🫖 Hi, friends. How are you? As you may know, since March, I’ve been playing with my format by shifting my mixtapes behind the paywall. This has been cool but also has had its technological shortcomings. I like having a perk for paid subscribers embedded into every post, but I also wonder if having the “PAID” header on all essays deters some readers. I also wish there was a way to open the comments section to everyone regardless of paying status. So, I have decided to re-open my long-form essays to the general public. That means my mixtapes are available to everyone again! Lucky you! I hope that my additional columns (tsundoku and doxxed) will feel like enough of a perk for my paid subs, now that I’ve established a regular monthly cadence. Anywho, very open to all feedback! 🫖
Oh, I just don’t know where to begin. I am telling boring stories. Everyone is not paying attention. Or, no one is paying attention, depending on the way you look at it. Years ago, I gave up recounting my dreams. More recently, I’ve cut coincidences too. Favorite artists are hardly worth discussion. All these experiences are so personal that they are rendered universal. Kill your darlings. Keep it to yourself. You are more likely to have a riveting conversation about the humidity.
Ultimately, even if you make a full loop-dee-loop around the swingset, you still end up where you started. Despite your harrowing journey, the external observer will only see a kid right-side-up on a swing.
//
At the reading in Bed Stuy, four-top tables are being pushed past their legal limits. Stemmed glasses—some smooth, some crystal-cut—are filled with pink and yellow wine. Mitchell and I talk about a psychological experiment developed by Piaget. A child is presented with an equal amount of liquid in two differently-shaped vessels, one tall, one short. They are asked, Which has more? Evana takes the stage and pours a little bit of her heart into every cup in the room. After she reads, we step outside for air and complain about metaphors.
//
We are regressing at the pool. Evana takes Kate on a ski ride. I am on the verge of shark play. My raisin fingers are itching to splash. I want to slither around at the bottom of the pool, to investigate the detritus, pedicures, and toe rings I might find. When cradling her like a baby, I threaten to dip Kate’s ponytail into the water. Chocolate dip cone. She screams in protest. We declare that girl dinner is a peanut butter jelly sandwich with a bag of chips and a glass of whole milk. I am braggadocious because the public pool was my idea. Isn’t it surprisingly nice? We exit the water and there is a used Band-Aid on the corner of my towel. It’s not bloody, which is somehow even more grim. What invisible ailments are currently diffusing into the pool? I choose not to care. Going to the public pool is, after all, a contract. Submerge yourself in water for free, there may be consequences.
//
Everything is cyclical. The last time I went to Hamilton Fish Pool was a year ago. I was astounded when Paloma brought along the same novel I was reading—Winesburg, Ohio. A few weeks ago, Kate and I realized that we are both reading Madame Bovary. This is a boring story, yet it is also two different cups with the same amount of water. Which has more?
//
At MoMA, we contribute nothing new to the discourse. Montana asks what constitutes appropriation. Anything that borrows or steals from previous work, I suggest. So, effectively all art. Does it have to do with intention, he wonders. Perhaps permission is the operative word. We frown. That doesn’t feel quite right either. I open the door for him with a comical flourish, thinking about all of the lines I have reverently pilfered. I don’t believe this is good or bad. It simply is. There is no writing without stealing.
Simon says write about plagiarism. Simon says take a weeklong vacation to work on your novel. Simon is Evana, and I am copying her every move. I hope she doesn’t mind.
I am frightened that my pages of fiction are too true, too close to life, too close to me. Who was it that said that after you finish your first novel, you should let it collect dust in a locked desk drawer? I am not unique.
I am soothed by the words of Wallace Stegner (which I hold so close to my heart, that I am hesitant to even share them here. I want them all for my own):
You break up experience into pieces and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary, and some are imagined . . . It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It’s all of it not true, and it’s all of it true.
I am often asked to explain the nature of my writing.
From now on, I will simply say: it’s all of it not true, and it’s all of it true.
//
Sorry, things have been crazy.
Things haven’t been crazy
and you’re not sorry.
//
Concerts are secular church services. They are places to cry and sway, anonymously transfixed by an idol in the spotlight. It’s a divine assault on the senses—colors, smoke, interplay between light and dark, smells, calls and responses, sounds so loud they’ll leave a holy ghost ringing in your ears long after the music is done.
As an audience member, none of it is about you, but you can choose to believe that all of it is about you. That’s what good music does. Good movies and good writing, too.
//
Over two weeks, I see two of my favorite artists perform live.
It’s Central Park and it’s hot and I’m drinking wine out of a can. I choose beer for my second round to save a few dollars. Alyssa drops her sparkling water, which snakes its way down the bleachers in successive thunks. Several people pantomime looking for it, but it is clearly lost. The concert is free and it’s miraculous that it’s not rancidly crowded. As soon as I know the show is starting soon, I can’t bear to sit any longer. I spring up and work my way into the crowd.
