This Post Is Not Funny

 This post is not funny, although it theorizes about comedy in a way where you as a reader have to accept the premise that I can be funny, know what humor is, and understand it.

A lot of people think they're funny. And yet, many people cannot recognize a joke being made. Many of the people who think they're funny are not coming from the sort of "comedy nerd" background of a person who watched hours of stand-up comedy and sketch comedy as high schoolers and honed their skills making jokes on the internet. Most people's idea of humor is premised more on social cohesion, where people laugh because they want to get along with each other, rather than some kind of unexpected disconnect where expectations are short-circuited. So much of life is about getting along with people, and finding common ground, and yet people who think of themselves as joke-meisters might find themselves in circumstances where people who have no reason to perceive them in that way bomb horribly. Working as a substitute teacher, I've found that expecting kids to understand I am making jokes is a fool's errand. Dan Licata, whose stand-up comedy has made me laugh incredibly hard, did a stand-up special recorded in front of teenage boys, on the premise that they're the target audience for his vulgar, Jackass-indebted comedy, and he didn't fare too well either, even given that he had over me the fact that he could swear and talk about sex, which I can't when working in my own professional capacity.

I suspect that in this social cohesion vs. cognitive dissonance framework lies the great number of our problems as a society. The social cohesion model of humor tends to bonding over an in-group or out-group model, and so trends conservative, and then it grows in power as people agree with each other and this idea of "common sense."

What's interesting to me, and maybe this is barely even related, is that a lot of people who trend conservative are increasingly becoming disenchanted with Trump as the figurehead of the conservative movement. And like, Trump has been a target of professional comedians for years. Actually decades. But there is a part of me that suspects that kind of joke - and here I mean the actual funny kind, but I'm not trying to claim that late-night TV talk shows are funny - is just qualitatively not the sort of thing that everyone gets. Like, I think conservatives struggle with cognitive dissonance, even understanding the concept of it as a term that describes what they experience. These recognitions of hypocrisy, double-standards, whatever, the sort of ironies which so much of what I would call actual humor hinges upon.

I'm not trying to say "this is why conservatives aren't funny," because, you know, I love Norm MacDonald, whatever; plenty of people are funny, and plenty of people who are liberals or leftists or whatever you want to call it can be humorless too. It's not a partisan trait. People of any political affiliation can not understand jokes, and yet think they have a sense of humor because of their ability to get along with people who are similarly doctrinaires. I think specifically conservatives have to confront their cognitive dissonance now because they're in power and are doing a horrible job. 

There's always going to be this underlying tension between people who can write jokes and people who simply love to laugh, and it's not necessarily going to be acknowledged within a society that can construct a theater with a stage where a performer has an audience. That situation creates a dynamic where all participants are affirmed. Where things get sorted out in actuality is away from the crowd: Can you amuse yourself when no one is watching. Laughing at others is one thing, but being able to laugh at oneself is different, and being able to laugh at oneself and then grow as a person or become smarter when you realize you're being dumb is another thing altogether. And I think that the latter might actually be dependent on being able to understand and appreciate jokes even when they're coming from people that you're not putting on a pedestal wherein you give yourself permission to laugh along with them.

Personal, Or Maybe Political, Blogging

 Like a lot of people, I have slowly stopped talking to my parents over the course of my adulthood, owing in part to political disagreements. My parents are divorced, and my reasons for not talking to my dad involve him not answering the phone and being impossible for me to contact, but my mom has become more conservative over the course of her subsequent marriages, susceptible to the influence of the men in her life to a degree I'm not sure she's aware of. I do not wish to attack her rationale in a way that would make it seem like I am trying to make her choose between her child and her husband, and so in choosing to pick my battles, have elected instead to barely converse with her about anything. It's not a great system.

I am Jewish, ethnically, meaning I inherited this from my mother, who inherited it from her mother. Although my mom converted to Christianity when I was in elementary school, after my parents' divorce, we are pretty inarguably Jews, and this ethnicity has been written on my facial features ever more baldly as I've aged. I'd also argue we are culturally Jewish, me perhaps especially, even if it's largely owing to a fidelity to a secular Judaism of stand-up comedy and inculcated love of books. Although not a Zionist, I did go on a Birthright trip, and while I don't consider Palestinean solidarity antisemitism, I do consider actual antisemitism, of the Nazi variety the Republican party is increasingly comfortable with, alarming. So when, at my grandmother's funeral in early 2024, my mom said she was leaning towards supporting RFK Jr. for President, I walked out of the room, knowing it was not the time or the place to ask if she was retarded.

For over a year, the resentment lingered, as RFK moved away from the explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories to stick ever-more-firmly to his lane of being anti-vax, and joining up, as so many other grifters had, with the Trump campaign. I read Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, partially in hopes that it might be a book I could lend my mom, but for all that book's skill at evaluating what is going on with the anti-vax mindset and the reactionary impulse, it is not attempting to do the work of cult deprogramming which is what I think my mom actually needs. (My brother and uncle have seen what my mom reposts on Facebook, and know the rich tapestry of her not thinking about things better than I do. My brother has left the site in part due to the discomfort of seeing this material, although ex-girlfriends of his still engage my mom when the content is particularly hurtful.)

