2018’s Best Songs

My sources for new music included:

Matt Wilkinson on Beats 1 radio, recommendations from friends, Pitchfork, Buzzfeed, randomly monitoring new releases and grabbing songs that looked like they might be cool, checking out interviews with my favorite artists to see what they’re listening to, Reddit, and Twitter.

Here’s a couple of songs that I thought were great in 2018.

Venice Bitch - Lana Del Ray

This is some perfect Laurel Canyon nostalgia (can you count the lyrical references?) segueing into a pretty and noisy middle, back out into pretty folk, and then back into the noise. It’s over nine minutes long, but it doesn’t feel drawn out or padded. It’s beautiful and hypnotic, and one of my fave songs of the year.

French Riviera - Cautious Clay

One of my happiest discoveries this year was Cautious Clay. He’s Brooklyn, and I guess you could say he’s part of this new wave of indie R&B. He’s got a real feel for how to bring the big chorus (check out Joshua Tree for another example of his production prowess). His lyrics are cynical and heartfelt at the same time, guarded and vulnerable. I missed his debut show at Baby’s All Right, and I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive myself. Watch this kid - he’s gonna be huge. 

Doesn’t Matter - Christine & The Queens

This one reminds me a lot of an old fave of mine, La Roux: open wound angst over chilling synth beats. The second part of the song (“Run if you stole a shard of sunlight/Don’t ever tell them I’ve got your back/Choking to tears on shards of sunlight/Run if you stole a shard of sunlight”) makes me cry every time. Sometimes it’s tough to be happy and optimistic in this life, and though I’m a cheerful, sunny person by nature, I’m not sure people always realize how much work it can be to remain that way, despite everything. This song gets it.

Break Thru - Dirty Projectors

I would listen to this song over and over while taking showers this summer. It reminds me of my wife, whom I love more than anything in the world. I’ve been a DP fan since Bitte Orca, even though it would be cooler to say “since Rise Above” but that would be lying. The circular riff, the squishy beats and bass, his weirdo vocals - I love it all.

bless ur heart - serpentwithfeet

For about a month, I was making everyone I knew listen to “four ethers” by this guy (which is not on this list because it was released in 2016). Then this album came out, and this song is the final track. It breaks me every time I hear it. It’s the end of a relationship, an attempt to come to terms with what happened. The only growth worth having has a least a little pain in it. Arianna Grande’s “Thank U, Next” isn’t even smart enough to wish it were this song. Even after all the times I’ve listened to it, it still made me cry when I listened to it while writing this.

(also, his outfits are ridiculous, and I have a soft spot for true weirdos)

Don’t Miss It - James Blake

I spent a number of years, most of my life maybe, being a depressed, self-centered asshole. A few years ago, I stopped doing drugs so much, I started taking care of my health, I married the love of my life, and I started being grateful for having such a great life. 

Then I got cancer, and all those things were thrown into sharp relief. I was confronted by my mortality, and whereas before I had been trying to be happy, I now realized that there was no other real choice. Happiness was the only option. I am so lucky. You are too, really, if you want. Don’t miss it.

High Five - Sigrid

This fucking song. Pure pop and absolutely glorious. When the chorus kicks in, it’s like a shot of pleasure straight to the spine. The production is stellar, too (the drums! the vocals! the breakdown in the middle 8!). Just listen and enjoy. 

Honorable mentions:

Golden Wings - Gabriel Garzon-Montano (IMHO this one’s an invocation of the God Mercury, may his name be Thrice Blessed, and the best invocation of a god through music since Holst)

LOGOUT (ft. Chance the Rapper) - Saba 

The beat in this one kept me coming back over and over.

Tomorrow: 2018’s best albums

Timor mortis conturbat me

Dale Pendell has been, next to my wife, one of the most influential people in my life, for better and worse. I never met him.

He died of cancer back in January, after a long illness, but I was working with Katie on getting our business on firmer footing, and didn't find out until today, when a quote came up on my social media that I had posted back in 2013. It's from his book Pharmako/Dynamis:

"There is a spring. It comes out of the rocks on a high ridge dividing two great watersheds. The water is very cold and is pure beyond any other. It may be the only thing in the world that is not poison. It is surely the only thing in the world that can save your life. I'm not going to tell you where it is, but you know how to find it."

I quoted this because, at the time, I was just coming out of a period of severe depression that had been precipitated by what I believe to have been Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. You can read about that here. I spent most of 2012 depressed out of my mind, watching anime and MMA to get the periodic shots of dopamine I so desperately needed. For those who didn’t click, I used a plant called kratom pretty heavily from 2004-2009, by the end using it almost three times a week. 2013 was when I started getting my head back together with yoga and meditation.

My depression wasn’t Pendell’s fault, of course. He was a writer and an ethnobotanist. Ethnobotany is the study of how plants and people interact. Specifically, he was super into the plants that people used to alter their consciousness. He wrote a series of books, the Pharmko series, that were a combination epic poem, scientific journal, trip report, sociological treatise, meditation guide, and occult grimoire. There is nothing like them in literature, that I know of.

In 1999 or so I stole one of his books from the sister of a friend of mine (Hi Lark! Hi Chad! I know you’ll never read this - sorry about everything) because I had fallen in love with it and couldn’t stop reading when we had to go back to New York from New Hampshire. At the time I was very interested in the chapter on Salvia Divinorum, which is a plant with hallucinogenic properties that, while useful to the seeker after wisdom, are unpleasant enough to make the stuff unpalatable to the casual, recreational user. This kept it from being scheduled by the DEA, since they mostly legislate against pleasure. Wisdom, being altogether more difficult to quantify, and perennially unpopular with the masses, they mostly leave alone.

