Pandemonium of New Year’s Eve: chaos of snow and mud churned up by a thousand carriages glittering with toys and bonbons, swarming with cupidity and despair; official frenzy of a big city designed to trouble the mind of the most impervious solitary.
I may not be in a big city (or at least not what I like to think of as one) but Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen rings in my mind nonetheless. These Year In Review posts tend to focus on what I accomplished “professionally” in the course of a year, emphasizing the last twelve months’ music, performance or film work. This year I’m trying to say something else.
In the midst of this deafening hubbub, a donkey was trotting briskly along, belabored by a low fellow armed with a whip.
I’ve told the story before, so I’ll spare you the details here. From the deafening din of severe depression, the donkeys of Oatman brought me back to the light, or at least to releasing music again. Laughlin Cantate is not my first album, though it is an album of firsts: my first real deal record in “singer-songwriter” mode, my first extended solo release (ahem) in four years and in a way the first album of a new phase in my recording and performing life. I’m still too close to the inside of this music to be able to find any perspective on it — I seriously could not tell you if this thing is good or bad or even listenable — but I’m very proud and gratified to have it out in the world.
Just as the donkey was about to turn a corner, a resplendent gentleman, all groomed, gloved, cruelly cravated and imprisoned in brand new clothes, made a ceremonious bow to the humble beast, saying as he took off his hat: “A very happy and prosperous New Year to you!” Then he turned with a fatuous air toward some vague companions, as though to beg them to make his satisfaction complete by their applause.
February opened with our first of two trips up to the Bay Area for Hannah’s birthday and Valentine’s Day. Every time we visit her hometown we come back more convinced we need to move there already, a dream we hope to make come true in 2025. We came back so hyped on hyphy Joe decided to pass up his acceptance to UCSD to attend Berkeley so when we move we can all be in one place. Speaking of that kid…
I wouldn’t have been able to release Laughlin Cantate if it weren’t for Joe. When he told me late last year he was releasing “Intimacy in Infinity” as a single it finally got me to quit moping and release “Dogs,” which I had been sitting on for a year or two at that point. “Intimacy in Infinity” was just the first single for Joe’s album Grasshopper Whispers, and his dedication in seeing that album through to its completion is what inspired me to finally finish Laughlin Cantate. But to look at Joe’s record only through the veil of my own accomplishment would be not just selfish, but a total disservice to what Grasshopper Whispers is. Put simply, Grasshopper Whispers realizes Joe’s most advanced and ambitious songwriting yet. From the harmonic language to the sonic palette, every aspect of his craft has expanded outward. Naturally, it wouldn’t matter if the performances and recording didn’t also represent a step up on every front, featuring a wider vocal and instrumental range than on any of his previous albums, under his name or otherwise. So far I’ve heard only demos of his new work, but whatever he does next promises to expand ever further upward.
I’d be remiss not to mention the music video we made for “Near Death“:
The donkey paid no attention to this elegant wag, and continued to trot zealously along where duty called.
But enough about anyone else. This is my blog.
I’m trying to find a place within my practice for intentionally minor work. Somewhere a balance exists between the perfectionist toiling I reserve for the “big” albums (historically the ones released by Those Darn Gnomes but now more likely to be my solo work) and the quick assembly of the “in-between” drops (free improv records, solo guitar excursions, goregrind misadventures); maybe when I finally get moved into our next new place I’ll be able to pick up the pace a little and release more singles and EPs.
As for me, I was suddenly seized by an incomprehensible rage against this bedizened imbecile, for it seemed to me that in him was concentrated all the wit of France.
Tall Can’s sentencing casts a, well, uh, tall shadow over the last few years. We haven’t been able to talk face to face since I last saw him in 2022, but Nathan and Lewis have been kind enough to provide updates whenever possible, so when the opportunity arose to shoot a little video for “Cuz I Drive the Seven” it was a no-brainer. If all goes well, the record I produced for Tall Can back in the back in the day drops in the new year.
On the subject of minor work: none of the music I put out this year is anything I’d characterize as “essential listening,” but after my long fallow period each of these little records means the world to me. After the first sessions for what would become Laughlin Cantate, Lucas took some of his riffs and turned them into songs for a new band with Roger and in the interest of continued rhizomatic growth I then took those versions and reworked them into the original Cantate versions.
Nine-year-old me would have been stoked I wrote three songs and played guitar on my own shitty butt rock record. Nineteen-year-old me would have called me a sellout but secretly been stoked on the Lil Uzi Vert samples and gnarly bass tone. Twenty-nine-year-old me is just happy to have some music out in the world again.
