You Are Hurting People

I address this specifically to the supporters of the Trump administration and the Republican Party, not as it was a decade ago, not as it is in theory, but as it actually is now. Whether or not you mean to, there are innocent people suffering, and you are responsible.  

As the Atlantic reported yesterday (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-administrative-error-sends-a-man-to-a-salvadoran-prison/682254/), the Trump administration itself admitted in a court filing that it had seized and deported a man with protected legal status, by mistake. They did not simply deport him, though: they have sent this man (again, taken by mistake) to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, where for two weeks he has been kept in abusive conditions. Having admitted that this was a mistake, instead of remedying the situation, the administration has said that courts have no power to compel it to return this wrongfully imprisoned man, because he is not currently on American soil – and the administration does not intend to free him.

Here you can read some of the most debased and spineless legal verbiage ever submitted to a court:

This is merely the latest and one of the most egregious human rights violations perpetrated as part of the administration’s immigration gulag, which has already swept up large numbers of people with no due process and thrown them in a foreign prison. And a plain reading of what the administration’s lawyers are now saying in court reveals exactly what this means for you and me.

It doesn’t matter if someone is here legally or illegally, if you committed a crime or are innocent – it even doesn’t matter if you’re an American citizen. The administration is grabbing people and imprisoning them in conditions none of us could likely stand, without even a hearing or a lawyer, and then arguing that no court can review this sentence. Any of us could be next.

 This man was taken while he was picking up his non-verbal 5-year-old on his way home from work. His wife and son are American citizens, and they have not been able to speak with him sense he was kidnapped. His family discovered he was in El Salvador because he appeared in a photograph of prisoners released by Salvadoran caudillo and Trump lackey Bukele as he deliberately and cruelly taunted an American judge who had ordered a cessation of deportation flights to the country.

After this story was published, the Vice President who went to Yale Law and surely knows better, took to social media to defend the administration’s illegal disappearing of this man. To do this, he attacked his reputation by twisting the facts to claim the deportee was illegal and had been found to be a gang member. The former is untrue because of his protected status, which is a legal status, and the latter was based on exaggerating an unfounded claim. But more importantly, the Trump administration itself already admitted that he was not supposed to have been deported, that this was a mistake, and, in their view, this simply does not matter. Vance also cited the man’s traffic violations. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think running a stoplight should result in being indefinitely tortured without trial in a foreign prison.  

And that is what this really comes down to. The Trump administration is claiming that illegal immigrant criminals do not get due process. The problem with this is that due process is precisely how we determine whether or not someone is legal, or a criminal. Without that, any of us can be taken simply by the bureaucratic whim of whoever is giving the orders at ICE, or in this case, by whoever is mistakenly bungling their execution.  

Court papers (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/us/politics/us-deportations-tren-de-aragua-deportation-guidance.html?searchResultPosition=1) in other cases indicate that other people have been seized and deported with no process of law simply because the government decided they were in a gang because they had tattoos or dressed a certain way or looked a certain way.

 An innocent makeup artist with a tattoo dedicated to his mother has been disappeared to El Salvador, something even influential right-wing blogger close Vance associate Rod Dreher was appalled to see (though clearly not all on the right share that human reaction):

 The transcript of a prominent Fox talk show is instructive as to the level of seriousness the administration’s propaganda apparatus treats the prospect of someone innocent languishing in a Salvadoran gang prison:

 What, you may be asking, is this prison like? It is not like a normal American prison (which, incidentally, one is meant to get a trial before going to). Here is what we know: https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-trump-prison-immigrants-4ab3fc3c0474efb308084604b61f8a37

Here’s NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/venezuelans-deported-el-salvador-detention-abuses-rcna197125 

Here’s The Guardian’s interview with an expert: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/trump-deportations-venezuela-prison

This is not a place anyone, even a guilty person, should be sent. Yet what now faces all of us here in the U.S. is the possibility that we could be taken by ICE without warning, with no hearing, no phone call, and thrown into this crush of suffering prisoners, and our families would not even know where we are. If you say that’s a ridiculous thing for me to say because I’m an American citizen, well, the government has no process in place to ensure that only citizens are deported, and has admitted to making mistakes it won’t remedy; and if you say it’s hyperbolic for a white middle class person like myself to make such a statement, that only concedes the racism of the administration and the peril to people who are my legal and human peers.

 This is what the Trump administration is doing, in your name; this is what the Republican Party has enthusiastically worked to bring about. To those responsible, I can only say – Repent.

Repent, and fix what you have done.

Jack Roos, 1932-2025

In the early hours of March 19th, 2025, Jack Roos, my Grandfather, passed on. In a way, it is a relief that he is released from the gradual decline toward the end; for those of us who trust that he is now at Peace in a sense greater than what we can understand, it certainly is a comfort. And of course I miss him dearly, as I have grown to miss him more and more over the many years of goodbye. In a sense, all grieving is already done, and there is only a quiet calm as we wait for reunion. Still, I feel unequal to writing anything about him. Any effort seems too little, yet even a great effort might strike no closer to the truth. Tennyson spent seventeen years writing a fitting eulogy for his best friend; I am not Tennyson. I had always imagined I would have eloquent words on the occasion; but when the time came to share at his funeral, I found the notes I had scribbled down on the plane seemed self-indulgently digressive and abstruse, and I couldn’t read them.

Of course I remember my Grandfather first from my childhood, teaching me to play chess with the seriousness of a man who found our games to be the most intellectually engaging activity in the world, when in hindsight I realize this must have been far from the reality. In the early morning we would slip out of his cabin on Whidbey Island, and walk down to the strand, and there he would flip over the largest rock he could find, to show us the bullfish burrowed in the muck beneath. I remember him persisting, even in these final months, to remain himself in spite of everything: sincere, kind, and mischievously funny, like a little boy. I think often of that little boy that he once was, growing up in Ballard in the 1930s and 40s, sleeping in his drafty attic room, slipping out early mornings to fish on the Sound. That wasn’t very long ago, yet that world and this are very strange to each other already. It will not be very long before the world I know is just as far receded, and things are stranger still. It is a hard thing for humans; even if one were to remain always in the town of one’s birth, the space between moments inexorably grows, and there is no way home again, except by dying.

Jack knew this better than most, I suppose. He was, professionally and passionately, a student of the salmon, who never forget the stream of their rearing in their days as fry, parr, and smolt. They return only the in hour of their dying, changed beyond all recognition. It is a great labor, reaching their end at the beginning, and I do not know if they find any joy in it.

I read his book, once – Restoring Fraser River Salmon: A History of the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission, 1937-1985 – his account of a life’s work. I admit it was a tome, especially for one like myself, who lacks the single-minded, patient intellectual doggedness of the scientist. I’m unlike him in that respect, for my grandfather was a great scientist, possessed of the utmost quiet patience. I don’t understand how he lived for months alone in the wilderness tagging fish, or spent year after year in the slow, difficult, tedious – and, at the end, frustratingly political and ungrateful – work of protecting those precious fish. But I think I understand why he was able to do it all, and be a loving parent and grandparent, and a good neighbor, and a man of God, all to boot. It was all of it an act of love; not merely the affection of a fisherman for the sport, or the inquisitive affection of the scientist for his subject, but the long, meandering, unglamorous life of one man poured quietly out in care for his little corner of this world. Where does this river find its source? My grandfather’s love was, in fluvial terms, a distributary channel of the love of his Creator for the creation. And that is the gravel to which he has returned, in the same faith of those fish who, knowing not what will come after them, expend themselves in the inarticulate hope of new life rising with the spring meltwater.

I am not a strong swimmer; I am no salmon. Yet I will, I trust and hope, one day reach the head of that same stream, and die, and rise in the spring, and I will meet Jack Roos again where the river becomes one with the sea.

Music in November 2024

November begins with a grim defiance to which I am growing all too used, with I Won’t Lie Down and Still Waiting. Final Hour and Save Me are both broad strokes at the epic, but the latter swings so hard at melodic melodrama that it successfully sells itself without a shred of nuance whatsoever.

Termites is a frothy sonic tsunami that I wish were longer, but it probably is best for its own intensity that the wavelength is short. Next are two tracks from different albums by The Mountain Goats, and like so much of John Darnielle’s work, I find encouragement in the bitter injunctions to live, and melancholy in warm reminiscences.

Regina Spektor’s 2009 album Far features the aching Laughing With, aimed directly at humanity’s primal wound, our Lack; One More Time with Feeling provides a kind of template for hopeful persistence in the face of how we feel.

Holly Humberstone’s Can You Afford To Lose Me? drops its piano notes into a puddle of reverberating synths and filters that is so satisfying it overcomes the glumness of England. Under the Bridge is of course a Red Hot Chili Peppers standard, but this cover by Scala & Kolacny Brothers gives the chorus in particular an auroral height and a weight to match.

Where Are You Driving? matches Laura Veirs’ raw voice with a fascinating instrumentation to produce something with a searching emotionality. Rufus Wainwright’s Oh What A World is a strange composition, a sort of plodding, mounting march that builds into a bounding deployment of Ravel.

Your Ex-Lover Is Dead by Stars is one of the most beautiful pieces of alternative rock left to us by its heyday in the first decade of the century. So is Maps, which rolls in like waves under a stormfront. Souvenir is a soft-edged susurration; Naomi and Me & Suspended From Class both cheeky little ditties.

Zmi, Sigure Ros, and Saho Terao form a bridge of reflective sound into the exuberance of OFFICIAL HIGE DANDISM’s Traveler. Smooth Operator swings with such aplomb that you can’t help but let it lead the dance; Inner Smile has a different sound but the same chutzpah. Tom Jones, of course, really knew how to belt it out with the best of them, and Blondie just keeps turning the dial up as well.

I’ve become  a yacht rock guy, only without the yacht; there’s something about this lubricated jazzy odd corner of musical history that gives it power; it wraps itself so fully in its own silliness that it becomes Teflon, impervious to any scorn. And ELO’s 1977 Out of the Blue is plenty silly in its own fun way, as is, I suppose, David Bowie’s Suffragette City. George Harrison, on the other hand, is quietly quite emotionally serious in this strange song of detachment.

I’m not sure how I came across the work of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but I am certainly glad I did. Likewise with the Punjabi folk music of Hans Raj Hans, which is hard to not nod along with incessantly.

In 2015 Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, English composer Johnny Greenwood, and the Indian ensemble The Rajasthan Express, collaborated to produce Junun, an utterly remarkable album which is perhaps impossible to properly describe. I strongly recommend just listening to it. And Khan is a bizarre collision of bagpipes and throat singing.

Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham’s collab album has all the lilting, wistful tartness one might expect. Comrade reaches a point where it begins ascending an escalator and doesn’t come back down. Finally, See Her Out (Thats Just Life) by Francis and the Lights shimmers like a prism.

Music in October 2024

October begins with the eerie sirens of Susumu Hirasawa, the inimitable futuristic composer. Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ Self-Fulfilling Prophecy builds in ominous beauty; a far more uplifting chorale piece is Quindon Tarver’s Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good). Also from the Romeo+Juliet soundtrack, Craig Armstrong’s original score conveys more longing than it says by virtue of its restraint. And Humbert Humbert’s comforting voices will always find their way home to my ears.

Minnie Riperton’s 1970 album Come To My Garden begins with the gently yet insistently lovely Les Fleurs. Crash Test Dummies’ 1993 masterwork God Shuffled His Feet includes a whimsically atavistic camper’s daydream of primordial life. More importantly, it features Afternoons & Coffeespoons, a song whose chorus I chant inwardly like a mantra, redeeming the anxiety of the future by baptizing inevitable retirement in the hope of “afternoons…measured out in coffeespoons & T.S. Eliot.” The song is an anthem of triumphant defiance spitting in the face of time. And everyone already knows that Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill is one of the greatest albums of the ‘90s – what more is there to say?  

Ada Lea’s what we say in private is a sort of bleary, wall-eyed, yet quite pleasing little record. I wasn’t previously aware of The Beaches, but Desdemona is a very crushable cacophony, as are the bouncy technopunk of Reol and the beautifully bizarre 2992, by a band whose name I can’t copy because it’s Spotify, and cannot search because it appears to be written in a kind of runic wingdings I can’t even identify. Miya Folick is a reminder that we live in an age of abundance in terms of great musical artists to keep stumbling across, to the extent that it’s impossible to ever run out. A Pill to Crush feels like sinking into citric acid; jumping back two decades, Garbage puts so many interesting sounds in their music, from the bells in Cherry Lips to the hard-driving warped choral melody in Supervixen. Tripping Me Up is a sunkissed cat; Handle This this Sum 41 with a more resolute purpose than usual.

Money Changes Everything is one of those well-loved classics that is always worth revisiting to appreciate just how many elements get taken for granted. Come Undone  is ‘90s Duran Duran, and it feels closer to the smooth pop of that decade than to their earlier work. Hamilton Leithauser’s The Loves of Your Life is defiantly messy, hopeful, and loud. Rostam’s In a River has a slightly more folksy, reflective tenor. Tintinnabulum is classic Adiemus, warm nonsense with a spoonful of sugar. Never Understand is Asobi Seksu rushing to catch up to itself; Pocky & Sake is Sissy Bar experimenting with a lovely, weird instrumental interlude. Chapterhouse is not a band I really know, but I shall have to know them better going forward.