Julia Jacklin is a showstopper. In fact, she stops the show twice, concerned about an someone in the back who needed medical attention. Her voice is perfect and her inter-song banter is excellent. Someone in the crowd smells like Sun Maid cinnamon raisin bread, toasted with a pat of butter. I realize it is probably me. Cherry perfume, sweat, bug spray, and a waning yeast infection.
Love is all that I want now, she sings to my broken heart. To me, Jacklin’s music embodies a direct earnestness that I need to save me from my precocious wordplay.
A week earlier, I take myself to the Beacon. The audience contains enough horn-rimmed glasses to pay off the electricity bills at every Warby Parker in America. It is the type of crowd that puts me on edge—white men in their 60s with white hair, black frames and wives. I wait for something insufferable to happen, but everyone behaves respectably, aside from a near-constant domino effect of bathroom trips.
At the top of the show, Elvis Costello promises a setlist exclusively comprised of songs that are confessional or have a girl’s name as the title. Cop out. These criteria sum up his entire catalogue. He just said it to be cool, and it—of course—was so cool. The only song he plays with a girl’s name is Alison.
Unlike Jacklin, Costello’s voice has seen better days. He struggles to keep pace at times, warbling to assert new differences in his songs, some of which he has been singing for more than 40 years. His imperfections are part of the confession, a nod that he is not the young man he was the first time he said with quiet desperation, my aim is true.
You lack lust, you're so lacklustre, he croons to my ironic heart. Costello’s lyrics feed me precocious wordplay so I don’t starve from my direct earnestness.
//
So, where does it go from here? Costello appropriated too, borrowing a haunted quality from Chet Baker’s The Thrill Is Gone, in order to write Almost Blue.
Not all good things come to an end,
Now it is only a chosen few.
It is a song that perfectly conveys the concept of “almost.” How a borrowed copy is not quite a replica of the original. How equal volume can be different, depending on the vessel. How fiction can live in the limbo of almost false and almost true.
I am not one of the chosen few. I tell boring stories and am constantly convinced that the particulars are universal, and the universals, particular. I am almost someone else; I am almost you. All my ideas have been said and said better, but there’s a part of me that’s always true.
7.24.23 Mixtape
Today’s mixtape begins with a gem in appropriation: Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space by Spiritualized. The title borrows from a novel called Sophie’s World. The lyrics borrow from Elvis (Presley’s) Can’t Help Falling in Love. The chord progression borrows from Canon in D by Pachebel. All this creates something new. 🎶 All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away. Getting strong today. A giant step each day. 🎶 // Julia Jacklin was singing Eastwick when she halted the concert to make sure that everyone was okay. After pausing it the second time, she said, “Well, that song is over now!” which was an ultimate pity because it is such a gem. For the uninitiated, Jacklin’s music is raw to a point that it might come across as grating upon first listen. It took a bit for me to get used to her. But, in my experience, once you’re in, she’ll have your whole heart, and take care of it well. 🎶 Come on now, your roots are showing. Unlike hands, your hair keeps growing. Oh, now love, you could keep on dyeing; I think the truth is more age defying. 🎶 // Courtney Barnett strikes me as the perfect middle ground between Elvis Costello and Julia Jacklin. Like Jacklin, she’s an Australian indie rocker. Like Costello, she’s a precocious bastard. I go through phases of listening to her a lot, and the summer heat has seen me stomping around to Pedestrian at Best. 🎶 Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you. Tell me I’m exceptional, I promise to exploit you. 🎶 // When trying to come up with a song that reflects something universal, I was drawn to Ladyfingers by Herb Alpert & The Tijauna Brass. It sounds like love and longing and nostalgia and memory and sunset in the desert. // And, just as I ended my essay, I’ll leave you with the irresistable Almost Blue by the ever-true Elvis Costello. 🎶 Almost blue. It’s almost touching, it will almost do. There is part of me that’s always true. Always. 🎶
🫖 That’s all for today! I hope you liked it. 🫖
I just need to big you up for that long hot summer weller pic in that post i cant read. Big up
Thought earlier today do I have time to read all these random writers that Substack throws up when there are so many books I want to read and don't..
This evening I've enjoyed your posts so much - probably because they seem to me (and of course you may totally disagree) to have the same random joy at being random and noticing the undercurrents that some of my writing has - and as total newbie I'm constantly looking for reassurance that I'm not just a madman writing any old shit that comes up for me.
Your playlists are a genius idea - though I wonder why you don't use Apple as well as or instead of the great beast Spotify that is such a poor deal for the artists...no doubt this is an ancient complaint and you'll sigh at my naivety - but still...