Tseng Chien-Ying, Singularity, 2026

I don’t consider myself a competitive person but I remember that shortly after giving birth to federica, I wished I could do it again because now that I knew what it was I could “do it” “better.” The gag is of course that the experience can never be recreated. I am three(?) weeks away from giving birth again but it’ll still be a first time. Preparing for the event taking into consideration what happened last time is no different than preparing for the event taking into consideration what books say can happen, what friends told me their own experience was like. I’m a different person now, I’m older (welcome to your geriatric pregnancy!), I’m more tired, I was not good at taking my pre-natal vitamins every day, and I did not do weekly Pilates throughout; but on the flip side the fact that we’re post-pandemie and we’re not quarantined anymore means I’ve been active member of society out in the world. Surely that’s worth something.

Obviously I’ve already broken what I assume to be the first rule of having more than one child—you’re not supposed to compare them. But I’m not, I’m merely looking at the different sets of circumstances as a way to make sense of the ways my life is going to change (“looking for a strand to climb” like Fiona would say but I’m not in need of hope… just reassurance?) I have half-siblings but I grew up an only child. Growing up I never dreamed of becoming a mother—not because I was against it, but I guess I saw it as a given and not something to waste a dream on, I had other uses for those. (I know now it’s not actually a given, but that’s the thing about being a young person looking at the world I guess.) I figured if I ever had children I would have just one because that’s all I knew. But now there’s gonna be two and I have no concept of what that’s like. The cringe confession is I can’t imagine how my heart can give and sustain double the love it’s been holding now even tho I know it’s going to work it out somehow. In the meantime I tell Federica I love her more than everything in the world while the statement is 100% true and requires no asterisks.

Usually by this time of the year I have made a playlist for the summer (I like to use playlists as markers of time), but I think I have been too laden with anxiety to pinpoint a mood and build a puzzle around it. It is also another thing I have felt guilty about: when I was pregnant with Federica I made a playlist of songs for her. A few weeks ago I had the thought that all problems would be solved if gang gang dance got back together and played a few shows. And it was a little like a lightbulb moment.

I did mushrooms once, on new years a long time ago. At the time I was living in a small one bedroom apartment on the top floor of one of those classic Brooklyn homes. I have a memory of being able to see a little bit of the Gowanus canal from my back windows but now am not sure if I’m conflating it with the view from a different apartment in my past. Sitting in the living room before the clock struck midnight, my best friend, my then-boyfriend, and I all ate some. I queued up Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna, and then sat around talking waiting to see what would happen while thinking that nothing would actually happen. Our living room had hardwood floors, stained an ugly shade of yellow visually sticky with resin from a haphazard application god knows how long so; but they were wood regardless. Suddenly I discovered that if I put my hands flat in front of me and slowly raised them from the ground, I could make all manner of grass and flowers suddenly bloom from the hardwood. Only god knows how much time I spent engaging in this spiritual gardening practice. Though now I understand that mushrooms do in fact seek to connect us to Mother Nature, I also felt that it was the Gang Gang Dance of it all that facilitated the connection, because what is their music if not a conduit for other dimensions?

My college boyfriend (a different one from the one I had the psychedelic experience described above) spent a lot of time on whatever kind of musical forums existed in the early aughts (maybe it was Discogs?). I don’t remember the first time I listened to Gang Gang Dance, but I know the first song of theirs that I became absolutely obsessed with was “Rugs of Prayer,” which was featured in an insane compilation called They Keep Me Smiling, put out by United Bamboo, one of those uniquely New York downtown independent fashion labels. It’s a haunting song with sparse beats that sounds like steps echoing down the hall and twinkling pianos heard in the distance when you think you’re supposed to be alone, Lizzi Bougatsos’s voice doubled or tripled onto herself as a haunting, and then the reach a crescendo when the ghosts maybe catch you and then you’re free from the fear and a groove emerges. I listened to it on repeat and would blast it during parties by the time everyone was good and wasted (I was a fun gal!). Every single time I’ve seen them live has been life-changing and life-renewing.

There’s still no playlist because I won’t need it this time, the vibe is simply their 2011 record Eye Contact. In any case, there will not be music playing while I give birth (it does not seem realistic to me), but every day on the train, I press play on “Glass Jar” and the voice says “I can hear everything / it’s everything time” and I imagine myself channeling that energy when it’s time to begin breathing, inhaling in all the cosmic sounds as it gets time to begin to push and the voice says “don’t worry,” and then when the melody starts in and the world opens up in the song that’s when the world will also open up in me, and the drums say it’s time to fucking push and I will push and this baby will be born to the most impeccable vibes known to mankind. And I don’t know what Lizzi is singing and I’ll never even look it up, but I think she says “I care for you like a mother” and that’s good enough for me.

After I finished this I remembered that Lizzi was one of the first-ever (or was she thee first-ever?) interviews I did—for Rookie!— and luckily it’s still online and not as embarrassing as I would remember it but also maybe the more things change the more they stay the same?

The joke was that “time is a flat circle” and for a time it was a joke.
There are a few times I’ve been aware of “time.” Once was when I was twenty seven.
I thought “wow you are almost thirty.”
I thought “what are you doing with your life.”

Later I realized that it was just my return of saturn and maybe a return of saturn just means waking up to the awareness that time is finite. But that was a brief spell and after I had course-corrected life to account for Time, it shifted back into the background like the constant almost imperceptible hum of the city rather than the constant loud clanging of church bells.

That was then, and now things are different. Every day I am counting something in my head, keeping track of things in an app, remembering new numbers with new meanings.

It started naively enough, with pandemic tracking time. Week one, week two, week three, month four, month five. I gave this count up a long time ago, but a friend who has been keeping track of the days on Instagram tells me today is day 705. There was a brief window of counting pregnancy time, followed by the seemingly eternal, hollow of counting un-pregnancy time, every week closer or further away from a goal or another. Then the counting of “we’re trying.” One day, two days, three days that are good, one week, maybe another. Then one week and another week and another, have there been enough days yet to take a test? Start the count all over again.

Pregnancy time is counting forwards and backwards. Counting to ten weeks until “it’s safe.” Every four weeks a doctor appointment. Counting the weeks until baby begins to move. Counting up to when baby is fully formed. Every two weeks a doctor appointment. Counting up to when it’s safe for baby to be born. Every week a doctor appointment. Counting down the weeks for baby to be born. Counting down the days for baby to be born. Counting the minutes between contractions. Are you ready to push? Three pushes, ten seconds each, during a contraction. Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One. I am suspended in time thinking about pushing, waiting for the next time to push. Three more pushes and then she’s out! Two more pushes and then she’s out! One more push and then she’s out! And then she’s out and time really does stand still. I see her little long legs flying through the air. I hear her cry. I hold her.

A pause in the count.

But that was just a timer reset, and I know that. She is one day old, she is two days old. She is one week old. She is one month old. I feed her. I count how many minutes she stays at my breast. When she is done, I attempt to go about my life. I count how many minutes are left until I have to feed her again. It is recommended that newborns eat every two to three hours with one four hour stretch, ideally during the night, to allow for some extra rest. But now she is five weeks old and the doctor says we can go five hours, if she lets us. There are 24 hours in a day but I live inside windows of two or three or four hours. I know it won’t be like this forever. When this count is over a new one will take its place. I think about buying myself a weekly flower delivery subscription. A more beautiful way to mark the time. I imagine myself in the future thinking back about week six with the Anthuriums, week nine with the mimosas, week 13 with the poppies. And yet I do not despair, I do not feel bleak, I have found the beauty in the numbers.

Everything is different now though.

The last time I wrote here, which was five months ago, it was about wanting everything and ignoring pauses. A fucked-up thing to write about (manifest?) in hindsight because this whole time I’ve felt like I am being pushed forward without a place to stop and rest for a minute. The countdown to ten weeks was as stressful as ever but after that it was off to the races as ever. I tried to take some time off during the holidays but I got sick so there was no rest, only the constant yearning for a time when “I felt normal.” I started a new job which is both more relaxed and more stressful because I need to exercise a new part of my brain. The other part of my brain is being taken up by the whole business of growing a human, and then the other part of my brain is being taken up by the whole business of raising a different human, and then the other part of my brain is being taken up by whatever things are solely mine and do not depend on or owe anything to anyone else but of course that’s the part I’ve been prioritizing the least. I have not read as many books as I would like, I find myself falling asleep after a few pages, so everything is moving fast and reading is moving slow. But there is just not enough time. To sleep and to work and to be a person, I find the time lacking. I try to start a list of all the things we’ll need for the new baby, but it gets overwhelming. I have time, I think. The baby spends the whole day kicking and moving and grooving inside my stomach. She doesn’t yet know about time! Fede is four and everything in the past is “yesterday” and everything in the future is “next year.” What do any of us know about time, really.

A song that goes and goes and goes and goes and then stops abruptly and then goes and goes and goes and in the video everything goes backwards the second time. Feels… relatable.

In the mornings Federica has her breakfast while watching music videos from The Strokes on the TV. I’m not entirely responsible for it. A year and a half ago I was scrolling on TikTok when a snippet of the “Hard to Explain” music video came on. I paused for a bit and then kept scrolling and Fede complained and asked me to go back but I instead I just pulled up the music video for her on my phone where I’d already been adding a few other videos that she liked to watch. She was hooked.

