harmonicait

[harmonicait]

An essay I’ve been working on and off for the past two months that I need to get rid of to finally move on from all of this.

Early last fall, I began taking a meditation class focusing on our chakras. Four years ago, Marion, my therapist, suggested I meditate to relieve the anxiety of my work day. She said I needed to let go. She said my mind was deceitful, manifesting in thought patterns that spiraled and spiraled into days.

Letting go is vital. Your present deserves you entirely. Your future too. But in the midst of the past, reality disintegrates. The present and future gripped me; reality was furious. I could not waffle in the recesses of the past. The here was too strong.

But the chance to meditate came back this year and I took it, intent on living with purpose. If I can give you advice it would be this: live with the intention of yourself. If you cannot, you will not.

Our class took place in the music room at Soho House. Each meditation aligned with a different focus chakra. And the room was full of people who had jobs I didn’t understand. It took them more than a sentence to describe their work, which made me think their work didn’t exist at all. I never felt comfortable calling myself a writer until I made money doing it. I don’t think they felt similarly about anything in their life. I crave that brazenness.

Other students leaned in to the meditations too, sitting on the floor and crossing their legs. They’d change into more comfortable clothes even though this wasn’t required and they’d make public intentions of what they wanted to accomplish and how they would accomplish it.

At the end of our sessions, we would discuss what we saw. What we saw? All I saw was blankness, maybe colors if I tried hard enough. Maybe white from the glare of the lights. Maybe purple because that is my favorite color. I could feel myself in other places, usually the desert (my idea of tranquility), but I couldn’t see a thing, only the memory of myself in that place. Most often I thought about the days ahead.

“As thoughts come to you, acknowledge them and let them go,” our instructor used to say. The longer I took the class, the less thoughts came to me, but they never truly went away. I thought about my work and my frustrations and my anger. I thought about my future and whether or not it would be as I wanted for myself at 16, at even 26. I thought about my family, my friends, my desire for completeness always and the lack that pulls at my everyday. I did not think of love. I did not think of him. I did not think of us.

But other people saw childlike versions of themselves taking them on long road trips through galaxies unlike our own. They saw colors that don’t exist. They had conversations with people they know and didn’t know, long ones, in-depth ones that covered everything from their early morning minutia to friend trouble to politics. They saw recreations of traumatic incidents from childhood played out with strangers. They floated above. They were witness to their own history. They went on a trip. I went nowhere.

One week in class, we circled back to the manipura (a secondary chakra located at the solar plexus). I couldn’t make it work. Instead, I felt a lump so thick in my throat, I could not breathe. It felt both real and like a closing.

Two years ago when I struggled like this, I felt it too: literally allergic but also spiritually crippled. My throat would close up every night after dinner with my ex-boyfriend. First the throat would swell shut, then my lips, then my eyes and nose until I was completely incapacitated. But most times, I could stop the swelling before it grew out of control. I ended that relationship, and yet I still needed three more months to understand what was happening. I kept that closing, that lump, that metaphorical hump I could not overcome.

I asked our instructor about it at the end of our meditation session and she told me this: that I am blocking my truth; that I have lost a part of myself; that I am not doing what I’ve always done to consider my problems (writing); that to deny reality is to let these things build in mental blockage and later, now, the physical too.

“I want you to go home and do nothing and go to sleep,” she said.

“I have insomnia,” I said.

“I want you to go home and do nothing and go to sleep,” she repeated. “And the next morning, I want you to wake up and write down everything that comes to you. I want you to do it until you can’t write anymore. I want you to not think about everything else and instead focus on what you’re forgetting. I need you to start,” she said.

A SECRET:

I feel so betrayed by my body. I hate it. Or not hate it, but I’m wrestling with what it all means. I can recognize that my depression manifests in my limbs more than in my mind. I can’t sleep. At night I ponder nothing, knowing quietly in the parts of my heart that are difficult to muster that this is happening because I can’t face myself. When you are unable to face yourself, you become unable to face the other normal parts of the self: sleep is out of reach. The work day is a new obstacle. My insomnia is a chance to face myself, but I can’t.

