The Inner Condition

I like to think of myself as a music journalist. At least that’s what I try to tell people when I go out. Je suis un journaliste musical. The native Parisians tend to give me reproachful glares until I tell them I’m from New York City. I’ve come to the conclusion that my city is less of a tangible place and more of an idiosyncratic fantasy. Idolized. Consumed. Regurgitated. NYC becomes an illusion for all those lost souls with ambitions as bright as their eyes. Living in Paris, transplanting myself to a new and foreign metropolitan, has really put The City into perspective for me. When I return maybe I’ll be better equipped to devour the lucid pleasures and dangerous provocations it has to offer. But before my flight I was anxious to uproot myself from all the turbid, gray madness.

The skies of Berlin sustain an off-white hue of melancholy most days. On average, the country gets far less days of sunshine than the city of Seattle, if that puts things into perspective. But this morning I woke up, congested, dehydrated, still buzzed from a late night bump of ketamine, and saw faint blotches of blue against the pungent grayness. This is all the more significant considering my acute colorblindness, where shades of color merge to make them indecipherable. The friends I’m staying with left for class and I wrote an album review for Kavinksy’s OutRun. Shortly after I go outside with Josh from the first floor who I met the night before and smoke a spliff on the side of an old building. Dazed and confused, I could feel the warmth against my cheek before I fully understood what had happened. From out of the clouds, the sun emerged like a tidal wave of ecstasy from the heavens. The wind picked up as the sky fractured and gave way to an ocean of blue. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen such angry sunlight and such elated blue skies. Josh tells me there hasn’t been weather this nice in four or five weeks.

My friend Josh is a deadhead and has very niche taste in music. On one hand he’s a cult follower of the Berlin techno scene, most passionately with the minimalism genre, and he also loves Grateful Dead. I let him explain minimalism to me in our stoned excitement, but I don’t think I fully understood it. He was persistent on the fact that this kind of music should be experienced in a live setting, preferably on the use of hard drugs, and surrendered to. This I understood. It’s the same appeal I find in all live music. Sound becomes a living, breathing, amorphous entity that surrounds, envelopes and ravages you. Tonight should be a lot like that. With the skies open and clear, the city won’t feel so frigid and people will swarm the streets looking to drink and dance and feel something true. Tonight I will be one of those people.      

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