The Collective and Eternal Sunshine: A Tour Diary
by Zachary Pace

1. intro (end of the world)

I woke with a shock. I couldn’t remember where I was. I knew I had to get up and go, but the place escaped me. My heartbeat and my stream of consciousness both reeled at warp speed. Wound in the white bedding behind the blackout curtains, I had no idea of the time of day or day of the week. 

Gradually, it dawned: I’m in Columbus, Ohio, at the South Wind Motel. Today is Wednesday, April 3, 2024. It’s 5:00 pm. I have to get up and go to the Two Dollar Radio Headquarters.

2. The Collective

On March 8, 2024, both Kim Gordon and Ariana Grande released new LPs: The Collective and eternal sunshine, respectively. These LPs possess numerous inadvertent affinities; for instance, the opening track on The Collective is called “BYE BYE,” and the first full track on eternal sunshine—following the opening track, “intro (end of the world)”—is called “bye.” But in even greater synchronicity, both albums are based on narratives of memory and technology.

Kim’s second LP released under her full name, The Collective takes its title and themes from Jennifer Egan’s novel of 2022, The Candy House—the sequel to the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Good Squad of 2010, which I haven’t read. The Collective could be read as a sequel of sorts to Kim’s LP of 2019, No Home Record, to which Kim gave her full name after thirty-seven years of recording and performing as a vocalist, guitarist, and bassist under the band names Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Glitterbust, and Body/Head. Thus far, the sound of a “Kim Gordon” album remains distinct from the sound of the others in their hip hop–influenced drumbeats, provided by Justin Raisen, a producer, engineer, songwriter, and musician with whom Kim collaborated on both No Home Record and The Collective.

Ariana’s seventh LP, eternal sunshine takes its title and themes from Michel Gondry’s film of 2004, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which takes its title from a poem by Alexander Pope), wherein the main protagonists, played by Jim Carey and Kate Winslet, volunteer for a science-fictional procedure to erase their memories of their relationship. 

Conversely, The Candy House centers on the creation of an app, Own Your Unconscious, which allows its users to upload their memories to a data cloud called the Collective Consciousness and thereby access the memories of other users. But the narratives being stored are not memories so much as real-time perceptions of an event, as if a spot in the brain preserves film footage of a person’s perceptions precisely the way they transpired. The novel doesn’t account for the subjectivity and fallacy inherent in memory. My father recently told my mother that I have a “false narrative” of our relationship, but I would argue that all narratives are automatically false; because one person’s memory remains so subjective, it’s their prerogative to disagree with the memory of another. “Sometimes you have to exaggerate in order to tell the truth,” I remind my mother.

The sweetest spot in The Candy House comprises the chapter “The Mystery of Our Mother,” surrounding the subplot of Miranda Kline, a fictional anthropologist whose book, Patterns of Affinity, identifies “formulas for predicting human inclinations,” or algorithms within and across attachment styles, which Kline witnessed while studying an insular tribe in a remote region of Brazil. Kline’s patterns of affinity are co-opted by one of her children, Melora, who patents and sells the algorithms to the creator of Own Your Unconscious, while monopolizing the music industry through a mega streaming service that overtakes Melora’s father’s major record production company. But, of the years prior—when Melora and her sibling Lana still intended to protect their father’s company from being eclipsed by the earliest streaming services—Melora says:

We contemplated a nationwide billboard to remind people of that eternal law, Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house! It was only a matter of time before someone made them pay for what they thought they were getting for free.

Allusions to The Candy House are scattered in a breadcrumb trail through The Collective, starting with the first line of the second track, “The Candy House”: I won’t join the collective / But I want to see you. Overall, The Collective both resists and submits to the technologization of memory. In wry tones, the narrator speak-sings of a fragmented identity and society, the difficulty of creating meaningful interpersonal connections, and the constant commodification of experience and its dissolution into data clouds. Coincidentally, “Psychedelic Orgasm” presaged Kim’s recent TikTok popularity; this line, Passing all the kids / TikToking around, was written and recorded long before “BYE BYE” became a viral sensation on the platform.

Kim told Rolling Stone that her friend Rachel—who, I’m fairly certain, is the writer Rachel Kushner—suggested that she write a song about bowling trophies, which turned into one of my favorite tracks, “Trophies.” But initially, I’d thought that the song took its title from a minor detail in The Candy House. After Melora and Lana have overtaken their father’s record company and its headquarters, where Melora remembers learning that the framed gold and silver records in his office were trophies, Melora says: “Our father’s office belongs to me. His trophies, and mine, line the walls, and sunlight splinters on the ocean outside my windows.”

