Here’s my reading list for August. This is last month’s list and you can follow it back from there. A very good month of reading for me.

PROFESSIONAL READING:

1. David-James Gonzales, Breaking Down the Walls of Segregation: Mexican American Grassroots Politics and Civil Rights in Orange County, California (Oxford, 2025). Too often, we think of American racial history as black and white. That’s an error and that includes our civil rights history. Gonzales looks at the organizing in Orange County that led to the Mendez v. Westminster, the 1947 case that struck down segregation against Mexican Americans and was a key precursor to Brown. These are the stories that need to be told in order to get a fuller sense of our civil rights history.
2. Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction (Bloomsbury, 2023). I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic. Williams writes with such verve about a top topic–the freed people terrorized by the KKK and other white supremacist organizations during Reconstruction and how they survived. The key word is “survival.” You can’t quite say they fought back, though they did. But this isn’t the kind of story that is going to make you feel good or that provides that cathartic release in the end. This was bad stuff and people did what they could to make it through.
3. Suzanna Krivulskaya, Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism (Oxford, 2025). A fairly straightforward, though valuable, explortation of the many, many prominent sex scandals in American religious history. These ministers sure are a bunch of complete hypocrites, from Henry Ward Beecher to Jimmy Swaggart.
4. Taylor M. Easum, Chiang Mai between Empire and Modern Thailand: A City in the Colonial Margins (Amsterdam, 2024). A book that I doubt will interest too many general readers, but which is quite good. This is an urban history of Chiang Mai, the major city of northern Thailand, looking pretty in depth at how the city was shaped both in resistance to and in the context of both the expanding power of Bangkok and the colonial intruders who didn’t exactly colonize the country, but who shaped it very heavily in a quasi-colonization. Importantly, Easum rejects the idea that one can only study Thai history with Bangkok at its center and the rest of the nation just outposts.
5. Amy Godine, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier (Cornell, 2023). At first, I wasn’t sure about a book split into so many tiny chapters, which tend to lend themselves more to popular writing than real considered analysis. But Godine does something extremely useful here. She looks at Gerrit Smith’s famous land grants to black settlers in upstate New York and turns the attention to the actual settlers. Smith, who was one of John Brown’s Secret Six, had plenty of prejudice in his own right and tried to control everything about the shape of his idealized communities. Meanwhile, black families really struggled on this less than marginal land, made their own communities, rejected Smith’s patriarchal attitudes, tried to make it in this very white place, and played an active role in the memory of it all when the fact that John Brown’s farm was there made it a key part of Civil War memory. Smith never could understand why these black New Yorkers either didn’t his land or didn’t do with it what he wanted. He hated slavery but listening to black people was not a strong suit. So this ended up being a really good book that I enjoyed a great deal.
6. Thomas Dunlap, Saving America’s Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind, 1850-1990 (Princeton, 1988). This is something of a classic of environmental history that I had reason to revisit. Dunlap shows how ideas of ecology rose in American scientific circles and, focusing on predators and the long-term desire of Americans to eliminate them, how people, including Aldo Leopold and then Rachel Carson began to resist that ideology and started reshaping the American mindset in regards to nature. At this point, not much in here is surprising, but that’s partly because Dunlap made it common knowledge.
7. Joan Singler, et al, Seattle in Black and White: The Congress of Racial Equality and the Fight for Equal Opportunity (Washington, 2011). A group of CORE volunteers in Seattle got together and decided to write up their history while they still lived. We don’t often center a city such as Seattle in civil rights history, which isn’t so shocking since it’s black population was smaller than many other major cities and it was also far away from California or the east coast media. But activists in the 60s here took on intransigent whites when it came to employment, housing, and education and this is a very solid addition to our understanding of these issues.
8. Sy Adler, Planning the Portland Urban Growth Boundary: The Struggle to Transform Trend City (Oregon State, 2022). How much detail do you want to know about Oregon land use planning after the passage of the state’s pioneering legislation in the early 70s? How much do you like acronyms? If the answer is a) all the detail and b) I fucking love acronyms, this is the book for you. I’m not really making fun here–this is a microhistory of institutional battles that has a ton of value for the right kind of scholar.
9. Aaron Goings, Red Harbor: Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, 2025). Goings writes about the history of his home community around Grays Harbor. Washington, home of significant radicalism in the early 20th century, mostly though not entirely through the IWW and then the state repression against that. This was also a heavily Finnish community so there’s good attention paid to them. This goes through the success of unionization after 1935. It’s a very good labor history, though as I usually wish, I wish it asked more what happened to that radical tradition once the workers actually had a union.
10. Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). This prize-winning book looks at the Flores Magon brothers and their band of Mexican radicals working on both sides of the border in the years leading up to the Mexican Revolution, which they helped spur but which immediately left them behind. That story is well known, but what Hernandez does here is really focus on the transnational efforts to police them and here she deftly narrates a fascinating story, with an emphasis on the violence any Mexican could face in the United States.

