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.

Why I don’t use Ticketmaster

I saw that tickets to the Chelsea Wolfe show at the Orpheum next month were pretty reasonably priced at $35, so I went to pick up a couple and was shocked—though, I guess I shouldn’t have been—to see a service charge per ticket at sixty-two percent of the face value. For what? To send me an e-mail? To make me download the shitty app on the day of the show so they can scan a QR code?

Given that the LiveNation executives brag about ‘robbing people blind,’ I guess stuff like this should come as no surprise. Still, it remains absolutely infuriating. I don’t think these companies should just be broken up—I think the executives should all be thrown in prison for years (and that, honestly, would be a kindness).

Sundown

Moonshine

Cord organization (Before)

Cord organization (After)

Completed board

It’s taken me seven years or so to build out this pedal board (although I’ve had a few of these for close to 15) but this week I finally did all the dirty work of organizing, cabling, connecting wires, and zip-tying them all together to finish the first upgrade I’ve made in a couple years. It took two days to figure out what order to put the pedals in and four hours of dealing with wires to finish it all.

The motivation is behind my recent decision to scrap a record and start something fresh due to a screening of King Lear. Ironically I’m starting that project out with mostly piano, bass, and string work but I’m eager to see where this takes me.

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.