Electronic music for the mind & body; 1930s movies for falling asleep; Kamala Harris for president.
I’m All Lost in…
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.
#41
1) As I told Seattle electronica musician Rob Joynes after his (no-cover-charge, alternative-to-the-Capitol-Hill-Block-Party) gig at Vermillion Art Gallery this past Sunday night: I’ve wanted to hear music like this since my long-ago violinist band mate Pekio V. and I tried to find a synths-and-tape-loops guy in 1992.
7/21/24, Rob Joynes at Vermillion Art Gallery
Rob and I met sometime during the past two years; he’s the bartender at the Cha-Cha Lounge where I’m a regular. One night, I noticed that the music playing on the juke wasn’t the usual death metal, classic punk, indie rock, or ironic 1970s jams. It was early 1950s jump blues. This was Rob’s doing.
I revere early ‘50s, precursor rock & roll; years ago, under the influence of music critic Charlie Gillett’s monumental rock & roll history book, The Sound of the City (1970), I curated a jump blues/early rock and roll playlist of my own.
Rob and I started talking about music that night, and it quickly became clear our tastes matched. It also turned out Rob was a serious working musician, and I subsequently asked him to do an opening set of transit pop song covers arranged for beats, drones, and vocals at my May 2023 book release reading. He killed it. (Urbanist side note: the serendipity of connecting with kindred bohemian spirits is one of the profound delights about city living.)
So, I was excited when earlier this month, Rob told me he was scheduled to do a set of ambient computer songs at Vermillion on the Sunday of Capitol-Hill-Block-Party weekend. (His rock band Fell Off had an official Block Party gig lined up too, for Saturday; I saw Fell Off play in May 2023 and dug their mix of doom metal and power pop.)
Rob was able to light rail it to the Sunday gig at Vermillion because all he needed was a laptop, groovy gadgets, some cords, and his dolorous lyrics. No band gear necessary. The crowd was mesmerized.
The best way to describe Rob’s music is this: It’s as if someone spliced plaintive vocal melodies over DJ Spooky’s 1996 paranormal ambient masterpiece, Songs of a Dead Dreamer.
Rob would tinker with some dials, settle his layered digital drones into key, wait for the generative sequencing to swell into a rhythm, and then, as if singing opera recitative, he’d croon his vulnerable diary lyrics in a sweet, searching melody.
7/21/24, Rob Joynes at Vermillion Art Gallery
After the set, I asked him where one could find these jams. He said he’s still working on the record (due out next year). Meanwhile, you can listen to some of his pop music here and here.
Thankfully, Vermillion Gallery posted a snippet of the gig which is otherwise reverberating somewhere out in the ether.
2) I doubt the filmmakers would be happy about it, so it’s lucky they’re all long dead: I’ve been watching pre-code Hollywood movies on YouTube all week as a way to fall asleep at night.
Don’t get me wrong, Hollywood’s pre-code days—between the start of the talkie era (1928) and the advent of the conservative Hays' guidelines (mid-1934)—were a rich time for delicately radical, risqué movie making. And despite the normalized (and crazed) groping and pawing endured by the female characters (one kiss evidently signaled a yes to marriage), pre-code’s melodramatic, gritty fairy tales tend toward incisive feminist themes and lefty class consciousness—with a post-stock-market-crash lens on white collar corruption. The stories typically take place in the glittering and hypocritical world of the wealthy and political classes as attendant working class strivers make waves and seek truth.
These films are good for bedtime because of the comforting dusty sound quality—they’re all 90-plus years old—and because of the specifics of the soundtracks themselves: Often set in Gotham, pre-code movies feature soundscapes of bustling street scenes, jazz nightclub chatter, tit-for-tat weisenheimer banter, conspiratorial drawing room and corporate suite plotting, and theatrical dialogue that eventually escalates to a kiss, a slap in the face, or a gun shot. The predictable meter is perfect for closing your eyes just for a second…
Hilda Vaughn plays Jean Harlow’s maid in Dinner at Eight (1933)
My sleepy nighttime ritual this week aside, there are plenty of good pre-code films. One in particular I’d recommend staying awake for is Dinner at Eight, a powerhouse epic about time and death with five-star acting from an elite cast, including John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, and one of my favorite actors, stock plebeian Hilda Vaughn. Similarly top-notch: 1934’s Of Human Bondage starring Bette Davis in her blow-up role. And yes, she has serious eyes.
Mostly though, the pre-code movies I’ve seen this week—the ones that work as comforting sleep aids—are short, B-grade flicks, barely an hour long in their telegraphed rhythms, like one I dozed off to Friday night called Brief Moment starring Carole Lombard.
Like most pre-code movies, though, it did come with heavy doses of class war consciousness!
“That’s what it means to be a Dean,” one harried office switchboard operator quips to another when the boss’ son (rich playboy Rodney Dean played by Gene Raymond) tells her to fend off any calls from his wife because he’s sneaking off to the horse races for the afternoon. “And this is what it means to be a Callahan.”
