Special Guest Post || Van Truong on New Towns

This month we’re lucky to have a few words from Van Truong. Truong, part of the cold war kids support network here at Oh!, makes some room for a few lilting sights and sounds to remind us that we just need to lay in the transitions sometimes. She urges us to take some time to look around and see the pretty even when it feels otherwise. And she should know too. Here she breaks from the grind of qualifying exam preparation to give us something lovely. *Badass project alert* We also hear that Van is writing about country music and Southern California swap meets (though not necessarily together).

Rebecca Solnit’s landscapes have been on my mind lately. Not so much her "landscapes for politics”; more so, her geographies of desire—a desire she recognizes in the melancholic color of horizons and in the untouchable blue of remote mountain ranges—what she calls the “blue of distance,” which is, indelibly, the color of anything far away. Of where you can never reach but always yearn to know. A diasporic blue, for those of us preoccupied by ever more distant and imagined landscapes, cultivated by the politics of what’s been called a “migrant melancholia.”

Solnit’s western mountains and deserts and dissolving skies have stayed with me, though admittedly not in any Muirian sort of way. I know how much distance and time has separated me from the west coast—enough to make me nostalgic and sentimental for a place that was never only blue skies and soft winds when I was growing up in that bordered corner of the world. But I like getting lost in such architectures of memory, especially now as the new semester threatens to take over again.

Mainly, I’ve been thinking about California and Iceland, the neighboring countries of my imagination. California I’ve known. It’s where I cut my chops all up and down that coast where north and south could very well be the “Two States” that Pavement once called for (maybe even four or five, by east coast proportions). It’s the place I was eager to leave, but still urgently miss, for all of the tangled histories that hometowns always hold for us. Especially, for those of us who have had to perpetually travel further and longer, and in more abstract ways, to arrive anywhere close to “home.”

That’s probably why I’m so obsessed with “natural” landscapes—with the open, mostly uninhabited (though never ahistorical) places, where your mind can travel across time and space to settle into some in-between place. Not in some manifest destiny sort of way. More in Doreen Massey’s sense of “slicing through space.” Like, the way sleeping under a California desert night sky can make your mind wander across other dry places while sinking you in the immediate need to make sense of just how the air is different in this particular place, at this particular time. Or, how driving certain lengths of the Pacific Coast Highway can make you wonder if there might’ve been roads like this along that other coastal country you left long before you could remember; or whether your parents, before you, ever got to travel such roads in such leisure. It’s like that space of a song that simultaneously transports and grounds you and makes you wish you could stay longer than the song’s five minutes, without having to break stride just to press play again.




While others have been thoughtfully preoccupied with this song’s genealogy, I’ve been listening for the particular fleeting sense of time slipping and scenes flitting by too quickly that makes certain songs feel like the kind of elusive landscapes that make us want to stop the car, find a comfortable rock to sit on, just to stay a little while longer. Maybe it’s what one of the members of Sigur Rós was suggesting when he said that “space is what we have—in our personal lives and in our land,” when speaking about Iceland and the influence of such ubiquitous “space” on their music. Their documentary, Heima (2007), performs landscape as much as it performs music and it reminds us of the various ways we come to incorporate and embody particular spaces. I won’t attempt a film review here, just to say that in titling their documentary after the Icelandic term for “at home,” the scenes that follow inevitably conjure a certain sense of deep time and intrinsic connection to the land, while certain songs simultaneously displace and belie any easy sense of belonging or settledness. Like the elegiac “Heysátan (Haystack),” about a farmer who, at the end of life, cannot reconcile his existence (as symbolized in a stack of hay) with his daily life of unacknowledged toil and fundamental alienation he feels with the land that he worked.



If what I’ve spilled so far has steeped too long in certain “naturalized” landscapes of my imagination, let me take a cue from Sigur Rós in following their “urge to go home,” by returning to my earliest remembered landscapes of strip malls and swap meets, trailer parks and make-shift gardens, reconstructed track homes, fruterías, pedestrian bridges, succulent-walled freeways, and so many chain link fences, for the sake of dispelling any assumed romance with the eternity of hillsides. I know hillsides are never just hillsides. That there are always multiple histories pushing up against each other in any possible space.

It’s what I was reminded of when I revisited this song from the all too short-lived band Life Without Buildings, off their debut album, Any Other City. The song rearranges in stutters and stops, obsessions and distractions, explanations and abstractions something as ostensibly optimistic as life in a “New Town.” It’s a migrant song, if you ask me, to those of us for whom there are never just new beginnings and unspoiled opportunities in the notion of new towns. For those of us who are all too familiar with “doing what you have to do” to continue amidst the incomplete, diagonal, sometimes frantic, other times mundane processes of remembering/rearticulating certain “rhythms and knowledge” of certain other (real/imagined) places.



That’s been the toughest part of being in this new town (besides the burns from learning these unfamiliar ropes of academia)—the sense that whatever our multiple and varied reasons for leaving, it is never quite so simple as we might’ve hoped, to merely arrive wherever we thought we were going. It’s what my parents have probably known all this time, and what this entrenched SoCal’ian is just now learning for herself: New towns don’t necessarily offer new hopes, and they might not even leave much room for cultivating old ones, but they’re sure as hell good for sharpening the contours of our ever-shifting memories and desire for other places and other times.

Van Truong hails from South San Diego and received her B.A. in Writing with a minor in Ethnic Studies from U.C. San Diego (1999). Before coming to Yale, she worked for many years with various nonprofit arts and community development efforts in Los Angeles. She is currently surviving the ritual hazing of grad school with the help of cable television, a good set of head phones, and lush runs through East Rock.