just an ode to Karen O rly. isn't everything??
hiiiii and welcome to both the first FAX ME HARDER & to lockdown 2.0 in England town!!! What a day. A Sunday as well! I’m making a chocolate orange mousse tonight, from Letitia Clark’s scandalously sunny and beautiful Bitter Honey, and I’m going to do it with baked peaches (grilled peaches? poached peaches? a form of cooked peaches.) and it’s going to be glorious. Gonna have a glass of Aldi’s finest mulled wine (November = xmas) and toast Trump being kicked out of office - join me !!!
I wrote this initial newsletter with love heart eyes, after reading [the OG] Griefbacon’s piece on why Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs is the best song of all time, which remains the most beautiful and my favourite thing I’ve ever read, on the internet or paper or otherwise. I read it once every few months but have only ever managed to read it whilst listening to Maps twice in my life because it so specifically pinpoints my feelings about the song that I feel filleted (and also am left gawping and pop-eyed, much like a dead fish ☹). u should a hundred thousand percent read it, though perhaps after not before my attempt at exploring the emotions that piece gives me (just below heheh ↓). I’m gna begin with some of my favourite excerpts from the Griefbacon letter - they’ll be in quotation marks - which is exactly how I actually wrote this when I first started typing it out in my iphone notes, hiding my tears badly under my fake eyelashes on the Overground.
“Sometimes I listened to that song so much that I couldn’t even hear it anymore.”
“When a shitty day is a broken heart and a broken heart is the end of the world but the end of the world is maybe, at least, a party”
“blazing in the worst part of myself”
“Maps is the moment between an inhale and an exhale that feels like fuck you and fuck everyone no one can ever tell me anything”
“remembering the worst things they ever did to you feels like home”
“the very few times when an experience actually aligned with my fantasy of it, when the idea of the thing became the thing itself, when the painting fit the frame”
“All we can do is stand there in the middle of our consuming love like those religious drawings in which a saint is surrounded wholly in fire and yet their body does not disintegrate”
“the incredible sense of doom, the gallows-feeling of dread that accompanies every breath and syllable in it”
“It’s holding up two hands to stop the floodwave breaking through the wall.”
There are some songs that make me feel too raw and I therefore can’t even listen to them. I love them so much and they hurt me so accurately; they skewer me, like an injection needle bursting through that first layer of skin, like when something should pop and burst but it just pops and slides in and fills up and it’s all the more painful for it - like that, that’s how they make me feel. Spiderwebs by No Doubt does it. The start of Y Control by Yeah Yeah Yeahs where the guitar slides and it feels like the whole of the bar that I’m in has shut down and the world might crash and cave in because of the fucking chime of that first guitar sound and I look up and it’s only me that gives even half a fuck. Everything by Patti Smith. The last bit of Do Me A Favour where Alex Turner is on the verge of shouting but he doesn’t quite shout as he asks and answers how to tear apart the ties that bind? perhaps fuck off might be too kind. The first chords of New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, and the last chords of New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down. Like that feeling when you’re falling in love and just everything matters you know? Like how they look at you when you injure yourself , or how they wrapped up your present or if they share their last cigarette. And literally none of it matters but fucking ALL of it does. It feels like my heart’s closing in on itself, it does, like it’s getting tighter and tighter and I don’t know where it goes when it gets too tight. Is This It by The Strokes, obviously, does it to me.
It’s that fine line between pleasure and pain, between beautiful and ugly, between interesting and disgusting - the line that makes all art and all feelings mean something. Few things make the line palpable, for me, in the way that these songs can - one of the things that does being the work of Louise Bourgeois. Looking at her work is like being hit in the stomach by that guitar sound from Y Control, the uncomfortable needling of something like terror wriggling around inside you, the bizarre reality of it feeling unique to only you. I’m gna post a picture of one of her pieces here so you can see this feeling that I’m describing translated into real life, into a real life monster. I recently listened to The Great Women Artists podcast on Louise Bourgeois (that’s not to say it was a recent episode, just that I listened to it recently. A trait of feeling feelings this intensely, I imagine, is that I obsess over things; never just an episode of a podcast I like, always 30 episodes until I can no longer listen) with Jo Applin, a feminist art historian. The episode is thoughtful and insightful but it doesn’t really touch on this untouchable (lol) sensation, perhaps because it’s something that can rly only be felt and is rly only felt yourself. It’s personal, though I find it hard to comprehend that anyone could look at this gruesome spider-creature that somehow still seems so delicate and not feel moved to not-quite-tears. It’s just like I said about the start of Y Control - you can feel like the whole world is clattering down around you, and no one else might even see it. We all exist in the same space, but we all occupy very different ones.
Last night as I was writing this, I heard some men shouting at a woman from outside on Camden High Street. They were spitting ugly words; violent propositions and scorched laughter, and hearing it play out made me feel this feeling of something filling up under my skin with no way to escape. But it felt different to hearing a Strokes song (I mean, obviously. haha) - it felt nastier, more insidious, and it made me feel helpless. Helpless is the opposite of how Louise Bourgeois’ terrifying art or songs that are special to me make me feel. The things that exist on the precipice of amazing and awful don’t make me feel like I have no control; they make me feel like I’m surrendering. I’m choosing to surrender, to give myself up to my feelings - like sinking underwater in the bath, where noise is drowned out by the roaring of the water filling your ears and vision is blurred or obscured by the veil of soap and you feel your hairs become heavy with water one by one, but you know in the back of your head you can just pull yourself up into the air, back into the room, anytime. Sometimes it’s just nice to be under there, u know.
Thank u so much for reading the first FAX ME HARDER!!! If u liked it plz share with your friends & tell ur mom, etc etc. big love, see ya next time xxxx