Archives for the 'Soundtracks' Category

Grand Analog – Touch Your Toes Part 2
The video makes me want to bring out my air guitar.

I.
I was being serious, and then I wasn’t being serious.
“But,” I paused and waved my hands grandly, “I am a writer.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “That was perfect. With all that sugar all over your face, like coke.”
It was my first raspberry jelly donut in months, and it was good. Continue reading this entry »

Fever Ray – Keep The Streets Empty For Me (mp3)

For going on nearly a year now, I have been writing and have been trying to write about home. I was trying to write about the spaces we construct between walls and behind doors, what we name them, and how we allow specific people into those spaces and call them blood. I was trying to write about the cities that we occupy, the ways we live in them, the way the shape of a particular street can inform a worldview. I needed to write these things because it was, after a certain point, a matter of sanity.

I wrote the post below in July. I’m still thinking about home, but more quietly now, with less of my heart in my throat.

—-

The first sentence of the last paper I wrote for school was this:
If we could reduce truth to its most literal elements and if we could be sure of the black and white markings of it, we could rightly argue that it is not so far from “here” to “there” – the distance just a solitary letter, nothing more than a trifling lowercase “t.”

Six weeks after I wrote that sentence, I punched in my final period and emailed the essay off, ending my academic career with a characteristically sprawling and inconsistent piece of melodrama. It was half-decent, just good enough to pass, just insane enough to mark it mine.

When I wrote that first sentence in June, those words meant something important to me. And naively I hoped that I could maybe put that important something down into coherent words, if not in this paper, then maybe elsewhere. In the intervening month and a half that it took me to write that paper, weeks punctuated with long days of sleep and nights of writing every other conceivable thing I could sit down long enough to focus on, that particular obsession faded away. The importance of figuring out how it is that we negotiate change in the cityscape and how and why we continue to love places and people when everything is caught in a perpetual flux waned with the summer heat. I grew nostalgic for the cold and for snowed-in beaches and for the stifling clasp of ill-fitting cheap wool coats, the way those things demand and encourage solitude.

I can’t remember now what it was that I was hoping to resolve when I finally typed up that first sentence after having had it float in my head for days. Naively, I started off every academic paper I wrote this last year with the hope that when I finished it, it would say something to me that I could hear, something important that had nothing to do with the text in question, something comprehensible to me.
Not a single paper ever did end that way.
Continue reading this entry »

Minnale – Vaseegara (mp3)

The other day, for the second time in my life, I wore a sari. The first time had been for a fashion show in grade seven. I told people I was representing Sri Lanka, but really when it came down to it, I was representing all browns, given how often I got the response, “No, you’re not. That place doesn’t exist. I’ve never heard of it,” to my answer to the question, “Where are you from.”
Funny how that worked, when so much of Saudi Arabia’s most impoverished workforce is Sri Lankan, the housemaids and the drivers and the street sweepers and the construction workers. The people who die on their jobs, who don’t get paid.

A Bengali friend brought in a sari she’d borrowed from her mother (I hadn’t told my own mother about the show or my part in it, knowing what her response would have been – what nonsense is this) and wrapped it around me as best her thirteen-year-old hands could manage. Then I walked to the washroom to check the mirror, and it unravelled in the process, so the Somali sisters helped me put it back on, now with the aid of a thousand pins, though I suspect their sari-tying judgement may have been biased somewhat in favor of guntiinos. By the time I manged to get on stage, I was fervently grateful for the skirt I had on under the sari, because my stint as a runway model at an all-girls’ school was threatening to turn into the world’s most unfortunate striptease.

So the other day, I wore a sari. And I wore a pottu and there was even jewelry in my hair. Then I looked at myself and I couldn’t recognise the woman in the mirror. Whoever she was, she was beautiful.

“Would you wear a sari to your wedding?” asked Geetha. “What if he’s a white guy?”

In June, I received an iTouch in the post. It came in an anonymous package. Due to a mistake in my address, I was only aware that I had something waiting for me at the post office after I received an email from one E. E. Even now, I’d suspect it wasn’t really meant for me, except it’s engraved on the back with run.likethewind.ca.

