[Landline] Outsider trading
Salutations!
1. QUICK HOUSEKEEPING NOTE
Previous edition of Landline featured a poster found on the internet that read ‘Make America an Endless Expanse of Old-Growth Forest With No Certain Borders Again.’ Very popular sentiment! Within minutes of the email’s transmission, I received replies from both the unknown-to-me artist who’d made the poster (Lydia Moyer, with Tero Juuti) and the store (The Concern Newsstand in Chapel Hill) that carried it. Please do pass along your compliments to them, along with encouragement to do another printing of this marvelous and inspiring poster.
2. QUICK HOUSEKEEPING NOTE 2
More than one person has been perplexed over what Landline is. Is it a new publication? A new magazine a la the old Arthur Magazine, which I used to run? Answer: Nope. Sorry for the confusion contusion! All Landline is is this: a free to-the-point email, sent by me, irregularly, hopefully more regularly, to a list of at present around 3,800 subscribers. As we head into autumn I hope to be successful in getting this out more often, time/space/energy/finances permitting. Maybe it’ll expand into something with a kind of Patreon/private element at some point, I dunno. Let me know what you think.
3. GETTING HIPPER
I’ve been engorging my Spotify playlist with good stuff, both garden fresh and dusty old. Latest additions include new Doug Paisley, new Meg Baird & Mary Lattimore, new Kiki Pau, Steve Miller Band, Circuit des Yeux (covering Catherine Ribeiro), Cosmic Invention, Garcia Peoples, new Kurt Vile, Endless Boogie, the Kinks, Skiffle Players (Cass McCombs, Farmer Dave Sheer & co.), Boz Scaggs, Ishmael Reed, Gil Scott Heron, Pharoah Sanders, the Myrrors, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Aretha Franklin, Harry Nilsson, Purling Hiss, Heaters, Cat Power, Van Morrison, John Martyn, Supremes, Mountains, Flamin' Groovies, McCoy Tyner, Greta Van Fleet, Mountain Movers, recent William Tyler, Incredible String Band, King Sunny Ade, 10cc, Traffic, Jon Hassell, Rail Band, One Eleven Heavy, Our Solar System, Mdou Moctar, Spirit, and of course, MV & EE....
My favorite way of getting hipped to stuff has always been through the kindness and generosity of knowledgeable friends, family and strangers. These folks—who only want to turn us on—still exist in these times, outside the algorithms, paid hype and general culture-smothering noise. Outsiders, trading. Three of my current favorites host live weekly radio shows, with playlists, streaming archives and (sometimes) comment/message boards all online. They are:
Explorers Room hosted by Flash Strap (Evan Crankshaw)
Thursdays 4-7pm PDT on WFMU's web-only Give the Drummer Radio
Description: “This is where all of culture and all of time are collapsed into one seductive portal and viewed through the panoramic lens of the exotic. Come and embark on an armchair-travel virtual-voyage to the heart of timeless darkness and beyond; embrace the numinous monolith of the exotic immensity. Let us find that place where hybridization meets its destiny as pure fantasy. Let us become observers observing those others who are ourselves. You wear your mask and I'll wear mine.”
Backroad to Nowhere hosted by Tom Humphrey
Sundays 6-7pm PDT on XRAY
Description: “Lost songs, unsung singers, demo obscurities, vanguard traditionalists, buried history. Midnight rounders, zig-zag wanderers, American primitives, folk sounds, lazy rock & roll, hazy honky-tonk, stripped-down R&B, mysterious doo-wop”
Avant Ghetto hosted by Jeff Conklin
Sundays 10pm-midnight EDT on WFMU
Description: “Unstuck in time, The Avant Ghetto wanders through heavy folk, pastoral noise, spiritual rock, harsh jazz and other dimly lit corners of the universe. “
There are many, many other radio broadcasts I’m only now becoming aware of. If you have a favorite, please email me. Thanks for the tips.
4. TEXT RECS
Clay by Melissa Harrison.
