At 250 knots the rain furls a frightful tape through night’s colossal headwheel. The view from the port side window is a pelagic blur, all sideways with speed. The plane’s headlights accuse clouds that appear and vanish like the lures of deepsea fish. I try and fail to photograph it, and rest my forehead against the scratch pane, listening to music.
In my ears is “20220214,” from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s latest record, 12. The dozen songs are all dates, formatted in that most efficient and elegant way: YYYYMMDD. As final songs, rather than mere drafts or voicenotes, the dates are deliberately indexical, calling attention to their place in time, as if the music exists to stand for or surpass the days themselves. YYYYMMDD: a day at its simplest. Ready to be processed, arranged.
Sakamoto, the composer, actor, producer, and member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of the 20th century’s most influential bands, announced two years ago that he had been diagnosed, again, with cancer. “From now on,” he wrote, “I will be living alongside cancer. But, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer.” Last month, he streamed a concert, assembled from new live recordings of individual songs that he was too wearied to play in a continuous set. The dated tracks of 12, improvised and recorded during his treatment, could be read as a diary of illness, their numerical names mirroring the attenuation of days into dates, of living into the notching of time.
Throughout 12, Sakamoto’s breathing is audible, in short and shallow breaths that keep their own rhythm. They are too irregular and slight to be invitations for the listener to breathe along. Instead, they emphasize both his own frailty and the physical, intimate process of making music. Like the songs’ names, the breathing foregrounds the circumstance of the recordings. Taken together, they constitute a record that is a record of itself, an hourlong LP that is also a calendrical and self-reflexive testament.
The music itself, marked by all this timekeeping, is remarkably timeless. Like Lee Ufan’s album artwork, a minimalist overlay of green, red, and blue lines, Sakamoto’s music slowly moves towards its own center, revealing further color and texture. Étude and ambience, clarity and murk, impressionism and minimalism are all gracefully balanced into this late and wordless work.
I experience this balance just as the plane emerges from the weather below. The track changes from “20220214” to “20220302 - sarabande.” The rain is sucked away, and we arc over a canyon of clouds. A thick, dark valley rolling up into a ridgeline of cumulous peaks. A piano emerges, clear and Debussian, from the previous song’s cosmic synths. The whole sky swerves. Far-off planes blink along their vectors. A man in Japan slowly dies into his keyboard that I might hear him breathe in space.
The songs of 12 proceed in chronological order, from “20210310” to “20220404”—except the final one. The record ends with “20220304,” plucked from its natural order. Good endings, in art if not in life, are often a matter of rearrangement. So, after an hour of pianos and synthesizers—bells. Clinking like suzu or coins dropped carefully into hammered bowls. Metals moved as if by hands or wind.
“I have just turned 70, but how many more times will I be able to see the full moon?” wrote Sakamoto last year. It is impossible not to find 12 funerary. A spirit leaving or approaching. The final bells like an inevitable epilogue, the sound of that early morning you will never hear arrive.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto’s friend and former bandmate, died on January 11. Jen Monroe made a great tribute mix for her monthly NTS radio show.
from the discourse
Co-published by the New Yorker and ProPublica, Alec MacGillis reports on efforts to build violence interruption and community safety programs:
The field, he said, “is so grossly underdeveloped. We continue to use two or three models from the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands. This field has evolved, social media and technology have evolved, gangs have evolved. There are pockets of promising evidence and good models, but, because of a lack of investment, we’re not seeing that return. If this was a board of directors running a Fortune 500 company, we’d ask ourselves some very serious questions about our investment.” There was an unjust element to the pressure to produce results: police departments had, after all, received exponentially more resources for decades, even as violence remained high in many cities. “There’s a lot of pressure to hurry up and reduce the violence,” Shani Buggs, an assistant professor of public health at U.C. Davis who briefly worked for the Baltimore city government, said. Community violence intervention, she told me, “should be seen as a core city function, as police are seen as a core city function. There’s never a question about whether they should get rid of the police department because violence hasn’t gone down.”
For his Substack, Christian Lorentzen on new NYT pundit Pamela Paul’s bad-faith reappraisal of American Dirt:
Paul writes that “publishers have become wary of what is now thought of as Another American Dirt Situation, which is to say, a book that puts its author and publishing house in the line of fire.” Maybe publishers are actually afraid that they are stupid. But they are not stupid. They are actually pretty good at knowing what sells. They are afraid that their cynical marketing campaigns can’t thread the needle between exploitative, pornographic, commercial trash and virtue-endowing social justice literature. Obviously the ability to thread that needle could be tremendously lucrative. And in fact, American Dirt was a bestseller for months.
from the Anthropocene
As part of Georgetown University’s series on Literature, Art, and the Environment, Nathan Hensley gave an excellent webinar on J. M. W. Turner and ecocide:
Seven southwestern states argue over water as the Colorado River shrinks:
“We have sound legal footing,” Mr. Hamby said in an interview. He said that fast-growing Arizona should have been ready for the Colorado River drying up. “That’s kind of a responsibility on their part to plan for these risk factors.”
Tina Shields, Imperial’s water department manager, put the argument more bluntly. It would be hard to tell the California farmers who rely on the Colorado River to stop growing crops, she said, “so that other folks continue to build subdivisions.”
from NYC
Investigating sky-high rental prices for Curbed, Lane Brown questions the idea that rents are high because people are flocking back to the City:
In November 2021, the New York City comptroller issued a widely circulated report on pandemic migration, which cheerfully asserted that “since July 2021, USPS data has shown an estimated net gain of 6,332 permanent movers, indicating a gradual return to New York City.” I checked and double-checked the USPS data and couldn’t find those movers, so I asked the comptroller’s office to explain. A spokesperson directed me to an updated chart, buried in the middle of an October 2022 newsletter, but it showed no bump in 2021, just continued bleeding.
Brooklyn finally has hundreds of smart compost bins, available 24/7 and unlockable via bluetooth. If you live in the City, you can download the app here and get started.
from my incoming texts
“Peter Gallagher is the evil Kyle McLachlan ?”
“Not sure why but I had this queued to text you ‘Literary art cringe’”
“I simply cannot come empty handed!”
“Public reveal of the person who said public execution of the moments of food copywriter for morale for morale”
weekly wiki
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