[So I woke up today to the sound of the alarm blaring, and a reminder on my phone that today's the anniversary of our first meeting, because of course this is an old reminder on an old backup of an old phone, and it'd obviously pop up today, though I don't think I actually remembered the date at all. But I do remember that first day, tentative, testy, tetchy, the both of us. Fourteen long years ago, and yet it doesn't seem an enough number of years, because I feel I've lived at least two full lifetimes since then. Had we known what we'd come to know, I wonder, would we have called it quits then and there?]
(You're the truth, not I.)
And then, because these things tend to be somehow linked, I woke up with a melody in my head. Not a familiar one, but one I knew I had listened to before - but where? when? I tried to hum it, and it hung there, just at the edge of recognition. I couldn't put words to the melody, so I began to realize that maybe this was something instrumental rather than vocal. I had this faint idea of a melancholy tune, and a part of me knew that this had been played to me in a somewhat intimate setting - somewhere with very few people. An image of people sitting around a table, all eyes on a lone figure came to my mind. I can't now remember the person's name, and I highly doubt that I memorized it at all, but in my mind's eye this moment was relived in full detail. Sometime in early 2000, I had been living in London for a few months, and feeling wholly miserable the whole time. I missed home, missed my family, missed my friends... and I hated both my work and one of the people I lived with. There were very few moments of joy back then, especially in this particular moment in time.
But there was this one day where me and this couple I lived with went to visit some of their friends at their place, themselves having moved to London a few years back, and this proved to be a great moment of home away from home, and a completely unexpected one at that. Besides the familiarity of listening to your own language again - though I did listen to it daily, but only from the same two people - it also helped that we were treated to some very good traditional cooking, with some very fine wine to go with it. Something I realized early was that I was the youngest person there, aside from the children, and because my own son was still very wee - and very far away - this did leave me far more emotional than I would've expected. At the end of the evening, as we all huddled 'round that table, a strong drink in hand, listening to stories of old, seemingly out of nowhere an accordion was produced. And this nameless figure that played this most melancholic of songs, wrought tears straight from our very souls; not an eye in that room remained dry as the notes swirled around us, tugging deeply at our heartstrings. What song this was I never knew, nor will I ever. I just look at it as the soundtrack to a happy moment, twenty years ago.
And that's the end and that's the start of it
that's the whole and that's the part of it
that's the high and that's the heart of it
that's the long and that's the short of i
that's the best and that's the test in it
that's the doubt, the doubt, the trust in it
that's the sight and that's the sound of it
that's the gift and that's the trick in it.
Twenty years ago, that boy that sat at that table, looked so much like this man I am now. Oh, a lot less gray haired, to be sure, and my heart and mind not yet as broken as today. And yet, that distant echo of me still reflects unto this day. I wonder, twenty years hence what reverberation of me will make itself be felt, that of now, or that of that twenty years past? We'll have to see, won't we? After all, there are only twenty years to go.
I wanted to do this post its due justice, so instead of writing it down when I first thought of it - which might've been more emotionally honest, if not compeltely factual - I waited for a few days until the words smoldered inside me. So the genesis of this actually begins a fortnight ago - it was my dear friend Sérgio's birthday - and as always we ended up reminiscing about days past, days of our youths, and a time period where everything was so deeply condensed, where we felt so much so earnestly and so very much to the depths of our cores that it truly became a highly formative era for us. I kept on musing on this - for the nth time, really - as I got home. And last week, we had a pretty huge thunderstorm over Lisbon, the kind that is all rolling thunder in the distance, interspersed with flashes of light in the night skies, and every so often a jagged lightning would rip through this midsummer welkin and illuminate us with its terrifying presence. This was, for the longest part, a thunderstorm devoid of rain, but eventually rain started falling, in slow, fat drops that were as like to bruise you as to leave you wet. As it fell, so languidly from the sky, I felt its warmth upon me, and memories of that time I spoke of earlier came flooding back to me - pun intended.
