Have you heard M. Gessen's podcast The Idiot? I've read three of their books:

• The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
• Surviving Autocracy
• The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

The books are mostly about Russia, fascism, humanity, and a story about the two brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombing. They're all humanistic stories, ones that tell people in more than two dimensions.

Now, the podcast is a little different because Gessen has made it about their 'least-liked cousin'.

The podcast is North American white-person-formatted: it goes on for too long and is kind of on valium at times. The exchanges between Gessen and their cousin are marvellous, not to mention FBI transcripts.

I won't give away information about the plot but the cousin is a very manipulative, scheming, lying, and treacherous individual, to say the least.

Is the podcast worth it? Yes, it is. Even though it goes on for too long at times, it's insightful and frustrating. I wish I could reach through the ether and slap the cousin, but then again, they just sound like a drab psychopath.

Gessen's way of reporting what happened is the interesting stuff to me. They're always good at cutting through faff and getting to the person behind it all: motives, thoughts, ways of thinking. The gist of the podcast enthralls, especially letters and conversations, but Gessen's style also shines through.

I long for another of their books.

#podcast #author #humanism

Lenny Henry gets it in the latest episode of The Assembly.

#humour #funny

Boards of Canada are about to release their new album, Inferno, the first album in 13 years. It's out on 29 May. Bleep have registered 'overwhelming demand' and I see why.

Boards of Canada is a mysterious band, like some other artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre.

Here's my favourite song of theirs, 'Dayvan Cowboy'.

#music

The text is in Swedish. It means 'Two years of genocide, more than 20,000 murdered children in Gaza'.

Each sheet of paper is a list of children that have been murdered by the Israeli government in Gaza in the past two years.

This is Hind Rajab. From Wikipedia:

Hind Rajab was a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the Gaza Strip who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the Gaza war, which also killed six of her family members and two paramedics coming to her rescue.

I aim to see the film The Voice of Hind Rajab very soon.

The Palestinian flag: red, white, green, black.

A close-up of one of the sheets of paper.

Another sheet of paper.

#Palestine #Gaza #murder #genocide #massacre #IDF #art #HindRajab #FreePalestine #israel

'Motown Junk' is Manic Street Preachers' second single.

A while back I read 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure, a song on every Manics song that's been released since their start. James Dean Bradfield—singer, guitarist, composer—still thinks it's their best song.

Bradfield is such an underestimated guitarist.

I think there's something about the song that only fervour and youth can mix and capture. On the other hand, lyrics like these can only be written by thoughtful, inventive, explosive, and young provocateurs:

Never ever wanted to be with you The only thing you gave me was the boredom I suffocate in Adrift in cheap dreams don't stop the rain Numbed out in piss towns just want to dig their graves

Motown, Motown junk I laughed when Lennon got shot 21 years of living and nothing means anything to me

Motown junk a lifetime of slavery Songs of love echo underclass betrayal Stops your heart beating for 168 seconds

#music #ManicStreetPreachers

On 10 July, Will Sheff—who fronts Okkervil River—releases his second solo album, Extra Mile.

'Funny Feeling' is the first single. This is a dreamy, flowy track. An amalgam of Will's project named Lovestreams...highlighting lovely song. The percussion and synths bring a kind of 1970s Donny Hathaway feeling to the track, that turns different four minutes in. Will got his groove in! This track carries a bunch of components, all nice.

I've not seen Will in years. I know his and Beth's companion, Larry, recently died. That is harrowing. I remember when my wife's and my little love, Blixa, died. I suddenly remember Blixa Bargeld—yes he's the source of our Blixa's name—writing 'How Did I Die?', a song that is part of the Einstürzende Neubauten project and album LAMENT is infused with World War I. Does anything ever end? Does war ever end?

Lyrics from 'How Did I Die?'

Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature. It seems to belong to another world. Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a board; of the villages nothing remains but gray smears where stone walls have tumbled together. A confused mass of troubled earth. Columns of muddy smoke spurt up continually as high explosives tear deeper into this ulcered area.

How did I die? I fell from the sky or didn’t I?

I filled my mouth with water so the bullet could secede

How did I die? How did I die? Did I die by my own hand? Or didn’t I? How did I die? Or didn’t I die at all?

