Implosions in NY: my Jumbled Reflections on A Little Life

A Little Life isn’t the type of book you want to read alone. Or at least, you might read it alone, but then it winds its way into the fabric of your brain to such an extent that naturally you want to discuss it with others. I was about halfway through when I found myself tweeting that I cared for Jude St Francis —the unfortunate protagonist— as though he were my own child and could it get any more brutal? (Yes, in case you're wondering).

I naively thought, initially, that I was the only person who’d be talking to twitter about it. Then I saw lots of other tweets and felt as though we were all partaking in some kind of cyber bleeding heart cry-off about Jude’s life (which was probably far from most of ours) and I felt a bit cringy about the whole thing. But still, for me the point of literature (and art in general) has always been to make you feel. I know trashy page-turner detective novels do that, as do badly ghost-written misery memoirs with titles like Mommy, No, but what separates ‘A Little Life’ from those things is the way in which it creates such an epic, complex portrait of a person’s life whilst avoiding any clichés about redemption or a linear path to healing.

A blurby synopsis for the unfamiliar: A Little Life begins as though it is going to tell, equally, the stories of four male friends living in New York, all of them fresh out of a top university and on the road to star careers. There’s JB, a gay painter, the Brooklyn-born son of Haitian immigrants; Willem, an actor/waiter of working class Swedish/Icelandic origins who stopped talking to his parents after his disabled brother’s death; Malcolm, an architect with a trust fund; and Jude St Francis, about whom little to nothing is known. Jude is dubbed ‘the postman’ by JB who describes him as ‘post-racial’ and ‘post-sexual’ as his sexuality and ethnicity are a mystery. Indeed, almost everything about Jude is a mystery, particularly his life before college, yet it becomes apparent early on that Jude is deeply troubled. He has ‘episodes’ in which he is incapacitated owing to problems with his legs from an undisclosed accident, he self-harms regularly and brutally and his arms, leg and back are covered in scars. As the novel continues it hones in on Jude and details about the horrors he experienced in the first fifteen years of his life slowly unfold.

The author, Hanya Yanagihara, has been accused of being gratuitous with the novel. I am not really one for such arguments, but there were times reading it when I thought, ‘this is too much’. I don’t think anyone should have to censor themselves, but it did almost feel over the top how much abuse Jude experienced. Of course what he went through could happen to someone, but it’s almost like Yanagihara put him through every horrific thing a person could go through and then when she was done with that, she added some more.

So why would anyone want to read such a book? Why is this the most compelling book I have read in years? Well, it isn’t actually 730 pages of Jude being tortured, what happened to him in his early life does unfold slowly but it’s intercut with his adult life and is very much a book about how trauma lives on in a person if it is never confronted, how anger can implode and turn in on itself. Jude never directs his rage at those who harmed him, always at himself.

The self-loathing, anxiety and illumination of the way in which the past chokes us in the present is very universal and relatable, whether you have suffered anywhere near as much as Jude or not. Perhaps in some way the fact that Jude has seemingly gone through everything means a person can relate to him having gone through anything.

A Little Life is also very much a book about friendship, where a traditional sexual/romantic relationship is not at the centre. Jude and Willem do eventually become lovers, but one of the acts of love Willem imparts on Jude is ceasing to have sex with him when he realises it can only cause Jude pain. Hanya Yanagihara has said herself she doesn’t believe in marriage (always a stance that gets the thumbs up from me) and the book challenges the normative notion that to be whole as a person one must be in a sexual/romantic relationship, or that one must have sex, or that not enjoying it is a flaw to be corrected.

Even Willem and Jude’s relationship is an extension of their already deep friendship and whilst JB and Malcolm do not play as big a role in the novel as they appear to at the beginning, the importance of their relationships to each other and to Willem and Jude as friends, is just as important, if not more so, than their romantic relationships. In this way the novel is one of the best takes on queer, non-normative family since Michael Cunningham’s A Home At The End of the World (which fans of A Little Life should read if they haven’t already). Whilst A Little Life rejects any kind of redemption narrative, the moments of solace in Jude’s life are all provided through friendship.

Despite the gratuity of some of the book, I think there is a something pretty beautiful in the honesty it displays — life is sad, life is painful, life is difficult, trauma is hard to survive intact and always leaves an imprint. There is something sort of wonderful and cathartic in the rawness of confronting that head on without flinching.

The book also gives a pretty non-clichéd take on suicide, resisting a black and white idea of a better or worse option. Harold (a key figure in Jude’s life who adopts Jude in his thirties) says of his own desperate attempts to keep Jude alive: ‘. . . you can see that it is costing them, you can see how much they don’t want to be here, you can see that the mere act of existing is depleting for them, and then you have to tell yourself every day: I am doing the right thing.’ 

