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1. Courtney Barnett - Avant Gardner

2. The National - Start A War

3. Glass Animals - Gooey

4. Genesis Owusu - Stampede

5. Yeah Yeah Yeah/Perfume Genius - Spitting Off The Edge Of The World

6. Radiohead - Weird Fishes

7. Film School - The More I Know

8. St. Vincent - Actor Out Of Work

9. Violet Grohl - Bug In My Cake (Movin’ To Grandmas)

10. Rocket - Take Your Aim

    Bonus:Ian Sweet - Criminal Kissing

    Bonus:Black Keys - Tighten Up

Bonus:

Thanks for listening with me.

I first discovered this book in Bernal Heights, a neighborhood in San Francisco. As is often the case, people will unload their books and records into boxes and just leave them on the sidewalk for anyone to pick through. I stumbled upon a box of books, and found a very old, early edition of The Scapegoat. For years, it just sat on my bookshelf and I didn’t read it. I knew there was a movie made out of it, but throughout the years I carried the book around with me from neighborhood to neighborhood, dozens of moves and across the country.

The Scapegoat is a psychological suspense novel by Daphne du Maurier, first published in 1957. The story begins when John, a lonely English academic traveling in France, meets Jean de Gué, a French aristocrat who looks exactly like him. After a night of drinking, John wakes to discover that Jean has stolen his identity and disappeared, forcing him to assume Jean’s role within a wealthy but troubled French family. What starts as a mistaken-identity thriller gradually becomes a deep exploration of personality, morality, and the question of whether a person can become someone else simply by living their life.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is that it is not really about the mystery itself. Du Maurier uses the double-identity premise to examine dissatisfaction, hidden desires, and the masks people wear. The atmosphere is distinctly Gothic: a decaying château, family secrets, financial troubles, illicit relationships, and old resentments hanging over every room. Unlike many suspense novels, the tension comes less from physical danger and more from psychological uncertainty. John slowly discovers that the family he has inherited is trapped by years of betrayal and emotional neglect, and he becomes increasingly invested in repairing damage that Jean caused. The novel moves at a deliberate pace, but the emotional complexity makes it compelling.

Psychologically, John is a man suffering from a crisis of identity. Before meeting Jean, he feels detached from his own life, almost invisible to himself. Living as Jean gives him purpose and allows him to become a more decisive and compassionate person. Jean, by contrast, functions as John’s shadow self—the selfish, manipulative, ruthless version of what John could become if he abandoned empathy. Jean appears charming on the surface but displays traits associated with narcissism and antisocial behavior: he uses people as tools, avoids responsibility, and shows little remorse for the harm he causes. The conflict between the two men is less a battle between individuals than a confrontation between competing versions of the self.

The supporting characters are equally rich. Françoise, Jean’s wife, embodies emotional exhaustion and learned helplessness after years of neglect. Marie-Noël, the daughter, is imaginative and deeply sensitive, carrying the emotional burdens of adults around her. Blanche is consumed by bitterness and unresolved grief, while Renée struggles between desire and duty. Even the elderly mother, trapped by addiction and family history, reflects the novel’s theme of people imprisoned by old roles. By the end, The Scapegoat becomes less a thriller than a meditation on identity and redemption. Its conclusion remains controversial among readers—some admire its psychological realism while others find it frustratingly unresolved—but the novel’s enduring power lies in its unsettling question: if given the chance to exchange lives with someone else, would you discover who you really are or lose yourself entirely?

I hope you enjoyed reading with me.

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Andy Goldsworthy is a British sculptor, photographer, and environmental artist born in Cheshire, England, in 1956 and raised in Yorkshire. Often associated with the Land Art movement, Goldsworthy creates works directly within nature using materials he finds on site—leaves, stones, branches, mud, ice, flowers, thorns, and water. His early experiences working on farms profoundly shaped his artistic sensibility, teaching him to observe seasonal cycles, weather patterns, and the subtle transformations of the natural world. Rather than imposing himself upon the landscape, Goldsworthy collaborates with it, creating sculptures that may endure for years or disappear within minutes. Photography plays a critical role in his practice, serving as both documentation and reflection on works that are often temporary.

The purpose of Goldsworthy’s work is not merely to create beautiful objects but to reveal the hidden processes of nature—growth, decay, movement, erosion, and renewal. Many of his sculptures are intentionally ephemeral, collapsing with the tide, melting in the sun, or being scattered by the wind. Through this impermanence, he explores humanity’s relationship with time and the environment. His projects have been created in diverse locations throughout the world, including forests and riverbanks in Scotland and England, urban settings in Edinburgh and London, coastal landscapes, New England, New Hampshire, France, Brazil, Gabon, San Francisco, and St. Louis. Each location becomes both material and collaborator, allowing the surrounding environment to shape the final work.

