Cecilia of Charlottenburg

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Or, a wordy Pinterest board

Last weekend I traveled from my neighborhood in the former East Berlin to visit a friend of mine in the western neighborhood of Charlottenburg. I take just about every chance I get to stroll through Charlottenburg because of how fancy I feel doing it. Seeing it at night this time, due to a very early sunset, newly accentuated aspects of the buildings. The windows and balconies are, I kid you not, at least twice the size of those in my area (balconies aren’t extremely common on the east side), even on the top floors; and the ground-floor establishments sport generous windows and polished presentation—plenty of galleries, salons, and the kind of cafés where I can imagine rounding up the writers of the Roaring 2020s to work and drink and exchange ideas (Siri, remind me to round up said writers). In sum, one of the starkest examples of the power of postwar urban planning and reorganizing.

I also had not a little fun picturing the sort of life I would lead, and the sort of person I would be, were I in possession of one of those terraced, high-ceilinged flats. Let’s say the more established, elegant Cecilia of a few years down the line. That Cecilia:

  • Collects art (mostly prints—by local artists of course, plus a few international to spice things up)
  • Is a visual artist (one room in her flat is a studio strewn with canvases, which she sometimes lays flat on the floor to paint upon, and also she has a tripod for her camera)
  • Wears caftans and/or flowy scarves
  • Plays vinyl records on a turntable
  • Has side tables, and puts candles on the side tables, and burns the candles in the evenings
  • Places her keys in a ceramic bowl near the front door
  • Invites people for weekend brunches
  • Hosts the occasional zingaration, which I cannot find on the internet but I promise is a real word (from one of those word-of-the-day calendars) referring to a specifically musical gathering where people bring songs to share
  • Is an old regular at one of the aforementioned cafés, and updates the staff on the progress of the novel/essay/poetry collection
  • Perhaps has a cat

Will I ever meet her? Time will tell…

Image: a square near Kurfürstendamm, taken by the author in October 2020

Edie, Again

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A costumed tribute

Halloween weekend was a strange one this year, and I had to delay and transform some planned things. It turned out to suit the personality I evoked, who was always fashionably late.

Today marks fifty years since we lost Edith Minturn Sedgwick. I didn’t foresee at the time I first explored her life how quickly and radically she would influence me in style and mindset. Not that I’m aiming to follow her activities down to the letter (“should I be concerned that you’re imitating her” : my dad) but just that her approach to and presentation in the world has given me permission to be a little more experimental and whimsical and bold. Or at least to wear flashier earrings and indulge my existing love for black tights.

I’m not sure young women with privilege and charisma are done any less a disservice in the current public climate than she and her ilk were in theirs. I do think there is more personal agency to go around nowadays, and that women of all ages are using it to amplify their own voices and tell their own stories. Edie didn’t often get the opportunity to tell hers. The work we do, we can do in her honor.

Raising a glass to your fog, your amphetamines, and your pearls. Whatever party there is after this, I’ll dance on the table with you.

20 April 1943-16 November 1971 ♥️

more 📸 here and here

On Persona

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Or, how much do we really know—and show—one another?

In the latest installment of Unresearched Musings—yes I am accepting sponsors to keep the series running—I’m mulling over the performance of personality, both large-scale (celebrity) and small-scale (everyday ‘ordinary’ interaction).

We are not consistent, immutable beings. Even armed with the list of attributes (voluntary and involuntary, self-styled and hereditary) that make us each ‘who we are,’ we pick and choose which of these to display at any given moment. We have subsets of our personalities that suit us best in certain situations and thus only reveal themselves when they feel called for. Not all of these subsets are intentional or conscious; they can surprise us by showing up at unexpected times or by even showing up at all, causing us to believe that we have acted somehow out of character. Kind of like Billy Joel’s thesis in “The Stranger.”