In July we cruised up to Hollywood to catch Noah’s play Otherkin at the Road Theater. We’ve all been close to this play since taking part in the first table read at Noah’s old apartment two years ago, so seeing the script more or less come to life onstage was a real treat — I say “more or less” because this was still only a staged reading as part of the Road’s annual Summer Playwrights Festival, but! of the 30-some scripts the Road programmed for the Festival, Noah’s was the only selected to be produced, which means their season next year opens with Otherkin. Noah’s living in New York now but I’m assuming we’ll catch him some time closer to the play’s premiere.
In August, Hannah and I (somewhat prematurely) celebrated our fifth anniversary with a party at the home of my grandmother, who wasn’t able to make it out to our wedding at Eden. We threw the party early so Joe would get one last hurrah before leaving to start at Berkeley; the final slide below gives an accurate representation of exactly how that went.
Aaaaand in October we celebrated our actual anniversary in, of course, our favorite place. This time I finally got the chance to propose to my wife; six years ago when my grandmother was in the hospital I told the nurses Hannah was my fiancée to allow her back with the family and we just kind of rolled with it. “Rolling with it” both vastly understates and perfectly summarizes what Hannah has done since we met, as she continues to challenge, support and grow with me in ways I could have never predicted. I love this lady (and Tommaso’s).
While up in the Bay the second time we caught two revival screenings: the 20th anniversary re-release of Saw and Dirty Harry on a boat courtesy of the Roxie. Loved seeing Squint dismayed at all our favorite North Beach haunts immediately before we headed that same direction.
The combination of work, travel and moving meant I watched far fewer films this year, certainly fewer new ones, and fewest of all new films of actual quality. Megalopolis and The Substance (which I even happened to catch on consecutive nights) were the easy standouts this year, both unequivocal masterpieces in dire need of immediate rewatches. I Saw the TV Glow, Cuckoo, Longlegs, and Challengers landed somewhere in the second-tier banger category. And special shoutout to the blockbusters this year: Dune Part II, Furiosa, Twisters, Alien: Romulus, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes were all varying degrees of dumb fun.
Trifectas dominated my reading this year, or at least that was the pattern I discerned: three novels by Austen (Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion); Melville’s first three books (Typee, Omoo and Mardi) and three by Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, A Wonder-Book, and The House of Seven Gables; half a dozen times or more I cracked open Fanshawe only to give up before the close of the first chapter. Let’s put that one off until next year.) which in a trinity with Leaves of Grass and Poe’s collected work represent an attempt to familiarize myself with the early American Renaissance canon; three strange mysteries by John Franklin Bardin (The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly); three novels by Kathy Acker (Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations and My Death, My Life, by Pier Paolo Pasolini — incidentally forming its own unwitting trinity alongside Oswald Stack’s book of interviews and Triple P’s own collected The Massacre Game); three books by Deleuze and/or Guattari (Kafka, The Fold, and The Machinic Unconscious); three by Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts, Bluets and her first poetry collection Shiner — what a trajectory to watch unfold!); three by Flaubert (Bovary, Three Tales and Salammbô); three long essays by William H. Gass (On Being Blue — part of a trilogy with Nelson’s Bluets and Theroux’s The Primary Colors in preparation for my final read, Goethe’s Theory of Colours — Reading Rilke, and Abstractions Arrive with photographer Michael Eastman); three books by Anne Carson (Short Talks, Eros the Bittersweet, and Glass, Irony and God); three novels by Dickens (beginning with Great Expectations to brush up before Kathy Acker’s take, which I ended up loving so much more than I expected I was worried I was going to become one of those Dickens Guys — at my age! Then onto Barnaby Rudge, which I liked throughout but thankfully lost me at the end, and finally a revisit to A Tale of Two Cities, which gave me absolutely nothing. Dodged a bullet there! Though it still didn’t prevent me from reading his first three Christmas stories.); three by Robert Coover (The Public Burning in the aftermath of the election, The Origin of the Brunists — plus of course The Water Pourer — and Pricksongs and Descants); three by Donald Barthelme (his first two collections Come Back, Dr. Caligari and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts bookending the novel Snow White); three pieces of Gramsciana (The Modern Prince and the first volume of his prison notebooks, plus Chantal Mouffe’s Gramsci and Marxist Theory); Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy; and the first three novels by S. A. Cosby, which despite finding deeply mediocre probably won’t deter me from reading his fourth. (One of these days I need to stop letting online hype convince me to pick up crap from little libraries. At least they were free!) Even the individual collections I read this year seemed dominated by threes, including the aforementioned triple-volume sets of Acker, Bardin and Melville, Flaubert’s Tales, and Dickens’s Christmas stories, plus Ligotti’s My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror and Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives.
