There are not many of you: still, I feel a responsibility, and it pains me when two weeks have gone by — this morning it is 15 days — and I have not written. The trouble is, I’ve been finishing a book that, while it will end up being on the short side — to its credit — has been abusing me, in one fashion or another, for the better part of four years. We’re in the final weeks, modulo polishing — it was only mid March when I understood, finally, what it wanted to be about — and that’s absorbing whatever verbal capacities I might otherwise bring to bear on STUFF. Not to say the beautiful weather: the overcast this morning makes me long for a monsoon and, more particularly, for an excuse to lie on a cool floor making up the sleep I missed the previous night for the damp heat and insects coming in a tear in the screen. It strikes me, not for the first time, how much of my writing life consists in an effort to evoke the character and logic of hypnopompic states, states of coming-to. This character is not oneiric, exactly, but it shares with oneiric and hypnogogic states a loosening of the constraints on bodily behavior and the causal dispositions of matter more broadly that we infer from waking experience. It’s a state of porousness, receptivity, and no doubt it is a fool’s game to try to evoke it in words — but on screen! I think of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking (歩いても歩いても), with its scenes of domestic tension blanketed by the heat of Obon, or Mo Scarpelli’s El Father como sí mismo, which, if you have not seen, what have you been doing with your time? Go watch it, now, today, so we can discuss it. I think too of Tsai Ming-liang’s Days(日子), or really of Tsai’s entire œuvre, since even when his protagonist Hsiao Kang, the indomitable Lee Kang-sheng, is not contending with flooded holes or selling real estate in the monsoon, he exudes a certain just-out-of-bed dazedness — save, of course, in the Walker films, where his slowness acquires the aspect of full realization. But Days in particular has a monsoon languidity to it, far more than Stray Dogs, though the latter unfolds over the course of a monsoon, and the protagonists’ search for shelter is a key motif.
Anyway, I was planning to write about Khruangbin’s new LP, A la Sala, and to observe that they’ve made an acid cumbia record without the organ and bandoneón, which, I don’t know about you, but the plangent harmonics of the organ and accordion have always grated on me. They’re a hair’s breadth from acid surf, which, I suppose, is where they started fourteen years ago, and I hope their next move is an EP with Gustavo Yashimura.