Comfort
Brrrrrrrrrr!
It’s not just the makings of compelling journalism. Brrrrrrrrrr is a Northeastern mandate, a slightly pained, but also wistfully melodic and altruistic nod that we’ve made it through yet another year.
Shiver, shake, jingle ba’dingle and sugar-spice. Brrrrrrrrrr is the aesthetic of a time and place, a well-intentioned performance and social current propelling us through the final stretch of exhausting Gregorian time.
And it all makes me feel anxious!
I feel silly and somehow wrong, actually bad at accumulating coziness, wool, and sentiment in this traditional and transitional period between autumn and winter.
Why? Idk and idc, because looking too deeply into the care of this matter is an additional existential rabbit hole I do not need at the end of 2021.
Right now I’m mainly trying to distinguish between this marketed coziness and what I find actually brings me emotional and physical comfort. Not just during these roughly four weeks, but always.
Is it soft? Is it smooth? Is it fanged or gummy and ingested through a straw?
I explore all this and more in the COMFORT episode of HTFHTS!
Episode 2: Comfort of HTFHTS is archived here on Mixcloud. Listen to it! I sing a Nat[alie] [King] Cole classic!
For the playlist version without my radio commentary and crooning, check out this thing:
Before I get into it, something tragic happened in between selecting the music for this episode and airing it. “Baroun Barouneh,” a Persian folk song sung by Pari Zangeneh, and without any exaggeration, the prettiest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, lost its streaming rights.
I want to feature Pari up front here and now. If you listen to only one song on this mix, please let it be this one.
Something or several things in Baroun Barouneh - the twinkly keys! the bright strumming! the soaring harmonies! - trigger an ASMR-like reaction in my body that I can only describe as comfort.
A ticklish feeling vibrates at the base of my neck and creeps up into my scalp, diffusing as I breathe in and out and projecting warming light beams through the top of my skull down through the tip of my toes. When I close my eyes and listen to this song with headphones on, I feel the deepest level of belonging I have ever felt.
One genre that seems to always bring me a similar sense of comfort is shoegaze. The interplay between its characteristic feedback, white noise, and extreme volumes, with ethereal and often indecipherable vocals/lyrics (Airiel, “Firefly”) feels extremely relatable to how I think about and process … maybe everything?
Overwhelmingly loudly, with a receptivity that sometimes is so strong in certain places or with particular senses that it obscures or altogether “turns off” other parts of my body or perception. It’s a slow and meandering fast-track to floating, a sensual thrashing cradled in what to me feels like overarching acceptance and gentleness.
Emotional familiarity is key. If it emotionally resonates, it’s comforting. That can be in any direction, be it “positive” or “negative” - though feelings are of course neither/nor. But I want to get to another point.
I LOVE DOGS!
All of them. Squirming quadrupedal babies, ancient drooling gods, garbage-eating philanthropists! Dogs are the truest keepers of my heart.
When I started compiling songs around Comfort, I knew I had to have something dedicated to them. I saw the poetic words “I Wanna Keep Yr Dog,” referential ofc to The Stooges’ iconic track by almost the same name (and imho one of the sexiest songs of all time), and knew I’d found it.
illuminati hotties “I Wanna Keep Your Dog” delivers a completely different spin on intent as well as a playful final verdict to the spiciest, speciesist childhood debate - Dogs Rule, Humans Drool 😜
LMFAO and just kidding, I love people as well. Really! It’s just that they aren’t unequivocally comforting, like dogs tend to be for me. In fact, some people are pure nasty ass! So sue me!
A last thing before I take off for twenty twenty two. (What? 😜 How? 😜)
I’m currently annoyed at myself for claiming that familiarity equals comfort. There’s not a 100% correlation, but even more than that, I tend to feel an even greater sense of comfort - like, blow-me-away level - from things I cannot trace back to my own experience.
I like to tell the story that I’d never heard a shred of music until 2006, when, at a friend’s recommendation and with my new-ish driver’s license, I attended my first concert alone in a smaller DIY Baltimore club. To my great fortune, the band was Deerhoof, and Deerhoof put on a show very much like this one:
Before attending Ottobar that evening, I simply didn’t know music could be like this. I had no equivalent experience, of feeling such immediate love and obsession for something while being so overwhelmingly confused by it.
I didn’t know it until I did.
And then it kept happening. And happening, and happening and happening.
The shock of newness made SO MUCH music boring in comparison, but it also made stumbling across instances of blow-me-awayness happen with much greater frequency and oomph.
And when I’m hit with it, the disbelief that something like this could exist but does, and that it took people with ideas and feelings to make it so, I become overwhelmed with a warm, flooding comfort.
It’s a teen awaking I have not that infrequently - I remember I don’t know everything and that I haven’t seen or heard it all. Not the disappointment, the ugly, nor the breathtaking and beautiful.
This reminds me of a concept known as the “four-minute barrier.” Basically, runners dating back to the late 1800s vigorously trained and competed to break the four-minute mile, a marker previously believed to be impossible by scientists and doctors.
Runners ran and ran (something I cannot relate to), and runners failed and failed (more relatable).
Then in 1954, someone didn’t fail. That year, Roger Bannister ran the mile in three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths of a second. The following year, three other runners broke the four-minute mile in just a single race.
More than 1,400 have since broken the record, with four minutes now serving as a standard for professional middle-distance runners.
Some things in this life just are until they aren’t. Other things just aren’t until they are. Still, some are very much so until they are not even a little bit at all, only and up until they are very much so again.
And those are just all from my perspective. Anyone could take my first proposition and say “oh no they aren’t and will never be!”
Nothing’s permanent. Things that I’ve felt before as comforting are now painful to me, and vise versa.
There’s a LOT of shit out there. A lotta, lotta shit. Mounds and heaps of shit! The good, bad, and the ugly.
I don’t know what it all has in store for any one of us, but I do keep plowing through it as it were otherwise linear, with seasonal Brrrrrrrrrrs! and everything, until my higher-conscience taps in and laughs -
“BS, ya silly billy!”
That’s comforting :)
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