MUSEICINGS from the year
The whole gamut and the big kahuna. Four snapshots for four seasons; only three weddings. No funerals.
Spring
(prior reading: article by the reason most of you have subscribed in Spectator Worldwide)
We’re halfway across Illinois. I am wondering, very vocally, how on earth Sufjan managed to write his pre-Javelin magnum opus about this godforsaken state. It sweeps past us or we sweep past it and who cares which it is, the country is one big swathe of brown and I am feeling an active sense of nothingness I haven’t felt since I had to turn pages for Scriabin’s Black Mass sonata, my stomach squirming with the void of noise coming out from the piano.
We still have six states to go, this motley crew of McCanns-moving-across-the-country and me. I’m going to keep asking this question through Missouri, through Branson, right into Georgia. It makes me feel snarky and smart and like I’m looking back at my fifteen-year-old taste with mature twenty-six-year-old eyes. Of course, when we reach Texas and I peel off from James and Tay and the kids and go see my family in Houston and ask the question again, my brother-in-law Joe has a good answer. Joe usually has a good answer.
Praire Fire That Wanders Around - Sufjan Stevens
Four states to go, through an Oklahoma that has my hands gripped onto the steering wheel and listening to Nick Leng’s SPIRALS on low volume while everyone sleeps. Our Toyota is ostensibly driving along the 44 but really these highways are a tightrope and none of us really knows what happens if and when we fall. I have been thinking a great deal about how the decisions for my life are a lot lower-stakes than many of my friends, or my siblings, who all have young children. I can up and away to Italy, to America, to Hamburg, to tag into their lives and cook them dinner and sweep their kitchen floor, but am I building? What for? I’m not even that hot while I do it. It feels like a bit of a waste.
James is awake and Tay is asleep. We listen to the entirety of the Eurovision playlist again, on the outside chance there is an outside chance James could place a bet on and Win Big (and Buy a Catamaran Etc Etc Etc). There is not, although this comes closest, a perfectly functional running song for the months to come:
This family is the one outside my own I’ve shared the most roadtrips with. Last year we hauled ourselves over to Melbourne for shows James and I had, beginning at five, listening to Classic FM on the road out of Adelaide, and reaching Nhill by 10am, feeling pretty damn pleased with ourselves. James put on this song, which now delights my Swiss bakery co-worker Max as describing perfectly our favourite activity to do on shift together:
It’s been grey, but at the border to Texas the sun abruptly shines, shimmering over the state-planted wildflowers blooming on the median strips. Less of a tentative hope and more a full voiced joy in this, the state of Blue skies and Buc’ees. We are four days away from Easter Sunday and it feels like a dream from the distant past. Missouri Dollywood and Branson coasters and the house we stayed in, baby blue gigantic tv on the lake, straight out of Wes Andersen’s remake of Stepford Wives. We have listened to Song Exploder interspersed with U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments on transcript all day. I put on an analysis of a song I’ve only heard once before. I’ve listened to it many times since. Somehow all the ’ag’ rhymes still make me think of bluebonnets.
Andrew in Drag - The Magnetic Fields
Summer
I spend a month in Australia unexpectedly over the summer. Unexpected in the best way, the gift way. It’s all a gift, right?
I come back to Zürich with a suitcase of books pilfered from Dad (let me see what of mine you’re taking, just so I know, he says as I frantically transfer them between checked and hand luggage and the surreptitious bag Mum is holding at the airport – he will forget, like he forgets his keys in the door of the car - my birthday – hopefully, all the ways I have stressed him out in the last month.) The books nestle between the print Kieran gave me from his debut exhibition and the poems Thom gifted while editing mine late one night at Ern. At 1am the editing is cut short by a tweed-jacketed dweeb whose entry line into our conversation is mygod, I love editing! I love poetry! and who then proceeds to write his ending lines all over my pages. Is that as unforgivable as I saw it in the moment? I walk to the bar to get another drink and intercept Kieran and Sam in a crux moment of a conversation about the humanity of the Virgin Mary. Why would I ever leave?
