May Favorites 📽️📚🥁: Smoke, Heti, and Dehd

Plus an invitation to criticize music in a literary magazine

Hello,

I’m weeding the garden beds this week. I forgot bug spray the first day, and now I’m covered in bites, itching so bad I’d sandpaper my skin if Malory weren’t watching to make sure I don’t do it. She hates when I scratch my skin scabby every summer.

My right knee has been a wreck since walking 37,000 steps up and down the hills of Seattle wearing Birkenstocks last summer. This was the day before I lost my shit backstage on an old friend who was promoting a festival there.

It’s summer again, almost a year later, and I’ve admitted that things won’t magically improve with time. I started physical therapy for the knee, and it’s working. There’s less pain and agitation, and I’m learning how to stretch and move in new ways to keep things from getting out of wack again. I also quit my job. That’s working, too, in roughly the same ways.

Below, I wrote the stuff I loved in May: a handful of books, an old movie, and a new record. What are you getting into?

🖤AV

PS: If you’re a music writer, catch the submission call at the end. If you know music writers, please send this to them.

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I re-watched Smoke 📽️

A favorite film long ago, and it’s even better than I remembered. I was surprised to find that it’s about fatherhood, or family at least. I didn’t get that when I watched it many times in the ‘90s. I wonder what I thought it was about. A writer? A merchant? A neighborhood? I suppose it’s also those things.

Mal hadn’t seen it but loved it. She pointed out something obvious I’d never clocked. The slow zoom-in on the mouth of Auggie Wren as he tells his Christmas story is perfect. It must have been intended as the film’s final shot. The next scene, Auggie’s story dramatized with the dialog on mute and a Tom Waits tune on top, is unnecessary. The story is so good, and so well-told, Auggie to Paul over lunch at the diner, that we’ve already seen it. I bet someone in LA pushed to have the extra bit tacked on.

After we watched, Mal brought up the cover of the VHS on her phone. “Weird art,” she said. I never questioned it, but it’s shockingly out of sync with the flick. “Where there’s smoke… there’s laughter.” Yikes.

Soon we’ll watch Blue in the Face. I remember not liking it nearly as much, but I mean:

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Five highlights in reading 📚

Alphabetical Diaries
by Sheila Heti

Yes, she simply alphabetizes sentences from her journal, but the gimmick is smarter than it sounds in a press release or blurb. Heti’s clever literary limitation expands what narrative can do. Writing with a weird new structure AND ALSO arriving at real meaning in easy-to-digest prose? Goddamn. I might’ve been less impressed with the trick if the writing weren’t fantastic, but it is. This is the best thing I’ve read recently.

The jacket copy says she began with half a million words. So it’s the vastness of the source material and the alphabet thing that makes the magic. Knowing how much other writing exists makes the fill-in-the-blank game a blast, and the trick, the limitation, ends up being an allowance. It’s just so much fun to read. I hope it was a pleasure for Heti to make a book this way, though I can imagine it being the opposite.

In chapter nine, Chapter I, eventually the I is I as in Heti. I am this. I’m not sure. I did that. I saw this, liked this, hated that. Here, the book found another gear and opened up even further for me.

Juxtaposition works hard on every page. Something saucy or serious lands next to a tossed-off thought, and suddenly insignificance bears weight. Repetition, too, is doing heavy lifting. Something embarrassing shows up. And then it shows up again, and then again. By Q R S, you’re dizzy with recurrent themes: some big, some mean, many funny, plenty sexy, and a majority so stubbornly the same. Instead of asking how a person should be, this book shows us how a person is. If there’s movement, it’s centimeters, and it’s centimeters without a direction in time. There is no progress toward a goal, no path to resolution.

I want a B-side compilation to accompany the book, maybe for a future anniversary edition. Heti cut well over 400,000 words to get what we’ve got in Alphabetical Diaries.

Negatives: A Photographic Archive of Emo (1996-2006)
by Amy Fleisher Madden

Emo is like goth now; it’s forever, and the definition is forever blurry. I love a small handful of the bands in here, but I enjoyed reading about the ones I disliked or ignored as much as my faves. The photography rules. It’s fun to see the venues, what fans in the crowds were wearing, and how the bands were combing their hair. Someone do a prequel here, a book covering the mid-‘80s stuff up to 1996, where Amy’s begins.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
by Philip K. Dick

My first Dick, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. There are so many novels! Let me know your favorites. I need a roadmap.

2666
by Robert Bolaño

This is taking forever. While I love it in theory, I'm bored and slogging through Part 4. After loving The Savage Detectives to death, this is the second Bolaño in My Year of Reading Thiccly™️. It's time for a break from the dude after this. I'll stick with the numbers-as-titles thing, and do Auster's 4321 as my next big one.

Train Dreams
by Denis Johnson

Perfect. I need to read more of his novels.

OK. Petition to replace the peer pressure to worship Jesus’ Son with Train Dreams devotion instead, at least temporarily.

DATE: _____________
NAME: _____________
SIGNED: _____________

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America’s coolest band have a new album 🥁

I've been rinsing Dehd's new album since I got my pre-order LP a few days before the official release. "Poetry" finds the band still in sparseland (thank god), and like all their records, this one's deceptively crammed with hooks and melodies. The songs are equally weighted between Emily and Jason singing lead, their signature duets weaving in and out throughout, and almost every song's about love. My current go-to is "Light On", which is Chorus City holy shit, but my favorite song rotates every few days.

I like to point out that you hear zero (0) cymbals across Dehd’s five-album catalog. “Unless you count the tambourine,” my buddy said dryly. “That’s just really tiny cymbals.”

I’ve been on an extended Modest Mouse kick. It’s been extending since 1996. I can’t help but be reminded of the early trio period of Mouse when listening to Dehd, though I’d have never wanted anyone to take Jeremiah’s cymbals away.

In closing, I need to make fun of Pitchfork’s review.

Not because they dissed it or gave it a bad number, but because of the bonkers bad writing.

Someone said, “P4K is obviously using AI now.” Maybe, but my gut says a human wrote it, and that one or two other humans who stand between the .doc and the publish button called in sick, got laid off, or no longer give a fuck.

Look, you can screenshot dumb shit I’ve written, but I’m just bloggin’ over here, not writing for The most trusted voice in music. Dehd deserve better!

Which brings me to a submission call.

Music writers: please submit to Little Engines. I’ve published poems and essays by musicians in the magazine, but I’m eager to include select profiles, interviews, scene reports, reviews, etc. Writers are paid.

To discuss, pitch, or send work:
✉️ submit@littleengines.pub

Please forward this to friends who write about music.

🖤AV