Ana
@motherslug
Detroit writer. Books, jazz, records, eclectic music, bleak sci-fi, depressing and upsetting fiction and films, the works. Read me in print media (Uncut Magazine & Maggot Brain), plus motherslug.substack.com and some other places when they will have me!
Every morning I spend twenty minutes in the sun, reading. It’s the best part of my day.
I’m gonna need Joanna Newsom to write a song called “Spare Needles and Pins, Plummets, Pencils, Scrap-paper, and Jeweler's Putty for the Compass.” (Text is page 241 of our boy Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, of course.)
Added my selections to the Staff Picks shelf yesterday, coincidentally bookending DeLillo to Pynchon.
I'm playing serious catch-up with a bunch of this year's new jazz releases and I'm having a great fucking time. Here are 4 standouts so far (links for all in the comments): • Sharada Shashidhar, A Foot On The Ground • Micah Thomas, Lucid • Phillip Golub, Partisan Ship • DoYeon Kim, Wellspring
Transcendental set from new Detroit band Field Kitchen, with special guest Ken Vandermark.
I do not have additional information, but it has come to my attention that Maggot Brain has ceased production. I was very involved in the first few issues & less so later on, tho I did get a few more stories published. I am VERY sad about this & will write more about it later.
89 years strong, baby. He’s got another one or two or even three in him, I just know it.
#NowPlaying Contemplating desert island art is largely a hyperbolic way of expressing our favorites but if I truly and really could only listen to one album for the rest of my life, it’s remarkably easy to choose JOURNEY IN SATCHIDANANDA.
#NowPlaying Herbie Nichols Trio, 1956. Satisfying straight-ahead piano trio, w/the great Max Roach on drums! This is pianist Herbie's show though, and it's delightful. He co-wrote Billie Holiday's "Lady Sings the Blues" and there's a great version here but her voice is missed.
Recent spins: Ut, In Gut's House (1987, Blast First/Mute [mine is a reissue], hard-edged radical no wave-drenched experimental rock) & Mute Duo, Lapse In Passage (2020, American Dreams, searing pastoral melancholic ambient drone-Americana).
Latest from me: on Listening Position's reissue of Kelan Phil Cohran's 1993 album African Skies, one of the deepest post-1970s spiritual jazz records. Features two double basses, two harps, lots of percussion, cornet, voice and the Frankiphone, an electrified kalimba that Cohran built himself.
I love John Biggs' illustration accompanying my Thomas Pynchon piece in @currentaffairs.bsky.social. I wrote a bunch of stuff about how he predicted it was going to get worse like a month before everything got so much worse.
Alice Coltrane describing the difference between the piano and harp vis-à-vis the sun: "The piano is the sunrise and the harp is the sunset ... But the sun is always the sun and a person is always who he or she will be.”
Really interesting to read in Alice Coltrane's own words how she characterized her approach to playing avant-garde music as journeying through a park and stopping to consider the beauty of its different areas: “Sometimes your moment is there like an eternity.”
Alice Coltrane on John: “But he would sit there and the quiet was strong. It didn't make you feel isolated, but part of. I identified with it right away. And it was a kind of silence that you don't want to disturb. You don't interrupt with, ‘Oh, would you like some tea?’ You respect it.”
Fascinating to read Virginia Woolf's first novel and an Alice Coltrane biography at the same time, having an inadvertent conversation about genius women entering creative and artistic spaces typically reserved for men.
Detroit jazz: Bennie Maupin reflecting on Alice Coltrane being a PERCUSSIONIST in high school concert band!
Miscellaneous reading plans for the year: • Mason & Dixon • Underworld • The works of Virginia Woolf • Music books & memoirs
Loved Jim Jarmusch's new film, Father Mother Sister Brother. It's a quiet, charming, well-constructed family triptych of unconnected stories with thematic resonance. Awkward, tense, reflective, and sad in that "life is so fucking weird and full" type of way. I cried a good bit through the final act!
Subscribe to @currentaffairs.bsky.social and you can read me on Thomas Pynchon in the latest issue, out now. 😬
Funniest and weirdest book about the dark curdling of political ideals and proliferation of America’s living dead, twinned psychic journeys of rejection and abandonment among the foghung redwoods, the fascist threat and the stupefying supremacy of screens. Must be read twice!
I can already tell that reading Mason & Dixon is going to change me: “Ponds and Creeks are frozen over, and the Trees a-glare to the last slightest Twig,- Nerve-Lines of concentrated Light.”