keeping it brief
rising water, folk punk, inquisitive collaging and time folding
Keeping it short and simple today. Life is coming at me fast lately and I’m trying to ride the change with as much grace as I can muster. Most of my time in the coming weeks is going toward my personal journaling, reflections, taking care of myself, making some lifestyle changes, etc. But of course my creative writing carries me and fills my heart and empties it and makes me feel like a person. Here’s what’s been inspiring me lately as a writer and as a human man.
This album is a revelation. Such a beautifully crafted collection of folk tunes with such endlessly catchy melodies. I’ve been walking around my apartment singing aloud to myself the opening lines, ‘you don’t have to die if you don’t wanna die.’ It feels somehow like a powerful manifestation of immortality and an acknowledgment that there are many points in my life in which I haven’t wanted to be alive—but I do now. I’ve seen the album referred to as ‘folk punk’ and I think that resonates. This artist has lots to say. You should listen.
Watching the reservoir rise. I don’t know much about the maintenance and upkeep of controlled water sources like reservoirs but it fills me with giddiness each year to see the water climbing up the rocky slopes. March is always full of trickery and deception—the changing of the seasons is always further off than I expect. But I’ll know it’s truly spring when the reservoir is full. For now though, I can still climb out onto the weird little islands and watch the water churn and the geese glide before it all gets swallowed up
The artist Hank Ehrenfried. Lately I’ve taken up collaging, I suppose as a form of art therapy but also it’s just fun. I like digging through my books and magazines and record collections searching for stuff I can cut out and piece into a different narrative. Hank is an artist I’ve followed for a while now who makes physical collages in his studio and then paints them. It’s a deeply fascinating take on what it means to pull these ideas and items together and then translate them into another medium. It’s challenged me to think about what I want to convey with the photos and words and colors I’ve pulled together and how changing their shape and arrangement alters the narrative. The source and the medium matter.
This is my contender for album of the year so far. It’s horny, it’s angry, it somehow straddles the line of gorgeous and messy. I physically cannot stop listening to it. I’m a waste of a woman but I taste like success, Marisa Dabice croons on personal standout, Loud Bark. It’s a bonkers line. Every track on this album makes me feel something new and dangerous and transgressive. What if I’m a god? And what if I’m a boar? I’m thinking about it, genuinely.
North Woods by Daniel Mason. I’m almost finished with my reading. It’s making me think a lot about the folds of time and the importance of place to narrative—both in writing and in life. Everything we see has a hidden, embedded history. The ways that the past overlaps with the present always reminds me of how little time we’ve existed as humans on this planet and how quickly we’ve enacted all this change. There are so many cool approaches to prose here, too. It’s filling me with ideas! I love ideas!
This Mitski cover makes me want to throw up. I don’t even have anything else to say about it. She says it all.
That’s it for today! Recommend me stuff. I want to see and hear and feel more things. Love you.
jw
A couple of my favorite collages I’ve put together recently. (:
