Little clods of tar are washing up on shores as far as Florida because for forty-seven days now the Macando oil prospect has been emptying into the ocean at a rate of 12,000 to 100,000 gallons a day. The government reports that 29.7 million gallons have been released into the ocean. The Macdonald estimate has this at 51.5, the Wereley has it at 95.0 . The BP worst case scenario is at 117.7 million gallons. It's a Sunday in Connecticut. This time of year, the green trees that line our streets give us a reason to live in the suburbs, while in the moments we have our doubts, the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis won't allow us to move.
Last year this month, Real Estate released Real Estate. None of the members of the band are from the beach, though we'll credit Real Estate with contributing to the movement of rock bands that have that sound of sun-stroked nostalgia. Eager-to-please chords quickly resolve themselves and voices are washed with a remarkable microphone echo, which gives any recording heavy nostalgia with it's self-conscious reminder of time, and in this case, the sensation of getting stoned in a volvo and looking for redemption in the music of the Grateful Dead, or anywhere: "You're walking down that Pensacola Beach, keep on searching. Until you find your Rolex in the sand, you wont be stopping..." is how Real Estate's "Beach Comber" goes. The record was made between January and June 2009, during a period when the band was out of college and marginally employed, living at their parents' homes in New Jersey. Other song titles are as follows: "Lets Rock The Beach,"Atlantic City", "Suburban Beverage," "Suburban Dogs." It is a nostalgic (Greek: nostos (return home) and algos (pain)) record of mundane agonies they call Fake Blues, and beaches and lawns and sprinklers and Budweisers, life as vacation.
The project of the suburbs operates on nostalgia, on what Mikhail Bakhtin called an 'historical inversion': being that the ideal is not being lived now, it is projected into the past. Out here, in the suburb in which I grew up, in the faux-danger of dark patches of trees, the small thrill of an unexpected turn in the road, the falsely wild hedges, we search for a preternatural return to the myth of eden. But our Valhalla hides invisible irrigation systems, tamed with pesticides, and powered on gas.
Down the street from me, a man I do not know has built a scaled version of Le Petit Trianon at Versailles, the delusional playhouse of Louis XVI, which was itself Jean Jacques Anges' return to the myth of Palladio, which was itself a return to pastoral Greece, who they themselves were nostalgic, since they invented the term. On the north side of the original Trianon, a double spectator staircase descended into a manicured backyard, hidden from the public. In Greenwich, Connecticut, a town in which I have noticed, since childhood, the boom of speculative building, the quieting of crickets, the nearly complete extinction of reptiles, and the thinning of mammal populations, the new new new manse in the woods has been reversed to face the street, so the back-lawn and all of its imagined pleasures spill out into the public eye.
On the New York Times website, there is an interactive feature that allows you replay the oil spill in time-lapse, and I've been scrolling my cursor obsessively back and forth through it, making the oil condense and then drawing it out again over the ocean. I hear reports that the oil spill has reached Pensacola beach, slowly turning the vacation zone for the family into a nightmare. The promotional on the website for Pensacola has yet to be corrected and still reads: "Pensacola Beach offers family fun on the whitest beaches in Florida. I am trying to grasp what has happened in the most abstracted, rational way, but in the end what I do is listen to Real Estate and feel nostalgia for nostalgia for nostalgia, for the beach and for everything else.
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