I give my love to myself, to my body, only at night. Alone, I am able to cradle my arms, feel the heft of my thighs as they rest one on top of the other. My hips dip deep into my bed, indenting slowly the deeply packed foam. Every couple of months, I move the mattress around, making sure the permanence of my weight is balanced. At night, I curl into myself, become small, almost child-like as my limbs come not to a place of rest, but to their only true home.

This time is precious even if it is not rare. I am thinking about those nights when I can’t sleep, when the insomnia grips me. It’s during the weeks before my flow, the moments when my body fails me with regularity. It’s when I cry, but it is a cry that takes me by surprise, at least until it doesn’t.

That insomnia, it’s when the day has been too long and not just long enough. A long day is inevitable. A long day stays long, stays going. It doesn’t give up. It keeps its bearings until the night breaks and then, it goes further. The insomnia plays with my limbs, turns them into heavy anchors to my mind. I feel them more in this space than anywhere else and I hate them for it.

It is not like the daytime as I wrangle for control of myself. No, it is something else entirely.

But that night I slept. It wasn’t long or thorough, but my eyes were closed and I was somewhere else. And when I woke, I wrote this:

Written on my body is the truth I was afraid to own of myself. I never knew I wanted a child of my own until the one I had was gone. Marion said that I am in a state of mourning not yet manifest. Shock. In medical terms, this means a sudden drop of blood flow through the body. Oxygen and nutrients can’t get to vital organs. Quickly, nothing works as it should.

In my life, it was the end of life and the end of the intangible thing that created that life (our relationship) and the end of the possibility of what would come after that life (stability). Faced with a difficult choice, I had none in the end.

He broke up with me, a shell of myself, as life bled out of me, literally. I knew it immediately. Reality manifests in my limbs. My body closes chapters in lost breaths and tears and stomach pains. The end of things is the end of good health. My body is swelling, is dripping, is moving.

I looked down. “So this is it?”

A month or so before, we sat together in his bed on my birthday after a large meal and he said, “All of your friends are very good looking.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean they’re all beautiful and all of the men dress well. I felt strange.”

There would be other little things like that afterward. Like when I got sick and he said I was stupid, reckless for not taking care of myself.

“It’s because you dress like that,” he told me. He meant with my breasts out, my legs bare, my skin breathing.

Or like when he got sick, and he wanted me to take care of him, to tuck him in, to still make love as if nothing had changed.

“I just don’t think you’re a good person,” he said.

Or like when we drove to the far South Side to stand atop the ruins of South Works, a former U.S. Steel factory and he said, “This is a ridiculous trip,” but then later said, “I’m so glad I drove us out here,” and then later said, “You just don’t appreciate what I’ve done for you. No one will do this for you.”

Misogyny is not the hatred of women. No, I think in reality it is the fear of women. We don’t fear the things we hate; we hate the things we fear.

The things I hate are plentiful, multiply and mutate over time, adapt to the machinations of my current mind. But I don’t fear them. They don’t grip me, immobilize my body, make me mute. Instead, they inspire a fire that burns constant, bubbling under the surface and intoxicating those who find home above its unstable ground. The things I hate are just there, existing in contrast to the things and people and places I love.  

Misogyny is not just the hatred of women. It is the fear of what we can become and what we can do and how we think it is all of those things.

I wrote and wrote until my hands cramped, my wrists throbbed, my fingers drummed invisible piano keys. I wrote and then, for the first time, I really got out of bed and stretched my limbs. It was a long high stretch, the kind I perfected as a young dancer. The kind that alluded me as neck cramps from insomnia kept me immobile.

At meditation the following week, we controlled our breathing and we imagined colors and then we were someplace else. I was some place else. Finally that desert I felt but could not articulate was real. And across my line of site I could see the burnt red mountains that felt foreign to me at first glance. I felt like I could touch them in the way that vast things from a distance feel like they could rest in the palm of your hand. And down below I saw the dirt of the desert, the sand, the whatever, that covered my lungs but still I breathed cleaner and easier than anywhere else in the world for me. And up above the sky was dark, only littered with stars for as far as the eye could see. I wanted to count them. Finally, it seemed, I thought I could keep going.

