radio

I don't listen to the radio much except for when I'm at home. In addition to the perfect temperature of the sun, and the easy wide roads, and the hills, the radio is why I love driving in the Bay Area. Besides the current pop (it was unexpectedly satisfying to crank up "California Gurls" in California), the stations here take me back to junior high dances and even further back to playing in the aisles of my dad's store with nineties soft rock in the background, and to being driven around by my brothers in their eighties cars to the tunes of eighties new wave. I blast a lot of bad, catchy music. It's stuff I never hear elsewhere, stuff that I haven't heard in years, like old school Mase (words I still know) or that one beautiful Donna Lewis song (I Love You Always Forever) that made me buy the entire album but only listen to that one song. Now that I've sold that CD away years before iTunes import was invented, the only time I might ever come across the song again is by chance on the kind of radio station they use at the dentist, the kind of station programmed in the car along with pop, hip hop and oldies.

It was in this house and in this place that I listened to my first radio, sometime in elementary school. The beer and cigarette companies my dad would purchase his store's goods from would send him little gifts with their brands all over them, like bags and cups and one time, a radio. It was from Camel cigarettes. It was a blue and yellow handheld radio, in a rectangular shape, with a camel on it, and an antenna. I sat on the carpet of my parents' bedroom, turned it on, and became mesmerized for the next four hours. I heard the same top forty songs cycled through the afternoon, and it's my first memory of discovering music. I became familiar with the concept of a radio station, and especially when I've been away for a long time, the pureness of that discovery comes back when I drive here to the radio. There's something about all this that makes nostalgia fresh, and the layers of everything around so light without losing substance. And it's just fun to dance and sing loudly, badly, and honestly in the car.

music

Spending the bigger chunks of my day studying means constant music. I really love music so much, and in the most recent immersion, I came to the thought that being with music is like being with a person. And not for memories associated with people, but because music is this living, organic thing to which you form real, heavy ties.

In listening to albums all the way through, and listening to multiple albums by the same musician, and seeing the same musician perform at different concerts in different venues, themes diffuse from the sounds to inside, and the layers shift and unveil. The National likes concepts surrounding lemons, geese, and years. There are a couple songs that Thao Nguyen always plays in concert, that I wasn't fond of before, but have grown to form a sort of attachment to because she's obviously attached, and because each time she plays them, they have a different feel, and I love that dynamic factor of moving art that people breathe.

It's funny, how despite all that movement, how much of the time when I listen to a song or album, I feel the same as I did when I first came to know it, no matter how much time and distance has grown since then. Listening to Plans (Death Cab) the other week, I felt the twinges of the summer when I first loved it, and not as a former remnant but as its complete whole, as if I was back in that carpeted room, stacking my CDs on the stereo playing those bittersweet songs, finding it insanely hard to move my hands because I was in such heartbreak over changes back then. I remember sitting at the office in Vietnam, when my co-worker played James Blunt, and I wanted to die, thousands of miles and two years away from when that song first made me feel and hurt. Regardless of listening to old music in new places, new periods of time, new places in life, how I knew it first always comes back.

In those ways and in other ways music is both less and more real than real life, and I like that funny, deeply strong state of feeling, even if it's more of an ache than anything else.

playlist

I periodically lose my song playlists, which upsets me at the time because I spend some time putting them together based on various associations, and then they develop more associations as I listen to them. A few times now, they've disappeared from my iTunes and I'm left to start over (I've tried saving them but I don't do this often enough to encompass changes over time, so that the last ones I've saved are not the ones that were currently on my iPod when I lost them). A friend once told me that this might be good, to consciously change and renew, and I thought this was a good point. Sometimes, though, I remember the old and ache for it, like now--when I'm fully enmeshed in the third year of medical school which is also soon nearing an end, when I suddenly remember a song that was so definitively part of a playlist entitled "second year" and a handful of the songs on that list come back to me and though I can't remember all of them, I go back to the ones I do and remember so clearly the walks and study sessions and nothingness spent listening to those sounds, and more than that, how the feelings of the songs themselves get mixed up in how I felt back then, how those songs chose me and I chose them for that time and experience in my life, how suddenly the gap between then and now can simultaneously open up and close. It's a crazy, crazy thing.

