Waltzing Matilda

              Los Angeles speaks to me tonight. And I must transcribe. I have not done it for so long. I have let the city crumble all around me, and I have let my memories settle like so many scraps of torn love letters swept off a fourth floor balcony. I'm trying to piece them together now, over the hum of my dying laptop fan and Tom Waits growling about getting wasted and wounded in foreign places. Sometimes I think all my LA posts will involve Tom Waits,one way or the other.

       It has been very long indeed, and fingers and prose get rusty if not utilized for washed away periods of existence. Drowned in work and realizations and not enough but just too much alcohol. My room is dimly lit.. and the streets outside, on the borders of South Central Los Angeles aren't that much better. I wonder who's walking past my door right now, and who eats at the lonely little taco stand somewhere along Jefferson between Budlong and Walton.. with its bright little bulbs burning deep into the badly lit night. I'm always listening to music. It's almost a compulsion really.  Sometimes late at night I want to turn the music off and go outside and sit on the pavement, and pay close attention to the natural soundtrack of the LA nocturne. The constant wail of police sirens, and the whirl of helicopters overhead, and the odd solitary cyclist wheeling by, music blaring as loud as it possibly can within the output limitations of a little transistor radio strapped to his bicycle handlebars. The family tearing itself almost to pieces in the house next to mine only to reassemble themselves hastily the following morning, and the trumpet player practising somewhere a couple of houses down. Sometimes I feel like if I hear real close, strain my ears till they become elvish keen, let the night sink into me, and if, maybe, the helicopters would suspend themselves in air for a bit, and the police sirens moved off to a pretty part of town, I could, maybe, just maybe, hear the city decay and die ever so gently all around me. Hear the cracks grow bit by bit, feel the edifice of an elaborately constructed dream sink deep into the dust and sand from which it arose. South Central is not the centre of the dream, but it feeds into and from the dream machine, as everything in LA does. And it is here that the dream dies the hardest, and the mirror paths dye themselves tar-black.

So we arrive once more at Thomas Alan Waits. And how I learnt a new expression for drunkenness today, one of the more poetic ones I've come across. 'Four Sheets to the wind in Copenhagen' is about getting wasted. Like so many more of his songs. I don't really know who Tom Traubert is, but these are his Blues. And this is also universal. As the Blues usually is. So much of why we dig art is apocrypha and interpretation. We want to believe that this particular reason is why this song was written or we have our own idea of what that painting means or what that long panning shot in that film is supposed to signify, and it can be nothing else because then it would ruin the work of art for us. We project our own fantasies, and we use art vicariously as wish fulfilment. And Tom Traubert's Blues too has a few stories behind it, and maybe none of them are true, and perhaps all of them are. I'd like to think it's both, because reality is such a nebulous thing. I can convince myself of a lie and tell it to myself and to other people over and over and over till I start to believe it, and soon it is true. It is why I did something, it is why I wrote a poem, it is why I liked that girl for those five and a half minutes, the real reason gets lost, if there ever was one.

Idiomatic digression:
Two sheets to the wind is a colloquial expression denoting drunkenness. Three sheets has also been used. Waits took it a sheet further. 'Sheets' are the ropes used to control a ship's sails. So if the sheets are in the wind the ship is unsteady, misdirected, veering out of control, heading for a brutal hangover on Sunday morning with strange jagged memories and graffiti all over the mirror.


In my head I see snow and clean streets and very light-haired people. In my head I see Copenhagen. I imagine one night sometime in the mid 70s, and a young Tom Waits drunk and waltzing somewhere deep in the heart of Scandinavia. Waltzing with Mathilde, a violinist. Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, Matilda you'll go waltzing with me. I can't dance the waltz sober but the next time I'm drunk I will put on Leonard Cohen singing Lorca and I will waltz in perfect 3/4 time with my shadow, with my reflection, with all the empty clothes in my wardrobe and with whoever else is willing to waltz with me. But Vienna is another few images away. Tonight I am flitting through Copenhagen on the wings of vicarious inebriation, broken streets and soldiers and that certain kind of Zorba The Greek light that only cities by the harbour can have. I am bargaining with these Danish ghosts selling memories on the wayside and I am stumbling through cobbled streets thinking of poets. I think I throw up at some point. Is this Singapore? I suddenly find myself in Clark Quay, overlooking lights on the harbour. And this whole stream is a mess. Whose memories am I reliving. I remember that night, the bits I remember. I remember it more as a precursor to heartbreak. But I remember stumbling steps and the feeling that my stomach couldn't hold the secrets to the universe anymore. A plastic bag would have to do. I hear waltzes playing deep within a bar, while I am outside pouring my heart out onto the pavement. There's a bitter taste in my mouth that only cigarette smoke can cure.

