-Ivan Lalić
Places we love exist only through us,
Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,
Places we love we can never leave,
Places we love together, together, together,
And is this room really a room, or an embrace,
And what is beneath the window: a street or years?
And the window is only the imprint left by
The first rain we understood, returning endlessly,
And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the night
Your son began to move in your sleeping blood,
A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,
The night you were frightened by your own light,
And this door leads into any afternoon
Which outlives it, forever peopled
With your casual movements, as you stepped,
Like fire into copper, into my only memory;
When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way,
Places we love we can never leave.
Mesta koja volimo
Mesta koja volimo postoje samo po nama,
Razoren prostor samo je privid u stalnom vremenu,
Mesta koja volimo ne možemo napustiti,
Mesta koja volimo zajedno, zajedno, zajedno,
Pa zar je ova soba soba ili je zagrljaj,
I šta je pod prozorom; ulica ili godine?
A prozor, to je samo otisak prve kiše
Koju smo razumeli koja se stalno ponavlja,
I ovaj zid ne međi sobu, nego možda noć
U kojoj sin se pokrenu u krvi tvojoj zaspaloj,
Sin kao leptir od plamena u sobi tvojih ogledala,
Noć kad si bila uplašena od svoje svetlosti,
I ova vrata vode u bilo koje popodne
Koje ih nadživljuje, zauvek naseljeno
Običnim tvojim kretnjama, kada si ulazila,
Kao vatra u bakar, u moje jedino pamćenje;
Kad odeš, prostor za tobom sklapa se kao voda,
Nemoj se osvrtati: ničeg van tebe nema,
Prostor je samo vreme na drugi način vidljivo,
Mesta koja volimo ne možemo napustiti.
May is National Masturbation Month. In fact it’s International Masturbation Month! I will stick with poetry, which had its month in the sun during April, but masturbation is still an interesting and compelling topic.
“Ordinary people who do it think there’s something wrong with them, and it’s painted as a pathetic third choice if you can’t get someone to have sex with you. In fact, if you can shake off this bad rap, masturbation is amazing. It can provide extraordinary pleasure, or just help you get to sleep, teach you about your body and sexual responses, and help keep the blood flowing in the nethers, as they might say on Firefly. It’s good for you, unless you do it so much that you forget to eat or run afoul of the laws of physics — here I’m really talking about friction.”
Every article about the existence of masturbation month reminds us of Bill Clinton’s no-nonsense US Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, who wanted to normalize masturbation as healthy. And, hell’s bells, people – it is. We all do it. But this was back in 1994 and her approach was most certainly not accepted in the spirit in which it was meant. Contextually, Elders delivered this as a part of World AIDS Day message – total abstinence from all sexuality is unrealistic, but if we were to destigmatize masturbation, which seems like a pretty innocuous message to me, perhaps we’d not only open up dialogue about sexuality and sexual health in general but might stave off premature (and uninformed) sexual activity. Her message – no surprise – was taken to its extreme and false interpretation:
“She meant that we should teach kids that it’s okay to masturbate. Spin media decided that her message was: “let’s bring some dildos to class and teach these kindergartners to have some fun!” Not the situation Elders was suggesting. She later went on to explain that masturbation could prevent the spread of AIDS; unfortunately, her bold statements led to a forced resignation.”
And you know – sometimes masturbation might have been a better option for a lot of people. Case in point: woman hires male prostitute (referred to in the article as a “professional priapist”) in Germany and becomes pregnant. She tries to track down this unwitting sperm donor/once-owner to claim child support. But Germany’s rigid data privacy laws prevailed on the side of protecting the man’s anonymity.
And of course there’s a poem even for this. Many, in fact, but today’s is from Israel.
MASTURBATION
–Yona Wallach
You slept again with Mr. No Man
loved his empty glance
and hugged his absent body.
The eyes of your lover look toward a foreign point
not exactly at you not on you,
he’s young and already so bitter.
The love that penetrated your flesh for an instant
fills your body and soul with heat
from the tips of your hair to your inner organs,
leaving you again with Mr. No Man
stroking with no hand your body
that responds with no emotion no expression
no heat on each stroke –
You showed the poem to your young lover
he responds with rage and says that it’s bad
and no poem at all and turns his back,
perhaps he thinks that he’s no man,
does he think that he’s no man?
doesn’t understand poetry, with feeling
demands too much, hours,
when five minutes of love would suffice
to fill an entire day with the heat required,
no man chills your emotions freezes
your body, the chill spreads through your limbs
freezing your cheeks and sending a nervous shudder
from the curve of a cheek to the opposite eye and extinguishing
the bud of emotion and sending the taste of pain
to the gullet to different parts of the neck and to the back.
