five things #1: weekly banjos
a memory, some music, and schmaltz
The writer
of officially wrote about her “Five Things” essay form back in 2022, but I can remember her using a variation of the form way back when she was publishing on her own site, which I found via her forthcoming book, The Parisian Sphinx. I’d encountered similar versions of the form at various writing programmes and ad hoc writers’ groups — lengthened or truncated, depending on the facilitator — and liked how “hybrid” the structure made my work look, visually and literarily. It also helps that the form allows for brevity (never my strong suit) and suits my particular strain of chronic Twitter brain.
Something about working with a five things essay form feels very “London ca. 2014-2016 AD”, not to mention that, as I’ve aged, shorter texts make the act of writing easier to wrap my arms around. I spend much of my days working on corporate content, ghostwriting articles and reports, so thinking about long-form writing has felt like someone’s tied an anvil around my head. Writing a sentence that is a paragraph feels like a blessing.
22 January 2023 2024.1
I.
Remembering to write “2024”, instead of 2023.
II.
Someone else took one of my favourite photos of you: standing at the wet bar, pouring whiskey or rum into a shaker, glasses tipping down the bridge of your nose. Your mouth is a little open, like you’re telling one of your famous stories — sometimes you start one that I’ll have heard it before, but I can never bring myself to interrupt; you are at your best (and, sometimes, your worst) when you’re telling a story — or maybe you’re holding forth about the origins of this-or-that cocktail, or reciting one of your bad jokes — did they press the button? You are focused in the photo, but loose, relaxed; at ease with the world. It’s a good impression. I’ve pinned the memory to my wall, but took it down this week in preparation for the move — tucked it into my copy of The Late Americans, not having anywhere else to put it or plans for where it’d be safe to go up again.
III.
I heard that Pitchfork was being subsumed into the Condé Nast behemoth this week, and it brought up a lot of ambivalent feelings. Some indifference, a little pettiness: the site has played a role as a villain in my mind, primarily because of their choice to review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989, rather than of the actual, award-winning album (a mistake amended in 2019). They were anti-populist, misogynistic elitists who seemed like they couldn’t just let people enjoy things — but, man, could they write! Razor sharp sentences that cut close to the marrow of the music.
Jenn Pally, one of Pitchfork’s editors, wrote one of my favourite reviews of Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters, but it was Ryan Dombal’s 2012 review of The Idler Wheel that got me really into Apple in the first place. I first fell in love with her raspy, bell-like voice in a cover of Cy Coleman’s “Why Try to Change Me Now”, but an album always seemed a much bigger hurdle to me. You have to spend time with an album to understand it, to wrestle with its arcs and themes and intentions. I’ve rarely fallen in love with an album without devoting a significant chunk of time to it — when Lorde’s Melodrama came out, I lay on my floor with my eyes closed over the course of three nights, trying to unpick the layers of melody and lyrics and meaning.
The Pitchfork review of The Idler Wheel was the first time I encountered the tools to understand what an album could do — what it meant to put together a project, or how an artist fit within a wider constellation of peers, rivals and influences — and it remains one of my favourite pieces of music journalism. That was probably the first piece of writing I understood to be a critical engagement with art. Before that, I’d been listening to a lot of anime OSTs and the nostalgic emo-pop/rock that soundtracked my teen years (All-American Rejects fans, where are you??). It was only later when money and record stores allowed me to actually encounter albums on my own terms, rather than the piecemeal downloads I pirated off LimeWire or the pop albums in my older sister’s collection.
The piece on the Idler Wheel opened a door for me, cracked open something vital that would later fuel largely-unrealised dream of writing about art(s) for a living (which I would later go on to not even really want, because I am 1) a lazy writer and 2) wholly prefer to not have to worry about money). It taught me how to love “difficult music,” like Apple’s, that resist catchy hooks and candy choruses, in pursuit of something more complex. Roughage for the mind. I liked the opening tinkle-drops on “Every Single Night”, and I enjoyed the propulsive forward-drive of “Hot Knife”, but back then I didn’t love “Werewolf” or “Periphery” the way I do now. I had to sit long and hard with the album, spend time wrestling with it, getting intimate with it. Now I can’t tell you if my relationship to that album is a love built on familiarity, but time (and heartbreak and youthful anger) unravelled Apple’s spiky songwriting for me, and I trace those origins to the clarity and insights I got from that Pitchfork review.
