once again, the universe hands me something so obscenely matched to my current mood, creative endeavours, state of being ahhh–merci ma zoe pour ce cher cher cadeau–it smells like spring and alignment everywhere i lend an ear…
finalement–the chick from the knife breaks out and rocks it on her own. i know im not the only one who was waiting on the masked ones’ resurgence for years…the song’s called ‘when i grow up’ and it’s a golden, golden gem, as is this video, as is the whole album. Fever Ray: checks it.
“when i grow up
i want to be a forester
run through the moss on high heels
that’s what i’ll do
throwing out boomerang
waiting for it to come back to me
when i grow up
i want to live near the sea
crab claws and bottles of rum
that’s what i’ll have
staring at the seashell
waiting for it to embrace me”
o and while im at it on the wondrously strange children’s dreamland front//wavelength i have been inhabiting as of late, has anyone else seen this?!?! and want to share in my inexpressible boundless joy and shivers-all-over excitement?!?!
Sometimes i feel like all of my ceaseless rambling amounts to hollering at closed doors. like i’m banging with my voice, my words, my endless love letters addressed to no one flying lost on the wind
hoping one of them will open
or that they might land like birds in just the right place
–perchance.
one might fling right open one april day,
and it is that ever-looming hum of a lingering possibility that leaves us hollering.
it might so we must.
We persist in this need to express to share to try to communicate, to put forth ourselves into the world somehow, words images sounds notes movement
(whatever our medium, we offer the scraps
hands and hearts open, exposed
spiritual emigrants searching for a home.
but sometimes,
some mornings,
the euphoria that fills me up
like snow blocking all other light from the sky
all other sights from my window
is silent.
Something that can’t be spoken in words
is shared in an almost-inaudible whisper, carried on the wind
Anyone who can place that quote please be my friend immediately. i love you i do.
Now i swear i shant post a new black cab sess every two days but this is really one of the most beautiful sessions from blogotheque or black cab i’ve ever seen and yeah ok i’ll admit it i’ve seen lots of ‘em. it was my bedtime story last night and yes i did stay up even later to watch it twice. but i think my papa would approve though!
you know i hadn’t really given this site a chance, seeing it as a blogotheque copycat and not really understanding the objective of having people perform in a cab. but these guys really utilize the moving vehicle as an aspect of the song, i think it’s really awesome…and i want an omnichord. ooo yes i do. papaaa??
today was an offbeat day. just a little too grey. not quite raining but rainy. worse, i know. snow dusting the top of the mountains like icing sugar on a cake, but down here? one beat off all day long.
this song came into my red hooded head as i walked the uphill streets of nelsontown. recalling this gem my dear friend renee shared with me some time ago,
i wandered home to make the acquaintance soon thereafter of a new companion in crime, brought to me by that very same gem-finder, journeyed afar from nashville to find its way here cradled in my very own arms, waiting to be named like a newborn…
ah(sigh, the ukulele. i can only admire and aspire. a performance to make capt. yorke proud to be sure. with a broken foot no less (inspiration pour mon aicha.
Everyone eastwards is gonna hate me. So either don’t read this or hold your breath. That’s it. Breathe in deeeep. Keep it, keep it, wait for it, and don’t judge… i miss winter.
Maybe it’s an Eastern European thing, maybe it’s the whole brought-up-by-a-psychiatrist thing, heck maybe i’ve just endured enough Montreal winters (20 to be exact until i decided i just couldn’t do it anymore and haven’t since…) to feel that i don’t deserve spring right now. It’s February! It’s February and i’m in a secluded mountain town in BC where everyone complains “it’s so cold!” and i’m not looking at any thermostats but i go for long walks in a goddam thin polar fleece and this isn’t natural!
Even my dad told me “I hate you” when i said this to him yesterday. So i get it. You’re all out there enduring that impossible thing that is February and wishing i would just shut up and stop gloating. But bear with me. All i’m saying is, there’s a certain something to wintertime.
i just want it to be a little bit colder. i wanna bundle up. i love my layers. i want scarves and hats and mitts. i want snoooow. i want heaps of it! Montreal mounds. i want to don big boots and tramp around in it on street corners everywhere. i want to play in the snow! i want someone to play in the snow with me. i want snowballs thrown across snowy streets on the way to nowhere in particular and snow fights and facefulls of the icy stuff. i want to holler going down a hill on a sled that may or may not be a stolen fast food tray cause city kids are just that ghetto. Ok now i’m nostalgicizing. But i want it all, no less.
