June 6 2025
Is death the weather? Or just the music in Whole Foods? When I wrote about THING Magazine for the Baffler, I discovered that all three founders have died: two from AIDS, one from diabetes. THING captured a Black, queer dancefloor consciousness at a moment of extreme newsprint, when zines could make a world and then contain it, for the health of the cohort. I wrote about the Jon King memoir, which traces the death of Gang of Four and the twentieth century (bricks! small handguns! diners!) but stops its narrative in the Eighties, long before the passing of guitarist Andy Gill (2019) and bassist Dave Allen (only a few months ago). We—Body Meπa—were playing our first show ever in April, at Rewire Festival in The Hague, the day Allen left us. As keeps being the case this year, he was a friend and an inspiration. Doug Kaplan at Hausu Mountain did a great edit of the show footage—thank you to all those who held up a phone.
I did not make my first movie on a phone. In 1986, I used a Bolex and shot on 16mm black-and-white stock for Leslie Thornton’s filmmaking class. The skilled people at Colorlab restored it last year and now you can watch The Take on Vimeo. Heads will notice that it was finished in April of that year. (I will accept a small bouquet of wildflowers from the sample police.) Is that version of me dead? Yes, as are some of the people who watched me transfer the movie to VHS and hand it to them nervously. Deborah had love for most of my work, not out of obligation, and yet there was one exception: this film. Was she right?
A very alive version of me will (inshallah) be showing up on the computer next week for Seeing Writing as Reading, a generative reading group hosted by the angels of Wendy’s Subway. There are not many spots left and the people who have signed up are delightful—tap in while you still can.
The man who took in my family during the 1977 blackout died on March 1st, at the age of 86. He was the organist for the church I grew up in. A month or so ago, I went to have lunch with the pastor of that same church, who is newly in this position. Our lunch lasted two hours and we bonded (I thought) over several things, including Palestine. Because of our extended lunch, I arrived late for analysis. I thought I was talking about what I wanted to talk about, which included two or three events that made me feel sanguine and more like myself. But, apparently, that’s not what I was doing. My analyst only wanted to talk about this lateness, which represented the “blood in the water” of “resistance,” something he accused me of avoiding discussing, ostensibly by making the mistake of thinking it was my session and I was supposed to talk about what was on my mind. I fired him the next day. I maybe fired psychoanalysis, in general. I then emailed the pastor all of my big deep thoughts. She never wrote back, so I guess she also fired me. Freud called this process “in your face, Charlie Murphy.”
We (Body Meπa) played our second Rewire set at the same time as caroline, and missed them as a result. Their new album, caroline 2, is now out. It is predictably great and unpredictably itself, working with singing in ways only shadowed by the first one. The voice is the center here, in one case featuring an actual Caroline (Polachek), and in many cases leveraging it against their sense of sync between instruments and their very particular sense of when that should not happen. Richard Dawson’s End of the Middle is an album of songs and singing that he hoped would reflect the “domestic” sphere, which it does. (Son punches someone at school, call from headmaster, etc.) It very much hinges on his very human voice, which is so so brutally clear. Some artists really hit an unmatchable stride late in the game: Dawson, Lucinda Williams, Bowie, Scott Walker, Cecil Taylor, Miley Cyrus.
If Th’ Faith Healers were still around, I feel like they would be hitting a stride. Do I know this? No but yes. Playing Lido and Imaginary Friend in the car, over and over, I think that Roxanne Stephen was one of the great lead singers of the ’90s. She always seemed like was both completely present and also uninterested in doing anything extra to sell us on anything she was saying. You will not be surprised that their cousins, Stereolab, are still in A+ form, and always have been. New album? More deliciousness from the human voice, this time with Xavi Muñoz, Marie Merlet and Joe Watson refining the work that Mary Hansen began more than thirty years ago. Lot of the background vocals seems to be Joe, though. Nice gender flip. Laetitia is sort of the inverse of Roxanne, an even coolness masking complete steeliness, rather than casual seatedness cloaking power. Not really opposites, though—more related isotopes. Can isotopes be related? Maybe not.
The voice is a strike against death, maybe one of the best. Public Access, the 2024 album from Clear Channel, should be massive. I had no idea ESG had borne such wild fruits. We need more songs about when the bus comes! Clear Channel played Pittsburgh last year and I missed it but I did see Me:You and (A) Psychic Yes at the Sweet Abyss, a Wednesday night series held once a month at Bantha, a sweet, cave-like tea bar. Me:You are a live duo working with voice, 404, and sax, and Mr. Yes works with files and DJ-type data. His set was fantastic, not least of all because he introduced me to “A Message From Q” by Cousin, which I listen to once a day now. I have also been listening to Sun Araw’s Lifetime, which sounds a bit like a lost krautrock band scoring a Michael Mann film about a retired surveyor lured into a life of cybercrime, and Keith Berry’s Xanadu, which is (I think) a generative vision of a non-existent island in a semi-tactile summer, i.e.: computers made it.
I’ve been a koala, clinging to online DJs and mixes to get a bit more person in the room with me along with the music. I like to hear the echo of one person’s heartbeat played through another’s. Amanny Ahmad is, per her site, “a Palestinian-American artist, cook, land worker, and folk herbalist.” Ahmad has several delightful online presences, one of which is Valley of Sound, a poster of mixes. Bird In Hand is the one I’m stuck on, kind of a Teddy Pendergrass feel that melts into a now-and-then flickering between MCs and singers and Akai-punchers and Shaft-ers and dubbers that represents a series of song choices I would make, if I knew all the material (and I don’t). Is that what we want from DJs in our vulnerable moments? We are trapped inside the machine, sending signals to someone we hope sends us what we dream of. If you want to just move, this 2024 set by Martyn (almost four hours) is some kind of dream average of UK motion music (bass, jungle, garage).
