After You're Over
How Long Before You're Still Here?
Usually, no one taps you on the shoulder and tells you that you’re over. The world is cruel, yet it’s not usually that cruel. Not where you live anyway. Your show will eventually run out of seasons. Your storylines will become less compelling. Once the shark is jumped, it cannot be un-jumped. The show goes on, but fewer people are tuning in. You could blame them? So fickle! Or the decline of the culture. What does the culture know? You are an indie movie in a Marvel world. Some people still go on Criterion to watch indie movies, right? They do, and they are watching things that are over and remembering the good old days. Things that are happening are unbearable. Before the over things were over, they will tell you, that was the sweet spot. Remember that band that got signed to a major label and never sold anything? They were the best. A woman in the 19th century said, “If this is progress, I’m glad I have consumption.” I tried to look up her name, but she eluded Google, an acute sign of being over.
I am friends with a writer about ten years younger. We have been cheering each other on for years. I witnessed him working his ass off for success, and now he has some. Our friendship began with me offering him advice. Now he offers me his. I’m glad to take it, because he has read the room and is now reading it for me. And this was the context in which I was informed that I was over. It was meant in a kind of jocular context, but that’s a way of softening the blow, and when it comes to that crucial moment, a kind of second bar mitzvah, the rough edges can never be made smooth. Your whole shtick could be about raging against the night, of being post-over, and there has been a lot of that. Like, Patti Smith used to shock people singing “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” (If you think about it, Jesus could be the ultimate example of what one could do with being over.) Patti was so red hot, she rebuffed an invitation to join Dylan’s Rolling Thunder. She even used the n-word in an album title. And then, at the appointed hour, she spent over ten years writing Just Kids, then won a National Book award, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize, then the Legion of Honor. It also made you cry, way before you were over. She was a punk! Now she’s a knight! Such prestige is very un-punk, but then what are you going to do? They closed down CBGB years ago, and it was over way longer than it was happening, and it smelled bad. We love the Talking Heads, Blondie, and Television, but we might prefer listening in a hygienic environment.
The other night I got into a conversation with someone who told me that after 1966, Bob Dylan was over. What about The Basement Tapes? Blood on the Tracks? Great, he said, but he was over. McCartney, he said, was over as soon as soon as The Beatles broke up. Lennon and Harrison hung in for a couple of albums until they were over, too. I think I identify with a lot of things that are over, and maybe that’s an acute symptom of being over myself. But who decides these things anyway? How about late period Billie Holiday? I love every period of her, but the cult really surrounds her late work. It is the sound of being over. It sounds like the voice of someone afflicted, addicted, and arrested. She went to the hospital, someone slipped her junk, and she died in prison. She od’d, but she’d been working toward it for a long time. And when she was almost over, wasn’t that when she was the most interesting? Like, autumn leaves—why do people look for foliage in the fall? The green leaves are like white noise after a while. Moribund leaves—that’s what keeps the bed and breakfasts full in season. How many blues musicians were discovered in the early 60s after living in obscurity for decades? They had more blues to sing about. If anyone told Skip James or Lightnin’ Hopkins they were over, they would have something to sing for you.