[harmonicait]

looking for collaborators, flâneurs writers

One thing I’ve been working on by myself for quite some time is what I call “the Google Earth Project” and it’s basically screencapping all the places I have lived and writing a memoir/fiction/whatever piece inspired by the picture of my apartment, gated community, house - back to apartment. And I’m an obsessively curious person (a repressed stalker) so I kinda want to know about other people’s places. My friend Imani wrote a booklet (I don’t think it’s online) about strolling in her city and it is the type of things I am researching. I’m obsessed with the movie My Own Private Idaho. I’m just interested in how you occupied/still occupy your place (s), your environment (s). How do you remember them? It doesn’t have to be a huge piece, it can be memoir, it can be fictionalized. I’d like to say that there is not deep reason behind this project but there is, ever since I start reading this one Caribbean writer I’m not going to name because you guys are probably tired by now (EDOUARD GLISSANT) and the way he asks people to claim their environment, like their direct environment, their landscapes, their streets, neighborhoods instead of pathologically dreaming of an elsewhere. I’ve been doing it and realizing that I am so alienated and estranged from the places I have lived while still being full (too full) of memories of those places. Also, living in France, as the child of immigrants I am always told that I do not own anything in this country and black/brown people are always reduced to a single space (suburbs/housing projects) when I know, from personal experience and simple observations, that we live everywhere and we own places in this country just by existing and living in it. So I’m interested in this “everywhere”, how it looks and the stories that it produced/can produce, how we own it.

I do not want to intellectualize this too much, it’s simple just write about the places (streets, lane, roads, intersections, towns, houses, cities etc.) that made you, how you see them, also show them to me! I just feel like it could a cool and fun collaborative, collective thing.

ok so if any of you want to collaborate with me on that project then hmu please [email protected]

Please share?  😁

[harmonicait]

stunning review of carly rae jepsen’s music & a skewering of others’ empty reviews of her personality

carly rae jepsen’s emotion, in facts and theories

Fact: Criticland is a bubble, and often a suffocating one. To the general public, Carly Rae Jepsen is synonymous with “Call Me Maybe,” which is synonymous with flimsy pop, which is associated with Justin Bieber, who to the general public may as well be a walking Ed Hardy hat. To the music industry, she is a C-list rising pop artist with a whiff of Radio Disney, less Ariana Grande than Miranda Cosgrove.

And thus she’s been shackled to meme after meme, like all rising pop artists. “Take a Picture” was a Coca-Cola ad with crowdsourced lyrics. Emotion was promoted with an unholy Tinder/Instagram mashup, which was soon buried, presumably because everyone but its architects found it ridiculous. “I Really Like You” underperformed at radio, based in part on listener feedback, and its Tom Hanks Dramatic Hanksing video failed to meme even more embarrassingly than “Bitch I’m Madonna.” “Run Away With Me” is not performing substantially better. Scooter Braun – whose starmaking batting average is only about 50-50 – has all but admitted defeat; he told The New York Times they planned to “stop worrying about singles,” which for an artist coming off a No. 1 hit is the equivalent of “spending time with my family” or “creative differences.”

Plea: I am a copy editor and I will fight this fight alone (because copy editors are used to being alone, AMIRITE): The album title is Emotion without the syllable marks just as will.i.am’s album title was Willpower without the hashtag and the Andy Grammer single is “Honey, I’m Good” without the period. You can be a fan of an artist without breaking out the Unicode. It’s a perfect conceit, really: Carly Rae Jepsen, literally the dictionary definition of emotion! But it’s a cover-art conceit.

Fact: Emotion is Jepsen’s alt-pop cred. It’s a viable strategy, as Haim and Alessia Cara can attest. But it’s also a tough juggling act – and for an artist who’s in her late twenties yet seen as a teenybopper to most of the world, it’s the equivalent of tossing ten more balls at someone who’s already juggling.

And so while Emotion is much more cohesive as a creative statement than Kiss – no Bieber, no Owl City, in fact no features at all, which to the industry is probably a downgrade but to everyone else is an obvious plus – it still ends up as the sort of album where a track whose first line is “I remember being naked” co-exists with a slow jam designed for nothing past slow dancing, whose closest thing to a come-on is “I will be your friend.”

