Infinite Digging #7
On Paris, Texas, Poison Girl Friend, 1Q84, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Negro Swan
The day before my 27th birthday, I found myself smoking a joint on a warehouse patio while Chencho Corleone performed all the songs I grew up listening to inside. Yet, here I was, outside of the party missing the performance. I was at an event sponsored by Don Julio and it was a Tuesday. Everything about this is so LA, I thought to myself. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way either. Where else can you experience something like this on a TUESDAY? I felt like an LA girl, desensitized to the excitement while my sister and brother texted me in disbelief. I guess we do get spoiled in LA—think of the concerts you actually pay to see and how many surprise guests you catch simply because everyone lives here. It’s a big city; everyone performs better, from artists to athletes, because you’re in LA. As a result, you get a crowd more eager to cash in the free drinks than to appreciate Chencho performing "Por Que Te Demoras"—Chencho must not have realized that he wasn’t the only main character in the building somewhere two songs in. It is LA, after all.
It was the Tuesday right before my 27th birthday and I had some heavy realizations a couple of days before that can be summed up by: holy shiz I’m an adult. At first, the thought of no one coming to save me made me feel really alone. Was I happy with who I was becoming? Do I know who my current self is? Do I like what I do? Can I really pull this off all by myself? I was scared and it was hard not to think of anything else especially when I had to move within the next two weeks. I hated that my birthday was mixed in between the week and wished to skip it completely. While in the pits of self-isolation, my friend David asked if I wanted to pop out to the Don Julio party. I was still in the cavity of spiraling but I thought of a 16-year-old me applying for college entrance exams, without of clue of what life-changing moment to write about because I haven’t had any. I did the traditional suburbian things, I was an honor student throughout college, but none of it felt like myself. I lived life very sheltered, eager to break out of the shell but not knowing where to go. Lost. I think of that moment often. Most of the time it’s used to convince myself to make it to the afters with the excuse that maybe something will happen and I’ll have additional content to write about. It’s proved itself valid 2/10 times.
“I guess there’s a performance tonight,” David said to me as I got in the car.
“Oh, who?”
“Chencho? Have you ever heard of him?”
“Chencho? Like from Plan B?”
“Chencho Corleone.”
I looked back at the flyer, and there he was, front and center. I must have been so checked out to not notice him, but truth be told, he could have walked right up to me and talked to me that week, and it still would have not registered. That’s how much time I spent inside my head that week. I vented through it all as we smoked.
“It’s just me,” I told David. “Through and through. At the end of the day, it’s just going to be me and that’s all it is.”
“Yeah, but it’s been like that for some time now right?”
“Yeah. It’s just me.”
“Yeah, you sound confident saying it.” I didn’t feel like it, but I started to believe it. It is just me. “But you know,” he continued, “It’s not just you though, you know that right?”
“Yes, I do.”
I blew some smoke out and looked to my right to catch a perfect view of the LA skyline in between warehouse alleys. Where else could you get this on a Tuesday night?
Since then, I have gotten wrapped up a bit with work so I haven’t had the time to write the next ID but sometime in between then, something shifted. If you’re one of the few people who were able to buy my book, It’s About Time (I only made 50 copies! - maybe I’ll do a second edition one day), you’d know that at some point in between 2020-2021, I got really fixated by time. In response to the fear that I was letting time slip through my fingers, I became obsessed with tracking time, sometimes in 15-minute intervals, and determined that I would find a way to maximize each second. Maybe it was due to this tracking of time that I began to see time vertically, from top to bottom with sections closed out for sleep, lunch, and my various tasks. I modeled my day-to-day like a work calendar. But life doesn’t adhere to a schedule. Somewhere in between chasing time, I lost sight of that and finally began to let go. And that was hard too. Until one day, I noticed that my days had become linear. Time was now continuous and horizontal. I could squeeze anything and everything into my day, but only if it was headed in the same linear direction rather than jolting back and forth to fit an insane path of life that simply wasn’t me. To me, this feels very linear. Thank you for tuning in and welcome to Infinite Digging #7.