Finding Salvia in the early days of the internet wasn’t super easy, but it wasn’t hard, and once you found somebody who could get you that, they often had other things for sale. That’s how I found out about kratom, which is a plant with opiate-like properties that, at the time, people believed to be non-addictive. Turned out that wasn’t true, but we live and learn.

One of the things that set Pendell apart from a lot of ethnobotanists was that, like Terrance McKenna or Timothy Leary, he made no bones about having tried all of the substances he wrote about. He was an alchemist in the truest sense, in that he was both the experimenter and the experimented upon, all with an eye toward enhancing and opening up his experience of the world.

It should be no surprise, then, that the guy who tried any number of different plants to alter and enhance his consciousness would, at some point, get liver cancer. This may be my protestant upbringing speaking, of course. There’s no way of knowing how or why a person gets cancer, and there may be any number of contributing factors. The idea that a person deserves to die for having pleasure and joy in the world and in the body is a pernicious myth propagated by puritanical busybodies, and I hate it.

But still he got cancer. He was recovering from it right around the time I was dealing with cancer, too. Which made today particularly hard. I made it. He didn’t. We’re all on a march to the grave.

I’ll likely edit out most of this.

He wrote beautifully. He wrote with cleverness and wisdom, like Terrance McKenna meets Alan Watts, with a dash of Gary Snyder. Because of him, I altered my consciousness, both with and without plants. I probably would have done that anyway, though. I’m still doing it to this day (yoga, Wim Hof). I loved him and his writing, and I’m sad he’s dead. I wish that we all lived a lot longer, and without the suffering that comes with living in a fallen world.

You Didn't Miss It If Everything Is Happening At Once

One of the things I hated most about coming up in the music scene in early-90's Tucson (and there were a lot of things to hate about the scene, even if the music was quite good), was the near-past nostalgia. This is, of course, a symptom of the hipsterism that, even then, permeated the town. Nothing defines a small-potatoes backwater with big-city ambitions better than vicious backbiting about matters of taste. Of course, Tucson didn't invent sneering hipsterism, but when I moved to New York in 1996 and went around the music venues, the cynical affect of a lot of the folks I met was not entirely unfamiliar to me, even if I still had no idea how to respond to their lack of enthusiasm for anything.

But near-past nostalgia was particularly prevalent. If a band put out a new album, it was nowhere as good as their early effort, and even I got caught up in it, going so far as to come up with a rule with my then-songwriting partner: first album was best, and everything after that could only be in the running for second place, at the highest. Part of this was in response to a lot of metal and punk bands already being in their "difficult middle" years in the early 90's.

The more I write about this, the more I realize I might not really have a thesis. The truth is, I just hated the idea that, whenever I first discovered a band or an album, there was always somebody there to tell me, "Well, that's kind of their sell-out album. You should have heard them when they first started out." This always led me to believe that, whatever was going on, whatever scene was happening, I had arrived too late. I had always just missed it, whatever "it" was. When I got to New York, by the time I was hearing about Williamsburg in 1999, it was, per all the truly "in-the-know" kids, already over. Bushwick is the same now, as anyone who has been paying attention would be happy to tell you that it's been over since 2010 (or earlier).

I discovered Sonic Youth because of "Goo." I was told that was the "sell-out" album. Maybe they were right, all those hipster kids with their indie-cred gatekeeping. It was pretty pop. Even had a video on MTV.

But because of that album, I went out and found "Daydream Nation". And that's the money, right there. "Daydream Nation" made everything else possible: noise, melody, snark and sincerity rubbing shoulders and butting heads. It was more than a dialectic of rock, punk and art. It kicked ass, and it allowed all the bits and pieces of those things to co-exist and create something more than the sum of the parts.

Everybody told me that "Daydream Nation" was also a sell-out, and that the real shit was "Evol" or "Sister". Then some other people were like, no, even those were too poppy, and what you really wanted was "Bad Moon Rising" and the truly evil stuff they recorded with Lydia Lunch. Nope, said others, it's "Confusion is Sex" and "Kill Yr Idols" or nothing.

Fuck it. The noisy early stuff is fine. Not my thing, though. For my money, "Daydream Nation" is the perfect prescription. They had some good stuff later, too, but this is where it all came together. Art and pop. My favorite.

There's a larger point here, though. "Daydream Nation" put together a lot of disparate elements and allowed them to co-exist. Similarly, on the internet, everything is simultaneous. When the sum total (or damn close enough) of human expression is available at any given moment, suddenly which came first becomes less relevant. The new Anderson .Paak album isn't competing with just the last AP album, it's also possible to compare it with Sudanese dance music from five years ago, Australian pop from the late-80's, and whatever the hell is happening in some small town like Tucson. And not only that, but you can compare it (and cross-fertilize it) with the latest movie by Spike Lee, an essay on metamodernism, or a GIF of Steven Universe with superimposed text written by a kid in Oslo.

There will always be asshole gatekeepers, and there will always be those who hang on to their scenes with a death grip to prop up an insecure sense of self-worth and identity. Regardless, thank you, internet, for making the argument over "artistic progression" vs. "selling out" completely irrelevant, in fact if not in discourse.

This is America, So Lose My Number

Donald Glover (as Childish Gambino) put out a song and a video that blew up the internet, called "This is America". You've probably heard of it.

It details visually, musically, and lyrically, the way that America destroys black lives and then covers up the damage with entertainment.

A few days later, a mash-up video put the first few minutes of the video together with an earworm from the early oughts called "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen. And then THAT blew up the internet.

I'm not linking to that video, because it's radioactive as fuck. If you haven't seen it, you're probably an adult, you can find it.

That being said, I do have some thoughts on it. 

It seems like there are several different reactions one could have to this video, only some of which are legit.

