For various reasons, I haven’t really been keeping the Ben Irving Postcard Project cross-posted between here and the Instagram account. I will try to change that this morning, but regardless: Volume 4 is in the finishing stages, and there will be a big announcement about that soon, along with some supplemental visual material posted here.
In the meantime, for this Monday, we’re visiting Hammond, Indiana – a small community in the Eastern reaches of Chicagoland, spitting distance from the Illinois border.
Irving mailed this postcard of the Northern States Life Insurance Company on May 12, 1942, and these photo reconstructions were taken on November 16, 2022. Today, the building houses a Montessori school.
More details in a future print edition of Postcards from Irving. Happy Monday.
I’m looking forward to these opportunities coming up, most of which are actually in the daylight. Come and say hi. I’ll make sure to keep this post updated here and over on the DJ page.
Wednesday, June 21 | Midland Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM Friday, July 14 | Loggers Brewing Company (Saginaw) 6PM – 9PM Saturday, July 22 | Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM Saturday, August 12 | Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM Sunday, August 13 | Loggers Brewing Company (Saginaw) 2PM – 5PM Saturday, August 19 | For Art’s Sake Market for the Arts (Mt. Pleasant) 11AM – 2PM Saturday, September 9 | Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM Saturday, October 14 | Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM
I’m going to be in Miami later this week to do some archival research, historic site visits, and some general exploration (about which I’ll share more if things works out). I’m excited to contribute Volumes 1-3 of Postcards from Irving to the zine collection at the Miami-Dade Public Library, as well.
If you know of any events, venues, or organizations that may be interested in learning about who Irving was and what I’ve learned about the highways, venues, and worlds he passed through, please get in touch.
Memo from Irving to Gertrude on his first trip to Florida | December 1933
I’ll be participating in a Faculty Panel tonight at CMU’s Opperman Auditorium (inside Park Library) at 7pm on the Anthropocene to kick off Earth Week. I’ll be with my colleagues Tony Feig and Jim Pytko, along with people from the English, Anthropology, and Philosophy departments.
Central Review and Sigma Tau Delta will be hosting and moderating. Other Earth Week activities can be found via Central Sustainability’s social media.
The first two Saturdays in April, CMU Critical Engagements is proud to present as part of their “Cities, Coasts, and Everywhere Else” theme for 2023, two of the greatest films noir made about Los Angeles: Ridley Scott’s 1982 neo-noir classic BLADE RUNNER (Saturday 4/1), and David Lynch’s 2001 surreal masterpiece MULHOLLAND DR. (Saturday 4/8). Both screenings are $8 in advance (on Friendsofthebroadway.org) and $10 at the door (Broadway Theatre, 216 E. Broadway St, downtown Mt. Pleasant).
Saturday April 1: Blade Runner
Dir: Ridley Scott Starring: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer Rated R, 117 minutes, Watch Trailer Here
It’s 2019 in Los Angeles, and the Tyrell Corporation has taken everything over. Their line of replicants (“more human than human” cyborgs) have gone rogue, and bounty hunter Rick Deckard has been hired to reign them in. Widely regarded as one of the most striking visual films of the 1980’s, Blade Runner remains a cult classic well in line with Ford’s iconic films of the era, including Raiders of the Lost Ark and the original Star Wars trilogy. It presents a wholly unique dystopian view of the near-future Los Angeles, including a legendary scene that reinvents the Bradbury Building (one of LA’s greatest pre-War structures).
Saturday, April 8: Mulholland Dr.
Dir: David Lynch Starring: Naomi Watts, Justin Theroux, Laura Elena Harring Rated R, 142 minutes, Watch Trailer Here
This is it: David Lynch’s masterpiece that garnered him an Oscar nomination for best director, made a star out of Naomi Watts, and topped the BBC’s poll of “Greatest films of the 21st century.” A subtle nod to classic Hollywood films noir like ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (down to the street-name title), this surrealist neo-noir depicts Los Angeles as a fever dream to two women – one with amnesia – trying to unravel a bizarre mystery. Meanwhile, a hotshot filmmaker (Theroux) loses control of his movie and his life. To go into more detail would be nearly impossible here; you just have to experience it on the big screen.
After a long delay, the third installment of the Postcards from Irving zine is now out in the world. It’s 12 pages long, and features highlights of my interview with Jean Trim, a longtime resident of Quincy, FL (1930s-1990s). It also features a special focus on one of Irving’s first regular gigs at the now-gone Lyric Theater in Hartford.
Postcards from Irving Volume 3 masthead.
If you would like to subscribe, send me an email or write to PO Box 1309, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48804. Back-issues are $1 apiece and probably most easily paid for with cash.