The reality is that a vast array of seemingly contradictory traits can exist inside us simultaneously. And they can all be ‘real,’ for lack of a better term: legitimate, valid parts of our image, whether visible to ourselves alone or to others. As we get older and continue to test the limits of who we can be in the world, we get more familiar with the nuances and perceived inconsistencies of our sub-personalities. (For instance, I’ve discovered I can get quite protective of my friends when it comes to the people they date, irrespective of whether I get along with those people.)

Given how complex we understand ourselves to be, I find it amazing how infrequently, or in what a limited capacity, we extend the same understanding to others, particularly to high-profile people—public personalities, if you will. Their front-facing personality traits are, as a default, what we take to represent their entire selves. This does neither them nor us any good, and in fact usually does harm.

I’ll give an example. A friend of mine has been listening deeply to Harry Styles, to my delight. I’ve been a conscious fan of his since his 2017 solo debut but become even more aware of the person behind the music since joining Twitter and Instagram and finding myself adjacent to the worldwide stan community’s discussions and photos. Suffice it to say his recent resumed Love On Tour has really bolstered the content. I wouldn’t call myself a stan, although I like his musical sensibility and him; and I will allow for the fact that he is one of those musicians (because they’re always musicians, for me) with whom I could picture falling suddenly and dizzyingly in love were I ever to meet him IRL. Never say never.

My friend and I have remarked on what a nice person Harry appears to be. Not the toxic ‘nice guy’ of modern media who masks his entitlement with a harmless-looking façade: we mean a genuinely decent person who treats everyone he encounters with respect and would probably be very pleasant to hang out with—someone who would make us, two young women, feel safe in his company. I think this is what draws a lot of women and girls to him. His whole brand since 2019’s Fine Line has been “Treat People With Kindness,” as one of the songs is titled. He tries to empower his fans to speak their truths and claim their identities, and to lead by example. He just seems good.

One thing we haven’t said but that wouldn’t be out of place in such an exchange is that he seems to have a head on his shoulders, that he’s down-to-earth despite having been in the public eye since he was a teenager in One Direction and having only risen to greater prominence since. ‘Down-to-earth’ is a blanket quality ascribed to celebrities who don’t give the immediate impression of their worldview having been irreparably skewed by the demands and standards of celebrity life. But can anyone escape that concentrated exposure unscathed? And if they do appear a little (or a lot) out of touch with a more ordinary level of reality, does it make them bad or negate the high points of their personality?

Essentially we have no idea how ‘good’ Harry actually is. His image pretty much radiates positivity, but he’s as complicated as anybody and the positivity he communicates to us is surely the tip of the iceberg. He is a man, and so enjoys a leeway that many celebrity women are denied; he’s also been attacked for his fair share of attitudes and actions, such as his Vogue cover. It will be interesting to see how his front-facing persona evolves—if, for instance. we ever see him get angry. I have reason to suspect that an angry Harry Styles would turn a lot of people on, so it can’t be all bad.

Then we have someone like Lorde, whose persona and message have changed significantly since the goth-girl look that defined her first album Pure Heroine. Upon the release of her new LP Solar Power, which explores themes of forgiveness and choosing happiness and features a sunny color scheme to match, there was buzz on Twitter over how the scowling, black-lipsticked Lorde of 2014 would never be seen with the smiling Lorde of 2021. But would we want to be seen with the 2014 versions of ourselves? People change. Lorde’s evolution has happened in such a way that some traits of hers that were more pronounced then have made room for other traits that were once more dormant. They’re all still there, though, because they’re all part of her and they’ve all helped to shape who she is. We too go through holding patterns and revolutions, and we too perform them for our world.

Countless versions of ourselves coexist, ready to rear their heads when we least expect it. We can work on ourselves and aspire to certain images, but we don’t have to reject anything. In fact, we would do well to be compassionate toward our own inconsistencies—as well as to the inconsistencies of others, no matter how large their social-media followings—because to reject those inconsistencies is to reject our own human natures, and we can’t get along in this world if we don’t stand by ourselves.

Anyway. To paraphrase Harry, treat yourself with the kindness you’d like others to treat you with.

