The premise of a Poirot episode is always the same—someone is murdered for their money, usually in the form of a defrauded inheritance. Often, the murder takes place under Poirot’s nose, inside the victim’s own mansion. The set decor is bar none.

OK so now, some show reviews of things I happened to be a part of:

Over the past week, I performed in two very different arrangements at shows in Philadelphia and Baltimore. The shows shared an unexpected symmetry of design I only took into account on my early morning drive home from Baltimore. In both shows, I was part of a trio playing a 20-30 minute improv set, in support of two other creative music acts that only comprised men. Both shows also took place in converted spaces and were organized as a part of a series.

The Philadelphia show was part of a series called Avant Mash, organized by Chris Coyle as a standing monthly jazz residency. Avant Mash has taken place at the MAAS building and the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Northern Liberties. Lately they’ve established camp at The Perch—a converted mechanic’s barn turned music venue. The building is divided into two performance venues. One, a vaulted warehouse with church pews for seating and a high ceiling resembling an apse. The other space is a converted rowhome with a converted ground floor that has all the trappings of a living room—small sofas, folding chairs, heavy drapes over vinyl windows.

This May iteration of Avant-Mash featured three acts including the arrangement in which I appeared as a guest. Special What is a duo project of Pete Angevine (drums) and Bryan Thomas Rogers (sax), where I joined with a eurorack. Our outing as Special What could be best described as beautiful, and embodied music. Pete announced a notion of a title for the piece: Dream Flag.

Here are rosters of the other two acts as listed on the event page (just because it’ll be more accurate than my memory):

It’s first worth noting how much literal (read: athletic) stamina is required of a saxophonist playing two consecutive 45 minute sets without break, for two distinct groups. Andrew Urbina arrived with an alto and departed with a tenor sax, like an Egyptian riddle of jazz maturity. In the latent green room gossip taking place above the stage in a lofted lounge, other musicians warming up or cooling down shared a minor debate about the virtues of each saxophone. Apparently Bobby Zankel doesn’t believe in anything but the alto. Others felt the same way about tenor. The saxophone is a brilliant topic of music in that way—divisive and rousing all at once.

Wayne Smith Jr. was an epic revelation, as a drummer, to a drummer. Smith is someone who might embarrass other drummers who’d deign to call themselves that. A True Drummer©, if like Champagne, we could only call it that when it met a standard of production or provenance.

The idea of compositional improv, or improvisational composition, is an oxymoron and yet how Jazz© does appear in the listener’s mind, as well as motivating highly trained performers. As one sits in converted spaces designed once upon a time for cars and families, you have to pay attention to the notions of tuning, repair, and a logic of comfort that includes some avoidance and some collisions, and a preference for chairs, though the best seat in a living room is usually halfway up a flight of stairs. These are all “you had to be there” truisms of attending live music events.

—

The Baltimore show was part of a series called Peace in the Valley, organized by John Hoegberg. It is a Spring-weekly Monday night showcase of experimental and creative musicians, and takes place in the lower patio of a boutique restaurant/wine cave called Le Comptoir du Vin, which won a Bon Appetit Best in the Country award in 2018! A fact the owner (Rosemary), a mutual friend (Will), and I laughed about a lot. Peace in the Valley is a musical takeover of an otherwise busy restaurant, on its weekly off night. This creative Baltimore ecosystem includes in its orbit the mighty High Zero Festival, with which PITV shares infrastructure, and which I got to participate in last fall. To date I’d say it is potentially the greatest presentation format of the genre we generically call “improv.” And I don’t mean this to say HZF features the best of the best musicians, or makes more lucrative sense than say, a Big Ears. I say it is the best presentation of the format because the format requires exactly the kind of mad looseness afforded by its organizers, and the city of Baltimore. There are no QR codes or lenghty personal introductions. Just a badge and a schedule.

