everyday is a child with teeth #3: sleep
I just finished reading Don’t Look At Me Like That by Diana Athill which I highly recommend. There’s a part towards the end where the main character is feeling depressed and takes to sleeping as much as possible. The writing becomes very hazy and dreamlike and you just feel like you are floating along the book if not completely processing the words that you are reading. Or maybe that was just me.
It reminded me of “Platinum Blonde Life,” a No Doubt song where Gwen sings, “I’m going to sleep all through the day / I’m going to sleep my life away.” My mind goes to the song before it goes to My Year of Rest and Relaxation simply because the song came out first, though I do think it’s funny that I read that book in one night early in the pandemic because I didn’t want to just go to sleep and wake up to do the same pandemic routine all over again the next day.
Then I started thinking about how women own sleeping and beds the same way they own the void (obv linking to Audrey Wollen here). It’s why we love to repost that Viktor & Rolf pillow dress from fall 2005—a show where I just learned Tori Amos performed, which is how I know they get “it”; “it” being the female condition(?). (See also the NO jacket, and honestly their spring 23 couture collection, especially the dress that goes through the model—impaled by glamour!!!).
Though these days I am almost always tired (who isn’t?), my fantasy is not for unending sleep but rather more awake time. I would like to magically carve out and burrow into an extra hour or two between 8:00 and 9:00pm on weekdays. I want to open a door to a little room that has a big bed and a record player and my computer and art supplies that I can step into and write and make and read and then when I leave, the night continues as normal and I can take a shower and go to bed at a decent hour. (I guess what I want is a time portal to my bedroom in my teen years or even my 20s.)
My fantasy is not not about room that leads into my own version of Tracey Emin’s My Bed. (Incredible to me that this is the second Emin version in as many weeks? What more Emins will the future bring!)
Anyway, the plan for this before I got a bit sidetracked with the bed of it all was to follow the No Doubt thread and then write about how Return of Saturn is such a massively underrated album, especially when it’s such an adult woman album and there are really barely any adult women albums. Who else has written a song about grappling with pursuing a career and freedom and then wondering how your desire for a family fits in to the whole thing? Can we stop and wonder at Gwen singing “I always thought I’d be a mom/Sometimes I wish for a mistake” in front of a giant flashing pack of birth control pills in a music video like she does in “Simple Kind of Life”? In “Marry Me” she sings “Marry me/forever and ever and ever and ever and ever” with an almost drunken, taunting stupor—challenging both herself for being “a creature conditioned to employ matrimony” and also her lover who likely harbors an allergy to commitment. I read that some critics thought that all the lovelorn songs were too incongruous with the hardness Gwen presented during Tragic Kingdom even though those are also heartbreak songs, the difference is in the first she was tired so she left and on the second one she was tired but she felt she needed to sacrifice herself for love. When Gwen and Gavin divorced I was excited at the prospect of an album full of songs about her divorce, not to be prurient, but because I truly loved the honesty in her songwriting and wondered about what happens when life-long fantasies are fulfilled and lived-in for a while and then they disintegrate.
That disintegration bit came up in conversation a few days ago when I was out with my friend Amy Rose. Later, she told me about another writer’s resolution for the new year to “be an artist of integrity.” I think integrity is a good one to carry always. When things are falling apart around you, you look to the things that make you whole.
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These two songs were playing in my brain while I wrote this so I’m including them below: one is about sleeping and the other one is about wanting to LIVE 24 hours a day.