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heldflesh · 1 year ago

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TALES OF O'FRIEL — TAMSIN OLWEN LOVEDAY.

── ( grace van dien. demi woman, she / they. ) recently seen sprawling across beer - soaked oak, hand clasped to ear in fitful whispers and sideway glances, the occasional cicada slipping past lip and taking flight at the whaler: enter TAMSIN OLWEN LOVEDAY O'FRIEL. twenty six years old & a libra, usually observed in gossamer lace, a ghost upon body; soft glow emitting from skin pulled sheer – pulsating veins and a flash of something golden, the teeth of a white rabbit drawn upon shoulders; sorry thumper, and goodby – ; love is a devotion local known within their circle as VULPINE + GNOMIC, a perpetual hum of twilight by bôa on salted mouth. something of the SEPULCHRAL + PESTILENT follows, regardless … something to do with one's very own side - quest, faux prophecies and dangers ahead; tales most befitting miscreants and visitors alike, one and the same – uncaring to lift another finger of their own , perhaps ? strange, what a FAERY can get up to. they’ve been heard waxing lyrical about a dream they had recently, a strange tale of a never - ending dance – how many eternities have we spent here together? – soles long worn to bone and dust; body nothing more but a husk of skin, exoskeletal; entertainment beneath a spider's growing web – but we're here together, aren't we? forever and ever . pay no mind to fanciful star - gazing, though: rather, mind the tangible. focus on bated breath against locks of hair, near - translucent fingers laid across shoulder – voice here, and there, nowhere – everywhere; you want to dive into this lake sooo bad, you want to swim all the way down and wrap around the seagrass and get stu– / ears impossibly long – all the better to hear you with, my dear – tufts of softened white gold, splintering from fine points, lily of the valleys dangling chain-like / and phantom wings in every passed mirror – gambling never a consequence until now; a mother's cruel laughter echoing from every budding flower, every cawing bird, every iron box clawed open in searing desperation . /

... mentioning themes of CONTROLLING MOTHERS, BODY HORROR, DEATH, GRIEF, DEPRESSION, and INSECTS, BUT LIKE GROSS. proceed with care.

with palms held out.

full name — tamsin olwen loveday o'friel.

nickname(s) — tam / tammy, if one despises their life; loveday; love ( friends, if you can call them that, and mother, if you can call her that ); owl face; first name preferred.

date of birth & age — october 4th, 1xxx, physically twenty6.

gender / pronouns — demi woman; she / her and they / them.

sexuality — demiromantic, bisexual.

typing — faery, wings MIA.

occupation — woods - wanderer; ex - dancer; hunter AND gatherer; gambler; front desk at shrike point light.

astrology — libra sun, capricorn moon, taurus ascending.

interests — hallucinogens. old - fashioned gold coins, particularly those dug up from hidden treasure chests. playing serpent. mammatus clouds. a good gamble, or an even better bet. winning. animal fur. warm beds. warm bodies.

aversions — classical dancing. uncalculated risks. lying ( even if desired ). weak constitutions. promises. anyone named "craig", no particular reason. high ledges. her mother. particularly nosy spiders.

next in queue — shadow of a doubt, sonic youth; vanished, crystal castles; pitch the baby, cocteau twins; show me your mind, sunken.

notable features — almost comically long ears; tufted at the ends, mimicking caracals & a constant, soft light emitting from them; evangeline, is that you?

general disposition — calculating to the point of desperate.

last known location — trying to convince tourists to step into faery rings at the campgrounds after being interrogated for twenty minutes about whether they can shrink down to the size of a half - chewed polly pocket and if faeries believe in, like, jesus?

scrying mirror & kindred — melisandre ( game of thrones ), rose dewitt bukater ( titanic ), lux lisbon ( the virgin suicides ), love quinn ( you ), vanessa ives ( penny dreadful ).

what lurks in the past...

were they born, or were they created? fae realm a haze beyond fingertips, limbs extending too long, too narrow; cobwebs sticking to new legs, trembling foul's - burning from inside out. a gleam to everything in view; light bouncing from leaf to leaf, sparkling upon open water; skewed from chest, lance - like. overwhelming - maddening, small eyes watching intently every human who stumbled upon their realm by accident; idiocy at their finest, curious as their bodies collapse into hysterics, never able to behold the beauty of the land before them.

she never cast doubt, a mother who would never allow it; too many eyes to keep sight of, too many eyes to be wary of. days filled of frivolous activity; dance after dance, sun and moon passing in tandem, day and night after day and night. rocketing themselves into the sky, as far as can go, vast, endless - did they have space? if she keeps going - will she be surrounded by nothing but void, but the sky all around her; come crashing down as the pressure compresses her lungs, stops her breath?

what did the other realm have, that they didn't? curiosity - not doubt - leads to their first visit - not alone, never allowed, not by mother; three of them at the slightest, pas de trois. it's hideous, it's beautiful - it's devotion; before they were - or have they always been the one and same? captivating, to be in a world not their own; to find vices only a human could have, dishonesty beyond the mirror, kept from wandering eyes and hands, but not cards.

visits become frequent - some secretive, some brash, crawling out of holes formed from bark, emerging from tree's flesh. eras change in a blink of eye - here one day, gone the next; so fickle, their short lives. unexpected friends meeting unexpected demise; but what right, would tamsin have to be sad? what is it - to be sad, melancholic? too much to do, to worry about such trivial things; too many minds susceptible to trickery, flimsy thoughts they hold so carelessly.

until she met them, light scorching eye, features engraved beneath eyelids; an intoxication never so sweet, rivaling nectar from their realm - maybe sweeter, maybe just. devotion a home, suddenly - to her, to them, together; forever, if she could. if they could - possibility just out of sight, just out of frame. but maybe not - somewhere else, where time moves different.

was she a fool? blinded by love - stricken by it as taut as grief itself; a mother like hers never trusting, never trusted - never trust. in all her wisdom; tamsin could not compare the centuries laid upon her mother's back. foolish. foolish. foolish - she never meant the harm; never meant the death sentence, lips of lover grazing fruit. lifting her into their arms - entwined in one another, feet barely dusting floor. spinning together in a silent waltz as time rolls on bye; until their skin is nothing more but dust molded husk, tamsin unable to look away, unable to pull apart; terror - laced ichor, enough for eternity.

doesn't remember leaving the realm - leaving them, there - by their lonesome; an exhibit to be watched, a reminder to be wrought. everything's new; modern, hum of technology reverberating skull, shaking spine. twenty years laid to rest; an unwavering form sitting atop rock in the woods, gaze unmoving; statuette, before bone creaks back into existence.

only to be tricked again; a mockery, lost to their own hysteria, their own grief - desperation seeping pores, clutching at narrowed frame. the dead should stay dead; even in their realm - law remains enact, balance must never waver. greed has no moral to stand upon; deals are made, gambles set - hands shaken, blinding light and sharp sulfur and a piercing scream as wing pulls self from body. and nothing. no body to raise from ground; still in the fae realm, still dancing; only spirit, only confused; memories scattered - no remnants of tamsin, or the years lost to them. nothing at all. husk meets husk; fool meets fool.

those of the realm of fae: family to friends, to those who think tamsin a fool for losing their heart so easily, for letting it slide from her palms into another; for upsetting her mother, older than most.

lost lover, loving no more: nothing more but a ghost; a clean slate free from burden and memory. it hurts to look at them - hurts to acknowledge; so tamsin doesn't - cowardly, after all sacrificed.

