on [folk] punk's not dead

My favorite love songs are the ones that don't waste time: simple and unrefined, awkward and sincere. My favorite love songs are the ones that don't really sound like love songs. They're the ones that might make you cringe a little not because their quixotic sap will give you a toothache, but because their bumbling honesty will induce some parasympathetic sweaty palms. They're the ones that make you question whether you're falling in love with the song, the person behind it, or the feelings the person behind it is so bravely sharing.

Which brings me to the Front Bottoms’ “Peach,” off their 2013 album Talon of the Hawk, which I am currently listening to several times a day because I am both an obsessive and a creature of habit, but also because I can’t not listen to music that makes me feel like I am in love (with the world, through the eyes of a girl...)

I’m kind of late to the game on the Front Bottoms. I’m late to the game on a lot of great new music, usually because my loner punk pride gets in the way of trusting that music created after 1995 is worth my time. But now that I’ve gotten over that initial imaginary hurdle, I am completely, heartbrokenly obsessed with this band. I am completely and totally relieved that this band is in existence. The Jersey band feels, refreshingly, like a relic from pre-aughts age, from the golden DIY age when just an honest voice and some messy guitar could be left alone, in their purest forms, to convey exactly what they intend: the purest and messiest projections of our inner selves. Isn’t that the point of music: to make us feel something?

The Front Bottoms make me feel a lot. They make me feel a little unsettled, which is what the best folk punk should do. They make me feel like I’m not alone in my weirdness, which is also what the best punk rock should do.

The writer in me feels a kinship with Brian Sella’s lyrics. They are simple, they are candid, and they are brave. He says exactly what he means to say: I do things wrong / You thought I might. All of our awkward humanness, sorted into pure poetry.

on meditating for dummies

Radiance Sutra 81

Drop the thought,

“I am this body.”

Abandon the limitation,

“I am only here in this specific place and time.”

Embrace instead,

I am not my body.

I am not this place.

I am not this time.

There is no place.

There is no time.

Realize,

I am everywhere,

Sustained by infinite bliss.

It’s really funny that meditation has such peaceful connotations, because it is actually one of the most difficult and scariest activities I have ever attempted. By “meditation,” I’m referring here to the classic practice of sitting-your-bum-on-a-cushion-and-breathing, which is an entirely different beast from meditation’s other forms. I regularly, and happily, practice moving meditations: yoga and walking almost always help to quiet my inner monologue (which, contrary to my exterior self, really doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up) in a way that feels natural and easy. Artistic meditation, too – that I can do. When reading, or writing, or listening to music or baking a batch of cookies, I’ve always been able to fall into a trance. These are the only moments in which I am completely unaware of the clock; the only times when I am finally unaware of my body.

But just sitting, just breathing, just hoping – or, worse, expecting – that I will stop talking to myself? That feels impossible. I can’t even fall asleep in less than an hour. I consider savasana – corpse pose – one of the more challenging poses of my yoga practice. How could I possibly keep quiet long enough to meditate?

But then I came across this sutra through my beloved yoga studio, which hosted Lorin Roche for a weekend workshop. His book, The Radiance Sutras, is an updated translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, an ancient Sanskrit collection of 112 meditations. The overall text is framed by an interaction between the god Shiva and his consort Shakti, with each, alternating deity professing a sutra to the other lover.

I’d had no idea what the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra was, or who Lorin Roche was, before I read yogapata’s blog. But as I read Lorin’s version of Sutra 81, I felt overcome by an uncanny sense of familiarity: it was like I’d already known these words, like they were inside of me, always, and here they were, gorgeously articulated onto the page. 

It all made so much sense: I am not my body, I am not my stuff, I am not my clothing or my apartment or my choice of perfume. I am more, and I am less, all at once. But this meditation, using the text’s narrative frame, arranged my jumbled feelings into more eloquent and universal terms than my objective standpoint could ever hope to do. 

I’ve found myself chanting these lines throughout my day. Their serene, but rapturous, beauty has replaced the Distillers and the Descendants running on a loop in my head (I’m going through an old school pop-punk thing right now), providing a comforting and useful soundtrack to my daily tasks. 

You guys, I swear I'm not a hippie. But, true to its nature as a mantra, Radiance Sutra 81 has become more to me than a combination of pleasing words, or a brilliant modern translation of an ancient text: it’s become a surprisingly easy step towards practicing a kinder and more mindful way of life. And even - lo and behold - a kinder and more approachable form of daily meditation.

(Photo by Danielle Goldstein. Again.)

on simplicity

(Photo by the very beautiful Danielle Goldstein)

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.” -T.S. Eliot

on untranslatability

Toska (Russian): "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” - Vladimir Nabokov

(Jim Goldberg)

Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): “The wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are too reluctant to start.”

Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): “The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.”

(Hedi Slimane)

Hyggelig (Danish): “Cozy, welcoming, and enticing.”

Duende (Spanish): “The mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.”

Saudade (Portuguese): “The feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.”

Waldeinsamkeit (German): “The feeling of being alone in the woods.”

(Charles Burchfield, The First Hepaticas)

on love, in several forms

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by Richard Rothwell

Today was one of those rare, special days (yes, they are rare and special even for us unemployed people) in which I had nothing to do: just a stretch of pure, unmined time, in this wide open city, to pass however I wanted.

