009: Music docs, self-interviews, avant-pop mixtapes, proto-girlboss anxiety, etc.
Free jazz, the American Beatle, Chandra & friends, an extremely intriguing podcast about a seemingly lame subject, plus more!
I kept this going for eight months, which is seven months longer than I thought I would, but then life got the best of me and I had to pause. I tried to revive it in October but I didn’t, and now I’m trying again. A handful of folks have subscribed in these lean months and I want to thank them for throwing some logs on this fire.
Previous iterations of this newsletter included playlists I created specifically for each issue. But the platform for those playlists is Spotify, and as time goes on, the shittier I feel about using and seemingly promoting Spotify. I love Bandcamp and buy plenty of records and want to share mixes so I need to put in the effort to create those mixes in a less eternally damned way. (Anyone out there in independent radio land wanna give me a show? )
But for now, I am still using it and I might as well share a recent playlist: a collection of sonically or lyrically wintery music performed largely by women, evoking cozy train rides and harsh winds in equal measure. I want to draw your attention to Anything Can’t Happen by Dorothea Paas, one of my favorite alt-folk pop albums of the year. The sublime, refractive “Frozen Window” was the initial inspiration for this concept.
One more quick thing: I’m writing a little bit about the books I'm reading and the books I plan to read. If you’re so inclined, check that out here; the first post is about the Brazilian novel The Girl in the Photograph by Lygia Fagundes Telles, which falls in the Books I Plan to Read column. (There’s an Instagram, too.)
Onto other stuff!
Ornette Coleman: Intro To Harmolodics
This is fucking great. Ornette’s commentary is as sharp and mind-expanding as always – he talks about removing the caste system from sound – and Lou Reed makes an appearance! H/t burning ambulance on Twitter, who says “This short film was apparently part of the press kit for Ornette Coleman's 1995 album Tone Dialing.”
Various Artists - Chandra Mixtape Vol. 1 (2021)
For a label called We Are Time that focuses on contemporary music, the songs on this mixtape have a curiously timeless feel, one that lends an aura of nostalgia. Maybe it’s all the stuff that the idea of time brings up in one’s thoughts, or maybe it’s the fact of calling this a mixtape rather than a compilation. Avant-pop, with some tracks post-punk and others verging on techno. A fun mix that is of a similar mindset without being too similar sonically. Dig it!
Listen & pick up the cassette on Bandcamp!
A touch of self-promotion: I had the pleasure to interview Chandra & Jesse Locke for the contemporary Chandra band’s 2019 Detroit stop. Maybe you want to read it?
Ingmar Bergman Interviews Himself
I loved this fantastic Anne Helen Petersen piece about celebrity profiles, in which she mentions Beyoncé interviewing herself, which for some reason was the first thing I thought of when I came across this translation of Ingmar Bergman interviewing himself to promote his 1953 film Summer with Monika.
But here’s where it gets sort of weird: BOTH SELF-INTERVIEWS OPEN WITH PREGNANCY. Beyoncé, of course, was actually pregnant and speaks of her experience in language that masquerades as self-effacing, designed to make women and parents see themselves in her, but reads as quite cold and calculating to me. (“Today I have a connection to any parent who has been through such an experience” is like an ice pick to the heart.) Ingmar’s language is much more heated, referring to the film as a “beautiful and naughty child,” hoping she will cause an “emotional uproar,” and claiming he “shall challenge any indifferent person to a duel!”
Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?
This full doc is available to watch on YouTube – h/t Ana Leorne on Twitter! It’s so sweet to hear the way his friends and colleagues speak about him, even when they’re talking about his grittiness or dark side. 🥺 A brilliant songwriter, gone way too soon.
Aack Cast! by Jamie Loftus
I simply fucking love this podcast, even though there are things about the production and style that aren’t for me. But the way that Jamie Loftus thinks about things is very much for me, namely her ability to thread together all these really interesting angles – diet culture! Feminism! BOOMERS!!!! – as represented by a character from the ancient-seeming world of newspaper comics who is known to most people as a consumerist symbol of proto-girlboss anxiety: AACK! Who else but Cathy!
I have no relationship to Cathy but have dipped in and out of comics throughout my life – shoutout to the Comics Curmudgeon, who got me through some dark times over a decade ago. Then there’s pop cultural osmosis, so of course I’m aware of her in that sense, but Jamie’s particular brand of podcasting genius is to take exactly this kind of sidelined or misunderstood but very well-known cultural artifact (Lolita and MENSA, hello) and just be so charming and intelligent and funny that you become completely fascinated despite no real prior interest. (I had no desire to reread Lolita, for example, but now I do because I want to more deeply engage with Jamie’s podcast about it.)
End Capitalism by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Where: Boston Review
Come for the gorgeous writing about specific marine mammal crises, stay for the sharp analysis of global structures that underpin all modern crises. I read this essay months ago but I still think about it with some regularity.
I wonder if we could outgrow rope. Braided with blood, a tangled legacy. Could we evolve past nets of capture, the intersecting technology of getting and keeping. I’m asking for a friend: Vaquita, the smallest living cetacean, whom EcoWatch says is days away from extinction because of the pervasive use of gillnets where she lives. And I’m asking for the North Atlantic right whale, also very close to extinction, whose major cause of death is getting caught in ropes used by large fishing vessels in her range. Or being stabbed by their propellers.
You made it to the end! And what a depressing note to end on. A rampaging moon should cleanse the palate.