Marginalia #48 has all you want from Takagi’s musical drafts: diegetic weather, piano that feels at once muted and suspended, and the simplest core of a melody that feels like peace. Asirrera’s chorus is plaintive and dovelike; Echo Sax No.4 seems like noodling around on a saxophone, but it somehow conveys a great depth of feeling in its deceptive simplicity.

The Feminine Urge has an incredible melodic climbing line in the chorus, where it feels as though the voice is being plucked like a guitar string. One Kiss Ends It All might be from 2013, but Saturday Looks Good To Me’s album feels like it escaped from the late ‘90s, and is all the better for it. I Won’t Run From It uses its vocal heights to great emotional effect, as Volcano Choir’s Byegone does with its lick that feels like an anchor being suddenly drawn up from the sea. Ohashi Trio put out a new album last year that feels like they were soaking in the folk of half a century past.

Speaking of the past, Billy Joel is an American bard I have underrated and neglected relative to his talent and fame. The Stranger is so insistently compelling, and Scenes from an Italian Restaurant is the sort of song Millennials like me are supposed to hate – a sprawling, indulgent Boomer elegy – and I love it, even if it is the musical equivalent of Grease.

P.S. Eliot’s name is perfect for this mumblecore rock, as is the title of their 2009 album Introverted Romance In Our Troubled Minds. Gillis Mountain is one of my favorite songs from the great Canadian folk singers the Rankins. The evocation of both the sunny day in the present and the nostalgic memory of settlers just a few generations earlier is so strong and keening that I can feel the sunburn and taste the blueberries. The next couple of tracks are windswept fantasy tropes I found on the soundtrack to Riddle of Fire. John Williams’ score to Lincoln is a musical distillation of the longing I feel for a nostalgic childhood love of American history, which calls up both my patriotic fondness for Fourth of July concerts on the National Mall, and my aching for an America where we felt as though we were growing in character, despite our faults. Kazahana resounds with the joyful life only Takagi can release on the stage, and 2.3 Courante has an urgent beauty glimpsed in passing and then lost.

Big Time is Angel Olsen achieving a new kind of mastery encoding settled sentimentality into big sound that doesn’t feel melodramatic. Holly Humberstone’s Paint My Bedroom Black contains a kind of breathy autotuning that is far more compelling than it has any right to be.

Say I Am You is the second record from The Weepies, and I can’t believe I made it 19 years without hearing it, because it is precisely my speed of melancholic encouragement to persist at life, to simply persist, regardless of how awful one might feel. Finally, John Williamson’s 1986 Mallee Boy is one of the greatest pieces of art produced by Australia. Nothing makes me homesick for a foreign land quite like Williamson’s wistful tone.

Books I Read in 2024

I read 17 books in 2024, which if you can believe it is actually an improvement for me, though more in consistency of making a habit of reading than in pace. Since there are so few, I’m going to work up the list, with the note that all of these are good books I enjoyed. https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/118209919-andrew-bell?page=1&shelf=read-in-2024&sort=position

 17: Supernove Era, Cixin Liu, 2003

An earlier work by megahistory sci-fi visionary Cixin Liu, Supernova Era poses the question “what if the children inherited the earth – and only the children?” The premise of an unforeseeable generational discontinuity is too interesting to be fully explored by such a short and strangely-plotted book, which seems to end as if awaiting a sequel which never appeared, and there is also a sense of discontinuity within the narrative; but when the Epoch Clock blinks out, the sense of dreadful grandeur breaks through.

16: Culture Care, Makoto Fujimura, 2013

I’ve stumbled into knowing artist and theologian of art Makoto Fujimura not through his work, but by interacting with him on Twitter, where he impressed me first as a wise and calm voice in difficult times. Culture Care argues for a renewed centrality of the artist as a gardener of culture, read through a view of both creation and humanity that acknowledges the indispensability of beauty. While the pedagogical style of the writing doesn’t match the beauty of the book’s point, that point is both necessary and deeply encouraging.

15. God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert, 1981

The fourth book in the series inaugurated by the classic Dune, God Emperor is both the last in the series that I’m interested in reading (given the unfinished and rapidly declining quality reputed to the final books), and also the most interesting one after the original, though its quality does not rise to that level, and perhaps not even to the level of Messiah or Children. The account of the millenarian man-worm is thought-provoking in the extreme, and frustrates my attempt to make sense of the endless arguments about Herbert’s ultimate moral or political point – other than that his universe is unimaginably bleak.

14. When the Sleeper Wakes, H.G. Wells, 1899

H.G. Wells was one of the earliest authors I developed a fascination for in middle school, and this book is a kind of synecdoche for everything good and bad about him that captures the way these aspects of him are interrelated and cannot be teased apart. There’s Wells’ utopian social vision, a genuinely heroic emphasis on the fight for justice against the oppression of capital; there’s the way he frames this vision in ways that flatter Wells’ own class; there’s the dystopic dimension of the monumental future he envisions, especially present in hindsight; there’s my ever-present uncertainty about which parts of his vision are meant to read as aspirational and which as appalling – with Wells, I can never distinguish his fantasies from horrors; and then of course there’s the extremely  troubling marriage of his early progressive-era socialist politics, and an extremely base and disturbing social-Darwinist-inflected late colonial form of racism, which in this case is unfortunately central to the plot. But through all of this, the overwhelming imagery of the future, its mammoth windmills carving up the night, brutal riots in the subterranean dark, the smoking hulk of the Council Tower looming like the wreck of a second Bable, all combine to create a dream of unsettling vividness.

13. Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose, 2006

I first read Francine Prose’s guide to writing well by reading during the brief semester I spent as a creative writing major. I revisited the book several times as I taught composition, ransacking it for excerpts to assign to my own students, which I suppose is endorsement enough. I suppose it seems obvious that the key to writing well is reading well and widely, but sometimes obvious truths bear repeating, lest they be forgot.

12. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1923

Zamyatin is the darker and wiser child of Wells, a socialist with actual experience of a utopian-aspiring totalitarian society. A courageous man of integrity, Zamyatin was imprisoned by the Tsar while fighting for his revolutionary ideals as a Bolshevik prior to the 1917 revolutions in Russia, who in turn became a dissident against Bolshevik rule almost immediately after they took power and the brutal nature of the new state became clear. He has the honor of having written the first book banned by the Soviet government, and he demonstrated more chutzpah than perhaps any other author by writing directly to Stalin to request to go into exile, since he was not allowed to be published in Russia. Shockingly, Stalin assented. But Zamyatin is not simply an author and idealist with a film-worthy biography: We was banned for a reason – it is an extremely powerful and shockingly horrifying vision of well-intended dystopia that both predates and influences later writers like Orwell, while somehow also going further into a more extreme hopelessness than his successors ever did. There is a glaring and nightmarish brightness to this future, and a horror of the inescapable fate of this world. Zamyatin directly addresses Christianity, which he did not find to be an antidote, in his mind, to this blank eschaton – in fact, the novel suggests that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is perhaps a logical consequence of any universal moral claims taken to a logical extreme. But personally, I can only fall back desperately on a Christian eschatology of inexplicable hope in the face of ideas this disturbing.

11. The Big Burn, Timothy Egan, 2009

I admit that this history is pitched toward my biases and attachments; it valorizes the US Forest Service and provides heroes in the form of Teddy Roosevelt, and especially Gifford Pinchot, and all the foresters like Ed Pulaski, set against the villainy of cartoonish late gilded-age timber baron Senators. It’s noble bureaucrats as heroes, trying to save their corner of the world from shortsighted profiteers. This is perhaps a rosy view of things, but it’s a slice of American history I am very fond of. It also takes place in the great National Forests of the Northwest, where I grew up. I would even say that my preferred architectural and stylistic aesthetic is loosely represented by the term early-20th century Forest Service & National Park Service vernacular. I want to highlight two quotes which are worth remembering. The first is from Gifford Pinchot, founder of the National Forests, a man who accomplished a great deal, writing as he often did in his diary: "Footless, useless, selfish, dumb, and generally of no use to anybody...Rotten as usual...This uselessness probably a result of so much gadding about & so many late hours after that very severe western trip. Anyway, am disgusted with myself most thoroughly." I take this as a great encouragement, that someone so great was so frequently dispirited and dismissive of himself. The second quote is from President Roosevelt, who reminds us that “There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty.”

9. The Arabian Nights, Many & Unknown, at least 9th Century AD

For as much as we have to be cognizant of the dangers of othering & objectifying Orientalism, and this version of the stories arrived in English refracted through that prism, I do think that there is a valuable place in the imagination for the exotic, half-imagined land just beyond our horizon – and in fact, that is the role China plays in some of these tales. But the setting that most fixes my attention is that Dream of All Cities, Baghdad of the Abbasids. How I wish I could see it!

6. The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 1921

Cherry-Garrard speaks to us for the dead who surround him, only surviving member of the incomprehensibly hellish Winter Journey to Cape Crozier after Bowers and Wilson, beloved, heroic Wilson, were lost with the entire Polar Party. I have been to Fairbanks in winter, but I cannot conceive of the meaning of 109.5 degrees of frost, and with no heat but intermittent kerosene.

10, 8, 7, 5. Showa, Shigeru Mizuki, 1989

I logged the four volumes of Showa separately, but it really is a single continuous work of history unlike any other. In Japan, the reigning Emperor gives their official name to the years of their reign, fixing it in the calendar as their era. The Emperor Showa witnessed the wheel of fortune turn so many times for Japan that it might have been spinning. From the rubble of the devastating earthquake that destroyed Tokyo in 1923, Japan sank into ungoverned imperialist expansion abroad and the strangulation of its fledging democracy at home during the shocks of the Great Depression. Radical young right-wing military officers erupted against the state, even as it was suborned by plutocratic oligarchs. Then, the increasingly suicidal meatgrinder of war in the pacific, and finally the silent, ashy peace of near-total immolation. The purgatorial, strange moment of turning where the world pivoted into a new course; the new injustices and political struggles with the new establishment, so fearful of anything Red. And then, slowly, but surely, the burgeoning acceleration into the future, to the commanding heights of economic power, social stability, and technological and cultural prestige.

But this graphic novel is not a simple recap of the most incomprehensible period of Japanese history; it is also the autobiography of Shigeru Mizuki, the oddball delinquent turned soldier turned starving comic book artist, who inscribed the entire arc of those 63 years with his pen and his own life over that period. There is nothing quite like a history told my a man who lived through it, not as a politician or person of historical agency, but simply as a normal – if, perhaps not average, man.

When academics write about history and literature, they often play the game of periodization - how to divide up history into chunks, where to draw the lines between different cultural moments. There's an acknowledged artificiality, and ultimately a kind of futility to this - reality will always be slipperier than the words we use to describe it. But there is a reason we frame history into periods - it's because it is how we experience it. We only live a little sequence of history out, and that is our story on the earth. So to make sense of history, we have to put the story into terms we can likewise comprehend. I don't think this means that the true span of history lacks a narrative, nor that we will not be able one day to comprehend it in the way we do our lives. But that requires a different kind of Life.

I'm stuck thinking about this because Shigeru Mizuki performed perhaps the greatest act of periodization in writing his book. Japan formally denotes the passing of time by the reigns of its Emperors, and in that sense, the period was ready-made. Likewise, it is no great leap to observe that this period contained within it such turns of fate by which the world was repeatedly remade in unrecognizable forms, that it was well worth treating as a whole. The stroke of brilliance was framing this story through Mizuki's own life. In doing so, he created a Showa period that was legible to any human, not through historical anecdote, but by indexing events in the kind of life we all live in common, however surprising and different our particulars may be.

4. The Wise Men, Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, 1985

We need history, we need stories and heroes and villains (even if at turns the same people play both roles), to make sense of life – or at least that is my excuse for allowing this book to imprint too quickly and completely on my political identity. There is a large helping of nostalgic hagiography in this book, but it is also honest about the sins of the titular wise men, which include the implementation of Japanese internment on the part of McCloy, and Dean Acheson’s creation of the very Red Scare which ultimately undid his career. Despite this, the constructive good that these six friends did is pitched so squarely at my particular technocratic, institutionalist, globalist, liberal bias, my fantasies of C Street experts with real power, that reading it immediately elevated my view of the Truman administration to new heights. I realize that this is a dangerously imperial temptation I indulge – but I think it is also an aspirational corrective to the debased political imagination of the present, where the American so-called ‘deep state’ is being ripped apart by an overgrown man-child who lacks the capacity to imagine the possibility of gaining supreme power, and actually using it to better the world, as we once did. But there was no undefiled golden age of American statecraft – even at its best, they muddled through moral compromise, specious corruption, internal backstabbing and undeserved falls from grace, and the machine they built was a necessary foundation for repairing the world, but set in motion it proceeded to destroy countless lives inadvertently in the Periphery over the course of the Cold War. So, in sober caution and the humility of a nation that has done great harm, but also in the faith that it is possible to use power to do good, let us pick up the pieces of our shattered republic, resume the fight to sinew together the world, and raise a glass to Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, Bob Lovett, John McCloy, and the great Averell Harriman.

