feeo: goodness

an exploded text, a work of art assembled out of sifted debris. sometimes approaches comfort and beauty as if they’re accidents, which they are. so post- something, so situated in the aftermath, that it feels like one of the only records this year that lives in the present and/or future.

chuquimamani-condori: edits

dance music at the stuttering edge of itself. absorbs all manner of bygone pop cultural ephemera (including a number of pop-country hooks) into its cumbian triangle, out of which it emerges fragmented and denatured but somehow still beguilingly, emotionally whole, e.g. i never expect to cry as much as i do when “big machine” by the goo goo dolls or “alewife” by clairo get blenderized by inwardly bent rhythms.

djrum: under tangled silence

classical/idm hybrid where even the harshest beats sound plucked from harp strings. lattice-like, even in the sense that, as one climbs it, one never quite knows what they’re ascending or descending into.

oklou: choke enough

lives up to my dream of an oklou full-length after hearing “level 5” on avalon emerson’s dj-kicks five years ago: beatless and pulsing glitterings, jeweled necklaces of songs, doing a great job of catching and redistributing all the light in the room, doing a bad job of distracting from all the melancholy the wearer feels for bygone things.

sudan archives: the bpm

horny maximalism which would be incredibly exhausting if it weren’t pulled off so well, if it didn’t seem to match in and of itself the size and immensity of the cycle of yearning/betrayal/confusion/renewed desire it describes. one of the two albums on this list that isn’t in any way abstract: it is exactly what it is. i admire it for that.

dijon: baby

discussed here.

smerz: big city life

another album about bisexual longing in hostile and crowded environments à la the bpm, though this one lives not in the club but in the bedroom alone after the club, thinking about what you really wanted to say instead of what you actually said, restaging the whole scene in your bathroom mirror, looking exactly as you did before you went out but a little wiser, a little more over it, a little more into that guy or girl you used to think was an asshole and who probably is one, whatever.

caroline: caroline 2

yeah i think we were overdue for someone to deconstruct indie rock to broken social scene you forgot it in people-levels again and then do a really awful job of putting it back together so it practically shudders apart whenever you get near it.

yasmine hamdan: i remember i forget بنسى وبتذكر

the other album on the list about which very little is abstract, situated as it is in the daily awareness of grief and horror, which can make remembering a world before it (or even imagining a world after it) feel like the futile efforts of an amnesiac. clearly a work dedicated to what’s lost, whether that’s people, places, ideals, values, all gone into irretrievable space.

kaitlyn aurelia smith: gush

idk clearly trying to fill a grimes-shaped hole in my heart with the latest effort by a woman whose brain was sizzled by california weed instead of new york coke. but it is an album about desire and texture and every detail feels fingerprinted into it. watching your touch make the briefest impressions in the skin of someone you love. resting your head on their chest and hearing their heart beat and imagining you can even hear their blood cells swim. that’s where this album lives, on the edge of the boundary between outside and inside. of course i love it. it may have been impossible to stop myself.

one of my favorite pyun films, vicious lips, falls apart at its halfway point, just as the coolness of the initial concept (retrofuturist rock opera wrought out of smoke and neon a la streets of fire, but set in space) exhausts itself and all we’re left with is barely-sketched characters drifting around a hollow metal spaceship like ghosts who’ve forgotten their original selves. on their way to an interplanetary battle of the bands (an idea so cool you may despair at how it barely materializes in the film at all), the vicious lips crash land onto a desert planet, all of them dressed as if ‘80s aesthetics were not abandoned as the decade ended but used as a model from which to build the future—fluorescent outfits, planet-sized wigs, five different kinds of eyeshadow forming luminous stages for their eyes. while they wait for help that may never arrive—the desert horizon stretches on forever—they talk to each other, though it’s hard to say even with the subtitles on what they’re talking about, or who they think they’re talking to. all of the girls want to “make it,” become fixed stars in this universe held together entirely by hairspray, but they can’t stop fighting over who deserves it the most, at least until they each suffer a sudden existential crisis and begin to wonder if they deserve it at all. their personalities erode to almost nothing, becoming one mind doubting and screaming at itself. this sequence takes about 20 minutes to resolve (and “resolve” is an exaggeration—the main character escapes the ship only to find the desert has been replaced by what is either an unfinished film set or an utter figment of space) but somehow it feels much longer, as if the movie’s gone to sleep and it’s dreaming.

i felt compelled to explore pyun’s work after attending a screening of the panos cosmatos film mandy, where co-writer aaron stewart-ahn cited cyborg as a major inspiration for the film1. i’d known of cyborg since i was a kid, could reconstruct the image on the cover of the vhs tape instantly in memory, jean-claude van damme’s enormous arm swaddling a big gun like they’re just two different kinds of guns and they’re kissing. all my life i had heard it was an awful film, it may have even merited a one-star review in the tv guide i perused every week for action movies to tape from cable. now i could order a gorgeously-restored version of it from scream factory, one of several boutique movie distributors that sell state-of-the-art transfers of odd curios from the vhs landfill, movies marketed to resemble legitimate blockbusters so they might be plucked from the shelves by pure accident of association. perusing a video store in a suggestive, half-asleep state your brain just might blur “arnold schwarzennegger in the terminator” and “jean-claude van damme in cyborg” into the same phrase. then you would come home to watch something that is what you wanted in some ways and not what you wanted in most ways. van damme isn’t even the titular cyborg. it is filmed on the discarded sets of a masters of the universe sequel and a spider-man adaptation, both of which were canceled before shooting began. by a lot of standards i no longer have, cyborg is barely a movie, an anti-movie, something that clawed its way into existence out of the refuse and debris of failure.

this is where pyun excelled. where others would not make a film, he made a film2. when pyun saw a junkyard, he saw more than just a junkyard: he saw punches and kicks, bullets and fire reeling through a landscape of rubble and corroded metal. this was his canvas even after he stopped making science fiction movies: the cheapest possible nowhere, a world ground to dust and ash. cyborg opens on such a broken reality, bridges collapsed into the water, buildings breathing smoke, as a voice offscreen intones, “i like the death, i like the misery, i like this world!” a plague has destroyed civilization as we know it, and now the earth is ruled by evil pirates decked out in the leading postapocalyptic fashions: chainmail, torn t-shirts, black sunglasses that admit no light. they’ve kidnapped a cyborg embedded with the cure for the virus, and only van damme can rescue her and save the world.