She’s since continued exploring the band’s repertoire on her own, adding to the list of songs that she loves. The last few months we’ve listened to “Heart in a Cage” on repeat, and although I am not sure she knows exactly what bad words are yet, she does take special relish in singing and repeating “fucking around.” When she listens to them she dances and plays air guitar and sometimes she straps on her little guitar and gets her microphone out. She calls them “The Stro-kees,” and Julian and “Nicky” are her favorites. She demands we listen to them every time we get in the car and also before bed.

Back in September 2001, I starting my first year of college in Philly and had thankfully already found the gang of music-obsessed kids to befriend. We’d heard about The Strokes as a thing people were talking about but we hadn’t seen them or heard their music. One day we were in the lounge in the basement of my dorm when we turned on MTV and caught what looked to be an old video of a band playing some sort of American Bandstand-ish show. My friend and I were totally enthralled, probably thinking, what is this and how come we’ve never seen it before? Then the little end credits came on and we saw it was The Strokes and well, that very same weekend we took the 32 bus down to South Street and went to Spaceboy and bought their cd. We listened to it on repeat, we were obsessed. We looked up the guitar tabs and learned a few of the songs.

A couple of years from now, when time feels even more elusive, I know there will come a time when I will listen to them and things will slow down… I will think about being pregnant with this baby and I will think about how it was one of Fede’s earliest obsessions, and then I will think about Philly and being 17 and my friends and my youth. And then it really will be like time is a flat circle and isn’t that something.

Tracey Emin, I’ve Got It All, 2000

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Some things at sea), 2010, Gouache on paper, 41 x 36 inches

I was still thinking about it on the train home after class and suddenly thought about Raymond Pettibon’s surfer paintings. I don’t remember ever seeing them IRL and was surprised at how clear they appeared in my head. A few days later I went and bought Point Break which gathers all of his surfer paintings. Reading the opening essay, I quickly learn that there is no sea in the Christian heaven. (Can you imagine such a thing? An eternal paradise without an ocean?) It’s fine I guess, we aren’t going to that Christian heaven anyway, and who needs it when you have Pettibon’s expressive waves, lines swishing and crashing, blues and blues and more blues and sometimes yellow and sometimes black but definitely white that you can get lost in just as easily as if they were real waves, but not in a way that could ever replace the real feeling. I’ve been obsessed with pictures of waves before, at the height of one depression or other, collecting them when I couldn’t find the words for emotions. I’ve never surfed, but I understand the appeal, the giving yourself completely to your surroundings, ceding control in order to be on top just for a few seconds, and then you are back where you started but you aren’t the same person that you were when you started. Waves continuously crash ashore but they aren’t the same waves and the shore doesn’t remain the same either. In that essay, the writer quotes a German philosopher that describes the sea as “a naturally given boundary of the realm of human activities,” and “the sphere of the unreckonable and lawless.” These things are of course the point of painting, of writing, of music, of all creative pursuits; to transcend the realm of human activities, and muck about in the sphere of the unreckonable and lawless! To SWIM!

Geese in Greenpoint

I saw Geese play this weekend. Their new record Getting Killed is chaotic and beautiful and weird and I have been listening to it on repeat. It was a free show in what turned out to be the middle of a street in Greenpoint. We got there early, found a spot right in front and then took in the scene. The average age of attendees show was probably… 23, (it’s how old the members of the band are too). Amy Rose and I agreed the vibe felt very Rookie.

They did not set up an elevated stage, just put up a few barricades to separate the area where they would be playing from the audience. We couldn’t see them when they started playing but the sound was stupid phenomenal. As the crowd started moving to the music and their heads started bobbing, we realized we were very close to them, maybe ten heads in, and could see lead singer Cameron Winter if we angled our heads right, but for most of the show it was just a sea of people. His voice is just as velvety as you hope it will be. Tran calls it the voice of god (the voice of a god?) and I don’t think she’s wrong. (Afterwards a friend texted, “I was deeply unconcerned about not seeing because it sounded so good,” which is another version of “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”) The afternoon had the kind of electricity that comes with witnessing once-in-a-lifetime events. I felt grateful to be there but also to be there with friends; it felt hopeful to be surrounded by so many kids completely enthralled by this band that belongs to them, that is them. Everyone sang along to “Taxes” yelling “DOCTOR! DOCTOR! HEAL YOURSELF.” I closed my eyes and looked up to the sky and felt myself getting cleansed of the muck energy stuck in my body. It all got sucked out of me like the someone struck me with a straw and drank through me. When they played “2122” from their previous record the kids totally lost their minds and I was sure they were going to mosh and I was going to have to get out of the way and let them have their fun, but that’s not really what happened. Everyone was just simply joyously pogo-ing in place. I jumped up and down too and let myself be carried back and forth and around like a wave.

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Lived, loved, wasted…), 2001, Ink and watercolor on paper, 33 x 25 inches

I think of the Annie Lennox song where she sings “No more I love you’s/ The language is leaving me/ No more I love you’s/ Changes are shifting outside the word” except I don’t think the language is leaving me but rather filling in me, piling the fuck up, fighting to be let out. I always thought she sang “changes are shifting outside the world” but now I see the “word” is indeed truer. The final boss of creative anxiety is just yourself with no lives left.

I have been reading a lot, which is the warm-up for writing. The stretching. I had been meaning to read Nadja because of Selin in Either/Or and then someone left a copy on the giveaway table at work. A few pages in I realized that randomly finding the book was the best way to read this book. But I don’t have any other meaning to assign to this. It’s just a thing that happened.

Here are other things that have happened: waiting for the D train, a group of school-aged boys on the platform. As the train enters the station they all hold their arms up and start pulling an imaginary horn, like it was a passing truck. When the conductor finally gets close to them he quickly honks the horn on the train and the boys absolutely lose their minds with joy. A woman sits down next to me on the R train, pulls out a compact mirror and starts doing her makeup. As she applies blush on her cheeks the woman sitting on her other side says “oh that’s so nice!” The woman is caught off-guard, says thank you. On a different R train, a woman huffs and puffs her way down the middle of the train: she’s young, in workout clothes, carrying a dark cloud of energy around her that makes everyone look up to see what’s going on, as she goes to open the door to cross trains, the man leaning on the door reading a book starts moving out of his way but she doesn’t wait, pushes him off to get through. He yells at her, she yells back at him. It was a quick and unnecessary violence, and I wondered if when she got home later that night she thought about and regretted her actions. I go back to reading my book, and look up a few stops later to see he is making conversation with a woman sitting on one of the seats directly next to the door, no doubt about the event that just took place. Even later on, as the man finally reaches his stop and starts to gather his things, they say goodbye, as if they are friends. Looking with tenderness at everyone riding the train is a new trait that surprises me.

The new Lorde has been a heavy topic of conversation in many group chats. I didn’t love the singles, and the promotion felt like she was trying too hard to prove she is cool and different, (though I say this with love because everyone tries too hard to be cool and different, they just hope you can’t see the hardcore paddling under the surface), but then the songs feel the opposite, unstudied and raw, like the writing you do for yourself and would “clean up” before letting other people see it. I cringe a little when she sings about getting pierced on Canal and making a wish when the needle goes in, but then a friend tells me “that’s so you.” She’s probably right even though I really am just “a grown woman in a baby tee.” I think a lot of this is cringe. But I’m stet.

[An actual P.S.: This has been sitting in my drafts for a month, I guess I had second-guessed my ability to be comfortable with my own cringe, but I really am stet! I’m stet!!! I continue to insist as I slowly shink and transform into a corn cob.]

What I really wanted to say was “I don’t want to hear songs about fame, I want to hear songs about god,” which just meant I was thinking about Cameron Winter so I put on “$0” where he sings “God is real God is real I’m not kidding God is actually real I’m not kidding this time I think God is actually for real God is real God is actually real God is real I wouldn’t joke about this I’m not kidding this time.” I really don’t think he’s kidding. That song makes me cry sometimes precisely because the way he sings makes me think he is telling the truth and then I feel humbled by the realization which in turn makes me feel absolutely ridiculous. It’s a gorgeous feeling.

Cameron Winter photographed by Adam Powell

I keep thinking about god. I want to read about god, no, wait that’s not actually what I mean. I walk by a church and make note of their service hours, but no, that’s not actually what I mean and in any case I can’t do mass in English because I only know how to pray in Spanish. At a movement class we go around saying the things we are looking for and the things we can offer each other. I say I am looking for god as a manifestation of community. It surprises me. (I offer that I am always down to clown, which I am). It is easter but it doesn’t mean anything. Later that evening a friend shows me a photo of herself as a tween and it is so pure I start crying.

Most of the times that I’ve felt floored by flickers of divinity it has been because of music: a live show, or playing a record at a party, or listening to music in my headphones by myself, or even, yes, karaoke. I read The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan, a short novel whose protagonist awakens to find she is going deaf. A nightmare. I wonder if the memory of having listened to music once would be enough to sustain me—a depressing thought. I enjoyed the book.