Peace in the Valley works because it, too, is only loosely organized in terms of format and conceit. Hoegberg uses a discerning ear to suggest arrangements, or invite known quantities to try something new, but otherwise like the best of performance platforms, the ins and outs are very casual. Le Comptoir du Vin hosts Peace in the Valley in its bar patio, a converted basement shed with a roll-up garage door. A garage door that harkens to the Perch, though significantly smaller. Wooden floors and a rustic approach to the wine-forward bar make visitors feel like they’ve stumbled into a cozy Italian hole in the wall, except it’s Baltimore so the alley is poorly maintained and the road winds around two or three different kinds of urban ecosystems of completely varying personality. Comptoir itself is the lovely hideaway you always want to find as a visitor; probably as a resident, too.

My arrangement in this outing included Hanna Olivegren (vocals), and Corey Thuro (guitar). We were followed by Sam Wenc who played an ethereal steel lap guitar set, and a mind-blowing, all-out, forward and upward sonic motion by Sam Pluta (electronics) and John Dierker (bass clarinet and tenor sax). This latter set reminds me why and how we got here as musicians. Absolutely incredible stuff—also requiring an athletic stamina we sometimes take for granted as mincing musicians.

In preparation for our set, Hanna, Corey, and I went over some general ideas of what we might do. I always love these notes because they’re most productive when metaphorical. The closer it hews to a conventional compositional cue, the less animated I become. It reminds me of this diagnosis I’ve just learned about, to describe my son’s opposition to classroom activities—Pathological Demand Avoidance. Apparently it’s more anxious, and not so much a oppositional behavior, in that a subject will work by his own volition with flying colors but react with fear when commanded with precise instruction.

Hanna had been talking about the iphone games she’s been playing to get out of her head, and a genre of games (room games?) that leads players through…rooms, with puzzles you have to solve to get out of them. Dario has a Mr. Panda game on his dummy iPad where you have to put out literal fires as a fireman (firepanda?) before advancing to the next floor. Same idea, I guess. So after this small talk, Hanna asked us “what is the room we want to start in?” and my mind went quietly and speedily to a very distinct form:

It’s an extravagant and ornate dining room of a large mansion, hardly used, and often occupied by a surreptitious eavesdropper or house keepers such as one would see in an episode of Poirot before the denouement of an upper class midcentury crime of reason. It was so clear to me that our sound would begin in an unoccupied room meant for larger occasions. Quiet but for the reactions of furniture, the dust thereupon, the portraits on the wall framed in gilded wood carvings of flowers and vines.

Introduce to the room, from the center of floor, a sound.

Follow and like these musicians, as they say:

Like many of my intelligent (more intelligent) friends, I am trying to break up with social media. I don’t want to get into the semantics of what social media includes, so don’t complain Substack is technically social media. I differentiate this newsletter because you mostly see it in an inbox, which makes it an email. Very different proposition.

I love email so much. And O, the halcyon days of early email when text surfaced in green bits of MS-DOS on a purpose built computer in the media lounge at my college where I created my first intranet account, and external communications were made only through a land line or with permission from the monitors. In those days, my main modes of communication outside conversation, were longform handwritten postmarked letters, and email. I would compare the value of those letters against email. What was more satisfying? What told me more about the sender? A thing about email was its pacing. It was really obvious when it was sent, whereas I had no idea what the relationship between written letters and the point of my receipt was, at least temporally. Someone might have spent a week composing their letter and another week dillydallying to the post box, making their sentiments almost a month old by the time I consumed it; non-urgent. Or the opposite might be true. Was it a manic thought that went straight to the post office before their postmark deadline of 1pm? An email on the other hand, had a time stamp and a clear “real time” advantage. I was just steps away from AIM, mind you, and this was my gateway.

I want to be emailing you all through this newsletter because I love email. Yeah, I saw those articles announcing the return of the email newsletter! I am fully here for it. I was, I’d say, an early proponent of the format as a publicist for a string of worthy and unworthy business enterprises. nails emoji

The difference in my approach to the newsletter now is that I want them to be equal parts “love letter” and general updates. You know, observations from life, plus “here are some shows I’m in, here are some things I’m up to, here I am. I hope we can all leave Instagram soon.” I took a big step in this direction of semi-ludditizing my life, by downloading a “get off your phone you fucking loser” app. It is working, but it feels like a calorie tracking app. I feel unearned superiority for practicing self-restraint, acing “self optimization.” nails emoji

I don’t want any of you to think I’m gloating. Let it be known any information I share is shared in the spirit of sharing information, period. I am trying for as little subtext as possible when I tell you what’s been happening in my life.