when i finally saw cyborg, i wondered why i’d rejected it out-of-hand for so long, as it is the only kind of movie eight-year-old me ever wanted to see—an unfinished sketch of a science fiction plot tying a bunch of rad fight sequences together—though a nice thing about encountering his work as an adult is that i am better prepared to notice the staggering images pyun and his cinematographers crafted. his camera is always peering into interiors lit like the sunset sinking into the ocean: bruised oranges, metallic blues. rain and smoke pour into every frame like the world itself is a machine that’s breaking down.

this style reaches its peak in pyun’s 1993 film nemesis, easily his most kinetic film, a 90-minute chase sequence that never gets derailed by anything resembling a plot or character. like vicious lips many of pyun’s films stop dead in the middle, too stoned to leave the couch or answer the door, but nemesis never stops moving, a liquid flow of action i’ve only seen approached in the last decade of john wick films. i couldn’t tell you how many scenes consist of just the principle characters running. but they have to. someone is always firing a machine gun in the distance.

what happens in the movie? hard to say. plot is always a mistier property in pyun’s work than it is in normal movies. what is a plot, if not an excuse for backflips and explosions? kickboxer olivier grunier plays a future cop named alex rain3, a blade runner-of-sorts working for a globally-expanded LAPD to exterminate cyborgs. except suddenly he doesn’t work for the LAPD, except now the LAPD has kidnapped him and is forcing him to complete one last assignment: assassinate his former handler who heads up an anti-cybernetics terrorist cell… even though she is also a cyborg? in fact, almost every character in the film is a cyborg, including the LAPD officers? they all have some kind of metal implant or entire robot lurking beneath their skin, and their eyeballs routinely extend from their sockets to reveal the dense circuitry beneath4. this is why the main character proudly asserts that he’s 86.5 percent human at the start of the movie—a number that likely degrades when his exploded body is reassembled twice. after almost nothing is left of us, pyun seems to ask, what’s left? the threat/promise/inevitability of nuclear war or similar extinction level event hovers over his science fiction movies like a shadow unbound, and it feels like he wants to see and wants us to see the survival of humanity past a point of almost total annihilation, a flowering out of a lifeless earth. in this respect, pyun’s creations can feel like works of profound optimism; through all the branchings of smoke and ash and metal there is always a wry smile belonging to someone trying to make things right, even if they are as corrupted by the world they live in as anyone else.

pyun would later characterize his interest in sci-fi as superficial, just a popular genre that he used as a vehicle for his ideas, so it makes sense that in the mid-’90s, more than a little inspired by the critical success of pulp fiction, he abandoned science fiction and started making crime movies with self-consciously snappy dialogue. the casts of these movies are surreal collages of faded film stars and contemporary rappers, none of them working on the set at the same time, acting at a blank space that would be filled in with christopher lambert or ice-t once their schedules opened up. pyun’s budgets continued to shrink—he shot two of these films in an empty los angeles prison just because it was available for cheap—and his ability to choreograph vivid and arresting action sequences wilted into almost nothing; all of the sudden, crowds of gangsters firing fake guns across a room seemed sufficient5. in the quaking silence after the gunfire, you hear a woman’s voice; she’s singing a romantic power ballad that glistens like splintered glass until it gets sucked away into corroded ambient sounds. rob lowe, playing an ex-con and crack addict nicknamed “crazy six,” stumbles into the club where the woman is performing her song, his face lit pale blue against a curtain of red light, as if he’s too cold and removed from the world to notice the hell seething around him.

if pyun’s sci-fi work mostly takes place in realms scraped clean of all life by some nuclear event, crazy six is what would happen if that nuclear event occurred on the surface of someone’s mind6. again, there’s no plot, not even the suggestion of one like in cyborg and nemesis, just damaged people falling through the abysses inside of them. you may witness a robbery, you may witness some kind of retaliation for the robbery, but none of it registers when the main character overdoses on crack and it’s like a drain opens up at the bottom of the world and everything sinks into it.

most of my experiences with hard drugs i try to lose myself and then i spend the whole trip worrying about who or what is going to spring up in my place. when lowe is acting in this film i feel like i can see what’s replacing him, erupting from his body like a black cloud. he has plunged himself completely in void, is staring at the visible world from its bottom, even though there is no bottom, every time you believe you have hit the bottom of the void it melts away and is replaced by another bottom, until finally the world narrows to a pinhole, star-sized, an eyelid beginning to close, and you cannot swim back up to it because your limbs and entire body and every second of every neverending minute feel heavier than stone.

2 crimes of the future (2022, dir. david cronenberg). for reasons that are still obscure to me, the past few summers i’ve felt a numbness working through my hands and feet, leaving an ache behind like a concavity opening. it suddenly becomes difficult to get out of bed, difficult to accomplish dexterous tasks, difficult to rest my hands on a desk and type without a noiseless buzzing taking over my extremities. i spend a lot of time on the internet googling “inexplicable numbness” and “dying.” it’s in these moments that i feel most out of control of my own body, like i’ve vibrated a plane of reality away from it and have to puppeteer it from afar somehow.

last june, while feeling this horrible way, i walked to the theater with my girlfriend to see crimes of the future, the most recent david cronenberg movie. cronenberg’s films are very close to my heart. they are more like poems about their subjects than they ever resemble a story being told, and his subject matter is the most adult—by which i don’t mean sophisticated or complex, but erotic—version of the cyborg movies i watched so often as a kid, exploring how the more perverse progressions of technology and culture can warp our inner realities as much as the outer one. his characters are often catastrophically repressed, and in trying to overcome this repression, they (and especially their bodies) are drawn into the furthest limits of pleasure and violence. it’s like a hole opens up in them and they go inside of it.

