motherboard (daft punk) / interlude (laura marling)

writing music: “Icarus Walks” by Epik High

Daedalus made a pair of wax wings for his son, Icarus. After that we remember what happens: Icarus uses his wings to escape captivity and then realizes that he’s curious for the world; over the ocean he flies too close to the sun. When he turns around to see that his wings are melting and realizes what’s happening, he begins to fall; he drowns in the ocean below. 

Pieces, part one is an album that I have really come to love recently. At the end of the school year when I was starting to really wonder about what to do and who I am, I could really only see my love for writing as the thing that grounded me to the world and that would allow me to relate to and interact with others. My world kept getting darker. I feel like I’m still sitting in blackness. Pieces, part one also includes “연필깎이” and “낙화” which are about living through the blindness (연필깎이) and maintaining your dreams despite them being impossible (낙화). The album rewards belief and hard work, but also curiosity and positive attitude. It doesn’t do it in a way I’ve seen before—not a YA anything is possible if you believe kind of message. It’s about being in a time when you feel far away from yourself and imagining what you must look like, wherever you are, and continuing to walk even in the darkness, when there’s no way to tell where your foot will fall.

“Icarus Walks” retells the myth we all know. The greeks were obsessed with hubris, the ways it could kill a person. If you angered the gods you were dead. But Pieces, part one is a different framework. We’re not in ancient Greece anymore; this is a world of cities and shadows and facade and noise that muffles the heart’s own language, where the choice between what mask to wear can consume the face that would support it (re: “nocturne” and many others from Remapping the Human Soul, the last album prior to p.p1). In this kind of landscape, the gods may have forgotten us, or found a better world. It’s now humans with the capacity to inspire and help each other through ugliness and periods of fugue. In Pieces, part one, when Icarus falls to the water, something else happens at the surface, and when we realize it, something else can happen inside us, too. 

these boys are now fertilizing daffodils

poetry was popular in Hell, the shades

recited lines they had memorized—forgetful

even of who they were, but famished for life.

from  “Eurydice and Stalin” by Robert Pinsky

writing music: angst (playlist)

PLAYLIST: WRITING MUSIC

Can also be called “relationships gone wrong” playlist or “there are a lot of things I wish I did better” playlist or “unstuffing my heart” playlist; listen to these songs while you’re writing through character-relationship conflicts, through uninitiated longing, through hesitation, through self-doubt, through characters’ awarenesses of their own flaws and their hesitation to act because of it. Listen while you’re getting to write a character who’s in pain because of how closely she can listen to her heart. Regret, heartache, missed opportunity, restlessness. 

But angst can also be, like, being in love with somebody. Angst can be anything (if you just belieeeeeevvvvve). 

Some of these listed below are my favorite songs in general. I remember listening to “Drops in the River” when I was driving up the I-5 from San Diego alone during the summer of 2012, looking out at the ocean with the windows rolled down, blue hair all over the place, just feeling really…. Well. You’ll know if you listen. Laura Marling is just perfect in every way and I like her music so much that I can’t think of anything actually helpful to say about it (at the moment), but there’s a theme amongst her songs of hosting darkness that’s really powerful. “Within” by Daft Punk is the one, though, that I can pretty much count on whenever, wherever, if I need to get down to a tough scene. I think it’s universally…true. And, at the end of my second year of college, I wrote an entire novella in two weeks listening to  “Sim Sala Bim,” so you can be sure it’s good. 

These are only a few of the songs I have in a writing playlist at the moment; I’ll continue to post suggestions as I continue to work. 

1. “The Beast” by Laura Marling

2. “Lonely Lonely” by Feist

3. “Within” by Daft Punk 

4. “Where Can I Go?” by Laura Marling

5. “Drops in the River” by Fleet Foxes

6. “When Were you Happy?” by Laura Marling

7. “When Doves Cry” by Alex Clare

8. “Too Close” by Vitamin String Quartet (Alex Clare cover)

9. “눈, 코, 입” by AkMu (Taeyang cover - THESE PPL ARE SO GOOD ;;) 

10. “Honey Honey” by Feist

11. “Sim Sala Bim” by Fleet Foxes

12. “I Don’t Trust Myself ” by John Mayer
13. “演員” (yǎnyuán | Actor) by Soft Lipa

writing music: 我們都有問題 by Soft Lipa (蛋堡)

The title of this song—我們都有問題—means “we have a problem,” but I’ve seen it referred to as “Our Problems” as well. Soft Lipa is a Taiwanese rapper who caught my attention in 2010 when I moved into the dorms at UCI and I heard his song called 收斂水 (“Lotion”) through the walls. Took me forever to find it and I only did because, like so many rappers do, SL branded 收斂水 with his name, singing “xì kàn zhè páizi xiězhe Soft Lipa” before the second chorus (line translates to “look, the sign says Soft Lipa”). 

“Lotion” is a great song, actually pretty sweet considering American hip-hop’s typical themes, basically instructing the listener on how to live well—“nǐ chúle xūyào bǎoyǎng de rǔyè /  wǒ hǎo xiǎng tuījiàn nǐ línghún de shōuliǎn shuǐ” (also, you need to use lotion / I want to recommend to you this lotion for your soul)—to take care of herself, to live purely (“occasionally you’ll want makeup, but think back to the simple”), to remember to relax, and basically to purify herself after descending into the clamor and pollution of daily life. The chorus translates to something like: 

“when you need to relax, play this song

after the nightclubs, play this song

after a bath, play this song

on leisurely afternoons, play this song”

For as sweet as “Lotion” is, it’s the kind of song I want to listen to—well—when I want to relax, not when I need to get down to writing. And writing is work—this is a strange idea to some people, because it looks like I just sit in front of a computer all day kind of moving my hands so why do I get so exhausted afterwards? First, it’s difficult to sit still and force yourself to work on one thing for hours, and you can only do it if you have a pretty strong 1) mental resolve or 2) emotional tether to what you’re writing. Either way it’s hard work.

