Going Ham and great food writing

Three things I recommend today:

The Scottish singer and songwriter Hamish Hawk. Backed by his band, his music thumps and surrounds. It feels like White Stripes and a bit of Elton John, but a big voice like Leonard Cohen. His voice is all his own, though. It broadcasts clear, anchored with bass, feels snuggled with each song's melody.

The lyrics spin like poetry marched straight out of the culture, spiked with political nudges, charged with erotic fireballs of masculine energies pent up, released within each new single I've heard, anyways. When I first heard his singles for his newest album A Firmer Hand, I imagined drums smacking water, yellow electric bolts hot in the night; a hand on a chest in the pocket of night.

As such in the gem "Men Like Wire:"

I watched my body soften
In front of men built like wire
Thrilling as sick leave
Vainglorious men
Fulfilling as a dry heave

Fulfilling as a dry heave? Which is to say, it isn't. His loud and catchy sound come with extra votes for my attention because he seems to be talking about the harsh realities of growing up in this century, which like much of the past centuries, has been heavily influenced by men. The three new singles zoom in and out of the most intimate issues of men, and the largest. From disco dancing to hot wars and Big Tech. As the case from one of latest singles, "Big Cat Tattoos:"

A billion dollars in your eyes, beside a hospital bed
Hot wars of the Middle Ages replaying in my head
You wore your Colonel Tom Parker signet ring
With the unmistakable air of "Get up there and sing"
I watched you and time itself share a fat cigar
The peer reviews were purring with their paws on my jugular
You get used to fighting talk, doing what you love
Turns out the soft boy gets hard, when push comes to shove

Or, you can feel similar protests from his 2021 album, Heavy Elevator song "Daggers"

Is nothing sacred
And shouldn't it bе?
Are businessmen womеn like me?
Should've seen what she gave me on Christmas day
Daggers
The man on my treadmill stands real still
The man in my mirror runs for the hills
Is nothing sacred?
Should've seen what she gave me
Daggers

His music gives my mind many avenues to venture, and sets off a feeling. Hamish Hawk, to me, seems to be telling about a feeling locked in many. A wish to say the unsaid. The song is a gasket, but allows the safety of a parchutte, letting you feel the release but when you're done listening to his music, you feel like you're standing up.

New album drops this Friday. Best interview here.

Some of my favorite New Yorker articles lately have been from Hannah Goldfield. In these unusually short articles for the magazine, Hannah flips a food review into a travelogue, a history time machine, texture of how food fits in the culture whether it's Hawaii's influence on Las Vegas or the gay utopia of New Jersey. Either way, this is food writing at it's finest.

 Caitlin Dickerson and Photographer Lynsey Addario take readers through the The Darién Gap. The United Nations estimates over 800,000 people will cross the Gap. See the business of migrating — the pain and difficulty people will go through to try and reach the United States. This is journalism at its finest:

More than 600 people were in the crowd that plunged into the jungle that morning, beginning a roughly 70-mile journey from northern Colombia into southern Panama. That made it a slow day by local standards. They came from Haiti, Ethiopia, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela, headed north across the only strip of land that connects South America to Central America.

AND

Each year, Panamanian authorities remove dozens of bodies from the jungle. Far more are swallowed up by nature. These deaths are the result not only of extreme conditions, but also of the flawed logic embraced by the U.S. and other wealthy nations: that by making migration harder, we can limit the number of people who attempt it. This hasn’t happened—not in the Mediterranean, or the Rio Grande, or the Darién Gap. Instead, more people come every year. What I saw in the jungle confirmed the pattern that has played out elsewhere: The harder migration is, the more cartels and other dangerous groups will profit, and the more migrants will die.

Yesterday's weather: Bright endless sunshine in Colorado — heat cranked up in afternoon. Everything felt still outside as we drove to the airport. Garbage swirls outside the window of the C gate terminal. A lawn of concrete with all these toy carts, jet bridges, cargo trailers for luggage, cranks, buses, people in blue vests, utility vehicles. Big indigo clouds gathered and loomed outside. They covered the day’s brightness. We traveled over a 1000 miles above and away from this weather.