I read 158 pages of The Candy House before I started skipping chapters and losing the plot, but I found what I needed in order to write this essay. I also lost interest upon learning that Jennifer Egan had cosigned a press release for PEN America, defending the organization’s decision not to condemn the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinian people. On the other hand, my love and respect for Kim soared higher than ever when, midway through her set for the Collective Tour’s stop at the Knockdown Center in Queens on March 23, she said into the mic: “Ceasefire. Right fucking now.”

My favorite literary allusion in The Collective isn’t to The Candy House at all; it’s a line in the closing track, “Dream Dollar,” lifted directly from Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho: I don’t know what to do / Two states of mind. Kim’s work abounds with literary allusions, as far back as her contributions to Sonic Youth. In a promo interview for The Collective with The Line of Best Fit, Kim discusses her five favorite tracks from her own discography, and the only Sonic Youth song included in the lineup is from Sonic Nurse: “Pattern Recognition,” which takes its title and themes from a work of science fiction by William Gibson and speaks from the perspective of its main protagonist. When asked what Kim thinks of “Pattern Recognition” as she listens to it now, she responded: “I don’t listen to it. I haven’t listened to it in a long time, probably since we last played it live. [. . .] I have more of a memory of playing it live than I do of listening to it. Not that I remember how to play it!”

 

3. BYE BYE

In Columbus, I spent two days with the creators of Two Dollar Radio, Eric and Eliza; we’d been in almost daily correspondence for more than a year, but we hadn’t yet met in person. I met their radiant kids, Rio and Maceo, and their extended family of friends and colleagues. I spent most of my waking hours with Two Dollar Radio’s publicist, Brett, who was visiting from Cincinnati; we’d met once briefly in Arlington, Virginia, and his warmth and brightness had immediately struck me as warmer and brighter than all the stars in the galaxy. During my time at the Two Dollar Radio Headquarters, my sense of purpose and belonging reached a pinnacle, and I found myself part of a true collective. I also started slipping into frequent bouts of déjà vu—an intense sense that I had already encountered these moments in dreams.

When I woke on my last morning at the South Wind, news of an earthquake with an epicenter in New Jersey that rocked New York City had just broken. In the days ahead, I would drive with Eric and Rio through tornadic wind, torrential rain, hail, and flooding across Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois. A week later, I’d be in Cleveland—in the path of totality of a solar eclipse. The end of a world crept nearer.

That evening, at the Graduate Hotel in Iowa City, I made a list: items appearing on Joan Didion’s packing list, which she writes into the essay “The White Album,” and items also appearing on the embellished packing list that Kim speak-sings in “BYE BYE.”

• Cigarettes
• Toothpaste
• Shampoo

I made another: items that appear on both lists but are phrased differently.

• Pullover sweater (Joan) and hoodie (Kim)
• 2 pairs shoes (Joan) and sneakers, boots (Kim)
• Nightgown (Joan) and pajamas (Kim)
• Aspirin (Joan) and Advil (Kim)
• Prescriptions (Joan) and medications (Kim)
• Face cream (Joan) and hand cream (Kim)
• Typewriter (Joan) and laptop (Kim)

I made another: items appearing on their lists that I have packed with me.

• Cigarettes
• Toothpaste
• Hoodie
• Boots
• Pajamas
• Medications
• Face cream and hand cream
• Laptop
• Pens (Joan)
• House key (Joan)
• White tee (Kim)
• Power cord (Kim)
• Button-down (Kim)
• Body lotion (Kim)

I made these lists to make use of the waiting, to keep getting used to waiting, to keep myself company during the lulls between frenzies. A month ago, I played “BYE BYE” while my friend Angelo packed a weekender bag, the night before we flew to Key West to do an event at Books & Books. “She’s saying goodbye to all that,” Angelo said, which echoed my thoughts exactly. What if the narrator isn’t taking this stuff along but leaving it behind when the world ends?

 

4. eternal sunshine

Iowa City’s cloudless sky reminded me that I hadn’t seen the sun for longer than I could recall. “I thought I was having a problem with my medication, but I just needed some sunlight,” I joked on the phone with my friend Jared.

“Write that down,” Jared laughed.

I’d been switching between The Collective and eternal sunshine depending on the situation: The Collective’s grinding guitars and aggressive synths helped me power through airports and drown out the noise of other passengers on planes, and eternal sunshine’s buoyant melodies helped lift my spirits as I navigated the unfamiliar cities alone. On my iPhone, eternal sunshine lacks two tracks: “yes, and?”—which I’d downloaded as a single before the LP came out, but it didn’t sync with the download of the full album—and “Saturn Returns Interlude” (the track list’s only title that takes initial capitalization instead of all lowercase), which I deleted from my library. A total waste of 42 seconds (not to mention $1.29 on Apple Music), the track features a vapid monologue by Diana Garland, an astrologist, describing the “Saturn Return”: the existential crisis that a person allegedly undergoes roughly every thirty years, coinciding with the planet Saturn’s slide into the exact location, or “ecliptic longitude,” where it presided at the time of the person’s birth, after completing one full orbit around the sun. 

