This brief update is just to say
Hi. I’m in the studio. I’m not writing on the computer. I’ve been very fortunate to have the ideas be flowing and to have these little slivers of time to spend exploring and expanding the ideas. The hugest of luxuries while genocidal horrors roll through our screens and radios and sleepless anxiety nights afflict even the closed-hearted.
Kelly Schirmann’s question “How do you write poems in a country like this?” is a good question, a big one. I ask it every day. The answer doesn’t come, but more poems and songs do. I at least try to steer them in a direction I hope will be useful. And the truth is I’m really excited about these recordings that are happening. It doesn’t feel meaningless or indulgent. I’m touching bedrock.
I watched the movie Ran again. There are moments where the characters (feudal-era Japanese nobility living out a version of Shakespeare’s King Lear) are going about their lives, arguing, speaking, brooding, and then there’s a hard cut to a full frame of sky, a giant billowing cloud, and a piercing flute blast. I think about these moments alot. This is what life feels like. The small and the big, the turmoil of our moments beneath the indifference of the huge other cycles playing out unknown to us. These hard cuts to the sublime are breathtaking and we need them.
I have some bonus content for paying subscribers today. Kind of an extra amount actually. Two recordings that are atmospheric windows into some of the new Mount Eerie album I’m recording, and a studio video I made of a tape loop contraption. Thank you very much everyone.
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