by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Middle Flight

The baby’s feet never touch the ground.
Before now, he floated in dark water
so I hold him like an exile for months

until his own weight is no longer foreign.
Someday he too will chase his lost lightness
half-remembered toward the sky. History

is full of flightless falls: metal wings
and bird machines built without destination,
just to be loose of the anchor. No one

flew until a papermaker watched
his wife’s chemise swell beside a fire
and conjured a craft to ride the heat.

Like putting a cloud in a paper bag, he filled
the first balloon with air from burning straw
and wet wool, and launched a rooster

above Versailles. The night my son takes
his first steps, I let paper lanterns go
in the dark and watch them soar from sight.

They rise moonward, like the aeronaut
who vanished over Lake Michigan
in a muslin balloon. The sky utters reasons,

lies told to other lives. Maybe the lanterns
sink in the distance, maybe the man drowned.
Neither return home. In Brazil, a priest

hitched himself to a thousand balloons
and was gone. He must have whispered céu
as he climbed aloft (only in English are heaven

and sky different words). As a child, I tied
balloons to my arms and tried to rise off
the grass. I wished for distance to turn the town

miniature, into a train set with matchstick
trees and voices too far to hear. I believed
the sky was actual blue, not the elastic

scatter of light that only makes it seem so.
I still cannot hold this truth in my mind:
navy, midnight, and royal are just semblance

of elsewhere. How bitter to sacrifice wonder
for proof. Napoleon kept a balloonist
in court who was more at home above

than below. She was ugly on the ground,
startled by dogs and carriages, but daring in air,
an acrobat with fire and ostrich feathers,

until she fell from a blazing balloon, dying
that seemed like flying. Maybe there is no refuge
in suspension, no swerve from gravity

and broken cobblestone. But to hide in faith
is easier than to contend with doubt.
What moved through sky I once believed

was holy. I buried moths and blue jays, and kept
a shoebox reliquary of feathers, rockets,
and airplane spoons. Somewhere in childhood

an equation is fused between elevation
and milk. It begins this way: too tired to stand,
we reach toward arms and find altitude.

Later, we scramble up trees, climb mountains,
and sail toward the poles to be light again
with the world underneath. In California,

a truck driver strapped weather balloons
on his lawn chair to hover above his wife
and house with a sandwich and cooler of beer,

but barreled three miles up, into the path
of landing planes. A secretary in North Carolina
carried her seat to a field, floated all morning

under a cluster of balloons, then rolled it back
to her desk and finished typing a letter. Sometimes
the world is too heavy, or we are too heavy in it.

At seven, I stood under an empty sky
hoping to be taken up by a beam of light,
a tornado, or the claws of a winged beast.

I traced satellites across the dark, awake
all night in the backyard. Their orbits grew smaller
and closer with every rotation. I waited all summer

for the space station to come down and was afraid
of what else might fall. In school, the siren rang
and grammar stopped. Behind the cubbies, I knelt

before mittens, hats, and paper bags.
I pictured bombs dropping, a cloud mushrooming
over the soccer field. The sky was strategy

for war. Decades before, beneath a silver balloon
at dawn, an Air Force colonel floated up
nineteen miles. More alone and farther than

anyone had been, he was high enough to see
the planet curve away. He radioed a message
then parachuted down: The sky above is void,

very black and very hostile. He was not
the first in the stratosphere, nor was an ape
or airship either. Before him, a shell lobbed

at France vaulted the height then crashed
through a cathedral roof, killing worshippers
knelt in prayer. The fallout shelters are gone now.

In my son’s school, they practice clearing halls
and locking doors. They hide silent on the floor.

I no longer worry about missiles but who

has a gun instead. I thought courage was leaping
from the basket. I thought the risk was descent,
not departure. When my son loses his grip,

a yellow balloon escapes and I remember
that skyward longing, to be untethered
from my life. After drifting over Paris,

the first balloonist declared, I felt we were
flying away from the earth and all its troubles.
Then he left his copilot behind and rose alone

ten thousand feet. He heard his breath
and rippling silk, and watched the sun set
a second time that day. Never has a man

felt so solitary, so terrified, he said
and refused to fly again. When my son says,
Lift me up, I raise him over my head,

not to catch the balloon or be airborne,
but to look down on me here. Above is empty,
but earth is home, even the bombs know that.

