SCALES #79: results from the geophys
Hello!
It’s 2022 and it is still a lot of things, least of which it is still [checks notes] Season 5 of SCALES. And that’s… okay! The publishing schedule, such as it nominally exists, was far more relaxed in 2021 than I thought. Season 5 still extends through issue #100. Here we go.
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I am all in on New Long Leg, the album from Dry Cleaning. There’s something alchemical about how the shifting, bass-heavy, post-punk grooves play off against deadpan spoken-word vocals delivered by Florence Shaw. On “Leafy”: “All the while, an exhausting walk in the horrible countryside. […] Simple pimple, stomach stab. What are the things that you have to clear out? Baking powder, big jar of mayonnaise. What about all the uneaten sausages?” Sometimes indirectly moving, sometimes flat-out funny lines: “I came here to make a ceramic shoe and I came here to smash what you made”.
It’s a bunch of found texts (“writing from my old drawings, stuff I’d written on my phone, diaries, things I’d seen in adverts and thought were funny”) stacked on top of each other and through that free association something magical happens. Maybe because it feels like how the mind works from the inside? The backing band motoring along to the next thought, and meaning not arising from any logical progression of one statement to another, but from the accumulation of a mood, an attitude, recurring phrases. Watching thoughts, like clouds, pass by; snippets of phrases wander past and sometimes double back. “Would you choose a dentist with a messy back garden like that? I don’t think so.”
One recurring subject is inevitably, just like in any medium, meta-commentary on the art itself: “Just an emo dead stuff collector, things come to the brain” on “Strong Feelings”; “Now it seems like none of that meant anything” in the coda to album closer “Every Day Carry”. In hindsight it makes total sense to learn the album was produced by long-time PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish: adjacent sound worlds. In writing this I also started watching some live radio appearances of the band and I am happy to report they have chops.
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Dangerous earworm alert: “On the chaise longue, on the chaise longue, on the chaise longue, all day long, on the chaise longue.”
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One book done from my long to-read list: Modern Bonds: Redefining Community in Early Twentieth-Century St. Paul, a monograph by historian Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello. It’s a bottom-up investigation, drawing on a range of types of primary sources, that tries to understand how “community” emerged in Minnesota’s capital during a period of urbanization and change, focusing on roughly 1900–1920. What does it mean to identify with an entity like “Saint Paul” that extends beyond the people you work with, worship with, see in your neighborhood? For what groups does such an idea have any coherency?
Duclos-Orsello interrogates a range of different cultural and literary sources to try to uncover the social and cultural attitudes of the era. An opening chapter considers Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, with its contrast between stifling fictional small-town Gopher Prairie and the relative openness of life in Saint Paul, at least for the Anglo, middle-class protagonist, Carol Kennicott. The world of Main Street, to Duclos-Orsello, reveals how the ties of “community” shift in the semi-anonymizing environment of a city. With a larger, less restrictive, set of social relationships available in St. Paul, Kennicott has more freedom to live in a social circle of her own choosing compared to the circumscribed associations of Gopher Prairie she ultimately fails to resist.
In one sense, Kennicott's self-selected St. Paul affinity group could be viewed as a fragmenting of community, a weakening of the small-town feeling of knowing everyone around you, in favor of something like today's “filter bubble”. However, Duclos-Orsello points out that for a certain class of person, including Kennicott, it’s possible to have both a comfortable close group of like-minded friends and acquaintances, as well as an affinity for the larger imagined community of Saint Paul in the abstract. In fact, coming from Kennicott’s position of privilege, uncomfortable questions such as how to reconcile her wealth and status with the poverty and poor living conditions of others around her are easier to sweep under the rug in Saint Paul. In Gopher Prairie she needs to navigate individual relationships with poor, politically radical Scandinavian immigrants such as her maid’s husband, Miles Bjornstrom, the “Red Swede”, while being closely surveilled and judged by her socioeconomic peers. In contrast in St. Paul she can survey the city from bluffs across the Mississippi and take it all in from a distance. To Duclos-Orsello:
“[Kennicott] is at home with what she sees from her perch; she can absorb its majesty without questioning her place in the life and times of the city before her. […] [She] embraces the diversity of St. Paul from a distance, but that diversity is not represented in her intimate, experiential community. It is real only in her imagination. In everyday life, at her dinner parties and on her long walks, her confidants are all people who share key economic and lifestyle characteristics with her. […] She can integrate members of many other demographic groups into her mind’s-eye view of the St. Paul community, even as she remains comfortably situated in her relatively homogeneous daily life. And she can do this because of her privileged position near the centers of power. […] We do not hear the voices of the poor, the homeless, or the immigrants in the St. Paul of Main Street. Their imagined communities and the ways in which they understood them do not appear on its pages. Crucially, if they were standing on the bluffs overlooking the city, would they feel as if they had earned a spot in its dramatic sweep?”
