I didn’t know there’s a dedicated Roman numeral for one hundred thousand. And it looks amazing.

(From April 24) The woman sitting next to Casey and me at Lula Cafe was comically cold-ridden. Like an actor in a Puffs tissue commercial.

The best street performer I saw in Nashville was an elderly man playing spoons.

The best street performers I saw in New Orleans were a ragtag band playing ragtime with raggedy instruments.

Deciding what we tolerate

“Experts really do have knowledge that lets them see why things are not as simple as outsiders think; however, to become an expert in a given field means being the kind of person who was willing to put up with that particular field’s particular BS for long enough to gain that knowledge.”

Isaac Chotiner interviews a senior emergency officer at UNRWA

“A lot of people I know and a lot of our colleagues, the first thing they did in the ceasefire was return to their homes to actually dig and find their families who were still under the rubble—some had been there for weeks, some of them over a year—and bury them and have some kind of dignity in mourning and putting those lives to rest.”

Jason from the Swatch store in Miami tried to convince me that chronographs are worth buying because he saw a movie once where a surfer only survived because her chronograph allowed her to track an attacking shark’s rate of travel.

Dudley DeBosier has got to be the most Louisiana personal injury lawyer name.

Things I saw on the ground in Houston:

  • 2 squished frogs
  • a sausage

How much magical thinking is useful…?

Should we believe in the Elf theory of Santa? That his sleigh only flies when we believe?

Who’s your Santa?

I learned the other day that part of the American Revolutionary War was fought on the island of Manhattan. And the house from which George Washington directed the Continental Army during that battle still stands in what’s now New York City.

There’s a spot on the campus of Columbia University where Thomas Knowlton, a Revolutionary colonel, was killed.

Two recent comments about my hair:

Costco saleswoman said, “You look like you’re in a band!”

████’s friend said, after sharing his half-Jewish heritage, “It’s brave of you to grow out your Jewish curls!”

Henrik Karlsson: “One way to think about the root of ethics is in terms of faithfulness to what your heart tells you.”

WSJ: The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers

BARF MALARF.

“Musk has said he is concerned about what he called Third World countries having higher birthrates than the U.S. and Europe, a person familiar with the conversation said. … One of the most important ways to change these dynamics, he has repeatedly told people close to him, is for educated people to have more children.

“While Musk posts sometimes dozens of times a day on X about right-wing politics or his companies, among other things on his mind, he often interacts with lesser-known users. He replies to them and sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies, according to people who have viewed the messages.”

“Money, a point of reference in the midst of chaos.” —Lalo Cura, a Roberto Bolaño character

Two opposing systems

…for avoiding uncertainty about the way the world works and everyone in it.

System 1: Everything is where it’s supposed to be. The government is flawed but it works basically the way anyone should want it to. Justice generally prevails. The best stuff rises to the top. There are good reasons behind things we find frustrating, inefficient, and unjust. Powerful people are trying their best. I’m fortunate because I work hard.

System 2: Everything is fucked and everything would be better if we were in charge. We are artists and poets. We are “philosopher kings.” We are doves, we’re well-read, and our intuition leads us effortlessly to what’s good and right. Greed and cruelty are the only causes of injustice. If you rip the head off the greed monster, and put an anarchic committee of me and my friends in its place, upside-down world would turn right-side up. Everyone would have what they need. And everyone would know we were right all along.

I don’t endorse either of these systems.

Teezo Touchdown said (something like) “doing everything myself wasn’t the flex I thought it was.”

At SXSW, we could see the photographers’ cameras come out when we would play something especially exciting.

Quotes from my friend Lyn’s essay “Projecting 2025”:

  • “Since the 1960s, food prices have risen fourfold, but median rent in the U.S. has risen more than sixteen-fold.”
  • “It is estimated that 140 million people in America (43% of the population) cannot afford the basic necessities of life where they live.”
  • “Ideological impurity and systemic power are two different things. Put bluntly—you can be wrong about a lot of things AND be pretty powerless.”
  • “The people at the bottom, ‘the voice from below,’ includes everyone.”

The fifteen minutes I spent in the outfield at Kevin Morby’s Sandlot All Stars baseball game in Austin, Texas, were some of the most blissful minutes I’ve had in a long time.

