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The More Film I Watch, The More John Ford Looks Like A Giant. His Politics Aren't So Good, And You Have To Learn To Accept John Wayne As An Actor, But He's A Poet In Black And White.

-Jonathan Lethem

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The More Film I

Jonathan Lethem

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The More Film I Watch, The More John Ford Looks Like A Giant. His Politics Aren't So Good, And You Have To Learn To Accept John Wayne As An Actor, But He's A Poet In Black And White.

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Black And White

More From Jonathan Lethem

I Hate Libraries For The Way They Put Stickers On Things. I Don't Approve Of Folding Over Pages, Or Of Writing In Books. God, Forget Scissors - That's Beyond The Pale.

I've Had The Odd Good Luck Of Starting Slowly And Building Gradually, Something Few Writers Are Allowed Anymore. As A Result I've Seen Each Of My Books Called The Breakthrough. And Each Was, In Its Way.

I Have No One To Blame For The Construction For Myself, Of Course, But I'm Always Surprised And Slightly Sulky When I RealizeВ People Are Buying The Whole Thing.

Writing Is Physical For Me. I Always Have The Sense That The Words Are Coming Out Of My Body, Not Just My Mind.

Teenage Life - Possibly Adult Life Too Is All About What You Want And Can’t Have. And Then About What You Receive And Misuse.

As I Get Older I Find That The Friendships That Are The Most Certain, Ultimately, Are The Ones Where You And The Other Person Have Made Substantial Amounts Of Money For One Another.

I've Been An Advocate Against The View Of The Writer As A Partitioned Genius Hanging In Conceptual Space, Or Up On A Mountain, A Bringer Of Promethean Fire, Some Unique Transmission That Comes Out Of Nowhere. I Prefer The Opposite View - That Writers Come From Somewhere. They Read Things, And They Think About Them, And They Incorporate Other People's Thoughts.

Nature, Or At Least Birds And Women, Abhorred The Invisible Man.

Artists Freeze Themselves Into These Weird Postures That Are Meant To Be Impressive And Involving, Then They Fling Them Out Into The World Like Polaroids, And Then They Move On. And I'm Stuck In This Intense Relationship To The Polaroid.

I'm Not Planning What I Listen To, Except When I Think The Music Can Guide Me To Some Emotional Place I Want To Be Reminded Of.

The Less You Offer, The More Readers Are Forced To Bring The World To Life With Their Own Visual Imaginings. I Personally Hate An Illustration Of A Character On A Jacket Of A Book. I Never Want To Have Someone Show Me What The Character Really Looks Like - Or What Some Artist Has Decided The Character Really Looks Like - Because It Always Looks Wrong To Me. I Realize That I Prefer To Kind Of Meet The Text Halfway And Offer A Lot Of Visual Collaborations From My Own Imaginative Response To The Sentences.

Some People Have Things Written All Over Their Faces; The Big Guy Had A Couple Of Words Misspelled In Crayon On His.

My Heart, To Put It More Simply, Got Nostalgic For The Present. Always A Bad Sign.

I've Just Finished Reading Reality Hunger And I'm Lit Up By It-astonished, Intoxicated, Ecstatic, Overwhelmed. . . . It Really Is An Urgent Book: A Piece Of Art-making Itself, A Sublime, Exciting, Outrageous, Visionary Volume.

Once You Fall Into Habits, I Think, You're Dead As An Artist. You Have To Challenge Yourself And Never Rest On Your Laurels, Never Think About What You've Done In The Past.

Comics? Honestly, That's More A Matter Of Nostalgia For Me. I Think Most Of That Energy Has Gone To My Love Of Literature, And My Love Of Film...

The Past Is Still Visible. The Buildings Haven't Changed, The Layout Of The Streets Hasn't Changed. So Memory Is Very Available To Me As I Walk Around.

Waves, Sky, Trees, Essrog - I Was Off The Page Now, Away From The Grammar Of Skyscrapers And Pavement.

I Just Noticed Recently That In One Book After Another I Seem To Find An Excuse To Find Some Character Who, To Put It Idiotically Simply, Is Allowed To Talk Crazy.

Every Artist Has Limits. No One Can Do Everything. It's Impossible.

Writing Is A Private Discipline, In A Field Of Companions.

