The Test Tube and the Scale

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seeme...

Exiled from banality, the outsider expatriates to borders within rock and roll desperate to outrun reality’s status quo. Finding there only others of the same ilk, we storm our new topography with an inebriated passion that ultimately reorients our psychological weaknesses towards a new understanding of the realities of vertigo. On Neil Young’s debut record with Crazy Horse, the mythological conceit of the outsider, along with the outsider’s primary theme, absence, haunts its most well known single, Cinnamon Girl. Two versions of that single exist; the version from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and the version originally recorded for that record which includes a co-lead vocal sung by the late Danny Whitten, whose vocal track Young had erased for the now familiar FM radio staple. On Cinnamon Girl, absence makes itself known with the phantom non-appearance of the titular girl, whom we experience only as an object of desire, vibrant inside of two individual imaginations, the lyric narr...