Cubic Zirconia profile in Dazed & Confused
Gwilym Gold interview in Dazed & Confused
A lonely life
Interviewer: Do you think it has become easier for women to follow their vocations?
Rebecca West: I don’t know. It’s very hard. I’ve always found I’ve had too many family duties to enable me to write enough. I would have written much better and I would have written much more. Oh, men, whatever they may say, don’t really have any barrier between them and their craft, and certainly I had.
[Paris Review interview, 1981]
Reading this just now brought to mind something that Meredith Monk said last October in conversation with Blondes (google for the feature on Dummy, it’s a great read). Some years ago a conflicted student had asked her for advice and she had told him, “a creative life is a very lonely life.” Clearly this struck me but at the time I had naively assumed she meant in a romantic way. Now, having read the above, I realise the sacrifice is so much greater.
You’re in it now
Lying in bed, the rain leaving patterns on my window, the orange glow of my lamp warming up the grey daylight, and You’re In It Now by Pure X floating over and over me. I rise to set the needle back to the beginning, again and again, round and round, a pattern in itself, a rhythm of listening, a circle of feeling, a warming in my bones.
Breathe deep
All we’re all doing – all we can do, should do – is working things through; trying this, trying that, taking this, leaving that. We’ve got to breathe it all in to know what to discard and what to hold dear. Stop exploring, stop experimenting, stop reaching, and you stop growing. Happiness is not a fucking destination.
Blister kisses
There is a blister on the sole of my right foot. It doesn’t surprise me; looking after feet is boring. Then I check my left foot: another blister, in the same spot. Why that surprises me surprises me. After all, my two feet have endured the same experiences: the same late nights, the same new shoes. It took the same pressure, the same heat, the same friction to create the same blister in the same spot on my two soles.
It’s not that different with people. Two souls can share the same spirit, divine twin responses to life, pursue a parallel path – moulded by mirror circumstances.
Today I am devouring Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a memoir of her formative years with Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s setting my imagination on fire.
The Circle Game
Life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And yet our lives don’t follow a linear path. We trace circles, follow patterns, chase our tails. Threads are found, dropped and picked up once again. Conversations, ideas and dreams revisited, relived, rewritten. Emotions echo in circular motion blur, rippling out and in again, reverberating like basslines. Or maybe heartbeats.
I can spend a whole evening pressing play again and again on the same songs. A repeating that breeds a closeness, a comfort, a leaning over and falling in.
These are a few I’ve recently been lost in. Some are newer than others, some are coming.
Jessie Ware & Sampha – Valentine
Jacques Greene – Another Girl
Konx-om-Pax – 7th Dimension
Cubic Zirconia – Night Or Day
Nicolas Jaar – Wouh
Gang Colours – In Your Gut Like A Knife
Bullion – My Castle In England
James Blake – A Case Of You (Joni Mitchell cover)
CYMBALS – Half Ask
Adele – Turning Tables
GB – The Provider
(In case you were wondering, The Circle Game is a lullaby by Joni Mitchell. To me it will always be the dragonfly song.)
Real life
Everything echoes louder in our heads: a single moment blows up silver screen size, a glance engulfs, a sentence repeats and repeats to distortion. We carry with us our own realities, which blur, overlap, and occasionally converge. Life is messy. But it gets less messy with music. I just got home from seeing WU LYF. They made my chest hurt, the pressure almost too much. There was no relief, no release, it just built and built. I can still feel the sound. It’s a sweet pain. They were really fucking good.
We are collages
The saddest thing anyone ever said to me was: “I’m not the person you think I am.” Sad because I chose not to hear it. Years later I finally understand. What is said and what is heard are often entirely different. Our desires colour what is received, shaping and shading it. None of us are the people others see us as or want us to be. Or even the people we believe ourselves to be. We are collages. Collections and layers.
Ruth Saxelby 