Notebook

New York City. Sunset: 6:18pm. A high of 70 degrees and 84% humidity. I can’t believe people buy humidifying machines on purpose. Seventy-two hours until C. and I head into the desert to consider whether we’d like to make it our home for a while. I’ve always imagined one day I would become a strange old man in the desert; the past year has punched the accelerator on this.

Spent a late night at the cemetery chapel, tending to After the End. There are over a thousand responses from visitors now, far more than we anticipated at this point, and the exhibit has been extended for an extra month until December 6. I’m moved by just how much people are writing. Long letters to their dead. Long letters to themselves. I see myself in the handwriting of these strangers. Apologies for not being present for a parent in their last days. The collateral damage of repression, denial, and gritted teeth. And one that says I’ve committed to helping those affected by the very thing that took you from me.

Stephen Baker – After the End

2021 | Bandcamp

The original score that Stephen Baker recorded for the installation, a beautiful sci-fi hymn.

New York City. Sunset: 6:20pm. A late spring day in October with a high of 72 degrees. Spent the afternoon meeting people around the city, and everyone is trying to figure out what to do with their lives, myself included, which is why my thoughts are half-cocked towards the desert, thinking about how the forecast for Vegas today was simply “dust.”

More and more, I admire the imagery of Catholicism as a vocabulary of mourning. This evening I dipped into Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and holy christ, does that place feel like the future: metal detectors and bag searches, two-dollar devotional candles and four-dollar commemorative coins—and Mary cradling her son’s body while she gazes down at a credit card machine.

Tropic of Cancer — Children of a Lesser God

Restless Idylls | Blackest Ever Black, 2013 | Bandcamp

Sunset: 6:20pm. A first-quarter moon. A high of 72 and another humid night that feels like the wrong season. Last night I dreamt that I painted a picture and could not tell if it was god or the devil because the image was too big for its frame. Then I had a horribly complicated dream about playing darts and spitting up green caterpillars. “We are quite probably dreaming all the time,” said Carl Jung. “But consciousness makes so much noise that we no longer hear the dream when awake.”

The moon was beautiful tonight, so striking that it silenced my idiot head chatter. It was a perfect crescent that dangled over the street, and I stopped in the middle of First Avenue and took a picture even though I knew there was no way to capture it.

Noveller – Concrete Dreams

Fantastic Planet | Fire Records, 2015 | Bandcamp

A drizzly Sunday with a high of 66 and thousand-percent humidity. The clean winds of autumn have yet to arrive. I’d like to read Herodotus someday. I remember reading about ancient Egypt on the top floor of a library while waiting for my mom to pick me up after work; I thought the pyramids and the Sphinx were science fiction. Rain streaked the windows, smearing the lights of Grand Rapids as the library began to close. I must have been eight years old.

I want to spend more time in the distant past while thinking about the future. Time is moving too fast, so I sat in the park this afternoon, hoping to slow it down. I watched the people pass by. Young lovers and middle-aged hand-holders. Elderly couples holding each other steady. Ducks drifted in pairs, and I wondered if they mate for life. (They don’t. They find new mates each season, and this fact left me disappointed.) Then I pulled out my notebook, and my pen hovered above the page for a half-hour, wanting to write something observant or clever or true, but I didn’t write anything except for this.

Sunset: 6:24pm. Moon: Waxing crescent. Cloudy with a high of 66 degrees and a low of 57. Finally, a semi-autumnal day with proper gloom. Took the Q down to 34th Street to load up on ramen, pork shoulder, gochujang, bok choy, and extreme-flavored shrimp chips from H-Mart and Woorjip.

A dog-sized rat scurried along the subway platform. Everyone pulled out their screens, cameras ready to flash, and two people nearly fell onto the tracks. Everything feels like a metaphor these days.

New York City. Sunset: 6:26pm. A waxing crescent moon. Sunny skies and a high of 75 degrees. The weather is too chipper. I crave gloom, damp leaves on the sidewalk, and a chilly breeze.

I’m almost done with Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, the last book in her apocalyptic post-plague, post-human trilogy that swings between the poignant and bonkers. She writes wonderfully about technology: “As the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.” Will this happen to us? Is it happening already? It’s difficult to imagine a society that has willfully abandoned its technologies. Maybe we can only romanticize life without them.

Atwood also writes about talking with the dead. “But it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but are alive in a different way.” And why shouldn’t this be true? I wonder if believing we can communicate with the ones we’ve lost makes us better people. It must provide a sense of comfort, which is no small matter. Sometimes I look at a photo of my parents and wonder what it would feel like to believe such a thing. Or where to begin.