You explain to your lover the meaning of the time of
love, five minutes are like hours
five hours even, there are all kinds, it’s worth it
to use all possible times whenever
for it’s impossible before work in the morning
to love three hours you have to warm up and that’s it
he catches on fast and tries but is disappointed
it doesn’t seem nice to him so fast
he wants it more plentiful than it is,
but he’s smart and there’s a chance an opportunity
like this might not return in his short lifetime
you have to change your ideas a little and adjust to the situation,
but again he’s alone with himself and with you
and demands the strength of a night in a brief morning.
You send a cold look to no man
and promise to meet him again in the evening
for sure he’ll return, he is spiritual death
he gives the coldest look
and stands by you waiting to catch each feeling
through the air, to turn it into complete emptiness into nothingness.
You studied your lover’s look
his dark eyes two berries
that threaten to send a glance as soft
as the memory of the taste of grapes, looking in terror
and more than this blind nerves
that endanger
the soft shoots of feeling and love.
Will he go crazy you ask, will he lose,
the wind’s movement over his face marks
tracks that you expertly decipher,
you give voice to cheerful sounds
of stretching, he cooperates for a moment sends a smile
and you turn him inward with self-love
bring him out and stare at him as at a jewel,
he emerges from the old songs and he
is one of their heroes, also his beauty
is such, he is one of the wondrous names
so lost in the frightened anxious
being in the womb of society,
he will be born out of there even more monstrous
be born anew and will love you
each morning as it should be as he is able,
he will get used to your prostitution whose source is internal
and logical otherwise it wouldn’t emerge
and its decency according to each honorable homely understanding
that distinguishes between what and how when and where,
and his love will wear less dead forms,
and you will surrender again to Mr. No Man
in the difficult moments he will freeze your fingers
stroking yourself with different desires,
but poems are just a technicality
acquired during years of living
the hero will live in every poetic form
as third person or first or second,
he will understand this also
will live as first person, second or third
the impression he makes is mainly that he
lives as third person with himself
speaks about himself as about he as about someone you’ve tired of,
speaks separates between himself and his sex
speaks about himself as about he and not about these his emotions
that’s someone else altogether the other
of whom he is jealous of whom he will be afraid,
sex that’s him, he gives it to him
you are his mother bring him up
give him back his confidence his faith in himself
you meet with Mr. No Man and learn about
other people about the other he
even though the he could be all kinds of natures
you join his separated sex to himself
it I feel it I sense it,
I my body my soul myself and flesh myself,
he will be cultivated will love operas and emotions,
will generalize with more ease about others of his kind,
because the fruit of love is short lived
even more than the fruits of a poem like this.
Radi te boli od koje umiru prsti
Do juče još uronjeni u pjesak i šećer
Radi te boli
koja nagoni oblake na bjeg i smrt
u dugim ljesovima zore
Radi te boli u mekom tkivu sna
kad se propinje sve do ruba tjela
do izvora krvi
već omamljene dlanom
već budne za plač
radi ovih nepoznatih bića
koje nadgrizaju koru noći
ponosnu koru noći
sto čuva uspomene.
Oklop tako snažan i opet tako ranjiv
tamniji od tame
Radi ove boli
koju mirisom mahovine i odložene stvari donose u sobu
krotku od tišine
u osvetljenom oknu prozora
pa pred zid na koji pljusti kiša ili dani
Stajala je nepoznata žena
i rukom već tuđom
i iglom već zarđalom
pretvorila vjerni sloj prašine
u onaj drugi svijet
opustošen drugom boli
od koje se ne umire
a da se ne zna zašto
a da se ne zna kako
Neprimjetno i neponovljivo
“Do we have any other choice? We wanted freedom, we got the freedom of a game, and we even thought the game was the freedom to just clown around. We wanted individual freedom and achieved the freedom of imitation.” -Dubravka Ugrešić, Karaoke Culture
In a long ago period during which I spent my life devoted to studying the (parts of the) former Yugoslavia – its history, its literature, its music, its politics, its divisions, its being knitted together haphazardly and unraveled again, its personalities, I naturally read everything I could get my hands on from writers there. Naturally this included the modern ‘classics’ like Krleža and Andrić (which, now how can we place geographically, and do we need to? As most writers and residents of former Yu will tell you, you may have been born in what is now Croatia, or Bosnia, but you had relatives from all over and these divisions were more artificial – and often economic – than political or ideological) but also contemporary fiction and poetry along with the slew of critical thinking and journalistic angles on the breakup of the Yugoslav union. I don’t want to be as crass as saying that this exercise – that the reaction to and observing of the war – ‘separated the wheat from the chaff’ in terms of writing ability. But in looking at the breadth of it now, I read Dubravka Ugrešić’s writing – whether essays or fiction – with joy, with attention, not being able to put the books down until I finish. Meanwhile, some of her contemporaries, notably Slavenka Drakulić, I still read (whether descriptions of life in Yugoslavia before its end or perspectives on its demolition) but not with as much zeal. Perhaps it is a matter of style or tone, but Ugrešić (for me) is the better writer by far.
