In a September 20 speech in Dubuque, Iowa, Trump said, “What they’re doing to our country, they’re destroying it. It’s the blood of our country. What they’re doing is destroying our country.”
Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply.
Dehumanizers view their targets as having “a human appearance but a subhuman essence,” according to David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor who has written on the history and complicated psychological roots of dehumanization. “It is the dehumanizer’s nagging awareness of the other’s humanity that gives dehumanization its distinctive psychological flavor,” he writes. “Ironically, it is our inability to regard other people as nothing but animals that leads to unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness.” Dehumanized people can be turned into something worse than animals; they can be turned into monsters. They aren’t just dangerous; they are metaphysically threatening. They are not just subhuman; they are irredeemably destructive.
THAT IS THE WICKEDLY SHREWD rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.
Trump’s opponents, including the press, are “truly the enemy of the people.” He demanded that the parent company of MSNBC and NBC be investigated for “treason” over what he described as “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” He insinuated on his social network, Truth Social, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for committing treason. At a Trump event in Iowa, days after that post, one Trump supporter asked why Milley wasn’t “in there before a firing squad within a month.” Another told NBC News, “Treason is treason. There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death.”
Trump has taken to mocking the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which left him with a fractured skull that required surgery and other serious injuries. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has brought two indictments against the former president, is a “Trump-hating prosecutor” who is “deranged” and a “disgrace to America”—and whose wife and family “despise me much more than he does.” The former president posted the name, photo, and private Instagram account of a law clerk serving Judge Arthur Engoron, who is currently presiding over Trump’s civil fraud trial and whom Trump despises and has repeatedly attacked, describing him as “CRAZY” and “CRAZED in his hatred of me.” (Trump later deleted the Truth Social post targeting the law clerk, whom he called a “Trump Hating Clerk,” but not until after it had been widely disseminated.)
Music that feels like it emanates from my youth-when electronic keyboards could elicit the newest and the most nostalgic emotions I experienced. Through the years this type of music in my ears has been lost, but here it's been found. Tranquil and ruminative. A spring in cool, fall air.
Pianist and synth player Lauvdal is a prolific collaborator. Her roots are in jazz, playing in countless ensembles in Oslo’s scene. She is one third of the shape-shifting improvisation trio Moskus, and also played on Jenny Hval’s 2018 EP, The Long Sleep. It’s only recently that she ventured into recording solo. From A Story Now Lost, produced with Laurel Halo, is a suite of woozy electronics and keys. Intricately layered, the tracks unfurl in gauzy webs and ebbs rather than marching out of the speakers.
Farewell To Faraway Friends is less layered, more hand-crafted, recorded at home with nothing more than two mics and a Wurlitzer keyboard. It’s an album that feels simultaneously itinerant and domestic, exploratory and private. Lacking the augmentation of her debut, it retains the knack of tumbling out the speakers like leaves twirling through the wind, with trickles of notes dancing through their own sustains. A sense of intimacy, that you’re listening in on a private ritual, is only amplified as you hear the creaks and soft clunks of the Wurlitzer as Lauvdal’s fingers move across its keyboard.
This feeling of being both homely and placeless, settled and roaming, makes sense when Lauvdal speaks about her life over the last decade or so. Years of touring internationally also meant years of travelling alone. Thanks to the generous parental leave available in Norway, after she had her first child, she opted to bring her family with her.
“When you’re away for longer periods, it’s strange, you change. At least I did,” she admits. “You get into this different way of being in the world, of travelling and seeing a lot of things. When you get home there’s a friction with that – who am I in this place? You need to adjust. When I was travelling with my daughter and partner we were more adventurous. We wanted to stay longer in each place and see more. We didn’t need that readjustment when we got back.”
“I think that for a long time, I didn’t really need it,” Lauvdal says, explaining why it took so long to put out her own music. “I really enjoy collaboration, and I have a very social relationship to music. It’s hanging out with friends and playing together, which is a really nice way to be in the world. But maybe six months before the pandemic, I was extremely tired from touring a lot and from being sort of dragged in a lot of different directions with all the many different projects, and so I sort of needed to gather my thoughts.”