...comes to light in present...

it's not better now; but it's better than nothing; existing bares easier on the soul, when distracted; kept amused, kept pushing limits - a child who learns best from example. she can't rot any longer, insects a collection inside her, now; coughed up on occasion, fluttering away like nothing - mother's watchful servants, ever - gazing, ever - curious. fucking nosy. better than the fae realm - better than reminders, devotion's growing modernity cloaking old memories.

tamsin's - hard to crack; penchant for gambling, seen tucked into far - off booths, old coins shuffling between fingers, betraying the air the exudes her, collaborating with the far off, dull look in her eyes. severity no longer reaches - slapped away with a dismissive hand and a cold, humorless laugh that twists maniacal at a pin's drop. can never deny a game - or the hunt, puzzles not the only stimulant solace is found in.

everyone's useless except the shrike family, and the knowledge their library keeps; front desk an excuse to scour over maps and crumbling pages - they've got to be somewhere, don't they? somewhere, anywhere; tamsin's pried open their fair share of iron boxes, trying to find the wings she bet away; lost, given up. sacrificed. the deal a bust - why should tamsin be the only one to suffer? fingerprints never quite there - most certainly no longer, wrapped in bandages with every clasp of iron.

never a liar - forever desperate, visitors of devotion, south of tene, are subjected to tamsin's harrowing tales of heartbreak and sacrifice, no storyteller but just a girl trying to find what is hers, rightfully; years and years of scavenger hunt, level impossible; treasure maps drawn and discarded and drawn again. a quest - she insists. it's just a quest. all will be well - just heed my word, do my bidding. help me fly.

the one whose heart shall be ripped fro - : most probably a witch, or another faerie; the one tamsin lost to, who won their gamble - the game they play. probably still alive, ever - mocking, tamsin staring into their windows nightly.

devotion visitors, none the wiser: it's a tale almost as old as time; the full truth never revealed, only enough sad details to guilt a stranger into potentially perilous tasks.

...and carries into the future.

how long can she dance this dance? make fool out of fool, reap the consequence of never listening to those wiser than her - almost childish, tamsin's resolution, determination. naïve. pathetic. too many eyes on her - waiting for her eventual fall, one she does not rise from; how do you kill a faerie?

but perhaps there's an alternative route; sky regaining vibrancy, leaves returning from their dulled hues - no more bodies, no more deaths; grieving a silenced lamb, a quest to complete on her own. be her own savior, heal her own wounds.

maybe tamsin can lock the king into a checkmate; play the game better - win, for once.

enough is ENOUGH! we're sick of it!: this isn't a soap opera, get a grip! one way or another, even if the end result is less desirable. enemies, friends of their mother, those wronged by tamsin after years of trickery and mischief.

a family found: eventual friends, insecurities and trust issues and fears aside; people who care, people who tamsin will not gamble the lives of. probably.

#devotion.intro #body horror tw #death #grief #depression tw #insects tw

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avantegarda · 2 years ago

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i'm rereading The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett and there's a bit where Twoflower the Tourist says "magic is one thing, and reflected sound of underground spirits is quite another."

and i knew that was funny but i didn't know why so i looked up what he meant by that and

it's echo-gnomics

economics

i just laughed so hard i thought i'd have to go to the hospital

#discworld #fucking classic

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synchronousemma · 3 years ago

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27th January–1st February: Miss Hawkins is well spoken of in Highbury

Read: Vol. 2, ch. 4, pp. 116–117 ("Human nature is so well disposed" through to "highly accomplished, and perfectly amiable").

Read and comment on WordPress

Context

News of Mr. Elton’s engagement spreads throughout Highbury.

We know that, at the end of this period, less than a week has passed since 26th January.

Readings and Interpretations

Either Marries or Dies

We are told at the beginning of this chapter that “[h]uman nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of” (vol. 2, ch. 4; p. 116).

Graham Hough uses this sentence as an example of the authorial voice in Emma, which he defines thusly:

[T]he authorial [as opposed to the narrator’s] voice occurs in passages (usually reflective, hortatory or gnomic) that stand outside the economy of the narrative, short-circuit it, as it were, and constitute a direct address from author to reader. […] They are always ironical and epigrammatic, and because they are brilliant and amusing we tend to think of them as more prominent that they are. […] They tend to establish a footing of agreeable complicity between author and reader; but otherwise they are not important. (pp. 203–4)

Despite this dismissal, other commenters have analyzed this sentence in some depth. Rachel Brownstein points out the resonance that the word “situation” picks up from the rest of the novel, in which it tends to emphasize the importance of “[r]ootedness, house and home” (p. 219). The sentence is remarkable, she writes, in how it “steps back from the action to philosophize, temporizes with the phrase ‘interesting situations,’ pivots on the ‘young person’ (pointedly not gendered), tendentiously parallels ‘marries or dies,’ blows up the parallel with the illogical ‘is sure of,’ and comes to social earth with the syntactically different but similar-looking ‘spoken of,’ ending triumphantly with a preposition” (ibid.).

There is an echo in this sentence of Byron’s truism that “All tragedies are finished by a death / All comedies are ended by a marriage,” but its “tendentious[] parallel[]” is notable given the kind of story this novel is presumably telling. The ambiguity may be unsettling, but appropriate. Though “English novels of the kind entitled Emma—or Evelina, or Ethelinde—are usually about young women who marry,” Emma resists being placed into this kind of plot: “here, as well as being possessed by the plot, the heroine hatches it, more than once” (ibid.).

Laura Buchholz describes this statement as an occasion on which Austen’s narrator “display[s] consciousness of an audience”:

Consequently, as the narrator displays consciousness of a reader, the reader also becomes more conscious of the narrator’s presence, thus rendering a more distinct individual in their imagination.” The sentence “goes beyond the world of Austen’s story in order to comment on a perceived universal reality, “human nature.” Moreover, the statement, coupled with the juxtaposition of marriage and death, adds a subversive or sarcastic tint to the statement itself. Thus, the implication is not just the statement itself, but also an embedded questioning of the merits of such behavior. (pp. 214–5)

For Buchholz, this is better described as a narrative “morphing” than as Hough’s “authorial voice”:

In this moment the narrator takes on more authoritative qualities concerning the world outside the story, perhaps even a slight rendering of the narrator-as-author […] along the continuum of a relative narrative presence that morphing provides. In my view, morphing better describes the reading experience by enabling the brief imagining of Austen talking to the reader, without necessarily equating that imagined Austen to a flesh and blood or implied Austen. (p. 215)

Perfectly Amiable

“A week had not passed since Miss Hawkins’s name was first mentioned in Highbury, before she was, by some means or other, discovered to have every recommendation of person and mind” (p. 177).

