Panicking & Processing
More Blogging
I have to give myself so many pep talks it’s crazy. Clearly I’m no good at the art form. What has been most relieving is imagining my current day-to-day as the storm before the calm, a time to be 22 and not know what medication your dosage should be and not have any money. But then I think- shouldn’t I be producing my best work during a period like that? And then I have to be like no that is the glorifying of pain and you just don’t want to be in it anymore. I used to think doing the work I dreamed of was an antidote to my despair, but now I cannot help feel like the work I dream of to be a source of it. Or rather not a source, but a pressure on myself- and knowledge of my lack- that amplifies it. But I have also been shifting my dreams, subtly. Trying to wither down ego into values. (But still I can only write about myself).
I am reading Sasha Frere-Jones’ memoir “Earlier.” I hadn’t even known it was coming out somehow, and then found it at the bookstore I want to work at, which gave me an excuse to follow up about why they haven’t hired me for the third time when buying it. I really like his writing, but I think what made me feel attached to him was a podcast he did with Derrick Gee. He said several things which resonated, one about the danger of thinking you really know anything, one about a Robert Christgau interaction where Christgau said he was just “getting the listens in” on an album to be sure how he actually felt about it, and one about Phoebe Bridgers being a great songwriter (something you can see if you don’t subscribe to twitter indie music identity politics). Anyways this is a really winded passage to share a singular ten-word sentence of the book which is: “Faith is not panicking, a friend of mine tells me.” And now because I cannot help myself, I’m sharing an excerpt of his description of seeing Elvis Costello and The Attractions when he was 13: “It is two hours of pure force and connection, bit to bit, hook to hook, idea to idea. This is rock as paste, something so rich you could put it in water and make five other bands from it.” That last sentence thrills me. I think Elvis Costello may have been my first concert, which is a strange thing to have no record of. I haven’t really listened to him since learning he is such a cop but I am now and it’s really fucking good. I wonder who I would have been at this age in 1977. Wanting to be friends with Ellen Willis, probably. When she died, I read somewhere that Sasha Frere-Jones said, “music was the accident that brought me to Ellen Willis.” What honor that line gives in such brevity.
It is now several days later and I have just gone to see music at Stone Circle Theatre: Niecy Blues and June McDoom. Ten feet in front of McDoom sitting cross-legged on the floor and it sounded like something coming from an old radio- vintage inflection with a glossy coating. She covered Judee Sill and Nina Simone. I was reading Safia Elhillo’s “Girls That Never Die” between acts and was stopped by: “because i want to contain my own solution/ i should want as well to dissolve.” A reminder I always need: the necessity of process.
