Paco Cathcart // Bottleneck Blues

Post by Misha //

I did not much enjoy walking when I lived in New York. At least not as much as I knew that I was supposed to. It is (rightly) unpopular not to enjoy walking in New York, and marks yet another way in which I was not a model New Yorker. Walking in New York is to experience the city in a way that is impossible in almost every other city in America. It is to commune directly with the place – its buildings, its parks, its people – and to belong to it and each other in a profound and unmediated way. It is not an insignificant part of the magic that people invoke when they talk about the city.

Growing up, most of my walking was done through the woods. Getting somewhere on foot was understood as a matter of peace and tranquility. A time to pick at one’s thoughts like strings on an instrument. In order to hear the notes you need quiet meditation.

Quiet meditation. A thing not readily invited by the New York City walk. There’s the dog poop, for one thing, which makes meditation of any kind very challenging. (If you are reading this from New York and you own a dog, please do better.) Also, there are the car horns, and the Frogger-level onslaught of other people on the sidewalk, and the gusts of subway steam, and good and bad smells, and the air-conditioner drips, and the constant, unnatural starts and stops dictated by the traffic lights.

Maybe it’s not entirely true to say that I didn’t enjoy it. Hard to deny the exhilaration of it all. But I was almost never relaxed by it. I would come back from a long walk in the city feeling like I had spent the day at the wrong end of a bullhorn.

Now that I live in the Pacific Northwest again I’ve rediscovered the joy of experiencing the world at a shamble. I bought a plant identification book. I especially love all the mosses. Their soft green patience. The dew drops preserved through the heat of the day in cool velvet. The ferns are good, too. Big dinosaur plants that communicate somehow with the ancient spores of the mind. It is a relief to renew this part of myself. A reminder that a place you like to walk in is also probably a place you will like to live in.

This song was written about escaping the crowded interior of Brooklyn for its coastline, where the world opens up into beaches and big briny skies. “I find a sense of emptiness and openness that is rare in the big city,” says Paco Cathcart, “where the claustrophobic bottleneck blues will get you every time.“

Pre-order Paco Cathcart’s (aka The Cradle) new album, Down On Them, here. Label: Wharf Cat Records