A couple months ago I went to see Refused play a show at the Brooklyn Paramount. It was a spur of the moment decision: I saw they were coming and thought I bet it would be amazing to be in a small room when they play “New Noise,” and so I went and it was. 2700 people yelling WOO! simultaneously and collectively reliving whatever moment of their youth is tied to this song. Refused are a hardcore punk band formed in Sweden in the ’90s, but I discovered them in 2001 I think and by then Dennis Lyxzen, the lead singer, had formed another band called The (International) Noise Conspiracy, that was more dance-y and which I was particularly obsessed with. Lyxzen is 52 now, wears frilly purple silk shirts, and has longish silver hair which fans around him as he jumps and contorts himself onstage in the same offhandedly sensual manner as Jarvis Cocker. In between songs he talked about how strange it is to be touring the world singing songs he wrote when he was 19 years old except of course… well they’re still relevant. Later, I learned he had a heart attack last year and feel honestly thankful that he recovered and that I was able to see him live. Is that a selfish thought? It was a really great show.

I watched Conclave on my flight back from LA. I love the soundtrack of Ralph Fiennes’ intense breathing. There is a scene where he says “Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt.” Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt! I try to think of other things that are beautiful and walk hand in hand with doubt. Days pass and I can’t think of anything and the sentence remains there by itself a little bit taunting. Then I notice I traded in faith for beauty. I think of the doubt or is it uncertainty inherent in making, and making as a kind of faith, and then, well, I can definitely see that.

A mini-playlist for this newsletter:

1. The first 5 seconds of “Like a Prayer” when Madonna says “God?”

2. “New Noise” - Refused

3. "“$0” - Cameron Winter

4. “Losing My Religion” - REM

5. “Goddess On a Hiway” - Mercury Rev

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The Luddite lore in a nutshell: In the 1800s Ned Ludd was a weaver who destroyed a mechanical weaving machine—or stocking frame as it was called—in a fit of rage after being told his work needed to improve. A few decades later, when other weavers were protesting for better working conditions, they took on the Ned Ludd name as a symbol. They smashed stocking machines not because they were against “technology” but because it was a sure fire way to get heard by their bosses. Apparently sometimes they protested in women’s clothes and declared themselves to be “the wives of Ned Ludd” which I’m very charmed by.

I can’t remember if I was listening to OK Computer and then read about the Luddites or if I was reading about the Luddites and then needed to listen to OK Computer, but that’s what happened. I read some old articles and learn it’s not about pre-millennium-induced techno-fear but touring-induced claustrophobia. But maybe the spark doesn’t always need to match the flame—the record says what it says. I watch the “No Surprises” video a few times. It turns out Thom Yorke’s head really is being submerged in water. I watch the Meeting People Is Easy documentary, and they show a few scenes of the making of the video where Thom is getting increasingly frustrated because he isn’t able to hold his breath as long as he should. In the comments below the “No Surprises” video, someone writes about how he smirks at the end because he was finally able to get it right. Now I see the smirk too.

I bought a Brick so I can be on my phone less. I blocked Instagram and the secondhand shopping apps. It’s working. (Though now I also do all three levels of Sudoku on the Times app. I think it’s a fair trade.)

I think everyone wants off their phones. It’s a natural progression of things. We’ve spent almost two decades feeding the beast and we’ve had enough. The novelty has long worn off.

Later, I’m walking around SoHo and I see this flyer:

“It’s funny because everyone is like AUTHENTICITY IS IN 2025.” We’re discussing a pop star. When pressed, I find I can’t explain what I mean by that any further. “That’s just where we are in the world right now. Everyone wants authenticity,” I say. I don’t know who “everyone” is, or “who” “decided” “their needs,” but I know this is an “accurate” “statement.” In the think-tanks of the world voices are yelling AUTHENTICITY GIVE ME MORE AUTHENTICITY!

In my head, meanwhile, I’ve begun hearing a voice—possibly John Mulaney’s—yelling “Phonies! You’re all a bunch of phonies!”

A fashion designer “inspired by America” cites taxi drivers, bombshells, and “American beauties in checked shirts.”

But it’s 2025, I think.

A bit from a 2019 Virgil Abloh New Yorker profile that I think about all the time:

Abloh makes quick decisions. Walking through the runway set, he took a few paces and stopped at a white monobloc lawn chair. The LV employees looked on. He frowned. “That’s not New York,” he said, and turned the chair onto its back, so that it appeared to have been knocked over: “That’s New York.”

At the Super Bowl commercials, a war between mayonnaises, hardcore MEN Harrison Ford and Glen Powell sell cars, and an ad for Jesus Christ is soundtracked by Johnny Cash’s cover of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.”

Immediately following the Super Bowl, a game show came on called The Floor, “an exciting trivia game” where 100 experts face-off on their chosen categories. In the first episode these categories include pantry items, pets, and ancient history. Pictures of these subjects appear on a big screen and people take turns identifying them. In the ancient history battle there are images of: the Ten Commandments, an abacus, an arrowhead, clay pots, Jesus, papyrus, mosaics, Sumo wrestling, the zodiac, Chichén Itzá, Hannibal (“one of the greatest generals of ancient times”), Moses, Confucius, hunting, cave paintings, whirling dervish, Terracotta Warriors, Dead Sea Scrolls, Persepolis.

(That’s not America, that’s America.)

Today I am thinking about David Lynch saying “Today I am thinking about.” In fact, I have been thinking about it for a few todays, since the today he died.

On the Monday after that today, from 12:33 to 1:33, we saw Christian Marclay’s The Clock at MoMA. Is the correct verb “to see”? Or should I say On Monday from 12:33 to 1:33 we experienced; or On Monday from 12:33 to 1:33 we were inside Marclay’s The Clock; we were engulfed by The Clock; we were in the presence of time.

At 12:44 (or was it 12:54?) someone said they needed more time or was it they’d had enough of this life? I was going to write it down but I didn’t because it felt too try-hard, and I was sure I would remember and now maybe this way is funnier anyway.

What I like about The Clock is the way it compresses the world. Outside the room the world lurched forward with daunting intensity, inside it was everything everywhere all at once. The hour we watched was filled with workplaces, mid-day sensual rendezvous, lunches, naps, but also car crashes. I thought of the time I watched Adaptation years ago and the scene where the guy is pulling out of his driveway and gets t-boned fucked me up enough that I partly blame it for having never gotten my driver’s license. Then… oh wait, this is the fucking Adaptation car crash scene. 24 hours of movie with ten thousand movie clips spliced together and yet there it was.

Today (another today than the today I started with) I am thinking about the following lyrics: “Enjoy yourself/ it’s later than you think.” They’re from a Specials song that I’m not actually familiar with, but was used in an Undercover fashion show in 2023 and the line seems to have stuck in my brain. I am thinking about it because another thing I’ve been thinking about is that time I saw Jeremy O. Harris and Fran Lebowitz “in conversation” and he kept talking about “late capitalism” and Fran said something like “it could be much later.” That was in 2020 so it’s much later now. Much much later.

Because I don’t actually know the Specials song, my brain has also served me another song bit: “Enjoy yourself/ Take only what you need from it.” One of those songs I know because I was alive in the early aughts but did not actually know is by MGMT. Anyway, it turns out the lyrics are wrong and he’s actually singing “Control yourself/ Take only what you need from it.” But I don’t think I want to control, I want to enjoy. I’m having trouble enjoying. Then I start thinking about Björk’s “Enjoy”— “I’m going to explore/ I’m only into this to/ ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYY/ ENJOYYYYYYYY” The way she sings it, it’s like she’s enjoying in spite of or to spite. Both work. She gets it, obviously.

Later, going on a weirdo Google-hole, I find a video of a 2002 Yeah Yeah Yeahs performance at the First Unitarian Church in Philly. I was at this show. The person filming is standing on the stage and every time the camera pans to the audience, my heart starts racing with the possibility that I will see myself singing and dancing. As if it will somehow reveal something about me to myself. I don’t see myself, but the realization comes anyway. It’s this: despite the insane amount of shows that I saw at the Church in the five years I lived in Philly, I do not actually remember the space. I remember how I felt being inside the church—fucking alive, like I was exactly where I needed to be, crying sometimes, dancing most of the times; but the image in my head of the the dark basement, the people around me, the stage—none of those things are based on anything real. They are like my brain’s stock footage.

Watching this video I realize I also do not remember the outside of the church where we smoked cigarettes in between bands, I do not remember the entrance through which we went to the basement, I do not remember the minuscule stage with its school auditorium lighting. What I think I actually remember is the ceiling, made of big tiles with squiggly lines like the ones in my grandmother’s bedroom. Once, at an Acid Mothers Temple show, I spent a long time looking up at it in disbelief; the room was so full and the music was so intense that our own sweat was sort of raining back down on all of us from the ceiling—a small weather pattern inside a tiny basement.

There’s a Dutch artist that “makes” clouds. They only last a few seconds, but it’s long enough to photograph them and claim them. He calls them sculptures but they’re not. They’re the same clouds Kendall Roy asked for once but didn’t get. “Guys, that’s not the clouds. It’s not the clouds at all,” he says.

Thee classic image of Guy Piciotto threaded through a basketball hoop while playing a Fugazi show at a YMCA in Philadelphia on August 7 1988 by Sean Gustilo.