On Taste & Its Influences

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In which I shop genealogy

Recently I got way too worked up (as usual) over music (as usual). Or, not so much the music itself as the reason behind its place in my life. I was wondering about the way I’d come to appreciate certain genres and artists and whether it would have worked out like that had I not been exposed to them at a particular time or by particular people, and what that said about me.

The answer, it occurred to me shortly thereafter, is of course it wouldn’t have worked out like that. Nothing would have worked out like that. Everything would have been different. Such is life, a series of experiences and choices that alter our perception of the world and our own identities in varying degrees of magnitude, within and beyond our individual control. Every experience we have, every choice we make, spirals us off in unforeseeable directions and closes off one path even as it opens numerous others. It’s like decapitating a Hydra: several new heads spring up in place of the original.

I turned it into a neurosis because that’s what I do when I’m kept awake late at night by insecurity and vulnerability. But even in my righter mind I do think taste in music is a unique case study, being shaped so heavily and randomly by the people around us. The absorption of music is often passive; you hear it in the car or in the supermarket or in a movie you’ve elected to watch. You chose the movie: you didn’t choose its soundtrack (unless it’s The Big Chill). However many people recommend a book to you, it takes an active decision on your part to crack the spine. Music can be happening in the background, while you go about your life, and escape your notice until later. Sometimes much later. Sometimes only at the point where you do actively seek it out.

In my childhood, music frequently happened to me before I was aware of it. There were types I gravitated toward, which is common with kids (like Emma and “Baby Got Back” on Friends), but much of the time I simply filed away what I was hearing for future identification and/or examination. Well, not simply; subconsciously, at a level I wouldn’t tap into until my teen years and whose full scope I’m still registering even now. I was raised by people of an eclectic, far-reaching music appreciation, which they manifested in different ways; and I began, consciously and unconsciously, to imitate and synthesize those manifestations.

Somewhere along the line, aided by an overdeveloped inner censor, I got the idea that it must have looked horribly derivative, my cribbing methods of analysis and even artists themselves from the adults in my life, like I needed to be led to a thing (to be fair, I did not see well) instead of discovering it on my own, like I didn’t have an original bone in my body.

(Guess what? I don’t. My bones are made of converted stardust and the old bones of the previously deceased, as are yours.)

But that’s life too, isn’t it? Learning from your forebears and building on the foundation that they laid? Inspiration is a thing to be celebrated. When you inspire someone else to ‘discover’ something—a singer, a filmmaker, a hobby—you never regard it as their having stolen from you. You’re happy and fulfilled to have given the gift of your love to someone who could use it. And they won’t interpret that thing exactly as you do, because they’re a different person, no matter how much DNA you share. And if you do share DNA, and spend a lot of time together, the influence is bound to rub off. It’s a long game, an intergenerational improvisation, each enthusiast riffing on the material of the person they got it from. It’s one of the things that make life worth living.

That said, I wonder too about the actual hereditary potential of artistic taste. Can taste, in short, be inherited?

The people I’ve engaged in conversation about it say no. They’re probably right. I can’t say I’ve never wondered what life will be like if some future kid of mine hates the Beatles. But it isn’t nearly so simple or linear: children are aware of the way their parents are and alternately drawn to and repelled by those same traits or interests or tendencies at different points in their lives for different reasons. Sharing a connection through the music that you listen to isn’t a genetic guarantee, but it can be present without your noticing. In my case, it can be a bridge that was built for you long ago which you come back to cross every so often as a sort of promise to the people you love, a way of saying you’ll always be close and you recognize what they mean to you.

Genes alone aren’t enough to do that. Music can connect you to anyone at any time. It can form bonds that grow into chosen families. That type of experience is perpetually new for me. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the people it allows me to know, or the people I thought I knew whom I’m given the chance to get to know all over again.

POD SOUNDS VOL. 2!

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Hello all! I’m thrilled to announce the new season of Pod Sounds—complete with new artwork by @sarahnhixsonart!

This time we’re covering Randy Newman’s 1977 album Little Criminals, on which my co-host Gil is the clear expert. First episode is up on all platforms.

