I WANT A REFUND

Throughout this year, lyrics from timeworn classics floated through my head--"mucha policía, poca diversión," "this fucking city is run by pigs," "smash to fuck their fucking systems"--and I would just pause and reflect on how decades of books and newspaper articles and an entire formal education had tried to teach me nuance when in fact, punk had taught me all I needed to know. "Have you ever thought about how 'some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses' is basically the most articulate political statement of our era?" I texted one of my group chats; everyone said yes. Maybe this is why "I Want a Refund" by Xylitol felt like the song of the year, like however many years since a monkey discovered fire and we have expensive juice and cops with burner activist accounts on instagram and a government vacillating between inept and homicidal instead of anything actually desirable, or actually resembling justice, or actually being able to have basic shit like enough food to eat and not dying from a virus.

 I planned to spend the year blogging on here about various matters instead of tweeting but hopefully you spent your time reading actually wise people with good thoughts instead of a worm woman whose brain pingponged between rage and sadness and the mundane indignity of "having to do a job every day," Baby Yoda and Tyler Glasnow and organized abandonment and meaningful distinctions between mutual aid and charity and how to measure a seam allowance along a curve and are cheez its lunch. For a lot of people I think, this year consumption of media/art felt alternately like a necessary comfort and/or like an intimate if fundamentally futile politics (cf all those reading lists during the summer protests). Some months I barely read or listened or watched, just lay on the couch alternating between brainless games and well-meaning infographics and covid graphs on my phone. Sometimes I listened only to NTS and flooded my brain more new sounds than I could parse. The other day, I listened to the same Ted Leo song from the early 00s 4 times in a row and secretly wanted to listen to it more. In May, I bought a mellow Thai country rock 12" for too much money after being captivated by some song snippets on instagram and it turned out to have the same 3 songs on both sides. 

Anyway here's some stuff I liked w a few notes on the ones that I feel I have something to say about. The previously blogged-about Cold Beat and Beatrice Dillon albums were favs too. 

JAZZ - WHAT IS JAZZ CATEGORY

Slauson Malone - Vergangenheitsbewaltigung

Irreversible Entanglements - Who Sent You?

Still House Plants - Fast Edit

Dyani - Under

Pharoah Sanders - Pharaoh 

I don't know anything about jazz despite many emails and google chats with friends in which I ask them to help me get into jazz, years of dating an academically trained jazz musician who awoke every morning to the yelps of Phil Schaap on WKCR's "Bird Flight," my own ass having taken jazz guitar lessons during high school, etc. HOWEVER, these records which bore certain Jazz Stamps really appealed to me this year. Irreversible Entanglements is Actual Jazz with Moor Mother's writing feeling like outright prophecy of what came and what lies ahead, "who sent you?"--whether the cops the colonizer the gentrifier and/or any white listener--maybe in and of itself being one of the year's most provocative indictments. Malone's record is beautiful; Dyani's fragments jazz into intimate, oceanic techno; Still House Plants continue the age old work of mushing jazz and emo together with Life Without Buildings-esque incanted lyrics. & finally, I finally have a boot of the world's best song "Harvest Time."

CLASSICAL MUSIC ? ? 

Charles Curtis - Performances & Recordings 1998-2018

a bunch of flute sonatas not recorded this year, esp Prokofiev and Debussy and Hindemith

Steve Reich various

Sarah Davachi - Cantus, Descent

AMBIENT MUSIC THAT IS BEAUTIFUL BUT TINGED WITH EMOTION--SADNESS AND IN SOME CASES ANGER TOO

Mary Lattimore - Silver Ladders

Ana Roxanne - Because of a Flower

John Atkinson & Ned Milligan - Call Me When You Can 

Nailah Hunter - Spells

REISSUES

Flaming Tunes s/t

Karen Dalton - It's So Hard To Know Who's Going To Love You the Best

Frumpies - Frumpie One Piece

Reigning Sound - Home For Orphans

I feel generally skeptical about the reissue industrial complex but here we had four absolutely unimpeachable classics all hitting the reissue shelves at the same time 

NOT A REISSUE BUT KIND OF

Arthur Russell - Sketches For 'World Of Echo'

Start to finish jaw droppingly good

MUSIC BY GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS

All, especially "All the Good Times" and "Time: The Revelator." I haven't dug into the Boots as much as I plan to, but even before the wealth of new material from the best singer-songwriter in the American tradition currently living came out, I was wearing out my mp3s of "Time: The Revelator," (please release this on LP) a literally perfect record, ideal for a summer spent glued to my couch with sweat during the death throes of the American Empire. For Welch, time doesn't heal all wounds--it lays bare scars and gaping holes, the festering repetitions of history. You be Emmylou and I'll be Gram.