3. How Do You Live?, Genzaburo Yoshino, 1937

I personally am frightened of the question that is this book's title. Years of moral anxiety, coupled with an unyielding selfishness, have compounded to make me err on the side of assuming I am unwilling to live in whatever difficult way I feel I am supposed to, whatever that might be, and to treat the topic as a source of anxiety. And it is, I suppose. Still, this book does what the better sermons do (even though it is not a Christian book), not ending simply in conviction, but in comfort and peace. 

In 1937, Genzaburo Yoshino, a man who had already been persecuted by the thought police for his political activities, buried the vital core of his humane values in this officially inoffensive half-novel, half-essay written to prompt Japanese children to think about ethics and the responsibilities of being a person. While it exists as something which could only have been produced in that exact moment, it is also utterly universal. In fact, I think there are aspects of this book which would be unknowingly echoed by Lewis. I am particularly thinking about the inference of a world that is Right by experience of the world that is wrong. 84 years later, Hayao Miyazaki put the book into his film The Boy and the Heron, prompting it to be translated for the first time into English, for which I am immensely grateful. This is a painfully beautiful, direct examination of life, with all the honesty that is due to children.

"In the same way, when a person is living in a way that's not normal for a human being, suffering and hardships of the heart let us know that. So then, thanks to that pain and suffering, we can clearly grasp what a human being should naturally be. If it weren't natural for people to live together in harmony, then why would we suffer when we felt a lack of harmony? If we should try to live a life of love and goodwill toward others but instead find ourselves driven by hatred and hostility, we feel unfortunate because of that, and for that reason, we suffer. Furthermore, anyone should be able to cultivate their own talents and to work according to those talents, so people suffer when they can't do that, and feel they can hardly endure it. People feel sad and suffer like this because it's not natural to have such hatred and hostility toward each other. Also, because it's wrong that they cannot freely cultivate the talents with which they were born. Generally, when people feel they are miserable, when people suffer, it's because that kind of misery isn't natural. Copper, we must find a way to draw knowledge from all our suffering and sadness!"

2. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark, 2012

"Depend upon us, gentlemen, everything will be superb" - Russian Minister of Agriculture Alexander Krivoshein.

Perhaps the most affecting works of history I have read, and one which upended my impressions about which nations were primarily responsible for the conflagration. I realize that in some sense, my reaction throughout is perhaps in tension with the spirit and truth of the book - that the collapse into war was a tragedy with many fathers, and that the desire to affix blame has a tendency to collapse that reality into a false simplicity. Ultimately, the war was the rotten fruit of a shared imperialist culture, and its upstart cousin, irredentism (the same thing in a different mask), which all involved parties had formed themselves in over the course of the prior century. But I cannot resist pointing an accusatory finger, if only in response to the profound sense of historical injustice at the mirage of simple German aggression which has been public orthodoxy both because the Entente won, and then because after 1945 German academics themselves were invested in examining their own Prussian sins - not incorrectly, but incompletely.

Section 1, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles reads as follows: "The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her Allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies."

This article is a lie. Frankly, in the interests of historical truth and justice, I wish the United States would formally retroactively disavow and remove its signature from the treaty. Do not read into this the slightest excusal of what Germany chose to do with its narrative of victimhood from the treaty - there is a perverse faction at work even today which seeks to cloak its malevolence in the nuances of once having been wronged. Reality is far more complex, and it is possible for two things to be bad at once. But let us be clear: while Germany bears some responsibility for the war, and certainly bears the degree of responsibility which can be assigned to some incompetence at the outset, it is not the guiltiest party. The Kaiser was a buffoon, not a warmonger; the Schlieffen plan was an automated mechanism of death, a sort of proto-dead hand device - but it emerged in a context. And in that context of years of decisions leading up to the war, one thing becomes terribly clear: the Entente has lied to us, or we have entertained their lies. For years prior to the war, key leaders in each of the Triple Entente states envisioned a war which would begin along very similar lines to how it actually did, contemplated the possibility, and accepted it as either not something to necessarily avoid, or in fact as a potential boon. I oversimplify - all the players were diffuse and complex, internally fractious - not just the governments, but in some cases (Lord Grey) the people. But the machinery of alliance was not simply a happenstance - they built it, piece by piece, and they were not totally blind to how it would work - even if they were insulated psychologically from the idea that it would actually come to that, or what, in fact That would be.

In conclusion, there is no power without blood on its hands, especially since all governments, even in the best countries, commit violent injustices, and the governments of Europe in 1914 were monstrous imperialists. But there are different kinds of blood-guilt. The Ottomans were innocent casualties. The Italians were feckless and fickle. The Germans were selfish and quick to attack in their fear - but their fear was not unfounded, and their situation was far more constrained than their enemies - and they were not really on the wrong side. Britain and France may have been the nicest, wealthiest, most liberal countries to live in, but as the wealthiest, most powerful colonial empires, with the greatest degree of latitude, they bear special responsibility - they chose to commit themselves to the possibility of this scenario, years earlier - and they really did have the option not to. For Britain, it was the cold calculus of protecting its stolen lands in Asia by keeping the Russians friendly; for the French, their bruised political ego from 1871 and their fear of Germany led them to start down a corrupting path; by the time August 1914 arrived, their leaders were already sanguine about the prospect of war. Serbian irrendentism was of course the inciting spark of the war, enabled and fed by elements of Serbia's government, and moreso by its populist political culture, and it is hard to avoid seeing Belgrade as a special source of evil in the course of 20th century politics - but Serbia was a small country, and the war would not have escalated if it had just been between them and Austria. For that, the culprit must be Russia, whose choices led directly to the outbreak of general war - choices motivated by a structure of beliefs adopted by a culture of leaders who saw the world in fundamentally self-serving terms: Russia had rights to lead all Slavs, Russia had rights to preempt any other power in controlling the Turkish Straits (at the expense of the Ottomans), Russia had rights to interests in the Balkans, while to them Austria had no right to self-defense. But do not think I am simply trying to excoriate Russia because we are presently in conflict with them - this was of course a different Russia in a different time. No, in fact I almost feel more anger towards the French leadership who seemed happy to move things closer to war for their own egoist purposes, or toward the British who have so mythologized the conflict into a noble struggle, obscuring the fundamentally indefensible motives and the sheer negligence on the part of the leadership. It is a special kind of privilege to see the possibility of a war, and yet to feel unthreatened by it to the degree of ambivalence. And they should have known better.

Austria-Hungary, for all its faults, was a decent country by the standards of its day, and was murdered by opportunistic vultures. Germany was a guilty imperialist aggressor, but it was cornered, provoked, and then framed as the monster which it then proceeded to become. The winners, meanwhile, patted themselves on the back, created a papier mache 'world-peace', and ruined the 20th century for everyone.

1. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, 1951

I wrote a whole post about my complicated reaction to finally completing this most influential of modern theological works, which I link here: https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/on-finishing-mere-christianity

Become Better Than This

I want to be perfectly clear so that I am impossible to misconstrue: Donald Trump has legitimately won a democratic election, and that notwithstanding, his Presidency notwithstanding, his popularity notwithstanding, none of that makes him or his movement normal, respectable, or acceptable. There is, I suppose, little point in trying to heap rebuke upon the shameless, and I’m not going to waste words that will simply be mocked and ignored. So I will be brief.

Some of you doubtless struggle to relate to the way in which I see our political moment. Perhaps it feels normal because you are younger than me, and do not remember a politics prior to Trump – but I do. I remember the way in which normal, reasonable, moral Americans of both parties reacted to him during his first campaign, and I remember those who then defected and betrayed the truth they had previously averred. I remember election night in 2016, when it became clear that the course of history would allow Trump’s followers to continue to mock the good and tell themselves that they had done nothing wrong, because they had gotten away with it, and now we are back there again, only worse. My views on a number of issues have changed over the past decade, but my views on Trump and his ilk have been steady and consistent. So while I understand if you find him normal because you grew up in this moment, if like many of Trump’s voters you find him normal simply because time has passed, and he’s been around, and people treat this as a normal reality – then that concession to the monstrous is precisely why I insist on being so loudly insistent that he is not normal or acceptable. He only seems so because people have allowed themselves to act as if it were so.

Some of you may wonder why I don’t have anything nice to say about the inauguration, or Trump’s speech. After all, I am someone who believes the United States faces many crises, some of which he gestured to, and I believe we need optimistic, ambitious, patriotic leadership. I even think spending money on space colonization is actually a good thing to do. But Trump is to this sort of strong leadership what the golden calf was to the God of Sinai. He can point out problems, he can claim values, but none of that qualifies him or his policies to further even the goals of his which are not intrinsically objectionable. America does need reform, and common sense, and strong leadership, and Trump is a sorry mockery of the genuine article, and he makes a mockery of all who support him. And as for his promises, even if Trump somehow changes tomorrow, and only does good instead of evil, and the economy soars, and peace breaks out across the world, and all his gassed-up followers feel totally vindicated in their vote, none of that will retroactively justify or excuse in any way the choice they made to vote for him, knowing what we knew at the time.

Some of you raise the objection that I am a committed liberal democrat, in the sense of supporting liberal democracy, and a democratic majority of the country elected Trump. How can I respect the will of the people and speak so ill of their choice? I have three responses.

First, the people are allowed to make a wrong choice, and while that grants it democratic political legitimacy, it has no relation whatsoever to moral rectitude. The great national evils of American history have all been popular in their day, and that popularity did not excuse them in any way.

Second, we are neighbors, we inevitably share a community – and I do not want things to be otherwise. I want to go on in relationship with all of you, I want all people everywhere to be reconciled. But when we talk about the concept of the American people as a body with a political will, in this moment, we are riven. The good news is that in this, we are not so different nationally from a single soul, riven and in conflict with itself, as we all are; the bad news is that, when I hear some of the things that people today say and do who claim to speak on behalf of groups I belong to, it is hard not to completely disown them and say that we are not in community with one another.

Finally, the way to repair a popular moral breach is by a moral reformation of the people. I can condemn utterly the result of our democracy, and yet remain committed to democracy as a proposition and principle. The way forward is for Americans to recognize the reality of their actions, and begin to choose to be better.

Music in September 2024

Life Is drops one straight into the stream, intersecting ripples concatenating and reproducing themselves out toward the shore.

Heroes is of course Bowie’s best work, but the whole eponymous album is good, and My Rights Versus Yours is another refreshing breath from Challengers, one of my favorite albums. There is a kind of wellspring of melancholy-tempered and thus melancholy-proof optimism. Sinead O’Connor’s later work isn’t her best, but her voice has a peculiar quality that makes Where Have You Been? stand on it’s own. Regina’s 2004 album Soviet Kitsch is a strange delight which dances through the eerie white Moscow night.

Wipala, Inkuyo’s Inca flute track featured on the Baraka soundtrack, makes me want to head directly for the Andes and not look back, and Flying lives up to its name with an abundant surge of energy reaching for the sky. world.execute (me); is another weird indigo dream from Mili.

Tigers Blood, Waxahatchee’s newest album, is a beautiful Texas elegy, and Spilt Milk and I Figured You Out share a country air with different moods. Hello Rain gazes contentedly at drops erupting on the surface of the puddles, and Man in the Moon is great sleepy Portland garage indie. Angie McMahon’s 2024 EP Light Sides may be short, but its weight exceeds its runtime.

Orinoco Flow is probably familiar to most people, and it is certainly Enya’s most memetic and catchily silly track, but it got that way for good reason. Sunbears! The Floor is Lava! feels less like their early work, and more like something cribbed from Walk the Moon about ten years ago, but it’s nice to have such boundless energy, and I Found Heaven has an excellent resonant sound. The guitar riff in Red Shoulder is impeccably catchy, like an autumn eddy dragging the listener under.  

Russian techno remixes are way outside my normal wheelhouse, but Uebok Gotta Run, as bluntly loud and crude as it is, is just fun. Born to Lose is Sleigh Bells dropping a hammer on your knees in a joyful way, while Many Moons is Janelle Monae at her most spacy and weirdly profound. Montaigne’s Please You is a shout for liberation from her superb 2019 album Complex. “There’s a forest in my gut that just wants to feel a pancake” is a lyric that sticks in my brain because it is strange and heartfelt and also makes me hungry. Manhattan is CHVRCHES back in a chorus of light.

Tomberlin’s 2018 album At Weddings is soft, strained, sad, and undeniable, and Ada Lea’s work is likewise bitter with tannins like the oversteeped earl grey I used to drink. The Greatest Love is London Grammar at full flush of symphonic scale and depth; The List is Maisie Peters at her closest, most heartfelt.

Back in their heyday I recall a lot of jokes about the exaggerated and undeserved popularity of Coldplay, and I think there was some truth to that, but Viva La Vida has really held up with age for me, twisting its way like a worm through the brain. Mitski’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is yet another masterpiece to add to her procession of artistic triumphs. When the full chorus suddenly burst out in Bug Like an Angel, the hair on my neck stood up, and I knew I was going to love the album; When Memories Snow has a weird and tortured horn element, and Star has the force of a benediction.

