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Yesterday, early evening, the sun low but brilliant in the sky, I picked up Banana Yoshimoto's novella Kitchen and began to read it on the westbound, city-bound train, snaking below and then above the Town while taking in language that I'd last encountered over a decade ago. I think, though I might be wrong (my memory is...let's say "tricky"), that I first encountered Kitchen in a friend's book stack. Either Lisa or Diane, leaning Lisa, which means it was probably Diane but my heart (not my memory) says Lisa.
All I recall about that initial reading was that I liked the design of the standard English translation cover, and was struck by the name Banana. I still like the cover and am struck by her name—but now that I'm reading as a Real Adult, someone who (unlike the me from a decade ago) seriously works with language, it hits different. I didn't remember anything about the plot, which is tenderly compassionate about something that a lot of modern, more "progressive" writers still can't pull off, and on a sentence level, the English translation by Megan Backus makes me feel like a star-shaped leaf (perhaps even the tree star from The Land Before Time) swaying with a sighing motion as gravity rocks it, gently all the way, to a ground collaged with its fallen, decaying compatriots.
I sent this photo to Lisa as the train surfaced for West Oakland station. Golden hour, #aesthetic-ized, a view that begged to become a snapshot. My follow-up text was: "siri play star by mitski."
Every time I listen to Mitski I think about a few things in rote succession, as though they're part of my boot-up sequence for Mitski.exe. 1: I first learned about her from this Stereogum blog post (written by a now-friend's friend), which either my little sister or my not-little sister, little sister sent me. (I'm leaning toward Steff.) 2: I have a sheet of photobooth photos with her, from an early (but really, mid-career) show of hers in Los Angeles, up on my fridge. (The last time my parents visited me, my mother peered at that photo and murmured, "Do I know her?") 3: Sometimes, when I'm going through my contacts to call someone I don't normally communicate with, I'll marvel at the numbers I've amassed over the years. One of those is what was Mitski's personal number, back from 2015 when I interviewed her for Hyphen Magazine after she declined to be interviewed for Noisey, which is affiliated with Vice. Noisey would've paid me; Hyphen didn't. But with that piece, I became not just a music writer but a true blue music journalist and thus, she's embedded forever as a time stamp in my writing journey: B.M. and A.M.
Back then, Mitski was, to me, a saint of some kind, someone people who look superficially like me had long longed to see. When I went to her and Japanese Breakfast and Jay Som's 2016 triple bill show at the Echoplex, I wrote of the show:
You can feel the desperation and the ecstasy of representation, the Real kind, in each impassioned sentence, that helpless, hopeful cadence of devotion. I wrote that piece in the same fugue-ish state that I'm writing through right now.
Even though I now regard Mitski fully as a person, even as a person who has the petty, thorny backstory that most artists have, I also have this Thing with her, a preciousness that I do my best to temper—since I acutely know that the not-tempering of it brings many artists a lot of grief—but which I tend with a small fan within the arc of my ribs, trying to keep the flames from escaping through the slats of bone. About half an hour ago, my partner came up to me, ostensibly to make small talk, the little knitting that keeps a romance burning after almost ten years. All I had to say was, "I'm listening to the new Mitski album for the first time all the way through," and he made a face of understanding and left me alone :)
These days, I generally don't listen to Mitski albums all the way through. I can handle single tracks; one of my playlist "tricks" is putting an emotionally annihilative Mitski song back to back with either something aggressively joyful like Carly Rae Jepsen's "Cut to the Feeling" or with something equally annihilative like Water From My Eyes's "When You're Around." But recently, I've gotten even more guarded about her new music releases, putting off listening to new singles as though they're chores or, perhaps more accurately, as though they're the last scraps of something I'm addicted to, stringing myself along until the hunger becomes unbearable.
I tell myself, Wait. It used to be, Wait, you want to savor this. Wait, you know you're going to be contemplative afterward, with a nostalgia bellyache. Now it's more like, Wait, you know she's not just for you, not that she ever was, and people will be talking about her as though she's human after all. Wait, disappointment might be worse than waiting. Wait, the knot you contort yourself into over her music is too much like second nature, and no one is handing out ribbons for being someone's number one fan, which you aren't, anyway.
If I hadn't gotten the PR preview stream for The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, and hadn't begun reading Kitchen the day before, I probably wouldn't have listened to the album until days, if not weeks, from now. As homework, as homily, as heartbreak cupped within an unbroken bud that, like a loose flower tea, would blossom completely when suspended and immersed in my liquid heart. Now I'm on my third listen, and everything I outlined above remains true. I scrapped an earlier line about always feeling like I have to cry, listening to her; now I type like a fool with tears in my eyes as the strings swell on "Heaven."
The Land has a lengthy artistic statement/bio about love and hope and humanity and divine compromise; Buddha's tea with Mara is invoked, as is Samuel Beckett, which only made me think about the Beckett poem that's tattooed on my back. It was my first, done at the Body Electric in Los Angeles when I was 19. In another tab, I have an email drafted for an inquiry with an Oakland tattoo artist, for something that might take up my entire back as a canvas—except, of course, for the Beckett ink.
It's a curse, I would say almost but no, no almost. I study Mitski's body of work and highlight the parts that bring me back into myself until I realize that I've cut up her texts and passed them off as work of my own, again. The songs molt as they loop, and I pick up the shed skin and eat it to make it part of me. There is no casual listening, only my body sinking. I have better things to do right this moment, and instead I'm figuring out how to incorporate the concept of scrying to this text.
Okay, let's try this: I scry for future totems in Mitski's music. In Laurel Hell, I only found them in "Working for the Knife," which came out when I was still 29. In The Land, they're everywhere. I have a PDF of all the lyrics open in another tab and I thought about screenshotting vignettes to include here, but what's the point? The people who get it, who exist beyond me!, will get it.
My favorite song on The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is currently "The Deal" (the chaotic ending reminds me of "Happy"...), but my favorite early single is "Star." This past spring, I went to a residency and worked and slept in Star Studio. There are no coincidences if you pay attention. Okay, my love is calling for me upstairs. Thanks for "listening." Stay tuned...!
🎶 xoxo Lio
P.S. One gripe... During Be the Cowboy era interviews, Mitski said that she was consciously keeping her songs short to capitulate to shortening listener attention spans. Okay, but imagine her digging into a song the way say, Weyes Blood or Japanese Breakfast or like Slowdive can/does... Just saying!
♬ﾟ࿐⋆｡♪₊˚. ݁₊ ⊹ *:･ﾟ. ݁