Cheap sex and sad films
Let's figure out if we like the band The War On Drugs, make a summertime picnic for dinner indoors, yield to a man when he plays just the right Radiohead songs, and feel overwhelmed by 'Downtown'.
Welcome to All The Songs. We use “soundtrack” as a verb here.
This is not a Christmas edition.
Listening
Joan As Policewoman’s immaculate collection Joanthology.
The War On Drugs. I’m trying them on for size after seeing them live. Haters describe them as a Bob Dylan vocal style impersonation over Springsteen-esque, Knopfler-ish middle America pop rock with more lush layers. Lovers describe them as transcendent. Their 2014 record Lost In The Dream is my favourite album of theirs so far, but I’m still listening my way through.
The remix of Mariah Carey’s hit ‘Fantasy’ featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Whatchu gonna do when you get out of jail? I’m gonna have some fun.
The audiobook of Mariah Carey’s memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey. She does accents and sings portions of the book but the best part is when, describing a family feud over the holidays, she says deadpan and straight faced, “The thing is, I really don’t want a lot for Christmas.” She’s had a hard road and I respect her.
Reading
I devoured Nicole Flattery’s debut novel Nothing Special. It follows bored teenager Mae in 1960s New York as she takes up a job transcribing tapes in Andy Warhol’s Factory for the book ‘a, A Novel’. While Nothing Special is fictional, ‘a, A Novel’ is real and this is a real job people held. An administrative tedious job carried out in the corner of a wild room.
In what the Guardian calls a “quietly bold coming of age tale”, our main character Mae despises her mother. She talks to her mother, who works as a waitress, in off-handed hateful sentences like “you’re such a fucking baby, honestly” which seems somewhat fair in response to her mother telling her that her life will never work out.
The tone of the book is cold, dissatisfied and bitter. We love “unlikeable” women narrators: they’re so interesting, and more relatable than we may care to admit.
This book captures the frantic energy of youth, the yearning for change, the hunger for a life different from what you grew up with.
For these fictional girls working in The Factory, long hours and hardship and the challenges of living in New York City give them life. “She was rabid for any kind of experience. Through her eyes, even the worst streets weren’t ugly, but transformative, full of possibility.”
The characters attend gallery openings in the West Village. They struggle to dress and act in a way that makes them feel cool enough in the edgy environment of Warhol’s workspace. “She had an unnatural way of smoking, self-conscious and eager, a way that was recognisable from other girls who were trying to invent themselves.”
Andy himself is barely mentioned. The book lasers right in on what it must have felt like to be insignificant in the same room as a notorious artist, to be a nobody at the centre of the art world. It also considers what it might feel like fifty years later to hold those memories when you amounted, after all, to nothing special. A gripping and unique novel.
Watching
I loved the debauchery, glamour and music of the film Saltburn. It’s kind of a millennial version of Brideshead Revisited with a few more surprising deaths thrown in.
The psychological thriller follows an outsider on a scholarship who struggles to fit in at Oxford but then befriends a classmate from a wealthy family, and spends a summer at their estate.
The parties are filthy and bombastic. It is set in 2006 so the soundtrack features bangers from my youth like ‘No Cars Go’ by Arcade Fire and ‘This Modern Love’ by Bloc Party. The movie’s twists will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Cooking
This little summer evening meal made me so happy. I bought a peach, sliced it and grilled in a ridged cast iron pan then drizzled Apostle Saint Valentine lavender and rosemary hot honey over the seared fruit. The salad is simply rocket dressed in olive oil and salt. The bread is Acme sourdough baguette spread with Chèvre goat cheese, sliced tomato and salt. A picnic, but make it dinner.
Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them
For this memoir-by-playlist project, I write 500 words on my memories of a song. These vignettes offer a glimpse in to the rich and varied emotions we all experience in our lifetimes through showing a brief slice of my life at a particular time, in how I relate to a certain song. What the music brings up might be shallow or it could be intense. The memory may be joyful or thick with sorrow, a reflection on pleasure or a heavy exploration of fear. Whatever emotions a song dredges up from the spectrum of human feeling, they are true.
I remember snippets alongside songs. This is the soundtrack to my life. Let me be clear: Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them is not a curated selection of the coolest songs I want to associate myself with. Some of them are my jam, others are trashy and catchy - all manner of music has been part of my life.
This project invites the reader to consider, where does this song take you? What does it remind you of? Where were you in your life when you last listened to this track?
‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ by Radiohead
He hits play on Kid A before coming downstairs to answer his front door when I knock.