two

A couple of songs immersing my trudges to and from, and much in between--

Two by the Antlers, from Hospice
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsXKa97J6pM
The sound at first feels so different from the words. The sound begins simple, a kind of pure that I'd like first thing in the morning. More and more builds, and you can't really hear the words too well, but phrases slip into sharpness and over time you string together pieces and realize the story is sad. Listen more and more, and the conflict comes into focus, but then blurs back into background, because it's not so much that the sound and word oppose; they layer.

Cosmic Love by Florence & the Machine, from Lungs
http://popup.lala.com/popup/432627079823895964
Soft female voices that can really howl give so much. I heard this song and thought for awhile of a word to describe what her voice does, and soon after I settled upon "howl," I noticed that song #4 on her album carries that title. Fitting for an album celebrating the capacity of her lungs. And that volume doesn't have to be about overcoming or battling in order to for her sound to be soaring; it can just be the volume of what she feels and the expression of that. I love when femininity proves its strength by pouring forth the full-blown force of vulnerability.

another m&m

While my last M&M post was about losing life, this one is about saving it. Not so much in the bringing back a pulse kind of way, or even the complete eradication of pain, but in the way that good turns all else into sources of gratitude. This M&M is called medicine & music.

"Medical school" has too many syllables, but really, it's more accurate than "medicine," because that's where I am, and what saves me. School allows for things that medicine may not: a certain free flowing mode of learning, and complete freedom to observe. And the beginnings of anything carry a peculiar poignancy that makes you very aware of them in the moment. Working in the emergency department is humbling, as the best parts of medical school have been. Crammed in a small space are little clips of people and problems, and as a student you can appreciate that you are in the middle of it. At this point in our lives, the weight of things still correlates with how they heavy they feel. A man with vertigo finds it's due to a stroke--the dizzy you feel that should just go away cause it's just in your head, but it won't go away because it is in your head. A man whose nephew passed away at 21 from a heart attack waits as we track his chest pain with labs and tests, his eyes wet as he talks about living in the southeastern tip of a small island. A woman finds the hard back of a trauma board more painful than the floor she's been lying on for twelve hours after a fall that fractured her arm in two places. A man writhes with tremors from an overdose, who is so thin you can't help but feel he might be right that things are too much.

Medical school is also more apt than medicine, because with school comes the family of friends I've had here. Early into my first year, a time that coincided with personal difficulties, I realized how much better I function in a small community. And more importantly, how much this small group of people offered. In this past week, small acts of kindness respond to my need for them, without knowing the nature of why I needed them but not questioning why. Dinners out with honest conversation about silly things and things most important to me. Someone who makes me believe in trying for genuine good, regardless of stumbles. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar in hand, and a mini avocado cheesecake in my fridge. Complete, sincere, effortless, unconditional acceptance of my faults from someone too hard on himself; he takes my mess and throws back simplicity. Company at the gym and the library. Encouragement disguised as a rap, both funny and sweet, and a typed smile from someone who has never before given one. Each person offers things in their own way, and the parallel care in individual qualities is such love.

While these things often take me beyond myself, music lets me be. I've returned to sounds that I loved years ago (Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots), or to sounds from years back that I didn't listen to properly back then (Linkin Park & Jay-Z: Collision Course, and lots of Linkin Park in general). I'm as addicted as everyone to The XX, whose atmospheric beats have both flash and depth, and I don't think I've loved this hard since Bon Iver. Besides catching up to the distant past, I'm catching up on 2009 with the timeliness of The Antlers' Hospice, and the new Muse, which has different parts all that I love through & through. A splash of Beirut's strange ache (Realpeople), all of Sigur Ros & Phoenix piling up on me, and so on and so on and it's all so filling. It's why I love commutes, the walks and train rides and road trips, the time I can take for music and myself and it's hard to describe in any other way except to say that it saves me.