I was reading about Fugazi because I had decided to re-read Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, which details the American underground music scene that spawned hardcore and eventually “alternative” music in the ’80s into the ’90s, because I’ve been thinking about a book I want to write and I had the thought “Oh, it could be like an Our Band Could Be Your Life-type thing.” OBCBYL came out in 2001 and I bought it at the school bookstore probably because there was a chapter about Sonic Youth but also because I simply knew that the other bands featured in the book were important and I was supposed/needed to know about them. That I’ve still never listened to a few of the bands chronicled within is beside the point, because to read the book is to be reminded of how important it is to just go out and make stuff. Start a band, write a zine, write letters, go to shows, become obsessed with things and explore that obsession, maybe let it define you for a little bit, maybe let it turn you into an annoying person who means well, maybe let it take you someplace new (mentally, physically). It’s really a book about teenage idealism that actually managed to change things a little bit. I’m not a teenager anymore but it’s damn good evergreen advice. I’m happy to have started the year filling myself up with that kind of energy.

I started this substack in late December 2023. I had just seen Interpol and they were great, and it seemed a good a jumping-off point as any other to start writing. I saw Interpol again last month, on the 4th. “My yearly December tradition!”, I thought, and then I remembered that the first-ever time I saw them there had been a big snowstorm in Philly—had that also been in December? I looked it up and it was December 5th 2002. Twenty-two years apart almost to the day! It’s one of those coincidences that don’t mean anything. (And yet…) Music is already a tether through time, but now here were these two anchor points in the flat circle. My favorite Paul Banks lyric is when he sings “you’re linked to my innocence” in “Say Hello to the Angels” because it is, he is, and I knew the first time I heard it that it always would be.

At work, I wrote and thought a lot about Matthieu Blazy, a fashion designer who in a very short time established himself as important and influential, and then was named creative director at Chanel, “the most important job in fashion” as people like to call it. Matthieu is endlessly likable, seemingly un-jaded, and he often references “childlike wonder” when talking about his process. His work shows an openness to experimentation and discovery—it’s both very serious capital-L luxury while also indulging a wild streak that’s down to clown. Like opening a show with a model wearing a plain white tank top and a pair of jeans that turned out to be made not of cotton and twill but leather, something that you’d only know if you walked up to the clothes and touched them with your own hands. A trickster.

(A friend put a trickster spirit in her new year’s resolutions which I will co-sign.)

A record I listened to often last year was Rhetoric & Terror by Nonpareils, which is what the musician Aaron Hemphill calls his solo output. Aaron was a co-founder of Liars, another NYC early aughts band that I adore (this substack is named after one of their songs). In recent years, I had not really kept up with him, or Liars for that matter, other than to know that once Aaron had left the band (amicably, the internet assures me) their music no longer interested me. The Nonpareils album came out in September when I was still in the middle of what seemed like an interminable miscarriage from a surprise pregnancy that I barely had time to process before I began losing it. The record was a faithful companion as my life suddenly split in two—on one level, work, jokes with friends, a daughter, life going on; on the other, a constant exhausting hyperawareness of my own body (just how much can a person bleed?). The music is by turns a fantasy and a haunting, shrieking in ecstasy and horror, it guides you along first with beautiful and then unsettling melodies and then suddenly it jolts you away with a strident noise (“Six Six Seven (Monsieur Faux Pas)”), a song that I always want to skip but I never do because the disturbance is part of the whole thing. The first time I listened to the album, I felt flashes of recognition of previous moments in my life spent listening to Liars. “Oh, that was Aaron doing that!” I thought when I heard the strange chorus of voices in the first track against a rolling drumbeat that came in a rush like the ocean and then broke into a groovy modern bassline that dramatically walked with one foot in front of the other, on a body covered in a black matte jersey catsuit. The music makes me feel alive in the same way that I felt alive when I was a teenager in college and in a constant state of discovering new things but this was different because it was new. “When you grow up your heart dies” but maybe my heart hasn’t yet, or at least the good parts haven’t. The thing about youthful abandon is you don’t know any better, maybe the world hasn’t yet revealed itself to you in its entirety. To maintain that abandon and that commitment to making and loving when you know that the world is indeed, bullshit, that, my friends, is what we call “doing the work.” It remains, as ever, my only resolution for this year: To make and to love.

• Following last year’s tradition, here are three records and one band’s almost complete discography that I got really into this year:

  • Kim Gordon: The Collective (2024)

  • Olivia Rodrigo: Guts (2023)

  • Pavement: Slanted and Enchanted (1992), Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994), Wowee Zowee (1995), Brighten the Corners (1997)

  • Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso: Baño Maria (2024)

• Here are some songs I got really into this year in no particular order:

  • System of a Down, “Chop Suey!”

  • Paco Amoroso, “Mi Deseo”

  • Beck, “Deadweight”

  • Romy Mars, “Stuck Up”

  • Natalie Imbruglia, “Wrong Impression”

I read Joy Williams’ Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, a collection of well, 99 short (verrry short) stories about or involving Azrael, the angel whose job it is to collect and guide people’s souls upon their death. The devil features prominently throughout as a kind of frenemy to Azrael, they talk, they hang out, they like and dislike each other for different reasons at different times. Towards the end of the book, story #90 begins with Azrael wondering if souls are now leaving people before they die, because you know, he’s arriving places to do the job he’s done for millennia and finding there’s no soul there waiting for him. Then: 

The story is called “A Sinking Ship.”

I was struck by the beauty of the sentence, the thinking that the earth is stripped so that it too is losing its own soul, and so it is also no longer a safe haven for other sould. I have been thinking about this story non-stop since. The idea of souls looking around at the state of the world and saying fuck this I’m out. And then of course to that I imagine one can add that there are a lot of souls that are expelled, banished from bodies by their own host. If we assume the soul is also the place where people’s goodness lies, that it’s the thing that makes us humans, then its sudden absence is certainly a neat explanation of the reasons why things are the way they are now.

A few months ago there was a quote making the rounds on Instagram—a screenshot from a newspaper’s “Letters to the Editor” section or something—where a woman said she didn’t understand why we were training AI to write songs or movies or do all these creative things instead of to pick up the trash or clean the bathroom or whatever. Why are we all so keen to have machines take over the exact thing that makes us human? An AI commercial that ran during the Olympics had a dad ask his phone to help him write a fan letter from his daughter to the athlete that she admired. I think they meant for it to be heartwarming. 

I was reading the New York Times article about the nominees for the Booker Prize, and I clicked open a bunch of new tabs for all the books that I hadn’t heard about (in complete honesty it was… most of them). One of the books is called Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I read enough from its review to know that it is about six astronauts on the space station and that it has “basically no plot,” as a lover (obsessee?) of space, this appealed to my interests. (I stopped reading the review because I like to read books knowing nothing about them.)

When a day later I still can’t stop thinking about it, I buy it and start reading it. Immediately it feels like my whole body is being flushed by an IV of… whatever universal particles make up… our… souls? (Writing this makes me cringe a little but I don’t know what other way to describe it!) I get to my train stop, close the book, and realize I’ve just spent 40 minutes sort of disconnected from my surroundings, I feel lighter. Have I been floating? Is this what meditation is like? Harvey writes in a way that feels as close to poetry as I’ve seen except it’s not, it’s fiction (although at the same time, why can’t it be poetry?). I am both in a hurry to finish the book and also feeling like I want to live inside its pages forever. 

When I finish it, I try to find interviews with her but I can only find one, in The Guardian, where she talks about how she started the book as a sort of personal writing exercise—that she’d been looking at images of the Earth from space for years and wanted to find out if she could “do justice in words to the beauty of the Earth and how [she] feels about the unnerving fact of its aloneness the same way an image can?” I have felt this feeling when I think about the unknowable vastness of the universe, but I don’t find it unnerving, instead I am humbled by its magnificence. Harvey says she thought of the book as “space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space.” The book ends with an imagined symphony, Harvey describing the sound of the Earth—not the sounds of Earth—but the one that emerges from the planet’s own vibrations. It’s enough to make one weep in its beauty, I mean the beauty of the writing, but also maybe at the sort of confidence that it takes to write such a deeply strange and elegant book about what it feels like to look at the Earth from space and how it feels like to live in such an Earth, when you’re on it, and when you’re far away, and how being in space changes your heart (literally, figuratively) and how all of this together can weigh heavy on your soul. A soul! There it is.

And just because…

There are some things that I am a creature of habit about, one of them is the music that I listen to to and from work. For the last month it’s been my pop girlie playlist (yes I am linking to it again because it’s very good), but on this particular Monday morning, two days after dinner that fated dinner, I decided against it and went for Portishead Live at Roseland instead. I took my seat on the train and started reading the Miranda July. The main character began her drive somewhere when: 

All Fours, by Miranda July

It was a funny sentence to read. Me and this woman both in transit somewhere, listening to Portishead. It sent a funky little electric shock through my body—recognition? There were three more mentions of Portishead so then I texted the Group Chat like “started reading the new Miranda and she keeps mentioning Portishead… while I am listening to Portishead.” It was like texting about the weather report. Huh, isn’t that something, but unremarkable.

The next day, back on the train and back to my reading. On Chapter 7:

Another one from Miranda July’s All Fours

In real life, my life, it is May 30th. “Am I reading this book in real time?????”—another text to the GC.

A few hours later, the main character gets on a plane.

All Fours by Miranda July

Another text to the GC. “What the FUCK I just watched Moonstruck on the way back from Australia lmaoooooooo” to which my friend responded “Laia if you live this book…” but like, I wouldn’t!

