Empathy Scrum

You can't curate empathy. Social media is not a responsive platform, especially as we run full speed toward this orb of empathy that glows brightest during times of global trauma. But let's say—in order to survive a few more years on this terrible earth—humans are inherently good. We all seek empathy, in our own bruised and inscrutable ways.

So we're not galled by the lack of empathy in others. The true gall that inspires screeds and jeremiads and endless moral positioning in the moments during and immediately after trauma, is that our social platforms are not calibrated to map the infinite paths toward empathy. 

Should you unschedule those innocuous tweets? Should you avoid politicizing a tragedy? Should score some brand points at the expense of the xenophobes? Should you change the logo of your company to the colors of the French flag? Should you tell a story about that time you were in Paris? Should you just say one thing to show you're a human being? Should you say nothing? When is it ok to talk about something else again? When we all feel like just this once we could rally around this one beautiful point of empathy, it's a scrum to get to the middle of it. 

This is not a fault of us humans, or your collegue who you temporarily muted, or your friend from high school who you rage-unfollowed. It's the fault of technology. Neither Facebook nor Twitter (nor blogs for that matter) are built to handle the byzantine pathways of how we deal with trauma, and how each person seeks empathy. One person's path towards do-goodery is another person's worst nightmare, and this dissonance is laid out in two-dimensions surrounded by the scheduled and promoted tweets, event notifications, crass opportunism, trolls, racists, the unaware, and the vast sums money that underly each byte of data.

This is the scrum, and it will never be perfect. The thing is, when we all focus on this empathy and we strive to understand and write our words of wisdom and platitudes of lesser wisdom, we see that finally that we are indeed human beings, in wholly different in terrifying ways. It shatters the binary dialogues of twitter into thousands of pieces, impossible to parse.

What is the root of this person's behavior, and why is it not like mine? This empathy scrum transcends politics, gender, race, profession, and suddenly we see that the stakes are raised on platforms that are chiefly used for dumb conversations and Michael-Jordan-crying-memes. Now, we have real human moments, and the folly of social media is that no platform could possibly capture us as humans. No level of curation could prepare us for that. 

The way we cope and deal with this ancient, biblical trauma ranges from singing Papa Roach at karaoke to laying in bed and doing nothing. This was the difference between me and one of my best friends. In our offline conversation, it was a mutual understanding, even if maybe deep down inside we were a little disappointed in each other. But we knew what the other needed, and we loved and respected it nonetheless.

But to know how others deal with trauma is to let them, and not judge them, even if it seems insanely stupid or extremely prescriptive.  

Good Invitation

You want to go see my buddy’s band next Monday? They play at 11 at this bar in Waukesha. It’s not really a bar, it’s more of a karate studio you can smoke in. I’ve never been, but my buddy’s playing this acoustic bass he got on Craigslist three weeks ago because he needed something to do after he broke his ankle playing ping pong with his niece. She got a slice past his right side and in diving for it, he flung himself over the banister right onto his sister’s DVD rack. At the hospital, my buddy told me the ping pong table’s placement on the upstairs landing was only temporary while he moved it out of his room to look for some bass picks, but he could never turn down a game with Mattie. Why he sleeps on a ping pong table is a long story, but it’s some calculus to do with a house fire, his sciatica, and a nauseating fear of ants. 

So he has to play in a cast Monday, which sucks for him because it’s his first time with the band. He used to play bass in that band Dr. Gore, that funk black metal band my buddy said sounded like “early Chili Peps defiling H.P. Lovecraft’s corpse”? I never saw them, but they all wore baseball caps. 

Well, they all wore baseball caps except the DJ, who had a rare condition where his hair hurt. Doctors said it had to do with extra nerve endings bottled up on his skull his hair that caused him searing pain at the slightest touch. One tousle could send him into a coma. Before my buddy joined, the band had to cancel a gig due to a long stretch of breezy nights.

The sad thing is, my buddy didn’t know about the DJ’s hurting hair, so his first night with the band during the DJ solo, my buddy noticed he wasn’t wearing his cap so he went behind him and slapped his cap on the DJ’s head, who without hesitation keeled over onto his turntables. At the police station, the DJ’s lawyer told us that that the words "DON’T TOUCH MY HAIR OR I COULD DIE” printed on the front and back of his shirt were all the grounds he needed to file an assault with intent charge. My buddy swears that he thought that was the name of a band he played with Pewaukee. The case is still in the early stages of litigation, but his bail bond put him deep in debt and then when his house caught on fire, he had to move in with his sister and her daughter Mattie. 

