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
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