I finished the book that same day I think. I loved it. I thought it was weird and alive and I’ve since told almost everyone I know that they need to read it. But I didn’t feel seen by this book. My main takeaway wasn’t “damn, I wish this was my life,” but, “fuck am I really that close to menopause?!” As such, these coincidences did not take on a new meaning, and I think that’s why I found the whole thing so amusing. Even though I think the thing about coincidences is that you’re like “haha… not really… jk unless…?” But there really was no unless. There was nothing deeper. 

I immediately went into reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, a book that I have “been meaning to read” since it came out. I remember multiple copies sent to the Lenny offices, then I bought another copy some time after that and I lent it to someone and never saw it again. So I bought it (again, on my phone).

It happened again.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

It was funny because how utterly meaningless it all was (every four years someone will read this book in the summer and think haha so true they are about to start!) and because I was so keenly aware of its meaninglessness. These sort of coincidences—the things that I come across when I am reading that feel like they’re pointedly being said to me or about me—usually have to do with something I am writing or thinking about writing. They become signs that I am “on the right path”; that I should keep moving forward because the universe is telling me that there “is value in my idea.” In the last four years especially, I have collected all these little moments as proof that this novel-thing I started writing four years ago during the pandemic because I was like well what else am I doing may as well try to do Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer thing, “has legs.” And now, here were all these coincidences with nothing to reveal for themselves. 

Please read all quotation marks in the previous graf as above.

I finished the The Idiot (LOVED IT!), and went straight into Either/Or (its sequel). Right away, I discovered Selin (the main character who yes, I’ll admit I identified with way more than I did with Miranda July’s unnamed narrator lol) engaged in these same kind of bullshit practices. It’s the first chapter and she has spotted a class on “Chance” in a course catalog which leads her to a book that she once saw and briefly read in her roommate’s shelf, which later, her crush happened to quote to her in an email. Deciphering these signs is in fact not not the driving force of at least the first half of the book (the second half is more like the strange erotic(?) adventures of an academic girl from Massachusetts to Turkey—and yes I loved this book too).

How sickos think. Either/Or by Elif Batuman

I had to fucking laugh—the thinking about coincidences being the coincidence, well that one I wasn’t expecting. But by now, I had figured out what it all meant (because of course I was always going to find meaning in it). It was The Muse, trolling.

Asking: How many more signs do you need to just sit down and write this you dumb bitch. If four years of sign-coincidences haven’t yet given you the confidence you need to just finish this, then I have nothing to offer you. You know the only way out is in.

And she’s right! (The Muse is always right.) This is all so deeply stupid. 

A few pages later:

Either/Or by Elif Batuman

I cackled. I’d already started writing this text. But it felt like the confirmation (sorry, old habits are hard to break) I needed. Should I apologize to you all? I think I worked through something here.

The plan was to write this during my 24+ hour journey to Sydney, Australia, where I traveled to cover fashion week. I imagined a full day full of intense emotions and existential questioning, similar to what happened nine years ago, the only other time I’ve been on a flight this long (to Tokyo on a press trip). I guess what I forgot was that back then I was fresh off a break-up and I relished the feeling of being floating in the air for forever and then being in a completely new place with no concept of time because it matched how unmoored I felt in real life.

But this time, my flight out from JFK was delayed so I missed my connection at LAX and I ended up spending the day there, which was great because I got to see one of my best friends and go to Erewhon where I finally had the $20 Hailey Bieber smoothie (I loved it). When I finally did get on the flight to Sydney I passed out for the first 8 hours then watched Past Lives without existentially spiraling afterwards; proof that my emotional life is very much grounded right now, which is always a nice reassurance. At some point I looked up and saw the flight tracker on the screen from the guy across from me; with our little plane slowly chugging along in the middle of nowhere, with no land visible on either side which reminded me of how Earth itself is just floating in the vastness of the universe. (A feeling I always dig). On my return trip, while waiting for my 9:20 am flight to New York at LAX, I realized I had already waited for a 9:20am flight that same morning(?) in Sydney; another helpful reminder of how time is meaningless 🙂 

I hadn’t taken a long work trip since the pandemic, and I forgot about the pleasure of coming up with a new temporary daily routine. My hotel room was set up like a studio apartment with a little kitchen, a dining room table—and most thrillingly—a washer and dryer!—so I went grocery shopping for some breakfast/snacks (yogurt, granola, strawberries, oranges, dairy free-milk). I worked at the table and began each morning by listening to the same two records: St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming, followed by Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism. 

St. Vincent talks about the phrase “All Born Screaming” as both a celebration of life—when a baby is born, it cries, and that’s how you know it’s alive—but also a feeling of being in revolt. It is a rock album but it is also weird, violent, playful, sensual. It’s funny because I think it perfectly encapsulates living in the year of our lord 2024 mostly because of the storytelling the music is doing—the jagged guitars, the groovy reggae beats, the thundering drums—though the bits and pieces of lyrics that have stayed in my mind after listening for a week seem to support this hypothesis. (“What are you looking at?\Like you’ve never seen a broken man”; “I look at you and all I see is meat”; “Ladies and gentlemen do remember me smiling”; “I forgot people could be so kind in these violent times”; “A karaoke version of Leonard’s ‘Hallelujah’”; “This revolution isn’t fun now/I’m out of fashion, I got god on my heels”) This version of St. Vincent is chaotic and powerful in the best possible way. 

The Dua Lipa record is, of course, none of those things. When I first listened to it I texted one of my group chats: “im sort of deeply into how one note it is? like it’s very go on give us nothing but in a very no thoughts head empty floating on a pool kind of way that i find very appealing.” The songs are about love and heartbreak because that’s what dance-pop songs are always about—they’re not generic because Dua’s music is so European(?) which adds to the whole lobotomized feeling. Radical Optimism is an escape for the mind into a world where there are no screens and no phones and you are living in the moment and that moment happens to find you communing with the sun, getting lost in the colorful splashes of color that form behind your own closed eyelids.

And so taking at face value alone, the names of both these albums are a fitting soundtrack for our current violent times (“Violent Times” also an excellent song on ABS). One is grounded on the excruciating pain of being alive and the other one is an antidote to escape your feelings. 

At some point between all these pop girlies, last week Spotify served me Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer,” a song I’ve always loved, but for some reason upon this “round” of listening it became fucking important and essential. Now I think it’s because the song finishes the summer 2024 trilogy begun by the St. Vincent and Dua Lipa albums.

“Feel the breeze deep on the inside
Look you down into your well
If you can, you’ll see the world in all this fire 
Take a chance like all dreamers
You can’t find another way
You don’t have to dream it all
Just live a day 
Don’t say a prayer for me now
Save it till the morning after”

PS I made this summer playlist inspired by St. Vincent and Dua (and the new Billie but that’s a subject for another time maybe). You’re welcome! xx

Watching them, I kept forgetting that they (we) are all middle aged(-ish) now. (An unprompted text from my mom: a screenshot of an article with Gwen’s birthdate [October 3, 1969—a date that I hate to admit I’ve memorized]. “When did we get this old!!!! I see her as I saw her in the  90’s!🤪” —My mom is 5 years older.) But I swear that during the show I could also see Gwen forgetting, slowly slipping back to her old self. They played “Total Hate ’95,” a song on that’s been around since the band first formed when Gwen and her brother Eric were still in high school (and Tony Kanal, Adrian Young, and Tom Dumont hadn’t yet joined), and which they released on The Beacon Street Collection, which they put out themselves a few months before Tragic Kingdom. It’s a banger on the record—where it also has a feature from Sublime’s Bradley Nowell—but live it goes really really hard. It’s also… a ska song, which means Gwen and Tony were doing their little synchronized skanking kicks dance thing and it was dorky as hell and beautiful. Tony, as hot as ever, had the goofiest grin on his face the whole time. The two of them were singing and performing to each other for most of the show, the same way they always used to (let’s not forget “Cool” is about him!).

Gwen + Tony

When they played “Just A Girl,” Gwen started climbing one of the tower structure-thing on the stage to do her usual sing-along thing, and I felt my brain sort of flicker to when I saw them play sometime in 2002, and she climbed the tower structure-thing at the amphitheater in San Juan to do the sing-along thing. Past and present converging. They closed with “Spiderwebs,” and as she was singing one of the last verses she suddenly stopped and asked the crowd if they would sing it with her. “I’ll try to sing it like the record, are you ready?,” she said. She did. It felt important. At the end of the show, as the band was walking off stage, Gwen climbed on Tony’s back and he carried her piggyback backstage. I took a screenshot. It’s not that I’m harboring some sort of sick Gwen and Tony get back together agenda, but it was just such a pure moment. 

The other highlight of their set was that they brought out Olivia Rodrigo to sing “Bathwater,” from 2000’s Return of Saturn. “Of course,” I thought as Gwen yelled “Why do the good girls like us always love the stinky stupid smelly boys!” I had just seen Olivia Rodrigo at MSG a few days before and had been in a GUTS-hole ever since. On Instagram Olivia wrote, “I remember hearing bathwater for the first time when I had just started writing songs. it totally turned my world on its head and inspires me to this day.” I thought omg she must’ve been a baby when this record came out, but she wasn’t. She was born in 2003. (Past and present converging.)

