An innovative Brian Eno documentary; a tasty vegan sandwich; a helpful column on Gaza (and No, not that “50 Things” list.)
I’m All Lost in…
The three things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#30
1) First an anecdote: In the spring of my senior year of high school, the photography teacher, Ms. Collier, stopped me in the hall, said she’d heard I was a music guy, and could I put together a playlist for the senior slide show. A few days later, I handed her a cassette I’d made of Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient record, Music for Films.
I never heard from her again, and at graduation, a batch of 1984 hits—rather than Eno’s “M386,” “Patrolling Wireborders,” or “There is Nobody”—ended up as the senior slideshow accompaniment.
Last Sunday, I volunteered at the Seattle premiere of Gary Hustwit’s Brian Eno documentary. Hustwit makes low-key, cerebral films—you may know Helvetica (2007) or Urbanized (2011). (I missed Urbanized at the time, but I watched it this week, and it’s an easy going tour de force that captures an early rendering of today’s full-blown YIMBY movement for more density and mass transit.)
Hustwit’s new movie, simply called Eno, uses today’s A.I.-era software as a way to create a “generative” film in the spirit of Eno’s own generative prompt-driven avant-garde minimalism. Hustwit shot hours of casual interviews with the amiable, intellectual, 78-year-old Brian Eno, while also digitizing Eno’s massive personal archives—behind the scenes studio footage, decades of TV interviews, Roxy Music performances. Then, using a proprietary film software he developed, he mixes it all together, gives it some prompts (be sure to play the Bowie “Heroes” scene) and conjures a different 80-plus-minute film for every screening. It’s like putting your entire music library on shuffle, with two or three rules, to produce a different playlist every night.
Sunday, 5/5/24: I snapped this picture of SIFF Downtown’s packed lobby from my volunteer perch on the steps up to the theater. And no, that’s not Eno himself in the the front row, though two-thirds of the crowd did look a lot like the Boomer/Xer icon. Myself included.
What we got at the packed, 500-seat downtown SIFF theater on Sunday night was lots of Bowie, early Roxy Music performances, key snippets of Lee Scratch Perry looping, and sweet footage of a young Bono coming up with U2’s Pride (in the Name of Love) as Eno gently conducts from the engineer’s booth.
I wouldn’t have minded a little more DEVO, the new wave oddity whose first LP Eno produced in late 1977/early 1978; they came on screen several times according to a friend who saw the New York City premiere four days earlier. But no matter the mix, Hustwit’s Eno gives us lots of the hyper eloquent, surprisingly unpretentious Eno playfully discussing the experimental aesthetics he’s lived by for decades. With doctrines like his “oblique strategies,” Eno emphasized lateral directives within otherwise fixed patterns. Looking back now, however, Eno also says, he sees “feelings” (odd, given his famously academic atmospherics) as the DNA of his work—as opposed to doctrine.
True or not, his approach has blessed us with everything from pioneering ambient music, like his 1975 Discreet Music LP, to the Talking Heads’ Fela Kuti-inspired masterpeice Remain in Light, to the Microsoft Windows 95 boot-up sound, to his raucous dials and hot tubes solo in Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain.
Eno, 1972
We also got—and apparently this segment plays at every showing—my new favorite thing about Brian Eno: a contemporary interview of him explaining his coming-of-age revelation as a young teenager in idyllic Suffolk England when he heard the Silhouettes’ 1957 doo-wop hit Get a Job. You wouldn’t associate Eno’s technology-based art music with 1950s rock (his contribution to Roxy’s campy rock & roll seems like a sci-fi ray gun aimed at obliterating rock not venerating it). But here’s Eno, giddy and gray, dancing away at his workstation to footage of the Silhouettes bopping out.
This info expanded the Eno narrative, which has been more about his place in the avant-garde trajectory from Steve Reich to King Tubbys to Adrian Belew to DJ Spooky. Get a Job also happens to be one of my favorite early rock & roll tunes; do a “control F” for Get a Job in this 10,000-word essay I wrote in 2021 about my piano set, and you’ll catch me raving on about the great Silhouettes’ song.
2) Perhaps it’s the spring weather.
Even though I can grab a hippie sandwich in the shop right next door to my building, I’ve been walking a mile south instead all week (and the mile back) to the 23rd & Union PCC Market where they sell Higher Taste brand vegan sandwiches.
Based in Cornelius, Oregon about a half-hour car ride east of Portland (where they started out in 1987 as a vegan and vegetarian catering service), Higher Taste has a groovy homespun, indie backstory (which you can read here.)