The rest of Modern Bonds goes on to examine different cultural records of St. Paul in the era—family photograph collections, civic architecture, actions by the Park Board to develop Como and Phalen Parks (including a memorable mention of flower displays at Como Park, the displays’ significance in moving away from elitist landscape architecture, and a deliciously biting city-rivalry aside by Joseph A. Wheelock, the President on the Board of Park Commissioners, about the “flowerless parks” of Minneapolis that are “poorly patronized by the public”)—to trace different affinity groups in the city and look for clues as to how identities based on race, class, religion, language, or neighborhood were integrated or shut out from the larger community of Saint Paul.
The most striking example is the Winter Carnivals of 1916 and 1917. Duclos-Orsello ventures beyond the shiny attractions and civic boosterism (and, according to one spicy footnote, beyond the official St. Paul Outdoor Sports Carnival Association Records at the Minnesota Historical Society Archives to a separately catalogued album of photographs) to interrogate the limits of the imagined community of the St. Paul Winter Carnival. Unsurprisingly, one intended focus of the event was to cultivate business ties and flatter the egos of the city’s economic elite. Most of the carnival events were held near the elite neighborhoods of the city, on Ramsey Hill and along Summit Avenue. Despite language implying events were designed for all of Saint Paul, those who could fully take part were only those who could afford to buy a carnival button, something complained about in letters to the editor at the time.
Furthermore all evidence points to the African American community of Saint Paul being shut out from the Carnival’s vision of St. Paul’s community, in practice if not explicitly. Duclos-Orsello notes that compared to the wall-to-wall coverage in the white newspapers, the Black newspaper, the Appeal, did not cover the Winter Carnivals at all, instead only mentioning an implicitly alternative “Three Day Carnival” scheduled weeks after the Winter Carnival at the Union Hall, a Black cultural center. In the Winter Carnival the only known photographic depictions of any Black participants are, shamefully, as subservient “attendants” of mascot King Boreas, who was portrayed by a prominent white businessman. Most shockingly, newspaper stories and photographs reveal that as part of the 1917 carnival, men and women in Klan outfits participated in a car parade for Minneapolis auto dealers, with coverage from the local white papers that I can only describe as disgustingly smirking. In this context, Duclos-Orsello interprets the silence of the Appeal regarding the Carnival as evidence that, “Only if marginality and experiences of community limited by racial identity were the norm does the absence of outcry or even commentary make sense.”
After reading Modern Bonds I’m not sure I’m left with a complete framework describing what makes a “community”, but I am left with a better appreciation of the sorts of questions and tensions involved. Who is participating in a event? Who is a space built for? Who appears in a family photo album, in the society pages, in reform photography? Who is at the city park? At the private skating rink? And equally importantly, where are the gaps? Who is not seen, mentioned, considered? Obviously the question of how community is defined and negotiated remains a live question in the present, as communication and transportation technologies change how geography organizes social ties, and it makes me think how similar tools and questions could be applied to the news coverage, local organizations, and social media-mediated cultural artifacts of today.
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Patricia Lockwood’s reviews infallibly have made me want to subscribe to the LRB: on the latest Knausgaard, “the weird Guinness Book decision even to do this, like walking on a tightrope not between skyscrapers but between the post office and the grocery store.”
Amanda Hess appreciating Yoko Ono’s performance artistry: “Her gauzy black outfit and flowing, center-parted hair lend her a tent-like appearance; it is as if she is setting up camp, carving out space in the band’s environment. A “mundane” task becomes peculiar when you choose to perform it in front of Paul McCartney’s face as he tries to write “Let It Be.” When you repeat this for 21 days, it becomes astonishing.”
“Put bluntly, the Ethereum “world computer” has roughly 1/5,000 of the compute power of a Raspberry Pi 4!” [ed: this is a tiny amount of compute!]
“Timothy Dexter, the Ridiculous Millionaire Who Sold Coals to Newcastle”
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Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam