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