After the game, the umpire—still in skintight Under Armour—and his wife danced to our music.

“But when I really accept it, accept with my whole being that to write a new book is to learn an entirely new skill, an entirely new process, the task becomes exciting again. I get to play. I get to try out new ways of going about my writing! If they don’t work, then that’s a good lesson. And maybe they will work, someday, for a different book.” —Jack Cheng, “Avoidance”

I’d been thinking of making some drummy animations like this. I have a lot of software learning to do…

(At first I was discouraged seeing this. Then I realized that not trying my own idea out because this exists would be like no one making puppets because the Muppets exist.)

Takeaways from the sixth installment of Craig Mod’s annual review of his “Special Projects” art/writing patronage program.

  1. Have clear goals. His are “make books and educate.” Every choice he makes for the program is based on those goals.
  2. Have deadlines. Work only gets done with deadlines.
  3. Experiment often; don’t get locked in.

I love crossing guards.

Dangerous words: “I have a system.”

“Making a song in a specific time signature is kind of like having a baby with specific personality traits” —Bill Wurtz

I like when the moon is visible during the day.

There is a restaurant in Los Angeles called Qin West Noodle. And in that restaurant there is a gigantic cauldron, filled to the brim, in which they cook noodles. And those noodles are delicious.

“Want Ads” by Honey Cone. How had I never heard this until last week?!

When I was making Mirror Sound, I met with Michael Azerrad and he told me, “When you don’t know where to start, start anywhere.”

Confession: I learned, yesterday, that ringworm isn’t a worm.

I love the plink sound of melt-salt falling on ice.

It’s merciful that cuts in our mouths heal so quickly.

I saw a Lays delivery truck driver pop open a bag of tortilla chips.

I wonder if Animal Collective’s “My Girls” is inspired at all by Jeezy’s “Thug Motivation 101”?

Always carry floss. You never know when you’ll eat a apple or some other tooth-stucky food.

And: I think “an apple” should be “a apple.” For reasons strictly related to fun and sound.

What’s Latin for “acknowledging your crime does not make it not so”?

I’m haunted by the song in the Marriott Bonvoy ads.

I dislike hanging shit from doors! Doors should be easy to open and close, no signs or clothes or tags or bells or whistles or canes or ties getting in the way.

Again: I’m always shocked by the continuity of roads. I leave one city and end up at my own, touching all the way.

The chairs at Electrical Audio. Custom-made. They’re so beautiful.

I think I heard Adam Savage say it first: drawers conceal, they put all your tools and docs and whatever out of sight and out of mind. Over and over, I learn this lesson with to-dos: if I actually want to remember to do something, I can’t have a highly detailed filing system. I can’t break lists into categories and folders. They just get lost in there. It’s gotta be flat, obvious, easy to reach, like Adam’s tool carts. (Embodying reminders in the spaces where they’re relevant, with Post-Its or whatever, is useful, too.)

The best music discovery algorithm is a friend who likes good music.

(On Monday) In a weepy mood, listening to Keith Moon.

I once heard a sober person say they got high from drinking water.

I dreamed about a guitar that alternated rubber bass strings with normal steel strings.

Whatever you do with your life, you don’t want it to be associated with the word “regime.”

Unless, of course, you don’t care about being associated with the word “regime,” in which case you’re probably the type of person who does things that deserve being associated with the word “regime.”

It's About a Basic Goodness

Jason P. Woodbury’s interview with drummer Jerry Granelli about A Charlie Brown Christmas. I love.

The Israelis came to Lydda and forced us to flee. It is a picture that does not leave my mind … Thirty-thousand people walking, crying, screaming with terror … If you see such things your mind and heart alter … Humans must change the world, they must do something, they must kill if needs be. To kill, even if that means we in our turn become inhuman.

Even if it means we become inhuman.

That’s George Habash, founder of the PFLP, quoted in Yezid Sayigh’s Armed Struggle and the Search for State.

I’m not including it here because I agree with the sentiment or any particular use of force. I’m including it because he acknowledges that to resist or reprise violence robs oneself of one’s own humanity.

(On Dec 15) I was just thinking about Dick Van Dyke. Then I woke up to find he’s starred in a lovely new music video for… Coldplay.

In Brisbane on December 1, got caught in the rain, soaked to the bone, enjoyed splishing and splashing in the street puddles.

Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety

“It is vitally important for us to have a neutral language for our governance options that can be used by everyone to debate where to go from here.”

I’m not sure if I totally grasp the metaphors here, but I’m for new political language with less baggage.

“It’s good, every once in a while, to get in a little over your head and be forced to ask every single person you know for a favor.” —Spencer Wright

“Your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being.” —Quincy Jones

Land acknowledgments seem helpful when they’re posted signs and less helpful when they’re verbal announcements. The verbal announcements sometimes feel self-congratulatory or superficial. The posted signs are removed from personal reward, and they’re part of the environment, just like the land itself.

Aphex Twin Drukqs is so musical

Well, duh, it’s music. But every time I hear Aphex Twin—in this case, “Avril 14th” on a Chicago college radio—I’m blown away by the meaningfulness of the intricacy in his arrangements. It’s not ideas for ideas’ sake. Everything is emotional, intuitive, and surprising.

I bit into an orange-infused peanut butter bar that tasted just like the baby aspirin + peanut butter combo I had to take daily for a year after my Kawasaki Disease treatment. Spat it out, unpleasant memory.

An easy way to keep track of your sleep manually: take a screenshot of your phone lock screen right before you fall asleep. Check the screenshot timestamp when you wake up. Write it down along with your wake-up time. Do it daily, see whether you’re really sleeping enough.

“Record-breaking tie-in.” A phrase that popped into my head as I was falling asleep.

Craig Mod on voting for play

When I throw a ballot seven thousand miles “home,” when I chuck it in the belly of a metal bird and burn a bit of oil to get it back in a timely way, to be present on that fetid ledger of nightmares, I’m doing so in a vote for [this train hobbyist] — for giving as many people the chance to commit their life to amplifying something positive, however goddamned nutty that thing may be. … Does it dent the universe constructively? Is it additive? Does it, uh, “spark joy” and leave people feeling elevated? Does it erase paranoia and suspicion and insidious stupidity? Does it upend gelded stasis? Does it negate pathological tendencies useful 20,000 years ago when we were resource constrained and living in caves and would die from stubbing a toe? Yes? Then go. Go all in. Do it. Anything that shows us the weird, beautiful, fractal depths of that which we’re capable when we commit to play.

On tour the day after the election, the Manny’s Deli pickles we brought from Chicago to Detroit kept me from full mood deterioration in the green room.

Did you know: From February 3, 1961, until July 24, 1990, the US Air Force kept a backup command post in the sky 24 hours a day, just in case?

Tigers Blood was nominated for a Grammy :-)

You kinda need to harness the “fuck it, there is no future, there’s nothing else, spend it all, spend everything” impulse for every take in the studio. It’s a dark impulse… but here it’s constructive?

It seems, surely, like we’re not done evolving the spine. This is some beta ass shit.

You gotta read slower to read faster.

Afraid that my douchey Ivy League vampire Halloween costume could have damaged my real-life friendships.

Boots theory

“An economic theory that people in poverty have to buy cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly, proving more expensive in the long run than more expensive items.”

The way the puppets at the Sugar Hole hang out at the counter, waiting in between customers, is soooo sweet.

Casey and I bought a vintage bar counter from an elder metalhead with very few teeth, a long ponytail, and a super friendly attitude.

When Basil—normally ravenous, insatiable, impatient—saves a treat to eat until Casey and I, his proven food sources, have gotten back home, I feel like crying.

The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates

[My Israeli companions] were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.

Plenty to debate with regard to Coates’s new book. I haven’t read it yet. But I think the above is a message we could all take to heart.

New Yorker: What’s Next in the Israel-Iran Conflict?

“Don’t cry, Sohmor,” Safieddine said. “You can’t have dignity without young blood.”

(Since this article was published, Israel killed Safieddine. He was the presumed successor to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.)

"A far higher risk of civilian casualties"

Wall Street Journal:

The Beirut strike replicated one key aspect of the war in Gaza: Israel’s willingness to use large bombs to achieve its military aims including the targeting of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, even in urban areas where those strikes risk killing many civilians. …

Israel takes on a far higher risk of civilian casualties than in comparable American attacks on high-value targets, said former U.S. military officials. For example, raids that killed Osama bin Laden and the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were carried out by teams of special forces on the ground paired with close air support, rather than airstrikes.