FICTION/LITERARY NON-FICTION

1. Makenna Goodman, Helen of Nowhere. Published last year, Goodman tells the story of a male professor exiled from his university home. It doesn’t seem to be so much sexual as it is that he is an old-style environmental studies professor who has no tolerance for feminism or any cultural studies and all his younger colleagues loathe him so he resigns. His marriage to one of those colleagues is also breaking up and he decides to look at a house way out in the countryside. There, he meets the realtor, a hippie type, who was friends with the woman who built the house and lived there for years, but who is now in senior living. Yet, the realtor seemingly can also channel said woman and as he reveals himself to her, she offers to do so. This little novel goes in some very unexpected places, including a pretty hilarious ending. Goodman herself is a rural homesteader, which is not a life I have a ton of sympathy with or want to romanticize, but she has enough self-awareness about it to write about it with some critical distance too. She recognizes the binaries in our environmental studies are kind of ridiculous and can’t stand up to much scrutiny. It’s also interesting that given the time of writing and the fact that Goodman is a progressive woman, this does not really demonize our aging male faculty members as a predator or engage in anything like cancel culture, which I don’t get the sense she likes very much. He’s sympathetic in his way too. Maybe he just needs to open himself to true love….leading to said memorable ending.
2. Zadie Smith, Grand Union. Published in 2019, but made up of stories Smith had published for years before this, this is her first short story collection. Anytime you can enter into Zadie Smith’s mind, it’s worth your time. She’s really engaging in experimentation here and the stories vary widely in style, subject, and quality. There’s brilliant stories and one terrible one (where she riffs on the myth that Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor fled together in a car after 9/11) and some that don’t quite work and some that are above average. Some of the stories are even about writers trying to experiment. In the end, this isn’t the most necessary Smith, but it almost is because here’s a brillant mid-career writer who probably is going to win the Nobel at some point just opening herself up to the public and saying “hey, let’s all experiment as writer and reader together, here’s some stuff.” I appreciated it. Plus there’s a devastating fictionalization of the 1959 racist murder of the Caribbean immigrant Kelso Cochrane, in case you need a reminder of Smith’s power and genius.
3. Amie Barrodale, You Are Having a Good Time. This 2016 collection of short stories revolves around the awkward person doing the awkward thing and most definitely saying the awkward thing. The central theme is miscommunication, which binds most humans together in a super uncomfortable embrace of weirdness. All the characters overthink their own actions, get in their own way, and miss chances for connection due to their issues. In other words, the human condition explained in mostly funny ways.
4. Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. I loved this 2020 collection of short stories (a real short story month for me here) about black women trying to make it in a world where men fuck them over constantly, where families are both beloved and totally disastrous, where religion is central to our lives but also holds us back from true happiness, where women have to make compromises that then transform their lives of their daughters, where both heterosexuality and homosexuality cannot be expressed as the protagonists need so very badly. There are men around, but mostly they are on the periphery. While I am not exactly the intended audience, I really very much enjoyed these finely detailed, sympathetic, and sometimes heartbreaking stories. I’d recommend this to anyone.
5. Philipp Meyer, American Rust. This 2010 novel about deindustrialized Pennsylvania was widely admired upon its release. I do not agree. It’s not very good. It follows a pair of friends who get themselves into some very bad trouble. One has a sister who has escaped to Yale and a disabled father. One has a mother who is in an on-again, off-again relationship with the local sheriff, who constantly intervenes in justice to get this kind of lost kid off from whatever he’s done. And then things get dark and can they be saved. So it’s a giant metaphor for what has happened to steel towns and other parts of deindustrialized America. But it lacks the courage of its convictions. Even when bad things happen to these characters, something always saves them from the worst possible things happening to them. By the end, there’s even a chance all of them are basically kinda sorta OK, almost as if editors said this would sell better if it didn’t get too dark in the end. The comparisons on the blurbs–Joyce, Faulkner, McCarthy–are all ridiculous. Meyer isn’t really like any of these authors. He’s a good enough stylist and storyteller to keep you turning the pages. But these reviews sound a lot more like people wanting to like a novel that exposed the horrors of forgotten corners of America (a sort of fictional version of a Times story interviewing Pennsylvania voters) than because the novel is as good as advertised.
