the book of unconformities

I meant to send an update sooner than this, but the end of summer was marked by my second bout with COVID — after three years of managing to dodge it, I once again found myself in its jaws. Not fun, but orange juice and applesauce slowly revived me. I am sad I missed a trip to upstate New York to visit Lucy, and it was also a bummer to be sick while Sound & Gravity was having their inaugural festival in town. Ain’t that the way.

I can’t believe summer is over. I had a nice time, which surprised me. Until Leo season comes it’s not particularly my favorite season. I tend to feel weirdly existential when a year hits the halfway mark. Maybe it’s not summer, just June, which would track because I was at my friend Evan’s funeral in June. Not great.

I do think that in honor of Evan I tried really hard to have a good time this summer in memory of him. I threw a very casual birthday party where the only demand was that everyone come in some kind of costume, and people really did! Super creative, shmedium effort DIY costumes, including Mr. Darcy, Laura Dern in Jurassic Park, a retired color guard member, a ladybug, tea, coffee, daisies, Han Solo, Marge from the Simpsons, Guy Fieri, a handsome fruit, and a handsome fruiteater (me).

I gotta be honest, fall has not gotten off to a good start. For those of you not local to Chicago or Portland, masked federal agents operating as part of ICE have been terrorizing and kidnapping our neighbors in warrantless arrests. They have been doing this in different neighborhoods for weeks, racially profiling and detaining US citizens and immigrants with legal status, body slamming members of the press, handcuffing elected officials, causing car accidents, tear gassing civilians, and generally trying to prevent any sort of upholding of constitutional rights or due process by the law. It’s giving secret police and we do not like it.

A helpful thing you could do if you have the means and are not in a place being affected by these raids is donate to ICIRR, that is, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. If you aren’t in a position to donate, please share some of the articles I linked above (or anything that Block Club Chicago is reporting on because they have been a very crucial on-the-ground news source) with your community.

last headliner of the year!

Band has one more headliner in Chicago this year, and on a Saturday! We will play a longer set (do you have a request? let me know) and my dear friend Emily Jane Powers is opening with her band - she put out one of my favorite records this year, Earnest Jamming Partners. Strongly suggest buying tickets now:

11/22 - Half Gringa with Emily Jane Powers @ Schubas

summer reads

I had time to finish a few books while ill and thought I would share my favorites of the summer:

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar

I’m a big fan of magical realism, but it’s been a few years since I’ve read something with those elements that really struck me. This book was also recommended to me by Evan a couple of years ago, and it was nice to read it and imagine what he thought of it. Set in an Iranian village after the Iranian Revolution, this book is narrated by the ghost of a 13-year-old girl and centered around her family’s repeated bereavement and the relationship between the living and dead. It is beautifully written, and though it does draw from Gabriel García Márquez’s well, there is a distinct, urgent voice with which this story is told.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

A romance novel? An examination of colonization and the multiracial experience? A spy thriller? I’m still trying to wrap my head around this book. It is strange and funny and messy and earnest, perhaps to a fault. However, I’m still thinking about it, which feels significant. I look forward to reading what Bradley writes next.

The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Hugh Raffles

I bought this book at the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park a couple of years ago because the conceit intrigued me. Its loose theme is unconformities, or sudden breaks in the geological record, and uses different types of rock to examine the anthropological eras that are tied to them. I’ve always gravitated toward nonfiction books that are told in narrative style or support the structure of a memoir, and I feel that this book in particular strikes a good balance of the inward and the outward. It also presents a few specific historical moments in a multi-dimensional way; you can see the relationships that humans have to power, to the land, and to one another. It felt like I read it at the exact right time.

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

This book recently won the Pulitzer in the Memoir category, and I believe it’s the first graphic novel to do so (and the first to receive a Pulitzer since Art Spiegelman’s Maus). On a personal level, this book is the most meaningful piece of work I’ve read in the last decade. It resonates bone-deep. Hulls spent ten years writing it, and in that time is able to examine the effects of immigration on her relationship with her mother and her mother’s relationship with her mother with such care and empathy, most crucially toward herself.

limited Spotify catalog // a Feist cover

Late last month, an open letter was published that I signed, along with 35 other Chicago musicians (now up to 85!), who are pulling some or all of their existing catalogs from distribution on Spotify. You can read the letter here and my additional statement here. From my perspective, de-centering Spotify — and honestly streaming services at large — as part of the music discovery and sharing experience is a good thing, and I am choosing to treat it for what it is: a marketing tool. Not an income generator or a fan base builder. It is one of many (worsening) tools. This shift in perspective has helped me not put as much stock into it. And Spotify’s practices of using AI to create content that benefits them, as well as their investors’ support of war tech, certainly doesn’t incline me to pander to them in any sort of way.

Anyway! This was a long one, thank you for reading. As a treat, I have a cover of Feist’s song “The Park” up on Bandcamp.