Songs Redux

Before leaving on the trip, I had a post up about my last trip's traveling tunes. This summer was a little unusual in that I had my headphones in a lot less than I usually do, following the pattern of my surrounding cultures. But I still had some songs, albums, and artists whose work is now melded to the trip. After the jump, a few of those albums.


 While a lot of songs from earlier stages of my life stuck around here (including most of the songs on my earlier list, The National and a bunch of other favorite bands) I'm focusing here on albums that were either new to me this trip or shifted in my sense of them on this trip.

A lot of the tracks on these may be familiar from showing up in videos over the course of the trip - I tried to lock cities to the songs that were in my head while I was there, which has proven to be a great instant-sense-memory machine. There's a bit of a temporal quality to this collection, moving from the early-summer, still-depressed, putting-my-heart-back-together material to the late-summer, more-hopeful stuff. Let's track that journey!

Early hardtime tunez

Beyoncé, Lemonade. Shortly before the trip, another friend going through a divorce texted me during this album's HBO launch to say "ummm you need to listen to this." And she was right - it's one of the great breakup albums (even if Beyoncé and Jay-Z ultimately reconciled), and it showed up at exactly the right moment to feel the truth behind its articulations of the gut-wrench of abandonment and loss. But the thing is: this album is also super not only (or even primarily) a breakup album. It's very, very about the experience of being a black woman in America. Definitely seek out the Lemonade Syllabus for an impressive rundown of the works that the album (and even more so the jaw-dropping "visual album") responds to and builds from. This thing is about a lot of things.

Noah and the Whale, First Days of Spring. Funny - the last time I was in Europe, their song "Five Years' Time" was in my ears, and this time around it was an album about the breakup between two members of the band (one of whom is no longer in it, obviously). This was one of those albums that morphed over the early days of the trip - its tracks follow something like a stages-of-grief progression. The standout here was "Blue Skies" (which I used in my Rome video), but the whole album came in and out of focus as the trip went on.

Better time tunez
Lucius, Wildewoman. My friend Casey gave me a mix tape with a live version of "How Loud Your Heart Gets" this spring and the album became a huge mainstay on the trip. These people are awesome and I am positively cheesed that I missed them playing in Boston this weekend.

Oh Wonder, Oh Wonder. Another friend-pick! Dan sent this my way, and from the first track ("Livewire," which I used in my Glasgow video) it had a pretty good grip on my heart. Funny enough, even though it's got its fair share of breakup songs, I never thought of it in that camp - I think having come to it a little later in the summer and further along My Journey, it stood on its own terms.

Bayonne, Primitives. Oh wait these are all friend-picks really. Well, this one's from my friend Paul, in response to a Facebook post asking for travel music recommendations. This was spot on - perfect for rapid transit days and urban landscapes. It's still in regular rotation back in Boston.

Mountain Goats, Tallahassee. I'd gotten into them a few years back through Transcendental Youth, but somehow in Italy this earlier album in particular came into focus for me.

 Rufus Wainwright, Take All My Loves. Found this after seeing the Berliner Ensemble's Shakespeare's Sonnets, for which Wainwright wrote these songs. A wide range of tunes, many fantastic, though the linked track will long be my favorite as it's welded to my favorite sequence in the production. Check out All Dessen Müd for some top-notch Kurt Weill pastichery!

Civil Wars, Civil Wars. My friend Sara passed this along sometime in early June, as I recall, and the track "Dust to Dust" became a huge part of my travelin' tunes as hope and newness filtered in. The whole album is great and moving and wonderful! Whatever!

Sufjan Stevens, Carrie and Lowell. I had this pegged as my favorite album of last year, though The Tallest Man On Earth's Dark Bird is Home may be eclipsing it now that I've heard it. Either way, this was the one that kept cycling up for me all across the continent. It's perfect train-travel music.

Cloud Cult, Light Chasers. I always associated this album with my last show in Chicago before moving (a fantastic Arcadia) but something about its narrative - a journey of unknown duration, uncertain success, and self-sacrifice required along the way - really hit me strong as I got into Venice, and it stayed with me for the weeks that followed.

I don't think any of these are particularly elusive or marginal picks, but they're the sonic world I swam in this summer - and will likely form the basis for the playlists with which I'll leave for my next extended travel whenever that is. Music is fun and nice!

