Welcome to AL's World
Welcome to Al’s World. I hope to post frequently about what I’m listening to, reading, and thinking about. I added you to this list because I thought you might like to read what I write. If you don’t want it cluttering up your inbox, please feel more than comfortable SMASHING the unsubscribe button.
Music
Satwa - Lula Cortes and Lailison
I’ve mostly been listening to Satwa by Lula Cortes and Lailison over and over. I first heard the title track at the Present Sounds listening party at Greenpoint’s preeminent private loft space on a Thursday night in late June, when the weather still felt like God’s own fresh breath off the East River. I’m thankful Present Sounds and this space has survived this long -- I hope it will continue forever.
I can’t really tell you what it felt like to hear this track on pristine KHorns in surround. It felt like meeting a part of myself.
When she played it, I knew I couldn’t leave without asking the DJ what it was. The evening had been billed with a Brazilian theme, but in my ignorance, I didn’t recognize any of the music as what I thought of as “Brazilian.” I went up to the booth and asked what “that English folk revival song” was that she had just played. She looked at me like I was the worst kind of idiot. But I feel like there’s something in conversation here — maybe a universal 1973 sound, the looping strum that crossed the Atlantic, Equator, and all other monumental geographic distinctions.
Ron Shalom
Ron’s new mind-bending album dropped on Friday. I can’t recommend it enough.
Ron doesn’t make music like other people are making it right now. You have to make your own 1970s.
Reading
It’s probably self-defeating to start my first newsletter this way, but man, I haven’t really been reading. I’ve been trying to make it through this short novel, recommended by Read Max, for weeks: You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. The book is fascinating, but because it’s a fictional account of the events of the day that Moctezuma met conquistador Hernán Cortés (more or less), I haven’t been able to finish it — you can’t really get into the characters or the plot, per se. It’s much more about the vast and ominous mood blanketing the exposition.
Still, the political disposition that it sets feels so relevant that I can’t give up on it: the moment an unstable, crumbling empire with its leader literally on mushrooms or sleeping through the strategy meeting encounters its demise in the form of a clueless, blundering, and unfortunately ambitious colonizer.
I still really want to read the Witches of Eastwick this summer (fun). I also bought this novel, Abigail by Magda Szabó, recently at my local-to-my-workplace bookstore last week and I really want to get to that too. It seems like the perfect intersection of my interests: traumatizing European World War experiences and boarding school. Fun! Maybe I’ll get to read them when I go to Maine in August. Maybe Maine will fix me.
Thoughts
Years after its relevance, I’ve started readying the Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour (hilariously, I’m reading it through Libby on my phone). I re-read some pertinent reviews, and realized that its thesis seems to be the answer I’ve been seeking all along through my research project on attention spans and scrolling: To scroll is to die for a little while. The smartphone addiction is the death drive disguised as something more palatable (read: “productive in capitalism”) than addiction to alcohol or drugs.
I remain addicted to looking at my phone even after I’ve deleted social media apps off of it (screentime somehow still hovering around 4 hours a day). I’m increasingly addicted to listening to podcasts in slow moments at work, and browsing various vintage clothing hawking apps during any given downtime. Knowing what little I know about addiction, I’ve been trying to notice exactly the feelings in my body motivating me to look at the phone or put on the podcast, and then notice exactly how it makes me feel. Obviously this technology was created in some respects to prevent us doing precisely this, so the task is a long-term one, and very much uphill.
But I’ve been noticing that the feeling on both ends is one of helplessness.
I read a review a while ago by frequently-embarrassing feminist writer Moira Donnegan critiquing some new tradwife book. The book she was reviewing seems incoherent at best, and the review mostly set out to argue that it was even a little more insidious than that, but Donnegan left us with a last line(s) that has been haunting me:
“This desire to be taken care of, to be loved in a way that obviates responsibility, is not a fantasy of a marriage. It is a fantasy of a return to childhood. [The author] is not looking for a husband; she’s looking for a parent.”
I feel like this desire, for a parent to fix and love us through whatever we’ve gotten ourselves into now, has seeped through to almost every aspect of political life, not just the sexist tradwife bullshit. I’d like to argue that it’s somehow attached to our scrolling addictions, but I have no real basis for doing so, except in my own feelings. It’s located in this feeling of childish helplessness. It seems deeply attached to the fascistic treatment that Trump gets — his lovers love him exactly like he’s Daddy, or Fuhrer, if you will. Daddy will fix it. Daddy will fix it all. Kamala’s newly minted supporters want her to be Mommy, and the shoe seems to fit so far. I’ve been distracted by the ways that internet culture has poisoned what should be straightforward signals of support or disapproval from all sides — like we can’t know what we mean if it’s not expressed in memes, if we have to look up.
— and it’s me too, I also can’t look beyond the screen for something else other than this kind of ambient meme parent.