This site is currently under construction. Though the blog is active semi-daily, the portfolio has been mostly archived and will only showcase newer work—anything done before 2020 will remain offline. As I’m currently working on a variety of new projects, there will be significant updates throughout the fall and winter. (There will also be a regular front page directing to the portfolio instead of the blog, but due to the fact writing is the only really active part of the site right now, I keep it on the front page.)

Anyway, thanks for visiting and hopefully the actual content of the site will be up sooner rather than later.

After a rather brutal August into September heat wave, Los Angeles is finally settling into normal weather for this time of year. I look at my portable AC with hesitation—I feel like putting it away for the winter is tempting fate that we’ll get hit with another week of 90 degree lunacy. The beach is only 10 miles away but it takes 45 minutes to get there. Sometimes living in this city just feels absurd.

One of the difficulties with sobriety is that addicts are obsessive and tend to replace their habit with another, arguably less destructive, one. For me it’s been TV and movies. I feel less bad about the latter, but watching too much television feels gross. I know how bad it is for the mind, I’ve read enough media theory. It’s a problem that I’m trying to use music and reading to beat, but I consider it just as bad as drinking.

So here’s a list of stuff I’ve been listening to on a lazy Saturday afternoon:

Wilshire Kingsley

Those Who Walk Away, Afterlife Requiem
Kind of drone, kind of melodic; this is one you just kind of get lost in. I’ll put it on while working and parts will just come out and grab my attention out of nowhere.

Songs: Ohia, The Lioness
Totally slept on this for years, even though I love Didn’t it Rain. Just sad songs and beautiful guitar work from the late, great Jason Molina.

Gillian Welch, Time (The Revelator)
Possibly the best singer-songwriter album of the 21st century. Though it was written about Napster, “Everything is Free” is more meaningful than ever. Not a second of this is less than perfect.

Tim Hecker, Dropped Pianos
Different than most of Hecker’s more intense and varied work, this is short and sweet piano and organ music that keeps a pretty morose but enchanting experience.

The National, Rome (Full Concert)
This is half-full of songs I really didn’t like on their Frankenstein album that are completely different when played live. I just wish they’d played “Slow Show.”

Charli XCX, Wuthering Heights
I kind of disdain Charli’s cultural presence in general, but it’s hard to deny this record is just banger after banger. Just a monster of a pop album that will probably be my favorite of the year.

Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédéric D. Oberland, Eternal Life No End
Excellent worldly music from this Middle Eastern duo that fuses a lot of traditional sounds from that part of the world with driving, electronic-inspired percussion.

Jason Isbell, Foxes In The Snow
I have been kind of mixed on his work since Southeastern, but this acoustic album about a breakup and falling in love with someone new is full of what it means to endure the extremes in relationships.

I haven’t really been writing much about politics these days. When I do, it tends to be pretty local or small-scale. Though I haven’t been making a ton of art, any political ideas never get too far.

Earlier this year, Conor Oberst talked about the difficulty of making protest-oriented art in the time of Trump. It’s the great paradox of Trump that is perhaps the most interesting thing about him: For a man with so many obvious character flaws, with only self-interest in his heart, he is remarkably difficult to actually insult. He is incredibly vain and therefore does care about image, but only in a specific capacity that art, or perhaps even language, doesn’t have a known capacity for.

Like I said, it’s a challenge, but one that I would think and hope any artist would be up for at least trying to overcome. That hasn’t really been my problem. Trump is just a guy, and in the end he’s a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.

What has become impossible, though, is reconciling the parallel horrors that have become the background noise of everyday life. The ongoing genocide in Gaza being one line; the Epstein Files being another. Blatant evidence of human life being ruined or ended at a massive scale to no consequence at all.

I have to imagine the only parallel in the United States would be living during the time of the slave trade. Slavery allowed for the evil to be on display the way it is now being broadcast over social media—after slavery but before the internet, the forces of white supremacy could use the media to generally control the discourse around atrocities. They could two-sides any scandal.

But there’s no way out of this one. These events are a mirror. From Palestine to Little St. James, there is no excuse for the systems that are operating via child trafficking, murder, mass rape, or ethnic cleansing to continue—much less for those who participate in any of it to get away unscathed. There is no room for debate. At some point, a line must be drawn, and to my mind, we crossed it years ago.