They live in the subdivision with all the McMansions on the west side, but are totally house poor after his sister's divorce. The only other piece of furniture in the living room other than the DVD rack is a couch that sits in the middle of the carpeted room that faces nothing. There's no window, no wall, no mantle, no TV, you sit on the couch and there is this unnerving feeling you are looking at nothing, such is its geographical positioning and the voiding architecture of the room. Of course, you are staring at something, but the room seems to slip away to the periphery. There are doorways that hint at structural meaning, a pathway into what can be be seen as definitively a kitchen, surely a coat room, of course stairs to the basement, but the view from the couch lacks any kind of function, only space defined as space, a glint of a banister, corners of drywall, an endlessly beige carpet, and Mattie waiting to play ping pong. 

The couch is where my buddy is sleeps now, because of the cast. He takes off the seat cushions and sleeps on the wooden slat then covers himself with garbage bags, because of the of ants. 

His new band is supposed to be pretty good. My buddy says they sound like "Violent Femmes trying to unfuck the economy.”

Also I think it’s doors at 11 and my buddy’s band goes on after the openers.

Joanna Newsom's 'Divers': Where Can You Find Peace?

Maybe my ears are fragile. It feels like the aperture between my ears and my head is twisting to become smaller and smaller. Years ago I pictured the opening to be the size of silver dollar, my secret biological anomaly that allowed music to enter unassailed and in heaping portions. What you would call an undiscerning ear I would call a mania that wanted to devour every sound and its attendant emotions. I loved it. Now it feels that music just barely squeezes through a pinhole into my life. 

Love will rust, because as soon as you begin to love you enter into a contract with time. And that initial rust is fine and unavoidable, you will just get used to the changing color of its frame. If you’re too mindless with it, corrosion comes next, and its original form starts to decay, though this too is fine and reparable. But if further unattended, if truly neglected, corrosion gives way to toxicity and then this thing you love poisons you and you die a very sad death.

These are the three stages of lapsed love. Avoid the final stage, because it becomes a heavy tumor that breeds contempt or worse: irony. It will kill you unless you pour concrete over this thing that once gave you such joy and seal it off like Chernobyl. Then it will petrify and serve as a historic landmark you visit on the days that come with that vague sadness you can’t name, and then you remember, yes, these are the things that I will carry with me forever and that, too, is fine. 

For Joanna Newsom, these relics are deeply embedded within New York City, as they are in ourselves, as they are between time and love. This is Divers, her fourth album, and her greatest. 

There are petrified moments of death and triumph throughout Divers that stretch across the space/time continuum. Most symbolically, there's the statue of Ozymandius, made famous in Shelley's poem as a man looks at the inscription on the crumbling structure that reads, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair." Newsom echoes this in the futuristic of “Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne” as she eyes Golden Gate Bridge and the Bering Strait from presumably her starship as the song speaks of how there is "unlimited simulacreage" to live now that we've conquered space and time. She comes back down to the Earth on the title track to speak of a more internal relic: “I ain't saying that I loved you first, but I loved you best.” 

A note about Newsom: These songs of sci-fi time wars and transcendent symbol-drawing between Ancient Egypt and early 20th century NYC, her older songs of clams, star ledgers, butchers, and barrows have very little market value. They are, by nature, arcane and autonomous, which is part of what makes Newsom so unmeasurable as an artist.  

But in her music there is a political message simply stated. Those rusted knick-knacks and prose that appear to have no modern cachet work to counterbalance all that does. On Divers, there is the obscure NYC mayor John Purroy Mitchell, King Tamanend, the garden of Chabot, a mill-wheel, a kiln, one ear of corn, a woman standing in the rain wearing a mackintosh, and on an on. These are the fading constants in the world, still humming low beneath our lives. She writes with a furiously untamed pen only to find that one thing can endure. It’s what makes Newsom one of the most important musicians of our modern time because it can be an exhausting enterprise to live simply, to write simply, to create simply, to put into words what needs to happen to conquer all the stuff that lays ahead and all stuff that’s left behind. Leaving the ephemera is no easy task. 