At this point, a character “on the threshold of a community,” Miss Hawkins is only “the name preceding the body in the circulation of gossip” (Finch & Bowen, p. 9). Thus we see here, less obtrusively, the same kind of slippage between mention of a person and the personage themselves that I have noted applying to Jane Fairfax (see “Tiresome and More Tiresome” and “Jane Fairfax, Jane Fairfax, Jane Fairfax”); we might also consider how Frank’s letter was allowed to stand in for the person himself before his arrival in Highbury (“A Very Handsome Letter, Indeed”). This slippage also applies to the eighteenth-century sense of “character,” meaning either “inmost qualities” or “moral qualities assigned to a person by repute” (Harper a, n.p.). “Discover” at this time means either “obtain first knowledge of what was before not known” (the modern sense), or “divulge, reveal, lay open to view” (Harper b, n.p.).

The character which Miss Hawkins is discovered to have is expressed in the kind of stock expressions that Austen is likely to deride as novel slang. The praise belongs to a “trivializing, undistinguishing, and exaggerating social voice” that is repeatedly marked out as untrustworthy in Emma (Stewart, p. 79); neither does the narrator’s (affectation of) ignorance in “by some means or other” inspire confidence in the accuracy of Highbury gossips. This light usage of the word “amiable” may also put us in mind of the higher value earlier placed on this word by Mr. Knightley (though his interest in linguistic niceness was, of course, aided by other motives).

Discussion Questions

What is the significance of the first sentence of this section? Who is speaking to us here?

What are the “means” by which Miss Hawkins’ character is discovered? How does her introduction compare to that of other characters who were “spoken of” before they were “seen” (Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax)?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Brownstein, Rachel M. “Why We Reread Jane Austen.” In Why Jane Austen? New York: Columbia University Press (2011), pp. 195–236.

Buccholz, Laura. “The Morphing Metaphor and the Question of Narrative Voice.” Narrative 17.2 (May 2009), pp. 200–19.

Harper, Douglas. “Etymology of character.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed 27 January, 2022.

_____. “Etymology of discover.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed 27 January, 2022.

Hough, Graham. “Narrative and Dialogue in Jane Austen.” Critical Quarterly 12.3 (1970), pp. 201–29. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8705.1970.tb02333.x.

Stewart, Maaja. “The Fools in Austen’s Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.1 (June 1986), pp. 72–86. DOI: 10.2307/3045055.s

#Jane Austen #Emma #Miss Hawkins #Mrs. Elton #e

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merelygifted · 3 years ago

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Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, visionary master of reggae, dies aged 85 | Lee 'Scratch' Perry | The Guardian

Lee “Scratch” Perry, whose pioneering work with roots reggae and dub opened up profound new depths in Jamaican music, has died aged 85.

Jamaican media reported the news that he died in hospital in Lucea, northern Jamaica. No cause of death has yet been given. Andrew Holness, the country’s prime minister, sent “deep condolences” to Perry’s family. ...

...his dub production, with its haunting use of space and echo, would have a profound influence on post-punk, hip-hop, dance music and other genres. Along with his gnomic pronouncements and mystical air, he became one of Jamaica’s most unusual and esteemed artists. Keith Richards once described him as “the Salvador Dalí of music. He’s a mystery. The world is his instrument. You just have to listen.”

Perry was born Rainford Hugh Perry in the Hanover parish of north-west Jamaica in 1936, and left school when he was young: “There was nothing to do except field work, so I started playing dominoes and learned to read the minds of others,” he said. He was hired by Clement “Coxsone” Dodd, head of reggae studio and label Studio One, as an assistant, then as a talent scout, DJ, store manager and eventually a recording artist. He earned his “Scratch” nickname from an early recording, Chicken Scratch, in 1965. ...

#Lee Scratch Perry #Genius #Music #Jamaica #Ska #Reggae #Dub #Experimental Music #Weird Music #obituaries #Have Great and Fortunate Rebirths #Damn I'll Miss You

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mandalorianreynolds · 7 years ago

Conversation

Discworld Politics

Vetinari: You have two cows. You convince them they will better off with you alive and in control than not.

Sam Vimes: You have two cows. They are probably guilty of something. Loitering, probably.

Young Sam: Where are your cows? Those goes "baah." Those are sheep. They are not your cows.

Moist von Lipwig: You steal two cows. You convince everyone they are made of gold and sell them for a fortune. You get arrested and become Minister of Agriculture.

Tiffany Aching: You have two cows. An elf tries to steal them and you hit it with a frying pan.

Nac Mac Feegle: Someone has two cows. You steal them, then fight them, then fight yourself. You win.

Rincewind: You run away from cows.

Unseen University: You have two cows. One is caught up in a magical accident and is now a chair. The other has become a professor.

Sybil Ramkin: You have many cows. They aren't dragons, so you don't care. You have 37 dragons.

Nanny Ogg: You have a cow and a bull. You enjoy explaining how they will make more cows.

Granny Weatherwax: You wish Gytha would stop explaining how you get cows.

King Verence: You try to create an economic plan for your country based on bovine products; your people are too busy listening to Nanny Ogg.

#discworld #echo-gnomics #this is the best thing I've read all day

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dustedmagazine · 3 years ago

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The Goon Sax — Mirror II (Matador)

Photo by Elliot Lauren

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The Goon Sax are growing but not grown. With Mirror II, the band shows greater confidence in exploring their musical influences: Louis Forster’s dark Romanticism, James Harrison‘s gnomic psychedelic whimsy, Riley Jones’ leftfield pop sensibilities. In producer John Parish, the trio finds a kindred spirit who encourages experimentation and allows the band to take their ideas to the edge (and occasionally beyond). Coming in cold, the tonal shifts may confuse or jar but the exultant surges that hit when the trio coalesce into a unit, adding to each other’s songs, the sense of collective identity and reciprocal generosity ameliorate the odd missteps. Lyrical motifs of psychic, spatial and social dislocation echo through the songs of Forster and Jones contrasting the ecstatic oddity of Harrison’s musings on connection.

