Detritus, Detrit-we, Detrit-ours

On cheap facsimiles of real artifacts of class.

I have misread my mother’s preference for the cheap and over-designed greeting cards one finds at CVS, over minimalist letterpress stationery only found in gift shops that can’t also dole out over the counter medication, as ignorance. I have always respected her taste, which is to say I have kept a respectful distance from it, but I have misread this preference nonetheless. It is not unlike her mischaracterization of my preference for the grizzly comforts of a hole in the wall restaurant when more festive environments would be called for on those occasions we want to celebrate, as a problematic attachment to a poverty mindset. She says to me, “you have money, now. Spend it!”

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I’d just had the privilege of crashing a birthday dinner for the artist Sky Hopinka, whose poetry recited but an hour earlier took my breath away. The fact that it was his birthday on this day of programming I attended, was a surprise. His friends joined dinner and surprised him, in turn, with a restaurant-wide singalong of the happy birthday song. He turned bright red with bashful humor. It seems inappropriate to use such a figure of speech to describe his reaction in particular, but also so oddly ironic as to make it impossible for me to pass up the opportunity. I hope he can forgive me, and us, for subjecting him to so much attention in that restaurant.

At the end of the meal, James collected the bill on behalf of the museum hosting the artist. As a friend and his dinner neighbor, I glanced at the bill with him before we looked at each other with the unmistakable shock of people who thought the luxury of dining out like this must cost more. “I can’t believe how cheap this dinner was!” he quietly exclaimed. We know someone else is paying for it, but parsimony is inherent for us. And hey look at that—Black Indigenous and Person of Color (which I feel syntactically and orthographically benefit from being “Black, Indigenous and Other People of Color” or BIOPOC but what do I know. I just said Sky Hopinka turned bright red when we sang him happy birthday.)

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The man who founded the Roland company and invented the Roland 808 keyboard—Kakehashi Ikutaro—wrote an autobiography telling the incredible story behind his relationship to the synthesizer, which begins as a clock and radio repairman. In his early days during and after the war, clock repair was an important source of income for his family, where otherwise education-supported mobility into higher middle class was not an option. The road from a clock to a synthesizer is tantalizing enough a prompt for the imagination, that the reader’s inference in filling the long journey with stories of rhythm and analog mechanical engineering, is likely accurate. I will spare you the summary, therefore. The story that I found the most fascinating and unforgettable, is when he explains how he arrived at the details of sound effects he decided to insert into the 808. Namely, the clapping effect. He says that in Japanese work songs, farmers would use clapping to hold rhythms, and that this sound effect would make the keyboard most legible to the Japanese market. The road from rural Japanese work songs to the “Cha Cha Slide” is even more tantalizing than the clock becoming a drum machine. The parity of technological innovation and other achievements of mostly financial success, overlooks one tiny fact: these keyboards were used ironically by electonic music pioneers. They weren’t designed for DJ culture, but for pianists who couldn’t afford real pianos. That the keyboard supersedes the piano in fifty years is quite extraordinary.

My mother’s insistence on having a piano in the home as a piece of art, as a piece of furniture and a glorious instrument symbolizing our newfound class security, and my ongoing search for the elusive Roland 808 on Craigslist, register equally to each other, but these artifacts can all be found as refuse and detritus elsewhere and always.

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I want to do something extravagant for my birthday while I can. A storewide rendition of Happy Birthday would not embarrass me. A high price tag for dinner with intimate and occasional friends would not shock me. Neither the grand piano nor the 808 would impress me. My mother will send me a Hallmark card and I will cherish it before I hide it before I throw it away. Detritus representing lucre, for another day.