Guest
'American Coffee' by Jenny Hval is taken from new album 'Classic Objects', out now via 4AD. Listen to the album here: Lyrics: My mother came to the city at 21and had no choice but to drive to work. She said, “I cried in the car every day until I didn’t”. And when she had me, the midwife looked her in the eye and said: Poor baby, you’re so scared. I guess I was born anyway. What is a home but the place you’ll be dying? What is far away but places to lose yourself? Myself, I had the choice, I left for Northbridge, Fitzroy, Astoria, anywhere but home. I moved in with some nurses in Collingwood. They looked me in the eye and said: A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. * Who would I have been if I’d never gone there? Who is she who faces her fears? I panic behind the wheel, I have sworn to drive again this year, I was taught how but I never taught myself to believe, or to run, or cook, or care. All the normal things. I went away. I don’t know them. I wonder who I’d been if I never got to go get a fine arts degree and American coffee with irrelevant quotes from French philosophy. We’d meet in the climax of a clever sci-fi movie, but that would just be stupid. Instead I give you that time at the cinematheque. I was watching La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc while having a UTI. I stared into Jeanne’s face, suffering in black and white. I’m sure I saw her wink at I peed blood in the lobby bathroom. The blood colour seemed so insanely alive, too alive to be just mine, and I felt I crossed paths with a version of me. A concept, you could say, but not she who stayed behind - she who quit everything, music and identity, just left a little blood behind and a fever for me to share. There is no courthouse here and no window, no bricks are thrown, but underneath us the floor tiles wow and flutter. In this moment she has quit.