“They have a high tolerance for extreme amounts of civilian casualties, especially when it comes to high-value targets like the Hezbollah leadership or the Hamas leadership,” said Wes Bryant, a retired master sergeant and special operations joint terminal attack controller in the U.S. Air Force.

This is the Wall Street Journal, folks. Not a dovish rag.

CNN: Germany arrests aide to far-right MEP on suspicion of spying for China

“Jian G. is an employee of a Chinese secret service. He has been working for a German Member of the European Parliament since 2019,” the prosecutor’s office statement said. …

German media quickly identified [far-right Maximilian] Krah as the lawmaker who employed the suspect. … The far-right AfD party has nine seats in the European Parliament, and is competing alongside Germany’s traditional parties in the European elections in June. Krah is the party’s top candidate in those elections.

The Oasis doc (Supersonic) has me fussing with my hair.

Walking in Nashville yesterday, heard a high school drum corps rehearsing in the distance and saw a guillotine on an otherwise Halloween-decoration-free porch.

Café Anne: These NYC Ambulance Volunteers Have Seen it All!

You’re supposed to be really humble, where you don’t have a “favorite time” that someone is going through a tragedy. Unfortunately, I’m arrogant. I think I’m the shit! So absolute shit shows are my favorite calls. Absolute shit shows! If I get to the scene of a shooting, and there’s six people shot, and everyone’s panicking and running—that’s my favorite call. Because I perform best at that. My least favorite is when you have to comfort the family, when someone doesn’t make it.

Iran turns to Hells Angels and other criminal gangs to target critics

With hit men it has hired in the criminal underworld, Iran has commissioned plots against a former Iranian military officer living under an assumed identity in Maryland, an exiled Iranian American journalist in Brooklyn, a women’s rights activist in Switzerland, LGBTQ+ activists in Germany and at least five journalists at Iran International, as well as dissidents and regime critics in a half dozen other countries, according to interviews and records. … The incongruous partnership between an Islamic theocracy and a notorious biker gang was driven in part by necessity, officials said, given the resources U.S. security agencies devote to preventing Iran from deploying operatives to the United States.

David Yow in The Creative Independent

One time we were playing in Milwaukee, and we came to “Then Comes Dudley” on the set list. I don’t know why or what, but I just completely blanked. I could not remember what the words were. So, I was just going, “Yeah, Dudley!” the whole time. But sometimes it’s my decision whether to keep it right or not.

The Secret Message Contained in One Million Checkboxes

Super sweet. Kottke says:

It reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s ~Contact~ (and the ~1997 movie~). Not only because of the in-game message left for Royalty but for the way that there turned out to be many ways to “play” or “beat” OMCB.

Half-assing it with everything you've got

Warning: supes dupes nerdy.

If none of the counter-intuitive stuff lands right, I think the main thesis is still agreeable: remember what’s actually important to you—whatever you’re doing automatically, or out of fear, or out of a will to please someone, might not serve what’s really important.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: "An exclusionary and radical set of players has hijacked the Palestinian narrative"

There are people who believe the Levant is exclusively and divinely ordained for Palestinians, and there are people who believe it is so for Jews.

Both of those groups are detached from reality, detached from history, and detached from anything resembling a humanistic value of justice. Both of them are in power.

The task laid out for all of us in the Jewish diaspora is to diminish the power of the extremists in our communities.

And here Alkhatib suggests that you can also diminish the power of extremists in the Palestinian community by lifting up other voices, multitudinous voices, voices like his.

You’re not wrong to fear extremists. But it is wrong to let your fear of extremists silence reasonable people, to silence an entire community desperately demanding basic decency and repair from Israel and beyond.

Alkhatib is not to blame for racists who lump him in with violent theocrats. Yet he’s right to call out the violent theocrats who damage the movement for justice.

I take his words to heart as those of one person.

The pipes periodically flushing in my hotel room wall sound exactly like a sleeping person breathing.

On tour in Asheville in the spring, I saw the “Brasstown Banger,” a rudimentary early synthesizer that Bob Moog (and collaborators?) made, at the Moog Museum. It was inspiring as hell, to see the totally chaotic, handmade beginnings of a company that ended up mass-producing (still by hand!) such gorgeous products. No photos of the instrument seem to exist online.