I chose to highlight 我們都有問題 because of its chorus lines: 

我們都很好 (we are good) 

我們都不好 (we are not good)

The song is basically about people who are in a relationship that’s both good and not good—they know they have “problems” but they ignore them, pretending they don’t have them—need each other, though. Before the chorus there’s a couple lines that translate to “we say we don’t have problems,” but then it moves into the chorus with an “actually, I just want to tell you—”. The song is confession, mourning something, but is also tender about it. 

In Asian culture, there’s a big disparity between “face” and what’s inside—and this song is kind of heartbreaking in the way that it wants to break down those boundaries between what the heart really feels and what the face is allowed to express, ultimately embodying that sort of restlessness in the chorus lines “we are good / we are not good.” It’s just a reminder to me that the two things can exist at once. 

There’s something kind of cool about the word “we” or “us” in Chinese—the singular first person is 我 (wǒ), and the plural first person is actually just 我 + 們 (men—pronounced more like “mun”), 們 indicating plural. So “we” isn’t so removed from “I” like it is in English, but it’s an extension of the singular first person in actual language. 

Every story is, essentially, about characters, and how they relate to other characters. Even a story about a lonely person is a story about a person and their world, and all the other people with whom they don’t interact. Not necessarily for the exact story of the song, but for the feeling it gives me, this kind of restlessness and sadness, but also a tenderness and timidness…. It’s so important, when you’re writing, to do your best at pushing something beyond the easy, the obvious, the two-dimensional. You were put on this planet with your own set of eyes; there’s something only you can see about whatever it is you’re writing, but in order to do that, you have to be on high alert to everything your heart’s saying. This song can heighten these things in me: either the intensity of my emotions themselves, or my ability to understand my own impulses and thoughts. 

book review: Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

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MURAKAMI HARUKI: SPUTNIK SWEETHEART

This book is...soft. I started reading Murakami with A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and had just read Kafka on the Shore the summer before I read Sputnik Sweetheart. There's something different about SS.... It's a quieter work--hurts more after putting it down, sticks with you afterwards, showing up when you don't expect it to, reminding you why it matters. 

I've wondered about Murakami's writing structure before, the way he styles plot, symbols, and interweaves character narratives into a thicket that you have to kind of slice through and then repair on your own, like cutting out stitches in a knitted scarf and then trying to tie them back together--but it felt good for this story; the narrative distance from events ties everything together into something you can interact with more easily, though Murakami isn't a writer to actually write out all the answers his stories raise. The best thing you can do if you read this book is to go into it having convinced yourself not to resist your reactions to what it's doing--Japanese, magical-realistic narratives are simultaneously in-your-face and pretty subtle, and Sputnik Sweetheart, for everything that's startling about it, is emotionally intelligent, and a little sneaky. The title--Sputnik Sweetheart--is both sweet because of its appearance as a phrase in the story itself, but also serves as a summary of the book's emotional story. 

Miu, whose transcendent and traumatic experience in the ferris wheel leaves her stranded between two worlds with white hair that regenerates every day as reminder that the past happened, might be like Laika on board Sputnik itself, gazing out, maybe, into space, down at earth--but also, Sumire might be like Laika, Sumire whose heart is a hoarder, whose return from the other world isn't metaphor, isn't symbol for something bigger, just is--K might be Laika, K, whose world is pinned down and measured out by Sumire but who finds himself launched into, maybe, emptiness like space when she disappears, spending that time gazing out at stars only to have his vision reoriented on earth when she returns.... Murakami writes about outsiders, people who are always going places, writes about airplanes and trains and walks down ocean paths and swims down into the ocean on moonlit nights. All motion, and also no motion, is forward motion in space--what's there to orient you? Life doesn't move linearly in Murakami's narratives, and it's not circular--not orderly and regularly patterned like a knitted scarf, either. Life is like the bundle of of a protein, like the erratic flickering in and out of physical space of the electrons in an atom's cloud, motion so small and irregular that to the eye too far away, it looks like it's standing still.

*I posted this review on Goodreads first, but at Dad's suggestion am now posting it here (ᅌᴗᅌ* )

writing music: 숲 by Epik High

I keep track of the music I write to in iTunes, but I often find it useful when others share the music they write to, and what they’re writing when they listen to it. I’m currently editing the piece I last posted about, editing in new scenes and fleshing out a few others. 

I love this song—숲 (pronounced “soop,” meaning “forest” or “woods” in Korean) by Epik High. It makes me think about low light, and being alone somewhere. I listen to it between more active scenes or before I start revisions to get myself in a good mindset for going back to a place I’d been before, left, and might have forgotten. I’m ready to discover a little more about my characters and their landscape after I’ve listened to this one. I don’t know how to say it better—maybe that it opens my heart a little, so that I become more aware of my own voices.

Epik High is a hip-hop group, so a lot of their other music is different, but “Epilogue,” their last album before hiatus in 2010 while the members served their mandatory military service,  has a couple other interesting instrumental songs, “Blossom” and “서랍”, pronounced “suh-rahp,” which means “drawer.” I also like to write low-light scenes (night time, early morning...) to “Harajuku Days” and “쉿” (pronounced “shwit,” like the English “shh!”) from the album “Lovescream” and “Icarus Walks” from “Breakdown.”