It's Infinite is a nice little piece of sad indie, like so much that I love, and Big Thief’s Capacity is a whole album of it, and quite a lot more beside. Bookmark is essentially that – just a momentary musing on the piano from Tota, all the more affecting for its muted brevity. Cecile Corbel’s new album of Arthuriana, Graal, is a good addition to her oeuvre of contented Breton fairy-dances. The late Ryuichi Sakamoto did some of his last work composing the score for Koreeda’s Monster, one of the most moving films of 2023, and Sakamoto at the end of his life is as great as he ever was, perfectly capturing both rising, unspeakable tension, and then elegiac resolution. Finally, I suspected I would like the work of The Weepies as soon as I saw their name, but let’s be honest, I came to Say I Am You for the wonderful Deb Talan. These three songs are particularly special and aimed directly and with no hint of dissembling at the core human need to be known and loved.  

On Finishing ‘Mere Christianity’

I have danced around finishing Mere Christianity, perhaps the most influential explication of my faith in the last hundred years, for quite some time. I’ve had it on my shelf for well over a decade, I’ve started it several times, and until this last year, never got very far into it. That’s no reflection on Lewis’ writing, which is impeccable, nor is the book a difficult or unengaging read – in fact, its brevity, clarity, and unpretentious style are a large part of why it has had such a reach. But I find almost any thorough discussion of theology which attempts to cover all the essential points almost inherently stressful to engage with. It’s work, for me, emotionally, because I read everything looking for implications that set off my anxiety about what I should be doing, but am not, or I encounter reminders of aspects of my faith which I am scared to look at. I don’t think this is an ideal or healthy way to engage with faith, but if anything it is in this context an endorsement of the book. Because Mere Christianity is, to my mind, probably the most emotionally and intellectually compelling framing of orthodox Christianity for modern western culture, it short-circuits my tendency to justify defensiveness at doctrines I struggle with by blaming them as harsh or unreasonable, and instead leaves me feeling exposed with my own anxieties and recalcitrances in front of concepts that make sense, but whose implications I fear.

I’ve lived for a long time with a kind of anxiety about the question of certainty around salvation that is bound up in my OCD, my tendency to require absolute certainty, and to frame things in extreme all-or-nothing terms. This intersects with my historically frequent willful rebellion, and my tendency to both feel highly scrupulous about what I should do, and to assume a total unwillingness to actually do it. How to parse attribution for any of my feelings between emotional and mental health symptoms, and actual conviction of sin, is exactly the question I can’t or won’t allow myself to finally answer, either because of OCD or because I’m holding out to get my own way – depending on the answer. And such ruminations are, I have been told, unproductive and unhealthy.

In this context, I have since childhood deployed my feeling of being made anxious, or taking umbrage at things in scripture, as a sort of unformed protest against understandings of doctrine that I assent to but dislike. In recent years I have come to feel more at peace with much of orthodoxy, both because I actually experience the wisdom of it in practice, or because I come to a different emotional understanding of what’s behind it, or because I accept more uncertainty as Mystery. But, at the same time, I have if anything become less tolerant of intellectual uncertainty about ultimate safety, and I have come to credibly hope that there might be some possibility of a universal redemption within orthodox Christianity – and as soon as that feels like a possibility, it becomes an emotional need to believe in. Charitably, this is because I have too much imaginative empathy to contemplate anyone perishing eternally as compatible with the kind of peace we are to have in Christ; cynically, it is because I do not want to have to be responsible to try to repent and bear fruit when I don’t feel like it, or else have any uncertainty about my own safety; and whichever of those might be true, it is certainly also because I find any possibility of being lost based on what does or not do, or what choice one makes, to be an unacceptable source of fear, even as a theoretical possibility.

To someone like myself, then, engaging with Mere Christianity is both absolutely essential for being open to the truth, and it is also fearful, because even though the book is in many ways reassuring and paints a picture of God and Christianity that more than sufficiently answers many of the most popular emotional objections people have to it, that very success of its apology leaves me frightened that my emotional desire to demand a kind of cruciform Christian universalism is actually unsympathetic, insincere, unjustifiable – that perhaps I am unwilling to accept things, and am also in the wrong on that, and because I do not want to have to change to be safe, or do not feel able to do so sincerely enough to feel secure, what I fear most is being left in a position where I know I am wrong and can choose not to be, but have not already done so and do not want to, with dire consequences.

The fear is that, if a doctrine I’ve refused to reconcile with peace and sanity, the idea that there is a risk people can be lost, can make sense and be true, and the way it does is by God simply allowing people to be unwilling, allowing them freedom – which of course, He does – that opens two troubling possibilities.

First, that the things I care about, which I don’t feel can be exchanged for better things without loss, because every thing is specific in its aesthetic quiddity – better is still different – that those things might be worthless or evil, and to live I might have to ultimately give them up and become a person whose feelings and tastes and values are alien to myself, or –

That if I am unwilling to be so transformed (and I don’t want to believe I am under pressure to have to be more willing than I’ve already decided to be), then I worry about my ability to have certainty of safety. Of course, this all-or-nothing position on anxiety is quite likely an excuse to get my own way.

Lewis writes “Handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus is you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”

To this, I always return with the same objection in practice – how can I try to obey in a less worried way, if not trying means that I should be worried (and again I start from the premise that I am not trying to do all that I should, partly to be safe, and partly because I do not want to have to do more than I have decided to accept now). So perhaps the objection is in bad faith, seeking to change the topic to my anxiety as a disorder, in order to not actually have to repent. This of course then turns the screw of anxiety tighter, as long as I won’t give up the position that I’m not willing to try. But if I were to try, as I have done many times, I would quickly fall into the same trap on some other rung of the ladder. I know I have a problem with scrupulosity, but I worry that behind my anxiety is not simply a sympathetic mental disorder I must disregard, but an occasion for pride – a refusal to say God is right and I am wrong about the Good, at least in some things. And I either seem unable to trust that God’s love will overcome my pride – unless it does for everyone, hence universalism – or that I simply do not want the responsibility of choosing. But perhaps it is wrong to frame it as a choice between two things. Life and death, after all, are not mirrored equivalent states: they are presence and absence. Only one of the two is real.

Perhaps I have been going about things backwards, having been warned in advance not to let my own feelings determine what I call good, and have instead been scrupulously careful to assent to the belief that the Good proceeds from God and has that objective form on its own, which might be disconnected from how I feel about it. This is not really wrong, but over the years I have come to err on the side of assuming that whatever I find good will be taken away or is a deception; and, in a desire to not have to permanently sacrifice anything I do find good, I have framed all my religious anxiety from the standpoint of taking for granted that I will not accept God’s definition of the Good. This is a defensive posture, an irrational rhetorical reflex to make something unacceptable and therefore untrue, if I am to be healthy and at peace, as I should be. And the corollary, reinforcing belief, is that if I am wrong, then to climb down from this precarious perch requires unburdening myself of everything I do not want to give up – a kind of total abnegation. But suffering for its own sake is not what we see in the Gospels or in the life Lewis led (and for all his self-admitted faults I do consider him a role model). In his book, Lewis suggests that we recognize the Good, because it is good – taste and see that the Lord is good, scripture says. What does that mean, if not to give hope that what we find good, our experience of good, if not dispositive remains imperfectly indicative of ultimate good, and the parts that seem to be missing now from that eschaton will in fact be painted in colors we cannot imagine?

While I worry that I am reading into all spiritual reassurance the easiest, most favorable interpretation for myself, and deceiving myself by taking umbrage at anything harder, and in so doing, doubt the hope that I try to grasp, nevertheless I am encouraged by Lewis’ words on hope:

“Most of us find it very difficult to want ‘Heaven’ at all – except in so far as ‘Heaven’ means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognise it. Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean… The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

This is the passage from Mere Christianity that I have carried about with me for many years as the argument that our desires will be deferred, and yet met – not denied. Of course I struggle greatly with the problem of some desires being or seeming intrinsically evil, and the idea that people’s desires must be transformed to enter this new country. And if it is possible someone could or would refuse God, that must be, it often seems to me, because there is some real difference between the desire they will not surrender and the Good, and if there is a real difference, it implies uniqueness, which implies inexchangeability, because aesthetics are not fungible: you cannot replace one rose with a better rose and say there is no loss, as long as they are different, because beauty is unique and if any is missing, that is a loss. So I try to read in Lewis an affirmation that somehow, in a way I cannot understand, nothing I desire will be missing, not simply through some kind of transformation of character, but through an abundance which puts to shame the apparent logical contradictions of this world. Still, I fear this is a dodge, a refusal to give up the longing for some part of evil. It would seem too good to be safe to believe. And yet, when Christ spoke of the Kingdom to come, he did so in terms his hearers would understand and relate to, in their needs and longings. He began by feeding and healing, rather than telling people that they wanted the wrong things. At the well in Sychar Christ taught that those who came to the well were not wrong in the wanting, but that they did not want enough.

Of course, this feels like it flirts with excusing or endorsing all desires, when we know perfectly well from experience that people desire to harm themselves or others. And it feels like an easy way out, an undemanding theology, a way to have and eat cake. But I am forgetting that the sacrifice, the trade-off, of Christianity is not the shedding of earthly desires in exchange for nirvana, it is the sacrifice of Christ, in whose death and resurrection perhaps we do have and eat cake. And in fact, in the doctrine of the Trinity, the Holy Paradox, there is a glimmer that contradictory truths can be reconciled. In discussing how God can be an individual and a community at the same time, Lewis turns to our real preoccupation: what is to become of us?

“Some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be ‘absorbed’ into God. But when they try to explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as one material thing is absorbed into another. They say it is a like a drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that is the end of the drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves – in fact, be very much more themselves than they were before.”

Again, I worry I am trying to stitch together a soteriology I can accept from a corpus of scripture that in many ways frightens or admonishes me, and I am exquisitely sensitive to the fear of the pleasant self-delusion. And yet, if the Gospel is truly Good News, then perhaps the truth, properly understood, will feel like something one would want to believe, a story one would tell oneself, if only one had the imagination. But then, why would anyone refuse it, properly understood, and be lost? Perhaps no one will.

When I finished the book, I wrote in my journal that I was left, as always, with the feeling that the invitation of the Gospel was a terrifying threat, and that hearing it again required me to do what I always do, and run to other Christians for reassurance of safety, which I always second-guess because I am attempting to see if I can feel safe while refusing to give myself up, and any way out of that rock-and-hard-place feels like a false hope. But there was no one around to talk to. I was in bed, in a cabin by the banks of Caswell Creek, in Alaska, in winter. So I went outside, into forty degrees of frost. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw above me more points of light in the firmament than I had seen since I was a child in the Australian bush. I knew I would always doubt any reassuring closure; and yet, at some point we have to move on. In that moment, between shivers, I thought that at the end of all thought, one must trust the Person who made the stars so beautiful for us to see.

Music in August 2024

This playlist kind of got away from me in terms of length, but in my defense I listened to a lot of music in August, starting with the jubilantly shouting merry-go-round of I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, a collaboration album between Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam. Haru Nemuri’s 2022 album SHUNKA RYOUGEN is a roiling conflagration tearing through late summer’s dry weeds. Bellevue mellows into a warm summer medley, while the great Australian singer John Williamson’s recording of True Blue has lived in my head since I got a CD of Australian folk songs twenty-four years ago. In Love With a Ghost is a different sort of electronic quiescence than the acoustic piano I usually prefer, typified by the Great Takagi’s Ageha (Gassho), which like so much of his best work is recorded with all the ambient noise of the locale and all the momentary idiosyncrasies of the people there, caught as in amber. Takahiro Kido’s Sakura makes a more muted melancholy, while MEITEI’s Oiran II warps traditional sounds into eerie strains.  I am so happy to have stumbled across Marmota’s Tuvan throat singing, straight from the Steppe, which carries me along like the wind in the grass, and I am likewise delighted to have discovered Bulgarian folk music, in all its wan grandeur. Rounding off these instrumentals is the ominous triumph of the conquistadors, Vangelis’ Conquest of Paradise. I am told the film was a flop; as far as I’m concerned, the album certainly is not.

In 1999, a year my generation will probably freeze in popular culture as the ultimate locus of nostalgia, the Last Good Time, just like the Boomers did with 1955, The Magnetic Fields put out a massive three-disk album, 69 Love Songs, which actually does have exactly that many tracks. Each of these is unique, and each is touching and humorously romantic, and I love them. I want to particularly shout out the delightful whistling noise of I’m Sorry I Love You, and the fact that they actually wrote a song about the great semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, possibly the last person I expected to show up in popular culture. Similarly warm and comforting is The Red Birds’ 1971 album Takeda No Komoriuta, featuring the sky-reaching Tsubasa wo Kudasai (Please Give Me Wings). Secret Shine and Pale Saints both offer fuzzy sound from the start of the ‘90s, which slips nicely into Hitsujibungaku’s honestly.

