SCALES #76: jump ahead
Hello!
I’ve been doing some escapist sci-fi reading: Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries. Both use the affordances of their genre to explore, with a light touch, the boundaries and varieties of “humanness” or sapience: humans as marginal, kind of smelly and ungainly, junior members of a multispecies Galactic Commons; Murderbot as a rogue bodyguard robot who is all-too-human in his conflicting impulses to zone out and binge-watch serials, avoid stressful social interactions, yet ultimately choose, despite a facade of cynicism and ennui and constant grumbling, to take care of others. They're also simply, through their plotting, world-building, and characters, a lot of fun to read.
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Music
One piece of new music and some not-new music of different vintages—reëvaluation revealing different contexts, different depths, different resonances:
The new: Indigo De Souza, Hold U, latches onto a warm, open-hearted groove.
“Falling Forward” is definitely is more of an album cut than a single off Sweeping Promises’s 2020 Hunger for a Way Out. What’s made it a slow grower is though it shares the scuzzy, claustrophobic aesthetic of the album, the chant-sung chorus insistently pushes, well, forward.
A not-quite-serious take: Is the 2009 Discovery LP the forgotten link that somehow, improbably, splits the difference between 2003-era-twee indie electronica Postal Service and certain strains of mid-to-late-2010s “how tongue in cheek is this?" maximalist not-not-indie-electronica PC Music? Here in 2021 I’m not sure what fraction of LP I would describe as “good”, exactly (more than zero, less than all) but a recent relisten reminded me there is a particular corner of my brain that will forever be used up remembering some joyfully facile, kind of cringey lyrics (“But I’m sitting at home, sipping this mi-soooooo”) that in hindsight reveal themselves to have captured a particular moment in which pieces of today’s technologically mediated social life were still just starting to piece themselves together—texting, but without a touch-screen keyboard; powerful search engines, but only accessible when sitting at a computer: “Sleep on the train to Tokyo / Google yourself when you get home”, “Texting too fast for me to reply / Never looking when you type T9”.
The 50th anniversity of Blue package by the New York Times was fun to read through, in part because of the funny mix of musician commentary, ranging from James Taylor to Bonnie Raitt to … the inimitable Dan Bejar, who I guess was serving the role of Canadian cultural commentator? Joni Mitchell as “being, essentially, like a melancholic swashbuckler from Saskatoon” is going to stick with me.
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On the Web
“Atlascope Boston” is a nifty browser-based historical map tool I wish I had for #35. Also on the Levanthal Map site is a curated tour of a 1904–1905 trolley map of New England. (h/t Dan Cohen’s “Humane Ingenuity” newsletter, which also linked to a charming video of Daði og Gagnamagnið making their iconic Eurovision interlocking keytars).
An interactive Times package about Olympic climbing and Czech climber Adam Ondra that immerses you in the challenges of the sport. (h/t Charlie Warzel’s “Galaxy Brain”)
Midwest Modern has been one of the best parts of Twitter for me recently, and Belt Magazine ran a profile by Jonathan Dale of Josh Lipnik, who runs the account. I loved how the profile revealed some of the perspective Lipnik brings to the project:
“Lipnik grew up in Detroit and studied architecture at the University of Michigan. As an undergraduate, he went on a study-abroad trip to study architecture in Europe, supervised by faculty member Dawn Gilpin. (Gilpin was influential on Lipkin’s understanding of architectural photography.) Among many highlights, the group spent a night at Sainte Marie de La Tourette, a rural monastery designed by famed architect and urban planner Le Corbusier. The class informed Lipnik’s understanding of how to look at cities. While Michigan towns like Saginaw or Port Huron might not have the same global renown as Paris or Rome, Lipnik takes the same approach when he documents East Michigan’s Rust Belt cities.”
“the persistence of memory by Lisa Frank” (h/t Tabs)
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—Adam