More Jarvis

My band was on Fearless Music – a NY-based national TV program that showcases different musical acts each week – a couple months ago, and the full version of the song we performed is now available on YouTube.

No Solid Ground…

… It’s fake believe
All you can see
Is really there…

The French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m sitting here on my bed in the apartment I grew up in for the first time in about three years, finally home again after a graduation, a couple jobs, and a flight across the world. I’ve already fallen into a comfortable routine after a few hours of being home, spending most of my time with my family yet strangely apart and distant in my bedroom while everyone else is either in front of a television set or a computer screen.

And that’s the way it has been since I moved away, coming home only during breaks in the school year. My bedroom, which I used to share with my older sister, is now a repository for my brother’s books, cardboard boxes of unidentified possessions, and other odds and ends that don’t belong elsewhere in the house. My closet, which used to store what I used to think was style from the 80s and 90s (think stretchy light wash jeans, oversized shirts and throw in a Hellblazer t-shirt I stole from my brother), has now made space for my mother’s clothes. My sister’s old books and CDs that she never took with her to the United States when she left in 2001, still sit on their shelves. Many of the musty, dogeared titles seem to belong to a certain time that we’ve now passed.

And still, even though we don’t live here anymore, my mother keeps some of our stuffed animals around the room. Mousie (mouse), Fritzie (bear), Winnie (wombat) – we were really into naming our toys when we were kids – and assorted Winnie The Pooh plushes from a time when McDonald’s in Singapore was giving them out with Value Meals. My Tori Amos poster is still stuck to the wall with what must now be pretty ancient Blu-Tack. This scattered patchwork of my things and things that aren’t mine, grown-ups’ artifacts and stuffed animals as old as I am, just doesn’t make the room smell the way it used to when I was much littler.

In some ways, the nostalgia is nice. It’s fun to poke through old drawers – As a child I was intrigued by boxes and the top drawer of my side (the left side) of my sister and my shared desk holds three different boxes each containing little treasures from my childhood – buttons, pins, barrettes, old plastic earrings, and even a picture of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus – a relic from when I thought I might be Catholic.

Poking around, reading old notes, and flipping through old photographs make me realize how much has changed in the ten years I’ve left home. It seems almost unkind to say I’ve outgrown this place here, because it is, after all, home. But I have, and it isn’t really my room anymore. In some ways I’m also a little melancholic about the way I feel some of my memories are slipping from me, and I don’t fully remember what this bedroom used to be like.

I’ve just arrived in Singapore, but I already miss New York City so much. I feel almost guilty for my attachment to my apartment in Bushwick. But this is the first time I’ve returned to Singapore without the existence of a transitory dorm room, with all its restrictions on being owned with pictures, paint and personality, waiting for me on the other side of the journey. This time, I do have a home and an adopted city that I’ve chosen for reasons more than cheap rent or proximity to campus, and I intend to stay for a while.

So when I came in there
A million lines tried to reach me
And what I’ve seen out there
Too many words misleading

Birth Is Never As Hard As The Guilting

When I was in high school I read a Japanese manga called “Maison Ikkoku“. Most of it is pretty memorable but there is one phrase, a supposed Japanese idiom or some kind of blessing, that I recall pretty often: Birth is never as hard as the waiting.

Birth is never as hard as the waiting. As if birth is the terminus of gestation and that is it, when in reality the first cry that wails from a mother’s uterus marks the beginning of a tumultuous relationship between self and child. Birth is never as hard as the waiting. As if everyone is able to have the luxury of making the “right” choice, or is able to pace up and down a metaphorical waiting room for nine months, and walk through the aftermath. As if birth was and has to be the inevitable outcome.

We are born into rupture and trauma, into shit, blood and amniotic fluid. When we’re born we give our mothers trauma and rupture, we begin to dispense blood, shit and piss. Our parasitism doesn’t end when we’ve popped out of the womb and begin to breathe for ourselves – we only get more demanding, vocal and unwieldy. I don’t deny that pregnancy and giving birth is a beautiful thing – I was in the room holding my sister’s legs apart when my niece was born – but I’ve seen what can happen after, and the reality of what demons can grip you terrifies me.