There are so many strange and lovely elements to The Girl’s Distracted, especially the strings that come in near the end. Slaughter Beach, Dog’s 2017 album Birdie is a distinctly mopey record in a way that plays well during a rainy-day August. Barrie’s Unholy Appetite, by contrast, might be sung in low tones, but it is undeniably upbeat and optimistic. The Slingers’ Little Conversations is a eulogy with a point worth being reminded of – that life is a dance we must learn in reverse; we don’t know what we should have done until it’s too late. Also, the descending piano chords at the end of the song are magnificent. Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird’s 2022 Smiles of Earth is definitely an oops-all-bangers record that has to be heard to be believed.

Bear McCreary has written some excellent scores for Battlestar Galactica and The Rings of Power, but he can be a bit self-derivative, and his Foundation score is on the whole far too close a copy of his work on ROP, but there is something in the sound that feels expansively deliberate, like slowly crossing the starry road. Marco Beltrami’s score to the remake of 3:10 to Yuma is not simply a successful ratcheting of tension; it carries within it the great moral suspense of the final setpiece. Gary Gunn wrote one of the most lushly enchanting original scores of recent years for A Thousand and One, and it sounds like nothing else I know.

James Street Tonight has a chorus of longing that rises and falls like the tall grass under the breeze. Aimee Mann’s 2002 album Lost In Space is another masterpiece to follow up her soundtrack to Magnolia. There is a resigned authority in her voice, giving the last word on the world she depicts. Minnie Riperton’s It’s So Nice (To See Old Friends) is just the sweetest thing. I miss you all. Go Places is a cool grey day after rain, like so much of The New Pornographers’ work.

Then I’m back to ska and the ‘90s with Where’d You Go, truly a silly song (complimentary). Classics of Love is perhaps even sillier, and its beat must be acknowledged. And then, of course, is Chumbawamba’s great fin-de-siecle working-class album, Tubthumper, a kind a grandly ironic end of history sound we just don’t get anymore.

Death Penalty Dog: is a song whose meaning I don’t quite know, but I do know that it is angry, and wonderfully so. Arcade Fire’s work on Neon Bible, however, has the energy of a dove beating its wings against a cage, trying to break free. Regina Spektor’s 2006 album Begin to Hope is a complete tour de force in her strange oeuvre. Just My Imagination may be late Cranberries, but it fits right into their wistful work. Learn To Like It and Pendulums are both folksy songs to come to terms with life to. Pilgrim is Enya’s answer to Robert Frost’s wooded crossroads, imbued with all her otherworldly reverence. It’s Blitz! is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at full power, able to seem both threatening and vulnerable at turns.

Carter Burwell’s score for Carol is one of the most beautiful pieces of film composition of the previous decade, so methodically mournful, emotionally unbound but restrained in its expression of that. Javelin is yet another wonderful work from Sufjan, whose emotional consistency is one of the great mainstays of my listening habits. Finally, we end with the end of ELO’s Time, one of the best albums of the early ‘80s, which looked into the future we now live in with curiosity and a sense of adventure, yet still longed for home.

2023 Photos

Yes, these are from 2023, not 2024. If the mills of Andrew grind slowly, I hope they at least grind tolerably small. https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBWQRR

The Turning of the Wheel

2024 was a year of major events with ramifications we will only come to know after it has gone. We know that events of great consequence have happened, but what exactly the consequences of the election, the fall of Assad, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the planet as a whole nearing or perhaps reaching the peak of its population growth, the instability of democratic governments around the world – these are portents we cannot yet read.

Setting all of that aside, 2024 was a very good year for me, personally. I got to spend far more time with my family than I had expected, explored more of Alaska than I thought I would get to, grew to sincerely enjoy more and more of my work, developed routines and habits I didn’t think I would ever get around to, and made a number of friends.

My hope for 2025 is that I will continue to grow closer to others, and that it will snow very soon so that I can actually practice with my new skis.

The Answer to Fear & Hope

Once our present moment and its real problems slips past, and it is always passing, two great problems of soul remain: fear, including what causes might warrant it, and hope – or rather, the need for more than the absence of pain, but for true fulfillment without expiry. Or at least that is how it feels to me.  Almost anything, perhaps in fact anything, can be borne for a time if the problem is temporary and the solution permanent, and this is exactly what I struggle with. I fear anticipated future pain, reasonable and unreasonable; I fear decline; I fear missing out on anything and everything; I fear being lost, and being self-deceived about that, and this last sum of all fears makes me struggle also to have hope for a future beyond whatever I might fear. I’m not writing this to worry anyone who might see this as a cause for sympathetic alarm – these are not new problems, and I have made a great deal of progress with them over the years. But they are persistent anxieties, perhaps because they are ultimate ones, or perhaps it is simply because of a fault in myself, a weakness. As I have grown older and have in fact developed far greater self-control in practice, I have paradoxically come to feel less and less willing to accept a commitment to any sort of prospective suffering or austerity, less able to cope with the idea of life getting worse – or perhaps defensively inflexible about the definition of ‘worse.’ Any uncertainty that leaves open the possibility of any pain or decline that does not resolve in joy eventually seems an unacceptable risk, inimical to mental peace. And I am more conscious than ever of my unwillingness to sacrifice in the present enough that I could ever believe the future secure. And security is not enough to live on; we must have a future to hope for, not some negation of suffering. Living merely toward oblivion or the release from samsara is not Life.

I’ve talked a fair amount about my Christianity, and I have no hidden agenda in bringing it up – it is the great preoccupation of my mind, which I could not sincerely avoid when discussing my feelings, if I even wanted to. The promise of Christ was never simply security and salvation, but for us to have Life, to the full – but I struggle with what that means, and in turn I consequently struggle with the fear of missing whatever it does mean. Theology in practice, passed down through the Church, doesn’t always feel like it speaks with equal eagerness or satisfying clarity to all human anxiety and desire. Milk and honey, fellowship, feasting, and song are easy to place in the Eschaton – and as a metaphor, it should seem broad enough to encompass all our hopes and dreams. But what if our desires are transitory and temporal, or are bad? Where does one locate the particular, nonfungible aesthetics of sexuality in the Eschaton, and what about the negative feelings which are still a component of heartfelt desire – the anger one feels, usually some mixture of rightly and wrongly all at once, or simple pride, the desire to make oneself great. It is difficult to imagine on an emotionally comprehensible level how these things can be either replaced or redeemed without becoming unrecognizable. And out of this anxiety about what exactly we have to hope for, comes both the fear of missing out, and the fear that if it is possible to reject a perfect future, it must be because one refuses to accept it as satisfying, which seems to suggest both fears as reasonably possible.

I’m very open about all of this all year round, but I bring it up on Christmas because, at the risk of narrating theology into a shape I can more easily accept, I believe the Incarnation has to be the answer to both the fear of loss & the uncertainty of what to hope for. I don’t want to go too far into making God’s promises neatly match my feelings about the good, the bad, and the beautiful, nor do I dare to get into the tortured question of whether or not anyone will ultimately miss out on Life.  But in becoming a human, who clearly had every feeling and desire and pain that is natural to our species, God exposed Himself to all that we fear – including disunion with Himself – and left Himself everything to hope for in a future, anticipated now that He had stepped into time. I haven’t resolved this issue of fear and hope in my life in a way I find satisfying, but I am trying to choose to believe that when Christ promises that “all these things shall be added unto you,” there is a way for that to be true, even if our dark glass is too dim to perceive how. I think it is necessary for there to be a way to know that we have no cause to fear, and that beyond whatever passing cause exists is a future in which all our hopes can find purchase. Perhaps I am downplaying the extent to which we must be transformed – I struggle with this because I do not think a better thing can necessarily replace a worse thing if there are differences, because there is something of life in the differences – so it is possible I am veering off course. I haven’t arrived. But by becoming a human, and going through ultimate loss, and then demonstrating the promise of hope, for a human, I believe Christ’s incarnation is a seal on the promise that all shall indeed be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Normalization & Neighborliness

“I felt I was incomprehensibly in radical opposition to all my friends, that my views of matters were taking me more and more into isolation, although I was and remained in the closest personal relationship with these men – and all that made me anxious, made me uncertain. . . . and I saw no reason why I should see things more correctly, better than so many able and good pastors, to whom I looked up –and so I thought that it was probably time to go into the wilderness for a while.”

-      Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Something has happened to my feelings around politics, which I feel compelled to discuss because I find it worrying – and yet I fear this is another case of writing about a fault in myself in order to air out my moral discomfort with it, without any willingness to actually change. Deflection by articulation, so often rewarded by people who compliment or encourage me based on things I say, which I both believe, but which I feel I know I am saying out of wrong motives. The crux of the problem is the intersection between indignation and arrogance. There is certainly good reason for righteous anger at the burgeoning injustice and simple pointless foolishness of our society, and I think there is perhaps even an obligation, if we are able, to say so. There’s no need to catalogue the reasons for this here; you can probably bring a whole list straight to mind with no prompting, and if you disagree with my fundamental position on the situation, I lack the ability to make such a rehearsal more persuasive than what can be seen with one’s own eyes. So I don’t have much insecurity about the actual views I espouse, other than the normal insecurity of a person with an over-scrupulous and threat-hedging mind that will always be second-guessing in all things.

What I do feel troubled by is the spirit in which I say things, and the motive energy behind that. I do feel guilty that I am being too sharp or mean, even indirectly, to friends and neighbors, and that I am exercising a kind of selective hypocrisy, whereby I chart a Rubicon on the timeline the day Trump came down the escalator, and turn my sincerely shocked and dismissive reaction to that into a litmus test, a kind of Great Sorting, despite the fact that my own views have changed dramatically over time, and despite the fact that people live in markedly different worldviews, both in terms of the information they acquire, the heuristics they use to assess and prioritize it, and the things they value. Of course I realize that the majority of people who support the President-Elect simply do not see the same thing as me when we look at him (though there is a very loud contingent who do, and who like it – and continual engagement on the internet stokes and exaggerates this spectre in my mind as a windmill to tilt against. Except it is no longer just a windmill, because this loudmouth trollish tail is wagging the dog of state, its sails actually sprouting gigantic legs and coming down off the tower to goose-step across La Mancha). So I do think that I have frequent bad motivations – finding a legitimate field in which to cultivate anger, to give vent to snobbishness, to stunt on people who haven’t had time or wherewithal to be more informed (while of course not applying the same lens to myself for all the things I don’t yet know).

The tension is that I want to be open about that, and self-critical, but I also do not want to give any oxygen to the fire that is burning through our political culture. Writing this paragraph there is present at once the feeling that I am engaging in self-deception by continuing to focus on the external political evil I wish to castigate, rather than beginning with the logjam in my own eyes, because I am too proud to give up a position, and also the feeling that I want to be certain that nothing I say is read as a retreat from any position. I’m not certain how to parse out the truth from my own words in my own mind, even if the audience were only myself. That is also part of the issue – a desire to work against the scrupulous second-guessing of all my own feelings or views, to move toward what might be a healthier ability to be direct and honest and take a side or fully commit to a feeling; but of course, that also seems like a way to excuse all manner of sin. These are live, unresolved epistemological problems that befoul everything I think, and at a certain point I have to note them and move on.

Normalization

What I want to defy is the cultural normalization of a kind of illiberal, far-right nationalist/crypto-fascist creep, and the entire apparatus of Trumpism, and the mainstreaming of dangerous unfounded myths that just ten years ago would have been laughed at by both sides of the aisle. I may have wrong motives for exposing myself to anger, and I don’t want to be hurtful to people and relationships, yet at the same time I am angry, and I think that is justified even if my reasons are not all just, and I want people to understand that. Yes, there is a pride issue at work when I exaggerate how obvious certain truths should be, implying a level of education I know isn’t universal, and also assuming I’m right when I may learn new information tomorrow and change my mind (which, after all, is how I ended up where I am in the first place). But I also want to continue to treat what used to be outrageous with outrage, and to decline to certify conspiracy theories by treating them with a respect they do not deserve, not when they may get people killed for no good reason at all. The more society shifts to act as though what just a few years ago they thought was unthinkable is now normal, simply because it has succeeded electorally, the more I will dig in and decline to validate that “new normal”.  I don’t want to be the immature, irascible crank at the party who people are quietly embarrassed by, but I am just insisting on what most of us believed five historical minutes ago.

Of course, I know I am infected with hypocrisy; I have used and relied on shifting cultural norms in my arguments from fear about theology, trying to address the real problem of religious anxiety in part by implicitly invoking the norms of the secular culture circa 2015. Of course, I still value what I value and believe what I believe. About theology and the state of my own heart, I harbor plenty of self-doubt and anxiety that my values may be discordant and wrong, even if I still value them; about actual policy, I am much more confident. Even if events do not ultimately progress to a worst-case scenario, the experience of all we have seen and heard over the last ten years ought to leave no room for excuse not to treat the situation as a five-alarm Reichstag fire.