6. Len Deighton, Berlin Game. A couple of months ago, I read Deighton’s Mexico Set, which is the second book in his first Bernard Samson series. The books are designed to work completely fine as individual works and it does, but I wanted to go back and read the first one, so I did. Berlin Game comes with fewer surprises if you’ve read Mexico Set of course, but Deighton was such a fine spy writer, precisely because the stakes are so high and so low at the same time. It’s the 80s, so hardly anyone is actually ideological about any of this anymore. But Deighton’s lead character sure hates communism–not as much as his spy wife it turns out–and he loves Berlin, so intrigue around the wall and who is the spy threatening a major intelligence network in East Berlin is the theme here. But the theme is also the class-based society of Britain, since our sorta hero didn’t even go to university, while all the men around him are from the tony upper classes and he’s always reminded of this. I still think LeCarre is the better writer, but boy I am reminded of what bullshit the whole James Bond thing is.
7. Tessa Hadley, The London Train. I absolutely loved Hadley’s 2022 book Free Love, about a middle-aged woman in 1967 who leaves her husband and stable lifestyle for a hippie, but which ends up really being about her daughter entering into this world and being transformed by it. So I went back to this 2011 book. I don’t think it’s quite as great, but it’s still a more than worthy read. It’s a story of two people in two separate parts. The first is a man, a writer and kind of a bad husband, who has a daughter from his first marriage who he never paid enough attention to. She ends up pregnant and living with some Poles. He finds her and rather than bring her home, he moves in with them, leaving his second family, at least temporarily. The second story is about Cora, a woman who has left a stale marriage but who has struggled to find herself since and is mighty depressed. The final quarter of the book gets into how they two of them had met some years before and entered into a passionate affair that has shaped both their lives since its sudden end. Speaking of ends, I loved the end of this one, as Cora finds her way again in a touching way that avoided cloying or cheap sentimentality but rather showed how sometimes, people realize that maybe they have made mistakes in their relationships because they were off and even if their partner isn’t the most exciting person in the world, well, what if this is as good as it gets and what if that’s OK?
8. Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin. A couple times a year, I decide to go back to the 19th century. I had never read Zola before. It was time to solve that problem. I chose Thérèse Raquin, in a recent printing of the novel as it was turned into what looks like a mediocre bodice-ripper with Elizabeth Olson, Oscar Issac, and Jessica Lange that also turned the name of the novel into what the film was called–In Secret, which is also a mediocre name. This is the novel that made Zola famous, in 1867. It is about a couple who fall passionately in love, kill her husband, and then find themselves eaten alive by the guilt. It was controversial, evidently, because it showed that someone could quite easily get away with murder, which made a lot of critics think it immoral Zola smartly marketed himself around that, which made him famous. Good call. But I can’t say I enjoyed reading this. The problem, at least for this modern reader, is that the murder takes place relatively early in the book and so over half of it is the couple’s slow, endless demise into insanity. I’m OK with a demise into insanity, but not over 2/3 of a book. I have no doubt of its historical importance and I can see why someone would reframe this into a movie (no doubt significantly changing the point in the story when the insanity starts), but I’d be unlikely to reread it.
9. Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers. I mostly hated this widely popular book from 2022. Chan’s debut novel, it hit the big time. Every outlet that might ever talk about motherhood was all in on it. It’s a slightly dystopian present or near future where mothers who don’t raise their kids according to societal standards are placed into a quasi-incarceration system for retraining to see if they can get their kids back. Our protagonist was not a good mother–a Chinese American woman, she was under lots of stress at work after her husband left her and left her kid for an afternoon to get work done and someone called the cops. So that’s the right kind of problem to create for a story like this–not too horrible, but yeah, not great. Some of the characters are truly abusive in this quasi-prison, others just let their kids walk home from school. Now, a book like this is necessary. Parenting standards today are stupid. We are a whole generation of people who were told at age 6 to walk to school alone and we did. Now that people my age are parents (or even grandparents in some cases!), if you let your kid walk to school alone, someone calls the cops. The only difference in terms of safety between now and then is that today it is way, way safer than in 1981. So Jenna Bush Hager and the Oprah Book Club had lots of conversations about “what if this situation was true and what if it is kinda true today, what does it say about me as a mother?” The problem is that the satire is too mild and the context way too underdeveloped. Some compared it to recent Ishiguro novels, but this is nowhere near as satisfying or successful or moving as Never Let Me Go, for example. There’s no real articulation of what proper parenting should or could be, how we got to this point in our society, or what all this says about our surveillance society. Moreover the book–and most of the discussion online and in the media about–totally misses the point that this dystopia is already the case for poor women of color and has been for a long, long time. There’s just no acknowledgement that the state intervenes in the homes of the poor all the time. In short, this is a book for wealthy women who are right that there are double standards for women but who really don’t want to think about the broader implications of their lives or these problems. As you can see, I found this book really, really frustrating.

