Viral In My Mind In 2022
Seven Things That Set Up Camp In My Head, Happily
In no particular order, with no rhyme, no reason, merely an outpouring of gratitude that enigmas and marvels continue to land for me, despite it all. These are things you might not have noticed this year (and I should add that none of them have a due date — they’ll still be good next year, or ten years from now). They went viral in my reality-sphere, though.
If you’re already familiar with one, that might predispose you to believe you’d be interested in the others. I hope so. If you recognize three or four, hey, we’re in the same karass. If you recognize all eight, you’re me, and I’m scared of you.
1.
Kazuki Tomokawa. When my ears were first met with the violent sincerity of Japanese singer-songwriter Tomokawa, I responded with involuntary embarrassed laughter, which I should have recognized for what it was: a flash of recognition. Like some other voices I recall finding only disconcerting and humorous at first encounter, like Dave Thomas of Pere Ubu, or Jonathan Richman, or Daniel Johnston, I was at the brink of allowing something to reach inside me. Unlike those others, Tomokawa’s songs are all in Japanese, so I’m not engaging with the language in terms of literal meaning. This keeps me lodged at the precise threshold of that first encounter, and though I can’t quit listening and finding new favorites, I’m also never completely secure in the feeling that I’ve heard a given song before or not. You can meet a lot of his music for free on Youtube, but the extra joy of the gorgeous Blank Forms reissues — LP and CD both — took this over the top as my “record of the year”. An added benefit is that I can crack up/freak out anyone I like (especially a teenager) simply by dropping the needle — and whether they make it past that reaction to a deeper engagement is entirely up to them.
2.
Anna Haifisch, “The Hall of Bright Carvings”. I’m a sucker for dark animal stories for grownup readers (see: Kafka, Franz) and for sublime graphic novels such as Fantagraphics routinely produces, and for bright colors, so when I spotted Haifisch’s Schappi at Skylight Books last month, I threw it into my checkout pile impulsively. Only after I got it home did I find that the collection’s first story is a haunting reworking of an early chapter of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. Appropriation! Anna Haifisch, you added catnip to your catnip.
3.
Sleepbaseball.com is a podcast radio station soporifically broadcasting unimportant regular-season games from a fictional baseball league, with teams like “The Cadillac Cars” and “The Tomah Tigers”, and players named “Tito McCaskill” and “Giorgio Mullins”. Described as “ASMR baseball”, and replete with advertisements, injury reports, and league standings, I actually sometimes find it too hypnotically beautiful to employ as the intended sleep-aid, despite the fact that I often fall asleep to my Mets; it helps me see how much self-soothing my baseball addiction actually consists of. This is retro-whiteness at its best, with a vibe more Bob-and-Ray affectless than Garrison Keillor smug.
4.
Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground. The Metrograph streaming service is the one for me. It was my lifeline through quarantine times, and for a while I was actually caught up — I’d seen every offering on the site, never with the least regret. Now there’s too much for me to keep up with, which is better. The one that really stuck for me this past year was Collins’ bittersweet grown-up depiction of the souring marriage of an academic and a painter, with danced interludes that brought out a certain resemblance to Cassavetes’ Love Streams.
5.
Bruce Wagner just writes books that seem like they couldn’t possibly exist. I was talking with my friend Sean Howe about how Wagner keeps ramifying his weird superpower for writing blistering cultural satires that collapse into molten-chocolate-souffles of rage and grief; Sean suggested that the only possible comparison was Charles Dickens. That might catch it.
6.
Brooklyn Pirates: Neighborhoods in the Sky 2014–2021. Available through the remarkable Bandcamp label Death Is Not The End, these captures of pirate radio broadcasts make for astounding cultural-historical core-samples— check out how Side Two spits out on-the-ground pandemic and Black Lives Matter reporting. They also have a fractured sonic intensity that makes a window into an altogether variant form of radio “ambience” — perhaps the perfect reply to the soporific Great Lakes baseball broadcasts in my item #3.
7.
I saw the Irish collaborative husband-and-wife team The Desperate Optimists’ essay film The Future Tense at a film festival; I suppose for U.S. audiences it is “coming soon” to some quiet streaming opportunity, an opportunity which you should take. It was great to see it in a theater, though. Like many of the best essay films (and essays) it has a digressive nature that seems to make it about all subjects at once, but I hope it doesn’t sound too complicated if I say it is about England, and Ireland, and migration, and Colonialism; it’s also about itself, its own making and makers, who are very charming. The experience sent me rushing to find their fiction films, like the superb Rose Plays Julie. I wouldn’t want the Optimists to choose between working in essay or fiction modes —I just want more of both.