I haven’t seen him for seventeen days, but this is how our relationship works: he ignores me for day after day after day then texts me out of the blue asking if I can see him urgently, with vague apologies for his lack of communication and availability. Can I come round in half an hour, or can he swing by my place on his way somewhere else. Sometimes the texts come at 2am or 3am. I’ve started leaving my phone on overnight just in case.
I always say yes.
He answers the door by kissing me instead of saying hello.
The album is up to ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ now and we are upstairs, in his room. The music is so loud. I can’t think.
I am dizzy, my body spent, when the song’s harp glissando sweeps in sounding like glittering stars falling. I read somewhere in a music magazine years ago that the band had wanted that section to sound like it accompanied a moment of magic in a Disney film - when bluebirds help Cinderella or a fairy spins around.
Feeling generous, I tell him that he can do that thing he asked me if he could do a few weeks ago. I hadn’t said no exactly, but my face reacted before I formed words. Now he’s gotten to me. He knows it.
He lights up then hesitates. He has the grace to ask if I’m sure. Benevolently, I assure him.
There is no furniture in his home. There is a bed in the bedroom, a couch in the living room but the dining room is empty. There are guitar picks strewn about in unexpected places. He never invites me out to dinner.
When he asks if I mind if he vapes in bed, I say that it’s his house. He replies that they’re my lungs. Like I always do with him, I say it’s fine when I feel like it’s not.
He puffs on the plastic and starts telling me what is happening with his work.
We met long ago, by chance. I’d interviewed him for a publication I wrote for. I spoke to several strangers every single day as part of my work as a journalist, but this person made my heart jolt over the phone. It made no sense how much he shook me up.
Back then he had invited me over to his house so he could play me something on guitar in person and I’d refused, taking my professionalism seriously. But the memory of how talking to him felt stayed with me.
Many years later when I tried a dating app, the first person I talked to and arranged to meet was him. Our liaison feels fated, meant to be.
Now he’s telling me all the behind the scenes secrets and although I feel lucky to be in his presence, I no longer think he’s a genius.
‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark
The structures along the streets of Shoreditch are made with a lot of red brick, and decorated with well placed artistic graffiti.
I enter a clothing shop that has gorgeous expensive old coats displayed. Down a flight of stairs is a basement with racks of jeans, sweaters, shirts and rows of secondhand shoes.
I try on a magenta fine wool jumper with small beads decorating each shoulder in the shape of flames, and a fluffy duckling-coloured cardigan. I get the cardigan and a green sheer blouse.
There’s a sign outside Rough Trade saying ’TONIGHT: MADNESS’ and ‘SOLD OUT’. Inside the store I flip through the dream-pop and shoegaze section, seeing usual suspects (my bloody valentine, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins) alongside bands I’m less familiar with. I buy a thin pamphlet containing an essay by Jarvis Cocker called Good Pop, Bad Pop.
In a cafe across the laneway, I order a glass of house red wine and sit to read.
I gaze at all the London around me instead of reading. The laneway looks like Melbourne and parts of Wellington and everywhere around the world like this - places in cities where there are record stores, secondhand clothing shops, vegan food, cheap house red wine. I’ve seen this street in Belgium, Montreal and Portland, Oregon. I love this street. I’m always welcome on this street.
The next day, wearing my new yellow cardigan with my black jeans and boots, I catch the tube to the Ottolenghi restaurant in Spitalfields, where I’m sat at the bar to eat. I order fried halloumi cheese, lemon labneh, walnut salsa, Middle Eastern salad, focaccia bread, tahini and mulberry molasses with fresh herbs and pomegranate seeds and feel alive in a way that makes my fingertips fizz the entire time I eat this beautiful meal. I order a banana tahini mini cake with miso caramel and sesame brittle from the display of treats in the window, a generous single serving to go.
Tate Modern, half an hour walk away, is showing photographer Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Olivia Laing’s brilliant book The Lonely City referenced this artwork. The slide show is displayed in a dark room. The 700 or so images, snapped between 1979 and 2004, play on a loop set to a vigorous soundtrack.
I find a spot on the floor and sit cross-legged as images of people glide past, pausing for several beats so you can take each picture in thoroughly before the next one appears.
I see people with their arms around each other on a night out.
I see people making out.
I see people having real unsimulated sex.
I see people shooting up heroin as ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark plays.
Then there’s Velvet Underground, Dionne Warwick, The Creatures. The music helps build the seedy nostalgia.
I wait until images I recognise play again then leave. I want to come back again before my trip is over. Physically, however, I feel suddenly, terribly, ill and worn out.
Previous instalments of Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me of Them
Thank you for reading! Jazial x