Thanks to hormones, I have been physically unable to cry since October (and I used to cry all the time) with only two exceptions, both when reading A Little Life. Reading it is sort of a traumatic experience but it’s also beautiful, enraging, devastating and enthralling; pretty much everything it is to be alive.

I Identify as Ambivalent

I always swore that if I took Testosterone I would never be someone who constantly talks about it and posts about every little hair growth online complete with photos, blogs and vlogs. Three months on T, here I am doing exactly that. Well, sort of.

The main thing I have learnt so far from being on testosterone is that I am definitely not a man, or not just a man at least. I don’t know why T has taught me this but as soon as I started looking and sounding somewhat more masculine I realised that this is only a part of me.

I spoke in my last post about how when I was a teenager/in my early twenties I felt like a boy but didn’t give a shit about pronouns or what gender people thought I was, I was just me. I often got read as male and was happy about this but didn’t mind. I guess I feel that again now, in a weird way T has made me come back to that, and even when I stop T I think (hope) I can still retain those feelings.

I don’t think my identity has changed that much from when I was younger if I'm honest with myself. In the queer/trans scene I have at times felt pressure to put a rigid label on myself and who I am, but I still feel like a boy and a fag and a dyke, all of it. Everything I have ever been is still a part of me. To deny that would be to deny myself.

It hit home that I was not a man in an uncomfortable encounter with an older relative recently who asked me what I was, and, he said, sounding somewhat relieved, ‘You’re not a lesbian, I know that’ and then asked me why I didn’t just do things properly and have ‘the operation’ (he is one of the many who believe there is one mystical operation where you go in a woman and come out a man). To be fair to this relative, he was 90 and actually trying to be supportive and acknowledge who I was. Unfortunately the idea that me being a ‘normal man’ was preferable to me being a lesbian/queer twisted in my guts as wrong because (aside from the implication that being a lesbian was somehow bad) I knew, think I’ve always known, it’s more complex for me.

I am 32 year old teenage gay boy who also likes girls and has the same posters on my bedroom wall since sixteen years ago. I am a trans boy who likes being called 'he' but is still partly female and if anything I’ve said sounds contradictory then so what? We are all a walking mass of contradictions, I’ve never been very good at being at peace with mine, whether it be about gender or politics or anything else, there’s always been so much push and pull within me, often causing catharsis and slumps of depression and anxiety. All I’ve ever wanted was to render myself easily legible both to myself and others but I’ve realised these past few months I probably can’t. I don’t believe in any kind of essentialism, if you are trans and say you are purely a man or a woman then you are, but that isn’t me.

I relate to Mykki Blanco’s unwillingness to take on a gender narrative that doesn’t fit them, just because it would make things easier for everyone if they categorically stated a preferred pronoun, identity, etc. I relate to Justin Vivian Bond — their genderqueerness with a foot still firmly in queer fag culture, their playfulness, irreverence in performance and writing. I relate to something that is always on the outside.

TLDR: I identify as ambivalent.

Now here's a dark and twisted but also beautiful video from the indefinable courageous genius that is Mykki Blanco. Surely one of the best music videos from last year.

Side Notes

Since my voice got deeper on the T, Beat Happening are one of the few bands I can comfortably sing along to because of their, ahem, lo-fi style of singing and Calvin Johnson's deep voice. I mean, it's comfortable for me, possibly not for anyone listening. I have learnt to play Angel Gone on the ukulele and do so daily — my poor housemates. But I couldn't sing before T either — as long as my ability to shout tunelessly is intact I am happy.

Hormones affected me really quickly and I think my experience proves how little some of the psychiatrists who actually prescribe this stuff really understand. I’m happy with my changes so far but they did come about very fast and for most of the time I’ve been on the T (three months) I have taken half a sachet (ie half my daily prescribed dose) of testosterone gel. The ‘gender specialist’ psychiatrist I saw was pretty adamant that I should go on injections as gel ‘didn’t really do much’ but he grudgingly agreed to prescribe it at my insistence. Shows what he knew.

I don't wanna be like anyone

everybody is standing staring at me

and they presume there are common goals that bind between us

but all i wanted; a break from mindless boredom 
to be special takes a better mind than you or i – Urusei Yatsura, Kernel

Urusei Yatsura are one of the defining bands of my teenage years and early twenties. As a teenager, they were one of the bands I would listen to obsessively in my bedroom when I first got into lo-fi, obscure indie music that no one else liked. They were a Glaswegian indie rock band named after a Manga comic. That sentence may sum up a lot about the nineties. There was a sincerity and simplicity to their lyrics that I really related to and their music was both hard and gentle, like harshness could have a soft underside. That’s a notion I still cling to today. What else can we do to survive in this world? Of course their themes of outsiderdom were something I really related to, never feeling at home amongst my family or at school. I had a difficult relationship with my parents and was severely bullied for being 'different', for being myself really, something that in all my years of therapy I don't think I ever got over and as a result I have never quite been able to feel at home anywhere, so Urusei Yatsura are still important to me and I get their songs in my head at different points in my life.

