“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

— Samuel Johnson

So London and I, we’ve had quite the love-hate relationship over the past six months. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I have harboured a love-hate attitude towards London because I’ve no doubt that London doesn’t really care all that much about me (or anyone else… it’s a very egalitarian city). I have grown convinced, however, that Samuel Johnson was right on the money – even way back in 1777.

Today, following a very enjoyable post-Japanese sandwich lunch in the park with classmates, I took a stroll down to the river for an afternoon of reading and people-watching in the sunshine. Inevitably, I wound up at the South Bank again. It has everything – the London Eye, sprawling gardens, outdoor piazzas, Thames views, buskers, abundant culture, any number of postcard-photo-opportunities – and it is fast becoming my favouritest place in London ♥ (possibly Covent Garden could give it a run for its money, but big minus points for not having a river view).

Never having attended any of London’s numerous free music gigs, part of my objective in hitting the South Bank was also to pop into the National Theatre foyer for their regular free music programme (every evening Monday-Saturday in the foyer!). Today’s musicians were Katriona Gilmore and Jamie Roberts, a fiddle/guitar folk duo (though they really play a wide assortment of instruments, including mandolin), and… oh my gosh, they were AMAZING. I know London and culture are pretty synonymous so it’d stand to reason that even free music is good (I’ve heard Covent Garden auditions their buskers for quality control!), but these guys were seriously brilliant. I really like folk music, which is a big reason I wanted to go for this particular gig in the first place, but I never realised how much I liked folk music until I heard them. I don’t know if that even makes sense, but I came home and immediately started listening to folk radio stations. The only thing that kept me buying a CD was the fact I had no cash and they clearly did not have card facilities :P I actually checked out all their other tour dates the minute I got home and was very disappointed they wouldn’t be back in London for the foreseeable future (and they are playing in York the day after I leave!! grrr).

Anyway I am now feeling all glowy and excited about the London music scene, and definitely intend to attend the National Theatre foyer concerts as often as I can in future… I think the thing that really struck me about Katriona and Jamie, and in retrospect, about all the buskers and street musicians I’ve seen around, is that their desire to just play their music is so radiantly palpable. No matter how much they’re pimping out their CDs and all, you can tell they’re really happy just being able to play and have people listen, to have an audience, to share tunes they’ve written. It’s infectious. And even as someone who’s mostly worked in theatre and genuinely believes in the power of the stage, I have to admit there’s something more, well… universal, I guess? about music. When done right.

At the end of a wholly unproductive self-allocated 10-6 workday (which will now have to be extended, as I have been in one of those stupors where I’ve no energy to do anything but I’m not sleepy enough to nap… yes I tried!), during which I was meant to tackle a myriad of applications and preparations that should really have been done earlier, I procrastinate further by sorting out phone photos and find this little gem from Tuesday’s Thought of the Day at Stockwell station.

Some time ago, Steffy said something to me that’s been lingering in my mind for the past week: that if something is mine, I don’t have to try so hard to hold on to it. Perhaps the allure of the past lies in the 20/20 vision of hindsight, the fact that I know I had all that, and I want to go back to being sure, to being certain. And now I don’t know what I have – but then, I know that back then, I didn’t know what I had either.

I’ve been wondering (time-wastingly, as usual) if the process of making friends gets so exponentially harder as one gets older so as to disadvantage all the new people one meets (this disadvantage is two-way, so fair’s fair), as far as forming genuine, lasting, rock-solid friendships go. My old girlfriends are always going to be golden in my book simply because we’ve spent half our lives together and nobody I get to know now is going to be able to compete with that, not because they’re any less delightful or likeable (I’ve often felt a clicky-feeling with people that’s made me think we could’ve been really, really good friends had we met under different circumstances).

Let’s say the BBC is right and that there is a limit to how many truly close friends one person can have. The average circle of friends, according to the article, consists of an inner circle of 5 core people plus additional layer of 10 to form a central group, some of whom may be family members. The numbers apply pretty much accurately to me so I’m egotistically assuming that most people are about the same. Obviously, by the time you leave secondary and pre-university schooling, these 15 spots will probably be all filled up! Where does that leave the new people you meet for the rest of your life, which presumably will be several times the length of your early school years? Are they all destined to be stuck in the intermediate-outer circles even if you could have been legendary BFFs had you met earlier in your lives?