Fact: Assuming critics in 2030 aren’t all broke in a ditch somewhere, they’ll remember this decade as a groundswell of great pop production, right up there with Timbaland and David Frank. Emotion is a joy to listen to on a pure sonic level. “Warm Blood” is like a Magic School Bus ride through the bloodstream – here be art-pop arteries, there be throbbing hearts, those right there are the red wub cells. “Making the Most of the Night” begins moody – maybe I was primed by Julianne Escobedo Shepard but on the verses I swear I heard “Gravity of Love,” which if true would make Jepsen only the second person to remember this bit of the ‘90s. But then Jepsen talks about hijacking you, and everything goes rickety, like she’s literally hijacked the track and is re-enacting Speed through sheer force of crush.

Statement: Carly Rae Jepsen supposedly lacks personality. She wouldn’t be the only one accused of it. But for every Jessie J or Leona Lewis who struggles to shed the accusation, there’s a Katy Perry or Kim Kardashian who doesn’t need to. Like a lot of supposedly objective pop music writing, it’s self-reinforcing criticism; what happens is money is sluiced through pop stars’ careers, or not, and to the victors go the “personalities.”

Fact: But Carly Rae Jepsen does in fact have a creative presence.

Evidence: She wrote most of the toplines on Emotion, and as a lyricist she loves the sudden swerve into the grotesque or criminal: “be tormented by me, babe”; “who gave you eyes like that, said you could keep them”; not since Kesha have we had such a good pop game Shirley Jackson.

Evidence: Between “Boy Problems” and that, Carly Rae Jepsen may be the one singer on the planet who can sing a Sia-penned song and not sound exactly like Sia.

Evidence: “Your Type” is pretty transparently an attempt to fuse the Taylor Swift of “Style” to the Taylor Swift of “You Belong With Me.” Without Jepsen it wouldn’t work, the synths Morodering their way dully through a tinny track. But Jepsen is tremor and quaver and flutter and apology: “I love you – I’m sorry – I’m sorry – I love you.”

Fact: The proper response to this is “you’re sorry you love me?” I know this because I literally said it, and heard that, last Saturday.

Theory: The awkward female pop star is not a personality pop in 2015 can parse. Women are expected either to be den mother, empress, cyborg, and Courage Wolf in one; or self-loathing romantic who’s one drug away from sensuous, fetching collapse. Every pop star is either retrofitted to one of these models or discarded. Take Taylor Swift, once the closest we had to awkward, now forfeited that label upon moving to New York and taking up supermodels and gentrification. And is it any wonder? Women are told to scour their speech for every stray “sorry” or “I feel like” or “just,” to spend an amount of energy on regulating their speaking voice previously reserved for opera singers, all in the name of displaying mandatory hyperconfidence.

Fact: Pop in 2015, despite what anyone including me tells you, is not synonymous with the fans. Because the fans can parse this; of course they can. Britney was beloved for her dorkiness. Ariana Grande is a far more appealing personality when she’s spouting off about demons and donuts than when she’s a living David LaChappelle photoshoot. The No. 7 song in America, which I have heard approximately zero people discuss critically, is “Fight Song,” which is like “Roar” if sung by someone who has perhaps actually experienced self-doubt.

Theory: Women experiencing self-doubt are invisible. Women writing about their feelings are devalued. This theory is all but ascended to fact.

Fact: Carly Rae Jepsen albums have many uses: soundtracking bad decisions, flirting with people you really shouldn’t be flirting with, rummaging for mantras. The best lyric on this album is “I have a cavern of secrets; none of them are for you.”

[harmonicait]

my whole last relationship 😊😊😊

One important thing to remember in life: Do not coddle men. Do not do their work for them. Do not perform uncredited labor for them, including intellectual labor. Do not bend over backwards to help them. Do not tell them they are good at things they are bad at. Do not smile at them when you don’t want to. Do not laugh at their terrible jokes or stroke their egos or let them think they are better than you when odds are good that they are almost definitely not. Do not even deal with men whose presence bothers you when you can get away from them/when you aren’t regularly forced to be near them for things like work. Do not include men in your life who don’t deserve to be in it any time that you can avoid it at all.

[harmonicait]

[harmonicait]

pansies

the smudges beneath her eyes bloomed pressed pansies between pages of an old book dead flowers, inked on no soil, no disintegration no. her eyes kept slightest color beneath indicating this passage, time she remained between pages stolen stem caught paper white not in the story, but of-- braving the weight pressed.