Yesterday I started on testosterone. I try not to talk about it too much because I don’t like to reinforce this normative idea that to be 'properly' trans a person has to take hormones, but after much consideration and hand-wringing I decided it was something I wanted to do. Then I freaked out, wondering if I was really doing it for me or because it was what was expected of me as a trans boy of sorts, and wondering if I was just trying to be like everyone else. I got 'Kernel' in my head.

i don't wanna be like everyone

i don't wanna be like anyone

Another person I admired greatly as a teenager, and still do now, is Jarvis Cocker. He was my male role model growing up, so different from my dad or the boys who bullied me for looking too much like them, and of all the people in the world, the person my gender felt closest to. He was a man but not masculine in the conventional ways. I also saw myself in all the vaguely effeminate boyish indie types, this was before they were all Shoreditch twats, perhaps before Shoreditch was even gentrified. I didn’t see any difference between myself and those boys. I never felt the need for any substance to make myself more like them, I’d never even heard of trans, I just was me. I never worried about pronouns or labels or whether I was read as a boy or a girl, I was just me.

Getting back to my indie pop loving roots at Prima Vera this year after a really difficult time with my mental health, I remember being in the sun with my friends thinking, I feel so happy right now, I’m not sure I want to take hormones, I don’t want anything to change. I felt like myself. Admittedly my antidepressants had just kicked in and I was at a stage where I just felt really happy to be alive, so all usual anxieties subsided, that feeling hasn’t lasted forever.

So my first day on T I had my doubts, thought maybe I don’t care about any of this, maybe it doesn’t matter how anyone reads me, maybe I don’t care about being whatever fucking gender, maybe I’m just me. Why is it now I care so much about gender or anything when I didn’t used to? Am I just doing what I’m meant to?

Of course, however one feels, negotiating the world is a different matter. The me inside my head is pretty different to the one a lot of other people see and I guess my real hesitation with T is the not knowing whether it would make me more like the me in my head or less.

I don’t know what I’ll do, if I do take it I will not be making a week by week videolog and if I don’t, I probably won’t write much about that either. So don’t watch this space. If you need me I’ll be listening to Urusei Yatsura again, letting the jagged guitars wash over me and trying my best to be me, whatever that may or may not entail. 

Messed Up Music Reviewer

Primavera Sound 2015

Parc Del Forum, Barcelona

May 2015

An empty stage on the first night of Primavera

I went to bed too early. I never saw the sunrise over the Barcelonian indie-rock skyline. I missed Underworld and Shellac, but Primavera still remains the best music festival I’ve ever experienced. For a start it’s the only one I’ve been to not in the UK, which means instead of shivering your tits off in the freezing cold and crying because you’re covered in mud and have convinced yourself you’ve developed pneumonia, it’s warm and sunny in the day and only just about not t-shirt weather at night. I know it’s so very English to talk about the weather, but for me this is a real game changer. When you enter the enormous outdoor Parc del Forum and descend down the hill, you can see the sea behind the stages and I actually felt like I was on holiday as opposed to being there to prove my devotion to various musical acts. I was there for that too of course. There were no queues for wristbands and everything was just ten million times better organised than any other festival I’ve been to. Also the atmosphere feels way less bro-ey than Leeds Festival or like a party for drunk art students than All Tomorrow’s Parties. I don’t know if this is because there are less English people (there are still a lot) or because the average festival-goer’s age is a bit older. Obviously it’s still a corporate rock festival dominated by white guitar acts sponsored by Heineken, H & M and Ray Bans (ray bans? is it 1982?) and probably paying its staff minimum wage, so let's not get carried away. But as those things go…

Thursday

We arrive in time to catch The Thurston Moore Band who are disappointingly pretty good in a hypnotic My Bloody Valentine/Sonic Youth dirgey kind of way. In fact the bass player is Debbie Googe from My Bloody Valentine. I say disappointingly because it means I can’t legitimately refer to them as ‘The Thurston Snore Band’ in this review but that is what we call them privately all weekend. Still team Kim all the way.