To the extent fans know what to expect from Forster and Harrison, the biggest excitement here is Jones’ continuing emergence as a songwriter and performer. “Tag” rocks like a storm-tossed ship sloughing through waves of pulsating keyboards over shards of percussion with a fizzing guitar line churning beneath. On ”Desire” she dresses The Ronettes in swathes of elegiac keys over gated drums, the chiming purity of her voice playing against the slight murk beneath and the restrained pace echoing the yearning of her refrain “Desire is a daydream of love.” “In The Stone” chugs along on Harrison’s thick bass riff with Forster and Jones exchanging and sharing couplets. It seems we’re in familiar territory but Jones has a new assurance in her voice which adds power to the male/female counterpoint. “Psychic” follows with a cathedral-sized organ, machine drums and grinding guitar riff. It evokes the best parts of classic 1980s alternative, but Forster elevates it with a seesawing vocal melody reinforced by Jones’ harmonic backing. His most striking contribution is “Bathwater” with its narrative of psycho-geographic dislocation. It begins inauspiciously enough with a torpid beat and weary sprechgesang, then explodes with an itchy No Wave sounding guitar line. Finally Forster breaks into German as a sax screams in frustration and the pace intensifies although flight seems impossible. Shoehorning three different songs into one, it’s a thrilling piece. Harrison channels Dan Treacy or Jandek fronting The Blue Orchids with mixed results. On “Temples” his innate sense of melody plays against a garage folk strum rising and falling as if he is trying to catch the words before they fall away. “Carpetry” and “Caterpillars” double down on both the whimsy and vocal quirks.

A single mirror reflects, two may erase, several will refract ad infinitum. As a metaphor for the confoundments of becoming Mirror II finds The Goon Sax deep in the lovely, perplexing mess of life, embracing the pain and pleasure, savoring the taste of change, finding inner strength and the consolations of a collective that allows individuality to flourish and supports it with an empathy which seems so sorely lacking in our world.

Andrew Forell

#the goon sax #mirror II #matador #andrew forell #albumreview #dusted magazine #brisbane #post-punk #pop #c86 #indie

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voodoochili · 4 years ago

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My 75 Favorite Albums of 2020

Every year produces excellent music and 2020 was no exception. The exceptional thing about this year, though, is the loss of livelihood so many musicians suffered as a result of the pandemic. To better celebrate all I’ve listened to and loved this year, I’ve expanded my albums list from 50 to 75 albums and included a highlight track from each in the Spotify playlist below. If you like what you hear, why not throw the artist a few dollars on Bandcamp?

Check the Spotify playlist HERE.

Without further ado, my favorite albums of 2020. Happy New Year, and happy listening!

10. Playboi Carti - Whole Lotta Red: Carti’s long-awaited opus has only been out for a week, which is probably not a long enough time to give an album as sprawling and surprising as this one a full critical evaluation. But I do know when I’m hearing something that’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard: this album rearranges hip-hop at the molecular level.

Whole Lotta Red is overstuffed with invention, the glitchy, expansive production giving Carti ample opportunity to glom onto the contours of the beat and experiment with his voice. That voice is the album’s main attraction: it squeaks, it squeals, it roars, it spits, it shudders, and organizes itself into irresistibly ignorant mantras (my current favorite is “Lamborghini parked outside, it’s purple like lean”).

Across its 24 tracks (which feels like too many, sure, but only the 5-minute long Kid Cudi-infected droner “Metamorphosis” overstays its welcome), Carti plays with listener expectations, annihilating rap songwriting conventions (why do you need verse-chorus structure if every line is a hook) as he defiantly proclaims his desire to be unlike anybody else. Though it bears some resemblance in sound and subject matter to Future’s Monster (and much of the production owes a debt to the work of Lil Uzi Vert’s favored Working Of Dying collective), Whole Lotta Red firmly establishes Carti as a totemic figure connecting mainstream and underground sounds.

9. BbyMutha - Muthaland: BbyMutha is a natural born spitter, armed with a drawly stutter-stepping flow that routinely annihilates unconventional instrumentals. She glows with supreme confidence and comfort in her own skin, especially when she’s dripping with disdain with those who’d dare refuse her the respect she deserves. A 25-track opus that earns every minute of its runtime, Muthaland is an engrossing immersion into Mutha’s world, balancing a fascination with the occult (“Sorry I don’t fuck with n****s who don’t fuck with Satan”) with grounding interjections from close friends and her four children. Boasting rockstar fantasies like “Heavy Metal,” bad girl anthems like “Nice Guy,” and dancefloor-ready jams like “Cocaine Catwalk,” Muthaland is a tour-de-force by one of rap’s singular voices, and if she’s really finished with music as she’s claimed (rappers never really retire, but Mutha has indicated she wants to focus full time on her Apothecary), the game will greatly miss her incisive punchlines and crudely empowering perspective.

8. Westerman - Your Hero Is Not Dead: In 2020, Mid-’80s sophistipop grew into one of my favorite comfort foods. Westerman’s Your Hero Is Not Dead struck me directly in the sophistipop sweet spot, evoking the attention-to-detail and synth-heavy craftsmanship of that era and pairing it with harmonic complexity and a piercing emotionalism that recalls his idol Neil Young. On songs like “Blue Comanche” and “The Line,” Westerman constructs tales as twisty as his melodies, economically exploring how people relate to each other at the beginning and end of romantic relationships. Westerman complements his tasteful palette of synth sounds with intricate and lyrical guitar playing, most notably on the sighing, gorgeous instrumental “Float Over,” which softly segues into the title track to end the album on a gently-rising high note.

7. WizKid - Made In Lagos: The focal point of the sub-Saharan Afrobeats renaissance, Lagos is having one of the most exciting musical moments of any city since Kingston in the early ‘70s. WizKid is one of the scene’s biggest stars, with an ability to combine the sonic tapestry of his hometown with Caribbean-influenced beats and vocal styles. Made In Lagos is a masterwork of sound design, bringing creamy bass, chicken-scratch speckles of guitar, tasteful interjections of saxophone and brass, and an intoxicating mix of acoustic and electronic percussion, all offered in service to an immaculate vibe that matches the album cover’s shiny, monochromatic color scheme. Made with lockdown in mind, the album eschews uptempo dancefloor workouts in favor of stress-relief and romance. WizKid plays the perfect host, tamping down his melodic flights of fancy and embracing a song-serving smoothness. He’s a warm and inviting presence throughout, laying out the red carpet for a cross-continental cast of collaborators like H.E.R., Skepta, Burna Boy, and Damian Marley. The result is a truly global pop masterpiece, capable of brightening even the dourest day of a miserable year.

6. Ka - Descendants of Cain: Firefighter by day and rapper/producer by night, Ka is a master of allusion. He organizes his thoughts into themed collections of metaphor, illustrating the bleak realities of street life with gnomic symbolism. On Descendants Of Cain, Ka’s strongest work to date, the enigmatic rapper expresses himself through a litany of biblical references, drawing parallels between ancient parables (he goes far deeper than the Cain/’caine double entendre that rappers have been using for decades) and the stark code of morality with which he lives his life. The 48-year-old hermit produced the project himself, creating an immersive sonic realm, crafting expansive, noir-ish backing tracks populated by late-night saxophones, sparkling pianos, and the occasional shot of sweeping strings. Once again, Ka’s music comes almost entirely without drums (certainly without “beats” in the traditional hip-hop sense–every once in a while, he adds an open hi-hat or a subdued shaker), the artist preferring to let his music swirl around his half-whispered words of wisdom. The album ends on a tearful, sentimental note with “I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev),” in which the artist ditches the biblical lyrical conceit and expresses his love for his wife, his mom, and his best friend atop light percussion and a warm soul sample.

