Recommended Reading #9: From Sing Sing to Manchester
Recommendations, musings, and your next weekend's recommended reading, lovingly curated by Aida Baghernejad.
Hi and Hallo dear reader,
I can’t believe my third month at the Thomas Mann House is coming to an end – has time itself speeded up? Surely it must have been earth spinning faster than usual. Surely.
But there’s still four weeks left! Four weeks in which I’ll probably not finish this huge stack of books next to my bed, but probably stay glued to the news, because it just doesn’t stop being utterly wild. I was driving across Melrose Blvd, listening to the merely ceremonial roll call during the DNC (counting the votes for the nominee to the presidential race), and literally couldn’t believe that the DJ chose Not Like Us and California Love during Gavin Newsom’s speech. I’m all for dissing Drake, but this felt bizarre. Kind of funny, but still bizarre.
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to discuss this and all other intersections between politics and pop at the Goethe Institute, which I’ll tell you a bit about later in this newsletter (including how to listen to this conversation!). I also have two more events coming up during my time here in Los Angeles, and if you are in town, I’d love to see you either at the Thomas Mann House next Thursday for a conversation with Wonderman and Monster director Patty Jenkins, or on the 19th for a listening session with Xiu Xiu at Dublab. Both free, both fun!
Back to this newsletter: despite a bit of a reading slump earlier this month and a bit of a writer’s block when it comes to finishing two essays I’ve been working on during my time at the Mann residency, I’ve read and watched and listened to plenty of new gems I’m excited to share with you. This week’s most important read however is… a film. Why? I’ll explain it all in a bit, and I do urge you to seek it out.
Even though the wonderful Clara Tang told me I should get rid of my standard disclaimer, I still don’t want you to feel bad about not catching up on all the stuff I’m posting here. You have my *explicit permission* to simply skim this email until you find something that speaks to you. We don’t do a bad conscience!
And with that, here you go:
Film: Sing in Sing Sing
I think I saw the best film of the year. Sort of accidentally actually – my bestie and fellow critic Annett and I didn’t set out to have a life-affirming cinematic experience on a random Saturday night. But there we were in a tiny theatre in Los Feliz, moved close to tears, with new-found hope for humanity. When does that ever happen?
Sing Sing is very close to what I’d call a perfect film: beautifully composed, elegantly executed, poetic camerawork, heartfelt acting, a heartbreaking, inspiring narrative, very poignant and not overloaded with distracting sideplots. I’m not going to pretend I’d ever heard of director Greg Kwedar before, but kudos to him for taking a risk that paid off beautifully: only two of the actors in the film, Coleman Domingo (of Selma, Beale Street, Ma Rainey, and… Transformers lol) and Paul Raci (a veteran guest actor who you’ll have seen in probably every last one of your favourite tv shows), are professionals, all the other ones made their start as performers in theatre projects during incarceration. Working with lay actors could be a recipe for disaster, but not here. Quite the opposite: in a story about a theatre project in the notorious max-security prison Sing Sing in New York, it is precisely these actors’ embodied experience that keeps the film from falling into the pitholes of kitsch – particularly as most of them are graduates of the very programme this film portrays.
Based on the Esquire article Sing Sing Follies (which later also became a book) and the real life organisation Rehabilitation through the Arts (which you can donate to/volunteer with), it focuses on the tension-heavy budding friendship between wrongfully convicted longtime theatre geek Divine G (Domingo) and prison dealer/theatre newcomer Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin, playing a role loosely based on his younger self), the film showcases the redemptive power of art and reinstates the humanity that’s too often denied to convicts.
Contrasting the humiliation prisoners have to endure on a regular basis, the loss of hope facing a system that too often does not seem to be interested in rehabilitation, let alone truth, with moments of lightness and joy within the theatre programme, it truly is a gem in today’s bleak remake- and superhero-heavy cinema landscape. It’s currently on the screen in the US with distributor A24 bankrolling free tickets – sadly after I paid money to see it! Smells like an Oscar campaign in the making to me, but what do I know. If it’s not shown anywhere near you, fret not, it seems to be available through Apple+, and there’s already release dates announced for the UK, France & Spain. Nothing for Germany yet, but I’m holding out hope.
Feature: True Crime, Chronic Stress, and its Human Toll
Much has been written about the (im)morality of true crime, particularly in how it affects survivors and friends and family of victims. But this piece in the Guardian takes a look at how the producers of these tv shows and podcasts might be affected – and what chronic stress might do to a brain. I’m no stranger to a bit of stress addiction myself, so The life and tragic death of John Balson: how a true crime producer documented his own rising horror has been a sobering read.