The first of many festival highlights comes with Antony and the Johnsons. Antony is backed by a full orchestra consisting of members of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and Catalonia National Orchestra and his voice sounds powerful and bassy enough to send shivers right through the enormous crowds -even me, and I’m standing pretty far away- without losing any of the heart-stopping subtleties. Good job soundpeople. The sun sets as Antony plays against a backdrop of a huge gothic fairytale screen whilst singing songs mourning the destruction of the earth by human hands and evoking powerful feminine energy. Unfortunately straight people keep making out in front of me and partially obscuring my view, a theme of the festival. I have to keep dodging my head to the side to avoid their Kath n Kim-esque face-slurping obscuring the view of one of my queer/trans icons. Straights to the back! (I know, I know I’m being binary and technically some of the people I make out with at gigs might put me in the ‘straight’ camp, but I offer myself up now for the scorn and disdain of any reviewers who would like to slag me off online for doing so. Particularly if I block their view. It’s the circle of life.)

I have no idea what Sun O))) will be like, knowing only that theirs is a name bandied around by musos as if it were gold. I watch them from the hill and they are incredible, coming on to a stage flooded with smoke and lights, dressed in black robes, indecipherable disturbing incantations building as if performing an ancient ritual, their wall of sound shaking the entire Parc del Forum. It’s so intense and unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, it’s actually kind of upsetting to watch and that’s why it’s so wonderful.

After Sun O))) and Antony, Electric Wizard can only be a disappointment. Their hair metal feels uber blokey and derivative by comparison. They have a screen up showing retro S/M porn movie visuals. I have nothing against S/M porn and I find it hard to take their backdrop seriously with the B-movie aesthetic, but given it’s always a maiden getting whipped by a bunch of dudes and the fact we’re surrounded by straight white dudes fisting the air with devotion it feels kind of uncomfortable. Electric Wizards songs themselves are fun in a kind-of-like-Black-Sabbath-but-not-as-good way but once you’ve heard three you’ve heard them all, so we leave after three songs.

Friday

Kathleen Hanna on TV

I keep thinking it’s Saturday as I cannot get my head around festivals running from Thursday – Saturday instead of Friday – Sunday. So much to unlearn. We get there for five in an unsuccessful attempt to see C86 jangly indie legends The Pastels. We discover that they are in a special venue and you have to queue to get special tickets for them. We fail to do this so just go and wait for Ex Hex who are on at six. At six a band comes on who are not Ex Hex. I don’t know who they are but unfortunately they don’t stand a chance of receiving anything other than vitriol from me as they are not Mary Timony & co who eventually come on at seven. Ex Hex are super fun rock n roll, theirs being one of the few records in my collection I can appropriately put on when I need cheering up (ironically because that is probably about 90% of the time) and the fun rock n rollness is reproduced pleasingly onstage. One thing that is not so pleasing is we spot the arsehole who tried to push my friend around and call her a cunt at the London Sleater-Kinney show in the audience. He has a disturbing number of friends and is wearing about thirty wristbands from other indie festivals where he doubtless went and saw all the feminist bands and called other women cunts and tried to push them around. We hate on him from across the crowd.

Then on to Patti Smith performing ‘Horses’ (I hear a bit of The New Pornographers doing ‘Sing Me Spanish Techno’, which they surely must have ended with, as we pass the ATP stage, they sound great). I just watch up until ‘Break It Up’ because I want to get a good place for Julie Ruin but Patti is predictably on great form and ‘Kimberley’ is a highlight for me, although I kind of prefer seeing her in more intimate settings.

Julie Ruin. Kathleen’s voice is going a little (which she attributes to an almond being stuck in her throat) but then she just sings in her Bikini Kill voice. Bonus. She and the band all look a little nervous playing to the enormous Primaveran crowd (apart from Kathi Wilcox who never looks anything other than flawlessly composed) and I’m sure the throat issues can’t help, but they give their all anyway and Kathleen closes with a cartwheel for extra awesomeness.

I make the heteronormative decision to go and see Belle and Sebastian rather than Perfume Genius as I saw PG last year and haven’t seen B & S in about twelve years. Like most heteronormative decisions it is the wrong one. Belle and Sebastian are pleasant but not mind-blowing. I watch most of their set in the toilet queue which has been excellently set out so the queuers get a good view of the main stage. I squat over a toilet rejected by the three people ahead of me, but I don’t care. Sitting on the toilet is bad for your bowels, they must not have gotten the memo.

Sleater-Kinney. They are wonderful and this is one of my favourite times seeing them. There’s something special about an open-air Sleater-Kinney show with the moon high above. Plus I’m actually in a place where I get a clear view of them and don’t have to spend the entire gig fighting over-entitled dickheads as I did at the most recent London show. Some of their songs I feel as if I’m hearing for the first time, and lyrics jump out at me as they hadn’t before. It’s a good mix of old and new material (nothing off ‘Call the Doctor’ I don’t think, but you can’t play everything). I like the latest album more and more every time I hear them play tracks off it live. My back is aching throughout because I’m an old man who’s been standing up all day but they are totally worth every second of agonising pain.