After the slight delay caused by unexpected events, it’s especially renewing and refreshing to get this second season off the ground. As always, hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoy making it.

Love—Cecilia

Notes on Experimental Warehouse Music

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In which I venture out alone in the dark

The other night I attended a performance by an international chamber group in a warehouse, complete with light installation and spaced-out seating. One of those true Artsy Events you would expect to encounter in an Artsy City.

And boy was I not let down. In fact, I was a little bit scared at times. Likely by design—the six musicians definitely used and interacted with their instruments with no intention of catering to the listener’s comfort. A pleasant listening experience—or at least one that relieved the listener from actively engaging their brain—was not the point.

Here follow some notes on what I saw and heard over the course of an hour-plus in a room with a smattering of masked people and little to no speech.

  • Violin squawking, cello moaning, bass saxophone (?? I think this is incorrect—the instrument is quite long and tall and mounted on a stand—but I don’t know the names of other such instruments belonging to that family. Brian Wilson would know. anyway, woodwinds) grunting, flute skittering
  • Cello grating, violin keening, woodwinds droning, flute insisting
  • Cello and woodwinds intoning, violin and flute screeching
  • Violin yelping, flute whining, cello battering, woodwinds hooting
  • Move at will and let the act of playing your music take your body wherever it is going
  • Players approaching and crossing into one another’s spaces—nothing is off-limits or out of bounds
  • Stop playing when your pendulum stops swinging, or when someone manually stops your pendulum: forces of nature and man counteracting
  • Emphasis on the exacting nature of repetition, the science (and mathematics) behind the ‘art’ of music
  • Both sound and silence fill the space—positive and negative substances, presence and absence
  • Instruments passing turns to one another in improvised phrases: key, tempo, rhythm all irrespective of one another
  • Much owed to free-form jazz but just in the context of a classical/orchestral framework
  • Intense, dare I say radical, interdependence among players: each one has to trust the others wholly and unhesitatingly
  • Multimedia: faces, voices, bodies play off of, and participate in, sound created
  • Not always easy to tell where one piece ends and the next begins
  • I think I leave with a better understanding of what John Cage (and, later, John Cale) was getting at…

Image: somewhere in Lichtenberg, pre-show

On Writing (About Other People)

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In which there will be hot takes

Hi all. This week I wanted to do another post about the act of writing, since I haven’t done one in a while, and since I’ve written much nonfiction in the past couple years even beyond what I do here.

Moving to Berlin marked a shift in the way I write, the amount I write, and the approach I take to writing. This chapter of my life—the first non-academic one in two decades—unlocked an eagerness to begin to structure a personal history. An eagerness, I should say, combined with a confidence and competence: I’d read a lot of excellent memoir and autobiography, starting with Stephen King’s On Writing in high school, the cumulative effect of which was now hitting. I published a few personal essays, contributed regularly to my postgraduate alma mater’s Coronavirus Notebook, and chipped away with renewed vigor at a collection of vignettes about my growing up.

In so doing, I regularly encounter a problem which is not unique to creative nonfiction but closely associated with it: the problem of talking about people you know and revealing details of their identities and lives. And the conclusion I arrive at is that a well-intentioned writer should be able to feature their people (friends, enemies, lovers, family, etc.) in their work with almost total impunity.

Now, what do I mean by work? One thing I don’t mean is libel. ‘Well-intentioned’ is the operative word here, an important qualifier. You can’t deliberately defame someone’s reputation. But if you are relating an incident that involves another person, and you treat them with the same nuance and respect that you give yourself, and you refrain from exaggeration, then there really is no reason for that person to take issue with you. Unless that person has a bounty on their head, whatever they’ve done with or to you—assuming you approach your writing sensitively and sympathetically—is fair game.

I’m not saying everyone should do this, because not everyone is a strong enough writer to walk that line. We readers have to feel safe with the writer: we have to know that they know how to relay events in a way that doesn’t vilify anyone. They let the events, and the conduct of those involved, speak for themselves. If so-and-so reads about themselves and is offended—well, if they didn’t want a story out there about them, then they should have behaved better.

