Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya – Jamaica Kincaid
For the last three weeks I booked myself every night with something or other – work, shows, rehearsals, seeing friends. I was looking to fall in love with the city again through a constant reminder of what I can do here. I wanted myself to be too busy to create more chores for myself. The theory was that if I was not home then home could not ask anything of me, and I wouldn’t be dirtying up things that would later beg to be cleaned. It didn’t work; instead I feel burnt out, like I need my time at home to recharge enough for whatever comes next.
Among Flowers is all about the newness of each day when you take yourself outside of your comfort zone. Or maybe it’s more about how strange that newness is, how otherworldly, how outside your body you can be when you ask more of your body then you’ve ever asked of it before.
It’s strange that here I am, living my eighth year in New York City, and I’ve become so used to it that nothing seems new anymore. Sometimes I think it’s the long shadow of the pandemic. On Christmas day I went with andie and Wolf and friends to see Nosferatu (a movie that has now been made four times, living many lives over a hundred years), and the opening has these shots of the vampire’s enormous shadow enveloping the plague-infested city streets, casting its evil spell on person after person. Not to be dramatic, but yeah, it feels like that right now! The vampiric shadow of real estate interests growing ever larger till it blocks out the sun. Or maybe it’s just winter.
So back to Among Flowers. I get the sense that this book was written because Jamaica could not process the sheer beauty, the strange beauty, that she had seen in those few weeks in the Himalayas. And so she wrote the book to get this unreal experience out of her body and make it real again, like you do when you have a dream that was so vivid that you need to write it down, and now that dream is real because words have made it real but it has lost the quality that only dreams can have, that slushy misty foggy illogical essence. I guess what I’m saying is that this book feels like the record of a dream. Interesting, fascinating even, but like the leftover remnant of something that was much more beautiful when witnessed by the author.
I’ve entertained a notion recently that more newness might fix me. Maybe I just need a great vacation, or maybe a walk in the Himalayas is what would do it. I was already coming to the realization, but this book made me fully realize that a dream can only be a dream. And you can even live in that dream; you can put yourself there, hiking the Himalayas, seeing mountains that go up and up forever, plants you’d never thought you would encounter in the wild, eating unremarkable food that tastes incredible because you are so deprived of calories. But when you go home, you’ll be left with yourself and the life you’ve built. And maybe all you can do then is write the dream down, so you can bring a facsimile of it into your real life.
After I watched this video, Jamaica’s writing tone made a lot more sense to me. She’s aloof and open at the same time; willing to share just about anything, but a little dispassionate. It didn’t always endear me to her as a narrator, but I’d be interested to give some of her fiction a try.
Infinite Space & Open Songs – No Tiger
An album by a friend of a friend who I don’t know very well. This one really surprised me. It’s elegant. There are a lot of people making electronic music in New York right now, and the relative ease with which you can make it sometimes results in an unfocused approach. Infinite Space & Open Songs feels focused. The title and the cover convey the mood well – the corner of what looks like an apartment juts out, angular, against an open blue sky. The windows are hidden in shadow behind metal railings, while the patterned blankness of the exterior walls shines orange in the setting light, better to make the blue sky pop in the background.
The music is lean, brutalist house and ambient. Everything feels that it is in the right place, like a well decorated room, lit carefully with accent lamps and warm light bulbs. An album like this is at risk of being cool, but this album is lived in. I think the trick is the choice of harmony; I’ve listened a few times over and even now the album has ended and so I go back and put on the song “Good to Me” and admire the warmth of the chords that have been chosen, like the hug of the fog machine, enveloping.
One more note; the way this album descends into the really dancy tracks (“Haze & Light”, “Water in the Mirror”) feels like going down into the basement of Paragon. Suddenly the ceiling is closer, it’s darker, and the bodies are packed in, sweaty and happy. It’s beautiful!
Shine – D’Monk
This album made me fall in love with rhythm all over again. I love a drums-first record and I feel like I’ve been encountering a lot of them lately. Everything here grooves so nicely but doesn’t bow to simplicity. Shine can make me move but resists easy understanding. And what I really enjoy is that the songs stretch out, six, seven minutes. A couple of the tracks here are recordings of live performances, and you can see just how comfortable D’Monk is creating a track on the fly.
a breath of life 
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