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.