Blog
Media, poetry, articles, art, videos and random nuggets that tickle me.
Barack Obama
The candidness of this interview provides valuable context to a presidency that has dealt with problems in culture and policy that will have far reaching implication for decades to come.
Present Tense
Always Traveling
We were driving through the solstice sunset of Iceland’s southern coast, a sunset that’s never satiated with a night-dark ending because it, some pastel-drenched hours later, simply turns into a sunrise; refusing to betray the majesty of the landscape by hiding it from the light. But just for these summery weeks does the sun march across the horizon like a tireless, poised soldier. In other weeks, on the opposite side of the calendar, the night creeps along without apology, only relenting from the blackness for a few hours of dusky twilight in the early afternoon.
It’s as if the year in Iceland is one long, slow day… the light and the dark, separated by seasons instead of hours. The thought crossed my mind more than once while frolicking through its formidable landscapes: what an injustice it is to be here for only one week, one blink of an eye in the long day of its year. Those that spend the full calendar here earn the white night by braving the darkness of winter. We earned it perhaps through a different kind of long night, in fact many of them, the ones of triumphant excess we had strung together the previous weeks in a couple of the old-world’s legendary metropolises to the southeast.
We started in Barcelona, the loud, rebellious Mediterranean city where gothic grey meets contemporary color. We used the music festival on its shores that week as an excuse to gather nine of us from across the world in a luxurious flat that had enough beds to sleep everyone, even though we didn’t really end up using them, at least for sleep. Instead, we ate and drank and danced without measuredness. We talked boisterously about politics and art, about the world’s problems, about our ideas for the future, about our hopes for each other—all with such passion that we eventually had to get a spatula from the kitchen to serve as a talking stick… shhhhh, you can only talk while holding the spatula! That worked for about five minutes. Then, we laid on a big bed together and gave each other the kind of feedback that comes best just around dawn. We uncovered things that needed to be uncovered and we buried things that needed to be buried. Not wholly because of, nor in spite of a certain amount of chemical assistance.
Traveling is important for its ability to force one to lose balance, to lose predictability, to lose comfort, to lose the calculated sobriety of striving. Gone is the stability of routine and the neatness it creates in life. Gone are the definitions of how the day is supposed to be carried out. Gone are the structures of quotidian organization that, even in their invisibility, beckon with such constrictive inertia in one’s place of living. When the paths of least resistance so present at home are given geographical space, the limitations they impose on identity quiet down. A foreign city carries little expectation. I can do anything I want, I can be anything I want!
Traveling also erases the certainty of knowledge—of where the cardinal directions are, of the meaning of street signs, of what the locals are talking about, of what lies around the next corner—but also, the knowledge of what the world is, of who the person traveling is. And in this way, traveling is a lot like love: the world being reinvented, lying itself at ones feet, begging another step into the lack of clarity, into the potential of letting go, into being something bigger. Where we lose the balance of sleep, where we lose the balance of consumption, where we lose the balance of practice, of practicality, of responsibility; we churn an immense opening of potential, so that when the scales rebalance, they do so with incredible freshness. There's a new idea of what's possible, what exists, what's healthy, what's important, and most critically, what lies within waiting to be unleashed—the one thing that can never be found while clinging to the need to always know which direction on the horizon will receive the sunrise.
I thought a lot about my next steps in life while driving around Iceland, I thought about what’s really important to me, about what I want to create, about where I want to be in one year, five years, twenty years. As we passed through a seemingly endless stretch of bulbous lava rocks dominating the foreground between the road and the grass-covered volcanic peaks in the distance, I had a moment of questioning whether the rocks were really the pale yellowish-brown they appeared to be… maybe they were deeply black like the rest I’d seen, but covered now with a tundra of moss, sliding across the rocky surface. It was hard to tell. I had to pull over, put my hands on the ground to investigate. I had to see by feeling.
It was in fact a muscly moss covering dry, dark lava. What looked rock-hard and permanent from the road was actually an inches-thick plant life, making the jagged, rocky edges more feminine and soft, more full of breath. After feeling the mossy surface with my hands, I could then, for the rest of the week from the highway, feel its slow movement in my mind. We drove some seventeen-hundred kilometers across the edges of the island, camping wherever we grew tired. When the moss popped up from time to time, it seemed somehow just like the glaciers off in the distance. Both were incredibly alive, just on a different temporal scale, a very slow one, in great congruency with the sedated but steady pace of the sun above. After two weeks of rapidity and explosiveness, I let that sedation seep into me from the sulfury water of the many hot springs in which I floated with a smile that could never be hurried away.
