Ponytail Picks #66 - Peace
We come in peace, obviously.
LISTEN
Ambient music for outer peace
I talked about some of my favourite ambient music back in Ponytail Picks #32 - Space and I still highly recommend all of those picks, but here are a couple artists I’ve been melting into only recently, and ones which uniquely blend their downtempo tunes with natural soundscapes to create a sense of what I would say is more of an “outer peace” than an inner one.
J.T. Gladysz
I first heard the phrase outer peace as the title of a song by my bud J.T. Gladysz. Taeya Hazel’s cover art for the single is worth posting here right off the bat:
In the same vein as the figure’s ecstatic atomic amalgamation with their atmosphere is Gladysz’s blending of peaceful synths with thoughtful field recordings, which, in his words, “conjure new imaginary worlds.”
For his latest release, Lush Vegetation, he fittingly created cool visualizers for each track, including the aforementioned single:
Sawako
I can’t remember how exactly I stumbled onto Sawako’s music on Bandcamp, but I’m glad I did. It’s the type of music that seems to have been made more with the intention to listen than to make noise, if that makes sense.
The New York/Tokyo-based artist died quite young last year but it sounds like she made quite the mystical impression during her time on earth. Do yourself a favour and read the write-up by Kenneth Kirschner that accompanies her mysterious Sounds album on Bandcamp.
A few highlights, first on his experience with this particular album:
What was I listening to? There were toys, birds, trains. Insects, oscillators, children’s voices. Sudden, abrasive bursts of noise and passages of overwhelming silence. Traffic. A music box. Distant musical instruments playing at the very edge of perception, then people casually, loudly talking. A crow. And throughout it all, a poetry, a magic…
But was it an album? Or was it just a disordered collection of sounds, thrown haphazardly together? Over the following years, I’m sure I asked all these questions and more to the sounds’ elusive author, and to each contradictory question she doubtless replied, “Ha ha ha, yes yes yes!” – smiling and nodding and revealing nothing.
And then on the “elusive author” herself:
With Sawako there was no inside or outside, no nature or artifice, no music or non-music. There was only the world.
Talk about a true peace!
-JB
What sounds have been giving you peace lately?
WATCH
Pacifist picks
The idea that violence is the best way to respond to violence is still very prevalent in the cinema I’ve seen, but there are a few films out there that show a better way (I say better while acknowledging that it is very easy for a person of my privilege to be a pacifist. But that’s another conversation). Spoilers ahead!
How to Train your Dragon (2010)
I wouldn’t kill him, because he looked as frightened as I was. I looked at him... and I saw myself.
Are we that different from the Vikings? What would our own stubbornly violent culture look like if we were able to empathize with our enemies?
Moana (2016)
Let her come to me.
An invitation instead of an aggression. A parting of the sea makes a path towards reconciliation and life anew, cracking open the crust that builds up around our true, beloved, and beautiful selves:
I have crossed the horizon to find you. I know your name. They have stolen the heart from inside you. But this does not define you. This is not who you are. You know who you are... who you truly are.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
Gimme Nausicaä flying in the face of danger with her arms outstretched over Mr. Marvel Superhero Man any damn day.
Doctor Strange (2016)
Okay, Doctor Strange might be one exception, at least in this first cinematic installment of his. In a film already containing some interesting discourse on violence and “the greater good” comes this thrilling and thought-provoking scene depicting Strange’s climactic confrontation with the main villain:
With humanity’s genocidal history repeating itself yet again in this current moment, I can’t help but cry out, like Dormammu, for deliverance from this unbearable cycle of violence.
The Straight Story (1999)
The previous picks presented stories of active peacemaking; in the late David Lynch’s The Straight Story, we see a glimpse of a world without the need for it. You keep waiting for some awful person to take advantage of this vulnerable old guy on a tractor but no one ever does. It’s strikingly peaceful as a result; there are no villains here, just humans at their empathetic best.
-JB
READ
Two little books to help keep the peace
The world seems to be fraying at the seems. Our collective memory never lasts as long as we need it to. But reading things like these two short books could help us avoid throwing the baby of modern, liberal democracy out with the bath water. I encourage you to read, reread, and encourage the people around you to read them. Let’s do what we can to hold onto the peace we’ve got.
On Tyranny
by Timothy Snyder
Back in March, a professor at Yale with a popular book warning against the evils of fascism made a public move across the border to the University of Toronto in response to the current U.S. president’s increasing shift toward authoritarianism. This is not that book and Timothy Snyder is not that Yale professor. But this list of 20 things to do will have you imagining the conversations the two of them might’ve had in the musty corners of those elistist halls.
For a book you could read in an afternoon, On Tyranny will get you fired up to save democracy.
Animal Farm
by George Orwell
It feels almost condescending to tell people to read Orwell right now—as if you need it said! It’s obvious, but I’ll be the first to admit I often don’t follow through with the obvious.
This is the rare occasion where I recently did. It helped that Animal Farm somehow fell through my literary cracks and I was reading it for the first time. Geez, am I glad I did. It’s cliché at this point, but the comparisons in this novella to our current climate really are gulp-inducing. If we haven’t already, it’s time we reintroduced this to school curriculums.
-AK
We hope you give today’s suggestions a chance. See what blows into Ponytail Press next time (June 6) as we see where the
wind
takes us.