[harmonicait]

SRO Speakeasy Pizzeria 6/15/15

Today is pay day which means I was already in a good mood. Of course, I also got to spend the whole day looking forward to a complimentary pizza dinner, so even the muggy grey weather couldn’t totally kill my spirit. I realized I had never invited Christina to come to an event with me, so I asked if she and Rob wanted to come. Dre was coming too. We got to SRO (Single Room Occupancy, named for the small 24 seat space I’m guessing) around 6:45 and got to sit down right away. It is really whimsical that this place is a “speakeasy”–AKA you have to walk through Gia Trattoria to get there. As in, you have to know it’s there. I love secrets and restaurants-within-restaurants and back rooms and hidden doors so I’m into this. However, it probably makes it hard and confusing for tourists or first-timers. Luckily for us, Flora was at the door so that made it easy to tell. After we walked in I snagged a glass of Pinot Gris but it was pretty sweet, so later I switched to the Chardonnay. Almost immediately some pizza came!

Keep reading

[harmonicait]

[harmonicait]

Church Street Tavern 6/10/15

I hadn’t been to Church Street Tavern before this event, but I’d certainly heard of it. It’s in Tribeca, and consequently, next to the La Colombe coffee shop I used to go to when I was a daydreamy intern at SPIN Magazine (2012 edition). Even then, I was too afraid to own my desire to be a writer, and interned in their Marketing department. But it was by denying myself the Editorial track that I realized how much I really wanted it, and I remember getting off the subway stop at Canal in the morning and hurrying to the old office on Broadway, repeating to myself over and over that I would be a music writer. One day, I would. That was a funny little memory to come upon as I walked into the event on Wednesday, even if it’s peripheral to the food.

Keep reading

[harmonicait]

the day i saw the poet

i saw the poet and, the poet saw me i was still listening though the poem was over tears escaping my chin  almond corner lashes-- he saw the quiver in my face sine wave salt visible ‘can you sign it?’ i asked and though that’s all he did, he heard what i meant which means he saw me, too

[harmonicait]

do you want snide with that?

look, i’ll be the first one to admit it: i fucking hate criticism. it’s hard! it’s hard to see your flaws or mistakes laid bare, your tones open to misinterpretation or utter misreading, your carefully constructed arguments dismantled. it’s hard to accept that other people flat-out disagree with you even on matters that you determine to be air-tight. it’s even harder to see people you like and respect disagreeing with you, people you want to impress. or, it’s hard to be the disagreer. to know that if you say something you might offend someone you like and respect. it’s hard to acknowledge that twitter has become a cesspool of people who seem to be actively searching through a site’s backpages and archives to find a hidden jackpot of sexism, a racist aside, a class-distinction carelessly slung. let’s be clear: there’s a difference between opinions and critiques and a barrage of snide, relentless hatred toward one outlet. but whether or not the criticism is current, old, gender-related or just trifling, it’s still important. i argue for it. i argue for it to exist. because criticism is what keeps this cycle a dialogue.

criticism is what keeps us in check, what makes us rethink things, what challenges our presuppositions. criticism is supposed to be what many of us do! the building of an argument or the dismantling of a claim. the voicing of our opinion. but we have created an environment where this is no longer possible. twitter allows a space where writers and readers, professionals and newbies can hash out their thoughts and feelings about all manners of articles, blogposts, speeches, essays etc. etc. it’s glorious! it’s unprecedented. it’s interesting. but it’s not dangerous! it’s the lack of it that strikes me as dangerous now. some feelings may be hurt, some disagreements may be had, some people may regret their past Bad opinions, but this kind of dialogue is the core of what made digital publishing a space i wanted to be a part of. twitter meant ye olde letter to the editor prestige was suddenly available to everyone in a great democratization of opinion. it felt like a fascinating, living and lurid process, to watch people react, share and argue about articles online. i would notice my own opinion changing as i read through these conversations.

