Hello friends, how are you this week? Still doing a bit of fine-tuning here. I realized that Ten Things feels like a lot of things, so I’m going to stick with five instead. What do you think? If you have a moment, I’d love a bit of feedback from you.
How’s this going? Are there things I write about that you like more than others? And how about those links? Does anyone really need more curated links? Should I dispense with them entirely?
And, if you’re so inclined, maybe you might consider helping a sister out and forwarding this on to someone you think might like it, or even just hitting that little ♥️ down below.
It’s the little things, y’know? That’s all. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you.
Love, Heather
I step out onto the sidewalk in front of my building, pop in my earbuds, though they’re not the fancy ones, so first I have to spend a minute untangling them – how did they even get so knotted up in the time it took for me to walk downstairs? – and press play. The staccato piano, the cymbal taps. Harry's voice kicks in: "Golden, golden, golden / As I open my eyes." I step forward with a bounce and a lean, propelled as if for liftoff. I've always walked on the balls of my feet. Pranced, a teacher said once, performing an exaggerated imitation of my springy gait as I walked toward her across the parking lot-slash-school playground. I turn down the street, my hands loosing themselves from my pockets and I'm swinging the canvas shopping tote I've brought with me in time to the beat.
I'm listening to "Fine Line" again, like I do almost every day when I set out for a walk, all the way through its forty-six perfect minutes. I haven't tired of it one bit. I have a few different routes and I can tell you exactly where I'll be when the first strum of "Watermelon Sugar" hits. A few more steps and the synth kicks in–"Breathe me in / Breathe me out." By the time the horns arrive around 2:12, I'm in a full-on funky strut.
In his essay, On Believing, poet Hanif Abdurraqib writes that, "Wherever the desire for dance is born, there’s a moment when it spills out of the body..." This is it exactly, his uncanny way of describing the feeling I've had lately, this irrepressible desire to dance, like Greta Gerwig's Frances, as she leaps across the street and pirouettes into a crowded and indifferent sidewalk. It's an energy that can't be contained, to the point of overflowing. Pouring would be a deliberate act; spilling is an accident. When it happens, it's already too late.
I love to dance, I've always loved to dance. Or, at least I've always loved the idea of it. I dreamed the unrequited little girl dream of pink satin toe shoes and limbs trained into litheness like Degas' bronze sculptures. I joined every school musical theatre production, never landing a starring role, but happy nonetheless to bop around in my poodle skirt at the sockhop in "Grease," or float across the stage in Laurie's dream sequence in "Oklahoma!" The teacher who told me I pranced? She was the instructor for an informal 'interpretive dance' group I'd joined with the wishful thinking it might help thirteen year old me find my groove. (Reader, it did not help at all.)
No, I'm gawky and ungraceful, shy and and self-conscious. I'm the opposite of Elaine; she genuinely believes her herky-jerky thumb jabs look fantastic. Me? Even though I don't actually look so unhinged when I dance (you'd tell me, wouldn't you?), I’m generally convinced that I do. But it doesn't always stop me. I've spent my fair share of sweaty nights dancing myself clean in a roomful of strangers who coalesce into a single pulsing, glitter-covered hydra. I'll crank up the stereo when it's already way too loud, jumping up and down in a friends' living room, booty-shaking to Beyoncé. And watch out for my exuberant elbows if I'm anywhere near a chugga-chugga skanking beat.
"Walk through fire for you / Just let me adore you" and suddenly I'm doing a jazz step down the rue Lepic; a little swerve, a finger snap. I wonder if anyone notices. I can't stop thinking of that line from Abdurraqib's essay, but it occurs to me that it might be better suited for one of his others instead, the one On Breakups. There he says "[t]hat language is the instrument and voice is just the vehicle, like a speaker or an amplifier," which I think could easily be reframed as "the brain is the instrument, and the body is just the vehicle..." except I don't know if I believe that's true. My brain says don't dance in the streets, you'll look ridiculous, what will people think, but then the chorus kicks in and my arm snaps out from my side like a rubber band slingshot. The body has a mind of its own.