Bourbon, Bluegrass n Bgentlemen

I had barely gotten re-acclimated to America (and really: have I mentioned how thankful I am that my family home is always the most relaxing and recharging place ever thanks to my incredible parents? I think I've made that clear on previous occasions in this space?) before I jetted off on another mini-journey, this time to Kentucky, "The Limestone State," as it is probably not known. The occasion: the bachelor party for my dapper, soulful, clever, funny, and relentlessly thoughtful 'n' kind pal Dan. Video and the rest of it post-jump!

The gang, on the town. We clean up... fine?

As per the usual, a bit o' video - though pretty well fatigued from the return home and pretty dazed by the return of Americana and Pal Overload, I was able to capture a li'l bit of the sense of joy that fueled this weekend. Good lord it was a swell 'un.

Lexington is pretty fantastic - I am sure both cities are, but I returned to Lexington just two weeks later for another friend's wedding (an absolutely heart-swelling occasion for dozens of reasons, among them being that a Bengali-Kentucky Muslim/Charleston Lutheran wedding might be exactly what 2016 needed at a bone-deep level?) and was struck again by its undercurrent of cool.

It's bourbon country for sure, and there's plenty of focus there: restaurants and bars all trumpet the stuff, highway signs clearly point the way to the distilleries on the bourbon trail, and we did our share of distillery-hopping. After a few sessions we could all call out the basic facts of bourbon by memory (the minimum and standard percentages of corn in the mash bill, the percentage made within Kentucky, the fact that the burn is known as a Kentucky hug, the list goes on).

A little hand-bottling underway at the Buffalo Trace distillery. FUN FACT: Buffalo Trace is a kind of bourbon. Bourbon is a kind of whiskey! Blogs are a kind of deadening morass of confusion and discontent!

But it's also just a cool spot. Both of my weekends in Lexington had me (and us) stumbling across artists and thinkers doing their thing, restaurants doing that local-organic-seasonal no-frills stuff that I love, and public art to beat the band.

A little art deco in Louisville. We tried our best to be fancy for Dan and I can only hope we succeeded??

 A couple more photos below; there are many stories from the weekend but they all benefit from an in-person telling. What's worth saying here is that the more I've visited the mid-sized cities of the States (Kansas City, Lexington, Louisville, Cleveland, etc.) the more I appreciate how omnipresent artistry and hustle are. And again: coming back from my adventures this summer, I'm a smidge better positioned to look for it and find that excellence wherever it happens to be.

Louisville was cool too! I had a great early morning walk through it, I just didn't solo explore much, so mostly I know it has a few great bars and a stupendous restaurant from Edward Kim! Whatever you guys!

Bourbon n smoke at our last stop of the night, which began with a server saying "We're closed. What can we get you to drink?" It was: highly nifty.

Three gents (OR ARE THERE FOUR) preparing to Step Out in Louisville. FUN FACT: Louisville and Lexington are entirely different cities and apparently do not like to be referred to as The Estranged Twin Cities of Kentucky! STAY TUNED TO THIS BLOG FOR MORE CULTURAL SENSITIVITY.

Home again home again

On August 23, I returned to the States, and had a crazy week of readjustment: a couple of days with my folks, a couple of days in Kentucky for my friend Dan's bachelor party, and a couple of days in Chicago proper before jetting back to Boston. I'll have a separate post up about Kentucky later this week, along with some lagging trip-in-retrospect posts, but for today I cut together this little video about homecomings - not as complex or observant as most of these, as I was exhausted and mostly too happy to be seeing friends to remember to capture almost any of it on camera, but it gives a good sense of how my heart felt about it all.

Palimpsests

One of the sub-hobbies of this blog is applying literary nonsense to my liiiiiife, and this is no exception. A little reflection on layering memories after the jump.

Szimpla, a ruin pub in Budapest, its own kind of palimpsest.

When I had first started coming to terms with my impending divorce, my friend Casey asked an incredibly smart question: “Did you lose any music in the breakup?” Not in the sense of physical albums, but were there songs, artists, albums that I couldn’t listen to any more.

There was really only one song that I could definitively point to as a lost song at that time – S. Carey’s “In the Dirt.” Kate had sent it to me on a mix early in our dating, and it became something of an anthem for our long-distance relationship. It was my ringtone for her, and something about the song’s drive and longing for a lifelong bond, a shared journey all the way to the finish, felt intimately connected to that period of distance and anticipation. With the shift from a shared longing to be together to her desire to be done with the relationship and with me, the song felt emotionally barbed. I don’t know that I listened to it once between January and the trip. Something and hopeful had transformed somehow into a cold reminder of what I had lost.

