Cascadia Calling, 2026.5.12
"making waves in spider caves, all I wanted was to sell you booze and vapes"
I’m down in San Francisco this week. SF, more than any other city, is always trying to sell you something. For all the reputation of Madison Avenue, New York respects your intelligence enough not to plaster every surface with incomprehensible billboards selling useless “AI” SaaS products.
I’m staying in Mid-Market and spent last night walking around with a couple of friends, one who used to live in SF and the other who still does. The current resident was telling us how the Ikea we walked by was something of a linchpin to bring business back to the area. A half block on I saw metal plating up over some windows, bearing the logo of a company that specializes in “Vacant Space Security”. It had never occurred to me that that could be its own specialization, but I guess, as they say, “markets in everything”.
On the way back toward my hotel, we stopped into a Target to get a sweatshirt for my former-SF friend who had managed to lose hers the night before. While she shopped, I wandered around. The place was busier than I’d have expected on a Monday night. I counted three armed security guards posted up around the second the floor, all of them looking incredibly bored.
The presence of the guards felt entirely performative. It’s hard to feel menaced by a guy who’s scrolling Tik Tok with the sound on his phone turned down, even if he’s wearing a ballistic vest and packing a glock. His ballistic vest didn’t have a name patch on it, but it did have a large copy of his company’s logo velcroed to it.
The debut album from Second Homes, Find a Way to Hate It, came out this week and it absolutely rips. The expat duo, composed of Sapheen Meran and Nate Bethea, bring a a sharp sense of alienation and a refined New Wave sensibility to their first record. They have a knack for making interesting, layered compositions without them ever feeling overly busy. The vocals and their lyrics (they trade off writing and singing duties on the record) always take center stage.
The standout track from the album is “Jerusalem (Worst Nightmare)”. Its clever, angry energy and its reclaiming of William Blake’s nationalist poetics are both artful. In rewriting “And did those feet in ancient times”1 into a song about immigration and betrayed hopes, Meran picks apart Blake’s saccharine poetics and builds it into a thing of beauty and wry rage. Laid over top of a prominent, crunchy bass line and tasteful guitar hooks, it makes for an absolute banger of a track.
I also quite like the album closer, “25”, which feels a Manic Street Preachers b-side. Its simple melody, led by vocals and punchy keys, supports a mournful and conflicted song about anger and imperialism. Like much of the rest of the album, it deal with powerful emotions with a sort of bitter resignation. The anger in the song feels real, but tempered.
It’s a great album and you should definitely check it out over on Bandcamp. I’d especially recommend it to fans of new wave or early-2000s indie. But really, it’s worth checking out for anyone who wants to hear two talented writers and musicians put their entire hearts into an absolutely banger of an album.
This past week I finished reading Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing by Lars Krutak and Aaron Deter-Wolf. It’s a fantastic collection of essays about the archaeological evidence for tattoos across cultures. It spans the history and archaeological study of tattooing traditions from across the world, from detailed histories of the spread of tattoos through Polynesia over millennia of migrations, to details examinations of the tattoos preserved on the frozen bodies found in Scythian kurgans.
The book also contained detailed (sometimes to the point of tedium for the non-expert) examinations of the remnants of tattooing tools found throughout the world. Of particular interest to me was the section which relayed microwear experiments to try and establish what marks would be left behind on prehistoric tattooing equipment. Essentially, if you find needles and dyes, that’s some evidence of tattooing, but how do we know they weren’t just used to, say, paint fine lines on skin, rather than score the skin to make tattoos? The researchers built replicated ancient tattoo needles using the kinds of techniques probably in use at the time and tattooed themselves with them. They looked at the needles under microscopes before and after to see the effects the tattooing process had on the bone tools, so that they could then match them to archaeological finds.
Another fascinating theme of the book was the reclamation by modern peoples of ancient tattooing traditions. The book discussed The Mark of the Four Waves, a group who are keeping traditional Filipino tattooing alive, as well as a modern resurgence of Balkan Christian tattooing, among others.
While this book does get deeply academic at times, the material is mostly accessible. It’s also unfailingly human. The book goes to great lengths to talk about the critical role that tattoos have played in humans lives across cultures for thousands of years. It genuinely changed how I think about tattoos as a practice, and if I end up getting one in the near future, it will be because this book changed the way I conceive of them. Marking ourselves can be about aesthetics and about enshrining specific images that we like or feel represent us, but it can also be greater than that. Tattoos can be something to connect us to a greater community or can enshrine aspirational values that we care deeply enough to score into our skins.
The book is highly recommended for anyone interested in archaeology, anthropology, or tattooing in general, or even just for folks who are curious to learn more about a practice that’s been with us for at least 6,000 years.
Perhaps better known from Hubert Parry’s setting of it to music as “Jerusalem”