everything is temporary

Collage Paper Playlist 11

things don't get better just different

"BCKYRD" - Hot Mulligan

Sally Davis described Joan Didion as someone who has "passed beyond optimism and pessimism to a far country of quiet anguish, bringing the scant comfort." There's something almost peaceful about that. A kind of Zen. A silence of disquiet. We spend so much time tossed between hope and fear. Expectation and anxiety. Weighing out immeasurable things into stark categories of worse and better, that are ultimately inconsequential. What would it take to be released from it? To step outside of the judgment for a moment? Sometimes things needn't be seen as anything other than 'different'. There is a kind of consolation there, perhaps even a revelry, in the acknowledgement that no matter what, things are always changing.

give me a reason

"Everything is Alright" - Motion City Soundtrack

For a long time, I kept all my type-collages analog. Then I started just distressing the type by hand and scanning it so I could manipulate it digitally. Lately, I've been using digital type more and distressing it with some of my hand made textures. It's an effective strategy. It allows me to have a little more freedom and flexibility. But, there's no better feeling than cutting it all out individually, making a mess, getting it gritty the old fashioned way. This week I decided to do at least one the in the manner I used.

Steven Budden

says that when things are too easy "it makes for lazy thinking". “Work smarter, not harder” I was always told. But if my creative practice has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes the smartest thing you can do is to do things the hard way.

will we ever talk the same

"Baby Blue" - Grayscale

In the first of the Buddha's Noble Truths, he says that Life is Suffering. It is the surest and most inevitable fact of our being. We know it in our bones. In our marrow. Nucleotides transcribed in heartache and pain. Double helixes coiled around fissures and breaks. Genes sequenced and encoded with loneliness like heredity. David Whyte says that we are deluded to think that "we can take a sincere path in life without having our heart broken". That we can march through the world unphased. We are beings made of our own unmaking. From tragedy to tragedy we persist, we endure, we remain. Built and unbuilt and built anew. A democracy of remnants made resplendent. We "Come around and love again".

this light with me

"Chase this Light" - Jimmy Eat World

The fact that I've made 10 playlists prior to this one without including Jimmy Eat World is a travesty. But thanks to

Words in Bloom

it's one that I am remedying as we speak.

"[L]ight is an invitation to happiness," Mary Oliver says, "and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive." It is a redemption that stays. That lingers. That lasts. Even when the light passes. A holiness sacred even in the dark. In the grime. In the shadows. A vigil. A hymnal. A happiness strong enough to cradle all our sadness. "I know, it's alive and somewhere for us to find…chase this light with me."

everything is temporary

"Life in Slow Motion" - Trophy Eyes

Daniel Barber

is on a bit of hot streak when it comes to sending me music that hasn't been on my radar but should be. If you need further evidence of Daniel's impeccable taste you can find it here, here, and here.

He's outdone himself this week. I didn't know it at the time. I didn't realize it. I didn’t see, but in this recommendation, he's given me the summary of this entire playlist. The small but constant thread, the connective tissue holding together the whole thing.

In one song after another. In one collage or another. There is the comfort and consternation of realizing that "Everything is temporary". "I am nothing/ But ain't that something?" Hold on. Hold on. Hold on...

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That’s it for this week’s Playlist. If you have any request or recommendations for the next one, feel free to leave it in the comments.

Take care.

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