Soundtrack to an August Noir
ISSUE #118
My Augusts are filled with the most dizzying mysteries. Faced with deducing what happened to the year, I play detective in my very own sun-drenched noir. I corner my witnesses ("Did I really say that?") and gather my clues ("That might be where I hit bottom"). Everything I see becomes mirage, every message a code I somehow cannot crack.
My library emailed me last week. My books are finally due, the ones I've left untouched since March. One is called Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties—I've crammed four-hundred pages in about two days. In it, there's substantial evidence that the Manson murders were conducted by the CIA—they tried to use him to frame the Black Panthers, but when all went haywire they had to fix their story. Time lurches forth despite unspeakable corruption.
We're trained to dismiss conspiracy as lunacy—which is not a bad impulse, as false ones cause real harm—but it should be known by all that the CIA squashed the left for almost sixty years. At least 250 operatives worked the press in the 60s, most notably at Time, Life, and CBS News. I doubt these things have changed, only the platforms and their targets—BLM, USPS, the nomination of Bernie Sanders.
With screens, we mass produce whatever lies we want—first it was cinema, then TV, and now it's feeds and their replies. These pixels are mirages that surround us all. Hobbled without faculties like smell and facial nuance, we're left more impressionable to being led astray.
The sun brings this paranoia to a sharper boil. I scratch at blistered skin to get to any kind of truth. Who is shaping my beliefs? How many evils have I ingrained? Who is keeping me from the light of good truth in the name of furthering capital?
The answers may come from a tuned internal compass, guided by magnets of art, of kindness, of honest and shared and vulnerable perspective. All these things point toward some ineffable good. Emotional engagement with another loving being. We must familiarize ourselves to recognize where it lies.
The playlist today will soundtrack our scouring—straw hats and cigarettes, detectives of the new millennium. Our enemies lurk behind every byte, and these are the songs for sussing them out. If something smells fishy, we learn throw it back.
This month, we’ve had a new song by Sufjan Stevens that harkens back to Carrie & Lowell; a Zach Bryan album that might sell stadiums and speak human at the same time; another fuzz-and-buzz single from MJ Lenderman; and a Julie Byrne masterpiece, the most cauterizing grief album since the aforementioned by Sufjan.