“Awhileaway”

For John Drake and Ashley Stephenson.

Cheers to two friends making the leap, at middle age, into new love. Because love is always new, right? Even when the feeling is familiar, or the people are long familiar to each other, even when you’ve fallen in love with a hundred different people before this one, even when you tell yourself a hundred more times that you won’t don’t do it again, love hits us anew. The world feels brand new with that love in it. Even once you’re together and you’re working at it and you think you know everything there is about the other person and/or your love with them and you’ve told each other all of your other love stories and oh god don’t tell me again, love is new. It can renew. Something shifts in the relationship, or something external changes the terms of the relationship, and the love wobbles, evolves, grows, settles, and then shakes things up again. The two of you grow together or apart with it. If you work at it, and if there’s more good luck than most of us are willing to admit, the love refreshes, changing you separately and in tandem. Love radiates. Love warms. Love leads us into discomfort and useful change, which is always hard to take. Love makes us go absolutely fucking nuts. Love pains us. And then, if we’re lucky and if we’re willing to work at it and think it through and think ourselves through, love soothes us.

It’s not easy, love. Especially the matrimonial sort—the kind you can choose to leave at any point because it’s the one you chose fully instead of being born into. The falling is the easy part. The maintaining, the tending, that’s what is hard. Nurturing love is like gardening at night. You till, plant seeds, keep watch, water, shelter, whisper at leaves, pray to the moon. But the blooms come slowly. You only see what you’ve done over the course of days and weeks, in the often harsh light of day. Then you correct, change course, re-irrigate, call on other gardeners who know better (you think so, anyway) than you do. You adapt in that night garden. Sometimes you make love on that loamy soil. Sometimes you throw clumps of dirt at each other. Sometimes you tear up roots and fling them miles away. Occasionally—and this is sad—you realize that the soil is barren. 

But, sometimes, you two sweat it out and in the early dawn there are shoots of green that you never could’ve anticipated. The love becomes a nourishing thing, something that gives to you and sustains you and that you find gorgeous and sumptuous, and sometimes others see that bounty and come to you when their own gardening of love is going awry.

*******

In pop music, Yo La Tengo has done the most work to chart the slow growth and tending of matrimonial love. I have no idea what the interiors of Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan’s 30+-year marriage is like except their music. That’s ok because that’s enough. In song after song, whether noisy or delicate, poundingly electric or whisperingly acoustic, the Jersey band traces the quiet triumphs, lingering arguments and almost unspoken resolutions, and images that come only from close observation of the person you love and of the love you make with them. 

There is joy in Yo La’s music. Heartbreak, too. And, maybe most significant, there’s the decision—again and again—to stick it through, to see what the love brings, takes away, and alters. So much of pop music is about that first wild bloom of love in the Garden of Eden. Most of Yo La is about the Fall of Eden, the coming down to Earth, when Adam and Eve have to work back-breakingly just to keep the earthly garden going.

Back in March, about a week before I went to a wedding, I heard Yo La Tengo live. Two sets, the first largely quiet, the second blaring. Two poles of love, Eden and Earth. Both were needed, as skronk and placidity on their own are less powerful apart than when heard side by side, and thus understood as two aspects of the same whole. Anyway, in the first hour, they played one of my favorite songs, even though I had trouble placing the title readily. “Awhileaway” seems to be, like so much of the band’s output, about a romantic spat and perhaps its resolution. 

So it’s you and me
Hard times pass peacefully 
Is that true? 
We’ll see

Even with its anxiety, the narrator notes tiny details about his partner that keeps him coming back—his partner’s smile when she sleeps, her tendency to chuckle at the narrator’s pseudo-profundity. Georgia Hubley’s gentle brushing of the drums matched her husband’s near-whispering singsong. The thousand people in Union Transfer were utterly silent on this song, leaning into to hear. It was like we were hearing a secret, an intimacy that we were eavesdropping on.

It’s a song that feels like marriage. It’s so specific to this particular couple that maybe no lessons can be extrapolated from it. Maybe its lessons lie beneath the surface. Maybe it’s good to hear it anyway, no matter what, because maybe the lesson is that matrimonial love is intimate, unknowable, often seemingly uncertain except to those in it.