It would also be crass for me to say something about how Ugrešić may have written about the dissolution of Yugoslavia and what the world did or did not do in response, may have written about the experience of leaving, may have written about the peri- and post-war damage to her own career that came at the hands of supposed friends and colleagues who didn’t approve of her criticisms or at least who chose to remain silent so as to not make waves – but her writing never felt forced, like she felt she had to unveil all of these things as a self-exploitative act. (What else could a writer of the place and time do, though, than write about what they saw, what they knew?)
She has always been keenly aware, and keenly vocal, about forging an identity as a ‘writer’ without the adjectives that are inevitably attached. Many would argue that we need to know that she is a woman from former Yugoslavia, who left during the war, and thus she will always travel through literary circles as THAT woman, with THAT voice and THAT perspective. But do others get saddled with this, in equal measure, responsibility and limitation?
My point was, though, that Ugrešić always feels relevant and transcends geopolitical events in a way that, for example, I don’t find Drakulić does. But then, Drakulić has made a career on writing about geopolitics and the issues inextricably tied to the former Yu. It’s not that this is not valid, it is just that I prefer Ugrešić’s writing. And I don’t feel that there is any reason we should lump them together; I choose these two writers – and lump them together – primarily because I started reading them both at the same time. They are contemporaries, and both left Yugoslavia as it fell apart – Drakulić to Sweden and Ugrešić to the Netherlands. In the cases of both women, they left largely because they were denounced by the Tudjman government in Croatia as “witches” (along with a handful of their contemporaries) and began getting threats that were not related to the war itself but to the frenzied, unquestioning nationalism that rose up on all sides in the convoluted breakup. One could argue that Croatian nationalism was never too far under the surface for many.
I’m not out to malign Drakulić – in fact, this is not meant to be about her at all. She’s fine. I like her. This instead is meant to ask why, at least in superficial treatments of a writer like Ugrešić, we veer toward easy categorizations. We put her into a specific box, representing a specific country, region, gender, point of view. Is it that we just cannot understand things unless we categorize and contextualize them? I guess labels are required – or else how would we discover these writers? On a larger scale, how could we find anything? We have, as Ugrešić herself has written about at length in Karaoke Culture, access to more information than ever – but we are also more deeply beholden to the technologies that allow us to find/discover all this information. We have some modicum of control – SEO and keywords and all those little tricks, but ultimately a search engine is going to be the gatekeeper, and our search terms are the terms of victory or surrender. Without categorization, I either discover Ugrešić – or I don’t.
Constructing the category
Ugrešić has written about this at length elsewhere: the construct of a ‘category’ in which certain writers, from certain places, will always live. In Karaoke Culture, she specifically writes on “the profitable exotic” – the exilee, who is all the more interesting by adding on other sub-categories, such as Croatian, ex-Yugo, post-communist, woman, etc. But then she asks: is everyone subject to these same categorizations? (In a search engine, sure – but in terms of framing the context or lens through which the reading is filtered and interpreted?):
“Exile is literally a change of context. Exile implies the personal experience of every exilee, which would be difficult to subsume under terms that are stubbornly endorsed by literary critics from both worlds, the writer’s home base and the host environment. The terms—émigré, immigrant, exile, nomad, minority, ethnic, hybrid literature—discriminate, but they are also affirmative. With these terms the home base expels the writer, while the same terms are used by the host environment to relegate the writer to an ethnic niche, and at the same time affirm his or her existence. The home base makes assumptions of monoculturalism and exclusivity, while the host environment make assumptions of multiculturalism and inclusivity, but both are essentially working with dusty labels of ethnicity and the politics of otherness. Even if I were to write a text about the desolation of frozen landscapes at the North Pole, I would still be chiefly labeled as a Croatian writer, or as a Croatian writer in exile writing about the desolation of the frozen landscapes at the North Pole. Reviewers would promptly populate the frozen wasteland of my text with concepts such as exile, Croatia, ex-Yugoslavia, post-communism, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Slavic world, Balkan feminism, or perhaps Balkan eco-feminism, while journalists would ask me whether I had the opportunity while up in the frozen wasteland to run into the Yugoslav diaspora, and how I perceived the situation in Kosovo from that frozen vantage point.”
