Saturday Night/Sunday Warning S2E6: The Clash presents... Cut The Map.
Another instalment of weekly recommendations and miscellaneous items.
This is the weekly round-up of things I liked in the past seven days (which is free) + extra content for paid subscribers. Read on for the free bit before the paywall arrives to conceal bonuses and unwise honesty.
6 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week
1. ARTICLE
What I Think About LeBron Breaking My NBA Scoring Record
by
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is one of the greatest basketball players of all time — scoring record or not — and he’s also a brilliant writer. His thoughts on LeBron breaking his record could apply to any endeavour where you’re working with other people and trying to be the best:
It’s also about not making scoring your obsession. Otherwise, you’re Gollum and the record is your Precious. The real goal is to win games so that you win championships because you want to please the fans who pay your salary and cheer you on game after game. Fans would rather see you win a championship than set a scoring record.
It’s also about making sure your team gets their moments to shine and thrive and pursue their own greatness. A record is nothing if you used other players’ careers as stepping stones just for self-aggrandizement. For me, I strove to play at the highest level I could in order to be a good teammate. The points—and the record—were simply a by-product of that philosophy.
2. ALBUM
Segue to Infinity — Laraaji
Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify
From Stevie Chick’s Guardian interview with Laraaji:
It was this mystical sound [Laraaji] aimed to recreate with his autoharp. In a trance-like state he would experiment for hours, developing “a vocabulary I could use in these extended improvisations. I explored different tunings, I added electric pick-ups, I hammered the strings”. He then took it to the streets, where he would sit in a lotus position and perform for hours at a time. New York in the 1970s was a city in turmoil – grimy, violent and neglected – the ideal venue, it seems, for the kind of hypnotic enlightenment Gordon and his autoharp were offering. “The music – this wafting sea of harmonics – had a trance-inducing, spellbinding effect,” he remembers. “Yes, it went against the grain of the environment, the hustle and bustle. But it allowed people to just be, to chill and reflect.”
3. ARTICLE
Will talking about my autism torpedo my career and sex life?
by Fern Brady for The Times
I found this piece by Fern Brady frank and fascinating. I’m looking forward to reading her book.
At a loss as to what to do and unwilling to have my partner work as an unpaid carer, I finally read the Aspergirls book. It may as well have been called Hey, Fern, You’re Autistic! Imagine reading the most accurate horoscope ever, except instead of telling you that you’ll find love this spring it tells you exactly why you’ve felt like an alien for most of your life. It listed dozens of things I had thought were specific to my life experience and mine alone: misdiagnosis of OCD as a teenager; low tolerance of alcohol; characterised as the bad child in the family; wrongly placed on antidepressants.
4. PODCAST EPISODE
217: QAnon’s Movie Obsession by QAnon Anonymous
Exploring how conspiracy theorists — particularly QAnon conspiracy theorists — focus on particular movies through Theodor Adorno’s criticism of the culture industry, this is a brilliant episode of a reliably excellent show.
5. COLUMN
Spoiler alert: sometimes real life could do with a trigger warning
by Eva Wiseman for The Guardian
I very rarely recommend columns from British newspapers in this edition but this one by Eva Wiseman is beautiful:
I have what the neurologist calls a “persistent aura” in my right eye, which means I’ve got used to there being a little glittering shadow hovering wherever I look. It’s this aura I think about when I try to explain what it’s like when someone you love is horribly ill in hospital, but also awake, and cool, and seemingly really quite OK. All of us will merrily go about our separate days, collecting the children, nipping to the shops, doing our work, writing our devastatingly funny messages in our various pass-agg WhatsApp groups, but all the time she’ll be floating on the edge of our vision, this distracting, shimmering concern. Like my migraine aura, you quickly learn to live with it, and your expectations of a day shift. In the evening you learn to ask for spoilers before committing to a film, or to flick quickly through a book before reading it, or to avoid the “darkly comedic” TV series because of a weird vibe you get from the trailer on your phone. The problem is, death and sickness is a really common plotpoint. It is useful: it raises the stakes, it provides drama, it propels the story forward and (as I’m discovering in real life) explodes characters in new and unexpected ways. Which is such a shame! Good art requires, I realise, bad feeling.
5. INTERVIEW
Graham Smith of Republic interviewed by Aaron Bastani for Novara Media.
Beyond the paywall: This week’s list of newsletters that nearly got written, a micro-essay, the weekly playlist, and a special bonus recommendation…
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