For PUNK I liked Xylitol, Special Interest, P22, and Gunn. I listened to very little new punk, which I think I blogged about before? About how hard it has become to find those sounds inspiring? wrt punk, for some reason the metaphor that comes to mind is a response to a question legendary punk and fellow blog/newsletter author Colin/Life Harvester posed about transitioning: perhaps the boner for punk has moved to my heart. 

I first heard the Magik Markers LP yesterday but I have already listened to it a bunch and it's excellent.

without THE MUSIC OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND I would be a salted slug. This year my favorite VU song was "The Ocean" as heard on Live/the Matrix Tapes but shoutout also to the "Live at the Second Fret" LP that was booted this year. 

Another thing that I became randomly obsessed with was Sinead O'Connor's first record "The Lion and the Cobra" and in a similar vein finally Got Kate Bush during the couple weeks when my bf and I would get drunk and started playing scrabble at midnight while blasting "Hounds of Love"

Probably I forgot some things. I spent a LOT of time watching movies and reading and that will be another posty I think--or maybe another issue of the print newsletter. Issue #2 of paper The Talya Times came out as part of Shivaun's zine swap this fall but I don't know how to post the PDF online. 

RIP to John Prine and Vern Rumsey and Sam Jayne and Marc Orleans and to so so so many others. If you're reading this, I will do what I can to keep you safe and I hope you'll do the same for me.

memorial day weekend blog time

Feeling self conscious about the last bloggy being a bit ~~much~~ so I thought I would reel it back in and just recommend a smattering of media and general things recently consumed/observed/experienced that I enjoy.

Marisa Anderson/Jim White - The Quickening

I don't have much of a vocabulary for describing improvised music but here we have two virtuosic musicians (guitar/drums) kind of circling around each other, dipping in and out of tight, dense moments. You never sense either holding back or outshining the other--it's just a really generous-feeling, collaborative record. I also really enjoyed Marisa Anderson's collaboration with Tara Jane O'Neil, which came out earlier this year.

Kissena Park
Really underrated (probably distance-related) park east of Flushing Meadows in Flushing or Kew Gardens, ft. a lake with cool ducks and egrets, a very cool and strange marshy zone with dirt paths through thick tall grasses and big trees overgrown with vines and weeds, spacious ball fields for playing catch, and nice lawn/shade zones. I would not describe this park as "empty" or "sparsely populated" by any means, but you can definitely lie around far enough away from people and read while still feeling a frisson of human activity. The last time I saw a VERY fast baby named Freddy repeatedly escape from his parents with great tenacity!

Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family & Their Legacy In American Music by Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg
Ian gave me this hardcover book for my birthday a few years ago and in keeping with my quar reading theme of heavy books my aged body can no longer bear to haul around public transportation (see also: The Beastie Boys Book, highly recommended), I finally read it. It is FASCINATING from page one, a story of three genuinely weird and unique humans from the shit middle of nowhere who figured out how to make singular music by openly and explicitly lumping together bits and pieces of every other kind of music they encountered. They crossed paths with everyone from the Kansas doctor who sewed goat testicles into men's scrotums to Elvis; there's daredevil driving, drugs and moonshine, a child famous for holding his breath until he passed out, life-prolonging apple butter, etc. Sara dedicated a song to her lover in the middle of a radio performance with her husband! Maybelle invented an entirely new style of guitar playing! I don't know if this is considered the definitive account of their life but I would 100% watch a Carter Family Dramatic Series.

Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams
Someone posted a picture of this book on instagram and the cover looked cool and I am always intrigued by late 20th century women authors I haven't heard of and aren't named "Alice" so I checked it out and man I did NOT expect this, kind of a day-drunk late 80s Flannery O'Connor journey through the Florida Keys and the souls and bodies of a young couple who live in other people's vacation homes.