Lauvdal decided to take a bit of time off — then Covid came along, and she had a lot more time off. “I suddenly found myself sitting in a room and playing alone for myself,” she says, “not having an audience and not having anybody at all, not even somebody recording it. I was completely alone, and that was a super-weird and intense feeling for me. Like, who do I do this for? It was a very, very new experience, but also sort of what I needed to get back the joy.”
The album was produced by Laurel Halo, the Ann Arbor-born, Berlin-based artist who, like Lauvdal, has a penchant for aural experimentation. The process, true to Lauvdal’s background, was a collaborative one, initiated by sending sketches over to Halo. “We found some mutual favorites,” Lauvdal recalls, “and we talked a lot about process, and then she asked, ‘Do you ever improvise with your own improvisations?’ That was really a door-opener for me, because up till then, I’d only sampled other people and other instruments.”
From Crack:
There’s something to be said about full-length debuts from artists some years into established professions. There’s often an eagerness from all manner of fans and critics, who await such releases with an additional air of excitement. Prospective listeners may well ponder how the creators of these highly-anticipated, long-awaited projects will make sense of colourful careers and reconcile the various offshoots of their work into a singular album, after extended spells of time spent honing a craft, working closely with peers and experimenting across a diverse spectrum of musical landscapes.
Anja Lauvdal is a Norwegian musician and composer who released her solo debut From a Story Now Lost last year via Smalltown Supersound. Hailing from the small town in the south of Norway where label founder Joakim Haugland started the imprint in the 90s, the record was a full circle moment for more than just Lauvdal. Created with LA-based producer and Awe founder Laurel Halo – who herself shared a remarkable album, Atlas, just a few weeks back – From a Story Now Lost was exquisite and transportive, and chronicled an artist in a clear moment in both time and place. A graduate of the prestigious Trondheim Conservatory of Music, the release marked the latest stop in a musical odyssey that has seen her particulate in various ensembles and collaborate with renowned artists like Jenny Hval both in the studio and on stage over the past decade or so.
I began talking with Jack Youngerman three years ago, as research for a book on the artist community that emerged at Coenties Slip in downtown Manhattan in the late 1950s and early ’60s. What I imagined might be a few conversations turned into regular sessions: he was a generous philosopher of art. He’d moved out to Bridgehampton, on the East End of Long Island, full time in the ’90s, and it was there, in a kitchen that was always sunny and warm no matter the season, with a cuckoo clock singing the hours and his wife Hilary Helfant’s sculptures gracing the round table, that we talked about his childhood, his art apprenticeship in Paris, and his early days in New York City living in an old sailmaking loft by the East River, next door to Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist.
Youngerman grew up poor in Kentucky and didn’t see any art in person until he was 19. He was immediately smitten. He went to Paris in 1947 on the GI Bill to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met the fellow American Kelly. The two often played hooky, with the city itself as their school: visiting museums and cathedrals, seeing the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse at the Salon de Mais, and making pilgrimages to the studios of Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean Arp. Paris was just waking up from its World War II nightmare, and cafés were crowded with arguments about politics, the war, and art. Youngerman absorbed it all. He met Delphine Seyrig, an ambitious French student and actor. They fell in love quickly and were married.
Youngerman and Kelly discovered abstraction in France, in the art and artists that surrounded them and through a series of experiments with how to compose pictures through found images and chance operations. (See Youngerman’s beautiful Untitled drawing from 1953, above, in MoMA’s collection.) Kelly returned to New York first, hopeful that Abstract Expressionism, like a powerful storm front, had cleared the air for other kinds of abstract thinking. Youngerman followed with his wife and six-month-old son Duncan a few years later, with a promise from Betty Parsons that if he moved to New York she would show him at her gallery. On a tip from Kelly, they moved in next to him at Coenties Slip, settling into one of the illegal loft spaces in the oldest neighborhood of Manhattan, a spot so secluded that Youngerman spoke about going “back into the city” when they needed supplies. Well before loft-living became a signature of artists’ life in New York, the Coenties Slip group fixed up the rough warehouse spaces. Youngerman found furniture on the street and splurged on a picnic table from Sears Roebuck at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn. (In one of our conversations, he mentioned offhand that he still had part of that table, and pointed outside to the back porch, where the 60-year-old bench held pots of herbs.)
