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The video begins with a tracking shot of dense trees with shades of tropical and forest green. There is a road sign, fifteen miles-per-hour, and maybe the slow speed is something that allows us to connect to the roads that have been rained on earlier.

There are cut-ins of lists and the holding onto them. B Sides. He meditates with the written notes on a chair, surrounded by wood frame windows and the quiet-moving, morning sun. It’s a mid shot without any movement, except for the wild flowers outside the edge of the window.

The camera tilts from a middle of waves to a single wave that crashes along the shore, then back to the room where the camera pans to show him, who before was still, now moving and raising his toes up from the floor.

There is a second tracking shot that is slower than the first. A narrow gap between the dense trees reveals a foggy lake with its misty, mossy gray evening setting in. The room is now dim and the members take a break from individual recordings. A pile of books sit on top the lists and the morning’s notes.

After a busy night, morning comes against the wood frames and a new, blank page is set. The camera is blinded by reflections from tiny dust which show up as little, red hexagons.

[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/BasiaBulat_TheShore.mp3" text="Basia Bulat - The Shore"]

A line from the book I was reading, on page 60 asked, “Could he remember them all?” I imagined passengers as sea creatures.

There was a sombre fisherwoman with black coral skin. She is far away from where she wants to be. He stands beside her with fists closed like large rocks. All the seats are taken. Hands reach up for train bars. Fingers lift, stretch and rotate like anemone. She motions the daily happenings by waving her hands like fins. A woman coils a long, magenta scarf around her neck and she looks like a psychedelic goby.

I thought about the sombre woman and also of these two other women that slept so peacefully. It must be the thought of going home. Outside the sky was a shadowy blue. You had to sing it in your mind and walk to its beat.

[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/BrendanCanning_DontPullTheStrings.mp3" text="Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning - Don't Pull The Strings"]

They sit and survey from the back before his poetry reading. He is a small man, a senior statesman and not yet a national treasure. She laughs. Her hair is fine, shoulder-length and silver. She wears a light leather jacket and turquoise earrings, shaped like arrowheads.

Before he begins and here’s the sweet part, she calls to him twice because he is hard of hearing. “David, David”. She asks him, “David, where do you want me?” She is beautiful and her eyes are like upside down crescent moons or canoes.

He reads poem after poem from Be Calm, Honey and follows each poem with a sigh and a pleased, “yep”. A few loud girls talk and laugh outside the room. She gets up, he continues reading, and then silence, she comes back inside, sees me waiting with my eyes for her to come back in. She sits back down and he continues to read, “I’ve never met a soul littler than mine”. She laughs and just in time.

Some of his poems refer to a friend, “Cloud”. Is it her, I wonder. “Never ride your bike with your mouth open”, he reads, “I swallowed a dragonfly that day”. Everyone laughs, but her laugh is the loudest.

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LORD of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit;

I recently added Shakespeare’s Sonnets to my collection and 26 was love at first sound. The soft combination of vowel and consonant sound in the word, ‘vassalage’ resonates still. The word is so full that it spills onto the next line, subjected to the idea of ‘duty’ and where the poet himself firmly joins the words as if they’re ‘strongly knit’.

By the time you get to the next line, ‘To thee I send this written ambassage’, one is ambushed again with sound. ‘Ambassage’, which can both mean a message or an overture, suggests the poet’s duty to not only show the written word but also their sound composition.

Fredrik Wenzel takes The xx song “VCR” and knits it with the fictive realities of two teenagers. The song starts, “you used to have all the answers and you, you still have them too”. It’s inner discourse; the kind of things you’d think only to yourself or confess to a friend.

And we, we live half in the day time
And we, we live half at night

The light flickers on and off. The image of light recurs again and again. Paint on walls crack creating long-lined crevices. He lights a fire and she writes the words on the wall. The chandelier shakes and the wallpaper is torn. It’s a desolate tunnel or empty rooms. They fill it with echoes of angst, ruminations and of course, love.