Just days before that Icelandic drive, I was sitting at one of the world’s most perfect cafés on Sorauerstraße in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin—sitting with a cappuccino, a piece of carrot cake, a pencil and a notebook. The street there is lined with uniformly spaced trees. The branches reach towards the open windows of a row of flats whose faces all look similar in their differentness, as if the buildings are siblings in a family that can all agree on a time and place, but not on a mutual view towards which to face; a perspectively-challenged family, like the rest of them. But those buildings feel very much at ease, leaning on each other, covered up to their ankles in a spray-painted graffiti whose beauty is defined by its pervasiveness. It’s so appropriate there, in a place built from ashes. Six feet up from the ground, there’s a city-wide ring of color that seems to somehow comment on the things that are now six feet deep, after a generation of rebuilding.
The girl who served me coffee that afternoon was now sitting outside as well, with a friend, at a table just to my right. I became sharply aware of this fact because I fell in love with her the moment I saw her. As she reclined there in a grey tank top and a blue skirt tied together with a floral apron, I wrote in my notebook about gravity. Not the type that binds planets in a cosmic dance, but the kind that makes someone directly to my left feel a thousand miles away, while she, sitting the same distance to my right, could feel like an unavoidable black-hole. I thought then about giving her a note to tell her about her gravity: We can only see ourselves through each other, and I see you as a perfect beauty in this wild world… I hope you see yourself in the same way.
I ended up writing that note days later with the accompaniment of a cold beer and a fresh cigarette outside an art gallery in Mitte. I wasn’t sure if I’d give it to her, just that I wanted to remember what I saw in her that first time, as well as the following few we made it back there, to the café across from my friend’s flat, after long nights of filling the world with vividness, of being filled, by the world, with vividness. While writing, I smiled internally at the silliness of love at first sight, knowing that it’s very real to love someone without knowing their complexity, but only the simplicity of their gravity.
Then, days later, and minutes before getting onto a train headed for the airport, I reached into the breast pocket of my black jacket, retrieved the folded, graphite-covered papers and handed them to her at the counter of her café. In doing so, I was in some way committing to always follow the mystery of gravity, to chase it towards its perfection, towards the place where nothing can escape. She smiled with a blush and I walked out a little bit taller for having found the courage to show her her own beauty through my words.
Later, on the last night of an exemplary trip, my friend and I took a seat on an old leather couch in the corner of a bar in downtown Reykjavik. We pulled some art magazines off the bookshelf, had some drinks, and laughed as certain scenes from the previous weeks surfaced from our memories and from our iPhone photos. I eventually found myself having a hard time reading the magazines because looking across the small, music-filled Icelandic room provided a better view for me to reflect upon what I’d learned, what I wanted to take home with me, and who I wanted to be in my old, new life.
We’ve heard that the safety net appears only after we jump, after the risk is taken to fly into the world fearlessly. Any hope that we have to achieve our full potential comes from a swift movement towards the unknown. After three weeks of pushing myself socially, physically and emotionally, I sat next to the window of an Airbus watching the sunset over San Francisco… deeply saturated colors now that signaled the arrival of the first dark night in a week. I thought yes, the net appears after we jump, but, only if we spend the days of our lives building that net in our imagination can we trust our inevitable leaping. Before any quick movement towards evolution, there is a glacial, mossy slowness of change built of the steadiness of questioning, of expanding into the world, of pushing the boundaries of what we think we know, of what we think is possible. We are always traveling, there is always newness. There is always an opportunity to be more vividly alive, more vividly in love, at home, now.
Rebecca Solnit
In honor of her birthday today, I want to share this powerful interview with my friend and my hero Rebecca Solnit, recorded recently on the great podcast On Being... She is a national treasure and I've learned so much about art, politics, history, feminism and how to be in the world from her prolific work. Enjoy!