Robin Beth Schaer is the author of Shipbreaking (Anhinga, 2015). She worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a hundred-and-eighty-foot full-rigged ship lost in Hurricane Sandy.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“Graffiti has been found on a road near Chittlehampton which accuses red headed people of smelling of urine.” [Via]

I’m not sure how you say “The summer is dying and now it’s dying fast. You’ll wake up in a week or two and realize what you wasted. You’ll wonder if winter will be as bad again this year but deep in your heart you know it will be worse,” in Welsh, but until I figure it out listen to this track from Gwenno while we still have some summer left to enjoy it in.

★★★ The sun was not too scattered to cast a retrograde shadow as it came back eastward off the mirrored tower. The MetroCard receipt stuck obligingly to a fingertip to be photographed for reimbursement purposes. A hot damp wind came up the sidewalk as the shoulders shuddered away the effects of the air conditioning. Objectively sweltering and foul as it was, it still took a bit of walking around to find a place that was genuinely uncomfortable — Union Square, as it turned out, with the sun battering the open plaza and a drummer banging away in a little bit of shade. A big bright cloud swelled over Fifth Avenue late in the day. The heat lost its grip when the sun did. Leaves stirred in Lincoln Square and a bagpipe carried from some unfixable location.

by Vijith Assar

Last year’s putative “Song of the Summer” was a national embarrassment; as a result, American songs — and for safe measure, all songs in English — are no longer eligible. Each month, until summer has died, the Awl will present alternatives.

Matimba by Kabele Mabelane
#1 in Botswana (Gabz FM)

Pretty clear who is running off with Botswana’s summer — the South African rapper’s single came out in March and is at no. 1 five months later. But this is an ensemble piece, in the sense that he spends considerably less time in the spotlight he does than leading chants and choruses. Drum circles, too, presumably: The massive percussion backdrop has an unusually Latin flavor, but even more curiously, it starts out peppered with digital glitches that would be more at home sandwiched between EDM wubs — but then they seamlessly fade away and come back reincarnated as a horn section. This is precisely the sort of material M.I.A. absorbs and repurposes so effectively, so you can probably look for these same sounds to make it to the U.S. soon enough.

Golden Touch by Namie Amuro
#3 in Macau (Teledifusão de Macau)

The model and pop icon’s twelfth album _genic debuted at no. 1on the Oricon chart in mid-June, but then dropped off almost immediately; it’s now nowhere to be found in the Top 30. But the lead single is still hanging on at number three in Macau, the Chinese province which remained under Portuguese control until 1999, where the local broadcasting conglomerate Teledifusão de Macau now maintains an encouragingly healthy mix of regional and international hits. (Amuro is on their international chart, surrounded by Mariah Carey and Mumford & Sons). Globalization creep flows in the other direction too, though: this is one of only three songs on the album that isn’t in English, since Amuro has been engaged in a mild crossover bid since 2013, and even so it still quickly switches back and forth between the choruses and the verses, sometimes within the space of a single line.

The visual curiosities of the music video are remarkable, almost like the spooky non sequiturs from The Ring’s haunted videotape have been turned into cheap sparkly toys for kids and loaded into a coin-op vending machine; during the early promotional phase it was picked up and summarized by BuzzFeed for a GIF listicle and then quickly forgotten. That’s a shame, because it should also be a contender for the song of whatever is left of your summer. Amuro recently filled in for the late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes on TLC’s 20th anniversary re-recording of “Waterfalls”, and some of the samples likewise harken back to the nineties heyday of white R&B;/pop. They’re spliced in here with a heavy-handed aggression, though, a refreshing change from the usual misty-eyed nostalgia, so it sounds like nothing else so much as bludgeoning the New Radicals to death with Paula Abdul.

