Life Elsewhere

After 29 years with British indie/garage/beat/punk/psych-pop collective Comet Gain, singer/mastermind, and main fireraiser David Christian thought, "Why not do a solo album?" After all, some of his favorite records are also solo records by people from bands; John Cale, Gene Clark, Julian Cope, Stephen Duffy, Mike Nesmith, Curtis Mayfield, Neil Young... under the sun of his new home in the South of France, exchanged for Brexit London, a timeless folk-rock album was created, For Those We Met On The Way with the kind help of numerous friends on numerous instruments, credited to David Christian and The Pinecone Orchestra. A conversation with Norman B was arranged via Zoom. David willingly explained the creation of his debut solo album and shared memories of his early days in popular music. You’ll hear a relaxed, informative musician who undoubtedly has a passion for his craft. Plus, David’s young son, Emile patiently standing by as his father chats, finally, cannot hold back any longer and pops into frame to ask a few pertinent questions.

Based on hundreds of hours of research, interviews, and access to exclusive sources and materials, Sandy Hook is Elizabeth Williamson’s landmark investigation of the aftermath of a school shooting, the work of Sandy Hook parents who fought to defend themselves, and the truth of their children’s fate against the frenzied distortions of online deniers and conspiracy theorists. On December 14, 2012, a gunman killed twenty first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Ten years later, Sandy Hook has become a foundational story of how false conspiracy narratives and malicious misinformation have gained traction in society. One of the nation’s most devastating mass shootings, Sandy Hook was used to create destructive and painful myths. Driven by ideology or profit, or for no sound reason at all, some people insisted it never occurred, or was staged by the federal government as a pretext for seizing Americans’ firearms. They tormented the victims’ relatives online, accosted them on the street and at memorial events, accusing them of faking their loved ones’ murders. Some family members have been stalked and forced into hiding. A gun was fired into the home of one parent. Present at the creation of this terrible crusade was Alex Jones’s Infowars, a far-right outlet that aired noxious Sandy Hook theories to millions and raised money for the conspiracy theorists’ quest to “prove” the shooting didn’t happen. Enabled by Facebook, YouTube, and other social media companies’ failure to curb harmful content, the conspiracists’ questions grew into suspicion, suspicion grew into demands for more proof, and unanswered demands turned into rage. This pattern of denial and attack would come to characterize some Americans’ response to almost every major event, from mass shootings to the coronavirus pandemic to the 2020 presidential election, in which President Trump’s false claims of a rigged result prompted the January 6, 2021, assault on a bastion of democracy, the U.S. Capitol.

Ukraine electronic producer 6TH Crowd (a.k.a. Dari Maksymova) has a new single 'Sokolonko', inspired by an old harvest song. This is the first offering from the album 'Step' which she was working on when Russia invaded Ukraine, turning the country into a war zone. About this song, Dari says, "This is a Ukrainian song from Donbas, my dear home region, which Russia is tearing apart right now. I didn’t know if I’d have a chance to do it later. In my research, as I learned more about Ukrainian folk music, I noticed that modern culture has plenty of references to music from western and central parts of my country, but nothing from the east.  Nothing from my home. Culturally it simply didn’t exist. So I decided I wanted to change that balance and bring songs from East Ukraine back to life, to remind myself and everyone that Donbas is a historical part of Ukraine, no matter how badly Putin wants to destroy it,"

He was a big, tall, imposing fellow. His scowl could easily be misunderstood. You couldn’t mistake him when he walked into a room. There are many stories, some true, many exaggerated from his hometown of Ellensburg to his adopted city of Seattle to numerous stops along the way. He was and will remain a legend. Mark Lanegan died at the age of 57 on February 22, 2022. To honor the memory of a unique talent the original drummer for Screaming Trees, Mark Pickerel shares his thoughts from the early years to the present day. Guitarist and musical arranger for Mark Lanegan, Jeff Fielder offers his observations. As you listen to Mark and Jeff reminisce about Mark Lanegan, take note of how they talk of their friend in the present tense - not in the past.

