In Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, a woman disappears on a rocky island. Her wealthy friends search for her until it begins to rain. They pace empty rooms. They speak in non-sequiturs and nod off mid-conversation. They stare at the ceiling and count. They are bored out of their skulls, trying to pass the time. And I played along at home, fidgeting and waiting for the film’s 144 minutes to end. This is the double-bind of an Antonioni film: the characters are adrift, searching for heat and drama; so is the viewer. The effect is physical.
Antonioni developed a cinematic grammar of modern isolation: people alienated by their comfort, their architecture, and one another. It was a revelation sixty years ago; now it’s as familiar as air. “Our myths and conventions are old,” said Antonioni. “And everyone knows that they are indeed old and outmoded. Yet we respect them.” And when they no longer provide solace, where do we turn? “It is impossible to be happy simply because one is ceaselessly entertained,” wrote Roger Ebert. “L’Avventura becomes a place in our imagination—a melancholy moral desert. Why don’t we have movies like L’Avventura anymore? Because we don’t ask the same kinds of questions anymore. We have replaced the ‘purpose of life’ with the ‘choice of lifestyle.'”
“They became frightful with lofty plumes, eyes like balls, fingers terminated by claws, the jaws of sharks.”
One thing I hate about my writing is that it often feels bunchy and tight. I want to recover a sense of play, so I’ve decided to find a hobby. Something unrelated to frowning at my sentences. Something I can do for the hell of it. And most importantly, something that doesn’t require a staring contest with a screen. So I bought a sketchbook and some watercolor paints because I have no illusions about being a painter. I haven’t drawn anything in years; the last time I painted was twenty-five years ago when I was very high.
But what to paint? I opened a random page from Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthonyand painted the first phrase that caught my attention. This has become my new hobby, a weekend ritual. Here are my first attempts:
“Our ancestors of painted wax” / “And lichen formed upon my jaws”“My 74 antlers are hollow like flutes. When I turn toward the south, they draw ravaged animals around me.”
Looking at these paintings, it’s hard to believe I’ve been sober for eight years. But it feels good to do something for its own sake, results be damned. And I have a newfound respect for Caravaggio.
It’s a little sad that my first impulse when considering a fun activity is to get away from the screen. But the screen feels increasingly heavy nowadays, magnetized with nervy energy. In the class I teach, we discuss the mental effects of attention-hijacking and outrage mechanics. My students have a lot to say, and their vocabulary is vivid, often violent: onslaught, bombarded, drowning, shredded, etc. More and more, these conversations leave me wondering if it’s possible to experience a “digital sublime,” a renewed quality of delight or awe. Or if I will ever recover a sense of lightness or play when I’m online.
Despite my best attempts at information hygiene, I’m still buffeted by the digital winds. The other day I caught myself reading an article called “What Yogurt Does to You.” Then I lingered over the ambient horror of a New York Times article about mushrooms that casually referred to “our ruined global moment.” This morning I received a marketing email for a meditation app from someone whose job title is “Editor of Wisdom Content.” Now I can meditate upon living in hell.
So back to weird painting. Tonight’s sentence: “They pelt each other with shells, devour grapes, strangle a goat, and tear Bacchus asunder.”
Odilon Redon, Everywhere Eyeballs Are Aflame, 1888
I’m attempting to read Gustav Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, his 1874 depiction of the saint’s struggle with vice and distraction while searching for salvation in the Egyptian desert two thousand years ago.
Flaubert’s account inspired one of my favorite artists, Odilon Redon, whose eerie etchings sought to capture the “unfettered, immaterial world of the psyche.” The titles alone conjure worlds reminiscent of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album: Then There Appears a Singular Being, Having the Head of a Man on the Body of a Fish, Everywhere Eyeballs Are Aflame, and Different Peoples Inhabit the Countries of the Ocean. And now you can buy a Temptation of Saint Anthony face mask because we’ve built ourselves a fine little hell.
