A Plum, Or Perhaps An Ashtma Inhaler
What I’ve Been Reading: No Saturday newsletter this week — I’m going away for five days, decamping to rural NSW with a few of my friends. I’ve been told that there’s no reception or internet connection where we’re staying. Given that post-honours burnout has taken longer than expected to shake myself free of, that sounds pretty good to me; all things going to plan, I’m going to sit with my feet in a creek and read.
Speaking of post-honours burnout, it’s been bad enough that I haven’t really felt like settling down with anything substantive, either philosophy or fiction. Mostly, I’ve just been lit up by poetry, trawling back over old favourites. Like this one, by David Berman of the band Silver Jews, titled, ‘Imagining Defeat’:
She woke me up at dawn,
her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels.
I sat up and looked out the window
at the snow falling in the strand of blackjack trees.
A bus ticket in her hand.
Then she brought something black up to her mouth,
a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler.
I reached under the bed for my menthols
and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.
Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead
in the distance where it doesn’t matter.
And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,
so far behind his wagon, where it also doesn’t matter
except as a memory of rest or water.
Though to believe any of that, I thought,
you have to accept the premise
that she woke me up at all.
I’ve been thinking about Berman a lot this week, I guess because he died about a year ago. Having made his name as one of the shining lights of the American indie explosion in the late ‘90s and early thousands, he dipped out of the public eye shortly after he revealed that his father was a well-known lobbyist for the alcohol and firearm industries. He said he had ammends to make due to his father’s actions, and wanted to do so privately.
The silence was deafening. It seemed possible that he’d never release a song or a poem again. But then he returned in May last year, with a new album and a new band, Purple Mountains. He gave some great interviews around that period, too — this one, with The Believer, is a lot of fun.
And then he died. It felt sudden and painful in the way that Bowie’s death felt — a great artist, preparing for a new stage of their career, suddenly disappearing. I miss him still.
What I’ve Been Listening To: Every once in a while, a song I’ve heard a hundred times already catches me sideways, and that’s it — it’s all I want to hear for a few weeks. A couple of days ago, I was sitting in a park, my music on shuffle, and Palace Music’s ‘New Partner’ came on. I know that song well. One of my first partners introduced me to Palace Music, nonchalantly handing me a battered CD with a little square of glue in the top right corner where the price tag had once been. But for whatever reason, it took thirty years of living for ‘New Partner’ to really hit with the totality of its force.
There’s a lot I think the song nails. Will Oldham’s voice is so high and thin — he sounds like a little child. And I’m in awe of any song that contain a lyric as complex as, “There is some awful action that just breathes from my hand” and a chorus as simple as, “And you were always on my mind.”
Better still for my obsession, Oldham hasn’t stopped re-recording the song. There’s the original, a swankier version recorded under the Bonnie Prince Billy name, a live version recorded at an open-air concert on Coney Island, and a version re-written with Bryce Dessner of The National. Listen to any one of them you like.
What I’ve Been Watching: There aren’t many actors that I enjoy watching as much as Jude Law, particularly now he has hit what can only be described as his golden age. He was all-time great in 2018’s prickly Vox Lux, full of sweaty, leering ambition in the underrated pirate submarine film (!) Black Sea, and even compelling in the barely-released spy thriller The Rhythm Section. Basically, give him even a half-cooked role, and he’ll spin it into something extraordinary.
I’ve already said a bunch of times that he delivers some of the best work of his career in this year’s The Nest. But he’s just as good in The Third Day, a toe-curlingly ambitious piece of television that Australians with Foxtel will be able to watch from December 7.
On paper, The Third Day sounds rather recycled; it’s a moody miniseries about a man named Sam (Law) who, on the run from an initially unspecified Dark Past, finds himself embroiled in mysterious goings-on after stumbling across an isolated community on a deserted island. Think the folk horror of The Wicker Man combined with the meanness of Straw Dogs and the slow pacing of literally any television released in the last five years, and you’ve broadly got the vibe.
But despite the cliches, I have found myself unable to stop thinking about The Third Day. Like I say, that’s partially Law’s fault. And yet it also comes down to the show’s unusual structure. It’s divided into three parts — Summer, Autumn, Winter. Summer and Winter are fairly standard television fare; the former follows Law’s character, the latter follows a new hero played by Naomie Harris.
But the middle section, Autumn, was filmed live, a 12-hour immersive theatre event captured in one long shot. It’s been edited together into a more compact episode of television for broadcast, but it still has the shaky vibe of amateur dramatic theatre, and there’s a warts-and-all kind of electricity to proceedings.
The Third Day
Oh, did I mention that Florence Welch shows up halfway through for some reason? You can watch it here if you want, as a stand-alone piece of art, or you can consume it as part of the entire The Third Day experience. I’d reccommend the latter; despite how much television there is these days, The Third Day has really stuck with me.
Two Good Things On The Internet: George Saunders, one of the greatest living short story authors, just published new fiction. Predictably, it’s masterful — a short, frequently dark, mostly funny tale called ‘Ghoul’ that’s a kind of spiritual offspring of his book CivilWarLand In Bad Decline. I don’t think there’s anyone who writes about the particular ways in which work can humiliate workers with more sensitivity and clarity than Saunders.
After you’ve read the story, I’d also highly reccommend this interview with Saunders about ‘Ghoul’, in which he drops more information about the work on “Russian Masters” he has due out in 2021, excerpts of which have been making the rounds on Twitter.
Finally, one of my favourite things is the surprisingly common practice of slowing down pieces of music by 800 to 900%, transforming pop music and theme songs into overwhelming works of emotional art. The all-time masterpiece of this form is the slowed down version of the Jurassic Park theme, which I find so beautiful I can only listen to it in little chunks; about three minutes in, when it hits yet another crescendo, I can feel the tears start and they don’t really stop.
This week, I discovered a new favourite, ‘Pyramid Song’ by Radiohead covered in treacle and turned into an even more devastatingly beautiful, 40-minute-long trip. Listen to it and have the back of your head blown out.