Corsican Stargazing, Crisis Acting, Calvary Cross
Hello. We return from our summer hiatus, and to our regular publishing cadence, to bring three new recommendations: an astronomical reflection, an exposition of musical “crisis acting,” and a Sisyphean folk-rock analysis.
Recommendation: Nicolas Godin - “The Border”
My girlfriend Hannah and I saw something striking in the night sky last month. We were stargazing in southern Corsica, looking for constellations and shooting stars. It was quiet and our location was remote.
We saw a body of light with a tail. Its trajectory differed from the planes we saw, which moved at a consistent altitude, mechanically crossing the aperture of our gaze with linear periodicity. In a marked divergence, the body of light proceeded at an angle orthogonal to the planet’s curve, and disappeared as if moving outwards.
It initially appeared as close as an airplane, and a couple of minutes later it was very far away. It emitted white light in a pulsating rhythm. It looked like a deep sea creature. Our accounts of the light’s rhythm and its visual composition differed – I saw a discrete grid of points, Hannah saw an interconnected continuum – but we both saw the tail. We resorted to descriptions of shapes and luminosities, and the way they might be counted and described. I would be curious to peruse a glossary of satellites to find a match. Such a glossary could be very beautiful.
— Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Sufjan Stevens - “Futile Devices” / Arca - “Fxck”
I’ve often heard 2026 described as a time of “crisis acting.” This could be a group-think conceptual extension of the “Crisis Acting” Instagram account analyzed in a recent article by artist Dena Yago in Spike Art Magazine; or, just a general mood. Yago wrote on the phenomenology of this IG account, describing the agony and ecstasy of its banal chronicling of found footage, or “the horrific-slash-divine in accumulation [...] Like beholding a biblically accurate angel, [where] there’s both terror and the glimmering possibility of redemption.” I like crisis acting as a term because it exaggerates the simultaneous reality and artifice of our various current crises. In contemporary life, and the various lenses in which we experience it, many things are in crisis. But perhaps not everything. There’s a kind of deep charade to feel the ambient horizon of crisis and act through it—that we could exist both temporarily and completely in crisis, and enter into the acting role of a participant during its totalizing simulation.
Crisis acting, and these themes of terror and redemption, remind me of Sufjan Stevens. I haven’t listened to his music in fifteen years or so, but I put on Age of Adz and Illinoise this past week. The albums felt like episodes in crisis. He’s in crisis, and we the listeners are asked to act through this crisis with him in order to even remotely enjoy or approach the music. When I was younger, I avidly walked into this terrorizing state of mind. It was a space of dramatic musical exploration—thematic revelry, wrung out instrumentation, epic-poem style lyricism. The music introduced a theatrical scale where you might actively participate in this drama, in Stevens’ crisis. The crisis of America (his “50 States Project”), the crisis of grief (Carrie & Lowell), the crisis of faith (the sacramental and Christian themes underlying his music), or the crisis of mental illness (the influence of schizophrenic Louisiana artist Royal Robertson). It was an adolescent coming-of-age to relate to these themes—a kind of crisis acting. This week, it’s nice (and weird) to briefly tap back into this energy. I can’t stomach most of it and actively recoil at many of Stevens’s songs; but, at times, I am taken aback by the raw severity of the music’s earnestness—a baroque and serious commitment to arrangement and brutal musicality.
This past week I also listened to the new Arca record XXXXX. Similarly, I haven’t truly listened to her music since the 2010s, most seriously when reviewing Mutant for Tiny Mix Tapes in 2015. The album does not seem that different in style from listening back to 2013’s &&&&& or 2015’s Mutant—and I appreciate Arca’s foregrounding of the materiality of the DAW (Ableton) in her work. It’s as if her productions were purely constructed from audio source material that was projected ahead in the linear flow of the DAW; silence was inserted to propel these sounds into the workstation’s linear future, furthering the tracks away from being more obvious compositions. This “distance” imbues her work with constant motion, an ineffable quality of one of this past decade’s most celebrated producers.
I hear crisis acting throughout Arca too, particularly in “Fxck”—a track that feels hewn from the 2010s era that established this type of free-DAW production style into rotation. It’s unconcerned with the details of its production, instead committing to a clear goal of creating a sense of motion, drama, and intensity. It’s cringeworhty too with lyrics saying “Kill the father” amongst a bunch of sexed-up singing about getting choked out, gagged, etc. But, the music is honest about what it’s trying to do: basically sound futuristic and badass. Similarly, we’re pulled in as bystanders to act through the crisis of its ascendent emotional space.
I haven’t particularly wanted to listen to Arca or Sufjan in a very long time, in ten or fifteen years each. I really do not want to act in their ongoing respective crises. But, by entering into the acting role of a participant in their music this week—I can appreciate what they’re each trying to do.
Considering Yago’s analysis of Crisis Acting, I’ve also thought of the divine as being the annihilating force, and something else as the force that would preserve the world as we know it. Like Yago’s biblically accurate angel—”there’s both terror and the glimmering possibility of redemption.” If crisis is that angel that could annihilate us (and by doing so, redeem us) then acting through it is our attempt to preserve ourselves in its wake.
— Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Richard and Linda Thompson - “The Calvary Cross (Live)
A gigantic white seed pod cruised by me at eye level at sub-one-mile-per-hour, and kept floating off to my right, without deviating in its course or dropping on the breeze. I was impressed by how slow and smoothly it traveled as it continued through my yard, into the next, and through the alley, to the street. I was listening to a live performance of “The Calvary Cross” by Richard and Linda Thompson, which ends with a long and slow 7-minute guitar solo, which I like a lot.
I’ve been listening to it on repeat. For one thing, I love the song; but the guitar solo is special because it manages to balance intensity and laziness in the right ways. Richard shreds, gives up, drones, noodles in mixolydian for another four minutes. The accompaniment is extremely spare: bass, drums and accordion, which, impressively, do almost nothing and take practically no liberties of their own alongside the meandering guitar. And, there are just three chords. It’s really beautiful.
Mount Calvary (or, Golgotha) is where Jesus was crucified, and the Calvary Cross is a particular version of the Christian symbol, depicting three steps beneath the crucifix: faith, hope and love. There could be some direct musical iconicity with the three chord repetition in the Thompson song, but maybe not. I believe the theological suggestion is that we ascend through virtues towards redemption. Thompson’s lyrics suggest a Sisyphean variation of this ascent, qualified by the compulsions of the earthly domain, in conflict with virtue. “[The song] is about a drive that you might not want, but it’s there, and you’re a slave to it,” he says.
Now you can make believe on your tin whistle
Ah, and you can be my broom boy
Scrub me till I shine in the dark
I’ll be your light till doomsday
These are gloomy sentiments, but the music carries them along and out of view, leaving only the space that they previously inhabited. The content of the thought becomes a small detail, an incidental variation expressed within a larger, gestural consistency, whose duration exceeds that of its dark reflections: affirming and redeeming them, in simply watching them drift out of view and memory.
— Alec Sturgis