#nonstop metropolis

[comixlessons]

[halosudne]

When I arrived in New York I was twenty-five: young enough to still believe in the prophetic power of certain songs and old enough to elope. I heard 'Piazza, New York Catcher' over and over again during my first winter in Harlem. I had been a Belle and Sebastian fan when I was in high school, and maybe I was still holding on to the last embers of my teenage enthusiasm for nerdy Scottish bands from the 1990s. The winter that I arrived in New York from Mexico I heard 'Piazza, New York Catcher' so many times and listened to it so intently that I somehow, maybe subconsciously, played part of its story out. That is how prophecies work. Even when you don't know exactly what a prophecy means, some deeper and darker strand of you feels compelled to enact it. I certainly didn't understand then, and don't now, what this song is really about. I guess it's a song about Mike Piazza, the New York Mets catcher, a song about choosing to leave one life for another, about sleeping in borrowed bedrooms, about being a kind of ghost in your own life, and about looking for the last rays of sunlight hitting rooftops in winter. For me it was a song about deciding to elope with someone when you're twenty-five and have just arrived in New York.  But good songs, like good books, are never really about anything. And sometimes, the minute we know what something is about, its radiance fades. Cities and relationships often suffer the same fortune. Maybe a key to saving things from their inevitable erosion through routine and repetition lies in knowing the lyrics by heart - as you might learn the names and order of the streets in a city by heart, or as you may come to perceive the many different faces your loved one has in a single day - but never being able to really decipher their meanings or predict the effect they will have on you at a given instant. The songs we like, as the cities and people we come to love, are always sung in a kind of foreign language.

Valeria Luiselli, from “Singing in the City” in Nonstop Metropolis