Recycled Ode to a Beachtown.

For Goa, December 25th,2000. Reissued for Galle, February 6th, 2011

Swimming out into the pinpricked night,
cleaving at the amorphous blue
with arms of curling smoke.

A spinning shuttle;
fairy-light spirals in my head.

A face in the dark - old; spry.
The dancing embers licking her fingers dry.

Beachfront in an hourglass.
Waves of euphoria pummel
the shores at the edge of time.

Orion sinking into slumber;
whisper goodnight,
and on the rim of the ocean:
crouching, hidden - Daylight.

Plugged in. Tuned out.

I got talking to a friend recently, about music and what it's meant to us, individually.

As we talked I realized I've been plugged in since I was maybe 9-10. That's a little more than 20 years. Aside from family, that would qualify as the longest relationship I've ever had. The Walkman to the Discman to the Ipod; more than half my life plugged on earphones.

It's different when you're listening to music over speakers and the world around you hears what you hear. It's a whole other thing when the music inside your head is yours alone. It becomes the voice in your head, your best friend, your therapist, your muse, your drug, your tourniquet, your happy pill and your bleeding heart.

You constantly have a soundtrack to your reality. Or maybe it's the subtitles. Every experience gets filtered and processed through the vocabulary of your playlist. It becomes a time capsule for your emotional development. If social archaeologists were to excavate my psyche, they'd find my musical influences stratified, compressed like minerals in the folds of my brain.

Listen to this - "The expression you wear on your face to keep the world out becomes the shape of the person you are." I read that somewhere. I wonder if that's true of the music you listen to as well? The music is my force-field - It keeps me in, it keeps you out. But I can't tell if I listen to what I do because it fits the grooves in my brain or I wonder, did the music engineer those grooves and orchestrate the person I've become? No answer. No matter.

What matters is that it has been with you, everywhere. On mountaintops with the wind slapping high-fives against your open palms; in the rush-hour hell of seething cars; holding your hand on a lonely night walk, watching blue lights winking at the dark; in the slow baked sunshine of a construction set, tuning out the sweat and paint and assholes; on overnight flights and bus-rides, flickering in that hazy, surreal half-life between awakenings and sleep. It has been there.

Music has been the one constant. The one solid thing. People come, go, change, wilt, take, give, drift away, move on, fuck off and fade out, but the music is always there. Always the same. Your time machine, your escape hatch, your weapon, your warm embrace, your festering gall.

Sanctuary

The work week, the work life, is spent in people's houses trying to turn flat boring whitewashed walls into the gateways to some exotic other realm using colour and my meagre imagination. Part of the job becomes about blending unobtrusively into their environment, their intimate life spaces, their homes.

It's a kind of involuntary voyeurism...outside, looking in through the plastic wrap of professional distance. Like second nature I read their lives from the encrypted code of their possessions and professions; their habits and their humours.

Amazing. like fingerprints and faces, no two are the same...each room coloured by the distinct aura of it's inhabitants.

The happily married, the hopelessly single, the bitter divorced.

The tiny rented apartments and the sprawling manor homes.

Homes warm and frenetic with light and laughter and love and homes barren and screaming with the trapped silence of mausoleums.

Catalog perfect homes and spiraling mess homes.

Homes that let you borrow their sunsoaked peace and homes that feed you hollow disquiet.

Homes rich and pungent with the smells of cooking and homes rank with the odour of wealth.

Homes with pictures of friends and lovers and pets and mothers taped to walls and refrigerator doors and homes spartan as monasteries.


And in the homes, the people...
The sweet apologetic ones that can't quite make up their minds.
The exuberant ones that talk a mile a minute.
The narrow fault finding ones.
The sneaky ones you know are going to try and work you over.
The quiet ones with the guarded eyes that you want to please the most because when you do their wonder is the purest.
The terminally design challenged ones who couldn't possibly trust you or their own sense of style...not without a signed affidavit from their mighty interior designers.
The arrogant patronizing ones who think they could do your job in their sleep.
The adventurous ones who let you go the distance...and come along for the ride.
The bewildered ones who don't understand any of it, but know you'll somehow magically figure out what they like.
They all let you in...and you stay a while...a tourist in a borrowed sanctuary.

Shared space is a shared life; it's inevitable that they'll talk to you and tell you things...sometimes just because you're there. Sometimes because no one else is.
And you'll see them as they are...in the inner sanctum...ceos and society heiresses, accountants and movie stars, mothers and lovers and newlyweds, rich men's wives and single working girls.

And you'll learn a lot...about style and wealth. And grace.
And you'll see that sometimes a blessing may be a curse...
and maybe a curse isn't necessarily so.