Bringing Back New Concepts to This Mad City

Caroline Hagood explores Jason Weiss’s “Other Lives Our Own,” a collection she hears in spectral conversation with the work of Kendrick Lamar and Agnès Varda.

By Caroline HagoodAugust 2, 2025

• Poetry

• Music

• Film

IN HER 2000 DOCUMENTARY Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I ), filmmaker Agnès Varda pans in on her own hand and says, “I mean this is my project: to film with one hand my other hand.” In his two books for Spuyten Duyvil Press, Listenings (2023) and Other Lives Our Own (2025), Jason Weiss pursues a similar philosophical project: to cast his mind as both camera and subject. Weiss wants to take in the clamor of the city, of his body, of the gears of his own mind at work. This sense of being a cultural camera connects intimately to that of flânerie—the flaneur (or flaneuse) who stalks cultural landscapes, gleaning mental and physical spaces in the process, collecting the refuse of street life and turning it into something meaningful. Kendrick Lamar, another gleaner and flaneur, describes himself as a collector of sounds and the various scenes he surveys—ranging from Compton to his own kaleidoscopic mind. He also samples heavily—memorably, from the history of Black music in his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly—as does Weiss, who describes in his work the act of rooting around in records for a compelling concept.

While their contexts are quite different, collaging these seemingly odd bedfellows is my effort to honor their maneuvers and, in the process, create something new. All three artists thrive on unexpected, even unorthodox, connections, specializing in a method of gathering, then deploying, extreme close-up shots of their own mental environments that open into careful studies of their cities, their cultures, their art forms. In quite the metacognitive production, this allows them to study their own minds, then all the things, then their minds’ reactions to all the things, and then, finally, to make art.

Varda shoots her own hand but also spends hours interviewing people who, in order to eat or make art, collect what others consider to be garbage. Weiss listens to the sounds that take place in solitude but also travels the world, taking in its urban crowds, other languages, and of course concerts and records. In albums such as 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, Lamar captures the sounds, smells, and feels of Compton, telescoping a deeply personal coming-of-age story that gives equal weight to the pilgrimage of faith and his quest to bed Sherane. Together, Weiss, Lamar, and Varda’s creative undertakings channel a fervent commitment to innovating by collecting striking pieces of the world and bringing their discoveries back to an inner “cocoon” of art-making. Lamar explores this inventive method/metaphor directly in the track “Mortal Man” from To Pimp a Butterfly.

Though these artists may not have listened to, read, or watched one another (given that Varda died in 2019), I hope they’d appreciate this little act of sampling, remixing them together here in a mode that’s not about influence but resonance, not collaboration but collage.

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Weiss has long, and quietly, been presenting other writers and thinkers to the world. His first published work, Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers (1991), foregrounded his role as interviewer, and he has since also worked as an editor and translator. But his behind-the-scenes support of other authors doesn’t prevent him from simultaneously being a literary rebel in his own Weissian way. He’s simultaneously blunt and philosophical, which might sound paradoxical, but Weiss uses these approaches in tandem to delve more deeply into the questions he cares about. From the first essay in Other Lives Our Own (2025), “Where Are You From,” Weiss poses the question that serves as his call to conceptual adventure: “What carried you the whole long way up to now?” Throughout Other Lives Our Own, he skips over small talk and polite intros in favor of origins and getting right into the nature of being. But it’s a particular kind of ontology that he’s after.

In Other Lives Our Own, Weiss aims to awaken readers to all the daily experiences they are not absorbing or even registering. He highlights oft-ignored elements of our lives, such as the sounds our bodies make, while knocking down a peg over-romanticized, writerly preferences like being precious about bookstores. In “The Strangeness of Bookstores,” he presents the counterargument to the conventional writer’s response to these havens, claiming he doesn’t feel at home in these spaces: “Familiar as the elements may be, I find little comfort there, no place I recognize as my own.” In Weiss’s writings, no identity quite fits, save that of the gleaner.