I noticed the tripartite trend about halfway through the year and decided to lean into it. It gave my reading a certain structure compared to years past, when I’ve simply opened whatever caught my eye. I still did plenty of that in 2024, but reading three books by an author certainly confers a more complete picture of an author’s project compared to my usual happenstance picking and choosing. (I’m very glad to have read Nelson’s Argonauts first, but the context around her life provided by Bluets has me even more excited to crack into this year’s Like Love.) I may keep it up in 2025, but who knows; I’m always telling myself I’m going to pick one writer and devote myself solely to their corpus for an extended period — Acker or Ackroyd? Barth, Baldwin or Burroughs? Could be Carver, Coover, Calvino or Cortazar. Delany or Dick, Didion or Dos Passos. Else Elkin, Everett or Ernaux. Faulkner or Federman? (Probably not at those import prices.) Gass or Gaddis. Hawkes or Hawthorne. Ishiguro. Just James or Joyce? Kavan or Krasznahorkai? Lispector or Lem? Maybe McCarthy, Mishima, Mann or Miller. None but Nabokov? Only O’Brien? Possibly purely Percy or Perec? Quin or Queneau? Rushdie, Reed, Robbe-Grillet? Solely Sukenick, Sartre, Sontag, Steinbeck or Stein? Tokarczuk’s tomes? Um. I’ve very much been vibing with Vollmann. Or Wharton or Whitehead or Woolf or Wolfe (Thomas or Gene)? Maybe dive back into Malcolm X or Xenophon? Either Marguerite — Young or Yourcenar — could probably keep me busy a while. Zealously Zelazny or, uh… Zamyatin? (Does he have other books besides We?)
One book I read towered over all others, though.
Since 2014 my friend Sam Hinsvark has compiled a mixtape for Halloween every year. These are no mere playlists, mind you: aside from creating original artwork — in some years even unique to each copy — Sam throws in all sorts of extras, from stickers to family photos personalized for his mailing list.
Whether he knows it or not, Sam has been a key inspiration in my life since I met him in my first year of high school. He had an Eraserhead poster in his window and spent all his time making movies and booking shows for R. Stevie Moore. A good half of my teenage iTunes library came from Sam and I trading hard drives some fifteen years ago when he foolishly tasked teenaged me with cutting the audio for his short film Creeps and Ghouls. We still meet up a couple times a year when I’m in Orange County for trade shows or tattoos.
You can check out the archive of past mixes at Sam’s website, but you won’t find the book anywhere.
As for the other music I listened to this year, I could have sworn Armand Hammer dropped We Buy Diabetic Test Strips this year but apparently it was in 2023, making 2024 the first year since 2016 billy woods hasn’t dropped an album either solo or with Elucid. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips was probably my most-listened record this year, but I’ll cut it from year-end consideration on those grounds. Not that anyone was slacking: Armand Hammer put out BLK LBL and, more importantly, Elucid’s Revelator absolutely burns in ways I’d never have imagined him capable. Not that I ever doubted the guy’s talent, but rapping over a Gaza sample? Made for me.
2024 was a pretty insane year for Backwoodz Studioz-affiliated rap including Cavalier’s Cine, Shrapknel’s Nobody Planning to Leave and PremRock’s Through Lines with Willie Green. Somehow Fatboi Sharif continues to just spew incredible new music out there, beginning the year with the 10-minute “Something About Shirley” before dropping Psychedelics Wrote the Bible with Duncecap and Brain Candy with Fat Tony and steel tipped dove. When I played Russell “Something About Shirley” the first time he said “I’m envisioning a cube. That music is like a cube, and I can’t see into it.” He’s probably the only rapper for whom I’ll get excited when he makes a vague announcement about how next year is going to be even bigger.
Moving outside of Backwoodz, all my favorite rappers from 2018 gave us new albums this year: Freddie Gibbs, Vince Staples’s Dark Times, Denzel Curry’s King of the Mischievous South, Maxo Kream. Mach-Hommy dropped #RICHAXXHAITIAN and, never one to be outdone, Westside Gunn gave us Still Praying and HWH 11. On the greater Griselda front Boldy James dropped, what, four records this year?
2024 also bestowed on us killer new albums by Pyrrhon and Scarcity, Doug and Dylan’s newer band featuring Lev from Krallice on drums. That Scarcity album is really something. Somehow it feels like the black metal equivalent of reading a particularly chilly nouveau roman, all edges and vacancies denying its audience any of the base pleasures of the form. Those Darn Gnomes used to call ourselves “post-metal” in that we utilized the tools of heavy metal with no interest in its goals; Scarcity seem like they’re tilling the same soil.
(Hey, remember when Doug sang on a Those Darn Gnomes song? That was rad.)
On a final note, I read MIKA’s No Tiger last week and subsequently dove into a couple of her interviews, including one at Full Stop with Logan Berry, in which she lays out the project for the future:
This year, I’m intent on developing new delivery methods and tactics for the psychic warfare I deal in my work.
See you next year…
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