in crimes of the future, human bodies are changing. human pain and infection have dwindled to almost nothing and are barely experienced. the world has fewer people in it, and they’re all consensually slicing into each other with knives. performance artists who disfigure themselves in front of small audiences in empty warehouses are the new pop stars. one of these artists, saul tenser, lives in a body that is always developing new, pointless organs that make his face splinter with pain. his partner and artistic collaborator caprice removes these organs from tenser’s body and displays them as objects of art while tenser passively dwells in surgical unit that looks like a hollow cockroach.

i think i fell in love with crimes of the future from the moment i saw the biomechanical units they designed for it—not just the surgical tubes but the elaborate exoskeletal beds and chairs that twitch like dying insects in order to regulate tenser’s digestion and sleep. they’re weird, misshapen, stuttering concavities, aesthetically transplanted from a cool industrial music video circa-1995. despite all their complexity they don’t even seem to mediate tenser’s pain; it’s a credit to viggo mortensen’s performance that whether he’s lying down or sitting or kneeling his face is adrift in unbroken discomfort, always slightly removed from whomever he’s conversing with, always having to talk through the noise of his pain.

tenser’s problem, as other characters frame it, is that he’s rejecting the mutations of his body when he should be embracing them, accepting the new, the boundless, the altered flesh. there’s something as yet undreamed, something more than human just beyond the rim of our understanding. wouldn’t it be wonderful to get acquainted with such a thing or, even better, make out with it? it doesn’t have to be so painful; the body need not be falling sheets of dissonance within; maybe you could experience harmony with your body for once in your life if, instead of rejecting your discomfort, you accepted and maybe even pursued it.

if this sounds perverse or dangerous then the government probably agrees with you. tenser keeps running into agents and counterrevolutionaries and systems that are motivated by ideas of what bodies should be instead of what they are. but they cannot control what is already happening. we were meant to change, to explore the margins of ourselves, to remake ourselves in an image that we could finally know and love without suffering7. if cronenberg’s films can seem occasionally apprehensive and ambivalent about these digressions of the self8, i think what ultimately animates his interest in the body is curiosity rather than judgment. nothing in a cronenberg film is natural or unnatural, and in fact the very concepts of “natural” and “unnatural” are revealed as inventions we’ve imposed on ourselves and others. this is why he can film the abject and gross with such a palpable sensuality, one that reminds me of the far more pedestrian sensation i feel when i put on makeup or a dress and can sense i’m becoming someone else who is also myself.

3 cabaret voltaire (1973-1994, 2009-2021). in september 2021 richard h. kirk died. kirk was one of the founding members of cabaret voltaire, a group that was formative in the creation of industrial music in the uk in the late seventies. when they started they made unsavory sound collages out of which a bassline or a distorted voice would arise like a hand from a grave. by the end of their first run in the early nineties, they were producing pristine ambient techno that could sit next to orbital or underworld in a dj set. they were my favorite kind of artists: never quite the same from project to project. just as you presumed to have an idea of what they did they slipped through a hole in the net of your understanding.

the throughline of their records, including when kirk revived the name a few years ago without voltaire member stephen mallinder, is that they all sound as if a mass of cultural detritus were trying to sing in a beautiful voice. they often relied on sampled vocals, extracted from sources as widely-ranged as outer limits episodes and documentaries about long beach street gangs, and they would transplant these voices from their original context into an irradiated air where they degraded rapidly. mallinder played bass and sang, but his singing voice, particularly in the early work, sounds like what would happen if a meat grinder had a mouth. the band rarely used drums and instead employed programmed rhythms that breathed, clanked, whirred, scraped against themselves in a desperate attempt to move their limbs made of scrap metal.

like many of their contemporaries—they emerged from a scene that gave birth to the repressed howlings of throbbing gristle as well as the more camp futurism of the human league—they were invested in their visual presentation, performing live in front of film projections and elliptically blinking lights. i have a copy of doublevision presents: cabaret voltaire on dvd, which collects several of their rudimentary music videos and live performances, and which appears to have been barely restored from whatever rotted vhs tape it was transferred from. each video contains looping images from history and popular culture as well as footage of the band itself, bleeding into each other like stains through a canvas.

on a particularly suggestive night9 i loaded doublevision into my dvd player to see where it would take me. for a while i saw images struggling to appear through a mesh of static. faces loomed and then hydra’d into a legion of faces. mannequins stood motionless in a window display. factories breathed dark clouds in silhouette. cities and civilizations collapsed; through their ruins marched war, famine, communism, fascism. things ended then began then ended again. no narrative could be applied to the images that wouldn’t immediately fall apart into the same debris that the images had been sifted from.

it was at this point that the screen began to warp into a hole, like a portal, the walls of which were blackened shivers. i leaned forward even though it was technically impossible to look further into it. it warbled. it shook. i thought i saw a figure waltzing out of the hole toward me, a shadow that as it approached began to take on dimension. it was a woman in a long dress that swam around her like black liquid. she had blonde hair, and i was about to tell her how nice her hair and dress were until i beheld her face, which was sewn together from other faces. i asked her who she was. without opening her mouth she said in a voice that was sewn together from other voices, “i’m you.”

then i woke up.

1 dhalgren (1975, samuel r. delany). the seasons appear to have stopped. the sky is one continuous smoke cloud, and the air feels hot and close year-round. (grey) day still deepens into (grey) night, but time doesn’t make any meaningful progress. newspapers are issued daily by the city’s self-selected mayor, but the dates on the covers are out of sequence, occurring in the remote past or future, and none of the inhabitants have a grasp on exactly when the present moment is either. this is bellona, the invented american city where samuel delany’s novel dhalgren takes place. it’s a city that’s been loosened from the web of history, torn from its original context. time is stopped there; it flows around it, not through, like a river split at its rim.

