Notebook

A man had a heart attack at a Starbucks the other day. I keep thinking about his glasses, fedora, and newspaper on the table next to mine—the remains of his plan to have a coffee and read the Times before his life blew apart. We’re all ticking bombs. Savor the mundane.

As if to confirm that dystopia has arrived, I catch a glimpse of a beloved actor from the 1980s smiling across three flatscreens in an empty lobby, encouraging everyone to triple reverse-mortgage their homes. Today a candidate called someone at a campaign event “a lying dog-faced pony soldier,” attempting to summon the ghost of John Wayne for some reason. But why do I know this? Strange how access to so much information somehow makes the world smaller, condensing it to a few lightning strikes.

As of 5pm today, New York City should have received fifteen inches of snow this season. So far we’ve had only four. Right now there are storms on Jupiter, unwitnessed and unseen. This morning I woke from a cluttered dream that included a giant who knelt down to tell me I was committing infidelity because I’m cheating on death with time. Taking a break from Photoshopping tonight, I laid down on the carpet and thought: Do it with love or not at all.

Some people worry the American president won’t cede power if he loses the election this year, an observation that would have been unthinkable four years ago. Our president. I am embarrassed to write his name into this journal, a name that looks like an obscenity on the page. Maybe it’s because I thought we deserved a worthy villain.

Nine years ago I was sitting in a Waffle House when my telephone buzzed with a CNN news alert: White House has pix of #Osama bin Laden with open head wound, his burial at sea, scenes from raid. The face of mass murderer, hashtagged and hyperlinked next to the word “pix.” Then I saw a headline that said, “12 Pop Stars Tweet About the Death of Osama bin Laden.” Nine years later, and I still can’t get that phrase out of my head. It was a modern koan, a signpost of things to come. The trivial sits next to the catastrophic like never before, producing creatures like our president. I keep scrolling: American suicide rates continue to climb. Eight reasons why shampoo is a waste of money. Coronavirus death toll hits 812. Your pets might smother you while you sleep.

I remember racing against the sun to reach the Badlands before dark, but I didn’t make it because I kept pulling over to photograph little white churches that flashed like teeth. I visited a tractor museum and a family playhouse. I cruised the streets of a leafy little town whose name I’ve already forgotten. When I reached the edge of South Dakota, the Badlands lay out there unseen, crouching in the dark. That night I dreamt of Natalie Wood, leaping and yelling hit your lights on the edge of a cliff, her arms swinging through the headlights again and again, my mind looping the scene until it felt like a prophecy.

Dirty Beaches – True Blue

from Badlands | Zoo Music, 2011 | Bandcamp

From Alex Zhang Hungtai, Badlands is a perfect 26-minute record that soundtracked my drive across the Dakotas. “True Blue” loops the Ronettes into a beautiful blur of AM radio drums and desert twang that sounds like memory.

Another day of headlines that describe people blasting, slamming, firing back, shutting down, lashing out, and tearing into one another—the overheated language of a national fever that has yet to break. I scroll through the aisles of the office supply store, soothed by the racks of folders and binders that promise an organized and efficient life. Someday I will find the notebook that will solve all of my problems.

I spend too much time in the weeds, focusing on immaterial details until I am incapable of decision. Should my titles on this website be bold or regular weight? Should my photographs be 900 or 850 pixels wide? I burn up hours dithering over these questions, a baroque form of procrastination rather than finishing the book I’ve been writing for years. I can fiddle for hours with a single moribund sentence, unable to decide between ‘which’ and ‘that’. Or I scroll through chatter, as if answers exist in the babble and thrum of screens. Why have these mental quirks become hardwired so quickly? Time to blow off the cobwebs, hunt down that miserable little pedant in my head and bury his body in the yard. Get back to covering pages with ink. That’s where the unexpected action happens.

Deadbeat – Slow Rot from Rhetoric

From New World Observer | ~Scape, 2005 | Bandcamp

One of those mornings when I put two contacts into the same eye. You really have to pay attention. On Lexington Avenue I heard a woman say, “It’s such a rare thing to have a human heart and live on this strange planet.” This sounded so profound as I moved through the city, not because of her words but the genuine sense of awe in her voice.

‘Civil twilight’ is an elegant term for the moment just before the sun sinks beneath the horizon. It might be a fitting name for these strange years. In The Age of Voltaire, Will Durant describes the texture of the days before the French Revolution: “Rococo was the art of an Epicurean monied minority eager to enjoy every pleasure before the disappearance of its fragile world in an anticipated deluge of change.” Perhaps these are also rococo days.

M83 – Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun

From Before the Dawn Heals Us | Mute, 2005 | More

Another night of vintage M83 tracks filled with drama and deluge. This is music for speeding across the great plains with tears in your eyes. Further reading: The Age of Voltaire by Will and Ariel Durant.