this is why i used to love twitter, too. it fostered dialogue and i could watch those exchanges unfold in real time, or catch up with them later if i wanted to. people who i wasn’t even aware knew each other would show up and spar, trading phrases and hashing things out. what’s more, it was a good self-correcting tool. you’ll remember grantland’s atrocious article about a transgender golfer who committed suicide -- without twitter i doubt anyone on staff at that publication would have any knowledge about that piece’s issues. but imagine, if instead of listening to the flurry of complaints that article caused, the editor of the piece simply unfollowed anyone in his feed who disagreed. silenced them. refused to listen. turned off the process. 

there are words for an environment in which speaking your opinion results in punishment: abusive and toxic are the ones that spring to mind first. perhaps those spring to mind because i was raised in a deeply conservative, religious background that did just that -- punished those who voiced anything that dissented with what they believed. perhaps it’s because of those early years that i most strongly feel the urge to speak out when i disagree. but if dissent is always penalized then this is a closed-system. it doesn’t allow for real relationship or real growth. it’s also boring. it attempts to punish us for our inborn instinct to argue, discuss, and analyze the words that daily flow through our feeds. if i post an article i disagree with, voicing that opinion, it does not mean i somehow hate, disagree or don’t support the entire site. but a site that would want me to voice only positive things about them is not an editorial vision worth supporting. any writer, editor or thinker who only wants to hear the good about their work is already working within a dead space. if criticizing a website means i can then never write for that website, so be it. how could i possibly respect a space that willfully ignores critiques? and how on earth does critiquing a single piece make me entirely useless to an editor or a website? doesn’t that show that i’m more invested than the person who blindly praises it? doesn’t it show a deeper level of investment in this entire process, a desire to dig below the surface that unremitting endorsement doesn’t provide? i’d so much rather engage in a dialogue and come out realizing or admitting i’m wrong after the conversation. some of the best writing i’ve read #onhere has been written in rebuttal to poorly-thought out or conceived initial pieces. what will we be left with when those go away? when desire for a coveted byline or fear of a popular, brilliant editor’s disproval completely squelches the thunderous, career-making essay of response from another writer? when that disappears is when writers and editors devolved into PR feeds for each other. the ability to freely criticize is a privilege. sure, it can be abused. yes, it can be annoying as hell. but it speaks volumes when those kinds of interactions can’t even happen. it’s petty. it’s lazy. it’s sad. please, disagree with me! i welcome it.

[harmonicait]

let me also add that alyssa never gets angry or upset when i forget/get to swamped to get back to her & this means so much to me! be kind first & foremost.

If you haven’t followed up, don’t get irate. And even if you have...

I’ve seen a lot of angry Facebook posts or tweets lately about people who have emailed people who have not written them back, whether it’s a band emailing another band about a show, a band or publicist emailing a writer, and so on. 

Each year of my life has been busier than the last, just when I think I’m at my limit. I hate when we do the “I’m so busy” pissing contest, but I get hundreds of emails each day. I want to read them all. I want to answer them all. But after I get through all my immediately urgent work-related emails for my paying clients, an email or two from my mom, not to mention all my work for the day, I usually find that I’ve been at my desk 9AM to 9PM, and often wind up laying in bed til midnight/1AM answering more. Sure, sometimes I go out to a show. Sometimes in the evening I even go out to bars with friends. Sometimes I even have the gall to go out of town NOT for work for a day or two, where I still put in several hours per day of laptop time. I don’t watch TV. I have no boyfriend. I have no children. I don’t sleep a lot. I work through the weekend. It’s honestly unhealthy how much time I spend responding to emails. But this isn’t about how busy I am. This is about how we treat each other. 

Due to the volume I receive, and the time it takes to do the work I’m hired to do, I just physically can’t answer them all. A lot of music writers and other professionals will relate. Bands on tour, too! It makes me feel horrible and rude. Sometimes those are emails from good bands I’d love to work with, and I haven’t gotten around to listening to their record because I want to make sure all my current clients are in good shape (sidenote: if a publicist gets back to you instantly, they might be starved for work, which might not be a good sign. Especially if their response time is shorter than the length of your album…)  In these situations, the kindest courtesy anyone can give me is a follow up email. When someone emails me, and a day later flies off the handle accusing me of blowing them off, all that tells me is that this is someone I don’t want to work with. 

I’ll hear artists say “yeah, we emailed a song to LABEL and they never wrote back, so they must not like us.” Did you follow up? Did you send a second follow up? Was your note personal and positive? 