Doucement by Makassy
#9 in French Polynesia (Radio 1 FM)

The Congolese singer turns in far and away the best vocal performance in this month’s batch of songs, which is especially amazing because he started out as a soccer player. The risqué visuals are obviously reminiscent of D’Angelo, but here he actually sounds more like a highly marketable blend of Akon and Usher, unrolling his formidable falsetto and firing a flood of staccato syllables into Auto-Tune, then losing track of them as they bounce around like they’re trapped in the high-scoring regions at the very top of the pinball machine. If by some miracle this isn’t the most seductive three minutes of your day, congratulations!

Summer ends on September 23rd, see you then.

As with the first noises of most Destroyer albums — the sandy processed reverb snare on “Kaputt,” the distortion power chords on “Rubies,” the tacky choral synth of “Your Blues,” to name just three albums that open impeccably — you will be welcomed to “Poison Season” reasonably convinced that Dan Bejar is just screwing with you. Like, oh noooo, he found another gnarly sound. A fresh ride around the crinkly lip of the roller derby rink of acceptable music!

Is music a joke? What does the sound of a group of instruments playing together now mean? Is emotion a joke? Most disgusting is that human bodies are brimming percolators of feeling — emotions kept hidden in secret, until they vomit overboard with a raised eyebrow or a fist or some gross tears. Actors are disgusting to society and are made fun of because they reach in for a handful of the acid and then splatter themselves AND they do it for money. Songwriters are celebrated too when they go for it, but they’re booed if they don’t go all in or not far enough. In the middle they are just treacle or pat or cheesy or gay. The main nasty feeling expressed by music for three decades has been lust. Banging was a Hot Topic of rock, sure, but sexy fuckability is pretty much all that inorganic electronica could support on the long road from Moroder to Skrillex. Knowing about camp made everyone a chilly sex bot, hiding away all that earnest horniness inside us. The computers won. The 80s gave up. But then finally the late great teen movement of emo came in to bring all the non-fucking feelings back. Goth the sequel came out with the great lady song-singers, and now we’re here at last on the far side of disco with music made by hand. Now even Skrillex wants you to feel.

“Poison Season” is an inexcusable album! It is so revolting. Here on the one hand we have that big Supertramp sound. It’s the musical Disney forgot to write and then discard, plus a wee bit of Bread and the old invasion of big jazz. That’s at least three incarnations of the besmirched music of earnestness. One time there’s a little bit of Prince even, from the end of the strings in the end of “Purple Rain,” which is the Certified Best Song Of 200 Songs Of The 1980s, according to Pitchfork, which has three women solo artists in its top 20 songs and one woman artist in its top ten, and THAT WOMAN ISN’T MADONNA EVEN. The phenomenally ahistorical list, which keeps talking about “singles” from albums that never saw the light of radio, does at least give Tom Tom Club, Sheila E., Public Enemy and Sade their basic due, even while dispatching the gays with a couple tracks like “Smalltown Boy,” but no CULTURE CLUB, and a WHITNEY HOUSTON track tops out at number 20, which is idiocy! Unlike that list — which omits entirely the legendary likes of Sinead O’Connor, Annabella Lwin and Debora Iyall, the queens of Bow Wow Wow and Romeo Void? And, uh, Japan??? And even Missing Persons and Berlin, and dear old Siouxsie Sioux clocks in once at #156, and Blondie tops out at #90 — “Poison Season” isn’t fake nostalgia, not reconstituted imagined sentiment, because it’s officially Not Cute. These are the organic married flavors mostly last seen in the live shows of 1981.

I mean fuck you Pitchfork.

It’s not camp unless someone’s in on the joke, and here now there’s not even a joke. The sickest arrangements don’t exist for no reason. The “Poison Season” orchestration is hysterical, the dream of a really bold 12-year-old with nothing to lose, some kiddo who knows about whimsy but has never even seen twee. But it’s all shot through with a sickly acid sound, then the piano wanders off, the strings go a little wonky. The saxophone goes on a bit longer than you thought you might like, a french horn in awkward tremolo. It’s the soundtrack to the last few hours of a messy Frank O’Hara party. Halfway through, there’s suddenly the bright chunky palette of “Young Americans” and you’ve never missed an acoustic guitar so much. The piano is icing and the saxophone is toxic. Glam pop is exhausted and is just pop.