It sounds ridiculous to immediately condemn all future attempts at friendship as doomed right out of the door – and I have made some amazing friends and met some fantastic people in York and London who’ve become really important to me. Maybe in 10 years’ time, when I’ve had a decade to spend with new(er) friends, that feeling of mutual understanding and camaraderie will have grown to a comparable extent to that which I currently enjoy with old friends. A part of me thinks I’m probably overthinking all this and friendship is really not that complicated, you either get along with people or you don’t (and yeah I can see the straightforward appeal of that line of thought). Another part of me, though, feels like it really does get harder and harder now to form the kind of friendships so easily forged in childhood. I want to, I really do. But just as I bring the baggage of innumerable memories and experiences to every new acquaintance I make, so too does the other person, and I feel it; that uphill climb to scale those years, to really connect and get to know them inside out, starting right from the bottom of the mountain where old friends have had the headstart well before me.

Anyway, well… I don’t really think I have a neat, stunning conclusion or an answer (how humanities-like, right?) to end this meandering chain of thought. Just a lot of questions. And the constant reminder to myself that maybe some of what I want is mine already, just as it was back in school. Maybe I don’t have to try so hard to hang on to fledgling friendships formed here. Maybe I should just relax. These things just happen naturally most of the time, don’t they?

i think i need to stop waiting round for something to happen to me, and start going out there to grab what i want. this is not some transitional period that shall pass if i wait long enough… it’s my life. and the rest of it will be like this as well if i don’t buck up. better to fail spectacularly than to have been too scared to try, right?

swallow your pride, you idiot. stand up and fight.

It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit. To the crowd, success wears almost the features of true mastery [...] Prosperity presupposes ability. Win a lottery-prize and you are a clever man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great. With a handful of tremendous exceptions which constitute the glory of a century, the popular esteem is singularly short-sighted. Gilt is as good as gold. No harm in being a chance arrival provided you arrive. The populace is an aged Narcissus which worships itself and applauds the commonplace.

- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Sixty-four pages into Les Misérables, which I really ought to have read ages ago and which is probably going to be my major read of the year (as I have grown impossibly lazy in my choice of literature), I came across this gem of a passage and knew I was going to like the novel. 440 pages later, nearly halfway through, I love it and don’t want it to end. I think the wonderful thing about classics – especially Victorian ones, though I freely admit to a bias – is that regardless of how archaic the setting is, how obtuse the language gets, how many longwinded descriptions of villages and stately mansions they contain, there is always some splendid illuminating truth to be found within. To be reminded unexpectedly of the great gulf between success and merit, at a time when I often find myself at a low ebb of self-esteem due to a singular lack of conventional success after months of trying, was like a bolt to the heart. I felt shaken, heartened, chastised, encouraged all at once.

I guess at the end of the day my greatest regret will be if I give up. Even if things don’t go according to plan, I still have precious time to spend here, and the worst thing of all will be if I waste it all in bitter frustration over not getting what I want. I’m still fumbling in the dark sometimes… but there’s no losing, as long as I keep trying.

Anyways, the past week in a nutshell has been a much-needed break from internet overuse, kicking the job application engine into gear again, reading Les Misérables, practising Japanese. I think I am, at heart, still rather a loner; much as I can’t live without friends and family I can’t live without these periods of shutting out everything either. Getting myself back up to properly recharged over this weekend, and heading out to face the world again next week. Game face on!

Having had a surprisingly eventful past week and a half, there’s actually a lot I want to write about – such as the unexpected perils of working front of house, watching my first Globe Theatre production, finally finally seeing the mindblowingly brilliant Les Mis and being so thoroughly impressed I immediately ordered the novel from Amazon, my first Japanese class with the awesomest sensei ever, and my literal 2 seconds of fame in a T-Mobile commercial featuring a flash mob at Trafalgar Square singing “Hey Jude” forever and ever and ever (did you know you can make the last line last for hours if you want it to? na, na na nananana, na na na na, heeeey juuuude… repeat ad infinitum).

Maybe I’ll do another entry with all of that another time. But for now, I really, really want to write about Vienna Teng and her new album, Inland Territory.

