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A SERIAL

SIX

“I AM YOURS!”

Jessica’s 63rd text had come in thirty minutes ago.

Last week, rain poured down the highway, The Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds riffing away, as I drove to my destination: a holiday art show, mysteriously titled “Smoke and Mirrors,” showcasing brilliant, up-and-coming abstract painter Lynne McDonald.

Photo credit: Chelsea Patricia Photography, 2024.

Last year, I embarked on a quest. That quest could have taken me to a grocery store. But walking mere steps outside my back door was better.

WILCO

Nearly 21 years since its release, Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born maintains its reputation for uneasy listening. Jeff Tweedy’s guitar playing was better than ever, as evidenced by his Neil Young-style soloing on “At Least That’s What You Said” and “Handshake Drugs.” The band’s songs and his lyrics, on the other hand, betrayed that confidence with a vengeance. Wilco took the pop melodies of their 1999 cult-classic Summerteeth, ran them through the starkness of their legendary 2002 masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, sequenced the result with a sobering moodiness, and piled on even more existential uncertainty. The new Deluxe Edition offers an alternate, arguably more accessible version of the original album and outtakes including the studio recording of “Kicking Television” (the title track from their live album follow-up) and the quietly acoustic “Improbable Germany” which would radically evolve into the masterful fan-favorite “Impossible Germany” years later. Like the egg on the cover art, get crackin’ on this.

HULU/ONYX COLLECTIVE

Questlove’s eagerly awaited second documentary, “SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” is finally here. The official follow-up to his landmark 2021 debut, “Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” (his third, “Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music,” barely beat it to release by two and a half weeks), Questlove’s cautionary tribute to music innovator Sylvester Stewart—better known as Sly Stone—surveys the latter’s determined rise to glory with the airtight Family Stone and tragic fade from public life. But Questlove is after bigger game. Alongside a handful of Sly’s obvious musical heirs—D’Angelo, Andre 3000, Q-Tip, Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, and more—he digs into the deeper forces in American culture that fueled Sly’s implosion and persist today. Like “Summer of Soul,” “SLY LIVES!” is as profoundly FRESH as it is moving.