1. "This is hilarious." Full stop. These people are likely missing the point of the original video.
2. "This is awful. The people who think this is funny are missing the point of the original video." As we can already see, reaction 2 has a basis in truth, see reaction 1.
3. “This is hilarious BECAUSE it is awful.” Another way of phrasing this is: "This is hilarious, because it makes me incredibly uncomfortable.” This reaction is responding to the way this video simultaneously seems to undercut the message of the original video and then reinforces it by the juxtaposition of the banal and the serious. Note that this reaction is very difficult for others to distinguish from reaction 1, because it’s both difficult to explain (and remember that any joke you have to explain is explicitly NOT going to be funny to the person you explain it to), and difficult for others to accept in good faith if they are already are in pain from feeling trivialized by reaction 1. It’s also difficult to express because people having reaction 3 are VERY leery of being lumped in with people having reaction 1, and so they’re already starting out from a position of defense. Understandably so.

Reaction 1, while understandable, because this is cleverly and skillfully done, doesn’t fly. I doubt anybody here just thinks the mash-up is straight up funny in its own right. 

Reaction 2 is completely valid: there’s a lot of pain being expressed in the original video, and anything seen as trivializing that is like a slap in the face.

Reaction 3 is also valid, but difficult (and somewhat dangerous) to express, and harder to justify. Laughter that comes, not at the expense of others, but at the existential horror of suffering, is a tough sell to those who are in the midst of suffering.

The laughter that comes from watching somebody fall down an open manhole and die is qualitatively different from the laughter of reaction 3, but that’s not going to make somebody having reaction 2 feel any better.

Rage Against the Past

In 1992 or so, the guitarist and co-songwriter for my band came back from a trip to California with a bootleg cassette of a band. "I've been making everybody listen to this," he said, shoving the tape into my hands. "This was everywhere," he added, shaking his head. "In six months, everyone in Tucson is gonna be playing this."

He was right, of course. He was right about almost everything. 

No One Knows When the Fineline Closed

Fourteen years old or fifteen maybe, and you know you're not like the other kids. This is one of the great myths of adolescence, the kid who's not like the other kids, when really all the kids are exactly alike in their alienation and utter difference from one another. None of the kids are like the other kids. 

But while a lot of the other kids have figured out ways to hide their difference, their secret shame, you haven't. Not savvy enough, not socially apt, unable to conceal or dissemble. And the other kids can spot it. They can smell it on you, the porous boundaries, the absence of a tough outer carapace to keep the world out. So they fuck with you, because it's easy, and because it's kind of fun, and because it takes all the pressure off them. Why would anyone bother to suss out their weirdness when yours shines out for everyone to see. You're an easy target, and it sucks. You learn to hide, to disappear, to avoid getting fucked with, which means spending a lot time with yourself. 

And in your solitude you find the music. It had already started in Junior High or Middle School. You went off the beaten path looking for music that wasn't like what they listened to, and you found strange flowers of song growing in the rocks. Now that you're able to explore you find vistas of music opening up, populated by weirdos like you. Whole scenes, people who, like you, strayed from the path, or threw themselves off it deliberately, or who never walked the main road to begin with. People who can't help feeling things, who aren't athletic or pretty in the conventional way, people who read and write and think and aren't afraid to talk about it.

You find your people, even if, because of the accelerated rate of change in the adolescent world, they're only your people for a few weeks, a few months, even just a semester or a year. 

In Tucson, in 1985, they wore black eyeliner, and flowy clothes, or heavy chains and leather, or pale white pancake makeup. Their clothes imitated bondage gear, cock rings and dog collars and safety pins, leather-daddy hats. They loved roses, and darkness, and cemeteries, skulls and blood, drugs, Baudelaire and Bauhaus. Some of them were gay, the first gay people you ever met.

And in Tucson, in 1985, they went to The Fineline. The Fineline was a club down near Miracle Mile, where the porn shops and the prostitutes hawked their wares. Once a week, on, if I remember correctly, Wednesdays, they had an all-ages night. I would go with my friends, the ones that could drive, and dance to Joy Division, to The Cure, to Bauhaus, to Siouxsie and the Banshees, to Sisters of Mercy. It was a dark and scary place, and being the good little Christian boy I had been raised to be, I found it thrilling. It was brooding, the music was mournful, the blacklights made everything ghostly.

This is where it started. Nights hanging out in graveyards while my friends made out on tombstones. Reams of overwrought poetry. Funny looks from the kids at school when I wore jewelry and eyeliner.

The Fineline was heaven. It was my first time experiencing a scene. I felt home, for a little while.

This song captures it as well as anything not actually from that era. The chorus, "No one knows when the Batcave closed," references the seminal club in the London goth scene. In Tucson, The Fineline was our Batcave. Enjoy.

Despite the title of this post, there' s a very nice article about the closing of The Fineline here. 

The Giant Sand Where God Lives

The mushrooms had just started to kick in when I saw the storm roll down the canyon toward me.

I'd driven out to the Saguaro National Monument (now a National Forest) in my first car, a sand colored Volkswagen Rabbit I'd named "Shadrach,"expressly for the purpose of tripping out in the desert. Out here, surrounded by the petrichor and the smell of the creosote and the slightly alien looking giant saguaro reaching their huge arms in supplication to a darkening sky, I felt like I would have the kind of experience I'd been looking for. I'd often said to my friends who asked me why I still lived in Tucson, long after most of them had moved to bigger cities and better things, that "God lives in the desert." Just ask the Jews. Just ask the Muslims.

The line of rain, a grey haze billowing like a sheet across the sky, seemed to move slowly. You always think you have plenty of time. The closer the rain comes, the tougher it is to tell just how far away it is. The hard dividing line between rain and sand becomes fuzzy and indistinct.