Leaning Into the Wind is the 2017 documentary directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer that revisits Goldsworthy sixteen years after the acclaimed Rivers and Tides. The film follows the artist across multiple countries and landscapes as he creates both temporary and permanent works, while also reflecting on aging, memory, and the passage of time. Unlike the earlier film, which primarily focused on the creation of ephemeral sculptures, Leaning Into the Wind explores Goldsworthy’s increasingly personal relationship with his art, including projects that incorporate his own body and larger installations requiring teams of builders and machinery. The documentary presents art as an ongoing dialogue between the artist, the landscape, and time itself.

Rivers and Tides is the landmark 2001 documentary that introduced many viewers to Goldsworthy’s extraordinary creative process. Directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer, the film observes the artist constructing delicate sculptures from ice, leaves, stones, flowers, and drifting materials gathered directly from the landscape. Viewers witness both the successes and failures of these works as nature actively participates in their creation and destruction. More than a documentary about art, Rivers and Tides becomes a meditation on patience, impermanence, and the rhythms of the natural world. By capturing sculptures that may survive only moments before dissolving, collapsing, or washing away, the film reveals Goldsworthy’s central belief that change and transience are not obstacles to art but essential elements of it.

To watch, click here:

Leaning Into The Wind: Leaning Into The Wind

Rivers and Tides:

I hope you enjoyed these two presentations. Thank you for watching with me.

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Listen:

Insiders will get the joke:

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Recently Josiah Lambert, the morning host of SiriusXM’s XMU (Channel 35, the popular indie rock and alternative music radio station) and the weekly host of the Download 15 (the weekly countdown of the 15 songs making the most noise on indie radio) posited a question to his listeners. He mentioned that 2009 was the best year for new bands erupting onto the indie scene and he wanted feedback, asking his fans to come up with a band they thought made an impact or lasting impression in the genre, in 2009 specifically.

I scoffed at his request and chuckled condescendingly, “Amateur,” I said. “Everyone knows the Summer of 2005 was the year the indie band scene came roaring in like a lion. What the hell is he talking about? Nothing happened in 2009.”

I mean, the following bands existed long before I heard about them. But in 2005, they became known to me, which is the only thing that matters.

Because we all know that when something becomes known to me, well, it’s game over. It’s kind of like when you’re an up and coming band and you learn Wet Leg is on the bigger stage opposite you at that festival you’ve been waiting to play your whole life. You may as well just hang up your keyboards and guitar. “Fuck, Wet Leg is in the room.” But then when you actually sit down and talk to Wet Leg they’re the sweetest, most kind-hearted, patient and authentic musicians in existence. I have to think that this authenticity is what really catapulted their success, not Rhian-Teasdale mockery of a striptease in hot pants reciting the line from Mangetout, “You want to fuck me? Most people do.” In other words, “Get in line. If you’re going to exploit me, then I may as well give you something to talk about.” But seriously, even Wet Leg wonders why people are so intimidated by them and scratching their head wondering why people won’t just talk to them. Ok, back to the post. See? They’re even trying to hijack my own “What’s On The Turntable” silly little blog entry.

In 2005 I ejected myself from San Francisco and found myself amidst a swarm of music I’d never heard of before, landing smack dab in the middle of the Intonation Festival which turned into the now-defunct Pitchfork Music Festival in Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois. During the year or so that I lived in Chicago, I was introduced to music that only a City like Chicago could kick you in the tushy and shake you awake to. Arcade Fire. Andrew Bird. Bloc Party. The Kills. The Decemberists; Kaiser Chiefs. St. Vincent. Bright Eyes. Death Cab for Cutie. Sufjan Stevens. Of Montreal. The New Pornographers. Wolf Parade.

But, because I have enormous respect for Josiah and what he offers, especially on the Download 15, I was like, “Ok, challenge accepted, hot shot.”

It didn’t take me long to dust off the memory banks and find the band of 2009.

In January, 2009, the band of the century quietly entered into the music scene and broke all barriers.Is it indie? Not really. It is psychedelic? Kind of? Is it electronic? Yea, but…

I’m talking about Fever Ray, motherfuckers. And while we all have to suffer through the banality of Japanese Breakfast and the infuriating upstart Phoebe Bridgers and the nauseatingly insulting pop star Bridgers opened for whose names rhymes will-someone-please-cross-check-this-bitch-and-get-her-off-the-stage-and-put-her-swiftly-where she belongs: producing crafty macrame in a back-channel next to Martha Stewart, Lambert’s query could not have landed at a more appropriate moment.