Today the president was acquitted of abuse and obstruction because we live in an exquisitely detailed form of hell. This feels like the only logical explanation. My eighty-year-old German neighbor and I picked at our omelettes while a television in the corner of the diner delivered the vote count. “God is leading us through these dark days because we must learn humility,” she said. “But that fucker in the White House won’t be around much longer.” I want to believe her, but I’m not so sure. That fucker might be around for a while yet. And I’d like to believe there’s some invisible hand nudging us through trials and lessons until everything makes sense. I wonder it would feel like, to wake up each morning believing in that kind of god.

Tonight I’m thinking about image hygiene after coming across this passage in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, a series of lectures about the future of literature that he wrote in 1985:

What will the future of the individual imagination be in what is often called the “image civilization”? Will humanity’s power to develop images in absentia continue to develop as it is increasingly swamped by the flood of ready-made images? The visual memory of individuals used to be restricted to the legacy of their direct experience and to a limited repertoire of culturally reflected images; the opportunity to give shape to a personal myth arose from the way in which fragments of that memory could come together in surprising and suggestive ways. Nowadays we are bombarded by so many images that we can longer distinguish direct experience from what we’ve seen for a few seconds on television. Bits of images cover our memory like a layer of trash, and among so many shapes it becomes ever difficult for any one to stand out.

All of which sounds eerily prescient thirty-five years later. Except one image does stand out: the profane face of our president, ever-present like the weather, the visual equivalent of Orwell’s black boot.

M83 – Don’t Save Us From the Flames

From Before the Dawn Heals Us | Mute, 2005 | More

A good night for old maximal M83 songs full of drama and light.

It’s unseasonably warm again, with a late April wind blowing through early February. An old woman on the subway platform belted out a Marvin Gaye song that nearly left me in tears. Her voice was swallowed by the oncoming 4 train. There are so many graceful voices singing against the heat and grind of this noisy world. Voices that might have been performing beneath spotlights for millions of people if the chips had fallen a slightly different way. I rode downtown thinking about the phrase lacrimae rerum: the tears of things, Maybe the world weeps with us.

There was a glitch in the machine last night, and twenty-four hours later, Iowa is still counting the votes from its caucus. Our demand for data is unsatisfied. Hours of punditry have gone unfilled. There are no numbers to spin, no narratives to shape, and the networks fidget while our trust in the whole enterprise erodes a little more. Conspiracies and disinformation fill the vacuum.

This is already a long and exhausting year, and it’s only going to get weirder, e.g., a talk-radio shrieker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom tonight. When the president’s garbled State of the Union address finally reached its blessed conclusion, the Speaker of the House stood and ripped up her copy of his speech. Perhaps this act of defiance will be in history books. Maybe we’ll forget by tomorrow when the next norm collapses.

New York’s skyline stopped me in my tracks this afternoon, reminding me that I live in an increasingly alien city. Its spindly billionaire towers brought to mind a line from J. G. Ballard: “the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.” Everything is moving so fast these days despite our best attempt to pin things down, if only for the briefest moment of orientation. But you cannot control nature, which is defined by relentless change. “Landscape paintings,” says the artist Robert Irwin, “are anything but.”

Clams Casino – Natural

From Rainforest | 2012 | Bandcamp

A smudge and a beat. The Ballard quote comes from High Rise and the Irwin quote is from Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. As for deciphering pseudo-events and surviving the internet, I’ve been enjoying The Convivial Society by L. M. Sacasas.

One of those days when the moon is perfectly visible in an empty blue sky. It’s unseasonably warm for February in New York. Riding the train along the Harlem River, I finished the last pages of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a stunning book dedicated to the artist Robert Irwin’s singleminded quest to understand awareness and presence. Of attending to the world. Asked in 2008 if technology will enhance our sense of perception, he responded: “The point is to get people to peel those visors off their faces, to remove the goggles, to abandon the screens. Those whose very purpose is to screen the world out. Who cares about virtuality when there’s all this reality—this incredible, inexhaustible, insatiable, astonishing reality—present all around!”

His enthusiasm is infectious. Walking down street tonight, I find myself paying closer attention to shadow and light, reminding myself that yes, this is plenty. This is more than enough.

Meanwhile in Iowa, the first caucus is underway for the 2020 election. Citizens clump together in the corners of gymnasiums and cafeterias, waving signs for their favorite candidate while reporters explain the byzantine logic for assigning delegates. It’s a portrait of American democracy: needlessly complicated spectacle, even in a recreation center in Des Moines. The television babbles through the night about “the viability threshold” and “the realignment procedure” like some kind of bad science fiction.

Birthday. Maybe it’s an auspicious one: it’s the first time in over 900 years—since 11/11/1111—that the date reads both ways, no matter how you format it. And it’s the 33rd day of the year with 333 more to go. I’d like to believe in numerical patterns and cosmic signs, but I do not feel particularly auspicious today. My beard is going grey and I’m losing track of my age. Sometimes I think I’m a year or two older than I am. Maybe this is nature’s way of softening the blow.

