JPW, Hataałii, Psychic Temple, Gold-Diggers, Los Angeles, September 23, 2023
This week, I hosted Navajo singer/songwriter Hataałii on Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions, and now I’m pleased to announce he’s joining the JPW band and Chris Schlarb’s Psychic Tempe on September 23 at Gold-Diggers in Los Angeles. Tickets can be found right here.
Gordon Lightfoot, At Royal Albert Hall
At Pitchfork, I followed up my Substack essay “The Watchman’s Gone” with a review of Gordon Lightfoot’s final album, the live recording At Royal Albert Hall
Lightfoot’s miles-wide voice plays no small role in his classic material, but settled into a light, agreeable lilt, the focus shifts more to the songs: their emotional tone and stark lyricism. Though he’s often thought of in terms of pillowy soft rock, his pared down range reveals the darkness nestled among even his most pastoral narratives and gentle rockers, to say nothing of the outright menacing ballads, like 1974’s Cathy Smith-inspired “Sundown.” This vocal approach reveals more of the humor and sly wordplay, too: Performed here, that song slides along on a more agreeable current. Like his contemporaries Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, who gathered at Lightfoot’s house in 1975, where Mitchell performed a draw-dropping rendition of “Coyote,” Lightfoot’s voice sometimes cracks and falters, adding a ghostly, sly tone to his visions of about sailor’s dreams and the murky distance between winning and losing. Read the full piece at Pitchfork
They’re Talkin’ About (Yeah)
Another week in the breakdown of consensus reality. Woo wee, let the ripcord go and let’s ride. This week at Aquarium Drunkard, I wrote a little about the first two installments in the Red Hot Organization’s Red Hot + Ra :: Nuclear War series. Like Yo La Tengo before them, a wide cast, including avant-R&B singer Georgia Anne Muldrow, trumpeter Josef Leimberg, punk jazzers Irreversible Entanglements, cosmic reedist and vocalist Angel Bat Dawid, vocalist Malcolm Jiyane Tree-o, Grandmaster CAP, and remixers Dennis Bovell, Rich Medina, Moon Medicin, Sanford Biggers, Joel Tarman, and The Kronos Quartet unite to explore, expand, and reinterpret Sun Ra. I found myself thinking about the bomb, and UFOs, two topics that are in the air these days, between Oppenheimer and Asteroid City:
After all, UFOs first entered the mass-mediated American consciousness when aviator Kenneth Arnold saw nine unidentifiable silver spinning disks over Mount Rainier, Washington, on June 24, 1947, early in the newly christened Atomic Age. It was a new era, and UFOS and atomic weapons were intertwined in the American imagination. The sky was now the domain of the unknown threats. —full piece at Aquarium Drunkard
Pee-Wee’s Alien Adventure | Click Vortex
Speaking of the skies, on WASTOIDS’ Click Vortex, Sam Means and I talked about aliens, some of our favorite UFO devotee footage, the infamous Alien Autopsy, and devoted some airtime to Paul Reubens, AKA Pee-Wee Herman, one of our shared heroes. This was a real fun episode of our real fun show, brought to you by WASTOIDS, the podcast and video division of Hello Merch.
A Note on Catastrophizing by Conner Habib
“Catastrophizing is a gesture that has become exacerbated in the post-pandemic landscape. When we have fear, rather than allowing it to rise and fall in time, it consumes more time than it should; it becomes a fantasy of the future, making the future a fixed point…Catastrophizing in our time is the dire sense of foregone conclusion, a false knowing that we can’t change our lives or the world. Of course we can but this requires an entirely different perspective…new ways of looking.” —Conner Habib, Against Everyone #230
Gold Diggers bill is STACKED