I always watch the Oscars with my besties Crystal Declined and Mocha Chocolotta. Those are their drag names. They’re not drag queens, not actively anyway, but we use each others’ drag names as a kind of sisterly playful put-down. It’s all very old school, sort of playing at being Boys in the Band-era homophiles. My drag name is technically Swallow St. John, but it never caught on like the other two. We always kind of expect the Oscars to be the ultimate in glamor and style and appreciation of great artistic expression, but end up delighting in the grotesque and spectacular ways it falls short.
I won’t bore you with more opinions about the Shakespearian self-destruction of that certain movie star, other than to say that Chris Rock must be some kind of Buddha the way he handled it. This year’s ceremony felt particularly desperate, whether it was finding it necessary to tart up the “in memoriam” or bringing in snowboarders to introduce an award like that’s gonna get teenage boys watching. Plus all the ads for Disney products — poor things couldn’t sell ad space. The Oscars are increasingly an archaic spectacle divorced from their purpose and relevance, as the world of film, in theaters at least, has curdled into superhero blockbuster light entertainment on the one hand, and stuffy prestige projects for stars of the pre-Netflix era to try and get themselves a statuette on the other. With the added thankless task of somehow compensating for past and present racism and addressing social ills in general. Still I can’t help but adore the old girl, particularly for the moments of unrehearsed humanity that bleed through — like the slap itself if I’m honest, or the adorable banter between a genuinely vulnerable elderly-infantile Liza and a comforting, maternal Lady Gaga, and Liza’s surprise and delight at successfully reading the one-word name of the Best Picture.
Last month we travelled to a Swedish archipelago for the strange pleasures of Skærgårdslyd by Astrid Øster Mortensen, and improbably there’s already another Swedish archipelago based release: Recordings from the Åland Islands by Jeremiah Chu and Marta Sofia Honer, which similarly incorporates environmental sounds into its no-drums-allowed sonic watercolors. The interweaving of viola and keyboards and field recordings seems to have surfaced from the time of Thoreau, but the exploration of textures and the freeform structure are rather avant-garde. It feels like a summer spent far from home, feeling ebbs and flows and whirling currents and subtleties of emotion, with songs built around the chirping of birds or the clicking of bicycle wheels.
I know I’ve been kind of quiet about my love life, but it’s because in February I started actually dating someone I liked and who liked me, so you know, I didn’t want to turn them into light entertainment. It was a 24 year old longshoreman from Long Beach. I had friends literally high-five me for bagging someone that young, which kind of bothered me — I’m attracted to younger guys, although not usually quite that young, but I hope I’m not the guy that wants someone super young on their arm for display. Aaaanyway, things percolated nicely between us all through March.
Tbh there wasn’t a huge physical attraction and I can’t say we super connected in terms of our interests and passions, but he was very sweet and enthusiastic and genuinely warm and he did take an interest in the music I shared with him. He randomly pulled out some vinyl from my collection and it was delicious to be transported back to throaty ‘80s Manchester guitar racket from Dub Sex.
…and the warm and soulful stylings of Headless Chickens — another 80s guitar band, from the New Zealand Flying Nun scene that ruled my world in the mid-80s.
Then he got suspended at work and he started talking about needing to get out of town. The next time he came over we had a great time, cuddling and cooking and playing records and eventually going to a party. I ended up asking him to spend the night, but once we were settled in I felt a strange anxiety come up, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep with him there. He seemed okay it, but when I FaceTimed him in the morning he was a bit chilly.
We stayed connected with kisses and cuddles in emoji form, but a week later he told me he was going to visit a “friend” in Ft. Lauderdale and promptly evaporated. It did hurt — especially after a FaceTime closure call a few weeks later in which I got more clarity than I expected, but to be fair I had never put a ring on it either.
As April started, Aldous Harding seemed to comment on all this, wormholing her way into my consciousness from New Zealand, first with an odd little ditty called “Leathery Whip” in which, over a warm, old-timey organ, she served up lovely early-onset world-weariness: “I’m a little bit older but I remain unchanged / And the folks who want me don’t have the things I need / No way.”
Young Aldous has a Belle and Sebastian knowingness in her words and her timeless sound, but she throws bold and quirky elements into her arrangements, leaving you satisfied but slightly off balance. There’s a wise old barfly in the timbre of her voice. Her cadence and trips into surrealism can be Tori Amosesque, Joanna Newsom-adjacent. She’s forever in a languid state of resisting the pull of sweet seduction from the wrong person. I also found an earlier gem, from 2019, called “The Barrel”: “It’s already dead / I know you have the dove / I’m not getting wet / Looks like a date is set / Show the ferret to the egg / I’m not getting led along.” Warm Chris is actually her fourth album — where has she been? Where have I been? I have needed her in my life.