As Weiss frames it in “Outs and Ins,” we don’t need the influencers to tell us what to think. He offers a madcap alternative to obeying the experts: conceptually off-roading it as rebel-gleaner, outlaw-flaneur. What’s the geography of Weiss’s outlaw lands? His essay “Canary” provides a possible map, chronicling how music transports us to eerie realms where we can converse with the dead, resurrect deceased melodies, and conduct ghost dialogues with the history of music and people. For Weiss, the recordings themselves act as conduits, putting us in touch with foreign notions that can blend with the local ones in our brains until we are pitch-perfect hybrids of past and present.

As for my own spectral writing travels, I’ll leave it at this: In Listenings, Weiss prefers to hear music without lyrics while writing. I often feel the same way, finding the sung words distracting as I reach for my own ideas; but sometimes I need terms from a ghostly Weissian musical realm to slam against the ones trying to form in my head. My favorite ghostlike music companion for my writing sessions of late has been (surprise, surprise) Lamar. At one point, I decided to reread parts of Weiss’s Listenings and Other Lives Our Own while playing To Pimp a Butterfly at the same time as Varda’s The Gleaners, until Weiss’s lyrical essays on thinking, seeing, and hearing started to interweave into haunting new inventions. This fits the way I want you to experience these three artists together (ideally): less as weighty exegesis, more as eclectic—and maybe even a little chilling—mixtape.

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In Listenings and Other Lives Our Own, Weiss plays the role of flaneur and gleaner, an artist of scavenge, of salvage. He’s a collector of culture, poetic images, records, ideas, and even ghosts. He wants to gather groups of interesting things and let us rifle through them. He doesn’t want the trendy bauble that’s been pushed on him by cultural arbiters but rather the dusty record found at the bottom of the cardboard box in some guy’s city basement. The urban is key here: it’s often cities near and far that he’s chronicling because of the sheer number of people consuming culture there, as well as the centrality of their museums, which hold the ghost-art relics of humans from the past.

In Listenings, as a complement to his cityscapes, Weiss outlines “aural maps” using synesthetic descriptions to zoom in on the process wherein we use our mind to examine that very mind. He describes the ear as a sort of brain, reading as a form of listening, listening as a kind of speech. Weiss takes everyday ideas or occurrences and inspects them from all directions, asking that we see them prismatically, anew. This is how he describes his writing process in Listenings’ “Writing Liner Notes”: listening to the music from every possible angle, at every possible volume, in every possible order. He chronicles his gleaning practices, how he enjoys the thrill of the search and the finding of unexpected gems. In “Record Hunting,” he writes of being moved to search for something deeper in those stacks, characterizing the quest for the perfect record as an act of archaeology. He cautions against underestimating the potential prophecies sealed in what appears to be just a plain old record. For Weiss, the recording is always a portal to somewhere more sublime.

Similarly, Lamar’s artistic process is perhaps best described as that of a collector, an obsessive curator. As he puts it in a Variety interview, he spends 70 percent of his time coming up with ideas for an album before he records it, and 30 percent assembling sounds. Only then can he figure out how to connect the sounds and ideas to communicate the right message. Lamar believes his greatest gift is discovering how to deliver intricate, deftly connected messages to the masses; he foregrounds in this interview the conceptual aspects of music-making, the process of composition over the flashy final product of, say, a Super Bowl performance. The “cocoon” is what matters, not the “butterfly.” In that same vein, Varda recognizes gleaning as an amassing of experiential delicacies to be enjoyed later as a record of where she has been and to serve as the raw material for a new work of art.

These works take discovered, trashed, or discarded objects as their subject, but just as essential are the stories of their creation. Lamar’s interest in anatomizing his own thought process, as Varda does in The Gleaners and I and Weiss does in both Spuyten Duyvil books, can be seen in his song “Gloria” (from his 2024 album GNX), which seems to be about a woman but turns out to be about his relationship to writing; or a song like “Mortal Man,” which culminates in a haunting allegory of a caterpillar, cocoon, and a butterfly (with the final interlude penned by the rapper Punch) that also glosses, with hardscrabble elegance, his artistic process.

