During COVID quarantine I got into weekly routines and rituals, for example scanning my weekly Release Radar on Spotify every Friday, taking an edible on Saturday around 5pm, and following
my Italian nonna’s recipe for spaghetti alla Bolognese using vegan meat, as my new favorite songs blossomed into five dimensions. I got my last pandemic unemployment check on Sept. 4th, and life changed almost immediately. LA traffic got thicker and more viscous every day, and my chill lifestyle morphed into work and obligations and actual social events quickly piling up.
We spent the month scrambling to get everything ready for the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, and thanks to the indefatigable Shira we pulled it off with vax requirements and masks and only one major COVID scare (the test came back negative). I got to see my programming efforts come to life, and meet and bond with the little geniuses that made the films that I had seen as submissions and that I’d been loving on for many months.
With my bestie Christien we still laugh about the classic SCTV skit where Barbra Streisberg (Andrea Martin) comes on the Donnah Shore (Catherine O’Hara) show and surreptitiously hums along whenever Barb starts singing — and then compulsively denies it, making Barbra more and more indignant. Liz Fraser got her Donnah Shore on with Daniel Lopatin AKA Oneohtrix Point Never on “Tales from the Trash Stratum,” making little gasps and fricatives that became mews and other pre-verbal babbling as Daniel got down in a stop-start bed of uneasy-listening ambient. As OPN has transitioned from obscure underground darling to canonized Important Artist, his work and the written appreciation of it have veered into stuffyosity, but collaborating with a bona fide goddess catapulted him (and me) into new sensual stratospheres.
I dove into Satomimagae’s back catalog and found treasures like “Odori” and “Ishikoro” on previous albums.
Brijean released a Rick Wade remix of “Day Dreaming” that turned up the languor and had me purring along.
And black midi — after a lot of hype and an album I just didn’t get — put out “Cruising,” a dark caramel croon that covered some serious terrain, bringing to mind Scott Walker.