I lost my flatcap somewhere near Skid Row on Halloween night this year. I was going to dance with a girl who had a boyfriend. Tom Traubert's Blues plays on loop. I'm letting my swirling memories settle for a bit. Singapore does that to me sometimes. Years and years ago it seems. Waits needed inspiration for his music, so he went to Skid Row, talked to the people there. Talked to the people whose stories he tells in his gravel-worn voice. He drank a pint of rye from a  brown paper bag and puked his guts out somewhere between Main and Alameda. And he went home and wrote Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen slouched over his Steinway. "every guy down there... everyone I spoke to, a woman put him there." Myth and music freely intermingle in this city where it gets so hard to distinguish dreams from reality.

Nothing is ever lost I suppose. And everything is somehow expressed, even if we never write a word. Everyone's a part of everything, and the look those two lovers exchanged at the bar last night is the culmination of a thousand years of relationships and the starting point of a thousand more years. Copenhagen is more alien to me than Skid Row. And Skid Row is so very alien.

My friend and I are walking past The Falls, somewhere in Downtown LA, and this homeless lady is smoking the burnt out end of a cigarette. Of smoky days if I were to to be showoffy about my reading habits. And my friend gives her a cigarette (his name's Ash, coincidences just work that way) and is too depressed the rest of the night to have any 'fun'. To get drunk and talk to girls when there is a woman too out of it to tell if she's smoking a bit of charred paper.

Skid Row is an alien place but I need to know it better. The world that Tom Waits' characters live in. The dank springwell from which his poetry emerges. It's nearly a full moon out tonight, but in my room it's just an orange sort of light. I can't hear the city die slowly outside because there's music in my room. Tom Waits is talking about the wrong side of the road. Singing, almost. I think I understand Los Angeles a little more each time I write about it. It's a big city. I should write more. I wonder who's wearing my flatcap tonight.

It's All About The Light

           I wish I'd seen Elliot Smith live in concert, but he got away too early, and I arrived too late. But I'm here now, city of dreamers and hopeless card hands, and I'm trying to make the best of it. I saw Emily Wells in concert at The Echo last Thursday night .I find myself meditating more and more on her music of late, and really, the concert was what got me going. This is emphatically not a concert review. I'm not a journalist and I don't take notes. This is, like everything else here, a ramble about a set of moments, a ramble with some sort of fuzzy goal.

      I hadn't heard of Mademoiselle Wells till a week before the concert, and my friend Sholto will own bits of my soul forever for the introduction. I ran through her Symphonies once before I got to The Echo, and I remember Symphony 6 stirring something within me, the way the songs which go on to my permanent playlist first do. But I was in a hurry, and left to see Emily Wells at the theater down Sunset Boulevard, still very much a stranger to her music. The queues weren't too long, neither were they very minuscule. We waited in line, watching the Los Angeles skies turn gently red in preparation for the falling evening. Concert demographics are interesting. Glimpses of why this is indeed different (and in the best possible way) from home, from other places too. Freedom, not alienation. A couple kissing in front of me. Both so pretty. All the pretty girls are taken. Los Angeles isn't kind that way.

   Time passed. I filed in with the rest, had conversations with strangers, saw a few women I'd never have the opportunity to get to know, and took in the neon arc lamps and the unfamiliar playlist of the DJ, Jeremy Sole, who had kicked off the evening.  More idle conversation, till finally, at about 9 pm, there was a girl up on stage, dancing to Jeremy Sole. Dancing so free, with bangles on her hands, and a top that's almost, but not quite, slipping off her shoulder. I'd never seen her before, so I knew it was Emily Wells only when she took centrestage with an acoustic guitar, as the evening's first act made his way off the little stage crossed by neon rainbows. 