the appearance of bellona is a reflection of the sky overhead: a gnarled grey husk, whole blocks of it filled with the black grins of broken windows, empty shopping malls like hives of echoes, long chains swaying in the total absence of wind. some cataclysmic event—which, even as we learn more about it, never really comes into focus, surviving only as fragments of sound and image in the population’s memory (riots, fires, sirens, screaming, glass)—rippled through the city, and ever since bellona has lived in the shadow of its own apocalypse. fires burn constantly behind the windows of buildings on the smudged horizon. the buildings themselves are apparitional, rooms and hallways within them disappearing and reappearing, ghosts of a lost structure. the layout of streets seems to shift depending on the day, and nothing is ever quite where you remembered it, as if the whole city had just turned on an axis. there is almost no power, though certain parts of the electrical grid still flicker like they’re struggling to remember themselves. but most of the time the dark is only broken up by giant animal skeletons made of light, emitted from the optic chains worn by a roaming street gang called the scorpions.

it seems like it must be impossible to live in bellona, but people manage to stay there for months and even years, existing by only the meagerest of means and carving out a dignified life for themselves, depending on one’s definition of dignity, which is often dependent on context. there is no industry; a delusional patriarch still pantomimes going to work every day even though whatever job he used to perform has completely evaporated from the city. there is a bar, but all of the beer is free, because there’s almost no money in bellona, and what little there is to be had is worthless. there are no cops, and thus there is no “crime”—people subsist on whatever food they can take from abandoned markets and no one can prevent them from attempting to survive. (in the absence of cops, however, a group of concerned white citizens has formed a militia which patrols the upper levels of the mall with sniper rifles.) the scorpions are an unruly crowd of burnouts with anger management issues, but their capacity for violence, with a few exceptions, is a performance. in fact, almost all of the action in dhalgren is death, and almost all of the death is gruesomely accidental, even though each accident also has a shadow of intent looming beneath it, cause and effect getting murkier and murkier as people get more and more displaced from their desires. one character falls down an elevator shaft—or was potentially pushed down the elevator shaft by his sister after he threatened to show their (white) parents a poster she had of a naked black man—and the scene where the main character wades through a red sea of grotesque description to retrieve the brother’s mostly liquid corpse is among the most memorable and eventful in the book.

i say “eventful” because otherwise not a lot happens in dhalgren. it can be reductively described as a series of conversations; the main character—who doesn’t have a real name, or at least can’t remember it, but is referred to as “the kid” or “kid” or kidd” by other characters throughout the text—drifts from gathering to gathering, from hippie enclaves to nuclear families to, finally, the barely-controlled chaos of the scorpions, trying to reassemble who he is from the reflections or refractions of self that others emit or desperately try to disguise. depending on his surroundings, the person he is literally changes, down to the articulation of his name, and at different points in the novel he finds himself referred to as a poet, or a hero, or the leader of a gang, even though he struggles to feel any specific identification with these categories. relating to a text is not a priority for me in enjoying it, otherwise i would read a lot of very boring books, but it was kid’s amnesiac sense of self, a wave that is always collapsing at his every attempt to grasp it, that kept resonating with me over the five months i spent wading through this very, very long novel. it reminded me of the blankness i feel every morning just a few seconds after waking up, before the personality i went to sleep with reasserts itself, when my mind is just a gap in space.

the other thing that happens in dhalgren is sex, practically an unstemmed tide of it, starting from the very first scene and culminating in a gangbang so mindless and endless it starts to have a hallucinatory effect on the participants and the reader, rapturous moans echoing off the humid walls of a dream room. the ease and frequency of sex in the novel actually reminds me more of conversations than almost any real-life sex i’ve had—characters melt into it almost absently, drowsily, realizing only minutes later in how immersed they are in the other person, in the very matrix of feelings and impulses that produces their personality. (in the novel, as in real life, i think, sex is just another form of understanding someone and reflecting that understanding back at them.)

this overflow of sex is taken directly from delany’s experience; for several months in the late 1960s, delany roomed with the members of his band (whose music, even after reading about it, i could not describe to you, except that it seemed both rooted in folk and subject to proggy excess; in my head this sounds like the moody blues, but we can’t know for sure because they never recorded a note) and a rotating cast of 10-20 others in a commune that took up the first floor of a lower east side apartment building; they lived so closely that sex was a subgenre of their interactions, and became yet another form of caring for one other. delany recounts this time in his life in the memoir heavenly breakfast, named after the band and commune; i read it right after dhalgren, and it sort of acts as an appendix of reality for the novel’s more ambiguous fictions. the scorpions even appear in the memoir as a group of unsavory characters that delany encounters in an apartment building a few blocks from the heavenly breakfast. wrapped in leather vests and silver chains, vigorously offering to eliminate any snitches that delany or his friends know of, their walls decorated with handcuffs and leather pieces hanging from nails driven into the wall, they embodied the part of commune life that delany wanted most to embed in dhalgren—that intimacy and community could be found among the most unexpected and seemingly-distorted characters, in the most hostile and rotted-through places, and that many of the devices we use to interpret other people and our environments—received ideas, assumptions, even language itself—are just human inventions that keep us isolated from each other.

2 drexciya (1989-2002). dhalgren is technically a work of science fiction, even as it resembles no work of science fiction i’ve read before. if delany were typing this newsletter, though, he would probably insist that science fiction, at least the good kind, is never exclusively about the future, and is usually more concerned with identifying and exposing the mechanisms that govern the present by offering us a slightly-retuned version of it. (the future is something that hovers beyond those mechanisms. i look forward to maybe getting there someday.) according to this conception, techno is science fiction too. but of course it is. in its very first stirrings it was trying to reimagine the harsh glitter of industrial detroit as spaceship gleam.

from the start, though, drexciya is different. anonymity isn’t an alien concept in dance music, especially among members of the detroit techno collective underground resistance, of which drexciya were a part. but drexciya’s membership remained obscure well into their career, and one half of the group, gerald donald, is still elusive about his involvement. (the other half, james stinson, died in 2002 from a heart condition.)