I’ve given a lot of my other favourite musicians plenty of blog-airtime – Rufus Wainwright, Matchbox Twenty, Michael Buble, Scissor Sisters, etc. etc. For some reason, I haven’t written that much about Vienna Teng. Perhaps this is because it wasn’t until Inland Territory that she truly blew me away. I love Vienna’s music, uncategorisable as it is; it’d be so easy to lump her in with the growing number of quirky female singer-songwriters out there, but she is so different from all of them. She’s most often been compared to Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos, and at a stretch you can describe her as a mix of the two, but really it wouldn’t be all that accurate. I can’t think of any other singer-songwriters who are quite like her. And I’ve always enjoyed everything she puts out, but Inland Territory is something else altogether. It’s a monumental achievement. There isn’t a single bad song on it, even the ones I like less than others are fantastic.

Kansas
endless and empty like Kansas
our cities of clouds
flat on the table like Kansas

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Vienna Teng is a great lyricist. What I think she does better than any other musician I know of, however, is evoke a mood with her music alone. “Kansas” is an absolutely brilliant example of this. The first time I heard it, I had no idea what the lyrics were, but the music broke my heart; she could have been singing anything at all over the chorus and it would still have nearly made me cry. I never cry at music. This is probably the closest I have come. Listen to the chorus of this song, from around the 1:30 mark… you can’t not be moved, you just can’t.

Radio
it’s just the radio, darling
just the radio and your runaway imagination

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“Radio” is another great example of what I mean (there are many on this album). The “it’s just the radio” chorus is so… evocative. My knowledge of instrumentation is zip so I don’t know what’s playing in the background – that xylophone-like tingly percussion (maybe it is a xylophone?) – but the whole thing is so weirdly dissonant, jittery, antsy, highly-strung. The song in its entirety is a masterful slapdash of styles and tunes, which in this case is more impactful and chilling when you know what the lyrics are, but even if you don’t the music itself is powerful enough to make you feel something.

Stray Italian Greyhound
oh no not now, please not now
i just settled into a glass half-empty
made myself at home

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“Stray Italian Greyhound” is a genius little number that’s easily the most attention-grabbing, ear-catching song of the entire album upon a first listen. It gets everything right – the tune is irresistable, the lyrics clever, freewheeling and not in the least complicated, the mood infectious. Inspired by attending an Obama rally, it’s about sudden bursts of hope from the viewpoint of a perpetual pessimist – appears initially to be about falling in love, but in actuality far more ambiguous and all the more interesting for it. No matter what meaning you attach to this song, though, or even if you attach no meaning at all beyond its contagiously buoyant mood, it is a real joy to listen to.

No Gringo
oh arizona’s burning
they say the fence turned round
now the razor wire keeps us out

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I’ve saved the best for last!

“Stray Italian Greyhound” was my favourite off the album the first time round, by a mile. But the more I listened to it (and I liked it so much I listened to it about 5 times in a row when I first got it, and plenty more times over the rest of the day), the more this tragic, chilling song stuck in my head. “No Gringo” is perhaps the pinnacle of everything I like about Inland Territory: it tackles tough, gripping subject matter, has an amazingly evocative musical backing (the maracas right at the start combined with the piano refrain are genuinely haunting), and lyrics that are up there with the best of anything Vienna Teng has ever written.

It’s about illegal immigration – but instead of making what would certainly be a futile, dreadfully twee attempt at addressing the real, current situation in America, the song is set in an imaginary future where “the fence turned round” and Americans are trying to sneak into Mexico. This tantalising description does no justice to the greatness of this song. If you only listen to one song of the ones I’ve put up, please make it this one. I love it beyond words.

I had a very, very hard time picking only a few songs for this post. I haven’t even got a song up that properly illustrates the magic Vienna is capable of weaving with her piano (if you’re interested and want to check out the rest of the album, the song I have in mind is “Antebellum”, though “Kansas” does pretty well too). Vienna Teng has always been a very obviously talented musician, growing by leaps and bounds since her debut effort (Waking Hour, which is still a fantastic album). But I think with this album, she’s really produced something incredibly, incredibly special. ♥

I don’t really feel like saying anything today, but one week past is one week past, and it’s not as if I’ve nothing to say. I just don’t want to talk about it.

So tired… but just gotta fight on, fight on.

one day more
another day, another destiny

Promise longer, more cheerful entry later in the week when more sanguine. Sorry so brief.