Notebook

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.

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.

Last night 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.

Gyeongsu & June - All to None

Dear Dogs | Bandcamp

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.

DJ Niraha - KorgMusic2024DemoEL-HELL-EΛ

Heat Crimes | Bandcamp | Boomkat

"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.

Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

Realistik | Bandcamp

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.

Midwife - No Depression in Heaven

The Flenser | Bandcamp

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.

Eat-Girls - Area Silenzio

Bureau B | Bandcamp

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.

Chantssss - Shyness

Theory Therapy | Bandcamp

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.

Dregs - Dregs

Purely Physical Teeny Tapes | Bandcamp

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.

Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol. 5

Noton | Boomkat

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.

See also:

• 2023 Rotation
• 2022 Rotation
• 2021 Rotation
• 2020 Rotation
• 2019 Rotation
• 2018 Rotation

The sun goes down at 5:23pm, and the temperature is an unseasonable seventy degrees. The skies feel hungover, damp and grey, which matches my mood. Yesterday a man who smelled like gasoline attempted to enter the Capitol with a flare gun. A few hours later, my country elected another man to do more or less the same. Again.

Materially, my life is the same as before. I trade encouraging nods with joggers as I run my morning laps around the pond. Strangers make room for each other at the supermarket. But my mind is stained with suspicion. Did you vote for him? Did you want this? This is the zone of horror: the inability to see the world as others do and vice versa.

I feel like a fool for allowing myself to hope for a few weeks, mainlining punditry from CNN and The New York Times and The Guardian, assuming we would choose consensus-driven reality over the poisonous feedback loops and silos of the internet, where the extreme left and right have driven each other into madness. But now I must accept that I’m the one who’s been living in a silo because the internet has won.

The bodhisattva was so overwhelmed by the suffering in the universe that the deity’s head split into eleven pieces. But then, seeing the deity's plight, the buddha gives Guanyin eleven heads to better hear the cries of those who suffer—and a thousand arms to help them.

I’ve never read HP Lovecraft. I understand him only as an early twentieth-century landmark that casts a long shadow over cosmic horror and as a man who held some noxious views, perhaps even for the early twentieth century. I am, however, reading Eugene Thacker’s extravagant meditation on cosmic horror, and he includes a paragraph that Lovecraft wrote in 1928 as the opening paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu. A century later, it sounds like my relationship with the internet.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday, the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

I understand less and less these days, yet I know too much: a blast on the other side of the world, shootings across the nation delivered like the weather forecast, something awful that somebody said thirty years ago, the sexual lives of politicians, the opinions of a distant acquaintance on Israel, the fact that a body found in an Ohio nature preserve turned out to be a discarded sex doll, and so on.

Are we standing on the precipice of a new dark age? Probably. I often catch myself thinking, yes, this is what a society circling the drain feels like, and in America, these nineteen days before the election feel genuinely existential. But there’s a phrase from Don DeLillo that refines Lovecraft’s prophecy: “Too much of everything from too narrow a source code.” Which means it’s time to step away from the screen.

Someday I’d like to be an old man who sits in museums with a sketchpad and tries to draw the paintings. In the meantime, I’m trying to identify a song that surfaced in my speakers the other day, a burst of fuzzed-out psychedelia in a language I do not recognize. After two minutes and eighteen seconds of pure delight that sounds like the Platonic ideal of 1971, it abruptly cuts out.

The filename is 10A - 126 - Download, and there’s no other metadata. My mp3 library is about to turn 25 years old, and with over forty thousand tracks, I have no idea when or how this song entered my life, and artificial intelligence knows nothing about it. So I turn to you in the hope that the Information Superhighway is not yet totally useless: I’m offering five American dollars and a mountain of gratitude to anyone who can identify it for me.

10A 126 Download

0:00

/138.168

1×

I was at the library, pretending to write. The man at the table across from me was loud. Pushing fifty and sunburnt. Fancy haircut in a pink polo and khakis. He brayed into his laptop about quarterlies and metrics and clickthrough rates.

This sunburn with teeth was the avatar of the utter lack of care or even bare-minimum awareness of other human beings that has poisoned public life. Yes, this man was a demon. He was what the end of civilization looked and sounded like.

I decided to say something. But first, I needed to make sure the people were with me. A woman two tables away nodded in the man’s direction and rolled her eyes. Good enough. I started to stand up, ready to tell him to knock it off.

Then a child appeared.

I don’t know anything about children, but this one was three feet tall, and I think it was a girl, although it was difficult to say because a bandage was wrapped around her bald head and her skin was grey save for the purple rings under her eyes. She wore a gown with a chunk cut out to accommodate a machine that sent tubes into her nose, and she cradled an armful of books as she toddled up to the demon’s table, grinning so wide it made me smile too.

“Daddy, look at all the cool books I found!”

I hung my head, and when I looked up again, the demon had become a saint. An exhausted father just trying to do his job while looking after his sick kid.

I thanked something I don’t quite believe in for saving me from myself and sparing that child from a scene of me haranguing her dad about civility. I made a promise to do my best to treat everyone as if they're dealing with something heavy. Because they are.

But it’s hard. Hating that man was easy. I enjoyed it. I could have turned up the volume on my music and focused on my work. Instead, I removed my headphones to be more fully annoyed. Why?

Because righteousness feels good. Righteousness is intoxicating, oftentimes addictive, because it provides a sense of purpose, even when its premise is false. And this is far more likely to lead us to societal collapse than some middle manager on a Zoom call at the library.

Meanwhile, my head is gunked up with fragments that point in all directions. There’s half of a zen aphorism about a fingernail pointing to the moon, but I can’t remember why this is supposed to be profound, although I swear I read somewhere that your uncoiled intestines can reach the moon.

Last night, we watched tornados threaten our neighborhood on the news while sirens rang from all corners of the county. We cheered when they zoomed into our street. They told us to wake our neighbors and take shelter, but we remained glued to the TV as a psychedelic throb of purple passed over a map of where we lived. The weather people said they’d never seen anything like it. When the blob reached the Target a mile away, we went to bed.

And what of silence? Lately I’ve been concentrating on the sliver of quiet between each passing car on Route 33 outside my window. Although I’m still reckoning with panic attacks on the highway, the thrum of nighttime traffic lulls me—perhaps an echo of growing up in apartments along Interstate 75 on the edge of Detroit. Some people are afraid of silence. They cannot tolerate it. I’m learning to savor it. 

Except when I fall asleep. I need to hear someone mumbling about the past. Fall of Civilizations is my favorite thing for this, and it feels timely these days. Last night I learned that, five thousand years ago, the Sumerians gave us sixty minutes in an hour because they counted the three joints on four fingers five times and believed this was a sacred number.

In Greek mythology, dreams were often personified as Óneiroi, black-winged demons that enter our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods. Last night I dreamt 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 Johnson and Ford.

This week our previous president went on trial for being sleazy, and I envy the optimists who think this might save our republic. Meanwhile, my therapist taught me how to give myself a panic attack in twenty seconds flat. He wants me to do this five times every day. I’m finally giving psychology a shot, and it was long overdue. Gutting it out wasn’t getting me very far. Each night, I drive along deserted highways with the Chromatics, trying to get my interstate mojo back. Each day, I feel a bit better, even though the world feels a little more insane.

Strange how it’s perfectly acceptable to say ‘goodbye’ in person or over the telephone, yet it transforms an email or a text message into a suicide note. In other news, I no longer understand the atheist who wants to talk people out of their gods. I often think about this line in First Reformed: “The desire to pray is itself a form of prayer.”