cul de sac of vulnerability
Hello.
Here again.
Though at one point it did look like I wasn’t going to make it.
Until I realised that neither Frasier or Niles can hear me when I talk at the TV, and that I better pull my luxe lounge socks up and set about doing something with this chapter of my existence.
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A Solitary bit of housekeeping:
To those who asked me if they can share this (this here very very PRIVATE substack) with people I don’t know - the answer is yes. Of course.
But if we have to kick them from the distribution for bad conduct, it will be on you. You might even have to go with them.
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The Riser:
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Transition, 1979. Leon Berkowitz.
“I am endeavoring to find that blush of light over light and the color within the light; the depths through which we see when we look into and not at color.”
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We sadly said goodbye to John Prine in April.
Truly one of the all time great songwriters.
“If his songs were allowed to exist in the world—so simply written, so profoundly beautiful—surely there was room for other good, decent things, too.”
Reading: Remembering John Prine, the Ultimate Songwriter’s Songwriter
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Reading:
I spent a wild couple of weeks reading a series of 1960s / 1970s police procedurals written by two Swedish marxists (It’s true!) but I made it back:
The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan
40 super short (and I mean 1-2 pages is the norm) nearly always unsettling, border line just straight up disturbing stories, with passages like:
A few years later, I heard about how this same man tied his leg to a concrete block and walked into the river. A fisherman motored over to where the man had slipped under, and with hooks and nets hauled him out of the water and onto the deck of the boat, but the man resisted. Violence became necessary, said the fisherman. To save the man, he beat him on the head.
The rescued man was taken to a place for cases like his and never heard from again. Out-of-town relations arrive to disperse his holdings. They affixed a price tag to every item in his house, then opened the doors on a Saturday morning. The proceeds would pay, in perpetuity, the people who now protected the man from his unnatural intentions.
and because I like to look after myself, on completion, I went straight into…
This - in only 150ish pages - was absolutely brutal. A badger baiter, a sheep farmer somewhere in rural wales during lambing season. I think I loved this book and I will be recommending this to each and every one of you. Passages like:
The scent of her was in the room and it almost choked him to understand how vital to him this was; how he could never understand her need for his own smell, could not even understand how she could find it on him under the animal smells, the carbolic, the tractor oil and bales and all the things he could pick out on his own hands. He had this idea of smells layering themselves over him, like paint on a stone wall, and again he has this sense of extraordinary resilient tiredness. He wondered what isolated, essential smell she found on him, knew the mammalian power of this from the way pups would stumble blindly to their mother’s teat, the way a ewe would butt a lamb that wasn’t hers. In tbhe shock of birthing, all that first recognition would be in that smell. They would take the skin sometimes of a dead lamb and tie it on an orphan like a coat in the hope that the mother who had lost her lamb would accept and raise it as her own.
Those of you who care for me will be pleased to know that I am reading something marginally lighter at the moment.
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I also seem to have discovered the work of Shaun Tan.
In particular, the book ‘Tales from the Inner City’, which is a series of short stories (w/ accompanying illustrations) that explore our relationship with nature.
Reading: an interview with the Guardian on the project.
Spoiler: the book has just arrived and it opens with an Alice Walker quote -
“The Animals of the world exist for their own reasons”.
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via Kelsey Lu telling Benji B what she listens to on plane journeys.
This is a playlist idea.
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Afghan Funeral in Paris
The aunts here clink Malbec glasses
and parade their grief with musky, expensive scents
that whisper in elevators and hallways.
Each natural passing articulates
the unnatural: every aunt has a son
who fell, or a daughter who hid in rubble
for two years, until that knock of officers
holding a bin bag filled with a dress
and bones. But what do I know?
I get pedicures and eat madeleines
while reading Swann’s Way. When I tell
one aunt I’d like to go back,
she screams It is not yours to want.
Have some cream cheese with that, says another.
Oh, what wonder to be alive and see
my father’s footprints in his sister’s garden.
He’s furiously scissoring the hyacinths,
saying All the time when the tele-researcher asks him
How often do you think your life
is a mistake? During the procession, the aunts’ wails
vibrate: wires full of crows in heavy wind.
I hate every plumed minute of it. God invented
everything out of nothing, but the nothing
shines through, said Paul Valéry. Paris never charmed me,
but when some stranger asks
if it stinks in Afghanistan, I am so shocked
that I hug him. And he lets me,
his ankles briefly brushing against mine.
by Aria Aber
Further Reading: Interview with The Rumpus
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(beg you go full screen)
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Celebrate all new Marcellus Pittman things.
I also continue to be warmed by the fact that - even though the algorithm is clearly rampant & will remain so - it is still possible to find digitally un-identifiable songs on tracklists.
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This feels so pure. I get it might not be what any 18 year old emcee aims for when they put new music out but boy did it make me smile.
Similar could, and should, be said about this very joyful reaction video to the new (& really, really - aka I play it on loop nearly everytime i go round the supermarket - good) abra cadabra single:
[I am super interested in reaction videos and people wanting to watch other people do things they have done / could do (see also: watching other people play games on twitch) so if any one has read anything good on these or associated topics please feel free to share.
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Manara is one of my favourite dj’s and she now has a long overdue weekly show on Asian Network.
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Music for High Ceilings!!!
Rediscovered this beautiful piece of music courtesy of a recent re-issue that none of us can afford.
To the comments for some 21st century liner notes:
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SIR NELSON. SOLID!, 1970. Barkley Hendricks.
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Some other things:
Group Therapy Board Game - “Irony never screams “defense mechanism” as loudly as it does during Group Therapy, and rarely is it so ineffective.” i.e. why I am both interested and appalled by the thought of this board game.
Become an NTS Live Supporter - new supporters scheme to ensure they remain 100% independent and open
Radio Al Hara - “The radio launched on March 20th under the name “Al Hara”, meaning “the neighbourhood” in Arabic. Their neighbourhood is the whole planet, with shows in Arabic, English and French from contributors across the globe, though there is a distinct focus on Arab artists. They’re also open to submissions, so anyone can upload a show to a public Dropbox folder and have it scheduled for broadcast.”
On Beirut’s sewage system- “The fifteen-year-long Lebanese civil war officially ended in 1990; soon afterward, the reconstruction project began. The common wisdom at the time, repeated wearily by taxi drivers and shopkeepers, was that the warring parties had finally realized that there was more money to be made through peace.” The port explosion was - albeit the biggest and most visible - just one of a series of disasters, tragedies stemming from the neglect and incompetence of the ruling classes.
There is No Dalit Cuisine. On a food tip: I enjoyed this essay (complete w/ recipe) on Sambal and it’s place in Indonesian cooking.
Review of / Essay on ‘How To Be Depressed’ by George Scialabba
Chilean author Alejandro Zambra in the NYRB: “I carry him into the living room while I tell him, in the tone of a passing comment or a discovery, that the night is for sleeping and the day for playing, and he looks at me with pity, the way you look at a person who stubbornly insists on a cause that is clearly useless.”
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The Closer:
Naptime.
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And the playlist:
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Love and joy to you all x