Not sure how I came to this fantastic 2013 post-anthropocentric novel—maybe via the excellent Caught by the River, where she is a frequent contributor—but I am glad, so glad, to be reading it. Harrison captures what it's like, from radically different human points of view, to deeply experience the sensations and consciousnesses of the natural world in the most unlikely place: the 21st century urban environment. Closest reference for me might be the opening to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Beginning Place... Anyways: bravo!
Wet Earth by Lala Albert.
Published in the last year. Wordless black-and-white graphic novel that follows life in a patch of salt marsh for a few seasons. Plants, insects, fairies. Slows you down, but quickens the mind and deepens the spirit. Life!
And here’s a recommendation from Landline correspondent Rjyan Kidwell (Cex):
The Tribes and the States by William James Sidis.
“If you've got a kindle, this one is only $1 on Amazon and it's pretty incredible. It's Sidis' explanation of how the entire character and structure of the United States can only be explained by what was taught to the earliest European settlers by the Native Americans. His writing style is a bit wry and seems much more modern than I ever expected to see coming out of a 1920s former-child-prodigy. He has a very interesting life story, his parents were intellectuals who said, ‘Anyone can raise a child prodigy, watch’ and then had a kid who knew umpteen different languages by age 10, got accepted to Harvard at 11, etc. He was reported on internationally as a child and then grew up to be pretty anonymous. The New Yorker or the New York Times or somebody then did a story on him when he was in his 20s, basically mocking the fact that he was working as a janitor, and he tried to sue them and lost. It wasn’t until recently that I realized his written works (most of which I think were found after his death?) were out on Kindle and I got to actually meet the guy I'd heard all the stories about. He makes some very sensible specific points that I haven't seen made anywhere else. Here's one of my fave quotes:
The red people from Manhattan Island crossed to the mainland, where a treaty was made with the Dutch, and the place was therefore called the Pipe of Peace—in their language, Hoboken. But soon after that, the Dutch governor, Kieft, sent his men out there one night and massacred the entire population. Few of them escaped, but they spread the story of what had been done, and this did much to antagonize all the remaining tribes against all the white settlers. Shortly after, Nieuw Amsterdam erected a double palisade for defense against its now enraged red neighbors, and this remained for some time the northern limit of the Dutch city. The space between the former walls is now called Wall Street, and its spirit is still that of a bulwark against the people.
5. POET IS PROPHET
If you have 15 minutes, direct your attention in this direction: Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, 1972, day(s) after Nixon’s re-election, reciting/reading poetry and talking smart sense on Brockport Writers Forum tv broadcast… As an old friend remarked upon viewing it after I hipped her to it, this video stops one in one’s tracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsX9cTDFXKs
From the same source, same 15-minute format: the mighty Ishmael Reed, in 1974, reading his work, relaying his history (Tenn., Pittsburg, NYC…Echo Park?!?) and discussing his views. (Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo is a fantastic, beautiful, ridiculously uproarious, under-read work, admired by Pynchon, George Clinton, Tupac, Harold Bloom, etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEZkPc2hnWw
And finally, from 1979: the brilliant Margaret Atwood, age 40, reading, discussing and setting a few records straight with characteristic wit, charm and clear thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gys5J4MQX2Y
6. CONSIDER THE SOURCE
Poet, author, editor, publisher, horseman and longtime Arthur contributor Charles Potts of Walla Walla, Washington was interviewed relatively recently by Paul E. Nelson at Rain Taxi. Tons of good stuff in there but this:
What I think Wordsworth was getting at is there was a time when birds, beasts, and flowers seemed apparelled in celestial delight. Nothing can bring back that hour ‘of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.’ The way we used to feel about things as children, when it was all very delightful and beautiful and our parents were lying to us about how great it all is. That's really not about personal development. Now I think there's no way to bring back that once upon a time, before we became chimpanzees with a gene for speech. We're no longer part of natural history. Language has separated us from natural history, we're cultural history now. I think that insight, and I attribute it to Wordsworth, really matters.
To conclude this Landline, here is a poem from Charles Potts, collected in The Source (2014, Green Panda Press)....