Paris, Texas
This year marked the 40th anniversary of the redemption film, and I’ve probably watched it a total of five times within the last 72 hours. Funny enough, also centered around a lost and dazed protagonist who’s on a mission of redemption, the film has a cult following for a reason. It’s visually so beautiful. Every scene is a masterpiece, the saturated colors bring a lively view into the living room—I can only imagine how bold and red Travis’ button-up looks in the remastered film shown in theaters. But if you’re in the mood for a visually appealing film to have in the background while you work on 1,000 tasks, this might be the one.
Love is.. by Poison Girl Friend
I’m not sure when I started to do this but I can tell you where it stems from. I listen to a lot of music. I spend about three to five hours every day listening to self-curated and shared playlists, DJ sets, and digitally crate digging while I work, clean, cook, etc. I love music, and sharing songs that I like is my love language that I picked up from my dad. Sometimes, however, I’m deep into the locked-in levels and don’t want my concentration to be broken up by the following song. Sometimes, I don’t want to guess what the next song is going to be or stop to think whether I’m going to like it or skip it. Sometimes, I’m perfectly fine with listening to the same song on repeat. This song became one of them.
Poison Girl Friend used to be a Japanese girl group called Poison Girlfriends but the band broke up and singer and composer, Noriko Sekiguchi, continued on as a solo artist under the same name sans the plurality. While PGF still releases music and performs to this day, the sum of her career was stamped by the techno-pop '90s. Her albums alone are enough to transport you to the hacker tech era that stamped the '90s.
Love is… is a declaration of all the things love is, good and bad. Overlapped with piano chords, strings, and a perfect loop, I can listen to this five-minute endlessly.
Stop being intimidated by Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
Truth be told, I was there too. Who wouldn’t be intimated by it? It’s 925 pages long. I passed by it multiple times at Kinokuniya thinking to myself that one day I’ll be free enough to read it. One day, one day. Well, one day I had some free time on my hands and walked to the Chinatown Public Library (quick s/o to the LA Public Library). It was more packed than I expected it to be, but I remembered that it was a very hot day outside and it was one of the few places that offered free air conditioning. I walked through the aisles as quietly as I could while carrying a loud plastic bag containing a new vase I bought for my birthday flowers. All the chairs were taken; some people were studying, some were on their phones, and a few people were reading. Maybe I’ll find a couple of books and leave, I thought to myself. There wasn’t much space to hang out. I skimmed through the fiction section and picked up a couple of books that seemed interesting up until I saw 1Q84 on the shelf. I figured if I was going to buy the hefty book at some point, I might as well get a small sample in. I sat on the smallest stool in between the aisles, uninterrupted for an hour before heading back home. I’m about 120 pages in now, still, very much a sample in comparison, but I say this to say that it hooks you immediately, and suddenly, 900 pages don’t seem so daunting.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfeghy year
I can’t get enough of this book. I had one day to get familiarized with this book before my days became overconsumed by work and I knocked out 100 pages in one day. The book itself is about depression. The book follows a young woman in her 20s who becomes determined to spend a year in hibernation through self-inducing drugs and self-isolation. The book gives a glimpse into what an extensive rot day(s) can become in the most comical sense.
Negro Swan by Blood Orange
Originally released in 2018, Negro Swan is a dreamy, funk-pop album that delves into the anxieties producer and songwriter, Dev Hynes, faced growing up as Black and Queer. The album starts with Orlando, a track that feels like newfound confidence after being constantly put down, and ends with a declaration of chasing all the things that were previously labeled as “doing too much.” The theme of acceptance for gay artists is, unfortunately, a common reality. It’s heartbreaking to listen to Hynes' emotional narrative, where he compares himself to the ugly duckling simply for being born the way he is, all set to catchy, synth-pop beats. But it’s all intentional. Negro Swan is an album about defining yourself and being unapologetically authentic, even if some people don’t accept it. The album is so personal and so beautifully crafted that you might not grasp its depth if you only get swept away by the beats.
