jem on jém

[ENTRY-002]

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At the time of writing, I’m listening to a newly released, live recording of one of my all-time favourite songs by one of my all-time favourite bands: If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know) by The 1975. To this day, hearing the extended opening of this song for the first time live (a couple years ago) has nestled itself into a fond core memory to draw upon. There’s a dreamy, glittering beauty in its slow build-up accompanied by one of the two sexiest saxophone riffs I’ve ever heard in my life. And then the actual song; one of (I think) the most romantic and enduring bangers ever written about intimacy in the current hellish online age of social interaction. This is how I feel about most 1975 songs. They’re all such well-written and (at times extremely poignant) personal accounts of bleeding in existentialism and drowning in poppy ironic detachment to conceal a core authenticity that remains as a beating heart in all their tracks. There are so many undercurrents of confronting perceived notions of addiction, relationships, suicide, intimacy and social dynamics of the time woven into tracks that sound genuine and earnest. A lot of them are usually about something but the bottom line is they’re just simply fun to listen to (if you can actually understand what they’re saying, which I’ve learned is a real point of contention for some people apparently).

And though I can hide my cold gaze (look up iPhone concert footage of the If You’re Too Shy opening on YouTube), and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours (ask me how good it was to hear a half cut Matthew Healy ramble and do a Michael Jackson pedo bit on stage), and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable (bring up how you didn’t hear a Michael Jackson pedo bit in your own live music experiences), I am simply not there (won’t experience a moment quite like that again, at least for a while).

Perhaps a long-winded intro just to say: I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about how my brain struggles to consume (yuck) art, especially when it comes to revisiting my beloved pieces of precious media.

I’ve made it a routine to listen to new albums every week during my morning walks (as I do laps around the very real underground facility in which I reside) and in some cases, it’s the highlight of my day. It will absolutely shock some people to discover that I really enjoy listening to new music, and with the exorbitant amount of free time I have on my hands it gives me a great deal of satisfaction getting through a lifetime backlog of artists I’ve always wanted to give the light of day but never found the time for. It’s been a totally random assortment with no rhyme or reason: Bob Dylan, Japanese Breakfast, Weyes Blood, Oasis, LCD Soundsystem, Joan Baez, Beastie Boys, The Beatles and Sufjan Stevens just to name slightly more than a few.

I say I give these artists the time of day on a made-up contract, but what they can hardly see is the small fine print about how my mind may frequently wander during these periods. It’s become an evil dickhead of an inevitability in my attempts to engage with new things.

I’ll start an album and listen. And listen. I’ll turn the volume up as I walk past the loud (and very real) subway system. But I keep listening. I avoid stepping on the gaps of the sidewalk. But I keep listening. I look at a tree and wonder if it’s always been there or if someone moved it. Would someone actually move a tree ever so slightly just to tease me? It doesn’t matter because I’ve been walking for eleven minutes and am now four tracks deep into an album I haven’t properly engaged with at all. I’ve absorbed nothing meaningful beyond a passive experience. So I walk it back (figuratively) and start again. “Lock the fuck in”, I say. And “lock the fuck in” I do. With every attempt, it gets easier. I appreciate a journey that’s been crafted to make me feel a certain way. The composition. The artistry. The instrumentation. The other synonyms.

Loving, and I mean really loving an art form as universal as music, despite lacking a deep or even passing knowledge of its rich language, or how to aptly describe specific instruments, has always been a weird sore point of detachment and unproductive wishful thinking. The same goes for things like making art of course, as well as cooking and at even one point in my life woodworking. For as much pride and satisfaction I feel in engaging with certain hobbies, I will never be able to succinctly put into words how much joy they bring me despite an absence of perceived skill or gaps in my knowledge. Boy, do I love doing things if I’m not particularly always good at them or can’t articulate why (although that doesn’t really matter).

I don’t think I can squarely put the blame on myself for this becoming an automatic process (maybe it awkwardly brushes past my shoulder) but that doesn’t shut off the Bad Feelings valve. Of gradual helpless regression, or that I’m going backwards. “How long before I start setting hourly reminders to drink water or forget to breathe entirely?” What an exhausting spiral to navigate. And what a shame that it seems to transcend across every medium, or that I let it seep into everyday life.

Then I think about my beloved precious MEDIA, specifically video games. Specifically The Last of Us. Tens of hours of gameplay I know inside and out. Nearly every line of dialogue, every workbench and vault location, every resource drop and every talking point from a near-endless stream of dreaded online discourse I’ve heard repeated ad nauseam. I’m stumbling away from the point now (far from regularly scheduled rambling) but in my replaying of Part 1, I noticed again my mind wandering during the seamlessly blocked and incredibly acted cutscenes. Of course, other parts of the game exist to flesh out a deeply complex whole but I’ve always found cutscenes (at least during my first-time experiences watching them) to be nice little rewards for all the infected runner necks I’ve had to snap or heartbreaking dog whimpers heard after sniping their owners with a silenced pistol affixed with a plastic bottle amongst some knee-high grass.

Just as I run it back with most albums, I’ve found myself having to replay cutscenes. I’m lost in the sauce as it were. Too lost. Somehow I become so mesmerised by facial animations and nuanced line deliveries that it melts away my focus. My once sharp knife of a brain has been dulled by the ever-reliable chopping board of peak fiction. It makes no damn sense. Compels me though. At least listening to music on a walk I can argue the medium lacks a visual component. “There’s no subway surfers down there”, imaginary J.K. Simmons says to me, chair hurled in my direction. But even with all my senses engaged it’s never a fair match. What do the things I used to love mean if they can’t keep my attention now? Or have I sucked them completely dry of every morsel of sustenance they could once provide reliably?

More than anything I want to expose myself to different things and learn and grow. I’m sure no human being of an artistic temperament would disagree. And I want it to be hard of course but not in this way where I feel my mind is going. Not where lyrics and dialogue and poetry go through one orifice and out the other. Maybe I yearn for a real-life gamified levelling system. Something straightforward with a pretty and intuitive UI to represent my progress. Less about finding frivolous single-digit percentage bonuses or accruing enough points to spend on improving an aspect of myself by simply existing. More in the vein of practising a skill repeatedly until it can’t but become second nature. What I’d give to max out my memory or speech trees.

It’s not all dour, however. I fret not, because I like to frequent the easy and comfortable first step of solving a problem which is recognising there is one. There’s still the whole “fixing the problem part” I hate but rather conveniently I love to forget that I’ve already fixed the problem like these countless times before. One reason the whole being alive thing is great to me is because I can look around the bend at how far I’ve come and imagine the progress I could make just a little further (barring the inevitable endless comparisons). I feel my mind begin to slip and maybe let it fall into the abyss but then I just turn it off. My experience isn’t worthless or wasted because it wasn’t perfect the first time. I go back and start again, and will continue going back and starting again (fingers crossed that the brain fog and poor attention span are symptomatic of short-term issues and no scary “your brain is dying” scares).

“What does it all mean?” reads the letter I attempt to hurl at the sea, which proves to be a more difficult dramatic gesture than anticipated. I don’t know. I’ll put a pin in it for now.

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