BRAIN MINT is back and this time we are celebrating the coolness of the late-winter months thawing into Spring. To me, the regrettably-named genre of trip-hop captures that icy, cold breeze of March, while the warmer breakbeats and acoustic strumming of the latter half of this mix attempt to evoke that feeling of snowmelt fading into babbling brooks. April is here. No shuffling as always.
Remember that October?
That was the month that you stayed.
You’d been in that little box in that skinny building
For over two years, you’d fallen in love with that place.
Even though it’d been haunted,
Even though ghosts had moved in,
Rats too,
And the whole building unified and stopped paying rent
And you wanted to renew
For a third year but had no lease,
And it felt as if an era would end soon.
You could have left before October.
You could have moved to Brooklyn the previous winter,
But you stayed then and you were staying now,
Only this time the staying felt more like staying
Because you technically no longer lived there,
But you still stayed,
You overstayed, you squatted,
In your own home, you sat still, you stayed still.
And then you put up string lights,
And you cooked chicken cutlets with puttanesca and wine,
And filled your ceiling with balloons,
Every inch of every room,
And watched them start to fall
At 3 and 4 and 5 am,
Some to the ground,
Some to eye level,
And some somewhere in between
And the world felt frozen for you
So you danced through it,
and in the morning sat in a sea of balloons,
A sea you parted with with scissors, with a corkscrew
Sometimes during those years,
You’d stand still and stare.
There was that one window to the north
With elegant orange lighting
And thriving indoor foliage;
And then there were others,
So many others,
Dozens of buildings everywhere,
above to the left, below to the right,
over and across the street, beyond that in the distance,
You’d feel the levels of the city infinitely layered on top of you,
like an intricately-patterned quilt, the horns and trains
and happy and alone and in love people singing you a lullaby,
As you slept, and sat, and stood, and stared, and drifted.
The winter I experienced my first proper adult heartbreak, I thought a lot about Joni Mitchell. Blue, her fourth studio album, had celebrated its 50th anniversary, Joni had yet to take all of her music off Spotify and I had yet to dig through the $1 CD bins at Princeton Record Exchange, desperate for a copy.
I thought mainly about how Blue was an homage to her whirlwind relationship with Graham Nash. I thought about bad timing. I thought so much about the man I had loved, the woman he happened to meet and love a little bit more than me. I thought about how, 50 years ago, Joni Mitchell wrote songs about the same feelings and experiences.
If you cracked open my brain, the chords and lyrics of “River” are probably imprinted along the inside. The song is a reminder that pain is enduring, but so is love. The combination of the two colors our outlook on life. An enduring, successful song reaches through the decades to say “I broke my own heart, too. We’re going to be okay.”
“River” is believed to be mainly inspired by Mitchell’s relationship with Nash, its tumultuous path and its hasty ending. Mitchell wanted to be free to create, travel and live life on her terms, and the idea of settling down with Nash spooked her. After a year of fights between the two, she ran off to Europe and sent him a telegram to say the relationship was over. It is believed to have read: “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.”
My biggest adult heartbreak ended in front of the 6 Train station in Spanish Harlem, and was finalized in a short, angry text exchange a month later.
In your twenties, the future goes on forever. But the present is equally frightening. For some, commitment is terrifying and limiting. For my previous partner, it was horrifying: who else was out there for him? Would settling down with me just hold him or me back? Was a little heartbreak now worth it if he hopefully found someone better?
And for me: could I bear to let him go and move on? Could I accept that he truly had happened to meet someone who met all the unspoken requirements he had? Could I also handle that as it happened over and over in the months that followed? At the time, I couldn’t. I cut him off, I walked away, I lost a perfectly good friend
I'm so hard to handle
I'm selfish and I'm sad
Now I've gone and lost the best baby
That I ever had
I walked away from that relationship because I couldn’t handle being friends, being second-best, being considered a lesser option. I’ve done it again since and God only knows how many more times I have it ahead of me. It’s a decades-old feeling, I am not the first to be in this situation and I am not the first to grow past it. But in the moment and moments after, it sure does feel like it.
That’s why “River” and Blue on the whole have endured for 50-plus years. Mitchell is willing to be blunt and emotionally vulnerable in her lyrics, to tell the story as she felt it and in cognizance of who else was hurt by her decisions.
There is no aggression toward her partner, no happy ending: just her, lamenting and trying, desperately, to escape the present and her own pain.
