Scott Walker’s “The Girls From The Streets” has flooded my daily course through wintering London in a radioactive blacklight this month. Alchemizing with the finger-freezing temperatures to illuminate steaming beacons of human collision around the city: buses, pubs, tube trains, Tescos. Pheromonal mirages to dissolve in.
My addiction to the palpable tension between empathy and self-preserving survival instincts in these spaces is nothing new, but as I soak in it longer and longer each day, I’m discovering how malleable it is. How much softer its edges can become. I think it’s the orchestral chorus that has been coloring it with blues and reds, purples and pinks. Cold and warm coexisting.
There’s a dull but prickly guilt that accompanies such an intense sonderlust, which the song’s impish angle amplified in me at first. But it slowly revealed an obvious freedom in stomping where I had been tiptoeing. It wasn’t hiding the fangs in its smile or encrypting its urges. It just ripped down the road with a big mirror on its back and dared me to follow.
So I did, and walls began to dissolve. My sketchbook replaced my camera and my pencil became a magnet. For flattered excitement or mild discomfort and all walks of laughter. For oblivious engines or double-eye daggers. Or in the case of a fishbowled conversation that screeched into my view from the Lillie Road curb, for a glance that pierced the glass and recognized itself before gliding back into the mortal current.