“…an English writer writes his or her version of a visit to the North Pole, Englishness will not likely serve as the framework within which his or her text is read. This attitude of the host environment to writer-newcomers springs from a subconscious colonial attitude—just when the larger literary world is doing its best to reject this—in a market which relishes any form of the profitable exotic, what with the always vital relations between the periphery and the center.”
“The real center of power is America, or rather Anglo-American culture, whose cultural domination marked the twentieth century. We are still looking to that center with equal fascination today. Anglo-American culture is the dominant field of reference, while, at the same time, it is the most powerful, if not the most just, mediator of cultural values. In other words, if certain Chinese writers are not translated into English, it is unlikely that any Serbian or Croatian reader, with the exception of the occasional sinologist, will ever hear of them.”
And will any of this mean anything at all one day in the not-too-distant future when culture – all culture, not that divided by geopolitical lines – is something akin to the fast-food, digitized “karaoke culture” Ugrešić observes, or that, for example, tv shows like Black Mirror threaten? This is a topic I will come back to.
National poetry month has ended, but for me, every day is poetry. I will continue to include poetry as long as it makes me happy.
Integrity
-Adrienne Rich
the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety
~ Webster
A wild patience has taken me this far
as if I had to bring to shore
a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor
old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books
tossed in the prow
some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.
Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.
Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain
in a sun blotted like unspoken anger
behind a casual mist.
The length of daylight
this far north, in this
forty-ninth year of my life
is critical.
The light is critical: of me, of this
long-dreamed, involuntary landing
on the arm of an inland sea.
The glitter of the shoal
depleting into shadow
I recognize: the stand of pines
violet-black really, green in the old postcard
but really I have nothing but myself
to go by; nothing
stands in the realm of pure necessity
except what my hands can hold.
Nothing but myself?….My selves.
After so long, this answer.
As if I had always known
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.
Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere —
even from a broken web.
The cabin in the stand of pines
is still for sale. I know this. Know the print
of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked the door,
then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis
back on the trellis
for no one’s sake except its own.
I know the chart nailed to the wallboards
the icy kettle squatting on the burner.
The hands that hammered in those nails
emptied that kettle one last time
are these two hands
and they have caught the baby leaping
from between trembling legs
and they have worked the vacuum aspirator
and stroked the sweated temples
and steered the boat there through this hot
misblotted sunlight, critical light
imperceptibly scalding
the skin these hands will also salve.
Like most people, I often skim over things to get the general idea without taking in the actual words. The results can produce a little chuckle.
I saw “Conducting a STOP STICKS Campaign” on the CDC website and, at first, quick glance, I misread it as “Conducting a CHOP STICKS Campaign” and wondered what exactly that would be and why the CDC would promote it.
Then someone shared a screenshot of his food-order delivery tracker, which actually read, “Track your order in real-time”, but which I misread as “Track your ordeal in real-time”. (It was Domino’s pizza, after all, so in fairness, it probably was some kind of ordeal.)
I heard someone say “nurture” but could swear she said “neuter”, which would have been more fitting. Nature v neuter. Haha.
The Good Goo of Random Gum: Darling Buds of May Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,/And summer’s lease hath all too short a date Shakespeare, sonnet 18
06 Arab Strap – “The First Big Weekend of 2016”
Sigh, here we go again, Mr Firewall. My heart always lies, cries and dies in Glasgow
07 Slowgold – “Korta sommar”
Surprise, surprise: Sweden; short summer (and this year, long winter… still snowing in May!)
