Melisma and The Long View
Figure him in your budget. Shortly before I sat down to finish this newsletter up, this newly discovered trove of FBI motivational posters from World War 2 crossed my stream, and effectively bumped another banana out of place for this week.
There are 62 weird, creepy, and sometimes wholly racist documents in all, discovered due to the diligent FOIA work of Trammell Hudson and now preserved forever in the Internet Archive. From the description: “FBI Motivational Posters produced by the FBI Cartographic Section during World War 2, reminding employees to be prompt at their jobs, not talk outside of work, to keep their typewriters in good repair, and to review fingerprint cards to find Axis saboteurs, etc.”
Melisma and the Maghreb. This Pitchfork article missed me back in September 2016. I guess I was busy. It’s a short excerpt from writer and musician Jace Clayton’s book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. In it, Clayton eloquently describes the power of the musical technique called Melisma as relates to Whitney Houston:
“…the crushing power of ‘I Will Always Love You,” its meaning in sound, results from how Houston’s melisma activates a mysterious, even mystical relationship between overflowing emotion, life’s viccissitudes, and ultra precise self control…Houston deploys melisma to enact in sound a heart-felt struggle between holding on and letting go. Like life as it unfurls, each moment is un-anticipatable until it happens, whereupon we can’t possibly imagine it any other way.”
They draw a line from Whitney Houston’s mastery of it to its longstanding prevalence in North African musical traditions, to the later invention of auto-tune, to possible reasons why those North African traditions embraced auto-tune so deeply.
Ancestor thinking and the here and now. There’s a lot I like in this excerpt from a larger book on long-term thinking. Even in this fairly short piece, Roman Krznaric offers a wealth of tools for thinking about what you do today in terms of how to be a good ancestor. But I think, at least in this excerpt, he’s missing a crucial tension, or deliberate contradiction, that has to be there to guide your life’s choices.
His project is to get you to think in terms of things like cosmic time, or seven generations ahead, or in the time scale of Cathedral projects, to help center your path through everyday decisions and what you do with your time. I think these are phenomenal ways to bring humility, perspective, and responsibility to even very ordinary behaviors. But if you don’t pair that with the opposite sense - the absolute immediate imperative to do things that help those right around you and this very moment, it’s easy to get lost in hyper-academic navel gazey thinking. And it’s easy to become completely divorced from the urgencies of your block, your city, your people, the immediate struggles and needs of now, and situations that may be far away in distance but are unfolding with you right now in time. This may be something of a set-up - maybe he covers it in greater depth or with differing emphasis in the book.
If you can pair up these two opposing forces, and let them both stand in tension as they guide you, I think you’re in better shape than with just one or the other. The book is probably worth picking up.
These are the three bananas I found for you this week. Writing this newsletter forces me to make time to stop and read some things, and I hope reading it does the same for you. You can hit “reply” and your email will go only to me. Thank you.