The name of the song is “True Life.” It starts with two dueling guitars competing for who can have the most serrated sound, like a knife cutting a knife challenging you to get the fuck up and move, which is evident when the drum beat starts keeping up the pace—are you running yet?—and then the bass line comes in the chorus like running horses chasing a steam locomotive but the steam locomotive is you and your legs are moving, running, before you even have a clue what’s going on. The instant I heard this song, Water From Your Eyes became a favorite band. I finally saw them live a few weeks ago and when they played this song I felt my entire body moving and convulsing my limbs losing control. It was even better live with their beast of a drummer locking into the exact kind of disco beat that can possess you. The energy they conjured was so intense that after, when they were playing a real slow jam, the kids started a mosh pit, like a delayed response. José and I always joke about “finding the pause,” the antidote to our love for commas and semi-colons and certainly em-dashes, but maybe now it’s time to give up the pause completely. I started reading Swann’s Way at the beginning of the year (this reminds me, I need to finish it), and of course the extraordinarily long sentences are so lush that sometimes I feel like I am a tourist sightseeing on a bus—Look at the size of that one! and Look at what he did with this one! I read Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love and was enthralled. It’s one long text, the narrator’s thoughts as she attends a dinner following the funeral of a friend (can it really be called a paragraph if it’s just the entire novel?). It was funny and familiar and I didn’t want to put it down and there was also not a single end of a sentence where it ever felt “like a good place to stop.” I didn’t read it in one sitting because, well, I’m a person who is alive with a kid, but it is exactly the kind of book that demands to just be read at once. In the afterword Dubno explains she “borrowed” the format/premise from Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, and then when I was talking about the book with T she said she was also reading a book with a similar structure and it turned out that it was a different book by Bernhard called The Loser, so I read it right after. This one was a different reading experience, Bernhard does a lot of repetition of the same phrases over and over again and I could only read about twenty minutes at a time before I felt my eyes glazing over. But then there was a whole section where he recalled things a friend had said and every sentence ended with “he said, I thought,” which I loved, I thought. The end comes to a crescendo but I was lulled to a kind of numbness by the time I got there, I thought. It reminded me of the first time I watched Jeanne Dielman on my little laptop in my kitchen table, knowing not a single thing about it when I was lulled by the pace and then at the last scene was jolted and “wait, what?” and had to go back and re-watch. After me and T finished the book we read more about Bernhard and a lot of it made more sense. I want to read it again soon, when I am in a better state of mind (I don’t think this is a book to read on your phone, in short spurts, on the subway). I keep thinking once again, of Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It All because everything is about abundance. (It’s funny how often I think of Emin’s work, unprompted, which is how I know that she’s really carved a path into my brain). I still think of this as the year (the life?) of jamming econo and it seems to go against the desire for all of the sounds and all of the words and a constant movement forward and a desire for desire itself but it also isn’t really at all because it’s about making and following a curiosity following all curiosities. When it rains it pours, they say, but you can make your own déluge anytime you want, I know.

Tracey Emin, I’ve Got It All, 2000

September was brutal as it always. When it was all over I went to movement class. “I need to feel grounded and come back to my body,” I offered at the beginning, after suffering through two weeks of brain fog where I was wringing my brain, extruding words and then desperately searching for better words to say what I needed to say. In class someone else said they were looking to “surf the wave,” and I could tell a few of us decided then and there we wanted to do it too. I got there. At some point during class, the music had a rounded sound, and my body fell in a groove like a loop, standing, kneeling, arching my body forward, planting my hands on the ground and sweeping them around. I thought “Oh I am really surfing the wave!” and it was funny.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Some things at sea), 2010, Gouache on paper, 41 x 36 inches

I was still thinking about it on the train home after class and suddenly thought about Raymond Pettibon’s surfer paintings. I don’t remember ever seeing them IRL and was surprised at how clear they appeared in my head. A few days later I went and bought Point Break which gathers all of his surfer paintings. Reading the opening essay, I quickly learn that there is no sea in the Christian heaven. (Can you imagine such a thing? An eternal paradise without an ocean?) It’s fine I guess, we aren’t going to that Christian heaven anyway, and who needs it when you have Pettibon’s expressive waves, lines swishing and crashing, blues and blues and more blues and sometimes yellow and sometimes black but definitely white that you can get lost in just as easily as if they were real waves, but not in a way that could ever replace the real feeling. I’ve been obsessed with pictures of waves before, at the height of one depression or other, collecting them when I couldn’t find the words for emotions. I’ve never surfed, but I understand the appeal, the giving yourself completely to your surroundings, ceding control in order to be on top just for a few seconds, and then you are back where you started but you aren’t the same person that you were when you started. Waves continuously crash ashore but they aren’t the same waves and the shore doesn’t remain the same either. In that essay, the writer quotes a German philosopher that describes the sea as “a naturally given boundary of the realm of human activities,” and “the sphere of the unreckonable and lawless.” These things are of course the point of painting, of writing, of music, of all creative pursuits; to transcend the realm of human activities, and muck about in the sphere of the unreckonable and lawless! To SWIM!

