Notebook

London. A chilly Saturday with fast-moving clouds and confusing bursts of snow while the sun shines. The sun goes down at 7:35pm. On the Tube, a woman thumbed through a large book called Solar Power Financing Without the Jargon. A few seats down, a kid in bright red sneakers held a book called Finding God while he scrolled through his phone. I understand that.

C. and I tagged along on a high school field trip to Stonehenge. It was our first time beyond London, and I was eager to see some foreign terrain. But the landscape looked like Ohio or Pennsylvania, and the motorway felt like any American highway, except backward. My disappointment shifted to a specific flavor of reassurance as I watched the familiar blur of concrete pylons, jersey barriers, and breakdown lanes: the universal grammar of our strange human project.

Stonehenge appeared on the horizon, and, like the Mona Lisa, it was smaller than I thought. All the photographs I’d seen since childhood had led me to believe it was larger than life. Strange how an image can both amplify and diminish reality. A photo display at the visitor’s center included a 1970s snapshot of a little boy with a quote that would be an excellent first sentence for a novel: “This is me, age 2, climbing on Stonehenge in a cape, carrying a shovel and a gun.”

You can’t climb on Stonehenge anymore, but you can walk around it under the eye of a tour guide and two uniformed guards. Some people said they felt a shift in their energies and auras as they stepped into the ring of jumbled stones, and I wished like hell I believed in such things. If I have an energy field, it’s probably something like television static.

As the tour guide described the lifestyles of hunter-gatherers and the effects of solstices, I got very tired and wanted to lean against one of those stones—but you’ll go to jail if you touch anything. It’s not like the 1970s when people used Stonehenge for picnics, sex, and sacrifices while their children scampered around with toy weapons. Maybe those were better days.

I had no idea Stonehenge was plopped next to a highway, but I admired the juxtaposition of truck traffic framed by prehistoric stonework, a beautiful collision of prehistoric and modern engineering. What relics from our world will people marvel at four thousand years from now? Will children in the year 6022 be clambering over the bones of a shopping mall or superstore?

Many of the stones have fallen over the centuries. They sink into the grass, covered in lichen. Maybe we should tidy the place up and move them back to where the Druids or Martians put them—it’d be a sign of respect. Then the wind began to howl, the blue sky turned a mean grey, and sheets of snow whipped across the scene. It felt like static had descended upon this ancient site, and for a moment, I think I felt some energy.

Clear skies and a high near sixty degrees. The sun goes down at 6:11pm, the moon is full, and I can’t stop thinking about this 11-year-old I met the other day.

“I’m interested in old stuff,” she said. “Everything seemed better a long time ago, like in the 90s.” I gasped for air and did the math. Good god, I’m old. But also, why wasn’t this kid interested in the future? It broke my heart a little. 

As we moved through classrooms, C. and I met quite a few nostalgic students. They’re making video poems about the 1990s. They delivered speeches in auditoriums about the stress of screens. They rhapsodized about a simpler time, sounding like ancient poets pining for a lost golden age. Days spent playing outside. The days when our telephones and screens were chained to walls, and the world did not follow us around, haunting our thoughts.

In the 1990s, I was bent toward the future, moving from hip-hop to electro to techno. The 1960s and 1970s did not interest me: those times were dead. The future was the sound of a screeching modem. I believed in compact discs, sky pagers, and dial-up. Of course, the liberating, polyglot promise of the internet would soon turn sour, poisoned by money and our worst emotions. But it was nice to believe in the future for a little while, and I’m grateful I get to carry this sensation with me.

I recently saw Cildo Meireles’s Babel at the Tate, a mammoth tower of twentieth-century radios that fritz and skip through stations. Meireles was concerned with the cacophony of the modern world. He built Babel in 2001. I wonder what he would build today. When I encountered the tower, the radios were tuned to Journey’s 1981 hit, an anthem we knew as well as our names, singing don’t stop believin’ through the static while we stood in a circle, taking pictures.

London. A damp weekend of clouds and mist. The sun goes down at 5:51pm and the moon is waxing. Yesterday I saw the birthplace of William Blake, now a strip of concrete between an Indian restaurant and an expensive handbag store.

C. and I stepped out of the drizzle into St Paul’s Cathedral, where a choir was preparing to sing the daily evensong, a sunset ritual that “is identical to the canonical hour of vespers.” God, I love the cadence of the church, how it renders everything into hushed and mysterious phenomena. Today’s language feels harsh and overlit, its contrast cranked into a black-and-white binary that echoes our machines: like/dislike, follow/block, save/delete, and so on.

Looking up at the constellation of arches around the dome inspired a sense of vertigo that was almost too much to bear. Perhaps this is how faith is supposed to feel. Most of all, I was struck by Gerry Judah’s memorial for the First World War, a pair of mammoth white crosses with destroyed cities clinging to their beams. Photography was not permitted in the cathedral, and I appreciated how this rule preserved the dignity of the space. Even if I spent much of my time thinking about how badly I wanted to take a picture.

The sun might come out this week. I sent a newsletter a few days ago.