Columbia Film Noir series on Criterion Channel
We watched two seasons of "Westworld" and I liked the alternate-reality aspect of it but honestly who needs to contemplate a TV-version Bad Future when we have a Bad Present dragging inexorable into a Boringly Worse Future? The Bad Past, however, stays forever unchanged and bounded: men wear hats, women wear gowns, everyone betrays everyone, bodies fall bloodlessly and theatrically. I am trying to watch all of these movies that I haven't already seen, none of which is longer than two episodes of "Westworld."
ALSO on the CChan, absolutely do not miss "Tell Me," the series of feminist documentaries from the 70s and 80s that my genius schoolmate Nellie Killian programmed.

The Gun Club - Mother Berlin

Are you a fan of the songwriting on the Mother Juno, the 4th Gun Club LP, but find yourself put off by Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins' extremely-big-80s-rock production? Or do you, like me, enjoy Mother Juno so much that hearing these songs BOTH in their released format AND in much more stripped down, very high-hat-forward demo versions--which I just found out existed--brings you great satisfaction? Most likely, you do not care about "Mother Juno," but please allow me to recommend these demos as every bit as good as the classic Gun Club LPs, some real bangers, some unbridled flange, really elegant Kid Congo leads, JLP howling in fine fettle. "Port of Souls" just tears me up. Why did only X and the Gun Club manage to make punk Americana music that doesn't make a person want to die of embarrassment?

Amaria Hamadalher - Music from Saharan Whatsapp Vol. 5

Amaria Hamadalher plays guitar in Les Filles de Illighadad, who played probably the best show I saw in 2019, just tightly locked-in what-we-do-is-secret music. Sahel Sounds just released this four-song digital-only EP that you can only get for the next month on their bandcamp and all proceeds go to the artist. These are great songs, the playing even more deft than on the last Filles LP imo, please buy it and support a very cool artist! Also just thinking about weird sonic connections, the Tuareg guitar style, where the guitarist typically mirrors echoes the vocal line and of which Hamadalher is said to be the only female practitioner, bears a distinct similarity to the Carter Scratch, which--I'm no ethnomusicologist but--probably has to do with the germs of blues music that crossed the Atlantic from West Africa.

ALSO I RECOMMEND
Cloud One - Spaced Out: The Best of Cloud One for feel good windows-open disco
John Atkinson & Ned Milligan - Call Me When You Can for feel good windows-open processed windchime loops that tell the story of 15 years of friendship
Priscilla Ermel - Origens de la Luz for feel good windows-open mysterious meditative Brazilian forest melodies

watch me jumpstart

Everything we do these days feels like an implication of a counterfactual: if I could interact with people at open businesses I would have gone to a bar to get a drink with Merran for her birthday last night, eaten fries instead of dinner, bought a seltzer from the bodega for my walk home past the sewage treatment plant, etc. Sometimes, this alternate history-building spirals out in scale and we consider various global-national-local what-ifs. Recently I had a nagging one, though, that went in the wrong direction and burrowed deep inside, and it started when I watched this old Guided By Voices documentary.

"Watch Me Jumpstart" takes 36 minutes not to teach you a great deal about Guided By Voices, which makes it better than most other music documentaries, a genre that tends towards the overlong and self important*. I think the director was in film school but if not, it certainly seems like he was, given the general '90s hand-held video aesthetic, all weird angles and cuts and illogical transitions. This works, considering the band in question and their cut-and-paste aesthetic both literal (the hundreds of collages Robert Pollard made as album art for records that existed only in his head) and figurative (the careful copy-reshape-chop down approach he uses to cribs bits and pieces from radio rock and morph them into GBV's perfectly condensed songs). You pick up those details, but mostly the movie takes place in cars and basements in Dayton where grown ass men with day jobs drink beers, smoke cigarettes, shoot baskets, and play guitars, living out a life that somehow, accidentally, curved nearer towards their teen dreams than they had a right to expect. It seems chill as fuck.

When Banks Tarver shot "Watch Me Jumpstart" in Dayton in the mid-90s, I was 50 minutes away in Symmes Township, Ohio, the suburb of Cincinnati where I lived until my dad took a new job when I was 13 and we moved east. Inspired by my snobby New York Review Of Books-reading, opera-loving parents who ceaselessly ragged on Cincinnati for being a cultural backwater with no good crusty bread, I vowed (actually! in my diary!) never to return to those stupid suburbs. I would live in a real big city where I could walk to the store, with sidewalks and museums and a wide variety of breads--NYC baby! And I did, and I have never been back to southern Ohio. But watching this movie a few weeks ago, as people decamped upstate and westward and the city's density started to feel at once poisonous and pointless--because why live so close to people and things when you can't go outside--I felt sick with longing and I wasn't sure what for.

