Learning the “Police & Thieves” bass line; Savoring 4Columns; Reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

I’m All Lost in the... in which I report on what I’m obsessing over this week.

Week #11.

1) The 1976 dub reggae tune “Police & Thieves” is the finale of my 2023 five-song piano set. I learned to play the song earlier this year from the sheet music to Junior Murvin’s original version. But because I grew up listening to the Clash’s cover rendition (one of my all-time favorite records since hearing it in junior high school), my take has turned into a hybrid between Murvin’s classic and the Clash’s cover. While largely sticking to Murvin’s softer vibes, I have replicated the Clash’s heavy back-beat chords in the left hand and incorporated their sweeping intro throughout.

But then, about a week ago—with just 10 days left in the year—I realized I was leaving out Clash bassist Paul Simonon’s signature pop-reggae riff. Junior Murvin’s lovely inversions and Joe Strummer’s whisper-spittle aside, Simonon’s syncopated bass is obviously the crowd-pleasing hook in this song.

I’m now committed to working his catchy bass into my arrangement before the year is up. With the bright, active melody line going in the right hand at the same time, it’s a tricky, but addicting, assignment.

2) I’ve been getting arts journal 4Columns’ Friday email every week since their 2016 debut. But sadly, I must say, I’d only read a handful of their articles over the years. Until recently.

If you don’t know the New York City-based journal, they have a great conceit: Every Friday, they publish four 1,000-word art reviews. Each column—published on their minimalist, yet elegant and user-friendly site, and written by a regular contributor from their impressive and erudite roster—reviews a separate, new work, be it a new exhibit at a gallery or museum, a recently-released record, a performance art opening, or a just-out book or movie.

For example, last week they cued up reviews of the following: a visual art show at Manhattan’s White Cube gallery; the new Nicki Minaj record; Michael Mann’s biopic on Enzo Ferrari; and An-My Lê’s conceptual photo exhibit at MoMA, which sounds like it’s a quantum-physics-level foray into the depressing persistence of war. Timely.

Le’s show, titled Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, includes a sub-set series of photos titled Small Wars (1999–2002). Incongruent with those dates, the photos appear to be taken during America’s war in Vietnam; they’re actually pictures of recent re-enactments shot in the U.S. 4Columns writer Aruna D’Souza explains:

To make them, Lê sought out enthusiasts—all white men—who gather in Virginia and North Carolina on weekends to game out skirmishes. Lê convinced them to let her take pictures; they said yes, as long as she agreed to participate in the role of Viet Cong guerilla.

[One] photo is an act of displacement—spatially, but also (given the dissonance between the date the photo was taken and what it seems to represent) temporally. Indeed, the artist, who was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the US after the fall of Saigon, has long been interested in displacement—especially how colonialism and its violence create diasporas, dislocate cultures, and trigger unsettling aftereffects that tend to go unnoticed.

The rendering of the exhibition’s title in Vietnamese, (American) English, and French points to the intersection of forces that have shaped the modern history of Southeast Asia, while the two rivers to which it refers—the Mekong and the Mississippi—collapse the distance between Lê’s birth country, a projection screen for so many American fantasies of power, domination, and defeat, and the United States itself.

I eagerly read this fast-paced review, along with two others in last week’s set, devouring three of the four columns. (It turns out, I guess, I have no interest in Enzo Ferrari nor Michael Mann.) As for the column on Nicki Minaj and the column on the art show at the White Cube gallery: Even though 4Columns reviews are written by academics and intellectuals, the prose is consistently straight forward, crisp, and accessible.

Here’s another excerpt, this one from Johanna Fateman’s review of the White Cube exhibit:

In Tracey Emin’s new show, gracefully or crudely outlined bodies are beached on islands of bleeding brushwork ...

Upon closer look at the canvas, the dark clot of gestures at its center seems to be a lover’s head, the crooked pose of the central figure a contortion of ecstasy…

Both artists [David Bowie and Edvard Munch] have long loomed large in her work, their influence reflected in her confident line and theme of desolation—though, in her treatment of the transhistorical subject of the nude, she evokes other things as well, such as cave painting and the pictographic porn of the bathroom-stall vandal.

It’s a treat to pick and choose from 4Column’s curated set. The week before this, they had a review of the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit on zines.

The week before that, they had a review the Guggenheim’s exhibit on 1960s and ‘70s experimental Korean art.

And the week before that? A review of MoMA’s exhibit on the 1960s and ‘70s American counterculture’s eco-architecture movement; that exhibit was a highlight of my recent trip to New York City.

This is all to say, I now find myself looking forward to their Friday email so I can read, and savor, 4Columns’ columns.

3) Readers of this regular round-up know I’ve been enjoying 19th Century accounts of industrial capitalism, the emergent and defining force of that time. Friedrich Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845) and Charles’ Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) have both shown up on on my lists.

This week I’m onto an acclaimed text of the genre: Elizabeth Gaskell’s debut novel from the “Hungry ‘40s,” Mary Barton (1848); please note the zeitgeist date, the year when reformist revolutions spread across Europe and the year Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto.

I’m only 60 pages in, but so far, set in the flickering candle-lit working class rooms clustered above Manchester’s alleyways and chronicling the family woes of a young dressmaker’s apprentice, Gaskell, in her languid prose (as opposed to Dickens’ frantic prose), has already lingered on a deadly mill fire, the untimely death of a child struck with scarlet fever, the trauma of sex work, and the faltering eye sight—symbolism!—of the apprentice’s best friend.

Gaskell also reports on the internal life of sudden Chartist, mill worker John Barton:

Barton tried credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with the bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly—all appetising sights to the common passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter! [the mill owner’s wife] She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove away; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy a corpse!