I’m partial to their tangy plant-based BBQ sandwich (the “Portland’s Best BBQ”), but they’ve also got a delicious mashed tofu salad sandwich (the “Veggie Chick”) and a marinated Teriyaki seitan crumbles sandwich (the “Big Kahuna.”) These hefty hoagie roll sandwiches are packed with fresh purple cabbage and carrots and just a touch of Vegenaise.
At $9, it’s definitely not a low-cost lunch, but these salubrious sandwiches, with big bite after big bite of plant-based dopamine, hit the spot without hitting your gut.
And unlike most of the plant-based competition in the ready-made, refrigerated sandwich aisles, including the disappointing aforementioned option at the place downstairs from my apartment, Higher Taste’s bread is never soggy or stale. And Veganaise, usually congealed and gross on the other brands, isn’t the presumptuous, main ingredient here.
3) With applause and comments like “This is great!” “kind of nails it,” I’ve noticed many fellow progressive Jews re-posting this Medium article, 50 Completely True Things. It’s a list of often flippant, though passionate and reasoned, statements by a Palestinian American aimed at torpedoing the deafening bombast from both sides in the debate about the war in Gaza.
A sampling:
FACT No. 1.
Some Jews are shitty and awful people.
FACT No. 2.
Some Muslims are shitty and awful people.
…
FACT No. 32.
What happened to the Israeli civilians on 10/7 is fucking awful, and Hamas has earned every fucking thing that the Israeli military throws at them.
FACT No. 33.
What is happening in Gaza to civilians is fucking awful, and not the smartest thing for Israel to do, and some aspects of Israeli military activity may be war crimes, and it doesn’t have to be genocide for it to be tragic.
FACT No. 34.
You can advocate for Palestine without being a racist, antisemitic piece of shit.
FACT No. 35.
You can advocate for Israel without being a racist, anti-Arab piece of shit.
I haven’t re-posted it because, even though, yes, it spoofs the demagogues and offers some helpful points, it strikes me as a yearning-to-be-edgy call for everyone to “shut the fuck up” (satisfying, but…) as opposed to a serious material account that fosters discussion or offers any practical recommendation for a solution.
What I did like this week—which surprised me because he’s one of the NYT’s overdue-for-retirement columnists—was Thomas Friedman’s opinion piece, “Why the Campus Protests Are So Troubling.”
In addition to A) providing a fact check for student protesters about Hamas’ detestable agenda (while also reporting on Palestinians on the ground who oppose Hamas), and B) casting the Netanyahu regime as equally criminal, Friedman highlights forces that are working toward a fair and practical solution.
Friedman starts by focusing his criticism on the student protesters (who, though just kids, are framing the debate). But he pivots meaningfully into a full-blown condemnation of Israel’s belligerent policies as well, using that comprehensive critique to advocate for a renewed focus on a two-state solution.
I am intensely both anti-Hamas and anti-Netanyahu. And if you oppose just one and not also the other, you should reflect a little more on what you are shouting at your protest or your anti-protest. Because no one has done more to harm the prospects of a two-state solution than the codependent Hamas and Netanyahu factions.
Hamas is not against the post-1967 occupation. It is against the existence of a Jewish state and believes there should be an Islamic state between the river and the sea. When protests on college campuses ignore that, they are part of the problem. Just as much as Israel supporters who ignore the fact that the far-right members in Netanyahu’s own coalition government are for a Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. How do I know? Because Netanyahu wrote it into the coalition agreement between himself and his far-right partners.
…
What Palestinians and Israelis need most now are not performative gestures of disinvestment but real gestures of impactful investment, not the threat of a deeper war in Rafah but a way to build more partners for peace. Invest in groups that promote Arab-Jewish understanding, like the Abraham Initiatives or the New Israel Fund. Invest in management skills capacity-building for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, like the wonderful Education for Employment network or Anera, that will help a new generation to take over the Palestinian Authority and build strong, non-corrupt institutions to run a Palestinian state.
This is not a time for exclusionary thinking. It is a time for complexity thinking and pragmatic thinking: How do we get to two nation-states for two indigenous peoples? If you want to make a difference and not just make a point, stand for that, work for that, reject anyone who rejects it
I will say, the Medium piece and the Friedman piece do agree on one thing: They’re both for a two-state solution, or, in the case of the Medium piece, explicitly against a one-state-solution. On that, I disagree with both. I may be dreamy on this point, but partition is the ongoing and animating problem. So, while I like that Friedman’s piece is specific and prescriptive, and I agree that two-states is a legitimate and just goal—as opposed to the psychotics of obliteration coming from Netanyahu and Hamas—I believe it’s time to embrace the pluralism that both sides rejected in 1947.
75-plus years of taking the opposite approach has only led to endless bloodshed.