Geese in Greenpoint

I saw Geese play this weekend. Their new record Getting Killed is chaotic and beautiful and weird and I have been listening to it on repeat. It was a free show in what turned out to be the middle of a street in Greenpoint. We got there early, found a spot right in front and then took in the scene. The average age of attendees show was probably… 23, (it’s how old the members of the band are too). Amy Rose and I agreed the vibe felt very Rookie.

They did not set up an elevated stage, just put up a few barricades to separate the area where they would be playing from the audience. We couldn’t see them when they started playing but the sound was stupid phenomenal. As the crowd started moving to the music and their heads started bobbing, we realized we were very close to them, maybe ten heads in, and could see lead singer Cameron Winter if we angled our heads right, but for most of the show it was just a sea of people. His voice is just as velvety as you hope it will be. Tran calls it the voice of god (the voice of a god?) and I don’t think she’s wrong. (Afterwards a friend texted, “I was deeply unconcerned about not seeing because it sounded so good,” which is another version of “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”) The afternoon had the kind of electricity that comes with witnessing once-in-a-lifetime events. I felt grateful to be there but also to be there with friends; it felt hopeful to be surrounded by so many kids completely enthralled by this band that belongs to them, that is them. Everyone sang along to “Taxes” yelling “DOCTOR! DOCTOR! HEAL YOURSELF.” I closed my eyes and looked up to the sky and felt myself getting cleansed of the muck energy stuck in my body. It all got sucked out of me like the someone struck me with a straw and drank through me. When they played “2122” from their previous record the kids totally lost their minds and I was sure they were going to mosh and I was going to have to get out of the way and let them have their fun, but that’s not really what happened. Everyone was just simply joyously pogo-ing in place. I jumped up and down too and let myself be carried back and forth and around like a wave.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Lived, loved, wasted…), 2001, Ink and watercolor on paper, 33 x 25 inches

I’ve been walking around carrying a low-simmering energy to and fro. A vat of soup. Bogged down by the realization that I am no longer waiting for, nor am I excited to receive signs from the world to do the things that I need to do, which in this case is write the things that I want to write, that I need to write. This is a good thing even though it’s a feeling of desperation, of utter frustration, at myself. The dread is a blanket, I am walking around in ooze, but the excuses are always so much easier to access: I am always so tired, the allure of sleep so powerful. I’m never going to get the time. I need to dig for the time, carve out the time, take it in small hits wherever I can find it. Push past other seductions, fantasies, and all other manners of I only had X then I could do Y wishful thinking.

I think of the Annie Lennox song where she sings “No more I love you’s/ The language is leaving me/ No more I love you’s/ Changes are shifting outside the word” except I don’t think the language is leaving me but rather filling in me, piling the fuck up, fighting to be let out. I always thought she sang “changes are shifting outside the world” but now I see the “word” is indeed truer. The final boss of creative anxiety is just yourself with no lives left.

I have been reading a lot, which is the warm-up for writing. The stretching. I had been meaning to read Nadja because of Selin in Either/Or and then someone left a copy on the giveaway table at work. A few pages in I realized that randomly finding the book was the best way to read this book. But I don’t have any other meaning to assign to this. It’s just a thing that happened.

