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I think I mentioned this last week, but my wife has been out of town at a conference for the past week, so my normal routine has been shaken up. Between that and trying to spend a good chunk of every day outside to enjoy our brief window of nice weather here in North Carolina, it’s felt like I’ve been living in some kind of alternate reality. Honestly, I kind of needed an alternate reality. I’ve been having a tough time lately. I worry I complain too much in this space, but it feels appropriate to check in each week and let you know where I’m at, and what kind of headspace I’m in when I’m listening to the music I write about. Along those lines, I feel like my media consumption lately has been all about escape. I guess it always is to an extent, but escaping feels good lately.
Since I’ve been spending most evenings at home taking care of the animals and keeping them company, I’ve been watching a movie most every night. I try to take a similar attitude to selecting movies as I do books, feeding my core interests while striving for breadth. In the core interests department, I watched that new documentary on White Flag’s Bill Bartell and really enjoyed it. I’ve liked White Flag for a long time (particularly Third Strike) and I knew a little about Bartell, but so much in the documentary was utterly surprising to me. It’s definitely worth a watch, particularly since Dave Markey is the director and he’s been around the block enough times to know how to make a stronger-than-average music doc.
A few days ago, I also treated myself to another film by the English directors Powell and Pressburger. I feel like I’ve raved about this movie to everyone I’ve talked to in person over the past few months, but I watched their 1948 film The Red Shoes a few months ago and was completely blown away. Watching that movie was like hearing A Love Supreme or The Velvet Underground & Nico or Pink Flag for the first time… a conscious feeling that I was encountering something strange and beautiful and very important. A few weeks later I watched another of their films, 1943’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and enjoyed it just as much. The other night I watched 1947’s Black Narcissusand it was another hit. Powell and Pressburger only made a handful of films together, so I’m doling them out to myself slowly, saving them for evenings when I have the time and mental energy to lose myself in them. I would love to see some of them on the big screen for an even greater sense of immersion, but even the places around here that play old / art / independent movies aren’t screening too many films from the 40s these days.
Another of my big escapes lately is this book The Truth About Animals by Lucy Cooke. Cooke is a British zoologist, but her writing voice is very cheeky and silly. She knows her stuff and is a working scientist, but it also seems like she could hold her own amongst a group of witty talking heads on a comedy quiz show. The book presents a bunch of interesting facts about animals (particularly animals that are misunderstood by humans), with a focus on the scatological, bawdy, and otherwise non-staid. For instance, did you know that vultures, in lieu of sweating, shit on themselves to keep cool? If that fact intrigues you, I promise you’ll learn quite a lot about exotic animals’ defecatory habits in this book.
One of my favorite stories has been about the hyena. I don’t think I was aware of this, but hyenas are typically portrayed as hermaphroditic in mythology and folklore. That’s because female hyenas (which are larger, more aggressive, and socially dominant over male hyenas) have a full set of faux-male genitalia, including fused labia that resemble a scrotum and an elongated clitoris up to seven inches long, a full “pseudo-penis” through which they urinate, have sex, and give birth. Scholars have struggled to discern the purpose of this adaptation, since it makes most of these activities way harder. A huge percentage of hyena mothers and babies die during childbirth because of the long, narrow birth canal, and sex is also very tricky, as it requires the male hyena to insert his actual penis entirely inside the opening of the female’s pseudo-penis. Perhaps you can see why I can’t seem to put this book down.
I should probably write about some music too, right? Outside of listening to new releases and other stuff for Sorry State, I’ve been spinning a lot of 70s Finnish punk, which has been my go-to feel-good music for the past several years. Here’s what’s at the front of my “recently listened” stack… I reserve to write a full staff pick about any or these in the future:
Loose Prick: Valkoiset Sotilaat
Se: Pahaa Unta?
Cathedral of Tears: S/T
Pekinška Patka: Strah Od Monotonije
Swell Maps: Jane from Occupied Europe
Voivod: Dimension Hatröss
Thanks so much for reading, everyone. And thanks also for participating in our big sale, if you were able. Until next week…