But you, you just know, you just do

There are things we can’t understand and friendship is about mutual understanding. The girl peers through as if she can see past everything. And when Oliver sings, “When I find myself by the sea” the teenage boy stares bewilderingly at a wall. He sings, When I go out to the pier, I’m gonna dive and have no fear as if to say “I’m not scared to tell you anything”. She illuminates him with a lamp until they’re wrapped up in color.

The trains arrive with a force and the people that watch this for the first time are frightened. They run away because they think they’re about to be hit by the moving pictures. They are met by real life people on-screen, who stare into the camera. The people watching can’t tell reality from unreality. There is no real focus. It is one shot. The train halts and the people come and go.

[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/Phoenix_Countdown_IvanBeckRemix.mp3" text="Phoenix - Countdown (Ivan Beck Remix)"]

Yesterday, I rode the train and walked along powdery paths listening to “Countdown” by Phoenix. The song is a remix version. I also remembered this old post, where I attached the song to a photo by canovix. Then I thought about the green and black patterned sweater I kept seeing at the thrift store. So that’s what it reminds me of.

Countdown unless you’re juvenile let’s go

Well, isn’t it a contradiction? The young consciously countdown for a race, dismissal from the last day of school or a dance tied to that ideal first kiss. The taste of bubblegum. But the juvenile is excluded. The countdown are for those who are not juvenile; for those who unconsciously countdown for an event, an end, a deadline.

God bless your miss somewhere

I love this line. It is hamartia, the missing the mark and the approving of it because we are or at least we still assume we are juvenile whenever we make an error. The juvenile that’s both True and everlasting and Cruel and everlasting; the juvenile time we all want to last.

My worthy Lord, I pray you wonder not
To see your woodman shoot so oft awry,
Nor that he stands amazed like a sot,
And lets the harmless deer (unhurt go by).
-George Gascoigne, “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship”

The remix version wraps the song in the sound of an organ; sometimes a liturgical instrument. Ask forgiveness you know somewhere. The somewhere I like to tie to the big sun. The big sun which is sometimes tied to god, freedom, the everlasting or fertility. Call it God, Helios or Hyperion and his solar steeds.

Come – let us hither drive
And facrifice to the Immortal Pow’rs
The beft of all the oxen of the Sun,
Refolving thus – that foon as we fhall reach
Our native Ithaca, we will erect
To bright Hyperion an illuftrious fane,
Which with magnificent and num’rous gifts
We will enrich.

It is a countdown for all ages; for those who saw the slopes of time spin backwards and stop. The counting backwards for the somewhere that arrives, moves past and is gone.

True and everlasting, It didn’t last that long…
We’re the lonesome, we’re the lonesome yell
True and everlasting, It didn’t last that long…

Tonight the sky is luminous. Roads of cloud repeat themselves like the ribs of some vast skeleton.
-Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems 1956-1968

Enclosed trains travel through the intercostal space from station to station. Each on a different curve of time. Immersed on The Lost Art of Walking, I wonder about the faces I missed but I look forward to the ones you might see, talk and write about. Names will be given and there will be true and false ones according to their number; twenty-four in total.

Unfortunately, the gleam of snow from the sunlight is gone. No one can claim such illumination, except for nerves as it enters the cranial to the brainstem, where one might dream such glowing grains. One can look forward bravely or listen to the sounds of caverns of footprints as they walk down the street.

But worse than that, he said, walking was actually bad for his condition. The more walking he did now, the less walking he would be able to do in the future. It was as though he had only a certain number of miles in him: every one he used up meant there was one mile less to use. He would eventually walk himself to a standstill.
-Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking

[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/BrokenSocialScene_AnthemsForASeventeenYearOld.mp3" text="Broken Social Scene -Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl"]

In Broken Social Scene’s Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl, Emily Haines repeats the lines, “Park that car, Drop that phone, Sleep on the floor, Dream about me” thirteen times before she repeats only the final two lines another five times. There is a faint sound of something like a slide whistle at the beginning.