The emotional core of Doppelganger is when Klein explains that she herself has an autistic son, that she loves very much, and she contextualizes the pain of the parents who blame vaccines for their children's autism on this narcissistic impulse of the influencer, who want their children to be a "perfect" child, as an extension of their brand, often one of wellness. RFK's anti-vaxxer logic is implicitly genocidal - it posits it would be better if children died of preventable disease rather than be autistic. My mom's becoming anti-vax after COVID and RFK support is particularly galling to me because she has suggested in the past that I might be autistic: High-functioning, of course, but "on the spectrum," having Asperger's Syndrome. Hans Asperger, the pediatrician for whom the syndrome is named, diagnosed autism as a spectrum while working under the Nazi regime, with those he would qualify as having Asperger's Syndrome essentially being "the good ones," who could go on to being productive, and so people don't really say "Asperger's Syndrome" anymore. Still, the reason I called my mom today, with Thanksgiving looming as a dinner invitation, was to confront her with that her own logic was essentially genocidal against her own bloodline.

I should clarify that I am not autistic, just a Jewish person who reads a bit more than the average and thus is alienated from the general culture which often expresses its fellow-feeling through the crypto-fascist pageantry of professional sports fandom. Either way, what I wanted was for her to think about her own logic, its implications, and why that would be a problem for me, that she, without really thinking about it, had basically publicly wished me and people who have personalities like me dead. Maybe this sounds overblown or oversensitive. I maintain my interpretation of the logic, and again, only would want her to think about it, which is to say, be able to recount the points of my argument and how they relate to each other, and if there was some actual flaw in my rationale, point out where it would be.

I wouldn't say the conversation went well, obviously. I got what I would consider a few non-arguments: the non-apology of "I'm sorry you see it that way," "I don't think you have to worry about my beliefs," calling her support of RFK moot because she wouldn't vote for him if he ran for President now (seemingly neglecting the fact that he is in power as the head of HHS), and an assertion that I should still come to Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving is about family and not whether you agree or disagree. I knew going in that her thinking about it, if it is going to happen, was not going to occur on the telephone. I didn't expect I would get the satisfaction of hearing "oh wow, you're so right, I'm sorry" today, or even at any point in this lifetime.

Which raises the question of what exactly did I expect, or what I can reasonably want. This was a conversation I'd avoided having for years. I would like to have a functional relationship with my mom in the years between now and one or both of us dying. In my mind, this requires us to occupy the same plane of reality, which requires agreeing to certain facts about the world as it is so that we be able to relate to each other. This, then, is the great problem of our age, really: How much can two people disagree, and not be pushing worldviews on each other, but not actually be in conflict about the basic facts of what is going on, when there are huge systems of propaganda effectively siloing people into incompatible models of reality? It is the sense that my mom is fully a resident of what Klein calls "the mirror world" that is my bigger problem. That her logic should be understood as something that could be weaponized against me (and of course, the people I love - trans people, leftists, assorted racial minorities - all will be targeted as "enemies from within" by a fascist regime) is something I pointed out largely in an attempt to use a personal appeal to bring her back to common ground. That the conversation should deteriorate into thought-terminating cliches is entirely predictable.

I made the phone call, after so long going without talking, because I felt like a hypocrite. In all of my advice I would ever give to someone else, I would advise people talk through their conflicts. Partly, I see myself as a confrontational person, as this is the way I was in my youth, although I think I have mellowed with time, as so many others have. But it's also true that when I was younger I had more of a relationship with my parents. That's part and parcel of youth, of course, but it might also be something that only exists, for me and my Jewish family, if I am continually confrontational.

An Admittedly Embarrassing Thing I Hope To Never Do Again

 I am not alone in hoping to never use an online dating app ever again. Despite their normalization, many of my friends have come to the same conclusion, even if the reason for their reservations are different. Whether it be a lack of interested parties, making you feel bad about yourself, or an overabundance of superficial interest from people who are merely treating the numbers as a game, but who have no interest in any particular person, hence making you feel bad about humanity as a whole, or the apps themselves becoming increasingly predatory in their monetization schemes, the way the mercenary has infected intimacy leaves a vast swath of eligible people alienated. Similarly, many of the people I am closest to, both in age and in temperament, no longer are interested in going out to bars, spending money on overpriced drinks. Whether they be actively sober or simply no longer fond of the company of the active drunk, the companionship of the barfly, especially as a romantic partner, does not appeal.

So when we chat with each other, my friends and I, there is a certain tenor to the conversation of having given up. These are the two main ways people meet each other, and they seem bad: Is there no alternative? While some might hope to meet someone normally, or have someone in their extended circle of acquaintances reveal themselves as a romantic prospect, the people that you meet through the ways that people meet each other do not appeal, at least in the abstract. Again, these feelings seem pretty widespread, at least among the people that I talk to, be they men, women, or queers of one stripe or another. They might live in different cities, or in isolated suburbs. They are, generally, older; I don't think the people I know in their twenties feel the same way. But age comes for us all, and coupledom does not, presumably some people are just a few years off from joining us in the ranks of the unsure what to do with oneself.

So it came to be that I started saying to people, what about speed dating, that's a thing people do. And one married friend said oh yeah I did that once, did not meet anyone, but had a good time. So informed, I continued to iterate, maybe that could be a thing that might work out. Most friends voiced disinterest, or academic interest in learning how it would be, were I to make such an attempt. And so it came to be that I put my money where my mouth was and did the thing everyone else was skeptical about. For them I write this blog post, to report: Yeah, that doesn't work either, I don't think.

