The Brooklyn Rail

The headlines pile up, crashing into each other. Sense becomes nonsense. Six months into Trump’s second term, many of us read the newspaper slack-jawed, tense with wonder about what could possibly come next. Universities cut deals and pay bogus fines in an effort just to survive. Congressionally approved funds for public television and radio are withdrawn (or “clawed back,” an appropriately dire phrase.) Government agencies oversee their own demise. The Department of Education is committed to shutting down the Department of Education, just when we need it most. Ordinary Palestinians are starving, denied basic human rights, and one opinion columnist finds it fitting to write “No, Israel is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.” Trump and Netanyahu spin tales intended to keep themselves out of prison, and the Israeli suggests that his American friend be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Oddly, the one bit of news deemed scandalous enough to possibly bring down the President is his involvement with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Why this, among all the madness of the day? One pundit wearily traced the path back over the ongoing concern that Democrats were somehow involved in child sex trafficking (who could forget Hillary Clinton and Pizzagate, though we have tried), and so therefore this sort of thing can’t be tolerated—never mind the fact that this demonization of a political party has not an iota of truth to it. But before any investigation can lead back to the current administration, a campaign is being mounted to accuse Barack Obama of treason for… what? In this case, the attack is openly discussed as an effort to distract the public, by bringing back a familiar target and smearing him. Meanwhile, the strangeness proceeds, almost like a mirthless joke: Hey, did you see the clip of Trump wondering if he’d rather be killed by a shark or a submerged battery? How about the repostings of himself playing every part in an AI-generated rock band?

What is this? Is it surrealism, farce? Lately, I have found my mind turning to the prospects of science fiction. This has never been a favorite genre for me. Give me a finely wrought human drama, a love story, an inter-generational conflict: those seem to have more than enough juice to keep me interested. But science fiction gives us new worlds, new propositions, which in turn can give us perspective on our own condition. In that way, it can be a form of truth telling. When the comedic actor Jordan Peele turned to directing sci-fi horror films like Get Out, he reasoned that Black life in America already proceeded according to the parameters of that genre. Something similar is happening here. An ordinary mirror won’t do to reflect these not-much-funhouse realities.

Composer and bassist Lisa Mezzacappa turned to a collection of science fiction stories called Cosmicomics by Italian writer Italo Calvino for a suite of songs that she recorded in 2020 (Queen Bee Records), then presented in July at The Stone. First published in 1965, Calvino’s sui generis creation has continued to grow in popularity over time, with novelist Salman Rushdie calling the book “possibly the most enjoyable story collection ever written,” adding “perhaps only Calvino could have created a work that combines scientific erudition, wild fantasy and a humane wit.” With these tales of celestial birth and its attendant pangs, Calvino locates the personal, inevitably neurotic self within a cosmic, open-bordered possible reality. In a review of the collection, esteemed science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin cited how “Calvino’s light, dry, clear prose dances over the lightyears,” especially true in the deft translation by William Weaver. Interestingly, she pointed out—as borne out by her own experience—that both science fiction and comics were considered fairly low-rent territory when Calvino first engaged with them.

Mezzacappa finds fertile inspiration in these fables, including several stories of the moon, with one that features the intriguing prospect that its trajectory has changed, and that it was once so close that a young woman could jump from earth to moon, one to the other. Her suite of songs begins with “The Soft Moon,” taking off from one of these tales with a confident stride. Like the bond that Calvino finds between earthly and cosmic, Mezzacappa crosses styles freely, setting rounded grooves against angular leads. The music investigates space and texture, with an inventive trove of electronics woven into the mix. As performed by a stellar group of musicians (Aaron Bennett, tenor saxophone; Brett Carson, keyboard; Mark Clifford, vibraphone; Kyle Bruckmann, electronics; Mezzacappa, acoustic bass; and Jordan Glenn, drums), Cosmicomics has the tuneful funk of the Bay Area they hail from, as well as a touch of the San-Francisco-noir sound she’s previously investigated, plus a good dose of time-shifting and skronk. In all, it was given a beautifully realized presentation in New York, with Calvino and Mezzacappa finding common and complementary ground.

Another artist who traffics in the mystical gave a surprisingly strong performance at Central Park SummerStage: India-born, long-time New Yorker Asha Puthli. She made her recorded debut in 1972, singing two cuts on the seminal Ornette Coleman album, Science Fiction. Apropos the title, Coleman dispenses with standard terms by which a world, or a composition, is organized. He found in Puthli a true free spirit, someone who invests her purring, breathy vocals with a quavering sense of being unbound. After that dazzling start, she moved toward dance music, bringing that same special vibe and belatedly earning the title “Disco Mystic.” Her take on the J.J. Cale song “Right Down Here” became a rare groove hit, and her reputation continued to grow. Taking a retrospective turn at the age of eighty, she brought shades of all these career phases to her performance, and continued to convey her particular fusion of the cosmic and the corporeal.

Reaching for spirits, going beyond the day to day, can have a particular appeal when the situation around us can seem to be splintering. But art forms can also work with those shards of a fracturing reality. The Dada artists, responding in part to the insanity of the First World War, made an art explicitly to break through old forms of logic, to dispel the fever dream of a world where this level of destruction would be tolerated. I wonder if those forms are in development now—in art, in music, and perhaps increasingly in our political vocabulary.

We may find them in the strangest places. I found one in a song with a triple-barrel title: “Return to the Moon (Political Song for Didi Blume to Sing, with Crescendo).” It was recorded a decade ago by the group El Vy, made up of Matt Berninger from The National and Brent Knopf from Ramona Falls. Its casual surrealism (“Scratched a ticket with a leg of a cricket / And I got triple Jesus”) is offset by a casually pleaded chorus (“Return to the moon, I’m dying / Return to the moon, please”) that sounds like an impossible prayer to land in a cosmically reclaimed place. We won’t ever accompany Elon Musk to Mars, but we can sleep to dream of that once so close moon.