SOUNDTRACK: ARLO PARKS-Tiny Desk Concert #80 (September 15, 2020).
I had never heard of Arlo Parks before this set and then today Spotify recommended her album to me. How about that.
Arlo Parks was born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho in London.
She began writing poetry and songs because (according to her short bio) she spent her high school days “feeling like that Black kid in school who couldn’t dance for s***, listening to too much emo music and crushing on the girl in Spanish class.”
Accompanied by a guitar from her home in London, Parks opens with her latest single, “Hurt”, followed by the three songs that introduced her to the world and remind us that we really aren’t alone.
All of her songs sound similar in style–very gentle guitar and her soft, eloquent vocals.
“Hurt” is filled with nice details like
Charlie melts into his mattress
Watching Twin Peaks on his ones
Then his fingers find a bottle
When he starts to miss his mum
There’s a nice spoken word part–she has a lovely singing voice, but I enjoyed hearing her speaking voice as well.
It’s funny to hear a 19 year-old talk about introspection and reading through her “old journals.” Especially since the next song, “Cola” is the first song she ever put out–way back in November 2018.
Playing “Cola” makes her reflect on the journey she;s had and what’s next to come. It’s another pretty, gentle song with lots of specific details.
“Eugene” explores blurring the lines between romance and friendship. It’s one of her favorite songs that she’s written. It’s got a simple but really engaging guitar melody.
I had a dream we kissed
And it was all amethyst
The underpart of your eyes was violet
You hung a cigarette between your purple lips
We’ve been best buds since thirteen
I hold head back when you’re too lean
I hold the Taco Bell and you cried over Eugene
“Black Dog” is one of the most emotional songs she’s written. It’s about mental health and has gotten a very string response from people. Her voice is so tender, so delicate. It’s quite lovely.
[READ: September 30, 2019] Personae
I really enjoyed De La Pava’s first and third books but somehow I missed this one, which is quite unlike the other two. It is several hundred pages shorter and has far less of a narrative. While the other books are chock full of details, this one feels like he was deliberately leaving things out.
Part 1 is called Our Heroine and begins with Detective Helen Tame. She is the author of this report: “this Department is obsessed with reports and I am not; if I had to cop to any obsession it would be with the Truth.”
She is amusingly no nonsense. When addressing a police officer on the case she says:
“You can go now,” I add, but he hesitates. “That means leave in Etiquette.”
She is writing this report because she has found a dead body–a bloody dead body. “He is more than century old; was.” The victim an 111-year-old Colombian writer named Antonio Arce.
She observes all of the details in the apartment–good forensic studying. There are also some wonderful details about her in the way she writes.
There are steps you can take to stand in plain view without being seen, just as you can follow someone quite closely without them noticing, provided you understand the behavior of sound waves and tale care to maintain proper angles*
*The footnote reads:
This is fact, not opinion. For a more extended discussion of the applicable phenomena non see, if even possible, Dr. Helen Tame’s article “Sound Without Fury: Soundwave Behavior and Surreptitious Audition” in issue three of the now-defunct Science Faction Magazine.
While she is there, a woman and a girl enter the house and Tame remains unobserved. The couple have a white box which they appear to have picked up in the bedroom although Tame saw no evidence of the box when she was in the bedroom. Nor did she see them picking it up. As they leave, they deposit it near the front door.
Tame picks up the box and opens it. Inside there are lots and lots of notebooks. Hours (or maybe days) later, she has read everything.
Part II is called 1st of 3 Excerpts of Dr Helen Tame’s Introduction to Her Article “Bach, Gould, and Aconspiratorial Silence.” The footnote explains that Helen Tame had an extraordinary musical career before abruptly giving it up and becoming a detective.
Part III is called In Which Painstakingly Restored Aphorisms Are Aired after Dormant Decades
She explains that most of what follows comes from the aged marble notebook found in the box. The manuscript was dated 1970 (sadly in pencil).
She prints as much as she can decipher–mostly it is fragmentary bits of fiction, poetry and essays.
Part IV is called An Octogenarian Beginner Begins after Wondering if Beginner’s Luck Even Applies.
This chapter is a longer work form the deceased entitled “The Ocean,” the body of which was written in the margins of a ravaged TV Guide.
Part V is called 2nd of 3 Excerpts of Dr Helen Tame’s Introduction to Her Article “Bach, Gould, and Aconspiratorial Silence.” It details the work of Bach and the birth of Gould
Then comes the longest part of the Book Chapter VI: Players at Play on a Stage that is the World.
This is a play that is surreal and Sartreian.
The dramatis personae are
- CLARISSA a person
- NESTOR another person
- CHARLES yet another person
- LUDWIG a fourth person
- LINDA the same person
- ADAM the first person plural
- NOT-ADAM the last person singular.
Four people are in a clinical room with five beds. One is moaning the others are staring. A stranger enters and one of them says
“What’s that? Call you Adam?”
“I didn’t say that.”
He insists his name is not Adam but he is called that for the rest of the play. The play is full of twisted wordplay and a kind of Waiting for Godot nothingness.
A sample of dialogue (with no characters given because it’s irrelevant)
So you guys thought Charles could speak.
No.
Not in a million years.
…yet somehow chose not to utter a solitary syllable in the many months…
Years
Decades
..he’s been here?
He’s an enigma
Enigmatic, a mystery
Mysterious, a riddle
ridiculous subject to ridicule
[Charles]: I’m right here I can hear you and it hasn’t been that long.
Wait, what do you mean by that?
[Charles]: I haven’t been here that long, that meaning.
So how long?
[Charles]: Feel like I just got here, really
You say feels like but you recognize that you’ve been here a while, longer than any of us, right?
No I’ve been here the longest.
What are you talking about. I was here when you arrived. I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was yesterday.
That’s right it was You just got here and already with the bossing everyone around
I remember when Charlie arrived and it w as a long time ago.
Years.
Eons
Chuck has always been here and always will.
and that’s just the start. The play lasts for eighty-three pages of existential crisis. In the end there is a violent confrontation and characters die.
Chapter VII is Another Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
This chapter actually pushes the Helen Tame story forward as her supervisors wonder why she is so sure that this centenarian didn’t die of natural causes. He was over 100 after all. It’s her hunch and Tame has notoriously excellent hunches
Chapter VIII is the Final Excerpts of Dr Helen Tame’s “Introduction to Her Article Bach, Gould, and Aconspiratorial Silence.”
Chapter IX is called Whats Left to Echo, and opens with this
Ed. Note: After much debate and internal hand-wringing we have decided, those of us who didn’t resign from unpaid positions in protest to publish (with one minor emendation) the following.
The debate is not that the person is dead but about the manner in which the obituary was written–they debated putting this obituary in the Arts section
Antonio Arce, 111, Man of Letters.
It runs some seven pages and is a scintillating tale. It is followed by Helen Tame’s own Obituary from March 12 2011
The final chapter is X: How Some Things Can Function As A Postscript Without Intent.
Each of these fragments is numbered and it is the story of a Man who seeks vengeance on his murdered daughter. And also a romance between a woman and a man who makes amazing Cuban sandwiches before they were a thing in the city.
So, there’s a lot going on in this small book. Not all of it seems related. I imagine if you really wanted to find connections, they are there, but it might be asking too much of a casual reader. The thing about De La Pava is that his sentences are wonderful. And in this case, each section is great. It’s just trying to puzzle them together that is such a headache.
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