Thank you again to Ed Lorenz and Jane Jelenek (pictured below) of the Pine River Superfund Citizens Task Force for paying visits to my Environmental Justice class! As always, it’s been a perfect introduction to Michigan’s very sordid history of poisoning and disaster, and I’m “grateful” (if that’s at all appropriate) that the atrocity happening in East Palestine, OH has brought them greater national attention across multiple media.
I must apologize for my own tardiness in updating this on my own site, BUT my new article “Trash in Everything We Do: Suede’s Singles and Psychogeography in Madrid” was published last week in Volume 6(2) of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music.
Though I spent much of 2022 putting it together, the piece itself felt almost nineteen years in the making, and I’m proud of how it turned out. Thank you to the editors (Sarah Raine, Iain Taylor, Nick Gehbhart) for including me in such a great issue, and special thanks to my friend Lara and her brother Abrahan for their valuable input.
You can check out the whole issue (highly recommended) here in PDF form.
I am working on getting my hands on a few copies of the physical journal, too. Reach out if you would like one.
2009 Photo from outside Club Supersonic in Chamberi. I made no mention in the article of how incongruous it was to see Debbie Harry on the sign. She was obviously influential to Britpop artists, but it’s still odd to me.
was ‘Cuatro Chavales’ by Carolina Durante. Feel free to listen to it here while reading along.
Spain is going to feature prominently within my first few publications of 2023. I will obviously post an update once it appears, but Riffs, an unconventional journal on music and material culture, has recently accepted an article I wrote about how Madrid’s early-2000’s bootleg CD market turned me into a Suede fan. Like all untidy music writing, it’s complicated, but hopefully you will like it.
Cuatro Chavales, the sophomore full-length from Madrid quartet Carolina Durante, is remarkable for many reasons, but for me, it boils down to two. First, on a personal level, it required me leaving North America and the physical act of “being there” to feel genuinely excited about indie rock again. Second, as much as Spanish culture feels off-center from even the rest of “Europe,” the record just hits the global popular music zeitgeist on the head (and then keeps on smashing). In October, America’s biggest pop-star (who adopted a polymorphous indie aesthetic to reinvent herself in her thirties) declared, “It’s me, Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” Eight months earlier, Diego Ibañez sauntered across a bridge over the autovía at sunset, lighting a cigarette and loudly declared the same thing. Did the sheer joy of returning to gigs unmasked last year bring out a collective, subliminal acceptance of responsibility?
2022 was great by transitive property, as any year where I get back to Spain is great. My prior visits to Madrid and Segovia, in 2015, came on an extended weekender flying in from Paris. The following year, Carolina Durante formed in Madrid and began recording quintessentially Spanish rock n’ roll shout-along power-jams. Though I had been obsessively listening to the Estepona power-pop trio Airbag since 2008 and had taken notice of their new label Sonido Muchacho, I still managed to snooze on the emergent movemnet which newer groups like Carolina encapsulated. Or, maybe it never went away; I was just gone for too long.
When you’re cursed to be born in a country that celebrates ignorance, it’s easy to fall out of touch with an entire cultural spark that happens to be sung in another language (even if it happens to be your own homeland’s close-second language). Airbag helped confirm my long-standing suspicion that I had been born in the wrong country – namely, the first time I heard the live recording of their 15th anniversary gig and the beachball-bouncing crowd mouthed the synth solo to “Big Acuarium.” In a truly amazing twist, the pandemic drove Airbag into a phase of their greatest activity since the mid-2010’s. They released a great little EP called Discotecas, which included “Disco Azul” a heart-rendering ditty about falling in love with a coworker that sits high atop my favorite songs they’ve ever recorded.
As soon as it was legally possible for Americans to travel to the EU again, Airbag announced that they would play a special gig at Club Ochoymedia (the 8:30 Club, in other words) in Madrid in mid-May. As I did with Blur’s Hyde Park Reunion in 2009, I bought tickets for the gig and then made the necessary arrangements. My partner and I planned our Iberian journey (her first time overseas) around a pop-punk concert, which feels just as cool to write now as it did to plan a year ago.
Less than two weeks before the gig, Airbag announced that their opener would be someone called Temerario Mario, which means “Reckless Mario” (as everything sounds dumber in English). Possibly influenced by Mario’s detached, lo-fi aesthetic online, I let my excitement to see Airbag drown out any curiosity about who the opener was. My presumption was that it would be some Spanish analogue of Christopher Owens (not great) or Ariel Pink (much worse).
I will proudly say now that I was amazingly wrong.