Also in the show, Political Analyst, Professor, and author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, Jared Yates Sexton answers two important questions concerning the invasion of Ukraine

1. Why are factions of the GOP and commentators on the right applauding Putin and Russia?

2. Can we ascertain why Putin is invading Ukraine?

Jared’s answers are succinct and thought-provoking. He is concerned that we are now in a new era and the old ways of dealing with war are no longer viable. Jared suggests we must all realize nothing is ever going to be the same.

“This is not something that’s going to go down well with some of your American listeners, but Trump is the consummate  American politician. What more could you want to represent you than a corrupt individual who is constantly in the courts, the great tradition of a litigious society. He is the personification of the great American ideal, which is to spend freely in the courts, which is to litigate, to hustle, the great hustling tradition”.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark, a frequent contributor to Life Elsewhere can always be relied upon to share his controversial opinions. The learned professor doesn’t hesitate to expound on all manner of topical issues with in-depth analysis. We asked Binoy to give his overview of the following topics:

The Putin Problem

The Royal Embarrassment

The End Of Trump

Global Warning

Olympic Fatigue

Assange Update

Listen closely to what Binoy Kampmark says, he may surprise or even shock you. But, you can be assured he will give you much to ponder, if not argue over.

Erich Schwartzel has written a fascinating book, Red Carpet - Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. His story-telling reads like the screenplay for a Netflix documentary, designed to binge-watch. If there were such a category, then Schwartzel’s book would come under the heading binge-read. He takes the reader back in time to early Hollywood while filling in the gaps in the movie industry in China. There are generous amounts of anecdotes and tantalizing details all perfectly placed to make Red Carpet a page-turner. Erich’s depiction of dubious characters, American and Chinese who validated a curious relationship between Hollywood and China suggests the narrative is not only about the movie business but the state of our world. Erich Schwartzel is an engaging conversationalist, you won’t want to miss.

To explore this funny ol’ thing we call love, six distinguished and talented guests were invited to answer two seemingly simple questions:

1. What Is Love?

2. What Is Your Favorite Love Song?

Our guests quickly voiced the same conclusion, to question number one. The answer will have a different meaning depending on the circumstances. On reflection, everyone agreed, it’s a difficult question, yet all the guests gave truthful, honest, and perhaps self-revealing answers. For some guests, the answer to question number two was easy, they were ready with exactly which song to choose. While a couple of our guests may have chosen more than one favorite love song, given the opportunity. The answers to both questions are surprising, see if you can match the favorite love song to the correct guest.

The guests

Toronto-based singer-songwriter, musician, and poet, Barzin

English singer-songwriter, Alice Kat

Writer and social commentator, Kate Clarke

Irish singer-songwriter, Keeley

Alternative musician, Chris Connelly

Iowa City-based singer-songwriter and bass player, Pictoria Vark

The Songs

Toploader - Dancing In The Moonlight

Caetano Veloso - Cucurrucucu Paloma (Hable Con Ella)

Fleetwood Mac - Silver Springs

Terry Clarke - Walk With Me

Tracey Ullman - They Don’t Know

David Bowie - Wild Is The Wind

The Monochrome Set formed in London in 1978, from the remnants of a college group called The B-Sides, whose members had included Stuart Goddard, later known as Adam Ant. The original line-up consisted of Indian-born lead singer and principal songwriter Bid (real name Ganesh Seshadri), Canadian guitarist Lester Square (real name Thomas W.B. Hardy), drummer John D. Haney (formerly of The Art Attacks), and bass guitarist Charlie X. The band had two more bassists, Jeremy Harrington and Simon Croft, before Andy Warren of the Ants, a childhood friend of Bid, joined in late 1979. They released several singles for the Rough Trade label before recording their debut studio album, Strange Boutique, produced by Bob Sargeant for Virgin Records' imprint DinDisc in 1980. By 1990 the band had gone through a number of lineup changes and Bid recorded a number of albums with his band, Scarlet's Well. In 2010, Bid, Square, and Warren reformed the band, with the addition of drummer Jennifer Denitto from Scarlet's Well and keyboard player John Paul Moran. 2022 sees the band release their 16th studio album, Allhallowtide. Bid joined Norman B for an in-depth conversation, delving into conspiracy theories, the music business, and recovering from a serious health problem. This is an illumination interview with controversial opinions and ideas, complete with a look back at The Monochrome Set’s first 7” single, He’s Frank (Slight Return), and a preview of the band’s latest album.