One morning in June, on a train from Budapest to Krakow, I woke up to see the Polish countryside rolling across my window at dawn, like a canvas unrolling some impossibly idyllic landscape scene, the sky a splay of pastels. My brain somehow leapt up and connected with something – tying the rhythm of the train and the smooth ripple of the fields going by to “In the Dirt.” Something about that moment felt instantly right for the song. I grabbed my headphones and gave it a whirl. And it was good. It was perfectly married to that moment - the air, the light, the motion, the rhythms and textures of the music all sang together.

There was a little miracle in that moment – the song didn’t suddenly become something new, a pure and unadulterated memory of Poland. But where before its meaning seemed to have completely flipped, to be destroyed and rewritten, now it felt layered. It was connected to this transcendent memory of awaking to movement in an unfamiliar new world and to the loss and destruction of the past six months. And if it could connect to those two things, it could also connect back to its initial meaning: love, longing, certainty. It became a palimpsest (one of my favorite literary concepts) -  a piece of writing atop another piece of writing, faint traces of the past visible beneath each iteration.

I think that's what this year is about for me. It's about seeking out that layering - the complicated commingling of tragedy, sadness, anger, frustration, and peace, hope, excitement, and newness. About allowing cities, memories, tokens and relationships to retain all their meanings, rather than blocking out that complexity and simplifying things down to the easiest-to-digest best-or-worst iterations of themselves. And along the way I'm reclaiming my sense of joy, my sense of discovery, my sense of potential and of hope above all.

The video I cut for Krakow was scored to "In the Dirt," and you can find that on the blog if you want. But here's the official video, which feels perfect in its own way. Let's keep refracting until these things are as rich as the world itself???

Stockholm: The Magic of Friendship

And the last stop on the trip: Stockholm! (I did make a one-night stop in Malmö, which was charming and cute, but due to Travel Fatigue and having a friend hook me up with a proper hotel room, I was mostly asleep and/or watching the Olympics while there. Though, if you're looking for a restaurant recommendation, Bastard was actually pretty stellar.)

Stockholm was an interesting space, almost a transitional one in preparing me for my return to the States. More on all of that - and the requisite video and photos - after the jump!

MORE CITIES FROM BOATS! If there is a sub-theme to this blog, it is "I like going to cities and then looking at them from boats." FELLAS! Who wants to get together and buy a boat?

First things first: my good friend Hilary met me in Stockholm, another Europe-tripping intersection as she made her way from Iceland to meet her (extremely excellent) partner in Berlin. Hilary's been an amazing listener to me for years, and most of what I remember about Stockholm are our conversations. That's why the video for Stockholm is, in its way, a video about paaaaaals as much as the city!

Making the jump to Vimeo since it seems like they're not gonna stick ads on my videos when I use copyrighted tunes. Fingers crossed??

That said, it was a neat place. Oddly, as I said above, a transitional one - much of the city was knocked down mid-twentieth century, with Gamla Stan as the outlier in retaining much of its eighteenth-century architecture, and a lot of the newer construction is unlike Copenhagen in that it's utilitarian more than artful. That doesn't mean it didn't have its high points, though.

Swedish Gothic

We made a visit to Strindberg's final apartment (as I had Ibsen's in Oslo), and I was struck at seeing the nearby subway station plastered with his portrait and paintings of the apartment building - given how grim he is, it's easy to forget that Strindberg is a literary national hero in Sweden. And we enjoyed wandering Gamla Stan, but the highlights were both ferry-rides away: a tour of the city's archipelago, and a day spent in Skansen and its neighboring park/farm on Djurgården.

We couldn't hear what this extremely dapper fella was saying, but I like to imagine he was mostly explaining "Lookit them islands, that's an archipelago. Them islands over there? Same deal. Basically it's all an archipelago, on account of the islands, who wants to get me a drink."

 One big discovery from the summer is how important nature is to me - something that can be easy to forget or lose track of. And while much of Stockholm follows the concrete-and-glass model of American cities, it was nice to so easily get away into the greens and blues that surrounded it. The archipelago - or more precisely, the vacation homes on the shores of its islands - strangely reminded me of Minnesota's lakes and the waterfront culture there. And the attractions of Djurgården felt like a little glimpse at how Swedes, given the sometimes-harsh climate, make the most of their summers when they come.

Hilary in Skansen, just before she RIPPED a pole out of the ground and started hacking at this thicket of trees. Hilary! Trees are nice, don't attack the trees.

(As a side note, I think that's part of why Jamaica Plain is treating me so much better than Allston did - there are trees lining the streets in a way that feels much more designed for enjoyment-of-the-world than did my last neighborhood.)

I would have enjoyed Allston's trash culture a LOT more if it had this groovy little guy helping to contain the garbage-piles that accumulated.