Brian Eno & Robert Fripp – Evensong

Evening Star | EG, 1975 | More

The usual clouds, the usual forty-something degrees, and the usual misty drizzle. The sun goes down at 5:47pm, and it’s been a long strange week of giving presentations in an auditorium at an unholy hour in the morning. Sometimes C. and I spoke to a hundred teachers, sometimes two hundred fifth-graders. How much do they need to know about Dada? They know it in their bones.

Last night I had a dream that my mom was calling me. I answered the phone, and she was saying my name. I knew it was a dream, and I told her so. But no, she said, this was very real, and she was very much alive, and she was so sorry she had to go away, but now she was coming back.

Two hours later, I’m standing on a stage with C., presenting our work, and there’s a photograph of my mom on the massive screen behind us. She’s on a beach, a snapshot my father took a year before she died. Her image was meant to appear for only a second before discussing the work she inspired. But she’s glitching, frozen on the screen. The photograph of my mom refuses to leave the auditorium. We jiggle the cords, but she’s still there, twenty feet tall and gazing at the water, her head turned away so you can hardly see her face. She remains there until the tech guy comes onstage, crouches over a box, and flips some switches.

There are 144 slides in that presentation deck. I do not dream about my mother often, certainly not about her calling me to say she never died. Even my battered, disbelieving mind senses a frequency here. The odds are too great; the signal is too strong.

Pattern recognition, maybe. Baader-Meinhof, confirmation bias, or just a good old-fashioned coincidence. I’ve been reading John Berger this week. After I finished the last page of Confabulations and closed the book, I opened my inbox and found a newsletter from Sasha Frere-Jones that introduced me to Time Is Away’s magnificent mix featuring Berger reading from Pig Earth. (There’s also a dub version.) I’ve been listening to both mixes all week, and I can’t recommend them enough.

Berger speaks to the sensation of seeing my mother’s image linger in an auditorium, a sensation amplified by a dream: “Between the moment recorded and the present moment of looking at the photograph, there is an abyss . . . the photograph is more traumatic than most memories or mementos because it seems to confirm, prophetically, the later discontinuity created by the absence or death.”

Coincidence, probably, but why not believe moments like this point to something more interesting? Perhaps even something reassuring.

Time Is Away – Pig Earth Mix

NTS Radio, London, 4.01.22 | Soundcloud

London. Another day of clouds and drizzle punctuated by a few moments of sunshine—an event so rare that it feels like a cosmic event when the light shifts and the world briefly brightens as if the gods are smiling down upon us. A high of 53 degrees and the sun goes down at 5:28pm. England ended most of its pandemic rules today, and Russia is claiming territory in Ukraine. The moon is in its final quarter.

My mind is fragmented this morning, flicking around our little flat by the train tracks, batting at threads but unable to grab hold of anything. “You can say anything about everything,” said C. as we studied the pompous text on the wall of an art gallery, where a blotch of paint was apparently renegotiating the past with the future and forcing us to confront our problems. You can say anything about everything—this might be a proverb for the 21st century. We’re living in murky times, and nobody’s keeping score of what makes sense anymore, which is both frightening and liberating.

Yesterday I tracked down a copy of John Berger’s Confabulations, needing to read something sane from someone who could render fragments into something beautiful. I like everything about this little book. The simplicity. The straightforwardness. Even the large typeface. “True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal,” Berger writes. “What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told and that, if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told. I picture myself not so much a consequential, professional writer, as a stop-gap man.”

And somewhere off to the left, I can hear Georges Perec: “Question your teaspoons.”

Damp streets, a stiff breeze, and Bertrand Russell comes to mind: “Eternal objects can be conceived as God’s thoughts. Hence Plato’s doctrine that God is a geometer, and Sir James Jean’s belief that He is addicted to arithmetic.” But few things feel as eternal as a lone bus stop in the middle of the night.

Record-breaking wind swept across England yesterday, closing bridges, train lines, and attractions. The nation tuned in to watch a livestream of airplanes struggling to land at Heathrow, and a gust of wind punched open the roof of an arena.

The trains started running again late last night. I know this because our flat is next to the Kilburn High Road Station, where four different trains rumble around the clock. One is light and faint like a sigh; the loudest is all judder and screech. At night, C. falls asleep encased a head-tomb of earplugs and noise-canceling headphones held fast with a scarf. But I enjoy the clatter and vibrations. There’s something soothing about drowsing next to a train station in an unfamiliar country, knowing that people are traveling at all hours to god only knows.

The noise worms its way into my dreams. Last night I dreamt I lived in a mechanical hotel that slowly dragged itself down the street. We could not leave, and we would never reach our destination. The hotel loved us too much to let us go. Every so often, new people would appear, and they were frightened when I approached because I was a ghost, haunting them. Then I dreamt that I drank perfume and had a minor role in a detective show in which none of us could remember the name of the president between Nixon and Carter.

A dream is defined as “a series of images and sensations that occur involuntarily during sleep.” Some definitions substitute visions for images, which may be a critical distinction between those who take their dreams seriously and those who do not.

