Concrete Peninsula Newsletter #1

c-ned

27 Jul 2025 — 4 min read

This newsletter compiles links to all the posts created and published on the Concrete Peninsula website within the last week, July 21-27, 2025.

Since this is the very first week of the website, an introduction came first:

What am I doing here?

I’ve got a lot of things that interest me that I want to lay out in essay form, niche interests to broad strokes and plenty of intersections to discover and invent. I’m first and foremost a musician, and I love to share my music and lyric ideas. Categories like film, books, music, basketball, art, history, architecture, writing fiction, nature, writing lyrics, games and all the things I enjoy can all be put through leftist, collectivist, anti-capitalist lenses.

Our interests won’t 100% intersect, but I’m hoping to present everything in interesting and relevant ways to give context and have fun. I’ve been enjoying receiving the newsletter/website format in my own life, so it’s time to compile and present my own. Here’s what I’m thinking: irregular article/essay/art posts throughout the week pulled from a large list of categorical interests to choose from, 2 or 3 each week, make them good and cool and dump them out into the world of personal email inboxes in newsletter format.

Next, an essay on the film The Long Good Friday (mostly about the use of windows and glass in the film):

Recently rewatching the 1980 crime masterpiece The Long Good Friday, I was struck not only by the catharsis of witnessing capitalist failure, but also the amount of looking through glass the director John Mackenzie employed throughout the film. A barrier between the viewer (sometimes us, sometimes characters in the film) of action as a metaphor for distorted understanding of reality. Let's explore several of my favorite... let's call them "action through glass"? scenes and dig into what is going on in each.

Closing out the week, an album review (one of my all-time favs for over 20 years):

I don’t remember why I heard about this album in 2003, but I remember the epiphany presented to me in the form of abstract lyrics, warm and biting bass tone, intermittent horn, squiggly and stabby guitar and ripping dance drums. My brain and consciousness warped, I heard Beefheart, I heard Minutemen, dissonance captured and harnessed, I heard everything I was ever seeking. The bass and guitar in their own quadrants, wrestling with each other across the melodies and across those drums. There’s an alternate reality where this album grabbed and exploded the consciousness of America in 2003, taught us how to diminish our world into small, organized communities and dismantle the never-ending war machine we were staring down and still has us in our grip today. Things are pretty good over there; they are able to keep the apocalyptic vibes in their music and not in their everyday lives. Maybe this feels like hyperbole, but maybe you haven’t heard this album yet.