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.
Thursday, April 23, 2020
Friday, April 17, 2020
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
--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
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
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.
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.
Friday, February 28, 2020
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":
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":
Monday, February 24, 2020
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?
** 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?
Friday, February 14, 2020
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
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