This is your monthly book thread.

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Sergey Brin really bought high on MAGA, and in the manner of many converts he’s become a particularly enthusiastic Trump lickspittle:

Google has updated its Maps application, labeling Lake Ontario as Lake America for users in the United States, following an executive order signed by President Trump last week amid an escalating trade war with Canada.

The decision of the tech giant reflects what it did when Mr. Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America last year.

The change has started to be rolled out, Google said in a blog post, adding that it was following its practice of using the name given by the U.S. Geographic Names Information System.

“People using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google said in its statement.

Mr. Trump’s decision to rename the lake on Thursday was met with derision and shrugs in Canada and across the United States, and sparked a series of online memes and late-night jokes.

He leaned into his decision, posting an A.I.-generated video depicting geese sporting his signature hairstyle, armed with semiautomatic weapons and shooting the guns under a sign that read “Lake America.”

And Silicon Valley wonders why data centers are so unpopular. I can’t imagine why people don’t trust them in 2026!

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I have no problem at all with acknowledging the white genocide against Native peoples. I’ve argued many times that it and slavery are the foundational principles of America and we should probably do something about that. The emphasis though is on do something. A few years ago, I saw a show by the outstanding young Abenaki bassist Mali Obomsawin play (she’s great!) a show in Cambridge and she noted that land acknowledgements were “corny” but wanted the audience to know that an ancestor of hers had been hanged near this site and what do you think about that. And I’m totally fine with any land acknowledgement done by a Native person–I’m now heading an institute on campus that brings in a lot of speakers and having a Narragansett talk about how indeed this is Narragansett and what are you go do about it has a ton of value.

What I strongly dislike is the performative empty politics of most land acknowledgements, say at the beginning of college tours. Oh yes, when I took Farley’s daughter on the tour of Brown, there was one and then nothing more about race was mentioned the entire time. So what did this do? It’s just another platitude.

So this Times op-ed from last month by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara member Reid Walker really struck home with me:

Most land acknowledgments don’t end with the suggestion that the displaced are smiling down from heaven, grateful for what replaced them. But the moment captured, in exaggerated form, something that can happen even in more careful versions of the practice. A ritual meant to recognize dispossession becomes a form of reassurance instead. History is named and then absorbed.

Land acknowledgments became common in museums, universities and cultural institutions across the United States and Canada, recognizing that they occupy the ancestral territory of Indigenous nations. Some are now vanishing; Ohio State banned most land acknowledgments last fall under a state law meant to reverse diversity, equity and inclusion measures.

The practice has roots in Indigenous protocol, but the modern institutional version came through Australia and Canada. In Australia, a “Welcome to Country” can be delivered only by a member of the nation whose territory you’re on, usually an elder — a host’s gesture. An “Acknowledgment of Country” is what non-Indigenous people offer in return, as guests. The American version collapsed the two, so non-Native institutions now perform what was originally a host’s role.

In 2021, Indigenous anthropologists formally asked the American Anthropological Association to pause the practice. There was no evidence, they argued, that acknowledgments produce measurable change.

Because the ritual still treats land as something that can be owned, it names the theft while leaving the idea of ownership untouched. Indigenous relationships to land were not about possession or title. They were about reciprocity, care, responsibility. Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke artist, put it this way: “The concept of territory is a completely Western idea. When we make land acknowledgments, we’re putting a Western, colonial concept on the relationship between the Native people who were stewards of the land. It’s not ownership.”

Here it is–give the fucking land back or shut up. And that’s what is never going to happen. OK, you say, well that’s just not possible. Yes, OK, but…. The government could recognize the Narragansett as a federal tribe for one thing. The nation could give back huge parts of the Great Plains, now almost totally unpopulated, to the relevant tribes. A college can’t give the land back, one supposes. A college can give free tuition and fees to Native students. A college can require all students to take a course in Indigenous Studies, yes, including the engineers. Colleges probably cannot require all students to take classes by indigenous people, simply because there aren’t that many indigenous scholars, but colleges could require readings by indigenous scholars. There’s lots of things that could be done. But that would move institutions away from their profit-seeking motives, their cronyism, their desire to feel good about themselves without doing anything.