I will do my best to protect the anonymity of the organizers by refraining from any embarrassing details that might in fact be their proprietary blend, even though it might be some of those factors that in fact made it worse than others. So it is that I cannot dismiss the enterprise completely, as much as I would like to. The basic premise, that you can realize you like someone in a really short period of time, and that the people that have this immediate appeal might differ from the purely superficial strengths as seen on a dating profile, is sound. The question of what then goes wrong is interesting: You have a smaller pool of options, but what goes awry is in the self-selection.

The best way I can put it is that that the people who are willing to participate in a speed dating event are primarily interested in the experience. They will congratulate themselves for putting themselves out there, even though the whole experience is designed to minimize risk. You could characterize these people as boring people, and maybe that would be fair, but I'm boring too, albeit in different ways. Arguably even more boring, because I don't have this interest in "experiences" for their own sake. My interests in the arts make me very much a homebody, despite what I would think of as a good amount of intellectual curiosity.

Back in the day, the dating website OKCupid had a blog, where they would make blog posts analyzing the data they discovered over the course of running a dating website. One of the things they found, that I think makes a lot of sense, is that men and women evaluate attractiveness differently, when asked to do so using a scale of 1 to 5. Men's ratings fall under what I would consider a normal or expected distribution of value, a bell curve, wherein most women are considered average, or a 3, with less people being given a 1 or a 5 judgment. Few are considered extremely beautiful, but few are considered hideous. Women's evaluations, however, are inverted, with very few men being considered merely average: It is more likely that someone will either be viewed as extremely attractive or completely unfuckable. That anecdote is not really germane to my larger point, that's just an example of a post they made that I remember. What's more important is that they determined that, of all the questions they had on their quiz, to assign a percentage to determined compatibility, two questions ended up being far more relevant towards if a relationship actually worked or lasted than any of the others. One of which was, do you like watching horror movies, and the other was, have you ever traveled outside of the country by yourself.

The best way I can describe the population sample of the speed dating event is that it self-selected for people who had traveled outside the country by themselves. There was a brief "introduce yourself and say a fun fact about yourself" that revealed this pretty explicitly, as travel destinations were pretty much the only thing that anyone had to say for themselves as a fun fact. Except for me, I explained that I had chosen this event over others because of its proximity within blocks of my house. This marked me as an outlier, and I commenced to not connect with anyone at the thing, which is fine. I suspect that this interest in "travel" as an activity or end to itself corresponds with the interest in "dating" as an end to itself.

The other part of meeting a lot of people one after another is that you realize how boring a lot of people are, and how many of them can barely communicate, or are sort of disinterested in doing so, and that being articulate to any degree might register as "intense" or "intimidating" to the general public, even when you are doing your best to be friendly and welcoming and ask questions or whatever. Many people don't want to answer questions, they just want to vibe vaguely. But look, I'm well aware that making any sort of criticism of people in general reflects poorly on me, so I don't want to dwell on that stuff. But suffice it to say, you might lose track of what most people are like when you exist in your own little self-selected world of people who share your interests or some personal history. The idea of meeting strangers holds appeal if you have begun to feel that you live in a small bubble. Still, certain laws of statistical averages explaining what the general populace is like will make a person come off as misanthropic if they break it down for you.

I Still Have Glaucoma

A few years ago, I was diagnosed as having glaucoma, a degenerative disease for which there is no cure, that usually affects people decades older than I am. Since that time, my eyesight has become noticeably worse. It is much harder for me to browse a bookstore, for instance, taking in the vast amount of visual information casually. It's harder to shop for groceries also. Things don't jump out at me from the corner of my eye. I also do not necessarily recognize the presence of friends in a crowded room. I really need to look directly at something in order to see it. As I describe this affliction, I worry about the extent to which it makes sense. If I tell you I can still read, but it is sometimes harder to make sense of a sentence because my eye is not taking in all of the words at once, that I don't really have the sense of a thought's simultaneity that grammar parses out into a sequence, do you understand what I'm talking about? Every time I go to a movie with subtitles I worry if I will end up being lose track of information embedded in the cinematic images because I'm prioritizing the visual information of the text at the bottom of the screen, but a person with sight should be able to have the whole thing beheld at once.

I received surgery last year. I was pretty worried about it, not really sure how I would be able to cope with the recovery time. It ended up not being a problem at all, but this is because I didn't actually get the fully invasive surgery that doctors recommended. I am going to need to get eye surgery again this year, this time the kind I was scared I was going to receive last time, essentially. There is, of course, the risk that this surgery could also just lead to me going blind anyway, if something goes wrong in some way. I have become a better patient in the time I've been under the doctor's care - while I used to be very twitchy about having a doctor touch my eye, for reasons I think are fully understandable as instinct, I am now essentially able to suppress this because I might not see the finger as coming right at me, if I divert my attention elsewhere.

In the post-surgery time, I will not be able to take care of myself. Both because I will be waiting for my vision to recover, (assuming for rhetorical purposes that it will, although I'm sure the entire time I wait I will be consumed with worry that I will not) and because I will have stitches in my eyeball which in order to keep from bursting I will need to refrain from doing certain tasks I generally do for myself, like lift and carry groceries home from the store, and bend over to pick things up. I do not think of myself as having people who can take care of me. It is possible I have many friends who will gladly help me whose kindness I take for granted in my possession of a great deal of shame around the idea of asking anyone to volunteer their aid.