I like to think that the city where I have lived for 20 years has formed me in more ways than I can express, but sensing it unravel at the edges as it has necessarily done during this state of emergency has me tearing away a little bit at myself. I'm just a little younger than GBV were in Watch Me Jumpstart. What if I had gone back to Ohio or never left? Would I have lived with all these trappings of normalcy and banged out covers in the basement with my friends on the weekend and felt ok with that? Would I be a cool secret suburban freak instead of a being a foot soldier in the women-with-glasses-and-Arthur-Russell-records gentrifier army? Would I drive drunk? Would I have a basketball hoop? Would I, instead, be more like one of the unseen wives of the GBV men, a presence implied only by their wedding rings, presumably home with the kids while the boys practice? Isolated in my house, driving to the grocery store in my boyfriend's car, I start to lose sight of how it was that I thought the city made me, somehow, different from who I might have been.

I went on Google Street View. I found my old house and clicked from there out of the sub-development, to the Loveland public library in the strip mall in one direction and to my elementary school in the other. Everything looked surprisingly unchanged, more recognizable to someone who last saw these places in 1997 than Williamsburg would to someone returning after a five year absence. I saw images of places I have seen only in my dreams for over 20 years: interstitial patches of woods we'd drive past on the way to school, the sinister biker bar called Shady O'Grady's across from the United Dairy Farmers, the steep downhill cul de sac I'd shoot down on my bike, daring myself not to brake until I absolutely had to. On the computer, I turned onto the onramp of 275 and headed north to I-75, towards Dayton; on my couch, I rubbed my foot. One of those baby foot foot peels had started to work and as the surfaces of calluses formed from walking miles around the city flaked off I remembered the first line of the movie's title song, "watch me jumpstart as the old skin is peeled," which seemed comically literal but I still don't know where to go next.

*the greatest music documentary of all time is, of course, "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" which I recommend even and especially if you don't like Metallica

where next, columbus hater?

 Like a lot of nerds, I shaped myself with distaste as much as preference ("you suck and you like this thing therefore I will not like it, it sucks") and as hard as I work to conquer this largely unproductive worldview in therapy, critical consensus unnerves me. The other day everyone dunked on some woman who wrote a review of "There Will Be Blood" in the Guardian with the premise that she had refused to watch it for a long time because too many annoying dudes tried to force a Great Work Of Art onto her and then on finally viewing it, she found it to possess extremely Dude Energy. This shallow reading of a classic film infuriated twitterers and people who said now now this is not how we do a feminist criticism. My primary take, on many levels, is who gives a shit, but also, as human beings, who would we be if we formed our taste in isolation of our weird brains and lives and feelings and hates? Perhaps this is more suited to a blog than to the guardian dot com, but look, in my early 20s someone tried to force me to get into Bergman and I wouldn't watch any of his movies, and in the succeeding years I have seen some; a few I disliked, some number among my favorite movies, and every time I watch any I feel a twinge of memory of that damaged human relationship I had and its time and place and attendant shame and pain (apropos enough or maybe TOO apropos for the filmmaker in question). A critic, I guess, isolates artistic merit from the taste of the Luna bar they grabbed from the deli that used to be next to IFC in the intermission between 3 hour segments of the uncut "Fanny and Alexander" but luckily I am just me.


I had a similar thought (why does the urge hate something universally adored nestle resplendently in my breast) when the new Fiona Apple record came out to overwhelming acclaim. After a few listens I agree that it's excellent. But for whatever reason the response still rankles me, particularly that perfect 10 from Pfork. I looked back on past 10s and despite the site's ostensible "indie rock" background, the vast majority of perfect records came out on major labels, by established artists, which would seem to beg the question well, what about actually independent music? Then I tried to come up with a counterexample of a clearly excluded "perfect" DIY or punk record from the last 10 years and nothing immediately came to mind. But then, I thought, maybe that's fine.

