1. Joy on Fire poster for our music video, “Uh Huh,” which
has been an official selection at the Prisma Rome Independent Film Awards (2020),
London Rocks Film Festival (2020), and L.A. Rocks Film Festival (2021). Many
other submissions are pending. You can check out the video through this link.
2. I got my flu shot this year!
3. While the image quality isn’t the greatest, this does
represent the reunion between me and the fox. By reunion, I mean that we jogged
together for the first time since she raised her cubs. As per usual, the fox was
more agile.
4. The “Li’l Liza Jane” project goes onward. Once it’s safe,
I will go to Emory University in Atlanta, via a Rose Library Fellowship, to
research the song in greater depth. We have learned so much about America’s
favorite poor gal, including the fact that the tune has been absorbed internationally
(and nationally) by a great number of cultures. Pictured above is the song
translated into the Chinook language.
“Uh Huh” is a protest song, during a protest
year, during a baffling era.
The lead instrumentation—John Paul Carillo’s bass
and guitar; Chris Olsen’s drums and percussion—alternates between harrowing restraint
and thumping outcry. Anna Meadors plays the song’s dirge on her alto saxophone;
the song, then, absorbs the universal lamentations of people who’ve been deprived
of other people. When all four of us participate at once, including the howling
vocals, there is a variety of madness that we could call liberation, or
honesty. Listeners will be rewarded again and again by the virtuosity of the
musicians. The outro, in particular, estimates the emotional quandary of
marching forward, despite a societal environment that cannot remediate its own
destructiveness.
“Uh Huh” refers to brothers in the universal
sense: close and distant family, comrades, colleagues. We are protesting an
inexcusable societal blight like gun crimes, on the one hand, but many protests
can be echo-located in “Uh Huh.” (What’s your
protest?) In the lyrics, a gun is pointed at an unarmed person. This
fundamental inequality can transfer from one situation to another. You’re powerless
at a crucial moment, you fear for your life, you lack a basic resource. You
struggle to envision a future, uh huh.
The artists who created the video—Gabriela
Bulisova and Mark Isaac—have stamped their narrative on the song. By turns
eerie, disturbing, and deeply righteous, the video commences with the thermal
imagery of headless bodies trudging toward a blank destination, at an orderly
pace, their backs to the viewer. Without being told, we know that many of them
are doomed. There is a gun-scope encircling a partial portrait, and an
incongruous flag unfurling, and a litter of human shapes strewn upon a stained ecosystem
that’s struggling, itself, to persevere.
“De voi
depinde,” said the poet Paul Celan: “It’s up to you.” What he meant was: the
individual really matters. By design,
the band does not appear. Our faces don’t outweigh the importance of the protest.
What will our brothers be singing?What will our, what will our brothers be
singing? If we deaden ourselves to loss, we’ll never challenge the status
quo.
Play this song loud. Expect punk-jazz. Topple
the establishment.
Joy on Fire is
John Paul Carillo (bass, guitar)
Anna Meadors (baritone and alto saxophones,
vocals)
Chris Olsen (drums, percussion)
Dan Gutstein (lyrics, vocals)
“Uh Huh” composed by Carillo / Gutstein / Joy
on Fire (2020)
Joy on Fire formed in Baltimore 12 years ago and is currently headquartered in Trenton, N.J. Featured last year on NPR's All Songs Considered, the band is scheduled to play a Tiny Desk Concert in July. Its most recent release is the Thunderdome EP, which features "Uh Huh," and is available on vinyl only at the Joy on Fire website. Maryland label Procrastination Records will release the band's next full length album, Hymn, in June. States of America, the band's first full length album with vocals, and which will also include "Uh Huh," is currently being mixed with release plans to be decided.