Brief Moment (1933) starring Carole Lombard and David Burton.
You can find these movies in droves for free on YouTube. Here’s a list to get you started (I went on a pre-code binge in late 2021 and early 2022). The scandalous titles are not entirely misleading:
Animal Kingdom; Dinner at Eight; Party Girls; The Road to Ruin; Sing, Sinner, Sing; Murder on Campus; Uptown New York; Strange Marriage; Asphalt; Of Human Bondage; Skyscraper Souls; Ten Cents a Dance; Love Me Tonight; One More Hour with You; Discarded Lovers; Brief Moment.
3) My giddy obsession this week about Joe Biden out-Kamala Harris in, with Kamala now having the delegates to lock the nomination, has gotten to the point where I’m telling Kamala jokes in the grocery check out.
On Tuesday night, I was standing in line when the person working the cash register said she was closing, and that her co-worker, who suddenly appeared next to her, would ring people up at the next register over. As all of us in line started to head to the next register, the new checker said, no, I’ll check you here. This caused some confusion: Everyone in line was caught turning toward the other check out lane; the original checker was trying to close her register; and the new checker was trying to open it. “I’m just swapping in at this register,” the new checker said.
“So,” I asked, trying to confirm the situation as I stayed put, “you’re like Kamala Harris and we’re like Donald Trump?” Not the funniest joke, but everyone laughed.
Mostly it just goes to show all I can think about is the great news: Kamala Harris’ has replaced Joe Biden as the Democrats’ candidate for president.
For example, I’m fantasizing about her debate zingers. Like when Trump accuses her of covering up for Biden, she can turn the tables and say: The public has been calling for a new generation of candidates. Joe listened. He did the patriotic thing and passed the torch. It’s embarrassing that instead of calling for their own new candidate, the Republican party stuck with a convicted felon like you. (I also hope Harris mines this handy bullshit detector-fact check on Trump’s stream of lies.)
Back on July 6, Shortly after Biden’s disastrous June 27th debate performance sent the Democrats into a tailspin of anxiety, I noticed a silver lining in the Democratic implosion. I wrote this on Facebook:
A silver lining (?) ... For the first time I can remember since 2015, Trump is not dominating, or even, in the headlines. Suddenly, the Democrats are the riveting drama. There is energy around their underdog story line that's creating a strange momentum for them. Trump doesn't quite know what to do.
Obviously, Trump dominated the news once again after surviving the July 13th assassination attempt in hyper dramatic fashion. But just a week after that wild news, Trump has been relegated to the background yet again. I’m starting to think this isn’t purely circumstantial anymore, but more a sign that at a larger level people might be done with him. Perhaps the country has moved on with the Democrats.
Of course, I’m being too optimistic. Trump has proven that his superpower is defining the narrative and getting attention. But the sea change—key change even, with Trump suddenly slotted as the sub-dominant note in the scale versus Kamala’s dominant note—has Trump falling flat. The New York Times reported on Trump’s sudden media struggles late this week.
I do believe something fundamental has changed. And I tried to capture my sense of it 24 hours into Harris’ emergence. On Monday, July 22, thinking out loud on Facebook, I wrote:
Three weeks ago, in the throes of the post-Biden debate disaster, and the frantic calls for him to step aside, I (like a lot of freaked-out Democrats) was in a panicked email thread with friends trying to figure out how this goes. One worry I had at that time was: We can’t anoint her because Trump will flip the script and turn the whole democracy argument against us; he’ll say we’re the ones who are subverting the system. Lo and behold, Trump took up that line today.
However, here’s what I didn’t envision three weeks ago: Trump’s lines of attack suddenly don’t seem as commanding or threatening. In fact, they feel small; he feels small. The ground has shifted, and it’s left him (in his MAGA bubble) behind. As Trump doubled-down on his nativist, deportation platform at the Republican convention last week (does anyone even remember the Republicans just had a convention?), the Democrats have moved on with an electrifying script change. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t be judicious about moving forward with Harris, nor that we don’t have work to do, but this is an entirely different race now, and it feels like it’s the GOP that needs a new candidate. Trump is stale.
I’m not naive enough to misinterpret the current Democratic momentum as a harbinger of a Harris victory—this is going to be a bruising fist fight where Trump is certain to land heavy, perhaps crippling blows. And I’m already getting some cocky Hillary bubble vibes from the Democrats. But Kamala’s history-making fundraising ($250 million in 3 days…I gave $100 myself on Sunday after Biden dropped out and endorsed her) makes it plain she’s gonna deliver some devastating left hooks herself.
I like this opening shot for starters:
In short, whereas just last week, our country seemed destined for a neo-Nazi Trump win and the end of American democracy as we know it, Kamala Harris has given us a fighting chance.
P.s. I left one bona fide obsession off my official list this week because I’m embarrassed that I’m still deep in my Blondie craze. But it’s true. I’ve been practicing my piano version of the group’s 1979 hit “Dreaming” every chance I get.