Fall Check-in
A handful of quick hits
Ok, let’s see, what’s new?
Awhile back my friend Ryan Sawyer asked me to contribute liner notes for the release of a live recording of his Shaker Ensemble performing a piece called For Those Who Wish to Sing Will Always Find a Song. I’d been at the live performance in question and found it quite moving, and the record is, in my professional opinion, quite worth checking out. Not much point in my elaborating further, you can read what I wrote here, and listen to the record which is out now on Lobby Art.
I’ve also been listening to Nashville-based finger-picker Kyle Hamlett’s new record, The Way Out Inn, a collection of smart, gently trippy and very catchy folk-rock-chamber-pop. I spoke to Hamlett a couple weeks ago about the record, dreams, the unconscious, Jung, Nirvana, the Beatles, church, manifestation, etc., and I will be shaping that into a long-form something-or-other once a couple other deadlines are no longer hanging over my head. Watch this space!
Speaking of finger picking, John Fahey’s Red Cross, released posthumously in 2003, has recently been a balm to my frayed nerves: Slow and spacious, meditative and deliberate, there’s even built-in silence, a full 17 minutes midway through “Untitled With Rain.” Sometimes that’s my favorite part.
A long time ago — 2016 perhaps — I started following Zoe Dubno on Instagram for some reason and somewhere along the way I seem to have developed a parasocial attachment. When she started posting about her new novel I was happy for her in the way I might be if she were my friend’s cousin from another city with whom I “really hit it off” at a party and never saw again IRL. Anyway, Happiness & Love, about a group of insufferable Downtown artist phonies, is fun, funny, scathing, and most importantly a quick palate cleanser after the tome I finished directly before …
Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante’s 1948 epic, follows the trials and tribulations of a Sicilian family cursed (in a sense) by its deep and mysterious connection to, among other horrors, a young nobleman/sociopathic little freak named Eduardo. Narrator Elisa, an orphan raised by a prostitute, takes us way back through her doomed family’s knotted history. Italo Calvino said of the novel, “While at first Lies and Sorcery appears to be an elaborate game of fairy tales it is actually a serious novel, full of living human beings … the narrative desperately and successfully penetrates to the bone, exposing the painful condition of humanity and its class structures.” Also it’s very funny and Tolstoy-esque not only in scope but in its wealth of stunningly modern observations and turns-of-phrase. Morante was heavily influenced by Freud, Kafka, the Brothers Grimm and Cervantes. She in turn influenced Elena Ferrante, which, having recently reread My Brilliant Friend, is why I picked this book up in the first place. Highly recommended!
The above-mentioned Ryan Sawyer had a sample of Fat Electrician in his car which I spritzed on our way to see Bob Dylan at Jones Beach this summer. Though I had sniffed it before, being an ELDO-devotee, I finally really “got it” and have been obsessing ever since. Vetiver is the main event, and then there’s a little bit of not-very-sweet whipped cream and a clever note of burnt wire. It’s masculine in an expensive French shaving-cream way, which gives me the confusing sensation of smelling someone else when I catch it on my own skin. Gender dysmorphia in a bottle? Regardless I love it.
I’ve been spraying Centerfold sparingly because it’s a bit pricy and very hyped and I had to wait several months for the restock after Hollywood Gifts sold out of its first run. I hate to be such a sucker for these tiny niche perfumery projects but this one really is a lot of fun. It smells like waxy cherry ChapStick and dollar store cherry cordials, and then loses some of that artificiality — becoming juicer and muskier — in the drydown. One could consider it a companion to Fat Electrician vis-a-vis gender performance. Fragrantica is full of tiresome fan fiction about the kind of woman who wears this, but for more on this cheeky little scent I recommend this piece by the wonderful Audrey Robinovitz.