In 1985, a nineteen-year-old Sinéad O’Connor moved from Dublin to London. At Heathrow, she was welcomed by the suited Special Branch officers who greeted Irish arrivals at baggage claim, routinely pulling aside suspicious-looking men. Dublin, her birthplace, couldn’t accommodate her artistic dreams or the pent-up howl she needed to shake loose. Ireland was, like her, an abused child – they had too much in common. She washed up at Portobello Road Market, jackbooted, young and hungry, with a record contract under her belt, and fell in with local Rastas. They bonded over a penchant for cursing the devilry of the Pope. Among those reed-like men debating scripture and flogging tapes on street corners, she found her people. The oppositional inclinations of Rasta chants and rebel songs would go on to shape her music and visual art. O’Connor would later dedicate ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’, a song on her second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got to Colin Roach, a young black man shot inside the foyer of Stoke Newington police station.
Every Friday from then on O’Connor tuned in to the Dread Broadcasting Corporation, a Ladbroke Grove-based pirate radio station founded by DJ Lepke, immersing herself in reggae and roots. St Marks Place, in the heart of Notting Hill, was a backdrop to these sonic convergences. At the nexus of Irish and Caribbean London, she joined the intermingling throngs of stylish, indifferent youths, fast-talking chancers, and shabby drifters in an area where former slum-dwellers scuffed up against brash yuppies. This was the London that intoxicated newcomers, where small-town dreamers could luxuriate in a newfound anonymity.
Novelist Bret Anthony Johnston was in his hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, when the news came from outside Waco, about 300 miles away. A 51-day standoff between federal agents and followers of the messianic David Koresh had ended in a cataclysmic blaze. Eighty-six people, including those involved in the shootout that began the siege, were now dead. Johnston, like so many who had watched the April 1993 tragedy unfold on the news, was baffled and distraught.
“I felt like we weren’t getting the whole story,” Johnston said in a recent interview discussing his new novel inspired by the tragedy, “We Burn Daylight.” “I just felt deeply sad, and I felt a lack of trust. It’s all anybody was talking about. Half the people you met were saying they deserved it, and the other half were heartbroken and confused.”
Summers in Kansas City in the nineteen-thirties were so hot that my mother’s father moved his bed into the porch, which opened off the living room and was screened on three sides. My grandmother spent many hours there, too, mostly reading in a big wicker chair between a card table and a floor lamp. The house I grew up in also had a screened porch, which my parents added when I was eleven. That house had primitive central air-conditioning, installed by a previous owner, but running it was so expensive that my mother could seldom persuade my father to turn it on. In hot weather, the porch became our family room, dining room, playroom, and party room, and when I was in high school my girlfriend and I sometimes took my mother’s little black-and-white kitchen TV out there and turned up the volume so that we could hear “MAS*H” or “Love, American Style” above the droning of what seemed to be millions of cicadas. My own house, in Connecticut, has two porches, one screened and one not. The screened one is a great place to read on summer evenings. I once looked up from “Bleak House” and saw two black bears walking by, thirty or forty feet away. They looked less like bears than like men wearing bear suits.
During hot months in the era before air-conditioning, a porch was usually the coolest room in a house; now it’s often the hottest. I can tell from Google Earth that most of the screened porches I knew when I was a kid have been closed in, presumably so that they could be air-conditioned, too. Artificial climate control has become such a standard part of American life that to most people the loss doesn’t register as a loss, but it is one. My wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, and I finally got air-conditioning a few years ago, after surviving thirty-seven New England summers without it, but we’re determined never to enclose either of our porches. One of them has recently become our favorite place to sleep.
It’s funny how children’s media riles us. We all think we own it, that our own particular memory is the authentic one, and that any change is ruinous.
Ultimately, Simon Kuper does a great job in conveying why Paris is a city that is impossible to embrace and impossible to resist.
As you watch how the Olympics and the politics of France unfold over the coming weeks and months, keep Kuper’s book by your side. It will explain a lot.