track for ur reading pleasure^
meditation on: how you say “return to normal tempo after a deviation”
I talk about “Pratt’s Manhattan Gallery” every single day at work and avoid going for a number of reasons—it’s associated with work, it’s associated with Pratt, and also it’s in Chelsea, which grows more and more to be my least favorite neighborhood in New York (outside of claiming the High Line, which is a damn jewel). I’d rather, for the most part, lie out in Hudson Yards and get pelted with pigeon shit than get off at the 14 St/8 Av stop ever again.
I went, finally, because somehow through my spam filters for every single work-related event, this one slipped through: an improvisational electric harpist and drummer duo playing—well it’s hard to say. I watched 3 minutes of a 30-minute video and could barely stand what was coming out of my speakers and was at the same time enraptured by it, and securing my ticket. Electronic music can be treacherous that way. There’s something about the sound of it that brings me blindfolded into the earth’s core and it’s like all I can feel is the sort of pulsating, powerful, wretched energy of the interior. (This on 50 calories of airplane “eggs” for this 7-hour flight.)
I made my friend Henry come because he’ll do anything that’s weird and musical. (I took him once to a sacred drumming circle, from which he left and said “That was weird. I’ve never done yoga before.”)
It’s probably 25 chairs in the open space of the gallery. The audience is salt and peppered, smells like soap and fingernails1, uncomfortable, there for work or relevant curating spouses.
Zeena Parkins, the electronic harpist is, I assume, the slightly crazed-looking woman against the wall wearing Gap’s most contentious Spring colors—a marbled lime green and yellow sweater vest over a blue floral top, and magenta skinny pants. She stands next to someone tall, lanky, jazz band-looking, in dark navy and black, slim pants, glasses, an archedness about him and deferential quality to his posture.
They’re introduced by someone very uncomfortable to be doing the introduction, the sweating and fidgeting of an introvert that got stuck with the intro because of cracking first in the vacuous silence of the Zoom meeting. Zeena is introduced as a legend, Guggenheim fellow, played with Björk, master composer of the insane.
When they take the stage—that is, the open space in the floor—the drummer, Brian Chase, “a visionary and otherwise back up to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” sits slumped over his drum kit like a weary schoolboy over his books. His mouth lies agape, his eyes half-lidded like a frat boy deliriously high in the attic corner. He is, I think—deliriously high. This supposition confirmed by the sounds these two start making in a minute.
The electronic harp, which really, you should read about this thing, stands on a metal spire and looks somewhere between a small harp and a very large swiss army knife. Zeena begins her, what to call it—piece? Movement? Work? Fugue state? with a passion that immediately unnerves me. She loves this harp in a way I am Not Gonna Get.
She approaches it first like she’s trying to catch a fly between its strings, creeping up on it and smacking the strings from both sides with her hands. Just as soon it’s like a snake to her that she’s trying to grope and lick, and the snake is, understandably, completely unwilling, but she acts as if it writhes—this completely stationary, nonconsenting object—and the more it writhes the harder she grips it. You get the sense you shouldn’t be seeing this, or that in some way you should rescue the harp itself.
But throughout the “set,” shall we say, the relationship between them is transforming all the time—during one movement, she stands away from it and reaches her hand before her to stroke it. Her face is delighted by the sound it makes, like she is a child hoping an inanimate thing could speak and so it is: speaking, and to her.
The hands of the drummer beside her move so quickly, it makes me think of the way minnows move when you step your foot into shallow water, how they fretfully disperse. At times, he uses a chopstick on his cymbals. At others he murmurs to himself what lip reads like “pa pow pa pow.” Not once in the performance does his mouth close.
It’s harder to explain the actual noise of it—this is what it is, noise—than to say it feels like colored lights flashing through your body. It’s far more tantric and kinetic than melodic.
As the performance carries on, you feel it’s imbued with sexuality. It becomes a sort of play in which you watch Zeena unveil her desire for the harp, its sound and the potential of its parts. She rapidly flicks the harp with her pick, drags her fingers along its strings and winds her thumb in between them with her mouth open and eyes wide. Then, lips pursed and eyes closed, she wraps her hand around the neck of the harp and strokes it. When the sound of the harp and drums unify, building towards crescendo (do you hear the silence, though, where I’m not saying climax), the drummer—it can’t be said any other way—starts to ride his stool, though his upper body is still slumped.
Which begs the question, for me—not have they fucked, like so many duos, but is this fucking to them? To make love to and with sound?
And I hate to diminish anything to the sexual, since it erases all its other nuance, but at times that felt trying; times, for example, like when she put her face against the strings and breathed hotly onto them while I sat behind a woman with a graduated bob and a black cardigan, her Eileen Fisher tag sticking out, who began to cough. “It was really interesting, yeah. Really bizarre…” she’ll say to her friends tomorrow, as will I.
The harp is not a harp, I’m realizing, but clearly some conduit for translation and desire, for knowing oneself through an object, or an art form, and in a way we couldn’t quite, with a person. And it sounds like this: guhlang guhlang eeper eeper eeper (BUM bum bum BUM) guhlangggg eeper.
Oh, I’m here because I’m obsessed with the multiplicity and depth of lived experience, I guess, of seeing where personal ambition and our unperturbed interims take us. I’m here because it’s Tuesday and I’m curious, because the true emotional comfort of my life was shattered some time ago and I remembered that you have to go forward with interest in your own individual life. Which for me often means doing anything that promises to be a little strange.