Staying with the topic of TV for a sec, I’m currently reading this piece on hate watching TV shows in the NYT, and I felt so seen.
Essay: Tech Bros at the Play
A few years ago, I randomly struck up a conversation with an older computer programmer at a hot spring in a desert town. Sounds weird, but our conversation was weirder – she turned out to be one of those very odd silicon valley libertarians, and Anton had to navigate us away from descending into a full blown political dispute, which is a story for another day. Anyway, I had to think of this weird little episode in my life while reading the new Jacobin opinion piece Burning Man’s Gentrification Was Inevitable. Burning Man is also on right now, and this year, a woman died on the first day of the festival. The case is currently being investigated.
Music: Please don’t put your life in the hands of a Rock’n’Roll band
Am I the last music journalist to say something about the impending Oasis reunion? I believe so – but obviously I can’t keep my mouth shut, after all this is one of the most important band that has ever graced the face of the earth. And yes, I mean every single word of that sentence. But I might be biased – like almost every other music journalist between 58 and 28, I’m not sure any other band influenced me as much as this one. Oasis delivered the soundtrack to my life (lots of crying seshs all across the world, lots of picking myself up and wiping those tears from my face, what can I say, I’m nothing if not a sad cliché). So in lieu of a deep analysis of the relevance of this reunion, here’s five unpopular, yet undisputable Oasis takes:
Gas Panic! is one, if not the best song they have ever written. I mean it’s literally feral, it makes you want to do things. No idea what kind of things, but things.
Stop Crying Your Heart Out and Don’t Look Back in Anger are basically the same song. And Stop Crying… is better than Don’t Look Back…. Just by sliver, but still.
They are the original vibes band, meaning that it’s a band about literally nothing. There is very little if any deeper meaning to most of their lyrics, even though we all pretend there is and project all our feels and wants and needs on something as utterly dada as Supersonic. But in reality, it’s all pure viiiiibes. And my god, do I love it.
The break up should’ve come with a bigger bang. We deserved a fight on stage. We deserved flying fists. We deserved more theatrics, and honestly, the rest of the band did, too. Sidenote: I was at one of their very last shows, and while it was great because they always were, it was also comparatively… meh.
Nobody needs this reunion. In my opinion, almost every band reunion is totally unnecessary (the exception to the rule is Bikini Kill, ofc). But of all the unnecessary reunions, this is the most unnecessary. We all knew it would be coming sooner or later, either sparked by their mum forcing the Gallaghers to reconcile or their dwindling riches and an armada of lawyers. Now it’s here, and it’s clear it’s a money grab. Of course I’ll still half-assedly try to get tickets because I am obsessed and stupid, but it’s utterly unnecessary and you’d be better off seeing 10 newcomer bands in dingy shitholes for that time and money. I mean, if they broke up again mid tour, it would serve as a kind of comic relief for the entire world – might actually be a nice break from the horror of everything.
And that’s all. That’s all I have to say on this matter. I hope you disagree and pick a fight with me. It’s what they would want after all.
More Music:
For weeks, I was excited to tell you about Drangsal and Stella Sommer’s side project Die Mausis and their second album In einem blauen Mond (“In a Blue Moon”), and then last week, when the record was finally released, I forgot to mention it in my roundup. Mea culpa! So it’s my pick of the week this week to make up for it. After all, the world is a horrible place, but when there’s songs like “Ich leg mein Geld in Käse an” featuring Dirk von Lowtzow (“I invest my money in cheese”), it’s a tiiiiny bit more bearable. And while the songs won’t save the world, they might save you for a minute with their joyful dada-ness.
New Yaeji! Booboo is a return to the dancefloor, and even samples her hit Raingurl – all while discussing the growing pains of becoming too popular too fast. I’m not feeling very drawn to clubs at the moment myself, but catch me bopping all across Thomas Mann’s bedroom to this one.
Look, I get it, the post punk wave of the past ten years had very quickly become its own cliché (Kristoffer Cornils wrote an essay in 2022 about this very matter, it’s still one of my fav pieces of German music writing of the past few years). But Fontaines D. C.’s new record Romance is loads of fun, very Y2K and at times even 90s alt-rock-y, very unpredictable and raw. It doesn’t feel like it takes itself too seriously, which is a relief. Here’s the Thing and Death Kink are my current favs.
