Category: Concept Playlists

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concept playlist #4: romance 101

i miss being in love n all that shit! i haven’t felt true desire since 2016…

1. “You wanted love and expected what? A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star?” – Dean Young, “Handy Guide”

2. “Rain finally came + it’s beautifully cool. Wonder how long it will last. It was marvelous because it started suddenly and then was alternately terrific and gentle.

I think of you all the time and therefor have little to say that would not embarrass you, for instance my first feeling about the rain was that it was like you.” – John Cage’s letter to Merce Cunningham (June 29, 1943)

3. “I like your energy. I love your legs. I long to see you.” – Virginia Woolf’s letter to Vita Sackville-West

4. “Now, I
demand a love that is stupid and beautiful,
like a pilot turning off her engines mid-flight
to listen for rain on wings.” – Paige Lewis, “Pavlov was the Son of a Priest”

5. “You came into my life — not as one comes to visit … but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps. It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars…I love you, I love you, I love you…” – Vladimir Nakobov’s letter to Véra Nabokov (1926)

6. “I have saved this afternoon for you.” – T. S. Eliot, “Portrait of a Lady”

7. “But I love you, you know, down to my last, best word.” – Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons

8. “Let every kiss hit the body like a season.” – Ocean Vuong, “A Little Closer to the Edge”

9. “Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.” – Richard Brinsley Sheridan

10. “I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Continue reading “concept playlist #4: romance 101”
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concept playlist #3: it’s a pandemic. and time moves like syrup. and the sun still shines so brightly in suburbia. and everything feels so far away…

1. “i have hypnotized myself into peace.” – Mary Butts

2. “Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful! – Federico García Lorca, from “City That Does Not Sleep,” Lorca & Jimenez: Selected Poems 

3. “We are getting stale. I call us stale. I can feel us getting stale and it sickens me.” – Jillian Weise, from “How to Treat Flowers,” The Book of Goodbyes

4. “”This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.” – T. S. Eliot, from “The Hollow Men”

5. “And make death proud to take us.” – William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

6. “Last night the sirens sounded like airplanes and the airplanes sounded like leaving.” – Kristina Haynes, from “Your Face is the Clearest Thing”

7. “”The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.” – John Fowles, The Magus

8. “April is the cruelest month” – T. S. Eliot, from “The Waste Land”

9. “God is not death. God is what survives.” – Mark Jarmon, Unholy Sonnets

10. “I had a dream
about a crystal blue pool.
I felt stupid when I saw the ocean.” – Wendy Xu, from “The News”

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concept playlist #2: for when thursday feels like the beginning. it feels like emerging.

1. “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” – Agnès Varda, The Beaches of Agnès

2. “… Anything worth dying for… is certainly worth living for.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22

3. “We’re all just walking each other home.” – Ram Dass

4. “Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, and yet, it is.” – Cecil Palmer, Welcome to Night Vale

5. “If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.” – Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

6. “It’s funny how the days slide along and you find yourself still living – living – living! – and wanting so badly to go on living. Because you do love life.” – Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

7. “What’s the use in worrying? It’s inevitable. “Ghibli” is just a random name I got from an airplane… It’s only a name… How pretty.” – Hayao Miyazaki, when asked, “Aren’t you worried about the studio’s future?”

8. “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

9. “I am always doing things I can’t do. That is how I get to do them.” – Pablo Picasso

10. “The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. And remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.” – Ocean Vuong, Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

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concept playlist #1: sitting in a bustling coffee shop at 3pm on a wednesday and having the sudden, terrible realization that you’ve been stuck in an 90’s-movie-esque time loop for the past two months

like your other mood playlists, but for quotes.

1. “The trick is to keep moving. If I stop my mind settles. We don’t want to sink. Being higher is a hurdle we can leap over.” – Raych Jackson, Even The Saints Audition

2. “So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” – James Joyce, Ulysses

3. “If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me? Even then? Since we’re bound to be something, why not together…” – Mary Oliver, West Wind

4. “As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.” – Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

5. “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.” – James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

6. “… how I long for the time to ripen fully, and the spring to come again after this long and appalling fall and winter.” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

7. “Better not to think about / the unimaginable distance / I’m at these days.” – Bella Akhmadulina, The Garden

8. “Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it – living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.” – Richard Siken, Birds Hover the Trampled Field

9. “My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?” – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

10. “Reality is very strange, it’s entirely unreal.” – Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life