listening to the music, the people behind it seem almost beside the point. it builds so much of its own world that personalities would just interfere with the fiction’s signal. every drexciya track describes and takes place in invented space, in a black atlantis constructed by the water-breathing offspring of pregnant africans thrown overboard from ships during the atlantic slave trade. it’s a mindbending afrofuturistic narrative that doesn’t just reimagine our current reality but alters the very coursings of past into present. writer greg tate, one of many sources in mike rubin’s invaluable history of drexciya, characterizes the drexciyan mythos as a “revisionist look at the middle passage as a realm of possibility and not annihilation”—from the total despair and dehumanization of slavery and death, life blossoms, and new worlds form.

the music didn’t offer up this mythology immediately. for the first few twelve inches at least, all one had to go on were the track titles (evocative undiscovered geographies like “bubble metropolis,” “aqua worm hole,” and “red hills of lardossa”), allusive sentences in the liner notes, and the odd shape of the music itself. where their contemporaries made music that recalled the evenly-spaced wheezings of mechanical joints, drexciya tracks were more amphibian in nature, built like frogs are, by which i mean they’re stacks of bubbles. percussion boils upward and evaporates. kick drums explode in muffled clouds like depth charges. a synthesizer buzzes and throbs so insistently it feels like you’re caught in the gravity drive of a drexciyan cruiser. i feel like i’ve known the story for so long that my description of the drexciya’s music inevitably comes out drexciyan. but even with the mythology muted in my mind, if i close my eyes and listen, i see crystal structures slowly rising through the ocean floor, schools of tiny watercraft humming between their legs.

in the last two years of drexciya’s activity, stinson planned a series of seven albums he called the “seven storms.” over the course of them, one gets vacuumed out of deep drexciyan waters into our reality (cf. the other people place’s lifestyles of the laptop café, one of the best dance albums of all time) and then vacuumed out of our reality into even more metaphysical and theoretical dimensions (cf. transllusion’s the opening of the cerebral gate, the title of which should be self-explanatory). just thinking about them makes my brain turn inside out like a glove. the final drexciya release, grava 4, found the drexciyans plotting a course from the ocean to their true place of origin, a constellation in deep space. someone uploaded the full album to youtube with its rhythms synced the footage of the apollo program, and i think it’s one of the most thoughtful collisions of sound and image available on the internet. rockets twist through the air; men in space suits float weightlessly over circuit boards; technicians make minor adjustments to hexagons of spacecraft; and drexciya’s music glitters like the stars must have over all of the (in the one bitterly ironic note the video strikes: mostly white) people in the footage: a new world of possibility, just within reach.

3 revolutionary girl utena (1997, j.c. staff, dir. kunihiko ikuhara). last summer when i embarked on the nearly inexhaustible project of rewatching sailor moon—it is 200 episodes long but the quality somersaults so much from arc to arc that it can feel like 400, and time dilates so extremely during the episode where sailor moon’s daughter befriends a dinosaur that i’m pretty sure it is a two day-long event in real time—i noticed the director of my favorite season, sailor moon s (almost perfect, devastatingly gay), kunihiko ikuhara, was also the director of revolutionary girl utena, a show i had previously seen described as “neon genesis evangelion for lesbians.” as a lesbian whose entire adolescence, for better or worse, was shaped by all-night marathon viewings of evangelion, i… had to see this show. right away.

the entire run is on youtube in low quality; i subscribed to funimation’s streaming service to watch it in high quality, which was its own compromised experience (streaming services are bad). i now own the show in two different forms, and have seen it five times. (ugh.) i also recommend trying to find a decent copy of the movie if you can, as together the series and film are the greatest queer work of art i’ve encountered in my life, and the film alone is one of the most overwhelming aesthetic experiences i’ve ever had. watching it is like standing beneath a waterfall of rose petals.

the staging and mise en scené are outrageously stylized. the dueling arena in the tv series is reached by a staircase that spirals upward with an escher-like endlessness. the architecture in the film is even more disjointed, half-constructed art nouveau platforms drifting around like ships without anything to anchor them into space. the camera, freed from the constraints of reality, can move however it wants to, performing 360 degree turns between two characters shadowed in darkness. colored roses spin in the corners of the screen, framing flashbacks or denoting important emotional beats for the characters. in one of my favorite episodes, a pointer indicates every significant object in a room, including the cats gathering in the window.

i would’ve loved the show if it were only as deep as these images; they don’t need anything beneath them to be involving. but utena is about love. the titular character wears a boy’s uniform to school because she wants to become a prince and rescue princesses. she finds herself enmeshed in a series of duels, each of which determines who at her school will possess “the rose bride,” anthy himemiya, and the sword of dios; whoever holds both will gain the ability to “revolutionize the world.” utena participates reluctantly at first, but as her relationship with anthy develops, she finds she wants to protect her from the members of the student council, people who, even if their intentions are noble, would still only use her as a means to an end.

ohtori academy is a middle/high school so of course the student council is made up of emotionally-stunted teens stuck in patterns they desperately want to break out of. they are forever in the position of mistaking something that is not love for love. who among us wouldn’t want to shatter and remake the whole world? but utena and anthy love each other. here look at this gif i found for proof:

anthy isn’t “the rose bride” to utena. she is simply anthy. this small fact allows anthy to finally, tentatively surface from the role she’s been submerged in for centuries, because she’s finally being valued for herself instead of for what can be taken from her. we so often feel like ballerinas under glass, turned by invisible clockwork, seeing a better world beyond but unable to access it. revolutionary girl utena is about shattering that glass, shrugging off every pointless gender role and impossible ideal and fucked-up standard that is imposed on us from without and finding a space outside of that in which to practice love, honesty, and tenderness, without boundaries, world without end. it is the kind of world i believe we have to make.

i have spent this spring getting into ecm records. since its founding in 1969, the ecm label has consistently released music where the distinctions between jazz fusion, smooth jazz, free jazz, new age, and contemporary classical music melt away almost completely. (if the label, which has put out a vast number of records in differing styles over five decades, can be said to have a single project, it might be to argue these distinctions are meaningless.) i can’t decide if ecm’s output feels particularly well-suited for spring because i happen to be working my way through it right now or if it’s some objective quality belonging to the music itself. i’m probably projecting. regardless, if you are like me and often feel like you live in a glass elevator getting brushed and dented by the elements outside, ecm has released records that sound exactly like that. ecm has also released records that replicate the perfect stillness of a cold spring day, the ruminative hush of things growing soundlessly.