In any case, between some persistent drizzle and the relatively staid nature of a lot of the city (I'd still be interested in going back to see Drottningholm) it oddly prepared me for my return back to the States... about which more in the next couple of posts!

Copenhagen By Canal

WELL, turns out that starting up a campus routine and setting up a new apartment and prepping for a weekend back in Kentucky for a friend's wedding all adds up to not a lot of blogging, I know this has been devastating for everybody involved. But a sleepy, slow start to my day in Lexington (which continues to be an extremely groovy town) gave me time to finally put together this video of my trip up the main canal in Copenhagen. Again: it is mighty fine to see what the price of a bus ticket can get you in some of these places. Later this weekend or early next week: Stockholm, friendship, and the return to Amer-i-kay!

What's a blog post without a picture of a hypnotic glass enclosure lit from behind by the setting sun canalside in Copenhagen? What have I even been POSTING for before now?

Back in Town: Surprise Twists

Not a photos-y/videos-y  update, but another navelgaze! Keeping the meat below the jump so you can ignore this if you're just here for the shiny stuff (which is absolutely the recommended route to reading this blog)!


I'm back in Boston and have to say I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I'm enjoying the return. There was some anxiety and stress going into it - this city holds a lot of hard, unhappy memories, both from the at-times-overwhelming stress of my grad program and from the past year of depression and relationship deterioration. I knew that this was the "smart" decision, but it was by no means my first choice. I'm really grateful for how it all turned out, though - like a few other choices I've made during this transitional year, I'm glad I stuck with the hard-but-healthy path forward.

And some of this change is absolutely stuff that was wrought during my time abroad. I feel a greater sense of exploration than I have had here before, in part I'm sure because I'm coming to the city with new eyes and a habit of looking. And I'm more used to taking inconvenience and dead ends as a matter of fact and adjusting myself to my circumstances. (This does not mean that Boston's civic planning can be forgiven its many ungodly sins, but I'm at least not taking it personally, which I think we can call the most infantile version of progress?)

But some of it is circumstance as well - after two years in Allston, it's an incredible relief to be in Jamaica Plain. A little further out from the city center, it's unlike any other spot I've lived here in that there's a real sense of community, of residents who have put down roots and invested in each other and their environment. This morning I went to a bakery for the second time in a few days (my stove is from the 1950s so I'm not quite comfortable firing it up until I get a tutorial from my landlord) and the owner recognized me; on my way out I picked up a brochure for the neighborhood's "open studio" art gallery program later this month. Neighbors smile and wave and let me pet their dogs (possibly the greatest thing to ever happen in the Boston metro area). A nice shift from the undergrad-heavy, trash-in-the-streets vibe of Allston.

I've also got a much better sense of structure and routine than I did during the overwhelming emotional and professional chaos of my comps year. And that's helping me figure out how to have a full, healthy personal life in tandem with an ambitious, productive year of scholarship and academic knick-knacks. Again: a nice shift.

All of these things keep me circling back around to the same thing, something I feel like I keep saying to my friends (sorry, friends!) - which is that I feel like me again. I didn't for a long time, well before the divorce. I'd felt adrift and alone and humiliated and stuck and sad. And those things still visit from time to time, but my core self feels present again in a way it hasn't since at least early 2015. And man, that feels tremendous.

In the year I've got left here, I'm pretty committed to doing my best to keep riding this wave of positivity and happiness, while knowing that there will obviously be stress and emotional setbacks as the academic year cranks into high gear and life moves past the settling-in phase. But I feel like in this year I've re-learned how to share things with my friends, how to accept and release frustrations, and how to take joy in all things, up to and including disasters.

That all feels great. That all feels new. That all feels like the future. I'm awfully keen to see what comes next!

Next up, a Copenhagen boat ride! Stockholm adventures with an amazing friend! The bourbon trail with another amazing friend! A sudden and destabilizing shortage of exclamation points!!!

Copenhagen!

Boy, fellas. Copenhagen surprised me. I'd been told how great it was by a few friends I'd run into in Bergen, as well as close friends from back home, but it really just sent me swooning in a way that no other Scandinavian city had done or would do. This city was a joyful spot, and I'll try/fail/try-again to articulate how after the jump...

Near the Little Mermaid statue is this infinitely-cooler sculpture/fountain, which is frustrating ONLY IN THAT as a photographer you're technically only supposed to be able to take pictures in one dimension so you can't take a picture that shows you the boats behind the fountain in one direction AND the gorgeous church on the other side of the fountain, because reality is a crock!

