The potential hiding in space
When I was a kid, I had a wallpaper trim creating a border in the centre of the otherwise blue walls of my bedroom. I’m sure there’s a proper term for this kind of wallpaper division, and if there is please tell me as I’m clearly just typing through it and not googling. I kind of, on principle, look up facts less these days unless I have to in order to maintain my journalistic integrity. This is not one of those times. No one is going to strip me of my literary awards because I didn’t google “what do you call the wallpaper strip in the middle of the wall”.
Honestly, I just kind of miss when I was allowed to be as blissfully uneducated as I can be in real life.
My job requires me to be smart, or at least to appear that way, and I think I am but I also don’t know how to pronounce the word pecan properly. I say pee-can, but I think it’s probably peh-kan. Also, and more importantly, it doesn't matter. It all ends the same way.
The wallpaper in my childhood bedroom was space themed, because of course it was. I was a kid, and kids love space. I don’t even know if it was a conversation anyone ever had with me. I just suddenly liked space. I knew all the planets, had a few of the now very coveted and expensive collectors pieces that were '80s LEGO space kits. I said I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, because that was space adjacent. I also said I wanted to manage a K-Mart, because I also knew I wasn’t as smart as I was pretending to be and managing a K-Mart seems like a good job when you’re a kid.
They don’t even have K-marts anymore, and let me tell you how it feels to know one of my dreams can never be fulfilled. Haunting.
I am still kind of obsessed with space, but the other version of it. The pee-can to the limitless beauty of the universe’s peh-kan. I’m obsessed with the space I inhabit. Our apartment, a loft in Downtown Toronto, is the dream of living in the city in a way. Before I moved here, I dreamt of an apartment like this. A loft, with 14 foot high ceilings, some exposed brick. Hardwood floors. Big windows.
It sounds nice, and it is, but the dream is never quite as good as the truth and the truth is that living in a loft with no other rooms to divide into is a constant battle of space, flow and energy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood home lately too, and in the process of working on the book I thought a lot about the living room. The living room is the focal point of my memories of the youth I half-remember in the house my parents still live in today. It’s been renovated time and again over the years. Walls are gone, floors have changed. Carpet torn up. My dad and I changed out all the windows about 10 or so years ago and discovered that when our house was built in the Yukon post WW2 they just kind of built with whatever wood was left over, and this meant every wall on the exterior of the house is a slightly different thickness.
I think about the living room most of all because I think about my dad’s stereo. I’ve mentioned this before, a stereo that he had built a cabinet for from window moulding and bronze glass. The speakers were a pair he had built himself from a kit he got in the back of a magazine. The stereo was all 80s grey, a Sanyo system with an amp that had a built in AM/FM radio, dual head tape deck, CD player, turntable. It’s where my dad slept at night listening to Gordon Lightfoot or the Waterboys.
A stereo built of intention and desire, from which to bring joy into otherwise hard and challenging days.
Lysh and talk a lot about our space, where to put shelves and the couch and all our precious and coveted things. Things build a life, they deserve a home just as much as we do. I’ve moved and rearranged my “office”, in truth just a desk in the corner of the room where the exposed brick wall is, a dozen times. I put up blackout curtains to finally give us some reprieve from the sun and the bright lights of a marquee across the street that seeps into our bedroom at night.
We have a wall of records and books, and whenever I’m on a zoom call it’s the thing people comment on. Oh I love your space. I do too, but I’m always kind of at odds with it too, I can always imagine it’s something different, something that flows better or feels perfect. Often this need appears in my brain because I’m supposed to be working, I have deadlines and commitments and instead I’m staring at a wall imagining it was something else.
On Sunday morning, my Youtube algorithm decided I needed to see something that would firmly plant this need for change in my head. A video of someone DJ-ing in one of the most perfect spaces I’ve ever seen.
The title of the video, Japanese Soul from the ‘70s: ライトメロウ with Kengo intrigued me enough, but it was the space held me. A pristine white wall, with beautiful plants perfectly placed around vintage and made-to-look-vintage audio equipment. Two turntables and the DJ, Kengo, in the middle of the frame moving records from a crate to each of the two turntables he’s playing on. It felt like looking peace and tranquility in the face at long last. I played the video twice, wrote to-do-lists and felt inspired and for the first time in a while felt a kind of peace deep within me somewhere.