The premise of DIY music kind of precludes geniuses. You, a person who has never picked up a guitar or me, a person who stopped playing guitar in her teens after being cowed by a chorus of bros at lunchtime guitar club all simultaneously (but not collaboratively) learning the the "Over the Hill and Far Away" riff, can validly make art. Tons of talented people possessed of singular visions make DIY music, but also like . . . my friends and you and me have made excellent and mind blowing and moving and emotional music, the divine in me finding the divine in you or whatever. This no-heroes-at-least-in-theory thing drew me to this kind of music in the first place. Everyone, I guess, has to decide what they ask of art and artists. People who write about music want ambition, which seems to mean a musician who made quiet music adding orchestras ("maturity") or a musician who used to make big sounding records going "back to basics." A lot of people want chill lo-fi hip hop beats to study to. In general I like music with a lot of space that finds its power in simplicity except sometimes I like Judas Priest.

What I find frustrating right now--primarily in terms of music-making--lies in the limits of ineptitude. Punk's pleasures derive from its ability to iterate. You learn the Ramones riff, you make the Ramones riff but different; you learn the d-beat, you make the d-beat but not that different. But how many repetitions can be borne after so many decades? I wish it didn't, but nothing exhausts me more than music that's inspired by the Rough Trade post-punk that first inspired me. In contrast, a lot of the music I enjoy now is made by and draws from technical and trained musicians in far less formulaic styles or genres (thinking here of something like Kali Malone's The Sacrificial Code from last year). I couldn't help but wonder: what's left for you and I to make to light our mutual fires? 




*gotta give credit for some blog inspiration to my FOREVER MENTOR, the genius Layla dot com, now blogging again at whatwewantisfree.blogspot.com all praise be.

the hottest august

"People in mouring tend to use euphemisms. The most melancholy of all euphemisms: the new normal. . . We can't even say the word abnormal to each other out loud. It reminds us of how things were before, the way season followed season. What used to be is painful to remember"
--Brett Story, The Hottest August

I haven't felt like writing or blogging because I don't have anything to add. Even in therapy, I notice as I parrot phrases or sentiments I've seen on Twitter or angry Instagram stories or in personal essays in publications whose URLs start with "ny." But anyway, yesterday I watched this very powerful and beautiful and excellent documentary called The Hottest August and I would like to recommend it to you. It starts showing on PBS on Monday.*

The film depicts August, 2017--not the very hottest summer of all, but close--across the five boroughs. That month, the third season of our current administration, saw the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Hurricane Harvey, and the solar eclipse. Also, people here packed into subway cars, called 311 about pitted roads, laid out on the beach in the Rockaways, vaped at the skate park, and (obviously my personal favorite moment) brawled at an amateur baseball game. Throughout the film, Story asks a broad range of subjects how they feel about the future. Mostly, they feel worried.

No scientists appear in the movie with doomsday numbers about glacial ice. One interviewee mentions her fear of having children because of climate change; another uses climate change as a for-instance of something she doesn't even worry about because it's too remote, unlike her financial future. At the same time, the film's interviews with an economist/investor type who clearly thinks of himself as a good guy rich guy and the mellifluous narration that draws occasionally from Capital bubble up to remind the viewer that behind all of these intimate hopes, dreams, and fears--a desire to start a small business or buy an apartment--lurks the superstructure of rapacious global capitalism and with it, the destruction of our planet and our island city.

The narration explicitly looks back at 2017 from an unspecified future, although whether it takes the perspective of the sci-fi future (represented in the film by an artist who walks around in an Afrofuturist astronaut costume) or just from 2018 remains nebulous. You have the feeling of watching the beginning and end of some certain era. In the film's logic, the past of 2017 represents a time when climate change seems remote and reaches less into our individual destinies than it inevitably will. Watching Story's Rockaway beach loungers on April 16, 2020, the day after the mayor announced that city beaches will be closed all summer, though, the film looks like the end of something very different than intended.

For the first time, I felt real grief for my city, seeing these everyday images of how it used to be just regularly, the Nostrand A train stop and Chinatown after it's closed and you can see people cleaning up inside restaurants. At the same time, seeing these little moments of every day life and these goofy New Yorkers trying to figure out how to make lives for themselves served as a reminder of the alone-togetherness of our current moment: all these people right now boxed up in their apartments, still harboring hopes, still under this same bright sky with a distant view of the skyline. In one of the last interviews in the film, a naturalist describes all the animals, the ospreys and coyotes and skunks, that have begun making their way back to the city. Nothing will be the same and everything will be hard, but those of us lucky to make it through will still find ways to go on.