The print and the poetry hang on the dining room wall in frames I haggle the thrift store owner down for. It’s a place I’ve recently discovered, and I spend the day talking with my co-worker Andrea about how good it is, how when you buy tools there you have to go the woman at the till because she doesn’t know the prices and when you buy crockery you have to go to the man for the same reason. We clock out together but don’t leave at the same time: Suki says she has a bottle of orange wine to share and Andrea says no, I drank five camparis before nine am last Saturday, I have to have some dignity. We finish the bottle and I simply must get to the thrift store before it closes: my sister is coming next week and I want the furniture in the apartment to be my messy aesthetic, not that of seven generations of students before me. Anna? The voice is coming from round the corner and I must be more drunk than I thought – no, it’s Andrea, skirting past the antique cabinets to ask me if I think what he’s holding is real wool or just acrylic. I am on the third furniture-lugging trip home with a cabinet in my arms when I run into a friendly acquaintance I almost worked with and almost studied with, Richard who just moved into my neighbourhood, Richard who just met my cousin at a film festival in New York. I’ve pretended to myself for so long that Zurich has no community for me and now it’s beating me over the head with it. I am on the bike again to pick up my phone, to pick up lightbulbs from the hardware store, and Alessandro is walking in the street with his girlfriend, another smile, another wave.
Everything I have to make a negroni doesn’t work together; I’ve bought gin and vermouth and apero that’s all too specialised and has no concept of melding together. It’s a symbol for how I don’t want an orchestra career anymore. (It’s not a symbol for anything). I am listening to the same five songs on repeat: I’ve stopped thinking and overanalysing whether they are too young or too old, too cool or too dorky for me. I’m twenty seven and for some reason that feels powerful. Maybe it’s because I listened exclusively to BRAT on my birthday. Maybe not.
Will Anybody Ever Love Me - Sufjan Stevens
Autumn
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free - Nina Simone
Violin Concerto in D Minor, III. Lebhaft, doch nicht schnell - Robert Schumann
Symphony No. 4, III. Ruhevoll, poco adagio - Gustav Mahler
Everything Will Be Alright - The Killers
The best day in Berlin begins by waking up in my friend’s childhood Prenzlauerberg apartment. I don’t know her that well but we have the same name, which feels like it takes a few layers off the whole process. I have a big competition at UdK and she offers her parents’ place for the week I’m there; looking up the address on Google Maps to do the obligatory stalk, I get discouraged by the chromium steel front on the street view. Turns out the streetview is entirely wrong.
You know when you enter in somebody’s house and scan their bookshelves quickly and go oh, these are my kind of people? Just me? I wrote an essay two years ago about how isolated and fragmented I feel by most traveling, how I only want to go where I am invited. I revise this opinion: I only want to go to my friend Anna’s apartment in Berlin. Waugh and Fitzgerald, Conrad. All the cliches and I love it. Even the copy of the Hobbit I wanted to buy for my teacher but the secondhand bookstore didn’t have.
I didn’t pass the first round of the competition; contented in my own feeling of how I played, the next morning’s awakening is mostly relief. Anna has taken an overnight train from Vienna and is only in town for three days; her parents are away and we settle quickly into the Best Sharehouse In Berlin Atmosphere along with her younger brother, who seems to exclusively survive off plain chicken and rice (I taught him to put onions in, you know. For the flavour). She freshens up in the bathroom she decorated with splashes of blue paint and mermaids when she was five and then we go buy bäckerei brötchen, exorbitant and decadent in our selection, more cumin-encrusted rolls and custard pastries than we could ever eat. It’s like we’re seventeen and have been let loose with our own money for the first time ever. Utopia conducted by Currentzis deliver an incredible Mahler at the Phil but we are a little too snarky to be ‘truly moved’ by it: I get unreasonably annoyed at Gustav using the same damn themes over and over again in all his symphonies. Someone needs to remind me that every essay and poem I write is a rehash of the three same themes.
The leaves, the gentrified coffee, the graveyard I get lost in on a walk – everything feels exactly where it’s supposed to be. Euphoria in the beams of sunlight crossing my path. Spring, a little older and wiser.
Big break. Big change of mood.
End of Winter
I don‘t have any songs for winter. All I have to do is take the fucking Heidi train again. I always forget about it, the shitty single line that connects Zurich domestic and international terminals. Everyone is going home for Christmas, or escaping the grey wet snow outside that refuses to tip the scales even one gram in favour of magical. Oxygen in here should be rationed.
Yoo-hoo…. Remember me? The voice that comes over the loudspeaker is somehow still jarring, no matter how many times I visit Helen in Texas or Mum and Dad in home-via-India-Qatar-Singapore-you name it. The whole train unwillingly prick up their ears. It’s Heidi, from Switzerland.
She sounds like Lana del Rey using her Marilyn Monroe ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ voice. Not eleven but twenty three and playing eleven, coy innocence oozing and sliming everywhere. I imagine the actress wearing a dirndl while she does the voice over. Not a real one, obviously. Shit knockoff from Aliexpress.