I try my best to never miss a beat when I get a note from a personal friend, a current client, or someone who wants to write about a current client. But when someone I haven’t worked with yet reaches out, it goes into the “respond later” mental queue, because at some point, I hit a limit on what I can accomplish in a day, or a week, or a month, even while sacrificing a big chunk of personal life or downtime. It’s not because I’m an asshole, or because I don’t like you, person I’ve never met. On one hand, we’re all busy, and “I’m busy” isn’t a great excuse, but sometimes it’s just plain true. And some people are just bad with email! But others are swamped, which means they are stressed out, trying hard, and probably already feeling guilty and bad about anything they don’t get around to. 

Follow up with people, and try to understand that they might be tackling something bigger than your email. 

[harmonicait]

What do we do now, now that we are happy?

Samuel Beckett, from Waiting For Godot (via bourbonandpearls)

[harmonicait]

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (via proustitute)

[harmonicait]

Reblog if you like this! (Or you think I make a cute Target employee)

[harmonicait]

Why I Left '1989' Off My Pazz And Jop Ballot

As a critic, you’re supposed to be able to separate your personal feelings from evaluating the quality of art. Sure, there will be personal preferences and predilections, but when you’re confronted with the (supposed) Truth of a work of art, you’ve got to strip these aside and judge unequivocally. But on the day my Pazz & Jop ballot deadline approached, I lacked the ability to do this. So I put aside everything I knew about the album’s tightly written songs, impossibly catchy hooks, elegant turns of phrase and unmissable choruses, and I left it completely off my list. In the weeks since, I’ve come to regret this.

2014 was the year of my great undoing. The mesh of my life began to unravel, first in little bits—a stitch here and there—and then all at once in enormous chunks. Two bombshells in the fall of 2013 racked the foundations of my personal and professional life, and entering the new year I had no job and little stability. Previously Type A to a fault about how I spent my time, how I Built My Career and what My Plan Was, I let it all drift. I’d spend days on end in bed, watching mind-numbing TV or raking through Twitter like it was some kind of alternative Zen garden. It wasn’t. 

The culmination of this slothful unraveling process came in the end of a romance, as many rock bottom rude awakenings do. But when the end came, I was still shocked even as I chose it. This particular relationship had been laden with drama and weighted with impossible pressures, but through a series of strange instances, I had convinced myself it was going to last forever. As I stared into the void of a future I no longer recognized, a Taylor Swift-sized tsunami began to gain force, preparing to sweep over the industry that, for me, has morphed from “workplace” into “lifestyle.” I remember listening to Red just prior to the start of my now shattered relationship thinking ‘this is the last time I’ll listen to a Taylor album and relate to the heartbreak parts.’ Boy was I wrong.

###

When 1989 flounced its way into the tail end of 2014, it nearly tore me apart. An already fraught year felt typified in these cold, crystalline pop songs filled with broken dreams, ire and a shellacked attempt at good humor. Every song felt like it was tipped from the fabric of my own life, my own hideous failing at love, all of my own anger, all of my own hurt. And to make matters worse, each listen was another reminder of my ex’s adoration of Taylor, and this, an album we would never share. I blamed her. I condemned the album. Why did it have to be now? Why was it here as a glittery vicious reminder that my dreams of forever were irrevocably shattered? Even as I dealt with my grief and realized I didn’t want those old dreams back, the record’s numerous “what ifs” made me doubt myself and my decision.

Still, I listened, and in the narratives of Taylor’s songs, I didn’t take comfort in vilifying my ex. Instead, in her descriptions of betrayal, pain, abandonment and mistrust, I saw both of us. We were both Taylor’s terrible ex to each other. We were both the one running, leaving, fighting and hurting. I couldn’t turn myself into Taylor’s own ultimate victim—I was never Taylor, I saw more of myself in the “bad” lover she rebuked. I was the backstabber on “Bad Blood,” the one scared of fake monsters that were really just trees on “Out Of The Woods, the leaver in “All You Had To Do Was Stay.” I could barely bear to face myself as this. I wanted to blame him for not being able to handle my “Blank Space” mania, but the horrific self-awareness of that song is really contained in its flippancy—an ability to assume an "On To The Next One" mentality. I couldn’t do that. I thought this love would be the eternal one with a Taylor in "Love Story" era optimism.

