I know I’ve been doing too much of both of these things—car shopping and binge watching True Blood—because I dreamt last night that I was scheming to date Alexander Skarsgaard who plays the ancient vampire Eric Northman, except in the dream he morphs into Joel Kinnaman. They float in and out of my subconscious displayed like options in a first person shooter game. I choose the one with the longer arms at any given moment. Their avatars float on a circular dais and I get a 360 degree view of their exterior dings and flourishes unique to each model. Ryan Gosling appears as a “customers also viewed” option at the end of my perusal.

Car shopping demonstrates a tenet of economics for which I do not know the name. I’m certain it has one, though. It looks like this: you look for a car that’s dependable. Most people (I think), are looking for a car that’s going to give you the least headache, to say nothing of general safety; i.e. there are more Camrys than doorless Wranglers on the road. But in order for a car to feel dependable, you need the cosign of dealers and mechanics who can work on your vehicle affordably and with great experience. You can’t depend on a car that hasn’t been verified by shops, but the dependability of a car hinges on its unlikelihood it will end up in the shop.

These are the economics of valuating virtue, too. The logic applies to virginity, hygiene, and an admixture of those things in a show like True Blood. In other wrods, the value of breaking in ones virtue lies in the verification of those seeking to break you in the first place. Having said that, I do actually commend the show for showing us how little the mileage of a person’s sex life matters to their character arc. The moral barometer of each character is driven more substantially by their shortsightedness and palate for platelets. There’s no posturing about virginity-

Why am I writing a thousand word screed on True Blood on a substack largely meant for the tribulations of my literal and metaphorical libido? I think it has to do with the notion of value. What we want and why we want it. What has driven each of us to believe self worth is more important than external achievement? How is it that Jakarta matters less than Hollywood? Why are billionaires. Who would get under my skin. Will I ever stop thinking about A, B, or C alternate life. If we contain multitudes, why am I jealous of everyone else who has what I already have.

Should I get a Honda Civic or a Swedish vampire? I think both would find me a quite capable fuel source. What if engines led iron and industry to heart we go underground for answers to why anything expires with the consent of our masters of mathematics the force of a zero sum economy, the force of a ratio of desires to needs, a ratio of me to me, an immortality with incredible mileage.

I’ve been feeling sorry for myself all week, watching people congratulate themselves online for taking minor risks in pursuit of an equilibrium they can only find in the same things that bring me equilibrium: playing music, writing novels, making art. It’s the fact that these friends really and truly cannot do anything else that makes me sad because I, on the other hand, can do other things. I can find equilibrium in a full-time job supporting other people who make music, write novels, make art. I can find it doing nothing but peruse dresses online. I am willingly taking medication for this equilibrium.

It will annoy the fuck out of them to hear this but I want what my friends in dire straits have. Dancing 7/8ths naked for wet dollars in their ass cracks while patrons gingerly peel back their gloves and then sleeves, baring soft baby animals by the nape before sending them to slaughter the cavities of art formation lost behind the wrong medication, the wrong diet, the wrong partners, the wrong job, the wrong life.

My child refused to go to bed tonight until he drew the perfect grid of 32 squares but in attempting to do this without a ruler, every fourth, fifth, sixth, and (in one impressive streak) ninth square was compromised, uneven, too messy, imperfect, and he would flip out. Scream at the top of his lungs:

I am the worst artist in the world! I want to be perfect! This is not perfect! I am the worst! I don’t want to be an artist. I want to be a baby again and start over!

I start sobbing with him because it sounds exactly like the voice in my head. I know it’s god telling me to shut up and stop feeling sorry for myself. Dario is saying out loud every feeling inside my heart I had successfully sublimated through jogging. It’s not only the words but the pitch and timbre and sequencing that tell us we’ve completely and utterly failed as artists.

I tell my child, “it’s ok if you’re not perfect. To me, it’s perfect.” He does not care. I do NOT care! He’s having a meltdown and it’s a quarter to 10. I’m close to giving him a benadryl (I won’t). Instead, I give in and find a protractor and a ruler; hurriedly snatch paper out of my printer. I decide I’m just going to teach him how to draw even lines and a grid at 10pm. He drafts the grid and enumerates it to 32. It takes five minutes, and honestly? It’s perfect.

He is so happy, so proud of himself. He proclaims himself an artist again. I am so good at art! He stares at this grid until he starts to nod off to sleep.