some of this quality is down to founder manfred eicher’s gifts as a producer, and he has produced nearly every album the label’s put out. he brings a really intuitive spatial awareness to the separation of instruments to his studio recordings, which is why an ecm record never feels crowded even when it is busy. the amount of space on eicher’s work makes me think of the amount of air between skyscrapers—the scale implied is enormous, yet there’s almost nothing in it.

and the musicians eicher records, at least when they’re recording with him, seem to have an almost meditative awareness of the studio as an environment, a terrarium where different sounds grow and decay. eberhard weber’s bass playing is an oil-spill of shadow slipping over an empty field. steve tibbets’s guitar work billows like a sheet in the wind, its fabric boiling and trembling in little waves. dino saluzzi’s bandonéon improvisations are evocative and moving as keith jarrett’s on piano, stirring up memories that don’t even belong to you. like: you are standing in a large, empty room lit only by the sun pouring through a hole in the ceiling. there’s no floor, just dirt, and the sun is so bright and hot you can hear the earth hiss as it cooks beneath your feet. you walk outside and see the desert shimmer in every direction, as far as you can see, the hills of sand dotted with other little houses like yours.

or: it is raining and you are watching raindrops gather and explode on the steel ladders and gratings of your fire escape. you can see them making brief dents in the fabric of the coffee shop awning across the street. the pale odor of smoke curls upward from someone smoking a cigarette on the floor below. you glimpse your reflection in the window and for a while you watch yourself watch the rain fall. your eyes blink and each blink lasts a little longer than the one before it, your gaze drifting sleepily toward the space between yourself and your reversed image, between the real world and one hazily duplicated in the window. though it is impossible to focus on, you somehow manage to stare directly at it, this envelope of dark lurking where your reflection ceases and you begin. just as you lean forward to give it a closer look, you fall into it.

—

here are 17 ecm releases i’ve grown attached to over the past few months. thanks to david drake and other members of ilx for recommendations:

• eberhard weber yellow fields (1975)

• jan garbarek, keith jarrett, palle danielsson, jon christensen belonging (1974)

• oregon crossing (1984)

• gary burton and chick corea crystal silence (1973)

• john abercrombie, dave holland, jack dejohnette gateway (1976)

• terje rypdal after the rain (1976)

• mark isham, art lande we begin (1987)

• pat metheny group pat metheny group (1978)

• kenny wheeler, lee konitz, dave holland, bill frisell angel song (1997)

• john surman, jack dejohnette the amazing adventures of simon simon (1981)

• steve tibbetts northern song (1982)

• dino saluzzi kultrum (1983)

• rainer brüninghaus, markus stockhausen, fredy studer continuum (1984)

• nils petter molvær khmer (1998)

• steve eliovson, colin walcott dawn dance (1981)

• gary burton quartet with eberhard weber passengers (1977)

• ralph towner blue sun (1982)

2 the plague (1947, albert camus). given the circumstances, i’ve been reading the plague. it’s only my second camus novel; i read the stranger twice in high school and barely remember it, and i sort of wonder if it’s designed to fire through your consciousness so quickly it only leaves a hole in your memory. the plague is conceptually and literally bigger than the stranger: it’s longer and more complex, and instead of just following one character it traces multiple characters arcs at once, the most compelling of which is the steadily darkening mood of the town it takes place in, the french algerian city of oran. oran comes alive on the page; you can feel it convulse as the plague advances through it, its inhabitants struggling to make meaningful choices in the shadow of a wave of death that flattens the meaning out of everything. they spend most of the book trapped inside of their own aimless fears and longings—whether for friends, for lovers, or for their former lives—though this is also what ultimately unites them; as camus writes in the novel, “a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike.” of course, except in a few isolated cases, this doesn’t bring them any closer together. silence starts to grow over the townspeoples’ conversations like grass over a fresh grave; having exhausted all other subjects, with no new subjects arriving to take their place, there is nothing to talk about but the plague.

the effect of reading the book has often been uncanny. the text echoes the last few months with such verisimilitude that it feels like almost all of the distance between the echo and its source has collapsed. every other page i’d be like, wow, the past sure is consuming the present. but the plague is still very funny at times, especially in the early chapters. one character spends the months-long epidemic revising the opening sentence of his novel, trying to polish it into something so perfect it will knock the hats off of the editors at the local publishing house. i have spent most of my time reading the novel trying not to feel devastatingly owned by this.

3 full moon features (bloodstone: susbpecies ii (1992) and dark angel: the ascent (1994)). here’s something i believe even though it obviously isn’t true: bad movies are better than good movies. bad movies aren’t even that bad sometimes; they’re just reaching for something they don’t quite grasp, or they’re trying to push good ideas through bad actors or bad ideas through good actors, or they’re too gnarled and too recently dragged out of a cave to be understood or accepted. bad movies are often boring but i bet right now there’s a growing awareness of the fact that boring things can be good. dreams, for instance, are boring; everything occurs for just a little too long in a dream, like you’re a horror movie character who’s been forced to explore a dark room with a flashlight for twenty minutes. time sags, the walls of the room stretch like the scales of a snake, and you’re never quite certain what’s ahead of you. it’s kind of a relief. for once, nothing ever ends when you think it will.

i have a particular fondness for efforts in this field from the direct-to-video production company full moon features. their films drone, sometimes out of total incompetence and sometimes out of seeming harmonic design. they produce the kind of low-budget genre fare where what can’t be expressed with special effects instead gets expressed as ideas, imagery, and atmosphere, if any are available at the time. (the movie gets made regardless.) if there are special effects on the screen they usually take the form of small creatures animated in stop-motion, puppets or demons or toys that stutter from frame to frame across superimposed backgrounds. i fell asleep to the puppet master twice this week, hypnotized by the dreamy low-angled glide of the puppet-point-of-view shots. in the subspecies movies, the vampire radu’s long, rakelike fingers, once severed, melt into walking demon figurines that i honestly think are pretty cute.

