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Making yourself up as you go along
1. Despite recent stress, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I went out tonight for Dine Out Boston at the Marliave. We wouldn't have been able to afford it ordinarily. But on a prix fixe menu, I had succulent, garlic-dripping snails and an entrée of scallops seared over tiny enoki mushrooms and crisp sage leaves with sweet potato ravioli on top and Rob had a starter of rarebit with smoky bacon and a superlative beef Wellington with nothing else on the plate to distract and we split half a dozen oysters for a dollar each and the desserts were frankly ridiculous. I expected not to like the mint chocolate chip ice cream which came with the other two flavors in the trio of the day; I accepted it as the necessary cost of blueberry swirl and salt caramel. It was the best of the three. The mint was fresh mint, not candy. It tasted like a garden, cool and bitter-green, like chewing on the crushed raw leaves. We may have fought over it a little. Fortunately, there was more than enough candied ginger butterscotch pudding to smooth over tensions. Afterward we walked around the North End, stopping in to Modern Pastry to lay in a store of cannoli and lobster tail for tomorrow, and watched Government Center under construction slide past the windows of the Green Line like a diorama in a dark ride, and between Harvard and Porter a stranger vomited slightly on Rob's shoes, which was not awesome. Everything until that point, A-plus!
2. Against Me! is a punk band from Gainesville who released their first album in 2001, so there is a non-zero chance that I heard some of their music in college. I found them in my new music trawl last week. Frontwoman Laura Jane Grace came out as trans in 2012. Transgender Dysphoria Blues is the album she wrote around that period; it was released in January on the band's own label. What I've got right now are the acoustic demos of two album tracks, released last year as the EP True Trans: "FuckMyLife666" and "True Trans Soul Rebel." Both are very good songs and I could find them for free on the internet (the EP was briefly a giveaway over the summer). The actual album, I am going to buy. I want to support the band. Cash-clear that trans punk is awesome. Also, the acoustic versions have been stuck in my head for a solid week now and that is generally a good sign about a record.
3. Talking about PJ Harvey withashlyme, I realized that I never mentioned a thing I noticed a few weeks ago. For years, I couldn't listen easily to "Sweeter Than Anything." It crystallized a part of my life that hurt. I mean it was physically painful when it came around on iTunes; I'd leave it playing only if I was feeling desolate. How can this be? There's nothing left here. We were never more than a dream. Harvey's voice breaks with the chorus, unable to complete the question she knows there's really no answer to. Even that rolling underwater bassline sounds like the endless repetition of a grief it's hard to think outside of, wearing the same spiral of memory and loss. I can't even remember where I was this last month, on foot somewhere in Cambridge or Somerville, running an errand or returning from a doctor's appointment, and I realized the song was in my head and I was using it to keep time as I walked and it was not wrecking me. I was not singing it to grieve. I don't know if I will ever be able to listen to it as simply as "White Chalk" or "Yuri-G" or even "The Phone Song," which is one of the B-sides from Uh Huh Her (2004) I like better than the album. But it's not nothing. And it's a really good song. To Bring You My Love (1994) and Is This Desire? (1998) were the first PJ Harvey I heard and I loved them at once. I was sorry to lose any of her voice from that time, no matter what it told me.
derspatchel and I went out tonight for Dine Out Boston at the Marliave. We wouldn't have been able to afford it ordinarily. But on a prix fixe menu, I had succulent, garlic-dripping snails and an entrée of scallops seared over tiny enoki mushrooms and crisp sage leaves with sweet potato ravioli on top and Rob had a starter of rarebit with smoky bacon and a superlative beef Wellington with nothing else on the plate to distract and we split half a dozen oysters for a dollar each and the desserts were frankly ridiculous. I expected not to like the mint chocolate chip ice cream which came with the other two flavors in the trio of the day; I accepted it as the necessary cost of blueberry swirl and salt caramel. It was the best of the three. The mint was fresh mint, not candy. It tasted like a garden, cool and bitter-green, like chewing on the crushed raw leaves. We may have fought over it a little. Fortunately, there was more than enough candied ginger butterscotch pudding to smooth over tensions. Afterward we walked around the North End, stopping in to Modern Pastry to lay in a store of cannoli and lobster tail for tomorrow, and watched Government Center under construction slide past the windows of the Green Line like a diorama in a dark ride, and between Harvard and Porter a stranger vomited slightly on Rob's shoes, which was not awesome. Everything until that point, A-plus!2. Against Me! is a punk band from Gainesville who released their first album in 2001, so there is a non-zero chance that I heard some of their music in college. I found them in my new music trawl last week. Frontwoman Laura Jane Grace came out as trans in 2012. Transgender Dysphoria Blues is the album she wrote around that period; it was released in January on the band's own label. What I've got right now are the acoustic demos of two album tracks, released last year as the EP True Trans: "FuckMyLife666" and "True Trans Soul Rebel." Both are very good songs and I could find them for free on the internet (the EP was briefly a giveaway over the summer). The actual album, I am going to buy. I want to support the band. Cash-clear that trans punk is awesome. Also, the acoustic versions have been stuck in my head for a solid week now and that is generally a good sign about a record.