Anyone Could See It All Coming And No One Could Possibly Stop It And That Was The Beautiful Thing. Friday Night Was Open Wide And Writ In Stone

It Was Only As I Wrote About Fear That I Began To Find Paths Of Access To Feelings That Were Intolerable To Me Then.

Context Is Everything. Dress Me Up And See. I'm A Carnival Barker, An Auctioneer, A Downtown Performance Artist, A Speaker In Tongues, A Senator Drunk On Filibuster. I've Got Tourette's. My Mouth Won't Quit, Though Mostly I Whisper Or Subvocalize Like I'm Reading Aloud, My Adam's Apple Bobbing, Jaw Muscle Beating Like A Miniature Heart Under My Cheek, The Noise Suppressed, The Words Escaping Silently, Mere Ghosts Of Themselves, Husks Of Empty Breath And Tone.

My Heart And The Elevator, A Plummet Inside A Plummet.

I Plan Less And Less. It's A Great Benefit Of Writing Lots, That You Get Good At Holding Long Narratives In Your Head Like A Virtual Space.

Those Promises We Make To Ourselves When We Are Younger, About How We Mean To Conduct Our Adult Lives, Can It Be True We Break Every Last One Of Them? All Except For One, I Suppose: The Promise To Judge Ourselves By Those Standards, The Promise To Remember The Child Who Would Be So Appalled By Compromise, The Child Who Would Find Jadedness Wicked.

Tourette's Is Just One Big Lifetime Of Tag, Really. The World (or My Brain---same Thing) Appoints Me It, Again And Again. So I Tag Back. Can It Do Otherwise? If You've Ever Been It You Know The Answer.

I’ve Always Been Uninterested In Boundaries Or Quarantines Between Tastes And Types, Between Mediums And Genres.

I Learned To Write Fiction The Way I Learned To Read Fiction - By Skipping The Parts That Bored Me.

I'm Not A Sociologist, And The Novel Has Often Concerned Itself With Sociology. It's One Of The Generating Forces That's Made Fiction Interesting To People. But That's Not My Concern. I'm Interested In Psychology. And Also Certain Philosophical Questions About The World.

I'm Learning To Hate The Sound Of My Own Voice.

You Discovered Yourself And What Really Mattered Only After You Passed Through The Lens Of The Fairy Tale, Imposed On Every Human Female And Male Alike, That Someone Existed Out In The Forest Of The World For You To Love And Marry.

...don't Rupture Another's Illusion Unless You're Positive The Alternative You Offer Is More Worthwhile Than That From Which You're Wrenching Them. Interrogate Your Solipsism: Does It Offer Any Better A Home Than The Delusions You're Reaching To Shatter?

I Don't Have A Lot Of Paper In My Immediate Work Environment, Except When I'm Doing Things Like Checking The Godforsaken Proofs.

As A Child Growing Up In Pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I Went Everywhere By Bicycle. My Bike Was In Many Ways The Key To My Neighborhood, Which, At The Time, Was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This Was In The 60s And 70s, Before All The White People And Restaurants. I Really Can't Underscore Boldly Enough The Fact That I Grew Up In Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Before It Was Gentrified. You Could Get Mugged!

What's Lucky About My Career In General Is That I Stumbled Into What Every Writer Most Wants. Not Repeating Myself And Doing Strange Things Has Become My Trademark.

I Never Take Any Notes Or Draw Charts Or Make Elaborate Diagrams, But I Hold An Image Of The Shape Of A Book In My Head And Work From That Mental Hologram.

Yet I'm Making A Book And I'm Going To Care Immensely About What Words Get Bound In The Pages, And I Want The Object To Look Good. I Won't Believe In It And It Won't Be Real To Me Until There's A Finished Book I Can Hold.

I'd Have Been A Filmmaker Or A Cartoonist Or Something Else Which Extended From The Visual Arts Into The Making Of Narratives If I Hadn't Been Able To Shift Into Fiction.

Life Is Fundamentally Up For Grabs

A Reader, Encountering A Sentence About A Barking Dog, Would Have To Dwell On Why That Choice Was Made At That Moment. Everything In A Novel Is Explicitly Chosen, Whereas Some Of What A Film Captures Feels Incidental, According To The Vagaries Of Photography And Sound Recording.