Like Ted Liebowitz once said to me after a Twilight Sad show, “Well, Julie. The music has to rattle your cage in one way or another.” And right now, the music, for the most part ain’t rattling. Except for Wet Leg of course.

But, in 2009 Fever Ray did rattle, like a voodoo rattlesnake at a revivalist Holy Ghost event. It doesn’t rattle your cage angrily like Jesus Lizard. No, it rattles your existential cage and releases you from banality and lazy ass thinking, puny human.

The Dreijer siblings (Olof and Karin), the Swedish duo behind The Knife had disbanded and we were all left in a dazed stupor. “What just happened,” we murmured to ourselves. Just as we were shaking the dust of Shaking the Habitual off, Karin quietly announces on the most back-channel of back-channels of the true indie machine (Sorry, SiriusXMU) that she was coming to San Francisco under a new project called Fever Ray.

Here’s a clip from the show I attended:

The combination of the laser show and the soft flickering of living room lamps onstage, left us all mesmerized and in a trance. After the show, no one could really fully explain what they just experienced. I felt particularly moved, since the show took place right around my birthday.

If Fever Ray were a season it would be winter. If Fever Ray were a thing to write home about it would be sound-alchemy. If Fever Ray would be a thing to make you run for the hills, it would be spell-casting through and through. If Fever Ray were a theory it would be that religion is bullshit and we’ve just found the key to immortality through the earth, the moon, the sun, the snow and the remnants of our ancestral power surges that found their enlightened spaces and engorged on hubris, we may as well have just ingested God himself.

Fever Ray’s debut album is blasphemy, a bad trip, or a good one depending on your view; it’s the cry of the wolf and a masterful wielding of breaking your spirit and your brain wide open. It’s the abduction of your children and their sweet sweet revenge against a world too small to consider the power structures that live within the spirit of something intangible.

Buckle up, buckaroo. Here’s the breakdown:

Fever Ray’s self-titled debut album, released in 2009 by Fever Ray, feels less like a collection of songs and more like a nocturnal landscape inhabited by ghosts, memories, and half-formed desires. Emerging after Dreijer’s celebrated work with The Knife, the album strips away conventional pop structures and replaces them with primitive drum patterns, cavernous synthesizers, and a voice that seems to arrive from somewhere beyond ordinary human experience and existence. Critics at the time described it as stark, glacial and hypnotic, qualities that have only deepened with age.

If I Had a Heart remains the album’s defining statement. Built on a slow, ritualistic pulse and beat, the song unfolds like an ancient chant transmitted through modern machinery. Dreijer’s manipulated vocals, “This will never end because I want more. More. Give me more, give me more.” hover between human and mythic, insatiably creating a feeling of yearning so profound that it becomes almost frightening. The song’s immense emotional gravity explains why it later became associated with epic imagery and dark television dramas; it sounds as though it existed long before it was recorded. The melancholy, “If I had a heart I could love you,” breaks your own heart because she knows she always has and always will.

When I Grow Up introduces a strange tension between childhood innocence and adult unease. Beneath its deceptively simple rhythm lies a portrait of restlessness and transformation. “I put my soul in what I do..” The track moves with the confidence of a dream whose meaning remains just out of reach, balancing menace and playfulness in equal measure.The Flexatone combined with processed electronic rim clicks and tuned metallic percussion (or FM synthesized plucks) is pure wizardry. If you want something, with a simple flick of your wrist, you can have it, you might walk away thinking to yourself.

Keep the Streets Empty for Me may be the album’s emotional center. It’s atmospheric and bleak. I can’t have the magic without the emptiness to fill it with. A masterpiece of loneliness and longing, the space exists to conjure your desires.This spacious production creates the sensation of walking through an empty city at night, carrying memories that refuse to fade, while activating them in real life without the encumbering busy streets to act as a barrier.

Meanwhile, Seven, the sacred number, drifts into recollection and introspection, abandoning the demands of adult life in favor of something more elusive and childlike. Riding your bike up and down. Listening to the adults natter on about dishwasher tablets. But still, the mystery and magic of Seven runs through your veins like happy acid.

Seven by Fever Ray is one of the most dreamlike and emotionally elusive tracks on the debut album. The song feels suspended between memory and imagination, moving through layers of shimmering synthesizers, distant percussion, and Karin Dreijer’s otherworldly voice. Lyrically, it evokes childhood perception—the way certain moments, places, and feelings remain vivid long after their details have faded. There is a sense of wandering through an interior landscape where time no longer moves in a straight line. Rather than telling a clear story, Seven creates an atmosphere of quiet enchantment and introspection, capturing the strange blend of innocence, mystery, and melancholy that accompanies our earliest memories. The result is a song that feels both intimate and untouchable, like a fragment of a dream recalled just before waking.