Watching Zeena—sorry, this is totally what it is—go down on her harp allows me to see for a moment how we know ourselves through, of course, the art we make, and not, as I’ve been thinking, the people we make art about. I am really (how it feels is) glowing to have myself back, fully. To remember how I am and how I interact with sound and space and art and people, without the influence of another personhood I devote myself to and absorb. I feel I exist in my spaces and clothes and the music I listen to, these silly dispatches, the people I love for no reason and no benefit, I just love them, my manic Google Doc that I need to figure out how to password protect. I am remembering there is just some series of sound in which I feel totally myself—the best example being this recent cover from Slow Pulp. I listened and thought of myself as the whole person I grew into and thought: right, exactly.
It feels like I was living for some, long, long time under a wet tarp of My Great Love, only to find: wait, I can just rip this thing off and it turns out it was just a wet tarp and actually the sun is out and I can cast the tarp aside, and warm my water-bloated gray body back to its ruddy and effusive pink.
I live my life with a crippling certainty of my experience—its conditions and the stasis of those conditions, the intensity of my feelings and circumstances. I’m always sure that things are absolute: that I will always feel this way, be this way, live this way, and love and die this way, etc. I can’t imagine some things such as: healing, security, the state of improvement. In a way, actually, it takes an enormous pressure off my life. I drift limply into the next thing, with no expectation, and then, often, delight on arrival.
Which is why it’s been so shocking to retreat back into the state of being single with so much dread, and then, on arrival: it feels completely normal. In many ways, better. I feel above the feeling of need—it’s clear up here, calm, exactly the feeling of when you have a window seat on an airplane and you’re looking at the veins of the Colorado River and thinking how exceptional this is there all the time, and from only this vantage point can you know it so well as this.
I feel relieved not to be in the clutches of something that rules my life and controls my feelings and makes my decisions for me. I have been glad recently to sleep alone, with all the space in my bed, to go to sleep without the comfort or resentment of love. To wake up to my programmed coffee pot and my tittering roommates, dressed in their stripes and reading already.
I like wandering out of the house when I’m ready to, having tried on my different sweaters without concern for time or optics. My phone is such a different object to me, no arbiter of drama or terror or validation; my friendships so much more lighthearted; my under-eyes so much less purple.
In this time of withdrawal, I’ve noticed many things about myself as if I wasn’t myself, caught myself in habits and with mannerisms I wasn’t aware I had, for better and worse. I’ve been sectioning out my attributes into things I like and things I should work on: I like that I have no relationship to alternative milks, that I have irrefutably a blue-green aura (which in conflict sometimes becomes a nuclear blast, I like this also), that my hair looks always as if I’ve just been traveling 60mph in a speedboat. I don’t like that, for example, I have weak enamel and social battery, thin patience for indecision, that I fear women. I like that I can’t affect another personality, and don’t like that I never want dessert. The list could continue vainly, and forever.
In these interims, we learn ourselves back, we grow. What that looks like is sometimes watching a woman try with sonic virility to Fuck Her Harp; 100 indie-rizz Western road trip movies bloated with emotional subtext, making fish 800 ways, growing out your hair. Sometimes also being fed cigarettes by a Matteo defending the work of Bukowski and Burroughs whom you’ve already called “perverts” and declared your least favorite poets whether or not that may be true, and who thinks you might be something of his eventual Someone despite being 6 years his senior and completely vacant in the face. Sometimes long periods of withdrawal.
The interim, though, what I’m trying to say, albeit sloppily, is not the interim. It’s the many centers of the whole self. It’s your being back in your body, in your sensibility and mind and taste, with the closure of self. I don’t know what, then, to call the periods of being in love, except for movements themselves, fugue states, if you’ll allow me to borrow again from the harp: tenuto (held).
recommendations:
I recently learned if you hug someone for 20 seconds or kiss someone for 6 seconds your body full on dumps oxytocin so I’m recommending everyone get up to that this week
I can’t stop listening to this album, spooky and awesome, especially “z” and “prayer at the dinner table”
I’m reading Justin Taylor’s Reboot which has been an amazing respite from my usual drawl of self-indulgent and vacuous Ivy League lit. You can also subscribe to his newsletter here
Wrapped my april: not this playlist which got weird at the end and then my may: hooch playlist got started in as weird a way
I can’t make it to Fazerdaze but someone go (5/16), and otherwise I hope people come to Gunkyard’s first event at Baby’s All Right (5/10)
Saw the work of Arielle Zamora at Future Fair this week and was soooo in love, she carves various lines into joint compound ?? V reminiscent of this other artist I love: Bice Lazzari
shout-outs/classifieds:
Awww new section for all the things I want to coax you into doing/spending money on bc the whole purpose of life is opportunity! Email me if there’s something you want in the next newsletter: juliafharrison@gmail.com
My perfect roommate Iz just released her knitting pattern via her brand Marchmont Studio for her gorgeous Kostas sweater
I’m looking for food writers/journos/influencers interested in writing about or posting content for a supper club I’m working for, din din nyc! Please DM me or email if you’re interested
I’m also running the food series at my favorite place in Brooklyn, dear friend, and we are looking for some collaborators on food/coffee/pastry pop-ups for Saturday’s through September! Please lmk if you have something like that or know someone to put me in touch with <3
P.S. ^ I’m hoping to use this space for the following:
jobs, opportunities, collaborations in my/the general community
a space to rec your writing/music/whatever you’re working on!
if you’re looking for housing I’m happy to write something up here with brief details and a contact! apt swaps included
I literally know y’all gonna beef with this but fingernails have a smell that first occurred to me in Arlington cemetery when I was 6 or something and has never left. It’s a bad smell