008: A book about moral truths, a podcast about Cool(er) Ranch Doritos, a great album with a perfect Klute sample, etc.
This month’s playlist matches both the exuberance and melancholy I feel as spring approaches with a vaccinated populace fresh on its heels.
Nick Drake and Roy Orbison are Sad Guy Sentinels, but we’ve also got eco-doom (you heard it here first, maybe?); a tune from a rare woman-led Impulse! release; the song that introduced me to the magical visionary mind of composer and musician Daphne Oram, an early pioneer of musique concrète in the UK; and two very different throwbacks to my high school days.
🎨 Virtual Performance: Mary Lattimore & Monet
Where: Here
If the idea of Mary Lattimore’s cosmic harp, performed live in response to works by everyone’s favorite French impressionist Claude Monet, doesn’t do anything for you, move on to the next item. But if, like me, your heart instantly started beating faster, I don’t need to say more. You’re in luck, as this is being live-streamed next Friday and it’s free! Register at the link above.
👠 Essay: I Couldn’t Imagine Being Happy. But I Could Imagine Being Carmela.
Where: Vulture
I’ve had this brilliant personal essay in the queue to share for weeks, but it’s even more relevant today on International Transgender Day of Visibility. This great piece exists at the intersection of pop culture, trans rights, and womanhood. By the end, goosebumps were prickling up and down my arms.
At the time, I was an egg, compartmentalized and scared, pretending that the strictures of my life were inevitable, and even somehow morally correct. This is a common trans experience, the assumption that, no, life cannot get better, and yes, you always will be repressed; you “crack” when you realize that you can do whatever the fuck you want (at least within the limits of our transphobic, material reality).
Seeing a woman whose aesthetic I could yearn for, but who was herself emotionally, socially, and sexually repressed, made the prospect of womanhood seem realistic for me. I could not imagine being a woman who was happy and free. But I could imagine being Carmela.
🤠 Podcast: Underunderstood – Cooler Ranch Episode
Where: Here
Picture some Doritos. Actually do it, think of them in your mind. Specifically the blue bag. Now, what is that flavor called? Some of us remember Cool Ranch, but some of us remember Cooler Ranch. But if you look for Cooler Ranch on the Doritos Wikipedia page, you’ll find no mention of it with reference to that blue bag of Doritos.
For my part, I definitively know them as Cool Ranch. I spent a big chunk of the 2000s working at a 7-Eleven. There’s no doubt in my mind that those fuckers are called Cool Ranch.
Lots of people have extremely vivid memories of Cooler Ranch, though. So what the heck is going on here? I could tell you, but you should just listen to this episode instead. If you’ve never heard of this podcast before, their premise is great. They simply investigate questions that can’t be Googled, not really. The topics are wide-ranging and I haven’t come anywhere near exhausting their pool yet.
🎸 Music: Number One by Jane Inc. (2021)
Where: Bandcamp
A perfect experimental art-pop debut, released earlier this month. I’ve been thinking of it as Chandra meets Prince in Toronto, the home base of Jane Inc. It’s just the right blend of dancey and dreamy and futuristic, guitar that is post-punk at times and reminiscent of Sonny Sharrock at others. Expressive and thoughtful in range and style, both stretching and affirming my own notions of and hopes for pop music, the album’s thematic content is just as thoughtful, considering how and why we construct our identities. Plus there’s a sample from Klute! It took this album over the edge from me, as I’d watched the film (a 1971 neo-noir crime thriller starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland) mere days before crossing paths with this music.
“Steel” brings the mutant disco of Chandra to mind the most; "Faceless, Bodiless" is a downtempo surprise with that great Klute sample; “Dirt and the Earth” sounds – in the absolute best way possible – like the ultra-sophisticated soundtrack to a cityscape level in Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega Genesis. But my favorite track might be "Mine/His," the lovechild of Nick Cave and Daphne Oram, what I imagine it feels like to be a sensual alien craving intergalactic romance, quivering antenna like the violent nosebleeds of manga.
🚧 Book: Bina: A Novel in Warnings by Anakana Schofield
Where: NYRB
That’s a very dark thought.
No wonder I am being locked up.
I don’t remember – had I such dark thoughts when I’d a man living here within my gaze, who if the forces that be had flattened him dead, I would have cheered? That’s not a dark thought, that’s a truthful thought and I don’t care who you tell it to. I would warn you never to disclose your dark thoughts but to constantly disclose your truthful thoughts, because it’s only the dark ones that follow when the truthful ones are hid.
In the broadest of terms, this uncompromising book is about moral truths, the richness of friendship, and the depths of sacrifices, unabashedly for and about women. It’s right there in the dedication at the front.
Quietly disconcerting and loudly thought-provoking, the mystery of what the heck is actually going on in terms of plot slowly unravels until you realize you do know exactly what has happened and your heart is positively aching. I didn’t love this book immediately, but something about the tone and style, the feeling that Schofield is really pushing and stretching what can be done and shown with words without disregarding the purpose of sentence structure, kept me so compelled to keep reading and by the end, I was completely won over.
We didn’t know you were going to do that, the other women said once I’d been hauled off to the police station.
Sure I didn’t know myself, I told them.
You never told us, they said.
I didn’t know myself, I repeated.
But God was I proud.
It was worth it.
Even how it has come back to double punish me now.
Still worth it.
🍳 Rest In Peace, Beverly Cleary
🎙️ My First Radio Show: Sick Sad Motherslug on Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard
Where: Here
It’s true: Sick Sad Motherslug hit the airwaves earlier this month. I was invited to present an hour of music for Aquarium Drunkard’s March broadcast for dublab and decided to name the show after this little world here. The show is archived online now and you can check it out at the link up there. Spoil yourself with the tracklist below.
Space jizz rocket debris, in case you missed it.