I Try To Write Every Day. I Don't Beat Myself Up About Word Counts, Or How Many Hours Are Ticking By On The Clock Before I'm Allowed To Go And Do Something Else. I Just Try To Keep A Hand In And Work Every Single Day, Even If There Are Other Demands Or I'm On A Book Tour Or Have The Flu Or Something, Because Then I Keep My Unconscious Engaged With The Book. Then I'm Always A Little Bit Writing, No Matter What Else I'm Doing.

I've Never Related To The Work Geek At All-it Sounds Much More Horrible Than Nerd. Like A Freak Biting A Chicken's Head Off In A Sideshow.

I've Discovered That Like Every Writer, I'm Helpless Myself - And That Means I Find Myself Unconsciously Or Semi-consciously Repeating Motifs And Themes And Even Using Certain Words Or Images Recurrently In My Work, No Matter How Much I Think I'm Starting Fresh. But I've Always Admired Artists Who Made A Specific Sport Of Trying To Visit Different Kinds Of Genres Or Mediums Or Modes - Not Just 'western' Or 'detective', But Comedy/tragedy, Epic And Miniature, Traditional/experimental.

I Tend To Think Of Myself As A Highly Emotional Writer. It's All Coming Out Of The Deepest Feelings, Out Of Dreams, Out Of The Unconscious.

Insomnia Is A Variant Of Tourette's--the Waking Brain Races, Sampling The World After The World Has Turned Away, Touching It Everywhere, Refusing To Settle, To Join The Collective Nod. The Insomniac Brain Is A Sort Of Conspiracy Theorist As Well, Believing Too Much In Its Own Paranoiac Importance--as Though If It Were To Blink, Then Doze, The World Might Be Overrun By Some Encroaching Calamity, Which Its Obsessive Musings Are Somehow Fending Off.

For Those Whose Ganglia Were Formed Pre-tv, The Mimetic Deployment Of Pop-culture Icons Seems At Best An Annoying Tic And At Worst A Dangerous Vapidity That Compromises Fiction's Seriousness By Dating It Out Of The Platonic Always, Where It Ought To Reside.

Apologies Aren't Something You Want To Get In The Habit Of Practicing In The Mirror

I Never Have Been A Musician; I'm Not Actually Capable. Because I Can't Even Pretend To Acquire The Gift, All Of My First Feelings About Art Are Still Attached To Music. I Look At It Yearningly, I Look At It Wonderingly. I Behold It From Afar, As Something Unattainable, Something Outside Of Myself, From Which I Can Take Nourishment, But I Can't Domesticate And Master.

However Appalling To Consider, However Tedious To Enact, Every Novel Requires Furniture, Whether It Is To Be Named Or Unnamed, For The Characters Will Be Unable To Remain In Standing Position For The Duration Of The Story.

All Paths Lead Nowhere; Choose One With Heart...

As Much As I Revere Great Writing, And Am Still Humbled By It, Literary Activities Are No Longer Esoteric To Me. When I Read A Great Novel - Something That I Could Never Have Written Myself - I'm Still Looking At It A Little Bit Like A Technician.

I Had Always Wanted To Be A Writer Who Confused Genre Boundaries And Who Was Read In Multiple Contexts.

When Rolling Stone Handed Me This Crazy Assignment To Be In The Studio With James Brown, They Had The Misapprehension That I'd Written For Them Already Just Because I Claimed My Character Had.

I Don't Want To Indulge Myself In The Luxury Of Writing Beautiful Paragraphs Just For The Sake Of Making Beautiful Writing. That Doesn't Interest Me. I Want Everything To Be Essential.

There's Never Any Percentage In Being Ahead Of Your Time.

Every Book Is A Kind Of Experiment In Doing Something That Feels Impossible.

Making Books Has Always Felt Very Connected To My Bookselling Experience, That Of Wanting To Draw People's Attention To Things That I Liked, To Shape Things That I Liked Into New Shapes.

Yes! I'm The Slowest Comic-book Writer On Earth.

It's Impossible To Overstate How My Relationship To Music Forms A Preserve For The Esoteric Or Even Spiritual Aspect Of My Relationship To Cultural Stuff, To Human Expressivity... It's A Safe Enclosure.