*note: I have heard that the PBS version is a shorter cut than the original? I definitely recommend the longer version if possible to find!
** note 2: you can rent the full version from BAM

i really recommend this long movie which you can stream on the criterion channel if you're quarantined

As soon as I found out about the existence of a beautifully photographed three-hour long film about the everyday lives of Italian peasants called "The Tree of Wooden Clogs" (Ermanno Olmi, 1978) I knew I would love it, although it took me about 15 years to force myself to sit down to watch a 3-hour long film about the everyday lives of Italian peasants. Luckily, BAM gave me the opportunity as part of the "Kelly Reichardt Selects: First Cow In Context" series a few weeks ago and honestly, it is one of the best movies I have ever seen.

I will not summarize the plot both because you can look it up but also because it has no narrative thrust and if I were to try, I would say something like "the seasons change on a northern Italian farm at the end of the 19th century, where four poor families live in close proximity." Slowly, personalities and hints of different characters' biographies emerge, but the struggle against but with the earth and a demanding landlord to make enough money to eat overrides all else. You witness the details of all this work, the scrubbing of clothes, the slash of the knife against a pig's carcass, the deliberate effort put into heaving a sack of corn. Joy comes in small moments: a finger presses a well-tended seedling into the soil; a child learns to read; someone finds a gold coin and laughs to himself with glee. I like movies about people working and living their everyday lives because made well, they gesture towards certain profundities that more exciting movies skip over. Art rarely acknowledges that we all spend most of our lives in routine work and that as a result, our lives just aren't that interesting. The Tree of Wooden Clogs points to the possibility of beauty in labor, if not necessarily to any greater meaning*. Time passes, the earth moves on its axis, plants die and grow again, and we survive through constant individual and, critically, collective effort. After a woman gives birth at home, the neighbors who came to assist in the stead of a pricey doctor shrug off her thanks, because of course they came to help.   

At the time it came out, leftist critics pointed that The Tree of Wooden Clogs takes place during a time of social upheaval but its tenant farmer subjects remain bent under their landlord's yoke.The film repeatedly alludes to protests and rebellions happening elsewhere, but at a key moment toward its end when, in a different movie, they might have risen up and resisted, they stand by silently. I find tremendous power in these scenes because they refuse a viewer the opportunity to identify with a hero. The average people--like these farmers, like most of us in our time--are scared and desperate to cling to what little they have. Olmi sees that we must tell these stories, too, not just those of the brave exceptions. How else do we understand what's at stake, what we're asking ourselves and others to sacrifice to improve our collective lot? How do we judge people who, in such a moment, opt to take care of themselves and their families? It's crushing but tinged with hope for a better future, like life.

*Olmi was religious and the film is steeped in Catholicism. There is, perhaps, a tiny miracle, and characters are really just constantly saying the rosary. I think for him, some meaning-in-the-mundane comes in bearing witness to god's creation. Obviously I cannot endorse this sentiment, and like its contemporary leftist critics, read exploitation in some characters' relationship to the church that I don't think he intended. At the same time, there's something sad and moving about seeing people have faith in anything at all, even if it's just in something that was once basic but today is seemingly unstable ie. the changing seasons.

** Some aspects about this movie--the expansive focus on a community that narrows down to family-sized, the constancy of work, tiny dramas of the mundane, a gaggle of cute yelling children--remind me a lot of the similarly perfect "Killer of Sheep," which oddly came out the same year.

chilling on the deep reflections on life and taste for this week to highlight 1 new and 1 old fav

Cold Beat's new album Mother came out today. The art has a Whole Earth Catalog sensibility, which you see all over the place these days, from expensive "bootleg" tshirts to Chobani yogurt branding. But not only does the Mother artwork wrestle free of cliche, it really fits the record perfectly: a document of life on a planet with an uncertain future, synths filling in the space between Hannah's propulsive, earth-bound bass lines and ethereal vox. There's a guarded optimism here, I think, because maybe you can't root yourself in despair over our current technological dystopia or hope only vaguely for better things to come when you've committed yourself to creating and loving new life? Although I've only listened to this twice after playing the two singles, "Prism" and "Flat Earth," relentlessly in my headphones over the past few months, I highly recommend this record by one of my favorite living songwriters, and may some more coherent thoughts soon.