My first update, then:

I just turned an age. Birthdays are so funny. Most of my 30s and now 40s were unfortunately celebrated while at work. For years, I would be stuck (I say, most lovingly) on some kind of grueling book tour during my birthday, because of the timing of things like Book Expo, and Toronto Comics Arts Festival (I name most lovingly). And I would be so disappointed that no one planned anything for me, or would sufficiently acknowledge the birthday with a gift or a food. I would have been thrilled with either. I was once regaled with a too-fancy dinner for my birthday by an old restaurateur friend, but an argument between a couple broke out and we were all too intimidated by the food to really relax. I always found something wrong with the way I got to celebrate My Day. Nothing satisfied me until I dropped all expectation.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my mother threw a surprise birthday for me when I turned 16. I will never forget how good it felt. How happy it made me. Sixteen was an awful year for me, and Mom knew that. aww i love my mom sniff.

So I just turned an age. I decided to wrest my own destiny. Effectively commanded people to join me. I booked a restaurant, paced myself at work, drank water. I got to celebrate with friends. We had a blast.

Today I have to sit with the boomerang effect of being accountable to my own powerful whims. I feel bad about everyone I didn’t invite. I do not want anybody to feel FOMO, excluded—if you read this, I’m really sorry. I feel bad that I flaunted my wealth by buying out a small restaurant. Many friends left grateful for leftovers. Others were astonished at how much we left behind. I feel bad I’m not going to remember to send thank you notes to everyone who gave me a present—if you’re reading this, thank you so much. I feel bad that I have one gift I value ten times more than the others. If you’re reading this, Lindsey, thank you LOL. But I also do not want this to become some solipsistic moral tale. I’m sorry, everybody. I just got older.

I am back to controlling my destiny after this hangover of emotions. Here is an email newsletters full of updates. Listen, I don’t get how I got from point A to point B exactly, either, but I want you all to know I am just a reply away from friendship.

Some shows:

1. On May 22, I’m playing at the Perch with my friends Pete and Bryan, who are Special What.

2. On May 25, I’m playing at Le Comptoir du Vin with Hanna Olivegren and Corey Thuro (this is the closest thing to an artists’ page I got for them) as part of the Peace in the Valley series curated by John Hoegberg.

3. On May 31, I’m playing in support of The Early and Bent Light at Brickbat Books.

You should check out all of the musicians I just named.

Some things:

1. I’m on the On the Calculation of Volume bandwagon. What a great book for an age of existential aporia.

2. I’m reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemison in bed. It’s kinda LOL but kinda fun.

3. That “get off your stupid phone you fucking dumb ass” app is called Freedom.

4. Chris Rabb won an important congressional seat in PA! How amazing are we.

A conversation I had with Dario this morning after he had a tantrum over doing homework after a couple hours of virtual school which he hates:

A conversation I had with Dario last weekend after driving past two cemeteries:

Maybe that’s why we sabotage our work.

It is obtuse to say men in contradistinction to people. I mean it to be. How do I appeal to people? I do not mean that to sound defensive, or else “people” would be the same species of purple people that racists do not care more or less about than Black or White or Yellow people. I am not actually asking any of these questions. I am wondering. There is a difference. What wondering tells me is that I seek attention, which is saying that my search will always be particular because the attention I am sure I do command, is somehow insufficient. What kind of attention I need, I don’t know, which means I want what I do not know I can have, which means I want what I don’t have. The world is falling apart and all I want is to pine. What would be different if I came into my full domination instead of pretending so poorly to be passive.

