For the first time in ages, I bought new music today.
I got the new Nick Cave, in which he seems to have long last discovered David Bowie. I also started listening to Franz Ferdinand in the Virgin Megastore, got hooked and bought it. It's really brilliant, and makes me want to be a teenager again, a teenager like I never was, so I snapped it up right away.
I mentioned here a bit ago in passing that all the music I really love is sort of set in the same mental landscape for me, and Franz Ferdinand just fit right into it. It's not a genre specific thing, it's not even really an emotionally specific thing -- more it's like there's the sketch of a novel in my head, and it takes place in some alternate version of our world, and all the albums I really love fit there geographically and temporally.
Nick Cave fits into this world, although his music seems to exist on a different body of land than most of the rest of it. The weather seems to be good there. The darker Marc Almond stuff is jaded and by the water and the air is a polluted gray; it's a city of smokestacks. Franz Ferdinand seems to be boys in the same middling city, bitter at being left behind on adventures they wouldn't want if they could have. James (Laid remains one of my favourite albums of all time) is a dreamy sad subburb where people don't talk about the things they've done because they know it all could have been different, and boys sit on the roof and wait to leave and girls don't ever get out. When I listen to these CDs and others that I really like and fit into the world, I see the little panoramas of the places in the back of my mind while I'm doing whatever else it is I'm doing. It's such an odd little thing.
Anyway, I wanted a big chunk of the way home, through the farmers market and Union Square in rain that couldn't quite be bothered to happen. People settling veggies in the square were wearing witches hats and it didn't look costumey or odd at all. Union Square was more empty than I've seen it in some time, but the usual protests were there, as were a few random girls wearing fairy wings and roaming about.
Last night I observed that these days feel like about three weeks after 9/11 when all that good in a crisis energy and drowning grief had given way to bursts of weird irrational anger and despair. The city never felt so dangerous and unhinged as when that stage finally came, and we're waiting waiting waiting for it now with the election. People are tired. We're so tired.
My parents called, asking me to come over to watch the election returns. I thought that was sort of touching.
In B&N earlier they had yet someone else covering Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, and it always makes me cry because I always feel like the moment Michael played that song for me was the moment we each took a step past each other. It's when the narrative came to stay, and in my weird little musical landscape thing that song is the crane shot over the city and subburbs, stupid and tiny before the grey and viscous winter sea.
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