On Separateness

Abstract

On Separateness Andrea Jurjević (bio) one The ticket to the world, my dad insisted, was speaking foreign languages. He didn't mean that in a literal way, of course, but that proficiency in foreign languages would expand my mind and enrich my understanding of the world. I took German in elementary school for several years, but instead of going to class, I often ended up with friends in the school park, sneaking off to smoke cigarettes incognito. Dad also tried teaching me Italian, but that went south with the first lesson, when he said, Okay, repeat after me: Amo il mio papà. It wasn't so much that his parental sentimentality was ridiculous but the fact that I had already taught myself more la lingua by reading the Italian porn mags he hid in the bottom of his wardrobe. I grew up in Rijeka, and we'd spend summers on the island of Krk, where Dad was from. Tourists, from just about every corner of Europe, and sometimes farther, had always been flocking to our coast. I'd help my parents rent a couple of our bedrooms, make frühstück for our guests, and work, first for a tourist agency as a porter and then in a hotel kitchen and a bar. With each new wave of arrivals, with new faces, I crushed fast on some Swede or Brit boy, their manner of speech, so utterly foreign, wonderful, dizzying. The world must be just like that, I used to think, so mysterious, so full of possibilities, so unlike our predictable reality. two Imagining the world through the lens of tourists became boring quickly, and my focus shifted onto music. While in elementary school I befriended an older teenage neighbor who didn't mind my hanging with her as she talked about music, cut band pictures from the Bravo music magazine, and wallpapered her room with them. We lived in one-bedroom apartments [End Page 153] in tall grey buildings. My sis and I had our bunk beds partitioned from our parents' room by a simple plywood sheet; my neighbor's living room doubled as her bedroom. Her parents had a low, glass-covered coffee table, and under that glass she assembled a collage of handwritten notes by various musicians—letters, signatures, drafts of lyrics to some of the best rock'n'roll songs. If I remember correctly, there was Dylan, Mercury, Bowie, Lennon, Hendrix, Joey Ramone, and more. I was captivated by their handwriting, how much individuality and intimacy each little note carried. Something so attractive and personal came through the curves of their script, the particularities of their strikes and dots, scratched-out lines, the varying pressure of their hand-scrawls. The musicians' notes looked cool, yes, but they also had an unusually freeing effect on me, as if their writing—so simply human, physical, and relatable—was closing the distance between what seemed like a grand world and our crammed one, between revolutionary art and the tedious everyday. I absorbed music, and all of its culture, with intense hunger. For a brief hot minute, I swooned at Duran Duran and Yaz, but then I quickly fell for the mad static of the Clash, the New York Dolls, the spellbinding quality of Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, and especially the deep, dark allure of The Cure as well as Siouxsie and the Banshees. Beyond their otherworldly sound, it was their particular brand of glam—Robert Smith's and Siouxie's spiky hair, black clothing, and deep red lipstick—and a diy approach that made it possible to imagine myself being a part of something bigger. I was especially enchanted by Siouxsie, her fetish and bondage garb, her particular brand of femininity, so commanding, aloof, modern, distinct, so unlike any woman I'd seen. They were the dreamworld I felt more at home in than anywhere else. And I couldn't get enough of it. I remember one day in the early eighties the evening news breaking into a report of the new death-obsessed youth "cult," who wore black, listened to morose music, and romanticized suicide, and, the news anchor said, trying to scare parents all across Yugoslavia, the...