WeakNotes July 2025 - Week 3

Jul 20, 2025

Walking the dog this morning, about 6 am, I looked straight up and thought: big sky. Clouds carpeted the sky, stretched from end to end, from horizon to the limitless. The whole thing looked soft and pillowy and dimpled like focaccia.

The dog pulled me onward, but at the top of our (small) hill I looked out over the fields, one of my favorite spots to take it in and take a photo. So that's what I did, resulting in this image to the left, and as I did I thought it again: big sky.

Perhaps Winchester thought it, too.

There's no single formula for big sky. Sometimes big sky is mostly blue, so deep and wide you sink into it. But big sky often speaks most artfully with a point of reference, something that pulls your eye across it, that asks you to really take it in.

I took the below photo way back in 2010, one of the first times I visited my (now) in-laws rural home with a good amount of snow on the ground. The empty corn fields flatten the horizon, and the combination of blinding sun and streaks of clouds made it seem like the sky had cracked wide open.

Around that same time, my now-wife and I drove west from Chicago to Boulder, Colorado, doing a tour of some of the more eccentric roadside attractions along the way (especially those with a religious theme). I distinctly remember driving through Kansas for a stretch, passing through a stretch of rolling hills and seeing in the sky these enormous cottonball clouds. They felt enormous, they felt bigger than any clouds I'd ever seen before - which is a very weird thing to think about, if you think about it - and the sky itself was bigger than that, incalculably so.

Big sky.

I ran a mini-marathon this week through Shalom Auslander's Feh. It's a memoir but also a striking social critique, in which the author rounds up many of the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, individually and collectively, and picks them apart. That description makes it sound like a very Serious and Somber book. It is serious but rarely somber -- at least, not hushed-tones somber. In reality, as a memoir, it's irreverent and hilarious, at times a bit crude and frequently dark. It's self-deprecating and very often heartbreaking in its self-deprecation. It was a good read and I look forward to writing about it soon.

I am on the very cusp of finishing Orbital. I think I've delayed finishing as I've enjoyed it so much. There is some tremendous writing and tremendous thinking, probably one of the best novels I've read in a while -- and I've read some great stuff lately! I can't recommend it enough.

Kudos to me for doing three of these "weaknotes" (weeknotes) in a row (even if I'm posting this a day late). Like a lot of this site, I am trying to not to put any specific expectations on the format, but I like the idea of a weekly recap, even if it's often less of a recap and more of a place to put an occasional thought or two -- a way to segue from one span of time to the next.

I figure it's a good place, too, to highlight The One.

You know The One, right? Sometimes it's an album, sometimes a passage from a book or a single poem, it's that song or maybe that magazine article or that scene from a TV show. It's that thing that takes you to that zone, whatever that zone is that in that moment, that thing you needed even if you didn't know it. That thing you put on again, and then again, or that thing you find yourself thinking about unexpectedly, repeatedly, each time a bit differently.

There's no single reaction to the One, no defining effect. Sometimes it elates you without reason. Sometimes it gets you thinking, it makes you curious. It might you down rabbit holes, turning you a bit obsessive in tracing its connections, leading you out into a constellation of new territories to explore. Or it might even just be a one and done, something that echoes for a time without you really being conscious of it. And then suddenly you realize your brain has been chewing on that thing NON-STOP, happily and busily drawing sustenance and direction all the while.

You know: The One.

This week, one of my Ones was Kokoroko's new album, Tuff Times Never Last, which came out on July 11. Kokoroko plays across the musics of the African diaspora, with strong connections to West African styles such as Afrobeat and clear inflections of R&B and jazz, but they have steadily found their way to a style all their own. This album is something special in its sound but also in its tone: it just feels bright and uplifting, from start to finish, even though some of its lyrics speak of grief and heartache. And it works as an album or suite, with melodies and lyrics re-appearing from one cut to another.

I can't get enough of it, and it's made me revisit everything else in their catalog, too, making the week a solid week of Kokoroko and related sounds.

Here's a live version of one the album's best cuts, "Just Can't Wait":