There was a sound, like a few people sucking in air between their teeth, moving my way. A few people became a group. A group became a crowd, then a mob, now all shushing each other, running toward me. A few drops plashed my face, and then it was upon me. Hammers, buckets of water, soaking my clothes, my skin, the earth. I felt the strong urge to get to higher ground. The part of my brain concerned with bodily safety was rapidly shutting down, but it must have managed to remember that flash floods were a real concern in this area, and was able to send up a subconscious signal flare through the star bursts that were starting to explode in my frontal lobes. I clambered up a hill, over shifting shale and dirt that was rapidly churning into mud beneath the onslaught, until I found an outcropping of rock under which I sheltered, shivering in my wet clothes.

It dumped. It plummeted. The heavens shouted rain down on the desert until the visibility decreased to only the few feet just beyond my primitive shelter. Thunder clapped and boomed, but I remained entirely unconcerned about my safety. Wind hooted and moaned, driving rain into the mouth of my little makeshift cave. I laughed.

Then, it was over.

The sun came out almost immediately on a disheveled and ravished scene, I stepped from the cave, dripping and cold, and felt my skin tighten as I started to dry. I stood on a rock, my heart quiet and full of light, and looked down into the valley below where my car was parked. The air still glistened with moisture, and the low sun made a rainbow from where I stood right down to the car. I swear. Mushrooms or no, that happened.

The same kind of ramshackle grandeur, the aloneness that isn't lonely, fills this song.The tension that mounts as the storm rises, the sun that opens up on the hook between the verses. This isn't the song of the storm, but what comes after, the still, small voice that speaks in the quiet when the storm has passed. Imagine the voices stuttering to a halt in your head, imagine the sun coming out, imagine the darkness that is coming, has gone, is still to come.

Howe Gelb - "This Purple Child"

Enjoy

Pop Goes the World

If I stood on the concrete outside the boxy, modern-looking fine arts complex at Canyon del Oro High School northwest of Tucson, and looked south toward Mexico, I believed I would see it, that it would be the last thing I would ever see: a flash of light as the nuclear missiles from Russia detonated over Davis Monthan Air Force Base. It was 1988, I was 17 years old, and I believed that the world was about to end. Not in a couple of days, or a week, or this year, or before I graduated. Today.

The madness of absolute certainty had gripped me that morning. Awakening from a dream perhaps, or maybe after church youth group the night before. I wasn't sure where the idea had come from, only that it was unquestionably true. I could feel the truth of it humming in the center of my chest, fizzing around the edges of my brain. I was glorious with it. The day glowed with edges and shadows sharper than the usual razors of Arizona sunshine. 

The fact that everyone went about their days without panic, with no sense of the horrible destruction about to rain down upon us, only served to further confirm my knowledge. I couldn't tell anyone, of course. They would never believe me. I had been given this knowledge, not because anything could be done, but as a gift, from God. I could say goodbye to the people I loved, my friends and family, I could ask for forgiveness for my many sins, offer my paltry soul to Jesus for safekeeping, and die, hopefully instantly, in the fiery inferno descending on us all from the clean blue sky. 

I was one of the lucky ones.

I walked around in pious, giddy sorrow for almost three days, joyously mourning every person, every beloved thing I came in contact with. My heartfelt farewells at every parting with every friend might have raised a few eyebrows, were I not already a little (a lot) weird. Nobody probably gave my doe-eyed departures a second thought.

It was the end of days! Finally! No more depression. No more unrequited crushes on almost every woman I was friends with, had ever met, or had read about in a book or seen on a screen. No more the inescapable weight of guilt every time I masturbated to pornography, skipped class, wrote poetry instead of doing homework. No more impossible to fulfill expectations of success, and, finally, no more "potential." I would never disappoint anyone ever again. I would be free. All God had to do was kill the world.

I wondered, briefly, if there would be a mix of the bloody biblical grotesqueries I was so fond of reading about in the Book of Revelations, the ones my youth group leaned on when they wanted to spice up bible study, and the hard science fiction of nuclear holocaust I knew so well from television and movies. Would Jesus come before or after the mushroom cloud? Would the Devil ride down from his kingdom in the air on a Soviet bomb to do ultimately fruitless battle with angels and principalities before he inevitably succumbed to the powers of Good?

Not my problem. Here come the jets. 

The hardest thing about prophecies that don't come true is the moment of double vision where two worlds exist simultaneously. There's the world where the prophecy is going to come true, absolutely, without question. This world is luminous with meaning, fraught with portent.

Then, superimposed over this world, off by just the fraction of a degree necessary to require a choice between them, is the other world. A world in which none of that shit is happening at all. This world has the benefit of continuance, but it is terrifying in its uncertainty, and it is meaningless, 

One morning a few days after my vision of a world cleansed in nuclear fire, I woke up and realized that it just wasn't going to happen for me. The bombs, despite my hopes, were not going to fall. Jesus wasn't coming back, no matter how bad tensions in the Middle East got. I saw the world of prophecy, and the world that was, and I knew I just didn't have the energy to sustain that kind of crazy. I started going to class again. I thought about applying to college. The sun continued to rise. 

All of this is to segue into this song by Scritti Politti, It's called "Overnite" and I'm pretty sure it's about someone who believes the world is going to end. I've done my research, and nobody else seems to subscribe to this theory, nor are there interviews with its author, Green Gartside (the "Green" of "Tell us about it, Green" in the lyrics), confirming it, but none of that matters. The guy who believes, against all evidence, that the world is going to end via nuclear conflagration in the middle of his senior year of high school clearly isn't looking for validation. It's just a theory, and a beautiful song. As the song says, "Check it out."

Overnite - Scritti Politti

When I was seventeen (Tell us about it Green)

There was a world to know about (Check it out)

Everyday she'd call me (What'd she say?)

Is it over yet? Do you love me?

Overnite - and while your troubles away

Under the stars up above - I'll build you another day

Close your eyes - I'll be home before it's light

And all the tears you cry - will dry in the dead of night

And now I'm in between (Tell us about it Green)

It all became a mystery (Check it out)

Everyday she calls me (What does she say?)