David Roback from Mazzy Star/Opal/Rain Parade etc. sadly passed this week, which prompted lot of folks to revisit his back catalog in some particularly evocative weather; I should remember to return to "She Hangs Brightly" on a cold, rainy February day every year. On the off-chance you're unfamiliar with it, I want to highlight one of my actual, no-exaggeration favorite records of all time, the Opal singles compilation "Early Recordings." A lot of the credit for these songs' greatness goes to Kendra Smith for the rare feat of writing actually-funny lyrics, but equally key are Roback's echo-y arpeggios and slides that cut through the mischief to the sadness she's barely hiding. It sounds kind of like if Lou Reed had written the vaguely country-ish songs on "Loaded" earlier on and with John Cale still around to drone away in the background, plus the occasional Neil Young-tone shredding. My favorite song on this record of flawless music is "Northern Line," a song driven by Roback's lead guitar line, which I initially thought was a pedal steel but I think he might just go ham on the whammy bar and it blends seamlessly with a harmonica, especially when they come together to mimic train sounds. Smith sings deadpan as a woman so pumped to leave someone behind and consequently so severely dgaf about everything else that she's singing a song (it's a song about singing a song yes) about a train wreck while sitting on a train--it's a Mary Gaitskill story in 4 minutes. Early Recordings currently runs a cool 99 euro on Discogs but if you feel like deaccessioning your copy please negotiate with me first. Also, check out this delightful original video for "Empty Box Blues":

please do not meet me in the bathroom or why I am trying to write a blog in 2020

Yesterday I walked through an industrial zone on the border of Sunnyside and L.I. City/Hunter's Point and passed an industrial bakery, and I sniffed vigorously and realized that I had found the source of a weird toast smell that has confused me ever since I moved to Queens. Nick said "you should blog about this," so here I am. 

I have been driving everyone in my life crazy over the past week recounting my reading of “Meet Me in the Bathroom.” Aside from being a bad book about some fundamentally uninteresting people, I feel like it’s my first direct, personal experience of history being written from the top down*. The victors (successful major label musicians, employed music journalists) tell a story that bears little resemblance to my own experience and recollections of loving music and seeing bands in New York in the early 2000s. I mean—honestly thank the goddess that Random House isn’t publishing memoirs about seeing generic touring d-beat bands at ABC and watching beat Essential Cinema prints in the torturous seats at Anthology Film Archives, but it feels unsettling to know that a record of “your” time and place excludes “you” and others for whom music isn’t just about drugs and financial remuneration. There's a chapter in which musicians advocate "selling out" or signing to major labels juxtaposed against these same people mourning about how the Lower East Side and Williamsburg became corporatized; no one even tries to connect the dots. Karen O gets a lot of credit for being the "only woman" in the "scene" with no reflection about why that might have been the case, or if it was. T*dd P describes attending shows at DIY venues as "real estate voyeurism." According to this book, everyone went out and partied hard after 9/11 and the only New York artist who commented on Bush/the Iraq War was...Conor Oberst? Needless (I hope) to say, I um, disagree on all these counts and many others. 

I found the section about the Killers (not from New York) the most interesting, because it reminded me the most of reading about the warped ways that small town kids found out about and interpreted punk in the '80s. Brandon Flowers worked in a restaurant on the strip and used to go to the mall and listen to CDs in the listening stations and that was how he learned about any music, and that was how he found the Strokes and that fused some kind of circuit in his head, and he and his bandmates who also all worked in restaurants or casinos or whatever started playing literally wherever they could and just putting on wild spangly performances to like 5 people in a shitty Las Vegas bar on weeknights. It makes me think about how in the grunge book (Everybody Loves Our Town) most people came from working class backgrounds and were true freaks who got beat up for liking the music they did and, had they not been successful, would have had to join the military or work in a factory or something--which in fact proved to be the case for some of them. Besides the Killers, the majority of the musicians in MMITB probably would have just gotten an MFA if they hadn't gotten signed to Interscope (which also makes their repeated canard that "only privileged people care about selling out" difficult to parse). My main takeway: Kim Thayil > everyone in this book.

When I picked up MMITB--which does NOT tell you the name of the bar where they filmed the "Someday" video--I thought it might give me some nostalgia pangs or retroactive FOMO about having not "been there" for certain things while I was busy doing uncool stuff like having terrible depression, living in weird places, writing my undergraduate thesis, watching videos, etc. That said, it brought back some visceral memories of just loving music, basing my life and the people who I wanted to befriend around shared taste, a hunger for taking in more and more and making maps (sometimes even physical maps!) of bands and shared members and influences and labels. This sounds corny and overwrought, but at the same time, these grotesque feelings and behaviors brought me to many of you my readers. Music fandom used to be my most public life. 

