Le Cinema Club is showing Many Kirchheimer’s astonishing Free Time (for free) and today, August 10, is the last day you can watch it. Released in 2019, the footage was “shot on a 16mm Bolex between 1957 and 1960.” You will see the streets of New York (and those streets alone) before they were a cinematic cliché (maybe they already were). Manny Kirchheimer filmed “children playing stickball, mothers smoking on stoops, and men strolling beneath skyscrapers’ shade.” Kirchheimer’s eye is kind and steady and he loves all of the shadows.
My friend Elvia thinks that my real love is sandwiches and that my memoir is about sandwiches. I have no idea what she is on about. Anyway, the Turkey Supreme from Smør Bakery is sublime. Every element is fresh and homemade. That photo below is mine and that sandwich below was also mine. Now it is yours! Stop complaining about the political content at sfj dot com!
But when people do complain and hit me with “stick to the music, man” unsusbscribes? Hit ‘em back with a gentle docent: Avi Shlaim. In this fantastic podcast, Shlaim describes his experience as an Iraqi Jew, watching sectarian divisions being manufactured in real time by nationalist goons. That work involved false flag killings, rhetorical pressure, and forced migration, a fascist playbook that holds true across time and place.
This month was good for two labels celebrating 10 (or 11) years in business. Test Pressing IV is a compilation from Muscut, a Ukrainian record label that focuses on “pseudo and practical audio archaeology.” They run an archival sub-label called Shukai and have a show on LYL radio. The tenor of the work is elegant and subtly fierce. Kashual Plastik has been going for a decade, and this compilation is worth every cent. Here, things tend towards the private and unclean, rumpled up and noisy.
There is a new set of live Autechre shows out today, if that is your thing. (Worth $20 or $25 or $29? No idea yet even though I know it is My Thing, until death do me unstart.) In more easily enjoyed developments, Autechre did a mix for Neuvoids, which is over two hours of percolation and acid-derived goofin’, as opposed to software-induced frame bending and gastric distress (not derogatory).
you’re all like sashi!!!! why don’t you tell us which of your 300 playlists “slaps” and I say well it is this Basic Channel-adjacent one. Much of it was added twelve years ago, a concept that confounds me (as in why did we not kill baby Spotify in 2011). I enjoy it in large part because I know merely a fraction of what is on it. Monolake’s Gobi EP, which is one half-hour track? Fantastic! Who knows what else is in there!!!