It is over yet? Do you believe them?

Overnite - and while your troubles away

Under the stars up above - I'll build you another day

Close your eyes - I'll be home before it's light

And all the fears you have - will die in the dead of night

Someday - maybe soon - we could show them a way

I would love just to watch it falling

Oh my pretty one - show me a way

Overnite - I heard a satellite say

There'll be a wind from the west - to blow all your dreams away

Close your eyes - and maybe before it's light

Oh all the hopes that you have - will die in the dead of night

Muhammad Ali

Before I learned I was pale and skinny and weak and strange, before the other boys taught me my place on the playground, I believed I could be dark and strong and funny and fast. I believed I could be like Ali. I could sing sweet and sting sour and make 'em all laugh as I beat 'em down. I was five years old and every time Ali clowned Cosell, that pinched little man in a suit, every time he got in front of a crowd and told them who he was and then proceeded to prove it, I believed I could be what I wanted to be.

He was mine, too. I loved his big mouth. I loved the way he moved, faster than I could see. I loved that he made my parents angry when he talked about the world, even though I didn't understand what he meant most of the time. I loved that he fought. I, afraid of everything, loved that he feared nothing. He would get punched and stand up, fall down and stand up, get booed and stand up. They'd take his title and he'd stand up and take it back. Over and over. He believed he was a man and demanded others treat him as such. I wanted to be a man like that. Funny, fast, strong, unbowed, unafraid.

I still do.

Real Men

My sister, arbiter of all things cool, her 18, me 11, informed me that the lyrics to "Little Red Corvette" were "dirty." I was singing along in the car, probably getting most of the words wrong.

"Underneath, where you can't hear it, they're singing, 'Real men call back.' It's about gays." She was, as always, absolutely unassailable in her rightness. She declined to educate me as to what the "Trojans" were about, but seemed to believe that the line about "horses" was so obviously filthy that no explanation was needed.

Now I was intrigued. I found myself listening even more carefully with nervous excitement, straining my ears to hear the subconscious assault on my burgeoning sexuality. Once she'd said it, of course, it was obvious. I mean, just look at him! Thigh-high boots and hair piled to heaven, purple lamé and eyeliner. He was terrifying and thrilling. That high pitched voice sang a siren's song of debauchery.

The graffiti at my elementary school already read what they'd say for years afterwards: "Scott Williams is gay." The slurs could not be have been more laughably far from the truth. I wished I was gay, just so this aching longing I seemed to have almost constantly carried around in my chest for the Jennifers and Christinas of my class would go away. I loved women in a way that crippled me and left me entirely unable to speak to them. I dreamed of becoming a girl, just so I could sit comfortably with them, talk to them, listen to their secrets, brush their long, shining hair. Just like the rest of the girls.

And didn't the kids have a point? I knew I wasn't like the other boys, obviously. I sang to myself. I cried too easily. I was "sensitive." I moved around like I wished I was an elf (the gayest of all the mythical creatures), and my hips swished, just a little, when I walked, no matter how still I tried to hold them. I wanted to write stories and poetry, for God's sake! When I turned thirteen, in lieu of the sex talk, my parents straight out asked me if I were gay, presumably to avoid having me lie to them more than I did already. I may not have been gay, but I was clearly something.

I went through a lot of confusion, for years. Maybe I was gay, and just didn't know it. The girls I liked clearly caught a whiff of whatever it was that made me strange - desperation, loneliness, a little bit of fey weirdness - and steered clear. So I went looking for sex and affection wherever I could find it. It didn't help that there were plenty of older men who didn't hesitate to take advantage of a horny, confused teenager with a penchant for self-destructiveness. It took years, and a move across the country, to figure even some of my issues out. But through it all, almost without even knowing, I had somebody showing me the way.

Prince showed me you could wear eyeliner. You could swish a little, or a lot. You could be soft spoken and scream and then destroy a motherfucker with your guitar. The girls could love you. The boys could respect you. And vice versa. You could sing about purple bananas and God and sex and nobody could say shit to you if you believed in yourself. You didn't have to explain yourself to anyone.

I never heard the voices singing "Real men call back." But Prince showed me real men - real people - do whatever the hell they want. I'll miss him more than I can say.

The Morning Routine

My morning routine:

• Wake up to my phone (current alarm: "And You And I" by Yes, mostly because it starts off nice and mellow and I like to wake up gradually)...
• ...except that really it's the cat waking me up by sitting on my head about five to ten minutes before the alarm actually goes off. She would like to be fed.
• Kick the cat off my head. Dog tries to eat the cat as she jumps down. Scuffle ensues.
• Calm the dog. Kiss Katie good morning before she drifts back off to sleep.
• Feed the cat while holding in an almost crippling morning pee (work those kegels, kids!).
• Finally pee.
• Fumble through the dark hallway down to the front room, draw the curtains, lay down my yoga mat on the floor, and proceed to read a bunch of articles on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr. 
• Give up on my timelines after I realize it's only been six hours since I last looked at them and everybody in America's still asleep, while my international crew are still just getting up. Set my timer for yoga (I use Insight Timer. It's got good sounding bells, the timer allows me a lot of flexibility in setting extra bells so I know when to switch positions, and it does this totally non-spiritual badge system that gives me gold stars when I use it everyday, which tickles the part of my brain that needs a "good boy" from some kind of authority to stay motivated).
• Do yoga. I practice Sivananda style yoga and have on-and-off for the past 24 years. The cat usually obstructs me as best she can by draping herself fetchingly across the mat until my excessive movement disgusts her and she leaves to stare moodily out the window while I finish.
• Meditate. I do a simple Zen exercise of counting my breaths which is about as complicated as I can handle. 
• Shower, weigh myself, shave, and listen to music or a podcast.
• Get dressed. By this time, Katie's up and watching the morning news. We don't have cable, so we're stuck with the major network news shows, all of which seem to be staffed and written by cretins (in the case of the Today Show), out-of-touch squares (in the case of CBS This Morning), or bores (Good Morning America). We've settled on the squares, for now. I could do with quiet or music, but Katie seems to need the structure of the same thing happening at the same time each morning to let her know what time it is. Periodically I yell at the TV when the squares say something particularly out-of-touch or banal.
• Eat breakfast: yogurt, blueberries, and honey.
• Kiss Katie goodbye, all the while lamenting the need to leave the house instead of staying home and hanging out, because work is for chumps. 
• Head downstairs and out into the world.

