Blood Jump #7: Stayin' Alive
Saturday Night Fever. Leigh Newman's Nobody Gets Out Alive. Laraaji.
Blood Jump is an independent and free publication, but writing has value. Solidarity with the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and everyone striking.
The border between survival and self-preservation is nebulous. It is easy to draw lines between our diets and our gut health, our Zoom-therapy sessions and our ostensible wellbeing. It is less easy to count the pieces of ourselves lost to compromise, to chart where we are vs. where we were or where we should be or whatever other imaginary rubric finds its way to our lapels. I know I am alive because I am typing out a newsletter with two cats fighting for my attention; I do not know the percentage of myself I’ve gained or lost to my own decisions. Our bodies’ cells are said to completely replace themselves every seven years or so, but I’ve also heard this isn’t true.
If you can’t tell, I just turned 34*, and I’m feeling “strange” about being “old now.” The weekend prior brought me to my hometown for my best bud Austin’s wedding. I hadn’t been home in about 12 years and I spent the night dancing with people I hadn’t seen in almost as long. It was a joyous time, but it’s strange to find yourself picking up conversations left idle for nearly a decade, your youth suddenly behind you, everything at once ancestrally familiar and alienly adult. I’d been quietly nervous that I had returned an incorrect version of myself, but by the grace of my friends, all I’d had to do was show up.
In this week’s Blood Jump, we’re looking at art that tackles the predicament of staying alive, whether that means flourishing, surviving, or simply kicking around until death decides it’s ready for you. Saturday Night Fever. Leigh Newman’s Nobody Gets Out Alive. Laraaji. Let’s begin.
*Stephanie Weber, a brilliant writer and friend from my Chicago comedy days, writes so well about the dilemma of a mid-30s birthday in her own Substack, SVENGIRLIE, which you should read and subscribe to.
Frillbilly Elegy
Toward the end of Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, Josh Neff (Matt Keeslar), a district attorney who ironically helped shut down the club that the cast is now mourning, eulogizes the dying genre they love so much. “Something like this that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die,” he says. “Oh, for a few years, maybe many years, it will be considered passé and ridiculous … people will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and going like this!” This being, of course, the disco finger immortalized by Travolta on the poster of Saturday Night Fever (1977).
Josh’s speech in Last Days is something of a sly punchline. Disco culture faced a far more dire adversary than easy jokes at cocktail parties: the racism and homophobia in the engine of America’s culture war with a genre rooted in Black, Latino, and queer artists. Last Days centers deliberately on white America’s involvement in the late disco scene, taking the piss out of marketing dorks and tracing Stillman’s own uncomfortable love of the music. Saturday Night Fever, the locus of Josh’s agita, is a more harrowing and brutal account: an American mess of tribalist nihilism that festers from a dancefloor’s blistered heels.
It's difficult to square the content of Saturday Night Fever with its legacy—i.e., the polyester and disco fingers that Josh complains about in Last Days. SNF’s pompadoured endurance likely stems from the movie’s soundtrack, a record that houses The Bee Gees’ most indelible output and remained the best-selling album of all time until Michael Jackson’s Thriller. But the music is a glossy negative of the movie itself, which finds John Travolta as Tony Manero, a 19-year-old Italian Brooklynite who scrapes together cash from a job in a paint store to spend his nights dancing at 2001 Odyssey, the local club. Tony runs with a gang of grease-and-leather hotheads, alternatively sweet and horrendous, who hang in his shadows as the best dancer in the scene. Eventually, Tony meets Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), who he’ll spend the rest of the movie trying to win as a partner, on and off the dance floor.
Tony’s life is a miserable one, and misery seems to be much of Saturday Night Fever’s trade. Tony and his friends run through Brooklyn like a pack of guido droogs: They suck down a constant stream of pills and liquor, they hurl despicable slurs, they fight, they use women. Tony’s family buckles under the weight of poverty, smacking each other and yelling and crying through dinners, and nearly falls apart when the favorite son, Frank Jr. (Martin Shakar), retires as a priest after a crisis of faith. Racial tension shudders through the movie like a fractured spine; when one of Tony’s friends his mugged, he mistakenly blames a local Puerto Rican gang and ignites a chain of senseless violence. There is a switchblade danger to Saturday Night Fever, one allows no safety—nor optimism—for any party involved. The sheer unpleasantness of the movie begs a question likely responsible for the goofiness that lies in its reputation: How is dancing worth all this?