Neighborliness

 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii[c] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

-  Luke 10:25-37

I do wonder if I am the Expert in the Law, or the Priest, or the Levite, in this story, and not the Samaritan. Let’s set aside the question of policies and political values – I think the ones I support are beneficial and kinder to the downtrodden, and those of Trump I know to be vengeful and oppressive. Outside of the reality of the actual positions, I wonder if perhaps I am right, in the way that the Expert in the Law was probably more right about theology than the Samaritan, but I am wrong in the more important question of treating others as neighbors. In a sense, it shouldn’t matter if the people I take issue with mistreat their neighbors even to an extreme – that shouldn’t alter the way in which I regard them. But at the same time, there is a place for Jeremiads against injustice.

So I want to affirm that we are all, in the end, neighbors, and that the one thing which we owe to each other is unconditional love. And I don’t want anything I’ve written here to be construed as me implying any sort of high ground – difficult, because I am frankly admitting I suspect myself of all sorts of pride as a motive in everything I say and do, even down to self-criticism, so it is hard to see how that isn’t just another attempt to assume a position of superiority. If it helps, I’ve done plenty of bad things I am not going to get into here, and I don’t expect anyone who disagrees with my politics to think well of me or see me as anything but an obnoxious scold. I just want to talk openly about the conflicts at the core of even strongly held positions, and the dangers involved, and acknowledge the ultimate reality that we are all neighbors, even as I continue to affirm that our present political situation is not normal, that the sides are not equivalent, and that some now-common positions are unacceptable, evil, and foolish. Somehow these things all have to coexist. Lincoln was able to welcome back the South “with charity toward all, with malice toward none,” after an actual civil war in which the army had taken to singing moral hymns about the crusading righteousness of their cause. But I feel like Lincoln was actually humble and generous; I don’t know how to engage with that without it becoming a prideful way of claiming the high ground, which I don’t deserve to have.

I want to continue to treat what has happened to the country as what it is: abnormal, irrational, and evil. I want people to feel the extent to which what they have done is harming others, and to be pointedly aware of how others see their worldviews. I also want to be honest and open about my own sinful motives in doing so, the distortions in my own heart. And I want to remind us all, as someone who fails to live like it, that we are all, in the end, neighbors.

July 2024 in Music

I didn’t think I was a ska person. Apparently I was wrong. Clueless ambushed me with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and I went off down a brassy rabbit-hole back to the ‘90s. For me, this is head-banging, get-up-and-dance stuff. Old favorites ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION and Asobi Seksu are here as always to join the fun.

And then of course there’s Kate Bush, too flighty and weird (complimentary) to be pinned down and described. Jessica Pratt is new to me, an artist who sounds as if she’s dislodged in the timestream, with a voice like no other. Blood Bank is melancholic even for The Mountain Goats, and at the same time hopeful, like the secret it alludes to – the one we don’t know how to tell, but perhaps, if we could just get it out –

Frances Quinlan’s 2020 album Likewise has a sort of wryly ambivalent resignation to circumstance about it, which is a posture I often struggle with. Bright Eyes voices a kind of wounded sentimentality packaged in the resentful bitterness of punk, and their repurposed Beethoven riles me up as a sort of war cry. Angelo De Augustine and Elliott Smith, by contrast, both seem to whisper.

Vig Mihály’s score to Almanac of the Fall, Colin Stetson’s horn composition, and Sufjan create a meditative bridge into Big Thief’s album Two Hands, a eulogy for ourselves spending itself in negation. But Yuji Nomi’s violin arrangement of Take Me Home, Country Roads restores a sense of a future in hope.

Kaneyorimasaru and HOLYCHILD both rock out in quite different modes, the former as summery J-rock, the latter as the advance guard from 2015 for this last year’s Brat-pop summer. Appropriate for July, John Williams’ 1996 ode to America, An American Journey, functions almost as a score to the Spielbergian version of America’s self-image, and makes for great Independence Day listening for all patriots. Summon the Heroes, his theme for that year’s Atlanta Olympics, has perched atop the pantheon of beloved trumpet pieces for me. By the final act of the song, the highest chairs reach auroral altitudes.

Thymia is another warm-sad piece, like much of what I enjoy. I actually included the real Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on my June playlist, and the cover of it recorded for the film Rocketman is not trying to compete with its immaculate original, but I liked the way in which it deconstructed the song for story purposes, and then exploded the final crescendo with a kitchen sink orchestra. Have All The Songs Been Written? hits directly at the inner doubt most artists feel about their ability to actually create anything worthwhile; but it is also speaking to the core anxiety of every person who has ever wondered if they are perhaps wasting their life, missing their shot; and it speaks to the aching moment of trepidation on the threshold of risking it all to try to reach someone when you aren’t quite sure whether or not they will take your hand.

People most likely remember Billy Joel’s 1989 album Storm Front for We Didn’t Start the Fire, but I wanted to highlight how many other great tracks it has, from the New England elegy The Downeaster ‘Alexa’, through the driving, sincere vulnerability of I Go to Extremes, to the epic send-off of the Cold War, Leningrad, and the reverent epilogue, And So It Goes, which in one line perfectly captures the essence of self-giving love: “…and you can have this heart to break.”

Then it’s a detour through the late ‘70s, a very silly time in music which I sincerely enjoy. Much more recently, The Arcadian Wild released Lara, a rock-skipping dance of neo-folk.

The next few tracks take a very different tone, a sort of muffled, rhythmic dread, from Jim Williams’ score to the cannibal film Raw, to Marcus Fjellström’s library music which was used to accompany the Erebus and Terror into the maw of the Arctic in the show The Terror, to Adam Janota Bzowki’s atavistic score for Out of Darkness, a film set 45,000 years in the past that actually feels its age.

Then it’s a couple of Beatles songs that feel more sentimental to me than most of their output (and I am above all a sentimentalist); Aaron Copland’s American masterpiece, Rodeo; and of course, to sing us out, As Time Goes By.

June 2024 in Music

It is December 1, and I am fully five months behind on my monthly playlists, as is tradition. Anyway, here is June.

Beginning with quiet introductions from three Japanese composers, we shift into the plaintive work of The Mountain Goats and Loch Lomond. This is followed by a couple of lush pop songs with an implacable undercurrent, and then by Junkie XL’s runaway score to Furiosa, one of 2024’s most fun deranged movies, and then by Bobby Krlic’s glass-sharpening score to Beau Is Afraid, one of 2023’s most bafflingly upsetting deranged movies.

Any of the tracks from clammbon’s 2007 album Musical or Asobi Seksu’s 2009 album Hush could easily have been included in this list – both albums are delightful buttermilk crepes of warmth. Sing Tomorrow’s Praise stands out as a pearl of a song, doing so many different complicated things which all redound to the same end of joy.

Like all of America this last summer, I spent some of June with Charli xcx’s BRAT, which remains a fun album even if it couldn’t meme Kamala into the Presidency. It’s interesting that it has room for both an extremely frank admission of anxiety about one’s future and purpose in life and also for momentary-hedonist club pop.

I Saw Cinnamon is another nonsensically fun song from Dressy Bessy, followed by a couple of other lighthearted tracks from WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA and Regal Lily. Black Math’s 2019 EP New Game has a more threatening tone, especially their spaced-out cover of Strangelove, already an ominous song. Used to the Darkness strikes a similar tone.

Big Thief has been one of my favorite purveyors of strange sentimentality for a few years, but I think their 2022 album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You may be even better than their earlier work which originally hooked me. Change strikes directly at our great terror of accepting and making peace with the inevitable passing of what we cannot hold onto; Sparrow is a meditation on our fallen and cursed humanity; Time Escaping has the cadence of a pot lid dancing on its rim under the motile power of steam left on the burner overlong; Spud Infinity is at once profound and silly in a way that feels like a philosophical ray of light simply in its incongruence.

Another interlude of gentle instrumental pieces, including a calming track written for one of the major Japanese booksellers, and culminating in World’s End Girlfriend’s discordant harmony. Minnie Riperton’s Les Fleurs is an old song I only just came upon this year, yet I feel I have been missing it for a long time. And of course Any Day Now is a classic.

Let’s Eat Grandma & Sky Ferreira are both exponents of a kind of driven thickly-produced pop, while Japanese Breakfast is more abstract, and Million Eyes feels like a complex counter-eddy of warm oil. Wolf Alice’s 2021 album Blue Weekend is aggressive, cutting, and precise – which is why it’s so easy to replay over and over again. First Aid Kit’s The Lion’s Roar is a twangy-rock elegy box of delightful regrets.   

I don’t really have any praise for Sir Elton beyond what others have said, but as I was dancing my way around my apartment to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I realized that this is easily the best piece of art inspired or connected to the entire Wizard of Oz IP (and yes that is a dig at the entire franchise). I naturally segued into Billy Joel, who feels like an American cousin of Elton John, musically.

Both Fleet Foxes and Sufjan Stevens are marked by a similar so of expectancy for a coming cathartic storm. Enya’s 1995 classic The Memory of Trees provides an answer of soft dappled sundrops raining on the summer grass. Then we end with two tracks which each are a sort of coda, bidding farewell to the zenith of sunlight as we exit June.

Giving Thanks

Objectively speaking, I have perhaps more to be thankful for this year than ever before. Two years ago I wasn’t sure if I could reasonably expect to find a job that would support living independently, or what career direction I would even enjoy. Last year I found such a job, but was plagued by all the attendant new-job anxieties and uncertainties. Now I am firmly ensconced in a very comfortable job surrounded by lovely people and with interesting career potentialities. I have made more sustained progress than ever before at maturing my behavior in many areas (though not all), and in sublimating my anxieties. My life is more organized than before, and I’m a year and a half into enjoying the beautiful icebox that is Alaska. I even consistently find time to read more than I have since grad school, without any such compulsion.

Yet gratitude remains challenging. I continue to encounter pressing anxieties more frequently than one strikes rocks on the road from Chitina to McCarthy. And for anything that I successfully do, I am reminded of my fear of missing out on everything else, or disappointed in the manner or pace at which I succeeded. It feels hard to be thankful when one is filled with temporal insecurity and existential anxiety about the longest-term future, and when one feels that the scope of desire can never be met.

I know the answer for the Christian is to have anticipatory gratitude, grounded in what has already been achieved but not yet realized. I struggle to trust that these promises will apply to me, because I struggle to trust that I will ultimately accept and find satisfying what is promised. For now, I continue to proceed in the daily habit of thanksgiving, even if it usually seems tossed-off or perfunctory, in the hopeful faith that just as I could not have anticipated the improvements in my situation from two years ago, my inability to comprehend an all-satisfying and certain End is a limitation of my own vision and not of God. Today, I am actually quite thankful.

A Black Letter

This is a Black Letter which I did not want to have to write. I wish I could say I am surprised at the outcome of yesterday's election, but in all honesty I had begun outlining something like this a week ago. I would say I am disappointed, but again that seems to imply a positive expectation of the electorate, which does not exist. Instead, I will simply say that I am disgusted. I know that is only one small word, and insufficient, but I am never going to be able to write out how I actually feel, both because I lack the skill and patience and most of all the energy, the wherewithal, especially now, but also because there are things I feel like saying that I do not permit myself to say.

But the feeling is not hard to define, even without adjectives. All I have to do is draw a comparison to another Tuesday night, eight years ago. By mid-evening on the west coast, it had become clear that things were not going well. At a certain point, my brother and I could no longer stand to watch the TV, so we absented ourselves to an empty Dairy Queen. When we had wrung all the cold comfort we could from wry, mirthless jesting, we returned home to find the balloons dropping on Trump’s first victory party, and the children’s chorale opening of You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Even at that moment, the Trump campaign’s talent and taste for artful mockery, rubbing salt in the wound, was clear.

For the last eight years, I have seen no end of this mockery. I admit that my impression has been skewed by my presence on Twitter, an increasingly vitriolic cesspool run into the ground by Trump’s wealthiest supporter. But the way in which people have treated others on there, before my eyes – and in many other contexts, too – is real. All I wanted then was for a reckoning, not for people to suffer, but to admit that they had been cruel and wrong and repent. And now it feels that will never come, in our lifetimes. I am confident that some of them, if they see this post, will immediately jump into the comments to mock me and jeer at my pain, because that is what motivates them, and what they like to do. Even now they are celebrating the ‘liberal tears,’ and citing that as what they wanted to vote for. It is beyond frustrating; but I don’t think the answer is to pretend to be all right, or to fake polite indifference, or to hide away like hermit crabs. We must live to spite the Devil.

I feel obligated to fret into this letter all manner of caveats about my own moral self-doubt, knowing myself to be overly motivated by pride in matters of politics, bitter, convicted of my unChristlikeness – and I have also done awful things, and I recognize that I write this partly in the wrong motive. I acknowledge it – but I do not want to silence myself because the magnitude of the outrage demands that we cry out over it.