I wrote a few more notes on my decayed attention, berserkers, and my father’s spiral notepads in my January letter.
On the first day of the year, I stood before the humming pencil grids of an Agnes Martin canvas at the Columbus Museum of Art. The ancient Greeks believed God was a geometer, but I think she was closer to the mark: “Geometry has nothing to do with it,” said Martin. “It’s all about finding perfection, and perfection can’t be found in something as rigid as geometry. You have to find it elsewhere, in between the lines.”
This seems like a good philosophy for an extreme season.
On the first day of this year, I sat in the pews of a medieval cathedral in Turku, Finland, and tried to pray, which is alien to me. I tried to pray because my thoughts were gummed up with so much chatter and junk, the outrage and opinions of digital living, the residue of too much time spent behind screens. I wanted to know if it was possible to develop any type of faith these days. And underneath this desire, I had buried too many memories of grief. I had also stalled in my writing. I found myself trapped in an idiotic loop of procrastination and perfectionism, stuck with a mind that deleted words before the first keystroke. So I decided to dust off this station and commit to writing something each night for one year. Perhaps a few ideas about art, faith, and loss. Maybe some notes about each day’s events for my future self.
And now, on the last day of this year, the memory of sitting in a church in a different country feels as though it belongs to some lost golden age, like telling your kids about the days when airports did not have x-ray machines or you could smoke in supermarkets. The end of the year leaves me feeling as if I’m supposed to be reflective; I find myself hunting for insights and revelations that never arrive. And as this nightly journal ends, I feel compelled to make sense of it. My first thoughts are: 1) I do not recommend such a needlessly compulsive approach, and 2) I wish I’d picked any other year. (From February 26: “New infections are being reported. How far will this thing go? Will history record this as a blip, or is this the start of something bigger?”)
But this practice helped me develop a steady writing routine. I managed to carve out an hour each night, and I’m eager to point this habit toward books and stories. Writing 366 entries in a row also helped me reckon with my precious bullshit. I often found myself wrestling with some murky idea or failing to make a sentence behave the way I wanted—then it was two o’clock in the morning. So let it go. Good enough. There will be something new to write tomorrow.
Most of all, I appreciated the need for people I do not know. I’ve always preferred writing in museums, hotel lobbies, and train stations because these places remind me that I am a stranger. At home, I become too familiar, and my perspective narrows. In a year without the babble, mess, and wonder of people on sidewalks and subway cars or the small adventures and chance encounters that come with simply moving through the world, I found myself plumbing my memories and dreams and revisiting moments of loss. So, in the end, this exercise felt like walking away from something, a way of clearing the decks before trying something new. Which I hope is how this year feels for all of us one day when we look back in the rearview.
Thank you for reading, and here’s to a more sensible year.
On the first day of this year, I sat in the pews of a medieval cathedral in Turku, Finland, and tried to pray, which is alien to me. I tried to pray because my thoughts were gummed up with so much chatter and junk, the outrage and opinions of digital living, the residue of too much time spent behind screens. I wanted to know if it was possible to develop any type of faith these days. And underneath this desire, I had buried too many memories of grief. I had also stalled in my writing. I found myself trapped in an idiotic loop of procrastination and perfectionism, stuck with a mind that deleted words before the first keystroke. So I decided to dust off this station and commit to writing something each night for one year. Perhaps a few ideas about art, faith, and loss. Maybe some notes about each day’s events for my future self.
And now, on the last day of this year, the memory of sitting in a church in a different country feels as though it belongs to some lost golden age, like telling your kids about the days when airports did not have x-ray machines or you could smoke in supermarkets. The end of the year leaves me feeling as if I’m supposed to be reflective; I find myself hunting for insights and revelations that never arrive. And as this nightly journal ends, I feel compelled to make sense of it. My first thoughts are: 1) I do not recommend such a needlessly compulsive approach, and 2) I wish I’d picked any other year. (From February 26: “New infections are being reported. How far will this thing go? Will history record this as a blip, or is this the start of something bigger?”)