5. SAULT - Untitled (Rise): Rise is the second part of a diptych that SAULT recorded in response to the movement that exploded in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Black Is, the first part, is a great album (you’ll find it in the lower reaches of my 2020 list), but the mysterious UK collective fulfilled their immense potential with Rise, a propulsive, powerful, and danceable album that doubles as a thought-provoking examination of the nature of freedom and liberation. The album tackles weighty topics–police violence, fake-woke “allies,” protest, cultural appropriation–but handles them with an inspiring effervescence and a propulsion meant to usher right-thinking people into the streets. The music itself is an intoxicating marvel, combining elements from every trendy musical movement from the early ‘80s (post-disco, post-punk, house, hip-hop, whatever the hell ESG was) into a percussive and surprisingly cohesive cocktail. The album immediately makes its greatness known with its first four songs, one of the strongest opening runs of any album in recent memory: the swaggering, funky, keep-your-head-up anthem “Strong,” which features a drum solo from SAULT architect Inflo, the soaring, club-ready vamp “Fearless,” concept-establishing, string-heavy interlude “Rise,” and especially “I Just Want to Dance,” the best song ESG never wrote.

4. Fiona Apple - Fetch The Bolt Cutters: Fetch The Bolt Cutters arrived with the kind of universal acclaim that can make some people suspicious. The Pitchfork review got a lot of attention, not just for its perfect score but for its bold statement that “no music has ever sounded quite like it.”

That statement might’ve been slightly hyperbolic. Fetch The Bolt Cutters has the kind of propulsive left-hand piano figures, chest-thumping percussion, and impassioned vocal performances that we haven’t heard since...the last Fiona Apple album. But the album deserves its experimental reputation. These songs mess around with song structure and melody in ways that resemble avant-garde singers like Meredith Monk, use overlapping vocals that occasionally evoke the works of post-modern composers like Luciano Berio, and echoing modernist composers like Edgard Varese in the way she wrings pathos out of rhythmic elements.

Though Fetch might be a slight step down from The Idler Wheel, it’s an invigorating listen, packed with the soul-baring confessionals that only Fiona is capable of executing. Combining literary wordplay with plainspoken directness, Fiona forces the listener to confront her trauma and contemplate her diagnoses of patriarchal ills. The songs are uniformly excellent–especially opener “I Want You To Love Me,” the most “traditional” song on the record, and “Shameika,” a burrowing childhood rumination with a happy ending–but Fetch The Bolt Cutters stands out to me as a collection of amazing moments: when the jig-like “For Her” fades into an unforgettably painful cadence (“Good mornin’, good mornin’/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), Fiona’s ground-shaking vocal intensity at the end of “Newspaper,” her dogs howling over the outro of “Fetch The Bolt Cutters,” the winking repetition of the title phrase on “Ladies.” Her albums display more than enough ambition to forgive the long gestation periods, but hopefully we won’t have to wait another 8 years for Fiona to bare her soul once again.

3. Drakeo The Ruler - Thank You For Using GTL: Embroiled in a Kafkaesque legal saga that shines a light on the worst aspects of our horrendous justice system, Drakeo The Ruler spent more than three years wrongly incarcerated for a crime he not only did not commit, but for which he was acquitted (for more info on Drakeo’s ordeal, read Jeff Weiss). He’s now mercifully a free man, mostly due to the work of his lawyer, but at least partially because of publicity generated by Thank You For Using GTL. Recorded over the phone from prison during the height of the pandemic, it’s a miracle that an album created under such sub-optimal conditions sounds as excellent as it does, but credit producer JoogSzn–who not only supplied the creeping, head-nodding backing tracks but recorded Drakeo’s phoned-in vocals–and engineer MixedByNavin for the project’s astonishing fidelity. Drakeo and Joog spent hours on the phone to record the album, in the process paying thousands of dollars to GTL, the predatory telecom company of choice for the L.A. corrections system, whose mechanical interjections serve as a constant reminder of the injustice that made the album necessary. Of course, a good story is a good story, but that alone doesn’t get an album on 2020’s most prestigious Best Albums list (mine). It’s a classic rap album, perhaps the best ever released by an incarcerated rapper, and a thumb directly in the nose of the D.A. and the LAPD. The album is a lyrical marvel, packed with winding wordplay and outlandish flexes, as Mr. Mosley takes aim at 6ix9ine, cackles at sorry-ass Instagram haters, and sneers at American-made cars (“To be honest, a Hellcat isn’t a foreign”). Each song has a carefully considered concept, the rapper’s punchlines building upon one another to make an airtight case for his status as L.A.’s top dog. He contrasts his own whip-crashing lifestyle with flashy wannabes on “GTA VI” and “Backflip or Sumn,” mourns a favorite department store on “RIP Barneys,” and proves he still doesn’t rap beef on “Maestro’s Tension.” The album’s masterstroke comes with “Fictional,” the final track, in which Drakeo exposes the prosecution’s use of his lyrics as evidence in criminal proceedings as the farce it is: “It might sound real, but it’s fictional/I love that my imagination gets to you.” Drakeo’s story was a rare bright spot in 2020, and a rare one with a happy ending. Just last week, the rapper released Because Y’All Asked, a studio-recorded version of Thank You For Using GTL, giving the album’s songs the clarity they deserve. But I think I’ll mostly return to the original, which will live on as an excellent album and a vital document of post-George Floyd America.

2. Pa Salieu - Send Them to Coventry: Hailing from the middle of nowhere–or, more accurately city in the English Midlands only known in the states for its middling Premier League team–Gambian-British artist Pa Salieu served up the most distinctive, visceral, and daring rap debut of the year. His style fuses elements of grime, drill, afro-trap, dancehall, and the darker edges of U.S. hip-hop into a percussive slurry, injected with the urgency of his struggle to survive. The magic of the album comes from the way Pa’s fluid flows interact with the shimmering and foreboding production (Felix Joseph and Aod lead the cast of the project’s sound architects), which is perfectly suited for cold city nights. He slips effortlessly into the pocket, toe-tagging the beats with a combination of aggression and trance-like meditation and uttering casually powerful pronouncements (“I'd make a killa riddim offa any riddim/The grind can never stop 'til I'm wrapped in linen”) that make you believe he’s Britain’s next great rapper. Pa keeps the vibe consistent throughout, but the moments that stand out are the moments when he locks into an unbreakable groove over no-frills production, like on singles “Block Boy,” “Betty,” and “B***K.” The artist’s wry sense of humor and brash confidence keeps the album from feeling bleak, but Send Them To Coventry wisely ends on “Energy,” a warm and bright ode to keeping your creative spark safe from the prying forces of fame and fortune.

1. Kassa Overall - I Think I’m Good: “I think I’m good”–a phrase that’s ran through my head throughout this shitstorm of a year. Sure, I postponed a wedding, cancelled trips, and saw my friends and family much less often than I would like, but I count myself among the lucky ones. Still breathing, still sane. Though it was recorded and released before the pandemic started, Kassa Overall’s I Think I’m Good became a lodestar of sorts for me. It’s a brilliantly introspective and deeply personal album about existing in enclosed spaces–whether a jail cell, an NYC subway car, or the inescapable prison of your own body.

