Pumping up the Kicks
Thoughts on Mile End Kicks, the Lilith Fair doc, Cécile McLorin Salvant, The Lowdown, and the Hidden Cameras. But first a sad farewell
Since last we met, I published a piece I’m quite fond of about Neko Case’s new album, so please read and listen to that. And I’ll also be at my Slate post on Friday morning, spectrometers and seismographs at the ready, measuring the impact of Asteroid Swift when it hits. But meanwhile here are some field reports on a host of equally worthy phenomena, just between you and me.
RIP Kaleb Horton
It’s been said better by others who were closer. But I was also fortunate enough to know the writer and photographer Kaleb Horton a bit online. I shared the shock and grief when news came last weekend that he had died during a seizure, I think still in his thirties. This thread on Bluesky links to many of Kaleb’s finest pieces: sharp, funny, aching writing about California culture, country music, other music (I loved his obit for Shane McGowan), noir writers, politics, nature, and more. Reading him is the best way to honour him.
It’s also the best way to feel stricken by the lost potential. Not just for the work he could have done in the future, but for work he didn’t get to do because there wasn’t enough of a feature-writing industry left to support him when alive. He was always struggling and often insecure. I wish he could see what we’re all saying now. (It’s not easy, trust me, for so many writers to admit how good another writer was.) In a better world, someone would publish a posthumous anthology. In this one, it’s probably smart for us each to save our own copies. Goodbye, Kaleb, and sorry on behalf of everyone who didn’t say it earlier.
Chandler Levack, Mile End Kicks
It’s not like I can be objective about this film, one of the toasts of TIFF 2025, though I couldn’t catch it there and had to beg a screener later. Director Chandler Levack and I have been friendly since the mid-2000s when she invited me to talk to the arts staff at her U of T student paper. And look, that’s my book right there on the table in the main publicity shot. This was a sweet gesture on Chandler’s part. It’s also apt because the main character here (Barbie Ferreira) is herself working on a 33 1/3 book, about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Will she finish it on time while spending her first summer ever in Montreal in 2011, trying to live on her $500 advance (true facts!), and getting crushes on boys in bands she’s supposed to be writing clear-minded articles about? Has any film ever had such a suspenseful plot?! I kid, but for some of us, movies about authors late with their manuscripts are an underappreciated subgenre of horror.
This followup to Chandler’s beloved debut I Like Movies captures perhaps the last moment in history when “arts critic” was a glamorous grownup job a young person might dream of. Chandler was an intern at Spin around that time—that’s her own now-vintage tee on Ferreira in the shot above—and in a lovely full-circle moment, she was recently interviewed by Spin about it. It also relives the final years when Montreal was still so cheap that you could work a shit job a few days a week and spend the rest of the time doing creative work in your spacious apartment. And/or getting distracted from doing so by bohemian happenings, drinks, drugs, and dancemusicsexromance. It features the requisite Bran Van needledrop and, surprisingly, original songs by the band-in-the-movie (TOPS, portraying the hilariously named Bone Patrol) that nearly justify the protagonist’s infatuation. Each detail is uncannily recognizable from my own years in Montreal, even though that was a decade-and-a-half earlier.
Mile End Kicks is also a master’s thesis on gender in music scenes, the insider/outsider dynamic of said scenes, and the problem of mistaking artistic taste for actual knowledge of life. In this sense it is in the High Fidelity genre, but from a radically different p.o.v. It’s funny-sad in a post-mumblecore, post-Girls idiom that died a premature death circa the 2016 election. As the sort of person who reads this newsletter, you will probably feel vindicated and/or indicted. Watch out for screenings near you (as in Vancouver this weekend), and when I hear about it coming to streaming, I’ll tip you off.
Ally Pankiw, Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery
If Mile End Kicks is a film in part about how hostile music culture can be to women, this long-awaited Lilith Fair documentary is a kind of antidote: yes, it says, but it doesn’t have to be that way. (Another TIFF premiere, this one is already streaming, for free, at least in Canada.) Canadian director Ally Pankiw took off from the landmark oral history published in Vanity Fair in 2019 by friend-of-the-newsletter Jessica Hopper with Sasha Geffen and Jenn Pelly, about the mobile home and traveling circus that Sarah McLachlan built for women in music in the late 1990s.