I Try Not To Become Too Regular An Addict Of Any One Subculture.

I Can't Bear The Silent Ringing In My Skull.

I'm A Firm Believer That There Are No Rules In Art. Every Trajectory Is Different.

The More Film I Watch, The More John Ford Looks Like A Giant. His Politics Aren't So Good, And You Have To Learn To Accept John Wayne As An Actor, But He's A Poet In Black And White.

Black And White

Fantastic Writing In English Is Kind Of Disreputable, But Fantastic Writing In Translation Is The Summit.

I Prefer Old Books And Find Them More Relevant. I Dislike New Books. It's Like Drinking Wine That's Not Ready.

The Key To Mostly Anything Is Pretending Your First Time Isn't.

It's Now Expected Of Me That I Will Defy Expectation, So I Really Generally Seem To Be Free To Write What I Want.

Being Blocked, Being Uncertain, Sitting There Not Knowing, Waiting, Abiding With It: This Is The Work. If You Don't Have The Tolerance For That You're In Great Trouble. If You Want To Call It A Writer's Block... That Doesn't Seem A Very Useful Name For That Kind Of Abiding That I Think Is The Essence Of The Work.

For Me, Music Is Sort Of The Art That I Can't Incorporate Into My Person The Way I Want To.

Apparently Brooklyn Needn't Always Push Itself To Be Something Else, Something Conscious And Anxious, Something Pointed Toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn Might Sometimes Also Be Pleased, As Here On Flatbush, To Be Its Grubby, Enduring Self.

I Guess They Needed A Maze In Japan, Where Everything's Neat And Tidy. In America Everybody's Already Wandering Around Lost.

The Kernel, The Soul - Let Us Go Further And Say The Substance, The Bulk, The Actual And Valuable Material Of All Human Utterances - Is Plagiarism.

I'm Gregarious With Writers And Never With Manuscripts . . . I [like To] Create The Illusion Of Seamless Perfection, So I Alone Know The Flawed Homely Process Along The Way.

Nerds Are Just Deep, And Neurotic, Fans. Needy Fans. We're All Nerds, On One Subject Or Another.

I Don't Really Ask Of Myself A Given Word Or Page Count Or Number Of Hours. To Work Every Day, That's My Only Fetish. And There Is A Physical Quality To It When A Novel Is Thriving.

Novelists Get To Direct The Perfect Films. We Get To Cast Every Part. We Dress The Set Exactly As We Wish.

I Want To Write Books That Can Be Read A Hundred Years From Now, And Readers Wouldn't Be Bogged Down By Irrelevant Details.

In The Sea Of Words, The In Print Is Foam, Surf Bubbles Riding The Top. And It's A Dark Sea, And Deep, Where Divers Need Lights On Their Helmets And Would Perish At The Lower Depths.

What Age Is A Black Boy When He Learns He's Scary?

I Listen To Music All The Time. I Write While Listening To Music. And I Tell Myself That The Music Nourishes The Art Forms That I Do Master And Domesticate, And Have Authority Over.

Good Films Demand To Be Looked At Several Times In Order To Be Observed Completely.

When The Civil Rights Battle Was Won, All The Jews And Hippies And Artists Were Middle Class White People And All The Blacks Were Still Poor. Materially, Not Much Changed.

You Can't Be Deep Without A Surface

I Don't Know Why The World Has Changed So Much That Writers Are Now Expected To Appear In Public And Talk About Their Work. It's Something I Find Very Difficult. And Yet, One Does Have Some Sense Of Responsibility Towards One's Publishers, To The People Trying To Sell The Book.

There's Something About The Rhythms Of Language That Correspond To The Rhythms Of Our Own Bodies.

I Got Into Underground Comics Fairly Early On And Kind Of Wandered Away From The Superhero Stuff, But I Was An Art Student And I Was Drawing A Lot As A Kid.

I'm A Serial Deconstructor Of My Own Authority In Certain Areas.

It Wasn't For Children, Seventh Grade. You Could Read The Stress Of Even Entering The Building In The Postures Of The Teachers, The Security Guards. Nobody Could Relax In Such A Racial And Hormonal Disaster Area.

I Keep One Simple Rule That I Only Move In One Direction - I Write The Book Straight Through From Beginning To End. By Following Time's Arrow I Keep Myself Sane.