A good place to start might be that soundtrack, which punctures the bleakness like pinholes through velvet curtains. Despite serving as Saturday’s aesthetic backbone, The Bee Gees didn’t enter the equation until the movie was in postproduction—they tossed the producers a few tracks they’d planned for a separate album. But serendipity spoke: the soundtrack remains the second-highest selling of all time (unseated by the Whitney Houston–backed The Bodyguard), and it’s become impossible to separate The Bee Gees’ legacy from that of the film. Their music gels and pops with a gum-chewing precision that rockets Saturday Night Fever through its two-hour runtime. “How Deep Is Your Love” would endure through decades of covers, wedding songs, and middle-school dancefloor boners. “Stayin’ Alive,” for better or worse, rewrote disco’s DNA and is likely responsible for much of its whitewashed history. When Tony spins Stephanie to “More Than a Woman,” you almost forget the horrors he faces and perpetuates outside of club doors.
But Saturday Night Fever isn’t content to forgive Tony’s (or its own) ugliness with dancehall beauty, nor does it afford Tony any sort of JD Vance–flavored redemption. Toward the end of the movie, Tony and Stephanie compete in 2001’s big dance contest against two other couples, one Black, one Puerto Rican. Even though they’ve clearly been out-performed, Tony and Stephanie win first prize. For a minute, Tony seems to get it: he sees he only won because of the racism that runs through the club and, dejected, hands the prize money over to the Puerto Rican couple. It’s a hopeful moment, but Tony is too lost in his own anger and misery. He does the unthinkable to Stephanie in a parked car, he lets his friends do the same to a drugged-up woman next to him. He’s too far gone to be saved by a sliver of humanity and sends his life careening into Hell, his friends buzzing around him like so many flies.
The better answer to why Tony is so hung up on dancing comes at the beginning of the movie. Tony is vying for a new shirt to wear to the club and begs his boss at the paint store for an advance. The boss tells him he’ll have to wait until the following week, that he should think of the future once and a while. “Fuck the future,” Tony spits back. The boss returns with a grim warning: “You don’t fuck the future, the future fucks you.” There is no precedent for optimism in Tony’s life, no reason to hold out hope for tomorrow. You might as well dance while you can.
I Think I’ll Try Alaska
I’d first read Leigh Newman in an issue of The Paris Review. The featured story, “High Jinks,” begins with the kind of first sentence that digs its nails into your brain: “The morning of the father-daughter float trip, Jamie’s father has the horrors and can’t leave the can.” The sentence is packed to the brim and unfurls the story like trash from a picnic blanket. In 18 words, we learn of a family that lives on high waters, of a tradition that’s likely been broken before, of hangovers so notorious they’ve become colloquial to children. For sale, baby shoes, etc.
“High Jinks” is the second entry in Newman’s 2022 collection Nobody Gets Out Alive, a set of short stories littered with the kind of wit-loaded and wistful statements that find Jamie’s dad holed up in a bathroom. Like “High Jinks,” all of Nobody’s stories are set in Newman’s home state of Alaska. Each follows people on either end of the sort of grand and wild idea that could set one out for such a faraway and mythologized—and yet distinctly American—place.
“High Jinks” finds two fathers and their daughters on a biplane trip into the wilderness, the men clutching the frayed ends of broken marriages, the girls watching time twist and pull at their friendship. “Alcan, An Oral History” traces a mother dragging her kids toward another doomed relationship and two college girls in a should-be romance until both parties’ journeys collide and implode. “Our Family Fortune Teller,” maybe the strongest story of the collection, sees a lonely clairvoyant living out what are likely her last days in a shack built buy a man who bought her from her mother years ago. The stories are not connected, but characters dip in and out of other entries like neighbors waving across a frozen lake, united more in their loneliness than in narrative.
There is a quiet vitality to Nobody Gets Out Alive, one likely borne from learning to survive harsh climates and long stretches of introspection. Alaska is a place people dream of one day coming to or leaving; the stories of the people already there are both urgent and worn, collections of directionless longing, of being at once nestled in and distinctly removed from our strange and caustic country. That’s not to say that Nobody is dour. Newman’s writing is deeply funny, crammed with punchlines and one-liners that find their muscle in and lend relief from a brutal Alaskan gray. It’s a sense of humor fired in a world known inside and out; you get the sense Newman could write Anchorage with her eyes closed, her prose precise and effortless.
Most of Nobody Gets Out Alive takes place from the 1970s through the early 2000s, but the best synecdoche for the collection’s grit and empathy might be the final entry, “An Extravaganza in Two Acts.” This one winds back to 1915, when an enterprising engineer heads to Alaska with the company of a young queer woman posing as his wife (and who joins legally under the engineer’s guardianship, a queasy detail that likely finds its truth in history). The story is as lovesick and tragic as its premise implies: The engineer longs impossibly for the young woman, the young woman longs impossibly for a man’s wife at their Alaskan camp, their dreams tangle and knot in the intersections. Remarkably, like the rest of Nobody’s stories, “An Extravaganza” navigates desperation without veering into hopelessness. This is a book that holds big ideas and burning out not as inevitabilities but as paradox. It takes a gambler’s approach to fortune; things will work out for its characters as soon as they decide which patch of ice can hold their next step. Because when you’ve already reached Alaska, where do you go next?