There was a time - this time I evoke here - where me and S and another, distant but never forgotten, friend of ours - N - were exposed to so, so much that would come to develop us - either in the music we listen to, the books we read, the aesthetics of all these worlds that sometimes would crossover, so to speak, with others that would send us down unforeseen paths of knowledge that seemed to just lie behind that elusive corner. This time was the time of the LeFanu and James and Stoker and other Victorian inspired poetry that made up so much of Dani's lyrics for Cradle of Filth. This was the time of Johan Edlund's writings of mind-altering drugs and the music it inspired. It was the time of My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, Samael, Moonspell, and a time of Thomas Mann's 'Doctor Faustus' (as well as his son Klaus's 'Mephisto'). It was a time of the first female voices we'd come to adore - Liv Kristine of Theatre of Tragedy, Kari Rueslatten, and later, Ann-Mari Edvardsen in The 3rd and the Mortal, Anneke van Giersbergen in The Gathering. But probably - thought not quite surely - this was also the time were one Darren White would make his presence known to us, and become prevalent as the years went on. We knew of Darren through his then current band Anathema, and that triptych of 'The Crestfallen E.P.', 'Serenades' and 'Pentecost III' - all in these few short years - proved to be an immense boon to us. These were works filled with felt and emotionally raw lyrics, Darren's growl intoning them in a lovelorn fashion, and the instrumental side did its very best to layer it with the most melancholy of sounds.
One day, though - probably through Terrorizer, Metal Hammer, or Kerrang, the word came down that Darren and the band had gone their separate ways - a new record had been in the works, tentatively called 'Rise Pantheon Dreams' - but none of that would come to pass. But what did come to pass?
Ah, well... at least for me, Anathema became a deathly dull endeavour, and I've rarely liked any of their output since, but Daz and some lads he knew quite well would come to produce some bit of magic once more.
So in 1996 we'd learn that together with Paul and Benjamin Ryan, as well as Paul Allender, an ex COF trio, together with drummer WAS and bassist Steve Maloney, Darren had created The Blood Divine, in essence a continuation of some of the themes carried from his Anathema days, as well as a ground for further sonic exploration. That year's 'Awaken' was certainly one of the musical highlights for us, and in due time, they were sure to grace these shores of ours for a gig, and of course we had to be there. Now let me tell you of a ritual of sorts that was quite common for us back then; just before the gig itself, earlier in the day, there'd be a signing session with the band - some of these were fairly crowded events, if I'm remembering correctly the COF session was hell, and maybe Paradise Lost's was heavily attended as well - but some, like Tiamat's - there's a story or three about that one - and TBD's were fairly low key, which - in this particular case - made for a spot of conversation with the band. This session being not very attended - insofar as I can remember - we ended up not only being able to talk with the whole band, but to hang out with them afterwards, even sharing a few drinks in the next door dive. And wouldn't you know, back in the venue we caught up with the guys and they recognized us from earlier, and we talked for a while longer, even joking with the lads that they could play some of the earlier Anathema tunes, with Darren amusingly suggesting to Benjamin that maybe they could do 'A dream of wolves in the snow', a COF song where Darren sang, and a song that is arguably one of the best in their celebrated debut. I actually wanted them to play a specific song - 'Warm Summer Rain' - but no female singer in their entourage meant that it was a no-go. Listening to that thunderstorm last week, my ears turned to 'Awaken' once again. Guess what song I just had to listen first?
As is yours, reality
Warm summer rain Will we never, ever breathe again?
'And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.' - 1 Kings 19:11
I don't often have conversations with God, but sometimes I do. I've always struggled to find you, o Lord, though you are all around me. I can't see your image. I can't hear your voice. But you must be somewhere, God. I surely hope so.
I don't often talk to you anymore, Lord. But sometimes you speak to me in your mysterious ways. I heard you yesterday, shortly after I woke up, and I mumbled something. Something so familiar, and yet - and yet so distant from me. I recognized the mumbling as poetry, but not the words, rather the cadence of it. In my younger days I used to know some poems by heart, a bit of 'The Raven', most of Hamlet's soliloquy, certainly Yeats's 'When you are old' and Davies's 'Leisure'. Maybe even 'I wandered lonely as a cloud'. But it was none of these I muttered, unknown and trembling words failing to coalesce. Throughout the day I found myself following this process, to no avail. I could see the shape of the poem, as if from afar, I could almost taste the words in my mouth, and though I knew this to be a poem that somehow revolved around nature or birds in flight, nothing in 'Leaves of grass' sated this fleeting ghost that sought to possess me. In vain I looked to songs, books and memories, but as the day wore on, I didn't come any closer to revelation.
And Lord, I heard you again today, as the memory of that evanescent poem lingered still inside me; I heard you in the song of another, a distant trill that heralds an outlier, one who still pursues the fading art of knife grinding. As that faraway song flew to my ears, so too did the words fly to my mouth and I at once started to recite Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'The Windhover', a beautiful - and very challenging - sonnet :
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
I never wanted you elsewhere, Lord, not in your house, not in the souls of your believers, but in the trees and in the waves, I never wanted you in your book and in those who'd defile our mother with its words, but in the touch and presence of something I'll never again have. I can only remember, Lord, and eventually, hope.