I have something like an existential crisis about issues around this disease basically all the time. How would I take care of myself, if I were blind, how would I work, how would I function. What would I do with all the comics and books I have accrued around myself if I no longer had any use for them? How would my friendships even work, in the absence of understanding my self as an "arts person," someone who reads literature and follows the news online, and as someone who takes care of myself, cooking meals and working jobs, earning money? Any desire to have a person close by that would voluntarily place themselves into the role of caregiver is mitigated by the knowledge that I would surely love this person an equal amount in return, and so would not want to burden them with a brutal responsibility.

There is basically no cure for glaucoma. There are, apparently, experimental treatments. One was dangled as an offer a few doctor's visits ago: Maybe nerve function could be restored with electric stimulation. The doctor was doing a study, maybe I could be a test subject. To be a test subject did not guarantee I would receive treatment, of course, there was a 1 in 3 chance that I would be part of a control group and so receive a placebo. Also, if I were in the test and received positive benefits, once the study was up, I wouldn't continue to receive the treatment anyway; the treatment has not been approved by the FDA. After repeatedly insisting to my doctor that I would still like to be considered, and briefly meeting with the doctor administering this study, I never got a phone call about it. Presumably there was something in my chart that made me not an ideal test subject, either the type of glaucoma I have, or how far along I am in my deterioration, or maybe even the statistical outlierhood of my under-forty age. I also just saw an article saying that there could be a treatment found by growing stem cells in mice, but this has never been mentioned to me by any doctor.

You may have noticed that none of these paragraphs really build off the one before it. Unlike four years ago, where I could go from a brief explainer of what glaucoma was to what I was trying to do to combat it, I no longer feel like there's anywhere I can go with this information I have, other than under the knife, hoping for the best, but with a deep ache in my chest of truly unmitigated terror. Even offering a glib "in conclusion, don't get glaucoma" seems pointless in the face of knowing that, honestly, you probably don't have to worry about it. I am writing these words simply because for now I am able to do so, able to type words onto the screen and check my spelling all by my own. At some point between now and when I lose the ability to do so, I might have something more spiritually edifying to share, but for now I am merely marking time while my eyes run out the clock.

12 Records for '22

This might be a more manageable list of records than I've written in years past, though my listening was no less wide-ranging. It might be a bit more honest, with the concision of its culling arrived at lazily, scrolling the automated iTunes playlist of 2022 records and either noting the amount of times I played it or thinking "oh, that was a good one." While a large amount of very good music came out this year, it felt maybe more than ever oriented towards the ephemeral, as if aware of how the constant release of new, very good, music creates a churn that makes every album feel meant for the moment, rather than the ages. Or else the fact that we all live in our own realities defines so much of the tenor of the times that no one could ever make a record that is in some way a "definitive record" of the year. This approach to music feels psychologically healthy, maybe even ancient: It's closer to live music's promise than investing in a record the qualities of a film or a novel, albeit in a time where "live music" feels like more of a delicate operation than it did pre-COVID, the recording stands as music's currency anyway.

So a review of the best music of the year should include the best shows I saw this year. I blessedly had a chance to see Jaimie Branch before she died. She played a solo set, relying on electronics, opening for her Fly Or Die quartet. I saw Rosali play a show with David Nance Group that was phenomenal. The Nance group backs her up on her last LP, and her forthcoming one as well -- Look out for the song "I Don't Want To Live Without You" when it drops, hearing it for the first time live it immediately felt like a hit. She played bass in the David Nance Group as well, effectively opening for herself. Both sets were so good I went to see the same people again the next night, at a gig where Rosali played lead guitar in Long Hots, her garage rock trio where the drummer sings. An insanely talented musician. I was very happy, brimming with joy, to see Fievel Is Glauque on a day in between their dates opening for Stereolab. (I am listening to their Audiotree session as I type this, the excitement of listening to their music keeping me from going to bed so I am granted the time for typing.) I saw a beautiful evening of music performed by the William Parker Heart Trio, that ended with Cooper-Moore talking about how many legends we lose every day, and so it's important we all share such moments together. Hamid Drake responded saying "You know, some mystics believe, and I believe, that since we're never really born, we never really die." It seemed like a morbid note to end on, although the recent loss of Jaimie Branch was still heavy on my mind, but then the very next day the world mourned the loss of Pharaoh Sanders together.

I also gotta mention going to see Stice and shooting the shit with Caroline Bennett after, really felt like I made a friend; going out of my way to see Myriam Gendron open for Godspeed You Black Emperor not knowing I would get the chance to see her at a much smaller venue months later, when she would complain about how the crowd at the bigger gig talked throughout her performance. Saw the longtime homies Ed Schrader's Music Beat open for Melt-Banana, saw Water From Your Eyes open for Palm, saw Aaron Dilloway in a basement, and afterwards was like "damn check out the Mary Hartman Mary Hartman bumper sticker" to a friend before noticing the Ohio plates and putting it together that it was of course Dilloway's car. But even this list is tainted by recency bias, I cannot really remember what music I saw in the early part of the year.

Also, I am just listing things. I write all of this feeling like writing about music is mostly uninteresting, or a waste of time, or I just don't want to do it, because I'm not particularly good at it. The people who write about music I most admire are not those who can expound at length, either parroting a press release or waxing pseudo-poetic, but those who can point in the direction of a record and with a few brief words of reference make it sound like the sort of thing I will like, if that is what indeed it is. In so doing, coming off as the sort of intellectually curious person worthy of listening to, due to their own willingness to listen deeply. If your taste overlaps at all with my own, just follow me on Bandcamp, where I have never once even attempted to write a blurb.