But this practice helped me develop a steady writing routine. I managed to carve out an hour each night, and I’m eager to point this habit toward books and stories. Writing 366 entries in a row also helped me reckon with my precious bullshit. I often found myself wrestling with some murky idea or failing to make a sentence behave the way I wanted—then it was two o’clock in the morning. So let it go. Good enough. There will be something new to write tomorrow.
Most of all, I appreciated the need for people I do not know. I’ve always preferred writing in museums, hotel lobbies, and train stations because these places remind me that I am a stranger. At home, I become too familiar, and my perspective narrows. In a year without the babble, mess, and wonder of people on sidewalks and subway cars or the small adventures and chance encounters that come with simply moving through the world, I found myself plumbing my memories and dreams and revisiting moments of loss. So, in the end, this exercise felt like walking away from something, a way of clearing the decks before trying something new. Which I hope is how this year feels for all of us one day when we look back in the rearview.
Thank you for reading, and here’s to a more sensible year.
It’s like a new form of weather, this atmosphere of everyone waiting for this wretched year to end. Although conditions won’t be much different on the first of January, we wait and hope nonetheless. Even though time is just a concept and clocks only measure other clocks, the promise of a new year is heavy: the logic of a new day stretched out, blown up to worldwide scale, a collective need for a fresh start.
Last night I dreamt that god appeared on the internet, issuing demands and revealing answers before stunned eyes in lonely rooms and rapt faces on street corners. I experienced the type of revelation that only appears in dreams, some urgent message or a new way of connecting the dots that I almost grasped. But now I can only remember angry colors pulsing beneath pixellated text. Perhaps it was a subconscious reminder to stop looking at my phone. Now there’s a resolution: keep it switched off until noon or maybe April.
The other day I found a sentence I’d scrawled in my notebook that I cannot place. A sense of vertigo comes, a slight internal slippage whenever I recognize my handwriting but not the words or their intention. I keep staring at it: Here comes an old man in a three-piece suit the color of sand, and he’s telling children not to grow up, it’s a goddamned trap, and he leaves everyone shaken in his wake. I don’t remember if this was a fragment of a dream, an idea for a story, or something I witnessed, maybe in New Orleans.
It’s snowing tonight in Ohio, and I cheered when I saw the first flakes falling through the streetlights. I’ve been watching it for an hour with my breath fogging the glass, and I’m grateful there’s still wonder there.
I remember the hope I felt this time last year, my naive faith that a foolish and frightening decade was drawing to a close and something better must be on the way. I try to imagine my reaction if someone showed me some scenes from the year to come: Wildfires tinting the skies a Blade Runner shade of red. Thousands of cars queued outside a stadium for virus testing. Shuttered restaurants, silent streets, and an empty Times Square. Americans tear-gassed and sometimes killed by their public servants. Candidates delivering speeches before parking lots of honking cars. A president who discussed invoking martial law to overturn an election. And on Christmas morning, a man played Petula Clarke’s “Downtown” on a loudspeaker and detonated a bomb. All of this seems poorly scripted, as if the tropes from every dystopian movie had escaped the screen to mock our definition of entertainment. Yet even these devastatingly real events are swiftly packaged and glossed into stories, becoming grist for punditry while the death counts are tallied across our devices. From gunfire to overdoses and now pandemic casualties, America is particularly adept at making needless suffering seem like the natural course of things.
Nineteen years ago, on the morning of September 11, C. shook me awake and told me to look at the television. After glancing at the live footage of the first tower, I wriggled deeper into the bed. “I don’t want to watch a movie,” I said, thinking it was one of those 1980s thrillers where the hero would leap from the burning building in the nick of time. I could not shake this idea, not even when we climbed to the rooftop to watch the towers that were falling several blocks away. This is the closest reference point I have for the sensation of living through this year.