I was walking around New Haven a little past four in the afternoon today, while it was still light. New Haven isn't thought to be pretty, but sometimes it is. The sky was filled in with gray but the top halves of all the brown-gray buildings were made golden by a sun you would have to turn around to see, but you wouldn't because you wouldn't move your eyes from the unearthly glow. Looking up at one point one such building merged its frame with quietly sprawling branches also alight with a mysterious sun, and my breath was sharp as I drew it in.

bon iver

No better time to reflect on winter than summer.

After a long absence I started running over Thanksgiving break, when I was in Denver at my oldest brother's place with my whole family. Historically, running has always started when my life has entered a certain phase, a difficult one or a transitional one. This time around I'm trying to add more permanence to its association and role in my life. Anyway this isn't about running but just to say that when I began in Denver, I was feeling a lot and running felt simple beside those things. The beginning of second year was...crazy. We were overwhelmed in every way, and Thanksgiving was the first breather. I spent a good deal of it studying drugs, which I hadn't even attempted to learn all semester. While the mechanisms were interesting, the new language blew my mind a little. I'd sit and wonder why we were learning to talk this way, and whether my mind would always sound like a stranger to myself, and not just strange like unfamiliar but strange like not right. Since this was my second school Thanksgiving break, and since I instinctively compare one time marker with its predecessor, last year's week came back to me often. Last Thanksgiving I was in Chicago, visiting a couple friends and exploring on my own. I wasn't studying, I missed the proximity of classmates I'd recently gotten to know but also absolutely relished solitude for the first time since a pretty rough time at the very edge of ends/beginnings that fall, everything was ahead. This Thanksgiving, it was wonderful to be with my whole family and my brother's new baby, the first in our family; people who'd been good friends the past year were now my other family and I didn't have to miss them, and I didn't feel any particular need to be alone either. I wouldn't say one Thanksgiving was better than the other. Putting them aside one another just made the year in between swell a little.

So much has happened. Even from now to this last Thanksgiving, I feel I know new facets of things and older ones more deeply. In any case, even though I wasn't thinking this at the time, I think all the things of the recent past were converging to make a me that wanted to run. I was tired. Spending the summer in Vietnam, road tripping cross country just a few days after, moving into our apartment right after that, starting school before moving even finished, then continuing full speed onto a year of massive mind-stuffing--I was tired. Things had been so fast I was still trying to decide how to approach the rest of the year, what did I want to do and what could I do. A year of tumultuous boy situations also reached its worst that fall, one that I never knew what to do with and another I didn't even realize was there. By Thanksgiving I had made myself proud though not particularly happy by eventually doing the right thing with the latter (yes, that is to say I probably didn't start out right), and transitioning to what would be the best time of our friendship with the former. I didn't know this at the time, though, and deciding how I would proceed was a struggle that break. It really took a lot in me, a lot of fighting my less admirable qualities, to continue the way I ultimately did, and so my energy was low for that reason too. Seeing all of my family was really wonderful; I'd been so looking forward to it but it still surprised me. Happiness is consuming too.

I always look forward to the music I run to. One night I decided that the next day I'd listen to Bon Iver, which really isn't typical running music if you like to listen to things chipper and upbeat. It's true that Bon Iver has a distinct tone, that could be described one-dimensionally as melancholy and quiet, but for me those things have always been so expansive. The sounds are so layered and raw at the same time. The effusiveness is subtle, tugs at things in you kept underneath. The next morning we woke up to a world draped in white. It was my first snowfall of the winter, and first run in a snowfall, and the soundtrack couldn't have been more perfect. Through the slow thirty-seven minutes of the album I went past my brother's neighborhood to discover water rushing fast down its creek, fluff atop and a mix of bare trees and clothed trees, for frame. I've loved Fremont and Cambridge runs, found lesser but palpable enjoyment in San Francisco and New Haven, but this was something I experienced in a place I had no real connection to and would likely never return to in that setting. For that and for everything else, in that sliver of space I felt everything.