  Freeform alternation between the tenses:
Grammar is Kerouacgrammar after all. Not pretence, it's just easier to express things that way sometimes. Without constrictions, allowances for what is allowable within the bounds of "proper" writing.

   She looks pretty, in the spotlights, with a guitar for company. She talks about geography and how it informs her music. She talks about singing a roadmap, of the places she's been, and grown up in and taken with her, and left behind. I'm paraphrasing her. I don't take notes, though sometimes I wish I did. She talks about Los Angeles being home, home wonsaponatime, home now too, though she lives elsewhere. And she gives a shoutout to her friends in the audience, and a minor irrational part of me feels bothered that I am just a stranger, just another listener in the crowd. But that feeling passes soon enough, it passes when she starts to sing. It passes when I enter her world, and see places through her eyes, see the colour of the afternoon sunlight which she sings about.

   Mt. Washington. I can't stop listening to the song. I've lost track of how many times I've heard it in the past few days. Still haven't been there.

  She starts off with an acoustic set. "Come on over to the dark side", she sings, and it is one of the most inviting lines I have ever heard. And I am reminded of geography in relation to me, places and events, and people left behind with the cities we move on from. Because we grow and change. And, for me, Los Angeles is the next step, logical or otherwise. For her, it is old memories, and rekindlings, and a sense of belonging. I'm here, and I can identify, even if a little bit, with others' memories of the place, of the certain kind of falling evening, of this feeling of being in the middle of something far greater and innately tenebrous than you could ever comprehend.

  The roadmap proceeds, and she sips from a glass of (quite possibly) scotch between songs. She is free, and very very talented. The acoustic set has a majesty to it. Her Mama Acoustic Recordings just released and she does some stuff off of that. She does Los Angeles of course, about burning for the city, a metaphor of the city, people and places and happenings and bits of filtered light all aggregating into one entity worth writing songs to. Worth writing songs about. Which is why I started this post writing about Elliot Smith. I heard Angeles, and I wondered what it would have been like to see him in concert, on stage, with his heart and his guitar and his razor sharp perceptions of the dream machine. But he took a stage left exit a long time ago, and I was back in Calcutta then, forming perceptions, still am, just in a different place, just a few years older.

    Emily Wells continues her mesmeric trip through the heart of the west. She moves on to her 'full band set', which is just her again, but with a violin, a drum set, a melodica, and electronic loops. She harmonizes with herself, plays drums over repeating violin requiems and generally performs an incredible set. None of it seems gimmicky. It's all good. It feels like it all belongs there. As does she. The stage is her own little dance floor. And she owns it.

People watching at concerts:
Couple in front of me. The woman getting more inebriated as the concert progresses. Something like a Long Island Iced Tea. The guy seems less inclined to the dancing that his concert partner obviously wants to do, more and more as the night rolls on, beneath rainbow lamps and musical roadmap reveries. The freedom of movement afforded by alcohol, as opposed to the innate restrictions that we impose on ourselves. I wonder what their story is, and where they will end up.

   The Symphonies, 2 and 6, follow, along with other songs I'm not very familiar with. The crowd is one, the faceless eyes and ears, and Emily's still up on stage, more and more familiar. No longer a stranger. Almost a friend. There is a moment when I close my eyes and feel like the music and the lights are enveloping me, taking me in, surrounding me, filling me like clear mountain air, talking to me alone. The lights hum softly to her tune, blinking through a wide spectrum of emotions. The night ends and I am a fan, I am a follower. I am also, probably, a little bit in love. Whatever that is. I file out the way I came in, into the Los Angeles night. Pizza tastes good after the concert, but the Led Zeppelin playing at the pizza place seems somewhat strident after the last two hours. Not the best music for quiet memory gathering. There are a few women outside the venue teaching each other dance moves; I catch the word "Bollywood" as I walk past them. The couple I noticed inside stand on the sidewalk talking. Sunset Boulevard is getting quieter. I owe someone my soul for this introduction, but I owe myself more time to take in this music. It breathes and lives and becomes colours that we couldn't ordinarily discern. It speaks of places and life. It genuinely moves me. I wish I could use adequate words to describe this deep sense of unrealistic identification that Emily's music (Yes, it's easy to be on first name terms now) gives me. Sunset Boulevard was quiet as we walked back to the car. My friend told me that Emily often comes out after concerts and interacts with the audience. That wouldn't surprise me, the concert felt like a personal thing, between friends. But we didn't wait long enough to see if that would happen. Maybe it's for the best that I didn't meet her. This is Los Angeles after all. All the pretty girls are taken.