Together these four songs If I Had A Heart, When I Grow Up. Keep The Streets Empty For Me, and Seven demonstrate Dreijer’s remarkable ability to turn isolation into beauty.

An honorable mention is Now Is The Only Time I Know. Light up the past, set it to blaze, embrace your mew mornings and begin again. “What’s forsaken I do not need… Settling down. Door and room. Keep it tidy. Keep it like home. Come here. Sparrow.” Like the song says, “There is more I’d like to know.” It’s the one song on the record that seems to break the sun through the dark storm of cold, isolating winter. Followed up with I’m Not Done, the redemptive quality of shrugging off those who do harm cannot topple the connection.

The last track Coconut serves as a slow-burning finale, a ritual unfolding in the dark.

Musically, “Coconut” is built on a repetitive pulse of deep synthesizers and sparse, mechanical percussion. The track moves deliberately, creating a hypnotic atmosphere that gradually becomes more intense. Midway through, layers of what we assume to be male voices emerge and swell into something almost ceremonial, giving the impression of a gathering of spirits, a chant, or a dream reaching its climax. Pitchfork described it as a pattern of synths and staccato drums that eventually gives way to a “ceremonious wall of voices” carrying the song to its conclusion.

Some suggest Coconut could have worked as an opener because of its atmospheric power. But I think it lands appropriately as the last track. It reminds us that the alchemical process of restructuring our outlook and our way of thinking is circuitous and always evolving.

As an album, Fever Ray is dark, atmospheric and one of the most singular records of the twenty-first century. It rejects immediacy and demands patience, yet rewards listeners with a world unlike any other. The songs seem suspended between dream and reality, comfort and dread, intimacy and distance. What could have become a cold experimental exercise instead feels deeply human, capturing solitude, desire, fear, magic and wonder with extraordinary precision. More than fifteen years after its release, Fever Ray remains haunting, mysterious, and utterly unforgettable—a debut album that sounds as if it arrived from another realm and somehow found its way into ours.

So, yea, Josiah, check and mate. Fever Ray is quite literally the only album in 2009 worth mentioning.

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The robin is not the most dazzling bird in the landscape. It lacks the brilliant plumage of cardinals, bluebirds, and orioles, and is often overlooked because of its familiarity. Yet what the robin lacks in spectacle, it makes up for in awareness. Constantly alert, it serves as one of nature’s most attentive sentinels, monitoring the movements, sounds, and subtle disturbances that ripple through its environment. A robin notices changes before most creatures do, responding to predators, weather shifts, and unusual activity with an intricate vocabulary of calls and behaviors. While more colorful birds may capture the eye, the robin captures something far more important: information. Its gift is not beauty but vigilance, making it one of the most observant and communicative birds in the natural world.

Jon Young’s What the Robin Knows, published in 2012, is far more than a field guide to birds; it is an invitation to rediscover an ancient way of paying attention. Drawing on decades of wildlife observation, Indigenous tracking traditions, and naturalist practice, Young argues that birds are constantly communicating detailed information about the world around them. The robin becomes both a literal subject and a symbol of awareness, teaching readers that nature is alive with signals that most modern people have forgotten how to read. From the opening pages, the book challenges the assumption that humans are separate from the natural world and instead presents attentiveness as a skill that can be relearned.

What makes the book particularly compelling is its psychological depth. Young is not merely interested in identifying bird calls; he explores how observation changes consciousness itself. The practice of listening closely to birds becomes a way of slowing the mind, sharpening perception, and moving beyond the distracted habits of contemporary life. Readers begin to understand that alarm calls, songs, and subtle shifts in bird behavior reveal patterns of danger, safety, and movement throughout an ecosystem. In this sense, the book is as much about human transformation as it is about ornithology. Young suggests that learning the language of birds awakens dormant instincts and reconnects people with forms of knowledge that exist beneath analytical thought.

The lasting power of What the Robin Knows lies in its blend of science, storytelling, and philosophy. Young writes with the enthusiasm of a teacher and the reverence of someone who has spent a lifetime immersed in the natural world. The book encourages patience, curiosity, and humility, reminding readers that intelligence is not exclusively human and that nature is engaged in an ongoing conversation whether we hear it or not. By the final chapter, the robin has become a guide to a larger truth: that attention itself is a form of belonging, and that the living world reveals its deepest mysteries to those willing to listen.

