Woke at 8:30 and showered and filled a mug with coffee and drove straight to the library. Only when I sat at a desk did I take a sip, look at my phone, open a can of Helwit Salmiak, and satisfy the little beast inside me that craves caffeine, internet, and nicotine. This is progress.
(I’ve been importing my nicotine from Sweden and the shipping costs are killing me but I enjoy having an international vice.)
Flipped through a massive book of Gary Winogrand photos and selected characters for a new story: a gnarled old man who looks like he was muscle for a union in some midwestern town, another with a spooked expression like he’s spent too much time thinking about God.
Went for an ugly run in the rain, and it was gloriously dramatic in the mud and the grey. I’m picking up my mileage now that the weather is no longer fuck-you degrees.
Came home to the news that one of my favorite music producers was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room, along with two other artists whose work I’ve admired. For fifteen years, Silent Servant has been a steady part of my life’s soundtrack, a name always in my playlists via landmark imprints like Sandwell District and Hospital Productions and Jealous God, and an early producer of one of my all-time favorite projects, Camella Lobo’s Tropic of Cancer. Now there will be no more. Goddamned fentanyl. It has claimed so many, and the chemicals are only getting weirder and more relentless.
Early in my sobriety, a loud old man in a church basement said this would be a life of stepping over dead bodies. I thought he was being melodramatic, but his words come to mind more often with each passing year. I loathe the moments when the suffering of others reminds me to be grateful. This should not be necessary. But tonight, I’m reminded yet again that my sobriety is like grace and cannot be taken for granted.
The winter has turned warm again. Rain and fog and highs inching into the fifties. I write about the weather because it is the only thing that feels true these days. This country is becoming a hallucination, everyone committed to the reality they prefer.
Time to get serious about writing again. Two hours at the library every morning except Sundays. A dead simple schedule, something I can remember even though I’m not a morning person—but I can no longer wait for the day to get out of the way. There will always be demands and obligations, but they do not need me before eleven o’clock.
Last week, I fell hard for IBM Plex, an open-source type system that is dignified yet future-facing, which is nice because the current future does not feel dignified. I want the things I design to feel the same: crisp, cool, and sane. It’s a never-ending search for the line between clarity and personality, a quest that might apply to dealing with the self as well.
Last night, I sat in a half-lit conference room with eight very different men, and we discussed God, forgiveness, and making amends to those we’ve lost. One man scoffed at the idea. “Let the dead bury the dead.” Another spoke of time as a kind of god, that we live with all that came before and yet to be born, which meant our dead were with us now. And why not believe this? Why not believe my dead are waiting for me to speak to them?
But I do not. Instead I drove around Ohio listening to Sisters of Mercy.
2023 got away from me, but I’m not surprised. Time itself has gone wobbly. We’re deep into the 21st century, yet I still find myself waiting for the future to begin. Music-wise, I’ve always enjoyed cobbling together a yearly list of my favorite new albums to mark the passage of time and cement some memories. Perhaps it’s a side effect of age, but each new release these days reminds me of something I’ve heard before. Whether this is a curse or blessing, I’m not sure, but I’d like to listen to a song that immediately gives me a splitting headache or, better yet, leaves me covering my ears while screaming that’s not music.
I tortured my parents with Plastikman and Boogie Down Productions. They assaulted their folks with Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds, and my grandparents probably did the same with The Glen Miller Orchestra and The Andrews Sisters. Youth should frighten middle age. This is the sign of a healthy culture.
My sense of losing touch is compounded by today’s condition of all-at-once, in which images and sounds hit our devices stripped of context and location and time, leading to a strange dual sensation of liberation and stasis. So this year, release dates be damned. Here’s the music I played most often or rediscovered or that delivered an unexpected thrill while motoring through the desert.
Ambient drone of the highest order. Each track ranges between fifteen and forty minutes, giving it plenty of room to slowly unfurl from the faint whir of an appliance into a monumental pulse that feels absolutely life-giving.
Music for a rain-soaked thriller in a fallen city: steam rises through the grates while trunk-rattling drums echo across windows with the shades drawn.