The friendships at Coenties Slip changed each of the artists there forever, and in turn changed American art history—how we now understand abstraction, Pop art, Minimalism, textile art. But that’s another story. Kelly was a particularly important figure for Youngerman, both from their time together absorbing so much art history in Europe and from the experiments and breakthroughs that each came to individually as artists making their way in New York. Youngerman would go on to work with sculpture and prints, but it was his paintings at the Slip that set the course of his thinking.
Disoriented by the world's growing violence and the political fantasies of the right, music has had a difficult time cutting through to my psyche. This brew by Villarreal, a musician I had not heard of until recently, brought in synch with my sanity and reminded me that there are sonic places where you can begin to align in this dispiriting environment that 2023 is. That is what my tastes are looking for the days and I'm sure my selections will reflect this.
Last year Villarreal released his debut solo album, Panamá 77 (named after the place and date of his birth), an irresistibly groovy, instrumental set that threads psychedelic funk, soul and jazz through traditional Latin-American folk. It was recorded with a large cast including guitarist Jeff Parker, known for both his work in Tortoise and solo records, and LA-based Australian bassist Anna Butterss, who’s served with Phoebe Bridgers, Jenny Lewis and Ben Harper and in 2022 released her first solo album, Activities.
All Villarreal’s projects see him expanding on his folkloric roots (though in fact, he cut his teeth on Panama City’s punk/hardcore scene in the ’90s), but with his second album he’s stretching out in a different way, relaxing the rhythms of cumbia, salsa and Afrobeat into sparer and more silken freeform pieces that channel the spirits of Ray Barretto, the Fania All Stars and Tony Allen, while sharing a genre ambiguity with Chicago adventurers like Tortoise, Isotope 217, New Fracture Quartet and the solo Parker. Lados B – it translates as “B sides” – draws from the same improv sessions as Panamá 77, specifically recordings made over two afternoons in October of 2020. Due to pandemic restrictions, the “studio” was Chicali Outpost, a patio garden in the LA home of International Anthem’s co-founder Scottie McNiece. Earlier live sessions in both LA and Chicago, plus several Outpost sessions, provided Villarreal with a ton of material to choose from and a handful of the recordings with Parker and Butterss made it onto that first album. One “super magical” session, though, demanded a release of its own. As Villarreal told Uncut: “It felt organic and raw improvising as a trio, with very minimal vibe to add in post-production. That’s what characterises those tracks [and led me to] thinking this can be a whole other album.”
Originally from Panama and now based in Chicago, Daniel Villarreal is a DJ, percussionist and drummer with several progressive alt-rock or folk-infused bands he co-leads such as Dos Santos, the Valebo duo or Yda Y Vuelta and which were all born out of the Latinx cultural hubs in North America. The drummer derives his style from a blend of popular Latin dance rhythms like Columbian Cumbia, Afro-Caribbean Salsa or Mexican Son with psychedelic rock, afrobeat, funk and jazz influences.
Following on from two well-received LPs with Dos Santos for the excellent Chicago-based International Anthem label, a 2019 impromptu gig in Los Angeles with a small ensemble sowed the seeds for what would become Daniel Villarreal’s first solo album.
Recorded over 5 sessions between 2019 and 2020 in three different locations, featuring 12 guest musicians and released on 20 May 2022 last, Panamá 77 is a fantastic instrumental album brimming with a vibrant creative energy. Released a year later, Lados B features unreleased music from the same performances and showcases Daniel Villarreal’s music in a striking trio formation.
When Dos Santos drummer/percussionist/composer Daniel Villarreal-Carillo issued the adventurous, polygenre Panamá 77 in 2022, he utilized an alternating cast of players. Two of the musicians, bassist Anna Butterss and guitarist Jeff Parker, also co-wrote five of that album's 12 tunes with him. Parker and Butterss are Villarreal-Carillo's accompaniment on Lados B. They recorded it during the pandemic over two days in October 2020 in the backyard of L.A.'s Chicali Outpost. This set differs from Panamá 77. In place of carefully constructed, painstakingly layered jams melding Latin styles with jazz, funk, rock, and psychedelia, we instead get a deeply intuitive, loose, open, and largely introspective three-way musical conversation, mildly related in feel to Parker's wonderful Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (its lineup also included Butterss).
Villarreal-Carillo introduces opener "Traveling With" using various cymbals, cowbells, and chimes before his bandmates enter with a mysterious call-and-response Latin vamp. Bassist and bandleader accent (via overdubbing) and extrapolate the groove into a jazz-rock approach without sacrificing pulse. As the trio interact, their statements and responses serve to extend and buoy the groove into infinity. "Republic," at just under three minutes, is one of the most unfettered tunes here. Parker's West African-influenced guitar playing rides and glides atop Butterss' joyous bassline, hand drums, small percussion instruments, and a drum kit that double- and triple-times the band. "Chicali Outpost" is introduced by Butterss' upright alongside shakers and hand percussion. Parker plays a circular vamp via the guitar's ringing harmonics until Villarreal-Carillo joins with a drum kit and Parker begins to solo rhythmically and mercurially, winding around the riff, cutting through it, adding modal blues, post-bop, and edgy psychedelia. An upright bass solo, vamp, and spectral percussion introduce "Bring It." Parker's sonic guitar washes create an ambient backdrop as the drummer improvises alongside Butterss. The delightfully funky "Salute" is laden with organic drum breaks, a round, warm, elastic guitar vamp, and a contrapuntal bassline. Neal Francis joins the trio on a Rhodes piano, adding fingerpopping rhythm, harmony, atmosphere, and ballast to the vibe. "Daytime Nighttime" is edgier. Parker's treated guitar erects one vamp that's joined by Butterss. Villarreal-Carillo frames it by adding a shadow beat for Parker's solo, which weds blues and jazz to tango. The longest cut, "Things Can Be Calm," is a subtle, mysterious, drifting meditation in texture, syncopation, and repetition before closer "Rig Motif," which is full of fusion chaos and rock dynamics that careen into a 21st century futurist take on post-punk Panamanian salsa. Each instrumentalist solos, but always inside tightly structured rhythms.
Lados B offers an entirely different M.O. from the more stridently produced Panamá 77. That's not a knock. If anything, the more open approach to creating tunes on the spot is exceptionally appealing. That said, don't let sonic appearances deceive you: the music here is exquisitely complex, often subtle, and kinetic. It's probable that listeners will find Lados B a stronger outing than its predecessor, simply because its adventure and intimate conversations inspire exceptionally inventive sounds.
To many inside and outside this war, the brutality of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks was unthinkable, as has been the scale and ferocity of Israel’s reprisal. But Palestinians have been subject to a steady stream of unfathomable violence — as well as the creeping annexation of their land by Israel and Israeli settlers — for generations.
If people are going to understand this latest conflict and see a path forward for everyone, we need to be more honest, nuanced and comprehensive about the recent decades of history in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, particularly the impact of occupation and violence on the Palestinians. This story is measured in decades, not weeks; it is not one war, but a continuum of destruction, revenge and trauma.
Since the 1948 Nakba — in which entire Palestinian villages were wiped off the map and the modern state of Israel was established — Palestinians have endured a subjugation that has defined their daily lives. For decades, we have been reeling from Israel’s military occupation, as well as a succession of deadly invasions and wars. The wars of 1967 and 1973 helped shape the modern geography and geopolitics of the area, with millions of largely stateless Palestinians split between Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, often referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, Palestinians are prohibited from entering or leaving, except in incredibly rare circumstances.
