April 10: The land claims what you leave behind
The Crossover Appeal
We’re from where we’re from. Scars are part of the deal, aren’t they?
The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones
By the time I was 18 I'd been to twice as many funerals as weddings - at least. Some were the kind of funerals where you're a bystander, an observer of other people's grief that you don't quite feel. Even if you're sad, you know deep down that your tears aren't coming from the same place as the people at the front of the room. Others cut a lot closer. I remember being sixteen, eulogizing a friend whose casket lay closed next to his brother's below the pulpit. I remember hating all of it.
My folks are generally death-positive folks. For them, grief is an opportunity for hospitality, hope, and connection. But something about that run of loss in my teenage years poisoned that well for me. A friend asked me the other night if I've ever thought about what I want to have happen to my body when I pass and I realized that I've never given it much sustained thought because, generally speaking, I keep the realness of dying at arms length as much as I can. A few years back when my dad had a heart attack that required a quintuple bypass to recover, I held his cold hand as he emerged from anesthesia, tubes and IVs everywhere. I'm so glad I could be there with him as he healed up, but in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to run out of the ICU, top speed.
This week's crop of recommendations (with one delightful exception) are all swimming in loss. They each answer some version of the question, "if loss is all we know for sure, how then to live?" From AHNONI's low tones in "Another World" saying "I need another world / This one's nearly gone" to the wild colors of the sunset over a boat as it passes beneath the final bridge of a soul's journey to rest, the recs on this list come from a place of open questions and forgone conclusions.
Again, except for the wonderful MAMAMOO medley which, at all times, is the perfect panacea for whatever ennui is currently derailing your own work - like, for instance, this newsletter about recommending cool stuff to try out.
The List
Listen: Dessner: Impermanence/Disintegration, Bryce Dessner, Australian String Quartet & Sydney Dance Company
Let me start by saying I know absolutely nothing about classical music. Or neo-classical. Or classical composition. I have a few favorite soundtracks that I could point to, but I don't know my Rachmaninoff from my Chopin, really. And so it is that I am tempted to recommend this new record by The National guitarist, Bryce Dessner, with some reservation, having virtually no credentials upon which to assess this album's nine gorgeous tracks.
Nevertheless I do recommend it, and without any reservation whatsoever. Impermanence/Disintegration is an intense, at times harrowing journey, whose beautiful arrangements alternate between keeping you at the edge of your seat and offering some space for your exhaustion. There's a strong, cinematic quality to the record's progression, amounting to something that verges on the narrative, a point that comes home especially on the final track which features the albums only vocal performance, a heartwrenching and dire rendition by AHNONI, herself a dramatic dynamo. This is not background music, this is not something to put on while you're doing something else. It is a powerful and ascendant collection of tracks that just add to Dessner's already impressive litany of musical achievements.
Play: Spiritfarer, Xbox, PC, Mac, Playstation, Nintendo Switch
Spiritfarer dropped in the late summer of 2020, a beautiful-looking game from Thunder Lotus Games, an independent game studio that has built its reputation on beautifully animated adventures like Jotun and Sundered, each. They have a knack for world building, drawing from a wide range of myth and folklore to tell surprisingly personal stories, none more personal and moving, however, than the one I'm finding here in Spiritfarer.
You are Stella, the new replacement for Charon, the famous boatman who ferries the souls of the dead to their place of rest. A grim premise, to be sure, but then why does the whole game have the bright heart of Steven Universe? And there's another wrinkle: Spiritfarer is more management sim than adventure platformer. See, while technically your job is to guide lost souls into the great beyond, the real heart of the game is in being the best possible companion to these souls while they prepare for the end. You cook them their favorite meals with ingredients you've fished yourself. You build them beautiful homes on your boat with skills and materials that have taken you time and effort to acquire. You give them hugs when they seem down and you stand by their side as they reflect on their lives' greatest regrets, the things they've left undone and unsaid.
It is, in a word, a lot. But it is also gentle and surprisingly without schmaltz. Spiritfarer is about death, yes, but it is also a game about hospitality, about making space for recovery and bravery and friendship.
Listen/Watch: Killing Voice: MAMAMOO
Last year, as I realized that the pandemic was settling in for the long haul and I found myself looking for deep rabbit holes to fall down, I came upon this group of stunning vocalists who served as my real entry into the K-pop scene. Mamamoo, a quartet who debuted seven years ago, has gradually built a reputation as the undisputed vocal queens of K-pop and for good reason. Each of the four members, Solar, Moonbyul, Hwasa, and Wheein are singular vocal performers in their own right, and after so long together, their chemistry is unrivalled. Dingo Music's youtube channel generally features performers from the Korean hip-hop and r&b scenes, but last year they made an exception for Mamamoo and gave us this: fifteen minutes of harmonic bliss as the girls run through a medley of their sizable discog.
Look, I'm definitely biased here. Mamamoo is, in my mind, the absolute cream of the crop when it comes to pure pop performance coming out of Seoul right now. But watch this video and tell me I'm wrong, I don't think you can. Also, you have to stick with the video until at least the ten minute mark when they hit “Miss You”. Plus, with Wheein’s solo debut hitting next week, I'm too hyped not to bring it up here.
Read: The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones
For a long time, my favorite sports sequence in literature has been the opening sixty or so pages of Don DeLillo's Underworld, a masterful, showy sequence that places baseball at the heart of its sprawling narrative about Americana and generational... something. To be honest, I haven't read that book in a while because it's like 750 pages long, but I do remember those sixty pages being incredible, and I don't even like baseball.
My point is that toward the end of The Only Good Indians, a stunning, terrifying novel about the costs four friends pay for a fateful rupture of Blackfeet tradition, there is one-on-one basketball match that is now my favorite sports scene in anything I've ever read. Jones' prose is spectacular throughout this book. Controlled, even, empathetic, and sincere right up until its most harrowing and gruesome moments, but in that climactic sequence between a young Blackfeet girl and her strange opponent, Jones' writing transcends into a thrilling and characterful mode where the tiniest gestures, the most passing glances, explode into world-spanning emergencies. In a story that spans generations, families, homesteads, and mythologies, this one scene on a homemade basketball court simultaneously expands and contracts the narrative space - a dilation of time that collapses the novel's themes of family, cultural loss, and intergenerational trauma into a single nuclear moment. It is maybe the single best chapter I've read in anything since I was in college.
Fortunately, while the rest of the book might not sustain that dynamic intensity, it still thrills the whole way through. Honest, heartfelt, and ruthless, The Only Good Indians is a shocking package, full of moments you want to look away from but won't.
That’s it for this week, folks - thanks for sticking around despite the heavier tone. Appreciate you for reading, as always.
Jordan Cassidy