During the years that coincide with a person’s supposed Saturn Return, the brain reaches full consolidation through the development of the prefrontal cortex. According to the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology, the prefrontal cortex is the spot in the brain that “functions in attention, planning, working memory, and the expression of emotions and appropriate social behaviors,” and its maturation leads to “improvement in cognitive control and behavioral inhibition as an individual grows into adulthood.” I’m ambivalent-to-agnostic regarding astrology, but I do not believe in the superstition of the Saturn Return. I believe that when the prefrontal cortex has finally developed, a groundbreaking shift in mortal consciousness takes place—similar or identical to the existential crisis often attributed to planetary alignment.

Still, I’m motivated by superstitious coincidences. I collect coincidences to create continuity. I make a list of coincidences, as Kim speak-sings phrases from “Trophies” on a loop in my mind.

• In the film Eternal Sunshine, Jim Carey’s character brings a bag of items associated with his ex to the memory-erasing clinic, and in the waiting room, another patient sits with a bag of items that include a bowling trophy.
• The Mission Creek Festival’s book fair took place in a bowling alley.
• In my room at the Graduate, a framed illustration of a football trophy was hanging on the wall.

While in Iowa City, I took part in a reading for the Mission Creek Festival at Prairie Lights with Fulla Abdul-Jabbar, who read from her luminous book, Who Loves the Sun. En route to Cleveland, I stopped in Chicago and visited the luminous bookstore Exile in Bookville, where I purchased the Velvet Underground’s Loaded on vinyl. Later, unpacking these items back in Brooklyn (then repacking for Detroit, my last stop), I realized that Fulla’s book takes its title from the opening track on Loaded. Here, I’m drawing a circle between these synchronicities, then a circle around them.

Ariana’s eternal sunshine alludes to the film Eternal Sunshine only a few times, mainly by way of the lyrics to the title track. The music video for “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” recreates the film’s primary plot, beginning with the singer sitting in the waiting room of a memory-erasing clinic. Over the course of the procedure, the singer revisits blissful scenes from her failed romance and grows increasingly distressed as her ex disappears from the footage. But, the procedure completed, she passes her ex on the sidewalk and neither one recognizes the other.

At a certain point in the film Eternal Sunshine, the main protagonists cross paths post-procedure and unwittingly recouple, eventually learning that they’d already dissolved a relationship that had turned bitter and abusive. Now, they agree to stay together, even in light of their knowing that they hadn’t been able to make it work. Once, I dreamt this scene, and my ex and I played the roles of the main protagonists; we also agreed to try again despite our embittered past. Then, I woke, weeping. Today, I wince at the prospect of such codependency and denial. But I wouldn’t erase a single memory of our relationship. I loved what worked and I learned from what didn’t.

 

5. Totality

On April 8, I woke in Cleveland, Ohio. The night before, I’d accidentally skipped the taking of my medication, which always makes me weepy the next day. This day unfolded with so many coincidences and aligning signs, I slipped into a spell of continuous déjà vu. At the Stone Oven bakery, I purchased a golden pastry called a provolone swirl and a black iced coffee, and even the coconut macaroons, each coated three-quarters in chocolate, reminded me of eclipses. If the moon went dark tonight / And if it all ended tomorrow / Would I be the one on your mind? Ariana sang on a loop in my mine.

My friend Nick, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly two years, collected me from Coventry Village, and we drove to his family’s home in Chesterland, where we gathered with his parents, siblings, aunt, and cousin in the yard to witness the eclipse. At around 2:00 pm, when the moon started to slide in front of the sun at its lower-right curve, Nick peered through the 2x solar viewers and announced that the sun was not quite a perfect circle.

Nick’s sibling Jeffrey responded, “They used to say the most perfect circle is the one in your own mind.”

I wept on the spot, shocked by the beauty and profundity of such an eternal law. Nothing exists outside the mind, I thought. When the mind ends, everything in the world ends with it. And there I was, after a month of obsessively listening to The Collective and eternal sunshine, lost in daydreams of making perfect circles between and around them.

By 3:15 pm, we were in the midst of totality. Nick’s cousin Mike, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the band name A Perfect Circle, crouched to focus the lens of a digital camera perched on a tripod. Everyone except Nick attempted to capture the scene, blocking it with our phones. I lit the yard with the flash of my Polaroid.

“Try to remember!” Nick exclaimed, rousing us away from our electronics. “Try to remember!” Nick repeated, staring up at the pitch-dark full moon surrounded by a hairsbreadth hoop of orange and white splinters in the midafternoon’s nighttime sky, which enclosed a single visible star and was enclosed by a sunset-like radiance on the horizon.

 

 

Zachary Pace is the author of I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am, published by Two Dollar Radio in 2024.

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