Still, we learn how to love—for better and for worse—from others. “Awhileaway” is on 2015’s masterful Stuff Like That There, which is a mix of covers and Yo La “covering” its own material, plus a couple of genuinely new songs, of which “Awhileaway” is one. The song that follows it is a gently bouncy cover of “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” (1967) by the Parliaments. Yes, the Parliaments that became Parliament-Funkadelic. George Clinton knew how to write classic soul before he went full-on Afrofunk. The original, jaunty and trying to hide its yearning a bit, feels like a man coming on to a woman at the start of a relationship. Yo La’s cover, though, sounds like a couple coming back together after a fight. Let’s start again. 

Love revs us up but, ultimately, if it’s gonna last, it’s more about revving up again after a stall, a blowout, a major repair, sometimes a new engine altogether, than it is about the fresh set of wheels.

*******

Supplemental listening:

The Parliaments, “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” (1967)

Yo La Tengo, “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” (2015)

R.E.M., “Gardening at Night” (1982)

Top 5 (2022)

Eighteen years ago, when I was much younger in health and spirit, the Top 5 Moments tradition started on a cold night in which one year turned over to the next, in the backyard of a friend of a friend, in a city that she no longer lives in, in a city (Austin, TX) that’s probably no longer all that recognizable to any of us in that backyard. We did all this with lit cigars punctuating the night air. Now, I no longer smoke tobacco at all. Yet this persists, lingering like cigar smoke.

It’s been a year. Some of these moments are not singular but instead exist in packets of time, because pleasure & pain, elation & contemplation, night sweats & long exhalations often hit simultaneously this year. Sue me. OK, here we go.

A Year in Reading (2022)

Once more with feeling, here’s my annual reading diary. I like doing this, and apparently some of you like reading this.

The fine print: 1) This list includes only books I completed, not stuff I started and abandoned (and I do more of that as I get older); 2) it leaves out all of the manuscript reading I do for my day job; 3) it also excludes all the articles, reviews, long Facebook posts, Twitter and Instagram threads, and other essays I read online, in all manner of periodical online or in print; 4) for the most part, the letter grades and commentary were noted as soon as I finished the book but were refined and edited this month, so there’s occasionally some reflective disconnect in my notes; 5) expect typos; these are tossed-off notes that get sanded down after the fact but often not by much; and 6) I don’t give ratings to people I know, so you’ll see a few without letter grades after the commentary.

Previous entries: If you’re curious, here’s what I wrote for 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. Alright, rock n roll, good people.

Tiny miracles are the best kind there are, #6

For David McCarty.

On Friday afternoon, walking in west Philly after lunch, I stumbled into an old friend. Or let’s say acquaintance, since I never really knew her that well.

Tracy and I were heading back to work after slurping down big, savory, sumptuous noodle bowls, slightly wobbly from the food intake but still thinking about maybe let’s have a dessert and a coffee. Across Walnut Street from the dessert/coffee locale, we saw a library book sale on the corner. I can’t pass one up. If there’s old shopworn books and/or vinyl right out there for browsing, I’ll take a peek. Paperbacks for a buck, hardcovers for two, books strewn every which way on those rolling metal shelves that I associate with patient joy.

After thumbing through many also-rans and dog-eared tomes and books stained and marked and stranded, my fingers stopped. A hardcover of Losing Battles by Eudora Welty, jacket crinkled but intact. Two dollars, say goodbye to Mr. Wallet.

Welty and I have a history, though she doesn’t know it.

For a few years in the mid aughts, I lived a few blocks away Welty’s house in Jackson, Mississippi. The state’s been home to more than its fair share of great writers but Welty (1919-2001) was the capital city’s patron saint. Sure, Beth Henley was born and reared there, even graduating from Murrah High School right down the street from Ms. Welty, but Henley left the city and never looked back except in her work. Same’s true of Richard Ford—except he basically never looked back at all. Margaret Walker and Willie Morris settled in Jackson as established adults, sure, but they were both from elsewhere in Mississippi.