In another life, I wanted to have children, in every sense of what that conventionality meant. I imagined nursing, dressing boo-boos and baking cookies. Mothering. But I’ve come to believe that I was just naively in love at the time, and trusted what other people told me from observing my behavior, that I would make a good mother. I was a smug 22 year-old, and already ensconced in a false sense of worldliness. When my niece was born, I expected an automatic maternal instinct to kick in, already revved to maximum but I found myself still disturbingly (to myself) not sufficiently moved in the way I had hoped it would feel. To not have those amped up maternal feelings despite being in the room when she was born makes me feel guilty in a way I feel I cannot adequately express to anyone.

My sister recently made the observation that when we were children growing up (and yet in 2009 still not fully grown!) we never played at house, or pretended to be mommies with our dolls. It’s true we were never terribly domestic little girls. We ran a radio show and we wrote our own jingles for ads. We had a TV show about crafting, usually with recycled cardboard and scissors. Our Barbies played in a band called “The Blue Oceans” and we had a female drummer who played overturned yogurt containers while Ken and Luke Skywalker (from my brother’s Star Wars figurine collection) stood looking pretty.

We never played at being mommies. That, I know, doesn’t condemn us to being inadequate parents, or bad mothers for our children, real or potential. But I wonder if that makes us inadequate and hurtful for ourselves because we might be trying too hard to be like the girls for whom this all came much more naturally. Of course we have a choice to not be parents, to not go through it all but sometimes that choice is clouded by a “what if” or an “I don’t know”. I can’t deny that I still wonder if someday I’d be a good parent even if for now I’m fairly certain I don’t want to have children or cannot imagine them fitting in my life.

It is the lingering “I don’t know” and “what if” that make thinking about the eventuality of that choice so much more difficult, especially with their implications on one’s “natural” womanhood – breasts, ovaries, uterus and the supposed innate desire to breed. Even if there is no timeline, and no responsibility to anyone else, the guilt that I’m not completely a woman because I feel little compulsion (and in fact much heightened fear) for breeding and its aftermath, sit patiently inside me.

And so I just wait.

Hello, hello…

… over and out
over and out.

Hello EP

My band’s EP got pushed through to Amazon.com! If you dig us and you dig the planet and being green, why not ditch the conventional CD packaging* and get the digital version of “Hello”, complete with a special bonus track! Our friend Roger O’Donnell (The Cure, The Psychedelic Furs, The Thompson Twins) remixed our song “14th Street Station” and it is available only digitally and online.

If you’re old school and like having a hard copy of the CD in your hands, drop us a note or purchase the limited edition EP here while we still have them in stock!

*although, take note that our CD packaging is made of planet-friendly recycled material!

over and out
over and out
over and out

People Come By And They Look At Your Face…

And they say it’s the fairest of all…

bicycle at dumbo

I’ve just added some pictures to my photography site, under the Minolta X700 section. Highlights include black and white pictures from Jersey City and the Renegade Craft Fair at McCarren Park Pool, as well as color pictures from a bike ride to DUMBO.

And while we’re on the topic of photography, of late I’ve been curious about a couple of Japanese photographers whose work I saw at the Met last weekend.

Polar Bear (1976) - Sugimoto Hiroshi

When Sugimoto Hiroshi first arrived in New York City in 1974, he visited the American Museum of Natural History where he discovered “the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. [He'd] found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

Containers At A Chinese Port (Honjo Naoki)

Honjo Naoki, Sugimoto’s younger colleague, explores the same theme of reality/illusion in his work by using a tilt-shift technique to achieve a shallow depth of field with selected areas of focus, making his real-life gargantuan subject(s) look like little toys in a miniature world.