What is especially hard about today is the fact that the electorate has actually moved toward Trump. Now, the writer Hannah Anderson made a good point a couple of hours ago, that there are proportional degrees of responsibility – Mitch McConnell’s decision to not hold Trump to account after January 6th was more consequential than any ordinary American’s vote, and the endorsements, the falling into line of the party-in-government signaled to longtime GOP voters that Trump was acceptable. I concur that these people are more responsible than some others. But what is also clear is that the voters who supported him have agency, and they made a choice. They are, one hopes, responsible adults, and as such they should not complain if I hold them responsible. Whole swathes of the Fourth Estate, the Punditeriat, the elected Democratic Party, many many faithful former Republicans who broke with Trump, have spent the last eight years bending over backwards to give these voters the benefit of the doubt, to sympathize with them, to try to understand them – and in the end, I feel that all that has been accomplished is to coddle and make excuses for them. One thing is clear: Trump was an unqualified, malicious, and ridiculous figure from the day he came down the escalator. Nine years have passed, in which this has only become more clear, and so I think today we can say the people are wholly without excuse. I don’t know the proportions of people’s motivations – what is ignorance (at this point difficult to excuse), what misguided selfishness, or willful malice – I only know that more than enough grace has been extended, and no repentance is in the offing. Enough then.

Political professionals are blaming Democrats for their messaging, their strategies, their keeping their head in a bubble. Much of this is sound political advice: clearly they do need to change tack. I’m not going to pretend they never made any missteps. But I am sick of people placing the blame for this on the Democrats, who at least tried to do the right thing, and not on the 51% of the electorate who should actually own the credit for what they have done. This is an indictment of that America. I know that people seem to think that Trump is somehow normal now. That has never been an acceptable view. We knew what he was in 2016, we know doubly so today, and I refuse to admit this type of politics to my view of normal and acceptable, any more than I did in 2016. Here I stand, here I remain.

That is the whole of my political advice, at this point, seeing as I clearly do not understand my country, and perhaps I no longer wish to understand it: however much they insist on it, for however many years to come, refuse to treat man, this movement, and this choice in the ballot box, as normal.

Elect Kamala Harris

At the beginning of 2024, I had planned to write a post on the election, perhaps around the Convention (though I know by now I will always be late). For a title I meant to reappropriate the text of one of the many pins I have laying around, this one picked up years ago from some older family member, supporting Nixon in ’72: it says “Re-Elect The President”. Well, that obviously isn’t something I can say now, but it’s worth mentioning simply as a reminder of what some have forgotten – that the Biden administration has been one of the best administrations of my lifetime. That’s not to say I agree with everything the President has done, or am not greatly frustrated by some things – but this is true of every Presidency, to varying degrees, and there are ways in which even valid critiques may miss complicated aspects of a decision. It’s difficult to think about the manner and aftermath of the evacuation of Afghanistan; it’s difficult to contemplate what is transpiring in the Levant, and the fact that we do not have clean hands. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine other modern Presidents managing these situations in a substantially better way (and many would be worse). It seems likely that there was no clean way out of Afghanistan once the decision to withdraw was made, and it is possible that the administration is currently maintaining the special relationship with Israel in part to preserve a degree of leverage and preclude additional escalation. We may not know until a later date. But what is clear is that the current administration has done more to aggressively invest in economy and our infrastructure than any in the last fifty years, and has drawn a clear line it is willing to defend between the liberal democratic western alliance and the increasingly shameless axis of authoritarianism that is testing its edges to see what it can bite off. In this Biden has in some measure improved on the foreign policy of President Obama, who I like, but who was perhaps too quick to assume the best in some actors, or perhaps not idealistic enough about certain fundamental conflicts - in many ways he inherited much of the policy orientation of President Bush, who went too far afield chasing the wrong enemies. And all of this of course follows Biden’s great public service of unseating his predecessor.

Why am I beginning an endorsement of Vice-President Harris with a paragraph about President Biden? For three reasons. First, because I struggle with knowing how to begin any post, and directly commenting on that creative process is my go-to shortcut into writing. Second, in order to answer the attempts at criticizing Harris by tying her to every decision the President has made. This is obviously specious given the relatively limited role of the VP, but it is also misguided because it only works if one views the present administration as more of a failure than what came before it – when it in fact has been significantly more productive than the average administration, to say nothing of the last one. Finally, I think it’s helpful to understand where I am coming from, and what the status quo is – and to understand that a potential Harris administration would exist in a context, and not simply fall out of a coconut tree. The Vice-President has done a lot of work to explain her own biography, which I will not repeat, because my interest is more in what the stakes of this election are for politics and policy. All I will say is that for years I never had particularly strong feelings about Kamala Harris as a politician either way; she was not my preferred candidate in 2020, and I had concerns (ultimately unfounded) about her electoral popularity on that ticket – so I’m not some longtime fan. I have, however, been fully won over and impressed by the way in which she has assumed the mantle in this impromptu campaign, and I think she will make a very good President.

But the coconut tree is much taller than just the last four years of growth, and there is a context more salient to this election than anything President Biden of Vice-President Harris have done or propose to do. I am of course speaking about former President Trump, who is not only an individual, but a symptom and synecdoche of a much larger illness in politics domestic and global. It occurs to me that an increasing number of people I consider peers and friends are now younger than me (a very troubling trend because it suggests I am getting older, which is something I must do something about). For some, the past near-decade of politics since Trump came down the escalator on June 16, 2015 may encompass the entirety of their adult awareness of politics. For me, it arrived after a decade of serious interest in politics, during which my views shifted several times in dramatic ways. I don’t want to re-commit the error others have made when waxing nostalgic about past eras of bipartisanship, which masked over ugly inequities, and I think there is a real extent to which Trump did not only change our politics, but also revealed things which were already present – in other words, I don’t want to mythologize the past or suggest that the present needs to be uniquely troubled (if anything, it is this sort of cataclysmic thinking about the present that has gotten us into this mess). But I do think that it is important for people to understand that for me, the last nine years are not normal – and I do not intend to accept them as such.

There is of course an extent to which I think political myth – in a very limited sense – is necessary. I want to be careful with this – even innocuous political myths, nationalisms which began as liberal reform movements to achieve independence for a subjugated ethnic group, have often become sources of violence against the innocent, and for much of American history the myth of our own national greatness has likewise posed this problem. But to the extent that nations and empires and polities are to an extent constructed fictions, I think that a myth can be necessary – as an ideal, a standard to rally to and unify around – as long as it does not overshadow the many inconvenient truths which interrogate it. In that sense, the notion that this decade must be made an aberration in our political history is not meant to suggest that everything was better before Trump, but rather to say that this myth of a past which had not fallen into its current state is helpful to articulating what we have lost and what we now aspire to. Of course no myth can contain the whole flavor of truth about a country, and there are many multiform political myths on offer from a whole host of minor players and fringes, with varying degrees of influence. What interests me is what mythic claims seem closest to those who would actually exercise power in the wake of the election, either way. And that is what is on offer in this election: two diametrically opposed mythic narratives about who we are as Americans.

And as I see it, the current vision of politics ascendent in GOP leadership is one which divides America along two axes: first, it frames politics not as a process of decision-making between all Americans, but as one theater of a war between the portion of citizens it feels count as legitimate, either because of who they are or because they hold the right views or cultural affiliations, and everyone else who are excluded from that legitimacy. Because of this difference in who is viewed as legitimate, the right, especially many of the younger activists who consider themselves intellectuals and who will staff the next Republican administration, already feel ready to take their ball and go home from the game of democracy if they can’t win a majority. If you think I am being unfair, I would simply point out that whenever the electoral college, or any other aspect of our electoral system which allows an absolute minority of the electorate to actually make policy over and against the will of the majority, is debated, they will tend to defend a counter-majoritarian system as a feature, not a bug. This may be grounded on the idea that small states should have as much representation as large ones, or rural areas should not be ruled by cities – but at the end of the day, this always comes down to a larger mass of individuals being ruled by a smaller mass of individuals in a way which flies in the face of the logic of representative democracy that justified the Revolution in the first place. If pressed, many will outright admit that they feel people who agree with or are more similar to them culturally deserve power more than others.

Now, I don’t want to ignore the argument that all political sides tend to seize every advantage and complain about unfair features that hurt their cause, while defending those which help it. Many have pointed out that many liberals had a sort of procedural fetish for the Supreme Court for many years, some of which was born out of sincere desire to believe in the process, but which obviously was aided by the legacy of the Warren court and the way in which SCOTUS had acted for many years – a tune which changed after the composition of the court shifted to the right. And it’s not exactly wrong, if one believes one’s political side to be morally right in a way that has high-stakes human rights implications, to want it to be in power even if some of those views are not popular with the majority. American history is full of movements in defense of civil rights which were not broadly popular at the outset, and which resisted in ways legal and illegal, and which are now justly valorized in hindsight. But I think are there two caveats to this which the new right is failing to see.

First, it is one thing to argue that the human rights of an individual or a minority may need special protection from the whims of the majority. That is, after all, the great insight of the Bill of Rights. Most Americans, right or left, would agree that there are certain things that governments, however democratic, should simply not be allowed to do to people in the name of the public. But it is quite another thing to believe that by extension all power should be exercised by a minority which is seen as more legitimately American than others. This is essentially a feudal or caste-logic, and it necessarily undermines the right of the people to govern itself and act collectively.

Second, it misses the point of democracy in general. The idea is not that 51% of people have the divine right of kings to lord over everyone else and do whatever they wish without limits; the point is that democracy is the best way we have of manufacturing enough legitimacy and consensus for a state of productive peace to exist between people who disagree. It is an agreement to try to effect change through the slow, frustrating process of persuading others, even if they are selfish, ignorant, or pig-headed, rather than resorting to violence or giving up on cooperative civilization. We have fought hard to get to the point in human history where there are alternatives to autocratic tyranny without recourse or means of change, or violent conflagration. But by attempting to embolden a section of the body politic to block or remove the means of the majority to win power, those ascendant on the right are pouring gasoline on our polity and then playing with fire.

I said that the political myth of the new right, which is not identical to everything every conservative believes and certainly not identical to all of the GOP’s historic positions, divides America along two axes. The first is between those with the right to rule, with or without a majority, because they have the ‘correct’ values, and everyone else who can be dismissed and scorned; the second is between ‘real,’ ‘heritage,’ legal’ Americans, and Outsiders. I want to be careful to note that I am aware that many of the people I know personally on the right, I know in the context of church communities that are very outward-looking, open, and welcoming to the stranger, and so people in those contexts who think of themselves as conservative may feel this is an unfair depiction of the right as it may not accurately describe their own motivations or experiences. But from the broader standpoint of the right as a whole, can anyone deny that the last nine years have not been defined, more than anything else, by the castigation of immigrants, migrants, various kinds of ‘others’, as well as calls for the wholesale abandonment of people around the world to whom we have commitments and obligations both diplomatic and human. One of the very first things Trump did in his administration was an attempt to implement what he had sold as a ban on Muslim immigration (obviously he had to limit this to a temporary ban on immigration from a specific list of countries for security reasons, because his administration was staffed with people who understood that nothing else had a chance of surviving in court – but we know how the former President referred to the executive action, and how he wanted the public to think of it). These divisions, between worthy and unworthy Americans, and between real Americans and all other people, are the animating spirit of today’s GOP, and the content of its national myth about who we are as a people.

The Democratic Party contains multitudes of competing views, but when we look at the political mythology in power at the top, we don’t see perfection, but we do see something that fights for our imperfect democratic republic to continue to breathe and function imperfectly as we muddle on through. It’s not very romantic, and it’s not apocalyptically or eschatologically satisfying in the way I suspect motivates some of the voices on the right; but what Harris is proposing to do, and what Biden has in fact done, is to try to rule by winning over the majority of the public through persuasion and shoring up a democratic process where coexistence between Americans of both parties is possible over the long-term, and conflict is worked through peacefully. And crucially, it is a national mythology which avoids the fatal sin of so many other nations mythologies: it is not exclusive. It is more motivated to see all Americans, and all people, as our neighbor, than it is to find reasons to disdain the Samaritan. This isn’t perfectly reflected in the platform or the party; I could rattle off a score of ways they fall well short of the ideal right now. But the content of the myth’s ideal and the direction of its aspiration are markedly divergent from the right’s, which turns its back upon others.

I am by necessity speaking in broad terms, because while elections have excruciatingly specific outputs for individuals affected, the voters only have the lever of the broadest input on what happens. This certainly does not seem like an ideal system – and indeed, it is not. The democratic process is often sluggishly frustrating and infuriatingly unjust in its outcomes, and it is always tempting, for a certain kind of person with an actively idealistic political imagination, to think ‘if only I could just run this or that for five minutes…’ – but of course we must choose between ourselves who would get that say, and the wise understand that they do no in fact understand the ways in which they would, untrammeled, abuse.

When I say that democratic legitimacy is under threat, some will feel I must be exaggerating, and I admit that this is an area in which I would rather be over-cautious than be caught sleeping. You may also suggest that my motives for saying this are entirely driven by political outcome, a desire to shore up liberalism by any means – and I don’t want to discount that criticism out of hand. I do think, as in the bill of rights, there are liberal human rights which should be maintained even against a democratic majority, and I am as susceptible to the same outcome-derived biases where procedure is concerned as anyone. But I think that even if you are on the right and disagree strongly about desired outcomes, the potential abrogation of democratic legitimacy posed by the current direction of the GOP should trouble you.