Welty, though, belonged to Jackson. She was born there, died there, set much of her work there, and lived there except for a stint in New York trying to make it as a photographer. She had died years before I moved to the Belhaven neighborhood but I walked by her home daily. It was a beacon of sorts for writers and would-be writers, same as Rowan Oak up in Oxford. In our mid-twenties and early thirties, we saw her as a talisman of possibility. If she could be from here and make it, maybe so could we, maybe we could claim this rinky-dink city of less than 200,000 souls as a place worth being from and writing about.

We were pricks, obviously. But, by being into Welty, we at least had good taste. Being not quite shed of hipster aspirations, though, I was a tad dishonest about that taste. I wasn’t exactly well-versed in Welty. In college at Millsaps College, also down the street from Welty, I had read her much-assigned stories “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “Powerhouse” in English classes, had read The Robber Bridegroom outside of it. None of this had set my hair on fire. I preferred her photography, velvety and strange and slightly but intentionally out of focus and realistic but also mythopoetic and curious about Black lives without being either sentimental or condescending. I worked at a publisher that was essentially ground zero for scholarship on, and work by, Welty. Throughout the early aughts, I did scuttlebutt cleanup work on a number of books by Welty as well as serious acquisitions of academic work about her.

So, my working life danced around Welty but not with her.

My creative friends and I, trying to make the best of Jackson (and being perhaps unfair to it in the process), decided to do what all punk kids end up doing at least once: Make a zine about it. David McCarty—now a Mississippi Court of Appeals Judge, then a Polaroid photographer and comics nerd donning “gorjus” as a moniker—ran the Sandusky Review, definitely the coolest and most visually adept zine I had ever seen. He was a stylist with a Xerox machine, an illustrator and poet of beautiful punk-rock aesthetics. Those back issues of Sandusky Review, which I’d see at cool record shops around Jackson, were wonderfully produced.

He and I became friends. Once I made a bit more money, I bought some of his art. We traded zines we had made. He made a piece of scratchboard art to use for the cover of one of my zines, and I still cherish that original slab a decade later. I followed his stream of thought like I was on a river with it, floating on an innertube. A year or two into the friendship, he asked me to contribute a flash fiction piece to a anthology zine he and Brannon Costello were putting together, a smattering of new short stuff by Jackson writers he liked: Lost Battles.

At the time, 2011, it was the tenth anniversary of Welty’s death. I wanted in. How could I not? I polished up a (very) short story that I had jotted down a year or two before, and sent it in. David and Brannon accepted it, even said that it prompted a conversation between them about fatherhood and love and being products of divorce and the hard bits and that they had no notes for me, it was accepted as is.

When I saw the one-shot issue of Lost Battles in my mailbox, I was thrilled. The cover evoked the lettering of the first edition of Welty’s novel, a book that I had to confess to never having read or even wanted to read. In the zine, there were my friends and quiet competitors—for what prize I could not now tell you—and alongside the texts were precise, quick, lovely illustrations by gorjus.

Under 250 words, “At the Greengrocer” is still one of the pieces I’m most proud of having written, mostly because it was my first piece of published fiction.

And here, eleven years later, on a rickety rolling shelf on the corner of Walnut and 40th Street on a bright, chilly November afternoonwas the source design material and driving spirit behind the zine,. Everything—all the heartache and dashed dreams of Jackson for me but also all the DIY brilliance and underground flashes of happiness and hope—came rushing back to me.

I bought the book. I’ll start it tomorrow.

******

NOTES:

Here’s a PDF of my story, from the original Lost Battles zine: “At the Greengrocer”

Here’s a Twitter thread I wrote praising public libraries.