Kassa Overall made his name as a jazz drummer, touring with icons like Geri Allen, but his solo music incorporates elements of hip-hop, classical, and trap to create a wholly original milieu. The album features contributions from over 30 accomplished voices, ranging from luminary Vijay Iyer, to Kassa’s saxophonist brother Carlos Overall, to virtuosic pianist Sullivan Fortner, to venerated activist Angela Davis. But all the disparate elements come together in service of Kassa’s deeply personal and engrossing vision.

Taking partial inspiration from Kassa’s struggle with manic depression, the music fluctuates between meditative calm and unbearable tension, mimicking the patter of an unquiet mind. Album opener “Visible Walls,” is a mesmerizing prayer for salvation soundtracked by fluttering harps, piercing woodwinds, and heartbeat percussion. “Find Me” buries a plea for help within a cacophony of sampled voices and rattling piano notes. Fortner’s piano guides us through the hauntingly devastating “Halfway House” and the Chopin-indebted “Darkness In Mind,” each highlighting a different stage of grief (despair and acceptance, respectively). The arc of I Think I’m Good concludes with the hopeful “Got Me A Plan” and “Was She Happy (For Geri Allen),” a Vijay Iyer-assisted tribute to his late friend and mentor.

It’s ironic that an album that so deeply explores the feeling of isolation vibrates with such a collaborative spirit. I Think I’m Good feels like an answered prayer–a community coming together to check on a beloved friend who’s gone through a tough time: “You good, man?” “I think so.”

Here’s the rest of my list.

11. Yves Tumor - Heaven To A Tortured Mind 12. Shackleton & Waclaw Zimpel - Primal Forms 13. Bob Dylan - Rough & Rowdy Ways 14. Duval Timothy - Help 15. Lil Uzi Vert - Eternal Atake 16. Moodymann - Taken Away 17. Secret Drum Band - Chuva 18. J Hus - Big Conspiracy 19. Headie One & Fred Again - GANG 20. Tiwa Savage - Celia 21. Andras - Joyful 22. Bill Callahan - Gold Record 23. King Von - Welcome To O’Block 24. Flo Milli - Ho, Why Is You Here? 25. Chubby & The Gang - Speed Kills 26. Madeline Kenney - Sucker’s Lunch 27. Empty Country - Empty Country 28. Smino - She Already Decided 29. Destroyer - Have We Met 30. Yves Jarvis - Sundry Rock Song Stock 31. Ela Minus - Acts Of Rebellion 32. Creeper - Sex, Death & The Infinite Void 33. Alabaster DePlume - To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals, Vol. 1 34. Good Sad Happy Bad - Shades 35. The 1975 - Notes On a Conditional Form 36. Kate NV - Room For The Moon 37. $ilkmoney - Attack of the Future Shocked, Flesh Covered, Meatbags of the 85 38. Eddie Chacon - Pleasure, Joy and Happiness 39. Kenny Segal & Serengeti - Ajai 40. Bad Bunny - YHLQMDLG 41. Kahlil Blu - DOG 42. Califone - Echo Mine 43. Boldy James - The Price of Tea in China/Manger On McNichols/The Versace Tape 44. Bufiman - Albumsi 45. Moses Boyd - Dark Matter 46. Thanya Iyer - KIND 47. Jyoti - Mama You Can Bet! 48. Obongjayar - Which Way Is Forward? 49. Rio Da Yung OG - City On My Back 50. Young Jesus - Welcome To Conceptual Beach 51. Owen Pallett - Island 52. Oceanator - Things I Never Said 53. Shootergang Kony - Red Paint Reverend 54. Shabason, Krgovich & Harris - Philadelphia 55. Six Organs of Admittance - Companion Rises 56. Lido Pimienta - Miss Colombia 57. Kelly Lee Owens - Inner Song 58. Polo G - The GOAT 59. Actress - Karma & Desire 60. Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher 61. Porridge Radio - Every Bad 62. Yg Teck - Eyes Won’t Close 63. Mozzy - Beyond Bulletproof 64. Ratboys - Printer’s Devil 65. R.A.P. Ferreira - Purple Moonlight Pages 66. Ulver - Flowers of Evil 67. Rina Sawayama - SAWAYAMA 68. SAULT - Untitled (Black Is) 69. Ezra Feinberg - Recumbent Speech 70. Davido - A Better Time 71. Hailu Mergia - Yene Mircha 72. HAIM - Women In Music Pt. III 73. Half Waif - The Caretaker 74. Key Glock - Yellow Tape 75. KeiyAa - Forever Your Girl

#kassa overall #pa salieu #drakeo the ruler #fiona apple #sault #ka #wizkid #westerman #playboi carti #bbymutha

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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years ago

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PHOEBE BRIDGERS - GARDEN SONG

[7.00]

And we managed not to write "tonic" or "balm"...

Vikram Joseph: The deep, soft ache in the bones of every Phoebe Bridgers song feels that much more poignant right now. The muted flicker of "Garden Song" sounds like an underwater pool sequence in a film, and plays out like a fractured montage, a string of unconnected visions and recollections which form not a narrative but rather an oblique window into Bridgers' psyche, a thousand stills coalescing into a single image capturing something devastatingly precise. The image of a movie screen turning into a tidal wave sticks with me, as does the strange, lovely line "The doctor put her hands over my liver / she told me my resentment's getting smaller." It ends by (probably inadvertently) echoing Billie Eilish -- "I have everything I wanted" -- in both cases, a line so loaded it weighs the song down like an anchor. It's hard to think of a voice in music that moves me more right now. [9]

Alfred Soto: It begins with a scratched, warped string loop. If we could see memories, they would also look scratched and warped. Gnomic lines ("The doctor put her hands over my liver/She told me my resentment's getting smaller") suit Phoebe Bridgers' furtive approach. She sings as if she holds secrets close, which can be off-putting. [7]

Michael Hong: Throughout "Garden Song," Phoebe Bridgers' voice seems to shake with nervousness, like every thought is sung apprehensively in case someone might overhear. The rest of the track takes shape around her voice, like a calming wisp of smoke, but that shakiness reverberates across, never letting the track fully form and creating the unsettling feeling that it'll blow over with the slightest draft. [6]

Katherine St Asaph: I think I just need my folk music to have venom and spikes. [5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: "Garden Song" both succeeds on the virtue of and is held back by its skeletal nature. Its solo guitar and vocal arrangement (give or take a deep bass backing vocal) is less folky than ghostly, lending the whole song something the feeling of waking up from an afternoon nap in the sun, still dazed and incoherent but full of warmth. It's an insubstantial feeling, but Bridgers handles it well. [7]

David Sheffieck: Balancing halfway between unsettling and elegant, but teetering between the two; like a chaotic good take on an early Animal Collective track, this is beautiful even as it disorients. Bridgers starts out threatening to murder a skinhead and winds up in a meditation on aging and contentment; somewhere in between there's a kind of transfixing peace. [7]