Here are other things that have happened: waiting for the D train, a group of school-aged boys on the platform. As the train enters the station they all hold their arms up and start pulling an imaginary horn, like it was a passing truck. When the conductor finally gets close to them he quickly honks the horn on the train and the boys absolutely lose their minds with joy. A woman sits down next to me on the R train, pulls out a compact mirror and starts doing her makeup. As she applies blush on her cheeks the woman sitting on her other side says “oh that’s so nice!” The woman is caught off-guard, says thank you. On a different R train, a woman huffs and puffs her way down the middle of the train: she’s young, in workout clothes, carrying a dark cloud of energy around her that makes everyone look up to see what’s going on, as she goes to open the door to cross trains, the man leaning on the door reading a book starts moving out of his way but she doesn’t wait, pushes him off to get through. He yells at her, she yells back at him. It was a quick and unnecessary violence, and I wondered if when she got home later that night she thought about and regretted her actions. I go back to reading my book, and look up a few stops later to see he is making conversation with a woman sitting on one of the seats directly next to the door, no doubt about the event that just took place. Even later on, as the man finally reaches his stop and starts to gather his things, they say goodbye, as if they are friends. Looking with tenderness at everyone riding the train is a new trait that surprises me.

The new Lorde has been a heavy topic of conversation in many group chats. I didn’t love the singles, and the promotion felt like she was trying too hard to prove she is cool and different, (though I say this with love because everyone tries too hard to be cool and different, they just hope you can’t see the hardcore paddling under the surface), but then the songs feel the opposite, unstudied and raw, like the writing you do for yourself and would “clean up” before letting other people see it. I cringe a little when she sings about getting pierced on Canal and making a wish when the needle goes in, but then a friend tells me “that’s so you.” She’s probably right even though I really am just “a grown woman in a baby tee.” I think a lot of this is cringe. But I’m stet.

[An actual P.S.: This has been sitting in my drafts for a month, I guess I had second-guessed my ability to be comfortable with my own cringe, but I really am stet! I’m stet!!! I continue to insist as I slowly shink and transform into a corn cob.]

“I don’t want to hear songs about fame,” I texted, but then the thought kept going.

What I really wanted to say was “I don’t want to hear songs about fame, I want to hear songs about god,” which just meant I was thinking about Cameron Winter so I put on “$0” where he sings “God is real God is real I’m not kidding God is actually real I’m not kidding this time I think God is actually for real God is real God is actually real God is real I wouldn’t joke about this I’m not kidding this time.” I really don’t think he’s kidding. That song makes me cry sometimes precisely because the way he sings makes me think he is telling the truth and then I feel humbled by the realization which in turn makes me feel absolutely ridiculous. It’s a gorgeous feeling.

Cameron Winter photographed by Adam Powell

I keep thinking about god. I want to read about god, no, wait that’s not actually what I mean. I walk by a church and make note of their service hours, but no, that’s not actually what I mean and in any case I can’t do mass in English because I only know how to pray in Spanish. At a movement class we go around saying the things we are looking for and the things we can offer each other. I say I am looking for god as a manifestation of community. It surprises me. (I offer that I am always down to clown, which I am). It is easter but it doesn’t mean anything. Later that evening a friend shows me a photo of herself as a tween and it is so pure I start crying.

Most of the times that I’ve felt floored by flickers of divinity it has been because of music: a live show, or playing a record at a party, or listening to music in my headphones by myself, or even, yes, karaoke. I read The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan, a short novel whose protagonist awakens to find she is going deaf. A nightmare. I wonder if the memory of having listened to music once would be enough to sustain me—a depressing thought. I enjoyed the book.

A couple months ago I went to see Refused play a show at the Brooklyn Paramount. It was a spur of the moment decision: I saw they were coming and thought I bet it would be amazing to be in a small room when they play “New Noise,” and so I went and it was. 2700 people yelling WOO! simultaneously and collectively reliving whatever moment of their youth is tied to this song. Refused are a hardcore punk band formed in Sweden in the ’90s, but I discovered them in 2001 I think and by then Dennis Lyxzen, the lead singer, had formed another band called The (International) Noise Conspiracy, that was more dance-y and which I was particularly obsessed with. Lyxzen is 52 now, wears frilly purple silk shirts, and has longish silver hair which fans around him as he jumps and contorts himself onstage in the same offhandedly sensual manner as Jarvis Cocker. In between songs he talked about how strange it is to be touring the world singing songs he wrote when he was 19 years old except of course… well they’re still relevant. Later, I learned he had a heart attack last year and feel honestly thankful that he recovered and that I was able to see him live. Is that a selfish thought? It was a really great show.

I watched Conclave on my flight back from LA. I love the soundtrack of Ralph Fiennes’ intense breathing. There is a scene where he says “Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt.” Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt! I try to think of other things that are beautiful and walk hand in hand with doubt. Days pass and I can’t think of anything and the sentence remains there by itself a little bit taunting. Then I notice I traded in faith for beauty. I think of the doubt or is it uncertainty inherent in making, and making as a kind of faith, and then, well, I can definitely see that.

