i'm back

cinco demayo's on tuesday

Hello,

Did you miss me? It’s been a long time since writing here. Everyone always says that on their blogs, and they’re sort of right to, although I’m starting to think that people don’t really mind what you’ve been doing since you’ve been gone as long as you come back. And I intend to be back, and it’s January, which is one of the few times of year that intentions seem to matter. They’re glowing with the heat of community will. Nearly erotically. It will come to pass that I will write more, for you, because if I don’t…

The general temperature for me right now is High. I feel very hot and feverish, and at this time would ordinarily be teaching a Fluxus intensive course with my pals at the New School, but am too sick, so I just watch around three movies a day, roast, and mope. The world does seem to inexorably trend downward, the decay is unavoidable. I’m writing now, again, because I need to feel some groundswell of hope by communicating. It’s also an organizing thing, to write here. Keith is snoozing on the studio bed and I’m organizing all the gigs I have this month so I feel like I have them.

Honestly, things have felt so flimsy, and not just language. Most of the fun I have on this earth is through language; massaging it, freaking it out, squeezing it through conditional tubes til it finally changes shape, rotates in midair. But something last year made me afraid of even journaling. I think that it’s the general stamping-out impulse I feel from the perceived march of Human Theater. Or, now that Substack is nearly cooked, I can do it because at my core, I love it. I don’t love Twitter, or Facebook, so I don’t do it. I want to love Instagram because I can share guitar videos there, but it depresses me in its stoking of the comparative impulse. I’m too much a dandy, too weakly constituted for that gloss. I see the people of my past in their yurts, grinning, and I feel the impulse to drive as far east as I can (not very, on Long Island), maybe towards the implacable, unknowable ocean, maybe just for a moment of solitude. The fantasies of someone who has been sick since New Years Day. Escape.

But nah. When I’m honest with myself I can say I love the blund stupidity of routine. I want to write this weekly (fat chance) because I want to be the kind of erect spine that does things regularly. That’s my desire. The thing behind that desire, my soul, wants nothing but the endless space of this sickness minus sickness. The so called free time. The white space in the text zone here is like the blank space I crave in my life; I fill it with the black keys, wristily. Speaking of, I’ve been playing a ton of keyboard.

Did you know I played piano first? Like many bourgeois children I learned piano, starting from age 5. Thank goodness. It’s been a joy to rediscover it, because it hasn’t been sullied for me by jazz trauma - not entirely. My last gig of 2025 was with my love More Eaze, and it was totally on piano; the hallowed and protected piano at the Owl. A delight. RIP to my favorite place, a place that made everyone’s music feel as important as it actually is.

Anyway, there is no order here; I’m sick, and order is the last thing I need (even if it’s what I say I want). Just spitballing, just reacquainting. I missed you. Did you miss me?

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Here be the gigs:

January 15 - Roulette with Ryan Saywer Shaker Ensemble 8pm

January 22 - Roulette - I curated a “Derek Bailey Company Night” at Jim Staley’s behest. Thank god! It’s a crazy band:

Eliza Salem drums
Ryan Sawyer drums
Kate Gentile drums
Nora Stanley sax
Emmanuel Michael guitar
Charmaine Lee voice/electronics
Patrick Holmes clarinet
Anna Abondolo bass
Conner Simmons bass
Chuck Roth guitar
Mari Rubio violin and electronics
Wendy Eisenberg guitar

do come out!

January 24 - apocalypse style show with my forever brother in song Bad History Month, and his friend’s band The Alaskas. DM for address

January 31 - Wendy Eisenberg Song Music opens up for Peaer at Baby’s Alright :)

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High Fives:

Music

1. Frank Hurricane - River of Love

2. Herbie Mann- Stone Flute

3. FET.NAT - le mal

4. Zelenaya - Folk Songs

5. D’Gary - Malagasy Guitar

Books

1. LJ Davis - A meaningful life

2. Walter Zimmerman - Desert plants - conversations with 23 american musicians

3. Caren Beilin - Sea, Poison

4. Bakhtin - Dialogic Imagination

5. Alice Notley - Descent of Alette

Thotz:

