Ding Dong, Love is Calling!
I am not incredibly smart, and to say so is freeing.
I was one of the children pulled out of my regular scheduled schooling to participate in a gifted program with a goofy, whimsical name (why are they always some convoluted acronym that spells out MAGE or WINGS or QUEST. Is this Dungeons and Dragons or elementary school?) every few weeks because I showed some sort of intellectual promise. In these programs, I learned about rocks, Martin Van Buren, and how to make pop-up cards - I have retained the latter, thank you very much.
I spent most of these class periods anxious out of my mind that I was in the wrong place, waiting for the demand to prove my place as “gifted and talented.” I was in these programs around the same time I had a real issue with pissing myself (see: anxiety), so gifted? Check. Talented? Check. Anyway, that little genius grew up into someone who types things like this into her supercomputer cellphone:
I feel like I strategically say that I’m not so smart to preface discussions of art so that if I make an outlandish claim that no one agrees with, I can fall back on not knowing anything about the entire subject in the first place. I’m just a dumb idiot! Maybe it’s a commentary on living in a surveillance state or maybe it’s just lots of mesh tacked up on a wall! Don’t ask me!
A friend and I recently saw Yayoi Kusama’s: LOVE IS CALLING, a mirrored infinity room, full of soft (even though I SWEAR I did not touch them) dot-covered tentacles that pulse with changing neon colors. When you enter the room, you enter an illusion as nimble as your own imagination. You know that you are in a small box inside an art museum, but what you see is an incredibly weird field of forever, while Kusama reads a poem in Japanese. I barely felt I could get my bearings about what I was experiencing before it was already a memory - my friend and I circling around the space, laughing, taking pictures, completely dazed.
The experience is timed and literally one-minute long - an exit door clicks itself open abruptly the moment you feel like you could spend all day there, marveling. Where there was once infinity, there is a rectangle of the world, asking you to rejoin it.
While we waited in line, I joked that it would be a really good, disturbing short story if, because we never really noticed anyone come back out, they just killed everyone as they exited and dumped their bodies down a chute. Why are short stories almost always disturbing? Have you ever read “The End of Firpo In The World” by George Saunders? It’s what I think of when I think of short stories. It’s about a kid who is seeking revenge against his bullies and then gets hit by a car and dies. I haven’t been able to write fiction since I was a gifted kid.
What I realized upon exiting, is that most people walk directly up to the wall next to the exhibit to read the English translation of the poem read - the title of which translates to, “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears.” Staring at the wall after trying to make sense of my all too quick encounter with the space tentacles, these lines begged for my attention, eyes darting back over them again & again & again:
Over many long years, with art as a weapon
I have treaded the path in search of love
As silly tiny brainless people, we brace ourselves (up against living) in so many ways, art is one - humor, mystery, mindfulness, nature, the list goes on... We walk the same paths, looking for the same things.
I wish I had something smart to say about how this connects to what’s inside the infinity room, but I don’t. I just know that sometimes love calls, and sometimes we are dumb enough to answer.
Speaking of, I saw The Worst Person in the World and left feeling unsure. When the credits rolled and Art Garfunkel sang “Waters of March” (It’s the mud! It’s the mud! - a truly excellent needle drop), I turned to my friend Maddie and said that I knew I’d think about the film for a long time, but couldn’t say for sure if I liked it. I sat on the train, cold fingers scrolling frantically through online reviews, and walked home thinking about how relationships leave greasy fingerprints all over us.
The Norwegian film follows Julie (played by superstar shapeshifter - I swear her face looked different all the time - Renate Reinsve), a 30-year-old woman who changes her mind a lot, about her career, passions, and you guessed it, loves.
While the character feels mostly like a middle-aged man’s idea of a young woman (because she is) it tugs at something in the gut. Something about loneliness. Something about things not going to plan. Something about alternative, Sliding Doors-esque realities. Julie stumbles through her life and two significant relationships, while a tragicomic hand controls the ebb and flow of “right/wrong place, right/wrong time.” The movie knows that around every joyful corner, there is heartbreak, loss, and sorrow lurking. It asks, as many movies do, if it’s all worth it. The call rings, we answer, but what do we say?
A scene that has stuck itself to the walls of my brain like a very resilient post-it note is one where Julie stops the world with a flip of a light switch, leaving her boyfriend mid-coffee pour, and runs through the streets of Oslo to spend an uninterrupted day with someone else she finds herself enamored with. Everyone in the city freezes - while crossing the street, riding a motorcycle, entering the coffee shop - it’s reminiscent of an old-school musical, one that grandly asks you to suspend your disbelief. It asks you to wonder for yourself, what would you do if you had the power to stop time?
The most delightful thing about the scene, I think, is that you understand its point the moment it begins and can fully relax into the indulgence of love forcing time to stand still - the scene is its own Kusama infinity room. Ding dong, love is calling!
The final thread in this hard-to-follow, half-baked rambling about the elusive beast of love is Pom Pom Squad. The indie grunge band put out my favorite record in 2021, Death of a Cheerleader, and I went to see them open for Fenne Lily and Illuminati Hotties last week in Cambridge. My friends and I laced up our best stomping boots and braved a snowstorm to scream along to songs like “Lux” - named after The Virgin Suicides character - with lyrics like, “I’ll show everybody/telling me that ‘life goes on’/meet me tonight in the garage.”
The record itself burns crimson red, equal parts carnal and tender, tearing through songs about love, fury, and growing into your skin, scored with a dreamscape vibraphone and grunge guitars.
Very early into their set, they performed “Drunk Voicemail” - a devastating song that highlights the push-and-pull form love often takes. Lead singer Mia Berrin confides:
I wanna tell you everything that makes me cry
Wanna tell you everything that keeps me up at night
Wanna tell you that I hate you, but I don't know how
When the truth is that I love you more than anyone else
Raise your hand if you’ve unfortunately felt that. Both of my hands are dramatically above my head reaching for God if that makes you feel any better.
Because of the concert’s proximity to my viewing of The Worst Person in The World (and by extension, LOVE IS CALLING), I was reminded of a scene in the film where Julie is breaking up with her long-term boyfriend, Aksel, over the course of an entire day. She says very clearly, “I do love you,” and less than a beat later, “And I don’t love you.” The intense tightrope, the understanding of two conflicting truths at once.
Death of a Cheerleader has lyrics like, “I learn the same thing over and over again” and the encantation of “Crimson and clover, over and over” on their cover of the oft-covered song by Tommy James and The Shondells. There is an endlessness that carves its way onto the record, over and over, endlessness not dissimilar to … drumroll … Kusama’s infinity room. Instead of glowing, polka-dotted tentacles, there is a sense of longing, of struggling to let go, of digging your nails into what and who you love. Pom Pom Squad is fearless in its romance and desperation. Their music is dotted with a line of sweat and a sloppy lipstick kiss. Like Kusama, like Julie, they have treaded the path in search of love.
A remix of that Bible verse about love that people quote all the time:
Where there is love, there is some kind of forever. The forever goes by in a museum attendant’s minute. Love stops time. Love goes over and over and over. Love is a mirrored room full of neon tentacles. Love is a Norwegian movie with questionable characters knotted into each other’s lives. Love is a grunge frontwoman in cherry red platform boots, rolling around on a stage sick with the stuff.
May we all be foolish (or even gifted & talented) enough to choose it when we can.
Big love,
kaylasomething
I really enjoyed the threads of this post and your poem at the end.