The other night we had an event featuring the supernaturally gifted singer/songwriter and poet Jenny Berkel. Jenny was in town and invited three of her friends to read poetry and sing with her at the shop. These days the skies are dark when our events get rolling and, with a full house, the four talents sang and recited and joked into the evening, the audience hypnotized by the vibe. We are both creatures of the night, like Dracula, and after a VERY busy Saturday it was splendid to just relax, lean up against the back counter, and let the ambient Richmond noise of carousing students and crazy people be drowned out by songsters and poets carefully enchanting us.
Usually at this point in our essays we break away, after establishing a vignette of local life, to meander into broader, more philosophical territory. Instead, today we feel local. We feel present. Beyond the apocalyptic worries of our friends and family, we feel that our little corner of the world, though hyperactive at times, is relatively sane. As Diane Lockhart says on the excellent TV show The Good Fight, “It’s all right that the world is crazy, as long as I make sure my little corner of the world is sane.”
Looks like we did get philosophical after all. However, it is meant to underline a simple fact that, despite our melancholic natures or desire for the transcendental, sweetness is found in full blush here in Downtown London (of all places).
Just consider the small mania of lugging guitars from a trunk. Then consider the last-minute-fretting when finding out that our extension chord doesn’t reach the plug (with all that gear). Then consider the night-time odyssey to Joe Kool’s, who provided us with a bright, long yellow one, NO QUESTIONS ASKED! Then the scrabbling of finding everyone a seat. Then the guy who came in declaring love for a customer (a stranger to her, it turns out…he was quickly asked to leave). Then the CHECK-CHECKs and tuning and throat-clearing and nervousness and social awkwardness of indoor kids seeking beautiful things. Then, finally, music.
Clear, accomplished, searching music, like something you’d wish to hear in a field but could not locate.
“Where is that music coming from?” you’d asked your monacled raccoon friend.
“I’ve never heard such beautiful sounds,” she’d reply, scratching.
We’ve been to shows where we’re stuck politely listening while an awful performer drones on and on, but this wasn’t that sort of show. This was lovely. The thing about Jenny’s music is that it could only be music. It couldn’t be a story or a comic or a TV show or anything like that. She’s found a place where only music exists and writes from there. We think that might be a working definition, that a piece of art succeeds if it can ONLY be that thing, if it finds a place where it could only exist in the form it has found.
Big ideas, but they were born from that night as it felt only that night could exist, in that form, with those people, and then like a good story told to you one night, vanish as folks got back in their cars and said goodnight. There was a sum-greater-than-its-parts kind of thing happening. We felt it. We don’t know if anyone else did because we would NEVER go on about that sort of stuff WHEN IT IS HAPPENING. Too cool for that, sadly. We did talk about it on the way home though, walking over the Blackfriars Bridge, where the city was quiet and the river was dark, where we saw the yellow lights in Blackfriar houses dot the trees like little blinking eyes.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
Our supernatural friend @jenny_berkel She’s some kind of woodland creature given the gift of song by the fairy folk.