I only started using it a few weeks ago. It wasn’t that my old mp3 player had great sentimental value for me, only that it did the job it was supposed to do: play music. For all my geekiness, I’m not a technophile. So it surprises me how attached I’ve grown to this iPod, especially since I still hate iTunes. I have a list of reasons compiled somewhere about why it’s so great, basically just a list of its features — things like how I have a new appreciation for album covers, and how it excites me that I could create my own wallpaper (if I weren’t so lazy). And maybe I screamed a little when I discovered that this site shows up pixel perfect on the iPod’s tiny Safari screen. As a web designer, the sense of validation was incredible.

I have it with me basically all the time now, so my last.fm scrobbles have gone up exponentially (since iPods are the only music players last.fm can read). If it were waterproof, I’d be probably be dancing in the shower. The first few days I used it, people would stop to talk to me about it – total strangers sometimes. I met a man from Halifax at the corner of Yonge and Queen who wondered if I could help him with some bug he had on his own iPod. People at work, at school ask to touch it. So I was rightly intimidated all the way back in June; this is easily the sexiest piece of machinery I’ve ever owned.

I’m trying to remember now – when did I first use it? What was the first song I listened to? I can’t remember either detail, though I think I started with Nina Simone.

I wish I had a picture of it to show you – even if it does looks like every other iPod out there. Still, maybe you can identify these things by their scratches, like fingerprints. The back of mine now boasts an intricate webbing of fine lines, though it’s still shiny enough to serve as the world’s most accessorised mirror. But my camera is away for repairs, so instead of a picture, I leave you with a song.

Much love in the new year,
-f.

Odetta – Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
I use this song to put myself to sleep sometimes.

The Heavy – Colleen (via zshare)

The reason I noticed him the first time was because from a certain angle, the angle formed by my getting off the elevator and his leaving the lobby, he looked startlingly like a friend of mine, a friend who has no reason to ever be anywhere near the neighbourhood I live in, let alone the apartment complex. Just as I was about to yell his name, he shifted coordinates so that the angle fell out of place, and it became clear that he was not my friend. He was significantly taller than my friend, for one thing, and a shade darker and somewhat less aloof around the mouth – though it was still a beautiful mouth, on its own grounds. He was a couple of years older than both of us, too, just old enough that if he wasn’t a newlywed, he was probably engaged. And if neither of those things, then he was the son of a parent who wished he was.

And so he became the man I know as the man who isn’t my friend, whom I see nights when I’m coming home and he is, too. Black messenger bag, nondescript wool overcoat, dress trousers, and always in his right hand (black leather gloves) a wrinkled silver bag from Winners. No electronic paraphernalia evident, no wires or beeping phones.

He stands out a little from the mass of bodies that populate this highrise, being about a head taller than most and a particular and interesting combination of class and colour. Occasionally one of the kids forever swarming these hallways will do something stupid, something that infuriates the righteously tyrannical superintendent wife&husband duo, and we will grin in unison.

I spent the day surrounded by undegrads cramming for exams, and as a result feel young and inexcusably carefree. Additionally, I nearly missed the moon while I was walking home from the bus stop, a full-bellied white moon that I mistook for a streetlight dangling inexplicably off a twenty-first-floor balcony. I had to stop and cross the street, just to make sure it was the moon, and in the process endangered someone’s driving licence.

The lobby, except for my music and the security camera doing its relentless rounds, is empty. I commence the hop, skip, and jump routine that my body believes constitutes dancing. When he comes in, I do not stop on his account, shuffling in my wet boots around a pillar decorated with dollar-store tinsel and an apparently inebriated paper Santa Claus. As I emerge from a particularly complicated stumble, I notice the elevator has arrived and, more importantly, is about to leave, so I sprint the two steps to its doors, which are now grandly sweeping shut.

Inside, I grin idiotically for no reason discernible to anyone in that tiny space, least of all me. It’s only when he gets off on the thirteenth floor that I remember that my grin, nine times out of ten, is indistinguishable from a smirk.