This history has been absent from much of the discourse surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, as though the attacks of Oct. 7 were completely arbitrary. The truth is, even in times of relative peace, Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel — if they are deemed citizens at all. According to Israeli law, Palestinians do not have the right to national self-determination, which is reserved for Jewish citizens of the state. A variety of laws restrict Palestinians’ right to movement, governing everything from where they can live to what personal identifications they can hold to whether or not they can visit family members elsewhere.
The “right of return” — the right of Palestinians and their descendants to return to villages they were ethnically cleansed from during the 1948 war — is central to many Palestinians’ political perspective because so many are still, legally, refugees. In Gaza, for instance, roughly two-thirds of the population consists of refugees. This status is not some abstraction; it dictates everything from where people live to what schools they go to or doctors they see.
Many Gazans have parents and grandparents who grew up only a few miles from where they live now, in areas they are now, of course, forbidden to enter. They still invoke rich memories from their childhood or adolescence, when they walked through citrus groves in Yaffa or olive fields in Qumya — the latter of which, like many villages whose people were expelled into Gaza during the 1948 war, was later transformed into a kibbutz.
There have been periods of increased cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians over the past 75 years. But these were usually preceded by times of increased conflict, such as the first and second intifadas, or popular uprisings. The intifadas, in which Palestinians participated in large-scale resistance, sometimes civil and sometimes violent, are often presented by Western media as random or indiscriminate bursts of murderous savagery — as has been the case with the Oct. 7 attacks. But that violence did not happen in a vacuum.
Stark conditions in Palestinian communities — including the ever-tightening control of daily life through violent night raids, arrests, military checkpoints and the building of illegal Israeli settlements — were the backdrop to these outbursts. Unfortunately, from a historical standpoint, these acts of violence seem to be the only things that have moved the needle politically for Palestinians.
Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, a finalist for best foreign film at this year’s Oscars, features the familiar fever-addled explorers, close-ups of vigilant jaguars and snakes baring their fangs, long pans of the jungle canopy, and indigenous tribesmen imparting portentous wisdom (“The jungle is fragile; if you attack her, she’ll fight back”). But the film is strange enough to resist the worst of the old clichés, which is to say it resists moral certainty. Guerra, a young Colombian director, shoots in a muted black and white (apart from a stunning montage in Technicolor during a climactic hallucinatory sequence), employs a counterintuitive narrative structure, and, most significant, empathizes not with the two white explorers whose misadventures drive the plot but with their indigenous guide, a profoundly conflicted figure who bears no resemblance to the customary noble or murderous savages.
The plot is based loosely on the stories of two scholars who traveled to the Amazon decades apart. The German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924) made several expeditions in the early twentieth century, and shot documentary footage that appears to have inspired Guerra’s sets and costume design. The Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001) lived in the South American rainforests in the 1940s and 1950s, becoming an expert on hallucinogenic plants and natural rubber. Guerra unites the two men through Karamakate, a shaman who is the last surviving member of a tribe destroyed by rapacious Colombian rubber plantation barons. In the Koch-Grünberg scenes, set in 1909, a skeptical young Karamakate (played by Nilbio Torres, a hunter who lives on the Vaupés River) agrees to help the feverishly ill anthropologist find the fictional Yakruna flower, the only known cure for his disease. (Koch-Grünberg did, in fact, die on one of his expeditions, but of malaria, in 1924.) In the Schultes scenes, set three decades later, the biologist begs the now hermetic, senile Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar, one of the last fifty remaining members of the Ocaína tribe) to help him find the elusive Yakruna for an equally selfish, but more cynical, reason. Guerra alternates between the two stories reluctantly, allowing each to expand and respire. The film’s pace is never slow but patient, lingering, accretionary, dilating with the logic of a nightmare.