Writing to you this week partially from my work computer and partially from the air. I’m sending it extra early because I am now on the west coast. As I write this sentence I’m on a de-iced and running late flight to LAX where I will get picked up by a buddy. In a few days my sister and I will drive to Las Vegas - I look forward to seeing some absolutely brutal roadside sand expanse and I look forward to drinking 7-11 coffee and hot chocolates with my family while we look at various Christmas lights strewn over various desert flora. How many years in a row does it take for something to become tradition? This will be my third year playing Pai Gow on Christmas Day, the money I lose is starting to feel like home.
The music this week is a bit of open-hearted piano, tracked plainly in my living room. I tried to leave enough space in-between the chords to let the sound of the dishwasher in the distance burble in as I recorded the sound of the room. Amazingly, the electric organ that lives in my house worked for the ten minutes necessary to fade in here with a beautifully undulating drone - usually it sputters or starts up a drum loop when it isn’t wanted but gladly it just kind of floats, iridescent like an oil slick, up to the surface.
I like this music a lot and I hope you listen to it. Also, I’m starting to think that I may have given myself a light concussion last weekend - I bonked my head tremendously when stepping into a cab on Saturday and later uncharacteristically could not muster the strength to go dancing, then I fell asleep in a chair in my living room. The following day, maybe still hazy, I made this piece of piano that I love. I should be thinking less when I make stuff, or maybe just bonking my head more. Later that day I acted in a friend’s comedy sketch in which I played an angel. Sort of. It might be out by the time you read this.
I had hoped that I might book a show while in LA this week but alas, too busy, dropped the ball, so not really all that much to mention to you. Although if you want to listen to everything I’ve made for this newsletter, here’s a playlist - it goes down smooth. Two whole hours!
There is also a really good show in Tortoise Town tonight. I won’t be hosting it, but if you’re in NYC and you want to go, reply here and I’ll send you the info.
This past Friday in Chicago my friend Jordan and I went for a walk along Lake Michigan. When I woke up from my afternoon nap (we took an early flight, I had to rest before a show), Jordan asked me what I would like to do with my free time in Chicago before the gig. I told him I wanted to walk along Lake Michigan, and so he obliged.
We parked his minivan near the lake, wandered through a park, and admired the early evening skyline. The lights had just started to turn on.
We came to a pedestrian bridge that went over lake shore drive. Up and over, red lights one way and white lights the other, and out onto sand. As we approached Jordan told me that he hoped we could get to the water, because they fenced it off for the winter. At a distance, it seemed like the fence had been put up already, but as we got closer, we saw that they had only gotten as far as sticking the metal rebar that holds the fencing up into the sand. The fence itself was lying helplessly bundled in a bale before us, and we effortlessly crossed onto the shore.
We walked toward a flat concrete jetty where the water of the lake lapped up over the edges. My feet - in thin canvas shoes - immediately got wet, but we walked out anyway, on the thin ribbon of concrete going out into the dark of the water. Through some combination of city sprawl backlighting and early winter fog, we couldn’t make out the edge of this jetty - it appeared to vanish into a black cloud. But we kept walking, and eventually we did find an edge. Looking straight out from the jetty we saw nothing but the glow of the city at the periphery, that big black lung of water heaving up and down, curiously un-briny (the great lakes continue to be alien to me, californian). If we looked to our right we could see the city jutting up, if we looked to our left we could see lake shore drive stretching on and on. We stood quietly, looking out into the dark, enjoying the cold and the air.
After a time, I noticed something strange on the horizon. There was a lot of activity - planes, helicopters, tankers going by - but this seemed unusual, distinct from the rest of what we saw. There was a deep red glow, almost the color of a firewood ember, but diffused, as if that ember was covered by cheesecloth. As I looked at it, it appeared to be getting bigger, and so I pointed it out to Jordan. What do you think that is? I imagined it to be a massive ship. Maybe this is the prow of a tanker heading in our direction, a skyscraper-sized boat full of cargo and barreling shoreward in the fog. Then I imagined it was a wooden boat being consumed by some conflagration, maybe it was aflame, sails being consumed and falling toward the mast, heading toward us unmanned. Jordan seemed equally perplexed. We both pushed our faces forward and pushed our eyebrows together, squinting out into the darkness, as this thing appeared to get larger and larger. It was clear that it was advancing on us, that it was looming toward us, and in continued to swell in size. We locked eyes with it. Jordan joked that if we were to turn around or break contact with it, the thing - whatever it was - would get us. He wasn’t necessarily 100% serious but I could still feel my heart pounding. I was worried about whatever this glowing…orb…was on the horizon. I could see that it was bright enough to reflect itself in the waters of the lake, it’s own self image was rippling beneath it, and sure enough it appeared to be floating.
We experienced something very real in that moment, which is an ancient and lizard fear of the unknown. We had accidentally stepped off the map. And when confronted by something we failed to understand we felt like our lives were in danger.
The tension broke when I suddenly realized that we had been staring at the moon rising the entire time - rising in an ominous shade I have never seen before, over a body of water I didn’t recognize in the early winter, but nevertheless a celestial object I’ve been shaking hands with my entire life. How did we not realize! We laughed it off, but still a part of me fails to understand how it could be *so* red, how it could be so large, how quickly we became so unnerved and so unmoored by this hunk of rock in the dark of the sky, bouncing day-old sunlight back to us.
(In Switzerland last summer we were surrounded, preposterously, by jagged little mountain islands rising out of the sea. The lines they made against the blue horizon were eerily similar to the lines and shapes our friend had made into sculptures and prints before we lost her. I sang songs almost angrily that without her felt like tipped over sailboats as these geologies arched behind me. After our first day of playing Nico and I went out for a beer or two. We walked out to the edge of a little pier and drank our comp beverages and suddenly found ourselves watching the moon rise, silhouetting one of these eerie crags. It was shocking, I gasped audibly, it looked precisely like something Dev would have made. At the time, even though it was spooky, I was comforted. I felt love in my heart and a salty tear in my eye. Watching the moon rise in Chicago had a similar resonance - we all associate her with deep, unnaturally vibrant oranges - but the abject terror I felt is new. When grief is gone, maybe the towering finality of loss remains, scaring our skeletons out of our skins).
I’m not including so much about the beautiful 24 hours I spent in Illinois last Friday - the gig was incredible, we met Jeff Tweedy, Jordan and I went dancing after eating a late night hot dog. Just want to take a moment of public attention to acknowledge and thank the city of Chicago.
I bought in-flight Internet to work on this newsletter and it appears that the president has been impeached. I’m running out of time on the hour I’ve purchased and so I will not be investigating further. I wonder if the world we live in has changed while I’ve been in the air.
But what’s up with you? Are you returning home to somewhere familiar, or are you encountering your family in a new and alien setting? Or are you staying put?Will you be in Los Angeles or Las Vegas in the next week? Have you ever not recognized the moon?
Thanks for reading - I should keep doing this, right?