Jean Michel Jarre

Jean Michel Jarre was one of my very first musical discoveries. After I stumbled upon the wonders of Synergy, I slowly began charting a map through the murky waters of electronic music, and one of the earliest islands I came across was Jarre’s legendary first album, Oxygene. In an age when the difficulties of producing electronic music pretty much guaranteed that each explorer had a distinct sound, Jean Michel Jarre was still startlingly original. His fluid musical waterscapes drifted seamlessly into each other and ebbed and flowed in and out of gently pulsing electronic percussion, predating the form and function of ambient dub by a good 20 years. I can’t tell you how many hours I listened to that album, intently studying the cover – a painting of the earth peeling away to show a human skull underneath. Jarre’s second album, Equinoxe, was just as mesmerizing and accomplished as his first and the two together mark one of the absolute high points of electronic music during the 1970s. After those albums, however, things starting getting a little iffy. His formula started wearing thin and so he started straying further and further from it in a not entirely satisfying direction. My interest started waning. I bought his albums Magnetic Fields and Concerts in China out of respect and hope, but it looked pretty dismal.

I never smoked cigarettes in high school. The temptation was there, certainly, and lots of my friends (being dancers) smoked, but I just could never get into it. That’s a kind of funny paradox about dancers. Everybody assumes that since they’re so physical, dancers worry constantly about their health and take care of their bodies. But in my experience, just the opposite is true. Dancers are harder on their bodies than any other group of people I know – in no small measure, perhaps, because dance is so hard on the body. I don’t know whether it’s the constant physical abuse or the mental strain from being so incredibly disciplined or what, but dancers party harder than most and can just beat themselves into the ground. And lots of the ones I knew smoked cigarettes in high school. But not me.

Once, when I was at the University of Chicago, I was offered a promotional pack while walking through downtown (as hard as that is to believe now), and I really tried to like it, but I ended up throwing the pack away. I just couldn’t do it.

A couple of years later, I was struggling through a pile of work at Hampshire College when I decided I needed a break. It was February and I was sick of the cold and dark and monastic loneliness of Massachusetts and decided, on the spur of the moment, to take the weekend off and go visit my best friend Eric in NYC, a three-hour bus ride away. My decision was made so quickly that I didn’t even have time to call him to see if it was alright (let alone if he were even in town), but I was pretty sure I could find him so I quickly bought a ticket and got on the bus before I could change my mind. Three hours later, I got off the bus near Times Square and walked the 15 or so blocks up to Julliard, where he and some other friends of mine were studying dance. As luck would have it, I got there just a few minutes before their dance class got out and I got to enjoy one of my all-time favorite things, the look of wonder and surprise that accompanies an unexpected visit. Eric and his roommates Kim and Diana were delighted to see me and quickly invited me up to their apartment way uptown near the Cloisters.

In a city of bad apartments, theirs was one of the worst. The apartment was located in basement of a building so the view was especially non-existent. The window in Eric’s room was broken and snow would drift in and collect on his bed while he was sleeping. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky, he’d wake up with a rat sitting on his chest. But the best feature of the apartment was the drain in the middle of living room that would occasionally back up and spew off-white foam into the room. Whenever that happened there would be a mad dash to move all the furniture away and then a sigh of relief when the foam stopped rising and started seeping back into the hole in the middle of the floor. Still, it was my best friend’s apartment and I was delighted and relieved to be there. But my delight wouldn’t last long.