Dispatch-001

Saturday night with a pot Darjeeling and nothing more to do than just flying away with all the things that crossed my way this week—shiny toys, blinking gadgets, ill-designed comic books, records lost in clouds. Readings. Stuff you can buy, for what else is left to do?

#1

Just now listening to three songs from James Brandon Lewis' upcoming album Eye of I with Chris Hoffman on Cello and Max Jaffe on drums. Sounds amazing, free every now and then, thoughtful and swinging, like a melancholy boxer. Will be back for the whole thing, drops next Friday, 2/3.

#2

Wout van Aert for the victory. Cyclocross can be pretty predictive if only one of the Big 3 is competing. They truly are above all the rest. That said, today was my first ride out of the year, far to late but all the more enjoyable. Remco blew San Juan, Nairo still in tha game—for now.

#3

Stay True by Hua Hsu (Huascene) is a read that caught me by surprise. It's the kind of book you want to read in all night while listening to your favorite music, or maybe an album that the book brought back to mind. Although Sonic Youth have not been mentioned (yet), this is the band that is always lingering around the back of my mind while riding through the pages. And because of my one-band-one-album habit back in the days, Sister is the record of choice. But anyways, this is just one of the many rabbit hole opened by the book, but deep inside, it is about something completely different, i.e. friendship in a form that might actually only exist in the early twenties, when you are still too young to write your biography but actually live through all the stuff that will make up the bulk of it. And this is exactly what this is. But, as a memoir, it's not a biography per se. It is also written in memory of an unlikely friend.

I bought the ebook while I was at the airport in Atlanta, Georgia with some time to kill. I was on my way back from an in-person job interview, and to finally get to this book now seems like a perfect fit for what felt like a final break away into adulthood. During my interview, I could feel that the new role would demand responsibility and leadership, vision and engagement—the youthful cynical disengagement seemed out of place. I did not think that Stay True would capture this change so adequately, at once outspokenly so and then also in terms of the story it tells, indirectly. This change makes me proud and sad at the same time. I feel like the place I interviewed for would be a great fit for me, somewhere where I could make a splash and have influence and work on my publications and career. But I also miss the cynically recluse me, the student who can only attain this role because he does not have any responsibility yet. Stay True locates this break a bit earlier (when Hua Hsu finishes college, he was the same age that I started), but that is another story. And not important at all.

Then, of course: The book is written quite beautifully. I was interested in it because I know the author's writing on music from the New Yorker (wonderful essays on both J Dilla and Madlib, if I remember corrctly), and the style of the magazine is definitely something that deeply influences how the book is set up (I am thinking of the theoretical interludes that comment and contextualize the narrative without explicitly referring back to it). But it also has its very own vibe and feel, something that is simultaneously laid back and urgent. It is not, however, nostalgic; rather, the breaks and tumbles of the narrative, the development that it displays and the constant change all make each earlier phase seem complete. As we would constantly build cocoons and emerge in a new form that does understand, but ultimately leave behind its former self. This peaceful relation with the time's passing certainly puts one topic front and center: death. Our struggle to let go. More, I hope, next week.

#3

Album most listened to this week: Cassandra Jenkins, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Soothing, unsettling. And too short.

Lie eats the Love

Radical in some moments, touching in others, consistent throughout -- Fassbinder’s “Fear eats the Soul” for sure is one of the masterpieces of so called New German Cinema. The love story between an elderly German cleaning lady and a handsome, yet disoriented young migrant form Marocco is so accurate in its depiction of social stereotypes and the oppressive force of majority opinion that it seems to regain its moment thanks to the current crises in European societies.

But it is not the socio-political aspect of the movie that evokes the pessimism that might follow the viewer of this piece for days. The huge tensions both characters have to withstand disappear after they went on a short trip, a time span sufficient to convince their once hostile environment to take advantage of the situation as it presents itself. Neighbors need help, grumpy grocery stroe owners think of profit rather than identity, family members remember the use close relationships might have for their own lives. Emmi and Ali, once forced together by the enormous pressure that social conventions put upon them, at once spin apart like a centrifuge out of control. Inner contradiction cause their relationship to function near collapse -- homesickness and the unanswered wants and needs in Ali’s case as well as the wish to reconcile old and new life into a frictionless existence on Emmi’s part lead to a circle of adultery, escapism, and unanswered longing. Crisis emerges not through social oppression but during its absence. (Fassbinder himself remarks this in interviews published in “The Anarchy of Imagination”.)

This fact makes the end so disturbing. Ali loses himself in sex, drinking, and gambling, his disorientation worsened by losing his focal point in Emmi. Emmi herself appears at the bar where they first met, watching Ali on his way down the gambling pit. By recovering the magic of their first encounter -- playing the same music, dancing with him -- she reminds him of where he apparently belongs. This gestures is a step back into a time where they suffered, but they suffered together instead of being alone. When Ali confesses to adultery, she soothes him and exonerates him for being a young man with certain needs.

Is it that easy? Ali will have a breakdown, his stomach does not withstand the foreign food anymore; or the intolerability of the broken love that lingers over him. The dislocation leaves scars, and so does the extraordinary relationship to Emmi. Her big heart and her caring love seem to tolerate his unfulfilled desires. However, we know that this is a mere lie. We saw her cry so bitterly, we saw her her her door, The bitterness that Ali's outbreak cause seems to destroy her,and still she tries to keep up her longing for a better life together with Ali. As the bar turns out to be a shelter in the rain, so the gentle dancing and tender whispering seems to be a pause within their struggles -- a certain retreat that will never be the rule but always constitute the tiny little moment of utopia. This state of nowhere, though, is dragging them down even deeper after it vanished. Emmi's broken mien at the end of the movie, sitting next to the sick Ali and wondering if it would be best for him to return to his homeland, reveals the shallowness of her soothing words. Whenever she releases him, a part of her will die. All the contradictions are there, simple and plain, and they hurt. The pain is what's real, and reality won't go away.