With that disclaimer, on to the records:

Weyes Blood - And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow. It's funny to read a New Yorker profile about someone coming from the noise scene that name-checks so many people I'm friends with and places I've been, in the interest of mythologizing a person I saw play many not-so-great shows, in the runup to the release of her record The Outside Room. This isn't a diss, that record blew me away, and making better records than one is able to perform live with a tape rig is one distinction between a pop songwriter and a noise act. As time has gone on, and associating Weyes Blood with the "noise scene" makes little sense, it is increasingly clear that she's making records for the ages, and nailing the vibe she's going for. I saw her perform with a full band early in 2023 and she was great, really drove home how she's got a lot of hits now. This is a gorgeous soft rock tapestry, unfurling its melancholy through the halls of time.

Lucrecia Dalt - Ay! Lucrecia Dalt is the musician of year. In addition to this record, Lucrecia Dalt released two soundtracks this year, The Seed and The Baby, and they're both amazing, filled with varied miniatures of atmospheric dread and fast-moving arrangements. Her earlier records had this Badalamenti quality to them, and while this feels like a return to the poppy qualities of those after the minimalist abstraction of No Era Solida, the soundtracks have so much of their own character to them, reminding you her nostalgia is not for the standards of 1950s americana but the dance musics of Colombia.

Blanche Blanche Blanche - Fiscal, Remote, Distilled. Very happy that Fievel Is Glauque has introduced more people to the music of Zach Phillips. This record is essentially a re-recorded greatest hits of his earlier band and should provide a entry point to a very unwieldy yet rewarding discography. The arrangements sound fucking amazing, really just lovely stuff.

billy woods -Aethiopes. Woods is the best rapper out, and he made two records this year, this is the better one. Incredible writing, great production, I don't necessarily know how to talk about this stuff other than saying I spent a lot of time with it. The sort of listening that's driven by words and turns of phrase running through your head while just out walking around.

Brandon Seabrook - In The Swarm. Jazz of course exemplifies the spirit of constantly producing music, based on the joy of the circumstances of people being in a room. It is also the genre which requires the most actual working knowledge of music theory to write about well so I will make no such attempts, this felt sorta similar to that William Parker Mayan Space Station record. A little more rock-adjacent than jazz usually is, and therefore more noteworthy, even though I also loved the work of Janel Leppin, Patricia Brennan, Mary Halvorson, Ashley Paul, Mali Obomsawin, this one fits a different mood.

Eric Copeland & Josh Diamond - Riders On The Storm. Big fan of Eric Copeland, of the band Black Dice, whose solo releases vary a bit between sorta straightforward techno, weirder noise stuff, and sorta dumb deconstructed pop songs with a Ween vibe achieved through distorted vocals. I was saying this had a dubby vibe, my buddy Adam more accurately pegged it as techno with disco guitar. The guitar is presumably being played by Josh Diamond, of Gang Gang Dance, whose record God's Money is a classic, at least with the sort of people who obsessively keep up with Black Dice side-projects. Anyway this is a record that feels like it could be put on at backyard barbecues for years to come.

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom - Reset. A little unclear what Sonic Boom is bringing to the table here since this is really that classic Panda Bear shit, the best Animal Collective associated record in ages (although Time Skiffs, their record from this year, was not bad - it felt like a "return to form" on a cursory first listen and then I never went back to it.

Caterina Barbieri - Spirit Exit. An electronic/synthesizer records, vocals vocoded, feels psychedelic and huge, I don't know, Barbieri's great. Not sure what the vibe would be like live, if it would be a rave vibe or a church vibe but for the proponents of each either is a spiritual proposition, transcendent.

Empath - Visitor. Feel like, in the time since this band's last record, people have collectively realized that self-identifying as an empath is most likely the act of utterly deluded narcissists, "toxic" people. It's a lucky thing the band's rock music is aggressive and joyful in a way that seems aware of the irony. A Philly band, I checked this out and immediately regretted not attending their release show, a short walk from my house. I get psyched at the start of every new song like "oh, I love this one" even though the songs are not really that different from each other.

Anadol - Felicita. I cannot remember if I wrote up the first Anadol record when that came out a few years ago. Maybe not a far leap from the Lucrecia Dalt record, in its use of electronics to present a gently-swaying type of dance music indebted to Turkish folk music. Then a saxophone plays a solo and you forget what you're listening to even though it is still very good. There's a Don Cherry recording made with Jean Schwarz at the GRM that got released for the first time in early 2023 that combines his seventies world music approach to tape music and as that is like the perfect music to me I like this too.

Dividers - Crime Of Passion. And this is like a blown out and noisy take on American country stuff, I don't know, I am just trying to post this so I don't have to think about it anymore. The reason music writers put out their year-end lists early is because once the new year starts it's on into the future and one doesn't have the energy for retrospect any longer.

Bjork - Fossora. I was not someone who was particularly into Bjork during her nineties heyday. Beyond my Michel Gondry fandom, the voice was an impediment into me getting her, but in the past few years, with enough people vouching, I got into the classics enough that I gave the new one a listen and was blown away by how crazy it was. I should spend more time with this, it feels like a serious work of art.

This is all just listing "new albums," rather than box sets/reissues - I ran out and bought a copy of that 3-CD PJ Harvey B-sides compilation as soon as I learned it existed, which was pretty late due to its major label release precluding a Bandcamp page and the attendant notifications. The archival release of Cheri Knight's American Rituals made me as proud to have gone to The Evergreen State College as a screening of Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile. That Jill Kroesen reissue is super-interesting, I only wish there was an option where I could order a version of the "Stop Vicious Cycles" tank top for myself. I recommended that Ghost Riders compilation to pretty much every one, and it should be on the list if that's the point of making one. A lonely atmosphere captured from the most accessible materials imaginable.