While dusting off my Speicher and Kresiel records, I rediscovered this unhinged ode to a footballer. Twenty-five years later, it’s still the best thing for running as fast as I can manage, and it still gets stuck in my head for weeks: Robson Ponte. Robson Ponte. Robson Ponte. Te. Te. Te.
Woozy Americana that sounds like a half-remembered, rose-tinted fantasy, even if the song is about the murder of the Clutter family. “Come, Las Vegas sunset…”
Late 1980s and early 1990s sessions from the muscle behind the indispensable Sandwell District and Downwards imprints. A concoction of new wave and no wave, punk and post-punk, industrial and pre-industrial, and every other genre that produces visions edging toward the sacred.
A masterpiece and a monument, a cold hard tower of sound yet malleable like a Rorschach test depending on my mood. Twenty-five years later, this still sounds like the future.
Earth - “Coda Maestoso In F(Flat) Minor (Autechre Remix)”
Legacy of Dissolution (Southern Lord, 2005) | Boomkat
High-grade low-end head-nodding sludge. An essential tool for challenging times.
A magnificent piece of songcraft, this is the plush sound of AM gold alchemized with some guitar shred. I played this song nearly every day in 2023, each time stunned by the sound of a band doing everything they know how to do all at once. It's like mainlining the 1970s in five minutes flat.
Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook – Sleeps With the Fishes
Midnight music by turns haunted and reassuring, here is the 1980s ancestor that not only birthed Bohren & Der Club of Gore’s turn of the century gloom but the emotional bombast of early M83. And “Searching” is a stone brooding classic.
Everything you need from a pop song: streetlights washing across the hood, a cigarette nodding on the lip, a memory of being cooler than you ever were, and a hook that will worm its way into your dreams because even though you don’t speak the language, you get the drift.
The Joshua tree was named by Mormons in the 1850s, who thought they saw their prophet pointing to the promised land. I wonder what it would feel like to see prophets and omens in the landscape. “God is not interested in our theology but only in our silence,” writes Cormac McCarthy in The Passenger, which restates Psalm 46:10 from a human point of view: “Be still and know that I am God.”
Stillness has been in short supply these days, and I’m trying to puzzle out the relationship between peace and growth. Does growth require pain? Or at least some degree of tension? I have yet to hear someone say their life was bursting with love and tranquility and they couldn’t count all the money in the bank and that’s when they decided to get spiritualized.
Virga is the name for precipitation that does not reach the ground. It hangs across the desert like a torn curtain. When rain does fall, the unique scent of a desert storm comes from the oil released by the creosote bush, and this odor has a scientific name, petrichor, derived from pétros, the Greek word for stone, and ichor, the mythic golden blood of the gods. In Mexico, the creosote bush is called gobernadora or “the governess” because its root system crowds out nearby plants. This is why they appear so evenly spaced apart. There’s a creosote known as “King Clone” in the Mojave Desert that is 11,700 years old. The Mojave is a rain shadow desert because it is surrounded by mountains that absorb the damp winds from the Pacific and dry the air on the leeward slopes.
Today the air temperature in Vegas reached 100 degrees for the first time this year. Meanwhile, 28 miles away, C. and I found a 68-degree breeze and a few patches of snow at 8,600 feet in the Spring Mountains.
But I did not enjoy the mountaintop. Each year I feel a little more vertiginous. A little more overwhelmed by the belly-flop sensation of tumbling from a great height. Perhaps this is another fun side-effect of becoming more familiar with mortality. Or maybe I’m just a ground-dwelling creature who prefers the pavement and neon and dunes.
Last night I covered my office with maps. I stayed up late and stitched together my favorite pieces of the Mojave: the Imperial Dunes and the Devil’s Playground, Last Chance Mountain and the Confusion Range. At dawn, I stepped back to admire my handiwork and discovered I’d turned into my father. Shortly before he died, he wallpapered a small room in New Orleans with maps of the bayou, marking the places he liked to fish: Jesuit Bend. Port Sulphur. Lost Lake.