Time and Sleep

A. lives in the apartment above us with her possibly older brother. "Possibly" because both brother and sister have reached that indeterminate age where time has done most all it can to you for the moment, and the ravages of the years pause or plateau, leaving the body, damaged certainly, and much the worse for wear, but still somewhat serviceable, to go on for a little while unmolested. In looking at them, it is impossible to distinguish their ages. He may be older than she, or vice versa.

We often hear them come and go, walking around their apartment, and Katie and I speculate, both on the layout of their apartment (a constant source of speculation in New York City), and on what they might be doing. Walking - yes, certainly - but why are they walking to and fro at eleven at night, or four in the morning, or even the middle of the afternoon? Why do they tread above us, causing the ceiling - our ceiling, their floor - to creak and groan in protest? Why do they pace the length of the house, and which one of them is it doing the pacing? 

What keeps them awake on their constant rounds, pursued by what unknown hauntings at all hours? Is it regret for their mutual spinster- and bachelor-hood? She seems happy enough when we greet her on the occasions we meet. Are they lonely, with only the stale bread of their long companionship to comfort them? Or are they merely walking off the tiresome wakings of the aged, when sleep slips from beneath their eyelids and leaves them bereft and abandoned in the silent darkness, and they must walk the halls and bedrooms, searching, hoping to coax sleep back into their beds before the sun rises to begin another day. 

Follow Up to a Dust Up

After being harassed by a small group of kids (late-late teens) doing the usual raising-money-for-our-school-team scam, I was surprised at how potentially violent it almost got - one of the kids actually smacked me. Well, really, it was more a little slap on the back. Which is no big deal on the face of it: people get touched involuntarily all the time in this city.

I have to fight against my tendency to catastrophize incidents. It may be just how I'm wired, but my brain tends to want to connect my experience to larger trends in the world. I had a small epiphany when I realized that my (very small) dustup occurred on the same day that presidential candidate and professional clownshoes Trump cancelled one of his rallies due to his "fear of violence" from protestors. We'll leave aside for the moment that the people most of us are afraid of attend his rally as supporters. Is there a change in the zeitgeist? Is a long suppressed violence rising up to once again pervade our culture? Are the black kids in New York City finally losing their cool over gentrification, inequality and racism, and taking matters into their own hands?

Nonsense. Honestly, that's crazy talk. The world is not becoming inherently more violent. Some days are tough for some people, they might have been going through stuff I don't know about, and if that's the worst thing that happens to me this week, I'm having a great life.

That being said, I was furiously angry, albeit about 5 minutes afterwards. It takes me a minute to realize exactly how I feel about a thing. Regardless, I spent most of the night forgiving them, which is an easy way of saying something very hard to do. The one thing I did think of that made me feel somewhat sympathetic towards them was, "God, kid. Don't touch a white man in public without his permission! What if somebody sees and calls the police? Suddenly you're on the ground in a chokehold and both our nights are ruined, mine because I've got to go down to the station and fill out a report, and yours because you might be dead. Get smart, man!"

I was still mad, but at something entirely different. They were a little hasty, a little stupid, but nobody deserved to go to jail, and for damn sure nobody deserved to end up dead. And yet, that had been a very real possibility for them if things had gone too far south.

It just put some things in perspective, is all.

On Longing

In the heart of every story, every character that I've ever loved is a hook. It tugs at me, pains me somewhat, leaves a scar when it goes.

It's longing. Not just desire, that hot, wet, vicious little monster with the teeth. Not the burning of ambition with its cold, mad stare. Longing has tenacity, and a penchant for the long game. It's patient. It might seem to leave for a while, but just when you feel like it's gone, like you're finally free, it reminds you - nope, still here. Miss me?

It comes in many forms, too. There's nostalgia, always a favorite of mine, a longing for an idealized past. The longing of love is a good one, too, that delicious heartache that always threatens to kill you, but never does. Religion has always given me that feeling, much to the chagrin of my more rational friends. God, or the thought of him, the love universal that sustains the stars in their courses and our cells burning with life. That longing hits me pretty hard.

The longing of stories, though, is more complicated. It's a particular mixture of the intention of the story and the reception of the reader. What might leave you moony and full of deep yearnings for days might leave me absolutely cold, or vice versa. 

The Muppet Movie, to pick what might seem like an odd example, is shot through with longing for me. Friendship, adventure, humble beginnings rising up to the heights of success, dreams, true love - when I was a kid, this was what I wanted my life to be about. It seems like a place where weirdos like me could find their space. I came out of that movie, a simple kid's movie, profoundly moved.

People can exploit that longing. A slogan like, "Make America Great Again" seems like a bunch of nonsense to anyone with even a modest grasp of history. We know that the "greatness" of America's past was partly built with racism and the wholesale extermination of native peoples. But the longing that makes that phrase resonate with so many people comes from a real place, a place of heartache and the deepest hungers of our souls. "Greatness" is, for many, not just domination, but a state of exaltation, an almost holy calling that combines strength with righteousness and a sense of responsibility. It comes from a place of love and hope. Others, manipulative and mendacious, will use this feeling, this longing, for their own purposes, which only further points out their evil.

