changes

Exceeded my expectations, and I can’t remember the last time a new album from an artist I already liked has done that. There is a warmth here that I haven’t heard in any of his work up until now. This is the electro psychedelic yacht rock I’ve been prepared for my entire life without realizing, every single track an absolute adult contemporary jam.

If I didn’t have so many other listening projects already queued up I’d probably just listen to this on repeat for the next couple of weeks.

Created a “Favorite Music of 2020” collection mainly so that I could add this to it as the first entry.

Standalone post link: Listening: The Slow Rush

In the past month I’ve found myself paralyzed in regards to social media, both personally and professionally. Whenever I peak into my feeds I’ve been easily overwhelmed by the content I see: deluges of RESOURCES FOR “ONLINE LEARNING¹,” endless interludes of stay-at-home inanities and banalities, and then literal death and suffering, since underneath all of this inconvenience, opportunism, and political posturing it turns out there is an actual tragic pandemic that is taking lives.

I haven’t known how to contribute to this world, and ultimately decided the best way to contribute would be to just stay quiet. Or maybe I just choked and failed by dropping out of this resource-sharing, curating, connecting game at the very moment when it was suddenly THE THING TO DO.

–

A couple of Sundays ago the weather was wonderful and I tried to get my kids to go outside with me on a walk or a hike or even just a drive, and they didn’t want to do it (this was the third day in a row I had invited them on such an excursion), so ultimately I went on a drive by myself. I headed east of Salt Lake for a particular side canyon dirt road I know that isn’t too high in elevation and that I had always found pretty much deserted when I visited in the past. I wanted to be able to socially isolate, and ever hopeful, scope it out to see if the snow had melted enough for a hike there with my kids on another day. When I arrived, the parking on the side of the road was full. There were far more people there at that moment than the collective number of all the people I had ever seen in all my previous visits to this place over the past 15+ years. Families and groups of people were out walking up and down this dirt road, with unleashed dogs running everywhere. One walking person, whose dog had just run in front of the car in front of me, almost getting hit and causing all traffic on the road to just stop for an awkwardly long period of time, loudly complained into my open window, “I don’t know why everyone wants to drive down this road TODAY!” just as a cyclist zoomed in between us and all the cars, dogs, and walkers as well. It was jarring and I felt exposed, and although technically I guess everyone was maybe keeping the 6 feet rule beyond their own families and groups it felt like the exact opposite of social distancing. I realized I had made a mistake and should have just stayed home, sat in my backyard or at my desk with the window open. I’m privileged to have these things, especially right now.

–

Turns out my 7yo daughter, the one we generally think of as the big extrovert in a mostly introvert family, hates video calls. She doesn’t want to be seen on them, whether it is with her grandparents, her cousins, or her teacher and classmates. She doesn’t want to converse with people. She finally got a little used to them by doing one with her brother from different rooms of our house. She spent the entire time just making goofy faces and noises at him until he laughed. (Didn’t take long because she is really funny, to be honest.) The next week after that she did join in a chat with her cousins, but never showed herself on screen. At one point in the chat she went outside on our old trampoline and put down the tablet with her microphone muted and the camera facing the sky, lay down next to it, and just listened to the chat. At another point she employed a small bunny rabbit puppet as a bonkers surrogate that would jump sideways into view and hop around in front of her brother’s face making ridiculous noises.

–

A curious thing I’ve noticed about myself is that the social networks I’m most consistently active on are those where I don’t actually know anyone or interact with them in any kind of way beyond following, reading, or maybe “liking” their posts. During this time of my social media confusion and my silence on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and other places where I actually know some people, I’ve still been faithfully logging and reviewing the movies I watch on Letterboxd, where I know no one (except one old co-worker who doesn’t post excessively) and get very little response from my posts. I continue to faithfully scrobble all my music listening on last.fm, where I likewise know no one and interact with virtually no one.