Obviously I have a complicated and very critical relationship to Spotify like everyone who deals with music for a living – but when the algo works well, it works really well. Case in point: alerting me to Organs, a collaboration between Molina, a Danish-Chilean producer and singer-songwriter, and the ever-so amazing Danish composer and producer ML Buch. It’s so, so good, I can’t stop listening to it.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Nick Cave’s work, and his music in the past few years is most aptly described as an investigation of grief since the accidental death of his son in 2015 (has anyone ever managed to listen to Skeleton Tree without crying? Don’t think so). Wild God feels like a different stage of grief now, vast, exalting, transcendent.
We obviously have to talk about Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, don’t we? I can’t lie, I can’t get these bops out of my head – it’s just very well executed pop writing, and so refreshingly light and cheeky. Do I need a whole album of these songs? Not really, but I also don’t mind the humour, the double-entendres, the silliness of it all. Oh, talking about silly: The Needle Drop’s in depth review (which resulted in a respectable 6/10) sparked this wonderfully stupid comment:
some fans need to touch grass. Picture: youtube South Africa based jazz percussionist, academic, and cultural worker Asher Gamedze introduces his new ensemble, The Black Lungs, with Constitution, a record that’s simultaneously a intellectual inquiry of struggle, thought, and sound, as well as simply a beautiful somatic experience. I feel like my brain is massaged and challenged at the same time.
Book: What the hell?
I picked up The Lady in Waiting a few weeks ago by accident at Book Soup (one of my very favourite bookshops in LA!). Anton found it, and, while I honestly couldn’t make sense of the blurb, I was intrigued enough to buy it. And woah, this may or may not be one of the most insane novels I have read in a while.
Viva, a young Polish immigrants (author Magdalena Zyzak is Polish herself) picks up a glamourous woman on the side of the freeway, and ends up working as an assistant to her and her husband. What sounds like a good deal quickly descends into a mess involving a stolen Vermeer, loads of sexual tension, and weird mysterious characters of all kinds. It’s sort of a heist novel, very much a hilarious homage to LA, a satire, and a comic take on class – which is a feat in itself. I’m still in the midst of it, and it leaves me highly confused quite a lot of the time with its rotating cast of mysterious and/or shady protagonists and red herrings galore. But it’s the good kind of confusion, the get me out of my own brain kind of confusion, and for that alone I can’t stop reading.
Some work by Yours Truly:
The other week, we had a lovely visitor at the Thomas Mann House: the one and only Jessica Pratt. We had a conversation about Death in Venice, paranoia, and the (sometimes sinister) allure of Los Angeles. Read my profile on Zeit Online (accessible link here)
It’s not really work, but: the wonderful Shawn Reynaldo invited me to give a guest recommendation for his iconic newsletter First Floor (which I have shared here before, it’s definitely Recommended Reading!). Honour for any music person – Shawn’s newsletter is truly a beacon of music journalism in this bleak mediascape. Fun fact: Shawn and I met yeaaaars ago at Melt Festival through my dearest Tabea Mathern. The world is small, and Melt is dead, but we’re still music journalists. Take that as you will…
If you’re in Germany, pick up a copy of taz.die tageszeitung today – and I’ll tell you all about Erewhon’s famed Hailey Bieber smoothie. But obviously with that Aida twist you know and love (making a fluffy little story go depressing within a matter of seconds)
Chappell Roan recently spoke out against the entitlement of certain types of fans in a video which you may or may not have seen. I think it’s such an interesting moment in pop, and tried to make sense of it all in my current Musikexpress column.
As I told you in the intro, last week, Annett, LA Times Entertainment Reporter August Brown, and I had a public conversation about Politics, Pop, and Protest at the Goethe Institute LA, which was intense, and illuminating, and so much fun! It’ll be published as a podcast for the series Foreign Correspondent Unplugged soon.
Again: sign up to my upcoming events at the Thomas Mann House and Dublab!
This is it for issue number nine of Recommended Reading! This week, my writing has been fuelled by a Banana Bread (!) flavoured latte in Sawtelle, courtesy of Maria Mair. Thank you Maria! If you’d like to keep me caffeinated enough to continue writing this newsletter, you can buy me a coffee here like Maria did, or IRL next time you see me out in the wild.
Meanwhile, feel free to send me some feedback, leave a like on Substack, let me know if you ended up reading or watching anything I posted here, and feel free to send the newsletter to friends and foes who might enjoy it, ok?
Speak soon
Aida