1. TO REVIEW: WHAT IS THIS EMAIL?
Landline is a free (that is: pay what you can), to-the-point email, sent to subscribers on a weekly-ish basis.
As odd and sometimes random as they can be, Landline bulletins are written (or: compiled) with an audience in mind: friends and colleagues, curious sweetfolk and old heads from the days of Arthur Magazine (which I edited), pastoral people and dharma bums, food bank workers and non-public figures doing other righteous activities — those kinds of people, I’m sure you know what/who I mean.
Landline is made up of ideas and nudges; rabbit hole wanderings and silly diversions; recipes, romances and cultural retrievals & such that hopefully add up to form a humble — but helpful? — bailiwick outside the avalanche of cruddiness that grows ever larger.
An archive of previous Landlines — 125 posts, going back to 2017 (!) — exists here.
Landline makes me very little income relative to the time/effort I put into it. But I like to do it, and it currently has 4,926 subscribers, which, gosh, is not nothing, after all. I am grateful for every single one.
If you’re able, please consider a paid subscription. $5/month, $40/year. Special discount available if you need it, if you use this button:
If you’d like to support Landline but prefer not to do business with or through Subsick, here’s two workarounds: buy me a coffee or leave a tip in the PayPal TipJar. If those don’t work for you, a secret third workaround is available if you email me directly. Thank you kindly.
Theoretically, advertising/sponsorship could also help make Landline more self-sustaining. Please email me directly (or simply reply to this email) for advertising rates, which are offered on a sliding scale. We’ll figure something out.
Speaking of which — this Landline is sponsored by our good friends at Fiddler’s Green…
2. FRIENDS SINGING TOGETHER
Via Press Play, Dae!: “Original 1968 promo video for ‘Friends’, along with the [Beach] Boys singing it a capella on a Dallas news station the same year. Dallas news footage owned by Ed Roach. Special thanks to Lee Dempsey.”
3. FINDING WHERE YOU ARE
Via Brian Johnson TV: “Robert Plant greets Brian Johnson in the misty mountains of Wales in his Celtic warrior outfit”
4. WHAT MOVED YOU ONCE CAN MOVE YOU AGAIN
Brian Eno, 1983, interviewed by Johnny Black for Blitz, via moredarkthanshark.org:
“I have a friend in New York, Bob Quine, who is very good at finding really old records. I recently asked him to find Ketty Lester singing ‘Love Letters Straight From Your Heart ‘and to put it in the middle of a blank tape for me, so I wouldn’t know when it would come on. I have a soundproof room in my apartment in New York, and I went in there, turned out the lights and put on the tape.
“While I was waiting for it to start, which took about fifteen minutes, I tried to remember the exact moment when I first heard the song. There’s a long river in Woodbridge, and beside it there’s a bandstand. We used to all gather there with our transistors and listen to Alan Freeman’s Pick Of The Pops on Sunday afternoons. One afternoon, just as the evening light was beginning to change, I heard that song, Love Letters, and I was so moved by it. It was such a huge experience for me. So I sat in my room and when the song came on again, it all just flooded back.
“I can be moved to tears quite easily by music, particularly Gospel songs, which is what I listen to most of all lately.”
Ketty Lester performing the song on television, 1962:
5. A LUMIÉRE UNWINDS IN YOUR HEAD: NIGHT DIVING WITH IRA COHEN
I recently discovered this piece that the poet-artist-legend Ira Cohen1 wrote for High Times 43 years ago, which is beautiful and, for me, haunting. Your mileage will surely vary. If you’re able, leave aside for a moment, any urge to determine how much of the text is dated, or ‘true,’ or romanticized, or based in some kind of (inevitable) cross-cultural misunderstanding. Maybe just let it be an extended, dazzling vision, one human’s attempt to transmit something that shocked him, as best he could.
By Ira Cohen / published in High Times, Sept. 1983
Majoon, majoun, ma’jun… how soft the word is, how full of magic and jinn, how dark to the imagination! Majoon is the Arabic word for jam, but here in Morocco and all through the Islamic world, everyone knows that it is a special confection with Indian hemp, or kif as its main ingredient. In Morocco it is still as commonplace as fruitcake in England or angel-food cake in the United States. It is usually taken on festive occasions or in the wintertime, when it keeps you warm through the long Moroccan nights; but any time you feel like traveling, or crave some instant magic theater, all you have to do is find your favorite majoon seller and Open sesame! All doors fall down and you are off on a voyage with no turning back.
Eating majoon is like night diving. You descend into unknown depths surrounded by hundreds of shining eyes. Everything is underwater and slow motion. Is that a squid I have in my hand, or is it the head of Medusa turning me to stone? Majoon embeds you in black tar while you glow like sapphires or you leave your body behind and soar through the air, holding on for dear life to the long braid of your jinni.
The effects of majoon are like those of smoking kif or marijuana, but stronger and more commonly hallucinogenic, building up gradually in waves and often culminating in oceans of laughter. You wonder where you are or why everything is so strange, like, you never saw your hand before or heard the cry of the muezzin floating over the city. It may take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more before the majoon takes over, before you realize what has happened, and can last for as long as 24 hours. A lumière unwinds in your head, or suddenly a café on the edge of a cliff takes off and sails through the stars. Rooms contract and expand and somewhere from your own most secret places there is a babble of voices made up of old memories and hidden desires asking you to surrender. Each gesture is eternal, for time has nothing to do with metronomes, and minutes have become hours or even centuries. You can feel your heart beating faster and you want something to drink, since your mouth is incredibly dry, or you feel ravenously hungry and can eat for hours on end sampling one taste after another. But sometimes, especially if you eat too much majoon, you may sleep your voyage away.
The Moorish women, although they very rarely smoke kif as almost all the men do, like a nice piece of majoon now and then. It makes them dreamy and sensual, though they say that it makes them want to take off all their clothes and run naked through the streets. But that is the way it is. Sometimes you draw donkey ears, other times it is a command performance between stars and half-spoken wishes.
Continue reading this piece here: High Times
6. TRUE HALLUCINATIONS
Via author Charles C. Mann:
A pal points out the wonderfully bonkers Halupedia, an entire lookalike Wikipedia (same fonts, organization, everything) that consists of 100% AI hallucinations in articles that are made up on the spot. An entire mirror universe of hilarious nonsense, all for free.
One of the top folios at halupedia right now:
7. SIGN UP TO SIGN OFF
From Panda Bear & Sonic Boom:
Change. Exciting & frightening at the same time. The slow slips & the big shifts. Highs & Lows from the distraction of connectivity.
AI slop becomes an AI slope. Algorithm tables & algorithms tumble.
We’re taking things a little off piste.
More rock n’ roll than flick & scroll...
From here on in we’re getting back to a place of real connectivity and as you might have noticed from our new Graveyard/Lucky Charm 7” (only available from record stores) there’s no streaming, no videos, and a minimisation of online everything .
Going forward we’re looking to radio, live shows, listening parties, Q&A sessions & real life interactions to get back to a place we feel makes more sense.To that end, we’re asking you to join us offline, outside of social media. To meet us in the real world. IRL not URL...
Sign up to sign off via the link in bio. We’ll be in touch soon, the old fashioned way.
Sending love and luck to you all meanwhile.
Panda Bear & Sonic Boom
Love and luck to all you Landliners too,
Jay
Patagonia, Arizona
My feature article on Ira for the LAWeekly ahead of his appearance at the 2002 All Tomorrows Parties in Los Angeles is here: “Akashic Offering.” I think my proposed title for the piece was “Ira Cohen, Human Being,” which Ira loved.
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