An update on places I've been and people I've seen.

The canopy on the street near my apartment is yellow where it used to be green, and the temperature on my phone is barely hanging on to double digits. Suddenly people on my mid-morning walk are dressed in light puffy jackets, and the occasional toque. You might not call them toques where you are. Maybe they're beanies, or winter hats. Regardless of what you call them, they're quickly moving to the front of the leaving-the-house repertoire.

I just got home from a whirlwind 36-hour stint in New York City, where they surely don't call them toques, for the show of a lifetime. For a long time, my fiend Rax King and I have been talking about wanting to find a way to do a reading series together. I believe, and she can correct me if I'm wrong, we once talked about doing it at a Waffle House. A restaurant I have never been to but have long dreamed about. What we came up with was this: what if we got some friends who write about music, and some friends who play it, and we got together to do a show. We asked Josh Gondelman, Grace Robins-Somerville, Luke O'Neil, Augusta Koch, Wendy Eisenberg, and Ted Leo to join us on stage at Littlefield in Brooklyn, and to our surprise and delight they all did. Those of us who are writers read about songs we love, and those that are songers played them and others. For my part, I wrote about Rilo Kiley's "A Better Son/Daughter" and Augusta Koch played a beautiful cover of it that made me cry multiple times. Watching the video I took on my phone makes me cry. I think maybe I'm just a mark for crying, but regardless, it was beautiful. I asked if she would be willing to do a quick recording of her take on the song, and once I have that I'll also upload my essay to this newsletter, so stay tuned.

If you are one of the many who came out to the show that night, thank you so much for being there, and for managing the fact that I had been awake for almost 24 hours and was losing my mind a little. Rax and I are already talking about how to do it again, how to publish some of the work from the first run of this show, and hopefully we'll have more on that soon.

I've been writing in other places lately, including this piece I wrote for my friends at Ravenous, about the Wendy's emo EP, and weaponized nostalgia that tastes almost like the real thing.

Wendy's is Trading on Millenia Nostalgia with Emo

There is no perfect place to cry, although I would argue that crying while sitting in a shitty car in the drive-thru of an aging fast-food restaurant comes close to transcendent. There is no science to this, but there is history

And delighted to say that The Rumpus asked if I would write a little about music for them, and my first piece is about Pavement, and Stephen Malkmus as man who will only tell how he feels in obscure, poetic fashion.

The Veiled Passion of Stephen Malkmus

Malkmus wants to tell you a secret, the way drunk people tell their secrets as loud whispers. He means everything he says, and he doesn’t believe a goddamn word of it. It’s all bullshit. It’s all hollow. These are lyrics used to kill time over guitar riffs that would not exist without words to give them purpose. Not that they are bad, but that they are eager for something. Desperate for a story to tell over their shambolic structures. And so Malkmus is a poet the way his longtime collaborator David Berman was a poet, and a poet will lie on their way to the truth. They tell slanted, enchanted truths. That’s just the way of things.

Also, if you didn't already know, I have a podcast with my friend Alex Steed, called The OC, Again, where we watch and discuss every episode of The OC. Or Rather, I should say we did, as we just released our final episodes covering season 4. You can listen to the whole thing here. We're moving on to a new show, called Alright Hear This, which is a show about how culture informs the world, and how the world informs it. The first season will be about the Beastie Boys, and you can subscribe to it now.

Thanks for being here friends, more soon on some new music I've been into lately, but for now I have a headache that commands I do something about it and so I will take my leave of screens and bright things until the world stops pounding on my skull.