Some bits of what I'm about to write here I've recently discussed with both my dear friends Hugo and Sérgio, though not at the same time. We talked of a need to leave the life of the city behind, to move to somewhere where time seems to be standing still, a place of yesteryear, a place of a simpler and probably more rewarding kind of life. Maybe it's a place where the comforts of modern life do not abound, and maybe it's a place where it's sere geography will be a test unto itself. I don't know, it's a need I feel. These past few weeks I read up on and watched videos of some of the most unhospitable places on earth, some inhabited, some not. I saw videos that made me wish I lived on Pitcairn or in Tristan da Cunha, my fascination with Yukon and Alaska - some of it inherited from the works of Carl Barks, some of it from books like 'White Fang' and 'Into the wild - grew deeper, add to that my dream of spending the rest of my days in some far hill in Iceland, and that image so firmly etched in my mind of living in a near desert state took a further hold in my soul.
And then, because these things have a way of becoming true - in a sense - not only did I end up dreaming of these unknown deserts, but also in things I read, music I listened to, and memories I dredged up from god knows where, they started to permeate my days.
Let's begin with the reading, which will later link to the memories. Those who know me will know I am an avid comic book reader, and I read far too many comics, I read far too many comics whose quality is very questionable, but I also read a number of very good comics. Some are new reads - whenever I do find something new that's actually good - but most end up being re-reads of books I loved from years prior. One of those books that I return to every now and again is Craig Thompson's 'Blankets' and this past weekend I almost picked it up again but at the last moment I decided to read his 'Habibi'. I'm sure I've already written about it somewhere, sometime, but this was not a book I really enjoyed that much upon first reading. That's ok, that's actually normal with me - there are a bunch of things I didn't immediately fancy that ended up becoming very dear to me. And 'Habibi' gained a more special significance only around a year and a half or so ago. And it wasn't just because the book itself, no. Rather, it was because of a story dear Sérgio shared with me then that I would come to look upon the book with different eyes. All the things that I found boring - the esoteric bits dealing with calligraphy - became things that wholly engrossed me. It's a book I now read - in its 660+ pages - with great delight, and with a smile whenever I see this page right here:
An inescapable part of this story is the main character's life in the desert, a desert that seems almost timeless, as if plucked from some distant arabian tale, but is set in rather modern times. The desert - and finding love and sensuality in these austere conditions - brings to my mind a time when my younger self fell completely in love with 'Dune's Princess Irulan, as portrayed by Virginia Madsen in David Lynch's adaptation of Frank Herbert's 'Dune'. Me, as a kid, wanted nothing more for that world to be a real one, far more real than this one, and most of all - I wanted to be one of the fremen, with their blue-in-blue eyes, tinted thus from prolonged exposure to the spice Melange. I am very much looking to Denis Villeneuve's take on the story, and hopefully next year it'll be out for our viewing pleasure.
But thinking of 'Dune' also makes me think of music, not only Brian Eno's 'Prophecy' theme, but another song by way of 'Dune', without being explicitly so. Now, I' m not a huge Sting fan - I do like some of his older stuff - but because he was both Feyd Rautha in Lynch's 'Dune' as well as the inspiration to John Constantine, there's a song of his that I adore - 'Desert Rose'. It always seemed to me to be somewhat inspired on 'Dune', and I read somewhere years ago that Sting had confirmed it to be so.
From the searing heat of the desert, both that of our world and that of another, fictional world, my mind traverses far away to the biting cold of the north, to snow-capped mountains whose whirling winds whispers names of heroes and gods of aeons past. As my mind's eye surveys these distant, barren lands, looking from on high as if borne on the wings of a mighty eagle, from afar I sense the gentle padding of the wolves through the swirling snow, their baying a call that echoes deep in instincts honed from lifetimes ago. I glide through these lofty peaks, the chill wind willing me to live, and I dream, I dream a dream of white flurries, and warm hearths, I dream a dream of frozen rivers slowly thawing and skies of the whitest blue. I dream...
Some time ago I alluded to the eventual existence of this post, maybe on the Patrick Wolf post I did some months ago. Here and there I might have also mentioned just how difficult - not to mention impossible, for me - it is to dissociate someone from a song or a band. And so it is here, with The National, a band that will always make me think of Filipa, an ex-girlfriend of mine. Now, to be honest, it wasn't through her that I got to know the band, no. That happened years prior, but for some reason they sort of flew under my radar until maybe 'Alligator', and even then I'd not take to them immediately. 'Boxer', the follow-up to that, though, was much more agreeable with my own sensibilities, and I enjoyed it much more than anything I'd listened of them before. But the problem with not really following a band, is like you know they exist, but they're always at the edge of your perception and eventually their output will be something you may not be aware of. In this instance, I wasn't aware that in the meantime they'd released an album in 2010 at all - that was a rough, rough year for me.
