sated

I wrote about comfort food, and somehow I cannot escape the metaphors of appetite. I thought of it again today as I rifled through CDs hungry for a certain track, a certain album, a certain accoustic moment that spoke to my mood. Even if you're not a Luddite like me and you have left behind the delicious tactile moments of CDs, LPs, cassette tapes, there are still times that a song surfaces and you must search it out so it can help you feel what you're feeling. And so the search begins through closets, across desktops, through drawers and under papers, until I find what I needed for momentary transendence.

Just Kids

"Before Robert died, I promised him that I would one day write his story," Patti Smith writes in the acknowledgements for her beautiful memoir of her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. I've raved about Patti on her before, but now I want to rave briefly about this love letter to the late 1960's/early 1970's in the New York City art and music scene as a girl from New Jersey found her voice, her art, and her love. Patti comes to the Big Apple and finds her ballast in Robert, a boy who would become known for his provocative black and white photographs of gay men, but a boy with a sweetness and compassion unparalleled. This is a love story of a queer sort, about an artist and a muse and yet those categories ricochet back and forth as Patti tells of encounters with Allen Ginsberg (who was bought her a sandwich thinking her a beautiful boy), the inhabitants of Chelsea Hotel, of sitting with Janis Joplin, of talking to Jimi Hendrix outside a party, of uncovering an inner beauty. It's a story of intimacy that has the rhythm of a Patti Smith novel, that place between singing and poetry where we can all alight if given the chance. It's an elegy, it's a love song. When Patti makes her first album Horses (one of my all time favorites), Robert asks for a song he can dance to and Just Kids is a slow dance, a sad dance, a happy dance, a private dance, a house party at the Chelsea Hotel. It meanders at times, but never loses Patti's incomparable voice and her ability to find beauty in the moments.

comfort food

Bad days, stressed days, days when the person you need on the other end of the phone doesn't call, can't call, won't call, days when you want to go back to bed as soon as you woke up. Days when you have to work long into the night, long past what should be quitting time.

These are the days I turn to music like comfort food.

I don't believe in guilty pleasures because I don't think there's much people can enjoy that they should feel guilty about (obviously within parameters of consent, etc). And so I don't think that there's a need for this tiering of music - this need to have the division between your "serious" music tastes and your "guilty pleasures." I like the Jonas Brothers, Britney Spears, Madonna AND I like Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Marianne Faithfull, et al. I think there's a weird divide there, a weird way in which we privilege a type of authenticity, as if all music isn't created at a remove. This is not to say that certain musicians don't speak more personally to me, sound more real to me, make me feel the grit and the sweat and the tears, whereas Britney only ever makes me feel like I'm privvy to her most recent re-programming.

I do believe that certain music is comfort food. I wrote before about songs that make me want to cry and feel particular and unique and spiritual all at once. Comfort food can do all these things, but I associate music like comfort food with a sense of nostalgia, of knowing all the words and anticipating refrains and dancing in my chair and lifting my spirits. Comfort food makes me feel like something works in the midst of it all and the delightful about music is that it can linger there in the background while I crank out the nth paper of the week or get all angsty about my social mistakes.

Which is why earlier this week, in the midst of a downward spiral, I made a pineapple upside down cake and listened to all of my Vanessa Carlton albums. That's right, Vanessa "A Thousand Miles" Carlton. When called upon, Vanessa is my comfort food because she hits all the right notes of adolescent pathos, schoolgirl journaling and heartfelt pianos. And she can be clever - on "Come Undone" she's a "sycophantic courtier with an elegent repose." On "Who's To Say" she speaks to the feeling we all have of never being old enough to emotionally negotiate life. She's slinky and hoonky on "Private Radio" and I love "Hands On Me" because both the song and video perfectly encapsulate the human condition of skin hunger, that innate need to be touched. How couldn't these songs be the perfect salve on a rough day?

P.S. I promise I will actually write about a song one of these days. Just not today.

crying (or not) because of music

I was lying on the floor listening to Brandi Carlile sing and it made me want to cry. I don't cry, not in the cold unfeeling way of sociopaths and dictators, but in a blockage borne of a freighted adolesence, but that's neither here nor there. The there there, for lack of a better turn of phrase, is the there of the way that music moves me. And maybe you too. There's something about certain songs that make me want to cry, not the cathartic cry of frustrated days spent toiling away at impossble tasks, but rather the cries that bind us together as fellow travelers. In the liner notes for her skillfull covers project Cover Girl Shawn Colvin talks about the moments of transendence achieved by certain songs, moments when it feels as if we are watching our lives from above our bodies, seeing the world from the sky, a moment that reminds me of Faith Ringgold's quilt (and children's book) of a girl flying above the city. I feel both deep within my skies and miles away, closer to everyone around me and yet wonderfully isolated in a moment of myself and the aural. And I want to cry. I'm an academic, so I turn to words like affect to describe this moment, a word that describes (as I understand it, which is slippery at best) a shared emotion. But affect fails me here, because I want so badly to share these moments, I make a million mix cds for my friends, poring over old CDs, old playlists, re-listening to songs and considering sequencing and mood and theme. And I turn over a cd with a markered tracklist and I hope for an understanding. I jokingly say, if you don't like it, it will make a good coaster. But I am joking. I want affirmation of my private moment, I want feedback, I want to know that, as I suspected, I am not alone.

And yet.

I hear that certain lines, certain guitar riffs, certain pauses, certain phrases caught up with them in the place between waking and sleeping, or visited them as they walked about their lives.

Or I don't.

We can never have that moment together. We can see the same concerts, hear the same songs, but we can never feel the same things. I can try, and I want to try and get them up to my Tar Beach but I remain isolated, you remain isolated, and instead we mouth the words across the room, dance at the right moments, laugh at our foolishness, thrill to our favorite tracks, replay our favorite songs. Can we really share that affective moment?

I wonder if I really want to give up my aloneness. If I really want to stop lying in the dark or the light listening to Brandi, (or Adele, or Norah, or Kid Cudi, or Tori, or Annie, or k. d. , or Joni, or Maria, or Antony, or Patti, or Mary J) all by lonesome. I wonder what I'd lose if I ever knew you were really here with me, sharing the same feelings, feeling the strains of longing, regret, love, anguish, contempt, caring, in the same way.

Maybe I'd rather try and cry alone.

Patti Smith - When Doves Cry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VfUZFPAC5k

Patti Smith is the grandmother of punk, of ladies in rock, of alt rock, of anyone who makes a concept album out of their personal poetry and open wounds. I love her 1975 debut album, Horses, which is equal parts pain, spoken word, and the craziest cover of "Land of a Thousand Dances." For her 2007 album, Twelve, Patti basically deconstructs everyone from Paul Simon to the Beatles.

Before that, in 2002, she covered Prince's theatrical bombastic hit "When Doves Cry." I love this cover for its calculated yearning, its understated pathos. Patti starts out disinterested, the backing music circular and lowkey, like a downbeat version of Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It." But as the song progresses, Patti's voice breaks, falls, raises, cries out like a wraith bent upon sharing its pain with the world. Patti is not the best singer, rather, her talent is that of the Everywoman, of the person standing on the other side of your screen door sharing her world. But with more art, more depth of experience than you've ever heard. This song simmers and boils and burns your hands - she turns Prince's song inside out, leaving behind the sweeping churches of his song for a dark club where you can't see her, but you can hear a voice that speaks from the shadows.