“Living on the left bank he listened to boatman songs / rice crops transported upstream migrating birds far and few” – Dong Li, “Live, By Lightning”
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues—check out these two poems from Tim Lynch.
Music journalism has always been a little foreign to me. Sure, I wrote about the Jazzmaster one time and did this very “speak to the youths” listicle, but I often feel like I don’t know how to do music journalism. Even these recent “albums I loved in high school pieces” don’t feel like music journalism, they feel more like times at band practice when Smags and I go back and forth about who had better taste as a teenager. “You can’t deny Limp Bizkit’s musicality,” he’d say. “The secret to the Chili Peppers is pretending Kiedis isn’t there,” I’d retort.
Lately, in the spirit of better understanding my city and those who came before me, I’ve been digging through archives, mostly from the Chicago Reader. It’s fun! There’s no big project I’m doing this for, just learning.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week: two books I kinda took swings on, buying simply because I saw them and thought, “yeah, I’ll take a flier on this.” One I found at AWP this year, one has been sitting on my shelves for longer than my son’s been around. Both were a treat! Not, like, fun beach reads or whatever. All I’m saying is I gambled on these anonymous-to-me writers and it paid off.
Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: found this gem at my old bookstore job and picked it up because 1) we sold books by the weight and this is like 100 pages and 2) I saw Rashomon in an intro to film class like everyone else. Interestingly, it’s the lead story, “In A Grove,” that follows the plot of the movie, although without re-watching the movie to fact-check, it seems like the frame narrative for the film is based on the story.
This book is good! If you haven’t read anything from early 20th century Japan and want to, this isn’t a bad place to start. Not that I know anything about Japanese literature, despite this post-Shōgun wave of interest. Akutagawa reminds me a bit of other short story writers concerned with the various absurdities and inequities of the early 20th century—Kafka, maybe a little O’Connor, James M. Cain if he wrote fairy tales. These stories are about greed, desire turned rancid, power imbalances, and socioeconomic hypocrisies. If you see this a used bookstore, try it out.
The Orange Tree by Dong Li: blessed and abundant Poetry Gods, what a book. Shades of Paul Celan, shades of Dan Beachy-Quick, shades of Anne Carson, appropriately introduced by Srikanth Reddy. This is one of those strikingly ambitious poetry books, pushing the limits of what language and meaning can do, pushing the limits of poetic form. I’m not totally sure if this is a book-length poem or if the sections are their own poems—epigraph might be cited incorrectly—but if you like poetry books that really go for it, read this. It’s a family history tied up with Chinese history (you know I love personal-as-political narratives), and there’s a mystic quality without it being oh-so-mysterious-and-unknowable. It’s one of those books that reminds us poetry has the power to do different things than any other art form, and one I’ll be returning to quite a bit. I do not regret buying this on instinct from the U Chicago table at AWP.
LINKS!
Something to listen to? YouTube’s home page is pretty great for music recommendations, and also reminding you that you never got around to watching Noname’s Tiny Desk. So how about Chicago’s great book club leader?
Really cool look at Same, a band from the 60s and the suburbs, or, as Steve Krakow in Chicago Reader puts it, “All-girl garage band the Same got short-changed by the grown-ups in the room.” Same started because some girls thought they could meet The Beatles if they started a band and made it. Hey, I get it. You think I could’ve ever imagined José Olivarez saying yes to The Line Break while I was reading Citizen Illegal? No word if they ever met The Beatles, but they did meet The Beach Boys. Predictably, Mike Love was a dick and Brian Wilson was cool and asked for their card.
Sometimes, the best spaces happen because of good vibes and circumstance. I’ll forever maintain Cunneen’s is the perfect Writer’s Bar simply because it’s cheap, quiet but not uninviting, and near a college campus. So it was great reading Leor Galil in Reader on Jim’s Grill, aka “The accidental postrock diner.”
Really cool portrait of DIY heroes No Sé Discos in Reader from Sandra Treviño, and if the title doesn’t draw you in, I don’t know what will: “The Chicano futurists of No Sé Discos share cosmic sounds from the working class.” There’s a lot in here that reminds me of how Brendan and I think about Lazy & Entitled. Nothing is fancy, we’re just trying to make art.
It’s easy to clown on Chance The Rapper after that “I LOVE MY WIFE IGH IGH” album, but 1) Acid Rap and Coloring Book still hold up 2) shut up, he’s from CHICAGO. It’s that latter point that makes this Chicago Magazine piece from Jessica Hopper so delightful. Relive the days with Chano was “Mr. YOUmedia,” inspiring kids to book studio time at the Harold Washington Library. Side note: I actually read this in Hopper’s book, The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic, which I promise to return to the Edgewater branch of the Chicago Public Library soon. It’s a good book that I’ve only read about a third of!
It should be obvious but nevertheless worth admitting that my experience with the punk scene is largely suburban and post-9/11, but also I like a bunch of bands from the 90s. Not to mention, as a 36-year-old father, it’s easier to read about circle pits while music blares in my headphones than it is to hire a babysitter and see how many bands I can catch at Cole’s and still be home before 1 a.m. As such, I enjoyed Miles Raymer in Reader talking about Chicago punk in the 70s and 80s in the guise of reviewing the documentary You Weren’t There (TW for a casual mention of a still-alive Steve Albini). Shocker of all shockers: Chicago punk was more working class, more experimental, and less popular than its coastal counterparts. Couldn’t have called that one.
What’re you still doing here? Did you not know Derrick Rose was FROM CHICAGO? We are going to, for 43 seconds, set aside the fact that Derrick Rose has no idea what consent is, and, like with Chano, take a time machine. On the occasion of Derrick’s retirement, we are going to once again ask: WHAT ARE YOU DOING DRAGIC?
If you’re in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Whatever happens, trust that you’re being treated better than you would’ve been in Edo-era Japan. I know I live in the country where everyone has an AR-15, but I am glad no pissed off Chili’s customers ever felt entitled to take a katana to my ribcage.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris