July 15 - Oh Land, "Renaissance Girls"

the first in the next theme which is "shit someone showed me/I found on the internet". this one wins many points for the amazing film clip, which is quite a bit about the dancing, a little about the hair and a bit about the clothing.

Oh Land is Nanna Øland Fabricius, a girl from Denmark with an amazing name. There's something catchy about this tune that I'm not quite ready to be bored with yet.

secret: the soundtrack of your life, part one

There are some songs that find me forever 17.

When I was 17 I was a beautiful mix of music, poetry, angst and idealism. I spent much of my time just being hard out in love with people who hard out did not love me back.

I was cocooned in the safety of parent's money and food on the table 3 times a day, clean sheets and clean clothes and care, lights on when I got home. I drew things and made things, sang things and wrote things and holy fuck, my little heart was so open, so joyous and so vulnerable. 

How ferociously I loved. How vigorously I scribbled and cut and pasted, how carefully I coded my poetry to hide the love it was bursting with. I marvel at my 17 year old self and her sheer bloodymindedness at being constantly rejected and loved and never really being aware.

I'm all too aware now. A heart can only stay open to all the horrors of the world for so long before it hardens over, just a little. I'd tell my 17 year old self to tell everyone how she felt, even though my 28 year old self finds that damn near impossible. 

I listen to '1979' by the Pumpkins and am putting the finishing touches to an end of school mixtape. Dragging my fingertips through the air with my arms out the window of someone's car adorned with freshly minted P plates (how did our parents ever trust us enough to let us go?). Embarking on my first real relationship with my first real boyfriend, not knowing what a struggle I'd put myself in for, just heady in love with somebody beautiful to deigned to love me back. That was enough, and I didn't know any better.

I listen to 'Nothingman' by Pearl Jam and I'm right back into the torn up pinstripe flares dragged on underneath my school uniform in a faux show of rebellion. Why don't I have any photos of this? We were punk in the way Smirnoff Ice is alcoholic, we were alternative in a mode of carefully constructed layers of tie-dye and nose piercings. I'm happy I've kept my nose pierced, a relic of my 16 year old self in one of her few moments of rebelling against parents who gave her every little thing she wanted except maybe being able to attend more parties.

When I was 17 I felt so damned invisible. I felt angry that a part of me wanted to get the best marks in the class, and another part of me wanted to burn the world down. How do you reconcile the two of those? How do you figure out who to be? I wanted to hurt people to be sure they cared, but I also wanted everyone to love me for always, to know all the secrets and be someone's everything. 

I'd never have picked all the things that would happen to me, all the loves I'd have had and all the times my heart would have broken by the time I was 28. 

And perhaps I hold it a little less loftily high than I used to, but love is still all I think about, one way or another. 

"Shakedown 1979, cool kids never have the time

On a live wire right up off the street

You and I should meet

Junebug skipping like a stone

With the headlights pointed at the dawn

We were sure we'd never see an end to it all

And I don't even care to shake these zipper blues

And we don't know

Just where our bones will rest

To dust I guess

Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below

Double cross the vacant and the bored

They're not sure just what we have in store

Morphine city slipping dues down to see

That we don't even care as restless as we are

We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts

And poured cement, lamented and assured

To the lights and towns below

Faster than the speed of sound

Faster than we thought we'd go, beneath the sound of hope

Justine never knew the rules,

Hung down with the freaks and the ghouls

No apologies ever need be made, I know you better than you fake it

To see that we don't even care to shake these zipper blues

And we don't know just where our bones will rest

To dust I guess

Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below

The street heats the urgency of now

As you see there's no one around."

1979, Smashing Pumpkins

treasure: Margaret Atwood

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.” 
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

secrets: rainy days

Single friends: Is it just me, or do rainy days make you wish you had someone to stay in bed with all day for sex and movies?

Actually, for me right now in the middle of my musical renaissance, it would be sex and songwriting. Or songwriting and sex.

A girl can dream.