Yet Untitled Lite 019 - Autobiographies, Social Media and Red Hot Chilli Peppers
Peering In vs Stepping In
Dearest Yet Untitler,
As many of you know, I am at best a utilitarian user of social media. I mainly use it to get this newsletter before an audience and not much else. However I’ll admit that for the few hours that Instagram lives on my phone each week after I post about my latest YU instalment and before I delete it again, I - like everyone else - use it to peer voyeuristically into the Lives of Others (remember that film?). It’s, admittedly, a thrill sometimes, this tasting of life’s variety that is now more than readily available to us.
But this access wasn’t always so. Earlier, it was mostly autobiographies that scratched my itch of wanting to peer into others’ lives. But it was a very different kind of experience. I realised this when I got totally sucked in to the autobiography of a bonafide rock and roll star the other day in a way that completely surprised me. I just could not put it down. It made me wonder why it was so fascinating for me to peer into a life so different from my own.
As I read, transported straight into to a very particular kind of Californian experience from the late 1970s, it struck me that what social media affords us today is such a pale shadow of what I was experiencing via this autobiography, especially this aspect of ‘being transported’. Rather than peering in, I was in.
It makes me think about social media and how it mostly invites me to ‘peer in’ rather than actually inviting me in. What all might I see if I was really invited in?
‘Scar Tissue’ - the crazy memoir by Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer of the band Red Hot Chilli Peppers - is a brew of sin and sensuality. But Kiedis opens the door fully, and I see a lot of things that he’s not so proud of, even some things he’s downright ashamed of.
If I was to only peer into Kiedis’ life as opposed to step into his head in the way his book affords me, I’d probably peer for a bit and move on, because I can tell you, there’s a lot in this memoir that I won’t ordinarily touch with a bargepole. But dang I’m curious, drawn by the temptation of wanting to know what happens when someone go that far down a road I have never tread. So, if Kiedis is going to give me a full pass - invite me in - hell yeah, I’ll step in.
Before I commit, I consider - who’s to say that Kiedis isn’t curating his life for me in the banal ways I too have done for my followers on social media in the past? This possibility exists. But, something - likely Kiedis’ vulnerability - makes me take the leap. I step in.
Once I’m in, there’s only me and the ride of a narrative well told. There is no fractured timeline, no comment button allowing me to pass judgment at every beat. I’m progressing on the currency of honesty, trusting Kiedis more and more as the little details he gives me about his sordid sexual experiences, his reckless self-destructive drug taking, his batshit-crazy father and the genuine love of friends and family that saved his life again and again. His commitment to drug-abuse but also to getting straight As in school feels so incongruous that - to my mind - it must be true. I’m aroused, I’m moved, I’m entertained. I judge, I keep moving - looking for more of the human being obscured by my judgment. I keep finding more of him. I keep going.
A quarter-way through the book, I believe. This belief will carry me to the end of Kiedis’ autobiography.
I find it significant that, unlike social media, I’ll be treading this path alone. Maybe that’s not wholly true. The truth is, that I’ll be treading this path along with Kiedis, whose story I have invested in. Perhaps, after I’m done, I’ll start reading around the book - via Wikipedia and articles in the Guardian, where I may learn that perhaps the things that I read about this life were indeed curated, perhaps - untrue. If that happens, yes I will be disappointed.
But, this experience, of being in, with some internal radar of mine repeatedly suggesting that what I’m reading is not trying to mislead me, is precious. For a span of time, Kiedis’ world is my world. I’m suddenly understanding afresh what good stories do for us. In whatever form.
It’s the same tryst I make with a movie, when I settle in a dark hall, turn off my phone, and rudely shush the guy who takes a call from his wife just as the movie’s starting. Being drawn in. Being transported. Is that not why you and I are here right now, dearest Yet Untitler? Are we not here, the two of us, nodding in each others’ direction because perhaps we feel something that resonates in the same frequency inside both our chests?
A few sentences down, I will ask you to leave a comment. In a few hours, I will post about this instalment on social media. At that point, you and I will not be here anymore as we are now - this place that’s akin to where I am right now with Kiedis, differing only in intensity.
I suddenly think about how I watch films now - sometimes in interrupted bursts of 30 minutes spread over days. I suddenly think about how I receive the news - in interrupted bursts of information interspersed with pellets of people’s lives and many businesses trying to reach for my coin. I think - I’m not sure why - of Geoff Dyer, who has famously written about watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker uninterrupted again and again and again.
All this, from having found Anthony Kiedis’ autobiography lying on a shelf at the place where I went to get a haircut!
Thanks for listening!
V
PS. And yes, do leave a comment!