Here, too, in the same piece, he might even swap out the word 'heartbreak' for 'dance' without losing any meaning: "So much of heartbreak is an animal born from past desires. Not just the desires themselves, but the things those desires asked us to ignore."
My body has stored these past desires for so long – to be free, to be loose, to be seen, to be adored – that perhaps it can no longer bear the weight of what it’s been asked to ignore, and now springs are popping, little coils of tension boinging out from the gears. "In real life, the people who have the most fun are the people who just let themselves go," says a New York Times article about the trend of pandemic dance parties, from this time last year, when even after just one month of lockdown life we were already wound very, very tight.
Though he uses it to other ends, Abdurraqib makes an example of the video for LA sister-trio HAIM's song, "Want You Back." It's filmed in a single-take shot, by director Jake Schreier, "...while a fresh dawn trots over an abandoned Ventura Boulevard." He describes the scene:
"The shot begins with Danielle Haim, the middle Haim sister, leaning on a sign and looking longingly off into some distance. As she begins walking down the middle of the empty street, she is eventually flanked on each side by her two sisters. As the song hits its groove, so do the Haim sisters, each of them occasionally breaking out into a small dance move or two before falling back into step. The dance moves get more elaborate as the choruses pile on top of each other. While a choir of palm trees accumulate in the background, Danielle plays air drums before really committing to her moves, dipping her shoulders in and out of the morning air. Alana Haim, the youngest of the sisters, snaps dramatically, unfolding those snaps into some shimmying."
I click over from reading the essay to watch the video myself, synchronizing the sisters' movements to Abdurraqib's words. I see myself in them, walking through the world as if in my own music video, jolted into little electric shock twitches to the music only I can hear. A hip wiggle. A shoulder roll. A high-hat strike. My head bounces to the beat as I wait at the corner for the light to change. I used to hate walking with headphones, anxious about being caught unaware. But I love it now, feeling somehow even more in tune with the world, plugged into my own soundtrack and working my own moves into the choreography of everyday life. "Feeling good in my skin / I just keep on dancing." I make my way back up the hill to my apartment, and the record ends just as I put the key in my door.
Put on your red shoes and dance the blues…
1. Oddly specific is how I would describe pretty much every playlist I make, and it turns out I am not alone. There is, in fact, a whole Facebook group dedicated to making and sharing playlists with songs that cover a range of moods, such as “a misunderstood villain who is just struggling with past trauma.” I get that. Did I already mention I want to make a podcast about playlists as storytelling? Is that something you’d wanna listen to?
2. Dance Church is squarely in the category of “I want to go to there.” And also, Pony Sweat. Yes, I said Pony Sweat. You know you want to find out what it is.
3. Hanif Abdurraqib and Moments of Shared Witnessing: I’m ashamed to admit that I hadn’t heard of Abdurraqib until I listened to this episode of the On Being podcast. Then, in the serendipitous ways these things unfold, I found myself the very next day pulling his latest book, A Little Devil in America, down from the shelf at Shakespeare and Company. The day after that, losing myself in his Notes on Pop essays in The Paris Review, two of which are featured in my essay above. And then, in a newsletter I’ve just discovered, a reference to his poetry. Now it’s your turn to pass it on.
4. Hot Priest does a hot dance in the BBC’s The Pursuit of Love. I won’t lie. I spend a decent chunk of yesterday watching this clip.
5. I’ll leave you with this, only the best worst music video of all time: David Bowie and Mick Jagger, “Dancing in the Streets,” which has the very unfortunate effect of making me not really want to keep dancing in the streets so much anymore.
You are so prolific! Links are fine! 3 things could even be enough!
Anyway... non sequitur... read this recently, not that I do it much but...
“First you decide how you want it to be, and then you see to it that it turns out that way”!
“It” being a desire or vision for a role, a responsibility, a relationship, a job, or a solution to a problem or challenge etc.
See... non sequitur!