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Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) can be understood in existential-psychological terms as a portrait of individuals trapped in radical freedom yet incapable of authentic choice. The bourgeois protagonists, Jean Yanne’s “Roland” and Mireille Darc’s “Corinne”, move through a collapsing social order driven by greed, desire, and instrumental thinking, treating other people as objects rather than subjects. From an existential perspective, they embody "bad faith" in the sense described by Jean-Paul Sartre: they evade responsibility for creating meaning and instead pursue wealth and status as if these external goals could provide a stable identity. The film’s increasingly chaotic landscape with the use of traffic jams, violence, revolution, and social breakdown functions psychologically as an externalization of inner emptiness and alienation. As conventional structures dissolve, the characters are confronted with the absurdity of existence, a theme associated with Albert Camus, yet they fail to respond with self-awareness or authentic engagement. Instead, they descend further into dehumanization, suggesting that when individuals refuse to confront freedom, mortality, and moral responsibility, both personal meaning and social reality disintegrate into nihilism.

In moral terms, Weekend can be read as a ruthless indictment of a society that has abandoned nearly every traditional virtue. Rather than offering heroes and villains in a conventional sense, Jean-Luc Godard presents a world in which greed, selfishness, vanity, and consumption have become the dominant moral principles. The central couple move through the film with astonishing indifference to the suffering of others, treating people as obstacles, possessions, or opportunities. Their behavior suggests a civilization in which empathy has collapsed and human beings have become commodities.

The film’s endless traffic jams, accidents, violence, and casual brutality function as moral symbols. Godard portrays modern consumer culture as spiritually bankrupt: people pursue wealth and comfort while ignoring the human cost of their actions. The characters rarely reflect on right and wrong; instead, they operate according to appetite, convenience, and self-interest. In this sense, the film resembles a modern morality play in reverse—rather than illustrating the rewards of virtue, it displays the consequences of its absence.

Yet Weekend is not simply conservative moralizing. Godard also attacks the social and economic structures that produce such behavior. The film suggests that bourgeois society itself encourages exploitation, competition, and alienation. Individuals are morally compromised, but they are also products of a culture organized around consumption and power. The result is a vision in which personal vice and systemic corruption feed one another.

By the film’s conclusion, morality has deteriorated so completely that civilization appears to dissolve into barbarism. The shocking final images are less about individual depravity than about a society reaching the logical endpoint of its own values. Godard’s moral argument is not subtle: when desire replaces conscience and consumption replaces human solidarity, the road eventually leads to chaos.

Viewed this way, Weekend is a dark philosophical warning. It asks whether a culture that prizes acquisition over compassion can remain truly human, and its answer is deeply pessimistic. The film’s most disturbing claim is that moral collapse does not arrive suddenly—it emerges gradually from ordinary selfishness until cruelty becomes normal and civilization itself becomes a spectacle of its own destruction.

Watch the film with subtitles here: https://m.ok.ru/video/3008443517616

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Here’s the trailer for Backrooms:

Here’s the discussion with the director Kane Parsons:

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In the age of AI where users and their devices are symbiotically connected to gain influence, I prefer the influence of music and art. As a result, I found myself drawn again to Devious Device, the debut album by the electronic pop duo Atlanta-based Sonen. Released on July 1, 2010, the entire album encompasses modern day culture where electronics have fused with humanity at a startling, horrifying pace.

Although produced long before AI, after 16 years Devious Device rings true today now more than ever.

After Devious Device, Inside the Sun was released in April 2013.

The band later recorded a full-length follow-up titled The Pink Moment in 2020 but has not formally released an album since then.

In fact the Atlanta-based duo has all but disappeared into obscurity as of 2020 and since 2013, there’s no record of tour dates or interviews.

Devious Device is the sound of a band discovering its identity in real time, predicting the future of AI, and yet without even realizing it, finding itself in an almost cult-position of reconciliation, challenging our position with our fractured human existence, each other and the dangers of e-messaging over authentic communication.

Long before the cinematic electro-pop textures that would define electronic music, this EP captured the raw energy of it and the Atlanta duo, determined to make electronic music feel human despite the internet having captured our humanity and left all actual humans bereft of accountability and true action. The production balances analog warmth with dance-floor urgency, while the vocal chemistry between Keith Evans and Holly Mullinax gives the record an emotional depth and anguish that separates it from countless electronic releases of the era. Their vocals represent the last gasp of a signal longing for humanity and connection amidst their electronic synthetic beats.