For the first time in decades, I remembered the fat sheath of maps in my grandfather’s fishing boat, where I would marvel at the mythic language of Michigan’s lakes: Thunder Bay. Jackfish Channel. Knife River Harbor. I did not expect these maps of Death Valley and Joshua Tree to draw me into the past, to join me with my father and grandfather’s need to comprehend where they were. But it felt good to say hello to these memories, my ghosts. My grandfather. My father. And me, the end of the line. They had the water. I have the desert.
Here I am at last, living in the landscape I’ve craved since the first time I drove across the country. Twenty years ago, the desert appeared through my windshield, and it felt like driving into a cartoon: a yellow rectangle beneath a block of electric blue. To my Midwestern mind, accustomed to damp fields and pale skies, the Mojave was another planet. Although I was only twenty-five years old and not yet thinking about god or regret or reinvention, I heard a spiritual hum beneath the silence of the mountains. Tribes of dune buggies crawled across the dunes, and I thought I saw the future. I’m going to live here someday, I said.
Instead, life led me through cities, snow, and swamp—New York, Helsinki, New Orleans—and it took my parents and delivered terrible scenes. A pandemic. Berserkers in the Capitol. Mass shootings like the weather report. Screens that scrambled my sense of space, time, and self. And all the while, I fantasized about the desert as a refuge where I might heal my battered brain and really get to work.
I’m finally here, perched on the southwest edge of Vegas. But I’m older now and fighting to resist the exhaustion of the twenty-first century, or worse yet, resignation. My view of the desert has changed too. The future is still here, but I also see the past. I think about all those ancient ascetics who wandered across the sand in search of the sacred, and I wonder if I can do the same.
I live in Las Vegas, but I do not gamble. When I first visited the Strip twenty years ago, I tried my luck at blackjack. Took out $100 in mad money. Lost $85 immediately. Back then, they had $3 tables with human dealers rather than machines, and a kind woman from Monterey showed me how to split and double down. I kept winning and let it ride, telling myself it was just fifteen bucks. Night became day, but I had no concept of time until I realized I’d smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. I was up nearly $800.
Five years later, I drove through Vegas again. I’m great at blackjack, I thought. I should play. Vegas took it all back and then some. This city will get its money, no matter how long it takes.
So I do not gamble. Except for one longstanding wager.
Seven years ago, C. and I debated how the world would end. We’ll all be killed by a disease, she said. All those chemicals, long-haul flights, and antibiotics are going to add up to something bad. I thought it would be the singularity, mostly because I was reading a lot of sci-fi. Our conversation felt theoretical at the time, this debate over whether we’d perish while holding hands on a cot beneath the harsh lights of a stadium transformed into a quarantine zone, or if we’d be running through the streets for our lives before getting laser-blasted by a renegade sex robot.
During the peak of the pandemic, there was a constant hum from C., faint but unmistakable. It said I told you so. But I’m gaining serious ground this year. I don’t think the Rise of the ChatBots will destroy us right away. Torching the livelihoods of millions so a few billionaires can line their pockets is the next logical step. But you never know what the side effects of any new technology will be. If someone told me fifteen years ago that Facebook and Twitter would transform America into a basketcase, I doubt I would have listened. I don’t know if anyone could connect the dots between sharing a picture of your lunch and attempting to hang the vice president. Social media seemed benign in its early years. AI feels sinister after two months.
So our wager continues, and it will be the biggest jackpot of all: one of us gets to look into the other’s eyes during our final moments and know we were right.
The wind is fierce in the San Gorgonio Pass, the narrow strip between the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains where there’s a field of 1,224 wind turbines. On Interstate 10, a gust knocked over a truck and its container blocked the westbound lanes. C. and I thought about the wind a lot as we toured Desert X, an exhibition of large-scale installations scattered around the margins of Palm Springs. We bowed our heads into 40-mile-per-hour gusts while we visited a chain-link maze and a headless, armless woman on a bucking horse.
Why does the wind leave us feeling so exhausted and harassed? I pondered this while we trudged into another howling gust to view an eerie ballet of mechanical bulls replaced by steel plates. C. said the wind tires us out because we use our muscles to brace against it. But I think the effects are more profound than struggling to remain upright, almost metaphysical, as if my life force is being blown away. C. stopped and looked at me, her hair whipping around her face. “So you think the wind is blowing away your ch’i?” Yes. It’s all over the Coachella Valley now.
