Checking In Vol. 5
Links, songs, and a new old story for late summer.
Greetings all.
This summer I have been all across this great nation of ours, or at least to the center and the fringe, and I am ready for the humidity to return my brain to me.
Links
At Defector I briefly returned to music criticism to write about Craig Finn the Storyteller.
[These] songwriters transform idle listening into an active experience: of empathy, compassion, identification. These are the stock in trade of certain kinds of realist fiction, with the close attention to the hard stuff of life, and it makes sense that all three have taken various stabs at literature. Samson has described himself as “a bit of a thwarted fiction writer,” and Darnielle has now put out three novels, to wide acclaim. Finn has taken stabs at fiction writing in the past, and now he has put out a collection of short stories, entitled Lousy With Ghosts. This slim book accompanies Finn’s latest album, Always Been, a widescreen LA record full of big synths and soaring guitars courtesy of producer Adam Granduciel. It’s also a narrative cycle, telling the stories of a group of interconnected characters. At the center is a man named Nathan, a veteran, divorcee, and one-time pastor now wasting away at the end of a bar in a seaside town. Handsome, charismatic, and handy with a miracle, he had a shot at the big time, once, with a group of developers planning a community around his church. But the money fell through, and his marriage failed, and now he’s drifting. His path crosses with his single-mother sister, an actor on the decline, and a petty criminal named Shamrock, illuminating a run of lives where happiness comes with hard limits.
I also wrote about Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who really scares me.
Throughout his career, Kurosawa has dramatized this repressive-explosive dynamic in yakuza films, detective stories, and tales of supernatural horror. Wife of a Spy locates the origin point in the crimes of Japanese imperialism, precisely the kind of widely known but still unacknowledged atrocity roiling everywhere beneath the placid surface of his films. Yet there is always a pathway out, a conduit that allows this existential pollution to leach out from its poorly repressed superfund site in the subconscious. Pulse’s grainy web-cam data loops might be ghosts or simply the byproducts of an obscenely lonesome society. Cure’s wandering amnesiac does not have to kill anyone; without a self of his own, he draws the petty rage and constitutive insecurity out of others and lets them do the rest. This hollow man turns out to be a black mirror, and he proves such an able missionary for his annihilation ritual because the people around him are also searching for the void.
I reviewed Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life for the Washington Post.
Sebastián goes on for pages and pages in this heightened, artificial register, about his workout routine, his social media habits, his opinion of various authors (positive) and academics (negative) and philosophy (pointless) and Maria’s ex-husband (despicable), rants Castillo delivers in the even, measured gait of a university lecturer, without a word out of place. As becomes clear, Sebastián gained this style in school from Professor Aleister himself, in long, aimless classes during which Aleister would monologue and his students would extemporize at length without ever doing the reading. “However long one goes on,” Sebastián deadpans, “it is inversely proportionate to what one has to say.”
Lastly, I reviewed Charlotte Wood’s spectacular Stone Yard Devotional for Commonweal.
Wood is not interested in simple juxtapositions. In its deep commitment to mundane profundity, Stone Yard Devotional reminds me of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone. There, an older man is made to confront the futility of hiding the part his life plays in the turmoil of world events. Here, the world rests easily across the landscape, embodied in every life. Yet both books wed the vastness of the world to the necessary intimacy of experience. By moving to the abbey, Wood’s narrator has seemingly rejected the big commitments she once made to fight for the future. Living in community with her sisters, she commits to doing just a bit less harm, still touched by the ravages of the world but not yielding to them.
Songs
Will Sheff - Tommy McHugh b/w Some News
Two years ago on the week of my birthday I saw Will play a half-full Le Poisson Rouge. I’d seen him at least three times before, twice in big sold-out off-market clubs when Okkervil River was at its peak, once in a friendly room at the foot of the Catskills. If anything, he was even better that night, slimmed down to a four-piece, manually triggering drum loops and leaning hard into his solo songs of failure and survival. The above might be the best he’s written yet, as true and humane as the English folk revivalists he’s channeling. That he seems to be getting better as no one is paying him any attention is both a shame and a vindication: when it comes to art, a crowd helps, but at the end of the night you won’t need them.
