1) Pokey LaFarge, “In the Blossom of Their Shade” / When I first caught wind of this St. Louis-forged songwriter, I assumed LaFarge’s early jazz-and-country act was all schtick. A dapper rambling man outside his time. I was quite wrong. LaFarge’s music continues evolving and, while he still draws on the best sounds of the early 20th century, he shapes them together into an increasingly tender canvas upon which to croon thoughtful, spry melodies.
2) Starflyer 59, “Vanity” / The latest from Jason Martin feels like a letter back from an old friend, someone you’ve come to know slowly and surely over the decades. His dispatch shows how he’s changed (employing noir-ish and, at times, Latin-influenced guitars); how he’s stayed the same (mixing shoegaze and synth-rock principles); and, most important, he reminds you why you became friends in the first place (penning lines like “Cause everybody’s out there / But I spend my whole life in bed”).
3) Jonathan Lee, “The Park Bench Is an Endangered Species” for the New York Times / Lee’s short essay is both an ode to the simple majesty of a park bench—and a sad-eyed nod to the social issues that sit there (ways in which communities employ a “hostile architecture” strategy, intended to discourage the unhoused, among others, from congregating). Lee writes:
“Maybe that’s the greatest power of the park bench: its capacity to retain and encourage the art of observation. A good bench catches us in our quietest, most vulnerable moments, when we may be open to imagining new narratives and revisiting old ones. Our masks are taken off, hung from the bench’s wrought iron. On other nearby benches, babies are being burped. Glances exchanged. Sandwiches eaten. Newspapers perused.”
4) J.C. Scharl, “Daybreak in Bretagne” for Ekstasis Magazine / In just nine lines, the poet J.C. Scharl evokes no less than three of the most beautiful images I’ve absorbed in recent memory. Forces as fleeting as mist and as enduring as the planet are safe and considered in her hands.
5) Ashley Lande, “Resurrection Dazzle” for Ekstasis / I need an entirely new list of five to properly handle and honor the themes in this terrific essay about life, death, faith, transhumanism and the spaces people carve out, then eventually leave. Let me simply leave this passage, and encourage you to follow the bread crumbs into Lande’s prose:
I had seen ugly, dark death, when my sister had died from an addiction we didn’t even know she had eight months prior. Now I had seen a holy death—still, with its own ugliness: buzzing and clicking and blinking medical equipment, fugues of terminal restlessness that had compelled him to struggle to leave the bed and then collapse again in ragged breathing as his wasted lungs reeled from the effort, the insomniac tension of waiting for something terrible. Incredibly, crushingly, devastatingly sad. Sad beyond sad. But hope was present, too, sometimes as an unwelcome, irrationally cheery optimist, others as a lifeboat to which I clung, nearly desolate, on a dark sea of chaos.