People out here just don’t know. There’s snow, ok, but it isn’t even deep enough to go past the cuff of my sorels. Maybe i just miss Montreal. Fine, i’ll admit it, fair enough: i do. i am surrounded by beautiful warm welcoming actual mountains, and i miss Mont Royal. i’m ridiculous, i know.
The precarious cusp between endings and beginnings are always a tricky ledge to be standing upon i reckon. But such is the life i lead the fluid time and place movement i welcome over and over again for whatever reason i don’t know myself. Like the incorrigible pursuit of sad songs some of us share. Which is directly connected, i’d say, to my need to leave the place that i love over and over again. That incomparable repeated return to winter longing songs that fill our souls with sweet sadness….ahh yes, just like the traces left by a lone always imperfect snow angel…
Or Bon Iver meeting Feist half way? i wonder if there ever was a better pair for the cause of winter longing songs. You tell me. Fast forward to 14 minutes.
Diamond in the rough I tell you. Diamond in the rough. As my old dearest former playing-in-the-snow-partner-in-crime used to say.
Then i crossed the continent to find—one fine sunny Sunday morn in Vancouver—a song that fit just right. i was in one wonderful record store called Zulu Records (those smiling now know) and beaming about as i was, i came upon this:
That was right about the time the serendipity stopped surprising me. My life has been drawing full circles in never-quite-closing looping loops for weeks and the time had come to cease looking for a reason and embrace it like the spring i don’t deserve but is mine to have no less. Some weeks prior i had made the acquaintance of something residing ‘round the perfect cross-section of heartbreaking and hopeful (like endings and beginnings why yes i am part gemini but only half) and all these linking lines made serendipitous sense with a knowing nod to self.
Listen to this, my rambles may make more sense:
i cannot actually remember the last time i was sitting listening to someone play never having heard them before and had that feeling, that genuine sense of being blown away, left without words, made small and unable to speak. The young man filled with winter wonder is Leif Vollebekk and he’s playing in T.O. March 4th at Supermarket in Kensington. Checks him out. Just in time to celebrate the ending of February: it’s in sight, it is, it is…and what better way to commemorate than to languish in the longing, embraced like mountains by fiddle piano harmonica guitar pedals and sweet singing—and he’s just one musketeer unaccompanied. Wonder i tell you. Filled with it.
To finish off this endless ramble, i can offer nothing sweeter and sadder than Antony Hegarty doing Leonard Cohen (do excuse Cohen’s rude interrupting, it’s taken from the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m your Man but even he must know who steals the show:
i came upon this marvel of a book in a gem of a bookstore in Vancouver wandering those streets recently. i–like many others it seems–hadn’t even known Bolaño wrote poetry when i picked it up off the shelf. It seems he considered himself a poet first and foremost. i flipped the book open to a random page and read this. i don’t wonder why.
DIRTY, POORLY DRESSED
On the dogs’ path, my soul came upon
my heart. Shattered, but alive,
dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love.
On the dogs’ path, there where no one wants to go.
A path that only poets travel
when they have nothing left to do.
But I still had so many things to do!
And nevertheless, there I was: sentencing myself to death
by red ants and also
by black ants, traveling through the empty villages:
fear that grew
until it touched the stars.
A Chilean educated in Mexico can withstand everything,
I thought, but it wasn’t true.
At night, my heart cried. The river of being, chanted
some feverish lips I later discovered to be my own,
the river of being, the river of being, the ecstasy
that folds itself into the bank of these abandoned villages.
Mathematicians and theologians, diviners
and bandits emerged
like aquatic realities in the midst of a metallic reality.
Only fever and poetry provoke visions.
Only love and memory.
Not these paths or these plains.
Not these labyrinths.
Until at last my soul came upon my heart.
It was sick, it’s true, but it was alive.
-Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs
i bought the book. Immediately. And it has been along the dusty path with me and breaking my heart only to repair it over and over again ever since. It’s searingly beautiful cracking-the-world-open-like-smashing-it-against-the-curb harsh and absolutely and completely wonderful. Check it out. Immediately.
from this lovely lonely mountain perch where i find myself this morn,
i thought i might and must begin with poetry
the tattered piece i carry with me everywhere and always
a constant inspiration
a reminder an
Introduction
The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople-- it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and
ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human
beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe
unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and
dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople
fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd
improbably call it dying--
you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the
mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of
doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now'and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem
anything,catastrophic included.
Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by "living"? They don't mean
living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but
unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain's a mammal. Mostpeople's wives could
spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.
-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real
unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is
a king,hasn't a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus,would
improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn't a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a
transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of
immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected inframortally
milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be
continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it to my
hand"--
nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or
extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints
childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which
breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to
fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of
mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and
rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of
inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
-e.e.cummings