Sunset: 6:27pm. Partly sunny and high of 75 degrees. It’s much too warm for October. Today I was introduced to the concept of samādhi, a rarefied state of absorption described as “falling in love with a moment.” I’ve been savoring this phrase all day: the idea of becoming hopelessly enamored by the aesthetics of a particular point in time. Maybe a shift in the light, a fleeting sense of calm, or coming upon an interesting arrangement in the city that reminds you of the wonder of belonging to a strange civilization.

I’ve also been thinking about a great sandwich I recently ate: focaccia, bresaola, parmesan, arugula, salt, and balsamic vinegar.

New York City. Sunset: 6:29pm. Cloudy with 76% humidity and a high of 70, a seasonless day that felt as if it could be anywhere on the calendar.

Today C. and I talked with a reporter from a local television station about our installation in the chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery. When I mentioned this project was rooted in the loss of my parents, the reporter asked if I’d like to discuss how they died. It’s an interesting sensation, glitching in the glare of a television camera. But they put together a nice little story with some thoughtful b-roll footage and person-on-the-street interviews, and I’m grateful for their interest in our work. I’m grateful for anyone who pays attention to anything these days.

Some people shine on television, as if they’re high-definition, whereas I’m a bit fuzzy, more VHS. As we listened to the reporter deftly introduce the segment, C. said, “It sounds like she has TV in her voice.”

The Normal – TV O.D.

Warm Leatherette | Mute, 1978 | More

New York City. Sunset: 6:30pm. A new moon. Heavy clouds and damp air, a high of 66 and a low of 57 degrees. My father would have turned 73 today, and I still do not know how to mark days like this, which I suppose is why I work on projects like After the End: the need for ceremony, for some patchwork kind of faith. This afternoon I went to the museum and sat among the busted statues from antiquity, and I felt so damned lucky that I had the chance to get to know my father in his last year, that we were no longer baffled by one another, which is too often the case with fathers and sons. I wish we had more time, and once again I found myself reciting these instructions from Epictetus: do not say something is lost, only that it is returned.

Although they were two thousand years old, these broken marble bodies from the Hellenic age felt illustrative of our current moment: an exhausted and fractured dignity amidst the decay of modern living. As I moved through the galleries, I listened to Lawrence English’s Observation of Breath, which captures the respiration of a 132-year-old pipe organ, a sound that reminded me of my father’s machines as the two of us sat in a small room, waiting for a lung. And the sheer miracle of being here, right now, and simply breathing.

New York City. Sunset: 6:32pm. A damp Monday with dull grey air, and a waning crescent moon. High of 72, light drizzle, and a low of 64 degrees tonight. I spent twelve hours behind a screen today, fiddling with the code for my website and untangling some domain names.

Meanwhile, the internet buzzed with the news that Facebook’s lights went out for several hours, highlighting just how far its tentacles reach. Transactions failed. Employees were locked out of their offices. Thermostats stopped working. There was a flavor of joy in these reports, not just schadenfreude but tentative hope that we’d been released from the grip of some leviathan or terrible dream.

Today’s outage was a crucial reminder that we must maintain our little stations in the digital ether and control our own signals. I’m not giving up hope that one day we will return to the chaotic, polyglot promise of the internet rather than Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1947 prediction that our culture industry would one day grant us only “the freedom to choose what is always the same.”

Autechre – JNSN CODE GL16

JNSN CODE GL16 / spl47 | Touched Music, 2017 | Bandcamp

New York City. Sunset: 6:34pm. Moon: Waning crescent. Weather: Mostly cloudy and 77 degrees with steadily increasing humidity and a low of 59. It’s too warm for October, yet C. and I are dreaming about the desert again. Today I told someone I want to live in the New Jersey of Las Vegas, which sounds like a curse, but I absolutely meant it.

Spent the afternoon at a get-together on the Brooklyn piers talking with people I did not know. I listened to them discuss film distribution, Istanbul’s club scene, sadism, book pitches, South Korean cinema, and the architecture of Dubai. There was a different texture to these conversations, the noises of friends of friends making small talk at a party. Two hours later, I realized: not one person mentioned the pandemic. It’s simply an unpleasant fact of life now, like talking over a car alarm.

Fuck Buttons – Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic

Street Horrsing | ATP, 2008 | Bleep