A mini-playlist for this newsletter:

1. The first 5 seconds of “Like a Prayer” when Madonna says “God?”

2. “New Noise” - Refused

3. "“$0” - Cameron Winter

4. “Losing My Religion” - REM

5. “Goddess On a Hiway” - Mercury Rev

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Did you read the article about the “Luddite” teens in the Times? They first wrote about them sometime during the pandemic, when they were still in high school, I think, and then this second story is a follow-up, learning if they’ve kept up with it now that they are in college. Naturally some did and some didn’t. A friend said, “It’s crazy that now the equivalent of going back to the land is just not using phone.”

The Luddite lore in a nutshell: In the 1800s Ned Ludd was a weaver who destroyed a mechanical weaving machine—or stocking frame as it was called—in a fit of rage after being told his work needed to improve. A few decades later, when other weavers were protesting for better working conditions, they took on the Ned Ludd name as a symbol. They smashed stocking machines not because they were against “technology” but because it was a sure fire way to get heard by their bosses. Apparently sometimes they protested in women’s clothes and declared themselves to be “the wives of Ned Ludd” which I’m very charmed by.

I can’t remember if I was listening to OK Computer and then read about the Luddites or if I was reading about the Luddites and then needed to listen to OK Computer, but that’s what happened. I read some old articles and learn it’s not about pre-millennium-induced techno-fear but touring-induced claustrophobia. But maybe the spark doesn’t always need to match the flame—the record says what it says. I watch the “No Surprises” video a few times. It turns out Thom Yorke’s head really is being submerged in water. I watch the Meeting People Is Easy documentary, and they show a few scenes of the making of the video where Thom is getting increasingly frustrated because he isn’t able to hold his breath as long as he should. In the comments below the “No Surprises” video, someone writes about how he smirks at the end because he was finally able to get it right. Now I see the smirk too.

I bought a Brick so I can be on my phone less. I blocked Instagram and the secondhand shopping apps. It’s working. (Though now I also do all three levels of Sudoku on the Times app. I think it’s a fair trade.)

I think everyone wants off their phones. It’s a natural progression of things. We’ve spent almost two decades feeding the beast and we’ve had enough. The novelty has long worn off.

Later, I’m walking around SoHo and I see this flyer:

“It’s funny because everyone is like AUTHENTICITY IS IN 2025.” We’re discussing a pop star. When pressed, I find I can’t explain what I mean by that any further. “That’s just where we are in the world right now. Everyone wants authenticity,” I say. I don’t know who “everyone” is, or “who” “decided” “their needs,” but I know this is an “accurate” “statement.” In the think-tanks of the world voices are yelling AUTHENTICITY GIVE ME MORE AUTHENTICITY!

In my head, meanwhile, I’ve begun hearing a voice—possibly John Mulaney’s—yelling “Phonies! You’re all a bunch of phonies!”

A fashion designer “inspired by America” cites taxi drivers, bombshells, and “American beauties in checked shirts.”

But it’s 2025, I think.

A bit from a 2019 Virgil Abloh New Yorker profile that I think about all the time:

Abloh makes quick decisions. Walking through the runway set, he took a few paces and stopped at a white monobloc lawn chair. The LV employees looked on. He frowned. “That’s not New York,” he said, and turned the chair onto its back, so that it appeared to have been knocked over: “That’s New York.”

At the Super Bowl commercials, a war between mayonnaises, hardcore MEN Harrison Ford and Glen Powell sell cars, and an ad for Jesus Christ is soundtracked by Johnny Cash’s cover of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.”

Immediately following the Super Bowl, a game show came on called The Floor, “an exciting trivia game” where 100 experts face-off on their chosen categories. In the first episode these categories include pantry items, pets, and ancient history. Pictures of these subjects appear on a big screen and people take turns identifying them. In the ancient history battle there are images of: the Ten Commandments, an abacus, an arrowhead, clay pots, Jesus, papyrus, mosaics, Sumo wrestling, the zodiac, Chichén Itzá, Hannibal (“one of the greatest generals of ancient times”), Moses, Confucius, hunting, cave paintings, whirling dervish, Terracotta Warriors, Dead Sea Scrolls, Persepolis.

(That’s not America, that’s America.)