How did we die? Or didn’t we? Didn’t we die at all? We didn’t die We didn’t die We are back with a different song

We didn’t die We didn’t die We’re just singing a different song We are back with a change of weather Ein anderer Wind, ein neues Lied

#music #WillSheff #EinstürzendeNeubauten

In Ferneaux is my favourite Blanck Mass album. It may be his most intangible, the most musique-concrète-meets-electronic-procession album he's made, and it's a monumental ride.

When David Holmes released Let's Get Killed in 1997, it wasn't just sample-looped boogaloo like what Propellerheads were doing at the time for the dancefloor, it was street recordings in New York City, drums picked up by a cheap recorder, deeply-felt synths into the darkness, viciously-beautifully engineered paths to something that mixed Sly Stone with Kraftwerk; the album now seems, to me, like a sort of stepping stone to In Ferneaux.

'Phase I', the first out of two ~20-minute tracks on In Ferneaux, starts with an electronic tingle of face-on scramble, not unlike how Blanck Mass starts his album World Eater. On this album though, after eight minutes, time blurs into a hypnotic drone: imagine SUNN O))) set loose on a bunch of tibetan bowls.

One could argue that it's simple to set up some sweeping synths and then have them harp on, but I think it's even harder to do that – which follows after the SUNN O))) moment – and then have a song go into something that sounds like Einstürzende Neubauten on valium.

I joke, of course; there's nothing funny about the album, even though Blanck Mass rarely takes his music seriously enough not to set it up for a piss-take.

The music is beautiful.

Then, 'Phase II' starts. The beginning of the track astounds me every time I hear it: a man talks about recognising misery:

how you handle the bitch-ass misery. Do I stay the same? I dunno! [...] I'm over here being powerful, not knowing your shit. Look at me, 55 and no drugs.

This kind of reminds me of the song 'Rodney Yates' by David Holmes, where a poet raps his stuff into a mic on the street. Or, so it sounds.

Direct human connection.

'Phase II' quickly contains flowing, beautiful synth overlays, the type of sounds that the wonderful artist Florian Fricke, aka Popul Vuh, may have loved. It's absolutely lovely to hear the human voice over these sounds.

To create this, to do this, demands a lot of humanism. I truly believe so. This is beauty.

Three minutes and forty seconds into the song, there is only wondrous composition. Ligeti couldn't have made this (in a good way). Then, flourishing sinus-wave stuff, gurgly synths —– absolute distortion.

Noise.

It's like being cleansed.

It's clear that this album followed World Eater as it's filled with some of the same sounds, the type of sounds that Blanck Mass used before getting into making soundtracks; in a way, In Ferneaux is the arc between his older self and what turned into the soundtrack to Ted K.

In Ferneaux is a singular project. There are others like it, but none that I know of that in modern time evokes what Blanck Mass did with the album. As it stands, it's therapeutic, beautiful in its wonders.

This is the final scene of Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's filmed version of Irvine Welsh's book of the same name.

We see Renton, a young man who might be at the end of a long heroin-addiction journey. He experienced the death of friends, he stole everything he could steal and sell to get heroin, he hung out with friends who acted like enemies, he wanted, he had no sex drive, he had sex drive. The book and the film are very much products of the 1990s.

You did not see William Burroughs depict heroin use like that in Junkie. I think Burroughs wrote in a more fluent way.

The way Renton looks as he's walking over a bridge, a smile on his worn-out face, a smile that grows bigger as it blurs over the screen, and then lights-out, what does it say?

In fact, as we see Renton walking away, it's the result of something we've seen throughout the film: he always looks completely turned off, as though he's most often unavailable to the viewer. On the other hand, because of Danny Boyle's want to turn most of his lead characters into comic-book characters, there are a lot of scenes where Renton pulls faces and appears to live, but these are comic elements, like the start of the film, when Renton is chased by police to Iggy Pop's 'Lust for Life', is hit by a car, and is tackled to the ground.

Renton's face might change at any second. Nobody can smile forever. Perhaps nobody should smile forever. I don't know.

Somehow I remember Michel de Montaigne. I think of Sarah Bakewell's brilliant book How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, and especially this part where Sarah speaks of an experience that Montaigne had when thrown off a horse:

Here's the transcript:

So Montaigne started out in life as just your average French young nobleman with an estate to inherit, and he worked as a magistrate in the city of Bordeaux. He went along like that for 13 years, but one day towards the end of that, he had an experience which, I think, changed his life.