Not only does my back ache, one of my friends has hurt her foot and is limping and I’m sure my other friend has some kind of injury too. Nonetheless she runs to see Pharmakon on the other side of the Parc Del Forum but is too late and we all haul our aching bones over to catch Run the Jewels on the ATP stage. They bring the party with Public Enemy-esque alternative hip hop and an attitude that at once manages to be both bravado-ey and humble to the audience. I’m a little underwhelmed by them for some reason but this might just be because I’m sprawled out watching them far away from the hillside.

On our way home on the metro a gross drunken expat in a suit slumps around the carriage before asking loudly in English, ‘Do I have to go to Berlin to find all the cute girls?’ I call him a prick as we get off and limp back to our apartment. Another day done and we round off our night by Instagram-stalking our favourite bands of the day and discovering what they’ve been doing in Barcelona. If, like me, you don’t have Instagram, here is what you missed. Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss = lots of sight-seeing + hanging with Kathi Wilcox. Kim Gordon wasn’t there but she commented on their Instagram thread about how it was bringing back memories. Mary Timony went to the beach. Carrie Brownstein posed in front of a big arch which I think is probably a famous Barcelona site about which I am ignorant. Kathleen Hanna packed her suitcase.

Saturday

Babes and babes and babes

Noooo. The last day. And again time to see Patti Smith. Yes, you heard right. But this time she’s not doing ‘Horses’ and we’re in a sit-down auditorium for which you have to queue an hour before her performance to get a decent seat. We do and we get a good place. I really prefer this set. Amazing as ‘Horses’ is there was something about her performing that album to such huge crowds which seemed almost contrived comparative to this one and like I said, I prefer intimacy. ‘Pissing in a River’ is incredible, every line rawly conveying brutal, murky loss. ‘Because the Night’ gets everyone standing up. The boy from the London Sleater-Kinney show is sat very near us again but Patti is so enthralling we don’t even notice until the gap between her set and Swans who play in the auditorium after her. Swans give a hypnotic performance. You could lose yourself in the million layers of percussion and the fact that they look all like extras from the set of Conan the Barbarian.

Multi-gendered Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up are next on the list. They’re joyous and eschew punk clichés, their keyboardist at one point getting out a flute. OK, so frontman Damian Abraham does stage dive at the end but not in a macho jerk way as can happen with guys in the hardcore world. He also gives big props to Babes in Toyland which can only be a good thing. The set feels like positive aggression which the world needs more of.

Next for something completely different. Tori Amos. I have never particularly been a Tori Amos fan and some of my least favourite people are big Tori Amos fans. I’m sure some people I really like are too, but they don’t talk about it. It’s great to come to a show with no expectations and it’s a happy experience. I forgot how much I liked that line ‘So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts/What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?’ and I smile at it and then I feel old and then I don’t care. The best thing about Tori Amos’s set is seeing all the gay boys watching her down the front on the big screen, crying their eyes out and singing along to every single word. I’ve seen so few queers this whole festival compared with the endless parades of happy straight couples who like to stand in front of me and make out whenever a band I wanna watch is on.

German pioneer industrial experimentalists Einstürzende Neubauten play the ATP stage after darkness. During their first song one of their members plays a sheet of shiny ripped up paper and progresses throughout the set to eventually ‘play’ a makeshift skip, emptying out metal rods onto the stage whilst the drummer drums with what look like a set of drainpipes, but don’t worry, Stomp! it ain’t. It’s not even a challenge to listen to as one may expect of an experimental band who use an entire arsenal of Blue Peter props to make a noise. The sound is still cold but their show is surprisingly warm. Lead singer Blixa Bargeld has a bit of a count Dracula look to him these days but is actually very sweet. ‘You know we love playing here, don’t you?’ he says quietly and sincerely, like a father telling his child, ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’

Babes in Toyland end the festival, for me at least, I didn’t have the energy to party till dawn this year, which I kind of regret now, but what can you do? BiT are wonderful, emotionally-involving and intense. Kat Bjelland freaks out and looks upset for the first few songs due to technical/guitar issues. It’s actually a bit uncomfortable to watch her to begin with, yet BiT still manage to be captivating, the sense of urgency to the music coming out possibly more in Kat’s state of anxiety. I still can’t help but grin from ear to ear as they play a storming set. I feel bad for Kat nonetheless - she’s not having the awesome time her fans are. Drummer Lori Barbero holds things together by telling jokes between songs when it gets awkward. Then Kat’s guitar problems get fixed and she is like a child at Christmas, the whole atmosphere changing. I can see that she is still somewhat ill at ease but surely ill-at-easeness is where Babes in Toyland’s music comes from. Their riffs and Kat’s powerful vocals reverberate through my ears and into my heart where they shall remain. I miss Shellac and Underworld but no one would top Babes in Toyland for a festival closer. The rest of life was a disappointment from thereon in. Good night.