they’re one of my favorite things about the subspecies movies, all four of which i love, especially the second one, bloodstone: subspecies ii, which i love for the following reasons: 1) reflexive admiration for any sequel that has the nerve to place the subtitle before the franchise name. 2) radu’s teeth are amazing, his fangs curve like long crescent moons from his jaws. 3) some of the shot compositions remind me of murnau’s nosferatu because shadows are the true architecture of the set. 4) other scenes remind me of early darkthrone album covers, faces pale as death glowing through the grainy dark of an erased vhs tape. 5) there are two scenes of sensual vampire seduction at a death metal club. 6) at the end of the first film radu converts the series protagonist, michelle, into a vampire, and in subspecies ii she’s caught in this melancholy loop between sad, longing nostalgia for her former human life and the seductive pull she feels toward her new purgatorial existence as a vampire. how can one act morally when they’re stuck in the meaningless space between life and death, where notions of goodness crumble into absurd human pretensions?

i think the best full moon movie i’ve seen so far is dark angel: the ascent, directed by linda hassani, written by freeway’s matthew bright, starring angela featherstone as the titular demon angel veronica maria theresa iscariot, who runs away from her totally square family of torturers in hell to the big city so she can live among human beings and murder rapists and racist cops in cold blood. it is as rad as it sounds. hell looks like a desert of cracked orange earth where long fissures breathe smoke. the city is like another version of hell, but lit with a cold blue tint that makes the buildings and streets look like reflections on steel, a place too alienated and abstracted from itself to notice the evil and indifference operating it from within. featherstone’s otherworldly presence is suggested not by horns and wings (though they do appear) but by the inflexible deadpan of her performance—imagine someone who has never heard of irony and can’t process it at all: that’s veronica. the film has one of the best sex scenes i’ve ever seen, indistinguishable rivers of flesh giving way to sudden sprouts of burnt black wings from veronica’s shoulder blades.

it’s at this moment in the film that the mortal man who’s fallen in love with veronica sees and accepts her, in all her beauty and hideousness, which are one and the same, demon and angel, woven together in this film’s righteously warped cosmology even though they’re traditionally opposed concepts, split in the way we feel split between what we want and who we are. veronica has no nostalgia for her former life in hell; her gaze is fixed forward, toward whatever righteous thing she can do next. she has the power to see the world for what it is and to effectively change it, to take human corruption, weakness, and indifference and restore them to some kind of justice, and over the course of the film she figures out a way to do this without removing anyone’s spine. she is my hero.

blood on the tracks didn’t make sense to me until i was 30. i thought i got it, but i didn’t. when i got it, it was horrible. it was like i had stumbled backward to behold a map of every time i’ve ever been hurt, threads connecting each momentary grief across time and space. just awful. blood on the tracks is like “history is a conspiracy of heartache and disappointment” and i’m like “yeah ok.” but even before that, way back in middle school, i asked my parents to buy me highway 61 revisited because i wanted to know more about one of the artists who codified the thing i loved—the album—as a thing, a format through which arrangements of songs—on an album side, in a setlist, in a dj mix—became stories.

even then i don’t think i had any specific feelings about dylan, just general ones, the feelings almost everyone had—couldn’t sing, didn’t matter, changed music with songs that took folk from the bleak physical world into a bleary metaphysical one and back again, then went electric and reeled out lyrics that jigsawed so much allusion and incident together that they felt produced by a brain slipping into and out of a fever and/or a vision of the end of the world. then i went through a reflexive period of a few years where i wondered if i even needed to be someone who listened to and thought about bob dylan, wasn’t music criticism lousy with that kind of person? but the truth is that people who’ve been thought about a lot over a long period of time tend to be fun to think about. they also tend to have periods of their life that people don’t think much of at all.

which is why i was so surprised to discover, when i picked up this bob dylan listening project again a few weeks ago, that i love bob dylan’s born-again christian records. they’re great. they often remind me of van morrison, another artist who built a bridge into gospel from his own weird isolated island of rhythm and blues. i think saved is one of the best albums dylan ever put out. now that i’m a bigger fan of his, i think that he can sing, in fact he’s a great singer. the way he stresses, elongates, rushes through certain words so that they each have their own weight, feeling, perspective, and character—he’s an interpreter who makes choices that serve his writing, even when the subject matter of the writing is narrowed to either the love and security offered by jesus or the horror and damnation awaiting all sinners. dylan hammers out quite a few fire and brimstone songs across these records, sounding so alienated in his fury that it’s like he’s an exile from the human race, wandering alone under the watchful eye of an angry god. then there are songs like “pressing on” and “covenant woman” where he sounds so connected to the love from which all things emanate that it’s hard not to believe that he really was saved for instant, even though a few years later he would dismiss and disparage this era as a mistake, a stumbling down the wrong path.

one of my favorite songs is “when he returns,” overwhelmingly powerful in any form, whether the barely-contained yearning heard in the studio version on slow train coming or the even more devastating live version where an organ bleeds daylight all over dylan’s piano. my other favorite is “what can i do for you?” especially the live performance included on the dvd in the trouble no more box set. from the moment dylan stops playing guitar during the second verse so that he can cradle the microphone with his hands and really bring the words into focus—so he can, in other words, preach—it’s like a totally different energy has taken over. “well i don’t deserve it, but i sure did make it through,” he sings, so humbled it’s like he wants to disappear from the song so god has room to enter, “… what can i do for you?” so he disappears. he starts playing the harmonica, bending his body with every contour of his solo, an antenna tuning itself to the least scrambled signal. the rest of the band dies away, leaving only the drone of the organ and the liquid chords still spilling from dylan’s harmonica into the silence, his hair held in a nimbus of red stagelight, his eyes closed in deep concentration as he plays, lost, searching, not quite knowing where his destination is but having faith one will arrive, sinking away into some layer beyond the self, into pure unconsciousness.

