December 29, 2024
A mystery of puppets
I was staying with friends up in Massachusetts over Thanksgiving this year, and they had a few of these marionettes, of a style I’ve seen before, but have never met anyone who knows much about them.
I think they might be Burmese yoke thé puppets, though I’m not entirely sure (and they seem to be a little bit smaller than the puppets in any of the videos I’ve been able to find).
Has anyone else ever seen these or know anything specific about them or what tradition they might belong to? I’d love to hear about them if you do!
December 3, 2024
The music getting me through
Something really odd happened to me almost immediately in the aftermath of the presidential election in November, which is that almost all of the music I’d been listening to beforehand became emotionally unlistenable.
It suddenly all just felt like it belonged to the possibilities of a different world, and some kind of curtain had fallen, irrevocably, between the day before and the day after.
Weirdly, the music I suddenly craved, found oddly comforting, or even found possible to listen to, were things that I’d been giving short shrift to in my library, that I’d thought I’d disliked or (with certain exceptions) didn’t feel like I’d had as much of an emotional connection to beforehand….
I made a playlist called “Wednesday.”
Caroline Shaw with the Attacca Quartet, “Entr’acte”
I actually do love this piece, but I’d given much less attention to this album than to Caroline Shaw’s second album with the Attacca Quartet, Evergreen.
The Flaming Lips, “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”
Two nights after the election, I went to see a low-budget, Off-Off-Broadway production of Fahrenheit 451 being performed at a local church, which was scrappy, weird, and delightful. Bradbury adapted the script himself. I heard a girl sitting behind me say that she’d never actually read the book, but she liked the play. This was her first exposure to the story. It was a tiny thing that felt oddly hopeful.
They used this song in the house music playlist.
The White Stripes, “Black Math”
A friend of mine with whom I often flail about gender and disability and music has been trying to get me to listen to the White Stripes for a long time. I was in college when they were huge and even went to a concert (where I didn’t have a good time, for totally unrelated reasons) but never really resonated with their music. But I felt like now might be the time.
I like this one especially; it feels kind of like hearing Led Zeppelin sing a Buddy Holly song.
Radiohead, “Ful Stop”
I also wanted to like this album more than I did when it first came out, but it feels more and more right to this period of time.
“You really messed up everything.”
R.E.M., “Wendell Gee”
R.E.M. is one of the few groups I had on heavy rotation before the election who have somehow managed to bridge the time for me, though Fables of the Reconstruction was never one of my favorite albums.
I saw a video of Michael Stipe performing this song at a Harris/Walz campaign event a few days before the election, and it took on an almost impossible poignancy afterwards.
Anyone else have any old or new music you’ve been finding particularly resonant or sustaining these days?
Chavisory's Notebook 