July 23 2024
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Let’s ease back into our time together with Simisea’s “Cotorra,” a rowdy green rumbler released in 2020. Or go long with the Pop Not Slop playlist, compiled over the last seven years by DEEK Recordings. (The complete list of 999 songs can be found here.) The category that obtains here is “songs you know or have known and will know again.” Forty-five selections in: fabulous. Every time a new song pops up, it’s as good as the last.
I wrote about The Poetry Project for The Nation. This piece is about what some people in New York have been doing for the last nine months, and the last sixty years. The movement and the moment and the language are all in here.
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Busytown is back and will be on the air every Tuesday from 2 to 4 PM on East Village Radio. I am sitting next to a pond right now so Mina is pushing out the boat today. (Yes, today.) Half of the time, listeners will get the original Busytown blend, with me and Mina channeling whatever is in the air. The rest of the show will be me interviewing people. Much is planned but little is fixed. Announcements will (probably) come each weekend before the Tuesday.
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Ian Fenton is taking the Frozen Reeds moon buggy into the coldest cul de sacs. The new 15-CD box set of Roland Kayn recordings, The Ortho-Project, is the logical and spiritual end of an inquiry that begins with “What if we just listen to the machines?”
Jake Romm’s “Elements of Anti-Semitism” is now up at Parapraxis, and is essential. Take the time — it is long. Also vital is comrade Mary Turfah’s talk with Louis Allday about Zionist sadism, which you can watch in video format or hear on The East is a Podcast. Their talk begins, but does not end with, Turfah’s brilliant Baffler piece on IDF posting.
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“Bitter North” by Alexandra Tanner! Fuck! This story makes me feel for fifteen minutes like everything might be OK, that people still think before they write, that sometimes flawless shit can exist. Tanner’s writing is simultaneously prose and poetry and “Bitter North” reminds me of Ottessa Moshfegh’s early stories—someone telling the truth about their experience, about what it doesn’t matter. We have also been blessed by Eva Wiseman’s new story, “The Knife,” which is about experience overcoming reality. And kids.
I wrote about the 2 Tone Records history, Too Much Too Young, for 4Columns. In doing so, I found new love for The Specials, which didn’t seem possible. If anybody can find me the 1981 US tour shirt (which I bought at The Ritz and lost, maybe to theft) please let me know.
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There is no reason to limit Chris Marker to any single practice. Eternal Current Events is “a selection of Chris Marker’s early writing for the French magazine Esprit from the years 1946 to 1952.” Hopefully, Inpatient Press will not mind me republishing this entry:
IMPORTED FROM AMERICA. When, in the darkness of a New York movie theater, our Don Juan of Brooklyn brushed against a velvety fur smelling of musk, immediately he imagined the tender creature luxuriously dressed by the business man that brought her here, starry eyed, with peace of heart, and the gratification of being taken care of. And without further ado, his hand—well-groomed toward the fingers that extensive experience fated to be adorned with gems and dressed with blood—drifted. Thus what a great surprise it was to encounter, at the end of the splendid fur, a hooked claw, albeit a trimmed one, couched in the bristle like a steel trap. And when his gaze, accustomed to the darkness, discovered that, where he was expecting a half-veil and mascara, was the snout of a very handsome bear, on the double Don Juan was on his way to Management to put up a fight against the admission of plantigrade animals into the movie theaters of Broadway. On came Management, cautiously, to the bear’s other neighbor and said to him: “Sir, would this happen to be your bear? — Why of course it is, responded the man. — How is it, Management answered back, that you find it reasonable to bring a bear to see a film? — Perhaps I was wrong, the man admitted in a sheepish tone, but you know, he liked the novel so much...” — February 1947
Issue 4 of Hammer & Hope is up and it’s a doozy: Palestine, dream hampton, Barbara Ransby, and more.
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My feelings about The Bear are in this short tweet thread. For those who don’t like to click: “the bear is the terrible and inevitable end of film bros trapped inside a tv contract rather than experiencing a long and peaceful life in advertising. S3 is utterly unwatchable like a first year edit test scored to leftover pandemic era post rock stings from a cancer doc.” We ended up watching all of Season 3, for some perverse reason, and as unpleasant as it was, there is a distilled essence of unearned privilege in this show that I am glad to know about. The Bear seems to have been made by people who have never met other people. This is, of course, statistically impossible, but this is the emotion I am left with. I wish I had been left with that feeling in, say, the course of an hour rather than the eleventy-seven days it takes to get to the end of this non-show.
I liked John Morrison on early rap tape culture, especially because of the details. Car services are too often forgotten.