The Deepest Darkest Beauty
Strength
This:
Food For Thought
Alignment
Art = The Self, Practiced
Moses Sumney
The Body As Consciousness
Loneliness: The Golden Opportunity
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. More...
Dreaming and Doing
Top 10 Albums of 2015
10. Lubomyr Melnyk — Rivers and Streams
The Ukrainian wizard strikes again with a somehow simultaneously chaotic and cathartic blanket of piano virtuosity that sounds a lot like, well... rivers and streams.
9. HVOB — Trialog
It's hard to make a deep house album that can actually be called an album, not just a bunch of tracks. Trialog is an album—an energetic, nuanced, haunting and exemplary album.
8. Colleen — Captain of None
Right when you think the upper reaches of looping potential have been reached in music, Colleen raises the bar with a perfectly minimal, perfectly layered piece of novel beauty.
7. Four Tet — Morning/Evening
No one in electronic music is as consistently themselves and consistently fresh every year. God bless Four Tet. That's all.
6. Nils Frahm — Solo
This album was created from nine hours of improvisation on a twelve foot high piano. The sound quality of the recording is as brilliant as the playing.
5. Vince Staples — Summertime '06
There are those that make meandering hip-hop records too long to get through, there are those that make hip-hop records deserving of two disks to be complete.
4. Shigeto — Intermission
The sounds, the rhythms, the challenges, the releases: Intermission is a victory for Shigeto and an inspiration for the forward progress of electronic music.
3. Leon Bridges — Coming Home
It's really just impossible.
2. Jenny Hval — Apocalypse, Girl
Jenny Hval is a writer whose understatedness simply can't last much longer. This is a visionary album, it's a poem whose honesty and clarity shines on top of a transcendent musicality.
1. Kendrick Lamar — To Pimp A Butterfly
Album of the decade. Seriously. Who knew that Bob Dylan, Miles Davis and Tupac had a love child? This album is sharp, soft, desperate, and triumphant. I still can't believe how good it is.
Honorable Mention Blond:ish — Welcome to the Present, A$AP Rocky — At Long Last A$AP, Freddie Gibbs — Shadow of a Doubt, Tame Impala — Currents, FKA Twigs — M3LL155X, Thundercat — The Beyond/Where the Giants Roam, Bob Moses — Days Gone By.
Last Year’s List
I'm Kin
Blank on Blank
Why I Sit
It’s a funny thing how most people that meditate don’t use the word meditate. For most of us, it’s simply sitting. Sitting is an adequately uncomplicated name to describe the practice: putting the body in something resembling an upright position somewhere near the floor and attempting to remain still for some amount of time. Within the seated position are many different meditative practices that can be undertaken, but in some way the rest of the endeavor is secondary to the action of just sitting still. It’s a simple thing to do, it’s a difficult thing to do, its a beautiful thing to do. Sitting still. I’m just back from doing it for ten days in a row—abstaining from all types of communication and sensory entertainment—spending around twelve hours a day with my eyes closed, awake, seated.
I get nervous before leaving to go on retreat because at this point I’m fully aware that each time it’ll surely be one of the most challenging things I ever do. I also get excited before leaving because I know that the absence of screens and dollar bills always grants me more room to explode in appreciation for something like a solitary leaf, spiraling towards the ground. I get nervous when coming back from retreat because I’m always so sensitive and the world is so… hmmmm… electric after such pronounced stillness and quietude. I get excited to come back because I know I’ll be more open, more permeable, more free, more alive, more compassionate.
I sit regularly. Not only on retreat at least once a year for ten days, but also every morning when I wake up for an hour. I do it for many reasons, perhaps the first of which is because it shows me what I’m made of. It shows me that I have a great determination to balance my weaknesses, it shows me that I have an incredible love to hold my fears, it shows me that I have an impenetrable stillness to permeate my tumultuousness.
Sitting still shows me what I’m made of as a human being, it’s a launching point for me to take a simple but penetrating look at the things that form my sense of identity, from my physical self to my energetic self to my social self. I sit because it allows my mind to become like a stylus carving its way through the etch-a-sketch of my body. I can feel my bones and soft tissues and organs like tentacles extending from the nervous system, wrapped in awareness. I sit because it gives me a proprioceptive map of my physical body, a map that is always increasing in resolution and intrigue. I sit because it gives me an ownership over my form, because it helps me more fully participate in my bodily undertakings.
