SOUNDTRACK: NICK HAKIM-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #12 (April 22, 2020).
I had a mixed reaction to Nick Hakim”s Tony Desk, although the blurb writer says he loved it.
Whenever I’m asked to name my favorite Tiny Desk concerts, Nick Hakim’s 2018 performance sits near the very top. He and his four bandmates reset the bar for intimacy at the Desk with their hushed groove.
Hakim plays three songs from his upcoming album WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD
from the corner of his dark bedroom with a keyboard, guitar and stacks of audio components.
His vocals on all three tracks are quiet and echoing, as if he is whispering down a long hall. In fact all of the music sounds muted and soft, with a feeling of hazy smoke floating around,.
“QADIR,” is a haunting dedication to a fallen friend. He plays guitar–mostly slow muted echoing guitar chords. When the song ends, he activates a mini applause effect box which is pretty funny.
He takes a few loud slurps from his drink and gives a big “ahhh,” before starting the next song. For “GODS DIRTY WORK” he switches to the keys. His singing style is exactly the same, although the song may be a little slower.
He adds a little more fake applause and then a somewhat creepy echoing laughter as he switches the drum beat for “CRUMPY.”
Honestly, all three songs sound a lot alike and seems really slow and hazy. It’s weird how upbeat and smiling he is, in contrast to the music. I wonder how he makes everything seem so quiet.
[READ: April 15, 2020] Nicotine
I really enjoyed Nell Zink’s two other novels, but somehow I missed this one entirely when it came out. I couldn’t imagine what it was about with that title and boy I never expected it to go where it did.
I actually had a slightly hard time getting into the book. That may have been because it was Quarantine and it was hard to ficus or it was because the opening of the book was so puzzling. And yet by the end I was totally hooked. But the beginning:
A thirteen year old girl stands in a landscape made almost entirely of garbage, screaming at a common domestic sow.
Then a white man comes and takes the girl away. Her name is Amalia.
The story jumps two decades to 2005 where the white man is heading toward a sweat lodge. But when they arrive a young girl is smoking inside of it. The man is annoyed. The girl, Penny, is his daughter. She is not allowed to smoke in the house and now she has messed up the the sweat lodge (it will take over an our to air out and warm it up again).
The girl returns to her room. She hears her half-brother Matt having sex in the next room. She opens the door and yells at him–no food or sex before the sweat lodge! Matt tells his girlfriend he’s going to kill that brat.
She is familiar with nudity–it is part of the house, but she has never seen an erect penis before and she connects his anger with his erection.
She tells her mother, Amalia, that Matt tried to rape her. Her mother brushes the idea off. Then she tells her father, Norm, (who is also Matt’s father and is the man who rescued Amalia) that Matt tried to rape her. He asks if Matt succeeded. She say no, to which her father says that he obviously didn’t try, because if he had tried he would have succeeded,. He also reminds her that sex is a private thing ans she should not have interrupted.
They discuss the girlfriend. Norm doesn’t like the girlfriend because she is so subservient to Matt–there is no point in loving someone if it makes you act phony. But Matt is not interested in her really, because he is independent and very successful (he designs garbage trucks–“mobile waste compactors that are changing peoples lives.”
11 years later the rest of the book takes place in 2016.
Penny is with her father while he is dying. Her half-brothers don’t visit. Even her mother does not visit. Penny takes it all upon herself, even when he goes to hospice, even when she moves him home because hospice is not working out. Then Norm dies and his rent-controlled apartment in New York is suddenly no longer his. All this happens in the first 35 pages.
I couldn’t imagine what the rest of the story would be about.
Norm was something of a guru (hence the sweat lodge). He had followers–medical students, fans of holistic medicine, fellow practitioners. Norm had written several books, too.
It is revealed that Amalia is actually younger than Matt and while Amalia is technically married to Norm, she is pretty hot for his son (he is not interested at all). When Amalia, Matt and Patrick (her other half-brother) finally get together, they discuss what to do with the various properties they own. Some of them are in Norm’s first wife’s name, and Amalia doesn’t not feel comfortable doling them out. The first wife vanished years ago and hasn’t been heard from since.