In fact, there was a great deal of steely purpose about many of the walkers, and there wasn’t anything random about it. Everyone looked determined, like they were on a mission, like they had to get somewhere fast. They wished they were already there, and yet they were frustrated by their fellow pedestrians.

The windows on the buses in the winter time are opaque from dried snow dirt. Funky Squaredance by Phoenix comes on; so funky the nerves of my skeleton, particularly my fingers can’t help but “fing” the spine of my book.

[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/Phoenix_FunkySquaredance.mp3" text="Phoenix - Funky Squaredance"]

I walked for forty minutes last night for some air; to lift the rib cage up and out. Then feeling satisfied, I went back in to read. Two and a half hours passed. I walked north of St. George St., cold and trailing the shoes of another pedestrian. We shared the same mission of getting to the station as quickly out of the cold as possible. We both wished we were already there.

It is something to have fled several cities. I am glad that I could run, that I could learn twelve languages, that I escaped conscription with a trick, that borders were only stones in an empty road, that I kept my journal. Let me refuse solutions, refuse to be comforted… Tonight the sky is luminous. Roads of clouds repeat themselves like the ribs of some vast skeleton.

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“I was (very simply) in charge of seeing for the world after all seeing is just a substance”.

Growing up, I’ve always had a very self-centered worldview. And up to this day, I still do. Self-centered in how I think I am in charge of the world; letting myself down, I also feel I’ve let the world down. Does this make sense? People may or may not share this worldview; to wake up and believe the world wakes up when you do.

I read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red today and followed the protagonist, Geryon, a young boy and winged red monster as he grows up. He collects, recollects, takes photographs and describes them. Obsessed with volcanoes, he embarks on a journey from childhood school-playgrounds to the foothills of Huaraz; the question of what “time” is, encloses Geryon.

“Whenever I looked it poured out my eyes I was responsible for everyone’s visibility it was a great pleasure it increased daily”.

I came across this photograph by canovix. It is an album cover for a band called “Fiesta Animal” who are from Uruguay. I found the photo to be appropriate for Carson’s long poem; the hands, twisting alongside shadows of grain, shades and veils. They join in a gyre inside the shape of an eye like the substances that formulates vision.

Anyhow, as I recall matters, Hythloday said the bridge over the Anyder at Amaurot was five hundred yards long; but my John says that is two hundred yards too much – that in fact the river is not more than three hundred yards wide there. So I beg you consult your memory. If your recollection agrees with his, I’ll yield and confess myself mistaken. But if you don’t recall the point, I’ll follow my own memory and keep my present figure. For, as I’ve taken particular pains to avoid having anything false in the book, so, if anything is in doubt, I’d rather say something untrue than tell a lie. In short, I’d rather be honest than clever. -Thomas More, Utopia

The bridge is an image I associate with my childhood. It is both a real and a figurative symbol; from something I used to often cross to something I can only recall in my mind. And the recollection of the real thing requires crossing the bridge of my present to my past.

Like in Thomas More’s Utopia, distance is irrelevant because Utopia is a fiction. Although my childhood bridge isn’t untrue, I feel I’d be lying if I were to give the exact measures of it.

My grandfather and I used to cross the bridge often, usually, on bicycle. You crossed the bridge to get to the next town. Once, in first grade my friends and I decided to journey across the bridge ourselves. You could see our house if you stood at a particular point on the bridge and I remember distinctly looking over my shoulder, fearful that my grandparents might see me as we crossed. I confess we did this to have a bowl of soup.

Recollecting the image of the bridge, I find its dimension changeable. It could be long, short, narrow or wide. Its paint, wrinkled and cracked like crumpled paper. The water below is still brown, opaque and possibly shallower now. In this new year, I hope you find a bridge moment; a place, an impossibility to cross over to.