What should you have to be afraid of? Here’s the thing, and I mean this as comfort: no one cares that much about you. A story you release into the wild in which you were the victim of someone’s cruelty is not going to garner legions of fans who set out to make your perpetrator’s life a living hell. You aren’t Beyoncé, and this isn’t a Rachel Roy/“Becky with the good hair” situation. (And Beyoncé was perfectly within her rights to write a lyric like that, because her marriage had been compromised.) All the lives in your pages will go on—undisturbed, if you’ve done your job as writer.

After all, they say the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. I, for one, would be flattered to have made enough of an impact on someone—positive or negative—to merit a mention in their memoir or autobiography. The singer said “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” but I don’t want you talking about anyone else!

Monologue: The Taxi Driver in “Leaving on a Jet Plane”

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In which I give a background character (at best) a chance to shine

Oh my God it is so cold. Pretty far from my ideal 6:53 a.m. Not that I minded driving twenty minutes out of our way right off the bat after this guy practically begged me to stop at his girlfriend’s place—the more time, the better for me. I could’ve done without the recap of their entire relationship on the way. I mean, I love a good story, but this one was…concerning. Doesn’t sound very healthy if you ask me. Apparently he’s messed up a lot. Like a lot. Like, I guess cheated on multiple occasions? I wasn’t fully clear on it: every so often he would get kind of evasive and go quiet, like he felt guilty for telling me any of this, but then the silence would be too much for him and he’d start up again.

I can drive in silence forever. That’s what I do.

Anyway, he was saying he wants to prove how committed he is to her and he’s going to suggest that they get married once he’s back. And I wasn’t about to tell him my theory that the last thing she’d be eager to do with a boyfriend who had an infidelity problem would be to tie herself to him so he could continue to be unfaithful behind the façade of marriage TO HIS FACE…but then he looked at me like he was waiting on my opinion, so I was like “you sure seem to have thought this all through,” and I’m willing to bet the sarcasm didn’t register because he was too distracted.

I can’t even tell if they had a fight and he’s just trying not to part on bad terms, in which case showing up at her house first thing in the morning is an even worse idea than I thought. On the other hand, it isn’t as if they can text while they’re long-distance. I don’t even know what texting is: it’s 1969 and we have no such technology. Maybe I can see the future. You know, I’ve always suspected that. I like to think I have more talents than just ferrying people around like that guy on the River Styx. I forget his name.

Where was I? Oh right, keeping my thoughts busy while my generous benefactor emotionally manipulates his partner. Ah, but he hates to go, I’m hearing him say, so that solves things. Hmm, should I rest my head on the steering wheel, or bang my head on it?

She doesn’t look like she’s buying it, though. I don’t know, I could be projecting. She looks smart, like she can make up her own mind. Unless he withheld something major from me, which I really doubt, he doesn’t have a terribly attractive pitch here.

Wait, what time is it? Time to lay on the horn is what. Neighbors be damned. What is he—WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WRAP IT UP. YOU HAVE TO BE AT THE AIRPORT AT LEAST TWO AND A HALF HOURS IN ADVANCE EVERYONE KNOWS THAT COME ON.

Cannot believe he’s making this my problem. I’m in kind of an ethical dilemma, aren’t I? By enabling him, I enrich myself but actively complicate these two lives. Especially the girl’s, she doesn’t deserve it. What do I do?

Oh, she’s giving him a bag he must have left with her. Yeah, yeah, just throw it in the trunk while I start the engine, we gotta go. (Now’s my chance.)

Hey sweetheart! Come here. Just for a moment. Yeah, lean in close. Listen to me. You’re free now. Okay? Your boyfriend might be the one getting on a plane, but you’re the one who gets to fly. You seem like a nice chick and you don’t have to wait for anyone. So do yourself a favor and get the hell out. Got it?

All right, you take care now. Go get some sleep!

*deep exhale*

All good? Good. Seatbelt?…Let’s go.

