Ways of Remembering
Hypnagogia, technicolor midwest gothic, and a human statue of Lumumba. Worms of the Senses for June 22.
Welcome to the (kind of, sort of) return of “Worms of the Senses.” Longtime readers will remember that this used to be a monthly feature here at To Whom It May Concern… recounting the best things I’ve seen, heard, and read recently. Music, film, television, books or articles or poems or stories or art exhibitions.
It fell off, as many habits sometimes do. Then it turned into an afterword of every article. Now it’s back in full form, this time as a (shorter) (less ambitious) weekly list, coming out every Monday, available to all readers and free subscribers. It will be in addition to my longer, more thorough and varied fare, posted every Thursday. So…
Boards of Canada, Inferno (2026). Not “late to the game” so much as “preoccupied elsewhere,” I’ve been unable to record my thoughts on this release, Boards of Canada’s first in thirteen years. What else is there to say, moreover? Particularly with Sereptie’s comprehensive and imaginative analyses out there, not to mention countless other reviews. Given the enthusiasm this act generates, given that BoC haven’t released an album in thirteen years, there has understandably already been so much written about Inferno that jotting down my own thoughts at this stage feels futile.
Except that there are endless facets to a group like Boards of Canada, so many rabbit holes and dimensions of inquiry, various states of being invoked by their music. I’ll have something longer coming on Thursday (subscribe to make sure you get it), but here it bears saying that, for as remarkable as Inferno is, it’s not what you would really call “enjoyable.” At least not in the sense of inspiring joy.
The first song I ever heard from Boards of Canada was “Dayvan Cowboy.” It was 2006, almost exactly 20 years ago, and I was in a place that made me very susceptible to the expansive, wide open desert-sky its sound conjured. It was an awesome experience in a literal sense: awe-inspiring. It was also a feeling of acendance, of finding resonance with something much bigger. And it was ineffably, indescribably, cathartically good.
BoC, as I was to learn, are absolute masters at invoking these kinds of resonant states, but as devotees know, this doesn’t always mean that it’s pleasant. Look at Geogaddi, long-since known as Boards of Canada’s “satanic album.” Transcendent, but well aware that while we are well-acquainted with the world we are transcending out of, there is no guarantee of what we transcend into. The two ontologies shape each other. The menacing and the heavenly co-constitute. And frankly, Geogaddi has nothing on Inferno. More to come.
Universal Harvester, by John Darnielle (2017). This was, quite bluntly, a fantastic book. I’ve never read any John Darnielle. Not much of a Mountain Goats fan so his novels haven’t been on my radar. After this I’m making it a point to read everything he’s written. (Next up is likely Wolf In White Van…)
Universal Harvester is only nominally a horror novel. The premise is plenty creepy: a video store clerk in late 90s rural Iowa discovers cryptic unsettling home movie scenes spliced into the copies of the store’s tapes, and sets out to decipher the who and what and why of this odd found footage. But the eeriness folds in atmospheres of melancholy, and soon gives way to an overwhelming longing to return… somewhere?
Darnielle’s book is centered on the 90s, but its setting reaches from the 1960s and 70s, and into 2010s. As we read on, we span into different abandonments – some deliberate, some accidental, many inevitable – and the methods we employ – analog, digital, odd and coercive – to try and hold on to the memory.
And what of that memory? Is it simply an experience from our past, living in our head and making us who we are? Or is it an attempt to physically reclaim something that won’t ever come back? Something that gnaws on the inside of our eyelids and stays there, tearing a chasm through every landscape and field you take in?
Darnielle seems to understand how these distinct ways of remembering live in the subregion where the American Midwest becomes the Plains States, those areas that enclosed the agricultural with the industrial before it all started to rust.
Iowa is beautiful, but it is also often desolate, and can be harrowingly lonely. Things haunt differently there. Certain passages allude to how overlooked this part of the country is. More so in the 90s, even more so in the 1970s. People learn to make do with anachronism until they become anachronisms themselves. The signifiers linger: antiquated things that shouldn’t be there, reminders of what should be there that isn’t. Hauntology, by way of uneven and combined development in the American midwest, filtered through the halo colors and static on a degrading VHS tape.
Lumumba Vea (2026). This is exactly why some of us watch the World Cup. It’s not just soccer but the historical sagas played through it. Here’s something I wrote in last Thursday’s post:
With the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Cup for the first time in fifty years, some relish the (remote) possibility of a matchup with Belgium: the potential for revenge against King Leopold’s ghost, complete with a stern and dignified Lumumba mascot.
That “Lumumba mascot” is Michel Nkuka Mboladinga, better known to DR Congo soccer fans as Lumumba Vea. The rest of the world is late to know him; he’s been showing up to Congo’s international matches since 2013 standing as a human statue dressed as Patrice Lumumba, to whom he already bears an uncanny resemblance.
Lumumba, of course, was one of Congo’s most effective independence leaders, and the country’s first prime minister. The story of his death is the stuff of anti-colonial legend. Shortly after Congo gained independence from Belgium, less than six months after being elected prime minister, Lumumba was kidnapped in a coup led by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (later Mobuto Sese Seko), then tortured and assassinated. His assassination directly involved Belgian mercenaries, and even Belgian King Baudouin had been in favor of efforts to “neutralize” him. And of course, the CIA was also well aware of what was happening. They always are when there’s a leftist movement to be done in.
It should be no surprise, to anyone with any sense of what history means, why this (literal) living symbol became such a hit among Congolese fans. Why they demanded the country’s government start paying him to be at matches, to have his stoic, determined posture present at the Africa Cup of Nations. Throngs of energetic fans surrounding him, and he stands stock still, undaunted (only breaking once when DRC lost to Algeria). It seems to me that those who say international soccer can stand aside from the currents and events of politics are the kinds of people who want certain people to sit down.
Header image: Mboladinga at AFCON 2025 (Gabriel Buoys/AFP), artwork from Boards of Canada’s Inferno, and my copy of Universal Harvester (photo by the author).