With A Book You Can Read The Same Paragraph Four Times. You Can Go Back To Page 21 When You're On Page 300. You Can't Do That With Film. It Just Charges Ahead.

I Don't Write About Anything I Don't Love Even If That Love Sometimes Gets All Screwed Up And Tormented.

You Don’t Have The Slightest Idea Of What It Means To Write A Scene And A Character In The English Language, With Images And Words Chock Full Of Received Meaning.

Someday I Would Change My Name To Shut Up And Save Everybody A Lot Of Time.

I Grew Up With An Artist Father, And My Parents' Friends Were Also Mainly Artists Or Writers, So He Connects What I Do With His Example.

I'm Not Too Embarrassed To Say I'm The Definition Of The Target Audience. This Is My Generation, The One Of Exalting Music In Album Form.

Target Audience

My Writing Life Is Pretty Simple - I Try To Work Every Day, Almost Always In The Mornings - And I Can Only Write Fiction Effectively For About Three Or At The Most Four Hours. No Big Mysteries, I Just Sit Down And Try To Advance The Cause A Little Bit Every Day.

I've Always Been Passionately In Love With Movies, To Such A Degree That Even As A Young Person Of About Nineteen Or Twenty I Thought Maybe I Would Try To Become A Film Director. The Reason I Didn't Do It Was Because I Felt I Didn't Have The Right Personality. At That Time In My Life, I Was Mortally Shy.

By Removing The Stories From The Morass Of Things That Surround Us, I'm Hoping To Achieve Some Kind Of Purer Approach To Emotional Life.

Poetry Is Supposed To Be Musical. But People Don't Understand Prose. They're So Used To Reading Journalism - Clunky, Functional Sentences That Convey Factual Information - Facts, More Than Just The Surfaces Of Things.

There Were Days When No Kid Came Out Of His House Without Looking Around. The Week After Halloween Had A Quality Both Hungover And Ominous, The Light Pitched, The Sky Smashed Against The Rooftops.

The Arts And A Belief In The Values Of The Civil Rights Movement, In The Overwhelming Virtue Of Diversity, These Were Our Religion. My Parents Worshipped Those Ideals.

The Level At Which My Ocd Enters My Writing Process Isn't That I Slap The Keyboard - It's More Along The Lines Of A Compulsive Need To Swap Syllables Around, Rework Words And Sentences - I Revise For The Pleasure And Satisfaction Of It, Rather Than Out Of A Sense Of Duty.

How Often Had That Hydrant Even Been Opened? Did You Jet Water Through A Car Window, What, Twice At Best? Summer Burned Just A Few Afternoons Long, In The End. As For Flying, Dose Never Even Glanced At The Sky. Flying Was A Summer Within A Summer, A Whim. So Why Think Of It At All?

I Want What We All Want," Said Carl. "to Move Certain Parts Of The Interior Of Myself Into The Exterior World, To See If They Can Be Embraced.

Discomfort Is Very Much Part Of My Master Plan.

It Was Often This Way, Life Consisted Of A Series Of False Beginnings, Bluff Declarations Of Arrival To Destinations Not Even Glimpsed.

I Don't Paint Anymore. I Haven't Since I Abandoned It At 19, In Order To Begin Writing Seriously.

But The Day I Can't Shrug Off A Twinge Of Self-pity, Is The Day I'm Washed Up For Keeps.

When I Write Lyrics, I Really Do Go Into An Automatic Folk Appropriation Mode... I See The Vernacular Register Of 20th Century Song As Being A Bunch Of Forms To Adapt And Reconfigure.

Writing Is A Necessity And Often A Pleasure, But At The Same Time, It Can Be A Great Burden And A Terrible Struggle.

I Definitely Care About How The Concept Of New York Punk Was Constructed, And Why It Mattered. But I Wasn't Gonna DoÂ That. Partly Because I'm Not A Great Journalist...

No Matter How Enormous A Novel May Become, The Physical Act Of Reading Determines That There's No Way It Can Become A Communal Experience. To Read Is Intimate. It's Almost Masturbatory.

To The Resentment That Hides Inside Love, To The Loneliness That Hides Among Companions.

As Much As I Care About Historical Context - I'm Very Eager To Read A Really Great Historical Account.