Good Morning Spider

  I still remember the first morning when I heard the album.  Good Morning Spider I mean. I remember it was cloudy.  And in retrospect my mind tries its best to convince me that even if it hadn't been cloudy, the first play of Painbirds would have drawn the darkening skies in close, like pulling the blankets up to your chin, not wanting to get out of bed, because you know the day can only go downhill from there. Did that make sense? I'm not sure. I had never heard Mark Linkous or Sparklehorse before, so when the album started off with the noise rock of Pig I remember feeling somewhat disappointed. And then in succession came Painbirds and Saint Mary and the skies turned grey within and without my little white room on the un-pretty side of South Central Los Angeles.
      
   But this isn't a blog about music. Or perhaps it's just a blog about music. But always in relation to geography. Life is anticlimactic. It revels in being anticlimactic I sometimes feel. Eliot knew what he was talking about when he postulated the world ending with a whimper. I am convinced, at times, that that is precisely how it will go. It'll just stop to exist. Or maybe the world will turn slowly into an exercise in interminable tedium. Maybe that's the end. And nothing more. It would have been poetic to say I heard Mark Linkous' fragile vocals for the first time when my girlfriend and I broke up, but it didn't happen that way. Instead of that I heard Good Morning Spider at a time when I was lonely and ten thousand miles away from everyone I cared about, but in my head at least, my relationship still persisted. However it did get a little bit colder when I first heard him sing. I wasn't drowning but I was struggling to stay interested in everything else around me. The music spun memories out of cobwebs, and some new images, elevators descending and ascending within polished white walls, a rabbit hunt.

    I woke up this morning in a new apartment, a temporary place, a place with few memories as of now, not the apartment where I cast a fleeting glimpse within Linkous' mind for the first time. I keep moving, but moving sadness can wait for another post. I woke up this morning with Sparklehorse in my head. I don't know what the weather is like outside. It's almost always sunny in Southern California. But in my room, with its lone table lamp and drawn curtains, it might as well be night. That day was one of the rare overcast ones. I want to call it ominous and foreboding but it wasn't really. It was just a little bit cold, and there was a certain bite to the breeze. I had the album on my iPhone and I found I couldn't stop listening to the two songs I've mentioned above. Suddenly home, Calcutta, everything was so far away. And Los Angeles was shutting me out. Or perhaps I was shutting my environment out, in an effort at getting lost in the music filtering through my earphones. The four minute walk along West 36th Place to USC was infinitely long, and I felt like avoiding the eyes of the people walking past me that morning. I didn't want conversation or interruptions. The music was enough.

  I eventually found myself in the basement of the Leavey library, putting in a few half-hearted half-hours of studying, all the while Good Morning Spider playing on repeat. Music is a good transportation device. I was reminded of a time a few months back, a California December, and a Mercury Rev phase. That music was confined to rooms and lonely walkways too. But sometimes, as with the Sparklehorse album, it explodes into outer space. Literally, almost. Boxes and boxes of stars. I wonder how many sparrows my own worth would be? One last clear memory of that day was that of feeling perfectly happy in my solitude, in the basement of a very full library in the middle of the Spring session at my university. Linkous sang about a Junebug bringing him luck, or wanting her to anyway. I read about his suicide three years ago, and I read about his life. I was sad that he was gone, but I was happy because in his minor chord legacy there was a sense of understanding, there was a sense of the triumph of his storytelling and his art, and a sense of marginal infinity, and as a would-be artist I'd take that, and I was happy for him. I didn't want to kill myself. I don't think I ever will. But I understood Linkous a little bit that morning, even if I'm not doing a very good job of articulation in the present. Junebug shut the rest of the world out. It was just me and him in this little artificial cocoon of whispering cobweb melodies. I knew then that the album was a very good representation of life, and this is no profound realization, of course, but in that moment it felt serendipitous. Good Morning Spider is about the usual contrasts that we experience, the darkness and the light, and the greys in between, it is about the liminal, between the sinking and the floating. Mark Linkous had been through a lot before he made the album, and he continued to make music till one night, I suppose, the greys became a little too much to handle. I don't identify perfectly well, but I think I understand well enough.