I’m coming to the film a bit late, and also watched it in the middle of work on my Poptimism feature for Slate. So among the many thoughts it provoked, what stood out were the reflections it prompted on how deep my indie-underground snobbery ran at the time. My initial reactions were all about the preponderance of “soft” folk-rock, especially in the first, 1997 iteration of the festival. Though I was a fan of McLachlan’s (she’d come out of an alt-indie world), I had a kneejerk reaction against the likes of Paula Cole or Sheryl Crow. Essentially I felt Lilith was “lame” (as I would have said then) because it wasn’t co-headlined by Sleater Kinney and Queen Latifah, followed by mostly other post-riot-grrl bands.
Besides massive naiveté about what was actually possible to sustain business-wise, there was an underlying sexism—and rockism— in my attitude, in the impulse that music ought to be hard and edgy, and cool women had to be cool on terms men had defined, even while protesting against those very terms. The routine industry sexism and harassment the women in the documentary describe is shocking, from the refusal to play women consecutively on the radio (still the case in country music) or having more than one female-led act on a concert bill (the direct inspiration for Lilith), to the constant objectification and worse in every stage of marketing. That stuff made me sick then too. But the belief that I was firmly in the virtuous opposition papered over my own indie-feminist-boy blind spots.
I would have argued, if you’d told me that then. I would have said that most of the women folk-rockers then popular on the radio were tamping down their anger and dumbing down their songs because that’s what a sexist society demanded. I liked lots of quieter artists, I would have said, provided that their writing was sophisticated and complex, like Suzanne Vega’s (who did play Lilith). I also wasn’t really interested in big festivals (“big corporate festivals,” I would have said) as a context to hear music. I never went to Lollapalooza either. I’m still mostly not interested in those events. But damn, I wish I had gone to Lilith Fair, especially in the second and third years, when the bills were a lot more diverse both racially and stylistically (McLachlan listened to the criticism!). It’s genuinely bizarre that I didn’t in 1998, when I was working closely every day at a Montreal alt-weekly with my friend Buffy Childerhose, who suggested the Lilith name to McLachlan. (She shows up briefly in the doc.) It was such a distinct bracket in time.
Many documentary viewers seem to have the reaction that you could never do something like Lilith now. I don’t know about that at all. What the film amply demonstrates is that you couldn’t do it then, either. Until someone just did, and then somehow you could. McLachlan’s flash of inspiration for how to use a position of power she was uncomfortable with, but also too pragmatic to deny, is so impressive in retrospect. I’d even venture that it was a Canadian response, in the best sense—this need to counteract the isolating effects of success (and perhaps a feeling of being undeserving) by inviting everyone else along.
In February, early in the Trump administration, I wrote a piece here looking back to Rock Against Racism and the Red Wedge in the UK as well as the Black Wedge in Canada, as past models of collective action, bringing musicians and other artists together with activists. Lilith Fair should have been on that list too. The answer isn’t to try to do the same thing over again (the 2010 Lilith revival was an unfortunate flop) but to invent a new vessel for the demands of the moment. Something else is always possible. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Cécile McLorin Salvant, Oh Snap
McLorin Salvant, raised in Miami by Haitian and French parents and then coming to New York to turn jazz on its ear, has been one of my favourite living singers since I heard For One to Love in 2015. Within jazz, her interpretive skills and selection of repertoire are unequaled in her generation. But in the past half-decade, she’s been turning more and more to original composition, often in a mythopoeic mode culminating in the 2023 album Mélusine and the as-yet-unrecorded chamber opera Ogresse. Compare those two titles to the exclamation Oh Snap and you get a hint of what a shift Salvant’s songwriting takes here. The next clue comes about 48 seconds into opening track “I am a Volcano,” when you get a full-fledged beat drop.
Oh Snap includes some of Salvant’s longstanding Sarah-Vaughan-reincarnated stylings (“Anything But Now,” “Expanse”), and a summoning of the melancholy and fury of Nina Simone on “What Does Blue Mean to You,” inspired by Toni Morrison. But on most of it, she slips beyond any enclosure or category. Her musical partner Sullivan Fortner switches between acoustic piano and a bank of synthesizers, playing as fluently as always, and there’s electric bass and drum machines alongside wood and skins. On “Second Guessing” and “A Little Bit More,” Salvant channels 90s and 00s R&B, to the point of including some AutoTune-like vocal alterations. Meanwhile on the beautiful “Take This Stone,” she presents a perfect contemporary folk song with harmonies from June McDoom and Kate Davis. (I thought of Allison Russell, but also of the McGarrigles.)