To reduce the cortisol, I’ve been looping the dub freon in the Think About It mix by Pugilist and dosing lots of Yibing, especially the Tranquilamente Radio mixes from The Lot. In the Nineties, Astralwerks put out four titles in a compilation series called Excursions In Ambience. YouTube is the only place you can find all four unless you buy the CDs themselves (which I did, again). I love this hotel music on the edge of dread, self-consciously not great but also so loving of the physical heft a soundwave needs to work. Unclear to me if Boards of Canada actually made the Half Awake Mix and/or the Half Asleep Mix or if some ardent fan just arrayed their tunes into these shapes. Both infinitely loopable for that uncanny BOC nowheresville built from BBC interstitials and cemented together with 20th century crib views. Boards of Canada make me think of Adorno’s “Bad Comrade” chapter in Minima Moralia, that he might have had his own Boards of Canada mix to soothe him while his “school comrades” Horst and Jürgen carried out “the oppression of all by all.” Some of the most effective anti-fascist injections have come from watching videos of Miyu dancing, a pleasure that reminds me how important dancing was to me as a teen and how strange it is that popular, vernacular dance is rarely talked about in criticism. The most passionate synthesis of form is happening in the house and breakdance competitions. If there is a future (unlikely), some of it is there.
At the end of February, Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal organized a symposium called Etel Adnan: In the Rhythms of the World, in collaboration with The Poetry Project, Giorno Poetry Systems, and Anthology Film Archives. An Etelien to the core, I saw every session save one, and it was the best slightly obsessive thing I’ve done in a minute. My favorite bits probably came in the first three hours of the symposium, a long session on a Friday afternoon. (Big day for the freshly shaven head hive, as my noggin is prominent downstage.) Safira Berrada, Omar’s daughter, opened the show with two songs for voice and oud, both by Mohammed Abdel Wahab: “An-nahr al-khaled [the eternal river]” and “Ya msafer wahdak [o lone traveler].” Elevated and based, Safira had everyone in tears before a single line of Adnan’s writing had been read.
I would watch the whole thing but if you must boil it down, skip to 1:45 (one hour and forty-five minutes). I felt changed by these three days and much of that feeling came from these two presentations. Brandon Shimoda’s talk on Hiroshima returned us all to the unbroken chain of genocidal lunacy that is United States history, an immoral dribble of racist cruelty and numb button-pushing. Huda Fakhreddine’s talk on Arab poetry drew out the poetic opening, “the stance on the ruins,” which I knew nothing about. Death has a life outside the West that informs the richness of life. If the ruins spoke to Americans, would they not drop bombs?
I went to this rumination on Adnan by Edwin Nasr afterwards, and then ended up reading Eric Hobsbawm’s “Identity Politics and the Left,” from 1996. Don’t @ me!
One thing that Dying For Sex and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives have in common is that the moment of death itself is shot at mid-distance, not close-up. Does this mean that American TV is moving closer to Arab poetry of the ruins? Weerasethakul is already there but somebody at FX got part of the memo. But what we have against death, every day, is our friends. And I am lucky to call these people friends, though I am mostly just an appreciate audience member before their work. Rosie Stockton’s new book of poems, Fuel, is essential. Your year is incomplete if you have not read it! They talked with Anahid Nersessian for Brooklyn Rail, and this Rosie quote stuck out: “There’s this fantasy that things end, then we grieve nice and neatly, and there's a period at the end of the sentence. In my experience, there's never a period at the end of the sentence. The intimacy continues to unfold in jagged and messy and painful and gorgeous ways.” Stockton also wrote about their connection to cars for Lit Hub, which ended up glossing Joshua Clover and his book about cars and Jonathan Richman and factories and time, Roadrunner. I am driving now, almost daily, and want to listen to this song, in a car, a thing I have never done.
Which brings me back to Joshua, again. I am writing something about Clover for a beautiful and precious publication now, and am sitting with the feelings and memories that arrived first in that frosty little blanket of anesthesia that is early grief. Now I’m just seeing it all. I missed a few great remembrances—one by Elizabeth McCracken (radio show) and a thread by Stephen Beachy (sheets of acid). Five colleagues from the Marxist Institute for Research recall Clover’s arc for Verso Books, a post which contains tight summaries of his work around value form, the node at the other end of his early career in music writing. I especially liked this description of his work in the academy, most of it at UC Davis: “He found the revolutionary imagination of students not yet dulled by ‘reality’ to be beautiful and utopian. He saw it his responsibility to test the university’s institutional form as a vehicle of transition, exposing its violence as an investor in housing deprivation, defense contracts and police militarization while testing its simultaneous promise as a site of emancipation, in which one could uniquely make and test maximalist demands.”
There is a sale of items from Steve Albini’s closet, mostly records and T-shirts, so far. Do people feel closer to someone in that Shroud of Turin way, to touch something they touched? Would we rather all have a complete list of his library, to know his tastes more fully? I don’t know. I think of the past friends we can be to ourselves, and this video for Ui playing in Princeton on April 13 of 1997 has been making me something like nostalgic, though not quite. I am more sustained by seeing Louis Allday’s thoughts on becoming a critical thinker & an anti-imperialist writer. Louis is a writer, editor and historian, as well as the founding editor of Liberated Texts. He is very much alive and kicking against the Zionist entity almost harder than anyone I know.