50-word reviews (semi-recent, semi-jazz edition, fall 2022)

Last year, I bought my first turntable. It’s given me an excuse to explore Philadelphia, seeking out vinyl shops and garage sales looking for my fix. The searching and crate digging has inspired patience and an appreciation of serendipity in me, both in terms of how I seek out music and in how I listen to it. I take my time. I don’t skip around albums as much. I take chances more in my buying habits. I give artists more of a chance to woo me with their tunes. I let the music boom through the house—sorry, neighbors—and let it bounce off the walls as I cook, read, clean, and amble around, instead of being cocooned in my headphones. It’s great.

To keep myself from spending entire paychecks in music stores, I try to focus on a single genre of-sorts for my record collection. Let’s call it, for lack of anything better, semi-jazz. A lot of it’s straightforwardly jazz but in general I find myself drawn to stuff in-between genres, a kind of “jazz and…”: jazz and post-rock; jazz and hip-hop; jazz and pop.” Or maybe it’s music that carries some of the improvisational attitudes of jazz but is structured otherwise. Maybe it’s not clear to me what jazz even is, and I’m discovering that I’m fine with that. I’m a kind of in-between guy myself. Here’s a sampling of my in-between stage, which I guess is what middle age is starting to look like for me.

A reminder: These reviews are all fifty words long, no more, no less. They’re rated on a scale of 1 (unlistenable) to 10 (masterpiece). I tag the best and worst tracks accordingly. It’ll all make sense but, if you need a primer, go here.

For earlier entries in this (very) occasional series: one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven.

A Year in Reading (2021)

Once more with feeling, here’s my annual reading diary. I like doing this, and some of you like reading this.

The fine print: 1) This list includes only books I completed, not stuff I started and abandoned (and I do more of that as I get older); 2) it leaves out all of the manuscript reading I do for my day job; 3) it also excludes all the articles, reviews, long Facebook posts, Twitter threads, and other essays I read online, in all manner of periodical online or in print; 4) for the most part, the letter grades and commentary were noted as soon as I finished the book but were refined and edited this month, so there’s occasionally some reflective disconnect in my notes; 5) expect typos; these are tossed-off notes that get sanded down after the fact but often not by much; and 6) I don’t give ratings to people I know, so you’ll see a few without letter grades after the commentary.

Previous entries: If you’re curious, here’s what I wrote for 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Alright, let’s go.

Top 5 (2021 edition)

Despite everything, there was beauty and joy in 2021. This tradition, started long long ago amongst friends, reminds me of this fact. Here we go, in order of chronology rather than significance.

1.  An inspirational Norristown nature loop walk in the snow and ice crunch (March): The Norristown Nature Preserve is not as secluded as I would like for a hike but I needed to move my body and thus reduce the churn in my head on a Saturday morning. For all my perambulations, this was the first hike I had ever taken after a big snow. A couple of January and February nor’easters had floored the Philadelphia area but the snowmelt was mostly gone in the city proper within a week. Northwest of town, however, had gotten covered more thoroughly and deeply, and the temperatures stayed chillier. I didn’t know any of that until I got to the trailhead and realized that snow was packed deep enough in spots to submerge my hiking boots, and it wasn’t going anywhere despite the sunlight glittering everywhere. There’s nothing like snow and twenty degrees to clear my head. Foliage was sparse; the century-old farm buildings looked like wrecks; rabbits abounded, as did friendly dogs and their leashed owners. It was so bleakly beautiful that it got me thinking about making a film in response, an ode to spring both in the woods and on the Philly streets. Right there, cleats crunching on ice, I began shaping a short movie for the first time in ages. I took notes as I walked, jotted ideas for its structure and pace, and considered shots that I would need to take. In early April, all the notes and ideas jelled into a piece that I’m proud of: A Spring in My Step. Well, I don’t hate it, anyway. Anyway that movie was a lark that I imagined in full on that cold, cold walk in Norristown.

2.  Getting the 2nd Moderna shot (May): Fifteen months of anxiety and terror melted away in the moment I got jabbed for the second time. I felt so good psychically that, immediately after, I walked around West Philadelphia on a breezy, sunny day humming showtunes and grabbing a street hot dog, and eating my meal on a park bench watching the world go by. Sure, the second Moderna shot wiped me out for two days but I took the hit with gratitude. I spent those days in bed thinking of myself not as bedridden but as freed, released from a prison of my own making. I was so giddy that I drew a comic about this.