Messed up

'Stress is only dangerous over a long period of time and only if there is no chance to recover.' I sit in a free community mental health workshop designed to help participants deal with stress, all the time feeling like my insides are being ripped apart. I can't help but feel it's too late for stress, I went past stress years ago. I can't imagine anyone could possibly feel as terrible or as backed into a corner as I do right now but looking around I see everyone is backed into their own particular corner and it's probable that a few others here can't imagine anyone else feeling as bad as them either. Emotion is more powerful than rationale.

The worst thing about mental illness is it often renders the sufferer completely and utterly alone, it's not possible to convey the feeling or why things affect you the way they do. I want so badly to be able to communicate this feeling to someone else but I can't. I wish I could infect those around me with this if only for a split second so they too could experience the internal crumbling, not out of malice or bitterness, but just because language really fails me in this realm and I can't bear the fact that I'm really alone.

The workshop leader goes over the fight or flight response and what that does to the body and even though this has been explained to me countless times it still freaks me out. 'What happens,' he begins, 'when you drive your car in second gear at 65 miles per hour for a long period of time?' And then he illustrates for us on his screen a picture of a smoked-out car engine, the driver, some bougie blonde woman, standing over the bonnet in despair. Think you've got problems arsehole? You'll just pick up your insurance and get another one! Everyone I tell about this analogy seems to find it ridiculous but it actually strikes terror into my beta-blocked heart because it's so painfully accurate. I don't even drive. I didn't even know you weren't supposed to drive fast in a low gear, but it looks really bad. Things build, sometimes for years.

He asks us when was the last time we had a really good sleep and I feel exhausted.

Three months ago -before things went from gnawing anxiety to completely overwhelming- I was fortunate enough to go to Iceland. My friend and I hired a car and drove along the ring road to a lake called Jökulsárlón. Well, she drove, obviously. It snowed so heavily on that trip you couldn't tell where the sky ended and the ground began. Jökulsárlón was full of blue glaciers, an amazing sight, and I remember closing my eyes to go to sleep that night and seeing only blue. The ice and the lake had flooded my mind's vision so much it felt like if you cut my brain open all you would find there would be blue ice. When I got back to England my brain soon reverted back to feeling like it was about to explode and it's hard to believe anything else could ever have been in there.

My salvation in London is in the park. The park and the medication I took grudgingly at first but I guess is the cheap gaffa tape holding me together, gradually making me functional, temporarily at least. Before that I stayed in bed and scrolled down Twitter on my phone, obsessively checked my emails for the email that would save my life, even though my phone tells me when I get an email so the checking was pointless. Consoled myself with the fact that it's exactly the same thing everyone who isn't having a breakdown is doing, it's just they're not in bed.

When things start to improve I go outside more. Last time things got this bad, about five years ago, I was living in Peckham and I used to go to Burgess Park and watch crows obsessively, if I could engross myself sufficiently in what they were doing I could hold myself, at least for a little while. Now it's Victoria Park where I lie on my front on my hoodie in the sun, press the side of my head against the grass and watch flowers classed as weeds go on and on and on, put my head down lower so it all looks more vast. Read a dystopian Margaret Attwood novel whilst intermittently carrying on the endless Twitter/Facebook scroll, hearing update after update of the real-life dystopia unveiling in the UK and wonder how to put it all together.

Post Recording in Progress Process

 

PJ Harvey – Recording in Progress

Somerset House

10^th February 13:00 – 13:45

A couple of years ago I met PJ Harvey. It was at the Southbank Centre after a Patti Smith show. I am not just doing this to name drop. I know several others who met PJ Harvey and managed to hold conversations with her like normal people, all I was capable of doing was blurting out at a pitch that may have been a little hysterical, ‘you made my life better!’ Or did I manage a slightly less crazy, ‘your music has made my life better’? Or was it, ‘seeing you play has made my life better’? Because much as listening to her records always has a profound effect on me, the main thing that really alters my life for the better is seeing PJ Harvey live. There are few artists I have seen perform who consistently make me feel so absorbed by the world created in their music that my consciousness goes to somewhere it isn’t normally. I don’t mean that in a terrible hippy rave euphoria way - often the places PJ Harvey goes to in her music are quite dark, but always beautifully crafted and easily relatable even if you don’t understand what she’s singing about, because she is a master of imagery, of atmosphere. Recently she compared her songs to paintings in an interview, but when experienced live they leave the dimensions of a painting and take a person somewhere else completely, as happens whenever you see a truly incredible live band.

