Snapshots and ruminations about art, reverb, creative processes, and finding a little faith in the twenty-first century. Currently broadcasting from Columbus, Ohio.
But why does talking about God feel so tacky? Strange how the grammar of damage is so vivid and precise, endlessly inventive—torched, shanked, concussed—while the vocabulary of peace remains squelchy and limp, reduced to cloudy words like serenity and bliss. I do not know how to speak about faith without feeling embarrassed, annoyed at the saccharine pitch in my voice. Language fails. Hell can be described a thousand ways, but heaven remains impossible to grasp.
Whenever I think about taking a leap of faith, a fork in the road appears: I’ll either become a wild-eyed zealot who wears a sandwich board, or I’ll have the self-satisfied smile of the public radio listener who speaks of energies and crystals. Agnosticism, atheism, nihilism, and even cosmic horror are more appealing than these options. So I turn away from the path and retreat into the familiar, even easy, life of doubt.
Yet the craving to become spiritualized persists.
Meanwhile, grocery stores are limiting eggs to a dozen per customer per day. Last week, the president said he wanted to kick everybody out of an ancient land so he could build luxury hotels that would transform it into the Riviera of the Middle East. Last month, the richest man in the world gave the Nazi salute three times at a political function, and the newspapers-of-record interpreted it as misguided enthusiasm.
And Candy Chang made this delightful collage of me walking through London three years ago. The graffiti behind me says, "Money is being made from Covid but whose pockets are being lined?"
This brings to mind a line from Rakim: "I'm hard to read like graffiti but steady, the science I drop is real heavy." Perhaps a more interesting question is whether Eric B. & Rakim's "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em" or Eric B. & Rakim's "Follow the Leader" is the best hip-hop performance of all time.
There are many reasons Francis Bacon's Figure with Meat bothers the mind. It's a crazed smear of flesh, velvet, and bone, but I think it lingers mostly because the screaming bishop inhabits a zone that cannot be determined, a room etched only by a few ghostly chalk lines. The ambiguity forces us to supply our own nightmares that pulse in the murk just beyond the grasp of language. Which is the whole point of painting, I think. And perhaps horror, too.
“God is an experience,” an old man told me as he reached for another cookie. “Not a thing or a concept. God is an event.”
I thought about this last night while I watched the snow come down, my nose pressed against the cold glass like a little kid—not judging or wanting, just watching. They’re calling it Winter Storm Blair. I’m not sure when we started christening snowstorms, but like everything else these days, the weather is branded and marketed, which leaves me even more disappointed when it fails to perform as advertised.
When I was a little kid, and I imagined the distant future, I always pictured people being nicer. They wore similar outfits and smiled and got along.
Meanwhile in Washington DC, they’re certifying the presidential election, and there is no insurrection this time because the man who tried to overthrow the government won. The other day, I performed some dark calculations while running around the pond: If I get lucky and live to eighty years old, I’ll have spent a tenth of my life with a grifter-clown as the leader of my country.
Yesterday at the library, there was a low-level thrum of anticipation as Winter Storm Blair approached, a subtle magnetic force that pulled us a little closer. Strangers smiled at one another. They told each other to keep warm and stay safe. A snowstorm might be the last benign unifying event.
They advertised fourteen inches, but we only got six. Still, it’s enough to soften the world a little. Enough to remember childhood winters and marvel at all this strange material from the sky.
Most of all, I’m grateful to be surrounded by snow because I can finally enjoy The Coldest Season in its proper context.
When making this sort of list, there's the temptation to go flashy or hyper-obscure, to use the occasion to advertise one's esoteric taste. So these are simply the new albums I played the most this year, the ones I kept revisiting because they challenged, delighted, and reassured. These records shifted my horizons, and more importantly, I enjoyed them.
A shimmer on the horizon. Extremely patient and a little gaudy, but never forgetting that music is a direct line to catharsis. These four songs are pop music from a much better future.
"Derived from the fiery Roma wedding music of Kavala, in northern Greece, eastern Macedonia," this album has been a steady companion for my ugly morning runs around the pond, and it delivered my favorite musical moment of 2024: Lale Pashmiri's accidental laughter in the middle of a hypnotic vocoded verse at the 1:43 mark of "Lali Lale". It's the sound of reckless abandon, ecstacy in its strict sense of escaping the body to join something greater, even if my running style is anything but.
This nostalgia-soaked opus will fill your living room with shag carpet, sploshed drinks, and overflowing ashtrays made of amber-tinted glass. At some point, it will soundtrack your grocery shopping, and you'll realize it's not an album, it's a haunting, the sound of a forgotten beehived girl group circa 1963, maybe the Rubies or the Sapphires, fooling around with the occult. As much as I've listened to this album, it shape-shifts and evaporates like an expertly blown smoke ring, and the only thing I can do is play it again.
Madeline Johnston's voice sounds like it's fighting its way through the static on a radio in the kitchen of a different decade. This is beautiful vapor, the afterimage of a flashbulb popping off after the encore of a band that littered the stage with only the finest reverb pedals.
These ten tracks have nicely filled the DVA Damas-shaped hole in my soul. Spiky vocals cut through the coldest of waves, and it's a durable album for running through the frost.
The color blue in all its permutations, aquatic and airborne, and it inspired me to get with the spirit of the twentieth-first century and create my very first personal automation. Fifteen minutes before sunrise, this album plays throughout our flat. Sometimes I wake up to the sub bass. Most of the time it seeps into my dreams.
Seedy and a little tacky like remembering a night in 1994 when people earnestly said things like "trip hop" and "acid jazz" and "dub techno" and thought new hybrids of music would lead us to utopia rather than the inevitable flattening of everything into an endless sheet of liquid crystal gloss. But the production here is so plush and friendly that alright, sure, I'll sink into this corduroy couch with cigarette burns in the cushions while Strange Days plays on mute and you tell me all about the Information Superhighway.
Dignified music for the right side of dawn. Stately orchestration woven with long threads of burning synthetics that conjure something beautiful entering an elegant room like Gerhard Richter's Woman Descending a Staircase in all her streaked glory.
I often imagine my writing sessions should be quiet and humble, like those stern Dutch paintings of solitary women making lace in solemn bands of light.
I still have vivid dreams that my mother is still alive; I find her sitting at a kitchen table in a tiny house by the sea, living under an assumed name.
Service plazas are modern works of art where I can eat slick food next to twelve lanes of humming traffic, lording over a glittering river of steel and glass.
The sun went down at 8:49pm, the moon is in its last quarter, and tonight I'm wondering if the health of a society can be pegged to the nerves of its motorists.