Dario’s nostrils were perfect circles as he stared at a pile of towels telling us he hadn’t hid the tv remote in his room. Of course we found it under the towels, but what I gathered is that this face is the exact way every single person looks when they lie to themselves. People includes children and adults. Each second that passes between being asked to tell a lie and telling the lie, is the day ending, a year passed, the sun hiding for winter below the polarity of diurnal time, the door closed, then locked.

Face down on a Brawny paper towel with a hole improvised through a padded table, I wait for the sound of the curtain hooks gliding so slightly and for the massage therapist to ask, “ready?” She starts with a sheet that covers me just from neck to ankle, and strokes my back gently before digging into my upper back so hard I wince. She giggles. “It’s okay?” I nod, burying my face into the table.

I think it’s funny she has to gain so much purchase on my limbs and the table to get to my back, as if levering herself over a wall like one of those army physical training courses. My elbow jambs into the fulcrum of her Y. It tells me she’s older than me, but probably not by much. Am I into that? Is she into this? After the massage I walk up to the register to check out and her back is to me, rifling through paperwork. Her embossed flesh outlining the bra under her regulation massage shirt—a black tunic—not because the shirt is too tight but because the bra is old, acquired in her last body.

When I leave I get on my bike and glide down the bike lane on Washington. I can’t believe getting this lane painted was such a political crap storm. There’s another older Asian woman now riding a child’s bike on the sidewalk. I feel like reassuring her the bike lane is safe. “We’re protected by the parked cars.” I think of the house she is going to return to. A foyer littered with abused slippers and sneakers that have been washed multiple times, the residue of care. One of her kin is an intern at the publishing company I started my career in. Emily, so small and excited just to have access to free books. She was always shocked when we told her she could take home our books to read. Imagine, a book being enough. This is so far from the possession of my desires. I vow to never go to the nice massage place again as penance.

I should have gotten Chinese pastries to surprise my kid, despite his favorite (a cream bun) being the opposite of mine (the hot dog). He’s only seven but already knows how much I like getting massaged. He loves when I rub his feet, which are so sensitive he goes into a fit when his socks aren’t just so. And one day those feet will fit in places where shoes are like books, and it will not be enough to have nice things if we weren’t amazed by the gift of our gratitude.

I recently read and re-read two books, which renewed my curiosity about a third book. Two were written by restaurateurs and the third was by Samuel R. Delany. I picked up Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table because I remember really enjoying the editorial he wrote for the NYTimes (or was it the New Yorker?). It was a primer on hospitality and management practices, rules like “if their plate is more than half full, they didn’t like the food and you don’t need to ask them.” I got the book because thought I’d benefit from brushing up on my own management and hospitality skills, as my day job winds up for a year of hosting two major events.

Simultaneously, I wanted to ground myself back in queer history while preparing for two college visits I have approaching. And college being that utopia of expansive genders and sexualities, of course I’d re-read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany.

I don’t know if we still refer to the act of boosting one chemical drug reaction with the consumption of a second competing drug as “candy flipping” — and speaking of “college,” that’s surely where and when I learned the high efficacy of LSD followed by smoking a blunt—but reading Danny Meyer and Sam Delany at the same time had the same profound effect of one reaction oxidizing the other, like foam in a Diet Coke catalyzed by a Mentos, one thing ejaculating, and the other, disappearing into the synthetic and saccharine atmosphere of conception.

For the unread: Setting the Table is about Danny Meyer’s journey to becoming a foremost restaurateur, business manager and CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group whose flagship operation was, at least at the time of publication, Union Square Café. The book was published in 2006. In other words, he had not had a chance to talk about his now publicly traded restaurant company that Americans are much more familiar with—Shake Shack. Setting the Table begins with his upbringing in St. Louis Missouri. Parents and close family members from whom he arguably inherits a love of food, music, and culture, as well as formidable business acumen. He moves to New York as a kind of travel agent with tons of anecdotal wisdom about Rome and Paris, specifically. Capitals of cuisine. But the majority of the book is about the Union Square and Madison Square Park neighborhoods of New York City from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Readers here are probably more familiar with Times Square Red Times Square Blue. The namesake is the obvious milieu of that book, published in 1999. It is mostly about Time Square porn theaters, johns, hookers, consumers of sex media, and direct intercourse. And in reading these two books as reflections on New York neighborhoods and changing communities, the fact that there are two men with first person accounts of business sectors, telling a story taking place in more or less the same time frame, and that those accounts tell such starkly different stories while also somehow sharing many conceits of self-discovery and change in a community, is astonishing.