I’m fumbling here. But as this journal draws to a close, I want to record this feedback loop, one that is felt rather than understood: fiction bleeding into reality and back again without the time required to comprehend, let alone mourn. There’s also the question of how to mentally brace for the unthinkable—and whether this requires the cynicism I’ve been hoping to shed.
Without new faces or scenes to cement memories, a rubbery sense of time has defined most of 2020. These final days of the year especially tend to drift and blur, as if they belong to some shadow calendar. The holiday buzz begins to fade and my thoughts nervously peek around the corner, wondering what changes and plans I should make.
I used to be a big believer in resolutions, in the mirage of a sparkling new James, now under new management. But my black-and-white thinking has mellowed with time (aside from my weird commitment to posting something each night this year). It might be a function of age, this acceptance that I’ll likely drag my flaws into the grave, and the best I can do in the meantime is forge a détente with my ornery and self-sabotaging traits. There will be no flash of light or burning bush.
Or maybe I’ve become infected by the chipper language of our culture. People keep talking about “becoming a better version” of themselves, a phrase that drives me nuts, how it reduces us to software. But perhaps it’s natural to equate our minds with the technology of our time: unplugging, recharging, feeling overloaded, etc. “Blowing off steam” originated with the steam engine, and being caught between a rock and a hard place might be prehistoric.
I’ll still attempt a few resolutions, although now I have more faith in fiddling and tuning rather than the myth of the tabula rasa or thinking of myself as something that can be easily upgraded. It’s always a moving target, this process of establishing some measure of discipline and structure without creating pointless or even painful little boxes.
Two years ago tonight in New York City, a strange blue light filled the sky. We stood at our windows, spellbound by an eerie neon glow that looked like something from science fiction. It was the fallout from an explosion at a power plant in Queens. But for three or four minutes, something otherworldly seemed possible. (And now I know that when the rapture comes or aliens descend, I’ll pace the room for a few minutes, finish my coffee, and check the internet.)
I often think about the hum in my nerves that night, the flush of excitement when it looked like something unthinkable was happening, that the world might change completely. Be careful of what you wish for. Now I’m in Ohio, sheltering-in-place aside from trips to the grocery store. Tonight at the supermarket, I watched two shoppers get into an argument in front of the deli meat because one of them was wearing her mask below her nose.
Each year I debate whether I should make an inventory of my favorite albums because it’s such an arbitrary exercise. Then I revisit my lists from the past, and I appreciate how this process generates a unique portrait, a sense memory of a lost season. But Christ, who wants to remember this year, let alone provide the soundtrack? And yet music felt more necessary than ever, carrying me through long nights of uncertainty and heavy bouts of cabin fever, and I’m grateful for these new sounds that provided some much-needed perspective and restored my faith in the human enterprise.
Introspective late-night synthetics so polished they seem to gleam in the dark. These songs start off murky, all bass and shadow, but they slowly gather steam, conjuring the optimistic tones of early 1990s electronics, back when there was still a little faith left in better living through technology. Driving down the highway late at night with these tracks on my dashboard, sometimes the synthesizers squiggle or veer a certain way, and I can’t help but let out a little cheer.
In this era of algorithmic playlists designed to satisfy our immediate moods, Signs is an increasingly rare phenomenon: music that teaches us to meet it on its terms. I’m not sure if I like this album, yet I find myself returning to it, almost compulsively. After a decade of increasingly brittle and cloistered records, Autechre has rebooted their software and returned to more poignant terrain. And like many things this year, the emotions here are alien and new. The result is stately and occasionally melancholy, with the residue of melodies flickering within patterns that never stabilize, and it sounds very much like a ghost in a machine.
A soundtrack for these long isolated nights. This is distilled rainy noir with faint neon on the horizon, a companion for a lone car drifting down the street. Bohren & Der Club of Gore’s slow-motion gloom is the music I play most often, usually around midnight. Their Midnight Radio album from 1995 is a masterpiece, and this new installment proved to be a logical score for these elastic nights.
A demented version of the Ronettes in the best possible way, like an otherworldly transmission of those mid-century bands named after jewels, their voices reverberated and haunted.