My Friend Alex

 I am very proud and happy for my friend Alex Tripp, who is coming out as trans and beginning a regimen of hormone replacement therapy. I have many times referred to Alex, conversationally, as my best friend, with occasional qualifiers of context like "who I met in college." We met when we were both eighteen, and we're both thirty-six now. That's half a lifetime. She's one of the people I met walking around the freshman dorm and looking at people's CD wallets, and immediately I was like "this person is cool." In sophomore year, when Netflix started, she'd rip DVDs and burn DVD-Rs and fill another wallet up with them. We watched a ton of movies together, hung out with a great many of the same people, listened to a lot of music, christened a house we moved into by playing Lightning Bolt's Wonderful Rainbow on the record player. We would run errands together, as neither of us drove, keeping each other company on bus trips out to neighboring towns to pick up packages that FedEx failed to deliver. We would chat on messaging services. I was weirdly moved when I realized Alex was the first person other than my mom that would end a conversation with me with "goodnight." That was in Freshman year, before we lived together. We shared bedroom walls for three years, essentially.

 I don't wish to seem like I am writing a eulogy where I am mourning a person I thought I knew. Rather I want to put across that while I felt like we talked about everything in our heads, just by virtue of sheer proximity, I didn't know about her gender dysphoria. This isn't to say I view this secret as a betrayal: Rather it's a revelation of the most basic "you don't know what another person is experiencing" common sense sort.

It's radicalizing to realize someone you love is a part of a population that you maybe previously held up to an intellectual distance. Like, if you'd asked me a few months ago for my "take" on the "trans controversy" I would've said: I think transgenderism's surge in popularity over the past few years is just the latest subculture, which always has an element of breaking from gender norms. Hippies had long hair, women in British punk bands would talk about how Johnny Rotten was empowering because he had an androgynous quality. Nowadays I think kids are just incredibly literal, so. The point of this take is meant to be "it's fine, more power to them, only losers get upset by a youth subculture" -- and while I don't think this "take" is WRONG necessarily, I now feel more like: Why the fuck do you need to have a take, to stroke your chin and pontificate?

We met at an ostensibly very liberal college, and Alex didn't feel comfortable coming out then, and who knows how much stupid shit I or my friends have said, either in the spirit of jest or pseudo-intellectualism? Our cohort wasn't a particularly macho group, and while the school didn't have fraternities or anything, it was segregated along gender lines just in basic terms of housing. While outward homophobia would certainly be called out, heteronormativity was nonetheless the order of the day. I apologize now for any dumb shit I have said that I don't remember saying.

However, over the course of our friendship, it became clear I had a much better memory than Alex did, and so I want to remember things that she may have forgotten, because they take on new resonance to me now: The first time I took acid, Alex was essentially my babysitter, bearing witness to me going a little bit crazy, doing some babbling. Of course, in my own head, there was a moment where I thought Alex's laughter was from her being a more ascended Godlike being, already an initiate into the wisdom psychedelics bring, but that's not the part I wish to recall. Rather I remember, coming down, after feeling like I'd entered into higher dimensions of greater complexity, feeling like I'd made a wrong turn in the corridors of different consciousness, to be once more in my body, in the realm of our shared living room, making a joke I thought would amuse Alex, "when did I lose genders?" thinking of us as no longer living in a world of gender difference and all its myriad pleasures.

This joke hits different now. So too do a bunch of personality traits of the "maybe that's gender dysphoria, maybe that's just Alex" variety: The disinterest in memory, for one, and its attendant explanations: the love for smoking weed I didn't share, the fondness for DXM's disassociative properties that made it a favorite drug. I want to see selfies documenting the changes in Alex's physical appearance, but she, like me, never liked being photographed. All her images uploaded online had her features distorted or otherwise obscured. In college Alex would tap her breastbone and it would emit this hollow sound, a bodily anomaly that would be touched on with the disclaimer offered that she did not expect to live to thirty. There has always been a streak of apocalyptic thinking and occasional nihilism running through my circle of friends. This comment now feels reframed, to refer to the high rates of suicide among transgender youth.

I'm so glad we're still alive, undertaking new experiences and continuing to grow. That's my sister. I would die for her.

Top Books Of Recent Years

In the past I've done brief write-ups of all the books I read in the period of time since my last set of write-ups, and that slowly became too exhausting to contemplate, so I am not going to attempt that again. I did want to mention books that were new, at least, so here's the list of my favorite books released in the past two years. My attention span was sort of fried by the COVID era and I found reading older books often incredibly difficult. By only talking about newer books, this should also function as something of a top ten for the year, though it runs a little long, and includes books published in 2020, as I find the hardcover format gross and often find myself waiting for copies of books to become available at the library. Some are works in translation that are older still. These days, with film in particular, any "best of the year" seems provisional or else false, as many of the best works are on the festival circuit and do not receive much in the way of a real release; discussing books in an honest way that doesn't favor the publicity cycles of major publishers means accounting for work others read earlier.

When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamin Labatut. Part of my affection for this book surely comes from how it does something interesting with the essay form without including the personal: The first chapter is sort of like Patrik Ourednik's Europeana in the way it lays out information to make a far-reaching point. A note in the back says that chapter contains only one paragraph of fiction, which the subsequent pieces increase, but as a reader I appreciate feeling that the point being made is rooted in the real. The whole book, with its cast of historical scientists being bedeviled by the elusive truths they pursue, is the sort of shit I'm into. A bunch of people are saying this book is good, I'm not riding for any obscurities here. I only wish the NYRB edition made some slight edits to the British spellings of an earlier publication.

Hollow by B Catling. This is historical fantasy, blurbed by Alan Moore, released straight to paperback by Vintage, though Catling has had two books printed by a smaller British press since his Vorrh trilogy concluded. My friend Adam, who says Catling is maybe his favorite living male writer of fiction, says those books were good but it makes sense this is the one a major publisher would bring out. It involves monks and mercenaries and a breakdown of reality as demonic creatures created by Bosch for his paintings emerge into the real world. The Vorrh books also included historical personages -- Raymond Roussel, William Blake -- and here the presence of Bosch's work allows for some neat bits of art criticism. This is an immersive, engaging read I read on a bus and liked a lot. I feel like most of the smartest people I know IRL that are fun to talk to definitely prefer genre writing to the sort of literature that gets talked about in Harper's, which makes sense, because Harper's is increasingly an awful magazine, a legacy publication steered by an old reactionary. 

I bring this up by way of getting into a digression about how a piece Christian Lorentzen wrote about how smart people learn about books from book critics was completely full of shit self-congratulation from someone who should know he works in a dying field and no one cares about what he does, but seriously: No one finds out about books from book criticism, book critics are largely obligated to all talk about the same high-profile releases from big five publishers that have enough of a promotional push a reader could just as easily find out about them by walking into any bookstore. I have another digression about the cultural discussion of books coming further down the list.

Harrow by Joy Williams. I realized this year that "environmental collapse" is the ideal literary subject matter for our era, both because it is the crisis we face that supersedes all others, but also because "environment" is a synonym for "context," and "context collapse" is also one of the conditions we face. A place of context collapse is also where Joy Williams' characters gnomic dialogue seems to emerge from, these issuances that have nothing to do with conversation as generally practiced. This book strikes me as "late style" for Williams, which I don't think reviews addressed. It's really weird, and while I enjoyed it a lot, it's probably closer to The Changeling than any of her other books, and while that may be my favorite of hers, that's not a popular opinion. I really enjoyed a large amount of stuff on pretty much every page, although the ending is particularly cryptic. Maybe I did myself a disservice by rushing it. I justified the expense of buying this in hardcover by giving it as a gift to a friend for her birthday, and I look forward to buying a paperback for myself to reread in a year's time.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Very funny, very insightful, and made me cry. Do I think it's weird to call this a novel when it takes it as a given you know all the characters from Lockwood's memoir? Yes. But I read an early draft of some of the material talking about the internet, presented as an essay and that blew me away, and the form of a novel can include all the weird shit it wants. Lockwood's almost certainly the best writer of my generational cohort, and her wide acclaim is both well-deserved and feels borderline inexplicable in terms of how hard it is to imagine older people making sense of her argot. But, for the record, this is what it's like, to be alive and engaging with the internet! It's weird too that she'll talk about reading the writing of Lisa Carver and a few other people she doesn't refer to by name. It's almost like within the world of the book, writers who know what the internet is don't have names, their essence is just an utterance of this larger supercontext, but that might not be as hard and fast rule in the way I'm describing it. The book also moves away from the internet talk into discussion of the tragic and holy, which could be what people who find the talk of memes baffling respond to; Lockwood's register can encompass everything.

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin. There are popular books about the internet that are either autofiction or close relatives to it, but Schweblin avoids these forms to come to an understanding of what the internet actually is that seems far more accurate: It's a system of mass surveillance that allows people to be voyeurs, and then feel connected through that. This novel employs what would be a science fiction conceit if the technology didn't 100% exist right now. This seems maybe the best way to address one of the defining elements of reality today, and of course, as the nineties predicted, it's a collection of different narratives with no real main character. I liked this more than Fever Dream, the author's novella from a few years back that received some acclaim.

Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh. This is probably Moshfegh's best book to date. An old woman encounters something inexplicable, and makes up a world she projects onto her surroundings accordingly. Obviously, this is a potent metaphor for what's going on in the world, but it never presents itself as such, instead just being a very old-fashioned dark comedy about a person who has to go to the library to look up what's happening.

The Glassy Burning Floor Of Hell by Brian Evenson. A new collection by the contemporary master of horror short stories. This earned an endorsement from R.L. Stine on Twitter, which is funny. Back cover copy tries to make it seems like this is mostly about ecological horror, which is not true. I'm pretty sure one of the stories in here directly connects to Evenson's novel Immobility.

Eleven Sooty Dreams by Manuela Draeger. I am on the record as being a fan of the French author Antoine Volodine, who has a very weird project, where that name is a heteronym, and he has others, one of which is Manuela Draeger, who sometimes appears as a character in books credited to Volodine. Draeger's In The Time Of The Blue Ball, published in the U.S. by Dorothy, A Publishing Project, is a pretty whimsical collection of three short stories (which are individual books in a series for children in France), and is a very intriguing introduction to the whole project in itself. This book is Draeger's first book for adults, and while there's still some whimsy to it, it gets closer to the Volodine subject matter of failed leftist revolutions and Bardo states between life and death. Honestly I've already forgotten most of the details but this is a good one. That I'm forgetting it probably has something to do with its dreaminess, which is a feature not a bug, as they say.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. We love a descent into hell that doubles as social realism, right? This one begins with the discovery of a dead witch, and each chapter expands the purview of what's going on, to include more darkness as it reveals more plot detail. I realized a lot of New Directions books don't have any plot -- Their biggest hit in the nineties was Sebald, after all -- but this one does. Have since grabbed an Anna Seghers collection NYRB Classics issued in part because Melchor had a blurb on the back, but I wasn't able to find my way into that one at all.

Machines In The Head by Anna Kavan. This is an NYRB Classics collection of an author I already knew I loved. This is a "selected stories" that includes stuff from books I've already read, but the selections are well-chosen, and the pieces I hadn't read before are good. If you just read this and the recent Penguin edition of Ice, (and I highly highly recommend you read Ice if you haven't yet) that's maybe a better approach than tracking down a bunch of books published in England by Peter Owen.

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Oyler's a fun critic, appreciated by all for her willingness to talk shit. That no one talked shit on this book was taken as an indicator that she wrote a really great book, but really the book's flaws are pretty evident. It's willing to be tedious in its scene-setting for the sake of mimetic detail, to increase the reader's sense that what they're reading must've really happened. Book people are maybe just willing to let her be the mean one, and look on admiringly from their positions of cowardice. The authorial voice of this book is an extension of her critical persona, and while I find that voice an amiable companion, it seems that readers forgive these excesses because they're so self-consciously presented, which is not the same thing as a book being without flaws. It's enjoyable enough, some of the jokes are funny, she knows what she's doing.

There was this "what do you want to see more of in books" survey at, I want to say The Rumpus, from which an Ottessa Moshfegh quote (about wanting less prescribed morality) went briefly viral. One of the people solicited for an opinion was Emily Gould, who said she wanted more examples of authors having fun, citing Oyler's "Middle Section (Nothing Happens)" heading as something she liked a lot and found delightful for its indulgent play with form, instead of a straightforward seriousness. I just want to say, if that's what you're seeking out, you should try reading a comic book, cartoonists make these kinds of throwaway jokes all the time.

Slapstick by Pete Toms. Pete Toms is a cartoonist, and we follow each other on Letterboxd, and he self-released this book digitally. It's a "comic novel," in the sense of being funny, but it's all prose, aside from its cover he drew. I like a little more linguistic bravado but it's pretty clear he's going for jokes and laying out everything in as straightforward a manner as possible. Anyway you can pay $3 to download this inventive collection of goofs. This list is short on obscurities if you're a book person, so if you're a book person who's heard of everything here throw this man a bone and get some laughs. People are writing work that reflects virtues totally absent in mainstream literature publishing, and then they have to self-publish it, because work that's accessible and entertaining and interesting isn't seen as viable by major houses, nor does it fit in with the tightly-defined aesthetic preferences of small publishers.

Vernon Subutex 2 and 3 by Virginie Despentes. I have mixed feelings as to whether these books are good or not, since on a level of language, the writing is incredibly simplistic and prone to cliche. This allows the books to read quickly, and keep their focus on characterization, and the movement between disparate characters to show how they view and interpret one another is pretty clever and insightful stuff. The books do not hesitate to discuss their characters and politics, many of which are aging men who've become increasingly right-wing. There are plot elements and movements towards the magical which reinforce the corniness of the prose and make me self-conscious about recommending it or considering it good.

One thing that's interesting about the books is that, after all of the groundwork laid, treating the characters' attitudes as this background radiation, the third book not only involves frequent mention of terrorist attacks, and captures 2016 as a cascade of rock star deaths, it ends with, and this is a massive spoiler, a mass shooting killing off almost all of the book's major and minor characters. This made me think of how Michael Chabon and his wife were supposedly going to adapt an article about the Ghost Ship fire into a TV show, and got shouted down by the community of survivors. I remember, when that happened, thinking "That just isn't how TV works. The tragedy of mass death, of people who know each other tangentially, and many of them are inspiring and lively, and then they just die in a fire, that's not television, that's not how narrative works." It's fascinating to me that these books do the work of having their narrative work in exactly that way, and not only have they been adapted into a French television series, but within the narrative of the books the tragedy gets turned into a television series courtesy of one of the people who set the tragedy in motion capitalizing on it. I'm willing to give Despentes credit for the commentary being pointed, partly because the whole series begins almost as a riposte to High Fidelity, with a Gen-X-er's record store going out of business and leaving him adrift in the world. For as much as I find off-putting about these books, it does seem to be in service to a vision and perspective I find valuable.

I Wished by Dennis Cooper. George Miles, the inspiration for a five-novel cycle of Cooper's, gets another book from Cooper where he tries to lay out what's special and important about this boy he knew who died, with a bit less transgressive violent sexual content than in the earlier books (though there remains a scene of parental sexual abuse, and it's a little unclear to me if this is being presented as something the real George Miles experienced). The best parts of this book are incredibly gentle, though it still kind of feels like a digestif for those who've read a bunch of Cooper's other books rather than an accessible introduction to an intimidating body of work.

I'm not going to list other books I read and felt more ambivalent towards. I wish I'd gotten around to reading Garielle Lutz's Worsted and Atticus Lish's The War For Gloria. The Lish should show up at the library one of these days, a friend has a copy of the Lutz I can probably borrow. I'm not claiming to have a great handle on the world of books, this is more of an accounting of the work I already knew to pay attention to than anything else.