Mornings in the studio with the cats

Every morning the cats and I head into the studio. I bring something caffeinated and the laptop to start the day with some writing and they enjoy having a large, open space to run around and harass each other in. Some days I can get started on a painting project—most, I end up retiring back to the apartment to work on music instead. It’s a little easier to break a habit there, perhaps because I’ve not been doing it as long as visual art.

The thing is, when you spend nearly two decades pouring a vodka before starting a painting, suddenly trying to paint without that drink is like trying to start a car without a key. Yes, there are ways to do it, but it’s not easy. I have not yet figured it out.

I tend to overthink things, and the one thing that drinking always did was quiet my mind. I could focus in ways that I just can’t otherwise. The overwhelming thoughts of futility and despair send me into a state of paralysis that Nothing really matters anyway so why bother starting anything. Alcohol always quieted that voice, at least just enough where I could work uninterrupted for hours on end.

So I don’t really know what to do about it. I watch the cats. I stare at the blank canvases, lining the wall. People go about their day, walking by down the sidewalk outside, none really noticing me sitting on this couch. There’s a 24-hour liquor store a block away. Five years without a drink and the gains feel minimal, at best—certainly not offsetting the fact I’ve lost touch with the only part about myself I ever really liked.

We take things one day at a time in recovery, but I look at all the days behind me and wonder how much I could have accomplished by now. I’ve barely picked up a paintbrush in five years. I’ve not taken a single photograph. Usually I’d have published three books by now. There are costs and benefits to every choice, and so many people in my life smile and talk about how quitting drinking is the best thing they’ve ever done. I’m worried that for me, it’s been the worst.

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.

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.

Those that didn’t make it

I want to talk a little bit about failure.

This is a photo of the wall next to my desk where I’m currently working on the 2026 edition of my ongoing series, Standing Still In A Storm. I’ve been doing this project for close to 15 years now, with each year the guidelines changing a little bit. The basics remain the same: painted freehand parallel lines in black gesso that are not allowed to touch but meant to get as close as possible to one another. The paper size, border measurements, and brush width vary year-to-year, but the general rules are always the same.

So far, this year I’ve finished 18 pieces—including these six failures. For one reason or another, each of these did not meet the standards I have for the work. On some the ink bled under the tape (an issue I did not discover until the work was already complete and otherwise satisfactory). On some the slightest twitch of my hand caused the black lines to meet at some point. On others the proportions weren’t right and by the time I got to the last line it ended up wider than the brush I’m using. Whatever the reason, these are the failures—one-third of the work I’ve done so far.

I feel like artists online only ever show their successes. The ones who post process videos only do so when the final work is suitable for publishing. Content creators and influencers crop frames and set up shots that don’t actually represent what they’re doing. The rule of advertising is that everything has to be positive all of the time, and the internet has become one big advertisement for life. It’s all success stories, and I wonder how many of them are outright lies.

The thing is, everybody fails. The process of taking inspiration to creation is an arduous one. Yet in a society that demands better results faster, standards lessen, quality drops, concepts fade, and the finished product is cheapened. It’s no wonder those obsessed with capital love AI—it removes all the parts that take time from creativity, but in doing so it also removes everything that makes a creation good.

Failure is important to process. It’s a learning experience, much more so than achievement. By having this entire sect of culture that only shows finished products, it becomes akin to something between a gallery and a mall. The human values have been lost, and it’s not because people don’t fail, but because in the public eye, they’re not allowed to.

(Like everyone else, I review the films I see on Letterboxd, but I write about movies as a general idea here.)

Zach Cregger has made a Resident Evil movie and it looks awesome. I’m a big fan of both Barbarian and Weapons and have always enjoyed the games when I’ve played them, so I’m pretty stoked on this. Will it win Best Picture? No. Will it be fun as hell? Probably.

Here’s the kicker, though: I love Resident Evil. I don’t mean the IP or any of the specific games. I mean the original movie from 2002 starring Milla Jovovich. I enjoy all of its 100-minute runtime. I can totally admit it’s 100% a bad movie. It’s a bad script with terrible acting and some really awful special effects. Yet still, I love it. It’s a guilty pleasure.

There’s been online discourse of late saying there’s ‘no such thing‘ as a guilty pleasure, or we need to take away the shame of it. (NPR even took a look at the brain science behind the concept.) I would argue the middle ground is where we should land as a society—yes, there are guilty pleasures, but we should also not fear any kind of public shame for indulging in them.

The innocence of guilt

I think a person should be proud to admit they have a guilty pleasure in art or culture because at least they’re admitting to understanding the idea that there are echelons of these things produced in terms of meaning and substance. If you say a Marvel movie is a guilty pleasure, you’re admitting you understand that it’s corporate franchise slop written at a fifth-grade level designed for nothing more than a dopamine rush, but you just don’t care. And that’s fine. It’s the understanding that matters.

I’m not always watching arthouse films. Hell, Bad Boys II is a piece of capitalist copganda and I love the shit out of it. But I know that Michael Bay wasn’t setting out to ask societal questions when he had Will Smith dodging boats in a Ferrari while speeding across a Miami bridge. He just wanted to throw boats at a car on a freeway.

However, I can say that movie, or Resident Evil, is a guilty pleasure because I know there are arthouse movies out there that Ask Serious Questions About Life, that exist because a filmmaker wanted to make us leave a theater with a new thought or idea about the world around us. I know that, while entertainment can be fun and relaxing, art and the concepts that creatives process during crafting a film or writing a novel is where we actually discover things about our humanity. Any moral quandary posed by a Marvel movie has been vetted by the CIA, while a David Lynch film will leave a person wondering what morality originates from.

Go for it

I have a friend here who is a very good, serious artist. I was at her place once staring at this massive painting of a tree she had splayed out across the floor of her entire apartment. In the corner, her television showed one of her streaming accounts and all of the ‘Recently Played’ section was filled with episodes of one reality show or another. I asked about it and she proudly said she loved it all—she could work with them on in the background, not having to worry about her attention being distracted by something heavy or some plot point she had to pay attention to. Also, they were just entertaining. It made sense.

She and I both know plenty about Serious Art, but also that there’s plenty of reasonable occasions to indulge in whatever bullshit might exist for the sole purpose of vapid entertainment. I tend to think the issue of American culture is that we’re increasingly being pushed in the direction of that void of uncaring, incompetent slop. Stephen Spielberg and John Williams teamed up to create one of the most iconic films ever made in Jurassic Park, which is now just a recurring CGI-fest of absurdity and nonsensical plot lines. Our entertainment is getting dumber, and our society is culturally worse for it.

I think the danger of a guilty pleasure lies in not knowing that it is one, or why it is one. To not understand that the new Avengers movie and Zodiac might both star Robert Downey Jr but the latter is a significantly different type of film is a kind of cultural illiteracy that I think we’ve generally waded into as a society, and instead of trying to right that wrong, we’re trying to take away any stigma about the shame of preference—even though that preference is nothing to be guilty about, but understanding the holistic nature of why culture matters to humanity is an inherently important and valuable part of life experience.