Certainly not news (Honjo and other photographers have been doing this for a while) but definitely captivating and appeals to my love for architectural types and miniature things. These pictures also inspire me to bake a huge cupcake and photograph it to make it look like a miniature dollop of deliciousness and frosting.

And next time I see you I’ll be pleased to see you
I hope you’ll be pleased to see me
I’ll visit your picture I won’t have the nerve
To tell them that they’ve got you all wrong

But – What If They Like It?

… and lock us in a cannery with your accordion,
Until we canned our love?

A while ago I had a lot to write about – I had planned to write posts on Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut “Synecdoche, New York“, the 2008 elections, a trip out to Flushing, my Metropolitan Museum day with D., as well as random little bits and blurbs about daily revelations and hmm-moments I’ve been having. But somehow, in the middle of being busy yet not, I haven’t been able to sit down and meander at the computer.

The days and their meanings are beginning to string themselves so closely together, calendrical milestones flitting by with one significant event after the other – Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas and the New Year before we know it – another champagne toast, another countdown, another midnight kiss pregnant with hope of a better string of milestones ahead. The more things change, the more they stay the same? I’m approaching the next month or so with the very slightest of anxiety and caution towards reality and my self – at the back of my mind, I wonder if this season, which I love in my own quiet way, is just repetition this year and I’m just moving along, bobbing up and down like a leaf on the surface of a pond.

Maybe it’s just because the days are getting so dark. I’m finding ways to light them up somehow, and reconnect my little world with the universe.

I tried and tried and tried and tried
and tried and tried to keep the crowds away

And it’s so cold

so cold baby I’m an old soul old soul inside.

beta.beta on fearless music from Parixit Dave on Vimeo.

We made it to Fox’s Fearless Music!

You Shouldn’t Talk To Yourself…

… Well I pictured somebody else.

I’ve been listening and relistening to Elliott Smith’s second posthumous album, “New Moon“, paying close attention to one song in particular – “Half Right“. I’ve been pressing play over and over, and getting sucked into all these memories from when I first got stuck on this song while packing up and bringing down from the walls a puzzling, confusing year into boxes to be crammed into a car headed for New York City on a cold Ithaca morning.

I’m still amazed at how much my life can change from one year to the next, or even one month to the next, and I sometimes miss all the old me’s that exist in pinpoints in my history, echoes that make me who I am today that are, at the same time buried and lost. The more I try to turn around to see them or seek them out, the more they seem to dissolve in the timeline.

As C. and I sat talking about our experiences with therapy and antidepressants at dinner this evening, I confessed that I somehow regret having taken drugs to deal with my depression. I flip through old journals I kept when I was a teenager, and wonder where that girl went. While I recognize I’m probably much more healthy than I was before, I also mourn the loss of that voice that trembled to a whisper when I decided to take antidepressants. It’s been a few years since I stopped taking them, but I’ve never quite mustered up the same confidence and creativity I had before, even though I still write and doodle in notebooks. I haven’t completed a journal in years – I start and stop and keep multiple books open at the same time, each one storing blurbs and bits, nothing really substantial.

It’s not like I want to be deep in that hole ever again, and exploit my entrapment to prime the creativity pump. But I wonder what it would be like to sit that girl down in a chair and offer her one of my notebooks, and just watch her draw or write, doodle or sketch, color outside the lines. I’d like to get inside her head again if only for another day, and another, and then another, just so I can really remember what it was like. Maybe it wasn’t all bad to be that way, and maybe it was half-right.

Would you say that one of your dreams
Got in you and ripped out the seams?
Thats what I’d say
Thats what I’d say

Just Before Our Love Got Lost You Said…

I am as constant as a northern star.

I am reluctant to end my vacation, as I sit here in the Portland Jetport waiting for a delayed flight to New York City. I am struck by how healing and beautiful the past five days have been in Maine, from the second I touched down in Portland to walking on the sand at Acadia National Park and feeling shell, life and salt between my toes, connecting and disconnecting simultaneously from the space I take up in the world.