3.  A June wedding (June): I got to see two dear friends joined in holy matrimony, after multiple COVID-prompted delays. The joyous occasion prompted my first visit to my hometown (Dallas, TX) in nearly two years; a face-to-face reconnection with my dad’s side of the family; visits with another dear friend who was also in town for the wedding, family in tow; and a sort of nostalgia tour of the Dallas I remember. I saw the East Dallas home that I grew up in, repainted and with both a fence and standalone garage house that weren’t on the verge of collapsing, so an improvement overall. The rehearsal dinner took place a block away from a section of Lower Greenville Avenue that I haunted as a teenager. I ate at old standbys Campisi’s and Campezano’s. The wedding itself took place at a church mere blocks from my childhood downtown church. The trip wasn’t tinged with melancholy but with happiness, a happy reconciliation of where I came from with where I am right now.

4.  Baseball and the Braves: OK, I’m cheating here but these are connected. My mom and stepdad visited me in Philly for eight days in July, and that delightful week was topped by a Saturday night game between the Philadelphia Phillies and my beloved Atlanta Braves. For our first live ballgame in two years (longer than that for me), I wore my Ozzie Albies jersey and took my glove for good luck. Our seats were so good that we got a lot of foul pop-ups in or near our section. And my Braves flattened the Phillies, 15-3. I had a blast, even if the majority of the crowd did not. I had even more of a blast on the night of November 2nd, even though I was at home watching on TV. My Braves beat the Houston Astros, 4 games to 2, to win the team’s first World Series since the 1990s. When shortstop Dansby Swanson turned over an easy third and final out to Freddie Freeman at first base, I cried a little. A flood of happy texts arrived from family and friends, and I spent the night happily drunk and yelling and wishing I had fireworks to shoot off into the South Philly night.

5.  Phish in Vegas (October): My first concert post-vaccine was to see Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog at Johnny Brenda’s, a well-regarded hipster spot in northeast Philly. The trio—my favorite pop format—raged and howled and skronked its way through 80 minutes of avant-garage bluesy jazz. Jesus, they were tight, and endearingly frayed. But I knew that, when Phish announced a four-night Halloween run at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas, this would be my true initiation back into live music. Most nights, Phish plays two sets, with a 30-minute intermission between sets. On New Year’s Eve, they play three. On Halloween, they also play three, but with the middle set being a Halloween costume of its own—which is to say that the band covers a classic album by another group in its entirety: Talking Heads’s Remain in Light in 1996, the Beatles’s White Album in 1994; the Velvet Underground’s Loaded in 1998; the Stones’s Exile on Main Street in 2009; etc.

Except that they’ve smudged the formula from the start. Sometimes, Halloween is an excuse for the band to debut a new album of its own, or to cover an nonexistent band’s album in an elaborate gag—which is to say to debut a new album of its own, while pretending to be someone else. At this point, we fans don’t know what to expect from Halloween, other than it will be an awesome, ironic spectacle.

I had never seen a Halloween run. And I’m just old enough to realize that my chances for this sort of thing are not endless or unlimited. So, I bought tickets for the run, booked a hotel on the Strip and a plane ticket there, took my masks and vaccine card, and hoped for the best. Now, I don’t gamble but I do love gaudy spectacle, so I was agog at Lost Wages. The Venetian features an indoor canal on its second floor. The Bellagio’s fountain really is as awesome and synchronized as it looks in Ocean’s 11. Young women really do wear bright blue leather dresses with sparkly dog collars at 1:00am on a Thursday night. The Pinball Museum really does plonk and shimmer like a building full of vintage pinball machines should.

The shows were spectacular, each one carrying out a theme–numbers, swimming, animals–that we audience members figured out as each concert progressed. The costume was indeed yet another new batch of material, with a cohesive sci-fi theme. (Think Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers for hippies, and you’re halfway there.) I cried during the whole first set of 10/28/21, so glad to be back, not yet knowing that we would soon be under lockdown again.