1. I vacillate wildly between believing in a personal future for my music and career and self, and not believing in anything of the sort, honestly believing something closer to “I am finished, I am abject".” Not only embarassingly teenaged in quality, this shitty false dialectic has become a sort of pendulum jail, where no matter what I’m warily looking on the other side of the bus. It’s awful and I think it’s linked to “phones” so I’ve been trying to get around that. Limiting stuff like this makes me feel very lonely. My job requires a smartphone because of 2FA, so I can’t really divest as much as I wish I could. The best thing I’ve done for this so far is upload all my music from harddrives and computers onto an off-brand mp3 player, the h2 walker. Listening to music on it makes me believe in music and personal choice again. Uploading music onto my phone never felt as good.

2. Part of the reason I haven’t been writing on here as much is because I’ve been doing EMDR which feels like some benevolent God is making you relive your own personal version of episode 17 of Twin Peaks the Return for as long as seems “necessary.” The nature of what I’ve been through, the thicket of bullshit that makes EMDR helpful for me, is dense and complex, so I keep reliving 17’s translucent glories, and then grieving that ultimate message of the Return, which is that “time can’t be redeemed.” So much of my life is shaped, bonsai-like, smaller and more delicate, around the management of abusive feelings, and being who I am all I want to do is ask why. Grief is more musical and less narrative than that, so much of last year I felt stretched by the hands of time. This year, I want to grieve while hanging out, New Orleans’ style. Make grief a little bit more in my every day, so I don’t have to feel as alone as I have these past few months.

3. I have a new record coming out in April, shh tell everyone, and like, 200 other really good songs I want to put out. How is it that the Beatles could put out so much music in less than a decade and I have to wait so long between songs records, especially when my profile is so much lower? I’m wary of it. Besides, all I want to do is play keyboards and guitar in a band. Your. band. I’m not as busy as it looks. I love music. Nothing else matters; the privilege I have to share my strange sounds is one everyone on this arid earth deserves. Message me if you want me to play in a city I’ve never been to, or anything, or a duo set. I just want to jump out of my skin 2015 style.

4. Thinking as always about critical industrial complexes, the fact that the most popular bands in the indie sphere have a really obvious front-person and a band of whoever else is not a surprise. It’s easier to meme one person than a band. That said, I think that the mechanism that makes it possible for there to be like, one ultra popular indie band with one popular scruffy person at the front, is the same mechanism that shapes the experimental world towards chilly icy rigor, this limiting fear of something new and possibly even bad. I think in both cases the standard for artistic correctness is familiarity. Even if the tuning system is new, the limited palette is familiar; even if the song is new, you’ve heard something like it before, in the 70s or the 90s. Novelty might be overrated, but I want to feel like the thing I’m hearing is a delicious surprise. Beyond me but, however miraculously or incidentally, for me.

5. And if it’s a surprise, something genuinely new in the caliber of its expression, there’s a tendency for mass critical pile-on. Things can be amazing without the person telling you it’s amazing claiming that they discovered it. Artists make things even if people don’t find them. Often when there’s a positive review, or cultural acclaim amassing over a new consensus figure (usually an alt white boy, sometimes a hot brunette), the esteem seems to come less from their music and more from the writer’s feverish relationship to their own discovery of that miracle. It shouldn’t take away from that miracle that someone’s excited to have discovered it, but it often feels like what people revel in is their own proximity to a critical moment in “music history.” I wonder if it’s because so much shit happens geopolitically every moment, and we’re more privy to it than ever, that the streamlined narratives we once called “history” have been so exploded that the narrative-trained hearts of these music writers yearn for some notion of legacy, lineage, etc. Not that they discovered the people, but that they were “there” for the discovery of this one person, who might “change music forever,” or something. Maybe I’m just cynical. I want to find out about artists through a shared hard drive or a show, not a pearl clutched in distant admiration, not through the memefication of a once-devastating lyric.

Tell me you love me, that you missed me. I’m sick and I need it. Mostly, though, I love you.

xw