And that’s the rub–racial liberalism designed to make people OK about things through acknowledgement without doing a goddamn thing to solve a single problem, that’s some serious bullshit.

For example:

This is the history a land acknowledgment is meant to answer for. When the Barack Obama Presidential Center opened last month, its acknowledgment was thorough. The dedication honored the Anishinaabe and the Council of Three Fires. A permanent display on the campus names nine nations beyond them, refuses the past tense and quotes Mr. Obama on broken treaties and promises. The criticism came anyway, most of it from conservatives who would ridicule any acknowledgment at all. The center cost $850 million to construct; its museum charges $30 to enter. If you mean it, give it back, the conservatives said. They are not asking in good faith, but they are asking for the right thing. It names the gap between the words and anything the institution is willing to surrender. One side points at that gap to dismiss the whole thing. Native people point at it to ask what comes next.

….

I’m not ready to throw the practice of land acknowledgments out. The form is too small for what it carries; there’s no way to spell out four centuries of dispossession in two sentences. An acknowledgment that opens a conversation, that involves the tribe, that leads somewhere, is different. But the test isn’t in the words. It’s in what action comes after the words have been spoken.

So OK. What does, in fact, come next?

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By the end of this term, Trump will simultaneously have been America’s oldest president and its first petulant 8-year-old president:

Lawyers for the Trump administration told a federal judge that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts desperately needs the major renovation ordered by President Trump and raised the specter that it would need to be “taken down” if those plans are blocked.

In a court filing late on Monday, Justice Department lawyers defended plans for the $250 million renovation project and described how, as recognition for the president’s role, an inscription of his name on the center’s marble facade would be appropriate.

“Without those efforts, the center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” the filing said, “with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.”

The suggestion was something of an aside in the Trump administration’s 21-page filing, which responded to an effort by a Democratic lawmaker to block the center from inscribing the president’s name on the building.

I wish I thought that this threat was empty.

It is true that the financial situation at the center has deteriorated, something which needless to say Trump is directly responsible for:

Ticket sales and fundraising collapsed after President Donald Trump’s name was added to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, even as the center’s leaders publicly touted a financial turnaround, according to confidential documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Ticket sales had already dropped in the10 months following Trump’s takeover, but both ticket sales and donations plunged after the Trump-led board of trustees voted in December to rename the center after him and put his name on the front of the building, according to the records.

The documents show that leaders knew both were cratering even as they publicly portrayed Trump’s takeover as a financial rescue. In a failed June request to keep Trump’s name on the building, for instance, a Justice Department lawyer wrote that renaming the center after Trump “represented a saving of The Kennedy Center which, if this doesn’t happen, would go into financial and structural collapse” — even suggesting in a new filing Monday that without Trump’s name and renovation plan, the building “will be required to be taken down.”

“He has to be allowed to destroy the Kennedy Center physically because he’s already destroyed it financially” is both insane and an argument the Republicans on the Supreme Court will assert without justificaiton has a strong likelihood of success on the merits in future legal proceedings.

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Out with several accomplished television journalists. and…

Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, is leaving to join the CBS News program “60 Minutes” as a correspondent, the show’s executive producer said in a memo to staff on Tuesday.

Mr. Douthat is among a group of journalists joining for the show’s 59th season, which will premiere on Sept. 13. The writer Sebastian Junger and Gianna Toboni, a former Vice News correspondent, will become contributors, along with Trevor Phillips, a British journalist who joined CBS last month. Norah O’Donnell, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” will be a correspondent as well.

They are the first significant hires at the long-running Sunday program since CBS’s new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, orchestrated a shake-up that led to the departure of three top correspondents this spring, including the veteran journalist Scott Pelley.

Ms. Weiss has been trying to rebuild the “60 Minutes” staff in recent weeks after a tumultuous period. In moves that rattled the program’s personnel, she dismissed the correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, along with the show’s senior leadership team, including its former executive producer Tanya Simon.

In all seriousness, this is a trade that is likely to hurt both teams. It’s likely that whatever ideological DEI hire replaces Douthat at the Times will be worse (the astonishing return of Pamela Paul!) And, for that matter, given what Bari is trying to do to 60 Minutes the problem with Douthat isn’t really ideological — the alternative would presumably be Eli Lake or Niall Ferguson or Alex Berenson or some shit. It’s just that “columnist/podcaster” and “television journalist” are very different jobs, and Weiss still seems to not have the slightest grasp on this concept.