Mystic – Beautiful Resistance (via zshare)

At the subway station, I slouch against a wall and fish small change out of my wallet. Head bent over the fistful of silver, I begin the necessary tortuous mental arithmetic.

“You wanna buy a token?”
I barely look up. “No, I’m good, thanks,” and continue sorting through the collection of dimes and nickels and quarters.

“But I need the food,” says the voice, as though taken aback at having to explain this. Too late I catch the prefatory ellipsis. I look up now.

For weeks I’ve been oblivious to my immediate surroundings, a strange blindness that prevents me from registering the presence of things directly in front of me. The more frightening result of this is that faces have become impenetrable to me, refusing entry to intent or nuance. Additionally, everything always appears to be happening on the very edge of my vision, outside the immediate and tiny sphere of my consciousness, even and especially those things directly in front of me.

“Oh.” I try to focus on his face, to see it as a coherent whole, instead of fixing on its disconnected pieces. He has a wide-eyed and slightly unseeing gaze, locked in a face framed by thin and straggly grey hair. “I’m sorry. Yeah, I need a token.” I commence again my desperate attempt at personal finance, but abandon the effort before getting past the first coin. Going haphazardly by weight and colour, I pour most of the mass of change into his open palm.

I’m just about walking away when I turn, embarrassed at my inability to do simple math. “Wait, is that right?” I’m thinking that maybe I short-changed him. Maybe that wasn’t 2.75 that I gave him. “Do you need more?”

“Sure,” he says, surprised, as though I’d asked the most obvious question. There is still that bemused look in his eyes, which are still the only thing I see, though I can’t tell what colour his eyes are. “Whatever you’ve got,” he says.

I empty the rest of the the change in his hand. “Thanks,” I say, for the token. “Have fun.” This is the meaningless goodbye that I make as I head to the turnstile.

Underground, waiting for the northbound, suddenly the casual brutality of the conversation hits me, its straightforwardly demeaning logic of need and the flat carelessness of my self-absorption. Have fun, I said. I swear out loud, startling the woman standing on my right.

Fleetingly, I consider going back up the stairs and apologising to him for my careless cruelty. Too late I note the slightly abashed note in his voice when he said he needed food, and the continued bewilderment when I asked him if needed more change. We were having two different conversations, his answers and my questions not quite meeting.

But what would I say to him, what paltry excuse could I offer for my crudeness — that I don’t understand faces and voices and words any more, that the delay between hearing and emotional comprehension has grown so long that I inflict these daily cruelties now everywhere, accidental and oblivious hurts.

So I don’t apologise to him, because that would have been a supremely self-serving thing to do. Instead, I let out an exasperated, tired Fuck and wait for the train doors to open.

It is November. I have been waiting for winter for a year now.

A junkie walking through the twilight
I’m on my way home
I left three days ago, but no one seems to know I’m gone
Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it,
might not be such a bad idea if I never, never went home again

stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why
hang on to your rosary beads
close your eyes to watch me die
you keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it
God, but did you ever try
to turn your sick soul inside out
so that the world, so that the world
can watch you die

home is where I live inside my white powder dreams
home was once an empty vacuum that’s filled now with my silent screams
home is where the needle marks
try to heal my broken heart
and it might not be such a bad idea if I never, if I never went home again
home again
home again
home again
kick it, quit it
kick it, quit it
kick it, quit it
kick it, can’t go home again

Gil Scott-Heron – Home Is Where The Hatred Is (z-share)
Esther Phillips – Home Is Where The Hatred Is (z-share)

Gil Scott-Heron – Angel Dust (live performance) (z-share)

My father will occasionally have one us of check his emails for him. Every time we do so constitutes a technological intervention, beginning with the retrieval of his password and ending with a careful explanation of the metaphysics of the Internet. We remember to check his email so rarely, though, that more often than not we end up having to reset his password, only to find his inbox scrubbed empty all over again by Hotmail’s invisible slaveforce. When we do check his mail in time to read his letters, I skim through the emails, tell him who wrote and repeat the gist of their messages. Sometimes he requests a print out of his emails, sometimes he has one of us reply for him, and sometimes he types out a response himself, tortuously reassuring himself of the location of each letter on the keyboard before committing himself to touching it.