So anyway, although I was really looking forward to seeing PJ Harvey’s new project with Artangel, ‘Recording in Progress’, I did not think it would be particularly mind-altering the way I have found her live shows to be. Or even her records. For it is neither a live show nor a complete record, but a ‘living sculpture’ in which the audience gets to watch 45 minute fragments of PJ Harvey and her band recording their new album. We watch them through glass in a recording studio set up in the basement of Somerset House, hearing what they’re saying/playing over the sound system. They can’t see or hear us.

Even from my own experiences recording in a shoddy punk band (where we’ve done it all in less than a day and don’t take things like singing ability or keeping time very seriously) I know that the process of recording can get boring and frustrating. Of course we’re not PJ Harvey, or her band, but still I wondered as I descended down to the basement to watch her work, in essentially a giant fishbowl, how interesting would the process actually be?

I read a review in The Guardian (or somewhere like that) which said that while interesting, the ‘living sculpture’ couldn’t be described as exciting. Perhaps exciting is not exactly the right word for it, although personally I did feel excited throughout. It’s not exciting in the way a live show is exciting or listening to a completed record for the first time is exciting, because you don’t get that immediacy, that quick fix thrill of chemicals fully formed music and performance send to the brain. But perhaps that’s what was special about watching the recording session. I thought to myself at the time – this is like watching something being born only better because it’s watching the process of something being deliberately created. In modern capitalism, and particularly with the event of the internet and social media becoming staples in most of our lives, there is this desperate rush for immediacy, urgency, newness, wanting to get to a point of satisfaction/completion now, which will generally evade us anyway. It would be a bit rich to propose watching PJ Harvey record an album at Somerset House for fifteen quid a ticket is a challenge to capitalism, but I think it is a refreshing move in a time where demands for a finished product immediately are so desperate and thoughtless. ‘Recording in Progress’ was a reminder of the importance of creativity as a process, not just a finished, consumable product. Watching a song slowly build and come together, the care and attention that goes into that. I found that thrilling.

I greedily ran to the make-shift studio as soon as we got down to the basement, then pressed my face to the glass like a goldfish that couldn’t cope with freedom and desperately wanted to get back in the tank. I positioned myself so the person I got the best view of was PJ Harvey. She was in the centre of the room, all other musicians in a circle around her.

The fishbowl was pretty sterile-looking. I can’t imagine going from recording in a beautiful, creepy church in the Dorset countryside (as ‘Let England Shake’ was) to recording in this white rectangle in a basement. But I found the session really moving despite the surroundings. I think it was watching the way PJ Harvey and the other musicians and producer worked together and how those interactions and that particular way of relating was different to the way I’m used to and that in itself felt like an opening to new possibilities. You can always read a person’s diary (or blog!) or watch a documentary or reality fucking TV, but I feel that is contrived in comparison to just being able to observe interactions unedited and in real time. And yeah, you can watch people in the park whenever, but you can’t usually watch your favourite musicians record an album through one way glass. I guess it was particularly effecting to me as a performer/writer who often gets stuck, seeing the concerns of other people creating something different from me –and who have been doing so a lot longer- and what they get stuck on, how completely different it is. There was something in watching that which felt very liberating.

PJ Harvey herself was so calm and in control throughout the session and only said things that were necessary, but never came across as austere or humourless. I loved the way she articulated herself when talking about how she wanted the song they were working on to change: ‘At the moment it’s too beautiful. We need some more ugliness, some more darkness underneath the beauty, driving the song’. How could you not love a person who says that?

Finally, and here is where it was a bit life-changing for me, it reminded me how important creativity is to me. How I often neglect my own because it can be scary and it’s far, far easier to consume or deconstruct than it is to create. Yet it reminded me how central it is to my life and how important it is to keep it going and that creativity and collaboration doesn’t always have to be terrifying, it can be exciting and wonderful, even the boring bits.





Melancholy Hill

I didn't anticipate I'd begin a post about depression with a Gorillaz song, until I heard this one and subsequently listened to it on repeat about 8,000 times. And yes, I am very behind as it's from five years ago, but I never heard it until Christmas day just gone. There is a pretty amazing epic animated video that goes with the song, which gives you a sense of the world created in the concept album it's on and the creatures that live within it, but it was the song alone that grabbed my attention when it came on the radio. I heard it when I was visiting my parents', lying in the bedroom of my teenage years. I thought it was a really beautiful song, perfectly capturing the sense of melancholy to which the title refers and I found it very relateable. The sound of giving up, resignation to not getting what you want but making something gorgeous out of the proverbial collapse. I imagine melancholy hill to be a place where you go to give up on things, on others, on yourself, to rest.