Learned a new word: akrasia.

Michelle and Barack Obama interviewed in 1996

Michelle:

There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.

And Barack:

We represent two strands of family life in this country—the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life. …

And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.

Wow.

To the stranger who gave me earplugs when they saw me watching JPEGMAFIA at Hopscotch Festival last night with my fingers jammed into my ears, an hour before our own show: thank you.

Terry Allen in The Creative Independent

It’s a necessity to confront your curiosity, confront the idea of mystery. When you throw yourself into making something that has never existed before and certainly in your own mind. It takes so long, especially the older you get, to breach your habits … You try to breach them to get to that mystery spot where things actually happen and you come out on the other side … and you might have as many questions about it as anybody else does, but it has become what it is. To me as an artist, that’s your job. Whether it’s a song, a sculpture, drawing, whatever it is.

Yeah!

The last thing in the world I ever thought I would be interested in doing is making bronze sculpture. And I got an opportunity to do a piece in LA called Poets Walk and I happened to meet a guy here who had a foundry who had asked me if I ever wanted to come in and work with him. I had no idea that I would ever take him up on it, but I did and literally went to school at that foundry on my own trying to learn how to do that, working with clay, making the mold and casting, really getting interested in it.

I feel that way about so many mediums and ideas: yuck, I would never want to spend time on that. But from Allen and others we know that sometimes those are the streets most worth stumbling down… You’re allowed to change your mind, or at least to test out whether your repulsion is really so repulsive.

My first car had this white Naugahyde in between the seats. I would start thinking of songs and have a ballpoint or pencil, trying to write stuff down while I was driving. I had it written all over the Naugahyde. It comes from boredom, the motion of tires, the rhythm of it. It’s always been conducive to lyrics starting to happen and rhythms, melodies.

I would love to see that car.

Walking around Durham at night, saw a municipal utility box. Rainwater standing on its lid. Machinery vibrating inside. Cymatic patterns forming in the water.

When I sit on a commemorative bench I like to read the dedication, to know whose bereaved are supporting my ass.

In New York today:

  • ate a quarter-pound of halvah
  • watched Carlos Alcaraz and Li Tu play tennis

Panic is kinda like a Charley Horse of the mind………

From where I sat on stage at Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh tonight, I saw a curious professor dressed in 19th-century clothes watching us through the auditorium doors. I stared at him between songs for half an hour before I realized he was a painting.

Adam Kirsch: The False Narrative of Settler-Colonialism

I think there are at least three nasty fallacies of logic in this essay, but this resonates anyway:

Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism1, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.

Many American Jews have observed this tendency for ten months if not longer.

It feels as though some of our peers afford grace to white Americans for having been born on blood-soaked land, but they don’t afford that to ordinary Israeli people. By thinking that Jews should simply leave Israel, or that Hamas and Hezbollah should succeed in their current and repeated vows to expel Jews, some Americans prescribe a remedy for colonialism that they wouldn’t adhere to themselves, or that they wouldn’t prescribe to their next-door neighbor.

It gives the impression that Israel and Palestine are a far-away sandbox in which Americans’ aspirations for justice or revenge can be embodied. It gives the impression that the lives of distant Jews are expendable or imaginary, just as so many members of my own Jewish community think that Palestinian lives are expendable or imaginary—a ghoulish way of thinking that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

The disconnect and irresponsibility of the “Jews should just leave” perspective is disturbing in light of the fact, also, that any Jew, regardless of whether their skin is white, brown, or black, has greater ethnic and cultural ties to the land in question than European Americans have to Turtle Island.

The desire to remedy colonialism is good. And the need to stop Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the West Bank is extremely dire. In our efforts to those ends we shouldn’t ask distant populations to undertake sacrifices we wouldn’t make ourselves. And we shouldn’t play into the hands of people who believe in the exclusive, divine rule of the Levant—whether by Arabs or by Jews. We should spend our precious energy building democracies under the noses of those rulers.

  1. 1. For the record, some founding Zionists considered Jewish repatriation to be a colonial project and used colonial terms (and racism) to woo European patrons and politicians. And there is no shortage of present-day extremists who would be happy to see a colonial-scale decimation of Palestinians. ↩

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