Not sure what I’m more scared of: that as I age, art and music and nature and all of it will, over time, mean less to me, or if all will always mean this much to me. It’s an excruciating outcome either way.
I’m also going to send out my hiking thoughts notes with this newsletter sometimes. For years I’ve tracked some of my most ridiculous and urgent thoughts while I’m alone and moving in the mountains. I never know what to do with it, which of course conflicts with my compulsion for the whole big world to see my tiny little inner one. I don’t think I really go out there to like, silence my mind or connect with God or anything, I just think I go out there to become myself (my knees are beginning to pay the price. I’m starting to rationalize this as cartilage sacrificed for the sake of a more essential connective tissue between me and the world…). These thoughts in my notes app (messy) are sometimes realizations or mantras, sometimes it’s a line I want to hear someone say in a movie, sometimes it’s a tweet except I’m out of service. Yesterday on the hardest first mile of a ten miler, my initial big thought was “NURTURE SHARED ENCHANTMENT, OR DIE!” That’s an eerily consistent feeling I’ve had my whole life. Even as a kid, how fucked is that? Now I’m coming to grips with seeing how I’ve built my whole life around this “truth.” But is it truth? Or am I just, weeks away from 30, simply wading in the dregs of youth’s delusions and attachments, of which this could be one—or is this something like a (gag) purpose, forever? I’m trying to enjoy the uncertainty (lmao), but I can’t settle my nerves about whether I’m just as scared about the potential dilution of all this, as I am about having to exist under the command of this urgency for the rest of my life.
With that being said, some stuff
“Alive Twice” by Friendship
MJ Lenderman from Wednesday put out a really good record a couple months ago that makes me stoked about ROCK again (but it’s not alone, this has been a fruitful year for guitar music so far, which makes me very happy). His album Boat Songs has that ramshackle bike-on-wide-summer-streets-in-the-summertime effect that always gets me, that late-Westerberg strain of grain-fed guitar sensibility…a grounded noisy abandon, a use of twang that underscores a line of confusion, rusting ashtrays on paint-peeled porch railings, I don’t know...does anyone know what to call this? That’s absolutely my sweet spot and one day I’ll be able to name this sound, and create maybe an index of my favorite examples. The bands I’m talking about here are from Philly, but I really associate this sensibility with the Midwest, where I was born.
MJ Lenderman announced a tour with this band Friendship and said they were one of his favorite bands, so I went to find their music real fast. Dan Wriggins is the songwriter (his solo stuff is also great), and I told my friend Andrew his writing is like “if Jason Molina touched grass,” with that grain-fed ramshackle affect I mentioned earlier, but on the poet-y, David Berman-y, Vic Chestnut-y side of that coin. Gutting, but uplifting? Getting punched in the heart by a clever king? Emotional humidity? Yes. Friendship has an album coming out on July 29 on Merge called Love the Stranger and I’d love the advance if anyone can pass it along. I will always want more of this strain of songwriting, and I will never be satisfied.
Lauren Berlant on intimacy
Clips from Lauren Berlant’s opening essay for a 1998 special issue of Critical Inquiry about intimacy; whole thing is on JSTOR, which I just remembered you can access for free with your library card! I’ve never finished her classic Cruel Optimism, because it’s really academic and dense, but she’s written some of my favorite sentences of all time, and spent a life in critical engagement with my favorite topic of all time, which is the good life.
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“Being precise, not precious”
Just an idea I had that, like most CRAP, applies to both art and romance. Being precious is literally repulsive; being precise, specific, detailed, is elite.
Last 3 minutes of Opening Night (1977)
I watched this again and again and again, and listen, I know this is a breakup scene, I know it is a meta-reflection on performance (as in, self-construction and its undoing, self-destruction), I know it is about the existentialism of aging, and I know these characters are hardly aspirational (except that they are both gorgeous and glamorous!), but the scene where John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands are on stage as actors, improvising a scene of a couple tangled on the precipice of their demise, where they do this fake-fight choreography is so fucking stunning, it’s riveting, it’s maybe a physical expression of the absolutely twisted, corkscrewed-down depth of intimacy, maybe? Like, intimacy’s inverse pinnacle? As in, maybe it’s when each of your demons know how to play with each other, when they’re aware that they have the power to utterly destroy the other, but instead of that, they just fake each other out? Maybe it’s a sense of playful mischievousness that percolates down into the darkest realm of yourselves that ultimately defangs the demons? Perhaps it’s the tact to turn the horrifying potential of truly hurting each other, into a just a little funny joke? While knowing, full well, that you still could if you wanted?
“This is an athlete’s trick!”
“Scenes from an Open Marriage” by Jean Garnett in the Paris Review
Essay about a woman’s experience in her open marriage published in the Paris Review. Sensing a theme lmao? No you aren’t shut up leave me alone!…I feel like the only thing that can really demystify the terror of commitment for me, personally, are stories about relationship experiments at the limits, boundaries, edges, confines of devotion…the levies, retaining walls, etc. being tested hardcore, like, civic engineering-style, like, will this survive hurricanes-style, like, who pays the tax that keeps the bridge up-style. Infrastructure! 🤘
"Runner” by Alex G
This song feels like friendship!
time keeps on slipping into the future,