Robert Hunziker is a pleasant, polite fellow, he writes extensively on the environment, collating mind-boggling facts and figures. We invited Robert back to Life Elsewhere to bring us up to date with his latest findings on the state of our planet. This was prompted in part by his frequent contributions to CounterPunch. After listening to Robert Hunziker speak for 60 minutes you may well decide to clamber back into bed, pull the covers up over your head, and hope you doze off to sleep peacefully, even though it could be the middle of the day. Hunziker paints gruesome scenarios in vivid detail. He invites the listener to board an imaginary spaceship to view Earth from afar. As you hurtle through space, Mr. Hunziker adds another catastrophic possibility after another. Then, without missing a beat, he announces, “I don’t know how to pilot this craft back to Earth. To survive we will most likely have to find another planet to live on. Are you scared yet?”

Two books by two talented authors. One writer uses imagined dialogue woven into documented events and facts while the other writer creates realistic scenarios with fictional characters.

When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself. Shakespeare and Company is more than a bookstore and lending library: Many of the prominent writers of the Lost Generation, like Ernest Hemingway, consider it a second home. It’s where some of the most important literary friendships of the twentieth century are forged—none more so than the one between Irish writer James Joyce and Sylvia herself. When Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses is banned, Beach takes a massive risk and publishes it under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company.

Best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen explore the lonely freeways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying with them the scars of their families’ tumultuous pasts. Fiona was always destined to leave, her effortless beauty burnished by fierce ambition—qualities that Jane admired and feared in equal measure. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California and grieves her estranged father’s sudden death, in the process alienating an overzealous girlfriend. Strained by distance and unintended betrayals, the women float in and out of each other’s lives, their friendship both a beacon of home and a reminder of all they’ve lost. In stories told in alternating voices, Jean Chen Ho’s debut collection peels back the layers of female friendship—the intensity, resentment, and boundless love—to probe the beating hearts of young women coming to terms with themselves, and each other, in light of the insecurities and shame that holds them back.

Some of the new music that arrives on my desk can be difficult to classify. The descriptives an artist is required to select for the various media platforms can appear confusing if not contradictory. For example, experimental, dreamy, melancholic, post-minimalism, ambient, computer-folk, spoken word, and drone are just some of the genres assigned to the following music.

Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine.

After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao’s phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today.

Both Carl Erik Fisher and Jing Tsu are exceptional writers, each has taken scholarly issues and flawlessly created masterful and readable books. Their passion and knowledge are evident in their engaging, informative conversations with Norman B.

Ever since the damn Covid plague, working in isolation has become de rigueur for what feels like the last hundred years. Thankfully, most of us have become reliant on Zoom to interact with each other, face-to-face, albeit virally. This is how we have conducted our conversations for Life Elsewhere, and Zoom has become the obvious work tool for musicians and producers who are possibly thousands of miles apart. The new album, a hAon by Telefis from two of Irelands most acclaimed musicians, Cathal Coughlan and Garrett Jacknife Lee was planned and created via Zoom and other electronic media. With Cathal being based in the middle of England and Garrett ensconced just outside of Los Angeles, the pair worked on the Telefis project remotely. Although they had met up in person, earlier in their careers, the planning, recording, production, and mixing for a hAon was all conducted via the internet. Continuing with that theme our conversation took place in three different time zones. For Cathal, it was early evening, early afternoon for Norman B, and late morning for Garrett. Listen carefully as the conversation flows with details about producing the Telefis album, insights into working with legendary bass player, Jah Wobble, and going back in time to unravel an early post-punk release, Rapejacket from the album Comforter by Compulsion. You'll also hear one of Garrett's latest collaborations and production ventures with Mali-based singer, Rokia Koné, aka the Rose of Bamko on the beautiful, Bamanan album. This is also a prompt for you to check out Garrett Jacknife Lee's extraordinary list of production credits. Although this is very much a conversation about music, it is also an explanation as to why Telefis is important for Cathal and Garrett to honor their Irish heritage.