My dad worked a lot when I was young. We were in a recession and largely a single income family and he worked very, very long hours to keep his business afloat, and because he is the kind of person who doesn’t feel safe and assured unless his hands are the ones on the wheel. I feel comfortable ascribing this to him because I’m the same way and I know where I got it. This is why I’m a bad employee, but I can confidently say I’m a motivated self-starter in interviews.
When my dad came home from his long days he seemed to find peace in places that struck me only then as odd. He would start reading a book he was sure to never finish, lie down on an oversized cushion in the corner of the living room under a lamp dimmed to its lowest settings with his headphones on, his black Sony headphones with a coiled cable and a gold 1/8” to 1/4” adaptor on the end. I could kind of hear the music coming out around the worn thin foam covers on the earpieces. This is how I know and love “Fisherman’s Blues” so well, why it’s a song that reminds me of the way night used to look in the memories of my youth. He was so at peace in this space, one he had made just for himself, that he would almost instantly fall asleep. A book he would never finish open and spread out on his chest. Eyes closed. Serenity.
I’m sure a lot of it was exhaustion, but I think a lot of it was the tranquility in having one space just for him, only there to provide comfort with its simple offerings.
My mom always tells me about how my dad used to buy records: walk into a store, look for a cover or a name that struck him as intriguing and buy it. He wasn’t as concerned with popularity or keeping up with trends or whatever. He liked to explore. I use the past tense because he doesn’t buy records anymore. When I was a teenager my aunt and cousin came to visit, and at one point in their stay we heard a loud BANG sound coming from the living room. My mom thought the antique hutch in the centre of the room had fallen over. Instead, and more tragically, my cousin had taken the speaker wires from the back of the amp, removed them from the speaker and jammed them into an electrical socket. He stood there holding the wires as we all ran in to see smoke coming out of my dad’s stereo.
He never really listened to music the same way after we had to throw that whole system away, and now music is a rare bird in their house. They’ve got an old iPod docking station on the counter in the kitchen, and when we visit them my parents will put CBC radio on in the background but it’s never the same as it was. It’s never a home built of music the way it was in my youth. A space that once held so much comfort has been renovated and shifted into something else. Calming and comforting still for sure, but never the same.
I thought about all this watching Youtube videos on Sunday morning. I thought about our space, and how I think it might need a drastic change in order to feel like there’s comfort in it. But also I thought about music, and how intentional it used to be. We have thousands of records, Lysh and I both longtime collectors who have worked in music for long enough that we have amassed a collection that is best described as a nightmare to move. I’ve got my vintage Denon turntable I bought at an estate sale in the Yukon many years ago. We’ve got vintage amps and tape decks that aren’t really working right now but they’re all beautiful and sitting there waiting to be reborn and I am starting to think more about what they're capable of.
Thinking about space and our living within it I'm thinking more than ever about how to make our music and stereo and their promise an integral part of the comfort and flow of the room. How to position them in places where we will seek them out when needed, when they are desired. When we want to put on a record, pull a book from the shelf, and find peace.
I have fallen in love with watching these videos on Youtube – DJs playing records in beautiful spaces – because it’s as much a celebration of discovery as it is of space and intention. This isn’t a playlist generated by an algorithm dictated by my listening to the same 10 albums every goddamn day. It’s not music I’m listening to because it was sent to me by PR teams. It’s covers and titles and ideas I don’t know but am intrigued by. Music I can look up, but am content for now in not knowing and just appreciating. Blissfully unaware, eager to learn, but unburdened by the the need to do it in the moment. Content to just sit here with it.
From the Japanese soul mix, I went to a woman playing city pop records — a genre I’ve always heard about but I know very little of, essentially Japanese pop music that was big in the late 70s and exploded in the 80s — into Italian funk, then Brazilian music that ran a breadth of genres, and more. I moved through videos, made playlists of them to put on the background while I work.
I posted a photo on Instagram of my new found favourite, someone told me their young niece loves watching these videos and instantly I’ve become a child who needs screen time to focus. My walls suddenly have a space border. I’m fine with this, comforted and inspired by the possibility of space, and the intention and the love of all the things in it. The potential of a perfect life built out of the things that bring inspiration and sublime pleasure.
I should be working on bigger things but I’m inspired, or distracted maybe, by the idea of space because maybe we’ll get it right at some point. Maybe perfect is just waiting to be discovered here, and once I find it, all my work will become easier, tasks will be accomplished and lives will feel lighter and my shoulders will ease a little. Maybe we’ll put everything in just the right spot and everything will feel perfect and then I can rest, fall asleep with my headphones on and a book folded at the spine on my chest. Serenity.