I still returned to the record. In the same way that I re-read old letters over and over, in the same way I sullenly destroyed mementos and talismans, past proof imbued with what I had considered to be an unshakeable future. Listening to the record hurt me in the same way that after the finality of the split, impossibly intimate details made public stung my pride, in the same way that when he rubbed proof of our rupture in my face I crumbled into myself. In times like these, I went back to the album for solace, but it could never be that for me. Instead, it became the mirror held up to my face, showing my own similar transgressions. 1989 began to show me that perhaps I was as bad as him. Perhaps, I was… worse. Then, I began to examine myself in earnest. What had I lost while dedicating myself to this contrived future I’d hoodwinked myself into believing in? What had I given up? Ignored? What malice had sprung from my own fear and struggle to keep this precarious boat afloat?

###

I had been most angry at an inability I perceived in my ex to help me shoulder the back-breaking personal trauma that marred last year. I counted this as his primary sin; a moral failure and lack of loyalty. But once he was gone and I was on my own again, I saw that it wasn’t his battle to fight. I saw that it was me who had refused to shoulder up the burden and sort through my emotions about it. I saw it was me, dirty with the residue of selfishness. Here, I reached a plateau where 1989 couldn’t help me.

Taylor as an artist and a person (nearly) never assumes any blame for her role in the demise of her relationships. Even if I was able to place myself in the shoes of the tarnished beloved she sings of, it seems Ms. Swift hasn’t achieved that kind of empathy. And this remains the flaw that plagues her songwriting and personal life—the blindness and oversight that makes her bodega video rub us the wrong way. The idea that everything is already hers, or should be! That everyone else is hurting her, that she is never complicit—or even an active force of destruction—in her own life. My hope for Taylor is that she gets rid of the need to organize every event into the binary of good and evil. She seems to be stuck with a fierce need to be the one on the side of Good, bleating her betrayal and shaming the evil-doer, who conveniently, is never her.

I want these realizations for Taylor because I want them for myself. I want them for every woman who’s had her heart broken or lost herself in the flurry of an unlived future dream. I want it for all women who try desperately hard to fit into an outline that they corroborated with society to construct, before it became clear that it wasn’t really what they wanted. Faced with catastrophes of this scope, it’s far easier to blame the man you loved, the patriarchy, Men As A Whole or any number of factors instead of shouldering up your own goddamn share of the blame and trying to put the pieces of your life back together. Trying to build the life that YOU actually want is scary, but it’s also thrilling. It also breeds quiet contentment. What’s better than blaming is being strong for yourself. What’s better than dwelling on your hurt is a life that doesn’t revolve around being someone else’s partner, or requiring them to be there for you. Not all boys want love to be torture, but if you’re stuck in a love story that is, it’s probably not solely your partner’s fault. It’s probably a mutually constructed prison. I want a Taylor Swift album that deals with this—I want a level of self-awareness for her that I’m only beginning to grasp for myself. I’ve got two years on her, so I’m hopeful.

It’s so important to see your role in your own undoing. It’s so important to see it so you can forgive yourself first. From there, forgiving others is easy, weightless even. Despite the flaws I’ve listed above, and despite the emotional hurricane that ensued every time I listened to it last year, I think 1989 was the best album of the year. There, I said it.

I think I’m finally clean.

#taylor swift #relationships #break ups #i think i'm finally clean #music criticism #personal shit #1989 #red #pazz and jop

[harmonicait]

"I went back to "You May Be Right" a lot of times when I listened to this record, actually. Sometimes when it was almost over, sometimes halfway through, sometimes I'd just leave that first track on repeat for hours, foolishly grinning every time that shattering glass sample kicked it back off again--like it symbolized my own rebellious act." -- me on Billy Joel's Glass Houses for my friend Andrew's tumblr.

Hey y’all: I have a guest on Vinyl in Alphabetical again. Today, you can read my friend Caitlin White go long on falling in love with Billy Joel, loneliness, GLASS HOUSES, and…well, I’ll just let her tell it.

I was right on the cusp between middle school and high school when I first got...

#Billy Joel #personal shit #glass houses #loneliness #love