February 11: A weird ghostly light on the whole composition
I was going to start this newsletter with an acknowledgement that January is already over and wow that felt like both five months and two days in one go. But then I realized that this is the second newsletter of February and we are already almost halfway through the shortest month of the year.
So that was shocking.
I'm going to blame it on my Winter Olympics induced haze. The Winter Olympics are, to my dopamine-blistered brain, the superior Olympics experience in virtually every way. As I put it to a friend of mine this week, most of what I like about the Summer Olympics comes from the group experience of watching them together. In general, I think watching eight people swim for a while is not on it's own that interesting. Even if they're going very fast, they're going very fast for a human being. Which is to say, not that fast. Meanwhile, right now I can turn on the television and watch an absolute lunatic strap two fiberglass sticks to his feet and fly literally half the length of a football field. Or I can watch a bunch of big American ladies hit a bunch of big Swedish ladies with sticks on the ice. Or I can watch a man on a snowboard pull off a... let me check my notes here... 2360 degree spin before landing like a cat.
It's just not in the same ballpark, these two experiences. So I've been more or less camped out with my family in the living room scooping up every bit of Winter Olympics I can manage.
The main drawback is, of course, the weird patriotic vibes that threaten to sweep you up each time they come around. I have never been one for nationalist fervor, and while I usually like rooting for my countrymen well enough, this year, for obvious reasons, feels pretty bad for that. It does seem like a lot of athletes feel the same way, much to the chagrin of our many jackbooted thugs back home. I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been very weird watching our Minnesotan curling team work to take silver for a country whose posture towards their state capital is one of an occupying force. So at the end of the day, the "current moment" has done to the Winter Olympics the same thing that it's done to most other things - made me second guess every aspect of my relationship to it at such a fundamental level that I feel like I need a soul anesthetic to just sit back and enjoy.
Which maybe brings me right back to the sheer fact of a speeding skier flying down a mountain at eighty miles per hour. When you watch this kind of thing it's like the opposite of an out of body experience - full contact viewing. There's an immediate affective thrill that becomes an anesthetic of its own, I suppose. Which maybe therein lies the thickness of the haze I've found myself suspended in.
Anyways, this week we're running it back old school with four quick and easy recommendations that I've been enjoying so far this year. In their own way they've each punctured my Winter Olympi-mania over the past couple weeks - hope you find them to your liking as well.
Charlotte Day Wilson
Two summers ago I went up to Montreal to get a tattoo from an artist I'd been following on Instagram for a while. When I'm traveling solo one of my favorite things to do is head out late at night without a plan and walk until I can't anymore - just see what happens and where I end up. Which is how at 11p in the Quartier des Spectacles outside in the pouring rain with Charlotte Day Wilson playing through a hypnotic set on a soaking outdoor stage as my soundtrack.
Wilson has been around for a minute. The Canadian R&B star released her debut album back in 2021, but she's been a prominent collaborator and performer on the neo-soul circuit since at least the mid-2010s. Her low, dreamy voice brings a half-remembered mistiness to all her songs; the tunes don't get stuck in your brain as much as they just seep in and keep you feeling aloof and desirable.
On her new EP, Patchwork, Wilson takes things in a spacier, more liminal direction than the relatively direct approach to soulful songwriting and instrumentation we saw on her last full length. There's often some aspect of each song that throws a weird ghostly light on the whole composition. The gospel choir that haunts the background of opening track "High Road" sounds like they've gathered for your at-sea funeral; the processing on Wilson's vocals on "Selfish" feel strangely at odds with the lively and direct percussion; and the warm, blushing synths of the title track trade the close walls of the smoky jazz bar back for a fuzzed out bedroom and meandering melodies.
It's a brief listen that mostly leaves me wanting another full release from her, but Patchwork will tide me over until then. Give it a listen.
Ian McConnell
These days a lot of the entertainment that sticks with me the most arrives in short form via Reels. I'm not proud of it, I know scrolling is boiling my brain in a nightmarish stew of slop, but unfortunately, some of the most talented musicians, comedians, and writers I know of are working there at the moment. The thing that makes this so appealing in particular to me is the strong sense that you're watching some really brilliant people in the process of honing their craft. Not to say that all of this talent are just tossing out their scraps, but rather, that you're getting that hometown watch-the-local-acts vibe pretty much constantly. Ian McConnell's improvisational little songs which have recently been filling my feed are a great example of this particular delight.
Each of these 15 second songs have a few things in common. First, McConnell's wonderfully expressive and rangey vocal - the kind of vocal that would have blown up as a Fueled By Ramen signing back in the early aughts. Second, the lyrics seamlessly blend carefree silliness, legible anxieties and needs, and absurdist jokes together so that each little song jolts your brain around once or twice like a novelty brain teaser. Third, every song feels like a bright shock of originality - no matter what, if I see McConnell pop up on my feed, I feel like I'm going to hear something for the first time.
My recommendation? Just go to his Reels or YouTube shorts page and scroll, scroll, scroll. See if you can find the song about going to Bangladesh - it's a personal favorite.
Inhuman Resources
Horror is often an exploration of the gap between a rock and a hard place. That's where the desperation lives, which means it's where the hardest choices live too. Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination is a game about that kind of desperation and the choices you have to make when you have nowhere to go and opportunity only comes knocking with a catch. In this case, the catch is permanently indentured servitude to a company that trades in kidnapping, global conspiracy, and brainwashing.
As a product, Inhuman Resources is a bit of an odd duck. It's a visual novel built using a proprietary interactive fiction engine that, according to the developer's website, they are making available to other devs. So in a way, Inhuman Resources represents a proof-of-concept for what the engine can do, and as a first run, I have to say I'm impressed. The visual and auditory presentation is slick, framing the anodyne horrors within the game's nightmarish corporate labyrinth in sharp counterpoint. There are also some light RPG elements and even a basic inventory system to add a bit more depth to your choices. It's a pretty tightly designed little package, and definitely worth seeking out if you're in the mood for a bit of the ol' anti-corporate body horror.
Sailor Moon
These days I have about a 60 to 90 minute gap in my morning's when my son goes down for his morning nap. Usually it's the part of my day where I can fold clothes without him diving headfirst into the laundry basket and helping me out by throwing everything on the ground. It's during that window that I've been watching Sailor Moon for the very first time, and folks, I don't know if you know this, but that show is both good and weird.
I'm still very early on - only on episode 10 or something like that - but so far the formula is both straightforward and delightfully direct in the themes it's interested in exploring. Every episode, our teenage heroine Usagi, struggles for a while with some aspect of her young adult life - maybe she's oversleeping, maybe she's worried about gaining weight, maybe she's jealous of her brother's cute new chinchilla. This puts her on a twenty minute collision course with the evil monster-of-the-week villain (inevitably, a hag disguised as a beautiful, aspirational woman) where Usagi works to figure out her new cosmic powers and apply them to save the day.
It is a goofy, campy romp that nevertheless feels incredibly sincere in its presentation. So, yeah, in case you didn't know already, Sailor Moon good.
That'll do it for this week folks. Take care of yourselves and each other whenever and wherever you can. See you next week.
Jordan Cassidy
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