December was a month for losing things. I’d say this is unique to this year but it seems to happen every year – or maybe it’s just one big thing, my sanity; everything tumbles headlong after it. I thought it would be less scattered than November, full of flu and things I didn’t want to do, but December seems to have been the month where I lost my will to do anything. My mind has become a pretty porcelain plate someone took a sledgehammer to. I can feel bits of it poke through my skull sometimes.
Oooooh, it’s so sad to see you go, the fakest and sweetest sigh of regret you ever did hear. The airport is chaos this time of year, did I mention? It’s all announcements jostling for airspace over each other. Worried American women ducking under the barrier in the security line.
I’ve watched so much crap Youtube this winter, distracted myself past the point of any distractions – to take my mind off what? Ah yes, the worry. The big big Worry About It All. Was it this bad last year? I know it was the year before, because I wrote an article very similar to this about it. Maybe my season cycle is just the same and will be forever the same and will be forever forever forever.
I have been watching the lives of people who read the same things as I do and people who don’t read at all, half-meta shows about getting tv shows made recommended to me by friends who want to get movies made. Stupid viral videos that are the same length as a tv show about running eighty kilometers to see a friend. I find myself becoming moved by it all, from the safety of the bed that gives me back pain and that I have no will to get out of. It’s the very act of making something – of getting beyond the emails, the planning. Making seems magical.
Have a look at this wonderful view before you go. Is she? No, she really can’t be – yes, she’s cooing, this horrible Swiss fantasy who is now directed everyone to look at a fake Swiss mountainscape. I would say the real Swiss mountainscape is just as fake as this picture, if I wanted to continue on how I usually go, mean about this half-homeland of mine – but the mountains are the force of resistance to any fakery, above everything and clean from any corruption. I have been to them more in summer than winter, so my abiding sense-memory is of hot sweet grass – a butterfly resting on hair – green valleys where trees begin to grow again – the cows, resting and moving and eating and standing in their slow summer progress.
I think the crux of it is that I want to be the real Heidi and this saccharine bitch is putting me off the whole affair. Isn’t that a stupid sentence - The real Heidi? This train is taking me to the plane I will spend nine hours on have an all-American Christmas with one branch of the massive family tree. I describe it to myself as a ‘real Hallmark movie’ when in fact Home Alone isn’t real, Die Hard isn’t real. To the absolute chagrin of my thirteen-year-old nephew, they didn’t even film Interstellar in space. WHAT’S REAL IS THE LOVE WE HAVE IN OUR HEARTS. Okay? Okay. Christmas cheer all round.
Right before the return flight, I get a little drunk, in the unexpected way. The gift way. I have one margarita at Rusty’s Tacos in Dulles International and when the server, unasked, places another one in front of me, I live for a while in a beautiful world where airport margaritas are refillable and free. The little plastic cup becomes magical in the same way that my Swiss mother thought free refills were at McDonald’s when she first moved to Australia – please, sir, do you have the Everlasting Cup? When I say no to the third (It had advertised itself as strongest margarita in town: on the phone talking about Hallmark Christmases I feel 4pm tequila entering my bloodstream) he places the bill in front of me: a sad shock, two fifteen dollar margaritas there in black and white.
For the longest time, all I wanted to do was travel the world and live in all its corners: now it feels less like traveling and more like breaking myself up into many different lives. So many people to love in so many places. I venture to say I live whichever life I am in well while I am there. I know I do not connect them well. Maybe I have a brain that comes easily and quickly to capacity, maybe we were not meant to live fragmented lives like this. Here is my shout: out to the void, to you, whoever you are, that is a part of the life I’m not living. I love you! I’m sorry. On my twenty seventh birthday I rung the proverbial bell at the bar and asked everyone older than I to give me reviews of their 27th year. They were overwhelmingly positive - the year for love! The year for making things! The year for whatever happens happening! I hope this is a year for putting all the porcelain plate pieces of my poor brain back together.
And you know what? I do have winter songs for you; because winter passes, and in the end, we want songs and stories to remember it by. It’s all about the stories. That’s all that Illinois is. That’s all Sufjan does – all he has to do, Joe says as we sit on the Texas back porch, watching mosquitoes chase the end of our cigarette smoke into the charged April dusk. He is right, of course.
Sing On - Caroline Shaw, Sõ Percussion
Oh What a World - Rufus Wainright
I Didn’t Know You Were Leaving Today - Clara Mann
Thank you for sticking around. Promises for 2025? Listen to the whole playlist again and maybe I‘ll have an answer for you by then.
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This was a DELIGHT to read. What are the three themes you return to in poetry?