004: Detroit arts, Sri Lankan elephants, strange Japanese fiction, etc.
Vacillate between the different flavors of Novembine autumn, as perceived by my ears: experimental classical violin, sexy pedal steel, extraterrestrial lullabies, some good old free jazz, and even a song by The Cure!
🍂 Hello Today: Things to Consider
Despite an increasingly concerning third wave of this pandemic, far too many American families will be sitting down today to share a meal together anyway. Why? A deadly combination of isolation fatigue and stubborn attachment to tradition, among other things.
With that in mind, I invite you to read Tommy Orange’s 2017 op-ed Thanksgiving is a tradition. It’s also a lie and brush up on the history of Unthanksgiving Day, when the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement group Indians of All Tribes occupied the recently shuttered Alcatraz for 19 months, beginning Thanksgiving week 1969.
If you’re in a giving mood, consider supporting Indigenous Journalists in Michigan, who are raising funds to report, consult, and train in the Traverse City Record-Eagle newsroom.
Also, check out the Native Land map, a pretty incredible work-in-progress with a mission that speaks for itself: “We strive to map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages across the world in a way that goes beyond colonial ways of thinking in order to better represent how Indigenous people want to see themselves.”
🪨 Short Story: The Stone by Louise Erdrich (2019)
Where: Read it yourself or listen to her read it to you at The New Yorker
I fucking LOVE this oddly moving piece of fiction, on the shorter side of the short story. It’s somehow perfectly sparse and expansive in the same breath, about a girl and her relationship with a stone over time. The emotion in it hits me hard.
✍️ Arts and Culture Journal: Three Fold Press
Where: HERE this Friday (tomorrow), password-protected until then
New from the brilliant folks behind Trinosophes and Two Rooms Records, Three Fold Press is described as “a quarterly arts and culture journal debuting at the end of November 2020 that is free, thoughtful and for the community, including contributors from all over the world covering issues and presenting ideas that are germane to the lives of Detroiters.” The debut issue is slated for an online release, but the future shape of this journal remains to be seen. I am super excited about this!
Fun fact: I took a creative writing course from poet/playwright/translator Chris Tysh many moons ago and it was a highlight of my college experience for a million different reasons that I can’t get into but I will say that one of them involves a story, written by one of my classmates, about a diaper-wearing adult.
Bonus fun fact: I was loaned an incredible text called Nostalgia for the Present: An Anthology of Writings (From Detroit) [1985] while writing about the obscure but beloved avant-garde jazz of Griot Galaxy a million years ago. I should probably give that back as soon as possible, but for now it’s still in my hands, so dig these snippets of a Chris Tysh poem from within its pages.
To my friends and readers not in the Detroit area, gallery space/café Trinosophes is also the best place around for jazz and experimental music; Two Rooms Records is something of an in-house label (a collaboration between Joel Peterson and Sam Hooker) which I should and will write more about sometime, but if you dig the aforementioned genres, you should check it out immediately. Just one great release from this year is Zeena Parkins & Jeff Kolar’s Scale, which I have described elsewhere as feeling like being inside the belly of a staticky whale, wonderful and unsettling. Instrumentation includes acoustic and electric harp, forks and tuned metal, electronics, and field recordings.
🐘 Viewing Material: Cemetery (2019)
Where: MUBI ~ I can send this film with a free 7-day-trial to three people, and one of them could be you! Just respond directly to this if you’re interested.
The best word to describe this film is sensory. The second best word is elephant. Filmmaker and artist Carlos Casas uses the concept of the elephant’s graveyard, from its folkloric origins to its role as a trope in classic adventure films, to tell a very different and much more modern, impressionistic version in which the elephant’s perspective is privileged.
I keep circling around ways to describe the experience of this film, but it’s the kind of thing that some people will like a lot and some people won’t at all! At any rate, you should check it out if you are at all intrigued by the prospect of a meditative, Lynchian exploration of the life of a Sri Lankan elephant, with absolutely sublime sound design. I fucking loved it.
🗞️ World News: what happened last week
Where: Subscribe here
During the early days of quarantine, I unexpectedly found myself structuring my email inbox into my own personal curated news source. The newsletter ‘what happened last week’ stands out as a favorite discovery during this weird process of embracing email.
Journalist and writer Sham Jaff (who I believe is based out of Germany) sums up major world stories in a conversational manner, drawing out natural connections between wide-ranging places, exemplifying her own self-described “easy, critical, no-bullshit” approach.
The US election has dominated the news cycle so much that I find it important, healthy, and refreshing to look beyond this stupid place for two reasons.
To see the larger effects of not just how American events reverberate internationally but also how international events reverberate on their own, here and elsewhere
To be reminded that other countries tend to hit major milestones before the US does:
“Kamala Harris broke a lot of records... in the United States. But don't forget that there have been female presidents and vice-presidents all over the world for a long time now – such as Germany, New Zealand, Finland, Liberia, Gabon, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Mauritius and Malawi. Togo has a female prime minister now, too. The female prime minister of Burundi in the 1990ies was also acting president for nine months.”
🏭 Book: The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (2013/2019)
Where: Bookshop or your local independent bookstore
This is a slim book about the surreality of one’s life as a worker, sharpened through the sprawling industrial factory that is the main setting. Three workers carry us around the strange and spellbinding story: one who shreds paper, one who proofs documents, and one who studies the weird moss growing everywhere.
The pace is quick, falling all over itself, conversations presented without break in a way that can feel exhausting to read, mirroring the mental exhaustion of the modern workday. Absurdity is depicted through images and the interior worries and mental digressions of the characters rather than any straightforward, plot-driven action.
One of my favorite examples of absurdist imagery is the presence of animal life in unsettling places, like washer lizards nesting in the factory laundromats. (Is it too obvious for me to love that?) The creatures become bizarre symbols of the intersection between work and life, edges bleeding and blurring into one another, inspired by her true, lived experience of once mistaking a toner cartridge for a bird at her own factory job.
“Here,” I said, setting down a cup of black tea. “Thank you, sir. So, sensei, have you seen the black birds at the mouth of the big river?” the old man asked as he reached for his cup of tea. Black birds? “I know about the birds. There are more of them every year, completely unafraid of people. I’ve been to the river a few times. Sometimes, I’ve gotten right up next to them – they don’t even flinch.” I’d been thinking about these birds ever since I started at the factory. I actually felt kind of excited when the old man brought them up. The other employees didn’t seem to pay any attention to the birds, even though their numbers really did seem to be increasing at an alarming rate. Right where the river becomes the ocean, and nowhere else, the birds roost in such great numbers you can’t tell one from the next.
🐴 Music: Petrichor by Heather Trost (2020)
I’m cheating because I already wrote about this record so I’m just going to quote myself below and link to Aquarium Drunkard, which you should please read because I loved writing it. Everyone has those albums that speak to them immediately; this one grabbed me by the wrist and walked me down a moonlit path directly into my own heart.
Have you ever wanted to hear a version of Harry Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire” that starts out sounding like a Body/Head track only to resolve into honeyed leftfield pop? How about that awful song James writes in Twin Peaks—but extremely good instead? Trost’s original “Tracks to Nowhere” channels the same wistful sock hop energy, offering pure refractive magic when molded to suit her vision.
I suspect many of you have seen some of these. Not only are those worth a second look, but there are plenty more!