He was riding one day with his friends, and he was another rider slammed into his horse from behind, and Montaigne was thrown violently from his horse. He landed with such a bang on his head that he was knocked out. Also, he had a blow to his chest, which made him vomit blood, and his friends carried him back to the house, and according to what they told him afterward, he was tearing at his clothes, and he was very distressed, and looks as if he was suffering. He came around afterward and started remembering the experience, and it changed his attitude to death. Until that moment, he'd been terrified of dying; he'd tormented himself with the thought that you had to somehow rehearse death, and study it; to philosophise was to learn how to die, which was an idea that he'd got from Cicero, but afterwards, he completely changed his mind about that, and began to think that actually, when death comes, you’re [...] not even there, because you’re drifting in this pleasurable state. So, it was like falling asleep, but very pleasurable, voluptuous, as he said, and it was as if life was just, just touching him by the tip of the lips, and he was drifting away.

And therefore, there's no point in preparing for it, and you should just sort of, you know, not worry, basically. 'Don't bother your head about death'; it became his his new philosophy, but it did change his attitude to life and, rather than to death, and after that, he started to seem to think slightly differently.

And very shortly after that, he resigned his job as magistrate, and he retired to look after his estate full-time because he did inherit his estate, but also he began to write [...] these little narratives of his, of his reading, things that he picked up, things that interested him, and as he went on, he became more interested in his own experience of the world. And he began to write [...] about that that near-death experience. A couple of years later, he traced it as it had unfolded from the inside, and as it had felt to him. He reflected on how it had made him think about death differently, writing very personally, writing about consciousness, the stream of consciousness from within. And it was that, that made him, that the extraordinary writer that he became.

In the face of death, in the face of life, we change. When do we not change? Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, may have said, 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.' It's profound and it's obvious. We all change. Or do we?

When do we not change? What is change?

Some people believe we are the same as adults as we are children, padded with experience, but, essentially we are the same persons. We don't change.

I think that's hogwash, because I've seen enough people change during my existence to know it is untrue. I've seen people to go hell and back and to hell again. Most of us have, I think, even though we might not realise it right now.

So, what is happiness?

Bodil Malmsten, the Swedish writer, said happiness is extremely fleeting. It's there, it's gone. Mostly, it's not here nor there. It's not a field into which one steps and frolicks. You can't turn it on and off at will.

I saw a TV series yesterday. A character said romantic love fades and becomes something deeper. Other characters baulked at the definition and rejected it, perhaps because they were afraid that that the statement could be true or perhaps because it seemed dire.

Bodil came back to the notion of happiness as fleeting and wonderful if you could get it. If you could get it.

But, what is happiness?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word:

1 a : a state of well-being and contentment : joy b : a pleasurable or satisfying experience

States and experiences pass.

And that's fine.

As long as we aim for happiness and to realise it is fleeting, that's fine, at least speaking for myself.

I want everyone I love to be happy. I want them to never suffer. I want them to all have good health and feel loved, to know they are loved.

Did Renton have real friends while he was addicted to heavy drugs? What is a real friend? Did Renton feel happy? What is heroin-incited feelings that are very similar to happiness? Can heroin abuse be happiness? What is happiness?

These are faint questions that pop into my head.

Pleasure or well-being or both, I wish all of it on people. Weird thing: my mind says, without feeling badly or poorly, can we ever experience happiness? Can happiness only exist if bad sides exist? Can God exist if the Devil would not exist? Hello protestant Swedish state school, for making me think that black-and-white way.

On to work. I've got to go to work.

#life #SarahBakewell

It was a sound bath, alright.

I felt that he started out with a simple idea and built on that; Simon, my friend who I saw the gig with, said it was 'all harmonics' and I think he nailed the description.

For some recorded Alessandro, check this out.

It felt like Alessandro Cortini was similar to Sunn O))).

#music #live #instrumental #drone

They've just released SUNN O))), a new album. Get ready for droned-out fuzz:

MRRRROOOOMMSSHHHHHHHHHZZZZZZZZ

I'm transported to the core of the Earth from listening to this music for long. It's a vast, vast ride.

#music #drone