010: Disasters in film & fiction, soundtracks to imaginary films, remembering AIM co-founder Clyde Bellecourt, etc.
That’s the American Indian Movement, FYI. Plus my favorite online bookstore and a Chilean novella I loved.
I’m skipping the preamble this month. Onto things I’ve enjoyed that you might too!
Short Film | Something to Remember by Niki Lindroth von Bahr
Where: Criterion Channel
Described as “a lullaby before the great disaster,” I was (somewhat to my surprise) completely fucking moved by this odd little stop-motion fable, not least of which is, I’m sure, due to one of the scenes being a slug getting his blood pressure checked while singing about the eternal grief inside him. The final scene takes place at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and is one of the most magical, depressing things I have ever seen. You have five minutes? You have the Criterion Channel? Just go ahead and watch this, now.
Bonus CERN thing: If you’re reading this newsletter I’m sure you dig His Name Is Alive, but if you don’t… you have a wild and wonderful discography to explore. The album I’m going to mention right now is Patterns of Light, a personal favorite of mine in which the rock is dialed way up.
I call upon the album here because of the CERN connection, which I’m just going to crib from its bio: “Having been invited to perform at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland by one of the scientists, HNIA spent a year studying particle physics and then created Patterns of Light. The scientist, Dr. James Beacham, was asked to ‘fact check for bad data, misquotes, dragons, pseudoscience and to make sure the witchcraft to physics ratio wouldn't be too embarrassing,’ he agreed and soon sent pages of notes, screenshots, event displays and also recommended books and videos. Patterns of Light is the result of this exchange of information.”
Oh!
Music | The Great Mountain by Waterless Hills
Where: Here!
I’m obsessed with this instrumental album, a soundtrack for a nonexistent – or if you prefer a more fanciful word, imaginary – film inspired by the travels of Freya Stark, an early 20th-century Anglo-Italian explorer and travel writer whose subjects include her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
This album is loosely themed around her 1934 travelogue The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels (the text of which is available online thanks to the Internet Archive, though I think I’d like to own a copy someday). The music is gorgeous – roving, Western-tinged post-rock that brings to mind Loreena McKennitt as much as it does Om’s later albums.
Novella | Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez
Where: Here!
Haunting and chilling seem like synonyms, but there’s a tonal difference. This novella runs between the two like a livewire, dreams and memory and repetition twisting in the wind of brutal Chilean history. The story concerns a group of schoolchildren during the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship in the ‘80s, vignettes of their memories at the time as well as snapshots of their lives as adults. An extremely quick read that feels like taking one long sustained breath, a whoosh of unpleasant relief when you turn the last page and finally let it out, but you don’t feel any better. You just feel sad.
Essay | Damn Hard Work by Nick Estes
Where: Here!
The tables had turned that evening. No concrete actions or apologies came from either side, but attitudes shifted. Bellecourt and AIM taught us something that they had been teaching Native people for nearly half a century: colonizing society is weak because of its sense of superiority. It has God, guns, and gold, but its soft underbelly is glory.
I can’t stop thinking about that last sentence, its truth of idea and perfection in form. Every writer strives for such lines, but they are especially vital in this kind of story. I was drawn to it from the Baffler’s newsletter, in which they wrote: “Estes remembers a figure who struck right at this weak spot: Clyde Bellecourt, one of the cofounders of the American Indian Movement, who died earlier this month. Bellecourt’s legacy lives on in the language schools and urban Indian housing projects he helped found, but also in the international indigenous rights movement he bolstered.”
Shop | 50 Watt Books
Where: Here!
A newish online bookstore from one of my favorite visual archives! I wish I could buy everything they have in stock. Their about page describes their specialty as “strange and wonderful international books -- graphic design icons, odd vintage arcana, surrealism, underground comics, obscure literature, and funky gift books, prints, and ephemera.” ALL THE BEST THINGS!!
Here is a list of what I have bought:
Weird Walk Zine Issue Two (Out of stock!)
Described as a “journal of wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles,” this issue includes pieces about the sonic inspirational legacy of Stonehenge and the 1971 Doctor Who episode “The Dæmons” in conversation with the second Glastonbury Fest and film Straw Dogs. They seem to be out of stock everywhere, but you can check the full list of stockists just in case!
The Beak Doctor and Bartholomew Fair by Eric Basso
Bartholomew Fair, published in 1982, is a novel set in London during a deadly, cataclysmic heatwave. It tells the story of the titular fair, which starts in the Middle Ages as a religious festival to honor Saint Bartholomew and by the time of the novel has descended into a depraved, sordid underground affair. The other is a collection of the author’s cult short fiction, unsettling and dark pieces spanning 1972-1976.The Cathedral of Mist by Paul Willems
Published in 1983 and described as "a collection of stories from the last of the great Francophone Belgian fantasists: distilled tales of distant journeys, buried memories and impossible architecture." There are also two essays, one about reading and the other about writing, the former of which opens with "Reading is my rapture, my vertigo" – to which I can only say HELL YEAH, ME TOO!Echoes of a Natural World by First to Knock Press
A new collection that’s a mix of fin de siècle 19th-century works and contemporary fiction, with strange phenomena of nature as the connective tissue. All I needed was to see that brilliant cover and that two of the stories are about, respectively, whispering mold and Midwestern strip mall desolation to know that I had to have this.
You made it to the end! I give you this for the headline alone.