Meyer writes with a patrician naiveté about New York’s hard knocks and the harder work ethos of manifest Americans. Delany’s account of the transmogrification of Times Square on the other hand, is denuded of hope, is clinical at times, bordering on what I’d cheekily describe as anthropological, and because it is dry in such a way as to seem academic, his personalization of the truth hits like thunder. Meyer’s soap opera has a soundtrack. Delany’s tragedy has sound effects.

I don’t pretend one is more important than the other. Meyer’s wisdom could be exceptional to those who follow in similar footpaths of leadership and complex project management, and Delany’s lived experience is critical, should be requisite, to the telling of any history of a neighborhood. But Meyer’s Union Square, his relationship to his team, his conflicts with the media (and the bygone status of today’s service journalism) are all metaphors. An light perversion of aggregate cliches. Statements like “I have gay friends” and “the staff, not the client, is number 1” truisms we’re all familiar with now, but were once ironic.

If metaphors abide, Delany’s Times Square is Atlantis. The tales of “how to survive without trying,” mean this culture has failed to thrive, and that that may be the more important story for the reader.

The third book I have to harken to is Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything—I’ve already talked about this somewhere else so I won’t belabor—but I think of it because of the synthesis of moods alongside Delany’s Times Square and Meyer’s Union Square. McNally is a bisexual bus boy turned manager turned restaurateur of Balthazar. Balthazar is the Tower of Babel.

Meyer and McNally ultimately read to the public as “successful” because they are real estate mavens, and it is any wonder SoHo and Union Square have positioned themselves by class in a way Times Square simply cannot. Even with the m&m store in the shadow of the Renzo Piano New York Times building, Times Square has continued to make itself much more inclusive than these hotbeds of fine food. What’s funny about these juxtapositions is also the gayness of it, and by gay I mean homosexual penetrative sexual gayness. I’d say queer but that leaves the option of penile intercourse left ambiguous. Who is left to take it up theirs is a question I will keep asking myself when I think about this city.

I <3 New York. Its neighborhoods and their stories are palimpsests. Where is the crossover, where is the crossdress, and where is the switch?

Thanks!

It is a new kind of honesty.

Those who can’t read between the lines want to so desperately.

A generation without pennies will not learn to subtract. Counting integers is honesty. Would that it sufficed to accumulate without ever deducting, deducing.

A new kind of honesty.

Multiverses of selves and multitudes of personas mean we can become exponents but division as a metaphor is so permanent, so painful. It hurts so bad it hurts our ability to render a truth about sharing. Division is sharing, is communion.

Humor is geometry, and satire is trigonometry. Ignorance is bliss, and knowledge is power. There is no deception if it is an interpretation. I think we could all use a little geometry these days.

Being good at math makes me an outdated stereotype, or a bygone archetype; someone who does not flinch at the truth. It’s so nice of you to say that. Thank you.

true:honest :: kind:nice

Multiples and magnitudes are by twos and tens, taking over patternless equations like a roll on a snare drum, tuned to absolute parity but bisected with soft barbs, an interruption to tone. Honestly. Why do I even count.

I am going to believe in my child’s capacity for agency. I will give him the love and support he needs. I will not laugh at him. I will be proud of him and go to all his concerts. I will provide solace for him. The guardrails I set up won’t be barbed with electrified wiring. I will not ignore my child like I was ignored as a child.

What I did not know, is that there are equally insidious patterns in positive support. My parenting covenant is not in discipline but in the expectation of achievement. I am expecting more of him than he is able to give.