They have lost the New York apartment because Amalia will not fight the eviction notice. That leaves a place in Jersey City where Norm’s parents had lived (and where Norm grew up).
Penny has never heard of this house. That’s because they don’t talk about it–Norm’s parents died in a fire there because Norm’s father was smoking in bed. They left it to rot and it is now a slum where squatters have been living for years.
And this house is where most of the rest of the action will take place.
The house is indeed full of squatters. There are five of them: Jazz, Tony, Anka, Rob and Sorry. The house has an 18 inch circle painted on it. The circle contains an N and the first upstroke contains an arrow pointing down–an anarchist lightning strike, international symbol for squatters. Next to the N in printed marker are the letters icotine.
Her family told Penny was told to check out the place and evict the squatters. But as soon as she meets the occupants, she feels camaraderie with them.
Rob is in the back fixing up bicycles. She thinks he is cute and very friendly. He lives at Nicotine, but unlike everyone else there, he doesn’t smoke, he spits.
Next, she meets Sorry, an older woman who lives at Nicotine because she was involved in a drug trial (she received $8,000) but it left her manic. The therapists put her on lithium, but she found out that cigarettes were cheaper and less toxic. Her name is Sarah, nickname Sari, but she is from Jordan and everyone thinks she is saying Sorry in stead of Sari.
Rob tells her that he found the place as a burnt out shell. The place was solid with no structural damage, so he got a loan from CHA to fix it up. By the end of the visit, she and Rob have kissed (he hugs her affectionately while his crotch communicates indifference). But he invites her back tomorrow when there will be more people around,.
The next day she meets Anka (Anna Catherine) who works for an AIDS magazine. Tony is a mystery man–older maybe forty–who seems normal and stable, so whats he doing there? Then there’s Jazz (Jasmine). Jazz is Kurdish American. She grows her own tobacco. Everybody likes her, she is also sexually adventurous and demanding. Then there’s the unused room.
The room was used by a hardcore anarchist. He was saving ammunition and one day when the police came he grabbed his stuff and left. What he left behind was a wall of buckets. Four rows of thirteen buckets stacked on wooden planks. The buckets are sealed shut but their contents are unthinkable. They have tried to move them, but even touching one causes the whole structure to wobble. They will return in a dramatic way later in the book,
All this and we’re still only on page 67.
There are a few plots that wend their way up.
Penny really likes Rob and they wind up sleeping together. But only sleeping. Rob says that he is asexual–he doesn’t have sex. There is never any evidence that he can get an erection. This drives Penny crazy, but she is so attracted to him, she can’t let go.
Penny wants to move in with her new friends. But she can’t live at Nicotine because there is no room. However, she does manage to get a place in the nearby squat named Tranquility.
Soon enough Matt comes to Nicotine to see why Penny hasn’t gotten the place ready to be sold. She tells the truth–she was going to sell it until she met the residents. Matt is furious because he wants the money (not that he needs it). He stays for a time and gets everyone upset with him, But after he leaves and everyone confirms that they hate him, Jazz admits that she thought he was hot.
From there it’s hard to even describe what happens. The folks at Nicotine get involved in some protests (which leads some of them to jail). Penny winds up getting a job at her mother’s bank (she is a college grad after all), but she still lives at the squat.
Matt and Jazz become a kinky sex couple until he freaks her out and she breaks it off. Matt’s jealously brings him back to Nicotine where he causes a scene and hurts Rob so badly that the occupants flee the house.
This gives Matt just the opportunity the was looking for to retake his property and turn the place into something else. What he decides on is quite a surprise, though. He also really misses Jazz (she reluctantly misses him too).
There is an astonishing amount of excitement and an astonishing amount of sex.
The book is funny and very compelling with an fascinating insight into squatters and anarchists.
I found the end to be a little bit of a letdown, but that’s because everything that led up to it was so exciting.
The cross-country trip, the hiding cell phone signals, the tracking of cell phone signals. The guns, the police, the breaking into houses. It was all really exciting. And Zink has an amazing way with a turn of phrase.
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