When abstaining from external communication for some time, my body starts to speak very clearly in a language all its own—it’s a language comprised of a vocabulary of sensations. Pain, pleasure, agitation, pressure, vibration, itching, strain, fatigue, electricity, heat, cold, lightness, heaviness. Sitting still for an extended amount of time sharpens my mind to see through these sensations, underneath the physical structure, into the energy that gives life to the structure. Just like when holding the eyes in a sharply centered stillness the periphery starts to fade, the body’s boundary can also wash out with the steady perception of an inner-most liveliness. The sensations don’t go away but they start to be perceived more and more as the gross surface of a subtle depth of vitality, a feeling of some common denominator that vibrates beneath every part of the body, beneath every experience of the body.
Inside and in between the body’s structures and energies is an intangible feeling of home. I sit because it shows me that the forest of my body is a burgeoning landscape of richness. I am made from the fertile soil of every possible emotion—joy, sadness; excitement, boredom; hope and fear are all there inside of me, they are a part of me, perfectly… I am decorated by densely spiraling ferns of relationship—everything I’ve ever loved is still there growing, crisscrossing the floor of my sense of self, giving life to new growth… I am populated by the trees of experience—everything I’ve ever done stands somewhere inside of me offering a unique viewpoint into the entirety of the forest itself.
I sit because it gives me the opportunity to recognize that, as much as I’m all the things that populate the forest, I am also the space that lives around the soil, the ferns, the trees—I am the air that blankets them, I am the freedom to move beyond them. The space inside of me is a vacuum. Invariably while sitting, something always flourishes to fill that vacuum. On the second day of retreat, the air was filled with beauty and gratitude. On the fifth day, there was a violent storm of despair and discomfort. On the sixth, there was an unspeakable ecstasy. On the eight, there was boredom and sluggishness. On the tenth, there was a feeling that everything is perfect. Every day, there was unapologetic ordinariness. Every day there was agitation, every day there was peace. Every day there was potential… for equanimity, for insight, for forward movement. Every day I had ideas. Every day I had to look at things I didn’t want to.
I sit because it helps me remember. I remember what’s important to me, I remember who and what matters. I remember where to let go, I remember where to try harder. I remember completely mundane happenings, I remember extraordinary events long forgotten, both of which worked to shape who I am today. I remember dreams, I remember to-do’s. I forget them and then remember them again. I sit because I remember my loneliness from middle school and wrap myself around it without fear. I sit because I remember the time five years ago when we poured hot sauce and tequila in Shaeley’s mouth until she laughed and it all came back out. I sit because I remember the sound of her laugh that night, I sit because I remember that it’s important to call her and tell her that even though we’re not as close as we used to be, I love her and I remember her laugh.
Going into retreat, I knew the full moon would fall on day seven, I knew its rising would happen during the evening tea break so I could watch it come up. That night I filled my thermos with hot water, put on my jacket and walked outside in anticipation of some sort of external stimulus, in need of something to invigorate me for the last three days of sitting. I leaned against a tree waiting for the moon to peak up from behind the saw-blade of pine trees cutting into the night sky on the horizon. I glanced around and noticed there were a few other people there to watch also. We stood in silence. Entirely together, entirely on our own, we watched the perfection of the moon’s rising. I was full of the vastness of life and, in seeing the moon’s great dynamism, with the reminder that everything is always changing. After some time, we turned to walk up the hill to the meditation room. We had to start again, still three more hours of sitting before bed time. I sat down and closed my eyes, fixed my attention on respiration and sensation, and then got distracted by something and fidgeted. I took a breath and resolved not to move an inch. Then I got distracted again and fidgeted and realized I sit because it reminds me how amazing it is that I get to start over, over and over.
Consonance
I used to make music a lot. But, in the interest of avoiding the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none phenomenon, I gave it up to use my words and body and stuff. Also, I was never that good at it. But in the midst of ten hours of bouncing in the car to and from Santa Barbara last weekend, I was struck with the strong necessity to do it again. So I spent some time putting together a DJ mix—partially because I thought I had good ideas and partially because if you live in San Francisco for three years without being a DJ, you don't count. It's totally eclectic, a little bit challenging and hopefully kinda lovely.