I’ve always felt that art is the closest thing we have to being able to get a better understanding of the soul. But these past few years have been killing off whatever was left of that human spirit, to the point where I ask myself, What am I even trying to relate to anymore?

Making art right now feels like hosting a party inside of a burning house. Anyone who wants to be entertained in this moment isn’t someone I’d want to entertain. But the lack of consequences for these monumental horrors are now embedded in our culture. And that makes me feel I just don’t want to participate in that culture any longer.

Q+A with John Wilson

Had the opportunity last night to see an advance screening of The History of Concrete featuring a brief Q&A session with John Wilson afterward. I’ve written before about what a joy theatrical experiences are in Los Angeles, and this certainly was no different. Waiting in line outside the theater beforehand, a guy drove by yelling, “Fuck yeah John Wilson!” out his window. A Gen-Z woman on the corner waiting for some tacos yelled toward us, “I’m jealous of every single person waiting in that line.” It was a good vibe.

Some would argue that the weather and the water are what makes living in LA worth the steep cost of living. Some might say that there’s a lot of opportunity. Some would say there’s just a lot going on. None would be wrong. It’s so expansive, both literally and metaphorically, that you can really just take what you want and leave the rest. While it’s probably nice to be a movie star and live in such a place without having to care about gas prices, the city offers up plenty for people who aren’t in the one percent. It’s still a good place to just be.

Alone in Virgil Village

Yet gas prices are a concern for many. There are more than a couple crises facing the city right now being debated in the lingering mayoral election (go Nithya). But the larger, national issues that a mayor has no power over are hitting hard here.

I was driving down Virgil and passed a Sinclair gas station with a line into the street of waiting cars because they were selling gas for $5.79 a gallon—which is the cheapest I’ve seen in the past few weeks. As the threads of the economy are being pulled apart by profiteers everywhere, I kind of wonder how this will play out in such a sprawling, only-kind-of-interconnected metropolis with an outsized police budget.

It does feel like we’re in the last moments of musical chairs, except there are like two chairs and three hundred people trying to grab a seat. There’s no telling what chaos will ensue when the dominoes start to fall at scale, and it’ll probably hit different everywhere. A city like San Francisco, condensed and contained by geography, will respond to public discontent with measures that won’t work in LA’s sprawl. That discontent will be difficult to measure as well, because class solidarity doesn’t really begin to take hold until a large majority of people can’t afford to just be where they’re at.

So I’m trying to enjoy these fun little movie screenings while I can, because it certainly feels like this is all going really bad and is going to get much worse in the not-too-distant future, and I have no clue what living in a city like Los Angeles is going to be like if gas hits ten bucks a gallon and all the restaurants shutter, but I can’t imagine it will be the fun kind of vibe I enjoyed last night.

Laundry room views

Los Feliz 3

I should preface this by saying, I’ve been finishing up a nine-song solo album that I’ve been working on for a few months now. There are a few loose ends to tie up, but for the most part, it’s done. Or it was.

Oxygen Masks was ready to go

Last night completely by chance I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s 1987 film, King Lear. I had no clue what was in store for me. I won’t really try to describe the experience, partly because I can’t yet. But it was just one of those unexpected experiences with art that completely caught me off-guard.

About halfway through the film, which was just as much a pleasure to listen to as it was to watch, this album I’ve been working on sprang to mind and I thought, I need to deconstruct my process for making music and start this entire project over. And so I have.

To me, this is the function of great art. Great art can be subjective, as well—for me, it’s a Godard film, but for someone else it could be a Picasso painting or a Bad Religion song. Whatever it is, something about it rewires the way you think about things, about yourself, about the world. It makes you approach life differently.

Watching this film, I realized I’d been approaching music—in what I play, how I play it, how I write and record it—everything—in a way that I don’t really identify with anymore. It’s comfortable and unfamiliar at the same time. I haven’t been pushing myself, and the results are generally good enough—and what I realized last night, sitting in this theater, was that good enough is actually not that at all.

So I am starting from square one, unsure of how to move forward or what I’ll end up producing, but I know it just can’t be what I was going for. I hope it will be weird.