A few months ago I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what I might post on this very website and started adding things here semi-consistently, but I was barely sharing it out at all anywhere else. It was kind of my secret spot. Then I shared a couple of things on twitter and facebook and soon after that I heard from a some people face-to-face that they had looked at the site. I got weirded out and my enthusiasm strangely waned. I mean, theoretically a primary reason to have a website and share things on it is at the very least with the intention or hope that other people might look at it, right?

–

Two weeks after it was expected, my 9yo son still hasn’t finished the first main lesson page² he was supposed to do at home. These pages are a combination of art and writing created by students on lusciously thick 11x17 paper, collected throughout the year, then sewnbound by the teacher and presented back to the student in a collection at the end of the school year. For the time being, we were to take a picture of the finished page and email it to his teacher. I believe this is the only assignment of this distance learning period for which she has requested such evidence of it being completed.

He colored the borders and drew the art on the top half of the page. He drafted the 5-sentence paragraph on the process of turning wool into cloth in his writing notebook, with only a single spelling error—sheer for shear—which he quickly corrected and added to his personal dictionary as per teacher instructions. He carefully wrote the first sentence of that paragraph in cursive on the lesson page. It was pretty much lunchtime, and he took a break for a minute “to imagine.” A week later he was still imagining.

–

I thought that sharing lots of digital resources was kind of my thing. I thought that communicating and connecting with people mainly online was kind of my thing. Turns out, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m not actually that good at it. Maybe I don’t actually like it or want it. Yet I keep thinking about it. I don’t quite know my path forward, but I’m going to start by posting this, finally, and then just maybe start sharing things again without overthinking? Yeah, right.

–

TL;DR- I was into social distancing and digital learning before they were cool, but now you all have come and ruined my scene.

Or maybe I’m losing my edge.³

⁴

Standalone post link: A Break for a Minute to Imagine

I had a dream that I listened to this song on a different streaming platform and the guitar solos were missing from the track. I feverishly scoured the internet trying to find the original version with the guitar solos and figure out what was happening. Tabs kept closing on me and websites glitched into oblivion. I wasn’t sure if the streaming platform or record label had demanded their removal, or if she had somehow become ashamed of them and self-censored, or if it was the Mandela effect, or some other kind of weird conspiracy, but I was going to somehow get to the bottom of this cosmic scandal against musicianship and bring the lost guitar solos back to light.

The next day I had to listen to the song several times on different platforms just to be reassured that the guitar solos had not actually disappeared, but still remained on the track in their fulness.

Standalone post link: It's a Moot Point

My kids and I have been casually talking about turning our yard into an orchard, and re-reading this book in my backyard today inspires me to get completely serious about it. Impossible to read these poems and not want to start growing stuff.

Read the title poem from the collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay.

Check out Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude from a Salt Lake County Library like I did once or twice before I finally bought it.

Standalone post link: Reading: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

For nearly the past two months I’ve been tracking all my reading updates just in a OneNote page. Transferring it here for transparency/accountability, or just some form of conspicuousness. Think I’m about to go onto Goodreads and log all of this, get caught up, be a social human of some sort, &c. Maybe I’ll post specific things about some of these books on here as well if I have time and inclination.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

• Started reading Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian

Friday, July 24, 2020

• Read New Kid by Jerry Craft

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

• Started reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Saturday, July 18, 2020

• Started listening to The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
• Finished reading Library of Small Catastrophes by Allison C. Rollins

Thursday, July 16, 2020

• Started reading Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume I (LoA) by Ursula Le Guin
• Read Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin (in above omnibus edition)

Sunday, July 12, 2020

• Tried to figure out what to write or do to the copy of Letter to a Future Lover that I’ve had all through the quarantine and need to finally take back to the library now.
• Reread Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

Saturday, July 11, 2020

• Started reading Library of Small Catastrophes by Allison C. Rollins
• Ordered a bunch of poetry anthologies to read