Anyway, for his first story, I suggest that Douthat spend some time in Alabama and Mississippi and then in Seattle and San Francisco, and be forced to live one of either the former or latter two for a year. I would actually watch that, but alas we’ll probably get “is it bad when women are allowed to join the workplace?” instead. (Come to think of it, I’m surprised that Weiss hasn’t tapped Helen Andrews yet. Maybe she’s seeing if Olivia Nuzzi is available first.)

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This is Newport Folk Festival weekend, so I won’t be around for the comments here until later. Next week will be the recap of the festival. As I didn’t have a lot of time in Chile for writing these posts, I still had one show from May that I had not discussed. When I went to see my brother in Texas in May, I saw that Max Stalling was playing at Dan’s Silver Leaf in Denton. Now, Dan’s is one of those great places that is everything good about Texas. It basically hasn’t changed in 20 years either. It’s still the home of cheap beer, smoking on the patio, and the best singer-songwriter Texan music that exists. I saw James McMurtry there. I saw Dale Watson there. I saw Turnpike Troubadours there when they were just another semi-popular Texas band. Enough of this type of artist still rises up too that it’s not just ancient singers holding on like at a lot of folk spaces. Max Stalling is just one of those guys who is a big deal in Texas and almost totally unknown outside of it, a very fine singer and songwriter making damned fine country music, in tandem with his wife Heather on fiddle and a quite good band. The opener was super fun too, Matt Hillyer, the singer of Eleven Hundred Springs, almost the prototypical Texas band that never made it outside of Texas but played forever inside the state. A show like that, it’s basically the best of what Texas offers to the world.

Other News:

I’ve seen a few music documentaries recently worth discussing. I have never been a fan of Brian Eno or his work or that whole scene, but I didn’t regret watching Gary Hustwit’s recent documentary on him. The documentary is called a “generative documentary” in that some of the film changes each time you watch it based on a random number generator. This seems incredibly dumb to me though evidently it really does take several viewings to see most of the scenes. Once seems enough for my purposes. But I guess it represents a kind of spirit of Eno messing around with electronics and in fact, he wanted the film this way because of course he did. What’s more interesting about the film to me is the inability by Eno or Bowie or anyone else to describe exactly what it is that Eno ever did. He’s just kind of a spirit or a house intellectual. He doesn’t really play a lot and certainly never played a lot of notes when he did. But who could possibly overstate his influence on culture in the last 50 years? He’s an interesting guy, if nothing else. And for me, really it doesn’t go too far beyond that.

I also watched This Ain’t No Mouse Music, the 2013 Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon documentary about Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz, who was one of these massive American folk music obsessives from the early 60s who decided he needed to record everyone he could and save all this old culture. A German immigrant, he brings a certain sense of, er, purity culture to it all. Yeah, he festishized the fuck out of American folkways. But he also found Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, did an enormous amount of work to save old conjunto records from the border region, helped make relative stars of Clifton Chenier and Flaco Jimenez, I mean you take him being a total crank for all this. And he was definitely a total crank and pretty clearly a gigantic asshole when he didn’t get his way, the film doesn’t even pretend to hide this. Of course, lots of commentary from other musicians about him in the film.

Finally, I watched Kavery Dutta Kaul’s 1988 film One Hand Don’t Clap, about the calypso scene in Trinidad, mostly around Lord Kitchener but also some around Calypso Rose. It’s alright as a film. I’m not a huge calypso guy and the material on the socio/cultural side of all this is a bit more marginal to it than I’d like, so I’d say this is basically OK, with some good footage and some spirited performances. But it’s really better for active fans of the music than your more casual viewer, like me.

Joe Melson, Roy Orbison’s songwriting partner who cowrote “Only the Lonely,” among other songs, died at 91. That’s kind of the perfect song.

If you are a Gen X person and want to feel real old, Dave Kendall, host of 120 Minutes, died at 63. Also, I confess that I never had really thought about the musicians behind “The Pink Panther” soundtrack, other than Henry Mancini of course, but Plas Johnson, who played the iconic saxophone for it, died at 94.

So this is pretty cool–the entirely of shows I have been to being released as a live recording is one William Parker song off The Peach Orchard. But now, the Joel Harrison-led version of In a Silent Way from Big Ears 2025 has been released on Bandcamp. My God this was a great show, one of the all-time highlights of live shows in my life. So I am glad to be able to buy it!