Giving up. I have lived with what the vast majority of medical doctors would call middling to serious mental illness my whole life. Unfortunately I find it hard to accept (for me personally, no disrespect to how anyone else view's their condition) that I 'have depression' or I 'have anxiety' or -as I've previously been diagnosed with- OCD, as though these are just illnesses and ca be separated from my psyche/personality/self as a whole. The doctor always told me when I was resistant to taking medication, 'look, if you have high blood pressure or if you break your leg or if you have an infection then then you have to take medication to get better, depression is just like that.' But being depressed isn't like having a broken leg and I can't see the black cloud that hangs over me as an illness that can be cured with medicine. 

I've written about antidepressants previously. I've been on them before but the only conditions under which I'd take them now would be if I was suicidal or I literally thought I was going to die if I didn't get more serotonin to my brain (as happened before - a feeling so unbearable it felt like it would kill me). 

Sometimes people despair that I won't go to the doctor's or take medicine but I feel as though the meds erase a part of me, not because they make me less depressed, but because I don't believe it's possible to only target the parts of the psyche that cause pain -the mind isn't chopped up into convenient bits, it's all connected- I find it hard to explain but I feel like I lose something of myself on them. 

I used to be very into seeing myself as ill but unfortunately I think it's more just a feeling of being trapped. We all have terrible things inside us, private things, difficult things, things that we can't relate to the people around us. But I am acutely aware of mine and I have been my entire life and I am troubled by them but I don't know if that makes me mentally ill for the construction of mental illness revolves around someone being sane. Who is sane? 

There's this stupid psuedo right-on internet fad going around about 'extrovert privilege' which irritates the hell out of me as someone who is an extrovert partly because I desperately want to run from this darkness within me that I feel will one day envelop me. I guess that sounds melodramatic, funny when put like that, but also it just is me. It makes me feel doomed. The other reason for my extroversion is of course my sense of self is largely dependent on what others think of me and that fucking sucks especially for a writer because invariably we are going to hated by some people, even those we admire, but I don't know if it constitutes mental illness. Probably it does in some DSM book, but screw them.

I tried everything. I've been in therapy for ten years and I think it's safe to say it's not working. This fog of sadness and these thoughts that I battle with in my head are exhausting. And yes, when I get it together to exercise or eat well or go outside or see friends without just getting shit-faced, all that does help make things better. But it all feels temporary. A good friend of mine does tarot and there's this card in her deck that's of someone trying to prevent their demons from bursting through a trapdoor but it's clear it's a losing and exhausting struggle as the wooden door buckles under the weight of so many trying to force their way through. Sometimes I feel like that's what I'm doing even when I'm functioning.

I've never wanted to kill myself, not really, but when I think of a lifetime continuing at the same harrowing pace, desperately fighting with myself, of self-sabotaging everything I write because of fear of too much rejection/exposure/that I'm not good enough, of having nightmares each night of such violence that feel so real, of the loneliness of it all, of how fucking tiring it is, I despair. I don't see necessarily myself getting better, whatever getting better even is. Maybe it's me and I'm just too scared of change, I don't fucking know. But I still don't want to do myself in, I think I'm much too Catholic in that respect - it's not that suicide is a mortal sin, it's that misery is there to be endured to the last. I think many people who grow up female or trans or queer learn that they deserve to suffer, but I don't think this is something I deserve really, I used to, but not anymore, but it's what I've got.

And you know what the pain of whatever this thing is (mental illness if you wanna call it that or perhaps just being me) leads to? It leads to desperation, to endless hourrs of googling shit, possible ways of recovery, of self-help books, of different medications, of every combination of B-vitamin and herbal thingy, of meditation, yoga, of CBT, of psychotherapy, of gestalt, Jung, Freud, Carl fucking Rogers, of desperate internet message boards at 3am in the morning, hoping something someone will help. Well, maybe nothing's gonna fucking help me. 

There are times when it feels better and times when it's worse of course but it's always present and I always know it and maybe it's just a part of my fucking personality, whose to say it's actually an illness? Anyway that's why I loved hearing the song so much, why all the violins sounded particularly alive to me, like the glitter of snow. That's why I always find beauty in landscapes that are dark and cold, or in the sea when it's stormy and rough at night, because if it's perpetually stormy in your mind, you sure as hell better find something to hold onto in that. 

What is so liberating to me is the idea of giving up the endless exhausting attempts to 'get better'  and the glorious gorgeous sense of melancholic resignation. And to do that and still feel love and compassion for others rather than just the bitterness and hatred which is a tempting response to the loneliness and frustration of being all at sea in your own mind.