I’ve always been skeptical of people who decipher their dreams or believe they are messages from some hidden realm, for they conjure the tacky aesthetics of the soothsayer or the drone of the dinner guest who talks about being present for the moment and worships rocks. My prejudice might be a knee-jerk reaction to the word involuntary—if something in my head cannot be controlled, does it belong to me? But like the trains, I’m learning to accept my dreams as a fine form of entertainment.

F.U.S.E. – Train-Trac

Dimension Intrusion | Plus 8, 1993 | Bandcamp

London. We experienced a brief hour of sunlight before the rain and gloom resumed. Meanwhile, a storm named Eunice is churning over the Celtic Sea, and the news is advertising it heavily. I thought naming winter storms was a purely American marketing move to drum up ratings. But events are being canceled, the government says it will be “a major incident,” and the United Kingdom is a swirl of yellow, amber, and red alerts. They’re saying it could be the most powerful storm in thirty years. They’re saying it could develop something called a “sting jet.”

But I never know how seriously to take anything anymore.

At first, I thought London was filled with a rare and surreal species of tree with thick branches and twisted, blunted tops. Now I’m beginning to suspect these are just normal trees that the city has abused. This is the type of thing I never bother to look up, preferring my impressionistic sense of the world. Let the mystery be, I say. We have far too few of them these days.

I remember staring at the sky in a superstore parking lot somewhere in North or South Dakota, watching a dozen seagulls circle overhead, hunting for minnows or plankton or whatever they eat. What had drawn them to this landlocked square? Their rusty squawks filled the night, and that’s when I realized something in nature was breaking.

There are quite a few palm trees here in London, enhancing my disorientation.

The Ides of February, and the London gloom and rain continue with a high of 59 degrees. Or 15°C, which looks less satisfying. The sun goes down at 5:17pm, and there’s a full moon tonight. All my little routines and ablutions get blown to bits whenever I travel, and soon I’m pacing the floors at three o’clock in the morning, trying to remember who I am and what I do.

I keep colliding with people in the streets and shops. I just can’t pick up the rhythm here. In New York, there’s a dance, a perpetual flow of pedestrians veering to the right, and if you stop to look at your phone or admire a window display, you’ll get killed or shamed. But here, people plant themselves in the concrete, taking deep root and not budging. Or they make a bee-line for me, inviting me to a game of chicken. Yesterday I had a theory: if people drive on the left, perhaps they also walk on the left. But no, I’m still getting out of everyone’s way. The problem is me. And I should get my own house in order rather than casting sinister motives on innocent Londoners. At least I’m finally a morning person in Eastern Standard Time.

God, the indignity of getting yelled at while standing in your socks. Getting dressed down because you put your bag in a bin or you did not. They’re constantly changing the procedures, and it’s so much wear-and-tear on the human spirit, these systems we’ve created. How many terrorists are captured each day at a Midwestern airport? How many plots foiled?

Night flight to London, and I spent six hours looking down at the Atlantic, hunting for the distant lights of boats, imagining a different life of shipping lanes and navigating the Labrador Sea.

London was breathtaking at six o’clock in the morning and ten thousand feet: a glittery sprawl without any discernible grid that slowly revealed itself beneath threads of low-flying clouds.

Our luggage went missing somewhere in the depths of Heathrow, so I bought a cheap change of clothes at a discount chain called TK Maxx, which has the same logo and chaotic atmosphere as TJ Maxx in the States. Only one letter was different. This minor tweak captures the uncanny sensation of being on the other side of an ocean, yet everything feels more or less the same now that we’re living in the shadow of an end-game corporate colossus. Also: I almost get killed every time I jaywalk, and the power jacks are large and ostentatious, like something an American would have come up with. They have chicken Big Macs here.

I’m sure other quirks and delights will become apparent after I get some sleep and our luggage turns up so I can install new contacts and see properly. But oh, I love this fifty-degree gloom. I also love the new Brutal Minimalism extended player from The Black Dog:

Cloudy skies with a high near fifty degrees. The snow is melting quickly, leaving behind grey-black slush and patches of dead grass: a scene like the bleary-eyed aftermath of a really good party. The sun goes down at 6:01 tonight, and the moon is in its first quarter. We’re leaving for London in two days.

Anything I know about London comes from detective dramas, so I imagine it as a city of CCTV cameras and well-fitted coats. Thirteen years ago, I was in London for an eight-hour layover while trying to get home from Helsinki to Detroit, where my mother was dying. I only remember riding the bus in a daze, my disorientation compounded by the reversed traffic. I sat there for hours, orbiting stops with fairy tale names until the bus was empty and the driver was kind to me and helped me find my way back to the airport.

Continuing this thread of grief in Britain, here are some beautiful lines from Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies:

He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief . . . but the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

And that’s the trick, I suppose: avoiding that fucking stone. One morning I woke up in the grip of those tangled dream-thoughts that have the force of revelation: After suffering loss, the soul can go one of two ways: it can harden into something spiky and guarded or… I’m not sure what the other option looks like, but I want to find it. 

Detroit is heavy on the hi-fi this week. This live set from Ectomorph has been playing around the clock, and it’s a perfect hour of bare-bones electro sleaze.

Ectomorph – Masonic (Live in Detroit)

Interdimensional Transmissions, 2018 | Bandcamp