About Olivia Rodrigo. My general stance on her used to be “I’m glad the teens have her, but she’s not for me.” The marketing for her second album GUTS was centered around her many Gen X/alternative music influences (a New Yorker article “Why Gen X Dads Can Appreciate Olivia Rodrigo”), and later she announced The Breeders (Gen X/alternative influences!) would be opening for her on tour. Even if I wasn’t exactly vibing with her music, I was thrilled with her whole thing. I was curious when the opportunity to see her came up—plus The Breeders were opening so win/win. The day before the show I decided to put on GUTS while I worked to get into the mood, and lo and behold, I LOVED it?! I have no idea what changed in my brain chemistry since I first listened to it when it came out seven months ago, but something clicked. It felt both new and familiar in really fun ways—the quiet-loud-quiet dynamics begat by Nirvana et al; the melodies of my favorite “ballad of a homeschooled girl” (idk they feel very L7 to me) or “pretty isn’t pretty” (are they Throwing Muses? Belly? I’m still investigating); the Fiona Apple-esque piano ballads; the Veruca Salt of it all (she covered “Seether” on her first tour), and that’s before we even get to the pop-punk bits! (And these are just the things I hear not some sort of overarching checklist.) She’s unafraid to reference or not reference! It’s a great fucking melange.

At MSG all the tweens and teens were decked out in their Olivia Rodrigo cosplay: sequin skirts, combat boots, leather jackets. The Breeders played basically a full set, and when they did “Drivin’ on 9,” I noticed all the girls standing right in front of the stage were rhythmically bopping their heads left and right and my heart fully melted. Olivia kicked off the show with “bad idea right?” and the crowd fully lost it, then she played my favorite “ballad of a homeschooled girl” (the chorus goes “each time I step outside/it’s social sui-ciiiiiiiide”), then went into “vampire.” I will admit that hearing the entirety of Madison Square Garden, full of GIRLS, singing at the top of their lungs made me emotional. I really am so glad teen girls have her.

She plays with an all-girl band (naturally), and also has a cadre of back-up dancers which seemed too “pop star” to me, but then I loved them. Their vibe was very the punk cheerleaders of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (duh), meets Kathleen Hanna dancing in a t-shirt and polka dotted-underwear over black tights in Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather” video. One of their costumes changes also reminded me of the outfit Courtney Love wore at Glastonbury in 1999—a pink bra, pink sequined hot pants, and butterfly wings. Olivia wears sequined hot pants (high waisted) through most of the concert, and towards the end she pairs them with a white tank top (with slogan) the straps of a red bra clearly visible—a nod to Gwen. 

Olivia + Jewel

This is our modern fandom culture—hunting down references, obsessing over “easter eggs,” and dissecting everything a star says, wears, the length of a song. Olivia knows this too! Her special guest at our show was Jewel, and they played “Foolish Games” together. (Past! and! Present! Converging!) Can you believe the first time I saw Jewel was at the Olivia Rodrigo show? As they began singing I turned to a friend and yelled THIS IS AN EDUCATION FOR THE CHILDREN!, joking but also not. The ’90s “Women in Rock” (lol) revolution, is mostly remembered by those who “were there”; the decade’s musical history is basically reduced to Nirvana and Britney Spears.

Olivia knows these women MEAN something, not just because she loves them, but because they also offer a roadmap to allow herself to grow-up and bring her music along with her. She wants to liberate herself and also her fans. (Not not related: Kaia Gerber’s Instagram book club celebrating Eve Babitz and Kathy Acker pretty much back to back.) Think about how Alanis was litero a Canadian teen pop star before the release of Jagged Little Pill (Olivia brought Alanis on stage during her last tour to sing “You Oughta Know”); Sheryl Crow was 30 when she hit it big with Tuesday Night Music Club (last month Olivia brought Sheryl onstage to sing “If It Makes You Happy”). (Jewel was 21 when Pieces of You came out but she had lived in a van!) On “teenage dream,” the last song on GUTS, Olivia sings, “When am I gonna stop being great for my age and just start being good?,” and then later, “They all say that it gets better/ it gets better the more you grow / They all say that it gets better, it gets better / but what if I don’t?”

Sitting in bed watching No Doubt’s Coachella performance, I also had a flashback of all the hours I’ve spent watching their Live In the Tragic Kingdom VHS (well, these days I just pull up the video someone ripped on YouTube) which captured the Anaheim stop of their Tragic Kingdom tour back in 1997—here I was 27 years still doing the same shit! Yesterday, as I made my way through edit number whatever of this, I decided to put it on the TV. “Say bye bye, Bluey!,” I told Fede, and cued it up not sure this was going to go well. To my surprise, a few minutes in she declared,“Me encanta mamá!” By the time they got to “Total Hate ’95” we were dancing around the coffee table in the living room like two gals in a chick flick.

I keep thinking about supposed former infatuation junkie mostly because I like the phrase. I like how it feels in your mouth when you say it (try it) supposed former infatuation junkie. I like that it feels like both nonsense and like it contains a whole universe—supposed former infatuation junkie. We’re all supposed former infatuation junkies, if you really think about it. (Or at least definitely J.Lo is.) Last weekend at karaoke with friends I sang “Right Through You,” from Alanis’ first record and while texting my friend Adam about it after (he loves Alanis so I thought of him when I sang it and then of course it made me miss him), I also informed him of my current obsession to make supposed former infatuation junkie-core happen. He could see it. I love when you text a friend something sort of half-joking and halfway through you realize maybe you are half-telling the truth. The best song on Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie is “Baba,” about her experience with a guru on her trip to India. The chorus goes:

How long will this take, Baba?
How long have we been sleeping?
Do you see me hanging on to every word you say?
How soon will I be holy?
How much will this cost, guru?
How much longer til you completely absolve me?

Alanis became rich and famous singing about all of the things “good catholic girls” weren’t supposed to say, a poster child for the liberated ‘90s woman, and just as soon she left it all behind. Going from “Are you thinking of me/when you fuck her?” to “Dear Matthew/I like you a lot/I realize you're in a relationship/with someone right now and I respect that”?! That takes guts.

Anyway, lately I think a lot about HOW LONG HAVE WE BEEN SLEEPING.

Alanis’s concert style in 1998 and 1999.

But back to the “-core” of it all… Before I started thinking about the music and the songs and the meaning, I was thinking about it as it relates to Alanis’s style at the time. The Indian-inspired raw silk fabrics with gold embroidery; layered sheer tank shell tops, maybe some Gaultier-inspired ones with images of the Buddha or other deities; cargo pants or skirts in military green cotton or a nylon, tech-y fabric. The most important part involved the layering of a straight skirt, made simply from two rectangles, over straight leg pants that erred on the side of slouchy.

On the Eckhaus Latta website there is currently a pair of pants that come with a detachable half-mid-length skirt-belt thing made of lace. I desired them immediately. I think that instant connection came from the skirt-over-pants layering, like they unlocked something in my brain though they don’t necessarily fit the description of anything I mentioned above. A few weeks ago, after Dries Van Noten announced he would be stepping down from his own label, I went on Getty to look at his old shows; and I discovered his collections from ’98 and ’99 especially were exactly all of the things I had been thinking about. Before he was known as like, the king of color or the master of florals he was a designer that dealt in “ethnic touches.” A 1997 review in the Times described his collection as “intriguing when he made familiar touchstones of Occidental style exotic with a light brush of Indian or African culture.” The point is, I love the thought of a post-rage, healed-Alanis wearing Dries van Noten.

Some Dries Van Noten Looks from 1998 and 1999.

Back then there was anxiety about the end of a millennium—doesn’t it seem so cute to think about how only twenty-ish years ago people thought the computers would malfunction because they wouldn’t understand the concept time?—now there is anxiety because well why isn’t there anxiety. The future. We are looking at tinctures, adaptogens, whatever Bella Hadid’s upcoming wellness line will be about. We wanna get off the machine!

At some point later this year or next year, Dries will name a new designer that will replace him. As it always happens, this new designer will begin by going into the Dries archives. I think people had forgotten about the richness of his early collections, is something this new creative director might say in an interview describing why their new collection is covered in rich Indian embroideries, or a Hungarian color palette—done in direct collaboration with artisans from the specific regions of course. Do you see it all coming together? Do you feel enlightened?

Last year I went through a period of listening to Nirvana’s Unplugged when it hit me that I had never heard of the original versions of the Meat Puppets songs they cover (how is it possible that I’d been so uncurious for so long?!), most of which are on 1984’s II. Listening to the original “Lake of Fire” was a revelation, like a whole universe opening itself inside my brain—what a deeply fucking weird song, what an off-the-cuff yet deeply felt way that Curt Kirkwood seems to just open his mouth and let notes come out. It made sense why Kurt Cobain loved them so much—how cool that he was able to play these songs with them!

I had never considered the two figures on the cover of The Covers Record and now I love it even more.