Whenever this topic is raised January 6th is what immediately leaps to mind, but it is only the tip of the iceberg, and my concern over democratic legitimacy greatly predates it. The fact of the matter is that our particular political system, with the Electoral College, numerous veto points, a House which skews rural, and a Senate which bears little resemblance to the overall distribution of votes in the country, is already far from wholly democratic. Of course, in many ways we have made great strides in improving this system since the Revolution, and I am not arguing in favor of a pure non-representative democracy with every issue voted on a simple majority, with no veto points whatsoever. The danger is that our system increasingly skews things so that a minority of the population has been able to rule over the majority, to prevent necessary legislative reforms – not in the protection of individual liberty, but in all areas, bringing the process of legislating to a near standstill. This has crippled our ability to respond to crises and changing conditions in an effective way, and it has poisoned public opinion with the view that the state cannot operate, when it is in fact being sabotaged.

The public is growing increasingly aware of this gap between public opinion and votes, and actual power in government, which tends to trend overwhelmingly in a single direction, and this threatens to undermine faith in the Republic as an institution – faith without which it cannot function. But more troublesome is that professional political actors are increasingly informed about the ways in which the system skews right, and they are behaving accordingly. We see in the gamesmanship in the lead-up to January 6th around putting forward alternative slates of electors an openness by Republican strategists and staffers to attempting to cheat the electorate by testing the limit of the letter of the law, knowing that if such an argument about the rules were to break out, in our present polarized moment it would immediately collapse into partisan camps – in other words, it might be possible to get away with cheating simply by carrying along one side of the public and ignoring the other along with the principle of the thing.

This is beginning to bleed into an overt disregard for democracy as a principle at all; anecdotes are not good statistical data, and I think my experience represents more the way the algorithm promotes loud extremism over what is popular, but it has been hard to ignore the rising salience of voices in public discourse and online who are openly contemptuous of democracy, and who don’t really even try to deny that this is because it doesn’t vote the way they want. And I get it. When I was a teenager, I was an ideologically hard libertarian, and my perhaps OCD-propelled logic, from the emotional premise of the non-aggression principle, let me to my own lack of respect for democracy, because it seemed to consist of the public deciding how to apply force to individuals. But of course, following this to its logical end, I wound up being carried toward the waterfall of an anarchism that just does not work in this fallen world, which made me realize that the entire premise was flawed, and that government that collects taxes and works for the public good in imperfect ways is the best option available to us in this world. And most on the right today are not anarchists, and still believe in a government that collects taxes and enforces laws. The question, then, is on how the public good is determined, and what avenues are available to rectify abuses and promulgate reforms.

This, ultimately, is what the Revolution, for all its flaws, was fought over. And the danger we face now is the same of the 1770s. There are many who point to our Constitution, which creates the institutions I argue are skewed, and who say that they are simply playing by the rules as written – and that is the real danger. There is a distinct probability that the right will, if returned to government, exploit the technicalities of our system to entrench their power in a way that allows them to claim the fig leaf of procedural legality, while permanently denying the public the ability to govern itself in practice. This is not unlike the situation facing the Colonies: after all, the British parliamentary system was one of the most liberal and democratic constitutional systems in the world at the time, and backed by centuries of legal precedent as a font of legitimacy. But without representation, even this was not good enough; to maintain legitimacy, the state must grow with its people and remain responsive to the population as a whole. And the Revolution of course did not achieve this – as we know, the vast majority of Americans were excluded from power. But we have made many steps forward, and we can continue those now – or we can let a small clique wedge themselves into power to spite the majority.

If this occurs and is not corrected, then we will face two undesirable outcomes in succession. Either the minority will exercise a kind of tyranny over the majority, which will delegitimize the government, and frustrate the people’s ability to effect change. If there is no realistic democratic path for the majority of the public to ever change or correct a political problem, then they will either grow disengaged with politics, and rule will be by force by a stagnant elite, or they will feel forced to pursue other means of direct action to pursue their political goals. The ultimate danger is an authoritarian state with no accountability, or the collapse of the democratic social peace treaty and a return to general violence, which almost always resolves into an authoritarian state no matter which side wins, because avoiding that requires the commitment of the disagreeing wings of the public to honor democracy as the compromise to gain peace and legitimacy.

The danger is present now more than before, because the Republican nominee has already demonstrated an avowed willingness to abrogate democracy in favor of power, the party around him has acquiesced to this, and its intellectual leaders have decided that they are not going to even try to win majorities going forward, but that it is now or never for them demographically, which incentivizes them to ensure they do not lose power again. That is why it is crucial this anti-democratic politics be stopped here and now, and broken permanently so that it is replaced even on the right by a politics of persuasion.

Vote for Harris-Walz on November 5.

May 2024 in Music

I feel like these playlists are getting longer as I rotate through more music each month, but what I actually have to say about any of it is diminishing, so this will be a brief post.

St. Vincent is one of our most interesting artists working today, so it’s unsurprising that the tone of these songs is utterly ineffable and baffling. Kevin Penkin’s Pathway is distressingly portentous. Belle isn’t a real pop-star, she’s a fictional character invented for the film of the same name, and the music was written by a trio of composers, but the voice and lyrics belong to the great Kaho Nakamura. It is the final rising act of the song which really brings into shore a great wave of catharsis, which is always what I am chasing. It’s emotional twin is One by one by one, a collaboration between my favorite composer and Aqualung.

Dermatillomania is no fun as a condition, but it makes an apt title for a song which, like an untamable itch, I keep compulsively returning to. Free Cake For Every Creature was the brief musical project of Katie Bennett, and while I respect the decision to end on a high note, I wish the whispercore had continued its patter longer. Slow Pulp, Tomberlin, Julia Jacklin, and Tancred all feel as though they fit together even if I lack the vocabulary to quite say why. Wasted is particularly potent, while Pens is good old-fashioned alt-rock of the sort I’ve always enjoyed.

I included Mandinka because there’s something in the mesh of sound enfolding the chorus which has a flavor I can’t place or do without. Head Over Heels is a classic exemplar of perhaps my favorite period in music. Anly and PASSEPIED are both joyfully explosive J-Pop artists, too energetic to not feel messy (complimentary). I’ve included Hiroyuki Sawano’s score for Attack on Titan in these playlists before, but it’s such a consistent doorway into the melodic epic when I’m trying to be productive at work. And Basil Poledouris’ score for Conan The Destroyer resolves none of its mystery.

Negoto and Haru Nemuri are two other energetic J-Pop artists, the former’s music bouncing on a candyfloss trampoline, the latter’s urgently surging ahead, direct and serious in tone. Come Alive isn’t a typical track from The ArchAndroid, but there is a unique rough monstrosity in its dance.

I included some of James Horner’s iconic Wrath of Khan score, the best music ever recorded for Star Trek, as a point of comparison for the score to the third (and easily best) season of Picard, which borrows from it heavily – indeed, the whole season is in conversation with fans’ memory of the great film. This is all classic Trek, grand, noble, and soaring.

The Beths have a kind of warm fuzzy guitar in which they blanket sincere vulnerability, and I feel that Asobi Seksu’s album Flourescence has a similar quality. But there’s really nothing quite like the latter’s crystalline prism of late afternoon sunlight. Vangelis also has a fuzzy warmth to his work, albeit a synthesized one, and his version of Jerusalem is a beautiful example of arranging a venerable hymn in the most evocative way possible.

Lift a Sail is one of Yellowcard’s later and less-appreciated albums, but as such it possesses the peculiar melancholy of decline, which creates space for a kind of unpretentious openness. Datadata is quite similar to Sie Liebt Mich, both serving as calming interstitials. Sutechattene is a typically loopy clockwork from Daoko; Daienkai is a typically profound work of feeling from Humbert Humbert, marching to some great End. As for FAMILIA, I find this weirdly captivating, though the band’s name appears to be wholly inscrutable.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture has always been one of my favorite works of classical music, and this choral version hallows it, to my mind, into a beatific vision of the Eucatastrophe. It’s a long track, and great at every point, but the penultimate act of the song, when the choirs of angels arise from the descent of the strings, and cranky old Pyotr throws a whole set of tubular bells down a spiral staircase, is perhaps the grandest phrase of music ever written.

I defend The Killers, the soul of the Great Basin, against anyone who mocks them as corny or passe. I found Day & Age to make a perfect denouement after the climax – heartfelt, without taking itself too seriously. Goodnight, Travel Well seemed like the perfect ending to this playlist, but I decided to pin on Summer Road as a kind of postscriptive gesture toward the hopeful future we can’t yet see.

Vienna

From Bratislava, Vienna is only about 45 minutes by train. I arrived in the afternoon, which in November 2022 was clear, brisk, and ruddy, sun sinking quickly over the imperial city. I stayed in the southern neighborhood of Favoriten, and once I had dropped by bag at the Airbnb, I made use of the waning daylight to go for a walk and form some sort of impression of this place I had imagined for so many years.

At first I found myself among crisp apartment blocks and modern parks, all the hallmarks of the kind of walkable communal spaces that I wish we would zone for (although my understanding is that Vienna is not above criticism and could in fact stand to have a higher density). Still, there is something specific and esoterically charming, at least for me, about certain kinds of foreign cities where children play in the public green spaces between concrete apartment towers. But of course, the foreignness is perhaps ancillary, a greener shade of grass.

Just north of the station, I found the first jewel of Vienna’s many-crowned imperial past, Schloss Belvedere, glowing with the fading warmth of day. Its garden mazes were picked threadbare by November, but they overlooked the most beautiful twilit city, St. Stephen’s spire like a lone sentinel over the fields of palaces and galleries.

Beyond the gardens was the beginning of Schwarzenbergplatz, where I could glimpse the active leisure of the evening begin. Here I found a reminder of Vienna’s strange position during the Cold War, balanced on the knife edge between empires – the monument erected to the Red Army, which arrived at the end of the war but did not stay so long. Nearby was the baroque wedding cake of Karskirche, lit up like a joyous candle in the blue gloaming.

The next morning I wended my way North, again past Karlskirche, the Ring Road, the Opera, and into the historical core of what had once been a walled town. There, at the center, stands Stephanskirche, built from the 13th through the early 16th centuries, it’s South Tower almost 450 feet high. The religious center of an empire ruled by the great stalwarts of Catholicism, the Habsburgs, the roof’s panoply of tiles bears their royal double-headed eagle, a symbol of empire that has existed since the Bronze Age. In the alleys nearby I found Mozart’s old apartment building and a wealth of other gorgeous architecture, including the heavenly St. Michael’s, which was in the midst of celebrating its 800th year.

From there I made my way into the Hofburg, the primary seat of the Emperors. I glimpsed one of the famous Lipizzaner horses in the Stallburg, and then made my way into a section of the Hofburg dedicated entirely to showcasing the unbelievable extent of the imperial tableware. Room after room after room of exquisite cutlery, painted plates, napkins folded in a manner passed down in secret by generations of palace staff, who now deploy them in service of Austrian state dinners, a table service which was a part of the peace treaty settlement with Napoleon, and gilded tureens. Above this was more palatial museum, showcasing the former imperial apartments and explicating the life of Empress Sisi, the much romanticized and troubled wife of the penultimate Emperor Franz Josef. On my way out, I passed doors with signs telling museum visitors that they were for staff – specifically Austrian presidential staff, because the President’s office and much of the core of the Austrian government is housed in other parts of the same connected buildings that compose the Hofburg.

As night fell I strolled past immense colonnades, the monuments of a shattered empire; a solemn Holocaust memorial; the beginnings of a Christmas market popping up around the Cathedral; and the Café Central, whose customers included everyone from Theodor Herzl, key founder of modern Zionism, to Adolf Hitler, and Sigmund Freud, Josip Tito, Stalin, and of course regulars Trotsky & Lenin, plotting revolution in exile.

The next day I explored a changed city, smothered under a blanket of cold fog that reached all the way to the ground. A local friend of a friend was kind enough to show me around the city, pointing out the ornate flowering of architectural decoration that began in the restive final years of the aging empire, or the gigantic flak tower built during the War to defend against air raids. A section of the Danube, the Donaukanal, was captured by the city’s engineers several centuries ago and regulated into a domesticated waterfront, more conveniently proximate than the main body of the river. From here boats leave, going back and forth to other ports up and down the river, like Bratislava.

The final morning I spent in Vienna was dreary and heavy with rain, but I had to go outside nevertheless to see great palace in the suburbs, Schloss Schonbrunn. The site of this on TV earlier in the year, when it was hosting its annual summer concert, had reminded me of my desire to see Vienna and in doing so prompted the timing of this entire trip. When I arrived, I found that the palace itself was merely the frontispiece of an immense work of landscaping which verged into naturalistic hills and woods, cut through with regular avenues of precisely-cut trees. I could not take pictures inside the palace, but I visited the mirrored great hall, a room sufficiently grand to host Napoleon when he occupied the city and forced the signing of a peace treaty with the Habsburgs, and also to accommodate the famous meeting of Kennedy and Krushchev in 1961. But the gardens made a stronger impression on me, because they allowed me silence to wander and feel the fatigue and quiescence that comes at the end of a long journey. The next sunrise I saw from the aircraft, on my way home. This is the end of my trip to Mitteleuropa.