I’m inside of an album, physically exploring
I travel through a sequence of chromatic spaces
separated by cushy, plush wormholes
There are no words in these spaces
Think of the lyrics as God’s word
and the spaces as visual manifestations of god’s word
All I hear is melody and texture
Each space is distinct, for example
one is sparse, bright yellow, fragmented and flowering
with a soilless species I’ve never seen
The next, a cloudy purple amoeba
filled with alien emotions I can only approximate
Another is an atmospheric blue,
and I have this constant falling sensation
due to association with earthly sky
or a symptom of new physical laws
In another, I’m surrounded by isolated sparkles
that look like eyeless twinkles
In one space I’m certain I’m the center of absolutely nothing,
and in another it all crumbles and expands and clears and clouds and collapses around me
In the next, I dance
My motions become this space’s scripture
Images of my movement immediately appear
painted on chapel ceilings
One wormhole is a ventricle
I know where this leads,
until suddenly I’m pumped into an empty space scape
Blood drips from my skin, freezing into icicles
It’s unclear how I proceed
but I do, perhaps into this space’s version of an afterlife
Ahead lurks a thicket of dark rusty metal beams,
and beyond that a white nothingness
or perhaps an off-white nothingness;
There’s so much rust I can’t tell,
and I don’t know if color theory works the same here
As I move forward I pass through the beams,
not like holograms exactly,
it’s hard to explain,
but I emerge feeling strengthened
This is the first installment of BRAIN MINT, a loose collection of tunes that will make your brain minty fresh, like you just put two Altoids in your head. Future editions may be more focused genre-wise, but Volume 1 features a smattering of disparate genres which together form a cohesive experience. I recommend listening in order for maximum pleasure.
When I wrote about the 30 most important songs in my life each day during April 2020, I started with “Rolling Stone” by The Weeknd. I don’t know if I was subconsciously avoiding picking a song on House Of Balloons, but I’ve found my favorite album of all-time impossible to write about since.
To celebrate bringing the 30 SONGS format to Mote Street, I’m going to try. It’s just difficult.
To describe its sampling as genius is as if mentioning Siouxsie and the Banshees, Beach House, and Cocteau Twins shows a sophisticated or unexpected palette rather than a future-of-music-shattering takedown of the concept of genre.
To praise the lyrics is as if the lyrics are lyricism, as if the sense of danger, sense of cool, sense of thrill, sense of paranoia, sense of arousal, sense of desire, sense of disconnect and sense of depletion are simply senses, rather than involuntary responses to the controlled substance being injected into your ears, spiking and draining your own serotonin to the point you forget what is making you feel this way in the first place.
To compliment Abel’s voice, his timbre and his range is as if there isn’t simply a quality to his singing that allows his most imagery-laden verses and his most non-verbal wails to somehow be equally decipherable, emotive and bone-freezing.
To identify standout songs is as if there’s somehow a way to critically discern between the merits of the synth pad that transitions House Of Balloons to Glass Table Girls, panning you from vibe to vibe without moving you an inch as if someone just poured a mountain of powder on the table in front of the silk couch you’re glued to, and the “oh-whoaaa-ohhh” Abel ad-libs on Loft Music, between asking what you are doing in the bathroom and saying that he hears noises in the bathroom, but that it’s okay because we can do it in the living room.
To admire its atmosphere is as if the samples, production, vocals, ad-libs, flows, lyrics, structures, transitions, motifs, through lines, song titles, cover art, and your own life with the album, from when you weren’t even fucking 20 to on your 30th birthday in the middle of the city, didn’t define the details of what you’ve wanted, the feelings of what you’ve desired and the contours of what you’ve achieved, in all its colors, its buoyancy, its temporality.
I felt electricity in your hand on Thursday. I’ve thought about our Avenue A weekends, the ones with you perched on my lap as I sit on a ledge in front of a bodega. Your hair is particularly curly those nights, and your eyes are glossy.
When someone emerged from the bar behind the booth I was sitting in, I felt transported back to my first psychedelic trip, which was 5 days prior. I’m 30, so my brain’s done developing, and there’s nothing inside that I’m afraid of seeing. Sure, I had visions of dingy basements, cobweb-covered radiators and long-nosed masks, which surprised and frightened me, but you didn’t show up until Thursday. As I turned to look at who was saying my name, I felt space blur. It was similar to the painterly blending of the lake and fall leaves I stared at last weekend while listening to Ethel Cain’s “Crush,” before I blinked and it all became one kaleidoscope pattern, the trees and their reflection forming a diamond-studded arrow, with brown, yellow, orange and green tones evenly distributed throughout.