My child is all but 7 and already we are told “there are concerns” about readiness for the second grade. I keep getting these calls from school, now text messages, which make it somehow more offensive. Like can’t they pay us the courtesy of saying it to our faces when we pick him up, obediently and on time, every day? My parents never picked us up on time, often not at all. Even they had unplanned house visits from social workers.

I am crippled by my fear of a child who will not grow up, who will not advance, who will not succeed, who will not impress anyone but his mom. I watch videos of other children mastering choreography they mime from tacit consumption of television. Ooh look at that kid do the Formation choreo and they’re only 3! I feel disappointed in my own child’s inability to do that. I watch videos of adults with autism so proud of themselves for getting jobs, drawing animals, making their families laugh. I feel despairing that my child will not entertain anyone with innate skills but will become entertainment as a disabled adult.

My child—beautiful, sweet, kind, humorous—is not going to get straight As like me. His teachers will not be impressed with how he takes care of himself. The world will not look to him for answers.

I fall apart with every text message.

New phone. Who problem is this?

—

I hope when the world burns down, survivors will tell the residue that we loved each other and did our best.

One will occasionally hear in a yoga class or meditation, an instruction to cross your fingers with the non-dominant thumb on top. It can feel like the greatest shift in energy to perform this minuscule adjustment. On a bicycle, you glide with a preference of a certain leg at the top of your pedal. When you change that leg, the quality of the stop changes completely. Touching a numb lip at the dentist’s office. Phantom limbs. Wiping with the wrong hand. These feel like a self-determined transformation, and anyway, I was feeling satisfied with myself, having achieved a kind of ambidexterity, so I wrote about it a couple weeks ago. Though I largely meant it as a metaphor, I did in fact rescue my left arm from isolation on the drum kit. And once it feels completely natural in drumming, I will move on to writing.

In this state of self-satisfaction, I attended the performance of Lucy Liyou’s Mister Cobra at Performance Space New York and fell apart realizing how naive it was of me to assume masterful transformation through the subtle act of switching thumbs, when Lucy had trained both of her index fingers to pull the trigger of a figurative gun in a transition of literal gender.

I was first introduced to Lucy Liyou’s music by Joshua at Tone Glow, four years ago over lunch when we were discussing Philadelphia’s music scene, and Lucy was about to graduate from U Penn. It feels important to mention this because for some reason, people keep asking me when I first became aware of her work, which I sometimes interpret to question whether I have bona fides for transgressive art.

Her presence at the piano—an instrument she has indeed mastered—is made indelible with voice and other extensions, namely in electronic sound, field recordings. The heart does not break, but rather tears, as in rips, and tears, as in sheds, inside the dialogic, diagnostic, diaristic voices inside atmospheres of sounds one could otherwise only characterize as: gorgeous. The change is perceptible when listening, but impossible to ignore when witnessed in theatrical presentation like this.

Mister Cobra is gorgeous, too, but grotesque. It is not the most dangerous work I’ve seen performed. Perhaps not even in this year, merely three months in. However…it brings out the mother in me; the mothering me. “Oh no…I hope she’s ok,” I think, when she broadcasts awkward exchanges with trade(?) a childhood evil(?). And yet. Who am I to speak bravery when I am twiddling my stupid thumbs, and Lucy, brave Lucy, transmogrifies in excessive eruptions, gay jokes, self humiliation, treacly pop mannerisms, covered in prop blood like Stephen King’s Carrie, and prop trash like Oscar the Grouch, committing a sort of stage-suicide.

Aaaaaand action.

Here I am, twiddling my thumbs, and Lucy braves Lucy.

—

We live in an age where a person will misconstrue their lack of wrongdoing as heroism, as courage. People rationalize their petulance, their indignant judgement, with the salvo, “I would never.” They do not think about the fact that this usually means they could never. They will likely complain like they had control because they don’t. Their indignation, and my indignation at them, is all an act of utter cowardice. But in witnessing degradation as art, I determine, every time, to become a little more brave in my indignation.

Let us believe in the indignation of those who have done more than move their lips, move one finger. Let us believe in the indignation of those who choke us when they sing, and commit to the bravery we advertise when we talk about transformation.

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