Splendour in Silver Dress :: Velocity in May Music Mix
Teardrop (Mad Professor Mazaruni Mix) :: Massive Attack Come Clean :: Eisley Mansions of Los Feliz :: Eels
Colours :: Editors Velocity Girl :: Primal Scream It's Up To You :: Shop Assistants Dearest :: Buddy Holly Domestic Scene :: The Radio Dept. Metal Heart :: Cat Power Wanted :: Abbie Gale Only You :: Alison Moyet
A&E :: Goldfrapp
Shells :: Mirah Zak & Sara :: Ben Folds You Make Me Feel Good :: Yo La Tengo Congratulations :: Mgmt Wild World :: Mike Bailey (from Skins) Rise Above :: Dirty Projectors
All My Stars Aligned :: St. Vincent Lavender Cowgirl :: Thea Gilmore
This song has such personal history and memories attached to it, for me, and no matter when I happen upon it, and no matter where I may be, I have to pause to listen, and remember.
Some of the recollections are candy-coated postcards full of wish you were here sentimentalities, and lipstick traces left on cool skin. There are phonebooths and train stops, half-drunk promises of things like love and forever, and an image of a girl and boy playing at being something together.
I close my eyes and listen, and between the verses I see that coat I found right before my second trip, the one that reminded us of Penny Lane, the one that helped to inspire all those scrawled notes about really falling in love with a band (and all those half-schemed dreams to follow the music down highways, and anywhere towns - to run away, together).
I lost it at the airport, that coat. I walked a way for a moment, turned my head, and it was gone (in a way, that same day, so were we).
Then there are the darker alleyway shadows, stray-cat scratches and tear-stained cheek kind of moments this song brings to mind. Mistakes realized nearly too late, clinic waiting rooms, losses and plane tickets, and goodbyes that should have precluded any hellos.
All of it, and none of it, and whatever falls in-between - somehow that city played its part in it all. And, locked in some harmonic memory, this song about that city.
Certain songs they stay with us forever. They affix themselves onto our hearts, swim sideways through our veins, and become part of the make-up of who we think ourselves to be. We collect soundtracks all our own, re-writing the order as we go, and the meaning. And sometimes we forget things, some pages of our stories blur and fade, but often - at least for me - a song can bring it all back. Certain songs last longer than lovers, than apartment leases, than dreams...
this will forever be one of those songs.
"Chicago is a city of contradictions, of private visions haphazardly overlaid and linked together. If the city was unhappy with itself yesterday-and invariably it was-it will reinvent itself today."
Keep Art Alive :: The 10 Questions Project :: Nina Friday
1. What music (or other art form) inspires you when you create your art?
I have quite a collection of music, but most inspirational is my classical selection of Mozart, Vivaldi, etc, as well as my good old Russian 80's underground music, KINO, NOL' , etc
2. Long-distance road trip: What three people do you invite along (Fictional or non-fictional, dead or alive)?
Hmm, well, for sure my dear Rick Ruiners, my dear friend Claudia Leo and Hawkeye Pierce :)
3. What is your favorite breakfast cereal?
I'm always on a run , so I take my breakfast in a snack bar form.
4. What is one thing that is currently hanging on your bedroom wall?
A vintage clock that doesn't work. :)
5. What smell/scent evokes strong memories for you?
Spring air filled with blooming lilac.
6. Coffee or tea?
Morning - coffee, night -tea. :)
7. What has been the most impacting compliment, or criticism, you have ever received?
It usually comes from my biggest fan -Rick, if something is not working -he tells just how it is, first I get mad , then I am grateful I listened, that guy has never gave me bad advice on anything.
8. Three words that best describe you?
Fun, trusting, determined.
9. Cartoon character crush: Who was, or is, yours?
Not so much an animated cartoon, but a comic book character -SANDMAN. :)
10. The world is ending in ten minutes, and you get to listen to one - and only one - song: Which song do you choose?
I don't think I would care at that point, lol.
***
Find out more about Nina at her website: Facebook and Myspace.
"I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlor, drinking milkshakes, cold and long, smiling and waving and looking so fine, don't think you knew you were in this song."