God I love this one:
The mysterious, reclusive Swedish indie-pop goddess Sally Shapiro resurfaced with Sad Cities, a new chapter in her catalogue of frosted melancholy. Her whispery, vaporous, little-girl vocals materialize and fade away in a field of clubby beats and sugar crystals. Favorite track “Falling Clouds” drives fast into the regretful night against chiming 80s keyboards, with a head full of confusion and longing for an ambivalent lover, and soars into a rapturous chorus, delivering wave after wave of ecstasy to my eager music hole.
Christian Lee Hutson looks like a Beach Boy, and writes fractured little short stories in song form. “Cherry” is the one that jumped out at me on his Quitters album — it starts with a conversational tone; the impending death of a friend (lover?) is mentioned casually, in a kind of sing song, but then he unfurls an oceanic chorus: “Something big is coming / I don’t know what it is yet.” It’s one of those lyrics that feel like a message from a higher dimension, and it gives me hope.
DJ Travella is a 19 year old producer from Tanzania who creates violent, jackhammering electronica with undercurrents of maddening ice cream truck melodies. His album Mr. Mixondo feels akin to Japanese avant-garde stuff like Foodman, but apparently it’s part of a whole scene called “singeli” and people who have never gone to art school dance to it. Favorite track “FL Beat” is like a Red Bull dance party with 8-bit characters.
How to describe Alabaster dePlume? The foundation of his sound is sax and poetry; his name suggests a highly self-expressed mid-century British fop, and he is from Manchester and his accent does bring Morrissey to mind. His spoken words are steeped in a dedication to recovery and empowerment; he creates a kind of manifesto on “Don’t Forget You’re Precious” where he contrasts that call to action with the mundane things he remembers, swathed in Yma Sumac-flavored angelic cooing: “I remember I’m busy / I remember my friends / I remember to change at Highbury / But I forget that I’m precious / Don’t do it / Don’t forget you’re precious.”
Last month I realized super late that Altin Gün and Nilufer Yanya, two of my favorite favorite bands, were gonna be playing TOGETHER, in Hollywood — the only problem was that a I was working that night and b the show was sold out. After much agonizing I got the OK to leave TCM Fest early and I bought a resale ticket for more than I ever pay for concert tickets. It just didn’t seem right for me to not be there. I paid 20 bucks to park across the street from the Roxy, and Altin Gün were already on stage as I walked in. The band is charmingly mismatched in their physicality and they rock some pretty sweet ‘70s fashions with lots of shaggy hair.
They remind me of the B-52s in the sense that they’re a full on party band, full of silly fun, but they have a deeply soulful core. Lead singer and baglama player Erdinç Ecevit Yıldız has a kind of cult leader presence, with wide, pale eyes that see into and through things, while Merve Daşdemir dervishes around, tossing her thick mane like a modern day Maya Deren. Their sound is both 1980s and 1380s, zany keyboards and throaty muezzin vocals coming together as they were meant to. They leaned heavily on Gece, their 2019 album, rather than the two incredible albums that came out last year — my eternal curse, bands that don’t play the stuff I adore — but I did get to hear the mighty “Yüce Dağ Başında.” Amidst all the good fun, the intense and mournful traditional Turkish song “Ordunun Dereleri” gave me the warmest feelings of sweet longing, with lyrics that translate to “Oh my Baglama, my Baglama / Are you an apricot branch? / You sound so strange / Are you more in love than me? / Oh mercy, whose eyes are blackened with kohl.”
It was great to see Nilufer Yanya in person but she couldn’t match that energy, plus she had a horn player who added some layers to her brilliant songcraft that did not please me. When I went to buy an Altin Gün T-shirt from a radiant blond Dutch woman, the bongo player was standing right there and I had to tell him how amazing their show was. He smiled an adorable smile. “Don’t forget your T-shirt,” he kindly reminded me. “I’m starstruck,” I acknowledged.
A few lovely random baubles. Duster isn’t a band that was on my radar in their turn of the century day, but they’ve resurfaced with a druggy dirty bluesy slowcore thingy called “New Directions” that takes me back to the hard rockin ‘90s and Thalia Zedek’s band Come.
Kevin Devine is another one who never came to my attention, despite putting out 24 albums since 2000. His new one, Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong, is kind of lavish ‘70s-style pop rock, sparkling with hooks.
Toward the end of the month I got a text from the wayward longshoreman — a pic of his car stereo screen playing “Do It Clean” by Echo and the Bunnymen. I can’t say I felt at all happy getting confirmation that I had changed from a lover to a fleeting memory. I responded “Haha nice — words to live by :)” — which was intended as a dig but hopefully oblique enough to seem friendly.