So by early 2011 I'm ending the relationship where I'd been trying and failing miserably to make work since 2006, and sometime in early summer, or somewhere close to that, I went out and met up with an old friend, Elaine. She was with some friends of hers, Filipa included. It's not a story I want to tell in full detail, but things did start happening that night. Unfortunately, the circumstances of those events led to a lot of pain and anguish for another person, and it's something to this day I wish didn't happen the way it did. But me and Filipa, we ended up being together for less than an year, ultimately after that initial bout of wild passion things fizzled out, and we decided to call it quits. I only saw her the once after that, and boy oh boy, the same thing that would come to happen as consequence of our first meeting almost happened again that time. What I do have though, are very fond memories of being with Filipa getting very drunk and listening to a lot of music - she had quite the voracious apettite, that one did. It's funny how clearly I can recall some things so well, while others just fade from memory altogether. I can hear her voice still, I can picture her in full detail, but I can no longer remember things like her birthday or her full name. And I can remember being inside her car, nigh on a decade ago, and she was playing 'High Violet' to me - it was my first time listening to it, and that bit where 'Terrible Love' hits right at the start, that was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the band. I'm not entirely sure why it happened then and not in any of the times before I'd been exposed to the band. I mean, the things that I already liked about the band - Matt's voice, the rhythm session, the melody - were already there, only now maybe even more prevalent. Maybe it was because it was through her, and these songs sort of became testament to our being so in love at the time. Or maybe it was a phrase from 'Terrible Love' that I came to recognize from something that was written to me only months before, in the throes of my dying previous relationship - 'It takes an ocean not to break'. Whatever the reason, I gravitated toward this album, like a fly does to honey, and it became a fixture of my songlist on my phone. It's still an album that I return to with immense pleasure, though I will confess to having enjoyed their next album even more, 'Trouble will find me', which includes my favourite song of theirs, 'Pink Rabbits'. When this special anniversary edition was announced I knew I had to buy it because a) it comes in a groovy marbled pattern and b) it includes the content found on the CD expanded edition, which boasts the greatest version of 'Terrible Love', the alternate version, where the drumming absolutely elevates this song. Speaking of it, check it out below.
It's true, I know, that as of late I've been feeling very, very morose, completely under the weather, beaten, exhausted... and that has translated itself into what I write. Some days I can cope quite well, other days no amount of meds can bring any kind of balance to this mind of mine. But just because I've been feeling like this doesn't mean I've not been having pleasant thoughts as well, far from it.
So just the other day I was cleaning my room, and I found a box under my bed, and in it - among other things - were a few issues of The Comics Journal I'd collected back then, featuring interviews with such greats as Charles Vess, Linda Medley, Kurt Busiek, Jeff Smith, Megan Kelso, John Severin and Chris Ware. I gravitated first towards #216, cover dated January 1999, because it had the Kurt Busiek interview, and it's always a joy to re-read it. Bear in mind that these interviews are often in-depth looks into an author's career, and they'll discuss everything from their influences (past and present), how they broke into the field, what they hope to achieve with the medium, how can they improve it, etc.
Reading the Busiek interview, I can't help but find some parallels there between what influenced him the most and what had the same effect on me, especially that '66 to maybe early '80s era of comics, which was the bulk of what I read growing up. Long before I even discovered that the actual comics were pencilled, written, inked, produced originally in America, I eagerly sought to collect and hoard as many of the brazilian editions I saw on newsstands, and it was in those sometimes heavily edited pages, often published without much continuity cohesiveness, that I would fall in love with the comics medium. And while I'm not sure those books were the first thing I actually collected (though I think they might have been), it's probably what sparked an interest in collecting in me. I'm taking a walk down memory lane here, and I remember being very, very young and collecting stickers (mainly football and cartoons), action figures, and sci-fi books (especially the E-A pocket collection), but there's a specific thing to my collecting that definitely began with comics : the gimmick. And the gimmick - it can be a number of any different things - that first got to me was when in 1985 the brazilian publisher Abril started giving out keychains with some of its comics - see them here - and to my 8 year old mind there was nothing that could ever top that. I couldn't ever collect them all, I think some books weren't published here at all, but those I had I absolutely loved to death. Soon after, they offered mini posters, temporary tattoos, screen printed transfers that could be ironed into a t-shirt and all that helped fuel my love for the gimmick.