Ian Mathers: It kind of surprises me each time "Garden Song" ends as soon as it does, because between the looped or almost-looped guitar (very soothing), the little bits and pops and crackles applied to it (somehow even more soothing) and how good Bridgers' voice sounds over it, I could easily sit here for another ten or twenty or thirty minutes, just letting the narrative unspool. It's the kind of song that briefly makes all other songs feel slightly awkward because they're not just further unfurlings of this beautiful, melancholy thing. [8]

Alex Clifton: It's the musical equivalent of Lady Bird, which is to say it's a beautiful collage of memories related to change and growing up and finding yourself, but I will cry if I think about it too much. [7]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Phoebe Bridgers #indie rock #rock #music #music review

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buffleheadcabin · 5 years ago

Quote

Even the moon has its own snail, Gnomic, removed Under miles of water, its pale Foot reaching for a shape to hold. In mornings the light stretched In cold arcs across the parking lot. Inside, we circled: table to kitchen to mirror. Decided we could go into town or not. The wet shore’s too many rounded rocks, Exotic jade and red, all dried to gray in my hand, Then lay on the white plastic table next to yours. The pieces of the world are calling To each other: you were looking For the moon snail’s husk, a fist-size Echo, washed into sight.

Moon Snail by Jessica Johnson The Paris Review. Issue no. 180 (Spring 2007)

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1921designs · 4 years ago

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Find your beach

ACROSS THE WAY from our apartment—on Houston, I guess—there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year.

Whatever’s on that wall is my view: I look at it more than the sky or the new World Trade Center, more than the water towers, the passing cabs. It has a subliminal effect. Last semester it was a spot for high-end vodka, and while I wrangled children into their snowsuits, chock-full of domestic resentment, I’d find myself dreaming of cold martinis.

Before that came an ad so high-end I couldn’t tell what it was for. There was no text—or none that I could see—and the visual was of a yellow firebird set upon a background of hellish red. It seemed a gnomic message, deliberately placed to drive a sleepless woman mad. Once, staring at it with a newborn in my arms, I saw another mother, in the tower opposite, holding her baby. It was 4 A.M. We stood there at our respective windows, separated by a hundred feet of expensive New York air.

The tower I live in is university accommodation; so is the tower opposite. The idea occurred that it was quite likely that the woman at the window also wrote books for a living, and, like me, was not writing anything right now. Maybe she was considering antidepressants. Maybe she was already on them. It was hard to tell. Certainly she had no way of viewing the ad in question, not without opening her window, jumping, and turning as she fell. I was her view. I was the ad for what she already had.

But that was all some time ago. Now the ad says, Find your beach. The bottle of beer—it’s an ad for beer—is very yellow and the background luxury-holidayblue. It seems to me uniquely well placed, like a piece of commissioned public art in perfect sympathy with its urban site. The tone is pure Manhattan. Echoes can be found in the personal growth section of the bookstore (“Find your happy”), and in exercise classes (“Find your soul”), and in the therapist’s office (“Find your self”). I find it significant that there exists a more expansive, national version of this ad that runs in magazines, and on television.

In those cases photographic images are used, and the beach is real and seen in full. Sometimes the tag line is expanded, too: When life gives you limes . . . Find your beach. But the wall I see from my window marks the entrance to SoHo, a district that is home to media moguls, entertainment lawyers, every variety of celebrity, some students, as well as a vanishingly small subset of rent-controlled artists and academics.

Collectively we, the people of SoHo, consider ourselves pretty sophisticated consumers of media. You can’t put a cheesy ad like that past us. And so the ad has been reduced to its essence—a yellow undulation against a field of blue— and painted directly onto the wall, in a bright pop-art style. The mad men know that we know the SoHo being referenced here: the SoHo of Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, the SoHo that came before Foot Locker, Sephora, Prada, frozen yogurt. That SoHo no longer exists, of course, but it’s part of the reason we’re all here, crowded on this narrow strip of a narrow island. Whoever placed this ad knows us well.

Find your beach. The construction is odd. A faintly threatening mixture of imperative and possessive forms, the transformation of a noun into a state of mind. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. On the one hand it means, simply, “Go out and discover what makes you happy.” Pursue happiness actively, as Americans believe it their right to do. And it’s an ad for beer, which makes you happy in the special way of all intoxicants, by reshaping reality around a sensation you alone are having. So, even more precisely, the ad means “Go have a beer and let it make you happy.” Nothing strange there. Except beer used to be sold on the dream of communal fun: have a beer with a buddy, or lots of buddies. People crowded the frame, laughing and smiling. It was a lie about alcohol—as this ad is a lie about alcohol—but it was a different kind of lie, a wide-framed lie, including other people.

Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if—as in the case of this wall painting—it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty.

In an exercise class recently the instructor shouted at me, at all of us: “Don’t let your mind set limits that aren’t really there.” You’ll find this attitude all over the island. It is encouraged and reflected in the popular culture, especially the movies, so many of which, after all, begin their creative lives here, in Manhattan. According to the movies it’s only our own limited brains that are keeping us

from happiness. In the future we will take a pill to make us limitless (and ideal citizens of Manhattan), or we will, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy, use 100 percent of our brain’s capacity instead of the mythic 10. In these formulations the world as it is has no real claim on us. Our happiness, our miseries, our beaches, or our blasted heaths—they are all within our own power to create, or destroy. On Tina Fey’s television show 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy—the consummate citizen of this new Manhattan—deals with problems by crushing them with his “mind vise.”

The beach is always there: you just have to conceive of it. It follows that those who fail to find their beach are, in the final analysis, mentally fragile; in

Manhattan terms, simply weak. Jack Donaghy’s verbal swordplay with Liz Lemon was a comic rendering of the various things many citizens of Manhattan have come to regard as fatal weakness: childlessness, obesity, poverty. To find your beach you have to be ruthless. Manhattan is for the hard-bodied, the hardminded, the multitasker, the alpha mamas and papas. A perfect place for selfempowerment—as long as you’re pretty empowered to begin with. As long as you’re one of these people who simply do not allow anything—not even reality —to impinge upon that clear field of blue.

There is a kind of individualism so stark that it seems to dovetail with an existentialist creed: Manhattan is right at that crossroads. You are pure potential in Manhattan, limitless, you are making yourself every day. When I am in England each summer, it’s the opposite: all I see are the limits of my life. The brain that puts a hairbrush in the fridge, the leg that radiates pain from the hip to the toe, the lovely children who eat all my time, the books unread and unwritten.

And casting a shadow over it all is what Philip Larkin called “extinction’s alp,” no longer a stable peak in a distance, finally becoming rising ground. In England even at the actual beach I cannot find my beach. I look out at the freezing forty-degree water, at the families squeezed into ill-fitting wetsuits, huddled behind windbreakers, approaching a day at the beach with the kind of stoicism once conjured for things like the Battle of Britain, and all I can think is what funny, limited creatures we are, subject to every wind and wave, building castles in the sand that will only be knocked down by the generation coming up beneath us.

