1. Anne Carson on Rosalía
The London Review of Books has run Anne Carson on Rosalía, which is one of those improbable pairings that turns out to be entirely inevitable once you read it. Carson takes the strange contract we sign with our entertainers — that they will burn themselves down in front of us at a certain ultimate degree of input, and that we will feel briefly redeemed by watching — and reads it against a singer who has learned to carry both flamenco and stadium electronics in the same body. This is not a puff essay. It is Carson in her cold, precise mode, thinking about heroism, sacrifice, and the way voice becomes a kind of religious labour. Read it slowly. It will spoil most other music writing for you for a few weeks.
2. Ugly façades are the real housing veto
Beauty In My Backyard, in Works in Progress, is the essay YIMBYs should have written a decade ago. The argument is disarmingly simple: opposition to new housing is not, mostly, ideological. It is aesthetic. People do not organise to stop density in the abstract; they organise to stop the ugly thing that is about to be built next to them. Charmless facades, cheapened materials, and the flattened rhythm of value-engineered blocks are not decoration issues. They are a political veto mechanism that has quietly killed thousands of homes. The corollary is uncomfortable for architects and for the housing lobby alike: if you want your building approved, it will have to earn its right to be looked at every day. Beauty is not a luxury addendum in this domain. It is planning permission.
3. A contrarian case for burying our trash
Also in Works in Progress: Just Bury Your Trash, which asks, in the driest possible tone, whether most of what we call recycling is theatre and whether a well-run modern landfill is, on the honest ledger, the more responsible option. The essay is careful, materially literate, and unafraid of the moral discomfort it produces. You may not agree with it by the end. You will not read waste policy the same way again. A useful correction against the reflex that every civilised gesture must be visibly virtuous rather than actually well-engineered.
Amsterdam: two evenings at the Bimhuis
Two concerts worth the tram ride to the IJ.
Tonight, Friday 4 September, 20:30 — Jasper Blom & Ben van Gelder, CROSSWORDS. Two of the more serious Dutch saxophonists, in a transparent quintet with three horns. New Dutch Jazz on its own terms, not as export product.
Saturday 5 September, 20:30 — Pablo Murgier Quartet. Argentinian pianist who has spent long enough in Paris to fold tango into a European jazz vocabulary without losing the pulse it came from. The right evening for anyone tired of clean genres.
Read Carson on the singer as burning body, then Works in Progress on the buildings we allow ourselves to build, then walk out along the IJ and let two horns and a piano remind you that some things still take a room, a listener, and an hour.