Like a lot of aging punk fans, my early-’20s dalliance with (indie-)rockism had left me largely apathetic about the prior decade of chaff that labels like Sub Pop and Matador had been spitting out. This prevented me from falling in love with artists like Mac Demarco, the War on Drugs, and other references from 2016. Even in the minutes before Mario del Valle and drummer Juan Pedrayes (who constitute half of Caroline Durante and play in several other bands) walked onstage, I let myself chomp at the bit for Airbag to begin.
Mario began his set with a few solo songs – just him, his acoustic-electric, and (what appeared to be) everyone in the audience below the age of 35 screaming along to everything. “Oh, this dude’s a phenomenon here,” I told my partner, “Of course he is.” Within a couple songs of Pedrayes joining him on drums, I found myself yelling at her, “I kind of love this kid!” unable to wipe the smile off my face. He and Pedrayes covered “The KKK Took My Baby Away” during their set (a potent reminder of just how important the Ramones have always been), and they spent almost all of Airbag’s thrashing through the crowd, climbing onstage, and embracing in tandem stagedives. I had never seen anything like it before, particularly as such a flagrant fuck-you to Spanish laddish machismo (even more so considering how “chaval” closely translates to “lad”).
Carolina Durante: Juan Pedrayes, Diego Ibañez, Mario del Valle, Martín Vallhonrat (via Sonido Muchacho)
All four members of Carolina Durante present different visions of sexual ambiguity, too, which, coupled with their unconventionally photogenic looks, make them the perfect rock n’ roll band for the 2020’s. Even their respective ages are difficult to guess, since they’re tight as hell musicians who still carry themselves as if they looked and sounded like shit (recalling musical urbanitas like The Strokes in their rawest moments). Diego Ibañez delivers a glorious mix of David Yow’s madman energy and David Gedge’s purposefully unsophisticated vocals, beneath a unibrow-scowl that brings to mind a brash young Liam Gallagher. If they’d formed ten years earlier in the UK, they may have supplanted the Arctic Monkeys as “the century’s saviours of Rock music,” but they formed in 2017 in Madrid, so they’ve had to settle for being one of the most exciting rock bands on Earth, largely unknown to the 7.35 billion people who don’t speak Spanish. Their Iberian contemporaries who chose to sing in English such as Hinds and Mourn have earned a following in that world, but they haven’t exactly taken it over. Either way, cultural traits like “la retranca” (ambiguity of personality/intent) are impossible to translate lyrically, no matter what language. The more I understand what Ibañez is singing, the more confused and intrigued I get about where he stands. And that’s fine.
I’ve grown increasingly skeptical and/or distasteful of outsider, English-language analyses of Spain – as enjoyable as Gerald Brenan and that ilk can be to read – but if I could insert my two cents as an English-speaking outsider who’s developed my own complicated relationship with the country: visiting Spain as an American feels like you’re sitting in a stranger’s living room with your feet up on their coffee table. It finally hit me just how off-center Spain is from “Europe” in 2015, and this time last year, it felt even more like a peripheral bubble with its own universe of art, food, and quality bullshit (even their interpretations of stuff created in the English-speaking world) that anybody from anywhere could enjoy or appreciate, but never understand.
This is all strange to write, since Carolina Durante has myriad points of reference in English-speaking indie music. It reveals their Spain to be an (infinitely better) alternate universe in which Doolittle made the Pixies – perhaps Carolina Durante’s most obvious Anglophone influence – superstars in their prime. The whole first half of Cuatro goes straight for the throat in that loud-quiet-loud way, and if “Tu Nuevo Grupo Favorito” doesn’t come true by its first chorus, well you’re about to start yelling along whether you want to or not. By the fifth track, “Urbanitas” (perhaps my favorite track on this thing) the scream-along choruses pound into your skull and played at the right volume, feel like they could peel your wallpaper. Cuatro Chavales feels calculated to be the record that should make Carolina Durante the biggest band in the world, even if that “world” is the self-contained one south of the Pyrenees.
So, let me return to that first point about what makes Cuatro Chavales such a landmark album to me. Ageing American music writers (cough) love to offer opinions about why rock music has “declined so much in cultural prominence” without even thinking what a tiny slice of the world we are. It’s that imperialist mentality that’s so easy to fall into without seeing how and why things don’t have to be that way.
Venues wouldn’t be so stringent and overpriced if our government weren’t too chickenshit to dissolve Ticketmaster and Livenation. People would pursue their creative dreams and be happier if they weren’t tied to soul-crushing employment for health insurance, and more people would come out and stagedive if ambulance rides didn’t cost $1000. Most importantly, it would be easier for us to admit that, sometimes, we are the problem, if we lived in a country that didn’t make a vast majority of us feel that way from birth. I make no pretenses that Spain is bereft of its own problems, but for me, hearing Carolina Durante shines a bright light on just how much more fun we could all be having.