Tag: canal

Playlist: July 2018

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This month first bloomed in the green-gold fairgrounds of sleepless nights, twinned in a week of pre-delirium. We stood in a packed sports bar and watched three screens simultaneously, everyone’s face a spectacle of something other that was going on beyond offsides and angles and penalties. Indulgent love of epi-bro culture. Finding that tiny jubilance inside you. Running round with the lights off, spouting catch phrases that kill and kill. I say the same name again and again, without meaning to. Am I winning.

Closing time and proximate whisky. What swills and feels wavy, later, at the top of the street. I hold ice in my gums for the numbing. 

Imagine a toothache so rich in pain it was like cradling some other entity within yourself.

So the paths seemed windier than usual and trailing my way into whatever would happen and the ascent and the lights that seemed stranger. Cradle your toothache into some kind of coda, a pause that leads to return. The portholes of naproxen, dihydrocodeine, paracetamol, ibuprofen. Appetite collapses and the mouth is a metallic pool of pain. Send one thing away to endure. Circle around, forget about yourself. Forget your body. Learn to make of my carpet a turquoise pool, our belligerent drift which quickens to pulse. I lay very still and bit my lip. Learn not to cry when people are kind, learn to accept gesture in itself. Walk in the back roads of Finnieston on some green afternoon, everything lush and wilted with rain.

So it warms again.

Salt rinses make me sad for the sea.

These train rides between cities and the way the light looks at eight of an evening in late July. The soft yellow gold of fields to be harvested, trails of meadow lines read as braille. We talk intermittently. I close my eyes to a faint remainder of presence. It is difficult to remember what’s happened, bundling into a part song of falling. Walk back along the Clyde, swallow a letdown that ricochets through all buried traits, read as you walk. Walk as you read. Chance encounters that mean things.

To be sent home early, to feel over-brimming with all this salty, incorrigible water. Cancer season comes to an end.

I say whatever weird thing pops into my head. This is the way we are now. It is light at six in the morning, we sit at the table among fag paraphernalia and sketch each other’s souls. So ever to read glitches between us in negative space. I walk home alone and the daylight tastes so beautiful and I am so dizzy from twice cheating the diurnal within the same week. When we message, we use only the choicest emojis. Wouldn’t you like a vial of mercury?

I told him I was seeing. I was seeing.

My head in my throat, forehead to forehead. Is it the sweat, the seemingly interminable beats? The club is like the cabin of a ship, sloshing with heat and bodies. I spill out in cold night. I write this looking at the rain outside, which is utterly vertical and soft, drooping the branches of trees I can’t name. The sky is a greyish egg white, clearer towards centre. It matches my mood quite perfectly. I fear it will melt.

The colours in the takeaway were ravishing, erratic. I could not take my eyes off the shreds of meat. The singular tomato.

The rain was welcome. It gushed bright cold to my skin as I peddled, the canal adjacent to my trail. Catching my breath on the hot chest feeling, which later would become a pang, a harp string pulled too taut. A minor chord that needed to settle. It takes awhile to settle into your own body, to learn its game. The rain was good, the rain was silver and dazzled the leaves. I cycled to Lock 31 and back again twice in a week. I wanted to compare each experience. The fact was a shift in my flesh, a chorus of moving blood and water.

My sweaty hair smelled of the sea. I like that the seagulls leave when it rains.

Maggie Nelson writes: ‘How many ways are there / to get saturated in another’s mind?’ & I wonder. She is writing about a canal too, but really she is writing about desire. Canals don’t flow though; canals are relatively static. Something of undercurrent draws them along?

The pale sweet scent of coconut oil and misplaced nostalgia.

The Forth & Clyde Canal is so unlike the Clyde, this great wide luminously masculine river. When the song came on and I thought of the boy who drowned. I like to look at the lights on the Clyde at night, feel quite dark in myself and proximate to history. Feel everything dimming. Feel muscular for merely being there.

But then once I saw the Clyde in the afternoon, it was buttermilk.

Maryhill becomes a sort of fairyland, the unseen space around the canal, the outcrops of houses blending into Anniesland. I stick to the line, the gravel, the pace. Trust in my breath. Clusters of teenage girls pass by on their mobiles.

Sometimes I hallucinate the phone ring of my childhood home.

Keep sleeping in and savouring escape. The trick is to get to bed before five. To keep yourself stable.

The weeks slip away like vulnerable sand flats.

I drink things that are orange and icy and strong. I try to recall that hullabaloo of pain. A wedge of it bright and red.

Drawing is a warm sweet vortex where I drag myself deep into greens and blues.