The best covers are faithful to the original but also a reflection of the artist’s pure vision. And when they’re done right I love covers because there’s an intrinsic vulnerability around them (“let me sing for you this song that I love!”) mixed with the bravado that it takes to then ignore what you know and love to make something of your own. Think about Cat Power’s entire The Covers Record, but specifically her cover of The Velvet Underground’s “I Found A Reason,” where she sings a handful of lines from the song against a sparse piano, not even saving the “pa-pa-paahs” or the little guitar riff, leaving nothing familiar behind. (I find this version infinitely more heartbreaking and romantic than the original.) Back when I was in college I randomly picked up a single by a band named OXES because the b-side was a cover of “Everlong.” It was instrumental, and the guitars (rock, with distortion) emphasized the more bleak, desperate longing side of the song. When the “vocals” came in as a slide guitar solo I literally burst into tears. Something new.

I have been thinking about how or if a cover can exist in a different medium. I don’t think it’s just about making a copy of an existing work, or a movie or story that is “based on” or a “remake” of something else. Then there are the works that exist to be interpreted by different people but aren’t considered covers (classical music, choreography). There’s no complete statement here, these are thoughts-in-progress.

Last week, the Times published an interview with the designer Phoebe Philo, her first in I don’t know how long, since even when she was the creative director at Céline a decade ago or whatever, she stopped granting interviews after the shows in favor of “letting the clothes speak for themselves.” The new interview proved she still feels the same way. She answered questions but didn’t (willingly) reveal anything. Reading the piece I was struck by how many of the quotes were refusals—lots of I don’ts and I nevers; and I felt a necessity to extract them from the article and then organize them in alphabetical order, in the manner of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries:

“I’m not particularly into that.” “I don’t feel myself that I need a lot of that from other fashion houses.” “I don’t feel that there’s a huge amount of storytelling that needs to be done.” “I don’t want to get rid of them.” “I don’t know why it can’t just be continuous.” “I don’t know why there has to be such a beginning and an end in our industry.” “I never know what to expect.” “I still don’t believe it needs to be like that.”

When I started writing this, I thought of my little impulsive experiment again. How Phoebe’s quotes weirdly did have a certain kind of Sheila Heti-energy about them. (Two women speaking honestly about the things they desire? Two artists speaking about their process?) It’s obviously not a cover… but there’s something in here that is inviting me to go further.

I was right. There’s a rhythmic quality to the sentences, especially when you hit a large chunk of the ones that begin with “I” or “because” or “how” or “not,” that allows you to sort of read with your main brain and let your second-level brain wander. The book is also bit of a meditation on writing simply because it is a topic that she comes back to again and again—wanting to write, needing to write, not being able to write, wishing she did anything else instead of writing etc etc. But then as a narrative, it is quite enjoyable too. The un-chronological nature of the book makes it fun, like putting together a puzzle. I think my favorite sentence was maybe “Of course Zadie Smith is married.”

During the pandemic I took a two-day writing seminar with Sheila about creating chance in your work. In one of the exercises we wrote down a lot of questions about the project we were working on and then flipped a coin three times (heads-yes, tails-no) with the understanding that we’d follow on whatever the coin said (though of course we could also not). I asked questions about the themes that I thought I was thinking about and then the answers came back No, No, No No. But then a series of questions: Is there a point to it? Yes. Will it Reveal itself in time? Yes. Should I just stop making excuses and write? Yes. Reading it back now, felt really good, you know? A message. But then a few lines down, another note “Writing is work, not divine intervention.” Right.

Listening to The Collective, Kim Gordon’s new record is also not not a meditation. On this record her droll voice is at times menacing or matter-or-fact or bored (or or or) over beats that are fucking dirty and destroyed and have the relentless energy of machines that are constantly flattening, pummeling, rooting a hole through the streets and the earth independent of any humans. Sentient. You can listen and zone out and vibe; check back in when something she says catches your ear. “Send in the clowns/send in the army” she sings in “It’s Dark Inside” and I imagine a spider-shaped metal structure ripping out trees, swimming in a fountain of lava with glee. People always describe her lyrics as stream of consciousness, but I don’t know, isn’t everything? It reminds me of NO ONE IS RANDOM, a phrase my friend T and I say to each other all the time, especially upon the discovery of someone’s family member of note. Yesterday she and I were also talking about the idea of revisiting the same topic in your work throughout the years (some people think it’s bad, we do not). In the past two weeks Kacey Musgraves and Ariana Grande both released songs about their Saturn returns and then I started thinking about Saturn returns again. I am always thinking about Saturn returns. This is the legacy of Gwen Stefani, which once again, I wrote about recently.

Anyway back to the Kim, in the liner notes she thanks Rachel Kushner for the lyric prompts. The name of the record is taken from Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (also the name of the second song on the record). I feel like saying “stream of consciousness” is, in a way, pretending like her lyrics are more “divine intervention” and less “work.”

On “Dream Dollar,” the last song on The Collective, Kim sings (somewhat unintelligibly), “cement the brand/get in the room” and then “dreams are…???” And it doesn’t matter that I don’t understand what she’s singing dreams are because then I heard her singing ALL YOUR DREAMS WILL COME TRUE/ALL MY DREAMS CAME TRUE/BUT NOW… I HAVE A BUNCH OF OTHER DREAMS BA-DUMP-BA on “Quest for the Cup,” a Sonic Youth song on Experimental Jet-Set, Trash and No Star, which is possibly my favorite album of theirs. I liked my brain filling in the blank from the information available.

Anyway the record is really great. I am starting The Candy House this week.

Last week I think it was, I randomly came across a post on Instagram about how it was the anniversary of Liars’ They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, which I wrote about here some weeks ago. I shared it to my stories and when I came back to Instagram some time later saw in my notifications that the two people who had “liked” the post were two of my friends from when I was going to school in Philly. We all loved the record. I don’t keep in touch with many friends from that time but I loved seeing that it was “still us” who that record meant a lot to, belonged to. An instant thread to the past. Later, I was listening to Rachel Kushner on the Apology podcast and she said something about having “proprietary feelings” about a book, which I loved. (I think this can be confused with being a snob but proprietary feelings come from love not from a sense of superiority).

I thought about connecting threads again for entirely different reasons. I was at work discussing a collection (fashion week is still going on) that I found completely lacking in relevance, modernity, or the knowledge of real life-women, when a Fiona Apple bit suddenly snuck in my brain—“I went crazy again today/looking for a strand to climb/looking for/a little hope.” In the process of looking at show after show after show, I realized that this season I am searching for connection through a level of awareness or recognition. Not necessarily about the state of the world (although absolutely about the state of the world), but in the sense of producing something that is grounded in (a) reality. I’m not looking for my own reality; just a level of humanity.

The designer Matthieu Blazy, who designs for the very luxe Bottega Veneta, spoke of “desert flowers that bloom after the earth is burnt,” which stuck with me. His collection was opulent (as the market demands) and yet restricted, a stark contrast to last season when the clothes instead showed turbulence at the end of a relationship with textures upon textures. I know that looking for humanity in luxury can be oxymoronic, but you know, it’s like Fiona quoted Maya Angelou as saying (yes I’m going there): “We, as human beings, at our best, can only create opportunities. And I'm gonna use this opportunity the way that I want to use it.” (This was followed by her legendary “THIS WORLD IS BULLSHIT” which I think about at least once a week). Meaning you communicate your truth using the means at your disposal. At Comme Des Garçons, Rei Kawakubo showed a collection full of black leather voluminous shapes; jilted, exploded, folded this way and manipulated that way. From the videos people posted on Instagram I saw one model walk down the runway, stop and then menacingly get in the face of a show-goer that was in the process of taking her photo. Another stomped down the runway holding up her big gown covered in black knots (not bows, not coquette), stopped half-way, threw the gown from her hands, then picked it up again to finish her walk. Today I saw the notes from the show. A single sheet of white paper that read: 

ANGER. 

This collection is about my present state of mind. 

I have anger against everything in the world,
especially against myself.

On Friday night I went to see Mary Timony at Bowery Ballroom. She has an excellent new record out called Untame the Tiger. I am not a hardcore, completist Timony fan but there are different parts in my life that have been exclusively soundtracked by her voice. In 2001, it was “Hole in the Ground,” by one of her earlier bands, Helium, which I discovered through the soundtrack of the criminally underrated movie All Over Me. It is a perfect song for teen disillusionment, breaking free of the expectations and demands of some deadbeat boyfriend but also maybe society. Then in 2011, it was “Something Came Over Me,” from another one of her bands, Wild Flag, that carried me through the first few months of my Return of Saturn, and an affair that kicked off a year of LIVING. And now this new record which I listened to on repeat all through December and January. This time around, it’s not her lyrics that I’m the most drawn to, but her music and melodies. They feel oddly familiar and like whatever sadness may live in me at any given time has seemingly found a kindred spirit. At the show, while she was shredding in the middle of a song, I closed my eyes and started dancing in place, wanting to get lost in the sound. I was surprised when in the darkness of the back of my eyelids, an image of my daughter appeared before me. It caught me off guard. I opened my eyes. That’s new, I thought. Of course my most inner place of joy now includes her. I imagined us going to shows together when she is older. It felt like a small strand of hope into the future.