The Book Is Openly A Kind Of Spiritual Autobiography, But The Trick Is That On Any Other Level It's A Kind Of Insane Collage Of Fragments Of Memory.

My Inner Chemistry Had Been Hijacked By A Mad Scientist, Who Poured The Fizzy, Volatile Contents Of My Heart From A Test Tube Marked Sober Reality Into Another Labeled Sunny Delusion, And Back Again, Faster And Faster, Until The Floor Of My Life Was Slick With Spillage.

So Much Of The Effort That Goes Into Writing Prose For Me Is About Making Sentences That Capture The Music That I'm Hearing In My Head. It Takes A Lot Of Work, Writing, Writing, And Rewriting To Get The Music Exactly The Way You Want It To Be.

When People Call Something "original," 9 Out Of 10 Times They Just Don't Know The References Or Original Sources Involved.

I Have A Horror Of Silence While I'm Writing. It's Like The Universe Is Howling At Me If I Don't Have It.

I Believe That Written Stories Will Continue To Survive Because They Answer An Essential Human Need. I Think Movies Might Disappear Before The Novel Disappears, Because The Novel Is Really One Of The Only Places In The World Where Two Strangers Can Meet On Terms Of Absolute Intimacy.

What I'm Constantly Striving For In My Prose Is Clarity. So That, Ideally, The Writing Will Become So Transparent That The Reader Will Forget That The Medium Of Communication Is Language.

Reading And Writing Are The Same Thing; It's Just One's The More Active And The Other's The More Passive. They Flow Into Each Other.

I Suppose In A Way Most Of My Characters Are Non-consumers, Not Terribly Interested In All The Little Baubles And Artifacts Of Contemporary Life.

The Computer Is The Way I'm Making Books, But I Still Think About The Physical Properties. I Visualize The Length Of A Book, The Proportions Of A Book, In Material Terms.

I Had An All-fear Of Music Ipod, Just Versions Of The 11 Songs From The Record. No Other Songs Allowed.

I'd Excluded New York From My Writing, And Then I Came Back And I Fell In Love With It All Over Again... The Energy Comes From An Absence, That Yearning For New York When You Are Not There.

The World's Large Enough And Interesting Enough To Take A Different Approach Each Time You Sit Down To Write About It.

I've Always Felt That The Writing I Responded To Most - The Novels And Stories That Compelled Me, That Felt Like They Described The World I Live In, With All Of Its Subjectivity, Irrationality, And Paradox, Were Those Which Made Free Use Of Myths And Symbols, Fantastic Occurences, Florid Metaphors, Linguistic Experiments, Etcetera - To Depict The Experiences Of Relatively 'realistic' Characters - On The Level Of Their Emotions And Psychology, Rather Than In Terms Of What Kinds Of Lives They Led Or What Kind Of Events They Experience.

What Exactly Is Postmodernism, Except Modernism Without The Anxiety?

One Of The Things That Novels Have Tended Not To Concentrate On Over The Centuries Is The Fact That People Read Books.

Consensual Reality Is Both Fragile And Elastic, And It Heals Like The Skin Of A Bubble.

Listen To Me. I’m Shy. I’m Not Stupid. I Can’t Meet People’s Eyes. I Don’t Know If You Understand What That’s Like. There’s A Whole World Going On Around Me, I’m Aware Of That. It’s Not Because I Don’t Want To Look At You, Lucinda. It’s That I Don’t Want To Be Seen.

Develop Your Pawns Or Hulk Will Smash.

Art Is About Eliminating Almost Everything In Order To Focus On The Thing That You Need To Talk About.

I Work On A Laptop Specifically So I Can Work In Cafes And Pretend I'm Part Of The Human World.

What's Beautiful About Art Is That It Circumscribes A Space, A Physical And Mental Space. If You Try To Put The Entire World Into Every Page, You Turn Out Chaos.

I Hate Feeling Too Complacent When I Write. I Like To Be Solving New Problems.

You Could Grow Up In The City Where History Was Made And Still Miss It All.

I Met Someone Who Lives In An Elevator.

Music Still Sort Of Hangs Up There In The Sky For Me As This Thing That Moves Me So Much, But I Can't Really Make It. It's Like A Car I Can't Drive.

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