When I land at JFK, everything changes. For the first few days it is a shock: I have to get used to old New York ladies beside themselves with fury that I have stopped their smooth elevator journey and got in with some children. I have to remember not to pause while walking in the street—or during any fluid-moving city interaction—unless I want to utterly exasperate the person behind me. Each man and woman in this town is in pursuit of his or her beach and God help you if you get in their way. I suppose it should follow that I am happier in pragmatic England than idealist Manhattan, but I can’t honestly say that this is so. You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. “A reality shaped around your own desires”—there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

It is also a fair description of what it is to write fiction. And to live in a city where everyone has essentially the same tunnel vision and obsessive focus as a novelist is to disguise your own sociopathy among the herd. Objectively all the same limits are upon me in Manhattan as they are in England. I walk a ten-block radius every day, constrained in all the usual ways by domestic life, reduced to writing about whatever is right in front of my nose. But the fact remains that here I dowrite, the work gets done.

Even if my Manhattan productivity is powered by a sociopathic illusion of my own limitlessness, I’m thankful for it, at least when I’m writing. There’s a reason so many writers once lived here, beyond the convenient laundromats and the take-out food, the libraries and cafés. We have always worked off the energy generated by this town, the moneymaking and tower-building as much as the street art and underground cultures. Now the energy is different: the underground has almost entirely disappeared. (You hope there are still young artists in Washington Heights, in the Barrio, or Stuyvesant Town, but how much longer can they hang on?) A twisted kind of energy radiates instead off the SoulCycling mothers and marathon-running octogenarians, the entertainment lawyers glued to their iPhones and the moguls building five “individualized” condo townhouses where once there was a hospital.

It’s not a pretty energy, but it still runs what’s left of the show. I contribute to it. I ride a stationary bike like the rest of them. And then I despair when Shakespeare and Co. closes in favor of another Foot Locker. There’s no way to be in good faith on this island anymore. You have to crush so many things with your mind vise just to get through the day. Which seems to me another aspect of the ad outside of my window: willful intoxication. Or, to put it more snappily, “You don’t have to be high to live here, but it helps.”

Finally the greatest thing about Manhattan is the worst thing about Manhattan: self-actualization. Here you will be free to stretch yourself to your limit, to find the beach that is yours alone. But sooner or later you will be sitting on that beach wondering what comes next. I can see my own beach ahead now, as the children grow, as the practical limits fade; I see afresh the huge privilege of my position; it reclarifies itself. Under the protection of a university I live on one of the most privileged strips of built-up beach in the world, among people who believe they privileged strips of built-up beach in the world, among people who believe they have no limits and who push me, by their very proximity, into the same useful delusion, now and then.

It is such a good town in which to work and work. You can find your beach here, find it falsely but convincingly, still thinking of Manhattan as an isle of writers and artists—of downtown underground wildlings and uptown intellectuals—against all evidence to the contrary. Oh, you still see them occasionally here and there, but unless they are under the protection of a university—or have sold that TV show—they are all of them, every single last one of them, in Brooklyn.

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ericfruits · 5 years ago

Text

In “Devs”, Alex Garland returns to themes of technology and power

More development In “Devs”, Alex Garland returns to themes of technology and power

Like his most recent film, “Annihilation”, it is taut and unnerving but a little confused

Books, arts and culture Prospero

“DEVS”, A NEW eight-part miniseries written and directed by Alex Garland, is a kind of sci-fi thriller. The action takes place in present-day (or close to present-day) San Francisco; it follows the employees of Amaya, a secretive tech company, who shuttle between the firm’s photogenically wooded, Silicon Valley campus and their nice lives in the city itself. It begins with the show’s heroine, Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno), and her boyfriend Sergei (Karl Glusman), getting up to go to work. They step over Pete, a homeless man who sleeps on their steps regularly enough to be on first-name terms. “Dude, please”, Sergei says, exasperated. “Have a great day”, Pete replies. “Be all you can be.”

It does turn out to be a great day for Sergei. After giving a knock-out pitch to Forest (Nick Offerman), Amaya’s founder, and his creepy deputy, Katie (Alison Pill), Sergei is invited to join the “devs” team, a tech-diminution of “development”. This is the firm’s most secretive and glamorous department, which is working on…well, no one except Forest and those already working there know exactly. Something to do with quantum computing, coding and a mysterious machine that is tantalisingly close to being perfected. It is a prestigious promotion, and one that unleashes chaos. Sergei never returns from his first day working on the devs team. Lily, meanwhile, maddened with grief, embarks on a quest to untangle the mysteries surrounding her lover.

Mr Garland rose to fame in the 1990s with the publication of his novel “The Beach”, later made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Since then, he has mostly focused his attention on the movie business. He wrote the scripts for “28 Days Later” (2002) and “Never Let me Go” (2010), both commercial successes; his directorial debut was the deft science-fiction thriller “Ex Machina” in 2014, followed four years later by the chilling and otherworldly “Annihilation”. Although gorgeously designed and featuring an excellent cast, the internal logic of “Annihilation” was so flabby it strained even generous credulity.

Nevertheless, Mr Garland’s fans will be pleased to hear that “Devs” is a return to many of his favourite themes and motifs. It features an elusive, compelling tech founder obsessed with an unsettling project; a jarring, jangling soundscape; power, control and justice; pitiless opponents; a slick aesthetic; and, most crucial of all, an intricate plot that unfolds slowly and carefully.

“Devs” gets a lot right: Mr Garland succeeds in unnerving and unsettling his viewers. The fictional Amaya contains echoes of a Facebook or an Uber, a hierarchical firm with too much money and a decidedly off-kilter moral compass. His characters are intriguing enough to hold viewers’ attention over eight hours. Mr Offerman, who is best known for his comic turn as Ron Swanson in the sitcom “Parks and Recreation”, convincingly balances on the knife-edge between visionary and villain.

Ms Mizuno, who Mr Garland has cast in previous films, makes a mercurial, inscrutable lead. Like many of the best characters conjured by the writer, the viewers’ experience of hers is subject to reversals so extreme they are almost dreamlike. Lily seems damaged and vulnerable in one scene, but hard and unyielding in the next. Despite her predicament, and her many good qualities, this makes her difficult to like. Jamie, her ex-partner, expresses this sentiment best when she approaches him to help find Sergei by hacking his phone. “Lily, sincerely and from the very bottom of my heart,” Jamie tells her, “fuck off.”

Unfortunately, “Devs” suffers from the same afflictions that bedevilled “Annihilation”. There are too many mysteries, unanswered questions and characters content to both give and receive gnomic utterances, which means the viewer must be both singularly focused and quite forgiving. Mr Garland may be in luck on that front: with so many people shut at home thanks to covid-19, there has never been a more captive audience.

“Devs” is available to watch in America via FX on Hulu. It will air in Britain on BBC Two from April 15th

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