When I started buying american comics, for a good while all I knew were standard editions of those books, their covers plain, just like any other comic out there, until the '90s hit and gimmick covers became a de facto thing. They could be foil, variant, die-cut, hologram, embossed, glow in the dark, scratch and sniff, interlocking, acetate, poly-bagged, fluorescent, prismatic, thermal-recative and my personal favourites - the chromium covers. I'm sure that beyond these there were even more gimmicks I thankfully don't remember anymore. But I loved all these gimmicky covers and I bought as many of these as I could, even going so far as paying multiple times the cover price just to have it in my collection. And these gimmicks didn't limit themselves just to my comics collecting. Maybe around '93 or so I started getting serious about my CD collecting, and with time I'd be adding digipack editions, limited editions, japanese imports, tour editions, whatever, to my collection. Sometimes I'd have 4 or 5 different editions of the same record and very likely some of them spent most of their tenure in my collection unopened and unplayed. And now we're getting to where I wanted to, which is my preferred gimmick when it comes to my vinyl collecting. Nowadays I'd say that coloured, splatter, marbled, transparent, or striped records appeal to me quite a lot - and I'd rather get one of those rather than a standard black edition.
But way before that... my first gimmick in my vinyl collecting was a little something called shape vinyl - records that are cut to a specific shape, often resulting in eye-catching results. The very first I remember seeing was in some record store (can't remember which) that had a copy of Survivor's 'Burning heart' for sale, shaped like a boxing glove, but no amount of pleading with my parents got them to buy it. The first I owned was actually Ray Parker Jr's 'Ghostbusters', shaped like the iconic Ghostbusters logo, which I very sadly managed to break somehow, and that got me in trouble with my parents because hey, once clumsy, always clumsy. And I can be very clumsy indeed. Some time in the mid '90s I started getting into vinyl again - it took a huge backseat to my CD collection, and it wouldn't be until some special record fairs began popping up that I started to devote some of my income to it. I wouldn't immediately be buying a lot of records, nor was I exactly prone to making impulse buys. But whenever I saw a shape vinyl, I'd get it, if it wasn't too pricey. Some that I can recall owning were a bunch of Iron Maiden ones that now fetch hefty prices, a few Queensryche (pictured above, though these are recent purchases) and others I can't even recall anymore. I loved having these records, holding them, tracing their shape with my fingers, though at the time I didn't in fact have a record player to listen to them. As with any other previous form of my collecting, I sort of always had a grail - in terms of brazilian comics it was Super Powers #2, in terms of american comics it was Grendel's first appearance in Comico Primer #2, I'm sure I might have had some sort of grail regarding my CD collection, but there was a particular shape vinyl that I desperately lusted after and there was a single store I knew of that had it - but not for sale, not for any price. God knows I tried, but the guy wouldn't budge. Rather than selling it, he had it on display in his store - a place that I quite detest, but to where I've been to far too many times. You can see it pictured right here to the right, and believe me - my teenage self wanted this almost as much as I wanted sex. Back then we didn't have things like Discogs, internet was still a ways away from being what it'd become, and even in my first forays into London record shops I never managed to see one of these in the wild. And, if I'm honest, I've barely thought about it these many years, though now and again when I went to that particular store it would always catch my eye, but I never really entertained the notion of buying it again. When I decided to begin collecting again, one of the things I knew for a fact was that I didn't really want to get all of the records I used to have - I had a load of records that I wouldn't want to have now. But I did know one thing... some records I did have, I wanted to buy again. What I didn't know was that some of those records now go for premium prices, so until someone decides to reissue those, I sure as hell will not pay the hundreds of euros or dollars they now go for. Still, in that previous collection there were a few that I could still get at a fair price. One of those - not only because I like the band quite a lot, but also because it's one of my favourite shape records - was none other than Yeah Yeah Yeah's single 'Cheated Hearts', one of the highlights from their sophomore effort 'Show your bones'. I leave you with the Peaches remix below.
Days like these are the days where I find myself feeling particularly thankful for not owning a gun. Days like these this world seems to get the better of me. There's no amount of words I can tell myself, there's no reasoning with me. I see the worst of us being constantly rewarded, and I punish myself for that. I destroy myself for that. I'm so tired. I just... I am so tired of this world. Of everything. Worst of all, I'm tired of me. I've tried so many times to pick myself up, but I just can't seem to. I don't know how to start. I don't know how to anymore.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid of this world. I'm afraid of everything. I've become afraid of something I used to look forward to - that light of the end of the tunnel. I've become afraid of what lies at its end, to where it leads to, to who it leads to. I've never felt like this before. So defeated. So resigned. So afraid.
