Shrug

Originally posted October 25th 2023

I keep waking up at 5am, struck by the sudden need to open my eyes. Sometimes out of nowhere, sometimes with the feeling that someone is standing in the corner of the room. I wonder if a neighbour wakes up around this time and the shifts and echos through the building reach me. It’s very easy to hear neighbours talking. An intense lovers spat, chats in a language I don’t understand, someone shouts about so and so in the hallway. Yesterday, someone came home sobbing their eyes out so I threw on a record. It was an attempt to give them privacy. It reminded me of when I went to a Wolf Alice gig and the lead singer had to stop during the opening of Don’t Delete the Kisses to turn away from us and cry. How can one be respectful in that moment? Do we all turn away? Do we leave?

I have yet to see any of my neighbours in person, we hear each other go in and out, if I can hear them they’ve certainly heard me talking to myself during the day. I cannot put the voices to a face yet and perhaps it’s just the time of year, but it feels very ghostly. A combination with trouble sleeping, the loud creaking of my bedroom door, a black cat sleeping on my bed, Halloween has been subtle but not unnoticed.

I visited a jazz bar on Saturday night. It was packed to the brim, the bartenders were running back and forth and a bored chef shifted his weight in the corner, taking on and off his hat. It was the first bit of live music I’ve heard since early last year, save for a brief minute at a basement show where someone roughly played acoustic guitar. But these guys were professionals. There was no stage, the band was surrounded at all sides. They were improvising, the guitar player often took time to just listen to her fellow players before jumping in, her and the saxophonist taking turns to solo as the drums and piano provided the foundations. The guitarist stuck out to me, likely because she was the only player facing my direction. She wore a bandana and a blue knit jumper with a beautiful acoustic guitar sat on her lap. I enjoyed how much she was enjoying herself.

I have had Juliette Lewis’ cover of Hardly Wait by PJ Harvey stuck in my head for over a week after watching the film Strange Days. I’ve watched a few other films from the 1990s this month and I miss films obsession with music. It’s corny and doesn’t always work, but I love a scene that operates like a music video. I feel like it takes full advantage of the medium and heightened emotion, as melodramatic as it is, I love how unabashed it can be. It seems like everything is so embarrassed to exist now. So many people are ashamed to even try, perhaps because we feel over saturated with opinions, how can we believe our own matter? How could our vision, so easily taken apart, be worth saying/making?

Strange Days was a huge flop that nearly ended the director Kathryne Bigelow’s career. It left no cultural impact. There’s not really a cult following I can find online. It kind of just exists now. But here I am nearly 30 years after its release, and something about it invigorated me.

Linda Perhacs released her debut album, Parallelograms, in 1970 and continued to be a dental hygienist until the album got re-released in early 2000s and she was able to release a second album in 2014. Beverly Glenn-Copeland recorded the iconic Keyboard Fantasies in 1986 and it wasn’t until a tape was rediscovered in Japan in 2015 did it really blow up.

My point is, you never know what’s going to work and what’s not. One hit wonders come and go with less than 15 minutes of fame these days. Someone made a demo 20 years ago and a reddit forum is going nuts over it trying to track down the original songwriters. If you make something genuine someone will care about it. If you are willing to make the effort, you will find a new favourite thing. Even if its a 2 1/2 hour long science fiction crime thriller you decided to watch because someone on tumblr posted a clip of Juliette Lewis playing a very 90s warehouse show.

Thank you for reading,

Enya xx