These songs capture a sensation that lives a few clicks beyond words, something listless and unsettled. Maybe it’s the sense of suspension that defines this season of distancing and isolating, or a childhood memory of killing time in a room while a voice bleeds through the walls. Drowsy guitars and drums blend with the rustling weather of someone pacing and waiting, perhaps sighing for time lost.
Elegant longform ambience that patiently begins at the periphery. Atmospheric hiss and cavernous tones hover at the edge of attention before they slowly, almost imperceptibly bloom into hypnotic loops. This is music that sounds like a shift in the light.
Midnight vapor and pop songs for dead cyborgs. Lurching across a bottomless low end, Love/Dead delivers a nervy Joy Division or Suicide aesthetic that’s been ground into matte black sludge. It’s an almost poignant flavor of future dread.
Orchestral drift that finds the territory between sorrow and hope. The centerpiece of this record is a magnificently restrained twenty-three-minute meditation that gives every element space to breathe, including the listener.
This album entered my life as reliable background music while I puttered around the room. Then it quietly moved to the foreground and became one of my favorite records this year. Gathering the soft-focus residue of an old shoegaze song, these ever-evolving compositions are equally comfortable with moments of abrupt silence as with gestures that soar.
A deeply strange and panoramic record that merges the frigid elements of dub techno with moments of unexpected warmth: the half-heat of voices at the margins, a hushed guitar, a sudden flash of brass. These songs roll in like a fog, and the word “sublime” is well-earned in the way this album transfixes you, holding you in its gaze. A perfect soundtrack for reading about failed arctic expeditions and contemplating the allure of such forbidding terrain.
Dignified heartache that bleeds through the grain of decaying tape loops. “Our world is in a bad feedback loop right now,” Basinski said a few years ago. “We’re at a point right now where we need to get rid of some bad feedback loops and it’s happening. It’s not gonna be pretty, but eventually things will resolve.” Listening to this album, it’s almost possible to imagine a moment when the loop finally and truly breaks.
Vatican Shadow – Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era
Vatican Shadow appears on my list of favorite albums every year. So be it. These are dark and conspiratorial times fueled by suspicious energies, and this project has nailed the gestalt.
C. and I spent the evening assembling a jigsaw puzzle of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most vexing images humanity has produced. The left panel depicts an idyllic scene where God introduces Adam to Eve and perhaps describes the joy of virtuous living. In the center panel, however, humanity is left to its own devices. The result is a literal clusterfuck as people frolic, feast, and copulate with one another—and with enormous strawberries. (Theories abound as to the fruit’s symbolism, ranging from their seeds to their sweetness; perhaps they are the devil’s candy.) The last panel introduces us to hell, and there is no devil here, only nightmares made from the material of our world. A city smolders on a hill while a bird-man feeds upon bodies, expelling them into a void. A pair of ears clutches a knife. A pig dressed as a nun encourages a man to sign a legal document. And so on.
Slowly piecing this image together left me with no better understanding of Bosch’s vision; it’s too overwhelming. Some have argued it’s a subversive commentary on the doctrine of original sin, that we might find delight in this world if we could live without shame. But Bosch was a devout Christian, so it’s more likely a warning about the perils of forsaking religion in favor of a frivolous life. Desire as heaven, desire as hell. But I marvel that arguing for a disciplined life of the spirit can be this delirious and fun.
The idea of developing a new visual grammar to speak to a fallen world brings to mind the painter Barnett Newman‘s rationale for minimalism and abstraction. “We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles,” he said, “a world destroyed by a great depression and a fierce World War, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello.”
Thinking about these things while doing a jigsaw puzzle feels connected: the inherent pleasure in putting together something that’s been broken, the clarity and sense of presence that comes with moving a piece from point A to B, and the fleeting sense of control it brings.
Kali Malone – Dungeon Canon
Studies for Organ | Rehearsal Demo, 2020 | Boomkat | Bandcamp