There was one man whose emails I never attempted to summarise to my father. Arjun emailed, I’d say and my father would never ask what he’d written, only tell me to note the email so he’d remember to read it himself. He emailed fairly regularly, a childhood friend of my father’s who’d moved to Ohio in the 1960s to do a PhD. Thirty years later, dissertation incomplete, he made a trip to Canada, wandered drunk into a snowstorm where he saw Jesus, and lost four fingers to frostbite, two from each hand. He had his surgery done in Toronto General and his baptism in Montreal. That December, sans former accoutrements of wife and children, he returned to Jaffna, from where he now sends rambling emails addressed to people who have nothing in common with the others listed in his randomly-generated CC fields. The BCCs are rendered only slightly less obscure when my father gets a letter in which his own email address is invisible, where his name shows up in the third person in a conversation with someone he doesn’t know.
Continue reading this entry »

Justin Jones – Boots of Spanish Leather (zshare)

I decided I might as well write this here, since I don’t know if you check your email address anymore, or if you even remember your own password. And anyway, in light of everything, this space seems fitting.

Thank you.

I picked it up at the post office and it was wrapped in official Canada Post shrinkwrap and that was enough to make me smile, the self-importance of all that government-approved wrapping. That box could have been empty and I’d have been happy enough for the postage. Anyway, I was on my way to school, or I was on my way to some randomly chosen street, or I was going to the beach, or I was about to see someone for lunch, or any one of a number of or’s – the point is that I was going somewhere that morning and so, after signing the necessary forms, I put the package in my bag without opening it. I waited for the bus and I got on the bus and I took my favourite seat at the very back of the bus, where the seats are just high enough that my toes don’t quite touch the ground. That was also the day I got an anonymous postcard in the mail – through the mailslot, no pickup required – and so I pulled that out of my bag first and read that first, carefully, all three handwritten lines.

I waited for one stop to pass, and then the next, and then I took it out of my bag. There was the shrinkwrap to go through, then the ribbon to untie, then your choice in font to identify and consider, then the box to untape, and then — and I was expecting a book, or maybe fudge — I pulled it out and said oh my god and startled the girl next to me, and then I put it back in its box and I didn’t open it again for at least another week.

It still scares me, a little. You may have seen me without it, in which case I hope you weren’t offended. I was working my way up to it, but in all honesty, a part of me just wanted to frame it and hang it on my wall, but that would be strange, I think. Also, I was waiting for the right moment. That moment took three and a half months in coming.

I have trouble accepting gifts, especially of this magnitude, especially when I have no way of returning the gesture. It’s … educational, not having a choice in the matter.

Thank you
& take care,
-f.

PS: It’s just as well that my building has only 18 floors, else I’d have never gotten it.

Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No…I’ve Got Life (youtube)

It has been a difficult year. The thing about extended periods of hurt is that you reach a point when, unless you’re very careful, every conversation becomes pitiful. Sometime in June, when I realised I needed to stop talking, I did. Here, anyway.

But hi, I’ve missed you – the people I’ve met because of this space, and the conversations that we’ve had that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. So I’m back, with the one disclaimer that this space will no longer be as straightforwardly autobiographical as it used to be. I’m likely going to continue writing about me, but hopefully a lot less often and a lot less truthfully.

I’ve been thinking about grace for some time now and as I think about these last few months and the conversations I’ve had, I’ve come to believe that there is a grace particular to the act of reading: this willingness to suspend disbelief, to indulge someone else’s insecurities a while, to humour their arrogance. Thank you for that.

A note on Nina Simone:
I know no musician who can touch Nina Simone for sheer calculated, disciplined force. Of all her songs, this is my favourite. And of all its renditions, this is the one I love hardest, the one that most clearly demonstrates why the thought of her as a physical, breathing person makes me catch my breath a little.