SCALES #80: Where the pot's not
Hello!
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PAINLESS, the new Nilüfer Yanya album, came out earlier this month. Digging in beyond the advance singles, I’ve been enjoying how “trouble” confidently, gorgeously unfolds. A recent in-studio appearance for French station Radio Nova reveals how sturdy song-writing anchors tracks when stripped down to basic components: voice, guitar, and, maybe less surprisingly in retrospect, atmospheric saxophone. A New York Times profile discusses how Yanya has explored her family’s Turkish, Irish, and Barbadian heritage during the creation of the album:
On Instagram, Yanya has publicized the work of Tteach Plaques, an organization that seeks to “contextualize statues, buildings and institutions enriched by the trans-Atlantic slave trade.” Last August, Tteach installed a plaque in Bristol Cathedral honoring the life of Yanya’s great-great-great grandfather John Isaac Daniel, who was born enslaved to a British family that owned sugar plantations in Barbados. The exhibit featured photographs and biographies of his descendants, including Yanya and her siblings.
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“June” from Destroyer’s forthcoming LABYRINTHITIS gives every indication Dan Bejar is at it again, scraps of surreal language piling up over six-and-a-half minutes of airy disco groove: “You had to look at it from all angles, says the cubist judge from cubist jail. The sky glows, the heat is unbearable. Parrot weather.”
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The Marshall Project reports on the stark difference in Cuyahoga County between those who participate in elections for 34 elected Common Pleas judges and those who most often appear as defendants, bringing together quantitative analysis of scraped court records and county elections data with on-the-ground reporting:
Attorneys, academics and people who have experienced the system firsthand offered fundamental reasons for low turnout: a glaring lack of useful information about how the courts operate and the individual track records of judges themselves, compounded by a deep distrust of the entire criminal justice system. That’s also what more than 40 residents told us in interviews conducted by the Cleveland Documenters, a group that pays people to attend local government meetings and gather civic information.
Christopher Thorpes, a community activist and lifelong resident of Ward 5, told The Marshall Project even though he has worked on political campaigns, he doesn’t vote for judges. Residents tell him, he said, that they know firsthand how unfair the system is, so why should they legitimize it? “Nobody wants to vote for a person who might end up locking them up,” he said.
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Newsletters
A new Working Letter from Mandy Brown threads together ambiguity, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and, remarkably, the workplace. An aside on Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching had me return to Laurel Halo’s “World Without Heroes” suite that crafts ambient spoken-word miniatures from a few passages.
The kind of audacious sentence I love to read in Robinson Meyer’s Weekly Planet: “Every day, humanity sticks steel tubes several miles underground and sucks out magic rock juice, which is made of dead ocean bugs.”
“We could be inventing new wheels with weird new physics” is a new classic in the series of thought experiments from Matt Webb’s Interconnected, jumping from bumblebees to plasma in fusion reactors to fish ~scales~, all priming the following to sound strangely plausible: “All mechanical objects with halos of filaments, magnets, mist, so fine that the eye can’t identify clean edges, no hard plastics or iron but all our artefacts in soft focus, encased as they will be in a gentle haze of turbulent air sculpted by alien intelligence.”
Adam Tooze has been working overtime in his Chartbook newsletter (and elsewhere) to unpack some of the historical, economic, geopolitical forces underlying the war in Ukraine: from the post-colonial perspective of African countries to competing economic models of German energy needs to 1918, post-Brest-Litovsk Ukraine.
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A discussion with geographer Geoff Mann on the LRB podcast about the narrow, status-quo-preserving political assumptions baked into standard quantitative economic models used to inform climate change policy.
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“Song 352” by Oleh Lysheha: “If you need warmth / It’s better to go to the snow-bound garden. / In the farthest corner you’ll find / The lonely hut of the horseradish..”
(h/t the indispensable and deeply humane poet Ilya Kaminsky)
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—Adam