The anticipation of good and stress, the tension of what happened, uncertainty of what I'd do and what would be done, the warmth of people I loved, gratitude for people who loved me so well--my family at school and my family-family, frustrations over words and connections, things I don't like admitting I feel (resentment, slighted, inadequate or superior, dislike and regret), open spaces, the heaviness of breathing, someone else's winter in mine, little life, treading and traversing over states, moving downtown, learning for the first time how to learn, a return after absence and the small changes, the walks to school, making home, laundromats and grocery stores, autumn, unfamiliar pressure, working hard to barely keep up, the newness of place and the continual resurgences of past that are so constant for me they may not even qualify as nostalgia--all there in a compact five feet two inches (and a half).

I bought a vinyl record of Bon Iver's album at their concert in Brooklyn, where wife and I were front row. I don't own a record player, and I purposely haven't gotten one yet. I would like to go to a store that probably doesn't exist anymore where they are still lined in rows and I can touch the spindles, on my own because I take a long time to make decisions, and choose one for myself...but not yet. But I like imagining that someday, when the time is right for me, I will have one, and I'll sit on my wood patterned floor and listen to those thirty-seven minutes. I might cry. Not for past melancholy, not even for present happiness, but for fullness in the crevices.

my songs

I use the word love a lot. I love a lot of things and a lot of people. On this particular day and on many days I think about all the different songs I love. But when it comes down to it, there are only a few I love in a specific, perfect way. This doesn’t mean that when I say I love other songs, I don’t mean it. I worry sometimes that applying the word too liberally to things devalues them, both in the eyes of others who become suspect of my standards, and intrinsically, as though love has to be selective to be true. I worry about this, but not too much, because all the while I know it’s not true, not for me. The quality of love can stay the same, even as the texture differs from one thing to the next.

Skinny Love (Bon Iver)
Push, acoustic (Matchbox 20)
Yellow (Coldplay)
Soul to Squeeze (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Cold Girl Fever (The National)
Delicate (Damien Rice)

There are common features; most apparently, they are all sung by males (I don’t really know what that says). They’re quiet and not earth-shattering. Most are well-known; for all the lesser known music I'm exposed to, these are the ones that choose me. Closer to me, they are songs for nighttime or the dark, and for the cold, for transportation in familiar places. I don’t love them for memories; though there are many, many songs whose associated people and experiences intensify my inherent love for them. They exude a similar quality. In their own way, these give me the same feeling, a certain kind of ache that makes them perfect, perfect not as in flawless; perfect because it fits my particular combination of angles.

soundtrack

I am in love and I already know I can't do it justice but I have to proclaim it anyway. Thao Nguyen comprised the soundtrack on repeat to my hours and nights of packing and if I miss anything about packing it's that. Her songs paint an image of a person I would like to know and would like to be. Charming but disingenuous, sensitive but strong, knowing but open, messy but together, brassy and effortlessly thoughtful. Her voice is deep and full and husky, but lilts into a lightness. It meshes with her folksy guitar and catchy beats, and then it stands on its own even as the background continues. She bares her insecurities and heartbreaks and not once seems weak for doing so. She does it so naturally and above all, honestly. In Chivalry, my favorite, she sings: "An offer of me you politely refused/Is it that my heart beat too loud/Is it I did not bid it calm down...I am tired/I am through/When I love I will love so hard." She draws out each "I," her voice up and down, and then comes the fast, beautiful plucking of guitar that forces you to keep up with her feeling, which you might've missed if you hadn't been listening because the song is light.

Those few lines make me think of one of those rare very true things that feels like a revelation when you learn it, something Hussain told me once. I was telling him how I worried that I was behind everyone else, because I kept believing in certain things that experience would then contradict and I would be surprised, how I still think about things that people get over, how I will never fully accept the idea of loss. I was worried that the ideals I thought were strong were actually naive. That maybe I hadn't matured and was left behind in the growth curve. He said that maybe maturity isn't about experience breaking down ideals, but about "having gone through that pain and hurt and all that without giving up your sense of self, without being jaded and cynical and giving up on people." And so I love Thao Nguyen for being tired now, but loving hard later.

I like the title of her second album, We Brave Bee Stings and All, her appreciation of a small, intense sensation of a bee sting. In her songs she says geography will make a mess of her, that she's a superhero, that she doesn't know, how she stings and how she's been stung. She talks about rainy seasons and big kid tables. And yes it is doubly awesome that she's a Vietnamese-American with voice. People describe her music with words suggestive of movement: bounce, jangly, poppy, vibrant. It's true that the beat draws you in first. But even amidst all the motion of her words and notes and voice and instruments and thoughts and sounds, there is a constant expression of something real and felt, and that takes you all over but really, holds you still in one place.

coachella

A delayed flight to LA, a two-hour drive to Indio, the wait for our keys to the condo, a trip to the grocery store, the 90 minute drive or more into Coachella (I think it normally takes 30 minutes but we missed a turn and sometimes there was traffic into the parking lot), the 20 minute walk from the car to the entrance (that was the damn longest part). The heat made the walk pretty miserable, and the first thing I wanted to do upon entering was get water and go to the bathroom. I needed another water bottle after the first show. The porter potties are stifling (though cleaner than I expected) and during the first half hour I honestly wondered whether I'd make it through the first day, much less all three days. But that first hour of the hot dry blindingly bright late afternoon was always the hardest each day, and once you get past it and know you'll be fine, it is glorious.

There are five stages: the huge Coachella Stage with screens and a long expanse of grass in front of it; next to it is the smaller but still large Outdoor Stage that has some bleachers way in the back; perpendicular to these are three tented stages in a row, aptly named the Sahara, Gobi and Mojave. There were SO MANY people. Families with little kids, groups of friends, college kids, couples, teenyboppers, hipsters, hippies...music lovers. Music has that ineffable quality of being intensified and better by sharing, more so than a lot of other beautiful things, because it can be so accessible to so many at once. I remember hearing a song I liked playing across the Yard from someone's dorm room, through their open window to mine, and thinking of connections between strangers. And it's amazing to be able to go from dancing to a semi-raunchy girl band packed in the middle of a crowd, to standing hushed in the front row listening to just a voice and acoustic guitar. And to see how everything contributes to making each show distinct: the time of day and the light and temperature that goes along with that, where you are in the crowd, whether you stand or sit, and so on.

There were so many highlights: the energy and passion of Arcade Fire and how much we moved to their music, Lily Allen's band playing their trumpets in sync, Damien's riffs, Air's atmosphere reaching us in the bleachers, Regina Spektor's distinctive piano and voice and pale skin with red lips, being so close to Jose's lovely quiet music, the Decemberists playing the entire eight minutes of the Mariner's Revenge Song. And all the dancing, to CSS and Rapture and anything with a beat really. I didn't expect to dance that much. I think we ended up seeing twenty artists, maybe fifteen of whom were full sets, which is pretty awesome.

The one singular highlight though was Bjork, headlining on Friday night. I didn't listen to much of her music before that, aside from Vespertine and Dancer in the Dark, which I love, but I wasn't a huge fan of her or anything. But I fell in love. Her voice is so beautiful, I have no words. It soars and it moves in a way that makes you feel each note. We were far back so I couldn't see her well but I could see her petite self move across the stage, and I was amazed at the sound that came out of her, she looked like a fairy or pixie but was so much more powerful than that. And she's so incredibly creative, all these strange sounds come together and you're surprised to find yourself immersed in them and loving them. Argh, I'm having that really frustrating moment of not doing something justice at all. Let's just say that if I had to choose fifty things that defined beauty for me, her music live would be one (fifty sounds like a lot, but it's not if you think about all the things you could name).

By the end of the each day, your lower back aches, there's dirt underneath your fingernails and dust in between your toes and blisters on the soles, your skin is a funky mixture of sweat and grass, your contacts feel like they have a little layer of fuzz atop them, and if you're me, your hair was messy to begin with. You feel like there's all this crap on you that you can't wait to shower off, but you're so happy because you've been filled up through your ears and feet and eyes with all this beautiful stuff.