Newsom understands how truly difficult it is to find a place and have peace there, which has been a long-running theme of her music: Where can we find peace? Can we find it in "unlimited simulacreage" of the time/space continuum? She is less concerned with who I am. She is always more concerned with where can I be to be who I am. Where in the digital and physical world can you find who you are? 

What makes Newsom hard to handle is not the music itself (in fact many of these songs songs are made up of the same three-chord motif that’s just like anything on pop radio, only it’s examined and expanded in strict rhythms like one thousand nodes on a music box) or that her language is language-y. What separates Divers from other music is that it stands in ornate relief to a kind of daily discourse that relies on brevity and easy consumption. It has a dissidence toward the speed of life and the bemusement we experience on a micro level every day, the hourly frustrations of social media, the hot takes, the many thousands of memes we use to connect with each other until the next one takes hold in pop culture. 

It takes courage to break this cycle, to write without reference, to sing untuned to common pitches, to inherit biblical proverbs, to interrogate ourselves deeply and without reflexivity, to encompass the past and look toward the future and not feel the stasis of the melancholic present where a toxic love of life poisons that which endures. 

The greatness of Divers is that Newsom understands that the past can also crumble and toy with our lives. Empires fall, and heroes lay buried in ruins, like Ozymandius in Egypt, King Tamanend and John Purroy Mitchell in New York, and all out previous lovers. Newsom sings of so many forces at work on this album it becomes a surreal jumble. These songs rarely have something what you could call a chorus, they just have a direct momentum as if she’s piercing through this universe at light speed. Yes, everything happens so much, but where do we go to escape these things? Maybe we do need the infinity of time and space and that "unlimited simulacreage."

It is always tempting to shrink this idea, and distill it to a more common form. Part of undermining art as a form of critique is to let the world know you are a well-balanced person, both within and without the artist and her work. But doesn’t that, at the crux of life, bely the wars that we’ve fought, martial and romantic, social and personal? The music of Joanna Newsom fights the cause of letting love lapse. It is something of antediluvian proportions, of tangled verse and bouncing cadences, because sometimes great wars call for great weapons. 

The world is large. No, the universe is large. No, it is time that is largest. No, it is love. What could possibly be more true than this? What deeper meaning do we want out of life than to live for joy and all its scraggly hairs, and who dares try to find it in a way that is more beautiful than Joanna Newsom? It should be all of us. 

Joy, this quizzical thing that Newsom has talked about since “Emily” on Ys: 

We could stand for a century,
staring,
with our heads cocked,
in the broad daylight, at this thing:
Joy
landlocked in bodies that don’t keep —
dumbstruck with the sweetness of being,
till we don’t be.

This I believe above all. For every Drake lyric adapted to an Instagram photo, find these romantic facets of the world, and embrace that risk of loving something with no cachet. When you find those facets, make that place your own, wherever it is. 

Divers has re-opened my ears to believe that this thing joy is an immutable force in this life, and to wrestle with it as if I were in one of those Italian paintings, with ancient marbly muscles and alabaster skin. This, now, feels right: 

The moment of your greatest joy sustains: 
not axe nor hammer,
tumor, tremor,
can take it away, and it remains
And it pains me to say, I was wrong.
Love is not a symptom of time.
Time is just a symptom of love
and of the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life.

There’s an idea that I’m paraphrasing and torturing from an essay in Dave Hickey’s excellent memoir Air Guitar that says something like we write about music in the hopes that we give credence to ourselves. What we laud as worthy also in turn makes us worthy, so that somewhere in the ether we become one with the music. That’s why I’m writing this, and this is a terrifying thing to type out: Divers gives me joy, and it makes feel joy again.

James Blake - "Sound of Silence"

This is a good cover because Blake and Vernon are remarkable vocal arrangers. Go back and listen to "I Never Learnt To Share" and hear how he keeps undermining the main melody line. And of course it's the same thing Vernon does on "Woods," a song I think is more impressive on paper. No one's handing out gold stars for arrangement in snowy indie rock or air-duct electronica, but these two are some of the best. The new chord voicings on here are so subtly implemented, and the Rickenbacker sample at the end is a great coda. Two gold stars. 

The Newest Website

Went ahead and made a web portal for me. This includes my published writing, my less than published writing, photography, and a robust contact page. Under "Writing" there are links to a selection of things I've written that you can read online. Under "Photography" some of my favorite photos I've taken. And for here, picture, if you will, this space to be used as an old shopping bag where I'll put things that I think are neat and swell. Thanks, friends.