08 Mount Eerie – “Real Death”…Though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down/Being swallowed into a silence that’s bottomless and real…
Heartbreaking true story of loss; what remains in mortality’s aftermath. Feeling lucky. Could be a companion piece to the book Grief is the Thing with Feathers
09 Elvis Perkins – “My Kind”…I conjure you/And you produce me/An off-white heir/for my vanity…
Love for Catherine S, who recommended Perkins years ago
11 Leon Bridges – “River”
“Oh, I wanna come near and give you/Every part of me/But there’s blood on my hands/And my lips aren’t clean”
12 Merchandise – “Become What You Are”…But it don’t really matter what I say/You’re just going to twist it anyway…
“No I couldn’t bear the burden/So I threw it all away/I left my home and all my friends behind”
15 Yamasuki Singers – “Yokomo”
Something old that sounds new (predating my life at least), from the father of one of the Daft Punk dudes. I can’t get enough – this one is great for driving along winding country roads in the sun
16 Belle & Sebastian – “The Stars of Track and Field”…But when she’s on her back/She had the knowledge/To get her where she wanted…
Oh, yes, endless love affair with Glasgow & Scotland ❤
17 First Aid Kit – “Emmylou”…Oh the bitter winds are coming in/And I’m already missing the summer/Stockholm’s cold but I’ve been told/I was born to endure this kind of weather…
“I’ll be your Emmylou and I’ll be your June/If you’ll be my Gram and my Johnny too/No, I’m not asking much of you/Just sing little darling, sing with me”
18 Laura Gibson – “Not Harmless”…I’ll teach you to cry in a crowded room/I’ll teach you how to talk ’till your teeth come loose…
19 New Fast Automatic Daffodils – “Fishes Eyes”
Oh, the familiar sounds of the high school years. Here’s to long-lost Terra Firma.
22 Christopher Owens – “Another Loser Fuck Up”…Sometimes a song is like a photograph:/Everybody wants to figure it out/But you and I will see a different picture/And I don’t need to tell you what it’s about…
23 Gram Parsons – “Return of the Grievous Angel”
Escape from rehab hospital, take ten. For SD
24 Françoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc – “Amours toujours, tendresse, caresses”
One of those carefree-feeling-over-it kinds of songs. Of course, there must be quelque chose French
29 Martha Wainwright – “I Will Internalize”…I am wet and weak…
I’ve included this one in a mix years ago but it felt appropriate for now 30 Tele Novella – “Sacramento”…one day you’ll die going into the light/and you’ll find yourself right here/turn the doorknob without fear/you were always coming here/since the day your soul appeared…
Spending frustrating days secluded at home, left to my own devices. Love for J, fellow at-home worker
31 The Beau Brummels – “Laugh, Laugh”
Those times when your breath is taken away, and it hurts, to laugh so hard…
35 Feist, Jarvis Cocker – “Century”…I fought my feelings and got in the way/Could’ve been easier than a decade of days…
A vaguely PJ Harvey sound going on here but unmistakably Feist-style lyrics
36 Fruit Bats – “Flamingo”
“The last thing I’ll do before I call it quits/Is probably dream just a little bit/But nothing too hard on my sweet fadin’ mind ’cause everything is gonna be just fine”
50 The Modern Lovers – “Hospital”…I’ll seek out the places that must have been magic/To your little girl mind/Now as a little girl/You must have been magic…
“I still get jealous of your old boyfriends/In the suburbs sometimes/And when I walk down your street/Probably be tears in my eyes/I can’t stand what you do/Sometimes I can’t stand you/And it makes me think about me/That I’m involved with you/But I’m in love with this power that shows through in your eyes”
51 The Boomtown Rats – “Banana Republic”…Stab you in the back yeah laughin’ in your face/Glad to see the place again, it’s a pity nothing’s changed…
For Travis, for Angelika – the very few who can join me in loving the Rats
52 Juana Molina – “Cosoco” 53 Marvin Gaye – “It’s a Desperate Situation”
Got on a bit of a Marvin Gaye kick; this song fit the frame of mind (can’t shake the sense that certain urges are uncontrollable – the lyrics don’t really apply in the least!). For J
57 The Jones Girls – “You Gonna Make Me Love Somebody Else”
A reminder of the lovely visit from Travis and Billy and discussions on musical ‘guilty pleasures’
58 The Avalanches – “If I Was a Folkstar”
“And I’d like to see her every day/I know I can’t be gone every weekend/Let’s wake up side by side/Let’s sleep in till we die”. On the road visiting the PoPos (Portugal, Poland, not the police). For R
59 Sam Evian – “Sleep Easy”…chemicals and candy/don’t know what they do to me/but I know I got a song/to come home to…
60 Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians – “Raymond Chandler Evening”