Honorable mentions: Christmas in Huntsville, AL, with my mom’s side of the family; Thanksgiving in Dallas with my dad’s side; stumbling upon the John Coltrane House while driving around with a friend; my first stroll through the Philadelphia Museum of Art, so vast that I can spend whole days in a single wing.

“A Spring in My Step”

To welcome in the spring season, I made a little movie. It was shot (mostly) in Philadelphia and Atlanta, with a snippet from rural Maine. I hope you enjoy it.

Credits:

Direction, photography, editing: Walter Biggins
When: April 2021 (more or less)
Where: Atlanta, GA / Philadelphia, PA / somewhere south of Bangor, ME
How: Shot with an iPhone 7, edited with CyberLink PowerDirector (free version)

Music:
Earl Harvin Trio, “A Little Walk to Relax” (Dave Palmer)
Originally appeared on Strange Happy (Leaning House Records, 1997)
Used by permission of Dave Palmer.

Musicians:
Dave Palmer – piano
Earl Harvin – drums
Fred Hamilton – bass

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A year in reading (2020 edition)

Once again, here’s my annual reading diary. I like doing this, and some of you like reading this. Here we go.

As always, here’s the fine print: 1) This list includes only books I completed, not stuff I started and abandoned (and I do more of that as I get older); 2) It leaves out all of the manuscript reading I do for my day job; 3) It also excludes all the articles, reviews, long Facebook posts, Twitter threads, and other essays I read online, in all manner of periodical online or in print; 4) For the most part, the letter grades and commentary were noted as soon as I finished the book but were refined and edited this month, so there’s occasionally some reflective disconnect in my notes; and 5) Expect typos; these are tossed-off notes that get sanded down after the fact but often not by much.

The color coding: Dates on which the books were finished are in red. Grades are in blue. If it’s a reread for me, the title will be green. You’ll figure it out.

Some have asked why I have so many “A’s” and “B’s” in my grading, relative to the amount I read, see point #1 above; the “C’s” and below are books I tend not to finish unless I’ve got a professional obligation to do so.

If you’re curious, see previous entries for 2014, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Enjoy, and see you in 2021.

50-worders: Phish figures it out, together and “alone”

Trey Anastasio is almost as prolific as Guided By Voices’s Robert Pollard, and just as experimental as the lo-fi stalwart. Since Fall 2019, it seems that Anastasio’s bandmates have caught the productivity bug as well. The band hasn’t played live since a February 2020 weekend at a Mexican resort but you wouldn’t know it from their output. But, with the exception of Sigma Oasis (see below), they haven’t done so together. You can hear the lack—each member of the quartet brings out the best and the weirdest in each other—in their solo efforts, sure, but you can also hear how singular their identities are on these non-Phish albums. They’re free to be themselves, without filtration or negotiation.

Well, sorta. Maybe. Of the five releases issued this time last year, three feature Jon Fishman’s work (Phish’s near-masterpiece Sigma Oasis, Mike’s truly odd and user-unfriendly Noon, Trey’s genius turn Lonely Trip), because fuck you for thinking drummers are inessential. Fishman has been the glue for the best of these albums, providing intricacy and forceful beats in equal measures, injecting wit into occasionally overly elaborate compositions. (Russ Lawton is the precise timekeeper for Trey’s solo band but the whole conflagration could’ve used Fish’s wild, wobbly energy a bit more.) And Vida Blue, Page’s side band, features a guitarist (Adam Zimmon) who wisely provides modal textures and subtle asides in ways remarkably similar to Anastasio in the midst of an ambient jam.

So: twelve months, five albums, with involvement from all four. I miss waiting on the lawn or in uncomfortable seats, next to too-drunk bros, for the lights to go down and for Phish to lope onstage. But this will have to do for now.

A reminder: These reviews are all fifty words long, no more, no less. They’re rated on a scale of 1 (unlistenable) to 10 (masterpiece). I tag the best and worst tracks accordingly. It’ll all make sense but, if you need a primer, go here.

For earlier entries: one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Alright, here we go.