As part of the exhibition, there was a fashion show by an artist/designer named Giovanna Flores. I first came across her work two years ago through mutual friends, when she held a show inside a tiny room on Lafayette next to the Public. Everyone just stood around the perimeter and her models came out wearing swooping things and I loved it and I felt that electricity that you can still sometimes get when you moved to New York for a dream and suddenly you’re like wow I’m in New York for my dream, even if you’ve been here for almost two decades. This time around, the clothes felt more conceptual. They made me work harder to understand them, which I appreciated. I kept thinking about this one look, with a sheer mesh long sleeve tee with these bits of colored fabric around the seams, framing the body. Like she was making clothes from the absence of clothes. Circling the body instead of filling it. I spoke to her after that first show in 2022, and she talked about how she adds darts and seams to the clothes before she fits them on a body (usually these are techniques used to make a garment fit the body properly). I love the idea that she plays with the body as another sort of medium, which means that she can also play with its absence or implied absence. The show then becomes an essential part of her practice, because it’s not just a way to see the clothes but see how the clothes interact with the body, or more specifically with her idea of the body; the body simply being another three dimensional object.

A few weeks ago I had mentioned how I still hadn’t figured out the music vibe for the new year, which I think was unwittingly causing my some level of anxiety. I realize that I need the music to also fill the spaces around me. I think I was just randomly scrolling through the albums on my iTunes (which now that I am writing this I am realizing no one calls it iTunes anymore and it’s just Apple Music; but this isn’t just Apple Music, these are records that I burned from a cd to my computer years ago and have just kept migrating and migrating and migrating and the reason why that’s important is precisely so that when you are looking for something and you don’t know what it is, a record from 15 years ago that you had forgotten about can suddenly return to your life).

And that’s how I ended up listening to Telepathe’s 2009 record Dance Mother on repeat. I don’t think this band is still around, but I used to listen to this record all the time, it’s dance-y and space-y with breathy female vocals that alternate between sweet melodies and off-key sometimes bored-sounding vocals.

From Telepathe, it was a natural jump to Portishead—specifically their Live at Roseland album. I love watching videos from this performance because sometimes Beth Gibbons is just holding a cigarette while she clutches the microphone and it’s all very cool and sexy and groovy. It seems I wasn’t the only one in a trip-hop frame of mind. Portishead was on the soundtrack at two fashion shows I attended last week; a bit of one song at Maria McManus and then a medley of all their greatest hits at Ulla Johnson. I liked it best at Ulla, who I was reviewing for the first time. When I met her backstage after the show, she told me she was inspired by Judith Butler. “Gender is a performance, femininity is a performance, this is a performance,” she said gesturing to the place where the show had taken place. It was unexpected because her clothes are straight-up feminine—she loves a ruffle—but then that’s probably why it all worked. (And here let’s imagine a sound cue of Gibbons singing Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to beeeee a wo-man /I just want to be… a wo-man) She made a good impression on me.

And it wasn’t Portishead but Massive Attack that played at Willy Chavarria (but the vibe remains the same). Willy named this collection “Safe From Harm,” and appropriately opened his show with the song of the same name. The chorus is “If you hurt what’s mine/I’ll sure as hell retaliate.” It was a reflection of our current times. (Willy also made a short film for this collection and if you watch/see nothing else from the fashion shows, you should definitely just watch this.)

Anyway, the best thing about trip-hop is that it feels like a liquid you pour over you and it runs over your body and finds the holes and the canals and the cracks and fills them up. It’s music to be depressed with and music to vibe to and music to thrash to and music to fuck to (or at least it was when I was young and stupid and fun, something I miss sometimes).

It could be that this is a cause or an effect of the fact that I’ve mostly been reading on the train, (which means I haven’t really ben listening to music—the headphones are in but the music stays off). I read four books this month: Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story, Diana Athill’s Don’t Look At Me Like That, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, Muriel Spark’s Idling With Intent. The Employees is written in short missives from the titular employees about what’s going in their workplace. I found it to be full of accidental(or maybe not) poems (see below).

Then the Muriel Spark which absolutely floored me in its goodness. I think she is my favorite writer but I don’t want to binge her books, I want to wait for each to find me when it needs to find me. Overall it was a good month for reading. A very Mitski I cry at the start of every movie/I guess cause I wish I was making things too, which to me remains one of the most fucking real feelings when seeing/hearing/experiencing art whatever. (The first time I heard this song I was like Jesus Christ give a girl a WARNING!) I thought about this when I was reading Paige K. Bradley’s piece on the Kaari Upson show at Sprüth Magers (which you should read even if you are not familiar with Upson’s work—I wasn’t!), especially this quote by Dorothy Allison she included in the text:

“If we were to reveal what we see in each painting, sculpture, installation or little book, we would run the risk of exposing our secret selves, what we know and what we fear we do not know, and of course incidentally what it is we truly fear. Art … is the projective hologram of our secret lives… . Do you dare say what it is you like?”

I love radical transparency in love. It’s easy to go off about the things you hate (ask the internet), but to completely sublimate yourself to the things that you love that bring you joy that make you feel alive that make you feel like a child that make you feel like a sensual being that make you feel human part of the cosmic force that is the universe… well that’s another thing entirely. (You feel guilty about your pleasures but not about your discontent.)

(Case in point I wrote and then deleted and then wrote the Radiohead part and then I wrote and then deleted and then wrote the Mitski part — am I revealing too much?)

One of my favorite things I saw this week at the Jean Paul Gaultier Couture show, which this season was designed by Simone Rocha. A model walked with arms behind her, each adorned with crystal flower embellishments. Her hands gave the illusion of being bound together yet her fingers were barely grazing one another. I thought it was such a wonderful take on Gaultier’s penchant for bondage; a suggestion of that was nonetheless just as seductive. Alma saying to Reynolds in Phantom Thread: I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open with only me to help…

Close up of Pay Nothing Until April. I could live in this place where the blue and the yellow and the white meet.

In a small room hung his paintings with descriptive sentences floating above idyllic countrysides or dark interiors with light shining through windowpanes. A label on the wall reported that Ruscha “denied any deeper meaning” to theese backgrounds, referring to them as “anonymous backdrops for the drama of words.” Immediately my internet-rotted brain thought “Me!”

Anonymous backdrop for the drama of words, I thought walking around looking at THE MUSIC FROM THE BALCONIES NEARBY WAS OVERLAID BY THE NOISE OF SPORADIC VIOLENCE painted in white across a peaceful field of wheat. I went back to take a photo of the label so I could remember it for later and as I was taking the photo a man next to me must’ve felt the same way that I did because he said out loud ANONYMOUS BACKDROPS FOR THE DRAMA OF WORDS.

Ruscha is a writer. From the same label I learned that he borrows the words and phrases in the paintings from “memories, dreams, or sometimes from listening to the radio.” Two days later I started reading Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent, where the protagonist is a writer, when I came upon this bit which I immediately texted to my friend Amy Rose. “‘I talk very little,’ I said, which was true, although I listened a lot because I had a novel, my first, in larva.” MY FIRST, IN LARVA.

Back to Ruscha—his next exploration of words after this series of paintings was, perhaps naturally, to censor them. The paintings have the same colorful backgrounds but instead of text, there are rectangles where the text should be. But he can’t resist not letting you in on the drama—the text can be found in the title. One was called Note We Have Already Got Rid of Several Like You—One Was Found in River Just Recently.

It reminded me of the way one of my favorite bands, Liars, used to approach their song names on their first few records. Liars were an early aughts NYC trio who started on that disco punk wave along with the rest of the scene but got increasingly more experimental with each subsequent record. “Everyday Is A Child With Teeth,” is actually the title of a Liars song that I always felt was a bit of a poem. I think they had a minor hit with the song “Mr. You’re On Fire Mr.,” which is basically the This is Fine meme 12 years before. (The song goes “Mister, you’re on fire, mister/ Thanks but I’m ok.”) Their second record was a concept album about witches called They Were Wrong So We Drowned. To record it they moved to the woods in New Jersey and the vibe was you know, very Blair Witch (a movie which I am not ashamed to say I saw three times in the movie theater when it came out).

Liars’ anonymous backdrop for the drama of words.

Like Ruscha, they also did not shy away from a bit of humor. For the cover of There’s Always Room on the Broom, a single from that witch record, they drew a little witch hat and a broom on the hyeroglyph-man on the cover of an Einstürzende Neubaten record, and scratched out their name and wrote LIARS underneath. (Just now I’ve discovered that MoMA has the original EN artwork in their permanent collection—do they have the Liars one? It seems sort of necessary). The songs on They Were Wrong So We Drowned are not very funny at all but are in fact, kind of hardcore (in energy not like hardcore punk), but the song titles were funny (“If You’re a Wizard Then Why Do You Wear Glasses,” and “They Don’t Want Your Corn, They Want Your Kids”), and maybe that’s why it worked. They put out a bunch of great records after that. (I can vouch for them until 2014’s Wixiw. They still put out music but I think it’s just Angus, who was also their lead singer, who does everything now.) With Liars, I love the music and I also love the titles as independent beings from it (in fact, I don’t actually know which name corresponds with what song for the most of them). Their first album is called They Threw Us All In a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, a phrase I come back to often.

After MoMA we went to have lunch at a nearby diner, and Jack said he wished we’d just left right after we walked through the Ruscha. I understood because when he said it I immediately felt disappointed that the walk through the museum had sort of watered down some of the things I was feeling. But I guess the truth is that once they (the ideas, the work, the magic) gets inside you then it’s in there forever. There’s always this impetus for doing as much as we can at all times, but sometimes one thing is just enough.

***

PS. I made a lil playlist with ten good Liars songs, in case you are curious.