Layering long stints of techno over the same routes. It gets heavier. I walk into the headlights of cars without meaning to. They keep playing Darude’s ‘Sandstorm’ in Byres Road Tesco, the inchoate vertigo of a broken decade. Later I dream the stores were empty as they were in the snow days. Water everywhere, sloshing the hours and ankles, not a drop to drink. Remember when everything caught glitches, sounded through the tinniness of a Motorola phone, those metallic wee speakers, resounded twice over on the plexiglass of a bus stop?

Everyone’s cold suburbia closes. You just shut the skylight, ignore the rain.

When you are away I sort of half live in the other place, but then already between myself.

Is it the circles below my eyes, below ugly tungsten light? The intimate work of a visceral distraction? Too many bowls of soft cereal?

Craving the expanse of the sea, releasing my cuts, wanna lose all time + memory.

Salt rinse, salt rinse; salt and cloves.

Find a note on someone’s jotter at work: get cunt fae spar. It will take a while to parse this. Fae spar get cunt, cunt spar get fae. Ye olde spar will get yae. Forget the star. 

There is a fight and a fire and over and over I write things like, gratitude, gratitude. Plug sockets sparking. 

Resist the tinny in the fridge. Do magick. I think maybe I am tired and scared of the present. The piano sounded lovely. With my window open, I could hear someone warming the keys. Notes for a genuine summer, notes for a situation. Then breathe. Bryan Ferry is sound-checking from the bandstand, you can hear the distant, phasing groan. It is almost August. 

 

*

 

Death Grips – Black Paint

03 Greedo – Jealous

Cold Cave – You & Me & Infinity

Fred Thomas – Good Times Are Gone Again

The Twilight Sad – I/m Not Here [Missing Face]

Hand Habits – Book on How to Change

Pavement – Harness Your Hopes

Mush – Luxury Animals

Black Marble – A Great Design

Sun June – Discotecque

Emily Isherwood – Calibrate

Hana Vu – Crying on the Subway

Laurel Halo – Sunlight on the Faded

RF Shannon – Jaguar Palace

Amen Dunes – Lonely Richard

Lucretia Dalt – Edge

Ride – Chrome Waves

Oneohtrix Point Never – Monody

Gang Gang Dance – Lotus

Beach House – Black Car

Womensaid – Magick!

Wooden Shjips – Eclipse

Phoebe Bridges – The Gold (Manchester Orchestra cover)

Galaxie 500 – Tugboat

Judee Sill – Lopin’ Along Thru The Cosmos

Aphex Twin – aisatsana [102]

Playlist: February 2018

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The birds in the garden have been keeping me up again. Sleep slides in and out of the dark hour, for which I’ve been hoarding the lights in my room for a sunrise. I’m not very good at putting on records; they always jump at the wrong bit, glitching backwards. When you wake up because the moonlight is too bright. It is a question of paying attention. It is a question of living quiet. I wish I could sleep like you.

Spent a few days waiting on trains late into the night or the afternoon. My fingers making a conspiracy of amethyst, mottled with cold. There’s a little glass case you can stand in, twirling your body to get the light to switch on again. I’ve got my comforting songs pressed into my headphones. Funny things happen in my chest when I hear them. Sometimes it’s a release, other times it’s like you can see all the filaments of your blood and sinew twist and sprawl like delicate vines. It feels hot and temporary. I flicker through bad thoughts about what might happen to the people I love. I flicker through good thoughts about what we can do with the summer. It seems so distant.

Sometimes I fall literally into bed; it’s like someone is dropping me.

There are moments I pull very close. There are places where everyone is here at once. There are places where it’s just us and it’s finally warm and my mouth tastes of dark fruit cider and other people’s cigarettes I didn’t want in the first place. The curtains are always closed.

I keep thinking about how there are takeaway shops in the southside named after glistering techno bands and wondering what came before. In my head it is always the music, but then maybe that is something Leonard Cohen said, or didn’t. No, what was it, we are ugly / but we have the music. These shops look like dollhouse shops with all the tools and objects miniatured, but maybe this is just an effect of where I’m standing from across the street, short-sighted. I went out dressed in gingham shorts and other inappropriate quantities of yellow. To have music you sort of have to walk a bit more; you have to let rhythm and melody drop memory with muscle. I once said, leaving a party, I have to make tracks and he thought I meant laying down records. But in a way it is all just recording. When do we click off? Skip between beats.