The book does a decent job of describing the dawn of the music internet--downloading, some blogs, how downloading fed into reissue culture (a topic I want to address another time), etc. But I remember how fun it was to just use nascent social media as a locker interior, festooning your profiles with bandnames and quotes. Later, a lot of us had blogger or blog-city blogs to think through our tastes and lives, before the best bloggers got to go pro and the rest of us got social media where text lost out to images. On the internet now, it is not only Not Cool to talk earnestly about what you like, there isn't really a space to do that. We can post a picture of a record cover on Instagram but it can feel more like fetishizing an object than sharing an enthusiasm; we can tweet about how the new Magnetizer record smokes but 93 things will happen that make people mad that very second and it will slip away. Listening to Nathan's excellent radio show last week (every Tuesday 12-2 wbar.org) I remembered how much it means to find out about good things from a real person who you trust. It feels less urgent to share music share music share music (or books or movies or whatever) than it did in our late teens or early 20s, but still important**. That is why I am trying to blog. 

*Ironic given the "oral history" format which, outside of journalism, is typically deployed to do the exact opposite work: elevating unheard voices, history from below, whatever

** or maybe--I care about why you like whatever it is you're consuming (what are you listening to?) almost as much as I care about your complaints about the MTA or Bernie memes, but while the latter is acceptable to share the other feels embarrassing--maybe as an overcorrection to taste's centrality in our younger years? 

Workaround

Did anyone else remember feeling betrayed in the early 2000s when everyone who had previously listened to post punk or screamo or “indie” whatever started getting into dance music?* As someone who sat on the side at bar mitzvahs and school dances feeling, as I always have, like a brain unmoored inside a body that I didn’t ask for or want or feel able to use to do the things I wished it could do or move in ways that mimicked how other people moved, last picked in gym class never been kissed in high school, I did. Indie and punk had seemed like safe head bobbing and foot tapping and fist pumping spaces but all of a sudden I stood on the edge of the party again, because I can’t walk down the street without tripping over my own feet, much less dance. 

I thought about this at the gym the other day, where every few years I return to try to confront my weird physical self and attempt to understand the connection between words—“tuck your pelvis”—and corresponding physical actions. Maybe this gap explains the weird role electronic & dance music plays in my life: the most public-facing music, meant to be played and enjoyed communally, & yet I have only ever experienced it privately in headphones. It soundtracks the movement of data in Excel sheets and my labored motions at the gym where I cannot escape that primordial feeling of doing-it-wrong-and-everyone’s-watching. My taste in this music also has no grounding or history or context. I find out what some friends listen to and I like it or I don’t. As someone who came to a sense of self, for better or worse, through music-knowing, this too seems like doing-it-wrong. 

These days, though, I like listening to dj mixes on the [internet] radio, which is weirdly an exercise in trust. I just let someone else who knows about the stuff pick the stuff for you and enjoy both the chunes and the expertise: a liberation, a deeply human one, from the stress of selecting from innumerable choices in just one area of one’s life. The format makes sense in my headphones because a mix has such personal qualities, a tour through someone’s records or hard drive or whatever, complete with shouts out to friends or cursing about Brexit. I even wrote an email to a group I heard on an NTS mix and they sent me the unreleased track that I loved! What a throwback—straightforward fandom! 

Maybe someday I will find an ability to extend this trust to other parts of my existence, ie. to my own legs and arms and hips, forgiving them for their clumsiness and weakness, their aches and blobs. For now I feel moved by this Beatrice Dillon record “Workaround.” It reminds me of tapestry weaving: a rigid frame of 150 bpm filled in, albeit sparsely, with bursts of analog instruments or vocals or melody. The craft here, these trained instrumentalists meshing with the mathematics of Dillon’s compositions, might represent a bridge crossing these mind-body head-heart public-private gaps.

*I read about 50 pages of “Meet Me in the Bathroom” the other night (maybe more on that a different time) which probably got me thinking about this but the reason I read it was because I want to figure out where the bar in the Strokes’ “Someday” video is, which might be in MMITB but the index doesn’t work on the ebook. Do you know? 

the changes were as many as the things I did not know

I'm tired of too many opinions all the time and I just want to know what good stuff my friends like and write down what I am caring about at whatever moment so I made this blog like we all used to have