The site unfavourably reviewed my favourite album of hers, Extraordinary Machine (not the Jon Brion version, which I really dislike), but I respect the work.
When I heard the news today, I went through their catalogue of Sunday Reviews — critical looks at significant albums from the past — and found more ideas and words for art I knew but was mostly new to. After hearing about him a lot, I started listening to Billy Joel’s The Stranger from beginning to end, and enjoyed this retrospective rendering of its journey. I liked their piece on Third Eye Blind’s debut album — I can still sing all the lyrics to “Semi-Charmed Kind of Life” (explicit and non-explicit versions) and “Jumper” still makes me cry — and I went hunting for a piece on the Stone Roses, which really helped explain why I didn’t like John Squire as much as I his 10 minute guitar riff on “I Am the Resurrection.”
Over the last two years, I got really into Billy Bragg. At first it was weird but fascinating to re-encounter the UK in a way that was so different than the one I knew while I was at university: the hardscrabble 1980s, punk-rock visions of angry young men and women in poor London neighbourhoods and abandoned Midland ones, and the vivid collapse of union power and its resurgence. My friend Amar whispered to me a secret about Billy’s work with Left Field, and I felt giddy with excitement that I understood its meaning and context and value. I found a sliver about him in a Pitchfork interview with Malcolm Gladwell, who talked about how Bragg’s work was pivotal to his own politics (whatever kind of credence you want to give to that).
I don’t think of Billy in terms of albums, though. I received his work through a series of haphazard recommendations, so my understanding of him is deeply tied to another person. But, in some ways, I think Billy as a whole is more “vibes” than anything, anthemic and circular when it comes to his themes and preoccupations. There are recurring figures and motifs — the lonely boy, the angry louse, the adulterer, the wandering man — threaded through with short, sharp poeticisms that can take your breath away. There are also the Major Arcana figures: a witch muttering in Latin, a drab coat and a mobile home, grief standing at the playground, lovers parting at war’s end.
Now, Billy is a comfort listen. I went to see him in Melbourne in 2023, and could barely see anything over the heads and shoulders of the many other 45-years-and-older fans, but hearing the songs — knowing the lyrics as well as I knew Apple’s — was electrifying. Here is where I started.
I’m always sad to hear about more media going down in flames — I’m not as sad about Pitchfork the way I was sad about gal-dem, or Jezebel, but it’s hard not to think about it as another death-knell in the long pathway to a monoculture.
IV.
As I alluded to last post, I made my own chicken schmaltz. My mom bought me 2kg of chicken skin and fats, which I then spent hours rendering down into a clear, yellow liquid that can replace oil or butter for cooking.
Why the fuck would you do that? you’re probably asking.
In 2022, I was in New York City, and woke at 8am to beat the crowds at Katz’s Delicatessen — my first Jewish meal. I ordered a salted beef sandwich and a bowl of matzo ball soup and fell in love. There was way too much food, but I dug into the massive, pale dough, its texture reminiscent of a perfectly steamed fish ball, the kind you get at the good dim sum places. I returned home three weeks later with the plan of recreating the meal, and I found out that I needed schmaltz to make them. Hence, the rendering.
Now, I realise that I also need matzah, which is basically impossible to get here in KL. So, the next plan is to make my own unleavened bread. I’ll update when (if) that happens.
V.
No, I don’t know why I called it “weekly banjos” either.
Much love,
Sam.
I mean, just look at how great an essay looks when you split it up into “parts.” It looks like it should be in Granta or The White Review (rip) or retrospective anthology on Jean Valentine.