Translation

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A eulogy I will not get to give, except here

My uncle, aged sixty-five as of just recently, died earlier this week from a cancer which tends to be detected in its advanced stages. It came on quickly and ended quickly. He was the eldest of three brothers (my dad being the middle) and of four children total. And he was a good man, one I enjoyed talking to and felt comfortable around—although given the lifelong geographical distance I have, relatively speaking, only ever learned fairly little about him and his life.

People have been sending condolences, saying how sorry they are for my loss, and I think, why express these things to me? What am I going to do with this information?

Of course the sentiments do help. But I can’t yet say exactly how. Grieving across the divide of space and time is a tricky human art, and I’m a bit disoriented having to do a crash course in it. It’s one thing to be there for collective mourning: it’s another to conduct and shepherd myself through my own mourning an ocean away.

The last time the whole family was together was Christmas 2017, the end of a big year. My cousin had gotten married at the beginning of July; hardly two weeks later, my grandma suffered a stroke. While seeing her at Christmas certainly wasn’t the same as seeing her at the wedding, simply getting to be with her and know she was on the mend was a huge relief, and there was a special joy and gratitude to the family festivities, at least as I recall them. That’s not a bad last memory to have, but neither a transatlantic move nor a travel-restricting global health crisis factored into the potential future I was taking into account as we said goodbye. I’m thankful to say that she is still here. We expected my uncle to be here, too. A phone call between the two of them, facilitated by my parents, was the last full conversation he had. Lives take their turns.

Death is a strange concept. I read things like “we aren’t afraid to die, we’re afraid to die without having lived,” whose sources I forget. The faith I grew up in tells me that death on this plane of existence is an upgrade to a less flawed plane. I once asked a friend who had studied theology how we would all understand one another in the afterlife—that is, what language we would use—and he said we wouldn’t need language as the human brain knows it because we would have the language of love. My uncle no longer speaks the language his loved ones speak; he is learning a new one, just as our ancestors and more lately departed family did. I wonder if he would understand me were I to speak to him now, if he could reach back through his memory for a means of communication he used to be fluent in, if there is a translation.

The funeral was today. I was present in spirit. Spirit can count for more than we think. He leaves behind my aunt, my three cousins, and the three grandchildren they’ve given him (so far). I’ve never liked the obituary phrase is survived by, like life is a war we’re fighting—sometimes it is, but that isn’t the point. The person’s soul survives, their spirit carries on, their essence remains. Certainly the family dynamic will always bear my uncle’s influence, the way he shaped it. If anything, we have one more commonality in how we all loved him. That seems like more than mere survival to me.

In memoriam Michael Battista Gigliotti, 6 October 1956-25 October 2021. Requiescat in pace.

Image: taken by the author last Thursday

Tiny Lit Review: NORMAL PEOPLE

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In which I review a book that I anticipated having more than one paragraph to say about

Friends, I was not a fan. I thought I was going to like it, in fact didn’t really prepare for the eventuality that I would not, so this put me at a loss. I often found Sally Rooney’s prose exciting and pointed—it was the story I took issue with, and just as often felt that the prose was wasted on the plot it was trying to convey. This plot was, more than anything else…predictable. Popularity shifts, not-like-other-girls/boys characterization, detached (dare I use a word like tawdry) sexual relations without a tremendous amount of emotional context. Each of the central couple hangs out with just awful people otherwise, whether platonically or romantically, so their choices aren’t especially sympathetic; I was baffled much of the time. Maybe I just don’t know how Ireland works (for the record, I never claimed to). I have not seen the series, nor am I terribly inclined to, as the writing essentially gave me all the picture I needed. It seems the story resonated with not a few people, which almost certainly skewed my expectations in its favor going in, which in turn made what I was met with all the more jarring. I won’t actively dissuade anyone from reading it; I’ll simply say it was not what I thought I was signing on for, and unfortunately not for the better. Rooney clearly has potential, and I do look forward to reading more from her, including her first novel, Conversations with Friends.

Image: Faber & Faber, 2018

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