There are signs of spring. I say this as it starts to snow. I mean a few days ago I could see buds on the trees, little yellow flowers. What happens now? Do they retreat inwards? I picture them shivering within precious membranes, cocoons, algorithms of promise interrupted. It’s okay, I’ll be buying less of these indulgent Lindt eggs from the Tesco round the corner. I’ll thin out eventually. Easter will come too early this year. Winter keeps us in its arms forever, shivering because like those buds we are children. Some people burst through. I admire the impulse. It’s like what, dancing naked in the snow. I used to listen to Sonic Youth when I was angry, whacking objects off dressers, now I close my eyes and try to visualise the colour blue. I get about as close as turquoise before everything melts to bliss. That would be the ideal effect. There’s something very beautiful and suggestive about the word lagoon. Is there a pill for this?

Recently I’ve been rediscovering canals. You see it’s actually been sunny. You have to walk along the motorway, cross several spaghetti roads to get over to the Phoenix Flowers—these sort of peculiar, half-lovely windmill structures. Then an underpass and up some steps. I follow a band of miscreant hipsters. A sign saying Urban Oasis. The canal looks good when the sun hits. I mean it looks sharp and glassy and properly blue. The trees glow ochre in the sun; the way they have faded all through winter seems refreshing now instead of exhausting. In a few months this should all be green. There’s still a fragility. Very little litter. You can see the stadium and the industrial buildings, warehouses and garages and houses. Everything over there gleams rust in the sun. I listen for whistles or song but the air is only as close as my headphones. I’m listening to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, remembering odd passages from Cider with Rosie and feeling regret for nights I could’ve made longer with more wholesome spirits. Waking up to bright clusters of strawberry jam on bread like blood on the sheets.

Nothing floats by on the canal, though there are boats tied at Applecross and then a few bottles bobbing their dark viridian messages. I write letters to friends in England, emails to friends in America.

Somewhere down the line, where does all this become ASCII?

I write an inordinate quantity of poetry about bruises and flowers and passing time. The year has stepped up its bicycle gear and I wish my bike was in order so I could fly down the Clyde like Brendan and May in Ruby/Sapphire. Most mornings are filled with flash fiction and occasional bouts of panic. I finish draft ten of an important application.

Daffodils on the kitchen table bloom overnight, just like that. They are marvellously, gorgeously yellow. I feel no shame in showering adjectives.

I dream a lot about the sea. Except we don’t reach it. Mostly it is a question of negotiating cliffs to find safe accommodation. I buy family-sized bags of crisps just for the taste of salt, then feel awful afterwards. This is probably normal.

I am drawn to a piece of teal-coloured scaffolding mesh that resembles a streak of kelp on the street.

It feels good to make coffees and twirl around tables. It feels good to be serving, to eke out a few hours on other people’s time. Sometimes I look forward to a long, long waitress’s summer. Sunlight, sparkling lager and indefinite afterparties. Reams of time to commit to writing in lieu of sleep. We hover at table six and salvage lost noughties culture, folding paper napkins to crisp blue lines. If everything was this chiasmic, easily given to compost.

Today’s Oblique Strategy pops up on my Twitter timeline: Make something implied more definite. Last year I got Tinder but ended up using it mostly to talk about Brian Eno to at least two strangers. I feel like I understand lust less; it is like clustering the silent hours with extra ambience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The snow outside my window right now is pretty pathetic. People are shaving the skin off clouds. It is really happening; the gaps are appearing. Sometime early nineties, year of the Rooster, hole in the ozone layer.

Being a sucker for charm, longing for the twilight of virtual swamplands where it is possible to cry again. An effect of atmospheric toxins. This is a slow-burner, just slip it on and trust me. You can see through the nacreous membranes, someone else’s confected scrolls of sugar, confession, snow.

~

Hookworms – Ullswater

Robert Rental, Thomas Leer – Day Breaks, Night Heals

Beth Orton, Four Tet – Carmella (Four Tet remix)

Kiasmos – Blurred (Bonobo remix)

Beach House – Lemon Glow

Agony – Beach Fossils

The Orielles – Old Stuff, New Glass

Japanese Breakfast – Soft Sounds from Another Planet

Martha Ffion – Baltimore

Cloud – Happer’s Laugh

Sun Kil Moon – Among the Leaves

Suuns – Make It Real

Brian Jonestown Massacre – Throbbing Gristle

Iceage – Catch It

Marnie – Lost Maps

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – The Lost Oasis

Neroche – Sycamore Trees

Grouper – Vapor Trails

Fieldhead – How Much I Love the Sea

Arthur Russell – Arm Around You

Mazzy Star – Five String Serenade

Yo La Tengo – Nowhere Near

There Will Be Fireworks – South Street