Disco and its children was all a really great scene until it proved to be making us dead inside.

How do you listen to music now anyway? Best to loll in bed as a sunny weekend fades. Ceaselessly and gently outré as a production lifestyle is a great way to be an artist.

Just when you think something truly lurid is going to happen on “Poison Season,” it does not. There might be a theme song to a 1976 cop show somewhere in the middle though? But a good one. Irony steadfastly refused to make an appearance. Arch isn’t ironic, it’s just arch! WE DID LEARN SOMETHING FROM THE 80S AFTER ALLLLLL!!! Maybe just once there’s a lone moment of camp, somehow there’s a bit of New Orleans on the back end of a song called “Bangkok.” But it’s not mean and old-thinking when everyone is in on the thesis. Here maybe it’s just: Let’s look at what gross fleshbag things we are and that’s okay.

It’s just the best that Dan Bejar hasn’t become bitter over the years, or, at least, he hasn’t in his work. He’s a fountain of songs, an always-turning bingo cage constantly popping out magic balls with words. A magpie thing for broken phrases of others, a diary quietly unspooled, a lonely album for emotional believers. That’s the way feelings arrive. I wouldn’t know! Like soldiers lockstep marching off a cliff, or the algorithm behind music videos lining themselves up to be endlessly played.

“How many national anthems are plagiarised?”

Verizon had agreed to have fiber-optic cable for FiOS pass all three million homes in the city by the end of last year. Lawyers for each side, however, are arguing about the definition of “pass.” The company says it has met the deadline. The city’s response: not even close. FiOS remains unavailable in large swaths of the city, including the vast Co-op City complex in the Bronx, which comprises more than 15,000 apartments. “We’ve had some rather impassioned meetings with some of our residents who say, ‘We want Verizon,’” said Jeffrey Buss, general counsel for Riverbay Corporation, which manages Co-op City.

The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications released a scathing audit report in June concluding that Verizon “systematically refused to accept orders for residential service.” By the company’s admission, nearly one-fourth of the blocks in the city have no buildings wired for FiOS, the report said.

The New York Times reports what many in New York City have already known: They cannot get FiOS and probably won’t anytime soon. The Awl offices are located on the third floor of a small building that is sandwiched between the tallest luxury condos in the borough on a bustling corner in the heart of a quaint neighborhood known as Downtown Brooklyn, which is the third largest business district in New York City. We would love to replace our incredibly slow Verizon DSL with FiOS so we can bring more of our Content to the People. But some for reason it’s just not available in our area? Please call us Verizon! (We’ve tried calling you.)

Photo by Eric Hauser

Want to feel old? The pictures of your hand you traced as a child and colored in to look like a turkey for Thanksgiving have all faded away and returned to the earth at the bottom of whatever landfill they lay in. The regulations that allowed the nurse to comfort you that time you left class in Kindergarten with a fever have all been updated to prevent any physical contact. The songs you sang at assemblies have very few plays on Spotify. The crossing guards who shepherded you across the street are all dead. There, you’re old. How’s it feel? Not good, right? Anyway, I like this track from Small Black a lot, what do you think? Enjoy.

by The Awl

FKA Capital New York reports:

At the behest of chief financial officer David Geithner, starting this Wednesday, sources familiar with the matter told POLITICO, the global business advisory firm FTI Consulting will begin meeting with Condé Nast employees to help assess things like editorial workflow, processes and productivity across the company’s nearly two dozen titles, which include standard-bearers like The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair.

We have heard from multiple sources that every Condé Nast publication has been ordered to complete reports that precisely account for every hour of every employee’s day — every employee must be listed, their tasks described in detail, hour by hour. It seems likely that a bloodbath will come with the changing of the leaves. (Just like last year.) We hope that nobody is redundant and that everybody is working at peak efficiency!