Last week, my son and I took in a Small Black show in Durham, NC. I have seen Small Black before, but it was many years and albums ago, and was excited to see them play newer material. Before the show, I checked out the opening act, Pictureplane. I discovered that Travis Egedy, the creative force behind Pictureplane, had coined the phrase “Witch house” to describe the music that he makes. I had heard of Witch house before, but never spent much time exploring the genre and was pretty skeptical. I thought about arriving later, so I wouldn’t catch the Pictureplane set. Those plans didn’t last long, though, because I’m congenitally prone to earliness, especially when I’m not familiar with the route to my destination.
Harvest, the new record from the Colombian band Balthvs, merits easy comparisons to Khruangbin. The middle eastern flavor mixed with a bit of surf guitar are instantly relatable. When I was listening to the record, my wife thought it was new Khruangbin. The comparison for this record, in particular, is more than superficial. While Khruangbin’s latest, A La Sala was recorded in a barn, Harvest was recorded in an equally rustic location, a tropical forest in the band’s home country.
Rod Stewart, An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down — George Jones, I Wanta Sing
Rolling Stone trots out some truly hideous cover art for The 50 Worst Album Covers of All Time. Two of my most favorite/least favorite are Rod Stewart, An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down, with its frightening old man/scarecrow appearing to menace a young child and George Jones, I Wanta Sing with its proto-Thomas the Tank Engine concept.
But your world doesn’t need to be big to matter. A world could be a droplet of water that was born in a raincloud and ends when it evaporates on a rock somewhere in Tasmania. It could be the size of a pinhead, its lifespan measured in minutes. Empires can rise and fall in seconds. A love story could be over in a nanosecond.
Addressing current events can feel a bit like grabbing a live wire these days. Hold on too tight or too long and you could be harmed. The ground under us is ever shifting and allegiances are volatile. In recognition of this, I’m sharing a homily that my priest, Fr. David, gave last Sunday, after the attempted assassination of former president Trump.
This piece by Erica Brown (gift article) about the hubris of our leadership in this country contains a surprising amount of biblical commentary for something from The Atlantic, but I’ll take it.
The Bible wants us to know that power changes people, that they come to enjoy the weight and clout of office and its many material and emotional benefits. Proverbs, in only one verse, captures the pleasure of power: “The king’s smile means life; his favor is like a rain cloud in spring.”
Emma Goldberg brings to light some new thinking (NYT gift article) from scholars who are looking at patterns in rural American culture.
The Rethinking Rural conference was full of a different type of political insight. Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity. Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.
Science Alertreports on the phenomenon of organ transplant recipients receiving some of the donor’s memories and personality traits along with their organs.
Other transplant recipients say they developed new tastes for food, art, sex, or careers following their surgeries. Some even claim to have new “memories” implanted.
Canned Dragons
Travis Egedy from Pictureplane
