Bathroom mirrors
This evening I was in one of the 97 male toilets that UQ St Lucia possesses, attempting to make myself respectable for the fascinating psychology lecture about to start. UQ toilets are wonderfully ancient horrors of porcelain and not-quite-stainless steel. Each one is different - some have movie-theatre troughs, some have urinal bowls. Others have what I can only describe as a half-cylinder of ceramic US-military-defence of your privacy in proper 1950s homophobic fashion.
It’s a pleasant change from going on 5 years of depressingly sameish office toilets, all grey 35cm-from-the-ground stalls with the only variety lent by the toilet paper dispenser, whether the hand dryer is one of those ones with the sign on it that became so popular in certain circles, or which extremely implausible colour the soap is.
Transcontinental
I discovered Vienna Teng through a piece of hers called Gravity, featured as the soundtrack to a well-executed if slightly melodramatic AMV of The Place Promised in Our Early Days, a film created by the current rising star of Japanese animation, Makoto Shinkai. I listened to Gravity a number of times, hearing the odd chord, a stray line of lyric, and knowing that these were really quite something I could listen to. Unfortunately, they were utterly lost in the trap of artificial intensity that so many apparently soulful songs tumble into.
Some months later, I happened upon her latest album, Dreaming Through the Noise, and commuted to it for a week straight. The style of the music is as eclectic as a genre that describes itself as ’singer-songwriter’ can be, and there are two pieces in particular that fit my mood of an evening pressed up against the glass on a crowded, silent train.
Vienna Teng - Transcontinental, 1:30 A.M.
wait
don’t let this line go slack
don’t go alone into the cold
wait
don’t give up on this yet
I know that there’s more you haven’t told
wait my love, just one more thought
wait my love, I haven’t got time in my life
to watch you drift out to seaso please
wait
don’t let this line go slack
I want to bring you back to where I know you
wait
don’t give up on this yet
I just want you to let you let me hold youwait my love, just one more thought
wait my love, I haven’t got time in my life
to watch you drift away
but I’ve all kinds of time if you’ll stayI know we’re transcontinental, 1:30 a.m.
and there’s not even a wire
just a whispering in air
I know we’re transcontinental, 1:30 a.m.
but I’m here
What’s she asking for? The futile extension of an inevitably-doomed long-distance relationship? I can see the partner fielding a range of responses: faux resoluteness, circular pleading, distancing - it works with his clients but they’re rational and tend to do what they’re told if they see the logic behind it. She thinks she understands but wonders if perhaps she just hasn’t hit on the right trigger, revealing her true lack of grasp of the situation. She tells him, “I know we’re transcontinental”. His reply is whispered, she doesn’t need to hear it, she knows the sort of thing he’d say, all calm, all rational, too rational: “Yes, we are.” Her final plea: “But I’m here.”