This has nothing to do with anything. It’s just another thing I want to tell you.
A few days ago I was sitting at the light at the intersection of St. Claude and Poland avenues, facing north on Poland. Please picture it. It’s a pretty big intersection. Both streets have a neutral ground1 and on the east side of this intersection, St. Claude climbs up into the St. Claude Avenue Bridge, which is a worn draw bridge spanning the Industrial Canal. St. Claude Avenue is a busy street and the St. Claude Avenue Bridge is a narrow bridge. Sometimes that bridge has to rise and traffic has to wait.
So you have the scene in mind, I hope, because I need you to really feel it when I tell you that while I was quietly sitting at this red light, a boxy purple car suddenly spat out — backward — from the eastbound lane of the bridge and into the intersection. What I mean is that a person backed their car off the bridge at 30-40 mph and into the intersection, banked right, stopped just feet in front of me, then calmy headed north on Poland, presumably to try the next bridge down, where no one can make you wait.
I think sometimes (often? always?) the best way to explain a city is through little stories, and I’m adding that one to my rotation.
— Ashley
let me tell you about this song
I love a song that makes be subconsciously do a little head wiggle and that’s exactly what I keep catching myself doing before I’m consciously aware “Two Face” is playing.
It’s the first single (but 10th track) off L’Rain’s Fatigue, which I’m going to call an experimental record even though I’m worried that might scare you off. I tried to map the song out but that doesn’t do its swirling effect justice. It’s mixing and matching a stumbling, sort of jazzy piano line with bursts of samples, skittery drums and a chorus of oohs. As L’Rain (Taja Cheek) sings, “I can’t build no new nothing, no new life, no new nothing for me,” her voice is smeary with effects. It’s something like a sardonic punchline when a saxophone jauntily echoes that melody in the end.
let me tell you about this book
Here’s a list of things Klara and the Sun has that I generally love:
A dystopian near-future — the kind that feels plausible in its circumstances and imminence.
A set of key details about that future — technology, terminology, politics, cultural rifts — that are not outright explained, so you’re putting the pieces together as you read.
Characters that make you ask, “What’s their deal?”
You eventually get to find out what their deal is and sometimes you gasp.
The general deal is: Klara is an Artificial Friend (AI). The story is told from her perspective. We meet her in a store, waiting placidly to be chosen by a young person, and when she’s chosen it’s obvious from the jump that something is up with the family. (Clear to us, but not to her.) And as it turns out, yeah, some pretty dark things are up.
I love the way the tension in Klara and the Sun shifts. It starts as tension between you and her, because all of your alarm bells are going off while she’s just happy to be there. But as she starts to feel unsettled, the tension moves between family members and their very small circle, and even elements of the landscape, until you’re in a big taut web of “What is their deal???”
But a good chunk of this book has a totally different feel, and it’s just as good. The beginning is just Klara sitting in the store before she’s taken home. It should be about as interesting as sitting nearly silently in a shop all day, every day, for many days, but it’s not. Klara’s observational ability is supposed to be what sets her apart from the other AFs, and Ishiguro really sells it in the early chapters, which in my mind are bathed in warm sunshine through a big display window.
And if you’re wondering what the sun has to do with all of this, I guess you should find out.
let me tell you about these cats
Maybe you’ve heard of these cats. Maybe you’ve seen them on TV.
The MacManus brothers, whose mother is dead and whose father is long gone, and their friend Rocco have made a bloody mess and no one especially wants to stop them. In fact, rumor has it they have the covert support of the FBI.
You see, the brothers (might as well think of all three as brothers) have been on a crusade to rid their city of evil. It started with a couple of mobsters and just spun out from there. I mean, they’re gunning down everybody in a bumbling but effective spree that at one point finds them killing nine mobsters with six bullets while unintentionally hanging upside down from a ceiling. Also, as it turns out, the MacManus brothers’ father has reappeared, hired to kill them, not knowing they’re his sons until he’s pointing two of his many, many guns and they’re saying the special family prayer. So now they’re going to shoot a lot of bad guys together.
If you realized this is the plot of The Boondock Saints, great job. If you didn’t, great job not going to college in Boston in the early 2000s, I guess, but you need to watch this legendary Willem Dafoe scene.2
For non-New Orleanians: that’s a very wide, grassy median where we park when it’s flooding and tailgate when it’s not.
Really tho.