Dear reader,
Happy long weekend to you! (I’m working again). This week I’m serving teen feelings and a rare glimpse of a song that will never be done. It’s been such a long week. It’s nice to find you here, xo.
When I was sixteen I discovered the shelf at Blockbuster where they keep the Criterion Collection DVDs. For a while I’d rent one every week: I’d watch the film on Saturdays, and then the critic’s commentary on Sundays, because I couldn’t understand the movie without it. The first Criterion film I watched was Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, which was also my first Monica Vitti film. I loved her immediately — the hypnotic way she perceived things, the ineffability of her expressions, the way she seemed to stand for Antonioni’s own gaze. I loved that in real life, the mysterious Vitti was apparently very sweet and goofy. The opening credits of L'Eclisse feature a song by Mina called “L’Eclisse Twist”. It’s a frantic early 1960s pop song, which creates a kind of vertigo in retrospect, because the film itself is so methodical and slow. Mina, unlike Vitti, was not subtle in her art — she was the best-selling Italian musician in history. But in real life Mina was a recluse, a mystery absent from public life from the late 1970s, even as she continued to release music. I loved Mina’s song so much that I’d play the opening credits over and over until the music would inevitably melt into the terrifying instrumental malaise of swelling horns that form the actual feeling of the film. All of Antonioni’s films from those years were about alienation in some way. They contained bursts of action, with long troubling periods of inaction in between. L’Eclisse contains one of the most memorable scenes I’ve ever watched, in which Alain Delon plays a stock broker at the Rome Stock Exchange. The space of the scene is pure chaos. It doesn’t make sense when you observe at it as an outsider (as Vitti, as Antonioni), but when you’re inside it (as Delon) you have purpose, you’re at work.
In Bologna, where I lived when I was twenty, there was a damp green smell that invaded my room every morning. It smelled bad, but not in a bad way, because I loved that flat and my Italian roommate. When I came back from Italy I moved into a little attic studio where I lived by myself for a year. That apartment had the most beautiful smell. I don’t know where it came from, but it was the feeling of being held but not too tightly, where things felt both secure and very possible. It was the first time I’d ever lived alone. The apartment was in a Victorian house owned by a retired engineering professor with a large white moustache. He’d read books and smoke his pipe with such pleasure on his balcony under mine, like Freud with his cigars, and when we’d cross paths he’d say hello and ask about my studies. I missed that place when I moved out to live with friends. For years after I moved, I’d go back to walk around my old neighbourhood, and sometimes in the street I’d briefly smell the smell of that house again. I remembered how happy I was alone in that room, writing and making music in the sun, and sometimes listening to Mina. I still don’t know where the smell came from — sometimes I think it was one of the trees in the yard outside my window. Where I live now, the tree outside my window is a Japanese crabapple tree, and in May I’ll watch it bloom with a massive head of pink flowers. As the flowers start to fall, my backyard will become like the 1888 painting “The Roses of Heliogabalus”, which depicts a group of Roman banquet guests drowning in pink flower petals as the young emperor watches. It’s not like Artax drowning in the Swamp Of Sadness, because the swimmers aren’t depressed. You can’t die in a flower, but I think you can disappear.
When I first watched L’Eclisse I tried to download Mina’s “L’Eclisse Twist” online because I wanted to listen to it all the time. It was 2006 and you couldn’t find those things very easily in those days. I looked everywhere until one day on Last.fm I found the one person who’d scrobbled the song. For those who don’t know, Last.fm was a website that tracked (or “scrobbled”) your listening history and displayed your top artists — like Spotify Wrapped in perpetuity, updated in real time. I messaged the user to ask if they could send me the MP3. They sent it to my email, and the song has followed me onto various hard drives for years. It’s strange to remember how exciting this was, because the thrill of owning music, of having access to something that feels rare, barely exists anymore. The electronic object of a song used to feel so important, and what we listened to seemed to stand for something huge. There was once a very earthly desire to possess songs that were good. For years my friends and I would burn mix CDs for each other, and we’d mostly listen to the same things, which was part of why we were friends. When I’d meet people in my twenties and thirties I’d eventually learn we’d been to the same concerts seven, ten, fourteen years before, as if occupying the same sonic space one time in 2006 meant we’d get along a decade later.
When I make songs I tend make them over and over, and I always stop before they’re finished. I sometimes bring back old melodies, like a film score where the same theme comes back in different scenes. Three years ago I made a song called “Depression Glass”. I wrote it after I moved out on my own again for the first time in ten years. The song ended up being about my first psychoanalytic patient, about the ineffable things we understand without words. Depression glass itself is a kind of glassware that the U.S. government distributed to households during the Great Depression. It was meant to be inexpensive and cheerful — it usually came in clear pink or green. When I wrote the song I was starting over, and I was noticing Depression glass everywhere in antique shops, where it had become more expensive than anything else. The glass was pretty but I never bought it. There was a certain malaise in the way history had transformed these objects, which were once freely handed out, into the most expensive dishes in the store. After writing and recording the first demo of “Depression Glass”, a friend produced the track with me a year later. Whenever I produce tracks by myself they end up oversaturated and muddy, because I like to feel enveloped in a song, a bit like I’m drowning. It’s not an uncomfortable drowning, more like disappearing into a wave of flowers. I like this even though at a technical level it’s not very good, and it makes the music less understandable to the listener. I don’t trust people easily with my songs because the songs can feel so vulnerable sometimes, but I know they’re always better when I let someone in. Here’s the latest version:
I love the hospital at night. There’s a quiet fortitude to the sleeplessness, to the feeling of knowing such a strange place so well. Tomorrow you’ll imagine me in my little 24-hour kingdom, in the maze of locked doors and passwords to which I’ve gained access. At night the halls are so empty compared to the day. During the day the sounds of the hospital can be terrible — the swell of alarms and medical machines, and the crowd of bodies to attend to them. Sometimes I’m amazed at how much I don’t notice those sounds when I’m working. In a medical emergency the sounds get so loud, but it’s during the emergencies that I hear them the least. I think of the chaos of the Rome Stock Exchange in 1962: the crush of buying and selling, the rush of pushing drugs and drawing blood. When we’re in it we don’t hear anything because we’re watching the numbers as they rise and fall on the vital sign monitor, as the patient crashes or recovers. At night, if there are no emergencies, I finally notice how quiet the hospital can be. It’s in the silences in between that we realize the horror of the scenes we saw before: the black stain of activated charcoal after an overdose, the quiet slipping that takes place when the person becomes a medical object. I love to be alone in those hallways at 3:00am because even after the heaviness of what I sometimes see in that place, in those moments it feels like I can do anything. It’s the feeling of possibility that I like, even if in the end I’m just at work.
Love,
E
Brb heading to indie_exchange to download some albums