3. Talking about PJ Harvey with
ashlyme, I realized that I never mentioned a thing I noticed a few weeks ago. For years, I couldn't listen easily to "Sweeter Than Anything." It crystallized a part of my life that hurt. I mean it was physically painful when it came around on iTunes; I'd leave it playing only if I was feeling desolate. How can this be? There's nothing left here. We were never more than a dream. Harvey's voice breaks with the chorus, unable to complete the question she knows there's really no answer to. Even that rolling underwater bassline sounds like the endless repetition of a grief it's hard to think outside of, wearing the same spiral of memory and loss. I can't even remember where I was this last month, on foot somewhere in Cambridge or Somerville, running an errand or returning from a doctor's appointment, and I realized the song was in my head and I was using it to keep time as I walked and it was not wrecking me. I was not singing it to grieve. I don't know if I will ever be able to listen to it as simply as "White Chalk" or "Yuri-G" or even "The Phone Song," which is one of the B-sides from Uh Huh Her (2004) I like better than the album. But it's not nothing. And it's a really good song. To Bring You My Love (1994) and Is This Desire? (1998) were the first PJ Harvey I heard and I loved them at once. I was sorry to lose any of her voice from that time, no matter what it told me.
no subject
There's a neat video for the album version, collaging the lyrics into the action of the song. The last video I saw make that much interwoven use of text was Amanda Palmer's "Want It Back," and even that felt fundamentally different: the ink in that one is a living, contagious entity, while here the words are just stamped onto the scene, sometimes subtitle, sometimes commentary. The jagged shadow cut-outs remind me of some experimental films from the '20's, which is a good thing.
(I've not given Is This Desire? the listening time it deserves, and I'll rectify that tonight.)
The B-sides from that album are all very strong: "The Northwood," "The Bay," "Instrumental #3," "Nina in Ecstasy," "The Faster I Breathe the Further I Go." It's her most literary album, I think; most of the songs are stories even if they're not explicitly referencing J.D Salinger or Flannery O'Connor, as many of them are. I can't listen to it without thinking of my apartment in New Haven, sitting at my desk the first time I heard any of the songs. I'm all right with that by now. It feels like a strange season.
I love To Bring You My Love beyond reasonable measure and I think that is appropriate.
Let me know your song of choice!
Argh. All right, since "White Chalk" itself is the obvious choice, how about "Grow Grow Grow"?
no subject
Gah, sorry. I didn't mean to put you on the spot. Actually, I thought "Grow Grow Grow" was the obvious choice; I love the hell out of it.
*I love To Bring You My Love beyond reasonable measure and I think that is appropriate.*
Yep. It's where I first fell in love with her too.
no subject
Well, then, I look forward to seeing what springs from it.
Yep. It's where I first fell in love with her too.
I heard the title track for the first time at a party in grad school: one of the professors, having discovered that I'd never heard of PJ Harvey, put it on for me. The guitar line came up under the conversation like walking the miles of endless, endless road, patient and repetitive and relentless as one foot in front of the other; her voice worn down by obsession and distortion to something as inhuman as dry earth and floods, as impossible to argue with. And that falling organ line at the end, which always makes me think of heat lightning, the rattle like a bronze sistrum in the dark. I took the CD home with me and played it over and over for days.