The Laws of Manifestation Are on My Side Today
I have always been charmed by, if not cautiously distant from, new age mysticism. I was raised in an evangelical church that cloaked its staunch conservatism in a smiley familiarity. My youth pastor loved The Simpsons and fashioned sermons around Wes Anderson movies; I played Badly Drawn Boy songs on guitar during prayer sessions. Laughing loudly was encouraged until it came at the expense of our faith—in those cases, the martyrdom that stains the modern church would rear its head. I once watched a leader of our youth group get so mad at this joke he turned red. So any model of faith that can acknowledge the idea of a cosmic joke—and place itself at the center of it—strikes me as a welcome alternative, if not a crunchy one.
Laraaji is not the butt of a joke, but I don’t think he’d mind serving as a punchline. The mystic musician’s penchant for laughter might stem from the early days of his career, when he’d scrape together rent between hosting comedy nights on the Lower East Side, playing piano gigs, and picking up small acting jobs (you can find a flash of him in Robert Downey Sr.’s seminal Putney Swope). In a move that carries due mythic weight, he picked up an autoharp when he entered a pawn shop to hawk an old guitar, launching him toward the stuff of ambient legends.
Eventually, Laraaji built a big enough sound through the autoharp and a series of effects pedals to carve out a living busking in Washington Square, where he caught the ear of Brian Eno. Their meeting eventually led to Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, likely the most popular album of Laraaji’s career and one that sonically outshines Eno’s own Music for Airports. Laraaji’s now in his 80th year and remains a preeminent new-age musician. He’s released over 50 albums; he is steeped in mysticism and calls himself “a conduit, a channel, a medium;” he hosts three-minute weekly laughter meditations on an LA-based digital radio station.
We were lucky enough to see Laraaji perform two weeks ago at the Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the country’s biggest botanical gardens, here in Chicago. Sacred Bones Records had partnered with the conservatory to host a night of music in celebration of Mother Earth’s Plantasia, an album that Moog pioneer Mort Garson composed specifically for plants that’s become an indie cult favorite, equal parts knowingly silly and earnestly spiritual. Ambient artists and DJs were stationed throughout the flora to pump drone music as a crowd dressed ten years younger than their age sipped cocktails and strolled and smiled under giant ferns. We were surprised at how hot they kept the place until we remembered where we were.
Laraaji headlined the night, his zither and kalimba backed by a venue-fit loop of recordings of running water. His music is hypnotic, a wash of bright strings and trickster finger piano and shamanic chanting that can seduce even the most sober head toward the cosmos. His setlist let songs bleed into each other, a lazy river of echo and reverb. Simple vocals peppered some tracks—one set of lyrics encouraged the crowd to experience each color of the light spectrum, another simply counted to eight—all with the intent to shock us into or out of a collective trance. Occasionally, he’d punctuate his harp with the kind of deliberate laughter that colors his radio meditations. It’s a chuckle that feels partly drunken, partly sinister, but ultimately delightful, the knowing glee that trademarks the peaks of mushroom trips—a tiny taste of the cosmic joke.
The crowd—one of what I’d guess was around 300, though the greenhouse made it hard to estimate—was rapt, silent to the point you’d wish someone would cough or shuffle or clear their throat. As one song drew toward silence, though, one person was brave enough to go for it: a single “woo!” erupted. Every spine in the room straightened, terrified that someone among us had broken the spell. Until, of course, a delighted smile broke across Laraaji’s face. The rest of us leaned into hysterics. Laraaji wrapped up with a few more songs, lead us on chants of affirmation, neither side of the equation ready to let the joke end. “In the old age, we’d say, ‘be safe getting home,’” he said toward the end of the night. “In the new age, we say, ‘you’re already home.’”
Sample Draws
We saw Ween’s show at the Salt Shed in Chicago this past weekend. Talk about being in on the cosmic joke! It’s remarkable that a band that cut its teeth on South Park collabs and songs about HIV has aged so well; the boys are healthy and vibrant and rock as hard as ever. Frank Zappa, eat your heart out.
We have tickets to see The Cure at Riot Fest this Sunday. I’ve been a casual fan most of my life—I knew Disintegration and the hits well enough—but I’ve been doing a deep dive over the past month, and I tell ya what. You guys ever listen to this shit? Pretty good!
I’m (very slowly) diving into Baldur’s Gate 3. This is my first foray into anything D&D related, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun with something I’m so bad at. I’m playing as a dwarf ranger, which I’ve been told is a contradiction.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again the week of September 25 for the next issue.