What makes Devious Device compelling is not perfection but potential, the sense that every track is pushing toward something larger.

“Head Down” starts out with hard-driving drum beats and as the first song on the EP it stands out as the album’s emotional centerpiece. Built on a driving rhythm and layered synth textures, as well as those classic layered vocals, the song creates a feeling of movement and determination. The arrangement gradually accumulates tension, allowing the vocals to emerge as both vulnerable and resilient. Rather than relying on an oversized chorus, the track succeeds through atmosphere, drawing the listener into a hypnotic pulse that lingers long after it ends.

“Outta Line”, the second song is the EP’s most immediate and infectious moment. We’ve stumbled into an intimate conversation, two humans grasping at each other, wading through their sea of indifferent electronics. This is a private conversation we were never meant to hear. The groove is sharper, more deliberate, the hooks more pronounced, and the band’s sultry dance-floor instincts are on full display. The interplay between the male and female vocals heard throughout the album gives the song a post-coital conversational quality, creating a tension that mirrors the track’s lyrical themes of friction and desire. It is the song most likely to convert a casual listener into a fan, combining accessibility with enough sonic detail to reward repeated listens.

“Wake Up” haunts and demands our attention. It closes the circle by channeling the band’s darker and more introspective tendencies. A call to action and accountability, the track’s honest and layered production creates a dreamlike atmosphere, while the rhythmic foundation keeps it grounded in the electronic-pop framework that defines Sonen’s sound. There is a cinematic quality to the song, as though it were written for the moment just before dawn when clarity begins to emerge from confusion. It serves as a fitting statement of purpose for a band that was already looking beyond genre conventions.

Just when you think you’ve got the album all figured out “Monolith” enters as song 6 and erupts like witchcraft. Any illusions and preconceived notions about the band’s sultry synth almost violently put the listener in their place. There is a conjuring happening here and if you listen to the lyrics, they say so.

Capping off the album with “Meander”, the all-instrumental song leaves the listener to fill in the blanks, weave in the conversation on their own, meander into their own thoughts and pace, with the song gently tugging us to the next plateau.

Devious Device remains an impressive early statement from Sonen. The EP captures a group balancing electronic experimentation, pop sensibility, and emotional authenticity. While later releases would further refine these ideas, “Head Down”, “Outta Line”, “Wake Up”, “Monolith” and “Meander” reveal the essential elements that made Sonen one of Atlanta’s most intriguing underground electronic acts and Devious Device the electronic album of the century. The record is both a snapshot of a particular moment and a blueprint for everything that would follow.

And yet, in the electronic music industry, nothing ever did. And they know it. Sonen’s Devious Device didn’t come in with low self esteem, thinking they were forgettable, thinking they weren’t worthy enough to be recognized on the charts, nor did they apologize for their existence, their authentic lyrics and their battle cry for connection. They already know they’re not easy to dismiss or leave, they know you’ll keep reaching for them again and again, despite your cluttered record collection. After all as the line in “Look It Over” says, “We can tear the walls down one by one while having fun.” They waltzed in, changed your perception, blew up your world, and for those of us who recognize this powerful demonstration, we learn from this and bend our knee in reverence to this extraordinary 8-part event, hold the music close, protecting its authenticity and integrity. It’s always there for us when we need it, committed to our progress.

It’s never too late to pick up music that transforms.

Listen to the EP on YouTube. Here is each song on Devious Device:

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Before I begin the analysis of The Tenant at Wildfell Hall (1848), written by that often overlooked, other Brontë sister, I must first recap the prodigious stand-out novels that have captured our hearts and imaginations, flinging us into haunting passion and lasting romance that set the standard for gothic lore. The following analyses are necessary to offer a fair comparison to Ms. Brontë’s empowering masterpiece.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is one of the most haunting and psychologically complex novels ever written. Set against the wild, windswept moors of Yorkshire, it explores the destructive power of love when it becomes inseparable from obsession, longing, and wounded pride. At its center stands Heathcliff, a dark and enigmatic outsider whose emotional life is consumed by his attachment to Catherine Earnshaw. Their bond defies ordinary definitions of romance; it feels less like a relationship between two people than a force of nature, fierce, irrational and impossible to control. Brontë creates an atmosphere of mystery and emotional intensity in which love and hatred, devotion and vengeance, become almost indistinguishable.

The relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy remains one of literature’s greatest enigmas. They seem to recognize themselves in one another with an almost supernatural certainty, yet their connection repeatedly drives them toward suffering rather than happiness. Cathy’s famous declaration that Heathcliff is “more myself than I am” suggests a union that transcends affection and enters the realm of identity itself. Even after separation, betrayal, and death, neither can fully escape the other’s presence. Their love lingers like a ghost over the novel, blurring the boundaries between life and death, memory and reality. This enduring mystery, whether their bond is a profound spiritual connection or a devastating emotional obsession, is what gives Wuthering Heights its unforgettable power and its dark, unsettling beauty

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is a profoundly moving psychological novel that traces the emotional evolution of a woman determined to preserve her dignity in a world intent on diminishing it. What makes the novel so powerful is its intimate exploration of loneliness, desire, and self-respect. Jane is neither a conventional heroine nor a passive romantic figure; she is fiercely intelligent, morally courageous, and painfully aware of her own vulnerabilities. Through her first-person voice, Brontë invites readers into the hidden chambers of Jane’s mind, where yearning for love exists alongside an equally desperate need for independence. Every emotional triumph and wound feels deeply personal, making the novel less a love story than a journey toward psychological wholeness.

The relationship between Jane and Rochester is charged with mystery, passion, and emotional complexity. Rochester recognizes Jane’s intellect and spirit, while Jane sees beyond his arrogance to the profound loneliness and guilt that haunt him. Yet their connection is repeatedly tested by secrets, power imbalances, and moral dilemmas that force Jane to choose between desire and integrity. The true genius of Jane Eyre lies in its insistence that love cannot flourish without self-respect. Jane’s refusal to surrender her identity, even for the man she loves, transforms the novel into a deeply resonant meditation on emotional survival. By the final pages, the reader feels not merely that Jane has found love, but that she has earned it through an extraordinary struggle to remain true to herself.

In stark contrast to her sister’s writing, Anne Brontë’s writing is defined by unflinching social realism, bold clear-eyed morality, and quiet feminism nested in an innovative narrative structure. Veering away from her sister’s emotionally charged gothic romances, Anne’s work directly tackled the brutal realities of Victorian society showcasing her fierce dedication to social reform: class distinction, lack of women’s rights and poverty. She writes in clear, succinct passages leaving the reader no room for doubt on where she stands.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) stands out as one of the most psychologically penetrating novels of the nineteenth century and arguably the earliest truly feminist novel in English literature. While Wuthering Heights explores obsessive passion and Jane Eyre examines the struggle for selfhood within love, Anne Brontë turns her gaze toward the devastating realities of marriage, coercion and emotional abuse. Helen Huntingdon enters her marriage believing in the transformative power of love, only to discover that affection cannot redeem a man determined to destroy himself and those around him. The anguish she experiences is not merely heartbreak but a profound psychological betrayal: the collapse of her faith in intimacy, trust and domestic security. As her husband’s alcoholism, infidelity, and cruelty intensify, Helen is forced to confront the terrifying reality that the person she once adored has become the source of her deepest suffering.

Unlike Catherine Earnshaw, whose identity dissolves into her attachment to Heathcliff, or Jane Eyre, whose journey culminates in an equal partnership, Helen achieves liberation through self-reliance and moral courage. Her refuge is neither romance nor fantasy but her art. Immersed in painting, she transforms creativity into a means of survival, financial independence and psychological preservation. Her artwork becomes an expression of an inner life that her husband cannot corrupt, a sanctuary where dignity and selfhood remain intact. In portraying a woman who rejects abuse, protects her child, earns her own living and refuses to sacrifice her conscience to social expectations, Anne Brontë created a heroine decades ahead of her time. The novel’s enduring power lies in its unsparing examination of trauma and its revolutionary assertion that a woman’s autonomy, safety and moral integrity are worth more than society’s demands for obedience and silence.

The romantic in me likes to imagine that, having finally discovered herself and learned to live on her own terms, the protagonist’s strength and independence would be recognized by a man who had been humbled by life and made worthy of her trust. Such a man would not seek to possess or reshape her, but would cherish and protect the freedom she fought so hard to attain. He would understand that her creativity, artistry and deeply held convictions were not obstacles to love but the very qualities that sustained her through suffering. Rather than diminishing her individuality, he would nurture it, ensuring that the resilience and selfhood that saved her could continue to flourish alongside a love grounded in mutual respect, admiration, trust and loyalty.

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Description:

Before Bridget Jones Diary (2001) and Love Actually (2003), a fairly unknown Hollywood romantic comedy surfaced amidst the blitz of Gladiator (2000) and the box office hit What Women Want (2000).

At the onset of Y2K, when Web 1.0 was introducing the world to the strange concept of what an internet connection is and what it means for our future, nestled within the apex of a strained and unsure culture came a small movie that represented the simple nature of connection and following your heart.