Beloved Hitchcock. “There’s a body on the railing/that I can’t identify/and I’d like to reassure you but/I’m not that kind of guy”
61 The Radio Dept. – “Sloboda Narodu”…When out of patience/Is your constant state of mind…
65 Aztec Camera – “We Could Send Letters”…And now I’ve seen what you can’t understand /I’d try to lead you but I’d crush your hand…
Classic, brilliant song and more Glasgow-area/Scotland goodness. “So if we weaken, we can call it stress/You’ve got my trust, I’ve got your home address/And now the only chance that we could take/Is the chance that someone else won’t make it all come true”
66 Eleni Mandell – “Someone to Love Like You”…some people never stop trying…
68 Childbirth – “Siri, Open Tinder”
I marvel at this title that now makes perfect sense but would once have been nonsensical gibberish. And of course this comes from Seattle…
69 Nathan Fake – “The Sky was Pink”
The pink morning and evening skies on the homestead
70 Rivulets – “Ride On, Molina” …I feel a fever coming on…
J and those horribly feverish days
71 Dear Nora – “The Lonesome Border, Pt 1”
Border life, as usual. “And I know we’re gonna last a long time/But I can’t help but need to live from minute to minute/’Cause now it is said there’s a change/And I sense the change in me”
72 Emma Pollock – “Don’t Make Me Wait”…I’m just the one to mop it up/When someone overflows your cup/Sitting in the shadows till you blame me…
The anthem of this late part of spring… waiting for winter to end, even as we head into summer, always waiting for the next step, the next move. And of course – Glasgow Glasgow Glasgow ❤ “You’ll never ever make it on your own/what makes you think you’ll make it on your own?”
73 Gwenno – “Chwyldro”…Paid, paid anghofio fod dy galon yn y chwyldro…
Because who in her right might would not want to learn Welsh?
74 O – “Deepthroat Love”…But I fear you In an offhand way/Digging the back door/Slamming, my heart in a daze/And you like that/It’s a lot like God/But not close enough…
Mr L… “you got a lot goin’ on, don’t you babe? My deepthroat love…”
81 Marvin Gaye – “All My Life” 82 Robyn Hitchcock – “To Turn You On”
Love for J. “I would leave you as you were/If I wanted to/Then I wonder is it fair/Now you’re on your own/Who cares about you/Except me, God help me/When things go wrong/I’d do anything to turn you/Must phone me, you know me/When things go wrong/I’d do anything to turn you on”. Roxy Music cover
83 Pavo Pavo – “Ran Ran Run”…time is a hole in my waterbed/some kind of cardinal sin/tomorrow might be sleeping in…
86 Michael Kiwanuka – “Cold Little Heart”…I can’t stand myself…
“I’ve been losing you/one day at a time”. Wouldn’t have known the song were it not for the Big Little Lies miniseries, for which this was the theme – but both well worthwhile. Now I am well and truly terrified of Alexander Skarsgård
87 Charlie Hilton – “100 Million”
“I’m a fountain/you can throw yourself in me”
90 Cowboy Junkies – “You Will Be Loved Again”…Her cold eyes tell you that you’re not welcome/she tells lies, but you’ll take her back again…
“How can he take you in his arms, and help you to be free, then leave you forgotten?” “Someday you will feel a love so deep, and you’ll find someone not lost in sleep…”
Not entirely sure what to say because I have resorted to making these mixes with such frequency.
*Considering the ‘same airport, different man’ question – in how many different men and different (and same) airports have I experienced these greetings and departures? Meeting one in Copenhagen airport and later him greeting me at Paris CDG and later at Stockholm Arlanda? Or all the Oslo Oslo and more Oslo. Or arriving and departing Lyon. The endless hours in and out of Minneapolis-St Paul. And let’s not forget the old days of meeting-greeting-bidding adieu at Keflavik. Or the Sea-Tac of another life.
Tips and tricks of how these mixes are built: my favorite songs are usually at the beginning and the end – occasionally one I really like comes in the middle. There are always a few that are not good songs but are reminders of some moments in my life. This time is was a lot about sound – what sounds and transitions made the most sense to me and my ears? What appealed to me most as I walked through the hills or drove late at night through the city, lost in detours avoiding all the endless construction. Music carries you through most of all when you’re lost.
Many people have let me know they no longer have conventional CD players, so I am cutting back on mailing these by post. I also have the entire playlist freely available on Spotify if you want to see it (and you can follow me on Spotify to find all the lists, dating back to 2004). I have not yet found a better alternative where I can put all the lists and tracks that will make it easily accessible for everyone.