So I went to a museum, which is what I always do when a bucketful of empty hours – that special resource – threatens to fill itself with watching makeup tutorials on YouTube and gradually eating half a jar of cashew butter on my couch.

On my dad’s recommendation, I went to the Morgan Library, which is currently exhibiting a selection of rare manuscripts from the University of Oxford’s Bodleain Library.

I mostly decided to visit the Morgan because this particular exhibit, in all its Britishness and rare manuscript-ishness, reminded me of the British Library, which I visited often when I studied in London. I lived very near the BL, and I used to love walking up that ugly stretch of Grays Inn Road, the conduit between central London and its northern territory beyond St Pancras. I always considered that area a “realer” London than its elegant center – maybe because that particularly charmless, very gray, very loud neighborhood reminded me a lot of New York.

I had some transformative experiences at the BL: breathing in the very same air that rounded the edges of Kerouac’s original “On the Road” manuscript; decoding Beethoven’s turbulent chicken-scratch; marveling over Jane Austen’s ruler-straight penmanship. I felt so good there, so right, like I belonged not just in this city – truly the city of my dreams – but within this tacit society of bibliophiles.

But I also went to the Morgan in the hopes that, maybe, what my solo trips to the BL did for my love of London, this exhibit could do for my love of New York.

I love New York, I do, but it feels more like the love between two long-married people, or what I imagine that love is like. That love is a subtler, tamer thing than its original iteration, a thing that can go unsaid and unacknowledged for long stretches of time. It’s a love which smoothes to the constancy of quiet co-habitation, to the implicit understanding that that love exists.

I live with New York, but I don’t tell it that I love it. New York certainly doesn’t tell me how much it loves me.

But what I ended up feeling at the Morgan exhibit was not a resurgence of love for my city, but a resurgence of love for love’s sake. Of all the manuscripts I saw – and there was some really crazy shit there, like Kafka’s diary (!), the torn remainders of a Sappho poem, salvaged from an 18^th-century garbage heap (!!), and a 13^th-century manuscript of the Magna Carta (!!!) – what drew me the most was Mary and Percy Shelley’s joint diary, and the pages of Frankenstein which Mary wrote and Percy edited.

The couple kept their diary while on a tour of Europe just after they married in 1816, taking turns writing entries, sometimes writing entries together. Relics are so powerful, so solid, and in this way sometimes more affecting than the impalpable written word: around that little diary, I could see the husband and wife huddled together, their dreamy, possibly lonely, internal worlds overlapping for a few wonderful moments.

This physical evidence of the couple's collaboration reaffirmed my belief not just in love, or in marriage, but in the possibility of true partnership. In equal representation within that partnership. Mary created Frankenstein, of course, but without Percy’s edits – which he employed forcefully, sometimes dashing out entire lines and writing in new passages – the story that’s come down to us would be only a shadow of what it came to be.

I do have a soft spot for the Shelleys, because Frankenstein is one of my favorite classic novels; and Percy Shelley, the quintessential Romantic poet, is one of my personal tragic heroes. But I don’t think anyone with eyes and a heart could help but be affected by the interplay of their scripts on the page, which reveal not just a loving relationship, but a relationship steeped in deep mutual respect.

Percy Bysshe Shelley by Amelia Curran

amis on youth

"So I am nineteen years old and don't usually know what I'm doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn't mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it's all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine?"-Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis by Angela Gorgas, 1979

on on beauty

“And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.” –Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Hello all!

Welcome to my [new] blog: a drawing board/receptacle/open forum to which you few, you lucky few, are welcome and/or victim.

Honestly, I was a little stressed about coming up with a title for my little corner of the Internet. Because, being a human, I feared that the slippery terrain of my interior world would not easily lend itself to a neat little container, and accurate self-representation - letting bloom the million-petalled flower - feels very daunting and kind of impossible.  

But then, a few weeks ago, I read Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty, and the title quite literally flashed before my face: On Beauty! Of course!

So this is, in part, my homage to Ms. Smith, one of my most beloved literary idols. I love, in particular, the gorgeously crossbred, high/low sensibility that characterizes her modernity; that voice which manages to combine a romantic, Eliot-worthy conscious narration with the stunning intricacies of a 21^st-century Londoner (or, in this novel’s case, a set of thoroughly American teenagers).

Can you tell I was an English major? And that I really liked writing essays?

Beyond a virtual Zadie-altar, though, this blog is actually exactly what it claims to be: everything you’ll find here involves beauty. It involves what I find beautiful, which may not agree with what you find beautiful. This is a categorization that surprises me in its seeming randomness, that sometimes frustrates me and challenges my desire to articulate what it is, what it means, what makes it that way. 

But beauty is also very precious. Real beauty is not necessarily what keeps me alive, but it’s what keeps me living.

So: Zadie Smith’s mongrel tongue is beautiful. “The Most Beautiful Bitter Fruit” by La Dispute is equally beautiful. Rumi’s “The Guest-House,” too: unbearably, ridiculously beautiful.

Because I've only just graduated, and I'm basically still in school-mode, I'm giving you an assignment: What do you find beautiful? So beautiful that it defies your limited human vocabulary? So beautiful that it makes you wanna know more, do more, love more, feel more?