Friday, July 10, 2020

• Finished reading Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac by Alex Dimitrov & Dorothea Lasky

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

• Started reading with kids The Last (Endling, #1) by Katherine Applegate

Monday, July 6, 2020

• Read Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice by Mahogany L. Browne with Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood, illustrated by Theodore Taylor III
• Restarted reading Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac by Alex Dimitrov & Dorothea Lasky

Sunday, July 5, 2020

• Read This Book Is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell, illustrated by Aurelia Durand

Saturday, July 4, 2020

• Finished reading Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
• Read Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Sunday, June 28, 2020

• Finished reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
• Started reading Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

Saturday, June 20, 2020

• Started reading Resist by Veronica Chambers [DNF]
• Still reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Saturday, June 13, 2020

• Finished reading Homie: Poems by Danez Smith
• Still reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Monday, June 8, 2020

• Started reading Homie: Poems by Danez Smith
• Started reading Poetry (June 2020) [DNF]
• Still reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Sunday, June 7, 2020

• Read Heartbeat by Evan Turk
• Read The Storyteller by Evan Turk
• Read You Are Home: An Ode to the National Parks by Evan Turk
• Read If I Was the Sunshine by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Loren Long
• Read A House that Once Was by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Lane Smith
• Read Just in Case You Want to Fly by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Christian Robinson
• Read When’s My Birthday? by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Christian Robinson
• Read How to Read a Book by Kwame Alexander, illustrated by Melissa Sweet
• Read Beneath the Bed and other Scary Stories by Max Brallier, illustrated by Letizia Rubegni

Saturday, June 6, 2020

• Read Intersection Allies: We Make Room for All by Chelsea Johnson, LaToya Council, and Carolyn Choi, illustrations by Ashley Seil Smith
• Read Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness by Anastasia Higginbotham
• Read Death Is Stupid by Anastasia Higginbotham
• Read The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett by Brontez Purnell, illustrated by Elise R. Peterson

Standalone post link: Books Read in June-July 2020

Did I somehow call forth the winds and fires by listening to this album so fervently last week?

I was just excited about fall, and autumnal black metal…

And despite my one percent superstition about this, I’m listening to it again - the present storms demand this fury.

https://thetruepanopticon.bandcamp.com/album/autumn-eternal

Standalone post link: ''autumneternal''

I watched the movie Soul last night, and I loved it.

Loved this movie, with one complaint: it really was a missed opportunity to not get an actual jazz or jazz-adjacent musician to do all of the soundtrack. The Reznor and Ross pieces were nice and quite serviceable, but when I imagine what Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington, or someone/anyone in jazz might have done instead I start to get a little angry about it. I’m therefore taking off 1/2 star for the failure to fully commit to jazz.

https://letterboxd.com/jdwhiting/film/soul-2020/

Standalone post link: ''soul''

I watched Born in Flames (1983), written, directed, and edited by Lizzie Borden.

(Actually mainly just testing to see how this post looks in micro.blog and on my website without a title. But I did watch this movie last night.)

Standalone post link: ''borninflames''

Started reading The Selected Works of Audre Lorde last night. Wow.

Think I’ll have more to share later once I have read more and thought through it more.

I’ve been wrestling with the words of a certain dead Mormon apostle in my head today, and for reasons not entirely clear to me yet I’m tempted to put him and Lorde in a dialogue with each other. If that goes anywhere I’ll share it here.

Standalone post link: Reading: The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

Kicking myself because I just missed being able to buy/download this collection from Nyege Nyege (now it is 666 Euros to buy and it can’t be streamed.)

But I found a decent mixtape based on the collection on Soundcloud.

Only problems are:

1. I’m not really supporting the label or the artists by listening to it this way
2. I don’t really know which artist or track I’m hearing at any given time to go seek it out

It is certainly an electrifying listen, though. Think I’ll be digging through more of this label and related artists for the next while.

Standalone post link: Listening: L'Esprit de Nyege 2020