May 17 2023
Kaleem Hawa, Tel Aviv, All Night Flight Records, Time Is Away, Syd Nathan, The Lot, Studs Terkel, Robert Caro, Ancient Plastix, Rachel Kushner, Sianne Ngai, Astrid Lorange, x or size, Liz Stip, more
Kaleem Hawa went to Tel Aviv in 2019. No, that’s not quite right. “In the spring of 2019, I visited Palestine to see friends and family,” Hawa writes. “I grew up in Canada and spent summers in Beirut, where my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins live. I decided I would travel to what we refer to as ‘1948 Palestine,’ to finally see my grandparents’ old homes in Haifa, Jaffa and Akka. I knew the trip would include Tel Aviv.” Tel Aviv is quiet and green, an urban anomaly “built on several depopulated Palestinian towns and villages.” Hawa makes out with a boy in a bar and visits the house his great-grandfather rented at the time of the Nakba. Hawa sees the money flowing from America and passes by The Sackler Faculty of Medicine, where the bodies of murdered Palestinians are held, out of reach, away from their families. Hawa’s fantastic essay is as calm as it is angry: “While the fanatical settler foot soldiers that roam the frontier are perhaps the most visible parts of the Israeli project, a quieter enemy remains at work — the state’s bureaucratic violences, dressed as system planners and administrators.”
All Night Flight Records is a shop near Manchester, one of the outlets that both sells and sifts through music, loosely allied with the genius duo, Time Is Away. (ANF sells their merch, at least.) All of these people have the ability to find a similar tranche of politely demented and subtly ecstatic records. The All Night Flight April 29 show for NTS aligns with the most recent Time Is Away episode, Erato, and the brand new Early Bird show from Jack Rollo (one half of Time Is Away). Some of these lean more heavily on new classical, some go harder on poetry, but there is a common thread here, of the reflective state being a rich position. It’s OK not to dance! I am not at the level of these folks, but I am happy with the show I did for The Lot on May 9. The voice that runs through the show is that of Syd Nathan, head of King Records and lone author of this batshit mid-Sixties artifact. (Huge thank you to Andy Zax for sending me that one.) You need not care about the music or my mix to appreciate the open-throated honesty of Syd Tha Ghoul, driven here by his disdain for “amateurs” and “geniuses” and deep love for the phrase “starry-eyed,” which he croaks at least five times over the course of this short LP.
Studs Terkel and Robert Caro talking about LBJ in 1982? Perfection, and I love the scrolling transcript that tracks the audio. Their voice, their work—this is my blankie.
Paul Rafferty does business as Ancient Plastix, and his new album is called II. Apparently created with a bunch of different synths going straight to cassette, this one has that gorgeous air-conditioned vault above the clouds feeling of the deepest kraut and kosmische. The themes are fully formed and the setting is true mindtone, interiority made concrete. It also gets nice and bumpy in the middle. I listen to it all the time.
Rachel Kushner is out here writing solid gold bangers on trials and people are just going about their days. What do you want out of a trial? The payoff? Or do you want to see how people position themselves and process their part in things? The guilt is often the easiest call.
Here is Astrid Lorange on Sianne Ngai and how the gimmick embodies and enacts the anxious trick of capitalist accumulation. Chewy and good for what ails us.
I have no idea who x or size is (my god the dumbest name) but both albums from this New York person are fantastic. The new one, Aether Ore, is an especially rich take on dub, a thing you know that I love foolishly and sometimes without much discernment. In this case, dub just means echo and delay, not reggae or any versions of reggae rhythms. I suppose you could talk about some of that “oh lord the length of life it is so long” vibe you get from Burial, because it’s present. I appreciate the dirt and cyclone-of-gum-wrappers wind that propels this music.
Who cares about the death of print when you’ve got someone named Liz Stip reviewing the top 500 albums of all time? I don’t know where the list comes from—maybe Rolling Stone? This is basically a perfect series. Liz is smart, funny, quick, and completely right about almost everything, including Nuggets. (I always hated that dumb album.) My only disagreement is about the cover of Anita Baker’s Rapture. Liz think she needs a hug (yes, she does) and I think it is perfect. Also: does she need to be right? No, there is no right. Also, she compares every album to this song, which is a great bit. Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere? “I really enjoyed it. The vibe is like having a brewski at a brewery.” She deems it worse than “Give It Up” by the Victorious cast, though.
I think that billy woods has probably been one of the best rappers in the world for several years now. Problem is, I missed the boat. No good reason! I’ve been listening to him a lot this year, and most of that can be found in this playlist. The balance of clever and raw and chaotic owes something to his buddies in Cannibal Ox, though not everything. There aren’t many other people saying unexpected shit over unexpected tracks for something other than the sake of novelty. This is not novelty music.
Clancy Martin has written a book about suicide and The Small Bow ran a great and brief excerpt. (You’ll need to scroll down a little bit.) As someone who was admitted to a psych ward for mentioning the S word, I am always interested in writing on this subject. Martin’s excerpt will be helpful for anyone baffled by the idea, in that he discusses exercise and spending money and selfishness, the small coins that make up the big bucks of suicidal ideation (as it is described in most hospital forms). I am not plagued by these thoughts anymore, but that doesn’t mean the various challenges that lead to suicidal thinking are no longer there. How we react to the slog of defeat and disappointment is how we become free, not from suffering, but the idea that suffering is all there is.