Lamar’s dedication to imaginative procedures over creative output makes him a hip-hop auteur in the spirit of French New Wave filmmaking, as he imbues his works with his own particular style and approach. In an IndieWire interview, Varda (sometimes treated as the godmother of the French New Wave film auteurs) describes filmmaking, and documentary in particular, as an act of gleaning, because such filmmakers select what they use and how they use it, and then transform what they discover into the unimaginable structures of art. This allows her, like Lamar and Weiss, access to the tools to outline the cognitive process of what it means to take junk and make something of it.

What kind of art comes from this process of innovative resurrection—so important to Varda, Lamar, and Weiss—that gives new life to discarded and literally or figuratively dead items (whether it be sampling the work of musicians who have died or using the ribs of a deceased animal to make a sculpture)? A decidedly ghostly kind.

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In “Radio” from Listenings, as in Other Lives Our Own, Weiss writes of music as an uncanny missive from a ghostly sender that can both visit and transport us, just as Lamar’s “Mortal Man” contains a visitation from Weiss’s ghost-spirit of the sound wave in the form of a dialogue with the late rapper Tupac Shakur. “Mortal Man” is a time-traveling document and an epic example of sampling: Lamar excerpts a 1994 radio conversation between Shakur and journalist Mats Nileskär and reimagines it to sound as though Lamar and his deceased hip-hop predecessor are the ones chatting. At the end of this spectral exchange, Lamar asks Shakur about the caterpillar and butterfly parable—which Punch wrote to summarize Lamar’s conceptual project on this album. In the parable, the caterpillar uses the butterfly and the cocoon until, Lamar explains,

certain ideas take root, such as going home, and bringing back new concepts to this mad city. The result? Wings begin to emerge, breaking the cycle of feeling stagnant. Finally free, the butterfly sheds light on situations that the caterpillar never considered, ending the internal struggle.

We see a blueprint of Lamar’s space of creation in this fable—the interplay between his inventive interiority (caterpillar) and the creative output that people can see (butterfly), as a result of the “new concepts” gleaned from “this mad city” to be transformed into art. The song closes with Lamar’s voice still calling for answers from Shakur, his ghost-idol-interlocutor who, inevitably, cannot answer. In “Mortal Man” Lamar, like most artists, finds himself in conversation with his own mind, but like the best of them, he screenshots this process in the song. Lamar is the flaneur who must go out and take in culture, then return to remix these bits into art. Varda frames this process of absorbing creative elements to later reconstitute them in the structure of the inventive “cocoon” in her IndieWire interview, describing discovery as a sequence of exciting sensations, a locating of insights about the world around the artist, while at the same time the artist stays very rigorous in their approach, systematic even. For his part, Weiss frequently takes us along on the mind-flight through his own inner spheres, as he systematically, artfully, takes in what most view as irrelevant or as refuse and then transforms it into prose.

In “Skyward,” from Other Lives Our Own, Weiss elicits another crucial question about what happens to the reader/viewer/listener by going along on the artist’s ghostly mind-flight. He reflects on the oddness of plane travel, how being in space changes an astronaut’s DNA, and he wonders why being on a plane cannot do the same. Lo and behold, a transformation, in fact, takes place in this essay, and it even involves a cocoon. As the piece ends, the nature of air travel morphs into something that flirts with the supernatural, where even the wealthiest passengers on the plane are not immune to the call of the uncanny. Weiss describes these bewitched first-class passengers, “coddled in their ample cocoons,” and wonders, “would they not be the first to grow horns, their bodies expanding with new appendages in spaces that can fit them?”

This speculative turn at the end moves the reader into a different territory with an image of plane riders growing horns as a result of air travel, transforming because they have taken a trip to, say, Wisconsin. Weiss explores in this piece, and in these two collections, the idea that we are always changed by the ghost-experience of art: music, movies, ideas, travel, garbage, going to Wisconsin. What’s more, Weiss wants to break this process down into its constituent elements—to “listen to it,” he describes in Listenings, “every which way possible,” as he does with the records he finds at the bottom of a cardboard box.

If a plane can cause a spooky metamorphosis, why not this haunted mind-flight we’re on while reading a Weiss book, listening to a Lamar track, watching a Varda movie? Could these be the phantom cocoons that might allow our own creative butterflies to grow? To perhaps even allow us to gain a new pair of horns in the process? Count me in.