This week’s playlist:

1. Brandi Carlisle, The Firewatcher’s Daughter
2. Palace Brothers, There Is No-One What Would Take Care of You
3. Joe Ely, Live at Liberty Lunch
4. Emily Scott Robinson, Appalachia
5. Margo Price, All American Made
6. Nicholas Hodges/Fred Sherry/London Symphony Orchestra, The Music of Elliott Carter, Vol. 7
7. Quantic/Alice Russell, Look Around the Corner
8. S.G. Goodman, Planting by the Signs
9. Nico Segal, Surf
10. Mourn, Self Worth
11. Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose
12. Harriet Tubman/Georgia Anne Muldrow, Electrical Field of Love
13. Priests, Bodies and Control and Money and Power
14. Buddy and Julie Miller, In the Throes
15. Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM
16. Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory, self-titled
17. Whitney Rose, Rosie
18. Max Roach, We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite
19. Neil Young, Hitchhiker
20. Dave Rawlings Machine, Nashville Obsolete
21. Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs
22. Jim & Jennie & The Pinetops, One More in the Cabin
23. Missy Raines & Allegheny, Love & Trouble
24. The Alan Lomax Collection, Vol. 1
25. Charlie Rich, Behind Closed Doors
26. Jose Gonzalez, Veneer
27. Tropical Fuck Storm, Brain Drops
28. Empress Of, I’m Your Empress Of
29. Sun Mi-Hong, Fourth Page: Meaning of a Nest
30. Django Reinhardt, Djangology 49
31. McCoy Tyner, Together
32. Buddy Tabor, Writing on Stone
33. Led Zeppelin, IV
34. Ken Pomeroy, Cruel Joke
35. Tom T. Hall, The Storyteller
36. Mitski, Laurel Hell
37. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, disc 1
38. John Coltrane, Giant Steps
39. Bill Frisell, Floratone
40. Dave, Psychodrama
41. Chris Stapleton, Traveller
42. Hank Thompson, Seven Decades
43. Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, De Facto
44. Loudon Wainwright III, Unrequited
45. Eric Taylor, self-titled
46. Sunny Sweeney, Trophy
47. Christopher Paul Stelling, Itinerant Arias
48. Gary Stewart, The Essential
49. Bonnie Prince Billy, We Are Together Again
50. Bobby Bare, The Winner and Other Losers
51. Merle Haggard & Bonnie Owens, Just Between the Two of Us

Album Reviews, something of a Newport Folk Festival prep week for me:

Feeble Little Horse, Bitknot

I’m not going to make any huge claims that this Pittsburgh band is a great rock outfit exactly but I do like them quite a bit. Lydia Slocum is a very good vocalist and I do like the juxtaposition between the often singer-songwriter through shoegaze sort of vocals and the very loud rock and roll sound between them. I guess you could say the same thing about MJ Lenderman, who is the prince of indie rock these days, even though I don’t really think he deserves that title. Girl With Fish really got me as the type of rock album I like a lot. Bitknot, the new album, ain’t bad either. The sound is heavier here, which raises the contrast with the vocals. Sometimes, I wish the vocals could match that intensity. The theme: it sucks to be in your 20s. These days, it’s hard to argue with that, not with the horrors the internet and AI have unleashed on the world, subjects of these songs. Ain’t much better in your 50s though, so at least they have that to look forward to.

B

Mavis Staples, Sad and Beautiful World

Any new Mavis Staples album is a treasure. Her voice isn’t what it was 50 years ago, but whose is? She’s still a force and one of the things I treasure her for is her mentorship of young musicians. She is all over Newport Folk, even if she isn’t on the schedule. Last year, I saw her come out and play with Lucius because of course she did. Can you imagine Mavis Staples wanting to sing with you? Must be amazing. Anyway, she doesn’t hide herself away like lot of older musicians or just ignore the present. She doesn’t have some belief that her heyday was the best. She knows that there’s great music now just as there was then and she wants to be part of that.

So one of the really nice things about her new album is that she has great tastes in songs that aren’t just covering another Dylan tune. She starts here totally reworking the Tom Waits song “Chicago.” And then she goes right into a touching version of Kevin Morby’s “Beautiful Strangers,” which is a very nice song both here and on Morby’s album, about gun violence. There’s covers of Sparklehorse’s “Sad and Beautiful World, ” Gillian Welch’s “Hard Times,” Curtis Mayfield’s “We Got to Have Peace,” and then Eddie Hinton’s “Everybody Needs Love” to close the album, a song that got revived by the Drive-By Truckers about 15 years ago. There’s also a new track written by Hozier and Alison Russell. Staples basically rethinks the idea of the Great American Songbook to realize that there are great songs written in the past but there are just as many great songs written today. The band, which includes MJ Lenderman and hosts of other first rate and mostly youngish musicians, is first rate. It’s like the spirit of Newport Folk in one album by one of the greatest artists to ever sing in this nation. Also, good for her to recognize that the old songs are not better than the new songs, and this from a woman who not only loved Dylan’s music but who had a marriage proposal from Bob.