2 inherent vice (2014, dir. paul thomas anderson). i’ve seen a lot of movies that are intended for stoners, driven by the kind of almost-funny-and-therefore-bottomlessly-funny sense of humor that being deeply stoned makes you sensitive to. i love those movies, they’re great. but paul thomas anderson’s adaptation of thomas pynchon’s inherent vice is one of the few movies i’ve seen that is actually stoned. like “everything you can perceive with your senses is made of a fabric that you can sink into” stoned. walls covered in forests of purple shag carpeting. a set so mummified in clouds of fog that i can’t tell if the actors are walking through a harbor at night or through the smog of a club. words, phrases, conversations that start normal and gradually warp into a nonsense so confidently delivered it must be some kind of ultrasense. reactions that don’t seem as tethered to actions as they used to be.

every lead private detective doc sportello follows in the book and film turns into a rope of sand or tugs at something glowering beyond the limits of his imagination, some invisible superstructure that governs our actions through the confusions and inefficiencies of the actual government. just as it starts to come into view it goes out of focus. “i don’t even know what i just saw,” sportello whispers to anonymous surf rock studio musician and government informant coy harlingen in the thick of the harbor or club fog. blackened harmonies sing just beneath the veil of perception. “me neither,” says harlingen. “fact, i don’t even want to know.”

doc is ultimately trying to find his disappeared ex-girlfriend shasta fay, even as this objective tends get dim and misty beneath the countless submysteries and subconspiracies that wrap around her disappearance. sportello spends the whole film trying to hold this image of shasta in mind, trying to remember her not through his confused yet enduring feelings for her, but just as herself. that’s who he wants to find—not the projection, but the person. everyone in this world is so sunken into their murky exoskeletons of selfhood that this kind of clarity is not only precious, it’s love. when doc first discovers that shasta is gone, he writes her name on a rolling paper and rolls a joint with it; as he lights it we see a superimposed image of shasta flicker both to the surface of his mind and the frame of the movie, her eyes averting from the camera as if she’s uncomfortable being seen so clearly, having bypassed the layers of weed and forgetting to break the surface, just for an instant, before slipping away again.

3 all elite wrestling: dynamite, march 25, 2020. because the real and the surreal are currently (and have always been?) indistinguishable, all professional sports have been canceled for the year except for professional wrestling, and i have been fascinated by the way wrestling, already in a pretty flexible relationship with reality, is bending in on itself further in response. last week’s wrestlemania transposed the near-annual undertaker match from the ring to a literal graveyard and for a brief moment wrestling tripped into the ‘80s action-horror b-movie universe that characters like the undertaker always seemed derived from. (i say this while also condemning wwe for their recent, really nauseating bids to be considered an “essential service.”)

and all elite wrestling is arguably as good as ever, even without an audience for the wrestlers to play off of. a few weeks ago the emptiness and silence of the arena allowed for increasingly bizarre and reality-breaking performances; chris jericho could open a promo by antagonizing a hovering drone, and matt hardy, now a mystic who has traveled distantly beyond all metaphysical conceptions of the self, could astrally project himself into different levels of the arena and blow minds. even though i’m constantly aware of the outer horror that’s contorting wrestling into these new odd shapes as i watch it, it is both inspiring and comforting to see it adapt to the moment by morphing into its best self. reality is bent; on some level professional wrestling, in its elaborate gymnastic displays of fakery, has proved that it always is. but it is not broken.

4 sailor moon r (1993-1994, toei animation). the birds have taken over the streets. when i walked up to my roof last week all i could notice was the silence between ambulance sirens filling up with birdsong. they yelled, warbled, sketched out a rhythm and melody and looped through it, pleased with themselves. i started to wonder if the louder birds were actually trying to talk to the sirens, their caws yawning wider and wider to emulate the native screams of ambulances.

the other thing that struck me was the size of the full moon the other night. it swelled in the sky and hovered there. and i wondered how closely the silence of the sidewalks and the streets—even the few cars on 21st street have just been softly hushing by as if they were ashamed of their own presence—approached the silence of the moon.

when i have not been looking at the sky, i have been rewatching sailor moon for the, i think, third time? it is 200 episodes long and many of the episodes are bad and/or boring but bad and boring are kind of my speed right now, and when the show is good it is the kind of good that makes you believe that friendship will save the world. (it might as well.) its second season, sailor moon r, is probably the most frustrating of the five. the first twelve episodes are devoted to an arc about aliens and an evil tree and it is tediously bad and boring, and afterward it spends a lot of time walking in place instead of exploring the ripples and bends of its cool time travel plot, which is why i fell in love with the show in the first place: i love time travel. it is a significant plot device in most of the media i love, or at the very least time is rearranged loosely enough in the media i love that moving from scene to scene or chapter to chapter is like time travel anyway (c.f. the dispossessed).

time in sailor moon is wildly crooked. sailor moon herself is a reincarnation of a moon princess who existed centuries ago. her current incarnation on earth eventually becomes an eternal being and queen of 31st century earth? the capital city of which is a tokyo filled with crystalline structures? we find this out because her (also ageless) daughter, chibi-usa, travels back in time to evade the black moon clan, who are trying to reduce all life to a deathlike silence and nothingness simultaneously in the years 1994 and 3000. it’s a lot. as a kid it rocked my world to know that a show about a magical girl that used the same looped transformation sequences in every episode could have this kind of mindbending scale, could fold time up as if it were paper.

but what really kept me yoked to the show were the relationships between its characters, the bond of friendship that unites and keeps each of the sailor guardians fighting for each other. there’s an incredible episode late in sailor moon r where ami aka sailor mercury is attacked by a monster who places her in these terrifyingly vivid hallucinations where fake versions of the other sailor guardians ridicule and criticize her in the psychedelically warped space. ami only survives this because she knows who her friends are; when the monster is shocked that she refuses to succumb to the delusions, ami tells her, “you wouldn’t understand—our hearts are bound by trust.” that’s what i think keeps you afloat when you’re surfing through the unknown, whether you’re born-again bob dylan or doc sportello or a professional wrestler or a magical girl in an anime wrestling with the emptiness of the future—there’s a trust that binds you to the things you truly care about and believe in. and that’s what i hope this newsletter will be about every week. thank you for reading.