We don't even curate it on purpose. It just happens. We sort of resent that the hipsters turned the things we like into a "thing" that a lot of people despise. If they would just shower, we could try to be friends...swap Instagram photos, make ironic Itunes playlists...