Time and things and plans are always falling through the cracks. Coffee and nicotine gum fuel my days. Perhaps one day it will be tea and licorice. Then rainwater. Then nothing at all. “Restriction can be a discipline to break habits,” says the artist Robert Irwin. “But it need not be a final state, and it’s no state of grace.” Maybe I’m just a gentle nudge away from buying a pack of Camels, some slight shift in the light. Because I miss smoking. The ritual of fire and ash, its irreplaceable rhythms and moments of solitude. Instead, I went for an ugly little run, my body all jiggle and creak. I wonder if, deep down, each of us carries a fantasy of one day becoming an ascetic or a mystic, some hardwired notion of stripping our lives bare and praying in the gloom.

I’m old enough to know one thing: I’m damned lucky to be here today, healthy and sober for seven years and more or less functioning in this world that has struck so many down. I do not believe in much, but I’m beginning to believe in grace.

Irwin quote from Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.

Flipped on the television to watch live reports from sites of pandemic anxiety: confused scenes from airports, schools, and hospitals. A fashion magazine ran a story called How to Style an Epidemic with color-coordinated surgical masks and gloves. Meanwhile, news of a sham impeachment trial while the Democrats tear each other apart before the Iowa caucuses. There’s a jittery energy circulating through our screens these days, an atmosphere that reminded me of a man I once met at a gas station in Bakersfield. 

He had long gray hair and a tight leather jacket and he warned me about the desert. “When you get out there, don’t listen to anybody who dares you to walk,” he said, sending his half-smoked cigarette skittering across the parking lot where it sparked against a pick-up truck. He clamped my shoulder, fingertips digging into my bones. “I’m serious, brother. People get in trouble like you wouldn’t believe. They’ll challenge each other to walk ten miles into Death Valley without any supplies and then walk ten miles back. They wager money on it.” I tell him I’ve never heard of such a thing and he stares beyond me, watching the late-night traffic. “Yeah, you can make good money on a bet like that,” he said, “but I lost some good friends that way.” I watched the tension in his jaw, the cords pulsing in his neck. God knew what he was remembering. I turned to go. “Don’t forget,” he called, “if you’re out there and you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated!”

No wonder so many religions began in the desert. The raptures and visions of the ancients were the most rational response to so much sky. And the higher the waters rise, the faster the fires burn, and the quicker we lose faith in our institutions, perhaps we will return to otherworldly thinking. We might find ourselves grasping at dogma, ritual, and rites. New prophets and cults will appear, promising salvation or at least an explanation. A future of old men in the desert, throwing fistfuls of salt and daring people to do dangerous things.

Enchanted Desert

American Decay, 2015 | More info

A track I built from a blurry loop of ‘Enchanted Sea’ by The Counts (Sea Crest Records, 1964). From American Decay, a collection of loops and reverberations recorded between 2009 and 2014.

A grim alignment like some rare cosmic event: the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union occurred on the same day the last glimmer of faith in America’s institutions faded. Today the Senate decided it did not want to hear any evidence against the president even though witnesses are publishing books and hollering about it in the streets. We know he is guilty, they say, but nothing matters. Meanwhile I scroll through footage of Chinese drones yelling at citizens who aren’t wearing face masks. I cannot tell if these videos are real or fake. Long-simmering anxiety has a new focal point, a new excuse for indulging in much darker fears. Borders are being closed. Travel restrictions are going into effect.

A woman once told me that she was going to win the game of hide-and-seek that she’s been playing with god. I still wonder if she is hiding or seeking. I want to learn to watch a fireplace the way I watch television or stare at my telephone. Everything else is unnecessary elaboration.

Vatican Shadow – Once This Fire Gathers Strength

From Atta’s Apartment Slated for Demolition | Hospital Productions, 2012 | Bandcamp

Music for the paranoid style in American politics.

It’s a strange sensation, living a life divided between these days of pixels and a childhood defined by magnetic tape. My first impressions of the world were delivered by audio cassettes and VHS, each unit of entertainment bound in plastic that occupied space and respected the logic of time: oxidized information gradually deteriorating whenever the tape was played, eventually dissolving into garbled images and hiss. Now it’s all so much static. No orientation, no sense of time. Perhaps my generation is uniquely positioned to be disappointed by the humiliations of today’s clicking and scrolling. After all, I still remember the optimism inherent in phrases like world wide web and information superhighway.

These are destabilizing days when there always seems to be a screen playing in the room. Endlessly breaking news bleeds through the walls. A new virus has been declared a public health emergency. The State Department is telling Americans not to travel to China. Hundreds of people are trapped on a cruise ship off the Italian coast, prevented from leaving because the might be onboard. Grounded flights and economic jitters. Meanwhile the Senate is determined to keep its eyes shut and ears plugged rather than reckon with our unstable president. The adults have left the room. The calvary is not coming.

There’s an uneasy shiver in my nerves each time I turn on a screen, bracing for live images of another massacre or disaster, the latest inhuman act. Somebody could tell me the entire Eastern Seaboard has been quarantined and I would believe it. This is the age of the permanent suspension of disbelief. And each bizarre episode is quickly forgotten as we lurch from one shattered norm to the next, left with no option except to adapt to increasing weirdness while we fight to hold onto our attention and maintain a grip on reality. It’s not an easy fight, and to everyone who manages to get dressed, go outside, and not yell at the sky: I salute you.