Elsewhere, on several of my favourite songs, she demonstrates how far her kinship with Kate Bush extends beyond her (amazing) cover of “Wuthering Heights” from Ghost Song in 2022—which, live, she would also layer with Bush’s nuclear-nightmare vision “Breathing.” Salvant’s inhabitations of extra-human personae in the recent works recalled Bush conceptually, but less so in style. But here, on “Volcano,” “Oh Snap,” “Eureka,” and “Nun,” Salvant emulates Bush’s way with song much more directly, at times seeming to peek out from behind masks and at others to leap into the listener’s lap, shifting shape while making vocal scissor-jetés over octave-sized intervals. Finally on closing track, “A Frog Jumps In,” she moves from evoking Bush to Björk, more as producer than as vocalist, in a coda that’s kin to the textural journeys of Vespertine and Medulla.
I may be making Oh Snap sound like a mash of styles, but that’s not how it feels. It glides from one sonic array to another with elegance, and a continuity at its emotional centre. That it can do so while combining all these idioms indicates the force of Salvant’s will as well as her earpower (and Sullivan’s) at this point in her evolution. Evolution is right: This album feels like a mutational leap not only for her but for the listener. Stunning, and no question one of the year’s best. Almost a one-woman Lilith’s Fair.
(NB: Salvant appears with her trio in Toronto on Oct. 25 as part of the Oscar Peterson 100th Birthday Celebrations at Koerner Hall. But given that context, don’t expect to hear Oh Snap represented there.)
Sterlin Harjo, The Lowdown
Reservation Dogs was an impossible achievement to follow, and thankfully The Lowdown doesn’t try. It gives us something else entirely. Various Rez Dogs actors do appear as side characters; of course lead player Ethan Hawke had a brief but memorable role in that series. But based on the first few episodes, The Lowdown is a shaggy noir with conspiratorial overtones that recall Coen Bros films as well as the series version of Fargo; the Thomas Pynchon of Inherent Vice (book and movie; btw I’m excited to see One Battle After Another); and the localized absurdism of a Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard (there are some Justified cast appearances too).
But mainly I’m here in my capacity as TV sommelier to point you to some background on the show’s inspiration, the Oklahoma independent historian-journalist, book dealer, and personality Lee Roy Chapman. He was a friend of Harjo’s until his untimely death in 2015. (He seems like a type Kaleb might have written about, or even aspired to be.) On YouTube, you can see a series of short films (shot by Harjo) under the rubric Public Secrets, that feature Chapman tootling his white van (or bike) around Tulsa, honking at everyone and jawboning through the local lore he’s uncovered. A few are directly relevant to The Lowdown, like the white-supremacist history of a prominent local family, or the tale of the transcendent Tulsa-born artist and poet Joe Brainard (us New York School nerds whooped when Brainard came up in the show). But then there’s also the one about the Sex Pistols’ second-last show, at a Tulsa country ballroom.
Maybe that will be a plot point later in the season. So far the soundtrack is more in the Lee Hazlewood line of musical nervous breakdown, or this bit of CanCon from Helena Deland.
The Hidden Cameras, Bronto
There was always a nest of paradoxes at the heart of the Hidden Cameras, ever since their early-2000s rise as the house band of Toronto’s indie-utopian years—or rather the other house band, the more perverse and strange counterpoint to Broken Social Scene, with its queer communal juices steeped in the glittery make-believe of Will Munro’s Vazaleen club nights. The Cameras were an explicitly gay band that sidestepped the signifiers of glam rock or house music and instead cheerfully corrupted the wholesomeness of folk jamborees and church choirs. They were also a clamorous collective that really sprang from the brainpan of one songwriter, Joel Gibb, who’d started it as a four-track bedroom project. These contradictory tensions put a Newtonian spring in the band’s every action.
In the past dozen years or more, one part of that dynamic fell away, as Gibb relocated to Berlin and the Cameras basically returned to being a solo project, despite contributions from past Hidden comrades and others. Now the other side of that original animating tension has been removed on Bronto (I imagine the title is a tribute to Arthur Russell’s Dinosaur)—this is an electronic dance album, the sound of Gibb’s adopted hometown as well as the international lingua franca of gay male social spaces. How wonderful to have the Pet Shop Boys do a remix of the excellent opening track, “How Do You Love?”
However, for me what’s missing is a fresh dynamic to replace those founding tensions. I know my attachment to the band’s past might bias me. I’m impressed by the way these songs bend toward an intimate vulnerability that contrasts with the Cameras’ past bravado. But that crying-on-the-dance-floor idea is too old and commonplace to strike a spark. I don’t feel the heavy production here leaves enough space for Gibb’s greatest strengths—his melodies, narrative threads, and sense of humour (with a few exceptions: “You Can Call” stands out for me, for instance). Still, I’m very glad Gibb continues to reach for new things, and I’ll always be more than keen to hear them.