My friend John talked a lot about how Copenhagen had a great culture of play, and: yes. It's full of playgrounds and little green spaces, and sure, there's a part of the city where the sidewalk is suddenly made of trampolines (NOT KIDDING, WATCH THE VIDEO), but it goes beyond that. The architecture itself is playful - for a city packed with modern buildings, it's gloriously thin on boxy skyscrapers, opting instead for a slew of approaches that cumulatively feel like the city's poking fun at the old line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Well, this city's buildings dance, so whatever, apocryphal-quote-speaker.

Two major points of Copenhagen stick out as worthy of mention here. (Three if you count food -  while there's plenty of overpriced and not-great stuff, the Noma trickle-down effect has left the city full of people making incredibly tasty, delicious food at reasonable-for-Scandinavia prices.) Tivoli Gardens and Louisiana Museum both feel like variations on the city's playfulness, and both made me very, very happy. (I should note that while I visited Christiania, I didn't take any photos or videos inside the gates - partly because in much of the settlement you're not supposed to, and partly to unplug from that end of this project. It, too, is a special spot, but one I didn't get a ton of time in and didn't love quite as much as... well, at least the Louisiana.)

"Nyhaven" is the Danish word for "dumdum creek with some stupid old boats stuck in it who even cares, what time is Netflix on"

Tivoli is an amusement park, with an "It's a Small World" style ride modeled on Hans Christian Anderson's stories, a handful of roller coasters and big drops, and a sprawling arcade with games and food. I sidestepped most of that (with the exception of the ferris wheel and the HCA ride) in favor of the park's surprisingly extensive cultural offerings.

A corner of Tivoli as viewed from an extremely dangerous Ferris wheel. Whoaaaa some brave photographer must have risked a lot to get that shot huh.

 As evening rolls in, the park becomes a bit more adult-oriented, with jazz, classical, and pop concerts as well as theatrical offerings. Some of these are free in the open air (the above video gets you a glimpse at the kind-of-terrible panto the evening I visited, and below there's a little snippet of a jazz concert) and some require an additional payment (the night I was there, the Norwegian Youth Symphony was playing the Symphonie Fantastique). There's also a lot of green grass where people just sit, drink, picnic, play around on rolling wooden seats, and generally enjoy the fading light of the day. As amusement parks go, it's hard to top (if, like me, you aren't a roller coaster hound).

But if there's one place that blew me away in Copenhagen it was Louisiana. This museum is incredible. All modern art, with a collection far too extensive to be displayed all at once, the curators rotate their displays and fill the rest of the museum with new works, loans from other museums, commissions, and the like. It's beautifully curated, but the actual layout of the place is what makes it special. It's built out of an estate on the sound separating Denmark from Sweden, and as it was developed, the grounds were turned into a sculpture garden designed to serve as a playing space for museum patrons.

Giacometti is the coolest, and this place is jam packed with his stuff. Also: NATURE???

The result is the most balanced, humane, relaxing and invigorating museum I've ever visited. Most of the galleries open out to the grounds at some point, so that you can move effortlessly from gallery to grass, down to the water, over to a wooded area, across a bridge, down a slide, back up through the (delicious!) cafe, and back into another gallery.

Blah di bloo, some kinda "sculpture" if you can even call a mesmerizing interplay between lively and untrammeled nature, its reflection in sleek modernity, and an inverted slab of earth "a sculpture." MY KID COULD HAVE SCULPTED THAT, etc.

There's even a children's wing, multiple rooms full of supplies for kids to create their own pieces, many of which are hung in the wing itself. I came expecting to spend three hours or so (I tend to fade after that point in most museums.) I stayed the entire day. It's just the best.

Botanical gardens? More like... substantial gardens! Wait, hang on, I know I have a sicker burn, just give me a couple of hours and a rhyming dictionary, please give me a chance to redeem my family's honor

In a way (SPOILER ALERT) I was happy that Stockholm, while fun, didn't blow me away, because it made Copenhagen seem more real/meaningful. I wouldn't have guessed it, but this is one of the cities I most want to spend more time in, and I think stands with Berlin and Glasgow as a top-three city in which I would jump at the chance to live. But we'll chat more about Stockholm, the end of the trip, palimpsests, the bourbon trail, and my return to Boston, in the coming days and weeks. (After another post dealing a little more with Copenhagen's architecture and a li'l video of a canal ride thanks to The Magic Of Public Transit.) For now, let's just all get ourselves a slice of rhubarb pie and think about how lucky we are to be alive and on this planet for some reason! Okay!