While that hallucination was more beautiful than the basement, it was perhaps even more frightening, because it was not the inside of my brain, but something I was actually seeing—however distorted—that blinking could only clarify—not disappear.
Why is laughter the trivial counterpart
to heavy tears?
Release through laughter
Release through tears
Laugh until you cry
Cry until you laugh
Deep lines creasing the same face
Pulling, stretching, contorting
Making their mark
As we forget to breathe
I want the characters in my poems
To become characters in a book, a
television show, a telenovela,
Written by someone else
I want a 3D model of the architecture of my mind
Filled with life-sized plaster casts of all my ex loves
Frozen in dramatic motion
Scattered across an endless maze of rooms
Separated by frameless doorways
Each section holding some conceptual purpose
Within its plaster white walls
I want to wander through this space
Admiring the vision of the artist
I suppose I must have commissioned him
But what fantastic execution
Her 2021 entrance was a teenage heartbreak dissertation, a destinationless journey through betrayal, pain, confusion, bitterness, anger, pity, acceptance, nostalgia, and pain all over again. On some songs, Rodrigo effortlessly breathes out intricate lyricism like prime Jay-Z. On others, she launches her emotional WMD of a voice, exploding into piercing notes and soul-rattling melodies.
She does much of the same on her sophomore album GUTS, which I first consumed ambling around Portugal. While "ballad of a homeschooled girl" might seem like an odd Euro-walk soundtrack, I felt Rodrigo's lugubrious shouts enhanced my ability to absorb my surroundings. I’m not sure if this is a compliment to GUTS specifically, or if it’s just an example of how we paradoxically need to distract ourselves in order to be present.
What I will say is that I thought a lot about balance on that trip. Like how dry, minerally white wine enhances fatty, salty cheese, or how bitter, acidic coffee complements creamy, sweet egg tarts. I thought about how never-ending club/bar/dance-filled nights feel untenable without crowdless solo strolls through quaint neighborhoods, and how riding mopeds pairs really nicely with never doing so again.
I thought about how after 3 days I was ready to move to Portugal, how after 6 days that Lisbon was my city of choice, and how after 9 that I'm never leaving New York.
GUTS isn’t SOUR. That fact alone made me dislike it on first listen; it felt scattered, trite and commercial. By listen 3 I started appreciating it as varied, funny and upbeat. By listen 5, its expression of imperfect vulnerability brought me to tears. A few weeks in, I find myself revisiting SOUR more often for my Rodrigo fix. But next time I’m walking up steep Bairro Alto streets, I’ll hear “Lacy” in my head, and every time I hear Rodrigo shout “your flowers filled with vitriol” in my headphones, I’ll see castles.
Here at the beach the sky is limitless
But the brim of my hat caps my field of view with a concave blackness
I'm suddenly transported–if only for a moment–back to the city
Below some great underpass not yet explored
>>>
The five specks of green sea glass, nestled into the mixture of burnt orange, dark grey, off-white, beige, light grey, terra cotta, black and spectrally brown pebbles, shell fragments and fossils, that make up the coastal edge of this particular part of Porto, the edge of Europe, the edge of the Atlantic, of which the clashing, contrasting, hard-edgedness will soften with time and become sand, matches the emerald glow of my Caravelhos sparkling water bottle, nestled into the earth.
>>>
Simple is the man
Who stands full lungs near the sea
Clarity is found
On one hand, it was the most personally-gratifying project I’ve ever worked on. Defining myself through moments, moments through music, and music through myself was both a literary and therapeutic accomplishment. At the same time, the project carried with it a melancholy nostalgia. As I locked myself in my room and wrote about memories from my final days of high school, my one-way flight to Italy and my first devastating adult heartbreak, I felt like life was behind me.
The day I finished that project, I met someone who would, over the next three months, open me up to Caroline Polachek, Carly Rae Jepson, Taylor Swift, and change my life forever.
6 months later, I tried updating the list. I tried again 6 months after that, and 3 after that, and 3 after that. Every time, I was hit with the same block.
I wrote this in December of 2021:
I am overwhelmed with raw emotion, emotion tied to a life that is perhaps—no, certainly—more full than it has ever been. I’ve made more friends, developed more crushes, been crushed more times, formed more intimate connections, partied more, (redacted), accomplished more professionally, established more independence, developed more confidence and learned more about myself than I have since I was a 21-year-old living in a Florence apartment building inhabited on every floor by other 21-year-olds living thousands of miles from home. The difference is that now, I am self aware enough to appreciate it so, so much more.