No. 1225 Chainlink by Rana BegumSearching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium) by Mario García TorresNamak Nazar by Hylozoic/Desires
Just off 29 Palms Highway, a loudspeaker broadcasted a frantic chant followed by ritualistic drums. As we approached, a soothing voice unfurled a theory about a grain of salt that can heal our climate. It’s a fine rare thing to encounter a conspiracy aimed in a positive direction rather than the usual apocalyptic doom.
But the most compelling piece was an incidental moment rather than any piece of art, which is often the case. As we walked alongside the eastbound lanes of Interstate 10 to see a sculptural arrangement of shipping containers, we passed a billboard for Tattoo Mark’s Estate Sales. A 20-foot-tall man in a ball cap grimaced above the speeding traffic as if struggling to arrange his face to meet the chipper demands of advertising while maintaining the solemnity his trade requires.
Sleeping Figure by Matt Johnson
The tangled formation of shipping containers was a beautiful feat of scale and balance, although I wish it wasn’t arranged like a reclining person. The artist even drew a face. I’d rather see a mystery and imagine the kind of force that could produce such an uneasy arrangement. Perhaps a terrible wind. As I stood beneath the shadow of a cantilevered Chinese shipping container, I thought about the truck flipped over on the interstate. But mostly, I thought about Tattoo Mark moving through the homes of the dead.
Woke up the other day and watched a billionaire’s rocket explode. Then C. and I ate breakfast at a Taiwanese deli on Rainbow Road: a bowl of soy milk, intensely fried bread, and an oyster omelet. We wandered into a hip zone of Vegas where a 1960s motel has been retrofitted into a breeding ground for nitro coldbrew, artisanal photography, chalkboard mantras, and shade-grown candles. Every surface gleamed with a gently neutered Art Deco aesthetic that belongs to no geography or point of view beyond lifestyle pieces that use phrases like “digital nomad”—a style so frictionless and familiar it feels almost narcotic.
Bought a small new notebook to carry around the desert, and it’s a pleasant shade of green. Whenever I buy a new notebook, the first thing I do is make an ugly scrawl to prevent myself from ever mistaking it for something precious.
In Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami contemplates why his novels sold particularly well during times of sudden upheaval: Russia and Eastern Europe as communism collapsed, Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He writes:
In any age, when something major occurs and there’s a shift in social reality, there’s a related yearning for a shift in the reality of stories as well. Stories can exist as metaphors for reality, and people need to internalize new stories (and new systems of metaphor) in order to cope with an unfolding new reality. By successfully connecting these two systems, the system of actual society and the metaphoric systems . . . people are able to accept an uncertain reality and maintain their sanity. I get the sense that the reality in the stories I provide in my fiction just happens to function globally as a kind of cogwheel that makes that adjustment possible.
This is a sound case for fiction when things get weird, particularly stories that shrug off the familiar and engage with the surreal. “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,” said André Breton a century ago. “Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial or not at all.” Could this sensibility also insert itself into our cafes, motels, parking garages, and department stores?
In this Terrible Year of 2023 when algorithms are chewing through the scenery, I thought I was decent at catching AI-generated vapor from my students. The incursions have been fewer than expected—and painfully obvious. Perhaps this is because I continually nudge my students to connect everything we read to their personal experiences. I want them to rant, revelate, and set the course material on fire if need be. Because the last thing anyone needs to write—or read—is another summary of the Bauhaus or ode to Constructivism. I take the work we do together seriously, aiming for conversation rather than evaluation until we find ourselves asking questions we cannot yet answer.
But the other day, I was sleepy, and after a long day of grading, I thought I was reading an especially uninspired essay about Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and I responded with a few hundred words of feedback and questions. Then it hit me. With gritted teeth, I pasted the essay into a text box, and yep, three of the algorithms that check the other algorithms delivered a 92% result.
And it was about the goddamned work of art in the goddamned age of mechanical reproduction, of all things. Perhaps I should just enjoy the beautiful irony here, but the image of myself spending my brief time on this planet thoughtfully reading and responding to the patterns of an algorithm fills me with a horror that edges toward the existential. And for some reason, I also feel a little dirty.