With the authentic background of Chicago, IL Bonnie Hunt, a Chicagoan, ventured into territory that some critics panned as sentimental and unworthy of a movie ticket.

Ms. Hunt wrote the screenplay, directed and co-starred in Return To Me (2000).

Ms. Hunt curated the film by immersing every detail of it into the most authentic aspects of The City With Big Shoulders, even insisting the character who plays her husband represent the working class down-to-earth men who made Chicago great. This of course could only be played by Jim Belushi, also a Chicagoan. From the scene at Buckingham Fountain, to all of the Chicago extras, many of whom are direct relations to Ms. Hunt herself, to the neighborhood scenes where the restaurant is located the richness of this movie represented in the background, as well as the plot itself brings us even closer to a City that captures energy of family values and hard work, values that are apparently emblazoned into the consciousness of most Americans.

Bob (David Duchovny) is at a crossroads. Grappling with the part of his life that represented safety, love and home juxtaposed with the darkest aspects of his life: abandonment and grief, he meets Grace (Minnie Driver) and within her both of these conflicts are reflected back to him.

Prior to meeting Grace, the conflicts within Bob foster a depth that highlight the insincerity, shallowness and mundanity of superficial connections. He abandons a woman in the middle of a date, he rebuffs invitations to go out and he is incapable of operating in these environments or retaining connections as he retreats further and further into despair and the refusal to face his shadow.

He has spent a considerable amount of time covering up his grief and abandonment and this is illustrated through his messy Chicago condo where old boxes of Chinese food, dirty laundry and general disarray pile on top of each other in a condo that was once a home of open space, cleanliness, safety and warmth. His dog, Mel, represents the loyalty to the past and within that loyalty the dog recognizes that brighter past reverberating within Grace and has an uncanny attachment to her when she enters Bob’s life.

Grace, having been on the brink of death most of her life and having been abandoned by her father lives safely within the care and protection of her grandfather. As long as she is nestled behind the gates of their patio garden, which acts as a sort of beautiful prison, she can paint, garden and flourish. But when she meets Bob, she is forced to reconcile with the fear of possibly losing that safe place and reconciling her own fears, which have been reflected back to her when she meets Bob.

Both characters are facing their shadow-mirrored selves within each other, and the supporting cast, played mostly by elderlies of a different generation where relationships were less complicated and torturous, offer a grounded and practical approach to the conflict within the two main characters.

Please enjoy today’s Friday feature, and thank you for watching with me.

Click here to watch the film for free with ads on YouTube:

Or you can watch it ad-free on ok.ru:

https://m.ok.ru/video/2116359031323?__dp=y

Support: https://linktr.ee/bookofours

Dear followers/subscribers,

JP and Julie who run this page, Book of Ours, are moving in a different direction focusing our energy elsewhere.

Those of you who follow us here and would like to support us, the best way is to go to patreon.com/bookofours. This is where all poetry, music and possibly any future video essays will live.

We believe Substack is a wonderful platform and many friends we are connected to here have benefited from it, so we don’t want to discourage Stackers from continuing their own work.

We also have a youtube platform, “Book of Ours” which will remain open, but no new content will be uploaded.

We started Book of Ours in 2016 on Facebook, just as a way to articulate our concern about a Donald Trump presidency. It synthesized into informative video essays, plus what is sometimes described as “streams of consciousness.”

We will continue to leave this Substack page open for a little while. Anyone who would like to email us can do so at julie@book-of-ours.com.

We Appreciate You. Thank you.

When Julie was a child her grandfather Richard Wenstrom, p. 95 and v gifted her The Chronicles of Narnia.

Most people know who C.S. Lewis is so there is no need to go into too much detail about his work, his beliefs and his influence.

Julie was gifted these books at a very young age and some believed she was too young to absorb their meaning. He insisted anyway. He wanted to expand her bright and curious mind, even though she was just learning to read.

Thank you for reading with me.

I was journaling at 1:00 am Saturday. God, who else could it be, spoke pretty clearly:

It was about this time that JP told me about his soul-stirring, a deep foreboding energy that was coming from somewhere else, landing in his solar plexus, or in his “deeps”, that I said, “This is signal through noise.”

Please listen to how this signal/information was processed:

In the above audio broadcast I mention we pulled three runes this morning. This is what that looks like.

Read from right to left.

Fertility - where we are now; Breakthrough - the challenge position; Harvest - outcome

Waiting for JP to leave so mama bird could get to her babies (see the first two seconds -if you blink you’ll miss it)

Pre-storm:

Storm (thunder at the 1:13 mark)

Thank you for experiencing this with me.