Which is not to say we should foreswear longing, only that we should be wary of it. It is a powerful emotion, and like all things of power, should be treated with respect and caution.

For a long time, I tried to write with a sharp eye and a cool heart. There's a time for that, editing, for instance. But there's a saying: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." I know I'm on the right track with something I'm writing when I get that old feeling, that feeling of falling in love, of missing a place I've never been. When I begin to ache for the world I've made, for the people in it and the mistakes I know they're going to make, that's when I know I've made something good.

The throat tightens. The chest opens. I wish for wings that I've never had. I want everyone to feel like I feel: this loving longing that might be the only thing that gives the world any meaning at all.

Thoughts on Hateful 8

Quentin Tarantino is responsible for two movies that, if you wanted to give an alien an insight into the American Id, would be your first exhibits. "Django Unchained" is a revenge fantasy, a spasm of horrific, bloody rage towards all the injustice of slavery, and a long look into our deeply conflicted attitudes toward black masculinity. "Inglorious Basterds," also a revenge fantasy, goes back in time to rewrite history and exact revenge on behalf of the Jewish people. Both movies are a howl of impotence at the unfairness of the world, and both movies have an almost classical use of catharsis as artistic device.

If you're watching a Tarantino movie - you've gone to the theater and paid your twenty bucks, you've pressed play on Netflix or Amazon, you've flipped passed on cable and gone "Oh, hey," and then not pressed the channel up button on your remote - you usually have a pretty specific set of expectations, namely: funny, sometimes shocking dialogue; gratuitous, horrific violence; Samuel L. Jackson; feet; at least one really long monologue that ends with somebody getting their head blown off; repeated uses of a derogatory term for black people That's his schtick. I've written at length about other Tarantino movies, and it's safe to say I'm something of a fan.

I wasn't exactly disappointed by "The Hateful 8." I enjoyed it. I thought it was entertaining. It had a much slower pace than many of his movies (which is not a criticism), it was beautifully shot (I highly recommend seeing the 70mm Roadshow version if you can), the soundtrack was gorgeous (Morricone, scoring a western for the first time in years), and it checked off almost all of the bits on the list I mentioned above. That being said, it left me a bit cold. After such a great run with Django and Inglorious, I kept waiting for the story of eight terrible people shoved together in a cabin during a blizzard to open up into something more. It kept threatening to. The politics of race, slavery, and the Civil War kept coming up, but, in contrast to Django, they were used as motivations for characters, rather than a larger backdrop on which to hang the story.   Every time a new backstory was added, another character introduced, I found myself thinking, "Okay. Here we go. Now we're going to get to it." To borrow a phrase from John Crowley, I kept hoping it would signify, and it just kept on ramifying. 

There wasn't anything in particular I objected to. It just had the sprawl of a John Ford Western and the claustrophobia of an Agatha Christie drawing room mystery. It's a pretty traditional whodunit/crime film. Katie compared it to "Reservoir Dogs," which seems about right to me. 

So I'd classify this as a minor Tarantino movie. Here's the order, if anybody's keeping score at home:

1. Inglorious Basterds

2. Django Unchained

3. Kill Bill part 1

4. Kill Bill part 2

5. Jackie Brown

6. Pulp Fiction

7. The Hateful 8

8. Reservoir Dogs

9. Death Proof

10. Four Rooms

Just because Death Proof and Four Rooms are at the bottom doesn't mean I don't like them. I just thought they were trifles, is all. And IG and DU could switch places, depending on which I saw most recently. 

Updated 10/06/18: Couldn’t stand having my my name associated with the use of a derogatory term for black people, when I wouldn’t speak it. Took it out.

Don't Call Up Something You Can't Put Down

New York Times Article: Kratom, an Addict's Alternative, is Found to be Addictive Itself

And to that, I merely can say: no shit

And also: no shit, again.

No judgement, but I must admit to a certain amount of anger at this. The lies and half-truths that the people in the article fell for were the same ones I fell for.  People are, and should be, free to alter their brain chemistry in any way they see fit, but it's a drag when they do so when they're misinformed about the strength of what they're taking. I believe that's one of the issues with a free society, and it sucks, but I can't say I know of a good solution.

You're a wizard, right? and you read in your spellbook, find a ritual you think is going to help you. You think you're calling up a kitten. Problem is, it's actually a tiger. And then you've got a tiger in the room with you, and you don't know how to make it go away. That's kratom.

Christmas Metta

The lights are up, strung across the streets between the lampposts and illuminating the shop windows. The apartments are lit up too, little hazy glowing portals in every building facade, framed in red and green and blue. Music plays almost everywhere you go, heartwarming and vague tunes that remind you of childhood, songs you know so well that their words fade into nonsense sounds.

Like this one: "God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay." And the chorus: "O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. O tidings of comfort and joy."

Christmas comes and, for a few days, there is a general wishing of comfort and joy to the people around us. We try to offer comfort and joy to each other, and we wish for God to give it to each of us. It is unique. From the period of Christmas through New Year's Day, we wish for peace on earth, where most other times, we think about most other people, if at all, with a certain distaste.

There is a Buddhist meditation, called metta, which many people do. It's a simple exercise in benevolence. We concentrate on other people - first people we know and love, then people to whom we're friendly, then those to whom we feel neutral, and then those people who are difficult. Lastly we concentrate on ourselves. And to all those people we visualize, we recite the following:

May you be happy.
May you be at ease.
May you be free from suffering.
May you be at peace.

We are to concentrate, sending them love and feelings of peace. Whether or not you believe that these feelings we send have any effect in the world, or on the people we send them to (I happen to believe they do, based on no science whatsoever, so, you know, take that as you will), the fact remains that we tend to find evidence for the thoughts we entertain. That means that, when we think benevolent thoughts about the world and the people around us, our minds look for evidence that these thoughts are true, creating a positive feedback cycle - we wish each other well, we look for evidence of happiness in the world, we find it, and we feel happier, which allows us to wish more happiness to others. You can only give what you have. If you have happiness, you can give happiness. Them that's got will have, them that's not will lose.