Epilogue: 

 

So how is this about LA? I have been asking myself the same question. There are links, obviously, but they seem rather tenuous. I listened to the album in this city, and I wrote these words here as well, and geography does inform and influence our thoughts and creative processes. I suppose this piece would have read differently had I written it somewhere else. Geography does influence us, even if we are in the habit of frequenting white postered rooms or library basements. The spirit, the soul?, the influences of a place do creep in, whether we want them to or not. In this case, I'm hoping they have, albeit inadvertently. My relationship frayed and tattered sometime in the spring, shortly after the morning described above, but it had nothing to do with Good Morning Spider. But it did have to do with Los Angeles, and the distance, physical and otherwise it creates between people. It had to do with the distances that people create among themselves, which is not a necessary consequence of them being far apart physically, across oceans and multiple time zones. I was responsible. So was she. And so was this city that spreads its  tenebrous wings all around me. Los Angeles is a lonely place sometimes.

What It Is

    Los Angeles is a city of lights, endless firefly lights moving like a river through the countless freeways that link the city with its many hearts, like so many luminous blood-veins. I am a stranger here, and like so many other strangers, I am, slowly and uncertainly, discovering this city, with its good and its bad and its beautiful and sometimes, its ugly. This blog will chronicle, in no particular spatial or temporal order, some of my experiences here, innocent observations, drunken serendipities, other moments, little sparks of perspective that disappear with the alcohol buzz, those certain moments that seem like an eternity, only to slip away before you can grab a strong enough hold on them to mold them into a tangible thought. LA hardly even fits the definition of a city, really, as so many people will tell you. And to some extent I have found this to be a truism. The 'city's' various parts all seem to have their own character, their own spirit, if you will. This is an effort, on my part, to try and gather together the disenchanted shards of pretty twinkling glass that make Los Angeles, eventually, into a window, or perhaps even a mirror.

  I should have started writing this earlier, but perhaps I was just waiting for the dust to settle. Some of the images used here may not be in the public domain and I would be happy to take them down if someone asked me to. And of course, this is entirely subjective. My perceptions, my opinions, my rants, my reasonings. The other people won't be mentioned by their actual names, and they may even be fictionalized. I don't mind if it's largely fiction, really, as long as it captures the essence of the actual experience. So take all of this with handfuls of salt, and no references to eternity please. This is the here, and this is the now, and also maybe the recently passed then. If I stumble across some eternal truths it shall be a happy coincidence, but I doubt it. Consider this an exercise in association, a series of letters, love and otherwise to the city that I call home right now, and will, in all probability, call home for some time to come. An epistolary exposition of a relationship, between a city and me, and perhaps, happily, between the city and some more of its present inhabitants. Or even those who don't live here. I have lived in so many cities vicariously, through jump-cuts, translated poetry, passages of imagined smoke curling gently up like evening melodies. At this point though, it's just for myself.

So, in short, this is a ramble. A set of rambles. About moments. About that girl in the black jeans and shirt, looking incredibly, heartbreakingly beautiful, in that moment before she slips out of the bar, and all I can do is sigh at the door where her silhouette used to be. These are writings about inconsequential events. These are writings about friends. These are writings about mountains looming blue and distant by day. These are writings mostly about the sensations of night, but passing afternoons and slanting sunbeams will creep in, sometimes, like memories of withered relationships. These are writings, by extension, about America. These are writings which don't have to mean a thing. But they could. Who can tell? I'll figure it out as I go along. Or perhaps I won't.

That is all.