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.