So, I wish you a happy new year. May you be at ease. May you have a year free from suffering.

May you be at peace.

The Box

Inside you, there is a box.

It may be a cargo container, or an old shoe box that you taped closed years ago in a move and haven't opened since. It may be heavy and full, packed so tight that it doesn't even shift when you shake it, or it may have just a few things in it. Or just one thing.

One day you will go before a jury of your peers. You have been selecting them yourself, and giving them a place to live, for most of your life. No matter how old you get, how your joints ache, how your skin sags, they will remain young and vital and sharp-eyed and absolutely unable to lie.

Have you seen those shows, the singing, or dancing shows? Often their titles have an accusatory tone: "So You THINK You Can...." The judges hand out soul crushing critiques, taking the dreams of, unfortunately, very ordinary people and cutting their wings off and flaying them, wriggling and naked, before a slavering worldwide audience.

This will be worse, I promise you.

The girl in fifth grade so beautiful you wanted to be her best friend so she would let you brush her hair, the boy always so at ease and confident that he seemed to surf through life on a wave of gold, they'll be there. So will the bullies, of course, the psychos that never tired of infecting you with their corrosive hate, and the teachers that helped them. Your parents might be there, your best friends, that one person you had a crush on for years who never really loved you back, all there. Carefully appointed by you.

Your jury will show you your life, what you have done, and they will show you how to despise it. You will do your song and dance, all the things that you think you are, and they will show you, without mercy, that you are wanting.

And after their judgement has been rendered, when they have lacerated your heart and turned away in disappointment, leaving you raw and bleeding and full of self-loathing, you will retrieve your box, which for some reason you set aside when you went in. You should open it. If you are lucky, one of your jury may look inside the box with you when you do, and point out something particularly interesting.

Here's where it gets tricky. The box contains what you really are, what you have made in this life. The only things that go in the box are the things that you risked your life to make. You might be surprised how few objects there are in the box, or how many. It might contain a rock with eyes drawn on it that's a promise you made to a friend, or a rude carving made out of wood and fire hardened to last that is your marriage. It might contain your art (not the song you sang for the jury - your song, the one you've only sung once for your father, your dance, the one that you do when you are alone and happy), or something you don't even recognize: a bone, a watch gear, an old toy lantern with a sliding switch that somehow still gives off a faint but unwavering light.

That is your life. The song and dance you performed for show is nothing, and the jury was right to reject it. The box contains what is real. The jury will see what is in the box, and they will be unable to refute it, rough hewn or simple though it may be. It will be real, you made it, and no one can take it from you. No verdict is possible.

Whether the box is empty or full, there is still room, and there may still be time, to add one more item. You have to risk your life, but what else do you have? You climb on your bike, or mount your horse, or just stand and walk, away from the seat of judgement. Your jury has been declared void.

You have work to do.

Status Report

Things I'm noticing about my 4 Each Days:

1. The limit of only four sentences, while interesting, is starting to give a structure to the things which I need to work on breaking free from.

2. I actually forget the interesting things, for example, the oven thermostat broke the other day and I had to fix it by taking the whole thing apart. Or the hardcore Morrissey fan who was bartending at the Sea Witch the other day, who, when I complimented him on his choice of music (Still Ill) and his tshirt (the Wu-Tang logo turned upside down into an "M" for "Morrissey"), proceeded to point out all of his lyrics tattoos (three), and told me about sleeping on his Morrissey body pillow (!), which was apparently how he met his girlfriend (!!!). He explained to me that he was a much bigger Morrissey fan than his friend down at the end of the bar, and I assured him that anyone who thought they were more of a fan than he must be delusional. That's a pretty good story, and I totally spaced it.

3. I get about 30 hits a day. Most of them come from friends on Facebook, but a few seem to be from Germany and England.

4. The pleasure I get from 4ED is different from the pleasure of writing longer work. In longer work, it's all about the flow - the joy of spinning out the words, the time collapse of being absorbed. The shorter work is like working out a puzzle that has a finite number of solutions. Four Each Day is like a math problem.

And since this is about Four Each Day, I'll leave it there.

Update, and Notes on "The Shuttle Sleeps Alone Tonight"

Hello! How have YOU been. Good, good. Glad to hear it. I hope that little thing with the whatnot cleared up. The salve helped? I thought it might.

Me? Oh, you know, this and that. Mostly this. Probably less that than I reasonably should.

Well, in case you remain unswallowed by the hydra of social media, I should probably mention my story "The Shuttle Sleeps Alone Tonight" published by the wonderful, friendly, and understanding folks at Devilfish Review.

It's a little elegy to the space program, written when they were moving the Space Shuttle Enterprise onto the Intrepid, and it revolves around something I heard Neil DeGrasse Tyson say to the effect that, should we attempt to return to the moon in this day and age, we'd have to reinvent much of the technology from the Apollo program, because many of the people that got us to the lunar surface in the first place are now old and/or dead, and we kept inadequate records of their creations. The confluence of these two ideas (a de-prioritizing of sending men into space, coupled with the evaporation of knowledge), together with the decommissioning of the ship that was supposed to make travel into space a daily occurrence, created a feeling close to what I imagine is meant when the Japanese speak of mono no aware AKA the "Pathos of Things." There's a sense in everyday objects (and, for a while, the Space Shuttle was an everyday object for me, as familiar and as homey as a toaster) of the passing of time, and the transience of all things. I wanted to capture that sense of loss, to talk about the hopes and dreams of humanity that still awaken in us when we look into the sky at night. To hopefully revive, by showing where we've fallen short, the vision of the future that once was, that might still be again.