Maine is a place where I can think. I remember days in college when I would stay with the C-J family by Messalonskee Lake, and I would shoot hoops in the driveway, or sit out in the sun, cross-legged on the deck, just to feel the quiet. Coming back to Maine on this trip brought back those feelings of thoughtfulness in silence. We sat out on the deck in the dark, putting our thumbs up against the sky looking for star clusters in the clouds, listening for zombies in the woods. And then there was the sharing of new experiences, like popping touch-me-not pods after a family lobster dinner, table tricks and blueberry pie. There was much lazing, and the languid dangling of feet over canoe edges, into warm lake water. We rescued waterlogged blueberries and melted chocolate covered almonds by throwing them in the freezer.

I’m so glad I made the trip to Maine, and got to see some of my favorite people. The long weekend was incredibly nourishing for the soul, and I’m reminded about how large the universe is, and how important it is to grasp an open perspective on life instead of getting caught up with the details that sometimes don’t really matter.

It’s okay to breathe deep.

Oh I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I’m frightened by the devil
And I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid

Comrade Has To Wonder…

… Was it ever worth the effort?

Could it be that happiness is exhausting?

For the past two weeks I’ve been riding on a high, a rush of loving my life as it is right now, and I think I’ve just experienced the physical crash and exhaustion that comes with having one’s eyes open and bright, and one’s bushy tail wagging uncontrollably. Earlier this evening I’d decided to take a short nap before going out to dance or party with P. or T. but the nap lasted a little longer than expected, and when I woke up, I was still drenched in my fatigue. I called off my (wild?) evening plans, checked my email, and now here I am writing and eating soup.

I know that to be young, at least relatively so in New York City years, and to be living in this city means that one’s social calendar needs to be constantly packed – You don’t have an excuse. You’re supposed to be young, sexy, fabulous, popular and all manner of things that the movies tell you about being in your 20s in the city that never sleeps. You’re supposed to be dancing, partying, drinking or getting wild and crazy so you have stories to tell, or stories to sell to the movies that tell everyone else what they’re supposed to be doing in their 20s in the city that never sleeps.

But I’ve been an introvert most of my life. If I’d gone to high school in this country, I probably would have been the freak girl with the goth nail polish and bad skin that ate at the lunch table alone. I’ve had crazy drama-filled nights of no sleep and substance abuse, although most people probably won’t believe it, but as I get relatively older in non-New York City years, those things don’t excite me, or make me laugh as hard or smile as much anymore. Am I turning into a humorless ice queen? Or just stupidly getting older before my time? Am I still, essentially, the freak girl eating at the lunch table alone?

I feel these days it’s important to focus on the small things in my life. The little bits of happy that coalesce into a big cloud of happy. Things like a pretty synth sequence in a song, finding the right brush pens at the art store, a well-drawn black line – straight or curved, a compliment received about one’s smile, sunshine after 6pm, birds in the sky, fish swimming in clean fishbowls, the rickety sound of a bike chain, little secrets like wearing your favorite underpants or brushing your teeth in the wrong direction. I recognize this might be childlike and inappropriate for my age, and I do feel a certain amount of guilt about not being more conscious, on a daily basis, about the world’s pain and suffering the way I used to when I was still in school. Another post for another time? Perhaps.

I think I understand my exhaustion a little more now. I think maybe I’m capturing too much, trying to process too much in each day as I subconsciously roll through uncovering the universe in every little sound or sight or footstep. Beauty is overwhelming. Optimism as a perspective is tiring.

But I feel like I’d rather be tired, than feeling like I have to do what the movies tell me I should be living. Yes, deep down inside, maybe I’m still the freak girl eating at the lunch table alone.

Look me in the eyes
And the skeptic in me dies
The skeptic is a fool
We are exceptions to the rule…
… And if you’re ever less than certain
I will be your iron curtain
I will be your Berlin Wall
And I will never fall.