Mortality is a slippery truth, translucent most of the time, and chameleon-like. We feel it so rarely, the honest and real feeling of our mortal selves. On the surface we say we know it doesn't last forever, that nothing ever does, and that our days - each stacking on the other - are numbered; but do we really believe it? We live our lives as if we have all the time in the world, as if we'll have time (eventually) to live our dreams, to tell the ones we love that we love them, to take that trip, grab hold of that love in our life, quit that job that makes us miserable, take that risk, say what we really feel.
What if we woke up tomorrow and the news said we had five years, no more, no less. What would we do differently? Would it sadden us, our grief holding us hostage within ourselves, making us unable to move? Would it motivate us, making us race and run to do those things we've put off so much? Would it make us reckless, jumping off bridges and pulling strangers round an alleyway, kissing and screaming and dancing in the street? Or would we continue to be us, in our lives, and just embrace it more, appreciate it more? Would we leave behind a story, with all our favorite characters (even the ones who don't realize their significance to us) typed and painted and coloured in brilliantly? Would we do something big enough to leave a mark behind?
Why not live like that today?
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.”
"Thunder only happens when it's raining, players only love you when they're playing. They say, women, they will come and they will go, when the rain washes you clean, you'll know, you will know."
Memory, and the feelings and consequences of remembering, seem to be a pervading theme right now, to me. The music I have found myself drawn to over the span of a week's worth of days seems to be veering in the direction of memory, lessons learned, and I suppose an over-arching subtext of learning to let go. Music is my muse, I've said it time and again, and perhaps it is that strange hand of musical, and lyrical, fate guiding me into issues I need to explore. Or, it could be me that is reaching out, and leaning towards the sounds and subject (whether on the surface, or tucked deep into my own interpretations of a song) of the very things I'm sifting and sorting through myself. Is it fate, or is it free will? I tend to be somewhere stuck in the middle, a believer in a little bit of both.
But, I digress, that pervading theme I mentioned, it is memory, isn't it? And perhaps the illusion of memory, the perception we gift everything, and the tint of the glasses we see what's happened with. Its like that game played in Summer camp, or grade school rainy days, where an event, or a picture, is recalled by a group - or a message is re-told, like in the game of telephone - everyone's impression, and memory, is a little bit different. That doesn't change much as we grow older. In some ways I think it becomes more pronounced, the differences in our recollections, and the colored lenses of our see and interpret the world glasses. We have our own pasts to come in and interfere, our life stuck issues that tilt the image, and our fears and insecurities that can turn the picture upside down, and inside out.
Is it the past, those early rejections that may have happened in our own homes, within our families, or maybe on the playgrounds and halls of school, that instill in us a more jaded perception? Can you recall the first time you were rejected? Does it still live somewhere in the tangled web of your memories? If you asked the person who rejected you would they see the moment as the same? Did one win the game, and the other get thrown into the storm? Did one carry with them a knapsack of blame that it must have been something I've done? Or, did it become an expectation, that we are all temporary, and just part of a game? Or, did both people, in some ways, get hurt in it?
How do we wash clean the marks of early rejection? Is that memory, the memory of pain, able to be washed away at all? Is the wash away the perception that everyone plays the game, that we are only loved within its constructs and constraints, and then tossed away - or maybe we run for the door ourselves - when the game is over? Or do we remember it differently, somehow? Do we recall the way we tried to hide the rules, cheat the game, change the player into something else entirely, and hideaway from the inevitable rains?
I don't know how I remember any of it exactly, the rejections, the endings, the ends of each game. I tihnk the way I recall those times, those endings, become painted by how I feel the day I look back. Sometimes I'm more fragile, breakable at a mere sideways glance, and internal bruises reach for the light of recognition and all I can remember is being thrown away. Other days, when I'm more myself (although self, like memory, is ever-changing, and colored by perception, too) - stronger, more sure of my place in this world, I remember being the one to walk away, or at least a mutual "it just isn't working, but you were wonderful" kind of goodbye. It never is that clean, though, and it never is that cruel - it is always somewhere in-between - like that space between fate and free will.
In the stillness of remembering, how do you remember?
"The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware.”