A-

Altun Gün, Garip

I ran across one of this Turkish band based in Amsterdam’s album last year and loved its rock-psych-garage Turkish feel. So when I saw there was a new album, I had to hear it. Turns out it’s pretty damn good! I don’t know that there’s really any big difference than their previous work, but, well, I will say this: I would absolutely prioritze the hell out of seeing this band at Big Ears if there’s any way to make that happen.

A-

Ambrose Akinmusire/Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Luminate Hoverings

Akinmusire and Halvorson are two of the real geniuses of contemporary jazz. This is project they’ve worked on for years. Is it OK to say that I don’t find it overly enjoyable? Yeah, it is. It comes down to much of the problem with a lot of duet jazz albums, which is that there’s not much to hold onto except for their rather occasional notes. For me, this is the kind of jazz that feels like an art project more than an album, not because they aren’t great at what they do. They obviously are, the technical skill is obvious. It’s because I just don’t much care to listen this sort of slowish album unless it manages to touch me in some way and this never quite gets there for me, with the exception of the last track on the album, which I thought quite powerful. It’s all good, they both have albums I love and I can listen to those.

B–

Billy Bragg, The Roaring Forty, 1983-2023

Bragg isn’t playing at Newport this year, but the one time I saw him was at Newport, two years ago. My general impression of him, both live and what recordings I’ve heard, is that I like him more in principle than in fact, as agitprop as songwriting can only go so far. So I like the idea of listening to his 40th anniversary collection, which is 40 songs, to set my thoughts on a stronger foundation. I have a few. First, no one should listen to this much Billy Bragg at one time. Second, he sure has grown as a vocalist over the years. His early tracks–many of which include his best songs, such as “St. Swithin’s Day” are pretty rough, which makes sense since his roots are in punk, but the solo voice with electric guitar didn’t always serve him that well. Third, his best songs really are great. Fourth, I never need to hear that version of “The Internationale” again. Or any version, for that matter. Fifth, he has a great knack for writing a political song overnight, but they don’t always hold up. Sixth, he sounds so good with Wilco backing him up on the Mermaid Avenue tracks, most of which are included here. Bragg is in the end not a great artist, but I am glad he is out there. I just need to hear a track now and then rather than whole albums.

B+

Lone Justice, Viva Lone Justice

The early 80s LA scene was incredibly fertile–X, The Blasters, Los Lobos, Concrete Blonde, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Waits as older but still around, all these people were hanging out and learning from each other. One of the greatest, if short-lived, bands from this scene was Lone Justice, the early alt-country outfit helmed by Maria McKee, who would go on to have a good, if not transcendent, solo career. I picked up an EP of there’s called The Western Tapes, which is 20 minutes long and which has become one of most listened to albums. In 2024, the band went back and put this release together from old material updated with some modern dubs. It shows what a band this could have been had Geffen not ruined them, a classic tale of a major label fucking up something great. At times, she sounds like Exene, other times you are hearing fiddle tunes. There’s also a refreshing lack of the brittle 80s production values that were so terrible for bands like this (seriously, of every rootsy/songwriting artist or band who started in the 60s and 70s, who was actually putting out good material in the 80s, other than Richard Thompson? It’s grim). The wide variety of styles here means it doesn’t quite cohere as a great album might, but it’s certainly a fun listen at the least. Plus she has the balls to cover “I Will Always Love You” and does a pretty good job of it because she doesn’t try to hit that Dolly/Whitney high note AND follows it directly with MC5s “Sister Anne.” How can you not love that?

A-

Hayley Williams, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

I like Hayley Williams and her old band Paramore just fine. Why she is closing the Friday set at Newport it an interesting question. By the time this post is published, I will have already decided whether to deal with the traffic jam at the end of the day in order to see this. Probably I won’t. I wouldn’t mind seeing her at all, but you have to then get home like 3 hours later than you would otherwise. It’s a big commitment.

I have little interest in hashing out the meaning of “folk music” in 2026 and Newport has long ago put away Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. So in 2026, I guess Hayley Williams closes a day here because anyone who writes their own songs and plays a guitar is “folk” music. Well, so be it, I suppose.I will say one thing where this makes sense–Williams is a very good songwriter. The title track, about “I’m the biggest star at this racist country singer’s bar/No use shootin’ for the moon, no use chasing waterfalls” is pretty great. The following track, “Hard” is a banger as well. Why can’t folk music be completely contemporary with contemporary production anyway? Don’t ask Chris Strachwitz that though.

B+

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.

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