Like so much new music, I found this via Stereogum’s Album of the Week column. The title track reminds me of Carissa’s Wierd, which basically the highest praise I can give a song. Still strange to me that slowcore of all genres is going through a revival, and while some of these bands need a separate move beyond a light tap on the ride cymbal, Teethe open it up.
Now that Waxahatchee has achieved her well-deserved global supremacy it’s time for more people to rediscover her first band. The discography is short, and the better album has some of the worst production in indie rock, but the songs are there. At the risk of ‘going there,’ I knew P.S. Eliot long before anyone went solo, a classic of my days spent trawling mp3 blogs, downloading every 128 kbps file I could. If you want to see Waxahatchee being born, watch their Pink Couch Session; feel old now?
A Story
Finally, last week I published a new old short story on this here substack. It’s called Invisible Theater, and I think it’s very good. Have a taste, and click through:
It was a lonely time, the autumn I moved down to New York. I was living out of my email then, frantic to fill any hour not already devoted to scraping together rent. Sometimes I saw my friends, but for the most part they were busy with their own lives. Other nights I tried to meet people, tried to go on dates or take part in reading groups, but with little luck.
So instead I walked. I would take the train into Manhattan and walk down the Hudson and then back up again, my face burning and my legs numb, until it was time to eat or leaf through the used book tables or return to my apartment, alone. My roommates thought me desperately lonely, and I’m sure they were right.
One of these nights, I was heading back to West 4th when I stopped before a small storefront in which a crowd had gathered. That winter was frighteningly cold, with news full of homeless men freezing to death on subway grates, and it would be accurate to say that I was drawn by the warmth. Only after I had opened the fogged-over door did I notice just how large the crowd actually was: every seat and spare bit of floor had been taken, as had the spots along the walls and the alcoves before the windows, and as I stepped in upon a blast of frigid air, every one of these resentful faces seemed to turn towards me. I forced the door shut against the draft, sidestepped to the windows, and tried my best to pretend that I belonged.
Up front were seated three men, framed on either side by hanging mobiles of children’s toys and broken glass. So fierce was their debate that they had not even registered my entrance. Though a few terms come back to me—invisible theater, productive alienation—I cannot piece together their conversation. Every word seemed couched in scare quotes, and I found myself lost in the jargon. I do remember the audience’s near-total focus as it fixated upon these three men, pausing only to applaud or to scoff.
I was able to make out several camps: one very large, in support of the youngest of the three men, who spoke decisively and dressed like a bike messenger; another, much smaller and composed mostly of young women, possibly students of the professorially balding man in the middle; and a nearly nonexistent third, which offered anemic support to the man on the left, whose crumpled and old-fashioned suit seemed to fit his speech, delivered haltingly and with a strong East European accent. The leftmost man would occasionally rouse as if about to deliver some decisive point, but the words never quite came. I felt an instinctive sympathy for this hesitant old man, so plainly out of time that he might have been a piece of art, displayed fondly but nostalgically to emphasize the gallery’s history. I longed to see him take hold of his voice, for his words to flow as if carried along by a vigorous and subterranean current, to burst out and overwhelm the room like one of those rivers lost for league after league amongst caverns and caves before it emerges at last to travel its final triumphant miles into the sea. I don’t believe he finished even a single sentence.
At home that evening, I searched for the gallery in which the event had been held, and discovered that I had inadvertently attended a discussion on “The Future of Revolutionary Drama.” It had been held to celebrate the youngest of the three men, who had just debuted an avant-garde piece of Epic Communist Acid Poetry, and had been hosted by a visiting NYU fellow whose most famous book, Post Lapsarian, Pre Revolution, covered “the possibility of Marxist organization among the Manitoban Mennonites.” If the talk was filmed, I have never found the video.
The old man’s name was Gyula F, and he seemed only to have been invited as a courtesy to the gallery owner. The two men had belonged in their student days to a thriving circle of artists in Budapest, a group of poets, playwrights, and painters who had pushed up against the constrictions of socialist realism in their drive for truly revolutionary forms. In their defining moment, the circle had put forth a manifesto in the heat of the revolt of 1956, demanding freedom for the people of their country. “The revolution demands that we be able to live our lives as free socialist subjects,” they declared, and were punished horribly for it.
Til next time xxx