The point is, I’m fucking alive and I’m fucking present. I may not have the perfect words to describe what “Deja Vu” means to me, but that might be because I am not yet over the girl who I met in the stairwell shortly after the song came out, who defined my summer in lockstep with Rodrigo.
Another year-and-a-half has passed since then. Circumstantially, I’m somewhere between where I was in April 2020 and in December 2021. I am still surrounded by friends, crushing on girls, getting heartbroken and breaking hearts. I also deeply miss the Lower East Side apartment I moved out of 6 months ago, feel somewhat stagnant, and am noticing my social circle slowly but surely lose the energy it had two summers ago, as we cross into our 30s one by one.
The beautiful thing is, unlike in April 2020, I don’t see this as life moving behind me. Periods of stagnation now feel like ones of transformation, and I’m listening to more new music than I have in a decade. There’s also a major plus to the reprieve from the peak intensity I was feeling in December 2021: I feel able to write again.
In celebration of the most versatile artist of his generation revisiting his southern roots and dropping Sandhills, I spliced together a small collection of songs that hit that indie-twang sweet spot.
Yet the way it lay heavily, undignified in the crack of the sidewalk let me know it had not simply suffered a heart attack, choked on a bottle cap, or otherwise expired. I knew I’d receive clues from the head, and as I came parallel with the creature, there it was.
Its neck was curled towards its wing at a near 180-degree angle, its beak open, as if frozen in one final agonizing trill.I looked up and saw an elderly man approaching, his back curved forward and to the side like a three-dimensional lowercase “r” as he jittered forward. I wondered if he noticed what lay ahead of him.
Sound. Background, foreground, score. In Oppenheimer, sound is no longer just an experiential tool; it is integral to the subject matter. It deepens our understanding of the internal and external world created, and destroyed, by inventing an atom-splitting, humanity-altering explosive.
Science and mysticism. The interplay between these two seemingly-oppositional forces is the stage on which so much of Nolan’s storytelling has been built. Here, he explores a real-world example of this dichotomy, and perhaps the best real-world example in human history. The magnitude of the science and its consequences is so extreme that as humans, it paradoxically becomes fully unscientific.
Mystery, conspiracy, paranoia. What starts as the film’s B plot is revealed to be its A plot. Take all the slowly bubbling unease of Memento and apply it to a story that is about, as much as anything else, the Red Scare.
Callbacks. Showing scenes again, but with a new angle, new dialogue or simply new context. To execute these revelatory climaxes the way Nolan has throughout his career is an exceptional feat. The fact that he doesn’t need short-term memory loss, identical twins, a cloning device or a magical spinning top to pull it off here is all the more powerful. Not because it’s more impressive (it is), but because it makes you ponder our actual reality in a new way. That’s not just peak cinematic experience, that’s peak art.
Boundless visual ambition. Nolan and his teams have been creating unparalleled visual masterpieces for a long time, but creating Oppenheimer’s nightmare vision of nuclear war above the clouds is perhaps the most lasting image from his films yet.
Where Oppenheimer truly breaks from anything Nolan has done before is that it feels important. Japan was terrorized with atomic bombs in 1945. World War II ended, the Cold War began, and it lasted until 1991. I was born the following year, to Jewish parents born during the peak of McCarthyism. In 2001, the most famous terrorist attack of my lifetime took place. In 2003, the United States pretended that Iraq had nuclear weapons to justify an invasion. In 2016, many claimed that Russia stole our election, and in 2023, truth is so hard to come by that we’ve collectively given up on caring - about our current reality, about history and about the future. All we want from our films is to include *snaps* inducing monologues, be about Spiderman, or both. We’ve become simultaneously desensitized and reactionary, paranoid and ambivalent, catastrophizing and dissociated. I never would’ve thought the world needed another World War II movie, but as much as the world can need a movie, I really think it did. It needed a movie about real life, real consequences, and it needed it to be extremely, extremely good.
BRAIN MINT is back and this time we are celebrating the coolness of the late-winter months thawing into Spring. To me, the regrettably-named genre of trip-hop captures that icy, cold breeze of March, while the warmer breakbeats and acoustic strumming of the latter half of this mix attempt to evoke that feeling of snowmelt fading into babbling brooks. April is here. No shuffling as always.