I learn from this that I can’t afford to feel this bad about myself or the missing “art thing” I thought I was doing in my life, because self-hatred telepaths its way straight into Dario’s psyche and comes back at me in the voice of a terrible tweven year old. I do not want to hear that song again.

So I am sorry I have failed as an artist, I say to myself. Sure I was good, but I failed. I am great, but I am failing. I will be incredible; I will keep failing. This craft inside me stays in the grip of the muscles no one can see, and the gloved hand is just my own inside. And whether to think of it as labor or coitus, the grip is all I will have left in me when the art stops fighting to eject, ejaculate. How fantastic would it be if instead of the craft getting caught in my grip, my yen for the art, the breath in my jog that runs in a polyrhythm, an arrhythmia because it’s me alive but on a bias, it’s a cosine, it’s a wave because that’s what all sound is…imagine that this art, the drum, the grid of numbers we have to get right lest we die…imagine everything dying to get out of me were perfect just the way it is.

I don’t suffer from the kind of anxiety that prevents people from getting things done. When I make a to do list, I’m fairly methodical about clearing all of the tasks therein. When I set out to make an art thing happen, I usually do it within the season. After I quit my last job, I started writing a fan fiction in tandem with 1000 Words of Summer. I should let that count as part of my public quota of publishing. Do my hours in the drum studio count? Probably. Do I wish I spent all my time there instead of at work? That, too, yes.

When I started my new job, as a prescribed arts administrator, I became preoccupied with jogging as a mental cleanse, and continued to lose ways to make time for the self-assigned artist. Athletic activities have a particular and peculiar relationship with art as a zero sum game in a self-assigned artist’s life. These identities are only in combat because of the me at the center, pulling them apart.

My last year in New York, I got into these house and hip hop dance classes at the Ailey Center, and found it was a safe passage out of the treacherous life of a small business owner whose primary audience was at night clubs and comic-cons where days and work and libidos blend into an amorphous blob. Now, I miss the blob of being a workhorse, athlete, and artist.

This substack isn’t about my persona, though. This is about Akiko.

I am going to describe Akiko, and I presage the kind of person she was by comparing my own artistic aspersions to hers amounting largely to failure; which is itself a sort of legacy of the Asian diaspora, a default to move up from. And while many of you will recognize an Akiko or a failed artist in your life, it is still the case that Akiko by definition was someone who slipped through the cracks of archetype.

Akiko died in an Uber on her way to work.

[…]

About ten years ago, I met her through Youngmi at Mission Chinese Food. We bonded quickly over carpe diem covenants of New York, and had mutual respect for our different ambitions and obsessions, moored to distinct disciplines of hedonism. For me it was witnessing gay sex, and for her it was “partying.” While we didn’t really like the same things, we did share a love of house dance. Her way there was quite different than mine. I took dance classes because I suck at dancing. She took dance classes because she was in love with the dance instructor.

I respected Akiko’s energetic drive like hell. She would throw the most extravagantly self-catered birthdays. Hers was January 1. How cool is that? She was a chef by trade in a second career after publishing via Japanese advertising. She got married and had twins. They seemed really satisfied in life. She did not.

After her divorce, Akiko seemed to be tying things on harder, longer. There’s a comedy bit about the difference between a drunk gay man and a drunk straight man, but I think a drunk Japanese woman in NYC is its own proposition entirely. Boy would she get twisted.

Her death simultaneously inspires in me the desire to live a more free life full of abandon, and gratitude for having played it much much safer in life. She is both admirable and pathetic. Like many irresponsible people, she was the victim of urbane abuses so subtle only another woman would recognize it. No one around her will have done anything wrong and yet she was still wronged.

Youngmi and I joke that poor Akiko has been overshadowed by Dolly. Pretty typical of Akiko. But more importantly we’ve talked about all that she represents in us, Asian women with blended contexts and pathologies that excite and terrify everyone as only an Asian could. And the point is that we can feel represented by our kin.

I pray her children have the resources to mourn Akiko, grow up healthy with and not despite the understanding of how extraordinary it is to disappear while maniacally dancing.

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…

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Thanks!

It is a new kind of honesty.

Those who can’t read between the lines want to so des…

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Training at the drum set where I have lost the athleticism of martial rudiments learned as a high school drum corps nut, my left han…

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I’m actually surprised to find out it was only last June that I last posted an article. It feels like much longer ago. And so, pardon the self-important preamble, but I think it may be helpful to th…

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